A eful ! From what have I not fiillen, if the child 1 remember was indeed myself, — and not some dissembling guardian, presenting a false identity, to give the rule to my unpractised steps, and regulate the tone of my moral being ! 'i hat I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy. :1S NEW YEAR'S EVE. in such retrospection, may be the symptom of some sickly idiosyncrasy. Or is it owing to another cause : simply, that being v/ithout wife or family, I have not learned to project myself enough out of myself; and having no off- spring of my own to dally with, I turn back upon memory, and adopt my own early idea, as my heir and favourite ? If these speculations seem fantastical to thee, reader (a busy man, perchance), if I tread out of the waj^ of thy sympathy, and am singularly conceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under the phantom cloud of Elia. The elders, with whom I was brought up, were of a character not likely to let slip the sacred observance of any old institution ; and the ringing out of the Old Year was kept by them with circumstances of peculiar ceremony. — In those days the sound of those midnight chimes, though it seemed to raise hilarity in all ai"ound me, never failed to bring a train of pensive imagery into my fancy. Yet I then scarce conceived what it meant, or thought of it as a reckoning that concerned me. Xot childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life ; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of Decem- ber. But now, shall I confess a truth ? — I feel these audits but too powerfully. I begin to count the probabilities of my duration, and to grudge at the expenditure of moments and shortest periods, like misers' farthings. In proportion as the years both lessen and shorten, I set more count upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. I am not content to pass away " like a weaver's shuttle." Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity ; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth ; the face of town and coixntry ; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the Bweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age to which I am NEW TEAB'S EVE. 33 ' arrived ; I, tind my friends : to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age ; oi' drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave. — Any alteration, on this earth of mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and discomposes me. My household-gods plant ;\ terrible fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood. They do not willingly seek Lavinian shores. A new state of being staggers me. Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and sum- mer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and in- nocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself — do these things go out with life ? Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him ? And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios ; must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces? Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading ? Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the smiling in- dications which point me to them here, — the recognisable face — the " sweet assurance of a look ?" — In winter this intolerable disinclination to dying — to give it its mildest name — does more especially haunt and beset me. In a genial August noon, beneath a sweltering sky, death is almost problematic. At those times do such poor snakes as myself enjoy an immortality. Then we expand and burgeon. Then we are as strong again, as valiant again, as wise again, and a great deal taller. The blast that nips and shrinks me, puts me in thoughts of death. All things allied to the insubstantial, wait upon that master feeling ; cold, numbness, dreams, perplexity ; moonlight itself, with its shadowy and spectral aj^pear- ances, — that cold ghost of the sun, or Phoebus' sickly sister, like that innutritions one denounced in the Canticles ; — I • am none of her minions — I hold with the Persian. AVhatsoever thwarts, or puts me out of my way, brings 40 XEW YEARS EVE. deatli imto my mind. All partial evils, like humours, inn into that capital plague-sore. — I have heard some pry liichard Fleckno, 1653 A QUAKERS' MEETING. 59' in aggregate ; a simple in composite : — como with me into a Quakers' Meeting. Dost thou love silence deep as that "before the winds were made ?" go not out into the wilderness, descend not into the profundities of the earth ; shut not up thy case ments ; nor pour wax into the little cells of thy ears, with little-faith'd self-mistrusting Ulysses. — Eetire with me into a Quakers' Meeting. For a man to refrain even from good words, and to hold his jjeace, it is commendable ; but for a multitude it is great mastery. What is the stillness of the desert compared with this- place? what the uncommunicating muteness of fishes? — here the goddess reigns and revels. — " Boreas, and Cesias, and Argestes loud," do not with their interconfounding uproars more augment the brawl — nor the waves of th© blown Baltic with their clubbed sounds — than their oppo- site (Silence her sacred self) is multiplied and rendered more intense by numbers, and by sympathy. She too hath her deeps, that call unto deeps. Negation itself hath a positive more and less; and closed ej^es would seem to obscure the great obscurity of midnight. There are wounds which an imperfect solitude cannot heal. By imperfect I mean that which a man enjoyeth by himself. The perfect is that which he can sometimes attain in crowds, but nowhere so absolutely as in a Quakers' Meeting. — Those first hermits did certainly understand this principle, when they retired into Egyptian solitudes, not singly, but in shoals, to enjoy one another's want of conversation. The Carthusian is bound to his brethren by this agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness. In secular occasions, what so pleasant as to be reading a book through a long winter evening, with a friend sitting by — say, a wife — he, or she, too, (if that be probable,) reading another without interruption, or oral communication? — can there be no sympathy without the gabble of words ? — away with this inhuman, shy, single, shade-and-cavern-haunting soli- tariness. Give me. Master Zimmerman, a sympathetic solitude. Ca A QVAKEltS' MEETING. To pace alone in tlic cloisters or side aisles of some cathedral, time-stricken ; Ov under hanging mountains, Or by the fall of fountains ; is but a vulgar luxury compared with that which those enjoy who come together for the purposes of more complete, ahstracted solitude. This is the loneliness " to be felt." — The Abbey Church of Westminster hath nothing so solemn, f.o spirit soothing, as the naked walls and benches of a Quakers' Meeting. Here are no tombs, no inscriptions. Sands, ignoble things, Dropt from the ruined sides of kings — • but here is something which throws Antiquity herself into the fore-ground — Silence — eldest of things — language of old Night — primitive discourser — to which the insolent decays of mouldering grandeur have but arrived by a violent, and, as we may say, unnatural progression. How reverend is the view of these hushed heads, Looking tranquillity ! Notliing-];)lotting, nought-caballing, unraischievous sy- nod ! convocation without intrigue ! parliament without debate ! what a lesson dost thou read to council, and to consistory ! — if my pen treat of you lightly — as haply it will wander — yet my spirit hath gravely felt the wisdom of your custom, when, sitting among you in deepest peace, which some out-welling tears would rather confirm than disturb, I have reverted to the times of j'our beginnings, and the sowings of the seed by Fox and Dewesbury. — I have witnessed that which brought before my eyes your heroic tranquillity, inflexible to the rude jests and serious violences of the insolent soldiery, republican or royalist, sent to molest you — for ye sate betwixt the fires of two persecutions, the outcast and oif-scouring of church and presbytery. — I have seen the reeling sea-ruffian, who had wandered into your receptacle with the avowed intention of disturbing your quiet, from the very spirit of the place A QUAKEES- MEETING. 61 receive iu a moment a new heart, and presently sit among ye as a lamb amidst lambs. And I remember Penn before his accusers, and Fox in the bail dock, where ho was lifted np in spirit, as ho tells ns, and " the Judge and tho Jury became as dead men under his feet." Eeader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would recom- mend to you, above all church-narratives, to read Sewel's History of the Quakers. It is in folio, and is the abstract of the journals of Fox and the primitive Friends. It is far more edifying and affecting than anything you will read of Wesley and his colleagues. Here is nothing to stagger you, nothing to make you mistrust, no suspicion of alloy, no drop or dreg of the worldly or ambitious spirit. You will here read the true story of that much-injured, ridiculed man (who perhaps hath been a byword in your mouth) — James Naylor : what dreadful sufferings, with what patience, he endured, even to the boring through of his tongue with red-hot irons, without a murmur ; and Avith what strength of mind, when the delusion he had fallen into, which they stigmatised for blasphemy, had given way to clearer thoughts, he could renounce his error, in a strain of the beautifullest humility, yet keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker still ! — so different from the practice of your common converts from enthusiasm, who, when they aposta- tize, apostatize all, and think they can never get far enough from the society of their former errors, even to the renun- ciation of some saving truths, with which they had been mingled, not implicated. Get the writings of John Woolman by heart ; and love the early Quakers. How far the followers of these good men in our days nave kept to the primitive spirit, or in what proportion they have substituted formality for it, the Judge of Spirits can alone determine. I have seen faces in their assemblies upon which the dove sate visibly brooding. Others, again, I have watched, when my thoughts should have been better engaged, in which I could possibly detect nothing but a blank inanity. But quiet was in all, and the disposition to unanimity, and the absence of the fierce controversial G2 A QUAKERS' MEETING workings. — ]f the spiritual pretensions of the Quakers have abated, at least they make few pretences. Hj^Docrites they certainly are not, in their preaching. It is seldom, indeed, that you shall see one get up amongst them to hold forth. Only now and then a trembling, female, generally ancient, voic;e is heard — you cannot guess from what part of the meeting it proceeds — with a low, buzzing, musical sound, laying out a few words which " she thought might suit the condition of some present," with a quaking diffidence, which leaves no possibility of supposing that anything of female vanity was mixed up, where tlie tones were so full of ten- derness, and a restraining modesty. — The men, for what I have observed, speak seldomer. Once only, and it was some years ago, I witnessed a sample of the old Foxian orgasm. It was a man of giant stature, who, as Wordsworth phrases it, might have danced " from head to foot equipt in iron mail." His frame was oi iron, too. But lie was malleable. I saw him shake all over with the spirit — I dare not say of delusion. The strivings of the outer man were unutterable — he seemed not to speak, but to be spoken from. I saw the strong man bowed down, and his knees to fail — his joints all seemed loosening — it was a figure to set off against Paul preaching — the words he uttered were few, and sound — he was evidently resisting his will — keeping down his own word- wisdom with more mighty effort than the world's orators strain for theirs. " He had been a wit in his youth," he told us, with expressions of a sober remorse. And it was not till long after the impression had begun to wear away that I was enabled, with something like a smile, to recall the striking incongruity of the confession — understanding the term in its worldly acceptation — with the frame and physiognomy of the person before me. His brow would have scared away the Levities — the 7ocos Tiisus-que — faster than the Loves fled the face of Dia at Enna. — By icit, even in his youth, I will bo sworn he imderstood something far within the limits of an allowable liberty. More frequently the Meeting is broken up without a word having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. THE OLD AXD TUE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. 63 You go away -vdih. a sermon not made with hands. You have been in the mildei' caverns of Trophonius ; or as in Bome den, where that fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the Toxgue, that unruly member, has strangely lain tied up and captive. You have bathed with stillness. — 0, when the spirit is sore fretted, even tired to sickness of the janglings and nonsense-noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it is to go and seat yourself for a quiet half-hour upon some undisputed corner of a bench, among the gentle Quakers ! Their garb and stillness conjoined, present a uniformity, tranquil and herd-like — as in the pasture — " forty feeding like one." — The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiv- ing a soil ; and cleanliness in them to be something more than the absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily ; and when they come up in bands to their Whitsun conferences, whitening the easterly streets of tlie metro- polis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, they show like troops of the Shining Ones. THE OLD AXD THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. ' MY reading has been lamentably desultory and imme- ■Uiodical. Odd, out of the way, old English pla3^s, and treatises, have supplied me with most of my notions, and ways of feeling. In every thing that relates to science, I am a w-hole Encyclopsedia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure among the franklins, or country gentlemen, in king John's days. I know less geo- graphy than a schoolboy of six weeks' standing. To me a map of old Ortelius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout Africa merges into Asia ; whether Ethiopia lie in one or other of those great divisions ; nor can form the remotest conjecture of the position of New South Wales, or Van Dicmen's Land. Yet do I hold a cor- 6* THE OLD ASD THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. respondence -witli a very dear friend in the first-named of these two Terras Incognitas. I have no astronomy. I do not know where to look for the Bear, or Charles's Wain ; the place of any star ; or the name of any of them at sight. I guess at Venus only by her brightness — and if the sun on some portentous morn were to make his first appearance in the West, 1 verily believe, that, while all the world were gasping in apprehension about me, I alone should stand un- terrified, from sheer incuriosity and want of observation. Of history and chronology I possess some vague points, such as one cannot help picking up in the course of miscellaneous •study; but I never deliberately sat down to a chronicle, even of my own country. I have most dim apprehensions of the four great monarchies ; and sometimes the Assyrian, sometimes the Persian, floats as first in my fmcy. I make the widest conjectures concerning Egypt, and her shepherd kings. My friend M., with great painstaking, got me to think I understood the first proposition in Euclid, but gave me over in despair at the second. I am entirely un- acquainted with the modern languages ; and, like a better man than myself, have " small Latin and less Greek." I am a stranger to the shapes and texture of the commonest trees, herbs, flowers — not from the circumstance of my being town-born — for 1 should have brought the same in- observant spirit into the world with me, had I first seen it " on Devon's leafy shores," — and am no less at a loss among purely town objects, tools, engines, mechanic processes. — Not that I affect ignorance — but my head has not many mansions, nor spacious ; and I have been obliged to fill it with such cabinet curiosities as it can hold without aching. I sometimes wonder how I have passed jnj probation with so little discredit in the woi'ld, as I have done, upon so meagre a stock. But the fact is, a man may do very well Avith a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out, in mixed company ; everybody is so much more ready to pro- duce his own, than to call for a display of your acquisitions. But in a tete-a-tete there is no shuffling. The truth will out. There is nothing which I dread so much, as the being left alone for a quarter of an hour with a sensible, well-informed THE OLD AND THE NEW SCUOOLMASTEB. C5 man, that does not know me. I lately got into a dileuiiiui of this sort. — • In one of my daily jaunts between Bishopsgato and Shacklewell, the coach stopped to take up a staid-looking gentleman, about the wrong side of thirty, who was giving his parting directions (while the steps wore adjusting), in a tone of mild authority, to a tall youth, who seemed to be neither his clerk, his son, nor his servant, but something partaking of all three. The youth was dismissed, and wo drove on. As we were the sole passengers, ho naturally enough addressed his conversation to me ; and we discuhscd the merits of the fare ; the civility and punctuality of tlio driver ; the circumstance of an opposition coach having been lately set up, with the probabilities of its success — -to all which I was enabled to return pretty satisfactory answers, having been drilled into this kind of etiquette by some years' daily practice of riding to and fro in the stage aforesaid — when he suddenly alarmed me by a startling question, whether I had seen the show of prize cattle that morning in Smithfield ? Now, as I had not seen it, and do not greatly care for such sort of exhibitions, I was obliged to return a cold negative. He seemed a little mortified, as vvell as astonished, at my declaration, as (it appeared) ho Avas just come fresh from the sight, and doubtless had hoped to compare notes on the subject. However, he assured me that I had lost a fine treat, as it far exceeded the show of last year. We were now approaching Norton Falgate, when the sight of some shop-goods ticheted freshened him up into a dissertation upon the cheapness of cottons this spring. I was now a little in heart, as the nature of my morning avocations had brought me into some sort of familiarity with the raw material ; and I was surprised to find how eloquent I was becoming on the state of the India market ; when, presently, he dashed my incipient vanity to the earth at once, by inquiring whether I had ever made any calculation as to the value of the rental of all the retail shops ia Loudon. Had he asked of me what song tlie Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed whsn he hid himself among women, I might, with Sir Thomas Browne, F 66 THE OLD AND THE NEW SCUOOLMASTEll. have hazarded a " wide solution." * My companion sa\v my embarrassment, and, the almshouses beyond Shoreditch just coming in view, with great good-nature and dexterity shifted his conversation to the subject of public charities ; which led to the comparative merits of provision for the poor in past and present times, with observations on the old monastic institutions, and charitable orders ; but, finding me rather dimly impressed with some glimmering notions from old poetic associations, than strongly fortified witli any speculations reducible to calculation on the subject, ho gave the matter up ; and, the country beginning to open more and more upon us, as we approached the turnpike at Kingsland (the destined termination of his journey), he put a home thrust upon me, in the most unfortunate position he could have chosen, by advancing some queries relative to the North. Pole Expedition. "While I was muttering out something about the Panorama of those strange regions (which I had actually seen), by way of parrying the ques- tion, the coach stopping relieved me from any further ap- prehensions. My companion getting out, left me in the comfortable possession of my ignorance ; and I heard him, as he went oit', putting questions to an outside passenger, who had alighted with him, regarding an epidemic disorder that had been rifo about Dalston, and which, my friend assured him had gone through five or six schools in that neighbourhood. The truth, now flashed upon me, that my companion was a schoolmaster ; and that the youth, whom he had parted from at our first acquaintance, must have been one of the bigger boys, or the usher. — He was evi- dently a kind-hearted man, who did not seem so much desirous of provoking discussion by the questions which he put, as of obtaining information at any rate. It did not appear that he took any interest, either, in such kind of in- quiries, for their own sake ; but that he was in some way bound to seek for knowledge. A greenish-coloured coat, which he had on, forbade mc to surmise that he was a clergyman. The adventure gave birth to some lefleotions T7in Burial THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. G7 071 the difference between persons of liis profession in past and present times. Rest to the souls of those fine old Pedagognes ; the Lreeil, long since extinct, of the Lilys, and the Linacres : who be- lieving that all learning was contained in the languages Avhich they taught, and despising every other acquirement; as superficial and iiseless, came to their task as to a sport ! Passing from infancy to age, they dreamed away all then- days as in a grammar-school. Pevolving in a perpetual cycle of declensions, conjugations, syntaxes, and prosodies ; renewing constantly the occupations which had charmed their studious childhood ; rehearsing continually the part of the past ; life must have slipped from them at last like one day. They were always in their first garden, reaping harvests of their golden time, among their Flori- and their Spici-legia; in Arcadia still, but kings; the ferule of their sway not much harsher, than of like dignity with that mild sceptre attributed to king Basileus ; the Greek and Latin, their stately Pamela and their Philoclea ; with the occa- sional duncery of some untoward tyro, serving for a refresh- ing interlude of a Mopsa, or a clown Damoitas ! With what a savour doth the Preface to Colet's. or (as it is sometimes called) Paul's Accidence, set forth! "To ex Jiort every man to the learning of gi-ammar, that intendeth to attain the understanding of the tongues, wherein is con tained a great treasury of wisdom and knowledge, it would seem but vain and lost labour; for so much as it is known, that nothing can surely be ended, whose beginning is either feeble or faulty; and no building be perfect whereas the foundation and groundwork is ready to fall, and unable to tiphold the burden of the frame." How well doth this stately preamble (comparable to those which Milton coni- mendeth as "having been the usage to prefix to sonio solemn law, then first promulgated by Solon or Lycurgus ") correspond with and illustrate that pious zeal for con- formity, expressed in a succeeding clause, which would fence about grammar - rules witli the severity of faith- articles ! — " as for the diversity of grammars, it is well pni- fitiibl}- taken away by the King's Majesties wisdom, who Y 2 68 TEE OLD AND TEE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. foreseeing the inconvenience, and favourably providing tlie remedie, caused one kind of grammar by sundry learned men to be diligently drawn, and so to be set out, only everywhere to be taught for the use of learners, and for the Imrt in changing of schoolmaisters." What a gtisto in that which follows : " wherein it is profitable that he (the impil) can orderly decline his noun and his verb." His noun The fine dream is fading away fast ; and the least con- cern of a teacher in the present day is to incidcate gram- mar-rules. The modern schoolmaster is expected to know a little of everything, because his pupil is required not to be entirely ignorant of anything. lie must be superficially, if I may so say, omniscient. He is to know something of pneumatics ; of chemistry ; of whatever is curious or proper to excite the attention of the youthful mind ; an insight into mecha.nics is desirable, with a touch of statistics; the quality of soils, «tc., botany, the constitution of his country, cum multis aliis. You may get a notion of some part of his expected duties by consulting the famous Tractate on Education, addressed to J\Ir. Hartlib. All these things — these, or the desire of them — he is expected to instil, not by set lessons from professors, which lie may charge iu the bill, but at school intervals, as ho Avalks the streets, or saunters through green fields (those natural instructors), with his pupils. The least part of what is expected from him is to be done in school-hours, lie must insinuate knowledge at the mollia iemj^ora fandi. He must seize every occasion — the season of the year — the lime of the day — a passing cloud — a rainbow — a waggon of , liay — a regiment of soldiers going by — to inculcate some- thing useful. Ho can receive no pleasure from a casual - glimpse of Nature, but must catch at it as an object of in- I .struction. Be must interpret beauty into the picturesque. I lie cannot relish a beggar-man, or a gipsy, for thinking of the suitable improvement. Nothing conies to him, not .spoiled by the sophisticating medium of moral uses. The Universe — that Great Book, as it has been called —is to THE OLD AND TEE NEW SCUOOLMASTER. G9 him, indeed, to all intents and piu"poses, a book out of which he is doomed to i-ead tedious homilies to distastin<^ schoolboys. — Vacations themselves are none to him, he is only rather worse off than before ; for commonly he has some intrusive upper-boy fastened upon him at such times; some cadet of a great family ; some neglected lump of nobilit}-, or gentry ; that he must drag after him to the play, to tho Panorama, to Mr. Bartley's Orrer}^ to the Panopticon, or into the country, to a friend's house, or his favourite water- ing-place. Wherever he goes this uneasy shadow attend?^ him. A boy is at his board, and in his path, and in all hi.s movements. He is boy-rid, sick of perpetual boy. Boys arc capital fellows in their own way, among their mates ; but the}' are unwholesome companions for grown people. The restraint is felt no less on the one side than on the other. — Even a child, that " plaything for an hour," tires always. The noises of children, playing their own fancies — as I now hearken to them, by fits, sporting on tho green before my window, while I am engaged in these grave speculations at my neat suburban retreat at Shackle- well — by distance made more sweet — inexpressibly take from the labour of my task. It is like writing to music. They seem to modulate my periods. They ought at least to do so — for in the voice of that tender age there is a kind of poetry, far unlike the harsh prose-accents of man's conver- sation. — I should but spoil their sport, and diminish m}- own sympathy for them, by mingling in their pastime. I would not be domesticated all my days with a person of very superior capacity to my own — not, if I know myself at all, from any considerations of jealousy or self-compa- rison, for the occasional communion with such minds has constituted the fortune and felicity of my life— but tho habit of too constant intercourse with spirits above you, instead of raising you, keeps you down. Too frequent doses of original thinking from others restrain what lesser portion of that faculty you may possess of your own. You get entangled in another man's mind, even as you lose youT'self in another man's groimds. You are walking with a tall varlet, whose strides out-pace yours to lassitude. 70 TEE OLD AND THE NE\V SCHOOLMABTEB. The coustant operation of sncb. potent agency would re- duce me, I am convinced, to imbecility. You may deiive thoughts from others ; your way of thinking, the mould in Avhich your thoughts are cast, must be your owti. Intellect may be imparted, but not each man's intellectual frame. — As little as I should wish to be always thus dragged up- ward, as little (or rather still less) is it desiia''4e to be stunted dowuAvards by your associates. The trumpet does not more than stun you by its loudness, than a whisper teases you by its provoking inaudibility. Why are we never quite at our ease in the presence of a schoolmaster? — because we are conscious that he is not quite at his ease in ours. He is awkward, and out of place in the society of his equals. He comes like Gulliver from among his little people, and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding to yourg. He cannot meet you on the square. He wants a point given him, like an indifferent wliist-player. He is so used to teaching, that he wants to ho teaching you. One of these professors, upon my com- plaining that these little sketches of mine were anything but methodical, and that I was unable to make them other- wise, kindly offered to instruct me in the method by which young gentlemen in Ms seminary were taught to compose English themes. The jests of a schoolmaster are coarse, or thin. They do not tell out of school. He is under the 3-estraint of a formal or didactive hypocrisy in company, as u clergyman is inider amoral one. He can no more let his intellect loose in society than the other can his inclinations. He is forlorn among his coevals ; his juniors cannot be his friends. " I take blame to myself," said a sensible man of this profession, writing to a friend respecting a youth who had quitted his school abruptly, " that y our nephew was not more attached to me. But persons in my situation are moi'e to be pitied than can well be imagined. We are sur- rounded by young, and, consequently, ardently aiFectionate hearts, but toe can never hope to share an atom of their affections. The relation of master and scholar forbids this. How pleasing this must he to you, how I envy your fedinrjs ! my THE OLD AND THE NEW SCU00L2IASTEE. 71 friends will sometimes say to me, when they see yoting men whom I have educated, retiirn after some years' absence from school, their eyes shining with pleasure, while they shako hands with their old master, bringing a present of game to me, or a toy to my wife, and thanking me in the warmest terms for my care of their education. A holiday is begged for the boys ; the house is a scene of happiness ; I, only, am sad at heart. — This fine-spirited and warm-hearted youth, Avho fancies he repays his master with gratitude for the care of his boyish 3-ears — this young raan — in the eight long years I watched over him with a parent's anxiety, never could repay me with one look of genuine feeling. He was proud, when I praised ; he was submissive, when I reproved him; but he did never love me — and what he now mistakes for gratitude and kindness for me, is but the pleasant sensation which all persons feel at revisiting the scenes of their boyish hopes and fears ; and the seeing on equal terms the man they were accus- tomed to look up to with reverence. My wife, too," this interesting correspondent goes on to say, -'my once darling- Anna, is the wife of a schoolmaster. — When I married her — knowing that the v/ife of a schoolmaster ought to be a busy notable creature, and fearing that my gentle Anna ^\"0uld ill supply the loss of my dear bustling mother, just then dead, who never sat still, was in every part of the house in a moment, and whom I was obliged sometimes to threaten to fasten down in a chair, to save her from fatigu- ing herself to death — I expressed my fears that I was bring- ing her into a way of life unsuitable to her; and she, who loved me tenderly, promised for my sake to exert herself to perform the duties of her new situation. She promised, and she kept her word. What wonders will not woman's love perform ? — My house is managed with a propriety and decorum unknown in other schools ; my boys are well fed, look healthy, and have every proper accommodation ; and all this performed with a careful econom}'-, that never de- scends to meanness. But I have lost my gentle helpless Anna ! When we sit down to enjoy an hour of repose after the fatigue of the day, 1 am compelled to listen to what 72 IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. have been her useful (and they are really useful) employ- ments through the day, and what she jjroposes for her to- morrow's task. Her heart and her features are changed by the duties of her situation. To the boys, she never appears other than the master's wife, and she looks up to me as the hoTjs' master ; to whom all show of love and affection Avould be highly improper, and unbecoming the dignity of her situation and mine. Yet iliis my gratitude forbids me to hint to her. For my sake she submitted to be this altered creature, and can I reproachher for it ?" — For the communication of this letter I am indebted to my cousin Bridcret. IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. I am of a constitution so general, tliat it consorts and sympathiselh •witli all things ; I have no antipatliy, or rather idiosyncrasy in anytliing. Those natural repugnancies do not touch me, nor do I behold with prc- iudice the French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch. — Belirjio Medici. THAT the author of the Ecligio Medici mounted upon the airy stilts of abstraction, conversant about notional and conjectural essences ; in whose categories of Being the possible took the upper hand of the actual ; should have overlooked the impertinent individualities of such poor concretions as mankind, is not much to be admired. It is rather to be v/ondercd at, that in the genus of animals he should have condescended to distinguish that species at alL For myself — earth-bound and fettered to the scene of my activities, — Standing on earth, not rapt above the sky, 1 confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, national or individual, to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no indifferent eye upon things or persons. Whatever is, is to me a matter of taste or distaste ; or when once it becomes indifferent it begins to be disrelishing. I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices — made up of likings and dislikings — the veriest thrall to sj'mpathies, apathies, IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 73 antipathies. In a certain sense, I hope it may be said of rao that I am a lover of my species, 1 can feel for all indif- ferentl}', but I cannot feel towards all equally. The more purely-English word that expresses sympathy, will better explain my meaning. I can bo a friend to a worthy man, who upon another account cannot be my mate or felloiu. I cannot like all people alike.* I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair. They cannot like me — and in truth, I never knew one of that nation who attempted to do it. There is something more plain and ingenuous in their mode of proceeding. We know one another at first sight. There is an order of imperfect intellects (under which mine must be content to rank) which in its constitution is essentially anti-Caledonian. The owners of the sort of faculties I allude to, have minds rather suggestive than comprehensive. They have no pretences to much clearness or precision in their ideas, or in their manner of expressing them. Their intellectual * I would be understood as confining myself to the subject of imperfect sympathies. To nations or classes of men there can be no direct antipathy. There may be individuals born and constellated so opposite to another individual nature, that the same sphere cannot hold them. I have met with my moral antipodes, and can believe the story of two persons meet- ing (who never saw one another before in their lives) and instantly ti.Ljliting. Wc by i^rooi find there should be 'Twixt man and man such an antipathy. That though he can show no just reason why For any former wrong or injury, Can neither find a blemish in his fame. Nor aught in face or feature justly Idame, Can challenge or accuse him of no e\i\. Yet notwithstanding hates him as a devil. The lines are from old Heywood's " Hierarchie of Angels," and he sub- joins a curious story in confirmation, of a Spaniard who attempted to assassinate a king Ferdinand of Spain, and being put to the rack could give no other reason for the deed but an inveterate antipathy which ha had taken to the first sight of the king. The cause which to that act compell'd him Was, he ne'er loved him since he first beheld him. 74 niFEBFECT SYMPATHIES. ■wardroLe (to confess fairly) has few whole pieces in it. They arc content with fragments and scattered pieces of Truth. She presents no full front to them — a featnre or side-face at the most. Hints and glimpses, germs and crude essays at a system, is the utmost they pretend to. They beat up a little game peradventure — and leave it to knottier heads, more robust constitutions, to run it down. The light that lights them is not steady and polar, but mutable and shifting : waxing, and again waning. Their conversation is accordingly. They will throw out a random word in or out of season, and be content to let it pass for what it is worth. They cannot speak always as if they were upon their oath — but must be understood, speaking or writing, with some abatement. They seldom wait to mature a proposition, but e'en bring it to market in the green ear. They delight to impart their defective discoveries as they arise, without waiting for their development. They are no systematizers, and would but err more by attempting, it. Their minds, as I said before, are suggestive merel}'. The brain of a true Caledonian (if I am not mistaken) is con- stituted ixpon quite a different plan. His Minerva is born in panoply. You are never admitted to see his ideas in their growth — if, indeed, they do grow, and are not rather put together upon principles of clock-work. You never catcli his mind in an undress. He never hints or suggests any- thing, but unlades his stock of ideas in perfect order and completeness. He brings his total wealth into company, and gravely unpacks it. His riches are always about him. He never stoops to catch a glittering something in your l^resence to share it with you, before he quite knows whether it be true touch or not. You cannot cry halves to anything that he finds. He does not find, but bring. You never witness his first apprehension of a thing. His under- standing is always at its meridian — you never see the first dawn, the early streaks. — He has no falterings of self- suspicion. Surmises, guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, semi-consciousnesses, partial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo conceptions, hpve no place in his brain or vocabu- lary. The twilight of dubiety never falls upon him. la- IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. ^!^ he orthodox — he has no doubts. Is he an infidel — he has- none either. Between the affirmative and the negative there is no border-land with him. You cannot hover witl: him upon the confines of truth, or wander in the maze of a probable argument. He always keeps the path. You can- not make excursions with him — for he sets 3'ou right. His taste never fluctuates. His morality never abates. He cannot compromise, or understand middle actions. There can be but a right and a wrong. His conversation is as a book. His affirmations have the sanctity of an oath. Y^oii must speak upon the square with him. He stops a meta- phor like a suspected person in an enemy's country. " A healthy book !" — said one of his countrymen to me, who had ventured to give that appellation to John Buncle, — " Did I catch rightly what you said ? I liave heard of a man in health, and of a healthy state of body, but I do not see how that epithet can be properly applied to a book." Above all, you must beware of indirect expressions before a Cale- donian. Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein of it. Eemember j'ou are upon your oath. I have a print of a graceful figure after Leonardo da Vinci, which I was showing ofi" to Mr. * * * * After he had examined it minutely, I ventured to ask him how he liked my beauty (a foolish name it goes by among my friends) — when he very gravely assui'cd me, that " he had considerable respect for my character and talents " (so he was pleased to say), " but had not given himself much thought about the degree of my personal pre- tensions." The misconception staggered me, but did not seem much to disconcert him. — Persons of this nation ai'o particularly fond of affirming a truth — which nobody doubts. They do not so properly affirm, as annunciate it. They do indeed appear to have such a love of truth (as if, like virtue, it were valuable for itself) that all truth becomes equally valuable, whether the proposition that contains it be new or old, disputed, or such as is impossible to become a sub- ject of disputation. I was present not long since at a party of North Britons, where a son of Burns was expected ; and iiappened to drop a silly expression (in my South British 76 IMPERFECT SYMFATHIES. ^\■ay), that I wished it were the father instead of the son— • Avhen four of them started np at once to inform me, that '• that was impossible, because he was dead." An imprac- ticable wish, it seems, was more than they could conceive. Swift has hit off this part of their character, namely llieir love of tiiith, in his biting way, but with an illibe- i-ality that necessarily confines the passage to the margin.* The todiousness of these people is certainly provoking. 1 wonder if they ever tire one another ! — In my early life I had a passionate fondness for the poetry of Burns. I have sometimes foolishly hoped to ingratiate myself with, his countrymen by expressing it. But I have always foxmd that a true Scot resents your admiration of his compatriot even more than ho would your contempt of him. The latter he imputes to your " imperfect acquaintance with many of the words which he uses;" and the same objection •makes it a presumption in you to suppose that j^ou can admire him. — Thomson they seem to have forgotten. Smollett they have neither forgotten nor forgiven, for his delineation of Eory and his comj3anion, upon their first introduction to our metropolis. — Speak of Smollett as a great genius, and they will retort upon you Hume's History ■compared Avith Ms Continuation of it. AVhat if the his- torian had continued Humphrey Clinker ? I have, in the abstract, no disrespect for the Jews. They are a piece of stubborn antiquity, compared witli which Stonehengo is in its nonage. They date beyond the pyra- mids. But I should not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse with any of that nation. I confess that I have tiot the nerves to enter their synagogues. Old prejudices cling about me. I cannot shake off the story of Hugh, of * There are some people who think they sufficiently acquit them- selves, and entertain their corapanj', with relating facts of no conse- (juence, not at all out of the road of such common incidents as happen every day ; and this I have observed more frequently among the Scots llian any other nation, who are very careful not to omit the minutest circumstances of time or place ; which kind of discourse, if it were not a Uttlo relieved by the uncouth terms and phrases, as well as accent and gesture, peculiar to that country, would be hardly tolerable. — Hints toicards an Essay on Conversation. niPEEFUCT SY3irATUIES. 77 Lincoln. Centuries of injury, contempt, and liate, on tlio. one side, — of cloaked revenge, dissimulation, and hate, on the other, between our and their fathers, must and ought to afiect the blood of the children. I cannot believe it caa run clear and kindly yet ; or that a few words, such as candour, libeiality, the light of the nineteenth century, can close up the breaches of so deadly a disunion. A Hebrew is nowhere congenial to me. Pie is least distasteful on 'Change — for the mercantile spirit levels all distinctions, as all are beauties in the dark. I boldly confess that I do not relish the approximation of Jew and C'hristian, which has become so fashionable. The reciprocal endearments have, to me, something hypocritical and unnatural in them. I do not like to see the Church and Synagogue kissing and con- geeing in awkward postures of an afiected civilit}-. If tJieij are converted, why do they not come over to us altogether? AVhy keep up a form of separation, when the life of it is fled ? If they can sit with us at table, why do they keck at our cookery ? I do not understand these half conver- tites. Jews christianizing — Christians judaizing— puzzle me. I like fish or flesh. A moderate Jew is a more con- founding piece of anomaly than a wet Quaker. The spirit of the synagogue is essentially separative. B would have been more in keeping if he had abided by the faith of his forefathers. There is a fine scorn in his face, which nature meant to be of Christians. — The Hebrew spirit is strong in him, in spite of his proselytism. He cannot conquer the Shibboleth. How it breaks out, when he sings, "The Children of Israel passed through the Red Sea!" The auditors, for the moment, are as Egyptians to him, and he rides over our necks in triumph. There is no mistaking him. B has a strong expression of sense in his coun- tenance, and it is confirmed by his singing. The founda- tion of his vocal excellence is sense. He sings with understanding, as Kemble delivered dialogue. He would sing the Commandments, and give an appropriate charac- ter to each prohibition. His nation, in general, have not over-sensibls coimtenances. How should they ? — but you seldom see a silly expression among them. — Gain, and the 73 IMPEBFECT SYMFATIIIES. pursuit of gain, sharpen a man's visage. I never lieard of an idiot being born among them. — Some admire the Jewish female-physiognomy. I admire it — but with trembling. Jael had those full dark inscrutable eyes. In the Negro countenance you will often meet Avith strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tender- ness towards some of these faces — or rather masks — that have looked out kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets and highways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls — these "images of God cut in ebony." But I should not like to associate with them, to share my meals and my good nights with them— because they are black. I love Quaker ways, and Quaker worship. I venerate the Quaker principles. It does me good for the rest of the day when I meet any of their people in my path. "When I am ruffled or disturbed by any occurrence, the sight, or quiet voice of a Quaker, acts upon me as a ventilator, lightening the air, and taking off a load from the bosom. But I cannot like the Quakers (as Desdemona would say) "to live with them." I am all over sophisticated — with humours, fancies, craving hourly sympathy. I must have books, pictures, theatres, chit-chat, scandal, jokes, ambi- guities, and a thousand whim-whams, which their simpler taste can do without. I should starve at their primitive banquet. My appetites are too high for the salads which (according to Evelyn) Eve dressed for the angel ; my gusto too excited To sit a guest witli Daniul at his pulse. The indirect answers which Quakers are often found to return to a question put to them may be explained, I think, without the vulgar assumption, that they are more given to evasion and equivocating than other people. They naturally look to their words more carefully, and are more cautious of committing themselves. They have a peculiar character to keep up on this head. They stand in a manner upon their veracity. A Quaker is by law exempted from taking an oath. The custom of resort- ing to an oath in extreme cases, sanctified as it is by all IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 79 Tcligious antiqiuty, is fipt (it must be confessed) to introduce into the laxer sort of minds the notion of two kinds of trutli — the one applicable to the solemn affairs of justice, and the other to the common proceedings of daily intercourse. As truth bound upon the conscience by an oath can be but truth, so in the common affirmations of the shop and the market-place a latitude is expected and conceded upon questions wanting this solemn covenant. Something less than truth satisfies. It is common to hear a person say, " You do not expect me to speak as if I were upon my oatli." Hence a groat deal of incorrectness and inadvertency, short of falsehood, creeps into ordinary conver- sation ; and a kind of secondary or laic-truth is tolerated, where clergy-truth — oath-truth, by the nature of the circum- stances, is not required. A Quaker knows none of this dis- tinction. His simple affirmation being received upon the juost sacred occasions, without any further test, stamps a value upon the woixls which he is to use Tipon the most indifferent topics of life. He looks to them, naturally, with more severity. You can have of hina no more than his word. He knows, if he is caught tripping in a casual ex- pression, he forfeits, for himself at least, his claim to the in- vidious exemption. He knows that his syllables are weighed — and how far a consciousness of this particular watchful- ness, exerted against a person, has a tendency to produco indirect answers, and a diverting of the qiiestion by honest means, might be illustrated, and the practice justified by a more sacred example than is proper to be adduced upon this occasion. The admirable presence of mind, which is noto- rious in Quakers upon all contingencies, might be traced to this imposed self-watchfulness — if it did not seem rather an humble and secular scion of that old stock of religious constancy, which never bent or faltered, in the Primitive Friends, or gave way to the winds of persecution, to the violence of judge or accuser, under trials and racking examinations. " You will never be the wiser, if I sit here answering your questions till midnight," said one of those upright Justicers to Penn, who had been putting law-casea with a puzzling subtlety. " Thereafter as the answers 80 IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. may be," retorted the Quaker. The astonishing composure of this people is sometimes ludicrously displayed in lighter instances. — I was travelling in a stage-coach with three male Quakers, buttoned up in the straitest nonconformity of their sect. We stopped to bait at Andover, where a meal, partly tea apparatus, partly supper, was set before us. My friends confined themselves to the tea-table. I in my way took supper. When the landlady brought in the bill, the eldest of my companions discovered that she had charged for both meals. This was resisted. Mine hostess was very clamorous and positive. Some mild arguments were used on the part of the Quakers, for which the heated mind of the good lady seemed by no means a fit recipient. The guard came with his usual peremptory notice. The Quakers pulled out their money and formally tendered it — so much for tea — I, in humble imitation, tendering mine — for the supper which 1 had taken. She would not relax in her demand. So they all three quietly put up their silver, as did myself, and marched out of the room, the eldest and gravest going first, with myself closing up the rear, who thought I could not do better than follow the example of such grave and warrantable personages. Wo got in. The steps went up. The coach drove off. The murmurs of mine hostess, not very indistinctly or ambigu- ously pronounced, became after a time inaudible— and now my conscience, which the whimsical scene had for a while suspended, beginning to give some twitches, I waited, in the hope that some justification would be offered by these serious persons for the seeming injustice of their conduct. To my great surprise not a syllable was dropped on the subject. They sat as mute as at a meeting. At length the eldest of them broke silence, by inquiring of his next neighbour, " Hast thee heard how indigos go at the India House?" and the question operated as soporific on my moral feelinsr as far as Exetor. 81 WITCHES, AND OTHER KIGHT FEAES. WE are too hasty when we set down our ancestors in the gross for fools, for the monstrous inconsistencies (as they seem to us) involved in their creed of witchcraft. In the relations of this visible world we find them to have been as rational, and shrewd to detect an historic anomaly, as ourselves. But when once the invisible world was sup- posed to be open, and the lawless agency of bad spirits assumed, what measures of probability, of decency, of fit- ness, or proportion — of that which distinguishes the likely from the palpable absurd — could they have to guide them in the rejection or admission of any particular testimony ? — That maidens pined away, wasting inwardly as their waxen images consumed before a fire — that corn was lodged, and cattle lamed — that whirlwinds uptore in diabolic re- velry the oaks of the forest — or that spits and kettles only danced a fearful-innocent vagary about some rustic's kitchen when no wind was stirring — were all equally probable where no law of agency was understood. That the prince of the powers of darkness, passing by the flower and pomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege to the weak fantasy of indigent eld — ^has neither likelihood nor unlike- lihood a priori to us, who have no measure to guess at his policy, or standard to estimate what rate those anile souls may fetch in the devil's market. Nor, when the wicked are expressly symbolised by a goat, was it to be wondered at so much, that he should come sometimes in that body, and assert his metaphor. — That the intercourse was opened at all between both worlds was perhaps the mistake — but that once assumed, 1 see no reason for disbelieving one at- tested story of this nature more than another on the score of absurdity. There is no law to judge of the lawless, or canon by which a dream may be criticised. I have sometimes thought that I could not have existed in the days of received witchcraft ; that I could not have slept in a village where one of those reputed hags dwelt. Our ancestors were bolder or more obtuse. Amidst the 82 WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEAES. universal belief that these wretches were in league with the author of all evil, holding hell tributary to their mut- tering, no simple justice of the peace seems to have scrupled issu ing, or silly headborough sei-ving, a warrant upon them — as if they should subpcena Satan ! — Prospero in his boat, with his books and wand about him, suffers himself to be conveyed away at the mercy of his enemies to an unknown island. He might have raised a storm or two, we think, on the passage. His acquiescence is in exact analogy to the non-resistance of witches to the constituted powers. — What stops the Fiend in Spenser from tearing Guyon to pieces — or who had made it a condition of his prey that Guyon must take assay of the glorious bait — we have no guess. We do not know the laws of that country. From my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about witches and witch-stories. My maid, and more legendary aunt, supplied me with good store. But I shall mention the accident which directed my curiosity originally into this channel. In my father's book- closet the history of the Bible by Stackhouse occuj^ied a distinguished station. The pictures with which it abounds — one of the ark, in par- ticular, and another of Solomon's temple, delineated with all the fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the spot — attracted my childish attention. There was a picture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, Avhich I wish that I had never seen. AVe shall come to that hereafter. Stacldiouse is in two huge tomes ; and there was a pleasure in removing folios of that magnitude, which, with infinite straining, was as much as I could manage, from the situation which they occupied upon an upper shelf. I have not met with the work from that time to this, but I remember it consisted of Old Testament stories, orderly set down, with the objection appended to each story, and the solution of the objection regularly tacked to that. The objection was a summary of whatever diffi- culties had been opposed to the credibility of the history by the shrewdness of ancient or modern infidelity, drawn up with an almost complimentary excess of candour. The solution was brief, modest, and satisfactory. The bane and WITCHES. AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. 83 antidote were both befcjre you. To dovibts so put, and so quashed, there seemed to be an end for ever. The dragon lay dead, for the foot of the veriest babe to trample on. Jjut — like as was rather feared than realized from that slain monster in Spenser — from the womb of those crushed errors young dragonets would creep, exceeding the prowess of so tender a Saint George as myself to vanquish. The habit of expecting objections to every passage set me upon starting more objections, for the glory of finding a solution of my own for them. I became staggered and perplexed, a sceptic- in long-coats. The pretty Bible stories which I had read, or heard read in church, lost their purity and sincerity of impression, and were turned into so many historic or chro- nologic theses to be defended against whatever impugners. I was not to disbelieve them, but — the next thing to that — I was to be quite sure that some one or other would or had disbelieved them. Next to making a child an infidel is the letting him know that there are infidels at all. Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength. O, how ugly sound scriptural doubts from the mouth of a babe and a suckling ! — I should have lost myself in these mazes, and have pined away, I think, with such unfit sus- tenance as these husks afforded, but for a fortunate piece of ill-fortune which about this time befell me. Turning over the picture of the ark with too much haste, I un- happily made a breach in its ingenioiis fabric — driving my inconsiderate fingers right through the two larger quadru- peds, the elephant and the camel, that stare (as well they might) out of the two last windows next the steerage in that unique piece of naval architecture. Stackhouse wat-: henceforth locked up, and became an interdicted treasure. With the book, the objections and solutions gradually cleared out of my head, and have seldom returned since in any force to trouble me. But there was one impression which I had imbibed from Stackhouse which no lock or bar could shur. out, and which was destintd to try my childish nerves rather more seriously. — That detestable picture ! I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The night- time, solitude, and the dark, were my hell. The suffering^! G 2 m WITCHES, a:nd other night fears. I endured in this nature would justify the expression. I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, froia tho fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life — so far sm memory serves in things so long ago — without an assur- Ance, which realized its own prophecy, of seeing some fright- ful spectre. Be old Stacldiouse then acquitted in part, if I say, that to his picture of the Witch raising up Samuel — (0 that old man covered with a mantle !) — I owe — not my midnight terrors, the hell of my infancy — but the shape and manner of their visitation. It was he who dressed up for me a hag that nightly sate uj)on my pillow — a sure bedfellow, when my aunt or my maid was far from me. All day long, while the book was permitted me, I dreamed waking over his delineation, and at night (if I may use so bold an expression) awoke into sleep, and found the vision true. I durst not, even in the day-light, once enter the chamber where I slept, without my face turned to the >indow, aversely from the bed where my witch-ridden pillow was. Parents do not know what they do when they leave tender babes alone to go to sleep in the dark. The feeling about for a friendly arm — the hoping for a familiar voice — when they wake screaming — and find none to soothe them — what a terrible shaking it is to their poor nerves ! The keeping them up till midnight, through candle-light and the i;n wholesome hours, as they are called, — would, I am satisfied, in a medical point of view, prove the better caution. — That detestable picture, as I have said, gave the iashion to my dreams — if dreams they were — for the scene of them was invariably the room in which I lay. Had I 3iever met with the picture, the fears would have come self-pictured in some shape or other — Headless bear, black man, or ape — "but, as it was, my imaginations took that form. — It is not l)ook, or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these terrors in children. They can at most but give them a direction. Dear little T. H., who of all ohildreu has been brought up with the most scrupulous exclusion of every taint of superstition — who was never WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEAIIS. 85 allowed to hear of goblin or apparition, or scarcely to be told of bad men, or read or hear of any distressing story — finds all this world of fear, from which he has been so rigidly excluded ab extra, in his own " thick-coming fan- cies ;" and fron"; his little midnight pillow, this nni'se-child of optimism V/dll start at shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in sweats to which the reveries of the cell-damned mur- derer are tranquillity. Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chirateras dire — stories of Ce- loeno and the Harpies — may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition — but they were there before. They are transcripts, types — the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that, which we know in a waking sense to be false, come to aifect us at all ? — or Names, -whose sense vre see not, Fray us with things that be not? Is it that we naturall}" conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury ? — 0, least of all ! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body — or, without the body, they would have been the same. All the cruel, torment- ing, defined devils in Dante — tearing, mangling, choking, stifling, scorching demons — are they one half so fearful to the S23irit of a man, as the simple idea of a spirit unen^- bodied following him — Like one that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turn'd round, walks on And turns no more his head ; Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.* That the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual — that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless upon earth — that it predominates in the period of sinless in- fancy — are difiSculties, the solution of which might afi'ord some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a ppep at least into the shadowland of pre-oxistence. * Mr. Colcvidgo's Ancient Mariner. 86 WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. My night-fancies liave long ceased to be afflictive. I confess an occasional nightmare ; but I do not, as in early 3'-ontli, keep a stud of them. Fiendish faces, with the ex tinguished taper, will come and look at me ; but I know them for mockeries, even while I cannot elude their pre- sence, and I fight and grapple with them. For the credit, of my imagination, I am almost ashamed to say how tamo and prosaic my dreams are grown. They are never ro- mantic, seldom even rural. Tbej^ are of architecture and of buildings — cities abroad, which I have never seen and hardly have hoped to see. I have traversed, for the seeming length of a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon — their churches, palaces, squares, market-places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an inexpressible sense of delight — a map-like distinctness of trace, and a day -light vividness of vision, that was all but being awake. — I have formerly travelled among the Westmoreland fells — my highest Alps, — but they are objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recognition ; and I have again and again awoke with ineifectual struggles of the inner eye, to make out a shape, in any way whatever, of Helvellyn. Methought I was in that country, but the mountains were gone. The poverty of my dreams mortifies me. There is Coleridge, at his will can conjure up icy domes, and pleasure-houses for KublaKhan, and Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abara, and caverns, "Where Alph, the sacred river, runs, to solace his night solitudes—when I cannot muster a fiddle. Barry Cornwall has his tritons and his nereids gam- boling before him in nocturnal visions, and proclaiming- sons born to Neptune — when my stietch of imaginative activity can hardly, in the night season, raise up the ghost of a fish-wife. To set my failures in somewhat a morti- fying light — it was after reading the noble Dream of this poet, that my fancy ran strong upon these marine spectra ; and the poor plastic power, such as it is, within me set to work to humour my folly in a sort of dream that very night. Methought I was upon the ocean billows at some VALENTINE'S DAY. 87 sea nuptials, riding and mounted high, with the customary train sounding their concbs before me, (I myself, you may be sure, the leading god,) and jollily we went careering over the main, till just where Ino Leucothca should have greeted me (1 think it was Ino) with a white embrace, the billows gradually subsiding, fell from a sea roughness to a sea calm, and thence to a river motion, and thiit river (as happens in the familiarization of dreams) was no other than the gentle Thames, which landed me in the wafturo of a placid wave or two, alone, safe and inglorious, somewhere at the foot of Lambeth palace. The degree of the soul's creativeness in sleep might furnish no whimsical criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident in the same soul waking. An old gentle- man, a friend of mine, and a humorist, used to carry this notion so far, that when ho saw any stripling of his ac- quaintance ambitious of becoming a poet, his first question would be, — " Young man, what sort of dreams have you ?" T have so much faith in my old friend's theory, that when I feel that idle vein returning upon me, I presently subside into my proper element of prose, remembering those eluding nereids, and that inauspicious inland landing. VALENTINE'S DAY. HAIL to thy returning festival, old Bishop Valentine ! Great is thy name in the rubric, thou venerable Arch- flamen of Hymen ! Immortal Go-between ; who and vraaz manner of person art thou ? Art thou but a name, typU fying the restless principle which impels poor humans to seek perfection in union? or wert thou indeed a mortal prelate, with thy tippet and thy rochet, thy apron on, and decent lawn sleeves ? Mysterious personage ! Like unto thee, assuredly, there is no other mitred father in the calendar ; not Jerome, nor Ambrose, nor Cyril; nor the consigner of undipt infants to eternal torments, Austin, whom all mothers hate ; nor he who hated all mothers, Origen ; nor 88 VALENTINE'S DAY. Bishop Bull, nor Archbishop Parker, nor Whitgift. Thou comest attended with thousands and ten thousands of little Loves, and the air is Brush'd with tlie hiss of rustling wings. Singing Cupids are thy choristers and thy precentors ; and instead of the crosier, the mystical arrow is borne before thee. In other words, this is the day on which those charming little missives, ycleped Valentines, c-ross and intercross each other at every street and turning. The weary and all for- spent twopenny postman sinks beneath a load of delicate embarrassments, not his own. It is scarcely credible to what extent this ephemeral courtship is carried on in this loving town, to the great enrichment of porters, and detri- ment of knockers and bell -wires. In these little visual interpretations, no emblem is so common as the heart, — that little three-cornered exponent of all our hopes and fears, — the bestuck and bleeding heart ; it is twisted and tortvired into more allegories and affectations than an opera- hat. AYhat authority we have in history or mythology for placing the headqiiarters and metropolis of god Cupid in this anatomical seat rather than in any other, is not very clear ; but we have got it, and it will serve as well as any other. Else we might easily imagine, upon some other system which might have prevailed for anything which our pathology knows to the contrary, a lover addressing his mis- tress, in perfect simplicity of feeling, " Madam, my liver and fortune are entirely at your disposal;" or putting a delicate question, " Amanda, have you a midriff to bestow ?" But custom has settled these things, and awarded the seat of sentiment to the aforesaid triangle, while its less for- tunate neighbours wait at animal and anatomical distance. Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all rural sounds, exceed in interest a JcnocJc at the door. It " gives a very echo to the throne where hope is seated." But its issues seldom answer to this oracle within. It is so seldom that just the person we want to see comes. But of all the clamorous visitations the welcomest in expecta- VALENTINES BAY 89 tion is the sound that ushers in, or seems to usher in, a Valentine. As the raven himself was hoarse that announced the fatal entrance of Duncan, so the knock of the postman on this day is light, airy, confident, and befitting one that hringeth good tidings. It is less mechanical than on other days; you will say, "That is not the post, I am sure." Visions of Love, of Cupids, of Hymens ! — delightful eternal commonplaces, which " having been will always be ;" which no school-boy nor school-man can write away ; having yoiir irreversible throne in the fancy and affections — what are yonr transports, when the happy maiden, open- ing with careful finger, careful not to break the emblematic seal, bursts upon the sight of some well-designed allegory, some tj^pe, some youthful fancy, not without verses — Lovers all, A madrigal, or some such devise, not over-abundant in sense — ^young Love disclaims it, — and not quite silly — something between wind and water, a chorus where the sheep might almost join the shepherd, as they did, or as I apprehend they did, in Arcadia. All Valentines are not foolish ; and I shall not easily forget thine, my kind friend (if I may have leave to call you so) E. B . E. B. lived opposite a young maiden whom he had often seen, unseen, from his parlour window in C e Street. She was all joyousness and innocence, and just of an age to enjoy receiving a Valentine, and just of a temper to bear the disappointment of missing one with good humour. E. B. is an artist of no common powers; in the fancy parts of designing, perhaps inferior to none ; his name is known at the bottom of many a well-executed vignette in the way of his profession, but no further ; for E. B. is modest, and the world meets nobody half way. E. B. meditated how he could repay this young maiden for many a favour which she had done him unknown; for when a kindly face greets us, though but passing by, and never knows iis again, nor we it, we should feel it as au oblio;ation : and E. B. did. This arood artist set himself at 90 VALENTINE'S DAY. work to please the damsel. It was just before Valentine's day tliree years since. He wrought, unseen and unsus- pecied, a wondrous work. We need not say it was on the finest gilt paper with borders — full, not of common hearts and heartless allegory, but all the prettiest stories of love from Ovid, and older poets than Ovid (for E, B. is a scholar). There was Pyramus and Thisbe, and be sure Dido was not forgot, nor Hero and Leander, and swans more than sang in Cayster, with mottoes and fanciful devices, such as be- seemed — a work, in sbort, of magic. Iris dipt the woof. This on Valentine's eve he commended to the all-swallow- ing indiscriminate orifice (0 ignoble trust !) of the common post ; but the humble medium did its duty, and from his watchful stand the next morning he saw the cheerful messenger knock, and by-and-by the pi'ocious charge deli- vered. He saw, unseen, the happy girl unfold the Valen- tine, dance about, clap her hands, as one after one the pretty emblems unfolded themselves. She danced about, not with light love, or foolish expectations, for she had no lover ; or, if she had, none she knew that could have created those bright images which delighted her. It was more like some fairy present ; a God-send, as our familiarly pious ancestors termed a benefit received where the bene- factor was unknown. It would do her no harm. It would do ber good for ever after. It is good to love the unknown. I only give this as a specimen of E. B. and his modest way of doing a concealed kindness. Good morrow to my Valentine, sings poor Ophelia ; and no better wish, but with, better auspices, we wish to all faithful lovers, who are not too wise to despise old legends, but are content to rank themselves humble diocesans of old Bishop Valentine and his true cluirch. 91 MY EELATIONS. AM arrived at that point of life at whicla a nian may account it a blessing, as it is a singularity, if he have either of his parents surviving. I have not that felicity — and sometimes think feelingly of a passage in " Browne's Christian Morals," where he speaks of a man that hath lived sixty or seventy years in the world. " In such a compass of time," he says, " a man may have a close apprehension what it is to be forgotten, when he hath lived to find none who could remember his father, or scarcely the friends of his youth, and may sensibly see with what a face in no long time Obliviox will look upon himself." I had an aunt, a dear and good one. She was one whom single blessedness had soured to the world. She often used to say, that I was the only thing in it which she loved ; and, when she thought I was quitting it, she grieved over me with mother's tears. A partiality quite so exclusive my reason cannot altogether approve. She was from morning till night poring over good books and devo- tional exercises. Her favourite volumes were, " Thomas a Kempis," in Stanhope's translation ; and a Eoman Catholic Prayer Book, with the matins and complines regularl}^ set down — terms which I was at that time too young to understand. She persisted in reading them, although ad- monished daily concerning their Papistical tendency ; and went to church every Sabbath, as a good Protestant should do. These were the only books she studied ; though, 1 think at one period of her life, she told me, she had read with great satisfaction the " Adventures of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman." Finding the door of the chapel in Essex Street open one day — it was in the infancy of that heresy — she went in, liked the sermon, and the manner of worship, and frequented it at intervals for some time after. She came not for doctrinal points, and never missed them. With some little asperities in her constitution, which I have above hinted at, she was a steadfast, friendly being, and a fine old Christian. She was a woman of strong sense^ 02 MY UELATIOKS. and a shrewd mind — extraoixlinaiy at a repartee ; one of the few occasions of her breaking silence — else she did not much value wit. The only secular employment 1 remem- her to have seen her engaged in, was the splitting of French beans, and dropping them into a china basin of fair water. The odour of those tender vegetables to this day comes back u]3on my senses, redolent of soothing recollections. Certainly it is the most delicate of culinary operations. Male aunts, as somebody calls them, I had none — to re- member. By the uncle's side I may be said to have been born an orphan. Brother, or sister, I never had any — to know them. A sister, I think, that should have been Elizabeth, died in both our infancies. What a comfort, or what a care, may I not have missed in her ! — But I have cousins sprinkted about in Hertfordshire — besides two, with whom I have been all my life in habits of the closest inti- macy, and whom I may term cousins par excellence. These are James and Bridget Elia. They are older than myself by twelve, and ten, years ; and neither of them seems dis- posed, in matters of advice and guidance, to waive any of the prerogatives which primogeniture confers. May they continue still in the same mind ; and when they shall be seventy-five, and seventy-three, years old (I cannot spare them sooner), persist in treating me in my grand climac- teric precisely as a stripling, or younger brother ! James is an inexplicable cousin. Nature hath her uni- ties, which not every critic can penetrate ; or, if we feel, we cannot explain them. The i:)en of Yorick, and of none .since his, could have drawn J. E. entire — those fine Shan- dean lights and shades, which make up his story. I must limp after in my poor antithetical manner, as the fates have given me grace and talent. J. E. then — to the eye of a common observer at least — seemeth made up of contra- dictor}' principles. The genuine child of impulse, the frigid philosoiDher of prudence — the phlegm of my cousin's doc- trine, is invariably at war with his temperament, which is high sanguine. With always some fire-new project in his brain, J. E. is the systematic opponent of innovation, and MY RELATIONS. 9a crier down of everything that has not stood the test of age and experiment. With a hundred fine notions cliasing one another hourly in his fancy, he is startled at the least approach to the romantic in others ; and, determined by his own sense in everything, commends you to the guidance of common sense on all occasions. — With a touch of the eccentric in all which he does or says, he is only anxious that ijou should not commit yourself by doing anything, absurd or singular. On my once letting slip at table, that I was not fond of a certain popular dish, he begged me at any rate not to say so — for the world would think me mad. He disguises a passionate fondness for w^orks of high art (whereof he hath amassed a choice collection), under the pretext of buying only to sell again — that his enthusiasm may give no encouragement to yours. Yet, if it were so, why does that piece of tender, pastoral Domenichino hang still by his wall ? — is the ball of his sight much more dear to him ? — or what picture-dealer can talk like him ? Whereas mankind in general are observed to warp their speculative conclusions to the bent of their individual humours, Ms theories are sure to be in diametrical opposi- tion to his constitution. He is courageous as Charles of Sweden, upon instinct ; chary of his person upon principle, as a travelling Quaker. He has been preaching up to me, all my life, the doctrine of bowing to the gi'eat^the neces- sity of forms, and manner, to a man's getting on in the world. He himself never aims at either, that I can dis- cover, — and has a spirit that would stand upright in the presence of the Cham of Tartary. It is pleasant to hear him discourse of patience — extolling it as the truest wisdom — and to see him during the last seven minutes that his dinner is getting ready. Nature never ran up in her haste a more restless piece of workmanship than when she moulded this impetuous cousin — and Art never turned out a more elaborate orator than he can display himself to be, upon his favourite topic of the advantages of quiet and con- tentedness in the state, whatever it be, that we are placed in. He is triumphant on this theme, when he has you safe in one of those short stages that ply for the western road. ■94 MY llELATIONS. in a very obstructing manner, at tlie foot of Jobn Murray's street — where you get in when it is empty, and are ex- l)ected to wait till the vehicle hath completed her just freight — a trying three quarters of an hour to some people. He wonders at your fidgetiness, — "where could we be better than we are, thus sitting, thus consulting f — " prefers, for his part, a state of rest to locomotion," — with an eye all the while upon the coachman, — till at length, waxing out of all patience, at your want of it, he breaks out into a pathetic remonstrance at the fellow for detaining us so long over the time which he had professed, and declares peremptorily, that " the gentleman in the coach is deter- mined to get out, if he does not drive on that instant." Very quick at inventing an argument, or detecting a pophistry, he is incapable of attending you in any chain of arguing. Indeed, he makes wild work with logic ; and seems to jump at most admirable conclusions by some process not at all akin to it. Consonantly enough to this, he hath been heard to deny, upon certain occasions, that there exists such a faculty at all in man as reason ; and wondereth how man came first to have a conceit of it — enforcing his negation with all the might of reasoning he is master of. He has some speculative notions against laughter, and will maintain that laughing is not natural to him — when per- adventure the next moment his lungs shall crow like chanticleer. He says some of the best things in the world, and declareth that wit is his aversion. It was he who said, upon seeing the Eton boys at play in their grounds — What a pity to tlnnh that these fine ingenuous lads in a few years will all he changed into frivolous 3Iemhers of Parliament ! His youth was fiery, glowing, tempestuous — and in age he discovereth no symptom of cooling. This is that which I admire in him. I hate people who meet Time half way. I am for no compromise with that inevitable spoiler. "While he lives, J. E. will take his swing. — It does me good, as I walk towards the street of my daily avocation, on some fine May morning, to meet him march- ing in a quite opposite direction, with a jolly handsome presence, and shining sanguine fece, that indicates some MY RELATIONS. 95 purchase in his eye — a Claude — or a HoLbima — for much of his enviable leisure is consumed at Christie's and Phillips's — or where not, to pick up pictures, and such gauds. On these occasions he mostly stoppeth me, to read a short lecture on the advantage a person like me possesses above himself, in having his time occupied with business which he must do — assureth me that he often feels it hang heavy on his hands — wishes he had fewer holidays — and goes off — Westward Ho ! — chanting a tune, to Pall Mall — perfectly convinced that he has convinced me — while I proceed in my opposite direction tuneless. It is pleasant, again, to see this Professor of Indifference doing the honours of his new purchase, when he has fairly housed it. You must view it in every light, till he has found the best — placing it at this distance, and at that, but always suiting the focus of your sight to his own. You must spy at it through your fingers, to catch the aerial perspective — though you assure him that to you the land- scape shows much more agreeable without that artifice. Woe be to the luckless wight who does not only not respond to his rapture, but who should drop an unseasonable inti- mation of preferring one of his anterior bargains to the jDresent! — The last is always his best hit — his "Cynthia of the minute." — Alas ! how many a mild Madonna have I known to come in — a Eaphael ! — keep its ascendancy for a few brief moons — then, after cei'tain intermedial degrada- tions, from the front drawing-room to the back galler}-, thence to the dark parlour, — adopted in turn by each of the Carracci, under successive lowering ascriptions of filia- tion, mildly breaking its fall — consigned to the oblivious lumber-room, go out at last a Lucca Giordano, or plain Carlo Maratti ! — which things when I beheld — musing upon the chances and mutabilities of fate below hath mad© me to reflect upon the altered condition of great personages, or that woeful Queen of Eichard the Second — set forth in pomp, She came adorned hither like sweet May ; Sent back hke Hallowmass or shortest day. With great love for you, J. E. hath but a limited sym- S6 MY RELATIONS. pathy witli wliat you feel or do. He lives in a world of ]iis own, and makes slender guesses at what passes in your mind. He never pierces the marrow of your habits. He Avill tell an old-established play-goer, that Mr. Such-a-one, of So-and-so (naming one of the theatres), is a very lively comedian — as a piece of news ! He advertised me but the other day of some pleasant green lanes which he had found out for me, Jcnowing me to he a great waiter, in my own immediate vicinity — who have haunted the identical spot any time these twenty years ! — He has not much respect for that class of feelings which goes by the name of senti- mental. He applies the definition of real evil to bodily suiierings exclusively — and rejecteth all others as imagi- nary. He is aifected by the sight, or the hare supposition, uf a creature in pain, to a degi'ee which I have never witnessed out of womankind. A constitutional acuteness lO this class of sufferings may in part account for this. The animal tribe in particular he taketh under his especial protection. A broken-winded or spur-galled horse is sure to find an advocate in him. An over-loaded ass is his client for ever. He is the apostle to the brute kind — the never-failing friend of those who have none to care for them. The contemplation of a lobster boiled, or eels skinned alive, will wring him so, that " all for pity he could die." It will take the savour from his palate, and the rest from his pillow, for days and nights. With the intense feeling of Thomas Clarkson, he wanted only the steadiness of pursuit, and unity of purpose, of that " tnie yoke-fellow with Time," to have effected as much for the Animal as he hath done for the Negro Creation. But my uncontrollable cousin is but imperfectly formed for pur- poses which demand co-operation. He cannot wait. His amelioration-plans must he ripened in a day. For this reason he has cut but an equivocal figure in benevolent societies, and combinations for the alleviation of human sufferings. His zeal constantly makes him to outrun, and put out, his coadjutors. He thinks of relieving, — while they think of debating. He was black-balled out of a society for the Eelief of * * * * * MACKERY END, IN IIEETFORDSJIIEE. 97 because tlie fervour of Iiis humanity toiled beyond iho formal apprehension and creeping processes of his asso- ciates. 1 shall always consider this distinction as a patent of nobility in the Elia family ! Do I mention these seeming inconsistencies to smile at, or upbraid, my unique cousin ? Marry, heaven, and all good manners, and the tmderstanding that should be be- tween kinsfolk, forbid ! — With all the strangenesses of this strangest of the Ellas — I would not have him in one jot or tittle other than he is ; neither would I barter or exchange my wild kinsman for the most exact, regular, and every way consistent kinsman breathing. In my next, reader, I may perhaps give yon some account of my cousin Bridget — if you ai'e not already sur- feited with cousins — and take you by the hand, if you are willing to go with us, on an excursion which we made a summer or two since, in search of more cousins — Through the gi'oen plains of pleasant Hertfordshire. MACKEKY END, IN HERTFOEDSHIKE. BRIDGET ELIA has been my housekeeper for many a long year. I have obligations to Bridget, extending beyond the period of memor3^ We house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness ; with such tolerable comfort, ujion the whole, that I, for one, find in my- self no sort of disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash king's ofifsj)ring, to bewail my celibacy. We agree pretty well in our tastes and habits — yet so, as " with a difference." We are generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings — as it should be among near relations. Our sympathies are rather understood than expressed ; and once, upon my dissembling a tone in my voice more kind than ordinary, my cousin burst into tears, and complained that I was altered. We are both great readers in different directions. While I am hanging over (for the thousandth time) some passage in old Burton, or one of his strange Q 98 MACKERY END IN HEBTFORDSHIBE. contemporaries, sbe is abstracted in some modern tale or adventure, whereof our common reading-table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies. Karrative teases me. I have little concern in the progress of events. She must have a stor}^ — well, ill, or indiiferently told — so there be life stirring in it, and plenty of good or evil accidents. The fluctuations of fortune in fiction — and almost in real life — have ceased to interest, or operate but dullj^ upon me. Out-of-the-way humours and opinions — heads with some diverting twist in them — the oddities of authorship, please me most. My cousin has a native disrelish of anything that sounds odd or bizarre. Nothing goes down with her that is quaint, irregular, or out of the road of common sympathy. She " holds Nature more clever." I can pardon her blindness to the beautiful obliquities of the Eeligio Medici ; but she must apologize to me for certain disre- sj^ectful insinuations, which she has been pleased to throw out latterly, touching the intellectuals of a dear favourite of mine, of the last century but one — the thrice noble, chaste, and virtuous, but again somewhat fantastical and original brained, generous Margaret Newcastle. It has been the lot of my cousin, oftener perhaps than I could have wished, to have had for her associates and mine, free-thinkers — leaders, and disciples, of novel philosophies and systems ; but she neither wrangles with, nor accepts, their opinions. That which was good and venerable to her, when a child, retains its aiithority over her mind still. She never juggles or plays tricks with her understanding. We are both of us inclined to be a little too positive ; and I have observed the result of oTir disjDutes to be almost uniformly this — that in matters of fact, dates, and circum- stances, it turns out that I was in the right, and my cousin in the wrong. But where we have differed upon moral points ; upon something proper to be done, or let alone ; whatever heat of opposition or steadiness of conviction I set out with, I am sure always, in the long-run, to be brought over to her way of thinking. I must touch upon the foibles of my kinswoman with a gentle hand, for Bridget does not like to be told of hor M ACKER Y END, IN UEBTFOEDSEIBE. 93 faults. She hath, an awkward trick (to say no worse of it\ of reading in company : at which times she will answer yes or no to a question, Avithout fully understanding its purport — which is provoking, and derogatory in the highest degree to the dignity of the putter of the said question. Her presence of mind is equal to the most pressing trials of life, but will sometimes desert her upon trifling occasions. When the purpose requires it, and is a thing of moment, she can speak to it greatly ; but in matters which are not stuff of the conscience, she hath been known sometimes to let slip a word less seasonably. Her education in youth was not much attended to ; and she happily missed all that train of female garniture which passeth b}'^ the name of accomplishments. She was tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious closet of good old English reading, without much selection or prohibition, and browsed at w'ill upon that fair and wholesome pas- turage. Had I twenty girls, they should be brought upj exactly in this fashion. I know not w^hether their chance in wedlock might not be diminished by it, but I can answer* for it that it makes (if the worst come to the worst) most incomparable old maids. In a season of distress, she is the tiTiest comforter ; but in the teasing accidents and minor perplexities, which do not call out the idll to meet them, she sometimes maketli matters worse by an excess of participation. If she does not always divide your trouble, upon the pleasanter occa- sions of life she is sure always to treble your satisfaction. She is excellent to be at a play with, or upon a visit; but best, when she goes a journey with you. We made an excursion together a few summers since into Hertfordshire, to beat up the quarters of some of our less-known relations in that fine corn countrj'. The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End, or Mackarel End, as it is spelt, perhaps more propserl}-, in some old maps of Hertfordshire ; a farm-house, — delight- fully situated w-ithin a gentle walk from Wheathampstead.. I can just remember having been there, on a visit to a great-aunt, when I was a child, under the care of Bridget ; h2 1.09 MACKERY END, IN HERTFOBDSEIRE. ■vvho, as I have said, is older than mj-self hy some ten j'ears, I wish that I coukl throAV into a heap the remainder of our joint existences, that we might share them in equal division. But that is impossible. The house was at that time in the occupation of a substantial yeoman, who had married my grandmother's sister. His name was Gladmau. My grandmother was a Bruton, married to a Field. The Gladmans and the Brutons are still flourishing in that part of the county, but the Fields are almost extinct. More than forty years had elapsed since the visit I speak of ; and, for the greater portion of that period, we had lost sight of the other two branches also. Who or what sort of persons inherited Mackery End— -kindred or strange folk — Ave were afraid almost to conjecture, but determined some day to explore. By somewhat a circuitous route, taking the noble park at Luton in our way from St. Albans, we arrived at the spot of our anxious curiosity about noon. The sight of the old farm-house, though every trace of it was effaced from my recollections, aflected me with a pleasure which I had not exj)erienced for many a year. For though I had forgotten it, lue had never forgotten being there together, and we liad been talking about Mackery End all our lives, till memory on my part became mocked with a phantom of itself, and I thought I knew the aspect of a place which, when present, how unlike it was to that which I had co))jured up so many times instead of it ! Still the air breathed balmily about it ; the season was in the " heart of June," and I could say with the poet, But thou, that didst appear so fair To fond imagination, Dost rival in the light of day Her delicate creation ! Bridget's was more a waking bliss than mine, for she *>asily remembered her old acquaintance again — some altered features, of course, a little grudged at. At first, indeed, she was ready to disbelieve for joy ; but the scene «oon re-confirmed itself in her affections — and she traversed svery out]30st of the old mansion, to the" wood-house, the MACKEhY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE. 101 orchard, tlie place where the pigeon-house had stood (honso and birds were alike flown) — with a breathless impatienco of recognition, which was more pardonable perhaps than decorous at the age of fifty odd. But Bridget in somo things is behind her years. The only thing left was to get into the house — and that was a difficulty wdiich to me singly would have been insur- mountable ; for I am terribly shy in making myself known to strangers and out-of-date kinsfolk. Love, stronger than scruple, winged my cousin in without me ; but she soon i-cturned with a creature that might have sat to a sculptor for the image of Welcome. It was the yoiingest of tho Gladmans ; who, by marriage with a Bmton, had become mistress of the old mansion. A comely brood ai'e the Bru- tons. Six of them, females, were noted as the handsomest young women in the county. But this adopted Bniton, in my mind, was better than they all — more comely. She was born too late to have remembered me. She ju.st recollected in early life to have had her cousin Bridget once pointed out to her, climbing a stile. But the name of kindred and of cousinship was enough. Those slender ties, that prove slight as gossamer in the rending atmosphere of a metro- polis, bind faster, as we found it, in hearty, homely, loving Hertfordshire. In five minutes we were as thoroughly acquainted as if we had been bom and bred up together ; were familiar, even to the calling each other by our Christian names. So Christians should call one another. To have seen Bridget and her — it was like the meeting ol the two scriptural cousins ! There was a grace and dignity, an amplitude of form and stature, answering to her mind, in this farmer's wife, which would have shined in a palace ' — or so we thought it. We were made welcome by hus- band and wife equally — we, and our friend that was with lis. — I had almost forgotten him — but B. F. will not so soon forget that meeting, if peradventure he shall read this on the far distant shores where the kangaroo haunts. Thr; fatted calf was made ready, or rather was already so, as it in anticipation of our coming ; and, after an appropriate glass of native -wine, never let me forget with what honest 102 MY FIRST FLAY. pride this hospitable cousin made us proceed to Whoat- liampstead, to introduce ns (as some new-found rarity) to her mother and sister Gladmans, who did indeed know some- thino- more of us, at a time when she almost knew nothing. — With what corresponding kindness we were received by them also — how Bridget's memory, exalted by the occasion, warmed into a thousand half-obliterated recollections of things and persons, to my utter astonishment, and her own — and to the astoimdment of B. F. who sat by, almost the only thing that was not a cousin thei'e, — old eifaced images of more than half-forgotten names and circum- stances still crowding back upon her, as words written in lemon come out tipon exposure to a friendly warmth, — when I forget all this, then may my country cousins forget me ; and Bridget no more remember, that in the days of weakling infancy I was her tender charge — as I liave been. her care in foolish manhood since — in those pretty pastoral walks, long ago, about Mackery End, in Hertfordshire. MY FIEST PLAY. T the north end of Cross-court there yet stands a portal^ ^\_ of some architectural pretensions, though reduced to humble use, serving at present for an entrance to a printing- oifice. This old door-way, if you are young, reader, you may not know was the identical pit entrance to old Drury — Garrick's Drury — all of it that is left. I never pass it without shaking some forty years from off my shoulders, recurring to the evening when I passed through it to see my first play. The afternoon had been wet, and the con- dition of our going (the elder folks and myself) was, that the rain should cease. AVith what a beating heart did I watch from the window the puddles, from the stillness of Avhich I was taught to prognosticate the desired cessation I I seem to remember the last spurt, and the glee with which I ran to announce it. MY FIUST PLAY. 103 "We went with orders, wlaicli my godfather F. had sent us. He kept the oil shop (now Davies's) at, the corner of Featherstone-bniklings, in Holborn. F. was a tall grave person, lofty in speech, and had pretensions above his rank. He associated in those days with John rainier, the come- dian, whose gait and bearing he seemed to copy ; if John (which is quite as likely) did not rather borrow somewhat of his manner from my godfather. He was also known to and visited by Sheridan. It was to his house in Holborn that young Brinsley brought his first wife on her elope- ment with him from a boarding-school at Bath — the beau- tiful Maria Linley. My parents were present (over a quadrille table) when he arrived in the evening with his harmonious charge. From either of these connections it may be inferred that my godfather could command an order for the then Drury-lane theatre at pleasure — and, indeed, a pretty liberal issue of those cheap billets, in Brinsley's easy autograph, I have heard him say was the sole remuneration which he had received for many years' nightly illumination of the orchestra and various avenues of that theatre — and he was content it should be so. The honour of Sheridan's familiarity — or supposed familiarity — was better to my godfather than money. F. was the most gentlemanly of oilmen ; grandiloquent, yet courteous. His delivery of the commonest matters of fact was Ciceronian, He had two Latin words almost constantly in his mouth (how odd sounds Latin from an oilman's lips !), which my better knowledge since has enabled mo to correct. In strict pronunciation they should have been sounded vice versa — but in those young- years they impressed mo with more awe than they would now do, read aright from Seneca or Varro — in hiss own peculiar pronunciation, monosyllabically elaborated, or Anglicised, into something like verse verse. 'By an im- posing manner, and the help of these distorted syllables, he climbed (but that was little) to the highest parochial honours which St. Andrew's has to bestow. He is dead — and thus much I thought due to his memovyf both for my first orders (little wondrous talismans !^ 104 MY FIRST FLAY. sliglit kej' s, and insigBificant to out-ward bight, "but opening to me more than Arabian paradises !) and, moreover, that, by his testamentary beneficence I came into possession of the only landed property which I could ever call my own — situate near the road- way village of pleasant Pucke- ridge, in Hertfordshire. AVhen I journeyed do%\Ti to take possession, and planted foot on my own ground, the stately habits of the donor descended upon me, and I strode (shall I confess the vanity ?) with larger paces over my allotment of thi-ee quarters of an acre, with its commodious mansion in the midst, with the feeling of an English freeholder that all betwixt sky and centre was my own. The estate nas passed into more prudent hands, and nothing but an agrarian can restore it. In those days were pit orders. Beshrew the uncomfort- able manager who abolished them ! — with one of these we went. I remember the waiting at the dooi" — not that which is left— but between that and an inner door in shelter — when shall I be such an expectant again ! — with the cry of nonpareils, an indispensable play-house accompaniment in those days. As near as I can recollect, the fashionable pronunciation of the theatrical fruiteresses then was, " Chase some oranges, chase some numparels, chase a bill of the play ;" — chase jjro chuse. But when we got in, and I beheld the green curtain that veiled a heaven to my imagination, which was soon to be disclosed — the breathless anticipations I endured ! I had seen something like it in the plate prefixed to Troilus and Cressida, in Eowe's Shakspeare — the tent scene with Diomede — and a sight of that plate can always bring back in a measure the feeling of that evening. — The boxes at that time, full of well-dressed women of quality, projected over the pit; and the pilasters reaching down were adorned with a glistening substance (I know not what) under glass (as it seemed), resembling — a homely fancy — but I judged it to be sugar- candy — yet to my raised imagination, divested of its homelier qualities, it appeared a glorified candy ! — The crchesti-a liglits at length rose, those " fiiir Auroras !" Once the bell sounded. It was to ring out yet once again— and. MY FIEST PLAY. 105 incapable of the anticipation, I reposed my shut eyes in a «ort of resignation upon the maternal lap. It rang the second time. The curtain drew up — I was not past six years old, and the play was Artaxerxes ! I had dabbled a little in the Universal History — the ancient part of it — and here was the court of Persia. — It was being admitted to a sight of the past. I took no proper interest in the action going on, for I understood not its import — but I heard the word Darius, and I was in the ]uidst of Daniel. All feeling was absorbed in vision. Oorgeous vests, gardens, palaces, princesses, passed before me. I knew not players. I was in Persepolis for the time, and the burning idol of their devotion almost converted me into a worshipper. I was awe-struck, and believed those significations to be something more than elemental fires. It was all enchantment and a dream. No such pleasure lias since visited me but in dreams. — Harlequin's invasion followed; where, I remember, the transformation of the magistrates into reverend beldams seemed to me a piece of grave historic justice, and the tailor carrying his own head to be as sober a verity as the legend of St. Denys. The next play to which I was taken was the Lady of the Manor, of which, with the exception of some scenery, very faint traces are left in my memory. It was followed by a pantomime, called Lun's Ghost — a satiric touch, I appre- hend, upon Eich, not long since dead — but to my appre- hension (too sincere for satire), Lun was as remote a piece of antiquity as Ltid — the father of a line of Harlequins — ■ transmitting his dagger of lath (the wooden sceptre) through countless ages. I saw the primeval Motley come from his silent tomb in a ghastly vest of white patchwork, like the apparition of a dead rainbow. So Harlequins (thought 1) look when they are dead. My third play followed in quick succession. It was the Way of the World. I think I must have sat at it as grave as a judge ; for I remember the hysteric affectations of good Lady Wishfort affected me like some solemn tragic passion. Eobinson Crusoe followed ; in which Crusoe, man Friday, and the parrot, were as good and authentic as in the 106 MY FIRST PLAY. story. — The clownery and pantaloonery of these panto- mimes have clean passed out of my head. I helieve, I no more laughed at them, than at the same age I should have been disposed to laugh at the grotesque Gothic heads (seeming to mo then replete with devout meaning) that gape, and grin, in stone around the inside of the old Eound Church (my church) of the Templars. I saw these plays in the season 1781-2, when I was from six to seven years old. After the intervention of six or seven other years (for at school all play-going was inhi- hited) I again entered the doors of a theatre. That old Artaxerxes evening had never done ringing in my fancy. I expected the same feelings to come again with the same occasioii. But we differ from ourselves less at sixty and fcixteen, than the latter does from six. In that interval what had I not lost ! At the first period I knew nothing, understood nothing, discriminated nothing. I felt all, loved all, wondered all — Was uourislied, I could not tell liow — I had left the temple a devotee, and was returned a rationalist. The same tilings were there materially ; hut the emblem, the reference, was gone ! — The green curtain was no longer a veil, drawn between two worlds, the xiu- folding of which was to bring back past ages, to present a " roj'al ghost," — but a certain quantity of green baize, which was to separate the audience for a given time from certain of their fellow-men who were to come forward and pretend those parts. The lights — the orchestra lights — came up u clumsy machinery. The first ring, and the second ring, was now but a trick of the prompter's bell — which had been, like the note of the cuckoo, a phantom of a voice, no hand seen or guessed at which ministered to its warning. The actors were men and women painted. I thought the fault was in them ; but it was in myself, and the alteration v.'hich those many centuries — of six short twelvemonths — had wj-ought in me. — Perhaps it was fortunate for mo that the play of the evening was but an indifferent comedy, as it gave me time to crop some unreasonable expectations, which MODERN GALLANTRY. 107 miglit have interfered witli the genuine emotions with which I was soon after enabled to enter upon the first appearance to me of Mrs. Siddons in IsabeHa. Comparison and retrospection soon yiekled to the present atti'action of the scene ; and the theatre became to me, npon a new stock, the most delightful of recreations. MODEEN GALLAXTEY. IN comparing modern with ancient manners, we are pleased to compliment ourselves upon the point of gal- lantry ; a certain obsequiousness, or deferential respect, which we are supposed to pay to females, as females. I shall believe that this principle actuates our condiict, when I can forget, that in the nineteenth century of the era from which wo date our civility, we are but just begin- ning to leave oif the very frequent practice of whipping females in public, in common with the coarsest male offenders. I shall believe it to be influential, when I can shut my eyes to the fact, that in England women arc still occa- sionally — hanged. I shall believe in it, when actresses are no longer subject to be hissed off a stage by gentlemen. I shall believe in it, when Dorimant hands a fish-wif& across the kennel ; or assists the apple- woman to pick up her wandering fruit, which some unlucky dray has just dissipated. I shall believe in it, when the Dorimants in humblei life, who would be thought in their way notable adepts iu this refinement, shall act iipon it in places where they are not known, or think themselves not observed — when I shall see the traveller for some rich tradesman part with his ad- mired box-coat, to sj^read it over the defenceless shoulders of the poor woman, who is passing to her parish on the roof of tl:.e same stage-coach with him, drenched in the rain — - 108 MODERN GALLANTRY. "when I shall no longer see a woman standing np in the pit of a London theatre, till she is sick and faint with the exer- tion, with men abont her, seated at their ease, and jeering at her distress ; till one, that seems to have more manners or conscience than the rest, significantly declares " she should he welcome to his seat, if she were a little younger and handsomer." Place this dapper warehouseman, or that rider, in a circle of their own female acquaintance, and you shall confess you have not seen a politer-bred man in Lothbury. Lastl}', I shall begin to believe that there is some such principle influencing our conduct, when more than one-half of the drudgery and coarse servitude of the world shall cease to be performed by women. Until that day comes, I shall never believe this boasted 2")oint to be anything more than a conventional fiction ; a pageant got up between the sexes, in a certain rank, and at a certain time of life, in which both find their account equally. I shall be even disposed to rank it among the salutary fictions of life, when in polite circles I shall see the same attentions paid to age as to j'outh, to homely features as to handsome, to coarse complexions as to clear— to the woman, as she is a vfoman, not as she is a beauty, a fortune, or a title. I shall believe it to be something more than a name, when a well-dressed gentleman in a well-dressed company can advert to the topic of female old age without exciting, and intending to excite, a sneer : — when the phrases "anti- quated virginity," and such a one has " overstood her mar- ket," pronounced in good company, shall raise immediate offence in man, or woman, that shall hear them spoken. Joseph Paice, of Bread-street-hill, merchant, and one of the Directors of the South Sea company — the same to whom Edwards, the Shakspeare commentator, has addressed a fine sonnet — was the only pattern of consistent gallantry I have met with. lie took me under his shelter at an early age, and bestowed some pains upon me. I owe to his precepts and example whatever there is of the man of business (and MODEBN GALLANTBY. 109< that is Bot uiiicli) in my composition. It was not his fault that I did not profit more. Though bred a Presbyterian, and brought up a merchant, he was the finest gentleman of his time. He had not one system of attention to females in the drawing-room, and another in the shop, or at the stall. I do not mean that he made no distinction. But he never lost sight of sex, or overlooked it in the casualties of a dis- advantageous situation. I have seen him stand bareheaded — smile if you please — to a poor servant-girl, while she has been inquiring of him the way to some street — in such a posture of unforced civility, as neither to embarrass her in the acceptance, nor himself in the offer, of it. He was no dangler, in the common ncceptation of the word, after women ; but he reverenced and upheld, in every form in which it came before him, womanhood. I have seen him — nay, smile not — tenderly escorting a market-woman, whom- he had encountered in a shower, exalting his umbrella over her poor basket of fruit, that it might receive no damage, with as much carefulness as if she had been a countess. To the reverend form of Female Eid he would yield the wall (though it were to an ancient beggar-woman) with more ceremony than we can afford to show our grandams. He was the Preux Chevalier of Age ; the Sir Calidore, or Sir Tristan, to those who have no Calidores or Tristans to defend them. The roses, that had long faded thence, still bloomed for him in those withered and yellow cheeks. He was never married, but in his youth he paid his addresses to the beautiful Susan Winstanlcy — old Win- •stanley's daughter of Clapton — who djdng in the early days of their courtship, confirmed in him the resolution of perpetual bachelorship. It was during their short court- ship, he told me, that he had been one day treating his mistress with a profusion of civil speeches — the common- gallantries — to which kind of thing she had hitherto mani- fested no repugnance — but in this instance with no effect. He could not obtain from her a decent acknowledgment in return. She rather seemed to resent his compliments. He could not set it down to caprice, for the lady had always shown herself above that littleness. When he ventured on- no MODERN GALLANTRY. tlie following day, finding her a little better humoured, to expostulate with her on her coldness of yesterdaj^ she con- fessed, with her usual frankness, that she had no sort of dislike to his attentions ; that she could even endure some high-flown compliments; that a young woman placed in her situation had a right to expect all sort of civil things said to her; that she hoped she could digest a dose of adulation, short of insincerity, with as little injury to her humility as most young women ; but that — a little before he had commenced his compliments — she had overheard him by accident, in rather rough language, rating a young woman, who had not brought home his cravats quite to the appointed time, and she thought to herself, " As I am Miss Susan Winstanley, and a yoiing lady — a reputed beauty, and known to be a fortune — I can have my choice of the finest speeches from the mouth of this very fine gentleman who is courting me — but if I had been poor Mary Such-a- one {naming ilie milliner), — and had failed of bringing home the cravats to the appointed hour — though perhaps I had sat up half the night to forward them — what sort of com- pliments should I have received then? — And my woman's pride came to my assistance ; and I thought, that if it ■were only to do me honour, a female, like myself, might have received handsomer usage ; and I was deteimined not to accept any fine speeches, to the compromise of that sex, the belonging to which was after all my strongest claim and title to them." I think the lady discovered both generosity, and a just "svay of thinking, in this rebuke which she gave her lover ; and I have sometimes imagined, tliat the uncommon strain of courtesy, which through life regulated the actions and behaviour of my friend towards all of womankind indiscri- minately, owed its happy origin to this seasonable lesson from the lips of his lamented mistress. I wish the whole female world would entertain the same notion of these things that Miss Winstanley showed. Then •we should see something of the spirit of consistent gal- lantry ; and no longer witness the anomaly of the same maa^a pattern of true politeness to a wife — of cold con- TRE OLD BENCHERS OF TEE INNER TEMPLE. Ill tempt, or rudeness, to a sister — the idolater of his female mistress — the disparager and despiser of his no less femalo aunt, or unfortunate — still female — maiden cousin. Just so much respect as a woman derogates from her own sex, in whatever condition placed — her hand-maid, or depen- dent — she deserves to Lave diminished from herself ou that score ; and probably will feel the diminution, when yoTith, and beauty, and advantages, not inseparable from sex, shall lose of their attraction. What a woman should demand of a man in courtship, or after it, is fu'st — respect for her as she is a woman; — and next to that — to be respected by him above all other women. But let her stand upon her female character as upon a foundation ; and let the attentions, incident to individual preference, be so many pretty additaments and ornaments — as many, and as fanciful, as you please — to that main structure. Let her first lesson be with sweet Susan Winstanley — to reverence her sex. THE OLD EENCIIEES OF THE INNER TEMPLE. WAS bom, and passed the first seven years of my life, in the Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its foun- tains, its river, I had almost said — for in those young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places ? — these are of my oldest recollections. I repeat, to this day, no verses to myself more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, than those of Spenser, where ho speaks of this spot : There ■when tliey came, ■wlierco.s those bricky towers. The which on TJiemmcs brode aged baoiv dotli ride, Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers, There whylome wout the Tciupler kuiglits to bide, Till they decayed through pride. Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis. ^^'hat a transition for a countryman visiting London for the first time — the passing from the crowded Strand or Fleet 112 THE OLD BENCHEBS OF TUE INNER TEMPLE. Sh-eet, by unexpected avenues, into its magnificent ample squares, its classic green recesses ! What a cheerful, liberal look hath that portion of it, which, from three sides, over- looks the greater garden ; that goodly pile Of building strong, albeit of Paper bight, confronting with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more fantastically-shrouded one, named of Harcourt, with the cheerful Crown-Office-row (place of my kindly engendrure), right opposite the stately stream, which washes the garden- foot with her yet scarcely trade-polluted waters, and seems but just weaned from her Twickenham Naiades ! a man would give something to have been born in such places. What a collegiate aspect has that fine Elizabethan hall, where the fountain plays, which I have made to rise and fall, how many times ! to the astoundment of the young xirchins, my contemporaries, who, not being able to guess at its recondite machinerj'-, were almost tempted to hail the wondrous work as magic ! What an antique air had the now almost eifaced sun-dials, with their moral inscrijotions, seeming coevals with that Time which they measured, and to take their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light ! How would the dark line steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to detect its movement, never catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrests of sleep ! Ah ! yet cloth beauty like a dial hand Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived ! What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous em- bowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dulness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like struc- ture and silent heart-language of the old dial ! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished ? If its business-use be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance. It spoke of mode- rate labours, of pleasures not protracted after sunset, of TEE OLD BENCEEBS OF TEE INNEB TEMPLE, ]]3 temperance, and good hours. It was the primitive clock, the horologe of the first world. Adam could scarce have missed it in Paradise. It was the measure appropriate for sweet plants and flowers to spring by, for the birds to apportion their silver warblings by, for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by. The shepherd "carved it out quaintly in the sun;" and, turning philosopher by the very occupation, provided it with mottoes more touching than tombstones. It was a pretty device of the gardener, recorded by Mai'vell, who, in the days of artificial gardening, made a dial out of herbs and flowers. I must quote his verses a little higher up, for they are full, as all his serious poetry was, of a witty delicacy. They will not come in awkwardly, I hope, in a talk of fountains and sun-diais. He is speaking of sweet garden scenes : — What ■wondrous life is this I lead ! Kipe apples drop about my head. The luscious clusters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their "u inc. The nectarine, and curious peach, Into my hands themselves do reach. Stumbling on melons, as I pass, Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass. Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less Withdraws into its happiness. The mind, that ocean, where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find ; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds and other seas : Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade. Here at the fountain's sliding foot. Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root, Casting the body's vest aside, ]\Iy soul into the boughs docs glide ; There, like a bird, it sits and sings, * Then whets and claps its silver wiugs, And, till prepared for longer flight. Waves in its plumes the various light How well the skilful gardener drew Of flowers and herbs, this dial new Where, from above, the milder sun Docs through a fragrant zodiac run ; 114 THE OLD BENCUERS OF THE II 128 GRACE BEFORE MEAT. savoury mess, and to find one quite tasteless and sapidless. Butter ill melted — that commonest of kitchen failures — puts me beside my tenor. — The author of the Eambler used to make inarticulate animal noises over a favourite food. Was this the music quite proper to be preceded b}^ the grace ? or would the pious man have done better to postpone his devotions to a season when the blessing might be contemplated with less perturbation ? I quarrel with no man's tastes, nor would set my thin face against those excellent things, in their way, jollity and feasting. But as these exercises, however laudable, have little in them of grace or gracefulness, a man should be sure, before he ventures so to grace them, that while he is pretending his devotions otherwhere, he is not secretly kissing his hand to some great fish — his Dagon — with a special con- secration of no ark but the fat tureen before him. Graces are the sweet preluding strains to the banquets of angels and children ; to the roots and severer repasts of the Chartreuse ; to the slender, but not slenderly acknow- ledged, refection of the poor and humble man : but at the heaped-up boards of the pampered and the luxurious they become of dissonant mood, less timed and tuned to the occasion, methinks, than the noise of those better befitting organs would be which children hear tales of, at Hog's Norton. We sit too long at our meals, or are too curious in the study of them, or too disordered in our application to them, or engross too great a portion of those good things (which should be common) to our share, to be able with any grace to say grace. To be thankful for what we grasp exceeding our proportion, is to add hypocrisy to injustice. A lurking sense of this truth is what makes the performance of this diity so cold and spiritless a service at most tables. In houses where the grace is as indispensable as the napkin, who has not seen that never-settled question arise, as to wlio shall say it? while the good man of the house and the visitor clergyman, or some other guest belike of next authority, from years or gravity, shall be bandj^ing about the office between them as a matter of compliment, each of them not unwilling to GEACE BEFORE MEAT. 129 fcliift the awkward burthen of an equivocal duty from Lis own shoulders ? I once drank tea in company with two Methodist di^dnes of different persuasions, whom it was my fortune to intro- duce to each other for the first time that evening. Before the first cup was handed round, one of these reverend gentlemen put it to the other, with all due solemnity, whether he chose to say anytliing. It seems it is the custom with some sectaries to jjut np a short prayer before this meal also. His reverend brother did not at first quite apprehend him, but upon an explanation, with little less importance he made answer that it was not a custom knoAvn in his church : in which courteous evasion the other acquiescing for good manners' sake, or in compliance with a weak brother, the sx;pplementary or tea grace was waived altogether. With what spirit might not Lucian have painted two priests, of his religion, playing into each other's hands the compliment of performing or omitting a sacrifice, — the hungry God meantime, doubtful of his incense, with expectant nostrils hovering over the two flamens, and (as between tAvo stools) going away in the end without his supper. A short form upon these occasions is felt to want re- verence ; a long one, I am afraid, cannot escape the charge of impertinence. I do not quite approve of the epigram- matic conciseness with which that equivocal wag (but my pleasant school-fellow) C. V. L., when importuned for a grace, used to inquire, first slyly leering down the table, " Is there no clergyman here ?" — significantly adding, *' Thank G — ." Nor do I think our old form at school quite pertinent, where we were used to preface our bald bread-and-cheese-suppers with a preamble, connecting with that humble blessing a recognition of benefits the most awful and overwhelming to the imagination which religion has to offer. Non tunc illis erat locus. 1 remember we were put to it to reconcile the phrase "good creatures," upon which the blessing rested, with the fare set before us, wilfully understanding that expression in a low and animal sense, — till some one recalled a legend, which told K 130 DREAM CniLDREN; A REVERIE. how, iu the golden days of Christ's, the young TTospitallei'S were wont to have smoking joints of roast meat upon their nightly boards, till some pious benefactor, commiserating the decencies, rather than the palates, of the children, c;om milted our flesh for garments, and gave us — horresco ref evens — trousers instead of mutton. DEE AM CHILDREN; A EEVEEIE. CHILDREN love to listen to stories about their elders, when tliey were children ; to stretch their imagination to the conception of a traditionary great-uncle, or grandame, whom they never saw. It was in this spirit that my little ones crept about me the other evening to hear about their great-gi'andmother Field, who lived in a great house in Nor- folk (a hundred times bigger than that in which they and papa lived) which had been the scene — so at least it was generally believed in that part of the country — of the tragic incidents which they had lately become familiar with from the ballad of the Children in the Wood. Certain it is that the whole story of the children and their cruel uncle was to be seen fairly carved out in wood upon the chimney- piece of the great hall, the whole story down to the Eobin Redbreasts ; till a foolish rich person pulled it down to set up a marble one of modern invention in its stead, with no story upon it. Here Alice put out one of her dear mother's looks, too tender to be called upbraiding. Then I went on to say, how religious and how good their great-grandmother Field was, how beloved and respected by everybody, though she was not indeed the mistress of this great house, but had only the charge of it (and yet in some respects she might "he said to be the mistress of it too) committed to her by the owner, who preferred living in a newer and more fashionable mansion which he had purchased somewhere in the adjoining county ; but still she lived in it in a manner as if it had been her own, and kept up the dignity DREAM CHILDREN; A REVERIE. 131 of the great house in a sort while she lived, which after- wards came to deca}', and was nearly pulled down, and all its old ornaments stripped and carried away to the owner's other house, where they were set up, and looked as awk- ward as if some one were to carry away the old toiubs they had seen lately at the Abbey, and stick them up in Lady C.'s tawdry gilt drawing-room. Here John smiled, as much as to say, " that would be foolish indeed." And then I told how, when she came to die, her funeral was attended by a concourse of all the poor, and some of the gentry too, of the neighbourhood for many miles round, to show their respect for her memory, because she had been such a good and religious woman ; so good indeed that she knew all the Psaltery by heart, ay, and a great part of the Testa- ment besides. Here little Alice spread her hands. Then I told what a tall, upright, graceful person their great- grandmother Field once was ; and how in her youth sho was esteemed the best dancer — here Alice's little right foot played an involuntary movement, till, upon my look- ing grave, it desisted — the best dancer, I was saying, in the county, till a cruel disease, called a cancer, came, and bowed her doMTi with pain ; but it could never bend her good spirits, or make them stoop, but they were still up- right, because she was so good and religious. Then I told how she was used to sleep by herself in a lone chamber of the great lone house ; and how she believed that an appa rition of two infants was to be seen at midnight gliding up and down the great staircase near where she slept, but sho said "those innocents would do her no harm;" and how frightened I used to be, though in those days I had my maid to sleep with me, because I was never half so good or religious as she — and 3-et I never saw the infants. Hero John expanded all his eyebrows and tried to look coura- geous. Then 1 told how good she was to all her grand- children, having us to the great house in the holjdays, where I in particular used to spend many hours by myself, in gazing upon the old busts of the twelve Ca3sarSj that hai^ been Emperors of Rome, till the old marble heads would seem to live again, or I to be turned into marble with K 2 132 BREAM CHILI BEN; A REVERIE. tliera ; how I never could be tired with roaming about that huge mansion, with its vast empty rooms, with their worn- out hangings, fluttering tapestry, and carved oaken panels, •with the gilding almost rubbed out — sometimes in the spacious old-fashioned gardens, which I had almost to myself, unless when now and then a solitary gardening man would cross me — and how the nectarines and peaches hung upon the walls, without my ever offering to pluck them, because they were forbidden fruit, unless now and then, — and because I had more pleasure in strolling about among the old melancholy-looking yew-trees, or the firs, and picking up the red berries, and the fir-apples, which were good for nothing but to look at — or in lying about upon the fresh grass with all the fine garden smells around me — or basking in the orangery, till I could almost fancy myself ripening too along with the oranges and the limes in that grateful warmth — or in watching the dace that darted to and fro in the fish-pond, at the bottom of the garden, with here and there a great sulky pike hanging- midway down the water in silent state, as if it mocked at their impertinent friskings, — I had more pleasure in these busy-idle diversions than in all the sweet flavours of peaches, nectarines, oranges, and such-liko common baits of children. Here John slyly deposited back upon the plate a bunch of grapes, which, not unobserved by Alice, he had meditated dividing with her, and both seemed willing to relinquish them for the present as irrelevant. Then, in somewhat a more heightened tone, I told how, though their great- grandmother Field loved all her grandchildren, yet in an especial manner she might be said to love their uncle, John L , because he was so handsome and spirited a youth, and a king to the rest of us ; and, instead of moping about in solitary corners, like some of us, he would mount the most mettlesome horse he could get, when but an imp no bigger than themselves, and make it carry him half over the county in a morning, and join the hunters when there were any out — and yet he loved the old great house and gardens too, but had too much spirit to bo always 2)ent up within their boimdavies — and how their uncle DBF AM CHILDREN; A REVERIE. 133 grew up to man's estate as "brave as he was handsome, to e in the Bench, or going to be hanged, which in reason 3Ught to abate something of your transport (i.e., at hearing he was well, &c.), or at least considerably to modify it. I am going to the play this evening, to have a laugh with Munden. You have no theatre, I think you told me, in your land of d d realities. You naturally lick your lips, and envy me my felicity. Think but a moment, and you will correct the hateful emotion. Why, it is Sunday morning with you, and 1823. This confusion of tenses, this grand solecism of tico presents, is in a degree common to all postage. But if I sent you word to Bath or Devizes, that I was expecting the aforesaid treat this evening, though at the moment you received the intelligence my full feast of fun would be over, yet there would be for a day or two after, as you would well know, a smack, a relish left upon my mental palate, which would give rational encouragement for you to foster a portion, at least, of the disagreeable passion, which it was in part my in- tention to produce. But ten months hence, your envy or your sympathy would be as useless as a passion spent upon the dead. Not only does truth, in these long intervals, un- essence herself, but (what is harder) one cannot venture a ci-ude fiction, for the fear that it may ripen into a truth upon the voyage. What a wild improbable banter I put upon you, some three years since, of AVill Weatherall 13G DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS. having married a servant-maid ! I remember gravely con- sulting you how we were to receive her — for Will's wife was in no case to he rejected ; and your no less serious replication in the matter; how tenderly you advised an abstemious introduction of literary topics before the lady, with a caution not to be too forward in bringing on the carpet matters more within the sphere of her intelligence ; your deliberate judgment, or rather wise suspension of sentence, how far jacks, and spits, and mops, could, with propriety, be introduced as subjects ; whether the conscious avoiding of all such matters in discourse would not have a worse look than the taking of them casually in our way; in what manner we should carry ourselves to our maid Becky, Mrs. William Weathcrall being by ; whether we should show more delicacy, and a truer sense of respect for Will's wife, by treating Becky with our customary chiding before her, or by an unusual deferential civility paid to Becky, as to a person of great worth, but thrown by the caprice of fate into a humble station. There were diffi- culties, I remember, on both sides, which you did me the favour to state with the precision of a lawyer, united to the tenderness of a friend. I laughed in my sleeve at your solemn pleadings, when lo ! while I was valuing myself upon this flam put upon you in New South Wales, the devil in England, jealous possibly of any lie-children not his own, or working after my copy, has actually instigated our friend (not three days since) to the commission of a matri- mony, which I had only conjured up for your diversion. William Weatherall has married Mrs. Cotterel's maid. But to take it in its truest sense, you will see, my dear F., that news from me must become history to you ; which I neither profess to write, nor indeed care much for reading. No person, imder a diviner, can, with any prospect of veracity, conduct a correspondence at such an arm's length. Two prophets, indeed, might thus interchange intelligence with effect ; the epoch of the writer (Habakkuk) falling in with the true present time of the receiver (Daniel) ; but then we arc no prophets. Then as to sentiment. It fares little better with DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS. l37 that. This kind of dish, ahovo all, requires to be served up hot, or sent off in. water-plates, that your friend may have it almost as warm as yourself. If it have time to cool, it is the most tasteless of all cold meats. I have ofteu smiled at a conceit of the late Lord C. It seems that travelling somewhere about Geneva, he came to some pretty green spot, or nook, where a willow, or something, hung so fantastically and invitingly over a stream — was it? — or a rock? — no matter — but the stillness and the repose, after a weary journey, 'tis likely, in a languid moment of his Lordship's hot, restless life, so took his fancy that he could imagine no place so proper, in the event of his death, to lay his bones in. This was all very natural and excusable as a sentiment, and shows his cha- i"acter in a very pleasing light. But when from a passing sentiment it came to be an act ; and when, by a positive testamentary disposal, his remains were actually carried all that way from England ; who was there, some desperate .sentimentalists excepted, that did not ask the question. Why could not his Lordship have found a spot as solitary, a nook as romantic, a tree as green and pendent, with a stream as emblematic to his purpose, in Surrey, in Dorset, or in Devon ? Conceive the sentiment boarded up, freighted, entered at the Custom House (startling the tide-waiters with the novelty), hoisted into a ship. Conceive it pawed about and handled between the rude jests of tarpaulin ruffians — ^a thing of its delicate texture — the salt bilgo wetting it till it became as vapid as a damaged lustring. Suppose it in material danger (mariners have some super- stition about sentiments) of being tossed over in a fresh gale to some propitiatory shark (spirit of Saint Gothard, save us from a quietus so foreign to the deviser's purpose !) but it has happily evaded a fishy consummation. Trace it then to its lucky landing — at Lyons shall we say ? — I have not the map before me — jostled upon four men's shoulders — baiting at this town — stopping to refresh at t'other village — waiting a passport here, a license there ; the fianction of the magistracy in this district, the concurrence of the ecclesiastics in that canton ; till at length it arrives 138 DISTANT COBRESPONDENTS. at its destination, tired out and jaded, from a brisk senti- ment into a feature of silly pride or tawdry senseless affec- tation. How few sentiments, my dear F., I am afraid we can set down, in the sailor's phrase, as quite seaworthy. Lastly, as to the agreeable levities, which though con- temptible in bulk, are the twinkling corpuscula which should irradiate a right friendly epistle — your puns and small jests are, I apprehend, extremely circumscribed in their sphere of action. They are so far from a capacity of being packed up and sent beyond sea, they will scarco endure to be transported by hand from this room to the next. Their vigour is as the instant of their birth. Their nutriment for their brief existence is the intellectual atmo- sphere of the by-standers : or this last is the fine slime of Nilus — the melior lutus — whose maternal recipiency is as necessary as the sol pater to their equivocal generation. A pun hath a hearty kind of present ear-kissing smack witli it ; you can no more transmit it in its pristine flavour thart you can send a kiss. — Have you not tried in some instances to palm off a yesterday's pun upon a gentleman, and has it answered ? Not but it was new to his hearing, but it did not seem to come new from you. It did not hitch in. It was like picking up at a village ale-house a two days'-old newspaper. You have not seen it before, but you resent the stale thing as an affront. This sort of merchandize above all requires a quick return. A pim, and its recog- nitory laugh, must be co-instantaneous. The one is tho brisk lightning, the other the fierce thunder. A moment's interval, and the link is snapped. A pun is reflected from a friend's face as from a mirror. Who would consult his Bweet visnomy, if the polished surface were two or three minutes (not to speak of twelve months, my dear F.) \\\ giving back its copy ? I cannot image to myself whereabout you are. When I tiy to fix it, Peter Wilkins's island comes across me. Some- times you seem to be in the Hades of Thieves. I see Diogenes prying among you with his perpetual fruitless lantern. What must you be willing by this time to give for the siarht of an honest man ! You must almost have DISTANT COEBESFONDENTS. 139' forgotten how we look. And tell me -what your SyJneyites do y are they th**v*ng all day long ? Merciful Heaven ' what property can stand against such a depredation ! The kangaroos — your Aborigines — do they keep tlieir primitivo simplicity nn Europe-tainted, with those little short foro puds, looking like a lesson framed b}-- nature to the pick- pocket ! Marry, for diving into fobs they are rather lamely provided a priori ; but if the hue and cry were once up, they would show as fair a pair of hind-shifters as the expertest loco-motor in the colony. We hear the most improbable tales at this distance. Pray is it true that tho 3'oung Spartans among yon are born with six fingers, which spoils their scanning? — It must look very odd; but use re- conciles. For their scansion, it is less to regretted ; for if they take it into their heads to be poets, it is odds but they turn out, the greater part of them, vile plagiarists. Is there much difference to see, too, between the son of a th**f and the grandson ? or where does the taint stop ? Do you bleach in three or in four generations? I have many questions to put, but ten Delphic voyages can be made in a shorter time than it will take to satisfy my scruples. Do yoii grow your own hemp ? — What is j^our staple trade, — ex- clusive of the national profession, I mean ? Your lock- smiths, I take it, are some of your great capitalists. I am insensibly chatting to you as familiarl}'' as when we used to exchange good-morrows out of our old contiguous windows, in pump-famed Hare Court in the Temple. Why did you ever leave that quiet corner ? — Why did I ? — with its complement of four poor elms, from whose smoke-dyed barks, the theme of jesting ruralists, I picked my first lady- birds ! My heart is as diy as that spring sometimes proves in a thirsty August, when I revert to the space that is between us ; a length of passage enough to render obsolete the phrases of our English letters before they can reach you. But while I talk I think yoxi hear me, — thoughts dallying with vain surmise — • Aye me ! ■while thee the seas and sounding shores Hold far away. Come back, before I am gro-mi into a very old man, so no THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPEBS. ns you shall hardly know me. Come, before Bridget walka on crutclies. Girls whom you left children have become sage matrons while you are tarrying there. The blooming- Miss W — r (you remember Sally W — r) called upon us yesterday, an aged crone. Folks whom you knew die off every year. Formerly, I thought that death was wearing- out, — I stood ramparted about with so many healthy friends. The departure of J. W., two springs back, corrected my delusion. Since then the old divorcer has been busy. If you do not make haste to return, there will be little left to greet you, of me, or mine. [Something of home matters I could add ; but that, with certain remembrances never to be omitted, I reserve for the grave postscript to this light epistle ; which postscript, for weighty reasons, justificatory in any court of feeling, I think better omitted in this first edition.] THE PEAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPEKS. I LIKE to meet a sweep — understand me — not a grown sweeper — old chimney-sweepers are by no means attractive — but one of those tender novices, blooming •through their first nigritude, the maternal washings not quite effaced from the cheek — such as come forth with the dawn, or somewhat earlier, with their little professional notes sounding like the peep-peep of a young sparrow ; or liker to the matin lark should I pronounce them, in their aerial ascents not seldom anticipating the sun-rise ? I have a kindly yearning towards these dim specks — poor blots — innocent blacknesses — I reverence these young Africans of our own growth — these almost clergy imps, who sport their cloth without assumption; and from their little pulpits (the tops of chimneys), in the nipping air of a December morning, preach a lesson of patience to mankind. "When a child, what a mysterious pleasure it was to THE PBAISE OF CHI3INEY-SWEEFESS. HI witness their operation ! to see a chit no bigger tlian one's- self, enter, one knew not by what process, into what seemed the fauces Avcrni — to pursue him in imagination, as he went sounding on throiigh so many dark stifling caverns, horrid shades ! to shudder with the idea that " now, surely he must be lost for ever !" — to revive at hearing his feeble shout of discovered day-light — and then (0 fulness of de- light !) running out of doors, to come just in time to see the sable phenomenon emerge in safety, the brandished weapon of his art victorious like some flag waved over a conquered citadel ! I seem to remember having been told, that a bad sweep was once left in a stack with his brush, to indicate which way the wind blew. It was an awful spectacle, cer- tainly ; not much unlike the old stage direction in Macbeth, where the " Apparition of a child crowned, with a tree in. his hand, rises." Eeader, if thou meetest one of these small gentry in thy early rambles, it is good to give him a penny, — it is better to give him two-pence. If it be starving weather, and to the proper troubles of his hard occupation, a pair of kibed heels (no unusual accompaniment) be superadded, the demand on thy humanity will surely rise to a tester. There is a composition, the ground-work of which I have understood to be the sweet wood 'yclept sassafras. This wood boiled down to a kind of tea, and tempered with an infusion of milk and sugar, hath to some tastes a delicacy beyond the China luxury. I know not how thy palate may relish it ; for myself, with every deference to the judicious Mr. Read, who hath time out of mind kept open a shop (the only one he avers in London) for the vending of this *• wholesome and pleasant beverage," on the south side of Fleet Street, as thou approachest Bridge Street — the only Salopian house — I have never yet adventured to dip my own particular lip in a basin of his commended ingredients — a cautious premonition to the olfactories constantly whisper- ing to me, that my stomach must infallibly, with all due courtesy, decline it. Yet I have seen palates, otherwise not uninstructcd in dietetical elegancies, sup it up with avidity'. 142 THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPEBS. I know not by what particular conformations of tlio organ it happens, but I have always found that this com- position is surprisingly gratifying to the palate of a young chimney-sweeper — whether the oily particles (sassafras is slio-htly oleaginous) do attenuate and soften the fuliginous concretions, which are sometimes found (in dissections) to adhere to the roof of the mouth in these unfledged piacti- tioners ; or whether Nature, sensible that she had mingled too much of bitter wood in tho lot of these raw victims, caused to grow out of the earth her sassafras for a sweet lenitive— but so it is, that no possible taste or odour to the senses of a young chimney-sweeper can convey a delicate excitement comparable to this mixture. Being penniless, they will yet hang their black heads over the ascending steam, to gratify one sense if possible, seemingly no less pleased than those domestic animals — cats — when they ptirr over a new-found sprig of valerian. There is some- thing more in these sympathies than philosophy can inculcate. Now albeit Mr. Eead boasteth, not without reason, that his is the only Salopian house ; yet be it known to thee, reader — if thou art one who keepest what are called good hours, thou art haply ignorant of the fact — he hath a race of industrious imitators, who from stalls, and under open sky, dispense the same savoury mess to humbler customers, at that dead time of the dawn, when (as extremes meet) the rake, reeling home from his midnight cups, and the hard- handed artisan leaving his bed to resume the premature labours of the day, jostle, not unfi-equently to the manifest disconcerting of the former, for the honours of the pave- ment. It is the time when, in summer, between the expired and the not yet relumined kitchen-fires, the kennels of our fair metropolis give forth their least satisfactory odours. The rake, who wisheth to dissipate his o'ernight vapoars in more grateful coffee, curses the ungenial fume, as he passeth ; but the artisan stojDs to taste, and blesses the fragrant breakfast. This is saloop — the precocious herb-woman's darling — tho delight of tho early gardener, who transports hia TEE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEJ'ERS. 143 tiaoking cabbages by break of day from Hammersmith to Covent Garden's famed piazzas — tlie delight, and oh! I fear, too often the envy, of the nnpennied sweep. Him shouldst tbon haply encounter, with his dim visage pendent over ih.Q grateful steam, regale him with a sumptuous basin (it will cost but three-halfpennies) and a slice of delicate bread and butter (an added halfpenny) — so may th}^ cu- linary fires, eased of the o'ercharged secretions from thy worse-placed hosj)italities, curl up a lighter volume to the welkin — so may the descending soot never taint thy costly well-ingredienced soups — nor the odious cry, quick- reaching from street to street, of the fired chimney, invite the rattling engines from ten adjacent parishes, to disturb for a casual scintillation thy peace and pocket ! I am by nature extremely susceptible of street affronts ; the jeers and taunts of the populace ; the low-bred triumph they display over the casual trip, or splashed stocking, of a gentleman. Yet can I endure the jocularity of a young sweep with something more than forgiveness. — In the last v/inter but one, pacing along Cheapside with my accus- tomed precipitation when I walk westward, a treacherous slide brought me izpon my back in an instant. I scrambled up with pain and shame enoxigh — yet outwardly trying to face it down, as if nothing had happened — when the roguish grin of one of these young wits encountered me. There he stood, pointing me out with his dusky finger to the mob, and to a poor woman (I suppose his mother) in pai'- ticular, till the tears for the exqiiisiteness of the fun (so he thought it) worked themselves out at the corners of his poor red eyes, red from many a previous weeping, and soot-inflamed, yet twinkling through all with such a joy, snatched out of desolation, that Hogarth but Hogarth has got him already (how coiald he miss him?) in the Mai'ch to Finchley, grinning at the pieman — there he stood, as he stands in the picture, irremovable, as if the jest was to last for ever — with such a maximum of glee, and minimum of mischief, in his mii-th — for the grin of a genuine sweep hath absolutely no malice in it — that I could have been content, if the honour of a gentleman Hi THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS. migLt endure it, to have remained his butt anel his mockery till midnight. I am by theory obdurate to the seductiveness of what are called a fine set of teeth. Every pair of rosy lips (the ladies must pardon me) is a casket presumably holding 6uch jewels ; but, methinks, they should take leave to " air " them as frugally as possible. The fine lady, or fine gentleman, who show me their teeth, show me bones. Yet must I confess, that from the mouth of a true sweep a display (even to ostentation) of those white and shiny ossi- fications, strikes me as an agreeable anomaly in manners, and an allowable piece of foppery. It is, as when A sable cloud Turns forth her silver lining on the night. It is like some remnant of gentr}^ not quite extinct; a badge of better days ; a hint of nobility : — and, doubtless, under the obscuring darkness and double night of their forlorn disguisement^ oftentimes lurketh good blood, and gentle conditions, derived from lost ancestry, and a lapsed pedigree. The premature apprenticements of these tender victims give but too much encouragement, I fear, to clan- destine and almost infantile abductions; the seeds of civility and true courtesy, so often discernible in these young grafts (not otherwise to be accounted for) plainly hint at some forced adoptions ; many noble Eachels mourn- ing for their children, even in our daj's, countenance the fact ; the tales of fairy spiriting may shadow a lamentable verity, and the recovery of the young Montagu be but a solitary instance of good fortune out of many irreparable and hopeless defiliations. In one of the state-beds at Arundel Castle, a few years since — under a ducal canopy — (that seat of the Howards is an object of curiosity to visitors, chiefly for its beds, in which the late duke was especially a connoisseur)—- encircled with curtains of delicatest crimson, with starry coronets inwoven — folded between a pair of sheets whiter and softer than the lap where Venus lulled Ascanius — was discovered by chance, after all methods of search had THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS. 145 failed, at noon-day, fast asleep, a lost cliimney-sweeper. The little creature, having somehow confounded his passage among the intricacies of those lordly chimneys, by some unknown aperture had alighted upon this magnificent chamber; and, tired with his tedious explorations, was unable to resist the delicious incitement to repose, which he there saw exhibited ; so creeping between the sheets very quietly, laid his black head upon the pillow, and slept like a young Howard. Such is the account given to the visitors at the Castle.^ — But I cannot help seeming to perceive a confirmation of what I had just hinted at in this story. A high instinct was at work in the case, or I am mistaken. Is it probable that a poor child of that description, with whatever weari- ness he might be visited, would have ventured, under such a penalty as he would be taught to expect, to uncover the sheets of a Duke's bed, and deliberately to lay himself down between them, when the rug, or the carpet, presented an obvious couch, still far above his pretensions — is this probable, I would ask, if the great power of nature, which I contend for, had not been manifested within him, prompt- ing to the adventure? Doubtless this young nobleman (for such my mind misgives me that he must be) was allured by some memory, not amounting to full conscious- ness, of his condition in infancy, when he was used to be lapped by his mother, or his nurse, in just such sheets as he there found, into which he was now but creeping back as into his proper incunabula, and resting-place. — ^By no other theory than by this sentiment of a pre-existent state (as I may call it), can I explain a deed so venturous, and, indeed, upon any other system, so indecorous, in this tender, but unseasonable, sleeper. My pleasant friend Jem "White was so impressed with a belief of metamorphoses like this frequently taking place, that in some sort to reverse the wrongs of fortune in these poor changelings, he instituted an annual feast of chimney- sweepers, at which it was his pleasure to officiate as host and waiter. It was a solemn supper held in Smithfield, upon the yearly return of the fair of St. Bartholomew. 146 THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS. Cards were issued a week before to tlie master-sweeps in and aboiit the metropolis, confining the invitation to their younger fry. Now and then an elderly stripling would get in among us, and he good-naturedly winked at ; but our main body were infantry. One unfortunate wight, indeed, who, relying upon his dusky suit, had intruded himself into our part}^ but by tokens was providentially discovered in time to be no chimney-sweeper, (all is not soot which looks so,) was quoited out of the presence with universal indignation, as not having on the wedding gar- }nent ; but in general the greatest harmony prevailed. The place chosen was a convenient spot among the pens, at the north side of the fair, not so far distant as to be impervious to the agreeable hubbub of that vanity, but remote enough not to be obvious to the interruption of eveiy gaping spec- tator in it. The guests assembled about seven. In those little temporary parlours three tables were spread with napery, not so fine as substantial, and at every board a comely hostess presided with her pan of hissing sausages. The nostrils of the young rogues dilated at the savour. Tames White, as head waiter, had charge of the first table ; and myself, with our trusty companion Bigod, ordinarily ministered to the other two. There was clambering and jostling, you may be sure, who should get at the first table, for Kochester in his maddest days could not have done the humours of the scene with more spirit than my friend. After some general expression of thanks for the honour the company had done him, his inaugural ceremony was to clasp the greasy waist of old dame Ursula (the fattest of the three), that stood frying and fretting, half-blessing, half-cursing " the gentleman," and imprint upon her chaste lips a tender salute, whereat the universal host would set up a shout that tore the concave, while hundreds of grin- ning teeth startled the night with their brightness. it was a pleasure to see the sable younkers lick in the unctuous meat, with Ms more unctuous sayings — how ho would fit the tit-bits to the pimy mouths, reserving the lengthier links for the seniors — how he would intercept a morsel even in the jaws of some }'t)ung desperado, declaring THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPEBS. 147 it " must to the pan again to be browned, for it was not fit for a gentleman's eating " — how he would recommeud this slice of white bread, or that piece of kissing- crust, to a tender juvenile, advising them all to have a care of cracking their teeth, which were their best patrimony,- — how genteely he would deal about the small ale, as if it were wine, naming the brewer, and protesting, if it were not good, he should lose their custom; with a special recommendation to wipe the lip before drinking. Then we had our toasts — "the King," — "the Cloth," — which, whether they understood or not, was equally diverting and flattering; and for a crowning sentiment, which never failed, " May the Brush supersede the Laurel!" All these, and fifty other fancies, which were rather felt than com- prehended by his guests, would he utter, standing upon tables, and prefacing every sentiment with a " Gentlemen, give me leave to propose so and so," which was a prodigious comfort to those j^oung orphans ; every now and then stuffing into his mouth (for it did not do to be squeamish on these occasions) indiscriminate pieces of those reek- ing sausages, which pleased them mightily, and was the savouriest part, you may believe, of the entertainment. Golden lads and lasses must, As cliimney-sweepers, come to dust — James White is extinct, and with him these suppers have long ceased. He carried away with him half the fun of the world when he died — of my world at least. His old clients look for him among the pens ; and, missing him, reproach the altered feast of St. Bartholomew, and the glory of Smithfiold departed for ever. L'J, H8 A COxMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS, IN THE METROPOLIS. THE all-sweeping besom of societarian reformation — your only modern Alcides' club to rid the time of its abuses — is uplift with many -handed sway to extirpate the last fluttering tatters of the bugbear Mendicity from the metropolis. Scrips, wallets, bags — staves, dogs, and crutches — the whole mendicant fraternity, with all their baggage, are fast posting out of the purlieus of this eleventh per- secution. From the crowded crossing, from the corners of streets and turnings of alleys, the parting Genius of Beggary is "with sighing sent." I do not approve of this wholesale going to work, this impertinent crusado, or helium ad exterminationem, pro- claimed against a species. Much good might be sucked from these Beggars. They were the oldest and the honourablest form of pauperism. Their appeals were to our common nature ; less revolting to an ingenuous mind than to be a suppliant to the particular humours or caprice of any fellow-creature, or set of fellow-creatures, parochial or societarian. Theirs were the only rates uninvidious in the levy, ungrudged in the assessment. There was a dignity springing from the very depth of their desolation ; as to be naked is to be so much nearer to the being a man, than to go in livery. The greatest spirits have felt this in their reverses ; and when Dionysius from king turned schoolmaster, do wu feel anything towards him bu.t contempt ? Could Vandyke have made a picture of him, swaying a ferula for a scef)tre, which would have affected our minds with the same heroic pity, the same comjiassionate admiration, with which wo regard his Belisarius begging for an oholu '? Would the moral have been more graceful, more pathetic? The Blind Beggar in the legend — the father of pretty Bessy — whose story doggrel rhymes and ale-house signs cannot so degrade or attenuate but that some sparks of s- A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS. 149 lustrous spirit will shine through the disguisements — this noble Earl of Cornwall (as indeed he was) and memo- rable sport of fortune, fleeing from the unjust sentence of his liege lord, stript of all, and seated on the flowering green of Bethnal, with his more fresh and springing daughter by his side, illumining his rags and his beggary — ^would the child and parent have cut a better figure doing the honours of a counter, or expiating their fallen condition upon the three-foot eminence of some sempstering shop-board ? In tale or history your Beggar is ever the just antipode to your King. The poets and romancical writers (as dear Margaret Newcastle would call them,) when they would most sharply and feelingly paint a reverse of fortune, never stop till they have brought down their hero in good earnest to rags and the wallet. The depth of the descent illus- trates the height he falls from. There is no medium Avhich can be presented to the imagination without off"ence. There is no breaking the fall. I^ear, thrown from his palace, must divest him of his garments, till he answer "mere, nature ;" and Cresseid, fallen from a prince's love, must extend her pale arms, pale with other whiteness than of beauty, supplicating lazar arms with bell and clap-dish. The Lucian wits knew this very well ; and, Avitli a con- verse policy, when they would express scorn of greatness without the pity, they show us an Alexander in the shades cobbling shoes, or a Semiramis getting tap foul linen. How would it sound in song, that a great monarch had declined his affections upon the daughter of a baker ! yel do we feel the imagination at all violated when we read the " true ballad," where King Cophetua woos the beggar maid ? Pauperism, pauper, poor man, are expressions of pity, but pity alloyed with contempt. No one properly contemns a Beggar. Poverty is a comparative thing, and each degree of it is mocked by its " neighbour grice.'" Its poor rents and comings-in are soon summed up and told. Its pre- tences to property are almost ludicrous. Its pitiful attempts to save excite a smile. Everj'- scornful companion can 150 A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS. weigli liis trifle-bigger purse against it. Poor man re- proaclies poor man in the street with impolitic mention of his condition, his own being a shade better, while the rich pass by and jeer at both. No rascally comparative insults a Beggar, or thinks of weighing purses with him. He is not in the scale of comparison. He is not under the measure of property. He confessedly hath none, any more than a dog or a sheep. No one twitteth him with ostenta- tion above his means. No one accuses him of pride, or upbraideth him with mock humility. None jostle with him for the wall, or pick quarrels for precedency. No wealthy neighbour seeketh to eject him from his tenement. No man sues him. No man goes to law with him. If I were not the independent gentleman that I am, rather than I would be a retainer to the great, a led captain, or a poor relation, I would choose, out of the delicacy and true greatness of my mind, to be a Beggar. Eags, which are the reproach of poverty, are the Beggar's robes, and graceful insignia of his profession, his tenure, his full dress, the suit in which he is expected to show himself in public. He is never out of the fashion, or limpeth awkwardly behind it. He is not required to put on court mourning. He weareth all colours, fearing none. His costume hath undergone less change than the Quaker's. Ho is the only man in the universe who is not obliged to study appearances. The ups and downs of the world concern him no longer. He alone continueth in one stay. The price of stock or land afiecteth him not. The fluctua- tions of agricultural or commercial prosperity touch him not, or at worst but change his customers. He is not expected to become bail or surety for any one. No man troubleth him with questioning his religion or politics. He is the only free man in the universe. The Mendicants of this great city were so many of her sights, her lions. 1 can no more spare them than I could the Cries of London. No corner of a street is complete without them. They are as indispensable as the Ballad Singer; and in their picturesque attire as ornamental as the signs of old London. They were the standing morals, A COMPLAINT OF THE UECA Y OF BEGGABS. 151 emblems, mementos, dial-mottos, the spital sermons, the books for children, the salutary checks and pauses to the high and rushing tide of greasy citizenry — • Look Upon that poor aud broken banki-upt there. Above all, those old blind Tobits that used to line the wall of Lincoln's-inn Garden, before modern fastidiousness had expelled them, casting up their ruined orbs to catch a ray of pity, and (if possible) of light, with their faithful Dog- Guide at their feet, — whither are they fled ? or into what corners, blind as themselves, have they been driven, out of the wholesome air and sun-warmth ? immersed between four walls, in what withering poor-house do they endure the penalty of double darkness, where the chink of the dropt halfpenny no more consoles their forlorn bereave- ment, far from the sound of the cheerful and hope-stirring tread of the passenger ? Where hang their useless staves ? and who will farm their dogs? — Have the overseers of St. L — caiTsed them to be shot ? or were they tied up in sacks and dropt into the Thames, at the suggestion of B — the mild rector of ? Well fare the soul of unfastidious Vincent Bourne, — most classical, and, at the same time, most English of the Latinists ! — who has treated of this human and quadru- pedal alliance, this dog and man friendship, in the sweetest of his poems, the EjpitapJiium in Canem, or. Dog's Epitaph. Eeader, peruse it; and say, if customary sights, which could call up such gentle poetry as this, were of a nature to do more harm or good to the moral sense of the passen- gers through the dail}' thoroughfares of a vast and busy meti'opolis. Pauperis hie Iri rcquiesco Lyciscus, herilis, Dum vixi, tutela vigil columenque senectre, Dux c£ECO fidus : nee, me dueente, solebat, Praetenso bine atque hinc baculo, per iniqua locorum Incertara explorare viam ; sed fila sccutus. Quod dubioa regerent passiis, vestigia tuta Fixit inoffenso gressu ; gelidumque sedilc lu nudo nactus saxo. qua praetereuntiuin 152 A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS. Unda frequens confluxit, ibi miserisque tenebras Lamentis, noctemque oculis ploravit obortam. Ploravit nee frustra ; obolum dedit alter et alter, Queis corda et mentem indiderat natura benignam. Ad latus interea jactii sopitus herile. Vol mediis vigil in somnis ; ad herilia jussa Auresque atque aniinum arrectus, seu frustula aroicfe Forrexit sociasque dapes, seu longa diei Taedia perpessns, reditum sub nocte parabat. Hi mores, hsec vita fuit, dum fata sinebant, Dum neque languebam morbis, nee inerte senecta Qua3 tandem obrepsit, veterique satellite caecum Orbavit dominum ; prisci sed gratia facti Ne tota intereat. longos del eta per annos, Exiguum bunc Irus tumulum de cespite fecit, Etsi inopis, non ingratse, munuscula dextrse ; Carmine signavitque brevi, dominumque canemque, Quod memoret, fidumque Oanem dominumque Benignum, Poor Irus faitbful wolf-dog here I lie. That wont to tend my old blind master's steps. His guide and guard ; nor, while my service lasted. Had he occasion for that staff, with which He now goes picking out his path in fear Over the highways and crossings ; but would plant, Safe in the conduct of my friendly string, A firm foot forward still, till he had reach'd His poor seat on some stone, nigh where the tide Of passers-by in thickest confluence flow'd : To whom with loud and passionate laments From morn to eve his dark estate he wail'd. Nor wail'd to all in vain : some here and there, The well-disposed and good, their pennies gave. I meantime at his feet obsequious slept ; Not all-asleep in sleep, but heart and ear Prick'd up at his least motion ; to receive At his kind hand my customary crumbs. And common portion in his feast of scraps ; Or when night warn'd us homeward, tired and spent With our long day and tedious beggary. These were my manners, this my way of life Till age and slow disease me overtook. And sever'd from my sightless master's side. But lest the grace of so good deeds should die. Through tract of years in mute oblivion lost, This slender tomb of turf hath L-us reared. A COMPLAINT OF TEE DECAY OF BEGGARS. 153 Cheap monument of no ungrudging hand. And with short verse inscribed it, to attest, In long and lasting union to attest. The virtues of the Beggar and his Dog. These dim eyes have in vain explored for some months past a well-known figure, or part of the figure, of a man, who used to glide his comely upper half over the pave- ments of London, wheeling along with most ingenious celerity upon a machine of wood ; a spectacle to natives, to foreigners, and to children. He was of a robust make, with a florid sailor-like complexion, and his head was bare to the storm and sunshine. He was a natural curiosity, a speculation to the scientific, a prodigy to the simple. The infant would stare at the mighty man brought down to his own level. The common cripple would despise his own pusillanimity, viewing the hale stoutness, and hearty heart, of this half-limbed giant. Few but must have noticed iiim ; for the accident which brought him low took place during the riots of 1780, and he has been a groundling so long. He seemed earth-born, an AntiEus, and to suck in fresh vigour from the soil which he neighboured. He was a gi'and fragment ; as good as an Elgin marble. The nature, which should have recruited his reft legs and thighs, was not lost, but only retired into his upper parts, and he was half a Hercules. I heard a tremendous voice thundering and growling, as before an earthquake, and casting down my eyes, it was this mandrake reviling a steed that had started at his portentous appearance. He seemed to want but his just stature to have rent the offending quadruped in shivers. He was as the man-part of a centaur, from which the horse-half had been cloven in some dire Lapithan controversy. He moved on, as if he could have made shift with yet half of the body-portion which was left him. The OS .niblime was not wanting ; and he threw out yet a jolly countenance upon the heavens. Forty-and-two years had he driven this out-of-door trade, and now that his hair is grizzled in the service, but his good spirits no way im- paired, because he is not content to exchange his free air and exercise for the restraints of a poor-house, he ia 154 A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS. expiating his contumacy in one of those houses (ironically christened) of Correction. Was a daily spectacle like this to he deemed a nuisance, which called for legal interference to remove ? or not rather a salutary and a touching object to the passers-by in a great city ? Among her shows, her museums, and sup- plies for ever-gaping curiosity (and what else but an accu- mulation of sights — endless sights — is a great city ; or for what else is it desirable?) was there not room for one Lusus (not Naturce, indeed, but) Accidentium ? What if in forty-and-two-years' going about, the man had scraped together enough to give a portion to his child (as the rumour ran) of a few hundreds — whom had he injured ? — whom had he imposed upon ? The contributors had en- joyed their sight for their pennies. What if after being exposed all day to the heats, the rains, and the frosts of heaven — shuffling his ungainly trunk along in an elaborate and painful motion — he was enabled to retire at night to enjoy himself at a club of his fellow cripples over a dish of hot meat and vegetables, as the charge was gravely brought against him by a clergyman deposing before a House of Commons' Committee — was this, or was his truly paternal consideration, which (if a fact) deserved a statue rather than a whipping-post, and is inconsistent, at least, with the exaggeration of nocturnal orgies which he has been slandered with — a reason that he should be deprived of his chosen, harmless, nay, edifying way of life, and be committed in hoary age for a sturdy vagabond ? — There was a Yorick once, whom it would not have .shamed to have sate down at the cripples' feast, and to have thrown in his benediction, ay, and his mite too, for a companionable symbol. "Age, thou hast lost thy breed."— Half of these stories about the prodigious fortunes made by begging are (I verily believe) misers' calumnies. One was much talked of in the public papers some time since, and the usual charitable inferences deduced. A clerk in the Bank was surprised Avith the annoiincement of a five hundred-pound legacy left him by a person whose namo A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS. 1j5 lie was a stranger to. It seems tliat in his daily morning- walks from Peckham (or some village thereabouts) where he lived, to his office, it had been his practice for the last twenty years to drop his halfpenny duly into the hat of some blind Bartimeus, that sate begging alms by the way- side in the Borough. The good old beggar recognised his daily benefactor by the voice only; and, when he died, left all the amassings of his alms (that had been half a century perhaps in the accumulating) to his old Bank friend. Was this a story to purse up people's hearts, and pennies, against giving an alms to the blind ? — or not rather a beautiful moral of well-directed charity on the one part, and noble gratitude upon the other ? I sometimes wish I had been that Bank clerk. I seem to remember a poor old grateful kind of creatm-e, blinking, and looking up with his no eyes in the sun — Is it possible I could have steeled my pui'se against him? Perhaps I had no small change. Eeader, do not be frightened at the hard words imposi- tion, imposture — give, and ash no questions. Cast thy bread upon the waters. Some have unawares (like this Bank clerk) entertained angels. Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted dis- tress. Act a charity sometimes. AVhen a poor creaturo (outwardly and visibly such) comes before thee, do not sta}- to inquire whether the " seven small children," in whoso name he implores thy assistance, have a veritable existence. Pake not into the bowels of unwelcome truth to save a halfpenny. It is good to believe him. If he be not all that he pretendeth, give, and under a personate father of a family, think (if thou pleasest) that thou hast relieved an indigent bachelor. When they come with their counterfeit looks, and mumping tones, think them players. You pay your money to see a comedian feign these things, which, concerning these poor people, thou canst not certainly tell whether they are feigned or not. |_" Pray God, your honour, relieve me," said a poor beads- woman to my friend L one day : " I have seen better 150 A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG. days." " So have I, my good woman," retorted he, looking np at the welkin, which was just then threatening a storm — and the jest (he will have it) was as good to the beggar as ,M tester. It was, at all events, kinder than consigning her to the stocks, or the parish beadle. — But L. has a way of viewing things in rather a para- doxical light on some occasions.] A DISSEETATION UPON EOAST PIG. MANKIND, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is not obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius in the second chapter of his Mundane Mutations, where he designates a kind of golden age by the term Cho-fang, literally the Cooks' Holiday. The manuscript goes on to say, that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I take to be the elder brother) was accidentally discovered in the manner fol- lowing. The swine-herd, Ilo-ti, having gone out into the woods one morning, as his manner was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his eldest son Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who being fond of playing with fire, as yonnkers of his age commonly are, let some sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly, spi-ead the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion, till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry antediluvian make-shift of a building, you may think it), what was of much more importance, a fine litter of new-farrowed pigs, no less than nine in number, perished. China pigs have been esteemed a luxury all over the East, from the remotest periods that we read of. Bo-bo was in the utmost consternation, as you may think, not so mnch for the sake of the tenement, which his father and ho could easily build up again with a few dry branches. A DISSEETATION UPON BOAST PIG. 157 and the labour of an lionr or two, at any time, as for tlie loss of the pigs. While he was thinking what he should say to his father, and wringing his hands over the smoking remnants of one of those untimely sufferers, an odour assailed his nostrils, unlike any scent which he had before experienced. What could it proceed from ? — not from the burnt cottage — he had smelt that smell before — indeed, this was by no means the first accident of the kind which had occurred through the negligence of this unlucky young firebrand. Much less did it resemble that of any known- herb, weed, or flower. A premonitory moistening at the same time overflowed his nether lip. He knew not what to think. He next stooped down to feel the pig, if there- were any signs of life in it. He burnt his fingers, and to cool them he applied them in his booby fashion to his mouth. Some of the crumbs of the scorched skin had come away with his fingers, and for the first time in his life (in the world's life indeed, for before him no man had known it) he tasted — crackling ! Again he felt and fumbled at the pig. It did not burn him so much now, still he licked his fingers from a sort of habit. The truth at length broke into his slow understanding, that it was the pig that smelt so, and the pig that tasted so delicious ; and surrendering himself up to the new-born pleasure, he fell to tearing up whole haudfuls of the scorched skin with the flesh next it, and was cramming it down his throat in his beastly fashion, when his sire entered amid the smoking rafters, armed with retributory cudgel, and finding how afiairs stood, began to rain blows upon the young rogue's shoulders, as thick as hail-stones, which Bo-bo heeded not any more than if they had been flies. The tickling pleasure, which he experienced in his lower regions, had rendered him quite callous to any inconveniences he might feel in those remote quarters. His father might lay on, but he could not beat him from his pig, till he had fairly made an end of it, when, becoming a little more sensible of his situation, something like the following dialogue ensued. " You graceless whelp, what have you got there devour- ing ? Is it not enough that you have burnt me down three- 158 A DISSERTATION UPON BOAST PIG. houses witli your dog's tricks, and be hanged to you ! but you must be eating fire, and I laiow not what — what have 3'ou got ihere, I say ?" " father, the pig, the pig ! do come and taste how nice the burnt pig eats." The ears of Ho-ti tingled with horror. He cursed his son, and he cursed himself that ever he should beget a son that should eat burnt pig. Bo-bo, whose scent was wonderfully sharpened since moming, soon raked out another pig, and fairly rending it asunder, thrust the lesser half by main force into the fists of Ho-ti, still shouting out, " Eat, eat, eat the burnt pig, father, only taste — Lord!" — with such-like barbarous ejaculations, cramming all the while as if he would choke. Ho-ti trembled every joint while he grasped the abomin- able thing, wavering whether he should not put his son to death for an unnatural young monster, when the crackling scorching his fingers, as it had done his son's, and apply- ing the same remedy to them, he in his turn tasted some of its flavour, which, make what sour mouths he would for a pretence, proved not altogether displeasing to him. In conclusion (for the manuscript here is a little tedious), both father and son fairly set down to the mess, and never left off till they had despatched all that I'cmained of the litter. Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the secret escape, for the neighbours would certainly have stoned them for a couple of abominable wretches, who could think of improv- ing upon the good meat which God had sent them. Never- theless, strange stories got about. It was observed that Ho-ti's cottage was burnt down now more freqiiently than ever. Nothing but fires from this time forward. Some would break out in broad day, others in the night-time. As often as the sow farrowed, so sure was the house of Ho-ti to be in a blaze ; and Ho-ti himself, which was the more remarkable, instead of chastising his son, seemed to grow more indulgent to him than ever. At length they were watched, the terrible mystery discovered, and father and eon summoned to take their trial at Pekin, lb en au A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG. 159 tnconsiderable assize town. Evidence was given, the obnoxious food itself produced in court, and verdict aboxit to be pronounced, when the foreman of the jury begged that some of the burnt pig, of which the culprits stood accused, might be handed into the box. He handled it, and they all handled it ; and burning their fingers, as Bo-bo and his father had done before them, and nature prompting to each of them the same remedy, against the face of all the facts, and the clearest charge which judge had ever given, — to the surprise of the whole court, towns- folk, strangers, reporters, and all present — without leaving the box, or any manner of consultation whatever, they brought in a simultaneous verdict of Not Guilty. The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked at the manifest iniquity of the decision : and when the court was dismissed, went privily and bought up all the pigs that could be had for love or money. In a few days his lord- ship's town-house was observed to be on fire. The thing took wing, and now there was nothing to be seen but fires in every direction. Fuel and pigs grew enormously dear all over the district. The insurance-offices one and all shut up shop. People built slighter and slighter every day, until it was feared that the very science of architec- ture would in no long time be lost to the world. Thus this custom of firing houses continued, till in process of time, says my manuscript, a sage arose, like our Locke, who made a discovery that the flesh of swine, or indeed of any other animal, might be cooked (burnt, as they called it) without the necessity of consuming a whole house to dress it. Then first began the rude form of a gridiron. Eoasting by the string or spit came in a century or two later, I forget in whose dynasty. By such slow degrees, concludes the manuscript, do the most useful, and seem- ingly the most obvious, arts make their way among man- kind Without placing too implicit faith in the account above given, it must be agreed that if a worthy pretext for so dangerous an experiment as setting houses on fire (espe- cially in these days) could be assigned in favour of any 160 A DISSERTATION UPON IWAST PIG. culinary object, tLat pretext and excuse miglit be found in KOAST PIG. Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edibilis, I will maintain it to be the most delicate — prlnceps ohsoniorum. I speak not of your grown porkers — things between pig and pork — those hobbledehoys — but a young and tender suckling — under a moon old — guiltless as yet of the sty — with no original speck of the amor imrmmditice, the here- ditary failing of the first parent, yet manifest — his voice as yet not broken, but something between a childish treble and a grumble — the mild forerunner or p-celudium of a grunt. B^e must he roasted. I am not ignorant that our ancestors ate them seethed, or boiled — but what a sacrifice of the exterior tegument ! There is no flavour comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well- watched, not over-roasted, cracJc- ling, as it is well called — the very teeth are invited to their share of the pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resistance — with the adhesive oleaginous — call it not fat ! but an indefinable sweetness growing up to it — the tender blossoming of fat — fat cropped in the bud — taken in the shoot — in the first innocence — the cream and quintessence of the child-pig's yet pure food — the lean, no lean, but a kind of animal manna — or, rather, fat and lean (if it must be so) so blended and running into each other, that both together make but one ambrosian result or common substance. Behold him while he is " doing " — it seemeth rather a refreshing warmth, than a scorching heat, that he is so pas- sive to. How equably he twirleth round the string ! Now he is just done. To see the extreme sensibility of that tender age ! he hath wept out his pietty eyes — radiant jellies — shooting stars. — • See him in the dish, his second cradle, how meek he licth ! — wouldst thou have had this innocent grow up to the grossness and indocility Avhich too often accompany maturer swinehood ? Ten to one he would have proved u glutton, a sloven, an obstinate, disagreeable animal — A DISSERTATION UFON MO AST PIG. 161 wallowing in all manner of filthy conversation — from theso sins he is happily snatched away — Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade, Death came with timely care — his memoiy is odoriferous — no clown curseth, while his stomach, half rejecteth, the rank bacon — no coalheaver bolteth him in reeking sausages — he hath, a fair sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure — and for such a tomb might be content to die. He is the best of sapors. Pine-apple is great. She is indeed almost too transcendent — a delight, if not sinful, yet so like to sinning, that really a tender-conscienced person would do well to pause — too ravishing for mortal taste, she woundeth and excoriateth the lips that approach, her — like lovers' kisses, she biteth — she is a pleasure bordering on pain from the fierceness and insanity of her relish — but she stoppeth at the palate — she meddleth not with the appetite — and the coarsest hunger might barter her con- sistently for a mutton-chop. Pig — let me speak his praise — is no less provocative of the appetite than he is satisfactory to the criticalness of the censorious palate. The strong man may batten on him, and the weakling refuseth not his mild juices. Unlike to mankind's mixed characters, a bundle of vir- tues and vices, inexplicably intertwisted, and not to be unravelled without hazard, he is — good throughout. No part of him is better or worse than another. He helpetli , as far as his little means extend, all around. He is the least envious of banquets. He is all neighbours' fare. I am one of those who freely and ungrudgingly impart a share of the good things of this life which fall to their lot (few as mine are in this kind) to a friend. I protest I take as great an interest in my friend's pleasures, his relishes, and proper satisfactions, as in mine own. " Pre- sents," I often say, " endear Absents." Hares, pheasants, partridges, snipes, barn-door chickens (those " tame villatio fowl "), capons, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I dispense as freely as I receive them. I love to taste them, as ii 162 A DISSERTATION UPON BOAST PIG. were, upou the tongue of my friend. But a stop must be put somewhere. One would not, like Lear, " give every- thing." I make my stand upon pig. Methinks it is an ingratitude to the Giver of all good flavours to extra-domi- ciliate, or send out of the house slightingly (under pretext of friendship, or I know not what) a blessing so particularly adapted, predestined, I may say, to my individual palate. — It argues an insensibility. I remember a touch of conscience in this kind at school. My good old aunt, who never parted from me at the end of a holiday without stu ffing a sweetmeat, or some nice thing, into my pocket, had dismissed me one evening with a smoking plum-cake, fresh from the oven. In my way to school (it was over London Bridge) a grey-headed old beggar saluted me (I have no doubt, at this time of day, that he was a counterfeit). I had no pence to console him with, and in the vanity of self-denial, and the very cox- combry of charity, school-boy like, I made him a present of — the whole cake ! I walked on a little, buoyed up, as one is on such occasions, with a sweet soothing of self- satisfaction ; but, before I had got to the end of the bridge, my better feelings returned, and I burst into tears, think- ing how ungrateful I had been to my good aunt, to go and give her good gift away to a stranger that I had never seen before, and who might be a bad man for aught I knew ; and then I thought of the pleasure my aunt would be taking in thinking that I — I myself, and not another — would eat her nice cake — and what should I say to her the next time I saw her — how naughty I was to part with her pretty present ! — and the odour of that spicy cake came back upon my recollection, and the pleasure and the curiosity I had taken in seeing her make it, and her joy when she sent it to the oven, and how disappointed she would feel that I had never had a bit of it in my mouth at last — and I blamed my impertinent spirit of alms-giving, and out-of-place hypocrisy of goodness ; and above all I wished never to see the face again of that insidious, good- for-notking, old gi'ey impostor. Our ancestors v/cro nico in their method of sacrificing A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT Ot MARRIED FEOPLE. 16S these tender victims. We read of pigs wliipt to death with something of a shock, as we hear of any other ohsolete custom. The age of discipline is gone by, or it would he curious to inquire (in a philosophical light merely) what effect this process might have towards intenerating and dulcifying a substance, naturally so mild and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs. It looks like refining a violet. Yet we should be cautious, while we condemn the inhumanity, how we censure the wisdom of the practice. It might impart a gusto. — I remember an hypothesis, argued upon by the young students, when I was at St. Omer's, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides, " Whether, supposing that the flavour of a pig who obtained his death by whipping (^per flagellationem extremavi) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using that method of putting the animal to death ?" I forget the decision. His sauce should be considered. Decidedly, a few bread crumbs, done up with his liver and brains, and a dash of mild sage. But banish, dear Mi-s. Cook, I beseech you, the whole onion tribe. Barbecue your whole hogs to your palate, steep them in shalots, stuff them out with planta- tions of the rank and guilty garlic ; you cannot poison them, or make them stronger than they ai-e— but consider, he is a weaklino- — a flower. A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT OF THE BEHAVIOUR OF MARRIED PEOPLE. A S a single man, I have spent a good deal of my time JJL in noting down the infirmities of Married People, to console myself for those superior pleasures, which they tell me I have lost by remaining as I am. I cannot say that the quarrels of men and their wives 164 A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT OF ever made any great impression upon me, or had much tendency to strengthen me in those anti-social resolutions which I took np long ago npon more substantial considera- tions. What oftenest oftends me at the houses of married persons where I visit, is an error of quite a difierent description ; — it is that they are too loving. Not too loving neither : that does not explain my mean- ing. Besides, why should that offend me ? The very act of separating themselves from the rest of the world, to have the fuller enjoyment of each other's society, implies that they prefer one another to all the world. But what I complain of is, that they carry this preference so undisguisedly, they perk it up in the faces of us single people so shamelessly, you cannot be in their company a moment without being made to feel, by some indirect hint or open avowal, that yoic are not the object of tliis prefer- ence. Now there are some things which give no offence, while implied or taken for granted merely ; but expressed, there is much offence in them. If a man were to accost the first homely-featured or plain-dressed young woman of his acquaintance, and tell her bluntly, that she was not handsome or rich enough for him, and he could not marry her, he would deserve to be kicked for his ill-manners ; yet no less is implied in the fact, that having access and oppor- tunity of putting the question to her, he has never yet thought fit to do it. The young woman understands this as clearly as if it were put into words ; but no reasonable young woman would think of making this the ground of a quarrel. Just as little light have a married couple to tell me by speeches, and looks that are scarce less plain than speeches, that I am not the liappy man, — the lady's choice. It is enough that I know I am not : I do not want this perpetual reminding. The display of superior knowledge or riches may bo made sufficiently mortifying, but these admit of a pallia- tive. The knowledge which is brought out to insult me, may accidentally improve me ; and in the rich man's houses und pictui'es, — his parks and gardens, I have a temporary usufruct at least. But the display of married happiness TEE BEHAVIOUR OF MAEBIED PEOPLE. 165 has none of these palliatives : it is tliroiigliont pure, un- recompensed, nnqualified insult. Marriage by its best title is a monopoly, and not of the least invidious sort. It is the cunning of most possessors of any exclusive privilege to keep their advantage as much out of sight as possible, that theif less favoured neighbours, seeing little of the benefit, may the less bo disposed to question the right. But these married monopolists thrust the most obnoxious part of their patent into our faces. Nothing is to me more distasteful than that entire com- placency and satisfaction which beam in the countenances of a new-married couple, — in that of the lady particu- larly : it tells you, that her lot is disposed of in this world : that you can have no hopes of her. It is true, I have none : nor wishes either, perhaps : but this is one of those truths which ought, as I said before, to be taken for granted, not expressed. The excessive airs which those people give themselves, founded on the ignorance of us unmarried people, would be more offensive if they were less irrational. We will allow them to understand the mysteries belonging to their own craft better than we, who have not had the happiness to be made free of the company : but their arrogance is not con- tent within these limits. If a single person presume to offer his opinion in their presence, though upon the most indifferent subject, he is immediately silenced as an incom- petent person. Nay, a young married lady of my acquaint- ance, who, the best of the jest was, had not changed her condition above a fortnight before, in a question on which I had the misfortune to differ from her, respecting the pro- perest mode of breeding oysters for the London market, had the assurance to ask with a sneer, how such an old Bachelor as I could pretend to know anything about such matters ! But what I have spoken of hitherto is nothing to the airs which these creatures give themselves when they come, as they generally do, to have children. When I consider how little of a rarity children are,— that every street and blind alley swarms with them, — that the poorest people com- ICG A BACHELOR'S COMFLAINT OF monly have tliem in most abundance, — that there are few marriages that are not West with at least one of these bar- gains, — how often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond hopes of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty, disgrace, the gallows, &c. — I cannot for my life tell what cause for pride there can possibly be in having them. If they were young phoeni^ies, indeed, that were bom but one in a year, there might be a pretext. But when they are so common • I do not advert to the insolent merit which they assume with their husbands on these occasions. Let them look to that. But why xve, who are not their natural-born sub- jects, should be expected to bring our spices, mj'rrh, and incense, — our tribute and homage of admiration, — I do not see. " Like as the arrows in the hand of the giant, even so are the young children ;" so says the excellent office in our Prayer-book appointed for the churching of women. " Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them." So say I ; but then don't let him discharge his quiver upon us that are weaponless ; — let them be arrows, but not to gall and stick us. I have generally observed that these arrows are double-headed : they have two forks, to be sure to hit with one or the other. As for instance, when you come into a house which is full of children, if you happen to take no notice of them (you are thinking of something else, perhaps, and turn a deaf ear to their innocent caresses), you are set down as untractable, morose, a hater of chil- dren. On the other hand, if you find them more than usually engaging, — if you are taken with their pretty manners, and set about in earnest to romp and play with them, — some pretext or other is sure to be found for sending them out of the room ; they are too noisy or boisterous, or Mr. does not like children. With one or other of these forks the arrow is sure to hit you. I could forgive their jealousy, and dispense with tojang with their brats, if it gives them any pain ; but I think it unreasonable to be called upon to love them, where I see no occasion, — to love a whole family, perhaps eight, nine. THE BEHAVIOUR OF MARRIED PEOPLE. 1G7 or ten, indiscriminately, — to love all the pretty dears, bo- cause children arc so engaging ! I know there is a proverb, " Love me, love my dog :" that is not always so very practicable, particularly if the dog be set upon you to tease you or snap at you in sport. But a dog, or a lesser thing — any inanimate substance, as a keepsake, a watch or a ring, a tree, or the place where we last parted when my friend went away upon a long ab- sence, I can make shift to love, because I love him, and anything that reminds me of him ; provided it be in its nature indifferent, and apt to receive whatever hue fancy can give it. But children have a real character, and an essential being of themselves : they are amiable or un- amiable per se ; I must love or hate them as I see cause for either in their qualities. A child's nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded as a mere appendage to another being, and to be loved or hated accordingly; they stand with me upon their own stock, as much as men and women do. Oh ! but you will say, sure it is an at- tractive age, — there is something in the tender years of infancy that of itself charms us ? That is the very reason wiiy I am more nice about them. 1 know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature, not even excepting the delicate creatures which bear them ; but the prettier the kind of thing is, the more desirable it is that it should be pretty of its kind. One daisy differs not much from another in glory ; but a violet should look and smell the daintiest. — I was alwaj^s rather squeami;:-]! in my women and children. But this is not the worst : one must be admitted into their familiarity at least, before they can complain of inat- tention. It implies visits, and some kind of intercourse But if the husband be a man with whom you have lived on a friendly footing before marriage —if you did not come in on the wife's side — if you did not sneak into the house in her train, but were an old friend in fast habits of intimacy before their courtship was so much as thought on, — look about you — your tenure is precarious — before a twelve- month shall roll over your head, you shall find your old 168 A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT OF friend gradually grow cool and altered towards yon, and at last seek opportunities of breaking with yon. I have scarce a married friend of my acquaintance, upon whose firm faith I can rely, whose friendship did not commence after the ■veriod of Ms marriage. With some limitations, they can endure that ; but that the good man should have dared to enter into a solemn league of friendship in which they were not consulted, though it happened before they knew him, —before they that are now man and wife ever met, — this is intolerable to them. Every long friendship, every old authentic intimacy, must be brought into their office to be new stamped with their currency, as a sovereign prince calls in the good old money that was coined in some reign, before he was born or thought of, to be new marked and minted with the stamp of his authority, before he will let it pass current in the world. You may guess what luck generally befalls such a rusty piece of metal as I am in these neio mintings. Innumeiabie are the ways which they take to insult and worm you out of their husband's confidence. Laughing at all you say with a kind of wonder, as if you were a queer kind of fellow that said good things, hut an oddity, is one of the ways ; — they have a particular kind of stare for the pui-pose ; — till at last the husband, who used to defer to your judgment, and would pass over some excrescences of understanding and manner for the sake of a general vein of observation (not quite vulgar) which he perceived in you, begins to suspect whether you are not altogether a humorist, — a fellow well enough to have consorted with in his bachelor days, but not quite so proper to be intro- duced to ladies. This may be called the staring way; and is that which has oftenest been put in practice against me. Then there is the exaggerating way, or the way of irony ; that is, where they find you an object of especial regard with their husband, who is not so easily to be shaken from the lasting attachment founded on esteem which he has conceived towards you, by never qualified exaggerations to cry up all that you say or do, till the good man, who under- THE BEHAVIOUR OF MARRIED PEOPLE. 169 stands well enougli that it is all done in compliment to him, grows weary of the debt of gratitude which is dno to so much candour, and by relaxing a little on his part, and taking down a peg or two in his enthusiasm, sinks at length to the kindly level of moderate esteem — that " decent affection and complacent kindness " towards you, where she herself can join in sympathy with him without much stretch and violence to her sincerity. Another way (for the ways they have to accomplish so desirable a purpose are infinite) is, with a kind of innocent simplicity, continually to mistake what it was which first made their husband fond of you. If an esteem for some- thing excellent in your moral character was that which riveted the chain which she is to break, upon any ima- ginary discovery of a want of poignancy in your conversa- tion, she will cry, "I thought, my dear, you described jour friend, ]\Ir. , as a great wit ?" If, on the other hand, it was for some supposed charm in your conversation that he first grew to like you, and was content for this to overlook some trifling irregularities in your moral deport- ment, upon the first notice of any of these she as readily exclaims, " This, my dear, is your good Mr. !" One good lady whom I took the liberty of expostulating with for not showing me quite so much respect as I thought due to her husband's old friend, had the candour to confess to me that she had often heard Mr. speak of me before marriage, and that she had conceived a great desire to be acquainted with me, but (hat the sight of me had very much disappointed her expectations ; for, from her husband's representations of me, she had formed a notion that she was to see a fine, tall, ofScer-like looking man (I nse her very words), the very reverse of which proved to be the truth. This was candid ; and I had the civility not to ask her in return, how she came to pitch upon a standard of personal accomplishments for her husband's friends which differed so much from his own; for my friend's dimensions as near as possible approximate to mine; he standing five feet five in his shoes, in which I have the advantage of him by about half an inch; and he no more 170 A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT OF MARRIED PEOPLE. than myself exhibiting any indications of a martial cha- racter in his air or countenance. These are some of the mortifications which I have en- countered in the ahsnrd attempt to visit at their house? To enumerate them all would be a vain endeavour ; I shalx therefore just glance at the very common impropriety of which married ladies are guilty, — of treating us as if we were their husbands, and vice versa. I mean, when they use us with familiarity, and their husbands with ceremony. Testacea, for instance, kept me the other night two or three hours beyond my usual time of supping, while she was fretting because Mr. — did not come home, till the oysters were all spoiled, rather than she would be guilty of the impoliteness of touching one in his absence. This was reversing the point of good manners : for cere- mony is an invention to take off the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the object of love and esteem with a fellow-creature than some other person is. It endeavours to make up, by superior atten- tions in little points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater. Had Testacea kept the oysters back for me, and withstood her husband's impor- tunities to go to supper, she would have acted according to the strict rules of propriety. I know no ceremony that ladies are bound to observe to their husbands, beyond the point of a modest behaviour and decorum : therefore I must protest against the vicarious gluttonj^ of Cerasia, who at her own table sent away a dish of Morellas, which I was applying to with great good-will, to her husband at the other end of the table, and recommended a plate of less extraordinary gooseberries to my unwedded palate in their stead. Neither can I excuse the wanton affront of But I am weary of stringing up all m}^ married acquaint- ance by Eoman denominations. Let them amend and change their manners, or I promise to record the full- length English of their names, to the terror of all such (desioerato oifenders in future. 171 ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTOES. THE casual sight of an old Play Bill, which I picked up the other day — I know not by what chance it was Dreserved so long — tempts me to call to mind a few of the Players, who make the principal figure in it. It presents the cast of parts in the Twelfth -Night, at the old Drnry- lane Theatre two-and-thirty years ago. There is something very touching in these old remembrances. The}' make iis think how we once used to read a Play Bill — not, as now peradventure, singling out a favourite performer, and cast- ing a negligent eye over the rest ; but spelling out every name, down to the very mutes and servants of the scene ; when it was a matter of no small moment to us whether Whitfield, or Packer, took the part of Fabian ; when Benson, and Burton, and Phillimore — names of small account — had an importance, beyond what we can be content to attribute now to the time's best actors. — " Orsino, by Mr. Barry more." — What a full Shaksperian sound it carries ! how fresh to memory arise the image and the manner of the gentle actor ! Those who have only seen Mrs, Jordan within the last ten or fifteen years, can have no adequate notion of her performance of such parts as Ophelia ; Helena, in All's AVell that Ends Well; and Viola, in this play. Her voice had latterly acquired a coarseness, which suited well enough with her Nells and Hoydens, but in those days it sank, with her steady, melting eye, into the heart. Her joyous parts — in which her memory now chiefly lives — in her youth were outdone by her plaintive ones. There is no giving an account how she delivered the disguised story of her love for Orsino. It was no set speech, that she had foreseen, so as to weave it into an harmonious period, line necessarily following line, to make up the music — yet I have heard it so spoken, or rather read, not without its grace and beauty — but, when she had declared her sister's history to be a " blank," and that she " never told her love," there was a pause, as if the story had ended — and then the image of the " worm in the bud " came up as a 172 ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. new suggestion — and the LeigMened image of " Patience " still followed after that, as by some growing (and not mechanical) process, thought springing up after thought, I \f/ould almost say, as they were watered by her tears. Sy in those fine lines — Right loyal cantons of contemned love — Halloo your name to the reverberate hills — there was no preparation made in the foregoing image for that which was to follow. She used no rhetoric in her passion ; or it was nature's own rhetoric, most legitimate then, when it seemed altogether without rule or law. Mrs, Powel (now Mrs. Eenard), then in the pride of her beauty, made an admirable Olivia. She was particularly excellent in her unbending scenes in conversation with the Clown. I have seen some Olivias — and those very sensible actresses too — who in these interlocutions have seemed to set their wits at the jester, and to vie conceits with him in downright emulation. But she used him for her sport, like what he was, to trifle a leisure sentence or two with, and then to be dismissed, and she to be the Great Lady still. She touched the imperioiis fantastic humour of the character with nicety. Her fine spacious person filled the scene. The part of Malvolio has, in my judgment, been so often misunderstood, and the general merits of the actor, who then played it, so unduly appreciated, that I shall hope for pardon, if I am a little prolix upon these points. Of all the actors who flourished in my time — a melan- choly phrase if taken aright, reader — Bensley had most of the swell of soul, was greatest in the delivery of heroic conceptions, the emotions consequent upon the presentment of a great idea to the fancy. He had the true poetical enthusiasm — the rarest faculty among players. None that I remember possessed even a portion of that fine madness which he threw out in Hotspur's famous rant about glory, or the transports of the Venetian incendiary at the vision of the fired city. His voice had the dissonance, and at times the inspiriting effect, of the trumpet. His gait was uncouth and stiff, but no way embarrassed by afl'ectation ; ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTOBS. 173 find the thorougli-bred gentleman was uppermost in ever^' movement. He seized the moment of passion with greatest truth ; like a faithful clock, never striking before the time ; never anticipating or leading you to anticipate. He was totally destitute of trick and artifice. He seemed come upon the stage to do the poet's message simply, and he did it with as genuine fidelity as the nuncios in Homer deliver the errands of the gods. He let the passion or the senti- ment do its own work without prop or bolstering. He would have scorned to mountebank it ; and betrayed none of that cleverness which is the bane of serious acting. Foi- this reason, his lago was the only endurable one which I remember to have seen. No spectator, from his action, could divine more of his artifice than Othello was supposed to do. His confessions in soliloquy alone put you in posses- sion of the mystery. There were no by-intimations to make the audience fancy their own discernment so much greater than that of the Moor — who commonly stands like a great helpless mark, set up for mine Ancient, and a quantity of barren spectators, to shoot their bolts at. The lago of Bensley did not go to work so grossly. There was a trium- phant tone about the character, natural to a general con- sciousness of power ; but none of that petty vanity which chuckles and cannot contain itself upon any little successful stroke of its knavery — as is common with your small villains, and green probationers in mischief. It did not clap or crow before its time. It was not a man setting his wits at a child, and winking all the while at other children, who are mightily pleased at being let into the secret ; but a consummate villain entrapping a noble nature into toils against which no discernment was available, where the manner was as fathomless as the purpose seemed dark, and without motive. The part of Malvolio, in the Twelfth Night, was performed by Bensley with a richness and a dignity, of which (to judge from some recent castings of that character) the very traditon must be worn out from the stage. No manager in those days would have dreamed of giving it to Mr. Baddely, or Mr. Parsons ; when Bensley wa.s occasionally absent from the theatre, John Kemble 174 ON S03IE OF THE OLD ACTORS. thought it no derogation to succeed to the part. Malvulio is not essentially Indicrous. He becomes comic but by ;iccident. He is cold, austere, repelling ; but dignified, con- sistent, and, for what appears, rather of an over-stretched morality. Maria describes him as a sort of Puritan ; and he might have worn his gold chain with honour in one of our old roundhead families, in the service of a Lambert, or a Lady Fairfax. But his morality and his manners are misplaced in Illyria. He is opposed to the proper levities of the piece, and falls in the unequal contest. Still his pride, or his gravity, (call it which you will,) is inherent, and native to the man, not mock or affected, which latter only are the fit objects to excite laughter. His quality is at the best unlovely, but neither buffoon nor contemptible. His bearing is lofty, a little above his station, but probably not much above his deserts. We see no reason why he should not have been brave, honourable, accomplished. His careless committal of the ring to the ground (which he was com- missioned to restore to Cesario), bespeaks a generosity of birth and feeling. His dialect on all occasions is that of a gentleman and a man of education. We must not confound him with the eternal old, low steward of comedy. He is master of the household to a great princess ; a dignity probably conferred upon him for other respects than age or length of service. Olivia, at the first indication of his supposed madness, declares that she " would not have him miscarry for half of her dowry." Does this look as if the character was meant to appear little or insignificant ? Once, indeed, she accuses him to his face — of what ? — of being " sick of self-love," — but with a gentleness and considerate- ness, which could not have been, if she had not thought that this particular infirmity shaded some virtues. His rebuke to the knight and his sottish revellers, is sensible and spirited; and when we take into consideration the unprotected condition of his mistress, and the strict regard with which her state of real or dissembled mourning would draw the eyes of the world upon her house-afifairs, Malvolio might feel the honour of the family in some sort in his keeping ; as it appears not that Olivia had any more ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTOBS. 175 brothers, or Idnsmen, to look to it — for Sir Toby liad dropped all such nice respects at the buttery-hatch. That Jlalvolio ■was meant to bo represented as possessing estimable qualities, the expression of the Duke, in his anxiety to have him reconciled, almost infers : " Pursue him, and entreat him to a peace." Even in his abused state of chains and darkness, a sort of greatness seems never to desert him. He argues highly and well with the supposed Sir Topas, and philosophizes gallantly upon his straw.* There must have been some shadow of worth about the man ; he must have been something more than a mere vapour — a thing of straw, or Jack in office — before Fabian and Maria could nave ventured sending him upon a courting-errand to Olivia. There was some consonancy (as he would say) in the undertaking, or the jest would have been too bold even for that house of misrule. Bensley, accordingly, threw over the part an air of Spanish loftiness. He looked, spake, and moved like an old Castilian. He was starch, spruce, opinionated, but his .superstructure of pride seemed bottomed upon a sense of Avorth. There was something in it beyond the coxcomb. It was big and swelling, but you could not be sure that it was hollow. You might wish to see it taken down, but 3'ou felt that it was upon an elevation. He was magnificent from the outset ; but when the decent sobrieties of the character began to give way, and the poison of self-love, in his conceit of the Countess's affection, gradually to work, you would have thought that the hero of La Mancha in person stood before you. How he went smiling to himself! with what ineffable carelessness would he twirl his gold chain ! what a dream it was ! you were infected with the illusion, and did not wish that it should be removed ! you had no room for laughter ! if an unseasonable reflection of morality obtmded itself, it was a deep sense of the pitiable infirmity of man's nature, that can lay him open to such * Clown. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl ? Mai. That the soul of our granJam might haply inhabit a bird. Cloivn. What thinkest thou cf his opinion ? Mai. I think nobly of the sou], and no way approve of his opinion. 176 ON SOME OF TEE OLD ACTORS. frenzies — but, in truth, you ratlier admired than pitied the lunacy Avhile it lasted — you felt that an hour of such mistake was -worth an age with the eyes open. Who would not wish to live but for a day in the conceit of such a lady's love as Olivia? Why, the Duke would have given his pi-incipality but for a quarter of a minute, sleeping or waking, to have been so deluded. The man seemed to tread upon air, to taste manna, to walk with his head in the clouds, to mate Hyperion. ! shake not the castles of his pride — endure yet for a season, bright moments of con- fidence — " stand still, ye watches of the element," that Malvolio may be still in fancy fair Olivia's lord! — but fate and retribution say no — I hear the mischievous titter of Maria — the witty taunts of Sir Toby — the still more insup- portable triumph of the foolish knight — the counterfeit Sir Topas is unmasked — and " thus the whirligig of time," as the true clown hath it, " brings in his revenges." I confess that I never saw the catastrophe of this character, while Bensley played it, without a kind of tragic interest. There was good foolery too. Few now remember Dodd. What an Aguecheek the stage lost in him ! Lovegrove, who came nearest to the old actors, revived the character some few seasons ago, and made it sufficiently grotesque*; bat Dodd was it, as it came out of nature's hands. It might be said to remain in piiris naturalibus. In expre^ing slowness of apprehension, this actor surpassed all others. You could see the first dawn of an idea stealing slowly over his coun- tenance, climbing up by little and little, with a painful process, till it cleared up at last to the fulness of a twilight conception — its highest meridian. He seemed to keep back his intellect, as some have had the power to retard their pulsation. The balloon takes less time in filling than it took to cover the expansion of his broad moony face over all its quarters with expression, A glimmer of understand- ing would appear in a corner of his eye, and for lack of fuel go out again. A part of his forehead would catch a little intelligence, and be a long time in communicating it to the remainder. I am ill at dates, but I think it is now better than five- ON SOME OF THE OLD AC TOES. 177 and-twenty years ago, that Avalking in the gardens of Gray's Inn — they were then far finer than they are now — tlis accnrsed A^erulain Buildings had not encroached upon all the east side of them, cutting out delicate green crankles, and shouldering away one or two of the stately alcoves of the terrace — the survivor stands gaping and relationless as if it rememhered its brother — they are still the best gardens of any of the Inns of Court, my beloved Temple not forgotten — have the gravest character ; their aspect being altogether reverend and law-breathing— Bacon has left the impress of his foot upon their gravel walks taking my afternoon solace on a summer day upon the aforesaid terrace, a comely sad personage came towards me, whom, from his grave air and deportment, I judged to be one of the old Benchers of the Inn. He had a serious, thoughtful forehead, and seemed to be in meditations of mortalit3^ As I have an instinctive awe of old Benchers, I was passing him with that sort of sub-indicative token of respect which one is apt to demon- strate towards a venerable stranger, and which rather denotes an inclination to greet him, than any positive motion of the body to that effect — a species of humility and will- worship which I observe, nine times out of ten, rather puzzles than pleases the person it is offered to — when the face turning full upon me strangely identified itself with that of Dodd. Upon close inspection I was not mistaken. But could this sad thoughtful countenance be the same vacant face of folly which I had hailed so often under circumstances of gaiety ; which I had never seen without a smile, or recognized but as the usher of mirth ; that looked out so formally flat in Foppington, so frothily pert in Tattle, so impotently busy in Backbite ; so blankly'- divested of all meaning, or resolutely expressive of none, in Acres, in Fribble, and a thousand agreeable impertinences ? Was this the face — full of thought and carefulness — that had so often divested itself at will of every trace of either to give me diversion, to clear my cloudy face for two or three hours at least of its furrows ! Was this the face — manly, sober, intelligent — Avliich I had so often despised, made mocks at, made merry with ! The remembrance of the N 178 ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTOES. freedoms wLicli I had taken with, it came upon me with a leproach of insult. I could have asked it pardon. I thought it looked upon me with a sense of injur3\ There is something strange as well as sad in seeing actors — youj- pleasant fellows particularly — subjected to and suffering the common lot;- — their fortunes, their casualties, theii- deaths, seem to belong to the scene, their actions to be amenable to poetic justice only. We can hardly connect them with more awful responsibilities. The death of this fine actor took place shortly after this meeting. lie had quitted the stage some months ; and, as I learned afterwards, had been in the habit of resorting daily to these gardens, almost to the day of his decease. In these serious walks, probably, he was divesting himself of many scenic and some real vanities — weaning himself from the frivolities of the lesser and the greater theatre — doing gentle penance for a life o-^' no very reprehensible fooleries — taking off by degrees the buffoon mask which he might feel he had worn too long — and rehearsing for a more solemn cast of part. Dying, ho " put on the weeds of Dominic." * If few can remember Dodd, many yet living will not easily forget the pleasant creature, who in those days enacted the part of the Clown to Dodd's Sir Andrew. — Eichard, or rather Dicky Suett — for so in his life-time he delighted to be called, and time hath ratified the appellation — lieth buried on the north side of the cemetery of Holy Paul, to whoso service his nonage and tender years were dedicated. There are who do yet remember him at that period — his pipe clear and harmonious. He would often speak of his chorister days, when he was " cherub Dicky." * Dodd was a man of reading, and left at his death a choice collection of old English literature. I should jndge him to have been a man of wit. I know one instance of an imjiromptu which no length of study could have bettered. My merry friend, Jem Wliite, had seen him one evening in Aguecheelc, and recognising Dodd the next day in Fleet Street, was ii-rer istibly impelled to take off his hat and salute him as the identical Knight of the preceding evening with a " Save you. Sir Andrew." Dodd, not at all disconcerted at this imusual address from a stranger, witli a courteous half-rebulring wave of the hand, put him ollf with an " Awav, Fool." ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 179 "\Vhat clijiped liis wings, or made it expedient that lie should exchange the holy for the profane state; whether he iiad lost his good voice (his best recommendation to that office), like Sir John, " with hallooing and singing of anthems ;" or whether he was adjudged to lack something, even in those early years, of the gravity indispensable to au occupation which pro fesseth to " commerce wi'th the skies," — 1 could never rightly learn ; but we find him, after tho probation of a twelvemonth or so, reverting to a secular condition and become one of us. I think he was not altogether of that timber out of whicli cathedral seats and sounding-boards are hewed. But if a glad heart — kind, and therefore glad — be any part of sanctity, then might the robe of Motley, Avith which he invested himself with so much humility after his depriva- tion, and which he wore so long with so much blameless satisfaction to himself and to the public, be accepted for a surplice — his white stole, and alhe. The first fruits of his secularization was an engagement upon the boards of Old Drury, at which theatre he com- menced, as I have been told, with adopting the manner of Parsons in old men's characters. At the period in which most of us knew him, he was no more an imitator than he. was in any true sense himself imitable. He was the Robin Goodfellow of the stage. He came in to trouble all things with a welcome perplexity, himself no whit troubled for the matter. He was known, like Puck, by his note — Ha ! Ha ! Ha ! — sometimes deepening to Ho ! Ho ! Ho ! with an irresistible accession, derived, perhaps, remotely from his ecclesiastical education, foreign to his prototype of — La ! Thousands of hearts yet respond to the chuckling ha ! of Dicky Suett, brought back ti» their remembrance by the faithful transcript of his friend Mathews's mimicry. The " force of nature could no further go." He drolled upon the stock of these two syllables richer than the cuckoo. Care, that troubles all the world, was forgotten in his composition. Had ho had but two grains (nay, half a grain) of it, he could never have supported himself upon those twa N 2 ISO ox SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. spider's strings, wliich sei"\'ed him (iu the latter part of his unmixed existence) as legs. A doubt or a scruple must have made him totter, a sigh have puiTed him dov^^l ; the weight of a frown had staggered him, a wrinkle made him lose his balance. But on he went, scrambling upon thoso aiiy stilts of his, with Robin Goodfellow, " thorough brake, thorough briar," reckless of a scratched face or a toiii doublet. Shakspeare foresaw him, when he framed his fools and jesters. They have all the true Suett stamp, a loose and jshambling gait, a slippery tongue, this last the ready midwife to a without-pain- delivered jest ; in words, light as air, venting truths deep as the centre ; with idlest rhj^mes tagging conceit when busiest, singing with Lear in the tempest, or Sir Toby at the buttery-hatch. Jack Bannister and he had the fortune to be more of personal favourites with the town than any actors before or after. The difference, I take it, was this : — Jack was more beloved for his sweet, good-natured, moral pretensions. Dicky was more liJicd for his sweet, good-natured, no pre- tensions at all. Your whole conscience stirred with Ban- nister's performance of Walter in the Children in the Wood — but Dicky seemed like a thing, as Shakspeare saj's of Love, too young to know what conscience is. lie put us into Vesta's days. Evil fled before him — not as from Jack, as from an antagonist, — but because it could not touch him, any more than a cannon-ball a fly. He was delivered from the burthen of that death ; and, when Death came himself, not in metaphor, to fetch Dicky, it is recorded of him by Kobert Palmer, wdio kindly watched his exit, that he I'eceived the last stroke, neither varying his accustomed tranquillity, nor tune, with the simple exclamation, worthy to have been recorded in his epitaph — La ! La I Bdbhy ! The elder Palmer (of stage-ti'eading celebrity) commonly ])layed Sir Toby in those days ; but there is a solidity of Avit in the jests of that half-Falstaff which he did not quite iill out. He was as much too shoAvy as Moody (who some- times took the part) was dry and sottish. In sock or buskin ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTOliS. 181 there was an air of swaggering gentility about Jack Palmer. He was a gentleman with a slight infusion of iJie footman. His brother Bob (of recenter memory), who was his shadow in everytLing while he lived, and dwindled into loss than a shadow afterwards — was a gentleman with a little stronger infusion of the latter ingredient ; that was all. It is amazing liow a little of the more or less makes a difference in these things. When you saw Bobby in the Duke's Servant,* you said, "What a pity such a pretty fellow was only a servant!" When you saw Jack figuring in Captain Abso- lute, you thought you could trace his promotion to somo lady of quality who fancied the handsome fellow in his topknot, and had bought him a commission. Thereforo Jack in Dick Amlet was insuperable. Jack had two voices, both plausible, hypocritical, and insinuating; but his secondary or supplemental voice still more decisively histrionic than his common one. It was reserved for the spectator ; and the dramatis personal wero supposed to know nothing at all about it. The lies of Young Wilding, and the sentiments in Joseph Surface, wero thus marked out in a sort of italics to the audience. This secret correspondence with the company before the curtain (which is the bane and death of tragedy) has an extremely happy effect in some kinds of comedy, in the more highly artificial comedy of Congreve or of Sheridan especially, where the absolute sense of reality (so indispensable to scenes of interest) is not required, or would rather interfere to diminish your pleasure. The fact is, you do not believt> in such characters as Surface — the villain of artificial comedy — even while you read or see them. If you did, tliey would shock and not divert you. When Ben, in Lovo for Love, returns from sea, the following exquisite dialoguo ■occurs at his first meeting with his father : — • Sir Sampson. Tliou hast been many a weary league, Ben, since I sa\r tliee. Ben. Ey, cy, been. Been far cuougli, an that be all.— Well, father and how do all at home ? how does brother Dick and brother Val 'i * Higli Life Below Stairs. 182 OX SOME OF THE OLD AGTOBS. Sir Sam2)Son. Dick ! body o' me, Dick lias been dead tliese two ycarai I writ you word when you were at Leftborn. Ben. Mess, that's true; Marry, I bad forgot. Dick's dead, as you say —well, and bow ? — I bave a many questions to ask you — Here is an instance of insensibility -wliich in real lifo would be revolting, or rather in real life could not have co- existed with tho "warm-liearted temperament of the cha- racter. But when you read it in the spirit with which such playful selections and specious combinations rather than strict mctajpJirases of nature should be taken, or when you gaw Bannister play it, it neither did, nor does, wound the moral sense at all. For what is Ben — the pleasant sailor which Bannister gives us — but a piece of satire — a crea- tion of Congreve's fancy — a dreamy combination of all the accidents of a sailor's character — his contempt of money — his credulity to women—with that necessary estrange- ment from home which it is just within the verge of credibility to suppose might produce such an hallucination as is here described. We never think tbe worse of Ben for it, or feel it as a stain upon his character. But when an actor comes, and instead of the delightful phantom — the creature dear to half-belief — which Bannister exhibited — displays before our eyes a do^vnright concretion of a Wapping sailor — a jolly warm-hearted Jack Tar — and nothing else — ■ when instead of investing it with a delicious confusedness of the head, and a veering undirected goodness of purpose — he gives to it a downright daylight understanding, and a full consciousness of its actions ; thrusting forward the sensibilities of the character with a pretence as if it stood ■upon nothing else, and was to be judged by them alone — we feel the discord of the thing ; the scene is distu.rbed ; a real man has got in among the dramatis personoe, and puts them out. We want the sailor turned out. We feel that his true place is not behind the curtain, but in the first oi* Bccond gallery. 183 o:n the aetificial comedy of the last CENTUEY. THE artificial Comedy, or Comedy of manners, is qnifo extinct on onr stage. Congreve and Farqnbar show their heads once in seven years only, to be exploded and put down instantly. The times cannot bear them. Is it for a few wild speeches, an occasional license of dialogue ? I think not altogether. The business of their dramatic cha- racters will not stand the moral test. We screw everything up to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent or guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left. We see a stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours' duration, and of no after consequence, with the severe eyes which inspect real vices with their bearings upon two worlds. We are spectators to a plot or intrigue (not reducible in life to the point of strict morality), and take it all for truth. We substitute a real for a dramatic person, and judge him accordingly. We try him in our courts, from which there is no appeal to the dramatis personce, his peers. We have been spoiled with — not sentimental comed}' — but a tyrant ihx more pernicious to our pleasures which has succeeded to it, the exclusive and all-devouring drama of common life ; where the moral point is eveiything ; where, instead of the fictitious half-believed personages of the stage (the phantoms of old comedy), we recognise ourselves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk, allies, patrons, enemies, — the same as in life, — Avith an interest in what is going on so hearty and sub- stantial, that we cannot afford our moral judgment, in its deepest and most vital results, to compromise or slumber for a moment. What is there ti'ansacting, by no modification is made to affect us in any other manner than the same events or characters would do in our relationships of life. We carry our fire-side concerns to the theatre with us. We do not go thither like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure 3S'l ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY of reality, so much as to confirm our experience of it ; to raake assurance double, and take a bond of fate. We mu.st live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was the mournful piivilege of Ulysses to descend twice to the shades. All that neuti-al ground of character, which stood between vice and virtue ; or which in fact was indiflerent to neither, where neither properly was called in question ; that happy breathing-place from the burthen of a perpetual moral questioning — the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistiy — is broken up and disfranchised, as injurious to the interests of society. The privileges of the place are taken a\\ay by law. We dare not dally wdth images, or names, of wrong. We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. "VVe dread infection from the scenic representation of dis- order, and fear a painted pustule. In our anxiety that our morality should not take cold, we wrap it up in a great blanket surtout of precaution against the breeze and sun- shine. I confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer for) I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience, — not to live always in the precincts of the law-courts, — but now and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a Avorld with no meddling restiictions — to get into recesses, whither the hunter cannot follow me—- Secret shades Of woody Ida's inmost grove, Wiiilc yet there was no fear of Jove. I come back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy for it. I wear my shackles more contcntedl}' for having respired the breath of an imaginaiy freedom. 1 do not know how it is with others, but I feel the better always for the perusal of one of Congreve's — nay, why should I not add even of W^xherlcy's — comedies. I am the gayer at least for it ; and 1 could never connect those sports of a witty fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn from them to imitation in real life. They are a world of them- selves almost as much as fairy land. Take one of their characters, male or female (with few exceptions they are OF THE LAST CENTURY. 185 alike), and place it in a modern play, and my virtuous indignation shall viae against the profligate wretch, as warmly as the Catos of the pit could desire ; because in a modern play I am to judge of the right and the wrong. The standard of police is the measure of political justice. The atmosphere will blight it ; it cannot live here. It has got into a moral world, where it has no business, from which it must needs fall headlong ; as dizzy, and incapable of making a stand, as a Swedei:iborgian bad spirit that has wandered unawares into the sphere of one of his Good Men, or Angels. But in its own world do we feel the creature is so very bad ? — The Fainalls and the Mirabels, the Dorimants and the Lady Touchwoods, in their own sphere, do not offend my moral sense ; in fact, they do not appeal to it at all. They seem engaged in their proper element. They break through no laws or conscientious restraints. They know of none. They have got out of Christendom into the land — what shall I call it r — of cuckoldry — the Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect freedom. It is altogether a speculative scene of things, which has no reference whatever to the world that is. Ko good person can be justly offended as a spectator, becausu no good person suffers on the stage. Judged morally, every character in these plays — the few exceptions only are mistalces — is alike essentially vain and worthless. The great art of Congreve is especially shown in this, that ho has entirely excluded from his scenes— some little gene- rosities in the part of Angelica perhaps excepted — not onh* anj^thing like a faultless character, but any pretensions to goodness or good feelings whatsoever. Whether he did this designedly, or instinctively, the effect is as happy as the design (if design) %vas bold. I used to wonder at the strange power which his Way of the World in particular possesses of interesting you all along in the pursuits of characters, for whom you absolutely care nothing — for you neither hate nor love his personages — and I think it is owing to this very indifference for any, that you endure tha whole. lie has spread a privation of moral light, I will call it, rather than by the ugly name of palpable darkness. T8G ON THE AliTIFlCIAL COMEDY over his creations ; and Lis shadows flit before you without distinction or preference. Had he introduced a good cha- racter, a single gush of moral feeling, a revulsion of the judgment to actual life and actual duties, the impertinent Goshen would have only lighted to the discovery of deformities, Avhich now are none, because wo think them none. Translated into real life, the characters of his, and his friend Wycherley's dramas, are profligates and strumpets, — tJie business of their brief existence, the undivided pur- suit of lawless gallantry. No other spring of action, or possible motive of conduct, is recognised ; principles which, universally acted upon, must reduce this frame of things to a chaos. But we do them wrong in so translating them. iNo such effects are produced, in their world. When wo aro among them, we are amongst a chaotic people. We aro not to judge them by our usages. No reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings — for they have none among them. No peace of families is violated — for no family ties exist among them. Ko purity of the marriage bed is stained — for none is supposed to have a being." No deep affections are disquieted, no holy wedlock bands are snapped asunder — for aii'ection's depth and wedded faith aro not of the growth of that soil. There is neither right nor wrong, — gratitude or its opposite, — claim or duty, — pater- nity or sonship. Of what consequence is it to Virtue, or how is she at all concerned about it, whether Sir Simon or Dapperwit steal away Miss Martha ; or who is the father of Lord Froth's or Sir Paul Pliant's children ? The whole is a passing pageant, where we should sit as unconcerned at the issues, for life or death, as at the battle of the frogs and mice. But, like Don Quixote, we take part against the puppets, and quite as impertinently. We dare not contemplate an Atlantis, a scheme, out of which our coxcombical moral sense is for a little transitory ease excluded. We have not the courage to imagine a state of things for which there is neither reward nor punishment. We cling to the painful necessities of shame and blame. We would indict our very dreams. OF THE LAST CENTURY. 187' Amidst Iho mortifying circumstances attendant npon j>ro\ving old, it is sometliing to have seen the School for Scandal in its glory. This comedy grew out of Congrevo and AVychcidey, but gathered some allays of the senti- mental comedy "which followed theirs. It is impos.siblo that it should bo noAV acted, though it continues, at long intervals, to be announced in the bills. Its hero, when Palmer played it at least, was Joseph Surface. When I remember the gay boldness, the graceful solemn plausibility, the measured step, the insinuating voice — to express it in a word — the downright acted villany of the part, so different from the pressure of conscious actual "wickedness, — -tho hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy, — which made Jack so deservedly a favourite in that character, I must needs con- clude the present generation of playgoers more virtuous than myself, or more dense. I freely confess that he divided the po,lm with me with his better brother ; that, in fact, I liked him quite as well. Xot but there are passages,. — like that, for instance, where Joseph is made to refuse a pittance to a poor relation, — incongruities which Sheridan was forced upon by the attempt to join the artificial with the sentimental comedy, either of which must destroy tho other — but over these obstructions Jack's manner floated him so lightly, that a refusal from him no more shocked you, than the easy compliance of Charles gave you in reality any pleasure ; you got over the paltry question as quickly as you could, to get back into the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns. The highly artificial mannc» of Palmer in this character counteracted eveiy disagreeabl