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THE
CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.









THE HERMIT OF BELLYFULLE.


THE
CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK;
WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF
The Hermit of Bellyfulle.
BY DOUGLAS JERROLD.
LONDON:
PUBLISHED AT THE PUNCH OFFICE,
85, FLEET STREET.
MDCCCXLVI.


LONDON:
BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.


CONTENTS.
PR
4825
J4
057
1846
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK
PAGE
1
ESSAYS.
FOLLY OF THE SWORD
141
ELIZABETH AND VICTORIA
THE ORDER OF POVERTY
A GOSSIP AT RECULVERS
THE OLD MAN AT THE GATE
149
161
·
172
179





THE
CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK;
WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF
The Hermit of Bellyfulle.
WE have yet no truthful map of England. No offence
to the publishers; but the verity must be uttered.
We have pored and pondered, and gone to our sheets with
weak, winking eyes, having vainly searched, we cannot
trust ourselves to say how many hundred maps of our
beloved land, for the exact whereabout of Clovernook.
We cannot find it. More: we doubt-so imperfect are
all the maps-if any man can drop his finger on the
spot, can point to the blessed locality of that most
blissful village. He could as easily show to us the
hundred of Utopia; the glittering weathercocks of the
New Atalantis.
And shall we be more communicative than the
publishers? No; the secret shall be buried with us;
we will hug it under our shroud. We have heard of
shrewd, short-speeched men who were the living caskets
of some healing jewel; some restorative recipe to draw
the burning fangs from gout; some anodyne to touch
away sciatica into the lithesomeness of a kid; and these
men have died, and have, to their own satisfaction at
least, carried the secret into their coffins, as though
B


2
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
9
the mystery would comfort them as they rotted. There
have been such men ; and the black, begrimed father of
all uncharitableness sits cross-legged upon their tomb-
stones, and sniggers over them!
Nevertheless, we will not tell to the careless and
irreverent world-a world noisy with the ringing of
shillings-the whereabout of Clovernook. We might,
would we condescend, give an all-sufficient reason for
our closeness: we will do no such thing. No: the
village is our own-consecrated to our own delicious
leisure, when time runs by like a summer brook,
dimpling and sweetly murmuring as it runs. We have
the most potent right of freehold in the soil; nay, it is
our lordship. We have there droits du seigneur; and
in the very despotism of our ownership might, if we
would, turn oaks into gibbets. Let this knowledge
suffice to the reader; for we will not vouchsafe to him
another pippin's-worth.
Thus much, however, we will say of the history of
Clovernook. There is about it a very proper mist and
haziness; it twinkles far, far away through the darkness
of time, like a taper through a midnight casement.
The spirit of fable that dallies with the vexed heart
of man, and incarnates his dreams in living presences
-for mightiest of the mighty is oft the muscle of
fiction-fable says that Clovernook was the work of
some sprite of Fancy, that in an idle and extravagant
mood, made it a choice country seat; a green and
flowery place, peopled with happy faces. And it was
created, says fable, after this fashion.
The sprite took certain pieces of old, fine linen,
which were torn and torn, and reduced to a very pulp,
and then made into a substance, thin and spotless.
And then the sprite flew away to distant woods, and
gathered certain things, from which was expressed a
liquid of darkest dye. And then, after the old, time-
honoured way, a living thing was sacrificed; a bird
much praised by men at Michaelmas; fell with bleeding


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
3
throat; and the sprite, plucking a feather from the
poor dead thing, waved and waved it, and the village
of Clovernook grew and grew; and cottages, silently
as trees, rose from the earth; and men and women
came there by ones and twos; and in good time
smoke rose from chimneys, and cradles were rocked.
And this, so saith fable, was the beginning of Clovernook.
Although we will not let the rabble of the world
know the whereabout of our village-and by the rabble,
be it understood, we do not mean the wretches who are
guilty of daily hunger, and are condemned in the court
of poverty of the high misdemeanor of patches and rags,
—but we mean the mere money-changers, the folks who
carry
their sullen souls in the corners of their pockets,
and think the site of Eden is covered with the Mint;
although we will not have Clovernook startled from its
sweet, dreamy serenity—and we have sometimes known
the very weasels in mid-day to doze there, given up to
the delicious influence of the place-by the chariot
wheels of that stony-hearted old dowager, Lady Mam-
mon, with her false locks and ruddled cheeks,—
-we
invite all others to our little village; where they may
loll in the sun or shade as suits them; lie along on the
green tufty sward, and kick their heels at fortune:
where they may jig an evening dance in the meadows,
and after retire to the inn-the one inn of Clovernook
-glorified under the sign of "Gratis !
Match us that sign if you can.
What are your
Georges and Dragons, your Kings' Heads, and Queens'
Arms; your Lions, Red, White, and Black; your
maids and your Dolphins, to that large, embracing
benevolence-Gratis? Doth not the word seem to
throw its arms about you with a hugging welcome?
Gratis ! It is the voice of Nature, speaking from the
fulness of her large heart. The word is written all over
the blue heaven. The health-giving air whispers it
about us.
It rides the sunbeam-(save when statesman
puts a window-pane 'twixt us and it). The lark trills it
""
Mer-
B 2


4
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
high up in its skyey dome; the little wayside flower
breathes gratis from its pinky mouth; the bright brook
murmurs it; it is written in the harvest moon. Look
and move where we will, delights-all "gratis," all
breathing and beaming beauty-are about us; and yet
how rarely do we seize the happiness, because, forsooth,
it is a joy gratis?
But let us back to Clovernook. We offer it as a
country tarrying-place for all who will accept its hos-
pitality. We will show every green lane about it; every
clump of trees-every bit of woodland, mead and dell.
The villagers, too, may be found, upon acquaintance, not
altogether boors. There are some strange folk among
them. Men who have wrestled in the world, and have
had their victories and their trippings-up; and now they
have nothing to do but keep their little bits of garden-
ground pranked with the earliest flowers; their only
enemies, weeds, slugs, and snails. Odd people, we say
it, are amongst them. Men, whose minds have been
strangely carved and fashioned by the world; cut like
odd fancies in walnut-tree; but though curious and
grotesque, the minds are sound, with not a worm-hole
in them. And these men meet in summer under the
broad mulberry-tree before the "Gratis," and tell their
stories-thoughts, humours; yea, their dreams. They
have nothing to do but to consider that curious bit of
clock-work, the mind, within them; and droll it some-
times is, to mark how they will try to, take it to pieces,
and then again to adjust its little wheels, its levers,
and springs.
Some of these worthy folk may, in good time, be made
known to our readers. But our first business is to intro-
duce to them a most wise, and withal jocund sage,
dwelling about a mile and three quarters from Clover-
nook, and known to the villagers as the Hermit of
Bellyfulle. It was a happy chance that brought the
anchorite and ourselves together. Thus it happened.
An autumn day had died gloriously in the west; dark-


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
5
ness came rapidly upon us, and to be brief with our
mishap, we had lost our way. We had travelled from
-, a market-town, and as our saddle-bags-for
we were upon our choice gelding-were, strangely
enough, stuffed with the lawful golden coin of the realm,
our fears rose with our sense of property. Again and
again we thought of our gold, and thinking, sweated.
To our apprehension, the gelding's legs became as eight;
for though we saw no horse following us, yet could we
certainly distinguish the sound of eight hoofs. We
kept up a sharp trot, and oddly enough, the gelding
that half-an-hour before showed signs of weariness and
distress, trotted, trotted on as though fresh from a
night's rest, corn and beans. As we went on, every-
thing seemed strangely changing about us. The sky
that had been black as coal, broke into a mild, clear
grey; star by star came twinkling out; the cold,
autumn wind blew soft and warm; our spirits became
suddenly lightened, when our gelding-it is a most
sagacious beast-made a dead halt.
us.
The creature stood fast, and we looked vainly about
We saw nothing-heard nothing. The animal still
stood as upon a pedestal. And now, it pricked its ears
-and now, snuffed, snuffed the air. Then the truth,
in truth's best sweetness, came upon us. We were close
to a human dwelling-place; we were in the neighbour-
hood of some of the units of the large family of man.
Hope could not have deceived us: no, the truth was
plain; for we smelt a smell of bacon and eggs.
Now, the gelding had merely paused to awaken our
attention to the odorous fact. This opinion we carry,
fast as a clenched nail, within us. For we merely took
a deep inspiration, jerked our right knee against the
saddle, and Bottom-for such is the beast's name-
immediately understood that we had taken his meaning,
and with mended step, went ambling on, as though his
soul danced to the music of the frying-pan.
A most
rational beast is Bottom.


6
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
Still, we trotted on, down close, winding, mossy
lanes-with odd, large, gnarled trees, throwing their
arms across the narrow road, and sometimes meeting
and hugging one another, like Titan wrestlers. There
was something strange in the trees; something, as
we thought, half-human: now and then they looked
like giants; and now, we thought we saw the red goat-
like noses of satyrs among the branches, with a quick
jerking of their horned heads. Once or twice, thinking
of our saddle-bags, we should have fainted from sheer
cowardice; but as Bottom ambled onward, there was an
increasing, a sustaining smell of bacon and eggs.
At length, Bottom stopt in a sort of triangular nook.
There was no outlet. We looked; was it a glow-
worm glimmering through that mass of green? No: it
was tallow, delicious, household tallow; or if not, oil from
leviathan. We dismounted, and groping our way, at
length, through a wilderness of woodbine and ivy, found
the door. We knocked.
66
Come in," cried a voice, loud as a trumpet.
Melodious syllables! Sweet accents of sweet hos-
pitality! Harmonious to the traveller on the outside,
glorifying to the man at the hearth! He has escaped
somewhat of the smitings of this single-stick world,
who, when he hears knuckles at his postern, can throw
himself back in his chair like a king upon his throne,
and without a qualm of the heart, cry—“Come in !"
In darkness, we clawed about the door; at length we
found the latch. In a moment we were at the hearth-
stone of the greatest animal in the scale of creation—
an animal that cooks.
"And who are you?" cried the master of the mansion.
What a pert, every-day asking is this! What a
query to answer! Reader, did you ever, for one moment,
say to your own soul,- "Who are you?" You know
that you are a something, but what thing? You know
that there is some living power, some knack within
you, that helps you through life; that enables you to


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
7
make a bargain with an eye to a good pennyworth ;
that even urges you to pick a wife from a few millions;
that walks with you in your business walks, that broods
with you at home over your ledger-but what is it?
Did you ever try to bring it face to face with yourself?
Did you ever manfully endeavour to pluck, for a moment,
this mystery from your blood, and look at it eye to eye-
this You? It may be a terrible meeting; but sit in the
magic circle of your own thoughts, and conjure the
thing. It may be devil-it may be angel. No. You
will take the chance: you are not curious: you are
content to jog on; you know that you are you; but
for the what you, whether perfect as the angels, or
scabbed like Lazarus, why should you seek to know?
Rather, dwell in the hopeful sweetness of your no-
knowing.
"And who are you?" again asked the man we had
elected for our host, ere we had time or thought to
answer.
"We are travellers, and have lost our way," said we.
"Sit down and eat," said the master of the mansion.
"And then, if the world has left you a light conscience,
you can, if you will, sleep."
""
"We'll first see to Bottom, and then have with you,'
said we; for there was a ring of truth and good-fellow-
ship in the man's voice, that, as we felt, made us old
acquaintances. We crossed the threshold, and taking
saddle and bridle from Bottom, sent him to his supper of
sweet grass.
We then returned to our host.
"And what brought you here?" he asked, offering
the dish.
"Bacon and eggs, said we, helping ourselves to the
glorious condiments bearing those names.
The man paused, looked down upon us, scratched the
nape of his neck, and walked to a corner of his habita-
tion. He then returned with a blushing gammon, which
he sliced with the potent hand of a master. Smiling
upon our appetite, he cracked a dozen or two more eggs,
and flung them singing into the pan.


8
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
We would give a hundred guineas from the aforesaid
saddle-bags, we thought, if we could carry away with us
a lively portrait of our host. We shall never forget
him he will to our mind always be a stirring pre-
sence; but how-how shall we ever fix him upon paper?
You don't eat," said our host, seeing our knife and
fork for a moment idle, as we mused upon the difficulty.
"Eat, eat, if you'd be welcome to the Hermit of Belly-
fulle.
66
""
"Are you a hermit?" we asked, with a wondering
look.
"Have I not said it? The Hermit of Bellyfulle, and
this my Hermitage; this the Cell of the Corkscrew,"
cried the anchorite; and he then turned to the pan,
his eye melting on the frying eggs.
The Hermit appeared between fifty and sixty-nearer
sixty. He would have looked tall, but for his breadth
of shoulder and bow of belly. His arms were short,
thick, and sinewy; with a fist that might have throttled
a wild boar or a keen attorney. Altogether he was
a massive lump of a man, hard and active. His face
was big and round, with a rich, larder look about it.
His wide, red cheeks were here and there jewelled with
good living. As gems are said by some to be no more
than a congelation of the rarest essences attracted and
distilled from mother earth, so were the living rubies
burning in the cheeks of the Hermit, the hardened,
incarnated juices of the deer of the forest-the volatile
spirits of the vine. The Hermit had no nose; none,
ladies, none. There was a little nob of flesh, like a
small mushroom, dipt in wine, which made its unobtru-
sive way between the good man's cheeks, and through
which he has been known to sneeze: but impudence
itself could not call that piece of flesh a nose.
Hermit's mouth had all the capacity of large benevo-
lence; large and wide, like an old pocket. There seemed
a heavy unctuousness about the lower lip; a weight and
drooping from very mellowness-like a ripe peach,
cracking in the sun. His teeth-but that he had lost
The


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
one, as we afterwards learned, in active service on a
Strasburg ham-were regular as a line of infantry, and
no less dangerous. His forehead was large: his black
hair waning into grey, save that one lock which grew
like the forelock of old Time, was raven still.
His eyes
were small, and so deep in his head, no man ever saw
the whites of them: there they were, like black beads
sunk in scarlet flesh. Such is the poor, weak picture of
the glorious living face and then every bit of it shone,
as though it had been smeared with sacrificial fat.
Hermit's voice was deep and clear; and he had a sweet,
heart-warming chuckle, which came like wine gurgling
from a flask. The very pope of hermits was the Hermit
of Bellyfulle.
The
This worthy anchorite wore no weed of grey-not he.
He had a capacious gown of faded scarlet damask, worn
-much worn: yet there were traces in it of past beauty;
goodly bunches of grapes, antique flagons, and Cupids
flaying a buck. This robe was girded about the waist
with a thick silken rope; a relic, as he told us, picked
up in a pilgrimage. It had been a bell-rope in the
best hostelry of Palestine. The nether anatomy of the
recluse showed, as we thought, that all the vanity of
the world had not died within him, for he wore black
velvet breeches; and, moreover, seemed to throw an
approving glance at his leg, cased in unwrinkled silken
hose of ebon black. His feet were easily lodged in large
slippers of cramoisy velvet, with here and there a glim-
mering of old gold lace.
A hermit would be no hermit without a skull. The
anchorite of Bellyfulle was fitly provided with such
tangible aid to solemn reflection: for he had the skull
of a heathen Paladin, in the which-for the top had been
curiously sawn off, and hinged, and a silver box con-
trived in the cavity-in the which the Hermit of Belly-
fulle kept his best tobacco. He moreover showed his
horror and contempt for heathenism by sinking the
basanet of a Saracen knight into a spittoon.


10
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
The Cell of the Corkscrew revealed the magnanimity
of its hermit indweller. Its walls were tapestried with
sides of bacon, with hams smoked over fires of cedar and
sandal-wood. Festoons of sausages hung from the roof,
dazzling the eyes and melting the heart of the beholder.
Frequent peering forth, with death-grim snout, a boar's
head would show itself, to the ear of fancy grunting for
the knife. And now, the eye would wander to a squab
of flesh-a buffalo's hump-toothsome to rest upon.
And then there were tongues, as many as at Babel,
hanging on all sides; tongues of deer, of antelope, of
Indian ox, smoked and cured by Indian cooks. Glow-
ing and beautiful were a hundred vitreous jars of
pungent pickle, disposed about the cell with the finest
consideration of colour and effect. There, too, was the
delicious olive, in its mild, immortal green, for Bacchus
in his after-dinner hour to dally with.
It was not until the next morning that the Hermit
discovered to us all the riches, the stores, the conve-
niences of the Cell of the Corkscrew, and its adjoining
messuages. But as we have opened the matter, we will
not put it off to a future page, but at once make an
end of it. We found that the room wherein we supped
was made sacred to knife and fork. By the way, let
us inform the reader that those instruments, of huge
dimensions, surmounted the mantel-piece. The Hermit,
raising his small jet eyes towards them, mildly said, with
a slight chuckle, "My lares-the guardian angels of my
fire-side."
An adjoining room was fitted round with shelves, on
which were pots and packages of preserves and spices,
and baskets of candied fruits, and here and there a case
of heart-consoling Curaçoa-soft and subtle noyeau-
biting absinthe; nay, all the cordials refined by the
inquiring spirit of man from nature's raw materials.
"What a delicious smell!" we cried. "I call it my
phoenix' nest, said the Hermit, and he said no more.
He then took us down into his cellar. We descended


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
11
"Cut by
some fifty steps into a place of vast extent.
some good-natured people of the olden time," said the
Hermit; "cut out of the living rock. And now, sir, the
sun shines on no sort of grape that is not bottled here;"
and the Hermit spoke with a voice of triumph, and gently
waved the lamp in his hand to and fro, its beams falling
upon a thousand and a thousand bottles, that to our
excited fancy seemed to laugh like negroes in the sun.
66
Simple, thoughtless man would not think it, but
there is much knowledge to be taken from this cellar,"
Isaid the Hermit.
"With the help of a corkscrew," said we.
"Right; with the blessing of a corkscrew," cried
the Hermit. "But for a time treading on the carnal man,
there is other, higher knowledge. You will observe, sir,
that I have laid out my bottles geographically; from the
cyder of Devonshire to the rice spirit of China. In this
way, I manage to go entirely round the world once a
year."
66
""
Is it possible?" we asked, and "we fear it," in a
voice of incredulity; for the Hermit drew himself up,
and spoke very solemnly.
66
66
Man," said he, a lie in any place is a poor sneak-
ing thing; still, a lie may be better or worse by its
locality. Now the man," and here the anchorite trem-
bled with emotion, "the man who would tell a lie in
a wine-cellar, is a wretch unutterable. His heart's-blood,
at the best, is bad vinegar.'
"It is—it is," said we, feeling the rebuke.
this is a map of the world, done by Bacchus ?"
"And
The Hermit of Bellyfulle, smiling benevolently, gently
nodded his head. "You will perceive it. Here, as I said,
is the cyder, the ale of England. There, Champagne,
Burgundy, Bordeaux. There, the Johannisberg. At
the present time, I am in Hungary, drinking Tokay."
""
"It is delightful," we said, "to meet you in so
favoured a place."
Leaving the cellar, the Hermit took us to his farm-


12
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
yard. Instantaneously we were surrounded by all sorts
of poultry. We were particularly pleased with a breed
of fowls, of enormous size, and of the whitest and most
dazzling plumage.
"You like them?" said the Hermit, observing our
look of admiration. "So do I. Were it not that I am
almost dead to fleshly affections, I should say they
were my passion. They are capons, sir.
It is a
strange weakness, but I love them dearly; especially
with pork, judiciously pickled. I call them, sir," and
the Hermit faintly smiled, "I call them my monks."
We next visited the fish-ponds.
66
Hermit, are my trout."
66
66
Here, sir," said the
How very large !" we exclaimed, as some huge fish
darted from under the weeds.
66
Now, sir, though you will not venture to doubt
my word, others might. I have a great moral expe-
riment going on among these fish. They are entirely
upon artificial flies.
"Is it possible?" we asked.
fed
22
?
""
"For what purpose
"To show the sufficiency of the imagination to the
satisfaction of the belly," replied the Hermit.
"It will be a great political discovery," said we.
"Have you tried the system on yourself?
""
Either the Hermit did not hear us, or hearing, dis-
dained an answer; for he walked on, we following.
'My orchard," said he, pointing to a very forest of
trees, loaded with the fruits of autumn.
66
""
"Are you not frequently robbed ? we asked. "Have
you no spring-guns, man-traps-
66
""
'Look," said the Hermit, and he pointed to a written
board fastened to one of the trees-there were twenty
such about the orchard-which board contained a notice,
inviting in the prettiest and most paternal words all little
boys who might pass that way, to come into the orchard,
and eat their fill. They were warned upon no account
to take the smallest fruit, but to carefully pick the
largest, the ripest, and the best. There were likewise


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
13
ladders provided that the boys might not injure the
boughs, or rend their breeches by climbing. Or if they
should chance to tear their garments, there was an
oilskin bag hanging from a large walnut-tree in the
middle of the orchard, in which bag were needles and
thread, to repair for the nonce any gash that might
else scandalise the out-door world.
66
99
But do not the birds plunder you?'
we asked.
"My cherries, for two or three years, suffered griev-
ously from the rooks," said the Hermit; "but they are
sensible birds, sir; very sensible. I bought the cast-off
coat of a Jew money-lender, and stuffing it with straw,
I hung it upon the highest tree. The rooks are clever
birds, sir-they never perched again."
Having shown to the reader the cell and grounds—
we have purposely omitted all notices of bed-rooms,
pantry, and out-houses, of the Hermit of Bellyfulle—we
must bring the said reader back to the first hour of our
introduction to the anchorite. Be it remembered, that
we are still tired and joint-sore with our journey, and
that we have only eaten three rashers, and swallowed
half-a-dozen eggs.
To say nothing of the external dignity of the Hermit,
it was evident to us, from one single circumstance, that
he was a man of superior mind. He never uttered a
syllable until we both had supped. In an afterchange
of thought, the Hermit confessed that he admired his
guest upon the same high principle.
"A man, sir," observed the sage, "who gabbles at
his dinner, may be said to swallow, not to eat. Eating,
sir, is as much a mental, nay more so than a physical
task. There is, sir, a wonderful sympathy between the
brain and the palate. Talk destroys the exquisite har-
All the nobler functions of the
mony between them.
soul should be present during every mouthful; and so
sublimating it, the wise man eats with his brain, the
fool with his mouth."
"You have studied these things curiously," said we.


14
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
"It was my prime object in quitting the world. I
resolved, upon the death of my fourth wife, to shut myself
up from the vanities of life, and write a cookery book
-an encyclopædia of the kitchen.
"It is to be hoped," said we, "you have not repented
of your magnanimity?"
66
No, sir; no. I have been hard at work-but it is
the labour of a life. I have toiled ten years, and only
got to ducks.'
"Ducks!
66
""
Ducks, sir. Ten years, and only finished four
letters but hope is strong: I have no doubt I shall
live to see Z. By that time the ignorant world will
begin to feel its mouth water for a sirloin of zebra ;
and I am the only man who can tell the world how to
cook it."
"A sirloin of zebra! Was there ever such a joint
put upon a spit? "
"I have partaken, sir, of hundreds; but those feasts
were in the blessed region of As-you-like.'
"As-you-like! Where may that region be?" we
asked.
The Hermit's eyes filled with tears, and he answered,
with a broken voice, "I cannot tell-I cannot tell;
though I have lived there-have children there-I know
not where it is, know not how to seek it.'
66
66
""
'How," we asked, "did you first find it out?'
That, sir, is the strangest story of my life; though
I have many, many stories in that box, " and the Her-
"that
However, sir, all I
mit pointed to a large cedar chest in the corner,
may some day puzzle the printer.
know you shall know. Brandy or Hollands?" asked
the Hermit, pushing the bottles.
upon my honour," said the sage, laying
his breast. "Do you take lemon?
squeezer made of true eremite maple.
hot and cold. And now, sir, you shall
I call it-
"Both smuggled,
his hand upon
Here, sir, is a
Sugar; water,
have my story.


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
15
44
The Flying Bottle.
"I have been a traveller, sir; a great traveller. It
was my fortune, when about five-and-twenty, to sail to
the Indian Seas. We dropped anchor close to one of
the islands to be found in those blissful waters. I went
ashore, and everything about me seemed new and
strange, but beautiful, very beautiful. I had wandered
from my party, and was alone in a field overgrown with
hyacinths, when a bottle suddenly sprang up beneath
my foot; and as I walked, the bottle- -a black wine-
bottle, no more-hopped, hopped like a bird, before me.
I ran after it; but the faster I ran, the quicker it hopped.
At length, mustering all my strength, I ran until I
fairly ran the bottle down. Then smelling at its mouth,
for there was no cork in it, I smelt a most delicious
odour; I raised the bottle to my lips, and drank.
Instantly my hands seemed riveted around the vessel,
and two wings sprang from the sides of the bottle. In
a moment, I was raised from the earth. I tried to let
go the bottle, but my hands were as a part of it; and
still the bottle flew and flew like an eagle to the sun;
and I swooned, and knew no more until I awoke in a
region which the inhabitants told me was the kingdom
of As-you-like.
"I looked about me, and I could have sworn that I
was in some street in London; for in my boyhood, I had
once visited that wonderful and wicked city, taken
thither by my grandfather. The houses were familiar
to me; the character of the people, their clothes, nay,
their language, all seemed known to me; but when I
said as much, the worthy folks about me smiled at my
delusion; and further, when I told them the story of the
bottle, they shook their heads, and said they doubted
not I should soon discover my mistake And very soon
I did so.
That I should know the language of the
people of As-you-like as perfectly as themselves was


16
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
only a part of the mystery of the bottle. I had drunk
it from its mouth.
"It was plain that I was considered a curiosity by
the folks, who, indeed, looked upon me with that sort of
pity and forbearance which I have known displayed by
soft-hearted people towards a Hottentot. It was plain
they felt that I had much in common with them all,
but was nevertheless of a much lower degree of sensi-
bility and intelligence. It is right, however, that I
should confess that this opinion arose from my own
coarse habits-from my education, and my manners
contracted in my previous life. To me, they seemed the
simplest, the most foolish of created things; whilst, as
I afterwards discovered, they at times looked upon me
with so much aversion, that, had they not been the ten-
derest, the gentlest people in the world, they would
have cast me forth to perish in the streets. But I
am forgetting myself," said the Hermit-"I am falling
into the common talk of the world about us: it was
impossible that even a dog should perish in the streets
of As-you-like.
"Before I descend to my own particular adventures
in that glorious region, I will endeavour to give you
some idea of its government, its religion, its laws, and
the social habits of its people. Pardon me, sir," said
the Hermit, wiping his eyes and emptying his glass,
"but I cannot touch upon this theme, without feeling
my heart melt like butter in my body. Whilst I talk
of As-you-like, my spirits sink; I am heavy, to very
dumpishness."
Pausing a moment, and clearing his throat, the Hermit
proceeded.
66
And first, sir, for the order of government. As-
you-like is a monarchy; a limited monarchy. At the
time I dwelt there, the crown was worn by King Abdo-
men, almost the greatest man that ever walked.
natural accomplishments were many: he was held to make
a more melodious sneeze than any man in the universe.
His


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
17
He invented buttons, the people of As-you-like before
his time tying their clothes about them with strings.
He also invented quart goblets. He was the son of
King Stubborn, known as the King of the Shortwools.
"After the king came the nobility; that is, the men
who had shown themselves better than other men, and
whose virtues were worked into their titles.
"Thus there was the Duke of Lovingkindness; the
Marquis of Sensibility; the Earl of Tenderheart; the
Baron of Hospitality, and so forth. Touching, too,
was the heraldry of As-you-like. The royal arms were,
charity healing a bruised lamb, with the legend, Dieu
et paix. And then for the coach-panels of the aristo-
cracy, I have stood by the hour, at holiday times,
watching them ; and tears have crept into my eyes,
and my heart has softened under their delicious influence.
There were no lions, griffins, panthers, lynxes-no
swords or daggers-no short verbal incitements to man-
quelling. Oh, no! One nobleman would have for his
bearings a large wheaten loaf, with the legend-Ask
and have. Another would have a hand bearing a purse,
with the question-Who lacks? Another would have a
truckle-bed painted on his panels, with the words-To
the tired and footsore. Another would display some
comely garment, with-New clothes for rags. Oh ! I
could go through a thousand of such bearings, all with
the prettiest quaintness showing the soft, fleshly heart
of the nobleman, and inviting, with all the brief sim-
plicity of true tenderness, the hungry, the poor, the
weary, and the sick, to come, feed, and be comforted.
And these men were of the nobility of As-you-like ;
nor was there even a dog to show his democratic teeth
at them.
"The church was held in deepest reverence. Happy
was the man who, in his noon-day walk, should meet a
bishop; for it was held by him as an omen of every
manner of good fortune. This beautiful superstition
arose, doubtless, from the love and veneration paid by
C


18
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
the people to the ministers of religion, who, from their
tenderness, their piety, their affection towards their
flocks, were looked upon as the very porters to heaven.
The love of the people placed in the hands of their bishops
heaps and heaps of money; but as quickly as it was
heaped, was it scattered again by the ministers of the
*faith, who were thus perpetually preaching goodness and
charity at the hearths of the poor, and the poor were
every hour lifting up their hands and blessing them. It
was not enough that the bishops were thus toilsome in
their out-door work of good; but in the making of new
laws and amending of old ones, they showed the
sweetness, and, in the truest sense, the greatness, of
the human spirit. During my stay in As-you-like, what
we should call the House of Lords, but what in that
country was called the House of Virtues, debated on
what some of their lordships deemed a very pretty case
to go to war upon; and sooth to say, for a time, the
House of Virtues seemed to forget the active benevo-
lence that had heretofore been its moving principle.
Whereupon the bishops one by one arose, and from their
lips there flowed such heavenly music, in their eyes
there sparkled such apostolic tears, that all the members
of the House of Virtues rose, and with one accord fell
to embracing one another, and called all the world their
brothers, and vowed they would talk away the misunder-
standing between themselves and neighbours; they
would not shed blood, they would not go to war.
"And this was ever after called the peace of the
bishops.
"The second deliberative assembly was called the
House of Workers. No man could be one of these, who
had not made known to the world his wisdom-his justice
-his worship of truth for truth's sake. No worker was
returned upon the mere chance of his fitness. He must
be known as an out-door worker for the good of his
fellowmen, before he could be sent, an honoured member,
to the House. The duty of the assembly was to make


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
19
laws; and as these were to be made for all men, it was
the prime endeavour and striving of the workers to write
them in the plainest words, in the briefest meaning.
They would debate and work for a whole day-they
always assembled with clear heads and fresh spirits
every morning at nine-to enshrine their wisdom in the
fewest syllables. And whereas, here with us we give
our children Goody Two Shoes and Jack and the Bean
Stalk, as the easiest and simplest lessons for their tender
minds to fasten on, in As-you-like the little creatures
read the Abridgment of the Statutes for their first book;
so clear, so lucid, so direct was it in its meaning and its
purpose.
66
Nevertheless, as there were some dull and giddy
folk, who, after all the labour of the House of Workers,
could or would not know the laws, there were certain
meek and loving-kind professors called goodmen guides,
answering to our attornies, whose delight it was, for the
very smallest imaginable sum, to interpret and make
known the power and beauty of the statutes. And
whereas, among us, physicians and surgeons-may the
spirits of charity and peace consecrate their fire-sides!-
set apart a portion of the day to feel the pulse of
stricken poverty, to comfort and solace the maimed and
wasting poor-so in As-you-like, did these goodmen
guides give a part of their time to the passionate and
ignorant, advising them to abstain from the feverish
turmoil of law; showing them how suspense would bake
their blood and eat their hearts, and wear and weigh
down man's noble spirit. And thus, these goodmen
guides would, I may say, with a silken string, lead men
back to content and neighbourly adjustment. When
men could pay for such counsel, they paid a moderate
cost; when they were poor, they were advised, as by the
free benevolence of the mediator.
"The people of As-you-like had, a thousand years or
so before, waged war with other nations. There could
be no doubt of it, for the cannon still remained. I saw
c 2


20
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
what at one time had been the arsenal.
There were
several pieces of artillery; the swallows had built their
nests under their very mouths. As I will not disguise
anything, I own there were a few persons who, when a
war was talked of, the war so happily prevented by the
bishops, strutted and looked big, and with swollen cheeks
gabbled about glory. But they were smiled at for their
simplicity; advised, corrected by the dominant reason of
the country, and, after a time, confessed themselves to be
very much ashamed of their past folly.
66
6
Perhaps the manner in which the As-you-likeans
transacted business was strange; it may appear incredible.
I was never more surprised than when I first overheard
two men dealing for a horse. One was a seller of horses,
the other seemed a comfortable yeoman. That is a
pretty nag of yours,' said the yeoman. Pretty enough
outside,' said the horse-dealer. I will give you ten
lumps for it,' said the farmer (the lump signifying our
pound). No, you shall not,' answered the horse-dealer ;
for the nag shys, and stumbles, and is touched a little
in the wind. Nevertheless, the thing is worth four
lumps. You have said it?' cried the yeoman.
have said it,' answered the horse-dealer. Understand,
that this is the only form of oath-if I may so call it
-in As-you-like. You have said it?' I have said it.'
Such is the most solemn protestation among all people,
from the king to the herdsman.
6
'I
"The shops in As-you-like are very beautiful. All
the goods are labelled at a certain price. You want,
let us say, a pair of stockings. You enter the shop.
The common salutation is Peace under this roof'-and
the shopkeeper answers- Peace at your home.' You
look at the stockings, and laying down the money, take
the goods and depart. The tradesman never bends his
back in thankfulness until his nose touches the counter;
he is in no spasm of politeness; not he; you would
think him the buyer and not the seller. I remember
being particularly astonished at what I thought the ill


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
21
"
manners of a tradesman, to whom I told my
What, friend,' he said, 'should I do?
astonishment.
My neighbour
wants a fire-shovel-I sell a fire-shovel. If I ought to
fling so many thanks at him for buying the fire-shovel,
should he not first thank me for being here with fire-
shovels to sell? Politeness, friend-as you call it—
may be very well; but I should somehow suspect the
wholesale dealer in it. Where I should carry away
so much politeness, I should fear I had short weight.
A strange people, you must own, these As-you-likeans.
""
"Taxation was light, for there was no man idle in
As-you-like. Indeed, there was but one tax: it was
called the truth-tax; and for this reason. Every man
gave in an account of his wealth and goods, and paid in
proportion to his substance. There had been other taxes,
but all these were merged into this one tax, by a solemn
determination of the House of Virtues. 6 Since Provi-
dence has given to us the greatest measure of its gifts,
it has thereby made us the chancellors to poorer men.'
Upon this avowed principle, the one tax was made.
Would it not be the trick of roguery to do otherwise? '
they said.
Should we not blush to see the ploughman
sweating at his task, knowing that, squared by his means,
he paid more than we ? Should we not feel the robbers
of the man-not the Virtues banded together to protect
him? And thus, there was but one tax. In former
ages there had been many; for I was shown in the
national museum of As-you-like, several mummies, dry
and coloured like saddle-leather, that in past centuries
had been living custom-house officers and excisemen.
"
"
"There were prisons in As-you-like, in which the idle
and the vicious were made to work, and taught the
wickedness, the very folly of guilt. As the state, how-
ever, with paternal love, watched, I may say it, at the
very cradles of the poor,-teaching the pauper, as he
grew, a self-responsibility; showing to him right and
wrong, not permitting him to grow up with, at best, an
odd, vague notion, a mere guess at black and white,-


22
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
there were few criminals. The state did not expose its
babies-for the poor are its children—to hang them
when men.
"So dear were the wants of the poor to the rulers of
As-you-like, that, on one occasion, in a year of scarcity,
the monarch sold all his horses-the beautiful cattle
went at 70,000 lumps-and laid out the money in
building school-rooms and finding teachers for pauper
babies.
"And the state, believing man to be something more
than a thing of digestion, was always surrounding the
people with objects of loveliness, so that a sense of the
beautiful might be with them even as the colour of their
blood, and thus might soften and elevate the spirit of man,
and teach him true gentleness out of his very admiration
of the works of his fellow. Hence, the museums and
picture-galleries, and abbeys and churches were all
thrown open to the people, who always seemed refined,
subdued by the emanations of loveliness around them.
66
There were very many rich people in As-you-like,
but I never knew them to be thought a bit the better
of for their money. They were thought fortunate—no
more. They were looked upon as men, who having put
into a lottery, had had the luck to draw a prize. As
for the poor, they were always treated with a softness
of manner that surprised me. The poor man in As-you-
like seemed privileged by his poverty. He seemed to
have a stronger claim to the sympathies of those, in
worldly substance, over him. Had a rich man talked
brutally, or domineered over, or ill-used a pauper in
As-you-like, he would have been looked upon as we look
upon a man who beats a woman. There was thought
to be a moral cowardice in the act that made its doer
despicable. Hence, it was as common in As-you-like to
see the rich man first touch his hat to the poor, as with
us for the pauper to make preliminary homage to wealth.
Then, in As-you-like, no man cared to disguise the
smallness of his means. To call a man a pauper was no


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
23
more than with us to say his eyes are grey or hazel.
And though there were poor men, there was no famish-
ing creature, no God's image, sitting with his bony, idle
hands before him, like a maniac in a cage; brutalized,
maddened by the world's selfishness.
66
For ten years I lived in As-you-like. Ten happy
years. I married, became a father, and"—
-
"And what, we asked of the Hermit,-
made you leave so blessed a spot?'
66
66
what
I was one day in my garden, strolling about, whilst
they were laying dinner. I paused to look at my melon-
bed, when out hopped the black bottle. Without a
thought I ran after it--woe is me that I did so !—.
and caught it in my grasp. I felt the bottle mount;
I became instantly dizzy, and I know not what passed,
but when I came to myself, I was lying on a truss of
straw in an English farm-yard."
"A most extraordinary adventure," said we.
""
"Yes, I've seen a few things in my time, said the
Hermit,- "but they must remain for future talk be-
tween us.
-
Worn with our last night's journey, and beguiled into
the sweet sin of late hours by the curious liquor and
eke curious discourse of the Hermit of Bellyfulle, it was
not until the clock struck nine that we became conscious
of our new resting-place. A bright day shone upon us
reproachfully through the casement; flowers shook their
heads impatiently at the panes ; cocks without crowed,
as we thought, in angry note, at their master's guest,
and the clock-a pretty piece of Venice work upon the
mantel-piece-ticked remonstrance. With a jump, we
leapt from goose feathers to the floor.
We flung open the casement, and the sweet, fresh,
nimble air came, like God's blessing, into the chamber.
Sinking in an easy chair, with a stocking in our right
hand, we made stern questioning of our memory. It
was all true-true as adamant. We were the guest of


24
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
the bounteous Hermit of Bellyfulle; we sat, at that
time, beneath the roof-tree of the Cell of the Corkscrew
How, indeed, could we question the sweet reality?
All things about us revealed the taste, the mellow
heart, of the anchorite householder. The chamber was
small-the bed a primitive truckle; but there was an
Indian carpet, soft as lamb's-wool, on the floor; there
were books, not many, on a shelf and the black oak
wainscot was carved with fruit and knots of flowers, with
here a flask and there a flaggon. Above the mantle-
piece was this sentence, in letters of ruddy gold :-
Happy is the man who may tell all his dreams.
:-
In a compartment of the wainscot, over the head of
the bed, was also written :-
Make your bed as a coffin,
and your coffin will be as a bed.
As we pondered on the philosophy of these lines, we
looked dreamily about us, and for the first time saw in
a corner of the chamber a little door. Above it was
carved a small delicate hand and arm in the action of
beckoning, with what seemed to us a string of pearls
about the wrist. Throwing down our stocking, we
opened the door, and heard distinctly the sound of
running water. We descended two or three low steps,
and following our ear, went through a narrow, winding,
sloping passage, cut, as it seemed, out of rock, the floor
covered with rushes and moss. In half a minute we
stood beside a brilliant fountain, tumbling and glittering
in a large natural basin-a hollow of the rock.
sky was sapphire blue, and flowers, carefully tended,
grew around the edge of the spring: and there, too, was
short greensward, tender to the feet. Towels, dried on
beds of thyme, were spread on a sort of garden-seat,
with slippers, dressing-gown, and other covering. We
at once apprehended the meaning of the beckoning
hand, and with short preparation plunged into the spring.
The


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
25
5
In due season we returned to our chamber. Touching
was the care of our host! A small tankard of hot
spiced wine stood upon the table, filling the room with
aromatic sweetness. Was not this the very heart of
hospitality? As we hastily prepared ourselves to meet
the eremite, we heard voices; and, as we thought, the
sweet, low voice of woman. Could it be the Hermit's
wife? He had said nothing of so blissful an appen-
dage to Corkscrew Cell; nevertheless, it might be.
We quickened our speed; for, thought we, Madam the
Hermitess may be waiting breakfast.
We hastened to what we will call the refectory. The
Hermit was seated in his chair; the breakfast-it would
have put a stomach into a mummy-was laid out, widely
and bounteously. As we entered, the Hermit raised
his face, scarlet with eating, from a platter; and his
little black eyes twinkling welcome, he nodded, and
gasped from his full mouth—“ Salve! Sit and eat."
One hour at least had run to the past, ere another
word was spoken. "That brawn, sir, was cured in
Paradise," were the next words uttered, as the Hermit
pushed away his platter, and fell like a pillow in his
chair. "The hog, sir, is a wonderful philosopher.'
66
Philosopher!" we cried, for the moment inatten-
tive to the truth delivered.
66
Philosopher! We call him filthy, ugly names;
brand him as a foul and doltish thing. It is like the
hurried ignorance of men. I look upon the pig, sir, as
the philosopher of brutes-yea, the Diogenes of four-
legged creatures. Consider, sir. Contemplate the doings
of a hog. See him, sir, with his frank stupidity; or
what, to skin-deep thinkers, seemeth stupidity. Mark
him wallowing in gutter-mud; see him in the haunts of
men, even where fever comes, sometimes, alas! as
kindest handmaid to poverty. See him, with his broad,
quivering snout snuffing at the thresholds of very beg-
gars. With what gust will he munch a cabbage-stalk!
With what a grunt of gratitude will he take unto him-


26
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
self the leavings of the veriest poor! There is nought
that tooth can pierce, that goodman hog will turn aside
from. He will get fat and flavour from a dunghill ;
nay, in hopeful discovery, shove his snout into a cinder
heap. These are bad habits; nasty, foul, degrading
practices. And yet, sir, what comes of them? Why,
this, sir-this ;" and the Hermit struck the flat of his
knife on a huge wedge of brawn. "Your philosopher
considers, and takes experience of man; and only as
he is curious in all the doings, from noblest to basest
of the animal, is he, the said philosopher, worthy of
his gown. He elaborates and refines his experience,
gathered from highway and alley, and hovel, and
cellar; and then out of the very juices of this digested
wisdom, he leaves an oral system, or a written scroll.
Now, sir, what the brawn is to the hog, is Plato's book
to Plato; a sweet and unctuous lump, drawn and
rarefied, and elaborated, from even the foulest doings
of the world for the world's better wisdom. When my
lady sees Master Pig munching and wallowing in a
ditch, she curls her nose and lifts her shoulders at his
nastiness. And lo! when the same pig's leg, fragrant
with sage and patriarchal onion, smokes upon the board,
-the same lady sendeth her plate three times.
I
It is
even so with philosophers, and the true men of the
world. They have lived and died despised in alleys;
and afterwards are fed upon in tapestried chambers.
never look upon a hog, even in his foulest plight, but
I consider him tenderly, affectionately, as the living,
pauper laboratory from which in good season men may
carve most melting sweets. It is in this spirit, I—as
I take it-judiciously class philosopher and pig.
"True," said we; "there may be affinity." Then
resolving to know if it was the voice of woman we had
heard, we returned to the swine-flesh and the lady
glanced at by our host. "Your figure of the lady
and the pig's leg," said we, "reminds us of a question
we had to ask. Pardon us, if we are bold; but heard


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
27
we not, ere we entered, the small, musical pipe of the
other sex ?"
66
My laundress, sir," answered the Hermit; "she
lives in Clovernook. In the wicked, noisy, topsy-turvy
world you come from, she was a lady in her own right,
with broad acres and sacks of gold."
99
"And now a laundress, cried we.
"How came
such change about? What cruelty of fortune?"
"A touch of conscience-a sweet touch, sir. The
Countess, it was her belief, had killed two milliners."
66
'Killed them!" we cried.
"Not a statutable, Tyburn-killing," answered the
Hermit; "not what would be called killing by twelve
men bolted in a box; but what, sir, a jury of angels
may look very grave at, and more, return a most uncom-
fortable verdict upon.
66
""
"Pray, sir, explain the case," we said.
"Phoo! the story 's as short as short-cake," said the
Hermit. "Her Ladyship would take no answer: it
was a birth-day, or a court-day, or a gad-about of some
sort; and her Ladyship, at a short notice, was to be
very fine indeed.
There were three girls, milliners, all
sick and wasted at the time, with fading eyes, hectic
faces, and deep coughs-death, sir, croaking and wheez-
ing in their throats. The last work two of the girls
did was for Lady Swandown. She went to the show,
whatever it was, with almost the last sigh of the girls
in her fine dress. The two girls died, and her Lady-
ship-she is yet a fine woman, sir, in the rich fulness
of some forty-five-forswore the drawing-room world,
and coming here to Clovernook, brought the surviving
sister with her.
"Is it possible?" we asked.
"You shall see the Countess Swandown; though in
Clovernook she is simply called Dame Diaper. Ha! it
is a pretty sight to see her tending Mabel, as we call
her here, the last of the sister milliners to see the
Countess petting and nursing her, and walking with


28
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
her down the green lanes; and when the poor thing is
too weak to walk, it is indeed pleasant to see the
Countess drawing the sick milliner in a little, light,
easy sort of a coach,'
99
"A sight indeed!" we cried.
66
Yes," said the Hermit, with a grave look ;
"when
we think of the poor things already killed, and the
creature yet suffering, it is a sight, I think, to please
the very cherubs. You shall see them both, sir; both
Dame Diaper and Mabel."
"But you said the Countess-that is, the Dame—
was laundress here?
""
e;
"I should say, a sort of lady-laundress; a clear-
starcher. She has taken the work by way of penance
and bringing all her genius to bear upon it, has elevated
a mere knack into fine art, sir. My cravats and ruffles
are very pictures. You heard us talking? Ay, sir,
the old story-the old grievance, sir, 'twixt man and
woman, said the Hermit.
""
"And what is that, sir?" we asked.
The Hermit, shaking his head and groaning, cried-
"Buttons."
"Buttons!" said we.
The Hermit drew himself closer to the table, and
spreading his arms upon it, leaned forward with the
serious air of a man prepared to discuss a grave thing.
"Buttons," he repeated. Then clearing his throat,
he began: "In the course of your long, and, as I
hope, well-spent life, has it never come with thunder-bolt
conviction upon you, that all washerwomen, clear-
starchers, getters-up of fine linen, or under whatever
name Eve's daughters,-for as Eve brought upon us the
stern necessity of a shirt, it is but just that her girls
should wash it,-under whatever name they cleanse and
beautify flax and cotton, that they are all under some
compact, implied or solemnly entered upon amongst
themselves and their non-washing, non-starching, non-
getting-up sisterhood, that by means subtle, and almost


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
29
mortally certain, they shall worry, coax, or drive all
bachelors and widowers soever into the pound of irre-
deemable wedlock? Has this tremendous truth, sir,
never struck
66
66
you ?
How-by what means?' we asked.
Simply, by buttons," answered the Hermit, bring-
ing down his clenched fist
upon the table.
We knew it-we looked incredulous.
"See here, sir," said the Hermit, leaning still fur-
ther across the table. "I will take a man, who, on his
outstart in life, set his hat acock at matrimony—a man
who defies Hymen and all his wicked wiles. Neverthe-
less, sir, the man must wear a shirt; the man must have
a washerwoman. Think you, that that shirt, returning
from the tub, never wants one-two-three buttons?
Always, sir-always. Sir, though I am now an ancho-
rite, I have lived in your bustling world, and seen, ay,
quite as much as any one of its manifold wickedness.
Well, the man—the buttonless man-at first calmly
remonstrates with his laundress. He pathetically wrings
his wrists at her, and shows his condition. The woman
turns upon him her wainscot face, and promises amend-
ment. The thing shall never happen again. The
week revolves. Think you, the next shirt has its just
and lawful number of buttons? Devil a bit!"
Starting at the word, we looked, we fear, reproachfully
in the Hermit's face.
66
Pardon me; let it be as it had never been said,"
cried the anchorite-a deeper tint dawning in his face,
and his eye looking suddenly moist. "Pardon me, but
the heart has strange chords; even buttons may some-
times shatter them.'
""
We bowed, and begged the Hermit to proceed.
66
22
Well, sir,' said our host, after an effort, “week
after week the poor man wrangles with his washer-
woman from the very gentleness of even maidenly
complaint, the remonstrance rises to a hurricane of
abuse; and still the washerwoman, as it would seem


30
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
6
bound by her oath to her unmarried sisterhood, brings
home no shirt complete in all its buttons. Man-the
fiercest of his kind cannot always rage. He becomes
tired-ashamed of clamour. He sighs, and bears his
buttonless fate. His thoughts take a new turn. In
his melancholy, his heart opens; he is softened—sub-
dued; and in this, his hour of weakness, a voice-a
demon voice-whispers to him, Fond, foolish man!
why trust thy buttons to an alien? Why helplessly
depend upon the needle and thread of one who loves
not thee, but thy shilling? Take a wife; have a
woman of thine own, who shall care for thy buttons!'
The tempter is strong. The man smiles distrustfully,
but still he smiles. That very night-it so happens-
he goes to a house-warming. He is partner at cards
with Miss Kitty. She never did look so toothsome.
And then her voice-'twould coax a nail out of heart of
oak. The man thinks of his buttons; and before he
leaves the house, Kitty has been brought to confess that
she doesn't know what she may do-she may marry,
or she may not.
66
66
""
Is it possible?" we cried, with a laugh.
Sir," said the Hermit, "'tis not a thing to idly
laugh at. Take fifty matches, and be assured of it, if
you sift 'em well, out of forty, at least, you'll find buttons
in some shape at the bottom of 'em."
"2
"It may be, we said.
66
It is," cried the Hermit with emotion.
are led by their noses; men by their buttons."
"Asses
There was a dead pause. The Hermit had us in a
clinch. We felt ourselves beaten, and therefore flung
our discourse once more upon swine's flesh. "It is
delicious brawn,' we cried. "Blessings have fallen
""
upon the man who reared it.”
66
Perhaps," said the Hermit, with a faint smile, "the
fellow knew well how to feed hogs.
Understand me;
I am no unbeliever in the efficacy of blessings: potent
are they, sweetly potent where they fall. Yet, sir, like


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
31
all goodness, they are sometimes terribly libelled in the
world. I have known men by the very lithesomeness of
their backs, and bronze of their faces, get fat and golden.
Well, sir, to what have they sworn they owed all their
grease and prosperous yellowness; forsooth, to the bless-
ings that fell upon them-blessings rewardful of their
piety. These men, sir, I know it, have in a business way
picked pockets, yet have they declared they owed their
substance to the untiring fingers of their saints."
"Very like," said we.
66
""
and 'tis there-in that
Sir, it is, said the Hermit; " and the brawn
before us brings to my memory a little story that may
shadow forth this truth. I have noted down the tale,
cedar chest, as I have said,
with a hundred others. Do not stir; I think I can
remember the little history, without rummaging the
papers. I call it-
A Short Story of a Cow and a Sow.
"You were never at Naples, sir?-No? Well, I will
not commiserate you; I will not triumph; I will spare
your feelings. Naples! If, sir, there be a place where
a man may forget taxes and all the tribulation of what
with great gravity we call civilized life, it is—always
excepting my own Clovernook-it is Naples !
"Saint Anthony is a great fellow at Naples: a saint,
sir, of the first water. Perhaps, I am wrong in the
epithet water being rarely a test of saints; monks,
who are to saints what porwiggles are to frogs, for the
most part abominating that pauper fluid. No matter.
Saint Anthony is a great gun at Naples, whatever he
may be elsewhere: for saints, like fox-hunting lords of
the manor, though they may make a terrible clatter in
their own neighbourhood, are sometimes held dirt cheap
in other places. Well, sir, Saint Anthony in his mortal
days had a kindly yearning, a love, a gentleness, a pity
towards everything that lived; beasts, birds, fishes,


32
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
reptiles. What Atticus was to Cicero, Saint Anthony's
pig was to Saint Anthony. Great was his power over
animals; most melodious, most convincing his speech;
as was proved by his sermon to the fishes, which touched
them all alike, the hard roes and the soft. Saint Anthony
died—but to this day Saint Anthony lives in Naples.
Once a year, with reverent care, people bring to him
their various four-footed chattels; yea, the two-legged
birds, to boot, that they may be soused with water
blessed at the shrine of Saint Anthony; the said water
being fatal to measles, mange, glanders, pip, and every
other malady that walks or flies. Do you laugh, sir?
I am sorry for it. Call it superstition if you will; super-
stition hath uglier blotches than this. There is, to my
mind, a fine spirit of humanity in this custom; nay, a
beautiful piece of natural religion. Men, who acknowledge
its sanctity, thereby acknowledge in the very hog that
grunts about them, a something cared for by the Divine
Schemer of things: it is a creature, part and parcel of
the wondrous whole; a thing to be used tenderly by
men, seeing it is not despised by a saint. The water
of Saint Anthony, thus sprinkled and falling upon
brutes, must cool the pride of human-kind, showing,
that although it is the highest piece of heaven's work on
this earth, it is not the sole piece. And thus, the
peasant taught by the love and benevolence of Saint
Anthony towards his horse, is taught a tenderness for
the creature which otherwise he had not known. He,
Pietro, has his saint to guard and bless him, but-to
Pietro's mind-so have Pietro's cows and sheep and
so, the saintly care about all, brings all into a narrower
circle.
66
:
Therefore, at Naples, great is Saint Anthony. Fine
ladies send their lap-dogs to be sprinkled, and they yelp
back with blessings about them. Parrots are soused, and
lo! they scream defiance at the pip; and if limited
before in their vocabulary, have full soon in their throats
a very dictionary.


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
33
"Gano was a Neapolitan farmer; a heavy, stupid, yet
withal, a most religious man. Not an animal that called
him master, that was not sprinkled, once a year, with
the water of Saint Anthony: and thereupon, the ewes
yeaned twins, the hens never failed of eggs, and multi-
plication was ever triumphant in his dove-cote! Though
Gano could not drive all his stock to the shrine of Saint
Anthony, he never failed once a year to purchase of
the priest a sufficiency of water, wherewith to sprinkle
his property at home; and all things throve with him
accordingly.
"Gano had bought a young sow; a spare thing,-but
with the blessing of Saint Anthony and plenty to eat,
the sow, it was the belief of Gano, would plump and
fatten. Gano failed not to drive the sow to Saint
Anthony's water, where, at Gano's special intercession,
it was doubly sluiced. Gano drove the sow home; and
thoughts of ham and bacon, and savoury sausage, sang
sweetly in his brain as he meditated upon the blessings
of Saint Anthony. Weeks passed away, and nevertheless
the sow did not fatten; no, it somewhat pined and
shrunk. There was some devil in the pig! So, at
least, thought Gano.
"A short while after, Gano bought a cow. Had she
been sprinkled by Saint Anthony? No. It was almost
no matter; she was so fine a cow, without aspersion.
Her black skin was like Genoa velvet; and then so
sweet, so gracious a look about the head! More than
all, every day she gave a flood of milk. Leagues about
there was talk of Gano's cow.
"As it sometimes happens with men, so did it happen
with Gano's cow. Just as her fame had spread around,
and brought many folks to see her, her merits became
less she began to shrink; and for milk, less and less
was drawn from her night and morning. It was well
for the faith of Gano that it was so for looking, as in
his infidel moments he had looked, upon the sleek
carcase of the cow, the animal unblessed, unsprinkled
D


34
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
by Saint Anthony, and comparing it with the spare con-
dition of the sow that had been washed almost from
snout to tail by the efficacious water, Gano-the saints
forgive him!--began to consider within himself, whether,
after all, Saint Anthony was so indispensable to the
health of a farm-yard. Weak, wicked Gano!
"Still the cow dwindled, and as it dwindled, still-it was
strange, or rather it was by no means strange-still
the sow increased. The cause was plain. The blessings
of Saint Anthony were working in the marrow of the
swine; the saint was covering its bones with flesh; and
in a short time, the wonder and admiration before
bestowed upon the cow-were offered to the pig. It
was prophesied by some that the cow would die; but it
was no matter: the added value of the sow would more
than make good the loss; it was so wonderful in its fat
-so beautiful, yet mighty in its proportions. Still the
sow fattened, and still the cow gave no milk.
6
"See you not," said old, pious neighbours to Gano-
see you not the blessings of good Saint Anthony?
How have they descended upon the swine! whilst for
that unblessed, misbegotten cow-cut her throat, burn,
consume her; otherwise she will bring a curse upon your
cattle, and blight upon your crops. Gano felt the
rebuke; acknowledged the evil dwelling in the cow,
the goodness fattening in the swine. If the cow should
die, it would be a just punishment on her presumptuous
owner.
"
"Matters went on, and even the fame of Saint Anthony
increased with the fat of the sow. Never had the saint's
water been so highly prized. At length, the true cause
of the sow's fatness was discovered; and thus it was.
"Very early one morning, Gano rose, and going to
where the cow was stalled, saw the sow lying on its fat
belly beneath the cow, with the teat in its mouth,
milking, milking with all its might, and grunting com-
placently at the larceny!
66
Gano, though astounded, and on the instant suspicious


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
35
sow had so behaved
He did so and six
saw the sow in the
of the truth, said nothing to his neighbours. It might
have been the first time that the
itself. He would wait and watch.
mornings, at the same hour, he
same place, milking, milking, and grunting the while!
Almost every ounce of swine's fat was due to the cow.
The neighbours had sworn that the sow had prospered
by the peculiar blessings of Saint Anthony. Alas! the
sow had flourished upon stolen milk.
"Now, sir," said the Hermit, "is there no lesson in
this little story? Teaches it nothing?"
66
"We think we apprehend its drift," was our answer.
Sir, in your world-for in Clovernook we know
no such animals—many are the fat swine, and only fat
at the expense of poor, defrauded cattle."
""
"It may be, we replied.
66
May be, sir? Ha! I know it is," said the Hermit ;
"and of all sorts of fatness, that is the vilest, the coarsest,
which owes its grossness to hypocrisy. You shall see a
man rich in pocket and poor in soul. He goes to his
church, and owns himself, to his passing condescension
by the way, a miserable sinner; he returns homeward,
and
proves himself to be so, albeit the proof never strikes
him, by spurning the Sabbath-beggar at his threshold.
This man was never known to do a large goodness.
Neither was any positive, legal wickedness proved against
him. No he never grumbles at the church rates, for
once a week he is decorously placed in his comfortable
pew. He pays his way, and can show stamped receipts
as vouchers for the goodwill he bears towards all men.
He is a Christian; for one of his godfathers now alive
can testify to his baptism; nay, he has the register
among other precious family documents. Hence, if he
be wealthy, why, riches have descended upon him as
the bounty rewarding his virtues. His own goodness
has been turned into a benison. And he has oppressed
no one? He has wronged no one? He has not armed
himself with an unjust, though an allowed usage to add
D 2


336
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
66
to his hoards-to increase his wealth? Alas, sir, alas!"
cried the Hermit, against how many such men, may
the accusing spirit some day thunder forth, Stolen
milk!'
""
6
We were about to venture some rejoinder when the
door was gently opened, and a negro child, as he appeared,
about ten years old, glided in, and made up to the
Hermit, presenting to him a velvet cap, and a staff of the
whitest ivory.
66
negro.
66
We at
Farewell,
My little boy, sir," said the Hermit; and the
child gently nodded to us, as pleased with the words of
his master. "This is my hour for a walk: will you use
your legs? Or, if it please you better, will you stay and
read? Bezoar will show you my book-room."
once preferred to accompany our host.
child; and let me hear good words of you,' said the
Hermit, tenderly laying his hand upon the little woolly
head. Saying this, the Hermit donned his cap, grasped
his ivory staff, and courteously showed us from the cell.
Our curiosity was immediately aroused by the little
Our host observed this in our looks, and said—
Yes; a fine little boy, and from a curious place,
too. You shall hear something of him as we walk.
This way, by your leave: it is a solitary by-road, and
winds to the top of yonder hill; whence you may
look down upon Clovernook, lying lamb-like and quiet
at the bottom." Saying this, the Hermit turned to
the left from his orchard, a large sheep-dog bounding
after him, and leaping about him, and barking loudest
gladness. "Gently, Colin, gently," said the Hermit ;
and the dog thrust his nose into his master's hand, and
taking a deep snuff, was on the instant quiet, and falling
behind, walked gravely as a court follower.
66
"And the little black boy's name is Bezoar?
said we, urging the promised story.
"Bezoar, answered the Hermit; who, after a
pause, continued. "He is older than his looks; and
his brain is still the oldest part about him.
He comes


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
37
from a curious place, unknown I believe to any tra-
veller, but myself. Do you know much of geography,
sir?
"9
We answered, and, we fear, without a blush,
thing."
"No-
"Your ignorance will spare me some description.
Let it suffice to you, that the birthplace of Bezoar is
an unknown tract-unknown to all but myself-some-
where in Japan. At one time ofmy life, I drove a
large trade in Dutch dolls. I travelled to Japan with
my merchandise, and making my way to the Emperor's
court, became an especial favourite by means of my
ware. The poor people had never before beheld a doll:
and as my dolls were the first sort fashioned to open
and shut their eyes, and emit certain sounds from the
mouth-the invention has, I have heard, been shame-
lessly copied in France-they were considered in that
strange, uncivilised country, as things of almost greater
worth than mere men and women; henceforth, they who
would prosper in the sight of the Emperor, became as
nearly as was allowed to them, like unto dolls. The
greater the doll, the finer the courtier. I soon disposed
of all my goods, which being limited in supply, carried
any price. I really believe, so great was the passion,
that some wives would have parted with their husbands
for dolls; and am almost convinced that husbands might
have been found who would have changed their living,
ogling, talking spouses, for mere machines of painted
wood that only opened their eyes, and sounded a few
sounds, when the wires were pulled for such purpose.
I became a great favourite with the Emperor ; and
protected and authorised by his letter-it was embroi-
dered in letters of gold on violet-coloured satin-roamed
everywhere."
"But what we want'
The Hermit stopped dead at the unseemly interruption.
With a sweet smile on his face, he shook his head, and
leaning on his staff, looked in our eyes.
"Once upon a


38
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
time, do you know what patience wanted?" asked he of
Bellyfulle.
We confessed our ignorance.
"She wanted a nightingale. Well, sir, patience
waited, and the egg sang.
""
We bowed to the soft rebuke, and promised to hold
our peace.
The Hermit continued.
66
As I said, I roamed where I would. In my wan-
derings, I fell among a strange sort of people; strange
in this way. Though the people were divided into an
equal number of white and black, there was no pride of
colour in the fair, no humiliation in the sooty. All were
alike.
""
"And how was this compassed? we asked, unable
to suppress the question.
"There ran a legend in the country that it had not
always been so, but that the blessing-for so the people
called it—had been brought about by one of their demi-
gods as I could understand, a sort of Japanese Prome-
theus. The blacks-people will tell you there are no
blacks in Japan; you have my full authority to con-
tradict them-had been hardly used: stripped, mutilated,
sold, made merchandise of, as in other places black flesh
has been, and is. The land was cursed with the wicked-
ness: on one side there was stony-hearted arrogance; on
the other, agony, debasement. Well, the Japanese God
changed this; and how? One morning-a time an-
swering to our 1st of May-all who had gone to bed as
negroes, rose as white men; and the white got up blacks
For a whole twelvemonth, sir," said the Hermit of
Bellyfulle, "I was myself a black man."
"Impossible!" we cried; but a glance from the
Hermit subdued us into a look of belief.
"A black man," repeated the anchorite, gently
striking his ivory staff upon the ground; "and, the year
past, I became of my first colour. And this, sir, is the
case with all the dwellers in that country. Each party
takes the colour of each for one twelvemonth.
year black, one white.'
22
One


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
39
"When the change was first ordered," said we, "it
must have astounded the better people.'
""
"It was a fine lesson, sir; a fine practical teaching
of humility. And after all, what is it at this moment
going on in that very remote province of Japan, what
is it more than you figure to yourselves in the world
you come from? The Japanese divinity did but anti-
cipate the work of the future. Men, I mean Christian
men, do not imagine to themselves angels of different
coloured skins: they do not conceive the notion of black
cherubim. Grave-dust, that truest fullers'-earth, surely
takes out the negro stain. I take it, sir," and the
Hermit paused in his walk, and closing his hands, let
his staff fall in his arms,—“ I take it, sir, we all rise
alike?"
We said nothing; and for a few minutes the Hermit,
resuming his pace, was silent. He then observed, and
we thought in a somewhat pensive tone, "The pretty
boy at the cell-yes, sir, I call him pretty-was a native
of the strange land I have spoken of. I have seen that
jetty boy white as the whitest English maiden. He was
an orphan when I brought him away!"
"And at that time in his year of black?
tured to ask.
we ven-
"Yes, sir," answered the Hermit; not observing,
or not condescending to observe, a tone of levity that,
struggle as we would, broke from us for sooth to say,
we thought the Hermit- -as doubtless the reader will
think either pleasantly jesting or pleasantly mad.
"Yes, sir," said the sage of Bellyfulle, "he was then
black. He has never changed since.'
-
""
"We can well believe it, was our avowal.
"It was my hope-otherwise I had never brought
the dear child from his delightful land-the paradise of
the world, sir! every single grape there is big as a
walnut: it was my hope, had the change from black to
white gone on, that the world might have been instructed.
As it is, sir, were I simply to publish the truth, 'twould
be taken as a traveller's story.'
27


40
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
said we.
"Just so,
"For there are some distant
truths that, however beautiful, will not bear a voyage.
You may carry ice to the Indies, if you carefully stow it;
but travellers, sir, sometimes find their best of truths
melt by the way.'
As we came to a turning of the path, we met one of
the villagers of Clovernook; as I afterwards found, an
old man, who, in the outside world, had been a planter,
and the owner of a thousand slaves. He had left nearly
all his wealth behind him, and by the greatest luck had
escaped to the village; there, in its sweet serenity, to
peep into the holes and corners of his soul, and blow
the worldly dust out of them, as the housewife blows
and dusts her best china. And, indeed, such care had
been most necessary.
He was, as the Hermit after-
wards told me, a sharp-faced, wan, edgy kind of man
when he set out for Clovernook, with a restless anxiety
of eye, and quick, whistling kind of speech. When we
saw him, there was a look of gentleness in his old face,
and his eye shone deeply, yet tranquilly, and he spoke
with a sweet cheerful gravity-the natural tone of good
old age.
"A good day and many," said the Hermit to the
old man. "You will find your scholar at the Cell,
Master Simon." And the old man, smiling, and gently
bowing, without a word, passed on.
we.
"What scholar do you speak of, may we ask?" said
66
Bezoar, the black boy," answered the Hermit.
"Master Simon teaches him chess."
"Chess! a planter, and an owner of a thousand
negroes, teach a black boy chess!" we cried.
99
'Tis a pretty game,
said the Hermit, not attend-
ing to the contrast we had ventured," a pretty game;
and serves to remind us, here in Clovernook, that there
are such things as kings and queens, and blazoned
braying state. That there are or have been knights,
sworn to do manly service, and alack! too often for-


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
41
-
getting the vow. That there are yes, still are-
castles, strongholds of wrong prison-fastnesses for
feeble innocence. That there still exist - we know
them not in Clovernook-worthy, pious bishops, pulpy
and rich as pine-apples. Kings, queens, knights,
bishops, and castles!"" cried the Hermit. "How few
the syllables! Yet in this world what an uproar have
they made! How much wickedness and suffering, and
violence, and stone-blind bigotry—if we read the history
of this dear old mother earth-Gracious Heavens,
cried the Hermit lifting his hand, "what daily Neroes
are we to her! What multiplied, and still multiplying
evils may all be written down in five small words!
Kings, queens, knights, bishops, castles! What a
significant short-hand is here, my master," said the
Hermit, and he shook his head, and stalked freshly
onward.
We followed him in silence along the path that,
with gentle acclivity, wound around the hill. Beautiful
was the way! Myrtles, geraniums, and a thousand
odoriferous shrubs blossomed and breathed about us.
No dead leaf was seen; no withered twig deformed the
place; no slug, no snail, crawled in the path. Bare-
footed Venus might have trod the grass, it was so soft,
so clean, so delicate. Seats, and banks, and mossy
green alcoves were formed at various distances, along
the way; places of rest and shelter from the sun and
shower. "Here," said the Hermit, pausing" here
is the Grotto of the Cup and Cake;" he then turned
aside, and entering what seemed to us the mouth of
a cavern, bade us follow. We obeyed, and in a few
moments stood in a circular grotto, into which the light
through various crannies, cunningly fashioned, found its
way; falling upon a myriad of shells of rainbow tints,
that flashed and glowed about us, burning in the air.
We heard the creeping of a spring, and guided by the
sound, saw it falling in a thousand silver threads from
a corner of the roof. An old man, clothed in white


42
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
linen, received us. We shall never forget the benignity
of his aspect.
He was above the middle height; his
face was pale as moonshine; his eyes of a bright
grey, and his hair and beard were white as thistle-
down. “Here is a man," thought we, "whose life
has been a long task of holiness." He approached us,
with a large shell-goblet in one hand, and a small basket
of cakes in the other. 66
Drink," said the Hermit,
handing us the vessel.
"Is it water?" cried we.
"Almost: mere noontide tipple," answered the Sage
of Bellyfulle. "I call it the Etcetra Cordial. Harmless
as mouse's milk, sir. A nun might see the bottom of
the cup, yet see no worse for't. We are now at half-
way distance from the summit of the hill.
Here every
66
Then,
""
villager halts, and takes the cup and cake.
with strengthened hams, plods onward. Some cakes?
and the Hermit presented the basket. They are made
by a French Duchess; a dweller in the village below.
She bought the secret at, I cannot say what price, from
a cardinal, her confessor.
66
""
Have the cakes any name? we asked.
With a slight movement of the left eyelid, the Her-
mit answered-" Maids'-lips."
We drank and ate, then followed the Hermit from
the Grotto of the Cup. "And who may be our host?
we asked.
"Some man of lifelong piety and worth, no
doubt?
""
"In the outside world," said the Hermit; "for 'tis
thus we ever speak of the cannibal country you come
from, he kept a gin-shop, in close propinquity to the Old
Bailey. In his time he has been thrice fined by the
excise for having, accidentally no doubt, certain com-
pounds in his house, to give, as the wickedness of man-
kind imputed, an unlawful vivacity to his liquors. That
man has seen much of the world, and from an eminence
not enjoyed by all men.”
"What eminence ? ""
we asked.


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
43
"The pillory," answered the Hermit.
"For one
hour did he twirl before the faces of a mocking, egg-
flinging generation; and at length descended from his
altitude a changed man.
"No doubt," said we.
""
"He was set up a false-swearing publican, and came
down a philosopher. In one hour did he see the vanity,
the folly, the wicked violence of the world. In the
midst of men he was apart from them: his moral
feelings drew themselves inward like the horns of snails.
Whilst twirling round like a pig at the spit, with abo-
minable odours at his nostrils, and the hubbub of vulgar
malice in his ears, the poor man's soul retreated into
itself, and shutting his eyes upon the mob about him—
he had good reason for that, sir-he saw with the
better vision of penitent hope, an abiding-place like this
of Clovernook; a sanctuary from his world of adultera-
tion and short measure. Released by Mr. John Ketch
-ha, sir! we have a hangman in Clovernook
"Is it possible? we cried in great astonishment.
"One who was a hangman. Here, his duty is to
prune trees, and kill pigs. Released, the publican turned
his heels upon the world, and-his lucky star guiding
him hither he became the host of the Cup and Cake.
His office is to supply the villagers of Clovernook with
bite and sup, when it pleases them to rest at the Grotto.
Employed in this duty, he never speaks; but at the
Gratis, sir, he is a talking fellow, and will chirrup a
song like a cricket.”
"How beautiful!" we exclaimed; for the Hermit's
talk had carried us to the top of the hill. High bushes
had, for some distance, shut out the view of the village
beneath, so that making a sudden turn, the scene burst
in all its unfolded loveliness upon us. At the summit
was a wide, long marble seat canopied with trees of
willow and acacia. We sat down, and revelled in our
very heart, as we gazed about, below us.
"You are now," said the Hermit,
66
on the top of


44
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
Gossip Hill; and there at our feet, sparkling like an
emerald in the sun, lies Clovernook. Now, sir," cried
the Hermit, and his face fell into shadow, "I have
seen nearly all the granite and marble triumphs of the
world all the structures set up by the vanity of man
to dare time to do its worst. And I have never looked
at those mighty conquests of stone-those altars where
men may venerate the might and grandeur of human
labour-that I have not been saddened by the thought,
the idle fancy, that the very blood and marrow of men,
victims of lawless rule, cemented the blocks before me.
I have looked at the Pyramids, and seen ten thousand
thousand ghostly faces staring on me yea, the whole
mass has seemed to me the petrified bones of a thousand,
thousand slaves. Antiquity cannot take out the blood-
mark philosophy, or what has quicker vision, sympathy,
may still behold the stain; the winds of centuries cannot
bleach it. I have galloped over the Appian Way, and
my horse's hoofs have spurned what to my eyes was
once the flesh of outraged man.
""
"Kindred thoughts," said we, "might give expres-
sion, animation, to every brick of every city."
66
99
Certainly," said the Hermit, "if men would so
consider it. What is Saint Paul's? A mass of stone,
no more, to the tens of thousands that crawl, or lounge,
or jerk, or hurry by it. Such it seems: but what is it,
looking with thoughtful eyes? Why, a multitude of
building activities. We look again : labour has ceased;
the fabric is done; and the harmony of the work steals
into our brain like the voice of a sweet singer."
"Even so," said we. "And thus the quietude of
the scene about us takes possession of the soul, and
soothes it down to gentleness and peace.
66
""
Sir," cried the Hermit, "Corinth, Babylon, Palmyra,
what city you will, was never so fair a sight as that village
at our foot. A handful of its thatch is more than worth the
brazen gates of Thebes. Its very chimney smoke rises
to my nostrils, like the sweet odour of a sacrifice. And


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
45
wherefore is it thus ?
span of earth, with its few cottages, simple as swallows'-
nests-what should give to that village worth and ma-
jesty not found in cities? Why, sir, the human goodness
that sanctifies it. There the hearth-gods are gentleness
and truth. There, man is not a lie to man; a daily
shuffler, an allowed hypocrite, who, ostrich-like, hides
his head in a bush of expediency, and thinks the angels
see not his plumes of vanity fluttering about him. There,
a creed is not a best coat, to be only worn upon certain
days, lest it should be worn out: no, sir, it is the
every-day working-garment; and odd enough to say—
a strange thing not credible in your outside world—the
more the said coat is worn, the better and the brighter
it becomes; and so," said the Hermit with a grave voice
and an upward look, "and so to the end, until it is so
bright, so beautiful, it seems to catch a lustre from ap-
proaching heaven."
What should make that little
The Hermit paused, and for some moments we both
sat in silence contemplating the scene around and
beneath us. At length we observed, gazing down upon
the village, "Its beauty seems to grow upon us.'
""
"Yes," said the Hermit; "for the two devils, Hypo-
crisy and Selfishness, those everywhere fiends of your
world, have never entered there.'
""
"Indeed they travel," said we.
66
Why, with you," cried the Hermit, "they are as
the universal Pan. Take me-in fancy, only, mark
me-into your world, and tell me a sound that is not
mixed with their voices, even though it may be a bishop's
whisper; show me a thing they will not spot, even though
it be a bishop's lawn. Why, they are the twin deities,
or devilries of your earth; they shout from the house-
tops; they creak in carriage-wheels; they ring in the
change of the shopkeeper: and with placid faces, I
much fear it, they lay their hands above their fungus
hearts, and cry 'content' and 'non-content,' and 'ay'
and no,' in Lords and Commons.'
""


46
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
66
66
"this is bitterness.'
99
Indeed, sir," said we,
Ha! ha!" and the Hermit laughed; "that's an
old complaint." Then turning full upon us, the Sage
of Bellyfulle, with a twinkling of the eye common to
him when hit by some quaint thought, asked-“ When
the world was very young, do you know where Truth
lived? Doubtless. In a well; that is a story, old
almost as the stars. And there she dwelt, and the
water of the well was in such high repute, men would
use no drop of any other. And so they drank it, they
washed their faces with it, cooked and scoured with it.
There was no water like that from the well of Truth.
Time plodded on, and the knaves, and the knaves' pup-
pets, fools, vowed that the water became worse and
worse, unfit for man or beast. It was brackish, foul,
filthy, sulphurous; indeed, what was it not? Men re-
fused even to wash their hands with it. No housewife
would boil her lentils in it. Men, temperate men, qua-
lified their wine with it; and after, swore it was the
water that gave them the headache. Shepherds watered
their flocks at the well, and, as the shepherds declared,
the sheep fell into the rot. No man could say a good
word for the water of the well of Truth; it was so bitter
no man could stomach it. Whereupon the people took
counsel, and determined to expel Truth from the well,
some old varlets declaring that they knew the time
when the well was most sweet and medicinal; but then
it was before Truth had been permitted to take up her
abode in it. It was Truth, and Truth only that had
made the stream so shockingly bitter. And so, with one
accord, they hauled Truth by the hair of her beautiful
and immortal head from the well, and turned her naked
upon the earth, to find shelter where she might. Of
course, in her nude condition, she could not appear in
cities. Nevertheless, though she herself was abused and
driven to rocks and desert places, her well has main-
tained her name; and so for thousands of years men
have drunk at what they called Truth's Well, only Truth


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
47
was out.
Certain it is, now and then she comes and
takes up her old abiding-place; and then do good people,
who have unwarily taken a mouthful of the water, spit it
out again, and with wry faces, and shuddering anato-
mies, cry,—'How very bitter!' Sometimes, too, Truth,
to get the poor devil a bad name, will wander like a
stray gnat into his ink-bottle! Miserable scribbler!
Branded, tattooed worse than any New Zealander with
his own goose-quill. Virtuous, honest, benevolent peo-
ple who love their species, that is, the Adam and Eve
of the printing-office, the race of men and women in
good bold type, for they care not so much about the
living vulgarities; they scream like a lady at a loaded
pistol, or rather like a thumb-sucking baby at aloes, at
the man of bitter ink; it is so very bitter.'
"Truly, sir," said we, "'tis not a profitable liquid to
him who uses it.'
"Sir," cried the Hermit, "I have much to say upon
ink; but for the present, I will give you some brief
advice. I know not your condition, nor do I seek to
know it you may be in the fulness of wealth and feli-
city. Nevertheless, sir, fortune, to try you, may compel
you to be an author. You may, sir, live by self-con-
sumption."
66
'How, sir?
we asked.
66
"Did you ever see a crowd of monkeys in a cage ?
Answer; and I will tell you what I mean by self-con-
sumption. You have seen the animals?
66
Often," we replied.
""
"There is, I believe, a disease among monkeys; a
horrid, morbid appetite which pricks the creature to
nibble, and bite away his own tail."
"We have observed it," was our answer.
66
Sir," cried the anchorite, "I've seen monkeys that
have had the fit so very strong upon them, that their
tails have been bitten short to the buttock-left with
scarcely a stump for pity to weep over. What, think
you, among the tribe of monkeys were these animals
with self-eaten tails?"


48
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
We could not tell.
"Alas! sir," cried the Hermit of Bellyfulle," they
were authors. And now, sir, let me for a moment speak
of ink. I will, for an instant, do you the injury to ima-
gine you an author. Now, sir, if you would keep a fair
reputation, and not have dirty water thrown upon you,
in the name of virtue, by moralists from attics-not be
squirted at in the cause of benevolence by sensitive
folks, who can scarcely spell the syllables that stand for
the virtue, avoid bitter ink as you would shun the small-
pox. No, sir; dip your pen in a mild, sweet fluid; and
if you will attend to my instructions, in this manner you
will make it."
The Hermit cleared his throat, and seizing our right
hand between his palms, and looking intently at us,
spoke with an earnestness that played along our heart-
strings. He began :-
66
6
A way to make profitable ink :-Seek a she-ass,
with a week-old foal, that has been foaled at the fall of
the moon, for the moon is much to be considered in this
matter. Go out at midnight, and milk the ass into a
skillet that hath never been tainted with aught but oat-
meal porridge. Whilst you milk, softly carol, Sing a
song of sixpence,' Little Jack Hormer,' or any other
innocuous ballad. Put the milk by, and in the morning
stir it with a pigeon's feather. Add to the milk the
yolk of three phoenix' eggs. Boil it over a fire of cin-
namon sticks, and then put to it an ounce of virgin
honey, made by bees that never had a sting. Be parti-
cular in this, or the ink will be spoiled. When this is
done, put by the mixture until the first of April. It
matters not how long it may be till then, for the phoenix'
eggs, when you have obtained them, will keep the milk
sweet for ever. Well, on the first of April, before
breaking your fast, take the milk and strain it care-
fully through the nightcap of your grandmother. If
you have not a grandmother of your own, borrow a
neighbour's. In three days the ink will be as good as
ever it will be for use.'


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
49
"And this," said we, "is the way to make a profit-
able compound?"
"You perceive," said the Hermit, "there is nothing
bitter in the ingredients. Some of your critics might
drink of the ink, as though it was their own mother's
milk. Profitable, did you ask? Why there is sweetest
sorcery in the ink. You have only to dip your pen into
it, and whatever you write will be all that is mild and
beautiful. There will be no wrong, no wickedness in
this world—at least, by the grace of the ink, there will
be none in your picture of it, but it will be a world of
unmixed virtues. Your ink will never then be led into
the unprofitable knack of calling selfishness and villany
by their proper names, but you will wink and let them
trot by. Every man will appear to you-at least your
ink will make you swear he does-like Momus's man,
with a pane of glass in his breast, and behind the glass,
a ruddy angel! All the injustice of life-the wicked-
ness that man in his sorry ignorance inflicts upon his
neighbour, will be instinctively avoided by you; the
while the injustice grows, and the wickedness triumphs,
and you, with your sweet and profitable ink, have helped
to cast no shame upon the abomination! And you will
put all the world in holiday attire; the beggar-girl will
be dressed in sarsnet and tiffany, and ploughmen them-
selves wear smock-frocks of white satin. And so doing,
you will win the good word of those who never think for
themselves—a large class, sir; and of those-almost
as large-who think falsely for other people. You will
be amiable, good, kind, far-seeing, deep-seeing, and you
will not be bitter!"
66
Truly, sir, the ink that will do this," said we, "is
a golden gift.
66
""
It has been found so," said the Hermit. "And
now, sir, let me show you Clovernook and its population.
Place these upon your nose, and look about you.
With
this, the Hermit gave us a pair of spectacles. The
glasses were in a frame of heavy brass-work, curiously
E


50
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
overwrought with strange, odd marks. Looking at them,
we asked, "What may these denote ?"
66
"I cannot tell," answered the Hermit. "They were
the work of a Portuguese philosopher. The Inquisition
found a gallantee-show in his house, and burnt him for
a wizard. I bought the spectacles of his widow: she
was blind, or, I take it, had never sold them. You will
find them curious glasses."
Marvellous, in truth! Putting them on, the whole
of the village was brought in wonderful distinctness to
us. Though Gossip Hill was of exceeding height, and
at least two miles distant from Clovernook, yet so strong
was the power of the spectacles, that we could distin-
guish the white throats of the young martens thrust
from the nests built beneath the cottage eaves; could
see the tints of the houseleek on the cottage roofs, the
colours and small threads of lichen on the church tower.
""
"Wonderful-wonderful! we cried.
66
They are good glasses," said the Hermit" very
good. I have sat here, and looked through them so
often, that I know every flaw and weather-stain on every
roof and wall. Yet, some eyes they will not suit. Can
you see the hour by the church clock?
""
""
"The hour! we cried. "Nay, we can see a fly
upon the minute-hand."
"What is the fly about?"
ingly.
"Nothing," we answered.
asked the Hermit, mus-
"It is motionless."
"And the hand moves towards the hour? Is the fly
still there?" asked the sage.
66
Still there," said we.
"And still idle! Ha, my son," and the Hermit sighed,
"how many of us are no other than lazy flies upon the
hand of time? What other thing do you see?'
66
A pair of daws. One of them has just flown up
with stolen goods in its beak."
"The wicked one!" said the Hermit with a laugh.
"Robs poor villagers, and yet lives in a church.
They


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
51
They 'd
are old sinners, sir, those daws; I know them.
take tithe of wool from a day-old lamb, and the one
chicken from a widow's one hen. Yet there they haunt
and roost in their grave black, and bring scandal upon
our dear old church by the rapacity of their ways.
And then the Hermit smiled, and was silent.
After a
66
""
pause he asked, What think you of our church of Clo-
vernook?"
66
Very beautiful," said
for the doors were open,
interior of the building.
and truth."
66
we, "in its sweet simplicity;"
and we could see the whole
"It looks the abode of peace
Ay, it does, sir. Yet there is an old legend that
in former times there was fierce strife in that little church.
The quarrel is known as the schism of the Blue and
Black. It was thus, sir :-'
-The parson died; and when
another parson was to be chosen, many of the congre-
gation declared they would give ear to no preacher
whose eyes were not blue. No grace could flow from a
pastor with black eyes. Other of the people were as
resolute on the contrary. They held blue eyes to be
heretical, unbelieving, and typical of burning sulphur :
hence, they would have black eyes in the parson, and
none other.
66
And how," we asked,
dated?"
66
66
was the dispute accommo-
"In this wise as neither party would give way, two
persons were chosen. When Blue Eyes preached in the
morning, Black Eyes held forth in the afternoon. Thus
both congregations were equally satisfied, and, let us
hope it, equally blessed."
66 Do you believe this foolish tale?" we asked.
"There are people who call it fabulous-the gossip
of fiction. I cannot say what happened in Clovernook,
but I will tell you what I once saw in the land of the
Mogul. There, sir, there were certain bonzes or priests,
who, like the twirling dervises you may have heard of,
were wont to show their devotion by spinning, like tops,
E 2


52
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
in white gowns. Suddenly there came other dervises,
who spun in black gowns; then others came, who spun
in yellow raiment; others in scarlet; others in purple.
And every colour had its champions and apostles; and
there were many foul words, and a little foul play, ex-
changed among them. The tumult convulsed the land
-every party vowing to fight to the death for the one
colour. When I left the country, it was torn to pieces
by the separate factions of the separate coloured gowns.
After some years I returned, and found the whole land
in peace; and how, sir, think you, was amity restored?
A great man—a man of genius and benevolence—arose,
and he combined all the opposite colours into one sted-
fast, admiring body of himself; for he, looking upon any
colour as of no matter, if the twirling were good-if the
spinning were sincere he, the meek and easy man,
spun in something very like a harlequin's jacket."
"A pagan philosopher, said we.
""
"There was some thought, some suggestive wisdom,
in this harlequin humour. The light that blesses us, is
poured upon us in one white stream from the everlasting
fount; and yet it is a light of many colours. Alas, my
son!" cried the sage, "what a place would this be, if
the many-coloured creeds of this world did not, by Al-
mighty goodness, make the white light of the world to
come!
""
""
The Hermit paused, and we continued to survey the
interior of the church. 66
Beautifully simple,' said we ;
"no stained glass: no gold-fringed, gold-tasseled pulpit
cushion; and no pews.
66
""
66 no pews.
Why, no, said the Hermit,
In your
world, I have puzzled myself to think what kind of
place your stickling pew-holders must paint to themselves
when they imagine heaven? A place with pews? With
a better sort of velvet-softer seats-more harmonious
hinges to the doors-white, cloud-like hassocks?"
66
56
They can have no such thoughts,” cried we.
Why not?" asked the Hermit briskly.
« Nay,


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
53
they must. What is, or should be, a church to the mind
of the worshipper, but as the porch to eternity; wherein
he stands, pondering the terrible mystery within him: a
place set apart from the sordid cares and crimes of the
world, where, shaking the dust from his soul, he hopes,
fears, dreads, prays for an angelic change?—He is at
the outer door of the dread Future; and shall he there
whine like a canting beggarman at the threshold ?
Tell lies of sores and wretchedness? shall he call him-
self a worm, yet, in the pride of his maggot heart,
enshrine himself in a cabinet, shrinking from the neigh-
bourhood of brother crawlers? Think you, said the
Hermit, "that men will rise in pews? I fear me not."
,,
Again the Hermit paused. "What think you of our
churchyard?" he asked. "You see, there are no cy-
presses; no weeping willows; no undertaker yews; but
sweet, odorous shrubs and orange trees, with bud, blos-
som, and the ripe fruit; types of those who lie below."
And no epitaphs ?" said we.
66
"Nor naked skulls, nor cross-bones carved in stone;
nor cherub cheeks, with marble tears; nor aught of the
gimcrackery of woe that libels death, making the
deliverer horrible. Beneficent death! In the church-
yards of your outside world he sits like a blood-smeared
Indian, counting his scalps. And then, your tomb-
stones! What a multitude of contrary counsel of creed-
denying misery is there! I have walk among them;
and fancy has given to them features, expression; the
embodied voice and feeling of the written thing. Why
one howls, worms and darkness,' in the desolation of
despair; one with wailing, shivering voice, cries—' the
cold, cold grave;' another gnashes its teeth at the
' tyrant death.' And are these the looks, the voices,
the words of hope the words of the faith the men pro-
fessed to die in? It would be more than curious," said
the Hermit, in a solemn tone, "if the spirits of the dead
might write their own epitaphs.'
""
The deep earnestness of the Hermit's manner made us


54
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
gaze at him. It was strange; but he appeared to us
almost a double man. His face seemed to lose its
fleshly, full-fed, laughing look, when he talked in this
wise and was refined and animated; wholly redeemed
from its vinous aspect by the seriousness of his discourse.
At his cell, he seemed to us the champion and the
genius of creature-comforts—the true and doughty
Hermit of Bellyfulle; and now discoursing of death,
his wrongs, and the fopperies cast upon him, the Hermit
appeared as one who had castigated his spirit in the
wilderness.
66
Is it not strange," asked the Hermit, "that men
should seek for skulls and bones, and turned-down
torches, to make them feel the true solemnity of death?
These things are to the imagination what strong liquors
are to the blood. They confuse the sense of truth. Can
there be a more beautiful or more hopeful memento of
the dead, than the mere heap of earth that covers them?
Lovely, pregnant earth! Teeming with life! Holding
in its dusty bed the colour and the sweetness of the
future amaranth! And yet in your world, you place a
skull and cross-bones over dead men's clay, and write
up desolate sentences of worms and darkness; of terror
and the fell destroyer; as though the wailing spirit of
the dead cried from beneath. Verily, sir, said the
Hermit, "the tombstones of a Christian churchyard do
at times jangle with the sweet spirit of Christianity.
I have looked at them with pity; may I be pardoned
the emotion! sometimes with slight resentment.'
""
""
"The graves beneath us are covered with herbs and
flowers. None osier-bound," said we.
"Look at the wall, there, to the right," said the
Hermit.
We looked, and saw a long row of bee-hives.
hived in a churchyard!" we cried, astonished.
"Bees
"Every grave," said the Hermit, "is planted with
thyme and other herbs; with flowers, that the bees
most love. The whole village is supplied with honey,


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
55
55
sucked, elaborated from the churchyard.
There, my
bones will lie. And there the bees will work, and
working, sing above them.
To my heathen mind a
sweeter, a more hopeful music, than dolorous words of
worms and darkness, chipped by stone-cutter."
"Bees hived in a place of graves!" we repeated.
"'Tis a strange fancy."
"Call it what you will," said the Hermit,
66
we leave
it to your outside world to seek for sighs and groans,
and tribulation, in your burying places. The villagers
of Clovernook-great happiness is it that it is so-seek
nought but honey from the churchyard."
66
66
Who is that the sexton ?" we asked, seeing an
old hale man, with mattock and axe, enter at the gate.
"Our sexton," said the Hermit. "In your world,
he was a man of pills; a most potent, money-seeking
quack. His penance, here, is to dig graves.
you, it may be said, he employed journeymen.'
"He was known as the sexton's friend.
we,
66
With
But," said
"you have several times spoken of penance.
Are
all the dwellers of Clovernook vowed to penance for
the follies or the worse guilt of their former lives?"
"Assuredly," said the Hermit. "Save the few chil-
dren born here, nearly all the men and women of Clover-
nook take some self-imposed task, to cleanse themselves
of past foulness, past folly. I had forgotten," said the
Hermit, rising, "I ought first to have shown you THE
VALLEY OF NAPS."
"The Valley of Naps," we cried; "what place is
that?"
"It lies on the other side of the Hill, between this
and the village. By that valley all who come from your
world to end their lives in Clovernook, are made to enter.
Here," said the Hermit, turning his back upon the
village, and following a narrow, winding path—" here
you may see something of it. Look," said the Hermit,
and he pointed downwards to a dark speck of wood.
"Your spectacles will serve you little here. That


56
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
black blot of trees-that is the entrance to the Valley
of Naps.
When the traveller arrives there, he puts up
at The Warming-Pan-the only hostelry in the Valley.
The landlord is said to have been a Lord Chancellor in
his day; and his servants customs and excise officers.
The traveller is shown to bed, and after a nap of some
six months, he rises, puts on new clothes, and having
left his old face at the Shrine of the Looking-Glass,
sets forward to Clovernock."
6.
Dear sir,' we cried, "explain all this. What do
How can a man leave his face?"
you mean?
66
Why, sir," asked the eremite, "think you that
Clovernook would be the Paradise it is, if its villagers
had brought their wordly visages with them?
Oh,
most beautiful and most foul is the human countenance !
A page, writ with sunny characters a greasy, dirty,
dog's-eared leaf ! Are there not faces, with every trace
of divinity thought out of them? Faces, with quick,
hungry, subtle eyes; and cheeks and brows, lined
and cut as with the sharp edges of sixpences? Have
you walked the streets of cities and not beheld such
faces? If so, believe it, you have dull eyes. Well, the
people bound for Clovernook leave the raiment of the
outer world at the Warming-Pan; and with it their
natures as deformed and warped in the world they have
quitted. Then they call at the Shrine of the Looking-
Glass, and take a last peep of their worldly faces.
They look into the mirror, and looking, leave all the
black lines, the wrinkles of calculation, the pallor and
sallowness of sorrow in the glass, and step forward
with faces happy, bright, and beaming as from a talk
with angels.
22
"And, of course, never again visit the Valley of
Naps?" said we.
66
Yes, indeed," said the Hermit, "and have solemn
sport there. I have told you, that every traveller leaves
at the Warming-Pan his coarse and sordid worldly
nature with his old clothes. Well, every New Year's


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
57
Eve, these past natures, these phantasma of the world
without, appear in the cast raiment, and are invited by
the purified villagers of Clovernook, their past owners.
There is, I have said, much sport there; and it happens
after this fashion. Although everybody beside knows
the shadow, the ghost of the past, to be the past property
of the man upon whom the spectre fixes itself; yet does
the amended man himself deny the phantom; endea-
vouring by all means to put it off upon any other of
his fellows. It is strange sport to see how ghosts are
bandied about; like unacknowledged paupers in the world
you come from."
66
But the villagers of Clovernook," said we, "do
not forget their former doings?"
"On the contrary," replied the Hermit, "they have
a quick, most curious knowledge of their past lives,
save on the solemnity of New Year's Eve; and then,
for the time, do they forget all things. You see our
sexton there"-for by this time we had returned to
our seat, looking down upon Clovernook," there was
rare sport with him at Shadow Fair.
""
66 Shadow Fair!" we echoed. "Is that the name of
the festival held in the Valley of Naps?"
"It is; and the sexton went, with others, last New
Year's Eve. He was immediately owned by his ghost,
the phantasm, the slough of his moral self left at the
Warming-Pan. The ghost was a long, thin-faced ghost,
with a bit of mangy hair on the upper lip. The ghost
made up to the sexton, who immediately took to his
heels, the ghost following him, and pelting him with the
spectres of his own pills, as people pelt one another with
sugar-plums at a carnival. There was great sport, I
can tell you. The pills-the ghost seemed to have
myriads of them in his coat-pockets,-fell in showers
about the sexton, the ghost straining its thin voice, and
calling out that the sexton could not take too many
of them. Where the pills fell, poisonous fungus, small
toadstools, with bolus heads, came up, killing everything
around."


58
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
"And will the poor sexton suffer the same pelting
next New Year's Eve ?" we asked.
66
66
Assuredly," said the Hermit.
'May he not have better wisdom than to visit Shadow
Fair?" said we.
"He cannot choose," replied the Hermit. "It is
the inevitable fate of every villager of Clovernook, to go
every New Year's Eve to the Valley of Naps."
"What! is death in the village?" we asked, seeing
the sexton doff his coat, and begin delving.
"Yes. A villager died three days ago. He was
ninety-three, and this day week-yes, this day week
-he played at cricket."
""
"And who is that old man, we asked, "with
long white hair, at the bottom of the hill, peeping and
prying into the hedge?"
66
He, sir, was a sharp attorney; a very keen tool,
indeed, in your world," said the Hermit; "but here
he spends his days in picking cotton blight and canker
from the trees, and freeing flies from cobwebs."
"And here comes a gay, thin-faced old man, with a
wooden leg."
6
"He was a great general-a very mighty gene-
ral; he has killed his thousands, and knocked down
cities by the dozen. And now, what think you, does
he in Clovernook ? Why, every evening he waits in
the skittle-ground of the Gratis' to set up the nine-
pins. The rest of his time he employs in snaring jays,
daws, and magpies; and when he has taught them
Peace, peace, peace!' he lets them fly, as
he says, to teach their ignorant brethren."
to cry
"And now the general meets a tall, lusty man.”
"I know him. He was a prime minister for years.
Here he turns humming-tops and other nick-nacks for
children."
66
And who is this, now- ?"
""
"Patience, said the Hermit, with a smile, as he
rose from his seat, " you will know all the villagers


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
59
in good time-shall meet them all, and hear their
stories, too, at our only inn, the Gratis.'
999
With growing reverence for the Sage, we attended
the Hermit of Bellyfulle back to his cell. "In half an
hour," said he, graciously smiling, "it will be dinner.
time. Half an hour," he repeated with musical em-
phasis, as he passed into his chamber. Having profitably
employed the time with cold water, we then, refreshed
yet hungry, sought our host. The Hermit awaited us.
He had put aside his cloak of the morning, and was again
wrapped in his old damask gown. He perceived that
we observed the change. "My custom, sir," he said;
66
The
I never yet could dine in full dress. The digestive
organs, sir, abominate close buttoning; and do their
work sulkily, grumblingly. No, sir; a man in full
dress may chew and swallow, but he never dines.
stomach cannot honestly perform its functions in state."
We smiled: whereupon the Hermit with a grave, sly
look, asked "Will you answer me this question ?"
We bowed. "Do you think it in the power of
mortal man to give a fair, wise, learned judgment
upon any dish or sauce soever, the said man being, at
the time of tasting, in tight boots? Sir, it is impossible.
The judicial organ is too delicate, too exquisitely nerved,
to vindicate its sweet prerogative, unless the whole
man, morally and bodily, be in a state of deep repose.
And, therefore, can there be a greater wrong committed
upon the cook, than the common injury of dining to
music? It is abominable. Once I well remember it
-I chewed to the clangor, and crash, and thunder of a
military band. Well, sir, the dinner was excellent-
admirable as a dinner; but I have no more judgment
than a beast, if I had any other taste in my mouth save
the brass of the trumpets, and the tough parchment of
the drum-heads. Silence, profound and solemn, is due
to the first hour of dining. One minute before that
time the finest jest is but a presumptuous imperti-
nence. In my encyclopædia of the kitchen I have treated


60
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
of these things-philosophically and at large.
present"
For the
Here the Hermit upraised his forefinger, and at the
same time the door was opened, and a man, drest in
snowy white, followed by Bezoar, brought in the first
dish. Placing it upon the table, the man disappeared,
Bezoar taking his place behind the Hermit's chair. And
then the Hermit rose, and baring his head, said grace.
"Thanks be rendered for this: and may no man dine
worse!" With this short ceremony the Hermit entered
upon his serious task. He dined as though he was
fulfilling a devout exercise of his life. Not a word es-
caped him, as dish after dish was levied upon, then
taken away.
We confess our ignorance of the many
delicious things set before the Hermit, they had been so
disguised, so elevated by the art of the cook. As, in
silence, we watched the doings of the Sage-for soon we
sat with idle knife and fork, whilst still our host cut
away we marvelled that a man so capable of solemn
thoughts a man who could discourse, as he had done,
upon a churchyard—and the pride, the guilt, the empty
foolishness of life-should be so curious, so eager in his
food. With his strange quickness of mind, he jumped
at our thoughts, and said "I doubt not I can guess
your meditation. I, myself, with the wings of my soul,
have tried to escape from this mound of flesh," and he
glanced at his stomach; "but the soul is, at best, as a
trained hawk; let it fly as high as it will, there is its
master for the time, with his feet upon the earth; and
straightway it drops from the clouds at his call." Saying
this, the Hermit pushed away his final plate. He had
dined for he had spoken.
"This wine is miraculous," said we, filling a glass of
tokay.
"Yes I shall remain some time in Hungary," an-
swered the Hermit, sipping the liquor with educated lips.
66 This, said the Sage, holding the wine between him
and the light," this is the true blood of our dear mother
29


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
61
We
earth. I have often wondered at the sneaking ingra-
titude of astronomical men. In the name of grapes,
why should not Bacchus have a star to himself?
have only to reflect upon the characters of the Pagan
deities siderally honoured, to feel the indignity done to
Bacchus. There is Saturn, a tyrant and a child-eater,
-he must be set in a ring, and nominally hung in the
sky. Mars, a bully, and nine times out of ten no whit
better than a highwayman or burglar, he, too, must
twinkle insultingly upon men, made fools and rogues,
tyrants and victims, by his abominable influence; yes,
he, the recruiting sergeant of the heavens-must stare
with his red face upon us ;-and Mercury, thief and
orator to boot, may wink through the long night, all
having their admirers and worshippers; whilst for
Bacchus, he, with all his great bounty, is starless and
unhonoured. 'Twould be a pleasant, yea a proper
thing," said the Hermit with a laugh, "to find a fire-
new planet for him.”
66
Indeed," we answered, "in these days, it is not
likely that Bacchus will meet with so bountiful an astro-
nomer. In the outside world to use your own words
of Clovernook-his godship is in sad disgrace.. His
bottles are broken; his pottle-pots shivered; his name
anathematized. Boys and girls, scarcely forgetful of
the taste of mother's milk, renounce him and his
ways; and more, by the potent eloquence of child-
hood, compel father and mother to forswear the worship
of the frantic god. Drunkenness itself has lost its
blotched and scarlet face, and, like the hart, pants
only for pure water."
"Can it be?" asked the Hermit. "I never knew
a drunkard so reformed, unless, indeed, he had been to
the Land of Turveytop."
66
The Land of Turveytop!" we cried :
"where may
that be? what people inhabit it, and what wonders may
be done there ?"
"As for its latitude," said the Hermit, why, I will
not puzzle your geography with it. The people are of


62
22
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
gigantic stature, at least forty feet high; yet mild and
benevolent-the nurses and pastors of the ordinary race
of mortals."
"And is the land far distant?" we asked.
"Some hundred leagues, no more, from Clovernook.
I was brought up there: understand me-brought up,
after the fashion of the Turveytopians. The truth is,
when I had arrived at man's estate, I found myself in
possession of a bit of nearly every vice that blackens
the sons of Adam. I will not run over the list, but to
save your time and my breath will merely desire you to
think me at that time knowing in all the rascally
accomplishments generally shared among a crowd of
sinners. And yet, though wild and lawless, and hotly
pursuing all sorts of mad delights, I never felt a touch
of happiness. My pleasure was at best delirium that left
me spent and heavy-hearted. It was in one of those
moods, when the whole world about me was, to my
moral vision, coloured like so much brown paper, that
walking at the base of a high mountain, it suddenly
opened before me. Sir," said the Hermit, with a
grave look that rebuked our gaze of incredulity, "I
say the mountain opened. A narrow passage, adown
which the sun shone with intense brightness, and
whence I heard delicious sounds, as of distant music, was
before me. Without a thought I entered it; when
having run a few
paces, I turned round, and-the
marrow froze in my bones-I saw the mountain had
closed again behind me. I was trapped; swallowed;
a miserable lump of breathing mortality, in the bowels of
the earth. Great was the anguish of my heart; yet,
strangely enough, light, like sunlight, streamed down
the long passage before me, and the sounds of the
music became louder and louder. By degrees they
carried peace and fortitude into my soul, and I began
to walk rapidly forward. As I walked, the passage
became wider, and at length ended in an open country;
where, save that the grass, the flowers, the trees, and
all things about me, were of gigantic proportions, all in


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
63
form were the same as the things of the world I had
left. I walked until I saw, what at first appeared to
me, huge rocks. Continuing to approach them, I dis-
covered them to he houses. My heart dropped within
me, for I feared that I was in a land of giants. As the
thought fell upon me, I turned round and almost swooned
to the earth with fear. A giantess of nine-and-thirty
feet three inches high-as I afterwards discovered—
stood before me. Instantly I believed I was destined to
be eaten alive. Though constitutionally gallant towards
the sex, I was yet so wayward, that I would rather
have fallen into the jaws of a tigress or any other
female beast, than have formed the meal of the giantess
before me.
She saw my terror, and a smile broke
upon her broad, good-humoured face, like a sunbeam
on a rose-garden. A few strides brought her to me. I'
fell upon my knees, and lifted up my hands imploringly
to her. Never did man drop at the foot of woman in
more earnestness of soul. Never could he pray more
fervently to be taken in marriage, than did I supplicate
not to be chewed alive. The giantess, with a laugh
that almost stunned me, bent over me; chucked me
under the chin; playfully nipped the end of my nose;
indented the tip of her fore-finger in both my cheeks,
and shrilly crying klukklukkluk,-which answers to our
homely catchy, catchy-took me in her arms like a raw,
red-faced, hour-old baby."
66
A strange place this Turveytop, and a strange peo-
ple," cried we. "And amongst these folks you say
you were brought up? Brought up! Why, you were
of man's estate when the mountain opened and received
you.'
99
"True; but it is the benevolence of the Turveytopians
to take in men and women to nurse: to bring them up
anew; and to this philanthropic end, every new comer is
treated as a new-born babe. Bless you! I have seen
a philosopher, who had made a great noise among
his brother pigmies on the outside of the mountain, I


64
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
nurse.
The
have seen him sent back to nurse's milk and pap.
one great principle of the Turveytopians is this, to take
no knowledge for granted on the part of those they
May this tokay, sir,"-cried the Hermit, about
to quaff"may it turn to train oil in my gullet, if I
have not seen a Chancellor made, whether or no, to suck
his thumb, because the little varlet would affect pre-
cocity and quarrel with his nurse, as if to suck his
thumb was an act below his consequence. I have
seen, too, a Lord Chamberlain taught again to walk:
yes, seen him toddling after a sugar-stick held tempt-
ingly, encouragingly, 'twixt his nurse's fingers."
""
And for what purpose," we asked, "this teaching
over again? Was it not a waste of time and pains?
66
'Assuredly not," answered the Hermit gravely:
and then fixing his eye upon us, he asked, “Have you
not known folks in the outside world, who—standing it
may be within a few years of their grave-seemed,
nevertheless, as if they had learned all their worldly
knowledge the wrong way? As if, to be aught good,
wise, and morally dignified, they should learn the lesson
of life again; yea, beginning in the nursery, should
sprawl and roar in the nurse's lap? You cannot think
this? It matters not the honest Turveytopians have
this belief, and therefore take weak and wicked men
and women, of every age, as younglings from the
womb; they are called the babes of the mountain-
children of earth; and for the many vices and faults
which they bring with them into Turveytop, why, they
are considered as spots and flaws inseparable from their
former condition. 66
Oh! the men I have seen there,'
cried the Hermit, with a laugh-"the kings, lords,
bishops, lawmakers I have seen, all put into second
swaddling-clothes, and brought up again as gentle, wise,
charitable, sagacious folk, doing good credit to the beau-
tiful earth, which, in their former days, they so grievously
scandalized."
""
"But surely," said we, "it was to take the training a


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
65
little too far back. We cannot, we repeat, but think
it loss of time and trouble."
66
66
Certainly not," cried the Hermit. Consider, sir,
how delightful it must be, by a strong effort of the soul,
to lose and forget all that we have mislearned of life,
and so begin the lesson again-with clear heads and
ruddy hearts. To compass this with the reprobates of
the world is the purpose of the Turveytopians-wise,
gracious, wonderful giants that they are mighty only
in their goodness, superhuman in their sweet charities."
Pray," we cried, "tell us your history whilst in
Turveytop."
66
66
You shall hear it, sir," said the Hermit," and the
brief histories of many others.'
We drew close to the table, and waited the story with
impatience.
"Though trembling violently in the arms of the
giantess, I became gradually self-assured by the sweet.
good-humour of my nurse. She gazed and nodded
smilingly at me, like a girl with a new doll; and although
I felt distressed and humiliated, I nevertheless smiled-
though I fear a wan, sickly smile—in acknowledgment of
her tenderness. Then she threw me up in the air, and
caught me again in her arms. Never before had I
been so far from earth. My head swam, and my
stomach-I had that day dined off eel-pie and goose-
threatened treachery, when I heard a loud voice exclaim
in the very purest English, for the Turveytopians
know all the languages of the earth,- Slut! baggage!
Is that the way to toss and jolt a new-born babe ?'
Holding me in her arms, my nurse turned round, and I
beheld in the speaker a matronly giantess, with a kind,
motherly countenance. 'A pretty skittish thing you are
to trust babies to,' she cried. Poor poppet,'-and the
benevolent gentlewoman wiped my nose,- - it doesn't
look half an hour old; and yet here you are, throwing
it up and churning its little bowels like butter.'
grandmother!' cried the girl, it doesn't mind it.
F
6
6
"
La,
See,


66
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
6
if it doesn't laugh!' I certainly did grin. Laugh!'
said the old dame; you know-nothing hoyden! laugh!
Poor little heart, it's wind.' At this, I couldn't help it,
I chuckled vigorously. There! if the dear lamb isn't
choking,' cried the woman; away with it to the
nursery, or you'll have its precious life upon your soul.'
Instantly the girl hugged me to her bosom, cast her
apron over me, and ran-I thought she flew-with all
her legs. I saw nothing until the girl carried me into
a spacious, lofty room, which in a moment I knew must
be the nursery.
There were about twenty other infants,
from a day to a week old; infants I must call them,
though all of them were older than myself. Some were
screaming, shouting, swearing in the most shocking
manner that they were not babies, that they were men
-wise, learned, authoritative men-and would shake
the pillars of the heavens ere they would be treated
as sucklings.
66
66
""
And what said the nurses?
"
we asked.
6
Oh, sir! what nurses usually say at such a time.
They bawled and shouted too. Then they called the
babies precious ducks,' 'darlings,' apples of their
eyes,' 'plagues,' and then 'precious ducks' again.
There was an old dowager from the outside world—how
she had ever wandered into Turveytop I know not—
who, screaming like a catcall, begged to ask the wretches
if they knew what they were about. Declared that she
had a son lord chief justice, and then desired to know if
she was to be treated like a child."
""
"And what was the answer? we inquired.
66
None, sir," said the Hermit-" none, save that
the woman who was swathing and dressing her, shrilly
sang a nursery song, and tossed her about like so much
pie-crust. From this, I found that no big words, no
struggling of mine, would prevail, and therefore meekly
resigned myself. And, sir, I had my reward; for
having been properly powdered and swaddled, my nurse
declared that I was the quietest dove of a babe she
had ever handled; quite a lamb."


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
67
66
And, pray forgive the question, did they really give
you to a wet nurse?"
66
In a
They did, sir," answered the Hermit smiling, "and
a very comfortable woman she was. It was wonderful
how soon I accommodated myself to a milk diet.
short time I seemed to have sucked in a serenity of
Recovered somewhat from the amazement of the
soul,
day, I took counsel with myself in bed."
66
66
Delicious, peace-giving bed!" we cried.
The Hermit looked grave. Happy is the man," he
answered, “who can say peace-giving bed. For oh, sir!
what a rack to the spirit of man may be found in goose-
down! You do not seem to apprehend me? Consider,
sir, what an unavoidable self-confessional is bed. Think,
sir, what it is to have our conscience put to the question
of goose-feathers. You are in bed, peace-giving bed, you
say-it is deep night; and in that solemn pause, you
seem to feel the pulse to hear the very heart of time.
You try to think of many things, but the spirit or demon
of the bed sets up yourself before yourself-brings all
your doings to the bar of your own conscience; and
what a set of scurvy gaol-birds may be among them!
They peep in at your curtains, crowd at the foot of your
bed, and though you burn no rushlight, you see their
leering, sneaking faces. Alas! you cannot disown them:
you know that some time or other you have given them
house-room in your soul, and, like unclean things, they
have repaid the hospitality with defilement. There
they are, old co-mates, sworn acquaintances; and yet
the world could not believe that, for a moment, you kept
such company. Oh, no! abroad in the world you have
all sorts of graces accounted to you. Alack! that night-
cap and sheets should, to your own conscience, make
you bankrupt. They make you know yourself hypo-
crite; stand before you, even though you lie in dark-
ness, your polished, easy, cordial, out-door self-a man
without a subterfuge, a soul without a meanness. And
your head upon your pillow-if conscious blood beat
F 2


68
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
at your heart-you blush for the counterfeit you have
a thousand times put off upon the world, and shudder
at the accusing naughtinesses about you. Peace-giving
bed! It may be so; and it may be-oh, sir!" cried
the sage of Bellyfulle, "if all our faults, our little
tricks, our petty cozenings, our bopeep moods with truth
and justice, could be sent upon us in the blankets, all
embodied, sir, in fleas, how many of us of lily skins
would get up spotted scarlet?"
"But surely, sir," said we, "you had no time for such
remorseful thoughts in the nursery?"
"No-not then," answered the Hermit.
"Then, as
The
I said, I took counsel with myself; and resolved, since
the strangeness of my fate had cast me in Turveytop,
to bear with meekness all that might befall me.
giant folk are wise, benevolent, I thought; else, where-
fore should they seek to purge men of their wicked
worldliness, taking them back to their first swaddling-
hour, that they may learn the lesson of life anew? Yes;
I will forget the scurvy wisdom that puffed my heart,
and made me cock my cap, a knowing fellow. I will let
the cunning, self-complacent, braggart creature die here
where I am, and be taken up a baby-yea, a very
suckling.
""
29
"This, sir, we said, "would be a rare secret to
teach men.
66
""
"It was taught in Turveytop-truly taught; but I
know not how it was, there was something in the place,
the people, that after a time made the most stubborn of
the babes apt and cunning pupils. For myself, I
resolved upon docility; and lying where my nurse had
placed me, I bade all my rascal thoughts depart; by a
strong effort of the soul kicked from my brain many a
shrewd deceit, that, in former days, I had treasured
more than gold and jewels.”
"And so became a babe again?"
"What a delicious pause was that!
cleanliness of soul! There I lay
How sweet that
in thoughts of


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
69
lavender; for the babihood of Turveytop is not like
our first childhood. There, man is not a midway thing,
between two mysteries, the cradle and the coffin. No,
sir; having purged my brain of its secreted wicked-
ness, I was conscious of my sweet condition. I felt
and rejoiced in my infancy of heart, and I have not
forgotten its deliciousness. I was resolved to begin
my life anew; and as a droll destiny had given me
a nursling to the giants, I so played my part of babi-
hood, that my nurse outsounded all her gossips with
my praises. Thus, I never cried or whimpered, but
suffered myself to be dressed and undressed, crowing
the while, and walking up my nurse's knees-and
cooing and laughing in her lap. In this, as I have said,
I found my account: in a fortnight I was short-coated,
and in another fortnight was put upon my feet, for my
nurse declared that in a week I should be able to walk
alone. Many of my companions were less docile. There
was one-he had been an admiral-who roared and
swore in a terrible vein, and vowed he would only be
quieted with pig-tail tobacco. Another, a weazened babe
-a money-lender in former life-was never silent but
when he was allowed to wear his nurse's silver thimble
on his head, he did so love the metal. Most of the
children, however, lost by degrees the errors and weak-
nesses of their former days, and in time became span-
new creatures."
"And pray, sir," we asked, "what term of probation
did they pass, ere they were permitted to claim man's
estate?"
66
That depended upon the progress of the individual;
for, with the Turveytopians the year of discretion was
not fixed by the almanac, but by the wisdom and purity
of the neophyte. There were, certainly, a few babies-
-1 must still call them so-who had been in Turveytop
for centuries. You are aware, sir, that it was the fashion
with those sorry dogs the Romans, when any of their
heroes were missing, to swear that they had been carried


70
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
off by Mars, charioted by a clap of thunder. A flam,
sir-a political flam-to double-gild the memory of ruffi-
ans. The truth is, they were taken to Turveytop, and
there they still remain; they are such hopeless block-
heads, they can learn nothing good and peaceable. There,
they are vermin-hunters to the giants, waging war with
the rats and mice; no child's sport, sir, when you
consider the strength and immensity of the beasts. Poor
King Arthur, whom the Welshmen look for—and King
Sebastian, still expected by all believing Portuguese-
both of them are in Turveytop, and there, I think, are
likely to remain. Arthur, the mirror of knighthood, is
a sulky, watery-headed lout, continually robbing the
other children of their nuts and apples-throwing sticks
at the legs of flies, and slily sticking pins into the
youngest babies. The Welshmen believe in Arthur's
return, faithfully as in leeks; but, sir, the Turvey-
topians know that he would only spoil his reputation,
so keep him where he is. And for the good King Sebas-
tian, who, nearly three hundred years ago, passed into
Africa, to cut Moorish throats, he was spirited off to
Turveytop, to be taught decent dealing."
66
""
And how has the teaching prospered?" we
inquired.
"Very badly, sir," answered the Hermit. "I don't
know how it is, but the heroes and wise folks of our
world become sad lubbers and dunces among the giants.
I have seen King Sebastian seated with twenty other
kings and legislators, all of them famous upon our earth
for their justice and wisdom; I have seen each of them,
with a piece of chalk between his fingers, vainly trying to
draw a straight line. For centuries have they in Turvey-
top been set to do such simple task, before they should
be permitted to return to their old world again; yet has
no one of them accomplished it. No, sir; there is not
one of them who does not draw zig-zag. And the best
of it is, each of them swears that his own crookedness
is the straightest of the straight. The Turveytop


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
71
geometrician shakes his head with a mild pity, where-
upon the late kings and lawmakers sulk, and, in a low
voice, swear at him. Fate alone can tell when poor
Sebastian will get to Portugal again. A sad thing for
him, sir,” said the Hermit" for I doubt not that there
his worst zig-zag might pass for a perfect straight line.
The dunces I have heard at school, too!"—and the
Hermit sighed.
66
66
Then they sent you all to school?" we observed.
Assuredly," said the Hermit, "and to me sweet and
pleasant was the academy. Not that we were packed off,
to be nailed to a form, as soon as we could lisp ;—the
Turveytopians are wiser, more benevolent. No-we
sprawled and kicked about in the sun, and rode cock-
horse upon the backs of snails, and took flying leaps
upon grasshoppers, and tore our frocks, and rolled in
puddles, and dirtied our faces, and ran thorns into our
fingers-and, in short, did every other trick that endears
a child to its parents. Yes, our constitution was suf-
fered to strengthen like palm-trees in the sun and air, and
the alphabet was an unthought-of calamity, until we
were at least seven years old. The girls were taken in
hand at five; for women, sir, are somehow always in
advance of us.
""
66 Is that your faith?"
"Is it not indisputable? Though Eve was younger
than Adam, was she not more than a match for him?
As for girls," said the Hermit with a gentle chuckle,
'I know not if it be not a great defect in their educa-
tion that they should be taught to read and write at all.'
66
"It cannot be, sir," we cried. "What! rear the
tender, blooming souls in ignorance?"
"Why not?" said the Hermit, stroking his chin,
whilst his eye twinkled. "Why not, sir? Ignorance
is the mother of admiration. Perhaps they'd love us
all the better for it. Ha, my friend! you know not what
mischief may be done when you teach a girl to spell,
and put a pen in her hand. It's adding weapons of


72
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
offence where there was more than enough before. 'Tis
like giving another quill to a porcupine. Relentless souls,
how many of them will write! Man,-let him be
praised, though praised in a whisper for it!-has his
fits of lordly idleness, his accidental headache in the
morning, and he turns from his standish as from a
nauseous draught, and his grey goose feather rises
upon his stomach as though it was the bird's yester-
day's flesh; and so, taking his hat, he lounges abroad,
hugging his laziness and dearly loving it: or he sits in
his chair, the world unthought of, humming upon its axis,
and he, in sweetest independence, twiddling his thumbs.
Not so with woman, sir; she has no idleness, not she;
that blot darkens not the crystal purity of her resolu-
tion. She, like frail bibulous man, has never one of his
No, sir, the world gets no such respite.
Fatally industrious, and sweetly temperate, your writing
woman, like a cuttle-fish, secretes ink for every day."
"Twill go ill with you," said we to the sage, should
woman write your epitaph."
headaches!
66
66
66
"Nay, her gratitude will protect me," answered the
Hermit, seeing that I shall then let her have what
is dearest to the sex.
66
66
22
And what is that?" we asked.
"The last word,"-and the Hermit blandly smiled.
Nevertheless, sir, let what I have said rest between
us. For the sex-blessings on their honied hearts!
will forgive wrong, outrage, perjury sworn ten times
deep anything against their quiet, but a jest. Break
a woman's heart, and she'll fit the pieces together, and,
with a smile, assure the penitent that no mischief is
done-indeed, and indeed, she was never better. Break
a joke, light as water-bubble, upon her constancy, her
magnanimity-nay, upon her cookery-and take good
heed; she declares war-war to the scissors. There
was my great aunt Dorcas. Poor soul! Her husband
had tried the woman a hundred cruel ways, and found
her, as her own mother declared, quite an angel. Her


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
73
133
heart had been broken many, many years; and yet so
well do women repair the ravages of time and accident,
nobody would ever have thought it. Well, sir, this
woman, who had endured wrong, neglect-nay, some
did whisper, the slight of infidelity, to boot-this woman,
who, placidly as a saint in china, had smiled upon a
husband's villainies, at length parted from the man
upon a custard! Yes, sir: her tyrant of a mate-as
he thought, poor wretch! pleasantly enough-flung a
heavy joke, before company, too, upon his wife's pastry.
The man had never been known to attempt a jest till
then. Whereupon, aunt Dorcas said she had endured
enough; there was a limit even to a wife's forbearance.
She rose from the table, and died upon a separate main-
tenance."
"Pray, sir," we inquired, "has your philosophy
fathomed the cause of all this?"
"'Tis in the deeper gravity of the sex," said the
Hermit. "Nay, sir, I mean it. They are shallow
thinkers, sir, who declare women to be light and frivo-
lous. Depend upon it, they take life much more in
earnest than we do. Hence, sir, woman is rarely a
joke-making animal. Far better than we does she know
the perishable materials of which life is made, and
takes serious care of them accordingly. And then, sir,
the delicacy of the sex makes them shrink from a jest.
Like pistol or small sword, it is a masculine weapon,
and not to be intruded upon their gentle presence. No,
sir; a woman may be brought to forgive bigamy, but
not a joke."
66
66
'It may be so,' said we; but, sir, all this time
we have wandered from Turveytop. You were sent to
school there, you say ?"
66
'I was—and there, indeed, the time went gaily by.
Benevolent and gentle was the schoolmaster, and worthy
of the honours lavished by the state upon him. Ay,
sir, you may look; but in Turveytop the schoolmaster
is not a half-drudge, half-executioner. No, sir; the im-


74
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
portance, the solemnity, of his mission is conceded.
Children are not sent to him with no more ceremony
than if they were terrier-pups, packed to the farrier to
have their tails docked and their ears rounded. In
Turveytop, the schoolmaster is considered the maker
of the future people—the moral artificer of society.
Hence, the state pays him peculiar consideration. It is
allowed that his daily labours are in the immortal
chambers of the mind-the mind of childhood, new
from the Maker's hand, and undefiled by the earth.
Hence, there is a solemnity, almost a sacredness, in
the schoolmaster's function; upon him and his high and
tender doings does the state of Turveytop depend, that
its prisons shall be few. It is for him to wage a daily
war with the gaoler. His work is truly glorious, for
it is with childhood-beautiful childhood! cried the
Hermit passionately-" holy childhood, with still the
bloom of its first home upon it! For, indeed, there is
a sanctity about it—it is a bright new-comer from the
world unknown, a creature with unfolded soul! And
yet, sir, are there not states where, whilst yet the crea-
ture draws its pauper milk-of the same sort, by the
way, that nurtured Abel-we give it to those fiends of
earth, violence and wrong, and then scourge, imprison,
hang the pupil for the teaching of its masters?
hood, with its innocence killed in the very seed?
Childhood, a fetid imp in rags, with fox-like, thievish
eyes and lying breath, the foul weed of a city? Such,
indeed, it is to the niceness of our senses, shrinking at
the filth and whining of that world-wrinkled babe.
But look at it aright, sir,"—cried the Hermit with new
animation. "translate its mutterings into their true
meaning. What do you see?-what hear? The linea-
ments and cryings of an accusing demon; a giant thing
of woe and mischiefs scowling and shrieking at the world
that hath destroyed its holiness of life; that, seizing it,
yea from the hand of its Maker, hath defaced the
divinity of its impress, and made it devil-a devil to
Child-


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
75
do a devil's mischief; then to be doomed and punished
by a self-complacent world, that lays the demon in a
felon's grave, and after, sighs and wrings the hands at
human wickedness.'
""
"In the strange land you speak of," we observed,
wishing to divert the passion of the Hermit, for, indeed,
he seemed strangely possessed," you said that child-
hood had its sacred claims allowed. There, all were
taught―all tended. The schoolmaster, too, had high
privileges ?"
"The highest," cried the sage, his light good-humour
returning." Indeed, in Turveytop the schoolmasters.
may be said to take the place of our commanding
soldiers. We give rank, distinction, high praises to
generals and such folk for the cunning slaughter of
their thousands. We take the foul smell out of blood-
shed, and call men-quellers heroes. We give them gold
lace, and stick feathers upon them, and hang them
about with Orders of Saint Fire, Saint Pillage, and
Saint Slaughter. We strip the skin from the innocent
sheep to make rub-a-dub to their greatness, and blow
their glory to the world from blatant brass. Now, the
Turveytopians have no soldiers; but they give the same
amount of honour to their schoolmasters. They have
a belief that it is quite as noble to build up a mind as to
hack a body; that to teach meekness, content, is as
high a feat as to cut a man through the shoulder bone;
that, in a word, it is as wise and useful, and surely as
seemly in the eye of watchful Heaven, to fill the human
brain with thoughts of goodness, as to scatter it from a
skull, cleft by the sword in twain. Hence, the school-
master in Turveytop is a great social authority, honoured
by the state. The savage counts his glories by scalps;
the refined man of war by his gazettes. The general
kills five thousand men defeats some twenty thou-
sand. He may have picked a quarrel with them, that
he might pick his sprig of laurel, and rejoice in lawful
plunder. He has done his work upon humanity; he has
--


76
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
acted his part in the world—a world of human sympathies
-and he becomes earl, or steps up duke. It is his
rightful wage, paid by a grateful hand. The school-
master of Turveytop numbers his scholars; shows the
heroes he has made; the victors over self among his
army; the troops of wise and peaceful citizens he has
marshalled for the field of life, and is honoured and re-
warded accordingly."
"And you were sent to one of these great pedagogues
-these laurelled teachers ?"
"He was
"Excellent old man!" cried the Hermit.
sorely tried by some of us. The perverseness, the
stupidity of some of my school-fellows passes belief; yet
the master's sweetness of spirit was unconquerable.
Some of his pupils he never could teach to spell the
commonest syllables. There was one boy-in our world
he would have passed for about sixty-five-who never
could master the word good. For years, as I understood,
he had been haggling at it. Now, my poor little boy,'
I have heard the schoolmaster cry a hundred and a
hundred times, a melancholy smile upon his reverend
face, now, my child, spell me good.' Whereupon the
pupil-a thin-faced, greenish-eyed fellow, and, as I
learned, a former dealer in foreign stocks-would answer
'g-o-l-d.' And thus it had been with him for years;
and thus, if alive, it may be with him now. Wretched
6
"
little dunce! He could not comprehend any other
way of spelling good than g-o-l-d. He, however, was
not alone in his dulness. No; there were twenty other
scholars from the outside world who still stumbled at the
syllable. Will it be believed? There was one boy,
about fifty-two, with a drum-like belly and a somewhat
purplish nose. It was whispered that, ere he was brought
to Turveytop, he had been a vicar, more than apostoli-
cally sharp for his tithes. Well, sir, you would have
expected higher intelligence from such a scholar; yet
somehow he never could master the monosyllable.
'Good' would be the word of the teacher, and still the


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
77
fat-bellied boy would spell 'p-i-g.' How our dear school-
master would look perplexed! How plainly I could see
him striving to account for the confusion in the pupil's
mind, that still from year to year had gone on spelling
'good' with the letters 'p-i-g.' The simple mono-
syllable was a trying task for many of the scholars.
Indeed, how few of them - from the defect of their
previous worldly education-could spell the word the
proper way! The old admiral I have already spoken of,
always insisted upon spelling it—'g-r-o-g.' From my
heart, I pitied the schoolmaster; for whilst other teach-
ers were seeing the young Turveytopians advance in all
their daily lessons, and so, doing their master honour in
the land, our poor pedagogue was doomed to sit almost
hopelessly amid a crowd of dunces, whose dull or
debauched faculties rendered them incapable of the
easiest tasks. And yet no word of passion or reproach
ever escaped the teacher. 'Poor little boy,' he would
say,
with a sigh, having hammered for an hour and
more at the word 'good,' while some foxhunting
urchin, with his hands in his pockets, and a brassy
confidence in his face, would spell 'dog;'-' poor little
boy,' the giant schoolmaster would exclaim, it is not
your fault, poor heart! no, it is the dark, dreadful world
you have come from!' It is a sad thing to think of,”
said the Hermit, yet are there many, many pupils,
growing hoary, and still mis-spelling 'good,' hay, dying,
and still unable to master that easy monosyllable. For I
know not how many hundred years King Arthur there,
in the preparatory school of Turveytop, has been sulking
with his thumb in his mouth, still spelling b-l-o-o-d' for
'good.' The last time I saw him he had on a dunce's
paper cap, made out of a poem written in this world to
his especial honour.'
66
""
"And King Arthur, and King Sebastian, too,-you
have talked with them in Turveytop?" we cried.
..Most certainly," said the Hermit.
66
And Numa Pompilius ?"-


78
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
"And Joanna Southcote," said the sage.
66
Is it possible?" we exclaimed. "Joanna Southcote!
Then she is not dead? That is, she will keep her word,
and come back to us?"
66
66
"And her great
And open a baby linen warehouse," said the Her-
mit. "She told me as much, for the comfort of her
believers; though, to confess the truth, I have never
until now bragged of my acquaintance with her. As,
however, she has been given up as incurable by the
Turveytopians, there is but little chance of her returning
to this world, since they suffer no one to come back who
does not at least promise continued amendment. Now,
Joanna, as I have said, is incurable."
"And what her malady?" we asked.
Lying, sir," answered the sage.
grief is, that nobody in Turveytop will believe her.
Poor thing! How she laments her loss of this world!
She dwelt alone in a little cottage, and being famous
for her tea-cakes-for there is a sort of sanctity that
hath a quick sense of kitchen comforts-was much visited
by King Arthur, Sebastian, and other dunces of Turvey-
top. I deny it not; I have made one at these meetings.
She was a sleek-looking, cosey woman, with a voice like
a flute. On my first visit to her, for there was some-
thing about her that somewhat tickled me,
66
""
Her tea-cakes?" we ventured in the smallest
voice to observe.
"Well, sir," said the Hermit, with a smile,
"" when
there be not other virtues, let even tea-cakes pass for
something. On my first visit, she would have devoured
me for news. 6
Anything stirring in my way in London ?'
she asked. I answered, No, madam; nothing what-
ever. I left all the people very dull-not at all what
they were when you were among them.'- Well, I did
give them a rouse,' she said; and then mournfully
added, but I suppose they have forgotten me?'-
6
Why, the truth is, madam, ingratitude is the public's
sin; nevertheless, you are still spoken of, and by a


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
79
6
hopeful few are promised back again. The worst of it
is, should you really return, I fear there will be unbe-
lievers who, even to your face, will disown you.'-
Never mind that,' said Joanna; only let me get back
again, and I warrant me I'll have the world by the nose
once more. As for being disowned, why, for the matter
of that, I'd take another name, and start a new mys-
tery. Is there, at the present time, think you, room for
such a novelty?'- As I have said, madam, we have
been somewhat dull in such matters of late. There
has been no new prophet on the stage for some time.'
Then the world wants one. Don't tell me,
6
།
I know
it bless you, after a season, the world gets sick and
tired of its old, old truths, and longing, hungering
for a good lie, will swallow anything. Otherwise, do
you think I should have gone down as I did? though
even I made one great mistake-my lie was not quite
strong enough.'-' Pretty well, I think, madam.'-Not
at all,' said Joanna; and then I gave it too short a
date. Nevertheless, I did hook 'em,-folks of all degrees,
--a good sprinkling of the high with the low-gentle
and simple-rich and poor. Well, if there is any sport
worthy of human enjoyment, it is cheating our fellow-
creatures.
999
"The old harridan!" we cried.
""
"Still give her the praise of an ingenuous tongue,
said the Hermit. "Joanna only confessed what I fear
me, many believe and practise, yet vehemently deny.
The woman spoke in earnest, and that's something.
And I fear me, she spoke truly of the world's hunger
at intervals for imposition. It is, I suppose, with the
multitude as sometimes with single Nokes or Styles:
truth becomes to them monotonous-propriety dulness ;
and so they get a zest for a lie, and make holiday with
extravagance. Nay, sir, if we look philosophically into
the matter, the greater the outrage offered to their
minds, the deeper, by consequence, their faith in it. A
zany boasts his daily intercourse with angelic spirits:


80
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
the daring of the falsehood carries away the imagination
of weak and simple folks who clap hands with the im-
postor, that they may be nearer to his celestial intelli-
gences. The spiritual mountebank, juggling with human
hopes and fears, offers a closer knowledge of the mys-
tery of mysteries. Hence, the dupe is often born of the
zealot. Enough of this. Perhaps, some day Joanna
will be again in the world: though, as she says, under
another name, and preaching forth another marvel. It
has been thus almost since Truth was born-and she
came smiling from chaos upon the earth-and will be
thus until the end."
"And the Turveytopians? What of their govern-
ment their laws, and customs?"
66
"Of such matters know I nothing," said the Hermit,
save that the schoolmasters were, so to speak, the
nobility of the people. We scholars, spirited from the
outside world to be brought up and taught in all things
anew, were confined to the nursery, the school-room
and play-grounds. Indeed, save that the benevolence
of our masters was more remarkable than in the teachers
of dancing-dogs, they seemed to look upon us as inferior
creatures, that might, with time and pains, be taught
some tricks of humanity-that possibly, by a sojourn
in Turveytop, might be made less mischievous to one
another when sent back to the world we were taken
from. Hence, I saw but little of the political and social
condition of Turveytop. There ran a legend that, many
hundred years ago, there arose a civil war in the land,
which was ended in a way it would be pleasant to see
imitated.
66
66
""
How, sir?" we asked.
Why, the two parties had armed themselves with
swords and spears and battle-axes-things unknown till
then-and guns and cannon, and all the devilry which
laurels come of. Thus armed, the divided people took
the field. The opposing chiefs had marked their ground,
and every man rubbed his hands-for the Turveytopians


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
81
were, for the time, frantic with malice-at the sweet
thought of chopping his neighbour through the skull,
whilst those birds of glory, the vultures, were already
cock-a-whoop for human flesh. Now, at that time the
Turveytopians worshipped, among other divinities, a
certain God of Laughter. I know not that such was
his name; but mirth, loud, reckless, rollicking mirth,
was his high attribute. This god had of late been much
neglected. The Turveytopians having their hearts
filled with rancour, and in the drunkenness of their
wrath yearning for nought but blood and wounds-had
wickedly neglected the service of their beneficent Numen.
Oh, glorious laughter!" cried the Sage of Bellyfulle,
falling back in his chair, and turning his broad shining
face upwards, whilst his eyes twinkled benignly, and his
lips seemed trembling with a jest "thou man-loving
spirit, that for a time dost take the burden from the
weary back-that dost lay salve to the feet, bruised and
cut by flints and shards—that takest blood-baking melan-
choly by the nose, and makest it grin despite itself—that
all the sorrows of the past, the doubts of the future, con-
foundest in the joy of the present-that makest man
truly philosophic conqueror of himself and care!
What was talked of as the golden chain of Jove, was
nothing but a succession of laughs, a chromatic scale of
merriment, reaching from earth to Olympus. It is not
true that Prometheus stole the fire, but the laughter of
the gods, to deify our clay, and in the abundance of our
merriment, to make us reasonable creatures. Have
you ever considered, sir, what man would be, destitute
of the ennobling faculty of laughter? Why, sir, laugh-
ter is to the face of man-what sinovia, I think ana-
tomists call it, is to his joints,-it oils, and lubricates,
and makes the human countenance divine. Without
it, our faces would have been rigid, hyæna-like; the
iniquities of our heart, with no sweet antidote to work
upon them, would have made the face of the best among
us a horrid, husky thing, with two sullen, hungry, cruel
G


82
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
lights at the top-for foreheads would have then gone
out of fashion-and a cavernous hole below the nose.
Think of a babe without laughter; as it is, its first intelli-
gence! The creature shows the divinity of its origin and
end, by smiling upon us: yes, smiles are its first talk with
the world, smiles the first answers that it understands.
And then, as worldly wisdom comes upon the little thing,
it crows, it chuckles, it grins, and shaking in its nurse's
arms, or in waggish humour playing bo-peep with the
breast, it reveals its high destiny-declares, to him with
ears to hear it, the heirdom of its immortality. Let ma-
terialists blaspheme as gingerly and as acutely as they
will, they must find confusion in laughter. Man may
take a triumphant stand upon his broad grins; for he
looks around the world, and his innermost soul, sweetly
tickled with the knowledge, tells him that he alone of all
creatures laughs. Imagine, if you can, a laughing fish.
Let man then send a loud ha! ha! through the universe,
and be reverently grateful for the privilege."
"And the Turveytopians, you say, sir, had their
God of Laughter?"
66
There
And, from what I could gather, he held a most
exalted place in their Pantheon. Sweet, too, especially
sweet, was one of their customs of sacrifice. It was
this. A man always dedicated his first joke, what-
ever it might be, to the God of Laughter.
was a fine spirit of gratitude in the practice, a sweet
acknowledgment of the honied uses of mirth in this
our daily draught of life, otherwise cold, flatulent, and
bitter. This first offering was always a matter of great
solemnity. The maker of the joke, whether man or
maid, was taken in pompous procession to the shrine of
the god. And there, the joke-beautifully worked in
letters of gold upon some rich-coloured silk or velvet-
was given in to the flamen, who read it to the assem-
bled people, who roared approving laughter. The
joker was then taken back in triumph to his house, and
feasting and sports for nine days marked this his first


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
83
act of citizenship; for I should tell you that no joke-
less man could claim any civil rights. Hence, when the
man began to joke, he was considered fit for the gravest
offices of human government; and not till then.'
وو
"What! no civil rights? Had he no vote-if indeed
there were votes in Turveytop-for his representative
in the Senate ?-for "-
66
Sir," replied the Hermit, gravely, "he had no
voice in anything; not even in the making of a beadle.
The man without a joke in Turveytop was a wretch,
an outcast; indeed, to give you the strongest, the truest
comparison, he was what your man in England is, with-
out a guinea."
"Miserable wretch!" we cried. "And what became
of these creatures?"
66
As I learned, the jokeless did all the foul and
menial work. Miserable men, indeed! I have heard of
a country in which the social dignity and moral intelli-
gence of the man was computed by the soap he was
wont to outlay upon his anatomy. He might be too
poor to buy the soap; never mind that; it was a terrible
thing, and stung the penniless offender like a nettle,
to call him the unwashed!' Now, in Turveytop, it
amounted to the same degree of ignominy to call a
man the jokeless! Some of these might be in tatters
and starving; well, they would ask charity, and how?
They would say nothing of rags and hunger, but stop-
ping the rich, they would despairingly slap the forehead,
and in a hollow voice, cry No joke!' Thus, in those
days of Turveytop, jokes gave dignity to the highest
offices of the state. Senators and magistrates thought of
nothing but making a joke of their functions and repu-
tation. They had their great reward not only in the
admiration of the people, but in the high degree of
mental expression and physical beauty which their genius,
constantly exercised, inevitably awarded them."
66
Have jokes such benign power upon their makers?"
we asked.
G 2


84
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
"Unquestionably," answered the Hermit, startled at
the question. "Take a sulky fellow, with a brow ever
wrinkled at the laughing hours, let them laugh ever
so melodiously-who looks with a death's head at the
pleasant fruits of the earth heaped upon his table-
who leaves his house for business as an ogre leaves
his cave for food-who returns home joyless and grim
to his silent wife and creeping children,-take such a
man, and, if possible, teach him to joke. Why, sir,
'twould be like turning a mandril into an Apollo. A
hearty jest kills an ugly face. The divine nature of
man irradiates and ennobles what at first sight seems
wholly animal. What a mighty joker was Socrates!
Yes, joker, sir; and rightly have the sculptors ima-
gined that knotty countenance, sublimed and sweetened
by the laughing spirit within! Now, the jokeless of
Turveytop-as it was related to me- -became physically
forlorn; the sympathy of mind and flesh was so active.
Hence, they were drudges, scavengers, bone-grubbers,
pickers-up of old rags and iron, bearers of burdens,
outcasts, miserable creatures;—the jokers all the while
sitting high in place, their cheeks greasy with the mar-
row of the earth, their eyes twinkling with its nectar."
Strange, indeed!" we cried.
'Ay, sir," said the Hermit, "for there are places
in which, nine times out of ten, your joker is the lean
drudge, and the dull fellow has the pot-belly, the purple
nose, and the full purse.'
66
66
66
And now, sir, for the civil war in Turveytop?
You say it was pleasantly ended?"
66
In this fashion," said the Hermit, "if I have
heard the legend truly. The two armies, in high con-
ceit with their murderous weapons-for until that time
there had been no men-killing engines known in Turvey-
top-lusted for the fight. Now, sir, you have heard or
read of the vast concern shown by the gods of the
heathen in the battles of their favourite soldiers-as if,
for instance, you and I should have pet emmets in the


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
85
bloody struggle for an ear of barley. Indeed, whether
or no, man will make his gods shoulder the knapsack
with him he will make them enter the breach, fire
the town, clap a ready hand upon movables; knock
a wayward householder on the head, and after, take
enjoyment in the cellar, the larder, and the chamber.
Man will, as I say, take his gods campaigning with him;
and, sir, it must be owned, scurvy treatment they oft-
times meet with at his hands. When he has laboured
profitably in the bloody harvest, he gives them money
for their good-will and support; and, alas, poor gods!
with swaggering, blaspheming impudence, thanks them
for his good fortune in robbery and slaughter. To hear
of certain thanksgivings for successful battle, should we
not believe that the devil had made his Adam, and
that the slaughtered creatures were children of the
demon handiwork, begotten by the evil principle, to be
zealously attacked and butchered by the progeny of
him who walked and talked with God in Paradise? It
would seem thus; but it is not so. No, we are chil-
dren of one Father, and when we have killed some thou-
sand brethren or so, why, with unwashed hands and
demure faces, we thank God for his good help in the
fratricide. In the outside world of brazen brows, there
is no impudence like the impudence of what men call
religion.
66
""
Still, sir," we urged, "you wander from the battle
of Turveytop."
"Right to wander is a besetting sin of mine. Keep
we now to the story. Well, sir, the two armies were
about to fight, when the God of Joking-whose shrine
had been sadly despised and neglected in preparation
for the war-resolved to put an end to the wickedness,
and so to bring the Turveytopians back again to jests
and reason. Whereupon, as the story runs, the God
Jocus repaired to a high hill near the battle-field, and
seating himself cross-legged on its summit, called his
thousands of servants about him, giving them due orders


86
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
for their goodly work. The god surveyed the hosts
below him with a wan smile, and then clapping his hands
to his sides, he laughed a laugh of thunder. On this, the
trumpets brayed once, and once only, and the armies en-
gaged. In a moment the god saw that his sprites-there
were immortal thousands, though born of human brains—
had done his wise behest. There was no smoke-no fire.
The great guns were dumb-the muskets undischarged;
for be it known to you, sir, that the Turveytopians
had at the time all the weapons since invented in our
miniature world. Then you might have seen the sol-
diers charge, and their brittle bayonets break harmless
against the bellies of the foes: then would some seize
their weapons, and with the butt-end strike the enemy
in the teeth. And the enemy stood and licked their lips.
Wherefore, you will ask? I will tell you. The musket-
stock was no longer walnut-wood; but, by the be-
nignity of the great God Jocus, a thing of savoury
sausage-meat, calling up the spirit of enjoyment in the
heart of man, as it smote his nostril. In this way, sir,
all things were changed. Here you would see a soldier
take a cartridge from his box, and with bloody and
sepulchral looks bite the cartridge-end. At that moment
the face changed to sweetness and content; for, the
cartridge bitten, a delicious cordial flowed into the
mouth of the biter, and winding about his stony heart,
melted it into human jelly. Here you would see a
grenadier sucking a bayonet, as a nursling sucks a
lollipop; and wherefore?—The great God Jocus had
turned the deadly weapon into sugar-candy. In another
place you might behold the small drums turned into pots
of jelly, and the little drummer-boys eating therefrom,
and painting their downy faces with raspberry and cur-
rant of more than martial red. Big drums took the
shape and flavour of rounds of beef; and in a thought,
the kettles were buffaloes' dried humps. The pioneers'
caps became wine-coolers, and their aprons napkins of
damask. Grey-headed officers swallowed their own


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
87
swords, turned into macaroni. A cymbal-player was
seen to devour his cymbals, suddenly changed into
ratafia paste. What had been gunpowder was eaten by
the handful as small saccharine comfits; cartridge-
bullets were candied plums, and gave great pleasure
both to horse and foot. Well, sir, it is not to be thought
that discipline could survive temptation such as this.
No, sir at first there was vast astonishment; then a
low murmur of delight ran through either host; then
there was a mighty smacking of lips; and then the
opposing armies laughed a tremendous laugh, and em-
braced. On this a solemn cacchination escaped the great
God Jocus, who, uncrossing his legs, vanished. The
news flew among the women of Turveytop, who, coming
and bringing their children to the field, made merry
with the army.
A banquet was resolved upon; it was
but rightful thanksgiving to the benevolent Jocus, whose
noble practical jest had saved the blood of Turveytop;
and more, had provided, yea, in the very engines of war,
the wherewithal to comfort the bowels and rejoice the
heart of man. The substance of dried meats was found
in gun carriages; delicious cheeses were in the wheels;
and pikes and halberds were nought more deadly than
attenuated sausage, pungent and aromatic. The great
guns, too-charged as it was thought with agony and
death for thousands-contained nothing more mischie-
vous than ruby wine. The cannon shot, turned to corks,
were now withdrawn; and the armies ate and drank,
and laughed and sang, and danced, and gave hearty
thanks to the great God Jocus.
*6
66
And so the matter ended?'
""
""
Even so, sir," replied the Hermit; "the field
whereon the armies met was called, from that time, the
Field of the Sage and Onions, those vegetables from
that very day abounding there. And in memory of the
time, the Turveytopians, in solemn procession, once a
year gather of the produce to stuff their geese. You
smile, sir. Think you, sir, it is not better to pull an


88
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
onion than to pluck laurel? There are fewer tears
drawn by homely scallion than by the green leaf."
"A strange freak, sir," we said, "of the God Jocus!
It was at that we smiled."
"A strange, yet mighty benevolence!" cried the
Hermit. 66 Would that he-or some kindred benefi-
cence-could descend upon carnivorous war, when and
wheresoever it should purpose to feed, and turn its
carving sword to sugar!"
"And pray, sir," asked we of the Hermit, "by what
chance did you escape from the land of Turveytop?"
66
"I was turned out in my sleep; yes, carried away
in deep slumber; for, waking one morning, I found
myself at the foot of the mountain, which, I know not
how long before, had opened to receive me.
""
"Your soul made clean your heart spotless, as
when first touched into life, and it began beating towards
the grave?"
"I am afraid so," said the Hermit, with a remorseful
sigh.
"Afraid?
"Ay, sir," said he, "much afraid; seeing how
stained and grimy they have since become. Every man
has not the happiness of a purification in Turveytop;
therefore, should not enduring cleanliness be looked
for from the lucky ones? And yet, sir, the very best
of us soil, ay, sooner than a bride's riband."
At this time the declining sun flamed goldenly through
the casement. We looked, doubtless, yearningly towards
it, for the Hermit rising, said, with solemn voice-
"Let us abroad, and behold God Almighty in the
heavens." Then taking his staff, he passed into the
garden, and silently we followed him.
It was a glorious time. The air fell upon the heart
like balm; the sky, gold and vermilion-flecked, hung, a
celestial tent, above mortal man; and the fancy-quick-
ened ear heard sweet, low music from the heart of earth,
rejoicing in that hour of gladness.


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
89
66
66
Evenings such as this," said the Hermit, after a
pause, seem to me the very holiday time of death; an
hour in which the slayer, throned in glory, smiles
benevolently down on man. Here, on earth, he gets
hard names among us for the unseemliness of his looks,
and the cruelty of his doings; but in an hour like this,
death seems to me loving and radiant,—a great bounty,
spreading an immortal feast, and showing the glad
dwelling-place he leads men to."
so.
"It would be great happiness could we always think
For so considered, death is, indeed, a solemn bene-
ficence a smiling liberator, turning a dungeon door
upon immortal day. But when death, with slow and
torturing device, hovers about his groaning prey; when,
like a despot cunning in his malice, he makes disease and
madness his dallying serfs
66
99
Merciful God!" cried the Hermit, "spare me that
final terror! Let me not be whipped and scourged by
long, long suffering to death-be dragged, a shrieking
victim, downward to the grave; but let my last hour be
solemn, tranquil, that so, with open, unblenched eyes, I
may look at coming death, and feel upon my cheek his
kiss of peace!
""
Thus spoke the Hermit, with passionate fervour.
His mind seemed solemnly uplifted. We turned aside
from him, following one of the many garden paths.
After some minutes, the Hermit came up with us.
was again the cheerful, light-hearted anchorite. "What
say you," said he, "to pass an hour or so at the
Gratis?
999
He
"Where we shall meet the villagers of Clovernook?
"Some of them, at least," said the Hermit. "I have
not been there these three weeks. This way: we shall
have time to stroll a round; there are some ruins-for
Clovernook has its antiquities —I shall be glad to show
you. The Hermit led the way from the garden, and
with a few strides we found ourselves in a delicious green
lane. "This," said he of Bellyfulle, "is called Velvet-
""


90
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
path, and leads eastwardly to the village. What do
you pause at?" asked the Hermit, as we suddenly stopped,
listening to sheep-bells, that sounded at various distances,
and in various notes, through the balmy air.
66
"The sheep-bells. How beautifully toned," we said.
Of all rustic sounds, our favourite music."
"To me," said the Hermit, "the sheep-bell sounds
of childhood; yea, of babyhood. In the world without
us, it hath often been to me a solace and a sweetness.
I have seen little of the green earth-knew, alas!
how little of its softening loveliness, its beautiful records
of God's tenderness to man in herbs and flowers, that in
their beauty seem sown by angel hands for man's delight.
Of these things I had little seen or known; I was so
early built up in the bricks of a city: otherwise, sir,
harsh thoughts and foolish sneers, evil and folly be-
gotten in a too-early, sordid strife with man, perhaps,
had not defiled me. The sheep-bell was the one remem-
brance-the one thought still dwelling in my brain, and
with its sometime music calling up a scene of rustic
Sabbath quietude. Swelling meads in their soft green-
ness; hedge-rows, and their sparkling flowers; a row of
chesnut trees in blossoming glory; a park; a flock of
nibbling sheep a child, the mute yet happy wonderer
at all.'
66
66
19
And the scene charmed by the simple sheep-bell?
Even now," said the Hermit," it is in certain moods
my best music. Many an evening have I seated my-
self on that mossy cushion, at the foot of yonder beech-
tree, and leaning back with folded hands and closed
eyes, have let my brain drink and drink its stilling
sounds; and I have gone off into day-dreams, heaven
knows where. I have been in the holy East; have
heard the flocks of the Patriarchs, and seen Rebecca at
the well."
Thus talking, we had proceeded half-way up Velvet-
path, when a man in rustic dress, followed by a sheep-
dog, came over a stile close upon us. He immediately


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
91
paused, and taking off his hat, accosted the Hermit—
"A blessed evening, this."
66
All's well?" asked the sage.
"All's well, ," answered the man. The Hermit smiled
and bowed, and saying, " God be with you, Joseph,"
passed on.
99
"Who is he? we asked.
66
My shepherd," answered the Hermit of Bellyfulle ;
and I would answer for it even upon parchment, as
honest, simple a creature as a day-old lamb. Look at
him; I warrant me he is about to play his evening music
to his dog.
It was even so; for turning round we saw Joseph
seated under a tree, vehemently twanging a Jew's-harp.
A strange instrument for a shepherd.'
66
"He hath wonderful knowledge of that piece of iron,"
said the Hermit; "nor is it strange it should be so.
For twenty years it was, in the outside world, the con-
stant companion of his lips."
"Indeed! what was your shepherd, ere in happy
hour he came to Clovernook?"
"He was door-keeper to a sponging-house. Yes,
he was the janitor; the demon of the iron grill; and
would solace his darkness and captivity (for keeper of
prisoners, he himself was the greatest) with that vocal
metal. Poor wretch! That fourpenny harp was his
comfort-his consolation-his blithe society."
"Is he not a Jew?" we asked.
66
Yes; and served a Hebrew master," answered the
Hermit, who smilingly added, "I knew the gentleman
well."
66
Pray, sir, has your philosophy discovered why, of
all men, Jews at first a pastoral, country-loving people
-should delight to take service under the sheriff, so
that they may carry away captive the spendthrift and
the wretched, holding the human chattels under lock
and key? Why, of all folks, should Jews delight to
be bailiffs?"
66
It may be," said the Hermit, "in memory and


92
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
sweet revenge of the Egyptian bondage. Poor things!
they still make bricks, too; ay, and brick houses;
though the cruelty of modern law, I hear, denies them
straw bail."
"How earnestly the dog watches the musician's
face!" we cried; for the animal, sitting upright, stared
with contemplative looks at the shepherd.
"We never
saw more meaning in a cur's countenance.'
66
said the Hermit.
66
99
Humph! Strange things are told of that dog,"
Joseph insists upon it that the
spirit of a London money-lender, an old acquaintance,
animates Flip. You may be sure, sir, I have no such
superstition, or would hardly trust my flocks within
range of its teeth. Yet has the dog marvellous saga-
city. Put a bad shilling among a hundred good ones,
and Flip, with sensitive nostril, will detect the counter-
feit. Many a man, sir, would think it impossible to
earn higher praise. A fine, elevating gift, sir, that
quick sense of bad money. I knew a man-poor fellow!
-who bought the faculty at what you and I should think
a great cost. It is an odd story, but true, sir-true as
the stars. I call the tale the
Tragedy of the Till.
66
"A strange, household title," said we; 'pray
relate it."
"You would hardly think, sir, that the matter
happened in London? In a mean, obscure street; a
place where the hard realities of life knocked daily,
hourly, at people's hearts? Where the men and women
seemed only made to work, and eat, and sleep, and
die; the unideal, moving things of the world, the mere
biped furniture of the earth. And yet, sordid and
barren as the spot may be, there is the restless spirit
of man, yearning and struggling to deliver itself from
the squalor that defiles it. See man, the natural monarch
of the earth, styed like a hog. Why, even there, in
chin-deep misery, visions will now and then glorify the
habitation. The poetic spirit-for what is hope but the


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
93
poetry of daily life?-will touch the coarsest soul that
answers, like a harp-string to the wind, unconscious of
the power that stirs it. Let this remembrance go with
you, and you shall behold no place where man is mean or
common. Take the thought with you in nooks and
alleys, where the sweet air of heaven sickens with dis-
ease, and man seems not made of the earth of Paradise,
but of city mud, a stark, foul, brutish thing; even there
man is glorified by his hopes, that, like angel-faces in
a dungeon, brighten and beautify his prison. Let us
imagine, sir,” said the Hermit, letting his ivory staff
fall in his arm, and leaning against a huge, sheltering
sycamore" let us imagine some city quarter, in which
the inhabitants miserable creatures!-should be be-
reaved of all hope. A little higher only would they be
than apes. They would seem to us the lay-figures of
humanity; moving images, with tongues to wag and
eyes to open. We should behold their habitations with
shuddering looks and shrinking nose, and hurry from
the spot, as though fever and poverty clawed like
demons at our skirts, to taint and ruin us. Any way,
the dwellers of Hopeless Quarter would seem to us—
dignified as we are by four meals a day, and with no rent
in our coats, no crack in our shoe-leather-as forlorn
animals, permitted on the earth for some mysterious
purpose, but who, though something like ourselves in
outward guise, had nothing else in common with us!
Would not such be the belief of many of us?"
66
66
It is more than likely," we answered.
Why, sir," cried the Hermit, with a grave look,
"it is our creed. Every street, lane, or alley that
harbours the wretched poor, is, to our gingerly appre-
hension, Hopeless Quarter. We wholly avoid it; or if
otherwise, with our moral thumb and finger holding our
moral nose, we hurry through it. We cast a rapid look
at the forlorn inhabitants-a frightened glance in at
doorways and down cellars-and never for one brief
minute think, that beneath that outward husk of hu-


94
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
manity, that in those miserable abiding-places of mortal
suffering, there is the aspect, and the earthly refuge of
the future angel. Many a time, sir," said the Sage of
Bellyfulle, "I have walked the streets, and day-dream-
ing, have fashioned to myself the doings, the hopes and
cares of the householders.
To my fancy, the brick
walls of the houses have turned to glass, and I have
seen all that passed inside. Well, I have been rarely
rapt by what I have beheld in the palaces and mansions
of the rich. There, human life, when at the purest and
the best, is as a graceful nymph, whose slightest motion
is silent music-whose look is sweet, intelligent serenity
-whose breath is odorous as morning air. Beautiful is
her speech; for she talks lilies and roses. There is
an atmosphere about her that steals upon the heart,
and lulls it into sweet placidity. But, sir, the heart
knows not or should not know-such dreamy rest at
the doors of the very poor. No; its blood quickens
and glows as it beholds the daily battle. There are
the poor fighting with the world, that, like a huge ma-
chine set in motion by some necromantic wickedness,
has action, speech, cunning, force tremendous, everything
but heart. A mighty creature, bloodless and pulseless.
Great are the odds against poverty in the strife. Alas!
alas! how often is the poor man the compelled Quixote ;
made to attack a windmill in the hope that he may get
a handful of the corn it grinds?
66
""
"Even so," said we ; "and many and grievous are
his buffets ere the miller-the prosperous fellow with
the golden thumb-rewards poor poverty for the unequal
battle.'
66
""
There it is,” cried the Hermit. "There is the
heroism which, at the houses of the poor, has made me
see and feel the majesty of poverty; has in my eyes
made starveling spinners and weavers more than kingly.
It is a fine show, a golden sight, to see the crowning of
a king. I have beheld the ceremony-with undazzled
eyes have well considered all its blaze of splendour. A


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
95
tender thing to think of is the kiss of peace; beautiful
the homage; heart-stirring the voice of the champion,
when the brave knight dashes his defying gauntlet on
the marble stone; very solemn the anointing-and most
uplifting the song of jubilate when all is done. But,
sir, to my coarse apprehension, I have seen a nobler
sight than this—a grander ceremony, even at the hearth-
stone of the poor. I will show you a man, worn, spent ;
the bony outline of a human thing, with toil and want,
cut, as with an iron tool, upon him; a man to whom
the common pleasures of this our mortal heritage are
unknown as the joys of Paradise. This man toils and
starves, and starves and toils, even as the markets vary.
Well, he keeps a heart, sound as oak, in his bosom.
In the sanctity of his soul, bestows the kiss of peace
upon a grudging world: he compels the homage of
respect, and champions himself against the hardness of
fortune. In his wretched homestead he is throned in
the majesty of the affections. His suffering, patient,
loving wife-his pale-faced, ill-clad children-are his
queen and subjects. He is a king in heart, subduing
and ruling the iron hours; unseen spirits of love and
goodness anoint him; and, sir," said the Hermit, in a
solemn voice-" as surely as the kingdom of God is more
than a fairy tale, so surely do God's angels sing that
poor man's jubilate."
""
eye
Here the Hermit paused; and then, grasping his
staff, walked silently on. He seemed for a time brood-
ing over new thoughts. At length he looked round
with his sunny smile, and his
"De-
twinkled again.
pend upon it," he said, "you shall hear more of Joseph
and his dog. Ay, there he is, still twanging to him.
Poor fellow, when he kept the key of the bailiff's house, his
chief company was the canary of the bailiff's wife. He
would finger his Jew's-harp against the bird's flying
notes, and I verily believe felt all the envy of a musical
rival. The canary, with its shower of sounds, fairly
smothered the Jew's-harp; and I believe Joseph, in


96
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
tranquil despair, thought of hanging it upon the willow,
when a cat chewed up the yellow songster. No singing
woman ever hated a sister syren with greater zeal than
did Joseph hate that canary."
66
66
"But, sir," we ventured to observe,
you have
forgotten the story, or Tragedy of the Till."
True," replied the Hermit. "It is a strange tale,
but it hath the recommendation of brevity. Some folks
may see nothing in it but the tricksiness of an extravagant
spirit; and some, perchance, may pluck a heart of
meaning out of it. However, be it as it may, you shall
hear it, sir. There was a man called Isaac Pugwash,
a dweller in a miserable slough of London, a squalid
denizen of one of the foul nooks of that city of Plutus.
He kept a shop; which, though small as a cabin, was
visited as granary and store-house by half the neigh-
bourhood. All the creature-comforts of the poor-from
bread, to that questionable superfluity, small-beer-were
sold by Isaac. Strange it was, that with such a trade,
Pugwash grew not rich. He had many bad debts; and
of all shop-keepers, was most unfortunate in false
coin. Certain it is, he had neither eye nor ear for
bad money. Counterfeit semblances of majesty beguiled
him out of bread, and butter, and cheese, and red herring,
just as readily as legitimate royalty struck at the Mint.
Malice might impute something of this to the political
principles of Pugwash, who, as he had avowed himself
again and again, was no lover of a monarchy. Never-
theless, I cannot think Pugwash had so little regard for
the countenance of majesty, as to welcome it as readily
when silvered copper as when sterling silver. No, a
wild, foolish enthusiast was Pugwash, but in the house-
hold matter of good and bad money he had very
wholesome prejudices. He had a reasonable wish to
grow rich, yet was entirely ignorant of the by-ways and
short-cuts to wealth. He would have sauntered through
life with his hands in his pockets, and a daisy in his
mouth; and dying with just enough in his house to pay


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
97
the undertaker, would have thought himself a fortunate
fellow; he was, in the words of Mrs. Pugwash, such a
careless, foolish, dreaming creature. He was cheated
every hour by a customer of some kind; and yet to
deny credit to any body, he would as soon have denied
the wife of his bosom. His customers knew the weak-
ness, and failed not to exercise it. To be sure, now and
then, fresh from conjugal counsel, he would refuse to
add a single herring to a debtor's score; no, he would
not be sent to the workhouse by any body. A quarter
of an hour after, the denied herring, with an added small
loaf, was given to the little girl, sent to the shop by
the rejected mother,- he couldn't bear to see poor
children wanting anything.'
-
.
"Pugwash had another unprofitable weakness. He
was fond of what he called nature, though in his dim,
close shop, he could give her but a stifling welcome.
Nevertheless, he had the earliest primroses on his counter,
-they threw,' he said, 'such a nice light about the
place. A sly, knavish customer presented Isaac with
a pot of polyanthuses, and, won by the flowery gift,
Pugwash gave the donor ruinous credit. The man with
wallflowers regularly stopt at Isaac's shop, and for only
sixpence, Pugwash would tell his wife he had made the
place a Paradise. If we can't go to nature, Sally,
isn't it a pleasant thing to be able to bring nature to
us?' Whereupon Mrs. Pugwash would declare, that
a man with at least three children to provide for had no
need to talk of nature. Nevertheless, the flower-man
made his weekly call. Though at many a house, the
penny could not every week be spared to buy a hint,
a look of nature for the darkened dwellers about him,
Isaac, despite of Mrs. Pugwash, always purchased. It
is a common thing, an old familiar cry," said the Hermit
-"to see the poor man's florist, to hear his loud-voiced
invitation to take his nosegays, his penny-roots; and
yet is it a call, a conjuration of the heart of man over-
laboured and desponding-walled in by the gloom of a
H


98
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
town-divorced from the fields and their sweet healthful
influences—almost shut out from the sky that reeks in
vapour over him ;-it is a call that tells him there are
things of the earth beside food and covering to live for;
and that God in his great bounty hath made them for
all men.
Is it not so?" asked the Hermit.
66
'Most certainly," we answered; "it would be the
very sinfulness of avarice to think otherwise."
"Why, sir," said the Hermit benevolently smiling,
"thus considered, the loud-lunged city bawler of roots
and flowers becomes a high benevolence, a peripatetic
priest of nature. Adown dark lanes and miry alleys
he takes sweet remembrances-touching records of the
loveliness of earth, that with their bright looks and balmy
odours cheer and uplift the dumpish heart of man; that
make his soul stir within him, and acknowledge the
beautiful. The penny, the ill-spared penny-for it would
buy a wheaten roll-the poor housewife pays for root of
primrose, is her offering to the hopeful loveliness of
nature; is her testimony of the soul struggling with
the blighting, crushing circumstance of sordid earth, and
sometimes yearning towards earth's sweetest aspects.
Amidst the violence, the coarseness, and the suffering
that may surround and defile the wretched, there must be
moments when the heart escapes, craving for the innocent
and lovely; when the soul makes for itself even of a
flower a comfort, and a refuge.
""
The Hermit paused a moment, and then in blither
voice resumed. "But I have strayed a little from the
history of our small tradesman, Pugwash. Well, sir,
Isaac for some three or four years kept on his old way,
his wife still prophesying in loud and louder voice the
inevitable workhouse. He would so think and talk of
nature when he should mind his shop; he would so
often snatch a holiday to lose it in the fields, when he
should take stock and balance his books. What was
every
worse, he week lost more and more by bad money.
With no more sense than a buzzard, as Mrs. Pugwash


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
99
said, for a good shilling, he was the victim of those
laborious folks who make their money with a fine inde-
pendence of the state, out of their own materials. It
seemed the common compact of a host of coiners to put
off their base-born offspring upon Isaac Pugwash; who,
it must be confessed, bore the loss and the indignity
like a Christian martyr. At last, however, the spirit
of the man was stung. A guinea, as Pugwash believed
of statute gold, was found to be of little less value than
a brass button. Mrs. Pugwash clamoured and screamed
as though a besieging foe was in her house; and Pug-
wash himself felt that further patience would be pusilla-
nimity. Whereupon, sir, what think ye Isaac did?
Why, he suffered himself to be driven by the voice and
vehemence of his wife to a conjurer, who in a neigh-
bouring attic was a sideral go-between to the neigh-
bourhood-a vender of intelligence from the stars, to
all who sought and duly fee'd him. This magician.
would declare to Pugwash the whereabout of the felon
coiner, and the thought was an anodyne to the hurt
mind of Isaac's wife-the knave would be law-throttled.
"With sad, indignant spirit did Isaac Pugwash seek
Father Lotus; for so, sir, was the conjurer called. He
was none of your common wizards. Oh no! he left
it to the mere quack-salvers and mountebanks of his
craft to take upon them a haggard solemnity of look,
and to drop monosyllables, heavy as bullets, upon the
ear of the questioner. The mighty and magnificent
hocus pocus of twelvepenny magicians was scorned by
Lotus. There was nothing in his look or manner that
showed him the worse for keeping company with spirits;
on the contrary, perhaps, the privileges he enjoyed of
them served to make him only the more blithe and jocund.
He might have passed for a gentleman, at once easy and
cunning in the law; his sole knowledge, that of laby-
rinthine sentences made expressly to wind poor common
sense on parchment. He had an eye like a snake, a
constant smile upon his lip, a cheek coloured like an
н2


100
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
apple, and an activity of movement wide away from the
solemnity of the conjurer. He was a small, eel-figured
man of about sixty, dressed in glossy black, with silver
buckles and flowing periwig. It was impossible not to
have a better opinion of sprites and demons, seeing that
so nice, so polished a gentleman was their especial pet.
And then, his attic had no mystic circle, no curtain
of black, no death's head, no mummy of apocryphal
dragon-the vulgar catch-pennies of fortune-telling
trader. There was not even a pack of cards to elevate
the soul of man into the regions of the mystic world.
No, the room was plainly yet comfortably set out.
Father Lotus reposed in an easy chair, nursing a snow-
white cat upon his knee; now tenderly patting the
creature with one hand, and now turning over a little
Hebrew volume with the other. If a man wished to
have dealings with sorry demons, could he desire a
nicer little gentleman than Father Lotus to make the
acquaintance for him? In few words, Isaac Pugwash
told his story to the smiling magician. He had, amongst
much other bad money, taken a counterfeit guinea;
could Father Lotus discover the evil-doer?
666
6
:
Yes, yes, yes,' said Lotus, smiling, 'of course-
to be sure; but that will do but little in your present
state, let me look at your tongue.' Pugwash obedi-
ently thrust the organ forth. Yes, yes, as I thought.
'Twill do you no good to hang the rogue; none at all.
What we must do is this-we must cure you of the
disease.'
"Disease!' cried Pugwash. 'Bating the loss of
my money, I was never better in all my days.'
"Ha! my poor man,' said Lotus, it is the bene-
volence of nature, that she often goes on, quietly
breaking us up, we knowing no more of the mischief
than a girl's doll when the girl rips up its seams.
malady is of the perceptive organs. Leave you alone,
and you'll sink to the condition of a baboon.'
666
God bless me!' cried Pugwash.
Your


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
101
"A jackass with sense to choose a thistle from a
toadstool will be a reasoning creature to you; for con-
sider, my poor soul,' said Lotus in a compassionate
voice, in this world of tribulation we inhabit, consider,
what a benighted nincompoop is man, if he cannot elect
a good shilling from a bad one.'
6
"I have not a sharp eye for money,' said Pugwash
modestly. It's a gift, sir; I'm assured it's a gift.
66 6
A sharp eye! An eye of horn,' said Lotus. 'Never
mind, I can remedy all that; I can restore you to the
world and to yourself. The greatest physicians, the
wisest philosophers, have, in the profundity of their
wisdom, made money the test of wit. A man is believed
mad; he is a very rich man, and his heir has very good
reason to believe him lunatic; whereupon the heir, the
madman's careful friend, calls about the sufferer a com-
pany of wizards to sit in judgment on the suspected brain,
and report a verdict thereupon. Well, ninety-nine times
out of the hundred, what is the first question put, as
test of reason? Why, a question of money. The phy-
sician, laying certain pieces of current coin in his palm,
asks of the patient their several value.
If he answer
truly, why truly there is hope; but if he stammer, or
falter at the coin, the verdict runs, and wisely runs,
mad-very mad.'
66 6
I'm not so bad as that,' said Pugwash, a little
alarmed.
66 6
66 6
Don't say how you are- -it's presumption in any
man,' cried Lotus.
Nevertheless, be as you may, I'll
cure you, if you 'll give attention to my remedy.'
"I'll give my whole soul to it,' exclaimed Pugwash.
Very good, very good; I like your earnestness,
but I don't want all your soul,' said Father Lotus,
smiling- I want only part of it: that, if you confide in
me, I can take from you with no danger. Aye, with
less peril than the pricking of a whitlow. Now, then,
for examination. Now, to have a good stare at this soul
of yours.' Here Father Lotus gently removed the white


102
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
cat from his knee, for he had been patting her all the
time he talked, and turned full round upon Pugwash.
Turn out your breeches' pockets,' said Lotus-and the
tractable Pugwash immediately displayed the linings.
Humph!' cried Lotus, looking narrowly at the brown
holland whereof they were made—“ very bad, indeed;
very bad ; never knew a soul in a worse state in all my
life.'
6
66
Pugwash looked at his pockets, and then at the
conjurer: he was about to speak, but the fixed, earnest
look of Father Lotus held him in respectful silence.
66 6
Yes, yes,' said the wizard, still eyeing the brown
holland, I can see it all; a vagabond soul; a soul
wandering here and there, like a pauper without a settle-
ment; a ragamuffin soul.'
66
6
Pugwash found confidence and breath. Was there
ever such a joke?' he cried: know a man's soul by
the linings of his breeches' pockets!' and Pugwash
laughed, albeit uncomfortably.
6
"Father Lotus looked at the man with philosophic
compassion. Ha, my good friend!' he said, 'that all
comes of your ignorance of moral anatomy.'
666
Well, but Father Lotus '-
6
"Peace,' said the wizard, and answer me.
have this soul of your's cured?
6
You'd
"If there's anything the matter with it,' answered
Pugwash. Though not of any conceit I speak it, yet I
think it as sweet and as healthy a soul as the souls of my
neighbours. I never did wrong to anybody.'
666
'Pooh!' cried Father Lotus.
"I never denied credit to the hungry,' continued
Pugwash.
"Fiddle-de-dee!' said the wizard, very nervously.
"I never laid out a penny in law upon a customer;
I never refused small beer to
6
"Silence!' cried Father Lotus; don't offend phi-
losophy by thus boasting of your weaknesses. You are in
a perilous condition; still you may be saved. At this


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
103
very moment, I much fear it, gangrene has touched
your soul: nevertheless, I can separate the sound from
the mortified parts, and start you new again as though
your lips were first wet with mother's milk.'
66
Pugwash merely said-for the wizard began to awe
him-'I'm very much obliged to you.'
666
'Now,' said Lotus, answer a few questions, and
then I'll proceed to the cure. What do you think of
money?'
.
6
"A very nice thing,' said Pugwash, though I can
do with as little of it as most folks.'
"Father Lotus shook his head. Well, and the world
about you 1?'
"A beautiful world,' said Pugwash; only the worst
of it is, I can't leave the shop as often as I would to
enjoy it. I'm shut in all day long, I may say, a pri-
soner to brickdust, herrings, and bacon. Sometimes,
when the sun shines, and the cobbler's lark over the
way sings as if he 'd split his pipe, why then, do you
know, I do so long to get into the fields; I do hunger
for a bit of grass like any cow.'
"The wizard looked almost hopelessly on Pugwash.
'And that's your religion and business? Infidel of
the counter! Saracen of the till! However-pa-
tience,' said Lotus, and let us conclude.-And the men
and women of the world, what do you think of them?'
"God bless 'em, poor souls!' said Pugwash. 'It's
a sad scramble some of 'em have, isn't it?
6
“Well,' said the conjurer, for a tradesman, your
soul is in a wretched condition. However, it is not so
hopelessly bad that I may not yet make it profitable to
you. I must cure it of its vagabond desires, and above
all make it respectful of money.
You will take this
book.' Here Lotus took a little volume from a cup-
board, and placed it in the hand of Pugwash.
Lay it
under your pillow every night for a week, and on the
eighth morning let me see you.'
"Come, there's nothing easier than that,' said Pug-


104
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
wash, with a smile, and reverently putting the volume
in his pocket (the book was closed by metal clasps,
curiously chased)-he descended the garret stairs of the
conjurer.
"On the morning of the eighth day, Pugwash again
stood before Lotus.
666 How do
you feel now?' asked the conjurer, with a
knowing look.
"I hav'n't opened the book-'tis just as I took it,'
said Pugwash, making no further answer.
6
"I know that,' said Lotus; the clasps be thanked
for your ignorance.' Pugwash slightly coloured; for
to say the truth, both he and his wife had vainly pulled
and tugged, and fingered and coaxed the clasps, that
they might look upon the necromantic page. · Well,
the book has worked,' said the conjurer.
66 6
Have it! what?' asked Pugwash.
666 Your soul,' answered the sorcerer.
"
6
'I have it.'
• In all my
practice,' he added, gravely, I never had a soul come
into my hands in worse condition.'
6
"Impossible!' cried Pugwash. If my soul is, as
you say, in your own hands, how is it that I'm alive?
how is it that I can eat, drink, sleep, walk, talk, do every-
thing, just like any body else?'
666
Ha!' said Lotus, 'that's a common mistake.
Thousands and thousands would swear, aye, as they'd
swear to their own noses, that they have their souls in
their own possession-bless you, and the conjurer
laughed maliciously, it's a popular error. Their souls
are altogether out of 'em.'
66 6
6
Well,' said Pugwash, if it's true that you have,
indeed, my soul, I should like to have a look at it.'
In
"In good time,' said the conjurer; I'll bring it
to your house, and put it in its proper lodging.
another week I'll bring it to you; 'twill then be strong
enough to bear removal.
666 And what am I to do all the time without it?'
asked Pugwash, in a tone of banter. 'Come,' said he,


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
105
still jesting, if you really have my soul, what's it like
-what's its colour; if indeed souls have colours?'
"Green-green as a grasshopper, when it first came
into my hands,' said the wizard; but 'tis changing
daily. More; it was a skipping, chirping, giddy soul;
'tis every hour mending. In a week's time, I tell you,
it will be fit for the business of the world.'
666
And pray, good father-for the matter has till now
escaped me what am I to pay you for this pain and
trouble; for this precious care of my miserable soul?'
"Nothing,' answered Lotus, nothing whatever.
The work is too nice and precious to be paid for; I have
a reward you dream not of for my labour. Think you
that men's immortal souls are to be mended like iron
pots, at tinker's price? Oh, no! they who meddle with
souls go for higher wages.'
"After further talk Pugwash departed-the conjurer
promising to bring him home his soul at midnight, that
night week. It seemed strange to Pugwash, as the time
passed on, that he never seemed to miss his soul; that,
in very truth, he went through the labours of the day
with even better gravity than when his soul possessed
him. And more; he began to feel himself more at
home in his shop; the cobbler's lark over the way
continued to sing, but awoke in Isaac's heart no thought
of the fields: and then for flowers and plants, why
Isaac began to think such matters fitter the thoughts
of children and foolish girls, than the attention of grown
men, with the world before them. Even Mrs. Pugwash
saw an alteration in her husband; and though to him
she said nothing, she returned thanks to her own sagacity
that made him seek the conjurer.
"At length the night arrived when Lotus had promised
to bring home the soul of Pugwash. He sent his wife
to bed, and sat with his eyes upon the Dutch clock,
anxiously awaiting the conjurer. Twelve o'clock struck,
and at the same moment Father Lotus smote the door-
post of Isaac Pugwash.


106
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
•
"Have you brought it?' asked Pugwash.
"Or wherefore should I come?' said Lotus. ' Quick:
show a light to the till, that your soul may find itself at
home.'
"The till!' cried Pugwash; 'what the devil should
my soul do in the till?'
666
6
Speak not irreverently,' said the conjurer, but
show a light.'
666
May I live for ever in darkness if I do!' cried
Pugwash.
་
"It is no matter,' said the conjurer; and then he
cried, Soul, to your earthly dwelling-place! Seek it
Then turning to Pugwash, Lotus said,
Your soul's in the till.'
-you know it.'
It is all right.
"How did it
ment.
66 6
get there?' cried Pugwash in amaze-
Through the slit in the counter,' said the conjurer;
and ere Pugwash could speak again, the conjurer had
quitted the shop.
"For some minutes Pugwash felt himself afraid to
stir. For the first time in his life, he felt himself ill at
ease-left as he was with no other company save his
own soul. He at length took heart, and went behind
the counter that he might see if his soul was really in
the till. With trembling hand he drew the coffer, and
there, to his amazement, squatted like a tailor, upon a
crown-piece, did Pugwash behold his own soul, which
cried out to him in notes no louder than a cricket's-
'How are you? I am comfortable.' It was a strange
yet pleasing sight to Pugwash, to behold what he felt
to be his own soul embodied in a figure no bigger than
the top joint of his thumb. There it was, a stark
naked thing with the precise features of Pugwash ;
albeit the complexion was of a yellower hue. • The
conjurer said it was green,' cried Pugwash; as I live,
if that be my soul-and I begin to feel a strange, odd
love for it-it is yellow as a guinea. Ha! ha! Pretty,
precious, darling soul!' cried Pugwash, as the creature


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
107
took up every piece of coin in the till, and rang it with
such a look of rascally cunning, that sure I am Pugwash
would in past times have hated the creature for the trick.
But every day Pugwash became fonder and fonder of the
creature in the till; it was to him such a counsellor, and
such a blessing. Whenever the old flower-man came to
the door, the soul of Pugwash from the till would bid
him pack with his rubbish: if a poor woman-an old
customer it might be begged for the credit of a loaf,
the Spirit of the Till, calling through the slit in the
counter, would command Pugwash to deny her. More:
Pugwash never again took a bad shilling. No sooner
did he throw the pocket-piece down upon the counter,
than the voice from the till would denounce its worthless-
ness. And the soul of Pugwash never quitted the till.
There it lived, feeding upon the colour of money, and
capering, and rubbing its small scoundrel hands in glee
as the coin dropt-dropt in. In time, the soul of Pug-
wash grew too big for so small a habitation, and then
Pugwash moved his soul into an iron box; and some
time after, he sent his soul to his banker's-the thing
had waxed so big and strong on gold and silver."
66
And so,'
we observed, "the man flourished, and
the conjurer took no wages for all he did to the soul of
Pugwash?"
"For some time,
"Hear the end," said the Hermit.
it was a growing pleasure to Pugwash to look at his soul,
busy as it always was with the world-buying metals. At
length he grew old-very old; and every day his soul
grew uglier. Then he hated to look upon it; and then
his soul would come to him, and grin its deformity at
him. Pugwash died, almost rich as an Indian king-
but he died, shrieking in his madness, to be saved from
the terrors of his own soul."
"And such the end," we said; such the Tragedy of
the Till. A strange romance."
66
Romance," said the Sage of Bellyfulle; "sir, 'tis
a story true as life. For at this very moment how many


108
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
thousands, blind and deaf to the sweet looks and voice
of nature, live and die with their Souls in a Till?"
We answered not, but for some minutes followed the
Hermit in silence, as he stept along Velvet Path; and
the beauty of the place seemed to us to increase at every
foot-fall. "What picturesque trees!" we suddenly
cried, making a dead halt before two withered yews.
"Said I not," asked the Hermit, with a smile," that
Clovernook had its ruins?"
"There is a noble desolation in their dead trunks-
their bare pronged branches. In their sapless naked-
ness, with flower, and leaf, and blade springing around
them; they stand solemn mementos of the end of all
things.
66
""
66
True," answered the Hermit ; eloquently doth a
dead tree preach to the heart of man-touching its appeal
from the myriad forms of life bursting about it! Yes,
the dead oak of a wood, for a time, gives wholesome
check to the heart, expanding and dancing with the
vitality around. In its calm aspect, its motionless look,
it works the soul to solemn thought, lifting it upwards
from the earth."
"There is a desolate grandeur in these old yews,"
we cried.
66
66
"Poor things," said the smiling Sage, "they were
cruelly killed, though, doubtless, murdered with the
best intentions. Look at them, sir, in their majestic
ruins; contemplate their magnificent nakedness; and
then, sir, drop at least one tear for their untimely fate,—
poor withered victims of the fantasy of woman!"
"Of woman!" we exclaimed. How, sir, of woman?"
"How many springs might they have flourished!"
cried the Hermit, with a restrained humour curling his
lip, and twinkling in his eye; "how many autumns
might they have borne their pinky berries!-how many
pairs of little birds might have wedded and built in their
boughs, and brought up rejoicing families!--but that
woman, sir, fantastic tyrannous woman, killed them in


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
109
their prime-slew them in their green strength-made
dead timber of their expanding greatness. Thus, sir,"
cried the Sage of Bellyfulle, "doth the female creature
sometimes blight the budding hopes of man, and change
the flourishing hero into a dead log. Poor ignorant
souls! when they do worst murder, they call it love.
They take a tough yew-tree in hand, and working their
charms upon it, turn it into very touchwood. They
seize the hardest heart of stubborn man; and like a
lump of dough, they toss it and thump it, and roll it
out, and lump it together again; and now make fancy
pie-crust of it-and now a homely dumpling. Oh, sir!
whenever I feel my just anger at the ways of woman
subsiding into unmanly softness, I come and look at
these yews, and am stirred up again. The elephant,
it is said, whets his tusks upon the gnarled trunks of
trees. Upon these yews do I from time to time sharpen
up my blunted indignation.”
66
Ha! as
legend?"
66
we thought. Then these yews bear a
Yea," said the Hermit, with mock affliction; "most
fruitful is their barrenness-most abounding in matter
for contemplation are their nude and ghastly branches.
Think you, sir, you have the heart to listen to the story?"
"At least, we'll try,
was our answer; and the Her-
mit, affecting to wipe a tear from his eyes with the back
of his broad hand, and then heaving a profound prepa-
ratory sigh, began the tale.
""
The Legend of Roses; or, the Old Maids' Green
Husbands.
"The precise date of this history," said the Hermit,
"is lost in one of the corner cupboards of time; but
once it was, believe me, fresh as Eve's cheek—and still
the unwrinkled spirit of truth dwells in it, making it as
a tale of yesterday. Beautiful truth! never young and


110
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
never old; but keeping, through all change and all time,
its bloom and grace of Paradise, even to the Judgment.
"Well, sir, it is somewhere written in our Chronicles
of Clovernook, that once upon a time two gentle maidens,
by name Bridget and Veronica, came from the outside
world, and entering the Valley of Naps, and taking their
due rest at the Warming-Pan, and leaving what was
dim and worn in their looks at the shrine of the Looking-
Glass, they were at length, according to custom, ad-
mitted among the happy villagers. They never told
their story; but it was plain they had jilted some poor
innocent men out of their hearts, they were so wont to
giggle, and laugh, and—not to speak it irreverently be-
fore the blooming faces of the whole sex-would rejoice
like two successful pickers of pockets, or other flourish-
ing malefactors. With all this, it was plain that they
were sometimes not at their ease. It was marked of
them that they would frequently wander to the very top
of Gossip-Hill, and there, unmindful of the dewy grass,
would drop themselves despairingly down, and sit watch-
ing and watching, with their faces toward the Valley of
Naps, as though they expected some old acquaintance to
arrive thereby. The simple-hearted chronicler who has
set this down-what an innocent, milk-white goose must
have bred his pen !-confesses that he knows not whom
Bridget and Veronica could expect. Perhaps, says he,
it may have been their brothers; perhaps their uncles.
Of course, sir, it was the weak, foolish young men whom
they had barbarously stript of their affections, and left
to perish on the world's highway; these it was for whom
Bridget and Veronica risked sciatica and rheumatic pains,
nailed, as it would seem, hour after hour, upon the green-
sward, looking for lost love.
66
'Ha, sir, here is a lesson, if the obstinacy of woman
would only let her con it. Consider, sir; call to mind
the barbarous impertinence of those two young women-
when with murderous and triumphant eyes they walked
the world—relentlessly dragging forlorn young men by


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
111
their heartstrings through briar and brake; over flints,
through gutters, and up dreary, winding lanes; still
dragging them onward, onward, and now and then turn-
ing round, and with settled malice smiling, and showing
their red, pulpy lips, and cruellest white teeth. Con-
sider these homicidal maidens in their flaunting hours
of conquest, stepping with mincing steps upon men's
hearts, and deeming in their arrogance that they con-
ferred much honour with the points of their toes. Ha,
sir! such pictures make a bold man shudder at the
tyranny of woman! In his virtuous indignation at such
violent wrong, he feels that no punishment can revenge
him upon the sex! And then, alas! sir, when he sees
the poor forlorn things sorry for what they have done―
when, victims to their own dreadful ignorance, like a
babe that hath unwittingly let off a blunderbuss, they
are laid prostrate, fairly knocked down by their own act,
why, sir-philosopher and flinty-bosomed fellow as I am
-I feel myself ashamed when I pity them."
66
Yet, after all, it is a magnanimous softness," said
we, falling in with the humour of the sage.
"And thus, sir, I have felt two tears, big as ordinary
marbles, roll adown my cheeks, when I have read the
simple text of the simple chronicler, who relates that,
night after night, Bridget and Veronica, still seated
on the cold and colder grass, looked down into the
Valley of Naps. Poor things! Every night their
fancy believed that their lovers-the scolded, kicked,
spurned dogs of other days-were with hopeful faces
struggling towards the Warming-Pan, and would, with
the morrow's sun, enter Clovernook! Alas, and alas!
can we doubt that the young men had wedded them-
selves to kinder, more compassionate mates, and that
oft, when their late mistresses were watching for them
-watching and shivering in the night wind-they,
snug fellows, were in their first sleep, close by their
happy wives? Yet still would Bridget and Veronica,
seated on the damp grass, feel that every night their


112
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
hopes grew colder and colder; and then would they look
up at the stars, and then would Venus seem to wink
reproachfully down upon them, saying in that wink,—
Oh, Bridget and Veronica, what fools you were!'
•
"Time passed on-winter came and Bridget and
Veronica, warned by the sudden bite of rheumatic pains,
watched no more on Gossip-Hill. It was plain, they
thought, that their lovers were dead, otherwise they
must have followed them. Why, sir, the men lived to
be happy great grandfathers, and died somewhere about
fourscore and five. Bridget and Veronica suffered them-
selves to sink gracefully down upon their sorrow as
though it were a cushion; came here to Velvet Path,
built a sort of comfortable nunnery, and were-if his-
tory is to be trusted in anything-the inventresses of
muffins.
66
27
It is well," said we, "when the afflictions of the
heart can be so profitably diverted."
66
Thus, sir," replied the Hermit, "private sorrows
often become public luxuries. I never cut my wintry
muffin-never see the butter shining like bright amber
upon it—that I do not feel a gentle swelling of the heart
towards Bridget and Veronica. Though, to be sure, it
is especially the bounden duty of women to bend all
their little energies to the one task of lightening and
adorning masculine human life. Sir," said the Hermit
66
with a grave look, when we think what women have
brought upon us poor men, they owe us all sorts of
muffins.'
66
"What they have brought upon us!" we cried.
How, sir? What do you mean?"
"All the pain, the trouble, and the weariness of sin-
ful life. Now, sir,' said the Hermit, "muffins and
other such innocent delights go a great way to break
the Fall."
66
They built a nunnery, you say ? Why, there is no
stone, no brick of it," cried we.
"No; a great evidence," replied the Hermit, "of


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
113
the antiquity of the legend. The less we find to prove
the truth of a story, the greater should be our faith in
it: such, sir, is the true antiquarian creed, and for
myself, I am a devout believer. It is very true, the
nunnery is gone; the oven to which mankind owes its
first muffins is a thing of shadows. Nay, the said mankind
with greasy chin, cheek-deep in muffins, may in its
besetting ingratitude deny the very existence of Bridget
and Veronica. What care I for that?-here, sir, in
these old yews, their mournful, blighted husbands".
"Husbands!"
"Husbands," repeated the Hermit; "I see and
acknowledge them; even as in the sorrowful furbelow
of a widow, I am made to acknowledge her departed
spouse.
""
"Pray, sir, explain. What riddle is this? How
came these dead, leafless trunks to be called the hus-
bands of the maidens Bridget and Veronica? Their
husbands forsooth!"
66
Ay, sir," cried the Hermit ; "and what was
worse, their murdered mates. They stand, in their pre-
sent desolation, gaunt witnesses of the volatility, the
wilfulness of the sex. Yes, sir; they were stripped to
the condition you see them in, and left upon the world.
I will tell you-as, indeed, I have gathered it from the
chronicler-how it was. For some years, Bridget and
Veronica smiled graciously upon the villagers of Clover-
nook. Nevertheless, there was no man among them
bold enough to return the courtesy. Yes, the women
flung down their smiles, but no man with proper chi-
valry took them up. Well, sir, this could not go on.
Bridget and Veronica felt, with increasing years, increas-
ing philosophy; and precisely at the time that all men
had resolved never to make them wives, they-stubborn
souls!-determined not to wed the best, the noblest
creature alive. The human heart has, of course, its
pouting fits; it determines to live alone; to flee into
desart places; to have no employment, that is, to love
I


114
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
nothing; but to keep on sullenly beating, beating, beat-
ing, until death lays his little finger on the sulky thing,
and all is still. This, the human heart, in some way-
ward fit proposes to itself, and thinks itself strong as
adamant in its determination. Well, it goes away from
the world, and straightway-shut from human company
-it falls in love with a plant, a stone-yea, it dandles
eat or dog, and calls the creature darling.'
""
“True, sir; it is the beautiful necessity of our nature
to love something."
"And so Bridget and Veronica-sympathizing spin-
sters!-fell in love with these yew trees, and their love
proved tragical to them; for the yews withered, died
under the affection. Patience, sir, and you shall know
the whole history. When the sisters came here—so
runs the legend-these yews were brave, wide-spreading
trees; freely flourishing, with Nature only tending
them broad robust fellows were they, when Bridget
and Veronica cast their hearts upon them. And then
the women, in the very fantasy of their passion, resolved
to cut and trim the yews-to lop and trim them-into
what they called shape. Doubtless, sir, you have seen
in the outside world mummeries of the sort; have seen
trees taken out of Heaven's hand, and cut and trimmed
into peacocks, pyramids, and nameless monsters? Now
Bridget and Veronica-at least let us award them such
praise eschewed all other shapes, save the form of
man; hence, had they the yew trees cunningly fashioned
into two brave knights, with shield on arm and sword in
hand. Thus did the maidens delicately show their
yearning sympathies towards the sex-thus did they
make manifest to all Clovernook the tenderness of their
unrequited hearts. Poor souls! it would have been the
worst surliness of man to grudge them such poor com-
fort it was not for men who, in their own persons, had
refused to become the living, fleshly protectors of Bridget
and Veronica, to sneer at and condemn the vegetable
substitutes, which, in the very meekness of misfortune,


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
115
the poor women had elected for their helpmates. If man
will not become spouse to woman, is it just in him—is it
even decent to upbraid and make sorry mirth of the
dear creature, if she wed herself to a yew, a cedar, a
holly-bush? When, sir, I have beheld the virgin inno-
cence of threescore fondling and feeding with tit-bits
some wheezing, apoplectic Dutch pug, I have felt com-
passion, ay, heightened somewhat into admiration, for
the poor soul, who, making the best of hard fortune-
who, turning the slights of the world to the best account
-has cheerfully, magnanimously, sunk the husband in
the dog. When I have seen waning beauty begin to
feed cockatoos and parrots, giving them sugar from her
own mouth, I have felt for the hard condition of the
feeder-have been moved to deepest pity for her strait.
And thus, had I lived in the days of Bridget and Vero-
nica, I could have cheerfully touched my bonnet to
their yew-tree husbands, standing here in all weathers,
knowing that it was not the fault of the poor maidens
themselves their first caprice excepted that their
spouses grew outside the house, when assuredly the
dear women would have rather had them cosy at the
fireside.
66
-
Poor souls! The chronicler tells us that both
Bridget and Veronica would, in the spring time, watch
their shooting mates; would with softened hearts behold
their tips of tender green, and strive to feel, with all the
love of loving wives, renewed affection for their vegetable
lords. In summer they would sit under the protecting
shadow of their husbands, working needlework of such
surpassing delicacy and brightness, that the degenerate
women of our day never, even in day-dreams, see the
like. Autumn, too, would find Bridget and Veronica
constantly hovering near the knights; and in winter
time, with the earth iron-bound, and icicles hanging
from the eaves, sweet was it to the spirit of either wife
to hear the robin red-breast, perched now upon the pum-
mel of the knight's sword-now upon his casque—and
I 2


116
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
now upon his shoulder-singing a song of hope to deso-
lation!"
""
"And yet, sir, we observed, "with all this tender-
ness, you say the women killed their growing hus-
bands ?"
66
So says the chronicler," answered the Hermit, “and
the evil happened after this manner. One winter the
cold was terrible. Long was it before the breath of
spring called forth the buds; and then, with all other
things sprouting and shooting, the yew-tree knights
showed not the green leaf. With a sweet superstition,
Bridget and Veronica gave themselves up for lost; they
believed that their lives depended upon the vitality
of the yews let the knights cease to bud, and they
-their widows-must cease to breathe. They were
even as the Hamadryads, and only held existence during
the leafing of their lords. Long and sharp was the sus-
pense. Day after day, the folks of Clovernook would
call to know the best or worst. The husbands of Bridget
and Veronica were especial favourites: middle-aged
folks from their childhood remembered them; they had
stood so boldly, valorously, through the storms of years;
and then it had been so pleasant to watch the spring
green steal upon the edge of their swords, to see it
freshen up their shields, and break in their helmets. It
was, too, an anxious time with the children of Clover-
nook to see the knights trimmed every autumn; to watch
the cunning progress of the shears, as, in the artistic
hands of the gardener, they worked in and out, above and
below, reforming the wanderings of vegetation, and
clipping vagrant and slovenly twigs into the proper trim-
ness of knighthood. And at these clippings Bridget
and Veronica were always present, directing with earnest
and affectionate eye the operations of the steel; and,
strange to say, every new autumn feeling a deeper love,
a closer tie towards their pruned helpmates.
"At length the knights took new heart, and began to
shoot. What a load was lifted off the hearts of Bridget


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
117
and Veronica ! Their husbands-for by such fond
names were the trees known to all Clovernook-were not
dead; the pride and glory of the place still flourished.
Again would the women sit and embroider beneath their
shadows-again would they rejoice in the strength of
their spouses. Fond human hopes-vain aspirations!
It is true that the knights were alive and lusty; but
frost-a mortal frost-had pinched both their noses;
the prominent grace and beauty of the knightly counte-
nance was gone; whatever else might shoot, the nose
would never grow again!
66
Now, sir, you or I might think a noseless knight
far better than a knight defunct. Not so Bridget and
Veronica in the noble recklessness of their sex, they
declared they would rather that their yew-tree husbands
should have died outright, than stand through all
weathers disgraced and noseless: there would have been
dignity in complete death; but to be maimed, disfigured,
made ridiculous by calamity, it was insupportable.
Misery they could endure, but not mockery.
"Well, sir, in this time of tribulation, the gardener
hazarded a hope. If the head of each knight were cut
closer in, a new nose might be brought out; but then to
show a diminished head upon the old broad shoulders
would look disproportionate ungainly. If a nose must
be had, it could only be produced by lessening the knight
from head to heel; by reducing the whole figure;
indeed, by bringing down what was grand and gigantic
into the proportions of very common life.
Thus a nose
might be obtained; but was it not to purchase a nose at,
in sooth, a most preposterous price?
"The gardener had said enough. He had given it
as his opinion that the noses might be restored, and it
mattered not to Bridget and Veronica-poor headstrong
women!-how it was brought about. A nose they would
have, come what might: the gardener was ordered to
produce the noses, and to leave the rest to fate. The
day was fixed; all Clovernook attended the solemnity,


118
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
and day after day, with breathless attention, hung upon
the movements of the gardener, who, on the third day,
had so successfully dwarfed one of the knights, that he
looked no bigger than page to his unclipped companion.
But then the little fellow had a beautiful nose; and
in the very completeness of his countenance brought out
the degradation of his noseless co-mate. A dwarf with
a nose was by far more preferable than a giant without;
and the next day the gardener was set to work to finish
his labours. A few days, and the husbands of Bridget
and Veronica again displayed their full-grown noses to
the sun.
To be sure, they had lost immensely both in
height and bulk; but each had gained a nose.
But
"And Bridget and Veronica were contented, happy
women; they looked at their husbands, and felt grateful
for their noses. Alas, and alas! they knew not, dear
souls, that they had bought noses with lives.
so it was; the poor fellows had been cut so close to the
quick, had been so shorn, that they could not survive the
treatment of the shears. In a word, sir, the yew-trees
died; the husbands of Bridget and Veronica gave up
leafing, and in a short time became the bare, unprofitable
things you see them.'
""
"And the women, sir, the maiden-widows of the
yew-tree lords?"
66
66
They saw no second spring. Their husbands had
ceased to shoot, and they dropt with the fall of their leaf.
It is strange that the dead, sapless trunks should have
stood so long; but," said the Hermit, I take it, they
are kindly preserved by fate as lasting records of
woman's wilfulness. To me, sir, these dry logs are
touching orators. Indeed, are they not preachers of
great counsel to what we jocosely call the gentle sex? "
"Counsel what counsel ?
66
""
This," answered He of Bellyfulle," that come
what may, a woman should never risk the loss of a
husband for the sake of his nose."


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
119
We will not venture to declare that the Hermit was
too exhausted by the delivery of this truth to continue
his talk; we think not. Nevertheless, we think that
the story struck upon some chord in his heart, and made
him for a time taciturn. Indeed, in the matter of noses,
the Hermit could hardly escape suspicion; there was
much equivocation in the centre of his face; was it a
nose, or was it not? Had he been a sufferer from the
We are afraid so.
caprice of the sex?
With slow and silent steps we trod Velvet Path,
following the silent Hermit. At length he paused before
a barn. There," said he,
66
Clovernook ruins.'
"A ruin!
"there is another of our
66
we cried.
Indeed, it seems a goodly
barn, in excellent, most perfect condition."
"True, sir, it seems so; and yet is it a ruin: what
think you
it once was? You cannot guess? Mint,
hospital, or prison? Sir, it was a palace; a kingly
abiding-place. Monarchs were crowned where now the
folks of Clovernook thrash beans and wheat."
"Indeed!" we cried, and without a second thought
were passing on, when the Hermit paused, and laid his
hand upon our shoulder.
A
"Is not such a ruin," he asked, "of all antiquities
most potent in its call to the heart and the imagination?
To me it seems to hint the history of human kind.
palace and a barn! How far were men from the palace
when they first laboured the earth! What changes of
thought—what growth of energy-what subtlety-what
calculation-what playing of man against man-motive
against motive,ere the king arose from among his
fellows, and clay was deified by clay! What a leap
from Adam's spade to Solomon's sceptre! Lingering
here, dreaming on this spot, it seems to me that I can
almost see the growth of the world; can almost behold
the advance and struggle of the race, from the hour
that all men tilled the earth, and tended flocks, to the
first crowning of a king-a shepherd king! A palace
and a barn!


120
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
"Now is it an abiding-place for men who, ages elapsed,
are the things of ceremony; who, the pastoral days long
gone, live a life of artificial wants, of artificial homage;
whose best enjoyment is self-sacrifice to pomp; and now,
time has run on, and the flail is heard where royal
trumpets sounded. The sons of Adam quit fields and
flocks to build a palace; the king is anointed; state
keeps its court; death shoots his silent arrows; ages
pass, the husbandman takes possession of the kingly
palace, and winnows grain where monarchs held their
sway. The palace turned to the barn seems to make
goodly reparation. Adam gets his own again."
At length we reached the end of Velvet Path, which
gently winding brought us to the door of the Gratis, the
one hostelry of Clovernook. A few of the villagers were
at the door, and greeted the Hermit with happy saluta-
tions; for, as they declared, he had been some time a
stranger to them. I should have come to the cell to-
morrow," said an old man, whose turbaned head and
expressive face made us curious to learn his history.
"Who is he?" we asked of the Hermit, as he turned
into the Gratis.
66
"We call him Mahomet," answered the Sage.
the outside world he was a street-dealer in rhubarb."
"Mahomet! Surely not a Turk?" we cried.
66
""
"In
Why not? asked the Hermit. "We leave the
battles of creeds to the noisy, impudent world you come
from. Here, in Clovernook, no man seeks to thrust
himself between his fellow and Heaven."
"And have you a mosque in Clovernook? If not,
where does your Turk worship?
29
"Did I not, from Gossip Hill, point out the place?
We have no other. There, all men, in their turn,
communicate with the other world. There, all, in their
turn, give place to one another; humility teaches them
tolerance. No man here makes to himself a trading
property in human souls; no man asserts for himself
exclusive freehold in heaven. You are yet young amongst


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
121
66
us, sir, and I see marvel at my words; you will find
them true true to the letter. Enough for the present;
come, I'll show you to the parlour." We followed the
Hermit, and in a few moments found ourselves in a large
apartment, in which were about twenty persons seated
in easy arm-chairs around a table.
'My friend," said
the Hermit, introducing us. All the company rose, and
bowing towards us, cried " Welcome." They then took
their seats, and instantly we felt as we were at home. As
the villagers will, in due time, introduce themselves, we
shall not now dwell upon their various characters. One
man alone we will speak of. He looked so old, and yet
so purified from the stains and marks of years, he seemed
something more than mortal. His face was smooth and
thin; pale, too, as moonlight; his eyes were of a clear,
deep, piercing grey, and his snow-white hair, parted at
the forehead, hung massively down his shoulders. His
smile was sweet and guileless as the smile of a babe. A
wreath of amaranth encircled his head. "Who is he?
we asked of the Hermit; and the Sage answered,
is the oldest inhabitant."
29
66 He
At length, then, thought we, he is found; at length
we see in the body that strange, mysterious person,
whose experience at times amazes a young and thought-
less generation. The Oldest Inhabitant! How often
do we hear his voice, like the voice of the cuckoo,
coming to us from an unseen anatomy! What garnered
knowledge must be his! What hard frosts has he
chronicled! What times of scarcity-what days of
fatness! Now doth he pass judgment upon gooseberries,
declaring them to be the largest within his memory;
now doth he the like service to hail-stones!
And now
precisely doth he measure the height of floods, and now
weigh the weight of spent thunder!
There is some-
thing solemn, too, in the Oldest Inhabitant. He is the
link between the dead and the living: in the course of
nature, the next to be called from among us; his place
immediately supplied by a second brother. Generations


122
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
have gone, passed into the far world, and left him here
their solitary spokesman-the one witness of the wonders
that had birth among them. He remains here to check
the vanity of the present, by his testimony to the past.
Where would be all human experience without the
Oldest Inhabitant? Yet, surely, we thought-in no
way discouraged in our belief by the placid, gentle looks
of the venerable man at the table-surely, the Oldest
Inhabitant loves now and then to pass off a joke upon
his ignorant juniors. Yes; antiquity likes a hoax, and
often, by its officer, the Oldest Inhabitant, puts off a
flam upon the unconscious and too confiding present.
Such was our thought; and, in truth, it was, after, well
justified by the practice of the white-haired sage at the
board. No little boy ever loved apples better than the
Oldest Inhabitant loved a joke. In his time, he had
written much for the newspapers.
"You were talking, Master Cuttlefish," said the
Hermit, addressing a villager about fifty years old-a
man with a remarkably blithe look, and ready manner.
Let us interrupt no tale," cried He of Bellyfulle.
66
"I was about to tell a little pen-and-ink experience;
an incident that happened to me in my days of goose-
quill," said Cuttlefish; from which I guessed that the
speaker had driven the dangerous trade of author.
"There is little in the story; only, indeed, this much,
that it taught me to have some tolerance even for those
of the very worst report."
Let us
"Call you that little?" cried the Hermit,—“ why,
'tis one of the prime lessons of benignant man.
have the story. But say, is it not a little chilly to-
night? Could we not bear some heat, eh?" Where-
upon, all called for a fire. The Oldest Inhabitant rang
a silver bell that stood upon the table; when, instantly,
a face that in short, one of those faces that coming
suddenly upon startled man, fairly make him gasp at
their alarming beauty-looked in at the door.
"Sweet-
lips," said the Hermit,
66
a fire." The girl nodded and


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
123
again closed the door; but ere we could recover ourselves
she again entered the room, carrying a small faggot of
cinnamon, which she laid upon the hearth, and stooped
to arrange some logs for kindling. Think her thus
occupied, whilst with dull, pale ink, we vainly try to
draw her beauty. Sweetlips-for such in Clovernook
was her name-had in her time been Maid of Honour at
the English court: she was still unmarried, and it was
said, had renounced the outside world, and become maid
at the Gratis, for the pure love of independence. Now,
then, for her face. (The pen shakes in our hand, as
though conscious of the hopeless task wherein we would
employ it.) Her face was beautifully fair-perfectly
regular. It was a dream of a rapt sculptor, incarnate
and living. Talk of music, the face seemed to breathe
nothing but harmonious sprightly thoughts. Her pretty
forehead was a tablet that seemed consecrated from the
mark of age; no, time, with his sacrilegious pen, should
never mark one black line there. It was living ivory,
defying wrinkles. Her lips! we almost faint, putting
down the monosyllable her lips, scarlet as blood,
seemed pouting with unconscious wealth.
Her eyes
were of dark, heart-devouring hazel; with now a little
love in them glancing timidly about, and now a merry
little devil. Her hair-if it was hair-came bright and
smoothly as light about her temples, and hung in lustrous
curls at her neck. Then her form! What swelling
ripeness! Her waist-we could see it; even the arm
of the Oldest Inhabitant appeared for a moment as it
would move towards it; her step seemed to strike music
from the ground,—and then her foot !—what man, with
the heart of man, would not have made that heart its
cushion? Her voice, too! She spoke but three words,
and for the next half-hour we were listening to some
delicious music. Her dress was of the prettiest, quaintest
fashion. She wore a white lawn boddice, laced with
silken lace before; her gown was of dove colour; and
her snow-white apron was curiously worked with fruits


124
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
and flowers around the border; needle never wrought
such delicate similitudes.
"Sweetlips," said the Hermit, "to-night I'll take
my tankard."
Whereupon the girl brought a large
silver vessel of wonderful workmanship, and with an
eloquent smile placed it before the Sage of Bellyfulle.
He, with an affection almost fatherly, patted her on her
cheek, and in his cordial voice wished that, die when she
would, it might be with a wedding-ring upon her finger.
"And now," said the Hermit, turning to Cuttlefish,
"tell your story."
"There is but little story in the matter," said Cuttle-
fish; "it is nothing more than an incident of my goose-
quill days.'
"Begin," cried the Hermit of Bellyfulle; and imme-
diately the speaker obeyed.
"It had been my ill fortune to be called a genius by
my discriminating parents, who, hugging themselves in
the possession of such a treasure, would constantly
remark that I did nothing like any other boy. No
matter what was the mischief, to their satisfaction I
always contrived to give it an original turn that mightily
recommended the misdoing. My brothers were dull,
stupid fellows, who I have heard my father declare it
twenty times-would never make a figure in the world.
No; it would be to me-his youngest and only hope-
that the name of Cuttlefish would owe a lasting lustre..
And this belief was as a religion to my poor mother. Dear
soul! she once visited Westminster Abbey. She had
not been five minutes in Poets' Corner, before she burst
into tears, and was compelled to quit the place. At the
earnest entreaties of my father, she, after a time, con-
fessed the cause of her emotion. She could not, she
said, look at the statues of the great people about her,
without feeling that her dear Jacky-myself-would
one day stand among 'em. She couldn't help, she said,
the feelings of a mother; and they had been too much
for her."


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
125
"It is something,
"Poor soul!" cried the Hermit.
to be sure, to the small pride of fleshly man to think of
standing in an attitude of eternal marble for all comers
of all generations; and yet the halfpence taken for the
show do somewhat jingle a discordance. They bring
the dead philosopher of the Abbey down to the living
Spotted Boy of the caravan. 'Tis making Madam Fame
the money-taker at a threepenny show. Perhaps,'
added the Hermit, with a smile, "'twas this thought
that touched your mother into tears. Women jump like
cats to conclusions; and the poor soul might have been
shocked at the prospect of the copper fee.
""
"She might," said Cuttlefish, "I cannot say. It
may, however, be some comfort to her spirit to know
that I shall certainly escape the degradation. However,
with this belief, that I should irradiate the name of
Cuttlefish, my parents let me follow my own will, which,
at a very early age, developed itself towards doing
nothing. And, indeed, throughout my life, that, my
first bent, has ever directed me. My brothers, who were
so very stupid, and therefore fit for nothing, were early
placed in the world, and indicated the truth of the
parental opinion, by making their fortunes. They were
dull blockheads, according to my father, and so became
men of wealth and influence by the very force of their
insensibility. Now I, who was brimful of genius, was to
do everything by some extraordinary hocus-pocus dreamt
of by my parents, but of which I, indeed, had not the
remotest knowledge. Leave Jack alone,' would still
be my father's cry, he'll make his way in the world-
how can it be otherwise? he has such wit!' Well,
after spending my little patrimony-and in its happy
mode of outlay I may be permitted to observe I showed
a genius for ten thousand a year—and after losing some
twelvemonth or two at bo-peep with bailiffs, you will
judge of my destitution when I tell you that I found
myself reduced to pen and ink. Oh, my friends! there
is a condition for the human animal. Consider the


126
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
outcast. The maker of matches has a business; nay,
he is the possessor of a mystery. When he has made
his matches, there they are-tangible wood and brim-
stone; their merits open to the eye of cook and house-
maid. Conscious of the excellence of his ware, the
match-maker may higgle gallantly for his price; matches
are things wanted in the commerce of life; it is no diffi-
cult task to recommend their utility to the world, alive
as it is to the worth of firelight. But books! their
worth is a matter of fancy, say of weakness, to the
weaker part of mankind; they have no standard value,
none, at their birth. Hence, the unknown maker of a
book-I speak especially of the time when I first sinned
in ink-is a sort of gipsy in the social scale; a pic-
turesque vagabond, who somehow or the other contrives to
live on the sunny side of the statutes, but is nevertheless
vehemently suspected of all sorts of larceny by respecta-
ble householders. Shall I ever forget the uneasiness,
the look of distrust from my landlady, when first the
alarming truth fell upon her, that her three-pair room
sheltered an author-or rather, an author in the shell,
for as then I had hatched nothing, but was only sitting
upon foolscap? Good soul! in a flutter of concern, she
told me that that very room had been tenanted, for three
long years, by an honest journeyman tailor, whose rent
was regular as the Saturday. She looked at me from
head to heel, and said she hoped that all was right; though
I could perceive that she spoke in the very forlornness
of the feeling. And after all, the woman had truth upon
her side. Her tenant tailor had an allowed business;
was a recognised necessity by fallen man; was moreover
one of a worshipful guild; an artificer whose cunning
administered to human pride; whose handiwork was
all-in-all to worldly triumphs. For instance, what would
be a coronation without a tailor? What would be man,
left to nothing more than sheepskins and parrots' plumes?
Hence, the woman, in her strong sense of the decencies
of life, acknowledged the vital use of the labourer of the


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
127
:
needle; hence, when she learnt that I only dealt in pen
and ink, she looked upon me as a sort of vagabond con-
juror; a white wizard, whose very money-if ever she
saw it might be of doubtful origin. Shillings got
out of an inkstand, she could hardly look upon as good
mint coin and for this reason, she could not compre-
hend how any man, by mere pen, ink, and paper, could
give value received for the ready cash. Now the tailor's
work was plain: a pair of breeches was a tangible
thing; and spoke as it were common sense to the com-
mon sense of man and womankind. But authorship!
Alas, how small to the breeches was a tale in verse!"
66
Right, very right," said the Oldest Inhabitant. “I
can remember in the days of my youth that people who
dealt in pen and ink were made to live in a quarter of
the city by themselves, for fear the rest of the inha-
bitants should catch their disorder. They were set
apart, like folks in a fever. And it was good policy,
that very good. Notwithstanding, the disease would
now and then spread. Indeed, a few foolish people went
so far as to say that some babies were born with it."
And here the Oldest Inhabitant gave a soft, flute-like
chuckle, and then was silent.
"There I was, the born genius, as my begetters had
averred," said Cuttlefish, "with wit enough to turn the
world, destitute, penniless. Can I cease to remember
the blank, hopeless look, with which, for an hour and
more, I sat for the first time gazing at the blank paper!
Then I rose from my wooden chair, and approached my
chamber-window. I looked down into the street. There
were coaches, and waggons, and drays, and carts-a
thousand passing evidences of wealth and commerce. They
all belong to somebody, said I. There-I would fancy-
goes a physician in his carriage to sell Latin promises of
health. There, the merchant to his counting-house; there,
the lawyer to his office; there, too, a fellow cries rabbits;
and there, at yonder corner, sits an old woman vending
pippins. Look where I will, I see no one who has not


128
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
a wherewithal—a something to trade upon: real chattels,
speaking to the dullest sense. And my stock in trade,
thought I, with a despairing fall of the heart, is words;
mere syllables. Alas! in the humility of my soul, I
would have exchanged my richest stock for the slippers
hawked by an old Levite past my door. Man can under-
stand the worth of shoe-leather, when the best written
foolscap shall be to him as waste-paper. Humbled by
these thoughts, I returned to my chair; and again gazing
on the barren sheet, groaned with sorrow that I had been
born the genius of my house. How I chided fate that
had not made me like my brothers, dull fellows-fools!
"Come to your story,
said the Hermit, impatiently
appealing to his tankard. "What were the first doings
of your maiden quill ?”
66
29
""
You shall hear," said Cuttlefish. "I know not how
long I sat with my skull clasped by my hands; trying
with all my might to conjure my brains. However, I was
at length aroused by a sharp knuckle rap at my door;
which then opened, and a gentleman-as he appeared to
me-of great dignity of manner, entered the room.
Pray, sir, I asked with growing confidence, for I saw the
man could not be a bailiff, To whom do I owe the
honour of this visit?'"'
"As for my name, sir,' replied the stranger, with a
melancholy smile, you know it well, though at present
we will speak no further of it. You deal in pen and ink.
I have a little job for you.' Saying this, the stranger laid
aside his cloak, and displayed a very beautiful court-suit
of black. His ruffles and cravat were of the most superb
lace; and his finger bore a diamond, which shone like a
little sun in the room, drawing my eye with it wherever
it moved. He was in every respect most richly appointed,
yet was there nothing in his bravery of the coxcomb. He
must be a cabinet-minister was my first belief; and then
I thought, perhaps, a quack doctor."
""
"Did you not ask his name? inquired the Hermit.
"Yes," answered Cuttlefish; "but his first reply was


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
129
only a smile, and a gentle shake of the head. Then he
said, 'Oh! never mind my name—you have heard of me,
who shall say how many times? Then he drew him-
self a chair, and took a seat by the fire, which, for lack
of fuel, was fast dying in the grate. Seeing this, he
took the ruin of a poker, for it was no more, in his hand,
and asking, with the blandest smile- Will you allow
me?' thrust it among the dying cinders. Instantane-
ously they blazed up, casting a brilliant light throughout
the room. Bless me,' I cried, I thought the fire was
out.' Whereupon the stranger, with the same sweet,
yet strange smile, briefly remarked- Nothing like pok-
ing!' Then my visitor again looked melancholy-again
was silent.
At length, I observed-'You said, Sir,
something about a job: of what character? A piece of
large history-or merely a little bit of private scandal?'
"Not that not that,' said the stranger, with slight
emotion. I have suffered too much from the scandal of
the world; have too keenly felt its wickedness to inflict it
even upon a beggar. The truth is, I came here to hire
you to pen my defence.'
6
"Alas, Sir!' I cried, what have you done?' The
stranger merely shook his head, and drew a deep, deep
sigh. With what are you charged?' I demanded.
•
"With everything,' answered my visitor;
with everything which the world calls wicked.'
"At these words, I leapt from my chair.
666
that is,
But, Sir,' said the stranger, taking a handkerchief
from his pocket, and passing it gently across his eyes,
but, Sir, though I do not wish to pass myself off as a
pattern person, I am nevertheless cruelly slandered,
Look here, Sir,' and to my astonishment, my visitor
drew a large folio from his coat-pocket. Be good
enough to run your eye along that passage.'
66
"I did so, and read as follows. Whereupon the old
woman, upon being questioned, confessed that the devil
had appeared to her in the shape of a black cat; that he
promised her
power over all things; and upon such pro-
K


130
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
mise, she became a witch. This happened at eleven at
night, on the 24th of October, in the year
66 6
Now, Sir,' said the stranger, I am prepared to
show the falsehood of every syllable of the old woman's
story.'
"You prove?' I cried; and then it immediately
came into my mind that the unhappy gentleman was
lunatic; and that it was his peculiar disorder-dreadful
malady!-to believe himself no other than the Wicked
One. Or, perhaps, thought I, he may be some poor
hypochondriacal creature, who will be Beelzebub, and
nobody else. I have heard of folks thinking them-
selves into tea-pots-of insisting upon lowering them-
selves to mean and base vessels; with this man, the
disease may have worked ambitiously.
Hence, poor
creature! he may be a demon in his own conceit; and
for a time, it may be humane to humour him. • Then,
Sir,' I said to my visitor, there is no truth in the old
gentlewoman's story? You were not bargaining with
the witch on the night of-
666
"
"I can prove an alibi,' cried the stranger, with some
vehemence. 'On that very night, I was closeted with a
certain minister of state, whose name, by the way, I
must beg leave to suppress-making a bargain between
him and a noble duke, for a vacant garter. And yet,
Sir, you must remark the grossness of the libel. It is
therein written that I appeared as a black cat; that I
visited a wretched old crone in a miserable, degrading
disguise, as though ashamed of myself. Infamous scan-
dal, Sir! I tell you, at that very time I was in my own
person talking to one of the first men of the land; to a
man of wealth and education; to one who had taken all
sorts of honours at college; to one whose eloquence would
lead away senates captive; whose keen logic would split
hairs as a bill-hook would split logs. It was with him,
Sir with him, the noble and enlightened that I was
chatting the whole of the night; and yet it is set down
in that folio that I was wasting precious time, and forget-


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
131
ting what was due to myself-by masquerading it with
some mumpish harridan as a black cat. Upon my word,'
said the stranger, with a look of injury—if men affect
to despise my principles, they might respect my taste.
The truth is, they commit all sorts of shameful deeds,
and then lay the temptation upon my shoulders. Be it
murder, or be it robbery of a hen-roost, I am called the
wicked instigator of the enormity; when the assassin and
the thief had nobody but themselves to thank for the evil
doing. It is, Sir, upon this point that I wish the aid of
your pen to set me right with the world.'
"It is clear, thought I, the man is mad. Poor fellow!
But I'll hear his story out.
"Look here, Sir,' said he, and again he dived into
his coat pocket; again he pulled forth another large folio.
'Read this,' he said.
"
6
"Obediently, I took the volume, and read the passage
to which the stranger's finger pointed; it ran thus-
Furthermore it was a common report that when any
gentleman or lord came to see the Lord of Orne, they
were entertained (as they thought) very honourably, being
served with all sorts of dainty fare and exquisite dishes,
as if he had not spared to make them the best cheer that
might be. But at their departure they that thought them-
selves well refreshed found their stomachs empty, and
almost pined for want of food, having neither eaten nor
drank anything, save in imagination only; and it is to be
thought that their horses fared no better than their mas-
ters.
It happened one day that a certain lord being
departed from his house, one of his men having left some-
thing behind, returned to the castle, and entering sud-
denly into the hall where they dined a little before, he
espied a monkey beating very sorely the master of the
house that had feasted them of late! And there be others
that say that he hath been seen through the chink of a
door, lying on a table upon his belly, and a monkey scourg
ing him very strangely; to whom he should say,-Let me
alone,―let me alone; wilt thou always torment me thus?'
K 2


132
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
C
"Now, Sir,' said the stranger, with a piteous look,
you at once apprehend the monkey-you know for whom
he is intended?'
"It is no difficult matter to guess,' said I.
"Upon my honour,' said the stranger, rising from
his seat, and speaking with difficulty from emotion, ‘upon
my honour, whatever may have been the parts I have
acted, I never yet appeared as a monkey; never, Sir; the
accusation is only one of the ten thousand falsehoods con-
cerning me that men have invented to disguise the wicked
deeds of their own free spirits. I ask, wherefore monkey?
What should I have gained by so base, so low a disguise?
Besides, why should I have taken the trouble to visit the
Lord of Orne? Would it not have been more reasonable
to wait till his lordship came to me?'
"Poor fellow again I thought he is very mad
indeed!
"Look here, again, Sir,' said the stranger, and he
took another, a smaller book, from his pocket. 'Read
here: more scandal.'
66
Taking the volume from his hand, I read as follows:
There was a conjuror at Salzburg, that vaunted that he
could gather all the serpents within half a mile round
about into a ditch, and feed them and bring them up
there; and being about the experiment, behold the old
and grand serpent came in the while, which whilst the
conjuror thought by the force of his charms to make it
enter the ditch among the rest, he set upon and inclosed
him round about like a girdle so strongly, that he drew
the conjuror into the ditch with him, where he miserably
died.'
"
"The fellow's foot slipped,' said the stranger. May
I die for ever if I had any hand in it—and then for the
story of the serpent-but never mind; please to look at
this.' With this the stranger took another folio from his
pocket. Opening it upon the table, he pointed to a para-
graph, and in the mildest voice, said Lege.' I obeyed.
“It was, in truth, a very lamentable spectacle that


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK,
133
6
happened to the governor of Macon, a magician, whom
the Devil snatched up in dinner-while, and hoisted aloft,
carrying him three times about the town of Macon in the
presence of many beholders, to whom he cried in this
manner-Help! help! my friends! so that the whole
town stood amazed thereat. Yea, and the remembrance
of this strange accident sticketh at this day fast in the
minds of all the inhabitants of the country; and they
say that this wretch, having given himself to the Devil,
provided himself with store of holy bread, which he
always carried about with him, thinking thereby to
cheat him; but, in truth, it served him in no stead, as
his end declared.'
666
What think you of that?' asked the stranger.
Do you mark the folly, the useless labour they put
upon me?
Why should I have taken the trouble of
carrying the governor three times about the town, when
I had but to wait patiently for him-to bide my time, as
you worldly people say, and he must have found me?
Besides, what an ass does the scandal-monger make me!
Is it likely that I should so forget my own interest as to
make so public an example of my victim? Was that
the way, think you, to draw other folks in? But there,
there is the blundering of the chroniclers. Now, they
call me all sorts of names to show my cunning; and now
they make me do tricks that would disgrace a fool, Why
can't they be consistent?
"Yes; the poor man is certainly mad, again and
again I said to myself; though, to confess the truth,
when I saw him dive his hands into his pockets, and
draw from them huge folios, I did, despite of myself,
feel a strange fear-a creeping terror.
"Read here!' he cried; 'tis, I know, a well-known
story; yet read it, that I may, as your law-makers have
it, explain.'
"Obediently I read.
"Cornelius Agrippa, a great student in magic, and
man both famous by his own works and others' report,


134
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
for his necromancy, went always accompanied with the
Devil in the similitude of a black dog. But when his
time of death drew near, and he was urged to repent-
ance, he took off the enchanted collar from the dog's
neck, and sent him away with these terms,-Get thee
hence, thou cursed beast, which hast utterly destroyed me.
And the dog was never after seen.
666
6
What think you of that?' asked the stranger, with
a slight sneer. Why there never was a greater flam.
I knew Cornelius Agrippa very well.'
"
"Indeed!' I cried, with increasing uneasiness,
which nevertheless I endeavoured to conceal. What
sort of a man may he have been?'
"An excellent person; and for his dog-poor,
faithful creature, it was the very fidelity of the animal
that made him suspected by the hard-judging world: it
was his very excellence that drew the scandal down upon
him. The dog was incorruptible, and therefore, said
men, the Devil was in him.'
"And you knew Cornelius Agrippa?' I ventured
again to ask.
.
"That is,' answered the stranger, I wanted to
know him. I knew his worldly miseries; I knew the
contempt and lies that were visited upon him. I knew
him an outcast from his fellows, spurned, hated by them;
yet with a stout and constant spirit working for the last-
ing delights of those who persecuted him. I knew all
this; and then, indeed, I tempted him, as I have
tempted others of his tribe, with ease, with wealth, with
all the sounding, hollow music of the world; but Corne-
lius laughed at me and my promises; took his staff,
whistled to his dog, and trudged securely about the
world, though at every footstep its dwellers would
have stoned him. To be sure I had this delight. I
found that his dog had brought a bad name upon his
master that was something.
66
Poor Cornelius!' cried I.
6
"Nay,' said the stranger, not for the evil that it


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
135
did to Cornelius, but to those who reviled and hunted
him. Do you not see-I know the truth-that the malice
garnered in the souls of the persecutors is of more worth
to me than the suffering of the persecuted? On one
hand, I have wickedness and folly working in ten thou-
sand hearts-that is sin by wholesale. Think you, when
the martyr roasts at the stake, that it is his pains I
delight in ? No it is the rejoicing of the men who
have doomed him to the fate; it is the ferocious
happiness of the multitude that makes my delight—
it is-
"I started from the stranger, who, recalled to him-
self by my agitation, mildly said- To return to Corne-
lius Agrippa. To the last he rejected my friendship;
and though it has passed from mouth to mouth among
men that he and I did business together, it is not the
truth. With his stout heart he spurned me; and so, I
confess it, out of pure spite, I contrived to fasten a bad
name upon his black dog.'
"Poor malice, indeed,' I cried.
666
Why, yes,' said the stranger; but it has served
its purpose; and, happily for my interest, there are few
men-I mean the men in advance of the millions—who,
by the beautiful falsehood of the world, have not all of
them been charged with black dogs of some sort.' Saying
this, the stranger lightly laughed.
"And now, Sir, may I ask your precise business
with me?' I asked, all the while feeling that I was closeted
with a madman; though at the same time not unvisited
by strange thoughts, which, however thick and fast they
came, I strove to master.
"Have patience,' said the stranger, 'let me first
supply you with your materials.'
"Hereupon the stranger, fast as he could, dipped both
hands into his pockets, drawing therefrom folios, quartos
-in truth, books of all dimensions, dropping them upon
the ground, fast as hail-stones. As volume after
volume fell, my blood became colder and colder, my hair


136
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
stood up like wire; I sat in my chair motionless as
though caught in a trap. With every moment I became
more and more assured that I was giving audience to
something supernatural, if not to the great fiend himself.
In my confused horror, I asked myself, is he a doomed
bookseller?-and then there was a remarkable intelli-
gence in his face that gave no warranty of such a
belief. At length, he seemed to have emptied his
pockets, and stood up to the shoulders amid a heap of
volumes.
66
6
At last, I was able to stammer, And do all those
books contain something about you?
666
6
All; and ten thousand thousand more,' answered
the fiend, for it was he, indeed. It has still been the
trick, the injustice of man, to shuffle off the rascalities
of his nature upon my shoulders. For thousands of
years have I borne this injustice; but I will no longer
endure with meekness the sins that really and truly
belong to man himself. I will no longer be made the
stupid blundering hero of his fireside tales; no longer
be turned into all shapes, foolish, base, and contemptible,
to excuse his ends. No: though, to confess it, I hate
printer's ink as I hate the glory of the sun, nevertheless
I will, I must, fight man with his own dirty missiles ;
and will, therefore, print a book. It is, I am aware, a
miserable strait to be reduced to,-a condition I little
dreamt of when I was wont to dodge John Gutenburg
about the streets of Mentz, and now and then stand
beneath his eaves, listing the first creakings of his virgin
press. I little thought that I should be brought to this
pass; but so it is: my best weapon is now a fine, bold
type. I have chosen you'—and here the fiend gave the
nod of a patron—' to do my work.'
"
"With much labour did I assure the fiend, that I was
wholly unworthy of the distinction. Why not take the
job to some experienced quill?'
666
No,' answered the fiend, 'I would rather intrust
myself to your simplicity. You are yet obscure, unknown;


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
137
and will for a time be docile: I say for a time, for when
the book shall have won you a reputation, you will be as
insolent and as unmanageable as the rest of them. How
many authors have I in my time set up! and how shame-
fully have they rewarded me!' Here the fiend ran over
a bead-roll of names from Faustus to but no matter,
making out a strong case of thanklessness against one
and all of them. 6
Now you,' he said, will, I doubt
not, finish what I want before you are quite spoiled.
Here, as I said,' and he looked at the mountain of
volumes, are a few of your materials. I will, as you
proceed, bring you more.
1
6
"I shuddered as I glanced at the crushing heap of
books. A few of the materials! I cried; why,
'twill take me a life to go through them; for, to say the
truth, I am a slow reader.'
"You 'll find the labour nothing,' said the fiend, 'for
I have doubled down the leaves at all the strong bits of
scandal, and have pencilled my refutation in the margin.
All that will be wanted from you, will be to put the
matter into nice clear English, fit even for families. I
could do it myself, but truly, I am not confident as to the
purity of my language. I know something of all tongues,
to be sure, quite well enough to speak; but not, I fear,
to write. I was once very well skilled in the dead
tongues, but, for want of practice, I feel myself now and
then at fault in them. My Coptic is quite gone; but I
have contrived to keep up my Hebrew talking with the
stock-jobbers and money-lenders.'
"And pray,' I ventured to ask, what is your
favourite language' of all the modern?
"I talk a great deal of French; indeed, without
vanity, I may say it-I think I have the true Parisian
accent. Not that I have had cause to neglect my
English-oh, dear no; I talk much English, and let me
tell you, to some of the very highest people. I know,
the prejudice runs that I delight in low company; that
my especial haunts are alleys, cellars, filthy places that


138
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK:
even make me stop my nose to think of them. Having
an interest in all human life, I certainly do at times
visit such places, but I am just as often-nay, oftener—
to be found in boudoirs, in statesmen's closets, and royal
drawing-rooms. But to business. You will immediately
get on with your work,' and the fiend pointed to the
work.
666
Upon my soul,' I cried with vehemence, I had
rather you took it somewhere else; I shall make nothing
of it; you'll only suffer in my hands.'
666
But, look here,' said the fiend; and opening a
volume where a leaf was turned, he read as follows:
The poor child, possessed by the Devil, vomited nothing
but bits of glass, crooked pins, and died at midnight."
* Observe my note upon this,' said the fiend. At the very
time I am set down as doing this mischief upon some
babe or suckling, I was-here I have written it-supping
with Pope Leo the Tenth. And so throughout. You
will find that my defence consists in a round of alibis.
You will find-and it is in such spirit that I wish you to
enforce the lesson-that what men falsely, fraudfully,
foolishly call the instigation of the Devil, the temptation
of the Devil, the prompting of the Devil, the work of the
Devil, is no other than the antics of their own stupid,
stubborn, headlong passion. It is thus the repentant
pickpocket vows that it was I who crooked his finger for
the theft the murderer swears 'twas I who gave him
his weapon-the adulterer, that 'twas I who burned in
his veins, and made him spirit off his neighbour's wife.
All lies, all wilful hypocrisy, fathered upon me, who am
determined to put up with the calumny no longer; and
for this reason, I shall be just as sure of those who do a
wrong as if I bore the shame of tempting them to the
iniquity. I shall have them still, with the proper credit of
their coming to me unpressed, uninvited. Therefore, you
will immediately from these and from the other books I
will bring you, write my defence.'
666
Will you have it in a folio?' I faintingly asked.


THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
139
666
Certainly not,' said the fiend; a small pocket
book for my money. Let me see; properly condensed
'twill make two nice volumes.
I shall pay you hand-
somely. I will give you a hundred guineas for the
work.
999
"And pray," asked the Hermit of Bellyfulle, "did
you ever write the book?
66
Never," said Cuttlefish with emphasis,
wrote a single line."
"And why not? inquired the sage.
66
66 never
Because, would you believe it," cried Cuttlefish with
a roaring laugh, "because the Devil was ass enough to
pay me fifty guineas for the work in advance."
*
*
*
The
But the meetings at the "Gratis" are no more.
hostelry itself is closed, found to be unlicensed by the
prim propriety of the world. The Hermit has wandered
we know not whither. Now and then his wise, happy,
cordial spirit seems to visit knots of men gathered to-
gether, to sit the sometime jurymen upon the faults
and follies of the earth; when he asserts the influence
of his benevolent soul in the broad charity of the verdict.
Yes; we must hug the belief that the Hermit is still a
pilgrim among men, though, like some kaiser out upon
a holiday, he travels unknown.
And Clovernook? It is gone; wiped out of the map
of the earth. Even as some scene, bright with the
hues of the land of dreams, the wonder-work of the
golden-handed Clarksonius Stanfieldius,-is blanked and
blotted out, that its whitened web may bear, it may
be, a cold lodging-house or a colder prison,-so is
Clovernook but a place that was; a hamlet wherein


140
THE CHRONICLES OF CLOVERNOOK.
fancy has loitered away a truant hour; loitered, to be
called back to the hard bricks and mortar that carry
rent-charge; to the real world gaol locked and grated
by Mulciber Convention. A gaol wherein man, with his
nose at the bars, will nevertheless see some sort of
Clovernook beyond. No unjust sentence; no keeper
Fortune, no turnkey Circumstance can blind his brain to
that fancy land. He will enjoy it: it is the heritage
of the imperial soul of man: and therefore-though a
thing of dreams-far more enduring than the stones of
Babylon.


ESSAYS.
THE FOLLY OF THE SWORD.
MAY we ask the reader to behold with us a melan-
choly show—a saddening, miserable spectacle? We will
not take him to a prison, a workhouse, a Bedlam, where
human nature expiates its guiltiness, its lack of worldly
goods, its most desolate perplexity; but we will take
him to a wretchedness, first contrived by wrong, and
perpetuated by folly. We will show him the embryo
mischief that, in due season, shall be born in the com-
pleteness of its terror, and shall be christened with a
sounding name, Folly and Wickedness standing sponsors.
We are in St. James's Park. The royal standard of
England burns in the summer air—the queen is in Lon-
don. We pass the palace, and in a few paces are in
Birdcage Walk. There, reader, is the miserable show
we promised you. There are some fifty recruits, drilled,
by a sergeant to do homicide cleanly, handsomely. In
Birdcage Walk, Glory sits upon her eggs, and hatches
eagles!
How very beautiful is the sky above us!
blessing comes with the fresh, quick air!
What a
The trees,
drawing their green beauty from the earth, quicken our
thoughts of the bounteousness of this teeming world.


142
THE FOLLY OF THE SWORD.
Here, in this nook, this patch, where we yet feel the
vibrations of surrounding London-even here, Nature,
constant in her beauty, blooms and smiles, uplifting the
heart of man, if the heart be his to own her.
Now look aside, and contemplate God's image with a
musket. Your bosom still expanding with gratitude to
Nature, for the blessings she has heaped about you,
behold the crowning glory of God's work managed like a
machine, to slay the image of God-to stain the teeming
earth with homicidal blood-to fill the air with howling
anguish! Is not yonder row of clowns a melancholy
sight? Yet are they the sucklings of Glory—the baby
mighty ones of a future Gazette. Reason beholds them
with a deep pity. Imagination magnifies them into
fiends of wickedness. There is carnage about them-
carnage, and the pestilential vapours of the slaughtered.
What a fine-looking thing is war! Yet, dress it as we
may, dress and feather it, daub it with gold, huzza it,
and sing swaggering songs about it-what is it, nine
times out of ten, but Murder in uniform? Cain, taken
the sergeant's shilling?
And now we hear the fifes and drums of her Majesty's
grenadiers. They pass on the other side; and a crowd
of idlers, their hearts jumping to the music, their eyes
dazzled, and their feelings perverted, hang about the
march, and catch the infection-the love of glory! And
true wisdom thinks of the world's age, and sighs at its
slow advance in all that really dignifies man, the truest
dignity being the truest love for his fellow. And then
hope and a faith in human progress contemplate the
pageant, its real ghastliness disguised by outward glare
and frippery, and know the day will come when the
symbols of war will be as the sacred beasts of old
Egypt-things to mark the barbarism of by-gone war;
melancholy records of the past perversity of human
nature.
We can imagine the deep-chested laughter-the look
of scorn that would annihilate, and then the small com-


THE FOLLY OF THE SWORD.
143
passion-of the Man of War, at this, the dream of folly,
or the wanderings of an inflamed brain. Yet, oh, man
of war! at this very moment are you shrinking, wither-
ing, like an aged giant. The fingers of Opinion have
been busy at your plumes-you are not the feathered
thing you were; and then that little tube, the goose-
quill, has sent its silent shots into your huge anatomy;
and the corroding INK, even whilst you look at it and
think it shines so brightly, is eating with a tooth of rust
into your sword.
That a man should kill a man, and rejoice in the
deed-nay gather glory from it is the act of the wild
animal. The force of muscle and dexterity of limb,
which make the wild man a conqueror, are deemed in
savage life man's highest attributes. The creature,
whom in the pride of our Christianity we call heathen
and spiritually desolate, has some personal feeling in the
strife he kills his enemy, and then, making an oven of
hot stones, bakes his dead body, and, for crowning satis-
faction, eats it. His enemy becomes a part of him;
his glory is turned to nutriment; and he is content.
What barbarism! Field-marshals sicken at the horror;
nay, troopers shudder at the tale, like a fine lady at a
toad.
In what, then, consists the prime evil? In the mur-
der, or the meal? Which is the most hideous deed-to
kill a man, or to cook and eat the man when killed?
But softly, there is no murder in the case. The craft
of man has made a splendid ceremony of homicide-has
invested it with dignity. He slaughters with flags flying,
drums beating, trumpets braying. He kills according to
method, and has worldly honours for his grim handiwork.
He does not, like the unchristian savage, carry away
with him mortal trophies from the skulls of his enemies.
No; the alchemy or magic of authority turns his well-
won scalps into epaulets, or hangs them in stars and
crosses at his button-hole; and then, the battle over-the
dead not eaten, but carefully buried-and the maimed


144
THE FOLLY OF THE SWORD.
and mangled howling and blaspheming in hospitals
the meek Christian warrior marches to church, and
reverently folding his sweet and spotless hands, sings
Te Deum. Angels waft his fervent thanks to God, to
whose footstool-on the man's own faith-he has so
lately sent his shuddering thousands. And this spirit of
destruction working within him is canonized by the craft
and ignorance of man, and worshipped as glory!
And this religion of the sword-this dazzling heathen-
ism, that makes a pomp of wickedness-seizes and dis-
tracts us, even on the threshold of life. Swords and
drums are our baby playthings; the types of violence
and destruction are made the pretty pastime of our
childhood; and as we grow older, the outward magni-
ficence of the ogre Glory-his trappings and his trum-
pets, his privileges, and the songs that are shouted in
his praise-ensnare the bigger baby to his sacrifice.
Hence, slaughter becomes an exalted profession; the
marked, distinguished employment of what, in the jargon
of the world, is called a gentleman.
But for this craft operating upon this ignorance, who
-in the name of outraged God-would become the hire-
ling of the Sword? Hodge, poor fellow, enlists. He
wants work; or he is idle, dissolute. Kept, by the
injustice of the world, as ignorant as the farm-yard
swine, he is the better instrument for the world's craft.
His ear is tickled with the fife and drum; or he is
drunk; or the sergeant-the lying valet of glory-tells
a good tale, and already Hodge is a warrior in the rough.
In a fortnight's time you may see him at Chatham; or,
indeed, he was one of those we marked in Birdcage
Walk. Day by day, the sergeant works at the block
ploughman, and chipping and chipping, at length carves
out a true, handsome soldier of the line. What knew
Hodge of the responsibility of man? What dreams had
he of the self-accountability of the human spirit? He is
become the lackey of carnage, the liveried footman, at
a few pence per day, of fire and blood. The musket-


THE FOLLY OF THE SWORD.
145
stock, which for many an hour he hugs-hugs in sulks
and weariness-was no more a party to its present use,
than was Hodge. That piece of walnut is the fragment
of a tree which might have given shade and fruit for
another century; homely, rustic people gathering under
it. Now, it is the instrument of wrong and violence;
the working tool of slaughter. Tree and man, are not
their destinies as one?
Is he alone
And is Hodge alone of benighted mind?
deficient of that knowledge of moral right and wrong
which really and truly crowns the man, king of himself?
When he surrenders up his nature, a mere machine with
human pulses, to do the bidding of war, has he taken
counsel with his own reflection does he know the limit
of the sacrifice? He has taken the shilling, and he
knows the facings of his uniform.
When the born and bred gentleman, to keep to coined
and current terms, pays down his thousand pounds or so,
for his commission, what incites to the purchase? It
may be the elegant idleness of the calling; it may be
the bullion and glitter of the regimentals; or, devout
worshipper! it may be an unquenchable thirst for glory.
From the moment that his name stars the Gazette, what
does he become? The bond-servant of war. Instantly,
he ceases to be a judge between moral right and moral
injury. It is his duty not to think, but to obey. He
has given up, surrendered to another, the freedom of his
soul: he has dethroned the majesty of his own will. He
must be active in wrong, and see not the injustice: shed
blood for craft and usurpation, calling bloodshed valour.
He may
be made, by the iniquity of those who use him,
the burglar and the brigand; but glory calls him pretty
names for his prowess, and the wicked weakness of the
world shouts and acknowledges them. And is this the
true condition of reasonable man? Is it by such means
that he best vindicates the greatness of his mission here ?
Is he, when he most gives up the free motions of his
own soul-is he then most glorious?
L


146
THE FOLLY OF THE SWORD.
A few months ago, chance shewed us a band of ruffians,
who, as it afterwards appeared, were intent upon most
desperate mischief. They spread themselves over the
country, attacking, robbing, and murdering all who fell
into their hands. Men, women, and children, all suffered
alike. Nor were the villains satisfied with this. In their
wanton ruthlessness, they set fire to cottages, and tore
and destroyed plantations. Every footpace of their
march was marked with blood and desolation.
up
Who were these wretches?-you ask. What place
did they ravage? Were they not caught, and punished?
They were a part of the army of Africa; valorous
Frenchmen, bound for Algiers, to cut Arab throats; and
in the name of glory, and for the everlasting honour of
France, to burn, pillage, and despoil; and all for national
honour-all for glory!
But Glory cannot dazzle Truth. Does it not at times
appear no other than a highwayman, with a pistol at a
nation's breast? A burglar, with a crow-bar, entering
a kingdom. Alas! in this world there is no Old Bailey
for nations. Otherwise, where would have been the
crowned heads that divided Poland? Those felon mo-
narchs, anointed to-steal? It is true, the historian
claps the cut-purse conqueror in the dock, and he is tried
by the jury of posterity. He is past the verdict, yet is
not its damnatory voice lost upon generations. For thus
is the world taught-albeit slowly taught-true glory;
when that which passed for virtue is truly tested to be
vile; when the hero is hauled from the car, and fixed for
ever in the pillory.
But war brings forth the heroism of the soul: war
tests the magnanimity of man. Sweet is the humanity
that spares a fallen foe; gracious the compassion that
tends his wounds, that brings even a cup of water to his
burning lips. Granted. But is there not heroism of a
grander mould ?—The heroism of forbearance? Is not
the humanity that refuses to strike, a nobler virtue than
the late pity born of violence? Pretty is it to see the


THE FOLLY OF THE SWORD.
147
victor with salve and lint kneeling at his bloody trophy-
a maimed and agonized fellow-man, but surely it had
been better to withhold the blow, than to have been first
mischievous, to be afterwards humane.
That nations, professing a belief in Christ, should
couple glory with war, is monstrous blasphemy. Their
faith, their professing faith, is-"love one another:"
their practice is to cut throats; and more, to bribe and
hoodwink men to the wickedness, the trade of blood
is magnified into a virtue. We pray against battle,
and glorify the deeds of death. We say, beautiful are
the ways of peace, and then cocker ourselves upon our
perfect doings in the art of man-slaying. Let us then
cease to pay the sacrifice of admiration to the demon
War; let us not acknowledge him as a mighty and
majestic principle, but, at the very best, a grim and
melancholy necessity.
war.
But there always has been-there always will be,
It is inevitable; it is a part of the condition of
human society. Man has always made glory to himself
from the destruction of his fellow, and so it will continue.
It
may be very pitiable; would it were otherwise! But
so it is, and there is no helping it.
Happily, we are slowly killing this destructive fallacy.
A long breathing-time of peace has been fatal to the
dread magnificence of glory. Science and philosophy-
povera e nuda filosofia!-have made good their claims,
inducing man to believe that he may vindicate the divinity
of his nature otherwise than by perpetrating destruc-
tion. He begins to think there is a better glory in the
communication of triumphs of mind, than in the clash of
steel and roar of artillery. At the present moment, a
society, embracing men of distant nations-"natural
enemies," as the old, wicked cant of the old patriotism
had it is at work, plucking the plumes from Glory,
unbracing his armour, and divesting the ogre of all that
dazzled foolish and unthinking men, showing the rascal
L 2


148
THE FOLLY OF THE SWORD.
in his natural hideousness, in all his base deformity.
Some, too, are calculating the cost of Glory's table:
some showing what an appetite the demon has, devouring
at a meal the substance of ten thousand sons of industry
-yea, eating up the wealth of kingdoms. And thus,
by degrees, are men beginning to look upon this god,
Glory, as no more than a finely-trapped Sawney Bean,-
a monster and a destroyer-a nuisance; a noisy lie.
-


ELIZABETH AND VICTORIA.
EVERY generation compared to the age it immediately
succeeds, is but a further lapse from Paradise. Every
grandfather is of necessity a wiser, kinder, nobler being
than the grandson doomed to follow him-every grand-
mother chaster, gentler, more self-denying, more devoted
to the beauty of goodness, than the giddy, vain, thought-
less creature, who in her time is sentenced to be grand-
mother to somebody, whose still increased defects will
only serve to bring out the little lustre of the gentle-
woman who preceded her. Man, undoubtedly, had at
the first a fixed amount of goodness bestowed upon him;
but this goodness, by being passed from generation to
generation, has, like a very handsome piece of coin, with
arms and legend in bold relief, become so worn by con-
tinual transit, that it demands the greatest activity of
faith to believe that which is now current in the world,
to be any portion of the identical goodness with which
the human race was originally endowed. Hapless crea-
tures are we! Moral paupers of the nineteenth century,
turning a shining cheek upon one another, and by the
potent force of swagger, passing off our thin, worn,
illegible pieces of coin-how often, no thicker, no weigh-
tier than a spangle on a player's robe!-when our
glorious ancestors, in the grandeur of their goodness,
could ring down musical shekels! Nay, as we go back,
we find the coin of excellence so heavy, so abounding,
that how any man-Sampson perhaps excepted-had
strength enough to carry his own virtues about him,
puzzles the effeminacy of present thought. Folks then
were doubtless made grave, majestic in their movements
by the very weight of their excellence. Whilst we,


150
ELIZABETH AND VICTORIA.
poor anatomies-skipjacks of the nineteenth century—
we carry all our ready virtue in either corner of our waist-
coat pocket, and from its very lightness, are unhappily
enabled to act all sorts of unhallowed capers-to forget
the true majesty of man in the antics of the mountebank.
Forlorn degradation of the human race!
But the tears of the reader-for if he have a heart
of flesh, it is by this time melting in his eyes-are not
confidently demanded for only the one generation where-
of (seeing he is our reader) he is certainly not the worst
unit but we here require of him to weep for posterity;
yes, to subscribe a rivulet of tears for the generations
to come. The coinage of the virtues at present in circu-
lation among us is so thin, so defaced, so battered,
so clipt, that it appears to us wholly impossible that
any portion of the currency can descend a couple of
generations lower. What, then, is to become of our
grandchildren? Without one particle of golden truth
and goodness left to them, for we cannot take into
account the two or three pieces hoarded as old ladies
have hoarded silver pennies-what remains, what alter-
native for our descendants but to become a generation
of coiners? Can any man withstand the terror of this
picture, wherein all the world are shown as so many
passers of pocket-pieces, lacquered over with something
that seems like gold and silver, but which, indeed, is
only seeming? A picture wherein he who is the ablest
hypocrite-passing off the greatest amount of false coin
upon his neighbour-shall appear the most virtuous per-
son? Is not this an appalling scene to contemplate?
Yet, if there be any truth in a common theory, if
there be any veracity in the words written in a thou-
sand pages, uttered at every fire-side, dropt in the casual
meeting of man and man at door-steps, in by-lanes,
highways, and market-places-the picture we have sha-
dowed forth must become an iron present.
"We shall never see such times again!"
"The world isn't what it used to be.
""


ELIZABETH AND VICTORIA.
151
"When I was a boy, things hadn't come to this
pass."
66
'The world gets wickeder and wickeder."
Since the builders of Babel were scattered, these
thoughts have been voiced in every tongue. From the
very discontent and fantasticalness of his nature, man
looks backward at the lost Paradise of another age. He
affects to snuff the odour of its fruits and flowers, and
with a melancholy shaking of the head, sees, or thinks
he sees, the flashing of the fiery swords that guard them.
And then, in the restlessness of his heart, in the
peevishness and discontent of his soul, he says all sorts
of bitter things of the generation he has fallen among;
and, from the vanished glory of the past, predicts in-
creasing darkness for the future. Happily, the pro-
phesying cannot be true; and happily, too, for the
condition of the prophet, he knows it will not. But
then there is a sort of comfort in the waywardness of
discontent; at times, a soothing music to the restless-
ness of the soul in the deep bass of hearty grumbling.
The ingratitude of the act is entirely forgotten in
the pleasure. "Ha! those were the merry days-the
golden times of England they were!" May not this
be heard from the tradesman, the mechanic, as he is
borne past Tilbury Fort, and the thoughts of Queen
Elizabeth, of her "golden days," ring in his brain;
and living only in the nineteenth century, he has some
vague, perplexing notion that he has missed an Eden,
only by a hundred years or two. He thinks not—why
should he?—of the luxury he now purchases for a shil-
ling; a luxury, not compassable in those golden days
by all the power and wealth of all the combining sove-
reigns of the earth; for he is a passenger of a
Gravesend steam-boat, the fare twelvepence.
We would not forget that wonder of Elizabeth's navy,
the Great Harry. No; we would especially remember
it, to compare the marvel, with all its terrors, to the
agent of our day, which wrought and directed from a


152
ELIZABETH AND VICTORIA.
few gallons of water, makes the winged ship but as a log
-a dead leviathan upon the deep; which, in the cer-
tainty and intensity of its power of destruction must, in
the fulness of time, make blood-spilling war bankrupt,
preaching peace with all men, even from "the cannon's
mouth.
""
We are, however, a degenerate race. In our maudlin
sensibility, we have taken under our protection the very
brutes of the earth-the fowls of the air-the fish of the
sea. We have cast the majesty of the law around the asses
of the reign of Victoria-have assured to live geese a pro-
perty in their own feathers-have, with a touch of tender-
ness, denounced the wood-plugged claws of the lob-
sters of Billingsgate. We have a society, whose motto,
spiritually, is-
"Never to link our pleasure or our pride
With suffering of the meanest thing that lives."
Very different, indeed, was the spirit of the English
people, when their good and gracious Queen Elizabeth
smiled sweetly upon bull-dogs, and found national music
in the growl, the roar, and the yell of a bear-garden;
whereto, in all the courtesy of a nobler and more virtuous
age, the sovereign led the French ambassador; that, as
chroniclers tell us, Monsieur might arrive at a sort of
comparative knowledge of English bravery, judging the
courage of the people by the stubborn daring of their
dogs.
Then we had no Epsom, with its high moralities—no
Ascot, with its splendour and wealth. Great, indeed,
was the distance-deep the abyss-between the sove-
reign and the sovereign people.
The
And in those merry, golden days of good Queen Bess,
rank was something; it had its brave outside, and
preached its high prerogative from externals.
nobleman declared his nobility by his cloak, doublet, and
jerkin; by the plumes in his hat; by the jewels flashing
in his shoes. Society, in all its gradations, was inexo-
rably marked by the tailor and goldsmith.


ELIZABETH AND VICTORIA.
153
But what is the tailor of the nineteenth century?
What doth he for nobility? Alas! next to nothing. The
gentleman is no longer the creature of the tailor's hands
-the being of his shopboard. The gentleman must
dress himself in ease, in affability, in the gentler and
calmer courtesies of life, to make distinguishable the
nobility of his nature from the homeliness, the vulgarity
of the very man who, it may be, finds nobility in shoe-
leather. Thus, gentility of blood, deprived by innovation
of its external livery-denied the outward marks of
supremacy—is thrown upon its bare self to make good
its prerogative. Manner must now do the former duty
of fine clothes.
State, too, was, in the blessed times of Elizabeth, a
most majestic matter. The queen's carriage, unlike
Victoria's, was a vehicle wondrous in the eyes of men as
the chariot of King Pharoah. Now, does every poor
man keep his coach-price sixpence! How does the
economy of luxury vulgarize the indulgence!
Travelling was then a grave and serious adventure. The
horse-litter was certainly a more dignified means of
transit than the fuming, boiling, roaring steam-engine,
that rushes forward with a man as though the human
anatomy was no more than a woolpack. In the good old
times of Queen Bess, a man might take his five long
days and more for a hundred miles, putting up, after a
week's jolting, at his hostelry, the Queen's Head of
Islington, for one good night's rest, ere he should gird
up his loins to enter London. Now, is man taught to
lose all respect for the hoariness of time by the quickness
of motion. Now, may he pass over two hundred miles
in some seven or eight hours if he will, taking his first
meal in the heart of Lancashire, and his good-night
glass at a Geneva palace in London. Is it wonderful
that our present days should abound more in sinful levity
than the days of the good Queen Elizabeth, seeing that
we may, in the same space of time, crowd so much more
iniquity? The truth is, science has thrown so many


154
ELIZABETH AND VICTORIA.
hours upon our hands, that we are compelled to kill them
with all sorts of arrows-which, as moralists declare,
have mortal poison at the barb, however gay and bril-
liant may be the feathers that carry it home. Dreadful
will be the time when that subtle fiend, science, shall
perform nearly all human drudgery; for then men in
their very idleness will have nought else to destroy
save their own souls; and the destruction will, of course,
be quicker, and, to the father of all mischief, much more
satisfactory.
Again, in the good times of Elizabeth, humanity was
blessed with a modesty, a deference-in these days of
bronze, to be vainly sought for towards the awfulness
of power, the grim majesty of authority. And if, indeed,
it happened that some outrageous wretch, forgetful of
the purpose of nature in creating him the Queen's liege-
man, and therefore her property-if, for a moment, he
should cease to remember the fealty which, by the prin-
ciple of the divine right of kings, should be vital to him
as the blood in his veins—why, was there not provided
for him, by the benignity of custom and the law, a salu-
tary remedy? If he advanced a new opinion, had he
not ears wherewith, by hangman's surgery, he might be
cured of such disease? If he took a mistaken view of
the rights of his fellow-subjects, might he not be taught
to consider them from a higher point of elevation, and so
be instructed?
Booksellers, in the merry time of Elizabeth, were
enabled to vindicate a higher claim to moral and physical
daring than is permitted to them in these dull and driv-
elling days. He who published a book, questioning-
though never so gently-the prerogative of her Majesty
to do just as the spirit should move her, might have his
right hand chopped off, and afterwards-there have been
examples of such devotion-wave his bloody stump, with
a loyal shout of "God save the Queen! But these
were merry days-golden days-in which the royal pre-
rogative was more majestic, more awful, than in the
""


ELIZABETH AND VICTORIA.
155
And wherefore? The reason is
nineteenth century.
plain as the Queen's arms.
The king of beasts lives on flesh. His carnivorousness
is one of the great elements of his majesty. So was it in
the times of Elizabeth, with the Queen's prerogative. It
was for the most part fed upon flesh. It would be a
curious, an instructive calculation, could we arrive at the
precise number of noses, and arms, and hands, and
human heads, and quarters of human carcases, which—
during the merry, golden reign of Elizabeth, of those
days we shall never see again—were required by law to
keep strong and lusty the prerogative of the Virgin
Queen! How, as the human head festered and rotted
above the city gates, was the prerogative sweetened by
the putrefaction! And then the daily lessons preached
by the mute horror of the dead man's mouth, to the
human life daily passing beneath it! What precepts of
love and gentleness towards all men fell from the shri-
velled lips-what christianity gleamed from the withered
eye-balls! How admirably were the every-day thoughts
of men associated with prerogative, its majesty for ever
preached by dead men's tongues-its beauty visible in
dead men's flesh. Those were the golden days-the
merry days-we shall never see such times again. Now,
a poor and frivolous race, we pass beneath Temple Bar,
untaught by the grim moralities that from its height
were wont to instruct our forefathers. In the days of
Elizabeth, we might have lounged at the door of the city
shopkeeper, and whilst chaffering for a commodity of this
world, have had our thoughts elevated by a consideration
of the ghastly skull-grinning a comment upon all earthly
vanities-above us. Those days are gone-past for ever.
We have now plate-glass and dainty painting, and pre-
cious woods, in the shops of our tradesmen, but nought to
take us from the vanity of life-no prerogative of a
Virgin Queen, in the useful semblance of a memento mori.
It is to the want of such stern yet wholesome monitors,


156
ELIZABETH AND VICTORIA.
we are doubtless to attribute the decay of the national
character. We are sunk in effeminacy; withered by the
fond ministerings of science. The road of life-which,
by its ruggedness, was wont to try the sinews of our
Elizabethan ancestors-we, their degenerate children,
have spread as with a carpet, and hung the walls around
us with radiant tapestry. The veriest household drudge
of our time is a Sardanapalus compared to the lackey of
the Virgin Queen. The tatterdemalion who lives on
highway alms
may look down upon the beggar of Eliza-
beth; for the mendicant of Victoria may, with his
prayed-for pence, purchase luxuries unknown to the
Dives of former days.
And what-if we listen to complaining patriotism-
what is the evil born of this? A loss of moral energy;
a wasting away of national fibre. Believe this melan-
choly philosophy, and national weakness came in (a
moral moth in the commodity) with silk stockings. Ere
then was the bearing of man more majestic in the eyes of
angels! For then was the sword the type of station;
a gentleman no more appearing abroad without his
rapier than a wasp without its sting. Human life could
not but lose part of its dignity with its cold steel. What
a fine comment on the charity, the gentleness, the
humanity of his fellow-men, did every gentleman wear
at his side! He was, in a manner, his own law-maker,
his own executioner. In the judgment of later philosophy,
we are prone to believe that the said gentlemen may
appear, at the best, ferocious simpletons-creatures
swaggering "between heaven and earth," with their
hands upon their hilts, ready and yearning for a thrust
at those who took the wall of their gentility. Ha!
those, indeed, were the good old days! And then came
a whining, curd-complexioned benevolence, and in pro-
gress of time, its thin, white, womanly fingers unbuckled
the sword-belt of the bully, and organized police. Sword-
makers were bankrupt, and human nature lost a grace!


ELIZABETH AND VICTORIA.
157
Thus, it appears, the world has been from age to age
declining in virtue, and can only escape the very profound
of iniquity by a speedy dissolution. Every half-dozen
years or so, a prophet growls from a cellar, or cries from
the altitude of a garret, the advent of the last day. An
earthquake, or some other convulsion (the particulars of
which are only vouchsafed to the prophet) is to destroy
the earth, or London at least; whereupon old gentlemen
remove to Gravesend, and careful housewives take stock
of their plate. Now, every such prophecy, instead of
bewildering honest people with all sorts of fears, and all
sorts of anxieties for their personal property, ought to
make them sing thanksgiving songs for the promised
blessing. It being the creed of these people that the
world gets worse and worse, they would at least have
the comfort to know that they had seen the last of its
wickedness. For a moment, reader, we will suppose
you one of these. Consider, upon your own faith, what
a terrible wretch will necessarily be your great-great-
great-great-great-grandson! Well, would it not be
satisfaction to you that this dragon (we believe dragons
are oviparous) should be crushed in the egg of the
future? How would you like your own flesh and blood
inevitably changed by the course of time into the anatomy
of something very like a demon? You are bad enough
as you are; that dismal truth your own humility
preaches to you; to say nothing of the plain-speaking
of your neighbours. No; out of pure love and pity for
humanity, you ought to wish all the world to stop with
your own pulse. It is hard enough now, even for the
best of us, to keep on the respectable side of the statutes;
but, with the growing wickedness of the world, we should
like to know what sort of metal will the laws be made of.
The great social link must, inevitably, be a fetter.
How often have we stood, with the unseen tears in
our eyes, watching the nobility of the land, in nobility's
best bib and tucker, winding in golden line to the
drawing-room of Queen Victoria! Alas! degenerate


158
ELIZABETH AND VICTORIA.
dukes-faded duchesses. Marquises fallen upon evil
times—marchionesses very dim indeed !
What are you
to the nobility of Elizabeth? What to the grandees of
those merry days, the golden shadow of which is bright-
ness itself to the cold, grey glimmering of the present?
We have yet one thought to comfort us; and that is, a
half belief that the court of Elizabeth was held as
nothing to all courts preceding; and so back, until
Englishmen mourned over the abomination of cloaks
and vests, sorrowing for those golden days, those good
old times of the painted Britons! Great was the
virtue abounding in woad; grievous the wilful iniquity
woven in broad-cloth.
Queen Elizabeth died—fair, regal bud!—in the
sweetness of virginity; and though the sun (by some
despairing effort) managed to rise the next morning, it
has never been wholly itself since. She died, and was
brought to Whitehall, to the great calamity of the fish
then swimming in the river; for a poet of the day,
quoted by Camden, has eternized the evil that in the
hour fell upon Thames flounders :-
"The Queene was brought by water to Whitehall;
At every stroke the oares teares let fall;
More clung about the barge; fish under water
Wept out their eyes of pearle, and swame blinde after.
I think the bargemen might with easier thighes
Have rowed her thither in her people's eyes.
Yet, howsoere, thus much my thoughts have scann'd,
She'd come by water, had she come by land."
So closed the golden days of Queen Elizabeth ; leaving
us, in all the virtues and comforts of the world, the
bankrupt children of Queen Victoria!
Unworthy is he of the balmy sweetness of this blessed
May who can think so! A churlish, foolish, moody
traitor to the spirit of goodness and beauty that, as
with the bounty of the sun and air, calls up forms of
loveliness in his path, and surrounds him with ten
thousand household blessings! With active presences,


ELIZABETH AND VICTORIA.
159
which the poet of Elizabeth, in even his large love for
man, could scarce have dreamed of; or, dreaming,
seen them as a part of fairy fantasy-a cloud-woven
pageant!
Let the man who lives by his daily sweat pause in
his toil, and, with his foot upon his spade, watch the
white smoke that floats in the distance; listen to the
lessening thunder of the engine that, instinct with
Vulcanic life, has rushed, devouring space, before it.
That little curl of smoke hangs in the air a thing of
blessed promise that roar of the engine is the melody
of hope to unborn generations. But now, the digger of
the soil looks moodily at that vapour, and his heart is
festering with the curse upon the devil Steam; that
fiend that grinds his bones beneath the wheels of British
Juggernaut. Poor creature! The seeming demon
is a beneficent presence that, in the ripeness of time,
will work regeneration of the hopes of men.
Let the poor man-the mechanic of a town-look
around him. Let him in his own house, humble though
it be, acknowledge the presence of a thousand comforts
which, had he lived two centuries ago, he could not with
a baron's wealth have purchased. Not mere creature
enjoyments; but humanizing, refining pleasures, drawing
man nearer to man, expanding the human heart, and
imparting to humanity the truest greatness in the
greatest gentleness.
"What! it may be asked-" can you have the
hardihood, or the ignorance, to vaunt these days above
the days of Elizabeth? These days, with famine
throwing the shuttle-with ignorance, wholly brutish,
digging in the pit-with gold, a monster all brain, and
so the very worst of monsters-dominating through-
out the land, and crushing the pulses of thousands
within its hard, relentless grasp? Would you not
rather pray for a return of those merry, merry days,
when men were whipped, imprisoned, branded, burnt, at
little more than the mere will of Majesty, for mere


160
ELIZABETH AND VICTORIA.
opinion-but who had, nevertheless, bacon and bread.
and ale sufficient to the day?"
No; we would go no step backward, but many in
advance ; our faith still increasing in the enlarged
sympathies of men; in the reverence which man has
learned and is still learning to pay towards the nature
of his fellow-men; in the deep belief that whatever
change may and must take place in the social fabric,
we have that spirit of wisdom and tolerance (certainly
not a social creature of the golden days) waxing strong
among us, so strong that the fabric will be altered
and repaired brick by brick, and stone by stone. Mean-
while, the scaffolding is fast growing up about it,


THE ORDER OF POVERTY.
WHY should not Lazarus make to himself an order of
tatters? Why should not poverty have its patch of
honour? Wherefore should not the undubbed knights
of evil fortune carry about them, with a gracious humility,
the inevitable types of their valorous contest with the
Paynim iniquities of life? Wherefore may not man
wear indigence as proudly as nobility flashes its jewels?
Is there not a higher heraldry than that of the college?
Not a very long time ago, the King of Greece awarded
to an Englishman the Order of the Redeemer. The En-
glishman did not reject the gift; he did not stare with
wonder, or smile in meek pity at the grave mockery of
the distinction; but winning the consent of our Sove-
reign Lady Victoria to sport the jewel, the Knight of
Christ-knight by the handiwork of the King of Greece
-hung about him the Order of the Redeemer!
And what may be the gracious discipline of this
Order of Redemption? Has the new Knight sold off
all that he had, and given the money to the poor?
We have heard of no such broker's work; and surely
the newspaper tongue would have given loud utterance
to the penitence of Mammon. What discipline, then,
does this Order of Christ compel upon its holy and
immaculate brotherhood? What glorifying services
towards the heart and spirit of man-what self-martyr-
dom does it recompense? Is it the bright reward of
humility-of active loving-kindness towards everything
that breathes? Is it, that the knighted, beyond ten thou-
sand thousand men, has proved the divine temper of the
spiritual follower of Jesus, making his hourly life an
active goodness, and with every breath drawn, drawing
M


162
THE ORDER OF POVERTY.
nearer to rewarding Heaven? Surely, the Order of
the Redeemer-that awful, solemn badge, setting apart
its wearer from the sordid crowd of earth-could only
be vouchsafed to some hard Christian service,—could
only reward some triumphant wrestling of the suffering
soul-some wondrous victory in the forlorn hope of this
dark struggling life. These are our thoughts-these
our passionate words; whereupon, the Herald of the
Court of Greece-a grave, fantastic wizard-with mildly-
reproving look and most delicate speech, says " You
are wrong quite wrong. The Order of the Redeemer,
though by no means the first Order, is a very pretty
Order in its way. Six months since we gave it to Captain
Jonquil, from Paris; and truly no man more deserved
the Order of the Redeemer. He taught His Ma-
jesty's infantry the use of the bayonet: his howitzer
practice, too, is a divine thing. Captain Jonquil is a
great soldier. Last week, the Order of the Redeemer
was also bestowed upon Andreas; a great favourite at
court-but, if the naughty truth must be told, a pimp."
Alas! is heraldry always innocent of blasphemy?
On the 13th of June, 1843, a grave masque-
solemn ceremony-was held at the Court of St. James's.
Heraldry again looked smug and pompous. A Knight
was to be made of "the most ancient Order of the
Thistle." Let us make a clean breast of our ignorance;
we assert nothing against the antiquity of the Thistle;
for what we know, it may be as old-ay, as old as
asses. But upon the glad 13th of June, a Chapter was
held, and John, Marquis of Bute, and the Right Hon.
William, Earl of Mansfield, were elected Knights. They
of course took the oaths to protect and succour distressed
maidens, orphans, and widows; to abstain from every
sort of wrong, and to do every sort of right.
a
"The Marquis of Bute then kneeling near the Sovereign, and Mr.
Woods on his knee, presenting to the Queen the riband and jewel of
the Order, Her Majesty was graciously pleased to place the same over
the noble Marquis's left shoulder. His Lordship rising, kissed the
Sovereign's hand, and having received the congratulations of the Knights
brethren, retired."


THE ORDER OF POVERTY.
163
From that moment, John, Marquis of Bute, looked
and moved with the aspect and bearing of a man,
radiant with new honours. He was a Knight of the
Thistle; and the jewel sparkling at his bosom feebly
typified the bright, admiring looks of the world-the
gaze of mingled love and admiration bent upon him.
But on this earth-in this abiding-place of equity-men
do not get even thistles for nothing. It may, indeed,
happen, that desert may pant and moan without honour;
but in the court of kings, where justice weighs with
nicest balance, honour never with its smiles mocks imbe-
cility, or gilds with outward lustre a concealed rottenness.
Honour never gives alms, but awards justice. Mendi-
cancy, though with liveried lackies clustering at its car-
riage, and there is such pauperism,-may whine and
pray its hardest, yet move not the inflexible herald.
He awards those jewels to virtue, which virtue has
sweated, bled for. And it is with this belief, yea, in the
very bigotry of the creed, we ask what has John,
Marquis of Bute, fulfilled to earn his thistle? What,
the Right Hon. William, Earl of Mansfield? What dragon
wrong has either overcome? What giant Untruth stormed
in Sophist Castle? What necromantic wickedness baffled
and confounded? Yet, these battles have been fought
-these triumphs won; oh! who shall doubt them?
Be sure of it, ye unbelieving demagogues-scoffing ple-
beians, not for nothing nobility browses upon thistles.
-
We pay all honour to these inventions, these learned
devices of the Herald. They doubtless clothe, comfort,
and adorn humanity, which, without them, would be
cold, naked, shrunk, and squalid. They, moreover,
gloriously attest the supremacy of the tame, the civilized
man, over the wild animal. The Orders of the Herald
are tattoo without the pain of puncture. The New Zea-
lander carries his knighthood, lined and starred and
flowered in his visage. The civilized knight hangs it
more conveniently on a riband.
We are such devout believers in the efficacy of Orders,
M 2


164
THE ORDER OF POVERTY.
that we devote this small essay to an attempt to make
them, under some phase or other, universal. We will
not linger in a consideration of the Orders already dead;
lovely was their life, and as fragrant is their memory.
There was one Order-Teutonic, if we mistake not, the
Order of Fools. There was a quaint sincerity in the
very title of this brotherhood. Its philosophy was out-
speaking; and more than all, the constitution of such a
chapter admitted knights against whose worthiness,
whose peculiar right to wear the badge, no envious
demagogue could say his bitter saying. Surely, in our
reverence for the wisdom of antiquity, this Order might
have resurrection. The Fool might have his bauble newly
varnished his cap newly hung with tinkling bells.
Some of us chirp and cackle of the wisdom of the by-
gone day; but that is only wisdom which jumps with
our own cunning; which fortifies us in the warm and
quiet nook of some hallowed prejudice. From the mere
abstract love of justice, we should be right glad to have
the Order of Fools revived in the fullest splendour of
Folly. Such an Order would so beneficently provide
for many unrewarded public idlers-ay, and public
workers.
-
There was a time, when the world in its first childhood
needed playthings. Then was the Herald the world's
toy-maker, and made for it pretty little nick-knacks—
golden fleeces-stars, ribands and garters; tempting
the world to follow the kickshaws, as nurse with sugared
bread-and-butter tempts the yeanling to try its tottering
feet.
The world has grown old-old and wise: yet is
not the Herald bankrupt, but like a pedlar at a fair,
draws the hearts of simple men after the shining, silken
glories in his box. Meanwhile, philosophy in hodden
grey, laughs at the crowd, who bellow back the laugh,
and sometimes pelt the reverend fool for his irreligious
humour; for he who believes not in Stars and Garters
is unbeliever; to the world's best and brightest faith,
atheist and scoffer.


THE ORDER OF POVERTY.
165
Is it not strange that a man should think the better
of himself for a few stones glittering in his bosom ?
That a costly band about the leg should make the blood
dance more swiftly through the arteries? That a man
seeing his breast set with jewellers' stars, should think
them glorious as the stars of heaven,-himself, little less
than an earthly god, so deified? If these things be
really types and emblems of true greatness, what rascal
poverty besets the man without them! How is he
damned in his baseness! What mere offal of humanity,
the biped without an Order! And, therefore, let stars
be multiplied; and let nobility-like bees-suck honey
from Thistles!
We are, however, confirmed in our late failing faith.
We are bigoted to Orders. Men, like watches, must
work the better upon jewels. Man is, at the best, a
puppet; and is only put into dignified motion when
pulled by Blue or Red Ribands. Now, as few, indeed,
of us can get stars, garters, or ribands, let us have Orders
of our own. Let us, with invincible self-complacency,
ennoble ourselves.
In the hopeless ignorance and vulgarity of our first
prejudice, we might possibly want due veneration for the
Golden Fleece; an ancient and most noble Order, worn
by few. Yet with all our worst carelessness towards the
Order, we never felt for it the same pitying contempt
we feel towards an Order worn by many-not at their
button-holes, not outside their breasts, but in the very
core of their hearts,-the Order of the Golden Calf.
Oh! bowelless Plutus, what a host of Knights!
What a lean-faced, low-browed, thick-jowled, swag-bellied
brotherhood! Deformity, in all its fantastic variety,
meets in the Chapter. They wear no armour of steel or
brass, but are cased in the magic mail of impenetrable
Bank-paper. They have no sword, no spear, no iron
mace with spikes; but they ride merrily into the fight
of life, swinging about gold-gutted purses, and levelling
with the dust rebellious poverty. These are the Knights


166
THE ORDER OF POVERTY.
of the Golden Calf. It is a glorious community. What
a look of easy triumph they have! With what serene
self-satisfaction they measure the wide distance between
mere paupers the Knights of the Order of Nothing-
and themselves! How they walk the earth as if they
alone possessed the patent of walking upright! How
they dilate in the light of their own gold, like adders in
the sun!
A most fatal honour is this Order of the Golden Calf.
It is worn unseen, as we have said, in the hearts of
men; but its effects are visible: the disease speaks out
in every atom of flesh-poor human worm's-meat!
--and throbs in every muscle. It poisons the soul;
gives the eye a squint; takes from the face of fellow-man
its God-gifted dignity, and makes him a thing to prey
upon to work, to use up; to reduce to so much hard
cash; then to be put up, with a wary look of triumph,
into the pocket. This Order damns with a leprosy of
soul its worshipper. It blinds and deafens him to the
glories and the harmonies ministrant to poorer men.
His eye is jaundiced, and in the very stars of God he
sees nought but twinkling guineas.
At this moment great is the Order throughout the
land! Tyrannous its laws, reckless its doings. It is
strong, and why should it be just? To be of this
Order is now the one great striving of life. They alone
are men who wear the jewel-wretches they without
it. Man was originally made from the dust of the
earth he is now formed of a richer substance: the
true man is made of gold. Yes, the regenerate Adam
is struck only at the Mint.
The Knights of the Order of the Golden Calf have
no formal ceremony of election; yet has brother Knight
almost instinctive knowledge of brother. In the solitude
of his own thoughts is he made one of the community;
in utter privacy he kisses the pulseless hand of Plutus,
and swears to his supremacy. The oath divorces him
from pauper-life-from its cares, its wants, its sym-


THE ORDER OF POVERTY.
167
pathies. He is privileged from the uneasiness of thought,
the wear and tear of anxiety for fellow-man; he is com-
pact, and self-concentrated in his selfishness. Nought
ruffles him that touches not that inmost jewel of his soul,
his knighthood's Order.
In the olden day, the Knights of the Fleece, the
Garter, and other glories, won their rank upon the
battle-field,blood and strife being to them the hand-
maids of honour. The chivalry of the Golden Calf is mild
and gentle. It splits no brain-pan, spills no blood; yet
is it ever fighting. We are at the Exchange. Look at
that easy, peaceful man. What a serenity is upon his
cheek! What a mild lustre in his eye! How plainly
is he habited! He wears the livery of simplicity and
the look of peace.
Yet has he in his heart the Order
of the Golden Calf. He is one of Mammon's boldest
heroes. A very soldier of fortune. He is now fighting
-fighting valorously. He has come armed with a bran-
new lie-a falsehood of surpassing temper, which with
wondrous quietude he lays about him, making huge
gashes in the money-bags of those he fights with. A
good foreign lie, well finished and well mounted, is to
this Knight of the Golden Calf as the sword of Faery to
Orlando. With it he sometimes cuts down giant for-
tunes; and after, grinds their bones to make his
bread.
""
66
And there are small esquires and pages of the Order;
men who, with heart-felt veneration, lick their lips at
the Golden Calf, and with more than bridegroom yearn-
ing pant for possession. These small folk swarm like
summer-gnats; and still they drone the praises of the
Calf; and looking at no other thing, have their eyes
bleared and dazzled to all beside.
The Knights of the Golden Calf shed no blood; that
is, the wounds they deal bleed inwardly, and give no
evidence of homicide. They are, too, great consumers
of the marrow of men; and yet they break no bones,
but by a trick known to their Order extract without frac-


168
THE ORDER OF POVERTY.
ture precious nutriment. They are great alchemists,
too; and turn the sweat of unrequited poverty, aye, the
tears of childhood, into drops of gold.
Much wrong, much violence, much wayward cruelty-
if the true history of knighthood were indicted-lies
upon the Fleece, the Garter, yes, upon the Templars'
Lamb;-yet all is but as May-day pastime to the
voracity, the ignorance, the wilful selfishness, the bestial
lowings, of the Golden Calf. And of this Order, the
oldest of the brotherhood are the most gluttonous. There
is one whose every fibre is blasted with age. To the
imagination his face is as a coffin-plate. Yet is he all
belly. As cruel as a cat, though toothless as a bird!
Oh, ye knights, great and small-whether expanding
on the mart, or lying perdu in back-parlours,-fling
from your hearts the Order there, and feel for once the
warmth of kindly blood! The brotherhood chuckle at
the adjuration. Well, let us fight the Order with an
Order.
The Order of Poverty against the Order of the Golden
Calf!
Will it not be a merry time, when men, with a blithe
face and open look, shall confess that they are poor?
When they shall be to the world what they are to them-
selves? When the lie, the shuffle, the bland, yet
anxious hypocrisy of seeming, and seeming only, shall
be a creed forsworn? When Poverty asserts itself, and
never blushes and stammers at its true name, the Knights
of the Calf must give ground. Much of their strength,
their poor renown, their miserable glory, lies in the
hypocrisy of those who would imitate them. They be-
lieve themselves great, because the poor, in the very
ignorance of the dignity of poverty, would ape their
magnificence.
The Order of Poverty! How many sub-orders might
it embrace! As the spirit of Gothic chivalry has its
fraternities, so might the Order of Poverty have its dis-
tinct devices.


THE ORDER OF POVERTY.
169
The Order of the Thistle ! That is an order for
nobility-a glory to glorify marquisate or earldom.
Can we not, under the rule of Poverty, find as happy a
badge?
Look at this peasant. His face bronzed with mid-
day toil. From sun-rise to sunset, with cheerful looks
and uncomplaining words, he turns the primal curse to
dignity, and manfully earns his bread in the sweat of
his brow. Look at the fields around! Golden with
blessed corn.
Look at this bloodless soldier of the
plough-this hero of the sickle. His triumphs are there,
piled up in bread-bestowing sheaves. Is he not Sir
Knight of the Wheat-Ear? Surely, as truly dubbed in
the heraldry of justice, as any Knight of the Thistle.
sun.
And here is a white-haired shepherd. As a boy, a
child, playful as the lambs he tended, he laboured. He
has dreamed away his life upon a hill-side-on downs-
on solitary heaths. The humble, simple, patient watcher
for fellow-men. Solitude has been his companion: he
has grown old, wrinkled, bent in the eye of the burning
His highest wisdom is a guess at the coming
weather he may have heard of diamonds, but he knows
the evening star. He has never sat at a congress of
kings he has never helped to commit a felony upon a
whole nation. Yet is he, to our mind, a most reverend
Knight of the Fleece. If the Herald object to this, let
us call him Knight of the Lamb! In its gentleness and
patience, a fitting type of the poor old shepherd.
:
And here is a pauper, missioned from the workhouse
to break stones at the road-side. How he strikes and
strikes at that unyielding bit of flint! Is it not the
stony heart of the world's injustice knocked at by
poverty? What haggardness is in his face! What a
blight hangs about him! There are more years in his
looks than in his bones. Time has marked him with an
iron pen.
He wailed as a babe for bread his father was
not allowed to earn. He can recollect every dinner-
they were so few of his childhood. He grew up, and
-


170
THE ORDER OF POVERTY.
want was with him, even as his shadow. He has shivered
with cold-fainted with hunger. His every day of life
has been set about by goading wretchedness. Around
him, too, were the stores of plenty. Food, raiment, and
money mocked the man made half mad with destitution.
Yet, with a valorous heart, a proud conquest of the
shuddering spirit, he walked with honesty and starved.
His long journey of life hath been through thorny places,
and now he sits upon a pile of stones on the way-side,
breaking them for workhouse bread. Could loftiest
chivalry show greater heroism-nobler self-control, than
this old man, this weary breaker of flints? Shall he
not be of the Order of Poverty? Is not penury to him
even as a robe of honour? His grey workhouse coat
braver than purple and miniver? He shall be Knight
of the Granite if you will. A workhouse gem, indeed-
a wretched, highway jewel-yet, to the eye of truth,
finer than many a ducal diamond.
Have
This man is a weaver; this a potter. Here, too, is a
razor-grinder; here an iron-worker. Labour is their
lot; labour they yearn for, though to some of them labour
comes with miserable disease and early death.
we not here Knights of the Shuttle, Knights of Clay,
and Knights of Vulcan, who prepare the carcase of the
giant engine for its vital flood of steam? Are not these
among the noblest of the sons of Poverty? Shall they
not take high rank in its Order?
We are at the mouth of a mine. There, many,
many fathoms below us, works the naked, grimed, and
sweating wretch, oppressed, brutalized, that he may dig
us coal for our winter's hearth; where we may gather
round, and with filled bellies, well-clothed backs, and
hearts all lapped in self-complacency, talk of the talked-
of evils of the world, as though they were the fables of
ill-natured men, and not the verities of bleeding life.
That these men, doing the foulest offices of the world
should still be of the world's poorest, gives dignity to
want-the glory of long-suffering to poverty.


THE ORDER OF POVERTY.
171
And so, indeed, in the mind of wisdom, is poverty
ennobled. And for the Knights of the Golden Calf, how
are they outnumbered! Let us, then, revive the Order
of Poverty. Ponder, Reader, on its antiquity. For
was not Christ himself Chancellor of the Order, and the
Apostles Knights Companions?


A GOSSIP AT RECULVERS.
THE spirit of the Saxon seems still to linger along
the shores of Kent. There is the air of antiquity
about them; a something breathing of the olden day—an
influence, surviving all the changes of time, all the vicis-
situdes of politic and social life. The genius of the
Heptarchy comes closer upon us from the realm of sha-
dows: the Wittenagemote is not a convocation of ghosts
-not a venerable House of Mists; but a living, talking,
voting Parliament. We feel a something old, strong,
stubborn, hearty; a something for the intense meaning
of which we have no other word than "English," rising
about us from every rood of Kent. And wherefore this?
England was not made piecemeal. Her foundations in
the deep-could a sea of molten gold purchase the worth.
of her surrounding ocean?—are of the same age. The
same sun has risen and set upon the whole island.
Wherefore, then, is Kent predominant in the mind for
qualities which the mind denies to other counties?
Because it is still invested with the poetry of action.
Because we feel that Kent was the cradle of the mar-
row and bone of England; because we still see, ay, as
palpably as we behold yonder trail of ebon smoke,-
the broad black pennant of that mighty admiral, Steam,
-the sails of Cæsar threatening Kent, and Kent bar-
barians clustering on the shore, defying him. It is thus
that the spirit of past deeds survives immortally, and
works upon the future: it is thus we are indissolubly
linked to the memories of the bygone day, by the still
active soul that once informed it.
How rich in thoughts-how fertile in fancies that
quicken the brain and dally with the heart, is every


A GOSSIP AT RECULVERS.
173
foot-pace of this soil! Reader, be with us for a brief
time, at this beautiful village of Herne. The sky is
sullen ; and summer, like a fine yet froward wench,
smiles now and then, now frowns the blacker for the
passing brightness: nevertheless, summer in her worst
mood cannot spoil the beautiful features of this demure,
this antique village. It seems a very nest-warm and
snug, and green-for human life; with the twilight
haze of time about it, almost consecrating it from the
aching hopes and feverish expectations of the present.
Who would think that the bray and roar of multitudinous
London sounded but some sixty miles away? The
church stands peacefully, reverently; like some old,
visionary monk, his feet on earth-his thoughts with
God. And the graves are all about; and things of
peace and gentleness, like folded sheep, are gathered
round it.
There is a stile which man might make the throne
of solemn thought-his pregnant matter, the peasant
bones that lie beneath. And on the other side, a park,
teeming with beauty; with sward green as emeralds,
and soft as a mole's back; and trees, with centuries
circulating in their gnarled massiveness.
:
But we must quit the churchyard, and turning to the
right, we will stroll towards Reculvers. How rich the
swelling meadows! How their green breasts heave
with conceived fertility! And on this side corn-fields;
the grain stalk thick as a reed; the crop level and
compact as a green bank. And here, too, is a field of
canary-seed of seed grown for London birds in London
cages. The farmer shoots the sparrow-the little rustic
scoundrel-that, with felonious bill, would carry away
one grain sown for, made sacred to, Portman-square
canary! We might, perhaps, find a higher parallel to
this, did we look with curious eyes about us, Never-
theless, bumpkin sparrow has his world of air to range
in; his free loves; and for his nest his ivied wall or
hawthorn bush. These, say the worst, are a happy


174
A GOSSIP AT RECULVERS.
set-off even against a gilt-wired cage; sand like dia-
mond dust; unfailing seed, and sugar from even the
sweeter lips of lady mistress. Powder and small shot
may come upon the sparrow like apoplexy upon an
alderman, with the unbolted morsel in its gullet; yet,
consider hath the canary no danger to encounter?
Doth not prosperity keep a cat?
Well, this idle gossip has brought us within a short
distance of Reculvers. Here-so goes the hoary le-
gend-Augustine impressed the first Christian foot
upon the English shore, sent hither by good Pope
Gregory; no less good that, if the same legend be true,
he had a subtle sense of a joke. Christianity, unless
historians say what is not, owes somewhat of its intro-
duction into heathen England to a pun. The story is so
old, that there is not a schoolmaster's dog throughout
merry Britain, that could not bark it. Nevertheless, we
will indicate our moral courage by repeating it. Our
ink turns red with blushes at the thought—no matter—
for once we will write in our blushes.
Pope Gregory, seeing some white-haired, pink-cheeked
boys for sale in the Roman slave-market, asked, who
they were? Sunt Angli-they are English, was the
response. Non sunt Angli-sed Angeli; they are not
English, but angels, was the Papal playfulness. His
Holiness then inquired, from what part of England.
Deirii, they are Deirians, was the answer. Whereupon
the Pope, following up his vein of pleasantry, said, Non
Deirii, sed De irá, not Deirians, but from the anger
of the Lord: snatched, as his Holiness indicated, from
the vengeance that must always light upon heathenism.
This grey-haired story, like the grey hairs of Nestor,
is pregnant with practical wisdom. Let us imagine Pope
Gregory to have been a dull man; even for a Pope a
dull man.
Let us allow that his mind had not been
sufficiently comprehensive to take within its circle the
scattered lights of intelligence which, brought into a
focus, make a joke. Suppose, in a word, that the pope


A GOSSIP AT RECULVERS.
175
had had no ear for a pun? Saint Augustine might
still have watched the bubbles upon Tiber, and never
have been sea-sick on his English voyage.
What does this prove? What does this incident
preach with a thunder-tongue? Why, the necessity,
the vital necessity, of advancing no man to any sort of
dignity, who is not all alive as an eel to a joke. We are
convinced of it. The world will never be properly ruled,
until jests entirely supersede the authority of Acts of
Parliament. As it is, the Acts are too frequently the
jests, without the fun.
We are now close to Reculvers. There, reader, there
-where you see that wave leaping up to kiss that big
white stone-that is the very spot where Saint Augus-
tine put down the sole of his Catholic foot. If it be not,
we have been misinformed, and cheated of our money;
we can say no more.
Never mind the spot. Is there not a glory lighting
up the whole beach? Is not every wave of silver—
every little stone, a shining crystal? Doth not the air
vibrate with harmonies, strangely winding into the heart,
and awakening the brain? Are we not under the spell
of the imagination which makes the present vulgarity
melt away like morning mists, and shows to us the full,
uplighted glory of the past?
There was a landing on the Sussex Coast; a landing
of a Duke of Normandy, and a horde of armed cut-
throats. Looking at them even through the distance of
some eight hundred years, what are they but as a gang
of burglars? A band of pick-purses-bloodshedders-
robbers?
What was this landing of a host of men, in the full
trump and blazonry of war,-what all their ships, their
minstrelsy, and armed power,-to the advent of Augus-
tine and his fellow-monks, brought hither by the forlorn-
ness of the soul of man? It is this thought that makes
this bit of pebbled beach a sacred spot; it is this spirit
of meditation that hears in every little wave a sweet and
solemn music.


176
- A GOSSIP AT RECULVERS.
And there, where the ocean tumbles, was in the olden
day a goodly town, sapped, swallowed by the wearing,
the voracious sea. At lowest tides, the people still dis-
cover odd, quaint, household relics, which, despite the
homely breeding of the finders, must carry away their
thoughts into the mist of time, and make them feel
antiquity. The very children of the village are huck-
sters of the spoils of dead centuries. They grow up
with some small trading knowledge of fossils; and are
deep, very deep in all sorts of petrifactions. They must
have strange early sympathies towards that mysterious
town with all its tradesfolk and market-folk sunk below
the sea; a place of which they have a constant inkling in
the petty spoils lashed upward by the tempest. Indeed,
it is difficult for the mind to conceive the annihilation of
a whole town, engulphed in the ocean.
The tricksy
fancy will assert itself; and looking over the shining
water, with summer basking on it, we are apt to dream
that the said market-town has only suffered a
change;" and that fathoms deep, the town still stands
-that busy life goes on- -that people of an odd, sea-
green aspect, it may be, still carry on the work of mortal
breathing; make love, beget little ones, and die. But
this, indeed, is the dream of idleness. Yet, who-if he
could change his mind at will, would make his mind
incapable of such poor fantasies? How much of the
coarse web of existence owes its beauty to the idlest
dreams with which we colour it!
sea
The village of Reculvers is a choice work of antiquity.
The spirit of King Ethelbert tarries there still, and lives
enshrined in the sign of a public-house. It would be
well for all kings, could their spirits survive with such
genial associations. There are some dead royalties too
profitless even for a public sign. Who, now, with any
other choice would empty a tankard under the auspices
of Bloody Mary, as that anointed "femininitie" is called;
or take a chop even at Nero's Head? No: inn-keepers
know the subtle prejudices of man, nor violate the sym-
pathies of life with their sign-posts.


A GOSSIP AT RECULVERS.
177
Here, on the sanded floor of King Ethelbert's hostelry,
do village antiquarians often congregate. Here, at times,
are stories told-stories not all unworthy of the type
of Antiquarian Transactions-of fibula, talked of as
"buckles," and other tangible bits of Roman history.
Here, we have heard, how a certain woman-living at
this blessed hour, and the mother of a family-went out
at very low tide, and found the branch of a filbert-tree
with clustering filberts on it, all stone, at least a thousand
years old-and more. Here, too, have we heard of a
wonderful horse-shoe, picked up by Joe Squellins; a
shoe, as the finder averred, as old as the world. Poor
Joe! What was his reward ?-it may be, a pint of ale
for that inestimable bit of iron! And yet was he a
working antiquarian. Joe Squellins had within him the
unchristened elements of F. S.A.!
The sea has spared something of the old church-yard;
although it has torn open the sad sanctity of the grave,
and reveals to the day, corpse upon corpse-layers of the
dead, thickly, closely packed, body upon body. A lateral
view of rows of skeletons, entombed in Christian earth
centuries since, for a moment staggers the mind, with
this inward peep of the grave. We at once see the close,
dark prison of the church-yard, and our breath comes
heavily, and we shudder. It is only for a moment.
There is a lark singing, singing over our head-a mile
upwards in the blue heaven-singing like a freed soul:
we look again, and smile serenely at the bones of what
was man.
Many of our gentle countrymen-fellow-metropolitans
-who once a year wriggle out their souls from the slit
of their tills to give the immortal essence sea air, make
a pilgrimage to Reculvers. This Golgotha, we have
noted it, has to them especial attractions. Many are
the mortal relics borne away to decorate a London chim-
ney-piece. Many a skeleton gives up its rib, its ulna,
two or three odd vertebræ, or some such gimcrack to the
London visitor, for a London ornament. Present the
N


178
A GOSSIP AT RECULVERS.
same man with a bone from a London hospital, and he
would hold the act abominable, irreligiously presump-
tuous. But time has "silvered o'er" the bone from
Reculvers; has cleansed it from the taint of mor-
tality; has merged the loathsomeness in the curiosity;
for Time turns even the worst of horrors to the broadest
of jests. We have now Guy Fawkes, about to blow
Lords and Commons into eternity-and now Guy Fawkes,
masked for a pantomime.
One day, wandering near this open grave-yard, we
met a boy, carrying away, with exulting looks, a skull
in very perfect preservation. He was a London boy,
and looked rich indeed with his treasure.
"What have you there?" we asked.
66
A man's head-a skull," was the answer.
"And what can you possibly do with a skull ?"
66
• Take it to London."
"And when you have it in London, what then will
you do with it?"
66 I know."
66
No doubt. But what will you do with it ?"
And to this thrice-repeated question, the boy three
times answered, "I know."
"Come, here's sixpence. Now, what will you do
with it ?"
The boy took the coin-grinned-hugged himself,
hugging the skull the closer, and said very briskly—
"Make a money box of it!
""
A strange thought for a child. And yet, mused we
as we strolled along, how many of us, with nature bene-
ficent and smiling on all sides,-how many of us think
of nothing so much as hoarding sixpences-yea, hoard-
ing them even in the very jaws of desolate Death!


THE OLD MAN AT THE GATE.
IN Surrey, some three miles from Chertsey, is a quiet,
dull, sequestered nook, called Shepperton Green. Whe-
ther the new philanthropy of new pauper laws hath, of
late years, sought out the spot, I know not. At the
time whereof I write, the olden charity dwelt in an old
workhouse-a primitive abiding-place for the broken
ploughman, the palsied shepherd, the old, old peasant,
for whom nothing more remained in this world but to die.
The governor of this abode of benevolence dwelt in the
lower part of the building, and therein, as the village
trade might fluctuate, made or mended shoes. Let the
plain truth be said the governor was a cobbler. Within
a stone's cast of the workhouse, was a little white gate
swung between two hedge-banks in the road to Chertsey.
Here, pass when you would, stood an old man, whose
self-imposed office it was to open the gate; for the
which service the passenger would drop some small
benevolence in the withered hand of the aged peasant.
This man was a pauper-one of the almsmen of the
village workhouse.
There was a custom-whether established by the
governor aforesaid, or by predecessors of a vanished
century, I know not-that made it the privilege of the
oldest pauper to stand the porter at the gate; his per-
quisite, by right of years, the halfpence of the rare
pedestrian. As the senior died, the living senior suc-
Iceeded to the office. Now the gate-and now the
grave.
And this is all the history? All. The story is told
-it will not bear another syllable. The "Old Man'


180
THE OLD MAN AT THE GATE.
is at the gate; the custom which places him there has
been made known, and with it ends the narrative.
How few the incidents of life-how multitudinous its
emotions! How flat, monotonous may be the circum-
stance of daily existence, and yet how various the thoughts
which spring from it! Look at yonder landscape,
broken into hill and dale, with trees of every hue and
form, and water winding in silver threads through velvet
fields. How beautiful-for how various! Cast your
eye over that moor; it is flat and desolate-barren as
barren rock. Not so. Seek the soil, and then, with
nearer gaze, contemplate the wondrous forms and colours
of the thousand mosses growing there; give ear to the
hum of busy life sounding at every root of poorest grass.
Listen! Does not the heart of the earth beat audibly
beneath this seeming barrenness-audibly as where the
corn grows and the grape ripens? Is it not so with the
veriest rich and the veriest poor-with the most active
and with apparently the most inert?
That Old Man at the Gate" has eighty years upon
his head-eighty years, covering it with natural reverence.
He was once in London-only once. This pilgrimage
excepted, he has never journeyed twenty miles from the
cottage in which he was born; of which he became
the master; whereto he brought his wife; where his
children saw the light, and their children after; where
many of them died; and whence, having with a stout
soul, fought against the strengthening ills of poverty
and old age, he was thrust by want and sickness out,
and, with a stung heart, he laid his bones upon a work-
house bed.
Life to the "Old Man" has been one long path across
a moor—a flat, unbroken journey; the eye uncheered,
the heart unsatisfied. Coldness and sterility have com-
passed him round. Yet, has he been subdued to the
blankness of his destiny? Has his mind remained the
unwrit page that schoolmen talk of has his heart be-
come a clod? Has he been made by poverty a moving


THE OLD MAN AT THE GATE.
181
image-a plough-guiding, corn-thrashing instrument?
Have not unutterable thoughts sometimes stirred within
his brain-thoughts that elevated, yet confused him
with a sense of eternal beauty-coming upon him like
the spiritual presences to the shepherds? Has he not
been beset by the inward and mysterious yearning of the
heart towards the unknown and the unseen? He has
been a ploughman. In the eye of the well-to-do, digni-
fied with the accomplishments of reading and writing, is
he of little more intelligence than the oxen treading the
glebe. Yet, who shall say that the influence of nature—
that the glories of the rising sun-may not have called
forth harmonies of soul from the rustic drudge, the
moving statue of a man!
That worn-out, threadbare remnant of humanity at
the gate; age makes it reverend, and the inevitable-
shall inevitable be said?—injustice of the world, invests
it with majesty; the majesty of suffering meekly borne,
and meekly decaying. "The poor shall never cease out of
the land." This text the self-complacency of competence
loveth to quote: it hath a melody in it, a lulling sweet-
ness to the selfishness of our nature. Hunger, and cold,
and nakedness, are the hard portion of man; there is
no help for it; rags must flutter about us; man, yes,
even the strong man, his only wealth (the wealth of
Adam) wasting in his bones, must hold his pauper hand
to his brother of four meals per diem; it is a necessity
of nature, and there is no help for it. And thus some
men send their consciences to sleep by the chinking of
their own purses. Necessity of evil is an excellent philo-
sophy, applied to everybody but-ourselves.
These easy souls will see nothing in our "Old Man at
the Gate" but a pauper, let out of the workhouse, for the
chance of a few halfpence. Surely, he is something
more?
He is old; very old. Every day, every hour,
earth has less claim in him. He is so old, so feeble, that
even as you look he seems sinking. At sunset, he is
scarcely the man who opened the gate to you in the


182
THE OLD MAN AT THE GATE.
He
morning. Yet there is no disease in him-none.
is dying of old age. He is working out that most awful
problem of life-slowly, solemnly. He is now, the
badged pauper-and now, in the unknown country with
Solomon !
Can man look upon a more touching solemnity? There
stands the old man, passive as a stone, nearer, every
moment, to churchyard clay! It was only yesterday
that he took his station at the gate. His predecessor
held the post for two years; he too daily, daily
dying-
"Till like a clock, worn out with eating time,
The weary wheels of life at length stood still."
How long will the present watcher survive? In that
very uncertainty-in the very hoariness of age which
brings home to us that uncertainty--there is something
that makes the old man sacred; for, in the course of
nature, is not the oldest man the nearest to the angels ?
Yet, away from these thoughts, there is reverence
due to that old man. What has been his life? A war
with suffering. What a beautiful world is this! How
rich and glorious! How abundant in blessings-great
and little to thousands! What a lovely place hath
God made it; and how have God's creatures darkened
and outraged it to the wrong of one another! Well,
what had this man of the world? What stake, as the
effrontery of selfishness has it? The wild-fox was
better cared for. Though preserved some day to be
killed, it was preserved until then. What did this old
man inherit? Toil, incessant toil, with no holiday of
the heart he came into the world a badged animal of
labour; the property of animals. What was the earth
to him?-a place to die in.
66
"The poor shall never cease out of the land." Shall
we then, accommodating our sympathies to this hard
necessity, look serenely down upon the wretched? Shall
we preach only comfort to ourselves from the doomed con-


THE OLD MAN AT THE GATE.
183
dition of others? It is an easy philosophy; so easy there
is but little wonder it is so well exercised.
But The Old Man at the Gate" has, for seventy
years, worked and worked; and what his closing reward?
The workhouse. Shall we not, some of us, blush crim-
son at our own world-successes, considering the destitu-
tion of our worthy, single-hearted fellows? Should not
affluence touch its hat to " The Old Man at the Gate"
with a reverence for the years upon him; he-the born
soldier of poverty, doomed for life to lead life's forlorn
hope? Thus considered, surely Dives may unbonnet to
Lazarus.
To our mind, the venerableness of age made "The
Old Man at the Gate " something like a spiritual presence.
He was so old, who could say how few the pulsations of
his heart between him and the grave! But there he
was with a meek happiness upon him; gentle, cheer-
ful. He was not built up in bricks and mortar ; but was
still in the open air, with the sweetest influences about
him; the sky-the trees-the green sward,—and flowers
with the breath of God in them!
THE END.


LONDON:
BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.





THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ
This book is due on the last DATE stamped below.
JAN 5 '83
JAN 4 1983 REC'D
JUL 24'89
AUGO 3 1989 REC'D


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203