( ' \ A ;>S^^ \ "^"-^^^ ^\ N I \ "^'^) ^ \^ [n\ ^^ ^ ^ ^^ \ \ \\ \\ VnN\^ s\ A i s^ \ \ .^^^\ VC; ^ ■^ \ ■''% \A^\^ ^ XN-N XX ■Axxx.xVXX X VN^^^.x.^,^ ^\ ^A\\xx-x\ \A^^ \ XX ^\:^ \x \\ x\ .^^ ^\ \: A A ^ \ x\-^ - \ XX \ X'^^ \x \ \ \ X x^\ \ ^ ■^ x\ X ^s"^ ^-^^ ^ sV> ■v^ \ ^ X ^ X X X XX X \\ -^^ \ ^ n^ X ,^A X A \ ^ Ax^ A \ X \> V. ,,^ AA^^^A \ THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA GIFT OF Franklin P. Nutting UKi^^r^J\..y M 'if- .i!L,^<^^ THE ESSAYS OF ELIA By CHARLES LAMB. WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY ALFRED AINGER. A. L. BURT, PUBLISHER, NEW YORK. r. l^y l^ v^ \o / O /^ BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY HENRY MORLEY. Charles Lamb was born in Crown Office Row on the 18th of February, 1775. His father, John Lamb, was clerk to Mr. Samuel Salt, a bencher of the Inner Temple. His mother was, before marriage, Elizabeth Field, daughter of the housekeeper to the Plumer family at G-ils- ton, in Hertfordshire, the Blakesmoor of one of the ''Essays of Elia.'" Touches of Charles Lamb's grand- mother. Field, were in the Sarah Battle who had sound opinions upon whist. Charles was the youngest of a family of three. He had a brother, John, who was twelve years older than himself, and a sister, Mary, who was but two years older than John. On the 9th of October, 1782, Charles Lamb, in his eighth year, entered Christ's Hospital, to which his father had obtained for him a presentation. He remained a blue- coat boy for seven years, and left Christ's Hospital on the 23d of November, 1789. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was among Lamb's school-fellows, an older boy by two or three years, and the friendship between Lamb and Coleridge, begun at Christ's Hospital, was never broken. After leaving school Lamb lived at home, and worked first as a young clerk under his brother John, in the South Sea House. Thus recollections of the South Sea House as 963 iv BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. well as of Christ's Hospital are in the " Essays of Elia," which idealize with a wise practical humor the outward cir- cumstances that shaped Lamb's inner life. On the 5th of April, 1792, his father's kindly employer, Mr. Salt, obtained for Charles Lamb, then seventeen years old, a clerkship in the accountant's office of the East India Company. About three years afterward, when Charles Lamb's age was twenty, and his home was still with his father and mother, the father, with weakened intellect, was in lodg- ings at No. 7 Little Queen Street, Holborn. He had been left with a little pension from Mr. Salt. The elder brother, John, lived by himself upon the income of his clerkship in the South Sea House. The father was failing in intellect, the mother Avas bedridden, Mary lived with them, nursed her mother, and earned for the little house- hold with her needle. Charles earned at his office, and comforted his father by playing cribbage with him in the evening. ■ There was a taint of insanity in the family. Charles Lamb himself spent six weeks at and after the end of 1795 in a lunatic asylum at Hoxton. Mary was liable to sudden attacks, in which she became violent. In her an attack of insanity had been slowly coming on, which broke into frenzy on the 23d of September, 1796. On that day Charles Lamb came home from his office work to find that his sister had wounded her father in the forehead and had stabbed her mother to the heart. The inquest next day on the mother was closed with a verdict of insanity. Mary Lamb was placed inji lunatic asylum. A month afterward Lamb wrote: *^My poor, dear, dearest sister, the unhapjDy and unconscious instrument of the Almighty's judgment on our house, is restored to her senses; to a dreadful sense of what has passed, awful to her mind, but tempered with a religious resignation. She knows how to distinguish BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. V between a deed committed in a fit of frenzy and the terri- ble guilt of a mother's murder." John Lamb, the elder brother, offered no aid to the family. Cliarles loved his sister, and he gave to her his life with a beautiful devotion. The father's pension and the son's clerkship in the India House produced together £170 or £180, out of which, said Charles Lamb, ^^ we can spare £50 or £60 at least for Mary while she stays in an asylum. If I and my father and an old maid-servant can't live, and live comfortably, on £130 or £120 a year, we ought to burn by slow fires. I almost would, so that Mary might not go into an hospital." Other members of the family, especially her brother John, opposed Mary's discharge from a lunatic asylum. Charles obtained her release by giving a solemn undertaking that he would take care of her thereafter. First he placed her in a lodging at Hackney, and spent all his Sundays and holidays with her. Then they lived together, he watching the moods that foreshadowed a mad fit, and taking her when needful, a willing patient, to the Hoxton asylum till the fit was over. He filled her life with his love. He put away his own desire to marry, burnt what he called, in writing to Coleridge, the " little journal of his foolish pas- sion." " I am wedded to the fortunes of my sister and my poor old father." The father died, and his pension no longer aided the housekeeping. An old aunt came back to die under Charles Lamb's care, and then the brother, with an income of not more than £100 a year, gave his whole care to his sister. '' God love her," he said, '* may we two never love each other less." She lived to be eighty. She was his Bridget Elia. In the last year of his life he said of her, '^ when she is not violent, her rambling chat is better to me that the sense and sanity of the world." Charles Lamb's life was a poem. Few in his own time knew the secret strength of self-devotion within that life of easy, unaffected kindliness. Under the playful ripple of his talk vi BIOORAPUICAL SKETCH. were depths that gave it lasting power. No utterance is weaker than a shallow jest. After Charles Lamb's death, AVordsworth, among the nearer friends who knew his story, wrote: *• Of that fraternal love, whose heaven-lit lamp From infancy, through manhood, to the last Of three- score years, and to thy latest hour Burnt on with ever-strengthening light enshrined Within thy bosom. ******* Her love (What weakness prompts the voice to tell it here ?) Was as the love of mothers; and when years. Lifting the boy to man's estate, had called The long protected to assume the part Of the protector, the first filial tie Was undissolved; and, in or out of sight, Remained imperatively interwoven With life itself. ******* O gift divine of quiet sequestration! The hermit exercised in prayer and praise, And feeding daily on the hope of heaven, Is happy in his vow, and fondly cleaves To life-long singleness; but happier far Was to your souls, and, to the thoughts of others, A thousand times more beautiful appeared Your dual loneliness!" The dual loneliness was only in those thoughts between them upon which the world might not intrude; the seques- tration was only that avoidance of the larger stir of life which both fortune and nature forced on them. Both needed, for the mind's health, restful lives. But never were lives more tenderly associated with the charities and affections of true human fellowship. Charles Lamb began as a writer with grave verse in a volume of poems by Coleridge, published at Bristol in 1797, which included, also, verses by his friend Charles Lloyd; BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. yii " Poems by S. T. Coleridge, to which are added Poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd." This was instead of a separate publication, planned the year before, of " Poems by Charles Lamb of the Lidia House." In 1797 Lamb also visited Coleridge at Nether Stowey, by the Bristol Chan- nel, after he had been with his friend Lloyd to visit Southey, who was then living near Christchurch in Hamp- shire. In 1798 appeared a little volume of ^* Blank Verse by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb," and in the same year Lamb's " Tale of Rosamund Grey, and Old Blind Mar- garet." In 1799, visiting Cambridge with his friend Lloyd, Lamb formed intimate friendship with Thomas Manning, a mathematical tutor there. When Charles Lamb visited Nether Stowey again in 1801, he had an opportunity of adding Wordsworth to the number of his friends. In 1802 Charles Lamb published his tragedy of John Woodvil, with pieces of his own professing to be ^'^ Frag- ments of Eichard Burton, Author of the ' Anatomy of Melancholy.'" He had left Little Queen Street at the beginning of the century, and moved first to Chapel Street, Pentonville, then to Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane, and then to No. 16 Mitre Buildings, in the Temple, where he remained nine years. In 1802 Charles Lamb visited Coleridge at his new home by Keswick, and first saw the Lake Country; and when he came back, Words- worth, on his way back from France through London to be married, paid a visit to Lamb. In 1804 William Hazlitt was added to the happy circle of Lamb's friends. The '* Tales from Shakespeare " were written in 1806 by Charles and Mary Lamb, Charles taking the tragedies; and Charles Lamb wrote his farce of Mr. H , which was once only, on the 10th of December, 1806, acted, and "then withdrawn as a failure. The '^ Tales from Shakespeare " were first pub- lished in two little volumes in 1807, and in 1808 appeared Lamb's '* Specimens of Dramatic Poets contemporary with Yiii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. Shakespeare," warm with evidences of his feeling for the literature of the days of Elizabeth and James. In the same year Mary Lamb published her stories of " Mrs. Leicester's School," to which her brother Charles con- tributed three; and they worked together at a little book of "Poetry for Children." In 1809 Charles Lamb moved to the top story of No. 4 Inner Temple Lane, and in 1810 he contributed Essays, including his papers on Hogarth and on the tragedies of Shakespeare, to a new quarterly magazine called the Rejlec- tor, edited by Leigh Hunt, who afterward became one of Lamb's familiar friends. One of Charles Lamb's papers in the Beflector, suggested by the fate of his farce, was on "Hissing at Theaters," and signed " Semel Damnatus." In 1818 was published by C. and J. Oilier a collection of Charles Lamb's works, which first carried a fair sense of his genius beyond the inner circle of his friends. What his friends found in him is expressed by Hazlitt, when he says that, at their easy social meetings. Lamb "always made the best pun, and the best remark in the course of the evening. His serious conversation, like his serious writing, is his best. No one ever stammered out such fine piquant, deep, eloquent things in half-a-dozen sentences as he does. His jests scald like tears; and he probes a question with a play upon words. There was no fuss or cant about him. He has furnished many a text for Coleridge to preach upon." "I think, Charles," said Coleridge once, "you never heard me preach?" "My dear boy," said Lamb, with the stutter that often gave piquancy to his words, " I n-n-ever heard you do anything else." He could play with his impediment of speech as well as get his own emphasis out of it. Somebody spoke of a cool action of the Duke of Cumberland. "What else," said Lamb, "could you expect from the Duke of Cu-Cumberland?" In 1820 the London Magazine was established, to which BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH, ix Carlyle contributed his *'Life of Schiller," De Quincey, his ^' Confessions of an English Opium Eater," Thomas Hood his earliest verse, and Charles Lamb his ^' Essays of Elia." The name of Elia was borrowed from a fellow- clerk in the India House, and the first Essay, '* The South Sea House," appeared in August, 1820, the last, *^ Captain Jackson," in 1824. The first collection of the Essays was published as *^ Elia" in 1823. The second series, with the " Popular Fallacies," appeared first as a volume in 1833. The ripe fruit of Charles Lamb's mind is in these Essays, begun at the age of forty-five, and finished when he was near fifty. At fifty, in 1825, he was released from service at the India House, with a pension for life of two-thirds of his salary, which had by that time risen to £600 a year. The directors reserved part of his pension as provision for his sister, in case she should survive him, as she did. Charles Lamb enjoyed for nine years this earthly rest, and entered into his heavenly rest on the 7th of December, 1834. October, 1885. H. M. Critical Introductory Note BY ALFRED AINGER. The two volumes of miscellaneous writings by Charles Lamb, published by the Olliers in 1818, contained a variety of prose sufficient to prove once more that the study and practice of verse is one of the best trainings for a prose style. In his dedication of the poetical volume to Coleridge, Lamb half apologizes for having forsaken his old calling, and for having ^' dwindled into prose and criti- cism." The apology, as I have elsewhere remarked, was hardly needed. If we except the lines to Hester Savary and a few of the sonnets and shorter pieces, there was little in the volume to weigh against the two essays on Hogarth and the tragedies of Shakespeare. It was the result of the miscellaneous and yet thorough character of Lamb's reading from a boy that the critical side of his mind was the first to mature. The shorter papers con- tributed by Lamb to Leigh Hunt's Refiector in 1811 — the year to which belong the two critical essays just men- tioned — more or less framed on the model of the Tattler and its successors, give by comparison little promise of the richness and variety of the Elia series of ten years later. On the other hand, there are passages in the critical essays, such as that on Lear, as represented on the stage, and the vindication of Hogarth as a moral teacher, which repre- sent Lamb at his highest. xii CRITICAL INTR0DUCT0U7 NOTE, On the republication of these miscellanies in 1818, it could not be overlooked that a prose writer of something like genius was coming to the front. One of the younger critics of the day, Henry Nelson Coleridge, reviewing the volumes in the fifth number of the Etonian, in 1821, does not hesitate to declare that ^' Charles Lamb writes the best, the purest and most genuine English of any man living," and adds the following acute remark: ^^For genu- ine Anglicism, which amongst all other essentials of excellence in our native literature, is now recovering itself from the leaden mace of the RamMer, he is quite a study; his prose is absolutely perfect, it conveys thought, without smoldering it in blankets." Lamb was indeed to do more than any man of his time to remove the Johnsonian incubus from our periodical literature. But the full scope of the writer's powers was not known, perhaps even to himself, till the opportunity afforded him by the establish- ment of the London Magazine in 1820. It did credit to the discernment of the editors of that publication, that no control seems to have been exercised over the matter or manner of Lamb's contributions. The writer had not to see all that made the individuality of his style disappear under the editor's hand, as his review of the Excursion in the Quarterly had suffered under Gifford's. To '^ wander at his own sweet will " was the first necessity of Lamb's genius. And this miscellaneousness of subject and treat- ment is the first surprise and delight felt by the reader of Lamb. It seems as if the choice of subject came to him ! almost at haphazard, as if, like Shakespeare, he found the \ first plot that came to hand suitable, because the hand that was to deal with it was absolutely secure of its power to transmute the most unpromising material into gold. Roast Fig, The Praise of Cldmncy- Siveepers, A Bachelor^s Com- plaint of the Conduct of Married People, Grace Before ^ Meat — the incongruity of the titles at once declares the I \ CRITICAL INTRODUCTORY NOTE, xiii humorist's confidence in the certainty of his touch. To jt ' have been commonplace on such topics would have been certain failure. In the Character of the late Ella, hy a Friend, which Lamb wrote in the interval between the publication of the first and second series of essays, he hits off the characteristics of his style in a tone half contemptuous, half apologetic, which yet contains a critici-sm of real value. U '' I am now at liberty to confess,^' he writes, ^^that much which I have heard objected to my late friend's writings was well founded. Crude, they are, I grant you — a sort of unlicked, incondite things — villainously pranked in an affected array of antique words and phrases. They had not been his, if they had been other than such; and better it is that a writer should be natural in a self- pleasing quaintness than to affect a naturalness (so called) that should be strange to him.'' No better text could be found from which to discourse on Charles Lamb's English. The plea put forth almost as a paradox is nevertheless a y^ simple truth. What appears to the hasty reader artificial ^ ' in Lamb's style was natural to him. For in this matter — ' of style he was the product of his reading, and from a child his reading had lain in the dramatists, and gener- ally in the great imaginative writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Shakespeare and Milton he knew almost by heart ; Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Ford and Webster, were hardly less familiar to him; and next to these, the writers of the so-called metaphysical school, the later developments of the Euphuistic fashion, had the strongest fascination for him. Where the fan- tastic vein took the pedantic-humorous shape, as in Burton; or the metaphysical-humorous, as in Sir Thomas Browne; or where it was combined with true poetic sensibility, as in Wither and Marvell, of these springs Lamb had drank so deeply that his mind was saturated with them. His own xiv CRITICAL INTRODUCTORY NOTE. nature became ^^ subdued to what it worked in/' For him to bear, not only on his style, but on the cast of his mind and fancy, the mark of these writers, and many more in whom genius and eccentricity went together, was no matter of choice. It was this that constituted the '' self- pleasing quaintness " of his literary manner. The phrase could not be improved. Affectation is a manner put on to impress others. Lamb^s manner pleased himself, and that is why, to use a familiar phrase, he was "happy in it." To one of the writers just named Lamb stands in a special relation. Sir Thomas Browne was at once a scholar, a mystic and a humorist. His humor is so grave that, when he is enunciating one of these paradoxes he loves so^ well, it is often impossible to tell whether or not he wears / a smile ujoon his face. To Lamb this combination of characters was irresistible, for in it he saw a reflection of himself. He knew the writings of Browne so well that not only does lie quote him more often than any other author, but whenever he has to confront the mysteries of life and death his mental attitude at once assimilates to Browne^s, and his English begins to dilate and to become somber. The dominant influence on Lamb in his reflective mood is Browne. His love of paradox, and the color of^, his style, derived from the use of Latinized words never / thoroughly acclimatized, is also from the same source— ^a use, which in the hands of a less skillful Latinist than Lamb, might have been hazardous. We do not resent his nse of such words as agnize, arricle, reluct, reduce (in the sense of " bring back "), or even such portentous creations as sciential, cognition, intellectuals, and the like. Lamb could not have lived so long among the writers of the Renascence without sharing their fondness for word^coin- age. And the flavor of tlie antique in style he felt to be an almost indispensable accompaniment to the antique in fancy. CRITICAL INTRODUCTORY NOTE, xv Another feature of his style is its aUusiveness. He is rich in quotations, and in my notes I have succeeded in-' tracing most of them to their source, a matter of some difficulty in Lamb's case, for his inaccuracy is all but perverse. But besides those avowedly introduced as such, his style is full of quotations held — if the expression may be allowed — in solution. One feels, rather than recognizes, that a phrase of idiom or tarn of expression is an echo of something that one has heard or read before. Yet such is the use made of his material that a charm is added by the very fact that we are thus continually renewing our experience of an older day. His style becomes aromatic, like the perfume of faded rose-leaves in a china jar. With such allusiveness as this, I need not say that I have not meddled in my notes. Its whole charm lies in our recog- nizing it for ourselves. The " prosperity " of an allusion"J as of a jest, 'Hies in the ear of him that hears it," and it were doing a poor service to Lamb or his readers to draw out and arrange in order the threads he has wrought into the very fabric of his English. But although Lamb's style is essentially the product of the authors he had made his own, nothing would be more untrue than to say of him that he read nature, or anything else, ^'through the spectacles of books.'^ Wordsworth would never have called to liim to leave his books that he might come forth, and bring with him a heart " That watches and receives." It is to his own keen insight and intense sympathy that we owe everything of value in his writing. His observa- tion was his own, though when he gave it back into the world, the manner of it was the creation of his reading. Where, for instance, he describes (and it is seldom) the impression produced on him by country sights and sounds, there is not a trace discoverable of that conventional treat- X vi CRITICAL INTROD UCTOR Y NOTE. meiit of nature which had been so common with mere book-men, before Burns and Wordsworth. Lamb did not care greatly for the country and its associations. Custom had made the presence of society, streets and crowds, the theater and tlie picture gallery, an absolute necessity. Yet if he has to i^ei^roduce a memory of rural life, it is with the precision and tenderness of a Wordsworth. Take, as an example, this exquisite glimpse of a summer afternoon at Blakesmoor: ^'The cheerful store-room, in whose hot window-seat I used to sit and read Cowley, with the grass- plot before, and the hum and flappings of that one solitary wasp that ever haunted it, about me — it is in mine ears now, as oft as summer returns;" or again, the sweet garden scene from Dream Children, where the spirit of Wordsworth seems to contend for mastery with the fanci- f ulness of Marvell, *' because I had more pleasure in stroll- ing 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 ^ipon 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 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 hang- ing midway down the water in silent state, as if it mocked at their impertinent friskings.'' It is hard to say whether the poet's eye or the painter's is more surely exhibited here. The *' solitary wasp'' and the *^' sulky pike" are master-touches; and in the following passage it is perhaps as much of Cattermole as of Goldsmith or Gray, that we are reminded: '^But would'st thou know the beauty of holiness? go along on some week-day, borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse the cool aisles of some country church: think of the piety that has kneeled CRITICAL INTROD UCTOR Y NOTE. xvii there — the meek pastor — the docile parishioner. With no disturbing emotions, no cross conflicting comparisons, drink in tlie tranquillity of the place, till thou thyself become as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies that kneel and weep around thee." The idea that some readers might derive from the casual| titles and subjects of these essays, and the discursiveness! of their treatment, that they are hasty things thrown '' off in a moment of high spirits, is of course erroneous. \ Lamb somewhere writes of the essay just quoted, as a A '^futile effort wrung from him with slow pain." PefEaJj^T this was an extreme case, but it is clear that most of tliej essays are the result of careful manipulation. They are\ elaborate studies in style, and even in color. Nothing is more remarkable about the essays than the contrasts of color they present — another illustration of Lamb's sym- p"aT;hy with the painter's art. The essay on the Cliimney- Siceepers is a study in black: '^ I like to meet a sweep — understand me, not a grown sweeper — old chimney-sweepers are by no means attrac- tive — 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 peeii-peep of a youn^ sparrow; or liker to the matin lark, shall I pronounce them, in their aerial ascents not seldom anticipating the sunrise? I have kindly yearning toward those dim specks; poor blots, in- nocent blacknesses; I reverence these young Africans of our own growth, these almost clergy imps, who sport their cloth without assumption." And if one would understand Lamb's skill as a colorist, let him turn as a contrast to the essay on Quakers, which may be called a study in dove-color: ^'The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving a soil; and clean- xviii CRITICAL INTROD UCTOR Y NOTE. liness 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, whiten- ing the easterly streets of the metropolis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, they show like troops of the Shining Ones." The essay on XJliimney- Siveepers is one blaze of wit, which yet may pass unobserved from the very richness of its setting. Ho\ysurprising, and at the same time how piciiiissgiie, is the following: " I seem to remember having been told that a bad sweep was once left in the stack with his brush, to indicate which way the wind blew. It was an awful spectacle, certainly, not much unlike the old stage direction in Macheth, where the ' apparition of a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, rises. ^" Lamb's wit, original as it is, shows often enough the influence of par- ticular models. Of all old writers, none have a firmer hold on his affection than Fuller. Now and then he has passages in deliberate imitation of Fuller's manner. The descriptions, in detached sentences, of the Poor Relation and the Convalescent are Fuller all over. When Lamb writes of the Poor Eelation — '^ He entereth smiling and embarrassed. He holdeth out his hand to you to shake, and draweth it back again. He casually looketh in about dinner-time, when the table is full,'' and so on, there can be no doubt that he had in mind such characterization as Fuller's in the Good Yeoman, or the Degenero^is Gentle- man. The manner is due originally, of course, to Theo- phrastus, but it was from Fuller, I think, that Lamb derived his fondness for it. And throughout his writings the influence of this humorist is to be traced. How en- tirely in the vein of Fuller, for instance, is the folowing: '^ They (the sweeps), from their little pulpits (the tops of chimneys), preach a lesson of patience to mankind;" or this, again, from the essay Grace Before Meat: *'Glut- CRITICAL INTROD UCTOR Y NOTE, xix tony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanks- giving. When Jeshurun waxed fat, we read that he kicked;" or, once more, this fine comment on the stillness of the Quakers' worship: ^' For a man to refrain even from good words and to hold his peace, it is commendable; but for a multitude, it is great mastery/' But Lamb's wit, like his English, is Protean, and just ' as we tliTnk we have fixed its character and source, it escapes into new forms. In ^simile he finds opportunity*! for it that is all his own. IVliat, for instance, can be^ more surprising in its unexpectedness than the descrip- tion in The Old Margate Hoy of the ubiquitous sailor on board: ^^ How busily didst thou ply thy multifarious oc- cupation, cook, mariner, attendant, chamberlain ; here, there, Wke another Ariel, flaming at once about all 2:)arts of the deck ?" Again, what wit, or shall we call it humor, is there in the gravity of his detail, by whicl^, he touches springs of delight unreached even by Defoe or ^v Swift; as in Roast Pig, where he says that the '^father and son were summoned to take their trial at Pekin, theii an inconsiderahle assize totun ;" or more delightful still, later on: ^^Thus this custom of firing houses continued, \ till in process of time, says my manuscript, a sage arose, ' nice 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 consum-y- ing a whole house to dress it." Or, for another vein, take the account of the mendacious traveler he affects to remember as a fellow-passenger on his early voyage in the old Margate Hoy, who assures his admiring listeners that, so far from the Phoenix being a unique bird, it was by no means uncommon *^in some parts of Upper Egypt," where the whole episode is not one jot the less humorous because it is clear to the reader, not that the traveler invented his facts, but that Lamb invented the traveler. XX CRITICAL INTRODVCTORY NOTE. Or yet one more, how exquisitely unforeseen, and how rich in tenderness, is the following rem^ark "as to the domestic happiness of himself and his ^^ cousin Bridget" in Mackery End: "^q are generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings, as it should be among near rela- tions." What is the name for this antithesis of irony ,^ this hiding of a sweet aftertaste in a bitter word ? What- ever its name, it is a dominant flavor in Lamb^s humor. There are two features, I think, of Lamb^s method which distinguish him from so many humorists of to-day. He takes homely and familiar tilings, and makes them fresh and beautiful. The fashion of to-day is to vulgarize great si and noble things by burlesque associations. The humor- [ ist's contrast is obtained in both cases; only that in the / one it elevates the commonplace, and in the other it J degrades the excellent. And, secondly, in this generation, when what is meant to raise a laugh has, nine times out of ten, its root in cynicism, it should be refreshing to turn'J^ again and dwell in the humane atmosphere of these essays of Elia. To many other qualities that go to make up that highly composite thing. Lamb's humor — to that feature of it that consists in the unabashed display of his own uncon- ventionality — his difference from other people, and to that ^' metaphysical " quality of his wit which belongs to him in a far truer sense than as applied to Cowley and his school, it is sufficient to make a passing reference. But the mention of Cowley, by whom with Fuller, Donne, and the rest, his imagination was assuredly shaped, re- minds us once more of the charm that belongs to the *^ old and antique" strain heard through all his more earnest utterances. As we listen to Elia the moralist, now with the terse yet stately egotism of one old master, now in the long drawn-out harmonies of another, we live again with the thinkers and dreamers of two centuries CniTIGAL INTROD UGTOR Y NOTE. xxi ago. Sometimes he confides to us weaknesses that few men are bold enough to avow, as when he tells how lie dreaded death and clung to life. "I am not content to pass away Mike a weaver^s shuttle. "* These metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets." There is an essay by Lamb^s friend Hazlitt on the Fear of Death, which it is interesting to compare with this. The one essay may have been possibly suggested by the other. Hazlitt is that one of Lamb^s contemporaries with whom it is natural to com- pare him. There are, indeed, obvious points of resemblance between them. Hazlitt wrote a vigorous and flexible style; he could quote Shakespeare and Milton as copiously as Lamb; he wrote on Lamb's class of subjects; he shared his love of paradoxes and his frank egotistical method. But here all likeness ends. Hazlitt's essay is on the text that, since it does not pain us to reflect that there was once a time when we did not exist, so it should be no pain to think that at some future time the same state of things shall be. But this light-hearted attempt at consolation is found to be more depressing than the melancholy of Lamb, for it lacks the two things needful, the accent of absolute sincerity, and a nature unsoured by the world. But Lamb had his serener moods, and in one of these let us part from him. The essay on the Old Benchers of the Imier Temple is one of the most varied and beautiful pieces of prose that English literature can boast. Emi- nently, moreover, does it show us Lamb as the product of two different ages-^—the child of the Renascence of the sixteenth century and of that of the nineteenth. It is as if both Spenser and AVordsworth had laid hands of bless- xxii CRITICAL INTROD UGTOR T NOTE. ing upon his head. This is how he writes of his child- hood, when the old lawyers paced to and fro before him on the Terrace Walk, making up to his childish eyes "the mytI:ology of the Temple:" " In those days I saw Gods, as ' old men covered with a mantle,^ walking upon the earth. Let the dreams of classic idolatry perish — extinct be the fairies and fairy trumpery of legendary fabling — in the heart of childhood there will forever spring up a well of innocent or whole- some superstition — the seeds of exaggeration will be busy there, and vital, from everyday forms educing the un- known and the uncommon. In that little G-oshen there will be light when the grown world flounders about in the darkness of sense and materiality. While childhood, and while dreams reducing childhood, shall be left, imagina- tion shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth." It is in such passages as these that Lamb shows himself, what indeed he is, the last of the Elizabethans. He had ^' learned their great language," and yet he had early dis- covered, with the keen eye of a humorist, how effective for his purpose was the touch of the pedantic and the fan- tastical from which the noblest of them were not wholly free. He was thus able to make even their weaknesses a fresh source of delight, as he dealt with them from the vantage ground of two centuries. It may seem strange, on flrst thoughts, that the fashion of Lamb's style should not have grown, in its turn, old-fashioned; that, on the contrary, no literary reputation of sixty years' standing should seem more certain of its continuance. But it is not the antique manner — the "self-pleasing quaintness" — that has embalmed the substance. Rather is there that in the substance wliich insures immortality for the style. It is one of the rewards of purity of heart that, allied with humor, it has the promise of perennial charm. " St. CRITICAL INTROD UCTOR Y NOTE. xxiii Charles!" exclaimed Thackeray one day, as he finished reading once more the original of one of Lamb^s letters to Bernard Barton. There was much in Lamb^s habits and manners that we do not associate with the saintly ideal; but patience under suffering and a boundless sympathy hold a large place in that ideal, and in Charles Lamb these were not found wanting. I would add a few words on the kind of information I have sought to furnish in my Kotes. The impertinence of criticism or comment, I hope has been almost entirely avoided. But there was a certain waywardness and love of ^ practicayoking in Charles Lamb that led him often to?^ ^^trSal matters of fact with deliberate falsification. His / essays are full of autobiography, but often purposely dis- \ guised, whether to amuse those who were in the secret, or' to perplex those who were not, it is impossible to say. In his own day, therefore, corrections of fact would have been either superfluous, or would have spoiled the jest; but now that Lamb^s contemporaries are all but passed away, much of the humor of his method is lost without some clue to the many disguises and perversions of fact with which the essays abound. They are full, for instance, of references to actual persons, by means of initials or other devices. To readers fairly conversant with the literary history of Lamb^s time, many of these disguises are transparent enough; but for others, notes here and there are indispen- sable. We have an authentic clue to most of the initials or blanks employed in the first series of Elia. There is in existence a list of these initials drawn up by some un- known hand, and filled in Avith the real names by Lamb himself. Through the kindness of its possessor, Mr. Alexander Ireland, of Manchester, the original of this in- teresting relic has been in my hands, and I can vouch for the handwriting, phraseology, and (it may be added) the spelling, being indubitably Lamb's. xxi V CRITICAL INTROD UCTOIl Y NOTE. There is much information in these essays, more or less disguised, about Lamb's relatives, and I have tried to illustrate these points by details of his family history for which I had not space in my Memoir of Lamb. In a few instances I have permitted myself to repeat some sentences from that memoir, where the same set of circumstances had to be narrated again. But apart from changes of names and incidents in the essays, there is in Lamb's *=^umor the constant element of aLjnischiey^i ^l q ve^ of ji oax - ing. He loves notlijng so much as to mingle romance with I reality, so that it shall be difficult for the reader to disen- tangle them. Sometimes he deals with fiction as if it were fact; and sometimes, after supplying literal facts, he ends with the insinuation that they are fictitious. And besides these deliberate mystifications, there is found also in Lamb a certain natural incapacity for being accurate — an invet- erate turn for the opposite. '' AVhat does Elia care for dates?" he asks in one of his letters, and indeed about ac- curacy in such trifles he did not greatly care. In the matter of quotation, as already remarked, this is curiously shown. He seldom quotes even a hackneyed passage from Shakespeare or Milton correctly; and sometimes he half- remembers a passage from some old author, and re- writes it, to suit the particular subject he wishes it to illustrate. I have succeeded in tracing all but two or three of the many quotations occurring in the essays, and they serve to show the remarkable range and variety of his reading. It is generally known that when Lamb collected his essays, for publication in book form, from the pages of the London and other magaziiies, he omitted certain passages. These I have thought it right, as a rule, not to restore. In most cases the reason for their omission is obvious. They were excrescences or digressions, injuring the effect of the essay as a whole. In a few instances I have retained a note, or other short passage, from the original versions of tho essays. CRITICAL INTRODUCTORY NOTE, xxv I have to thank many friends, and many known to me only by their high literary reputation, for courteous and ready help in investigating points connected with Lamb's writings. Among these I would mention Mr. Alexander Ireland of Manchester; Mr. Richard Garnett of the Brit- ish Museum; and, as before, my friend Mr. J. E. Davis, counsel to the Commissioners of Police, who has given many valuable suggestions and constant assistance of other kinds. I must also express my acknowledgments to Mr. W. J. Jeaffreson, of Folkestone, and to the family of the late Mr. Arthur Loveday of Wardington, Banbury, forper- mision to make extracts from unpublished letters of Lamb's in their possession. Preface to the Last Essays. BY A FKIEND OF THE LATE ELIA. This poor gentleman, who for some months past had been in a declining way, hath at length paid his final tribute to nature. To say truth, it is time he were gone. The humor of the thing, if ever there was much in it, was pretty well exhausted; and a two years' and a half existence has been a tolerable duration for a phantom. I am now at liberty to confess, that much which I have heard objected to my late friend's writings was well founded. Cxude they are, I grant you — a sort of unlicked, incondite things — villainously pranked in an affected array of antique modes and phrases. They had not been hisy if they had been other than such; and better it is, that a writer should be natural in a self-pleasing quaintness, than to affect a naturalness (so called) that should be strange to him. Egotistical they have been pronounced by some who did not know, that what he tells us, as of himself, was often true only (historically) of another; as in a former Essay (to save many instances), where under the first person (his favorite figure) he shadows forth the forlorn estate of a country-boy placed at a London school, far from his friends and connections — in direct opposition to his own early history. If it be egotism to imply and twine with his xxviii PREFACE. own identity the griefs and affections of another — making himself many, or reducing many unto himself — then is the skillful novelist, who all along brings in his hero or hero- ine, speaking of themselves, the greatest egotist of all; who yet has never, therefore, been accused of that nar- rowness. And how shall the intenser dramatist escape being faulty, who, doubtless under cover of passion uttered by another, oftentimes gives blameless vent to his most in- ward feelings, and expresses his own story modestly? My late friend was in many respects a singular character. Those who did not like him, hated him; and some, who once liked him, afterward became his bitterest haters. The truth is, he gave himself too little concern what he uttered, and in whose presence. He observed neither time nor place, and would e^en out with what came uppermost. With the severe religionist he would pass for a free-thinker; while the other faction set him down for a bigot, or per- suaded themselves that he belied his sentiments. Few un- derstood him; and I am not certain that at all times he quite understood himself. He too much affected that dangerous figure — irony. He sowed doubtful speeches, and reaped plain, unequivocal hatred. He would inter- rupt the gravest discussion with some light jest; and yet, perhaps, not quite irrelevant in ears that could understand it. Your long and much talkers hated him. The informal habit of his mind, joined to an inveterate impediment of speech, forbade him to be an orator; and he seemed determined that no one else should play that part when he was present. He was petit and ordinary in his person and appearance. I have seen him sometimes in what is called good company, but where he has been a stranger, sit silent, and be suspected for an odd fellow; till some unlucky occasion provoking it, he would stutter out some senseless pun (not altogether senseless, perhaps, if rightly taken), which has stamped PREFACE. xxix his character for the evening. It was hit or miss with him; but nine times out of ten he contrived by this de- vice to send away a whole company his enemies. His conceptions rose kindlier than his utterance, and his hap- piest impromptus had the appearance of effort. He has been accused of trying to be witty, when in truth he was but struggling to give his poor thoughts articulation. He chose his companions for some individuality of character which they manifested. Hence, not many persons of science, and few professed literati, were of his councils. They were, for the most part, persons of an uncertain fort- une; and, as to such people commonly nothing is more obnoxious than a gentleman of settled (though moderate) income, he passed with most of them for a great miser. To my knowledge this was a mistake. His intimados, to confess a truth, were in the world's eye a ragged regiment. He found them floating on the surface of society; and the color, or something else, in the weed pleased him. The burrs stuck to him — but they were good and loving burrs for all that. He never greatly cared for the society of what are called good people. If any of these were scandal- ized (and offences were sure to arise) he could not help it. When he has been remonstrated with for not making more concessions to the feelings of good people, he would retort by asking, what one point did these good people ever con- cede to him? He was temperate in his meals and diver- sions, but always kept a little on the side of abstemious- ness. Only in the use of the Indian weed he might be thought a little excessive. He took it, he would say, as a solvent of speech. Marry, as his friendly vapor ascended, how his prattle would curl up sometimes with it! the liga- ments which tongue-tied him were loosened, and the stammerer proceeded a statist! I do not know whether I ought to bemoan or rejoice that my old friend is departed. His jests were beginning to XXX PREFACE. grow obsolete, and his stories to be found out. He felt the approaches of age; and while he pretended to cling to life, you saw how slender were the ties left to bind him. Discoursing with him latterly on this subject, he expressed himself with a pettishness, which I thought unworthy of him. In our walks about his suburban retreat (as he called it) at Shackle well, some children belonging to a school of industry had met us, and bowed and courtesied, as he thought, in an especial manner to Mm. '^ They take me for a visiting governor, ^^ he muttered earnestly. He had a horror, which he carried to a foible, of looking like anything important and parochial. He thought that he a^^proached nearer to that stamp daily. He had a general aversion from being treated like a grave or respect- able character, and kept a wary eye upon the advances of age that should so entitle him. He herded always, while it was possible, with people younger than himself. He did not conform to the march of time, but was dragged along in the procession. His manners lagged behind his years. He was too much of the boy-man. The toga vwilis never sat gracefully on his shoulders. The impressions of in- fancy had burnt into him, and he resented the imperti- nence of manhood. These were weaknesses; but such as they were, they are a key to explicate some of his writings. CONTENTS. FIRST SERIES. PAGE. The Soutli-Sea House 1 K^ Oxford in tlie Vacation 9 . Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago IS^^i^W** The Two Races of Men 28 New- Year's Eve « 33 V' Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist 40 y/^ A Chapter on Ears 46 ?CA11 Fool's Day 51 A Quakers' Meeting 55 The Old and the New School-master 60N^* X Imperfect Sympathies 68 Witches and other Night Fears 76 Valentine's Day 82 y My Relations 85 Mackery End, in Hertfordshire 91 V My First Play 96 Modern Gallantry 100 The Old Benchers of tha Inner Temple 104 Grace Before Meat 115 Dream-Children; A Reverie 122 Distant Correspondents 125 The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers 131 A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis 138 A Dissertation upon Roast Pig 145 v*^ A Recantation 152 A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behavior of Married People 154 On Some of the Old Actors 161 On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century 172 On the Acting of Munden. . . . , , » c . 180 xxxii CONTENTS. LAST ESSAYS. Page. *VBlakesmoor in H sliire 183 "> Poor Relations 188 "^^etaclied Thoughts on Books and Reading 194 Stage Illusion 200 To the Shade of Elliston 203 Ellistoniana 206 The Old Margate Hoy 211 The Convalescent 219 Sanity of True Genius 223 Captain Jackson 226 X The Superanuated Man 230 -4 The Genteel Style in Writing 237 ''Barbara S 242 The Tombs in the Abbey 247 Amicus Redivivus 249 Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney 254 Newspapers Thirty-five Years Ago 262 ^Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of ^ Modern Art 269 The Wedding 280 Rejoicings upon the New- Year's Coming of Age 285 ^-» Old China 291 - VThe Child Angel; A Dream 296 IConf essions of a Drunkard 299 Popular Fallacies: I. That a Bully is always a Coward 307 II. That Ill-Gotten Gain never Prospers 308 III. That a Man must not Laugh at his own Jest 308 IV, That Such a one Shows his Breeding — That it is Easy to Perceive he is no Gentleman 309 V. That the Poor Copy the Vices of the Rich 309 VI. That Enough is as Good as a Feast 311 VII. Of Two Disputants, the Warmest is Generally in the Wrong 312 VIII. That Verbal Allusions are not Wit, because they will not Bear a Translation 313 IX. That the Worst Puns are the Best 313 X. That Handsome is that Handsome does 315 XL That we must not Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth 318 GONTE:Nm. xxxiii Page. XII. That Home is Home though it is Never so Homely. . . 820 XIII. That you must Love Me and Love my Dog 824 XIV. That we should Rise with the Lark 827 XV. That we should Lie Down with the Lamb 329 XVI, That a Sulky Temper is a Misfortune 381 Notes ., 335 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE. Eeader, ill thy passage from the Bank — where thou hast been receiving thy half-yearly dividends (supposing thou art a lean annuitant like myself) — to the Flower Pot, to secure a place for Dalston^ or Shacklewell, or some other thy suburban retreat northerly, didst thou never observe a melancholy-looking, handsome brick and stone edifice to the left, where Threadneedle Street abuts upon Bishops- gate? I dare say thou hast often admired its magnificent portals ever gaping wide, and disclosing to view a grave court, with cloisters and pillars, with few or no traces of goers-in or comers-out — a desolation something like Bal- clutha's.* This was once a house of trade, a center of busy interests. The throng of merchants was here — the quick pulse of gain — and here some forms of business are still kept up, though the soul be long since fled. Here are still to be seen stately porticoes; imposing staircases, offices roomy as the state apartments in palaces — deserted, or thinly peopled with a few straggling clerks; the still more sacred interiors of court and committee rooms, with venerable faces of beadles, door-keepers — directors seated in form on solemn days (to proclaim a dead dividend) at long worm-eaten tables, that have been mahogany, with tarnished gilt-leather coverings, supporting massy silver inkstands long since dry; the oaken wainscots hung with pictures of deceased governors and sub-governors, of Queen Anne, and the two first monarchs of the Brunswick dynasty; huge charts, which subsequent *I passed by the walls of Balclutha, and tliey were desolate.— Ossian. 2 THE ESSA T8 OF ELIA. discoveries have antiquated; dusty maps of Mexico, dim as dreams, and soundings of tlie Bay of Panama! The long passages hung with buckets, appended, in idle row, to walls, whose substance might defy any, short of the last, confla- gration; with vast ranges of cellarage under all, where dol- lars and. pieces of eight once lay, an *^ unsunned heap,^^ for Mammon to have solaced his solitary heart withal — long since dissipated, or scattered into air at the blast of the breaking of that famous Bubble. Such is the South-Sea House. At least such it was forty years ago, when I knew it — a magnificent relic ! What alterations may have been made in it since, I have had no o^^portuniiies of verifying. Time, I take for granted, has not freshened it. No wind has resuscitated the face of the sleeping waters. A thicker crust by this time stagnates upon it. The moths, that were then battening upon its obsolete ledgers and day-books, have rested from their dep- redations, but other light generations have succeeded, making fine fretwork among their single and double entries. Layers of dust have accumulated (a superfoetation of dirt) upon the old layers, that seldom used to be disturbed, save by some curious finger, now and then, inquisitive to explore the mode of book-keeping in Queen Annex's reign, or, with less hallowed curiosity, seeking to unveil some of the mys- teries of that tremendous hoax, whose extent the petty peculators of our day look back upon with the same expres- sion of incredulous admiration and hopeless ambition of rivalry as would become the pun}'^ face of modern con- spiracy contemplating the Titan size of Vaux's superhuman plot. Peace to the manes of the Bubble! Silence and desti- tution are upon thy walls, proud house, for a memorial! Situated, as thou art, in the very heart of stirring and living commerce, amid the fret and fever of speculation, witli the Bank and the ^Change, and the India House about thee, in the heyday of present prosperity, with their important faces, as it Avere, insulting thee, their poor neighbor out of husi7iess — to the idle and merely contem- plative — to such as me, old house! there is a charm in thy quiet — a cessation, a coolness from business, an indo- lence almost cloistral, which is delightful! With what reverence have I paced thy great bare rooms and courts a\ TEE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE. 3 eventide! They spoke of the past — the shade of some dead accountant^ with visionary pen in eai% would flit by me, s iff as in life. Living accounts and accountants puzzle me. I have no skill in figuring. But thy great dead tomes, which scarce three degenerate clerks of the present day could lift from their enshrining shelves, with their old fantastic flourishes and decorative rubric inter- lacings; their sums in triple columniations, set down with formal superfluity of ciphers; with pious sentences at the beginning; without which our religious ancestors never ventured to open a book of business or bill of lading; the costly vellum covers of some of them almost persuading us that we are got into some better lihrary, are very agreeable and edifying spectacles. I can look upon these defunct dragons with complacency. Thy heavy odd-shaped ivory- handled penknives (our ancestors had everything on a larger scale than we have hearts for) are as good as any- thing from Herculaneum. The pounce-boxes of our days have gone retrograde. The very clerks which I remember in the South-Sea House — I speak of forty years back — had an air very different from those in the public offices that I have had to do with since. They partook of the genius of the place I They were mostly (for the establishment did not admit of superfluous salaries) bachelors. Generally (for they had not much to do) persons of a curious and speculative turn of mind. Old-fashioned, for a reason mentioned before; humorists, for they were of all descriptions, and, not having been brought together in early life (which has a tendency to assimilate the members of corporate bodies to each other), but, for the most part, placed in this house in ripe or middle age, they necessarily carried into it their separate habits and oddities, unqualified, if I may so speak, a;v^^ as into a common stock. Hence they formed a sort of Noah's^kyf^r; ark. OdjJ^fishes. A l ay-mon asterv. Domestic retainers^^wp*^ in a great house, kept more for show than use. Yet A" pleasant fellows, full of chat, and not a few among them \ had arrived at considerable proficiency on the German flute. The cashier at that time was one Evans, a Cambro- Briton. He had something of the choleric com2:)lexion of his countrymen stamped on his visage, but was a worthy. 4 TUE ESSA YS OF ELIA. sensible man at bottom. He wore his hair, to the last, powdered and frizzed out, in the fashion which I remember to have seen in caricatures of what were termed, in my younger days, Maccaro7iies. He was the last of that race of beaux. Melancholy as a gib-cat over his counter all the forenoon, I think I see him making up his cash (as they call it) with tremulous fingers, as if he feared every one about him was a defaulter; in his hypho- chondry, ready to imagine himself one; haunted, at least, with the idea of the possibility of his becoming one: his tristful visage clearing up a little over his roast neck of veal at Anderton's at two (where his picture still hangs, taken a little before his death by desire of the master of the coffee house which he had frequented for the last five- and-twenty years), but not attaining the meridian of its animation till evening brought on the hour of tea and visiting.' The simultaneous sound of his well-known rap at the door with the stroke of the clock announcing six, was a topic of never-failing mirth in the families which this dear old bachelor gladdened with his presence. Then was his forte, his glorified hour! How would he chirp and exj^and over a muffin! How would he dilate into secret history! His countryman. Pennant himself, in particular, could not be more eloquent than he in relation to old and new London — the site of old theaters, churches, streets gone to decay, where Rosamond^s ])on(i stood, the Mulberry-gardens, and the Conduit in Cheap, with many a pleasant anecdote, derived from paternal tradition, of those grotesque figures which Hogarth has immortalized in his picture of Noon — the worthy descendants of those heroic confessors, who, flying to this country from the wrath of Louis the Fourteenth and his dragons, kept alive the flame of pure religion in the sheltering obscurities of Hog Lane and the vicinity of Seven Dials! Deputy, under Evans, was Thomas Tame. He had the air and stoop of a nobleman. You would have taken him for one, had you met him in one of the j^assages leading to Westminster Hall. By stoop, I mean that gentle bending of the body forward, which, in great men, must be sup- posed to be the effect of an habitual condescending atten- tion to the applications of their inferiors. While he held you in converse, you felt strained to the height in the THE SOUTU-SEA HOUSE. 5 colloquy. The conference over, you were at leisure to smile at the comparative insignificance of the pretensions which had just awed you. His intellect was of the shal- lowest order. It did not reach to a saw or a proverb. His mind was in its original state of white paper. A sucking babe might have posed him. What was it then? Was he rich? Alas, no! Thomas Tame was very poor. Both he and his wife looked outwardly gentlefolks, when I fear all was not well at all times within. She had a neat meager person, which it was evident she had not sinned in over- pampering; but in its veins was noble blood. She traced her descent, by some labyrinth of relationship, wliich I never thoroughly understood, much less can explain with any heraldric certainty at this time of day, to the illus- trious but unfortunate house of Derwentwater. This was the secret of Thomas' stoop. This was the thought, the sentiment, the bright solitary star of your lives, ye mild and happy pair, wdiich cheered you in the night of intellect, and in the obscurity of your station! This was to you instead of riches, instead of rank, instead of glittering attainments: and it was worth them all together. You insulted none with it; but, while you wore it as a piece of defensive armor only, no insult likewise could reach you throuorh it. Decus et solamen. Of quite another stamp was the then accountant, John Tipp. He neither pretended to high blood, nor in good truth cared one fig about the matter. He " thought an accountant the greatest character in the world, and him- self the greatest accountant in it.'' Yet John was not without his hobby. The fiddle relieved his vacant hours. He sang, certainly, with other notes than to the Orphean lyre. He did, indeed, scream and scrape most abomi- nably. His fine suite of official rooms in Threadneedle Street, which, without anything very substantial appended to them, were enough to enlarge a man's notions of him- self that lived in them (I knew not wdio is the occupier of them now),* resounded fortnightly to the notes of a * I have since been informed that the present tenant of them is a Mr. Lamb, a gentleman who is happy in the possession of some choice pictures, and among them a rare portrait of Milton, which I mean to do myself the pleasure of going to see, and at the same time to refresh my memory with the sight of old scenes. Mr. Lamb has the character of a right courteous and communicative collector. 6 THE ESS A YS OF ELIA. concert of '^ sweet breasts," as our ancestors would have called them, culled from club-rooms and orchestras, chorus singers, first and second violoncellos, double basses, and clarionets, who ate his cold mutton and drank his ]Dunch and praised his ear. He sat like Lord Midas among them. But at the desk Tipp was quite another sort of creature. Thence all ideas that were purely ornamental were banished. You could not speak of anything romantic without rebuke. Politics were ex- cluded. A newspaper was thought too refined and abstracted. The whole duty of man consisted in Avriting off dividend warrants. The striking of the annual balance in the company^s books (which, perhaps, differed from the balance of last year in the sum of £'Zb'. 1: 6) occupied his days and nights for a month previous. Not that Tipp was bli-nd to the deadness of things (as they called them in the city) in his beloved house, or did not sigh for a return of the old stirring days when South-Sea hopes were young (he was indeed equal to the wielding of any the most intricate accounts of the most flourishing company in these or those days): but to a genuine accountant the difference of proceeds is as nothing. The fractional farth- ing is as dear to his heart as the thousands which stand before it. He is the true actor, who, whether his part be a prince or a peasant, must act it with like intensity. With Tipp form was everything. His life was formal. His actions seemed ruled with a ruler. His pen was not less erring than his heart. He made the best executor in the world: he was plagued with incessant executorshijjs accord- ingly, which excited his spleen and soothed his vanity in equal ratios. He would swear (for Tipp swore) at the little orphans, whose rights he would guard with a tenacity like the grasp of the dying hand that commended their inter- ests to his protection. With all this there was about him a sort of timidity (his few enemies used to give it a worse name) — a something which, in reverence to the dead, we will place, if you jDlease, a little on this side of the heroic. Nature certainly had been pleased to endow Johu Tipp with a sufficient measure of the principle of self-preserva- tion. There is a cowardice which we do not despise, be- cause it has nothing base or treacherous in its elements; it betrays itself, not you: it is mere temperament; the THE SO UTU-8EA-H0 USE. 7 absence of the romantic and the enterprising; it sees a lion in the way, and will not, with Fortinbras, ^' greatly find quarrel in a straw/^ when some supposed iionor is at stake. Tipp never mounted the box of a stage-coach in his life; or leaned against the rails of a balcony; or walked upon the ridge of a parapet; or looked down a precipice; or let off a gun; or went upon a water-party; or would Avillingly let you go if he could have helped it: neither was it recorded of him, that for lucre, or for intimidation, he ever forsook friend or principle. Whom next shall we summon from the dusty dead, in whom common qualities become uncommon? Can I forget thee, Henry Man, the wit, the polished man of letters, the autliOT, of the South-Sea House? who never enterest thy olfice in a morning or quittedst it in midday (what didst tliou in an office?) without some quirk that left a sting I Thy gibes and thy jokes are now extinct, or survive but in two forgotten A^olumes, which I had the good fortune to rescue from a stall in Barbican, not three days ago, and found thee terse, fresh, epigrammatic, as alive. Thy wit is a little gone by in these fastidious days — thy topics are staled by the ^'new-born gauds" of the time: but great thou used to be in Public Ledgers, and in Chronicles, upon Chatham, and Shelburne, and Rockingham, and Howe, and Burgoyne, and Clinton, and the ^var which ended in the tearing from Great Britain her rebellious colonies, and Keppel, and Wilkes, and Sawbridge, and Bull, and Dun- ning, and Pratt, and Richmond — and such small politics. A little less facetious, and a great deal more obstreperous, was fine rattling, rattleheaded Plumer. He was descended, not in a right line, reader (for his lineal pretensions, like his personal, favored a little of the sinister bend) — from the Plumers of Hertfordshire. So tradition gave him ov^t; and certain family features not a little sanctioned the opinion. Certainly old Walter Plumer (his reputed author) had been a rake in his days, and visited much in Italy, and had seen the world. He was uncle, bachelor-uncle, to the fine old whig still living, who has represented the county in so many successive parliaments, and has a fine old man- sion near Ware. AValter flourished in George the Second's days, and was the same who was summoned before the House of Commons about a business of franks, with the 8 THE ES8A YS OF ELIA. old Duchess of Marlborough. You may read of it in Joluison's Life of Cave. Cave came off cleverly in that business. It is certain our Plumer did nothing to dis- countenance the rumor. He rather seemed pleased when- ever it was, with all gentleness, insinuated. But besides his family pretensions, Plumer was an engaging fellow, and sang gloriously. Not so sweetly sang Plumer, as thou sangest, mild, child-like, pastoral M ; a flute's breathing less divinely whispering than thy Arcadian melodies, when, in tones worthy of Arden, thou didst chant that song sung by Amiens to the banished duke, which proclaims the winter wind more lenient than for a man to be ungrateful. Thy sire was old surly M , the unapproachable church warden of Bishopsgate. He knew not what he did, when he begat thee, like spring, gentle offspring of blustering winter — only unfortunate in thy ending, which should have been mild, conciliatory, swan-like. Much remains to sing. Many fantastic shapes rise up, but they must be mine in private: already I have fooled the reader to the top of his bent; else could I omit that strange creature Woollet, who existed in trying the ques- ^ J tion, and hought litigations ! — and still stranger, inimita- ^ ^ , ble, soiemn Hepworth, from whose gravity Newton might ' hpve deduced the law of gravitation. How profoundly would he nib a pen, with what deliberation would he wet C ^ a wafer!" " xJ But it is time to close — night's wheels are rattling fast ^ / ^ over me — it is proper to have done with this solemn N^' mockery, i \^ Reader, what if I have been playing with thee all this 6^''V while; peradventure the very iiames, which I have sum- . ^ moned up before thee, are fantastic, insubstantial, like Henry Pimpernel, and old John Naps of Greece! .3. Be satisfied that something answering to them has had a ■^ being. Their importance is from the past. / e^.^^^S-^^ ^.x>>. \ OXFORD IN THE VACATION. OXFORD IN THE VACATION. Casting a prepamtory glance at tlie bottom of this arti- cle — as the very connoisseur in prints, with cursory eye (which while it reads, seems as though it read not), never fails to consult the quis sculpsit in the corner, before he pronounces some rare piece to be a Vivares, or a Woollet — methinks I hear you exclaim, reader, WJio is Elia ? Because in my last I tried to divert thee with some half- forgotten humors of some old clerks defunct, in an old house of business, long since gone to decay, doubtless you have already set me down in your mind as one of the self- same college — a votary of the desk — a notched and cropped scrivener — one t)iat sucks his sustenance, as certain sick people are said to do, through a quill. Well, I do agnize something of the sort. I confess that it is my humor, my fancy — in the fore-part of the day, when the mind of your man of letters requires some relax- ation (and none better than such as at first sight seems most abhorrent from his beloved studies), to Avhile away some good hours of my time in the contemplation of indi- goes, cottons, raw silks, piece-goods, flowered or otherwise. In the first place . . . and then it sends you home with such increased appetite to your books . . . not to say, that your outside sheets, and waste wrappers of foolscap, do receive into them, most kindly and naturally, the impression of sonnets, epigrams, essays — so that the very parings of a counting-house, are, in some sort, the settings up of an author. The enfranchised quill, that has plodded all the morning among the cart-rucks of figures and ciphers, frisks and curvets so at its ease over the flow- ery carpet ground of a midnight dissertation. It feels its promotion ... So that you see, upon the whole, tlie literary dignity of Elia is very little, if at all, com- promised in the condescension. Not that, in my anxious detail of the many commodi- ties incidental to the life of a public office, I Avould be thought blind to certain flaws, which a cunning carper might be able to pick in this Joseph's vest. And here I must have leave, in the fullness of my soul, to regret the v .,v^ 1.0 TEE ESSA 78 OF ELIA. abolition, and doing-away-with altogether, of those con- solatory interstices, and sprinklings of freedom, through the four seasons — the red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days. There was Paul, and Stephen, and Barnabas, Andrew and John, men famous in old times — we were used to keep all their days holy, as long back as when I was at school at Christ's. I remember their effigies, by the same token, in the old Baskett Prayer Book. There hung Peter in his uneasy posture — holy Bartlemy in the troublesome act of flaying, after the famous Marsyas by Spagnoletti. I honored them all and could almost have wept the defalcation of Iscariot, so much did we love to keep holy memories sacred: only methought I a little grudged at the coalition of the better Jude with Simon — clubbing (as it were) their sanctities together, to make up one poor gaudy-day between them, as an economy unworthy of the dispensation. These were bright visitations in a scholar's and a clerk's life, ^^ far oif their coming shone." I was as good as an almanac in those days. I could have told you such a saint's-day falls out next week, or the week after. Per- ad venture the Epiphany, by some periodical infelicity, would, once in six years, merge in a Sabbath. Xow am I little better than one of the profane. Let me not be thought to arraign the wisdom of my civil superiors, who have judged the further observation of these holy tides to be papistical, superstitious. Only in a custom of such long standing, methinks, if their Holinesses the BishojDS had, in decency, been first sounded, but I am wading out of my depths. I am not the man to decide the limits of civil and ecclesiastical authority — I am plain Elia — no Selden, nor Archbishop Usher, though at present in the thick of their books, here in the heart of learning, under the shadow of the mighty Bodley. I can here play the gentleman, enact the student. To such a one as myself, who has been defrauded in his young yeais of the sweet food of academic institution, nowhere is so pleasant to while away a few idle weeks at as one or other of the Universities. Their vacation, too, at this time of the year, falls in so pat with ours. Here I can OXFORD IN THE VACATION. 11 take my walks unmolested, and fancy myself of what degree or standing I please. I seem admitted ad eimclem. I fetch up past opportunities. 1 can rise at the chapel bell, and dream tliat it rings for mc. In moods of hu- mility I can be a Sizar, or a Servitor. When the peacock vein rises, I strut a Gentleman Commoner. In graver moments, I proceed Master of Arts. Indeed I do not think I am much unlike that res23ectable character. I have seen your dim-eyed vergers, and bed-makers in spectacles, drop a bow or a curtsey, as I pass, wisely mistaking me for some- thing of the sort. I go about in black, which favors the notion. Only in Christ Church reverend quadrangle I can be content to pass for nothing short of a Seraphic Doctor. The walks at these times are so much one's own, the tall trees of Christ's, the groves of Magdalen! The halls de- serted, and with open doors, inviting one to slip in unper- ceived, and pay a devoir to some Founder, or noble, or royal Benefactress (that should have been ours), whose portrait seems to smile upon their overlooked beadsman, and to adopt me for their own. Then, to take a peej) in by the way at the butteries, and sculleries, redolent of antique hospitality: the immense caves of kitchens, kitchen fire-^Dlaces, cordial recesses, ovens wdiose first jnes were baked for centuries ago; and sj^its which have cooked for Chaucer! IS^ot the meanest minister among the dishes but is hallowed to me through his imagination, and the Cook goes forth a Manci2:)le. AntLa iiity ! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, j)ein^ potliiiio;. art everything! "When thou ivcrt, thou wert not antiquity- — then tbou wort nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses* are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with wdiich we forever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing! What were thy dark ages 9 Surely the sun rose as brightly then as now, and man got him to his work in * Januses of one face. — Sir Thomas Browne. \)feh goods ticketed freshened him up into a dissertation upon tlie cheapness of cottons this spring. I was now a Httle 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 inquir- ing whether I had ever made any calculation as to the value of the rental of all the retail shoj)s in Lond.on. Had he asked of me what song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, I might, with Sir Thomas Browne, have hazarded a " wide solution." * My companion saw my embarrassment, and, the almshouses beyond Shoreditch just coming in view, with great good-nature and dexterity shifted his conversa- tion 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 insti- tutions, and charitable orders; but, finding me rather dimly impressed with some glimmering notions from old poetic associations, than strongly fortified with any specu- lations reducible to calculation on the subject, he gave the matter up; and, the country. beginning to open more and more upon us, as we approached the turnpil^e at Kings- land (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 off, putting questions to an outside passenger, who had alighted with him, regarding an epidemic dis- order that had been rife about Dalston, and which my friend assured him had gone through five or six schools in that neighborhood. The truth now flashed upon me that my companion was a school-master; and that the youth, * Urn Burial. TEE OLD AND THE NEW SGUOOL-MAST. whom he had parted from at our first acquaiiitanco, must have been one of the bigger boys, or the usher. lie was evidently a kindliearted man, who did not seem so much desirous of provoking discussion by the questions which he ])ut, as of obtaining information at any rate. It did not a}>])ear that he took any interest, either, in such kind of inquiries, for their own sake; but that he was in some way /bound to seek for knowledge. A greenish-colored coat, Avhich he had on, forbade me to surmise that he was a clergyman. The adventure gave birth to some reflections on the difference between persons of his profession in past and present times. Rest to the souls of those fine old Pedagogues; the breed, long since extinct, of the Lilys, and the Linacres: who believing that all learning was contained in the lan- guages which they taught, and despising every other ac- quirement as superficial and useless, came to their task as to a sj^ort! Passing from infancy to age, they dreamed away all their days as in a grammar-school. Eevolving in a perpetual cycle of declensions, conjugations, syntaxes, and prosodies; renewing constantly the occupations which had charmed their studious childhood; rehearsing con- tinually 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 Sjrici-Iegiaj in Arcadia still, but kings; the ferule of their swav not much harsher, but of like dignity with that mild scepter attributed to king Basileus; the Greek and Latin, their stately Pamela and their Philoclea; with the occasional duncery of some un- toward tyro, serving for a refreshing interlude of a Moj^sa, or a clown Damoetas! With what a savor doth the Preface to Colet's, or (as it is sometimes called) Paul's Accidence, set forth! '*To exhort every man to the learning of Grammar, that in- tendeth to attain the understanding of the tongues, wherein is contained a great treasury of wisdom and knowledge, it would seem but vain and lost labor; 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 uphold the burden of the frame." How 64 THE E8SA YS OF ELIA, well doth this stately preamble (comparable to those which Milton commendetli as "'' having been the nsage to prefix to some solemn law, then first promulgated by Solon or Lycurgns ") correspond with and illustrate that pious zeal for conformity, expressed in a succeeding clause, which would fence about grammar-rules with the severity of faith -articles! — "as for the diversity of grammars, it is well profitably taken away by tlie King^s Majesties wisdom, who foreseeing the inconvenience, and favorably providing the remedy, 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 hurt in changing of school-masters." What a giisto in that which follows: ''wherein it is profitable that he (the pupil) 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 inculcate gram- mar rules. The modern school-master is expected to know a little of everything, because his pupil is required not to be entirely ignorant of anything. He must be superficially, if I may 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 mechanics is desirable, with a touch of statistics; the quality of soils, etc., botany, the constitution of his coun- try, cum multis aliis. You may get a notion of some part of his expected duties by consulting the famous Tractate on Education, addressed to Mr. Hartlib. All these thing — these, or the desire of them — he is expected to instil, not by set lessons from professors, which he may charge in the bill, but at school intervals, as he walks 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. He must insinuate knowledge at the moUia temioora fandi. He must seize every occasion, the season of the year, the time of the day, a passing cloud, a rainbow, a wagon of hay, a regiment of soldiers going by, to inculcate some- thing useful. He can receive no pleasure from a casual glimpse of Nature, but must catch at it as an object of TUB OLD AND THE NEW tiCUOOL-MAHTER. 05 instruction. IIo must interpret beauty into tlie pict- uresque, lie cannot relish a beggar-man, or a gipsey, for thinking of tlie suitable improvement. Nothing comes to him, not spoiled by the sophisticating medium of moral nsos. The Universe — that Great Book, as it has been called — is to him, indeed, to all intents and purposes, a book out of which he is doomed to read tedious homilieij to distasting school-boys. Vacations themselves are none to him, he is only rather worse off than before; for com- monly he lias some intrusive upper-boy fastened upon \\\m at such times; some cadet of a great family; some neglected lump of nobility, or gentry; that he must drag after him to the play, to the Panorama, to Mr. Bartley's Orrery, to the Panopticon, or into the country, to a friend's house, or his favorite watering-place. Wherever he goes this uneasy shadow attends him. A boy is at his board, and in his path, and in all his movements. lie is boy-rid, sick of perpetual boy. Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates; but they 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 aliuays. The noises of children, playing their own fancies — as I now hearken to them, by fits, sporting on the green before my window, while I am engaged in these grave speculations at my neat suburban retreat at Shacklewell — by distance made more sweet — inexpressibly take from the labor 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 conversation. I should but spoil their sport, and diminish my own sympathy for them, by mingling in their j^astime. 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 consideration of jealousy or self-comparison, for the occasional communion with such minds has con- stituted the fortune and felicity of my life — but the 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 66 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. of that faculty you may possess of your own. Yet get entangled in anotlier man's mind, even as you lose your- self in another man's grounds. You are walking with a tall varlet, whose strides out-pace yours to lassitude. The constant operation of such potent agency would reduce me, I am convinced, to imbecility. You may derive thoughts from others; your way of thinking, the mold in which your tlioughts are cast, must be your own. Intellect may be imparted, but not each man's intellectual frame. As little as I should wish to be always thus dragged upward, as little (or rather still less) is it desirable to be stunted downward by your associates. The trumpet does not more stun you by its loudness, than a whisper teases you by its provoking inaudibility. Why are we never quite at our ease in the jDresence of a school-master? 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 yours. He cannot meet you on the square. He wants a point given him, like an in- different whist-player. He is so used to teaching, that he wants to be teaching you. One of these professors, upon my complaining that these little sketches of mine were anything but methodical, and that I was unable to make them otherwise, kindly offered to instruct me in the method by which young gentlemen in his seminary were taught to compose English themes. The jests of a school-master are coarse or tliin. Tliey do not ell out of school. He is under the restraint of a formal or didac- tive hypocrisy in company, as a clergyman is under a moral one. He can no more let his intellect loose in society than tlie 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 your nephew was not more attached to me. But persons in my situation are more to be jDitied than can well be imagined. We are sur- rounded by young, and, consequently, ardently affectionate hearts, but we can never hope to share an atom of their affections. The relation of master and scholar forbids this. THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOL-MASTER. 67 Holo pleasing this must be to you, hoio I envy your feelings ! my friends will sometimes say to me, when they see young men whom I have educated, return after some years' absence from school, their eyes shining witli pleasure, while they shake hands with their old master, bringing a pres- ent 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 hap- piness; I, only, am sad at heart. This fine-spirited and warm-hearted youth, who fancies he repays his master with gratitude for the care of his boyish years — this young man — 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 school-master. When I mar- ried her — knowing that the wife of a school-master ought to be a busy notable creature, and fearing that my gentle Anna would 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 fiom fatiguing herself to death — I expressed my fears that I was bringing her into a way of life unsuitable to her; and she, who loved me tenderly, promised for my sake to exert her- self to perform the duties of her new^ situation. She prom- ised, and she has kept her word. What wonders will not woman's love perform? My house is managed with a pro- priety and decorum unknown in other schools; my boys are well fed, look healthy, and have every pro2)er accom- modation; and all this performed with a careful economy, that never descends 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, I am compelled to listen to what have been her useful (and they are really useful) employments through the day, and what she pro- 68 THE E8SA TS OF ELIA, poses for her to-morrow's task. Her heart and her feat- ures are changed by the duties of her situation. To the boys, she never appears other than the master^s icife, and she looks up to me as the hoys' master ; to whom all show of love and affection would be highly improper, and unbe- coming the dignity of her situation and mine. Yet this my gratitude forbids me to hint to her. For my sake she submitted to be this altered creature, and can I reproach her for it?" For the communication of this letter I am in- debted to my cousin Bridget. IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. I am of a constitution so general, tliat it consorts and sympatliizetli with all tilings; I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy in any- thing. Those natural repugnancies do not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch. — Religio Medici. That the anthor of the Eeligio Medici monnted upon the airy stilts of abstraction, conversant abont 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, isnot much to be admired. It is rather to be wondered 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, I 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 np of likings and dis- likings, the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, antipa- thies. In a certain sense, I hope it may be said of me that I am a lover of my species. I can feel for all indifferently, but I cannot feel toward all equally. The more pnrely English word that expresses sympathy, will better explain IMPEMFECT SYMPA TUIES. 09 my meaning. I can be a friend to a worthy man, who upon another account cannot be my mate or fellow. I can not 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 wardrobe (to confess fairly) has few whole pieces in it. They are content with fragments and scattered pieces of Truth. She presents no full front to them — a feature 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 * I would be understood as confining myself to tlie subject of imper- fect 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 meeting (who never saw one another before in their lives) and instantly fighting. -We by proof 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 blame, Can challenge or accuse him of no evil. Yet notwithstanding hates him as a devil. The lines are from old Hey wood's " Hierarchie of Angels," and he subjoins 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 wliich he 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. •J'O THE ESSA Y8 OF ELIA, 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 accord- ingly. 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 full development. They are no system- atizers, and would but err more by attempting it. Their minds, as I said before, are suggestive merely. The brain of a true Caledonian (if I am not mistaken) is constituted upon 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 princij)les of clock-work. You never catch his mind in an undress. He never hints or suggests anything, 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 some- thing in your presence 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 understanding is always at its meridian — you never see the first dawn, the early streaks. He has no fal- terings of self-suspicion. Surmises, guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, semi-consciousness, partial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo conceptions, have no place in his brain or vocabulary. The twilight of dubiety never falls upon him. Is he orthodox — he has no doubts. Is he an infidel — he has none eitlier. Between the aftirmative and the negative there is no border-land with him. You cannot hover with liim on the confines of truth, or wander in the maze of a probable argument. He always keeps the path. You cannot make excursions with him — for he sets you 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 con- IMPERFECT S YMPA TRIES. l' 1 versation is as a book. His affirmations have the sanctity of an oath. You must speak upon the square with him. lie stops a meta]:tlior like a suspected person in an enemy's country. *'A healthy book/' said one of his countrymen to me, who liad ventured to give that appellation to John Buncle, '' Did I catch rightly what you said? I have 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 Caledonian. Clap an extinguisher on your irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein of it. Remember you are upon your oath. I have a print of a graceful female after Leonardo da Vinci, which I was showing off 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 assured me, that ^Hie 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 pretensions." The misconception staggered me but did not seem much to disconcert him. Persons of this nation are 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 pro^^osition that contains it be new or old, disputed, or such as is impossible to become a subject of disputation. I was present not long since at a party of North Britons, where a son of Burns was ex- pected; and happened to drop a silly expression (in my South British way), that I wished it were the father in- stead of the son — when four of them started up at once to inform me, that ^^that was impossible, because he was dead." An impracticable wish, it seems, was more than they could conceive. Swift has hit off this part of their character, namely their love of truth, in his biting way, but with an illiberality that necessarily confines the pas- sage to the margin.* The tediousness of these people is * There are some people wlio tliink tliey sufficiently acquit them- selves, and entertain their company with relating facts of no conse- quence, not at all out of the road of such common incidents as happen every day; and this 1 have observed more frequently among 72 THE ESSAYS OF ELlA. certainly provoking. I 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 found that a true Scot resents your admiration of his compatriot even more than he would your contempt of him. The latter he imputes to your '^imperfect acquaint- ance with many of the words which he uses;" and the same objection makes it a presumption in you to suppose that you can admire him. Thomson they seem to have forgotten. Smollett they have neither forgotten nor for- given, for his delineation of Rory and his companion, upon their first introduction to our metropolis. Speak of Smollett as a great genius, and they will retort upon you Hume's History compared with his Continuation of it. What if the historian had continued Humphrey Clinker? I have, in the abstract, no disres])ect for Jews. They are a piece of stubborn antiquity, compared with which Stone- henge is in its nonage. They date beyond the pyramids. But I should not care to be in habits of familiar inter- course with any of that nation. I confess that I have not the nerves to enter their synagogues. Old prejudices cling about me. I cannot shake oft the story of Hugh of Lin- coln. Centuries of injury, contempt and hate, on the one side ; of cloaked revenge, dissimulation and hate, on the other, between our and their fathers, must and ought to affect the blood of the children. I cannot believe ib can run clear and kindly yet; or that a few fine words, such as candor, liberality, the light of a nineteenth century, can close up the breaches of so deadly a disunion. A Hebrew is nowhere congenial to me. He 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 Christian, 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 tlie Scots tlian any otlier nation, wlio are very careful not to omit tlie minutest circumstances of time or place; wbiclikind of discourse, if it were not a little relieved l)y the uncoutli terms and plirases as well as accent and gesture peculiar to that country, would be bardly tol- erable. — Hints toward an Essay on Coaversation, IMPERFECT S TMPA TUIES. ^^ congeeing in awkward postures of an affected civility. If they are converted, why do they not come over to ns alto- gether? Why 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 con- vertites. 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 seiiarative. 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 sj^irit 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 Eed Sea ! " The auditors, for the moment, are as Egyptians to him, and he rides over our necks in triumph. There is no mis- taking him. B has a strong expression of sense in his countenance, and it is confirmed by his singing. The foundation 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 oversensible countenances. How should they? but you seldom see a silly expression among them. Gain, and the pursuit of gain, sharpen a mane's visage. I never heard of an idiot being born among them. Some admire the Jew- ish female-physiognomy. I admire it, but with trembling. Jael had those full dark inscrutable eyes. In the negro countenance you will often meet with strong straits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness toward some of these faces — or rather masks — that have looked out kindly upon one in casual en- counters 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 74 TEE ESS A TS OF ELIA. 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/^ lam all over sophisticated — with humors, fancies, craving hourly sympathy. I must have books, theaters, chit-chats, scandal, jokes, ambiguities and a thousand whim-whams, which their simpler taste can do without. I should starve at their primitive ban- quet. 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 with Daniel 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 resorting to an oath in extreme cases, sanctified as it is by all religious antiquity, is apt (it must be confessed) to intro- duce into the laxer sort of ininds the notion of two kinds of truth — the one applicable to the solemn affairs of justice, and the otlier 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 oath.^^ Hence a great deal of incorrectness and inadvertency, short of falsehood, creeps into ordinary conversation; and a kind of secondary or laic-truth is tolerated, where clergy-truth — oath-truth, by the nature of the circumstances — is not required. A Quaker knows none of this distinction. His simple affirmation being received upon the most sacred occasions, without any fui-ther test, stamps a value upon the words which he is to use upon the IMPERFECT SYMPA TUIES. 75 most indifferent topics of life. He looks to them, iiiitunilly, with more severity. You can have of him no more than his word, lie knows, if he is caught tripping in a casual expression, he forfeits, for himself at least, his claim to the invidious exemption. He knows that his syllables are weighed — and how far a consciousness of this 2)articular watchfulness, exerted against a person, has a tendency to produce indirect answers, and a diverting of the question 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 notorious in Quakers upon all contingencies, might be traced to this imposed self- watch- fulness, 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 accusei', under trials and racking examinations. ^' You will never be the wiser, if I sit here answering your questions till mid- night," said one of those upright Justices to Penn, who had been putting law-cases with a puzzling subtlety. " Thereafter as the answers may be," retorted the Quaker. The astonishing composure of this 2:)eople is sometimes ludicrously displayed in lighter instances. I was traveling in a stage-coach with three male Quakers, buttoned up in the straitest noncomformity of their sect. We stopped to bait at Andover, where a meal, partly tea ap- paratus, partly supper, was set before us. My friends con- fined 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 in 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 I 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. 76 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. who thought I could not do better than follow the ex- ample of such grave and warrantable personages. We got in. The steps went up. The coach drove oft*. 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 twitclies, 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 neighbor, '' Hast thee heard how indigos go at the India House?" and the question operated as a soporific on my moral feeling as far as Exeter. WITCHES AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. 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 jiarticular testi- mony? 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 revelry the oaks of the forest; or that gpits 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, shoukl lay preposterous siege to the weak fantasy of indigent eld, has neitlier likelihood nor unlikeliliood a priori to us, who have no measure to guess at his poUcy, or standard to estimate WJTCUB^S AND OTllEli NIGHT FEARS. 77 what nite those iiiiile souls may f etc! 1 in tlie duvirs market. Nor when the wicked are expressly symbolized by a goat, was it to be wondered at so much, that lie sliould 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, I see no reason for disbelieving one attested story of this nature more than another on the score of absurdity. Tiiere 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 witclicraft; that I could not have slept in a village where one of those reputed hags dwelt. Our ancestors were bolder or more obtuse. Amid the universal belief that these wretches were in league with the author of all evil, holding hell tributary to their mut- tering, no simi^le justice of the peace seems to have scrupled issuing, or silly head borough serving, a warrant upon them — as if they should subpoena 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 i:)assage. His acquiescence is in ex- act analogy to the non-resistance of witches to the consti- tuted powers. What stops the Fiend in Spenser from tearing G-uyon 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, sui^plied 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 occupied a distinguished station. The j^ictures with which it abounds — one of the ark, in particular, 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 atten- tion. There was a picture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen. We shall come to that hereafter. Stackhouse is in two huge tomes; 78 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. and there was a j^leasiire in removing folios of that magni- tude, which, with infinite straiiiing, was as much as I could manage, from the situation which they occupied upon an npper 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 tlie objection regularly tacked to that. The objection was a summary of whatever difficulties had been opposed to the credibility of the his- tory by the shrewdness of ancient or modern infidelity, drawn up with an almost complimentary excess of candor. The solution was brief, modest, and satisfactory. The bane and antidote were both before you. To doubts so put, and so quashed, there seemed to be an end forever. The dragon lay dead, for the foot of the veriest babe to trample on. But — like as was rather feared than realized from that slain monster in Sjoenser — from the womb of those crushed errors young dragonets would creep, exceed- ing the prowess of so tender a St. G-eorge as myself to van- quish. The habit of expecting objections to every passage set me upon starting more objections, for the glory of find- ing 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 chronologic 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 weak- ness, but the child's strength. 0, how ugly sound scrip- tural doubts from the mouth of a babe and a suckling! I should have lost myself in these mazes, and have pined away, I think, witli such unfit sustenance 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 unhappily made a breach in its ingenious fabric, driving' my inconsiderate fingers right through the two larger quadrupeds, 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 WITCHES AND OTUKR NIGHT FKARS. 70 architecture. Stackhonse was henceforth locked up, and became an interdicted treasure. AVith 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 Stackhouvse which no lock or bar could shut out, and which was destined 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 suffer- iiigs I endured in this nature would justify the expression. I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life — so far as memory serves in things so long ago — without an assur- ance, which realized its own prophecy, of seeing some frightful specter. Be old Stackhouse then acquitted in part, if I say, that to this picture of the Witch raising up 8amuel (0 that old man covered with a mantle!) I owe — not my midnight terrors, the hell of infancy — but the shape and manner of their visitation. It was he who dressed up for me a hag that nightly sat upon 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 exjDression) awoke into sleep, and found the vision true. I durst not, even in the daylight, once enter the chamber where I slept, without my face turned to the window, 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 hojiing 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 mid- night, through candle-light and the unwholesome 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 fachion to my dreams — if dreams they were — for the scene of them was invariably the room in which I lay. Had I never met with the picture, the fears would have come self-pictured in some shape or other — Headless bear, black man, or ape — 80 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. but, as it was, my imaginations took that form. It is noi book 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 children has been brought up with the most scrupulous exclusion of every taint of superstition — who was never allowed to hear of goblin or apjDarition, or scarcely to be told of bad men, or to read or hear of any distressing story, finds all this world of fear, from which he has been so rigidly excluded ah extra, in his own ^' thick-coming fan- cies;" and from his little midnight pillow, this nurse-child of optimism will start at shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in sweats to whi^h the reveries of the cell-damned mur- derer are tranquillity. Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire, stories of Cal^no and the Harpies, may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition, but they we re thee 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 affect us at all? or -Names, whose sense we see not, Fray us with things that be not ? Is it that we naturally 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, tor- menting, defined devils in Dante — tearing, mangling, choking, stifling, scorching demons — are they one-half so fearful to the spirit of a man, as the simple idea of a spirit unembodied following him — Like one that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once tiirn'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 u^Don earth, * Mr, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. WITCHES AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. 81 thiit it predoininates in the period of sinless infimcy, are difficulties, the solution of which might afford some prob- able insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence. My night fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. I con- fess an occasional nightmare; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of them. Fiendish faces, with the extinguished taper, will come and look at me; but I know them for mockeries, even while I cannot elude their presence, and I fight and grapple with them. For the credit of my imagi- nation, I am almost ashamed to say how tame and prosaic my dreams are grown. They are never romantic, seldom even rural. They 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 daylight vividness of vision, that was all but being awake. I have formerly traveled among the Westmoreland fells, my highest Alps, but they are objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recog- nition, and I have again and again awoke with ineffectual 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 np icy domes, and pleasure-houses for Kubla Khan, and Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abara, and caverns, Wliere Alpli, tlie sacred river, runs, to solace his night solitudes — when I cannot muster a fiddle. Barry Cornwall has his tritons and his nereids gamboling before him in noctural visions, and proclaiming sons born to Xeptune — when my stretch of imaginative activity can hardly, in the night season, raise up the ghost of a fish- wife. To set my failures in somewhat a mortifying 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 humor my folly in a sort of dream that very night. Methought I was upon the ocean billovv^s at some sea nuptials, riding and 82 THE ES8A YS OF ELIA. mounted high, with the customary train sounding their conchs before me (I myself, you may be sure, the leading god), and joUily we went careering over the main, till just where Ino Leucotliea should have greeted me (I think it was Ino) with a white embrace, the billows gradually sub- siding, fell from a sea roughness to a sea calm, and thence to a river motio'", and that river (as happens in the familiar- ization of dreams) was no other than the gentle Thames, which landed me in the wafture of a placid wave or two, alone, safe and inglorious, somewhere at the foot of Lam- beth palace. The degree of the soul's creativeness in sleep might fur- nish 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 he saw any stripling of his acquaint- ance ambitious of becoming a poet, his first question would be, ^' Young man, what sort of dreams have you?" I have so much faith in my old friend's theory that when I feel that idle vein returning uj^on me, I presently subside into my proper element of prose, remembering those eluding nereids, and that inaiis23icious 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 what manner of person art thou? Art thou but a name, typify- ing 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 cal- endar; not Jerome, nor Ambrose, nor Cyril; nor the con- signer of undipped infants to eternal torments, Austin, whom all mothers hate; nor he who hated all mothers, Origen; nor Bishop Bull, nor Archbishop Parker, nor Whitgift. Thou comest attended with thousands and ten thousands of little Loves, and the air is Brusli'd with the hiss of rustling wings. (iJl*Uaj3U ct Aa^vu-UtK. C^j^A./^^<^^^yi/^ VALENTINE'S DA T. 83 Singing CupKls are thy choristers and thy precentors; and instead of i\\\ crosier, the mystical arrow is borne before thee. In other woVds, tlusis the day on which those charming little missivesVroeped^^ilentines, cross and intercross each other at every streeTand turning. The weary and all forspent twopenny postman sinks beneath a load of deli- cate embarrassments, not his own. It is scarcely credible to what an extent this ephemeral courtship is carried on in this loving town, to the great enrichment of porters, and detriment 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 tortured into more allegories and affectations than an opera hat. What authority we have in history or mythol- ogy for placing the headquarters 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 address- ing his mistress, in perfect simplicity of feeling, ^*^ Madam, my liver and fortune are entirely at your disposal;" or put- ting a delicate question, ^'^ Amanda, have you Vi midriff to bestow?" But custom has settled these things, and awarded the seat of sentiment to the aforesaid triangle, while its less fortunate neighbors wait at animal and anatomical distance. Not many sounds in life, I include all urban and all rural sounds, exceed in interest a knoch at the door. It 'Ogives 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 expectation is the sound that ushers in, or seems to usher in, a Valen- tine. As the raven himself was hoarse that announced the fatal entrance of Duncan, so the knock of the postman on this day is light, airj^, confident, and befitting one that bringeth 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 84 THE ESS A YS OF ELl'A. commonplaces, which '^ having been will always be;" which no school-boy nor school-man can write away; having your irreversible throne in the fancy and affections — what are your transports, when the happy maiden, opening with careful finger, careful not to break the emblematic seal, bursts upon the sight of some well-designed allegory, some type, some youthful fancy, not without verses — Lovers all, A madrigal, or some such device, not overabundant in sense — young love disclaims it, and not quite silly — something be- tween 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 oj)posite a young maiden whom he had often seen; unseen, from his parlor 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 humor. E. B. is an artist of no common powers; in the fancy parts of designing, perhaps infei'ior to none ; his name is known at the bottom of many a Avell-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 favor which she had done him unknown ; for when a kindly face greets us, though but passing by, and never knows us again, nor we it, we should feel it as an obligation : and E. B. did. This good artist set himself at work to please the damsel. It was just before Valentine^s day three years since. He wrought, un- seen and unsuspected, 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 Oayster, with mottoes and fanci- ful devices, such as beseemed — a work, in short, of magic. MY RELATIONS. 85 Iris dipped the woof. This on Valentine's eve he commended to the all-swallowing 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 precious charge delivered. lie saw, unseen, the happy girl unfold the Valentine, 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 benefactor was unknown. It would do her no harm. It would do her 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, Ave 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 church. MY RELATIONS. I AM arrived at that point of life at which a man 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 com- pass of time,'Mie says, ^^aman may have a close appre- hension 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 Oblivion" 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 86 THE ESSA TS OF ELIA, so exclusive my reason cannot altogether approve. She was from morning till night poring over good books and devotional exercises. Her favorite volumes were, " Thomas a Kempis/^ in Stanhope^s translation; and a Eoman Catholic Prayer Book, with the matins and com- plines regularly set down — terms which I was at that time too young to understand. She persisted in reading them, although admonished 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, I think at one period of her life, she told me, she had read with great satisfaction the ^^Advent- ures 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 Cliristian. She was a woman of strong sense, and shrewd mind — extra- ordinary at a repartee; one of the few occasions of her breaking silence — else she did not much value wit. The only secular employment I remember to have seen her engaged in, was the splitting of French beans, aud dropping them into a china basin of fair water. The odor of tliose tender vegetables to this day comes back upon my sense, redolent of soothing recollections. Certainly it is the most delicate of culinary operations. Male aunts, as somebody calls them, I had none — to remember. 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 sprinkled about in Hertfordshire — besides two, with whom I have been all my life in habits of the closest intimacy, and whom I may term cousins ^^mr excellence. These are James and Bridget Elia. They are older than myself by twelve, and ten years; and neither of them seems disposed, in matters of advice and guidance, to waive any of the prerogatives which primogeniture confers. MT RELATIONS. 87 May they continue still in the same mind; and when they shall be seventy-five, and seventy-three years old (I caTinot spare them sooner), persist in treating me in my grand climacteric precisely as a stripling, or younger brother! James is an inexplicable cousin. Nature hath her unities, which not every critic can penetrate; or, if we feel, we cannot explain them. The pen of Yorick, and of none since his, could have drawn J. E. entire — those fine Shandean 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 contradictory ^irinciples. The genuine child of impulse, the frigid philosopher of prudence — the phlegm of my cousin^s doctrine, is invariably at war with his tempera- ment, which is high sanguine. With always some fire-new project in his brain, J. E. is the systematic opponent of innovation, and crier down of everything that has not stood the test of age and experiment. With a hundred fine notions chasing 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, com- mends you to the guidance of common seiise on all oc- casions. With a touch of the eccentric in all which he does or says, he is only anxious that you 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 works 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 encourage- ment 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 tlieir individual humors, ^15 theories are sure to be in diametrical opposition to his constitution. He is coui'ageous as Charles of Sweden, upon instinct; chary of his person upon principle, as a traveling Quaker. He has been preaching up to me, all 88 THE ESS A YS OF ELIA. my life, the doctrine of bowing to the great — the necessity of forms, and manner, to a man^s getting on in the world. He himself never aims at either, that I can discover, 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 Avhen she molded this im- petuous cousin — and Art never turned out a more elaborate orator than he can display himself to be, upon his favorite 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, in a very obstructing manner, at the foot of John Murray's Street, where you get in when it is empty, and are expected 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 l3e better than we are, thus sitting, tlius consulting f — '^ prefers for his part, a state of rest to locomotion '^ — with an eye all the v/hile 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 argLiment, or detecting a sophistry, 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 Mm, when peradventure the next moment his lungs shall crow like a chanticleer. He says some of the best things in the world, and declareth that wit is his aversion. MY RELATIONS. 89 It was lie who said, upon seeing the Eton boys at play in their grounds — Wliat a pity to think that these fine in- genuous lads in a few years 2vill all be changed into frivolous Members of Parliament ! His youth was fiery, glowing, tempestuous — and in age he disco vereth 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 toward the street of my daily avocation, on some fine May morning, to meet him marching in a quite opposite direction, with a jolly handsome presence, and shining sanguine face, that indicates some purchase in his eye — a Claude — or a Hobbima — for much of his enviable leisure is consumed at Christie's and Phillips — 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! — chant- ing 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 Indiffer- ence doing the honors 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 j^ou assure him that to you the landscape shows much more agreeable without that artifice. Woe be to the luckless wight who does not only not resjoond to his rapture, but who should drop an unseasonable intimation of preferring one of his anterior bargains to the present! 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 Raphael! — kee^D its ascendency for a few brief moons — then, after certain intermedial degradations, from the front drawing-room to the back gallery, thence to the dark parlor, adopted in turn by each of the Carracci, under successive lower- 90 THE ESSA Y8 OF ELIA. ing ascriptions of filiation, mildly breaking its fall^con- signed to the oblivious lamber-room, go out at last a Lncca Giordano, or plain Carlo Maratti! which things when I beheld musing upon the chances and mutabilities of fate below, hath made me to reflect upon the altered condition of great personages, or that woeful Queen of Kichard the Second — -set fortli in pomp, Slie came adorned hither like sweet May; Sent back like Hallowmass or shortest day. With great love for you, J. E. hath but a limited sym- pathy with what you feel or do. He lives in a world of his own, and makes slender guesses at what passes in your mind. He never pierces the marrow of your habits. He will tell an old established play-goer, that Mr. Such- a-one, of So-and-so (naming one of the theaters), is a very lively comedian — as a piece of news I He advertised me but the other day of some pleasant green lanes which he had found out for me, hnowing me to he a great walker, 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 sentimental. He applies the definition of real evil to bodily sufferings exclusively — and rejecteth all others as imaginary. He is affected by the sight, or the bare supposition, of a creature in pain, to a degree which I have never witnessed out of womankind. A consti- tutional acuteness to 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 overloaded ass is his client forever. He is the apostle to the brute kind — the never-failing friend of those who have none to care for them. The contem- plation of a lobster boiled, or eels skinned alive, will wing him so, that ^^all for pity he could die.'^ It will take the savor from his palate, and the rest from his pillow, for days and nights. With the intense feeling of Thomas Olarkson, he wanted only the steadiness of pursuit, and unity of purpose, of that ^Hrue yoke-fellow with Time," to have affected as much for the Animal as MACKERY END, IN UERTFORDSHIRE. 91 he hiith done for the Negro Creation. But my uncon- trollcible cousin is but imperfectly formed for purposes which demand co-openition. He cannot wait. Ilis amelioration plans must be 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 Relief of because the fervor of his humanity toiled beyond the formal apprehension and creeping processes of his associates. I 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 understanding that should be between kinsfolk, forbid I With all the strangenesses of t\\\% sti'cingest of tlie Ellas, I would not have him in one jot or tittle other than he is; neither would I barter or ex- change my wild kinsman for the most exact, regular, and every way consistent kinsman breathing. In my next, reader, I may perhaps give you some ac- count of my cousin Bridget — if you are 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 — Througli tlie green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire. MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE. Bridget Elia has been my housekeeper for many a long year. I have obligations to Bridget, extending beyond the period of memory. We house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness; with such tolerable comfort, upon the whole, that I, for one, find in myself no sort of disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash king's offspring, to bewail my celibacy. We agree pretty well in our tastes and habits — yet so, as ^' with a difference.^^ We are generally in har- 9^' THE ES8A TS OF ELM, mony, with occasional bickerings — as it should be among near relations. Our sympathies are rather nnderstood 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 contemporaries, she is abstracted in some modern tale or adventure, whereof our common read- ing-table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies. Narrative teases me. I have little concern in the progress of events. She must have a story, well, ill, or indiffer- ently 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 dully upon me. Out-of-the-way humors 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 beauti- ful obliquities of the Keligio Medici; but she must apolo- gize to me for certain disrespectful insinuations, which she has been pleased to throw out latterly, touching the intellectuals of a dear favorite of mine, of the last century but one — the thrice noble, chaste and virtuous, but again somewhat fantastical and original- brained, generous Mar- garet 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 philoso- phies and systems; but she neither wrangles with nor ac- cepts their opinions. That which was good and venerable to her, when a child, retains its authority over her mind still. She never juggles or plays tricks with her under- standing. AVe are both of us inclined to be a little too positive; and I have observed the result of our disputes to be almost uni- formly 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 MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE, 03 points; upon something proper to be done or let alone; Avhatever 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 her 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, without fully understanding its pur- port — 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 passethbythe 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 will upon that fair and wholesome pastur- age. Had I twenty girls, they should be brought up exactly in this fashion. I know not whether their chance in wed- lock might not be diminished by it, but I can answer for it that it makes (if the worst come to the worst) most incom- parable old maids. In a season of distress, she is the truest comforter; but in the teasing accidents and minor perplexities, which do not call out the tuill to meet them, she sometimes maketh- matters worse by an excess of participation. If she does not always divide your trouble, upon the pleasanter occasions 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 country. The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End, or Mack- arel End, as it is spelt, perhaps more properly, in some old maps of Hertfordshire; a farm-house — delightfully situated 94 THE ESSA TS OF ELIA. withiu a gentle walk from Wheathampstead. I can jnst remember having been there, on a visit to a great-aunt, when I was a child, under the care of Bridget; who, as I have said, is older than myself by some ten years. I wish that I could throw into a heap the remainder of our joint exist- ences, that we might share them in equal division. But that is impossible. The house was at that time in the oc- cupation of a substantial yeoman, who had married my grand mother^s sister. His name was Gladman. My grandmother wasaBruton, married to a Field. The Glad- mans and the Brutons are 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 — we 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, affected me with a pleasure which I had not experienced for many a .year. For though / had for- gotten it, we had never forgotten being there together, and we had 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 conjured 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 easily 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 soon re-confirmed itself in her affections, and she traversed MACKEllT END, IN IIERTFORDISIIIRE. 05 every outpost of the old mansion, to the wood-house, the orchard, the place where the pigeon-house had stood (house and birds were alike flown) with a breathless inipfitienoe of recognition, which was more pardonable perhaps than decorous at the age of fifty odd. But Bridget in some tliing;s is behind her years. / The only thing left was to get into the house, and that was a difficulty which 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 returned with a creature that might have sat to a sculptor for the image of Welcome. It was the youngest of the Gladmans, who by marriage with a Bruton had be- come mistress of the old mansion. A comely brood are the Burtons. Six of them, females, were noted as the handsomest young women in the county. But this adopted Burton, in my mind, was better than all — more comely. She was born too late to have remembered me. She just 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 metropolis, bind faster, as we found it in hearty, homely, loving Hertfordshire. In five minutes we were as thoroughly acquainted as if we had been born 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 of 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 jialace, or so Ave thought it. We were made welcome by husband and wife equally, we, and our friend that was with us. 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. The fatted calf was made ready, or rather was already so, as if in anticipation of our coming; and after an appropriate glass of native wine, never let me forget with what honest pride this hospitable cousin made us proceed to Wheathampstead, to introduce 96 THE ESSA TS OF ELIA. us (as some new-found rarity) to her mother and sister Gladmans, who did indeed know something more of us, at a time when she almost knew nothing. With what cor- responding 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 per- sons, to my utter astonishment, and her own, and to the astoundment of B. F. who sat by, almost the only thing that was not a cousin there, old effaced images of more than half -forgotten names and circumstances still crowd- ing back upon her, as words written in lemon come out upon 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 have been her care in foolish manhood since, in those pretty pastoral walks, long ago, about Mackery End, in Hertfordshire. MY FIRST PLAY. At the north end of Cross-court there yet stands a portal, of some architectural pretensions, though reduced to hum- ble use, serving at present for an entrance to a printing- office. This old door- way, if you are young, reader, you may not know was the identical j^ 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 7ny fij'st play. The afternoon had been wet, and the con- dition of our going (the elder folks and myself) was, that the rain should cease. AYith what a beating heart did I watch from the window the puddles, from the stillness of which I was taught to prognosticate the desired cessation! I seem to remember the last spurt, and the glee which I ran to announce it. We went with orders, which my godfather F. had sent us. He kept the oil shop (now Davies') at the corner of Featherstone-buildings, in Holborn. F. was a tall grave person, lofty in speech, and had pretensions above his rank. He associated in those days with John Palmer, the come- dian, whose gait and. bearing he seemed to copy; if John MY FIRST PLAT. 97 (which is quite as likely) did not rather borrow somewhat of his manner from my godfather. lie was also known to and visited by Sheridan. It was to his house in noll)oni that young Brinsley brought his first wife on her elo^iemeni. with him from a boarding-school at Bath — the beautiful Maria Linley. My parents were present (over a quadrill(; table) when he arrived in the evening with his harmonious charge. From either of these connections it may be in ferred that my godfather could command an order for the then Drury-lane Theater at pleasure — and, indeed, a pretty liberal issue of those cheap billets, in Brinsley's easy auto- graph, I have heard him say was the sole remuneration which he had received for many years^niglitly illumination of the orchestra and various avenues of that theater — and he was content it should be so. The honor of Sheridan's familiarity — or supposed familiarity — was better to my god- father 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 con- stantly in his mouth (how odd sounds Latin from an oil- man's lips I) which my better knowledge since has enabled me to correct. In strict pronunciation they should have been sounded vice versa, but in those young years they impressed me with more awe than they would now do, read aright from Seneca or Varro, in his own peculiar pronun- ciation, monosyllabically elaborated, or Anglicised, into something like verse verse. By an imposing manner, and the help of these distorted syllables, he climbed (but that was little) to the highest parochial honors which St. An- drew's has to bestow. He is dead — and thus much I thought due to his memory, both for my first orders (little wondrous talis- mansl — slight keys, and insignifictuit to outward sight, but opening to me more than Arabian paradises!) and, more- over, that by his testamentary beneficence I came into pos- session of the only landed property which I could ever call my own — situate near the road-way village of pleasant Puckeridge, in Hertfordshire. When I journeyed down 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 al- 98 TEE ESSA YS OF ELIA. lotment of three-quarters of an acre, with its commodions mansion in the midst, with the feeling of an English free- holder that all betwixt sky and center was my own. The estate has passed into more prudent hands, and nothing but an agrarian can restore it. In those days wwe pit orders. Beshrew the uncomfort- able manager who abolished them! with one of these we went. I remember the waiting at the door — 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 pro chuse. But when we got in, and I beheld the green curtain that veiled a heaven to my im- agination, which ivas soon to be disclosed — the breathless anticipations I endured! I had seen something like it in the plate prefixed to Troilus and Cressida, in Kowe's Shakespeare — 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), re- sembling — a homely fancy — but I judged it to be sugar- candy — yet to my raised imagination, divested of its home- lier qualities, it appeared a glorified candy! The orchestra lights at length rose, those " fair Auroras!'^ Once the bell sounded. It was to ring out yet once again — and, incapa- ble of the anticipation, 1 reposed my shut eyes in a sort 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 Darias, and I was in the midst of Daniel. All feeling was absorbed in vision. Gor- geous vests, gardens, palaces, princesses, passed before me. I knew not players. I was in Persepolis for the time, and MY FIRST PLAY. 99 the burning idol of their devotion almost converted me into a worshiper. I was awe-struck^ and believed those significations to be something more than elemental fires. It was all enchantment and a dream. Ko such pleasure has since visited me but in dreams. Harlequin^s invasion fol- lowed; where, I remember, the transformation of the magis- trates 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 Lud, 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 I) 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 story. The clownery and jDantaloonery of these pantomimes have clean passed out of my head. I believe 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 me then replete with devout meaning) that gape and grin in stone around the inside of the old Round 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 jolay-going was inhibited) I again entered the doors of a theater. That old Artaxerxes evening had never done ringing in my fancy. I expected the same feelings to come again with the same occasion. But we differ from ourselves less at sixty and sixteen than the latter does from six. In that interval what had I not 100 THE E88A T8 OF ELIA. lost! At the first period I knew nothing, understood noth- ing, discriminated nothing. I felt all, loved all, wondered all- Was nourislied, I could not tell liow — I had left the temple a devotee, and was returned a rationalist. The same things were there materially; but the emblem, the reference, was gone. The green curtain was no longer a veil, drawn between two worlds, the un- folding of which was to bring back past ages, to present a ^' royal 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 a 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 wdiich those many centuries — of six short twelvemonths — had wrought in me. Perhaps it was fortunate for me that the play of the evening was but an indifferent comedy, as it gave me time to crop some unreasonable exjoectations, which might have interfered with the genuine emotions with which I was soon after enabled to enter upon the first appearance to me of Mrs. Siddons in Isabella. Compari- son and retrospection soon yielded to the present attraction of the scene; and the theater became to me, upon a new stock, the most delightful of recreations. MODERN GALLANTRY. 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 j^rinciple actuates our conduct, when I can forget that in the nineteenth century of the era from which we date our civility, we are but just begin- ning to leave off the very frequent practice of whipping MODERN QALLANTHY, 101 feuiiiles 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 are still occasion- ally — hanged. I shall believe in it, when actresses are no longer subject to be hissed oft' a stage by gentlemen. I shall believe in it, when Dorimant hands a fish-wife across the kennel; or assists the ap^ole- woman to pick up her wandering fruit, which some unlucky dray has just dissipated. I shall believe in it, when the Dorimants in humbler life, who would be thought in their way notable adepts in this refinement, shall act upon it in places where they are not known, or think themselves not observed — when I shall see the traveler for some rich tradesman part with his ad- mired box-coat, to spread it over the defenceless shoulders of the poor woman, who is passing to her parish on the roof of the same stage-coach with him, drenched in the rain — when I shall no longer see a woman standing up in the pit of a London theater, till she is sick and faint with the exertion, \vith men about 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 be welcome to his seat, if she were a little younger and handsomer.^'' Place this dapper warehouse- man, or that rider, in a circle of their own female acquaint- ance, and you shall confess you have not seen a politer- bred man in Lothbury. Lastly, I shall begin to believe that there is some such principle influencing our conduct, when more than one- half of the drudgery and course servitude of the world shall cease to be performed by women. Until that day comes I shall never believe this boasted point 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 even be 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 youth, to homely features as to handsome, to coarse complexions as to clear — to the 102 THE ESSA TS OF ELIA, woman, as slie is a woman, not as she is a beauty, a fort- une, or a title. I sliall 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 ^'antiquated virginity, ^^ and such a one has ^'overstood her market,^^ pronounced in good company, shall raise immediate offense 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 Shakespeare commentator, has addressed a fine sonnet — was the only pattern of consistent gallantry I have met with. He took me under his shelter at an early age, and bestowed some pains upon me. I owe to lus pre- cepts and example whatever there is of the man of business (and that is not much) in my composition. It was not his fault that I did not profit more. Though bred a Pres- byterian, and brought up a merchant, he was the finest gen- tleman of his time. Pie 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 cas- ualties of a disadvantageous 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 acceptation of the word, after women ; but he reverenced and upheld, in every form in which it came before him, womanlwod. 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 re- ceive no damage, with as much carefulness as if she had been a countess. To the reverend form of Female Eld he would yield the wall (though it were to an ancient beijgar- woman) with more ceremony than we can afford to show our .grandmas. 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. MODERN GALLANTRY. 103 He was never married, but in bis youtb be paid bis ad- dresses to tbe beautiful Susan Winstanley — old AV'instau- ley^s daugbter of Clapton — wbo, dying in tbe early days of tbeir courtsbip, confirmed in bim tbe resolution of perpet- ual bacbelorsbip. It was during tbeir sbort courtsbip, be told me, tbat be bad been one day treating bis mistress witb a profusion of civil speecbes — tbe common gallantries — to wbicb kind of tiling sbe bad bitberto manifested no repugnance — but in tbis instance witb no effect. He could not obtain from ber a decent acknowledgment in return. Sbe ratber seemed to resent bis compliments. He could not set it down to caprice, for tbe lady bad always sbown berself above tbat littleness. Wben be ventured on tbe following day, finding ber little better bumored, to expostulate witb her on ber coldness of yesterday, sbe con- fessed, witb ber usual frankness, tbat sbe bad no sort of dislike to bis attentions; tbat sbe could even endure some bigb-flown compliments; tbat a young woman placed in her situation bad a right to expect all sorts of civil things said to her; that sbe hoped sbe could digest a dose of adu- lation, short of insincerity, with as little injury to her hu- mility as most young women; but tbat — a little before he had commenced his compliments — she had overheard him by accident, in ratber rough language, rating a young woman, who had not brought home bis cravats quite to the appointed time, and sbe thought to herself, '* As I am Miss Susan AVinstanley, and a young lady — a reputed beauty, and known to be a fortune — I can have my choice of the finest speeches from the mouth of tbis very fine gentleman who is courting me — but if I had been poor Mary Such-a- one {naming themilUner) — and bad failed of bringing home the cravats to the appointed hour — though perhaps I bad 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, tbat if it were only to do me honor, a female, like myself, might have re- ceived bandsomer usage; and I was determined not to ac- cept any fine speecbes to the compromise of tbat sex, tbe belonging to which was after all my strongest claim and title to them.^' I think tbe lady discovered both generosity and a just way of thinking, in tbis rebuke which she gave her lover; 104 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA, and I have sometimes imagined that the uncommon strain of courtesy, which through life regulated the actions and behavior of my friend toward all womankind indiscrim- inately, 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 S23irit of consistent gal- lantry; and no longer witness the anomaly of the same man — a pattern of true politeness to a wife — of cold con- tempt or rudeness to a sister; the idolater of his female mistress; the disparager and despiser of his no less female 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 depend- ant — she deserves to have diminished from herself on that score; and probably will feel the diminution, when youth 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 first — resjDect 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 atten- tions, incident to individual preference, be so many pretty additaments and ornaments — as many and as fancied as you please, to that main structure. Let her first lesson be with sweet Susan Winstanley — to reverence her sex. THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. I WAS born, and passed the first seven years of my life, in the Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountains, 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 recollection. I repeat, to this day, no verses to myself more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, that those of Spenser, where he speaks of this spot: There wlien tliey came, wliereas those bricky towers, The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride, THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. 105 Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers. There whylome wont the Teraplar knights to bide, Till they decayed through pride. Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis. What a transition for a countryman visiting London for the first time — the passing from the crowded Strand or Fleet Street, by unexpected avenues, into its magnificent ample squares, its classic green recesses I What a cheerful, liberal look hath that portion of it, which, from three sides, overlooks the greater garden; that goodly pile Of building strong, albeit of paper height, confronting with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more fantastically-shrouded one, named of Harcourt, with the cheerful Crown-Office-row (place of my kindly engendure), 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 ISJaiadesI 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 urchins, my contemporaries, who, not being able to guess at its recondite machinery, were almost tempted to hail the wondrous work as magic. Wiiat an antique air had ^e now almost effaced sun-dials, with their moral inscrip- tions^ seeming coevals with that Time which they meas- ured, and to take their revelations of itsjflight immediately from heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain oi_- 1-ight. How would the dark line steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to detect its move- ment, never catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrests of sleep. Ahl yet doth beauty like a dial hand Steal ironi his jfigure, and no pace perceived I What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous em- bowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dullness of communication, compared with the simple, altar-like structure and silent heart-language of the old dial I It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished? If its business use be super- 106 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA, seded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance. It spoke of moderate labors, of pleasures not protracted after sunset, of 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 ap- portion 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 occupa- tion, provided it with mottoes more touching than tomb- stones. It was a pretty device of the gardener, recorded by Marvell, 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 witty delicacy. They will not come in awkwardly, I hope, in a talk of fountains and sun-dials. He is speak- ing of sweet garden scenes: What wondrous life is this I leadl Ripe apples drop about my Lead. The luscious clusters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine. 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 ani 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. My soul into tlie boughs does glide; There, like a bird, it sits and sings, Then whets and claps its silver wings, And, till ])repared for longer flight. Waves in its i)lumes the various light. How well the skillful gardener drew Of flowers and herbs, this dial new. Where, from above, the milder sun Does through a fragrant zodiac run: THE OLD BKNCUKR8 OF THE INNER TEMPLE. 107 And, as it works, the industrious bee Computes its time as well as we. How could such sweet and wholesome hours Be reckoned, but with herbs and flowers ? * The artificial fountains of the metropolis are, in like manner, fast vanishing. Most of them are dried up or bricked over. Yet, wliere one is left, as in that little green nook behind the South-Sea House, what a freshness it gives to the dreary pile. Four little winged marble boys used to play their virgin fancies, sj^outing out ever fresh streams from their innocent-wanton lips in the square of Lincoln's Inn, when I was no bigger than they were figured. They are gone and the spring choked up. The fashion, they tell me, is gone by, and these tilings are esteemed childish. Why not, then, gratify children, by letting them stand? Lawyers, I suppose, were children once. They are awakening images to them at least. Why must everything smack of man and mannish? Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in the bosoms of the wisest and the best some of the child's heart left, to resjDond to its earliest enchantments? The figures were grotesque. Are the stiff-wigged living figures, that still flitter and chatter about that area, less Gothic in appearance? or is the splutter of their hot rhetoric one-half so refreshing and innocent as the little cool, playful streams those exploded cherubs uttered? They have lately gothicized the entrance to the Inner Temple-hall, and the library front; to assimilate them, I suppose, to the body of the hall, which they do not at all resemble. What is become of the winged horse that stood over the former? a stately arms! and who has removed those frescoes of the Virtues, which Italianized the end of the Paper-buildings? my first hint of allegory! They must account to me for these things, which I miss so greatly. The terrace is, indeed, left, which we used to call the parade; but the traces are passed away of the footsteps which made its pavement awful! It is become common and profane. The old benchers had it almost sacred to ^themselves, in the fore part of the day at least. They * From a copy of verses entitled " The Garden." 108 TEE E8SA Y8 OF ELIA. might not be sided or jostled. Their air and dress asserted the parade. You left wide spaces betwixt you when you passed them. We walk on even terms with their successors. The roguish eye of J 11^ ever ready to be delivered of a jest, almost invites a stranger to vie a repartee with it. But what insolent familiar durst have mated Thomas Coventry.? whose person was a quadrate, his step massy and elephantine, his face square as the lion^s, his gait peremptory and path-keeping, in- divertible from his way as a moving column, the scare- crow of his inferiors, the browbeater of equals and superiors, who made a "solitude of children wherever he came, for they fled his insufferable presence, as they would have shunned an Elisha bear. His growl was as thunder in their ears, whether he spake to them in mirth or in rebuke; his invitatory notes being, indeed, of all, the most repulsive and horrid. Clouds of snuff, aggravating the natural terrors of his speech, broke from each majestic nostril, darkening the air. He took it, not by pinches, but a palmful at once, diving for it under the mighty flaps of his old-fashioned waistcoat pocket; his waistcoat red and angry, his coat dark ra43pee, tinctured by dye original, and by adjuncts, with buttons of absolute gold. And so he paced the terrace. By his side a milder form was sometimes to be seen; the pensive gentility of Samuel Salt. ^They were coevals, and had nothing but that and their benchership in com- mon. In nolitics Salt was a whig, and Coventry a staunch tory. Many a sarcastic growl did the latter cast out — for Coventry had a rough spinous humor — at the political confederates of his associate, which rebounded from the gentle bosom of the latter like cannon-balls from wool. You could not ruffle Samuel Salt. S. had the reputation of being a very clever man, and of excellent discernment in the chamber practice of the law. I suspect his knowledge did not amount to much. When a case of difficult disposition of money, testamentary or otherwise, came before him, he ordinarily handed it over, with a few instructions, to his man Lovel, who was a quick little fellow, and would despatch it out of hand by the light of natural understanding, of which he had an un- common share. It was- incredible what repute for talents THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. 109 S. enjoyed by tlio mere trick of gravity. Yin was ii shy inan; ii cliikl might pose him in a minute — indolent and procrastinating to the last degree. Yet men would give him credit for vast application, in spite of himself. He was not to be trusted with himself with impunity. He never dressed for a dinner party but he forgot his sword — they wore swords then — or some other necessary part of his equipage. Lovel had his eye upon him on all these occasions, and ordinarily gave him his cue. If there was anything which he could speak unseasonably, he was sure to do it. He was to dine at a relative's of the unfortunate Miss Blandy on the day of her execution; and L., who had a wary foresight of his probable hallucinations, before he set out schooled him, with great anxiety, not in any possible manner to allude to her story that day. S. promised faithfully to observe the injunction. He had not been seated in the parlor, where the company was ex^iect- ing the dinner summons, four minutes, when, a pause in the conversation ensuing, he got up, looked out of the window, and pulling down his ruffles — an ordinary motion with him — observed, " it was a gloomy day,'' and added, *' Miss Blandy must be hanged by this time, I suppose." Instances of this sort were perpetual. Yet S. was thought by some of the greatest men of his time a tit person to be consulted, not alone in matters pertaining to the law, but in the ordinary niceties and embarrassments of conduct — from force of manner entirely. He never laughed. He had the same good fortune among the female world — was a known toast with the ladies, and one or two are said to have died for love of him — I sup2:)ose, because he never trifled or talked gallantly with them, or paid them, indeed, hardly common attentions. He had a fine face and j^erson, but wanted, methought, the spirit that should have shown them off with advantage to the women. His eye lacked luster. Xot so, thought Susan P ; who, at the ad- vanced age of sixty, was seen, in the cold evening timr, unaccompanied, wetting the pavement of B d Row, with tears that fell in drops which might be heard, because her friend had died that clay — he, whom she had pursue«i with a hopeless passion for the last forty years — a passion which years could not extinguish or abate; nor the long- resolved, yet gently-enforced, puttings off of unrelenting 110 TEE ESSA YS OF ELIA. bachelorhood dissuade from its cherished purpose. Mild Susan P , thou hast now thy friend in heaven! Thomas Coventry was a cadet of the noble family of that name. He passed his youth in contracted circumstances, which gave him early those parsimonious habits which in after life never forsook him; so that with one windfall or another, about the time I knew him, he was master of four or five hundred thousand pounds; nor did he look or walk worth a moidore less. He lived in a gloomy house opposite the pump in SerjeantVinn, Fleet Street. J., the counsel, is doing self-imposed penance in it, for what reason I divine not, at this day. 0. had an agreeable seat at North Cray, where he seldom spent above a day or two at a time in the summer; but preferred, during the hot months, standing at his window in this damp, close, well- like mansion, to watch, as he said, ^^ the maids drawing water all day long,'^ I suspect he had his within-door reasons for the preference. Hie currus et arma fuere. He might think his treasures more safe. His house had the aspect of a strong box. 0. was a close hunks — a hoarder rather than a miser — or, if a miser, none of the mad Elwes breed, who have brought discredit upon a char- acter which cannot exist without certain admirable points of steadiness and unity of purpose. One may hate a true miser, but cannot, I suspect, so easily despise him. By taking care of tlie pence he is often enabled to part with the pounds, upon a scale that leaves us careless, generous fellows halting at an immeasurable distance behind. C. gave away £30,000 at once in his lifetime to a blind char- ity. His housekeeping was severely looked after, but he kept the table of a gentleman. He would know who came in and who went out of his house, but his kitchen chimney was never suffered to freeze. Salt was his opposite in this, ^s in all — never knew what he was worth in the world; and having but a competency for his rank, which his indolent habits were little calcu- lated to improve, might have suffered severely if he had not had honest people about him. Lovel took care of everything. He was at once his clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his friend, his ^^'flapper,'^ his guide, stop-watch, auditor, treasurer. He did nothing without consulting Lovel, or failed in anything without expecting and fearing TUE OLD BENGUERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. HI his admonishing. He put himself almost too much in his hands, had they not been the purest in the world. He re- signed his title almost to respect as a master, if L. could ever have forgotten for a moment that he was a servant. I knew this Lovel. He was a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty. A good fellow withal, and ^' would strike." In the cause of the oppressed he never considered inequalities, or calculated the number of his opponents. He once wrested a sword out of the hand of a man of quality that had drawn upon him, and jDommeled him severely with the hilt of it. The swordsman had offered insult to a female — an occasion upon which no odds against him could have prevented the interference of Lovel. He would stand next day bareheaded to the same person modestly to excuse his interference — for L. never forgot rank where something better was not con- cerned. L. was the liveliest little fellow breathing, had a face as gay as Garrick's, whom he was said greatly to resemble (I have a portrait of him which confirms it), possessed a fine turn for humorous poetry — next to Swift and Prior — molded heads in clay or plaster of Paris to admiration, by the dint of natural genius merely; turned cribbage boards, and such small cabinet toys, to perfection; took a hand at quadrille or bowls with equal facility; made punch better than any man of his degree in England; had the merriest quips and conceits; and was altogether as brimful of rogueries and inventions as you could desire. He was a brother of the angle, moreover, and just such a free, hearty, honest companion as Mr. Izaak Walton would have chosen to go a-fishing with. I saw him in his old age and the decay of his faculties, palsy- smitten, in the last sad stage of human weakness — *'a remnant most forlorn of what he was " — yet even then his eye would light up upon the mention of favorite Garrick. He was greatest, he would say, in Bayes — ^' was upon the stage nearly throughout the whole performance, and as busy as a bee." At intervals, too, he would speak of his former life, and how he came up a little boy from Lincoln, to go to service, and how his mother cried at parting with him, and how he returned, after some few years' absence, in his smart new livery, to see her, and she blest herself at the change, and could hardly be brought to believe that it 112 THE ESS A 7S OF ELIA. was 'Mier own bairn." And then, the excitement sub- siding, he would weep, till I have wished that sad second- childhood might have a mother still to lay its head upon her lap. But the common mother of us all in no long time after received him gently into hers. With Coventry and with Salt, in their walks upon the terrace, most commonly Peter Pierson would join to make up a third. They did not walk linked arm-in- arm in those days — *^ as now our stout triumvirs sweej) the streets" — but generally with both hands folded behind them for state, or with one at least behind, the other carrying a cane. P. was a benevolent, but not a prepossessing man. He had that in his face which you could not term unha23piness; it rather implied an inca- pacity of being happy. His cheeks were colorless, even to whiteness. His look was uninviting, resembling (but without his sourness) that of our great philanthropist. I know that he did good acts, but I could never make out what he luas. Contemporary with these, but subordi- nate, was Daines Barrington — another oddity — he walked burly and square, in imitation, I think, of Coventry — howbeit he attained not to the dignity of his prototype. Nevertheless, he did pretty well, upon the strength cf being a tolerable antiquarian, and having a brother a bishop. When the account of his yearns treasurership came to be audited, the following singular charge was unanimously disallowed by the bench: "Item, disbursed Mr. Allen, the gardener, twenty shillings for stuff to poison the sparrows, by my orders." Next to him was old Barton, a jolly negation, who took upon him the ordering of the bills of fare for the parliament chamber, where the benchers dine — answering to the combination rooms at College — much to the easement of his less epicurean brethren. I know nothing more of him. Then Read, and Twopenny — Reed good-humored and personable — Twopenny, good-humored, but thin, and felicitous in jests upon his own figure. If T. was thin, Wharry was attenuated and fleeting. Many must remember him (for he was rather of later date) and his singular gait, which was performed by three steps and a jump regularly succeeding. The steps were little efforts, like that of a child beginning to walk; the jump compara- tively vigorous, as a foot to an inch. Where he learned THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. 113 this figure, or what occasioned it, I could never discover. It was neither graceful in itself, nor seemed to answer the purpose any better than common walking. The extreme tenuity of his frame, I suspect, set him upon it. It was a trial of poising. Twopenny would often rally him upon his leanness, and hail him as Brother Lusty; but W. had no relish of a joke. ]Iis features were spiteful. I have heard that he would pinch his cat's ears extremely when anything had offended him. Jackson — the omniscient Jackson, he was called — was of this period. He had the reputation of possessing more multifarous knowledge than any man of his time. He was the Friar Bacon of the less literate portion of the Temple. I remember a pleasant passage of the cook applying to him, with much formality of apology, for instructions how to write down edge bone of beef in his bill of commons. He was supposed to know, if any man in the world did. He decided the orthography to be — as I have given it — fortifying his authority with such anatomical reasons as dismissed the manciple (for the time) learned and happy. Some do spell it yet, perversely, aitch bone, from a fanciful resemblance between its shape and that of the aspirate so denominated. I had almost for- gotten Mingay with the iron hand — but he was somewhat later. He had lost his right hand by some accident, and supplied it with a grappling-hook, which he wielded with a tolerable adroitness. I detected the substitute before I was old enough to reason whether it were artificial or not. I remember the astonishment it raised in me. He was a blustering, loud-talking person; and I reconciled the phe- nomenon to my ideas as an emblem of power — somewliat like the horns in the forehead of Michael Angelo's Moses. Baron Maseres, who walks (or did till very lately) in the costume of the reign of George the Second, closes my im- perfect recollections of the old benchers of the Inner Temple. Fantastic forms, whither are ye fled? Or, if the like of you exist, why exist they no more for me? Ye inexpli- cable, half-understood appearances, why comes in reason to tear away the preternatural mist, bright or gloomy, that enshrouded you? Why make ye so sorry a figure in my relation, who made up to me — to my childish eyes — the mythology of the Temple? In those days I saw Gods, as 1 1 4 THE ESS A YS OF ELI A, '' old men covered with a mantle/' walking upon the earth. Let the dreams of classic idolatry perish — extinct be the fairies and fairy trumpery of legendary fabliug^Mn the heart of childhood there will, forever, spring up a well of inno- cent or wholesome superstition — the seeds of exaggeration will be busy there, and vital — from every-day forms educ- ing the unknown and the uncommon. In that little Goshen there will be light when the grown world flounders about in the darkness of sense and materiality. While childhood, and while dreams, reducing childhood, shall be left, imagi- nation shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth. P. S. — I have done injustice to the soft shade of Samuel Salt. See what it is to trust to imperfect memory, and the erring notices of childhood! Yet I protest I always thought that he had been a bachelor! This gentleman, E. N. informs me, married young, and losing his lady in childbed, within the first year of their union, fell into a deep melancholy, from the effects of which, probably, he never thoroughly recovered. In what a new light does this place his rejection (0 call it by a gentler name!) of mild Susan P , unraveling into beauty certain peculiarities of this very shy and retiring character! Henceforth let no one receive the narratives of Elia for true records! They are, in truth, but shadows of fact — verisimilitudes, not verities — or sitting but upon the remote edges and outskirts of history. He is no such honest chronicler as E. N., and would have done better perhaps to have consulted that gentleman before he sent these incondite reminiscences to press. But the worthy sub-treasurer — who respects his old and his new masters — would but have been puzzled at the indecorous liberties of Elia. The good man wots not, peradventure, of the license which Magazines have arrived at in this plain-speak- ing age, or hardly dreams of their existence beyond the Gentleman's — his furthest monthly excursions in this nature having been long confined to the holy ground of honest Urhan's obituary. May it be long before his own name shall help to swell those columns of unenvied flat- tery. Meantime, ye New Benchers of the Inner Temple, cherish him kindly, for he is himself the kindliest of ORAGE BEFORE MEAT. 115 human creatures. Should infirmities overtake him — ho is yet in green and vigorous senihty — make allowances for them, remembering that '^ ye yourselves are old." So may the AYinged Horse, your ancient badge and cognizance, still flourisli! So may future Hookers and Seldens illus- trate your church and chambers! So may the sparrows, in default of more melodious quiristers, unpoisoned ho]) about your walks! So may the fresh-colored and cleanly nursery-maid, who, by leave, airs her playful charge in your stately gardens, drop her prettiest blushing courtesy as ye pass, reductive of juvenescent emotion! So may the younkers of this generation eye you, pacing your stately terrace, with the same superstitious veneration with which the child Elia gazed on the Old Worthies that solemnized the parade before ye! GEACE BEFOEE MEAT. The custom of saying grace at meals had, probably, its origin in the early times of the world, and the hunter-state of man, when dinners were precarious things, and a full meal was something more than a common blessing. When a bellyful was a windfall, and looked like a special provi- dence. In the shouts and triumphal sougs with which, after a season of sharp abstinence, a lucky booty of deer^s or goat's flesh w^ould naturally be ushered home, existed, perhaps, the germ of the modern grace. It is not other- wise easy to be understood, why the blessing of food — the act of eating should have had a particular ex^^ression of thanksgiving annexed to it, distinct from that implied and silent gratitude with which we are expected to enter upon the enjoyment of the many other various gifts and good things of existence. I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, those spiritual repasts; a grace before Milton, a grace before Shakespeare, a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen? But the received ritual having prescribed 116 THE ES8A T8 OF ELIA, these forms to the sohtary ceremony of manducation, I shall confine my observations to the experience which I have had of the grace, properly so called; commending my new scheme for extension to a niche in the grand philo- sophical, poetical, and jDerchance in j^art heretical, liturgy, now compiling by my friend Homo Hnmanus, for the use of a certain snug congregation of Utopian Rabelaesian Christians, no matter where assembled. The form, then, of the benediction before eating has its beauty at a poor man's table, or at the simple and unpro- vocative repast of children. It is here that the grace be- comes exceeding graceful. The indigent man, who hardly knows whether he shall have a meal the next day or not, sits down to his fare with a present sense of the blessing, which can be but feebly acted by the rich, into whose minds the conception of wanting a dinner could never, but by some extreme theory, have entered. The proper end of food — the animal sustenance — is barely contemplated by them. The poor man's bread is his daily bread, literally his bread for the day. Their courses are perennial. Again, the plainest diet seems the fittest to be preceded by the grace. That which is least stimulative to appetite, leaves the mind most free for foreign considerations. A man may feel thankful, heartily thankful, over a dish of plain mutton with turnips, and have leisure to reflect upon the ordinance and institution of eating; when he shall con- fess a perturbation of mind, inconsistent with the purposes of the grace, at the presence of venison or turtle. When I have sat (a ranos Jwspes) at rich men's tables, with the savory soup and messes steaming up the nostrils, and moistening the lips of the guests with desire and a dis- tracted choice, 1 have felt the introduction of that cere- mony to be unseasonable. With the ravenous orgasm upon you, it seems impertinent to interpose a religious senti- ment. It is a confusion of purpose to mutter out praises from a mouth that waters. The heats of epicurism put out the gentle flame of devotion. The incense which rises round is pagan, and the belly-god intercepts it for its own. The very excess of the provision beyond the needs, takes away all sense of proportion between the end and means. The giver is veiled by his gifts. Yon are startled at the injustice of returning thanks — for what? — for having too QUA GE BEFORE ME A T. 117 iiuicli while so many starve. It is to praise the gods amiss. I have observed this awkwardness felt, scarce consciously perhaps, by the good man who says the grace. I have seen it in clergymen and others — a sort of shame — a sense of the co-presence of circumstances which unhallow the blessing. After a devotional tone j^ut on for a few seconds, how rapidly the speaker will fall into his common voice, helping himself or his neighbor, as if to get rid of some uneasy sensation of hy^^ocrisy! Not that the good man was a hypocrite, or was not most conscientious in the dis- charge of the duty; but he felt in his inmost mind the in- compatibility of the scene and the viands before him with the exercise of a calm and rational gratitude. I hear somebody exclaim. Would you have Christians sit down at table like hogs to their troughs, without re- membering the Giver? No, I would have them sit down as Christians, remembering the Giver, and less like hogs. Or, if their appetites must run riot, and they must pamper themselves with delicacies for which east and west are ransacked, I would have them postpone their benediction to a fitter season, when appetite is laid; when the still small voice can be heard, and the reason of the grace re- turns — with temperate diet and restricted dishes. Glut- tony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanks- giving. When Jeshurun waxed fat, we read that he kicked. Virgil knew the harpy-nature better, when he put into the mouth of Celceno anything but a blessing. We may be gratefully sensible of the deliciousness of some kinds of food beyond others, though that is a meaner and inferior gratitude; but the proper object of the grace is sustenance, not relishes; daily bread, not delicacies; the means of life, and not the means of pampering the car- cass. With what frame or composure, I wonder, can a city chaplain pronounce his benediction at some great hall-feast, when he knows that his last concluding pious word — and that in all probability the sacred name which he preaches — is but the signal for so many impatient harpies to commence their foul orgies, with as little sense of true thankfulness (which is temperance) as those Vir- gilian fowl! It is well if the good man himself does not feel his devotions a little clouded, those foggy sensuous 118 TEE ESSA YS OF ELIA. steams mingling with and polluting tlie pure altar sacrifice. The severest satire upon full tables and surfeits is the banquet which Satan, in the '' Paradise Eegained/^ pro- vides for a temptation in the wilderness: A table richly spread in regal mode With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort And savor; beasts of chase, or fowl of game, In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled, Gris-amber-steamed; all fish from sea or shore. Freshet or purling brook, for which was drained Pontus and Lucrine bay, and Afric coast. The Tempter, I warrant you, thought these cates would go down without the recommendatory preface of a benedic- tion. They are like to be short graces where the devil plays the host. I am afraid the poet wants his usual deco- rum in this place. Was he thinking of the old Roman luxury, or of a gaudy day at Cambridge? This was a temp- tation fitter for a Heliogabalus. The whole banquet is too civic and culinary, and the accompaniments altogether a profanation of that deep, abstracted holy scene. The mighty artillery of sauces, which the cook-fiend conjures up, is out of proportion to the simple wants and plain hunger of the guest. He that disturbed him in his dreams, from his dreams might have- been taught better. To the temperate fantasies of the famished Son of God, what sort of feasts presented themselves? He dreamed indeed, As appetite is wont to dream, Of meats and drinks, nature's refreshment sweet. But what meats? — Him thought he by the brook of Cherith stood, And saw the ravens with their horny beaks Food to Elijah bringing even and morn; Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought He saw the prophet also how he fled Into the desert, and how there he slept Under a juniper; then how awaked He found his supper on the coals prepared, And by the angel was bid rise and eat. And ate the second time after repose, The strength whereof sufficed him forty days: Sometimes, that with Elijah he partook, Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse. GRACE BEFORE MEAT. 119 Nothing in Milton is finelier fancied than these temperate dreams of the divine Ilungerer. To which of these two visionary banquets, think you, would the introduction of what is called the grace have been the most fitting and pertinent? Theoretically I am no enemy to graces; but practically I own that (before meat especially) they seem to involve something awkward and unseasonable. Our appetites, of one or another kind, are excellent spurs to our reason, which might otherwise but feebly set about the great ends of preserving and continuing the species. They are fit blessings to be contemplated at a distance with a becoming gratitude; but the moment of appetite (the judicious reader will apj)rehend me) is, perhaps, the least fit season for that exercise. The Quakers, who go about their busi- ness of every description with more calmness than we, have more title to the use of these benedictory prefaces. I have always admired their silent grace, and the more because I have observed their applications to the meat and drink fol- lowing to be less passionate and sensual than ours. They are neither gluttons nor wine-bibbers as a people. They eat, as a horse bolts his chopped hay, with indifference, calmness, and cleanly circumstances. They neither grease nor sloj:) themselves. When I see a citizen in his bib and tucker, I cannot imagine it a surplice. I am no Quaker at my food. I confess I am not indiffer- ent to the kinds of it. Those unctuous morsels of deer^'s flesh were not made to be received with dispassionate services. I hate a man who swallows it, affecting not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters. I shrink instinctively from one who professes to like minced veal. There is a physiognomical character in the taste for food. holds that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple-dumplings. I am not certain but he is right. With the decay of my first inno- cence, I confess a less and less relish daily for those innoc- uous cates. The whole vegetable tribe have lost their gust with me. Only I stick to asparagus, which still seems to inspire gentle thoughts. lam impatient and querulous under culinary disa2:)pointments, as to come home at the dimier hour, for instance, expecting some savory mess, and to find one quite tasteless and sapidless. Butter ill melted, 120 THE E8SA T8 OF ELIA. that commonest of kitchen faikires, puts me beside my tenor. The author of the Eambler used to make inarticu- hite animal noises over a favorite food. Was this the music quite proper to be preceded by 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 graceful- ness, 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 consecration of no art 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 acknowledged, 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 tlie 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 duty 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 sliall say it ? while the good man of the house and the visitor clergy- man, or some other guest belike of next authority, from years or gravity, shall be bandying about the office between them as a matter of compliment, each of them not unwill- ing to shift the awkward burden of an equivocal duty from his own shoulders? I once drank tea in company with two Methodist di- vines of different persuasions, whom it was my fortune to introduce to each other for the first time that evening. GRACE BEFORE MEAT, 121 Before the first cup was handed round, one of these rever- end gentlemen put it to the other, with all due solemnity, whether he choose to say anytUing. It seems it is the custom with some sectaries to put up a short prayer hefore 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 known in his church: in which courteous evasion the other acquiescing for good manners^ sake, or in compli- ance with a weak brother, the supplementary 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 in- cense, with expectant nostrils hovering over the two flamens, and (as between two stools) going away in the end 'without his supper. A short form upon these occasions is felt to want rever- ence; 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) 0. 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 tlrink 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. I remember we were put to it to reconcile the phrase " good creatures," upon which the blessing rested, with the fare set before us, wil- fully understanding that expression in a low and animal sense, till some one recalled a legend, which told how, in the golden days of Christ's, the young Hospitallers 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, com- muted our flesh for garments, and gave us — horresco refer- ens — trousers instead of mutton. 122 THE ESS A YS OF ELIA. DREAM CHILDEEN; A EEVERIE. Childken love to listen to stories about their elders, when they were children; to stretch their imagination to the conception of a traditionary great-nncle, 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-grandmother Field, who lived m a great house in Norfolk (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 Robin 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 be said to be the mistress of it too) committed to her by the owner, who preferred living in a newer and more fashion- able 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 of the great house in a sort while she lived, which afterward came to decay and was nearly pulled down, and all its old orna- ments stripped and carried away to the owner's other house, where they were set up, and looked as awkward as if some one were to carry away the old tombs 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 con- course of all the poor, and some of the gentry too, of the neighborhood for miles round to show their respect for. DREAM CHILDREN; A REVERIE. 123 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 Testament besides. Here little Alice spread her hands. Tlien I told what a tall, upright, graceful person their great-grandmother Field once was; and how in her youth she was esteemed the best dancer — here Alice's little right foot j^layed an involuntary movement, till, upon my looking grave, it desisted — the best dancer, I was saying, in the county, till a cruel disease, called a cancer, came, and bowled her down with pain; bat it could never bend her good spirits, or make them stoop, but they were still upright, 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 apparition of two infants was to be seen at midnight gliding up and dow^n the great staircase near where she slept, but she said ^^ those innocents would do her no harm;" and how frightened I used to be, though in those days 1 had my maid to sleep with me, because I was never half so good or religious as she — and yet I never saw the infants. Here John expanded all his eyebrows and tried to look courageous. Then I told how good she was to all her grandchildren, having us to the great house in the holy- days, where I in particular used to spend many hours by myself in gazing upon the old busts of the twelve Caesars, that had been Emperors of Kome, till the old marble heads would seem to live again, or I to be turned into marble wdth them; 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 Avhen 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 j^leasure 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 124 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. 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-^oond, 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 flavors of peaches, nectarines, oranges and such-like 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 n:iore height- ened tone, I told how^, though their great-grandmother Field loved all her grandchildren, yet in an especial man- ner 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 nettlesome 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 be always pent up within their boundaries — and how their uncle grew up to man's estate as brave as he was handsome, to the admiration of everybody, but of their great-grandmother Field most especially, and how he used to carry me upon his back when I was a lame-footed boy — for he was a good bit older than me — many a mile when I could not walk for pain; and how in after life he became lame-footed too, and I did not always (I fear) make allowances enough for him when he was impatient and in pain, nor remember sufficiently how considerate he had been to me when I was lame-footed; and how when he died, though he had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he had died a great while ago, such a distance there is betwixt life and death; and how I bore his death as I thought pretty well at first, but afterward it haunted and haunted me; and though I did not cry or take it to heart as some do, and as I think he would have done if I had died, yet I DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS. 125 missed him all day long, and knew not till then how much I had loved him. I missed his kindness, and I missed his crossness, and I wished him to be alive again, to be quarreling with him (for we quarreled sometimes), rather than not have him again, and was as uneasy without him, as he, their poor uncle, must have been when the doctor took off his limb. Here the children fell a-crying, and asked if their little mourning which they had on was not for Uncle John, and they looked up, and prayed me not to go on about their uncle, but to tell them some stories about their pretty dead mother. Then I told how for seven long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in despair, yet persist- ing ever, I courted the fair Alice W n; and as much as children could understand, I explained to them what coy- ness, and difficulty, and denial, meant in maidens — when suddenly turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reality of re-presentment, that I became in doubt which of them stood there before me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I stood gazing both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, reced- ing, and still receding, till nothing at last but two mourn- ful features Avere seen in the uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed upon me the effects of speech: ^' We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all! The children of Alice call Bartrimi father. We are nothing, less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence and a name " — and immediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm-chair, where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side — but John L. (or James Elia) was gone forever. DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS. IN" A LETTER TO B. P. ESQ., AT SYDNEY, KEW SOUTH WALES. My dear F. — When I think how welcome the sight of a letter from the world where you were born must be to you in that strange one to which you have been trans- 126 THE E8SA TS OF ELIA. planted, I feel some compunctious visitiugs at my long silence. But, indeed, it is no easy effort to set about a correspondence at our distance. The weary world of waters between us oppresses the imagination. It is diffi- cult to conceive how a scrawl of mine should ever stretch across it. It is a sort of presumption to expect that one^s thoughts should live so far. It is like writing for poster- ity; and reminds me of one of Mrs. Rowe's superscriptions, ^^ Alcander to Strephon in the shades." Oowley^s Post- Angel is no more than would be expedient in such an inter- course. One drops a packet at Lombard Street, and in twenty four hours a friend in Cumberland gets it as fresh as if it came in ice. It is only Ijke whispering through a long trumpet. But suppose a tube let down from the moon, with yourself at one end and the mnn at the other; it would be some balk to the spirit of conversation, if you knew that the dialogue exchanged with that interesting theosophist would take two or three revolutions of a higher luminary in its passage. Yet, for aught I know, you may be some parasangs nigher that primitive idea — Plato^s man — than we in England here have the honor to reckon ourselves. Epistolary matter usually compriseth three topics; news, sentiment, and puns. In the latter, I include all non- serious subjects; or subjects serious in themselves, but treated after my fashion, non-seriously. And first, for news. In them the most desirable circumstance, I sup- pose, is that they shall be true. But what security can I have that what I now send you for truth shall not, before you get it, unaccountably turn into a lie? For instance, our mutual friend P. is at this present writing — my Now — in good health, and enjoys a fair share of worldly reputation. You are glad to hear it. This is natural and friendly. But at this present reading — your Noio — he may possibly be in the Bench, or going to be hanged, which in reason ought to abate something of your transport {i.e., at hearing he was well, etc.), or at least considerably to modify it. I am going to the play this evening, to have a laugh with Munden. You have no theater, 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 DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS. 127 liateful emotion. Wliy, it is Sunday morning with you, and 1823. Tliis confusion of tenses^ tliis grand solecism of two 2)rese)it^, is in a degree common to all postage. But if 1 sent you word to Bath or Devizes, that I was expecting the aforesaid treat this evening, though at the juoment you received the intelligence my full feast of fun Avould 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 intention 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, unessence herself, but (what is harder) one cannot venture a crude fiction, for fear that it might ripen into a truth upon the voyage. What a wild improbable banter I put upon you, some three years since, of Will Weatherall having married a servant-maid I I remember gravely consulting you how ^we were to receive her — for WilFs wife was in no case to be rejected; and your no less serious replica- tion in the matter; how tenderly you advised an ab- stemious 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 con- scious 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 Weatherall being by; whether we should show more delicacy, and a truer sense of res^iect 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 difficulties, I remember, on both sides, which you did me the favor 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 lol while I was valuing my- self upon this flam put upon you in New South Wales, 128 THE ESS A YS OF ELIA. the devil in England, jealous possibly of any lie-children not his own, or working after my co23y, has actually in- stigated our friend (not three days since) to the commission of a matrimony, 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, under a diviner, can, with any prospect of veracity, conduct a correspondence at such an arm's length. Two prophets, indeed, might thus inter- change intelligence with effect; the epoch of the writer (Habakkuk) falling in with tlie true present time of the receiver (Daniel); but then we are no prophets. Then as to sentiment. It fares little better with that. This kind of dish, above 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 often smiled at a conceit of the late Lord 0. It seems that traveling somewhere about Geneva, he came to some pretty green spot, or nook, where a willow, or something, hung so fan- tastically 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 Lord- ship's hot, restless life, so took his fancy that he could im- agine 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 character 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 sa]t bilge wetting it till it became DISTANT COllREfirONDENTS. 129 as vapid as a damaged lustring. Suppose it in material danger (mariners have some superstition 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 I) but it has hapjnly 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 sanction of the magistracy in this district, the concurrence of the ecclesiastics in that canton; till at length it arrives at its destination, tired out and jaded, from a brisk sentiment into a feature of silly pride or tawdry senseless affectation. 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 arc, 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 scarce endure to be transported by hand from this room to the next. Their vigor is as the instant of their birth. Their nutriment for their brief existence is the intellectual atmosphere of the by-standers: or this last is the fine slime of Xilus — the melior lutus — w^hose maternal recipiency is as necessary as the sol loater to their equivocal generation. A pun hath a hearty kind of present ear-kissing smack with it; you can no more transmit it in its pristine flavor than 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 merchandise above all requires a quick return. A pun, and its recognitory laugh, must be co-instantaneous. The one is the 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. 130 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. Who would consult his sweet visnomy, if the polished sur- face were two or three minutes (not to speak of twelve months, my dear F.) in giving back its copy? I cannot image to myself whereabout you are. When I try to fix it, Peter Wilkin^s island comes across me. Sometimes you seem to be in the Hades of Thieves. I see Diogenes prying among you with his perpetual fruit- less lantern. What must you be willing by this time to give for the sight of an honest man! You must almost have forgotten how tue look. And tell me what your Sydneyites do? are they thieving all day long? Merciful Heaven! What property can stand against such a depre- dation! The kangaroos — your aborigines — do they keep their primitive simplicity un-Europe-tainted, with those little short fore puds, looking like a lesson framed by nature to the pickpocket. Marry, for diving into fobs they are rather lamely provided a jjriori; but if the hue and cry were once up, they would show as fair a pair of hind-shifters as the expertest locomotor in the colony. We hear the most improbable tales at this distance. Pray is it true that the young Spartans among you are born with six fingers, which spoils their scanning? It must look very odd; but use reconciles. For their scansion, it is less to be 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 thief and t'he grandson? Or where does the taint stop ? Do you bleach in three or four generations? I have many questions to put, but ten Del- phic voyages can be made in a shorter time than it will take to satisfy my scruples. Do you grow your own hemp? What is your staple trade, exclusive of the national pro- fession, I mean? Your locksmiths, I take it, are some of your great capitalists. I am insensibly chatting to you as familiarly as Avlien 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 ladybirds? My heart is as dry as that spring sometimes proves in a thirsty August, when I revert to the space that is be- THE PRAISE OF GUIMNEY-SWEEPER8. 13 L tween 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 you hear me — thoughts dallying with vain surmise — Ay me! while thee the seas and sounding shores Hold far away. Come back, before I am grown into a very old man, so as you shall hardly know me. Come, before Bridget walks on crutches. Girls whom you left children have become sage matrons while you are tarrying there. The blooming Miss W r (you rem^ember Sally W r) called upon us yesterday, an aged crone. Folks wlioni 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. THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS. I LIKE to meet a sweep, understand me, not a grown sweeper — old chimney-sweepers are by no means attrac- tive — 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 jjeep-jjeep of a young sparrow; or liker to the matin lark should I pronounce them, in their aerial ascents not seldom anticipating the sunrise? I have a kindly yearning toward these dim specks — poor blots — innocent blacknesses. I reverence the youn^ Africans of our own growth — these almost clergy imps, who sport their cloth without assump- tion ; and from their little pulpits (the tops of chim- neys), 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 wit- ness their operation. To see a chit no bigger than one's self, enter, one knew not by what process, into what 132 THE ESSAR8 OF ELIA. seemed i\\Q fauces Avcrnl — to pursue him in imagination, as he went sounding on through so many dark stifling oaverns, horrid shades! to shudder with the idea that ^^now, surely he must be lost forever!" — to revive at hearing his feeble shout of discovered daylight — and then (0 fullness of delight!) 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, certainly, not much nnlike the old stage direction in Macbeth, where the *^ Aj^parition of a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, rises." Reader, 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 nnusual accompaniment) be superadded, the de- mand 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 Salojnan house — I have never yet advent- ured to dip my own particular lip in a basin of his com- mended ingredients — a cautious j)remonition to the olfac- tories constantly whispering to me, that my stomach must infallibly, with all due courtesy, decline it. Yet I have seen palates, otherwise not uninstructed in dietetical elegan- cies, sup it up with avidity. I know not by what particular conformation of the organ it haiDpens, 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 slightly oleaginous) do attenuate and soften the fuliginous THE PRAISE OF CniMNET-SWEEPERS. 133 concretions, which are sometimes found (in dissections) to adhere to the roof of the mouth in these unfledged prac- titioners; or whetlier Nature, sensible that she had mingled too much of bitter wood in the 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 odor 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 purr over a iiew-found sprig of valerian. There is some- thing more in these sympathies than philosophy can inculcate. Now albeit Mr. Read boasteth, not without reason, that his is the only Salojnan 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 savory 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 prema- ture labors of the day, jostle, not unfrequently to the mani- fest disconcerting of the former, for the honors of the pavement. It is the time when, in summer, between the expired and the not yet relu mined kitchen-fires, the kennels of our fair metropolis give forth their least satis- factory odors. The rake, who wisheth to dissipate his o'ernight vapors in more grateful coffee, curses the un- genial fume, as he passeth; but the artisan stops to taste, and blesses the fragrant breakfast. This is saloop, the precocious herb-woman^s darling, the delight of the early gardener, who transports his smoking cabbages by break of day from Hammersmith to Covent Garden's famed piazzas, the delight, and oh! I fear, too often the Qn\y, of the unpennied sweep. Him shouldst thou haply encounter, with his dim visage pendant over the grateful steam, regale him with a sumptuous basin (it will cost thee but three-halfpennies) and a slice of delicate bread and butter (an added halfpenny); so may thy culinary fires, eased of the overcharged secretions from thy worse- 134 THE ESS A TS OF ELIA. placed hospitalities, cnrl np 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 winter but one, pacing along Cheapside with my accus- tomed precipation when I walk westward, a treacherous slide brought me upon my back in an instant. I scrambled up with pain and shame enough — yet outwardly trying to face it down, as if nothing had happened — when the roguisii 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 particular, till the tears for the exquisiteness 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 could he miss him?) in1;he March to Finchley, grin- ning at the pieman — there he stood, as he stands in the picture, irremovable, as if the jest Avas to last forever — with such a maximum of glee, and minimum of mischief, in his mirth — for the grin of a genuine sweep hath abso- lutely no malice in it — that I could have been content, if the honor of a gentleman might endure it, to have remained his butt and 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 such jewels; but, methinks, they should take leave to *^air" them as frugally as possible. The fine lady, or fine gentle- man, 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 ossifications, strikes me as an agreeable anomaly in manners, and an allowable piece of foppery. It is, as when THE PRAISE OF CHIMNET-SWEEPeRS. 135 A sable cloud Turns forth her silver lining on the night. It is like some remnant of gentry not quite extinct; a badge of better days; a hint of nobility; and, doubtless, under the obscuring darkness and double night of their forlorn disguisenient, oftentimes lurketh good blood, and gentle conditions, derived from lost ancestry, and a lapsed pedi- gree. 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 Kachels mourning for their children, even in our days, 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 the delicatest crimson, with starry cor- onets inwoven, folded between a pair of sheets whiter and softer than the lap where Venus lulled Ascanius — was dis- covered by chance, after all methods of search had failed, at noonday, fast asleep, a lost chimney-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 invitement 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 liigli instinct was at work in the case, or I am mistaken. It is probable that a poor child of that description, with whatever weari- ness he might be visited, would have ventured, under such 136 THE ESSA T8 OF ELIA, a penaxi}^ as he would be taught to expect, to uncover the sheets ol' a duke^s bed, and deliberately to lay himself down between them, when the rug, or the carpet, pre- sented 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, prompting to the adventure? Doubtless this young noble- man (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 incunahula 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. Cards were issued a week before to the master-sweeps in and about the metropolis, confining the invitation to their younger fry. Now and then an elderly stripling would get in among us, and be 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 party, but by tokens was providentially discov- ered 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- ment; 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 every gaping spec- tator in it. The guests assembled about seven. In those little temporary parlors three tables were spread with napery, not so fine as substantial, and at every board a THE PRAISE OF CUIMNET-SWEEPERS. 137 comely hostess presided with her pan of hissing sausages. The nostrils of the young rogues dilated at the savor. James White, as head waiter, had charge of the first table; and myself, with oar trusty companion Bigod, ordinarily ministered to the other two. There was clambei'ing and jostling, you may be sure, who should get at the first table, for^Kochester in his maddest days could not have done the humors of the scene with more spirit than my friend. After some general expression of thanks for the honor 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 con- cave, Avhile hundreds of grinning teeth startled the night with their brightness. it w^is a pleasure to see the sable yonkers lick in the unctuous meat, with his more unctuous sayings; how he would fit the tit-bits to the puny mouths, reserving the lengthier links for the seniors; how he would intercept a morsel even in the jaws of some young desj)erado, declaring it "^ must to the pan again to be browned, for it was not fit for a gentleman's eating;'" how he would recommend 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 genteell}'' he would deal about the small ale, as if it were wine, naming the brewer, and pro- testing, if it were not good, he should lose their custom; with a special recommendation to wipe tlielip before drink- ing. Then we had our^toasts — '^the King,'' ^"^the Cloth," which, whether they understood or not, was equally divert- ing 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 comprehended by his guests, would he utter, standing uj^on tables, and prefacing every sentiment witli a **' Gen- tlemen, give me leave to propose so and so," which was a prodigious comfort to those young orphans; every now and then stuffing into his mouth (for it did not do to be squeamish on these occasions) indiscriminate pieces of those reeking sausages, which pleased them mightily, and 138 THE ESSA Y8 OF ELIA, was the savoriest part, you may believe, of the enter- tainment. Golden lads and lasses must, As chimney-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 Smithfield departed forever. A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGAES, 11^ 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 t'he last fluttering tatters of the bugbear Mej^dicity 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 persecution. From the crowded crossing, from the corners of streets and turnings of- alleys, the parting Genius of Beggary is ^Mvith sighing sent.^^ I do not approve of this wholesale going to work, this impertinent crusado, or bellum ad exteiminationem, pro- claimed against a species. Much good might be sucked from these Beggars. They were the oldest and the honorablest form of pau- perism. Their appeals were to our common nature; less revolting to an ingenuous mind than to be a suppliant to the particular humors 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 sjoringing 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 school-master, do we A COMPLAIN!' OF TUK DEC A Y OF BEGGARS. 139 feel anything toward him but contemj^t? Could Vandyke have made a picture of him, swaying a ferule for a scepter, which would have affected our minds witli the same heroic pit}', the same compassionate admiration, witli which we regard his Belisarius begging for an oboliis 9 Would the moral have been more graceful, more pathetic? The Blind Beggar in the legend — the father of pretty Bessy — whose story doggerel rhymes and ale-house signs cannot so degrade or attenuate but that some sparks of a lustrous spirit will shine through the disguisements — this noble Earl of Cornwall (as indeed he was) and memorable sport of fortune, fleeing from the unjust sentence of his liege lord, stripped 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 honors 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 which can be presented to the imagination without offence. There is no breaking the fall. Lear, 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, with 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 up foul linen. How would it sound in song, that a great monarch had declined his affections upon the daughter of a baker! yet do we feel the imagination at all violated when we read the " true ballad, '' where King Cophetua woos the beggar maid ? 140 THE ES.8A YS OF ELIA, Pauperism, pauper, poor man, are expressions of pity, but pity alloyed with contempt. No one properly con- temns a beggar. Poverty is a comparative thing, and each degree of it is mocked by its ^' neighbor grice.^^ Its poor rents and comings-in are soon summed up and told. Its pretences to property are almost ludicrous. Its 2:)itiful attempts to save excite a smile. Every scornful companion can weigh his trifle-bigger purse against it. Poor man re- proaches poor man in the streets with impolitic mention of his condition, his own being a shade better, while the rich pass by and jeer at both. No rascally comparative in- sults a beggar, or thinks of weighing purses with him. He is not in the scale of comparison. He is not under the measure of j)roperty. He confessedly hath none, any more than a dog or a sheep. No one twitteth him with ostentation above his means. No one accuses him of pride, or upbraideth him with mock humility. None jostle with him f«or the wall, or pick quarrels for prece- dency. No wealthy neighbor 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 r^ainer to the great, a led captain, or a poor relation, I would choose, out of the deli- cacy and true greatness of my mind, to be a beggar. Rags, which are the reproach of poverty, are the beg- gar'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 colors, fearing none. His costume hath undergone less change than the Quaker's. He is the only man in the universe who is not obliged to study appearances. The ujos and downs of the world con- cern him no longer. He alone continueth in one stay. The price of stock or land affecteth him not. The fluctu- ations of agricultural or commercial prosperity touch him not, or at worst but change his customers. He is not ex- pected 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, I can no more spare them than I could A COMPLAINT OF THE DEC A Y OF BEG OARS. 141 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, emblems, mementoes, dial-mottoes, the spitjd sei'inons, the books for children, the salutary cliecks and pauses to the high and rushing tide of greasy citizenry — Look Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there. Above all, those old blind Tobits that nsed 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 faitliful 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 dropped half-penny 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 caused them to be shot? or were they tied up in sacks and dropped into the Thames, at the suggestion of B , the mild rector of ? AVell fare the soul of unfastidious Vincent Bourne — most classical, and, at the same time, most English of the Latin- istsl — who has treated of this human and quadrupedal alliance, this dog and man friendship, in the sweetest of his poems, the Epitai^liium in Canem, or Dog^s Ejntajjli. 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 pas- sengers through the daily thoroughfares of a vast and busy metropolis. Pauperis hie Iri requiesco Lyciscus, herilis, Dum vixi, tutela vigil columenque senectae, Dux cseco fidus: nee, rae ducente, solebat, Praetenso hinc atque hinc baculo, per iniqua locorum Incertam explorare viam; sed fila secutus, Quae dubios regerent passus, vestigia tuta 142 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA, Fixit inofEenso gressu; gelidumque sedile In nudo nactus saxo, qua prsetereuntium Unda frequeus confiuxit, ibi miserisque tenebras Laraentis, noctemque ociilis ploravit obortam. Ploravit nee frustra; obolum dedit alter et alter, Queis corda et mentem indiderat natura benignam. Ad latus interea jucui sopitiis lierile, Vel mediis vigil in somnis; ad herilia jussa Auresque atque animum arrectiis, sen frustula amice Porrexit sociasque dapes, sen longa diei Tsedia perpessus, reditum sub nocte parabat. Hi mores, lisec vita fuit, dum fata sinebant, Dum neque languebam morbis, nee inerte senecta Quae tandem obrepsit, veterique satellite esecum Orbavit dominum; prisei sed gratia faeti Ne tota intereat, longos deleta per annos, Exiguum hune Irus tumulum de eespite fecit, Etsi inopis, non ingratae, munuseula dextrse; Carmine signavitque brevi, dominumque canemque, Quod memoret, fidumque Canem dominumque Benignum. Poor Irus' faithful 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 hands 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 Irus reared, Cheap monviment 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. A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEUGARS. 143 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 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. Tlie 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 him; for the accident which brought him low took place during the riots of 1780, and he had been a ground- ling so long. He seemed earth-born, an Antseus, and to suck in fresh vigor fi-om the soil which he neighbored. He was a grand 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 cen- taur, 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 o.s sublime 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 impaired, because he is not content to exchange his free air and exercise for the restraints of a poor-house, he is expiating his contumacy in one of those houses (ironically christened) of correction. Was a daily spectacle like this to be 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 ac- 144 THE ESSA TS OF ELIA, cumulation of sights — endless sights — is a great city; or for what else is it desirable?) was there not room for one Lusus (not NaturcB, indeed, but) Accidentitmi? What if in forty-and-two years^ going about the man had scraped together enough to give a portion to his child (as the rumor 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 stature 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 de- prived 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 sat down at the cripples' feast, and to have thrown in his benediction, ay, and his mite too, for a com- panionable 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 with the announcement of a five- hundred-pound legacy left him by a person whose name he was a stranger to. It seems that in his daily morn- ing 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 sat begging alms by the wayside in the Borough. The good old beggar recognized 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 A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG. 145 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 creature, blinking and looking up with his no eyes in the sun. Is it possible I coufd have steeled my purse against him? Perhaps I had no small change. Reader, do not be frightened at the hard words imposi- tion, imposture — give, and ask 710 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. When a poor creature (outwardly and visibly such) comes before thee, do not stay to inquire whether the '^^ seven small children," in whose name he implores thy. assistance, have a veritable existence. Eake 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. A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG. Mankii^d, 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, claw- ing 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 bi'other), was accidentally discovered in the manner following: The swineherd, Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods 146 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA, one morning, as his manner was, to collect mj-st 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 younkers of his age commonly are, let some sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly spread 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 much for the sake of the tenement, which his father and he could easily build up again with a few dry branches, and the labor of an hour or two, at any time, as for the 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 odor 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 handfuls 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. A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG. 147 and finding how affiiirs stood, began to rain blows upon. the young rogue's shoulders, as thick as hail-stones, which Bo- bo lieeded 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 houses with your dog's tricks, and be hanged to you ! but you must be eating fire, and I know not what — what have you got there, I say ?" ^'0 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 morning, 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 ^\g, 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 wliether 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 applying the same remedy to them, he in his turn tasted some of its flavor, which, make what sour mouths he would for a pre- tence, proved not altogether displeasing to him. In con- clusion (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 dispatched all that remained of the litter. Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the secret escape, for the neighbors 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. Nev- ertheless, strange stories got about. It was observed that Ho-ti's cottage was burnt down now more frequently than 148 THE ESS A YS OF ELIA. 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 son summoned to take their trial at Pekin, then an inconsiderable assize town. Evidence was given, the ob- noxious food itself produced in court, and verdict about 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, townsfolk, 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 mani- fest iniquity of the decision: and when the court was dis- missed, went privily and bought up all the pigs that could be had for love or money. In a few days his lordship'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-ofiices one and all shut up shop. People built slighter and slighter every day, until it was feared that the very science of architecture 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. Roast- ing by the string or spit came in a centnry or two later, I forget in whose dynasty. By such slow degrees, concludes the manuscript, do the most useful, and seemingly the most obvious, arts make their way among mankind. A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG, 149 Without placing too implicit faith in the account above given, it must be agreed that if a worthy pretext for so dan- gerous an experiment as setting houses on fire (especially in these days) could be assigned in favor of any culinary object, that pretext and excuse might be found in roast PIG. Of all the delicacies in the whole mundtis edibilis, I will maintain it to be the most delicate — princejjs obsoniornm. 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 avior iminunditioe, the heredi- tary 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 2)rceludium of a grunt. He vuist le roasted. I am not ignorant that our ances- tors ate them seethed, or boiled — but what a sacrifice of the exterior tegument! , There is no flavor comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over-roasted, crackling, 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 com- mon substance. Behold him while he is ^^doing^^ — it seemeth rather a refreshing warmth than a scorching heat, that he is so passive 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 pretty eyes — radiant jellies — shooting stars. See him in the dish, his second cradle, how meek he lieth! wouldst thou have had this innocent grow up to the grossness and indocility which too often accompany maturer swinehood? Ten to one he would have proved a 150 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. glutton^ a sloven, an obstinate, disagreeable animal — wal- lowing in all manner of filthy conversation — from these sins he is happily snatched away — Ere sin could bliglit or sorrow fade, Death came with timely care — his memory is odoriferous — no clown curseth, while his stomach half rejecteth, the rank bacon — no coal-heaver 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 teuder-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 border- ing 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 un- raveled without hazard, he is good throughout. No part of him is better or worse than another. He helpeth, as far as his little means extend, all around. He is the least envious of banquets. He is all neighbors' 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 vil- latic fowl"), capons, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I dispense as freely as I receive them. I love to taste them, as it were, upon the tongue of my friend. But a stop A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PM, 151 must be put somewhere. One would not, like Lear, " give everything." I make my stand upon pig. Methinks it is an ingratitude to the Giver of all good flavors to extra- domiciliate, 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 indi- vidual 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 stuffing 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 gray- 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 coxcombry 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 sooth- ing of self-satisfaction; but, before I had got to the end of the bridge, my better feelings returned, and I burst into tears, thinking 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 odor 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-nothing, old gray imposter. Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing these tender victims. AVe read of pigs whipj^ed to death with something of a shock, as we hear of any other obsolete custom. The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be curious to inquire (in a philosophical light 152 THE MJSSA YS OF ELIA, merely) what effect this process might have toward inten- erating 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 flavor of a pig who obtained his death by whipping (per flageUationem extremam) 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 Mrs. Cook, I beseech you, the whole onion tribe. Barbecue your whole hogs to your palate, steep them in shalots, stufl them out with planta- tions of the rank and guilty garlic; you cannot poison them, or make them stronger than they are — but consider, he is a weakling — a flower. A EECANTATION. }f UNDER THE TITLE OF "THOUGHTS 01^ GAME,'' ETC. [Tlie subjoined paper is interpolated here among the Elian Essays as a distinct pendant to the immortal " Dissertation upon Roast Pig." As conveying a gravely humorous repudiation by Elia of his earlier "penchant for the luscious crackling and the animal manna under- neath, it may be regarded as not unworthy, by reason of many inim- itable touches scattered through it, of being brought into formidable comparison with that succulent masterpiece. The narrow proof- slip of this slight but dainty contribution to the Athenmum — sown all down the margin with minute emendations and erasures in Charles Lamb's handwriting — has, with many other choice original papers of Lamb's, been placed at the command of the editor of this popular Centenary Edition by the kindness of Sir Charles Dilke, into whose hands, with a mass of similar treasure, they have passed through direct inheritance. From among these manuscripts, one of the very choicest of them all is here selected for the purpose of being given upon the opposite page in fac-simile. It is surely the epicure's bit, the A RECANTATION. 153 tenderest slice, the loveliest morceau carved from above tlie spinal cord of this delicate roasted hare — one that its numerous appreciators (for this surely is the Hare with Many Friends), will learn while devouring it, eats so "crips" according to the apt phrase of that delightful Mrs. Minikin.] " We love to have our friend in the country sitting thus at our table hy j^voxy; to apprehend his presence (though a hundred miles may be between us) by a turkey, whose goodly aspect reflects to us his * plump corpusculum;' to taste him in grouse or woodcock; to feel him gliding down in the toast peculiar to the latter; to concorporate him in a slice of Canterbury brawn. This is indeed to have him within ourselves; to know him intimately; such participa- tion is methinks lenitive, as the old theologians phrase it. — Last Essays of Elia. Elia presents his acknowledgments to his '^ Correspond- ent unknown/^ for a basket of prodigiously fine game. He takes for granted that so amiable a character must be a reader of the AthencBum. Else he had meditated a notice in the Times. Now if this friend had consulted the Del- phic oracle for a present suited to the palate of Elia, he could not have hit upon a morsel so acceptable. The birds he is barely thankful for; pheasants are poor fowls dis- guised in fine feathers. But a hare roasted hard and brown, with gravy and melted butter! Old Mr. Cham- bers, the sensible clergyman in Warwickshire, whose son^s acquaintance has made many hours happy in the life of Elia, used to allow a pound of Epping to every hare. Per- haps that was overdoing it. But, in spite of the note of Philomel, who, like some fine poets, that think no scorn to adopt plagiarisms from a humble brother, reiterates every spring her cuckoo cry of '"^ Jug, jug, jug," Elia pro- nounces that a hare, to be truly palated, must be roasted. Jugging sophisticates her. In our way it eats to " crips," as Mrs. Minikin says. Time was, when Elia was not ar- rived at his taste, that he preferred to all a roasted pig. But he disclaims all such green-sickness apjietites in future, though he hath to acknowledge the receipt of many a delicacy in that kind from correspondents, good but mistaken men, in consequence of their erroneous sup- position that he had carried up into mature life the pre- 154 I'HE B8SA TS OF ELIA. possessions of childhood. From the worthy Vicar of En- field he acknowledges a tithe contribution of extraordinary sapor. Tlie ancients must have loved hares. Else why adopt the word lepores (obviously from lepus) but for some subtle analogy between the delicate flavor of the latter, and the finer relishes of wit in what we must poorly trans- late ^j/msft^z^n'es. The fine madnesses of the poet are the very decoction of his diet. Thence is he harebrained. Harum-scarum is a libelous, unfounded phrase of modern usage. ^Tis true the hare is the most circumspect of animals, sleeping with her eye open. Her ears, ever erect, keep them in that wholesome exercise which con- duces them to form the very tit-bit of the admirers of this noble animal. Noble will I call her, in spite of her detrac- tors, who from occasional demonstrations of the principle of self-preservation (common to all animals) infer in her a defect in heroism. Half a hundred horsemen, with thrice the number of dogs, scour the country in pursuit of puss across three counties; and because the well-flavored beast, weighing the odds, ir: willing to evade the hue-and-cry, with her delicate ears shrinking perchance from discord — comes the grave naturalist, Linnseus perchance or Buffon, and gravely sets down the hare as a timid animal. Why, Achilles or Bully Dawson would have declined the prepos- terous combat. In fact, how light of digestion we feel after a hare. How tender its processes after swallowing. What ch3de it promotes. How ethereal. As if its living celerity were a type of its nimble coursing through the animal juices. The notice might be longer. It is intended less as a Natural History of the Hare, than a cursory thanks to the country '^good Unknown." The hare has many friends, but none sincerer than Elia. A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT OF THE BEHAVIOR OF MARRIED PEOPLE. As A single man I have spent a good deal of my time in noting down the infirmities of Married People, to con- sole myself for those superior pleasures, which they tell me I have lost by remaining as I am. A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT. 155 I cannot say that the quarrels of men and their wives ever made any great impression ui)on me, or had much tendency to strengthen me in tliose anti-social resohitions which I took up long ago upon more substantial considera- tions. AVhat oftenest offends me at the houses of married persons where I visit, is an error of quite a different de- scription; it is that they are too loving. Not too loving neither: that does not explain my meaning. 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 pre- ference 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 you are not the object of this preference. Now there are some things which give no offense, while implied or taken for granted merely; but expressed, there is much offense 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 opportunity 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 right have a married couple to tell me by speeches, and looks that are scarce less plain than speeches, that I am not the happy man — the lady^s choice. It is enough that I know that I am not: I do not want this perpetual reminding. The display of superior knowledge or riches may be 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 and pictures, his parks and gardens, I have a temporary usufruct at least. But the display of married happiness has none of these palliatives: it is throughout pure, unrecom- pensed, unqualified insult. 156 THE mSSA TS OF ELIA. 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 their less favored neighbors, seeing little of the benefit, may the less be disposed to question the right. But these married monop- olists 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 newly-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 that we, who have not had the happiness to be made free of the company: but their arrogance is not content 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 incompetent person. IS'ay, a young married lady of my acquaintance, who, the best of the jest was, had not changed her condition above a fortnight before, in a ques- tion on which I had the misfortune to differ from her, respecting the properest 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 any- thing 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 commonly have them in most abundance, that there are few marriages that are not blest with at least one of these bargains, how often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond hopes of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty. A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT. I57 disgrace, the gallows, etc. 1 cannot for my life tell what cause for pride there can possibly be in haviiig them. If they were young phaniixes, indeed, that were born 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 tliat. But why we, who are not their natural-born sub- jects, should be expected to bring our spices, myrrh, 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, where 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 children. On tlie 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 send- ing 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 toying 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 or ten, indiscriminately — to love all the pretty dears, be- cause children are 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 158 THE ES8A TS OF ELIA. 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 unamia- ble 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 attrac- tive age — there is something in the tender years of infancy that of itself charms us? That is the very reason why I am more nice about them. I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature, not even excepting the deli- cate creatures which bear them; but the prettier the kind of a thing is, the more desirable it is that it should be pretty of its kind. One daisy differs not much from an- other in glory; but a violet should look and smell the daintiest. I was always rather squeamish 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 inti- macy 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 friend gradually grow cool and altered toward you, and at last seek opportunities of breaking with you. I have scarce a married friend of my acquaintance, upon whose firm faith I can rely, whose friendship did not commence after the period of his 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. A BACUKLOIVS COMPLAIJ^T. 159 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 new mintings. Innumerable 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, Imt an oddity, is one of the ways — they have a particular kind of stare for the purpose — till at last the husband, who used to defer to your judgment, and would pass over some ex- crescences 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 con- sorted with in his bachelor days, but not quite so proper to be introduced 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 toward 3^ou, by never qualified exaggerations to cry up all that you say or do, till the good man, who understands well enough that it is all done in compliment to him, grows weary of the debt of grati- tude which is due to so much candor, 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" toward 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 160 THE E88A YS OF ELIA. riveted the chain which she is to break, upon any imagi- nary discovery of a want of poignancy in your conversation, she will cry, ^'I thought, my dear, you described your friend, Mr. , 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 over- look some trifling irregularities in your moral deportment, 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 candor 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 that the sight of me had very much disap- pointed her expectations; for, from her husband's repre- sentations of me, she had formed a notion that she was to see a fine, tall, officer-like looking man (I use her very words), the very reverse of which proved to be the truth. This was candid; and I had the civilitv 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 than myself exhibit- ing any indications of a martial character in his air or countenance. These are some of the mortifications which I have encountered in the absurd attempt to visit at their houses. To enumerate them all would be a vain endeavor; I shall 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 ver'sa, 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 fret- ting 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 ceremony is an invention to take ofl^ th^- uneasy feeling which we derive ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 161 from knowing ourselves to be less the object of love and esteem with a fellow-creature than some other person is. It endeavors to make up, by superior attentions in little points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater. Had Tedacea ke])t the oysters back for me, and withstood her husband's im2)ortunities 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 husband, beyond the point of a modest behavior and decorum; therefore I must protest against the vicarious gluttony of Cerasia, who at her own table sent away a dish of ]\Iorellas, which I was apj^lying to with great good-will, to her husbands 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 my 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 desperate offenders in future. ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. The casual sight of an old Play Bill, which I picked \\\) the other day, I know not by what chance it was preserved 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 Drury-lane Theater two-and-thirty years ago. There is something very touching in these old remembrances. They make us think how we once used to read a Play Bill — not, as now perad- venture, singling out a favorite performer, and casting 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 Philimore — names of small amount — had an importance, beyond what we can be content to attribute now to the time's best actors. '' Orsino, by Mr. Barry- more." AVhat a full Shakespearian sound it carriesi how 162 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. 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 Oj^helia; Helena, in All's Well 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 fore- seen, 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 new suggestion, and the heightened image of '^Patience" still followed after that, as by some growing (and not mechanical) process, thought springing up after thought, I would almost say, as they were watered by her tears. So in those fine lines: Write 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 pas- sion; 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 and 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 imperious fantastic humor of the ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 163 character with nicety. Her fine spacious person filled the scene. The part of Malvolio has, in my jiulgment, 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 con- ceptions, the emotions consequent upon the presentment of a great idea to the fancy. He had the true poetical enthu- siasm — the rarest faculty among players. None that I re- member 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 affectation; and the thorough-bred gentleman was uppermost in every movement. He seized the moment of passion with great- est 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 to come upon the stage to do the poet's message simj^ly, 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. For 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 confession in soliloquy alone put you in pos- session 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 uj^ for mine Ancient, and a quan- tity of barren spectators, to shoot their bolts at. The lago of Bensley did not go to work so grossly. There was a tri- umphant 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 success- 164 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. ful 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 chil- dren, 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 avail- able, 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 tradition 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 was occasionally absent from the theater, John Kemble thought it no derogation to succeed to the part. Malvolio is not essentially ludicrous. He becomes comic but by accident. He is cold, austere, repell- ing; but dignified, consistent, and, for what appears, rather of an overstretched morality. Maria describes him as a sort of Puritan; and he might have worn his gold chain with honor in one of our old roundhead families, in the service of a Lambert, or a Lady Fairfax. But liis morality and 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, honorable, accomplished. His careless com- mittal 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 con- found 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 indica- tion of his supposed madness, iifeclares that she '^ would \ ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 165 not have him miscarry for half of her dowry/' Does this look as if the character was meant to appear little or in- significant? Once, indeed, she accuses him to his face — of wliat? — of being '^sick of self-love," but with a gen- tleness and considerateness which could not have been if she had not thought that tliis particular infirmity shaded some virtues. His rebuke to the knight and his sottish revelers, 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 dis- sembled mourning would draw the eyes of the world upon her house-affairs, Malvolio might feel the honor of the family in some sort in his keeping; as it appears not that Olivia had any more brothers, or kinsmen, to look to it — for Sir Tobey had dropped all such nice respects at the buttery-hatch. That Malvolio was meant to be 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 tlian a mere vaj^or — a thing of straw, or Jack in office — before Fabian and Maria could have ventured send- ing him upon a courting-errand to Olivia. There was some cousonancy (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 worth. There was something in it beyond the cox- comb. It was big and swelling, but you could not be sure that it was hollow. You might wish to see it taken down, but you felt that it was upon an elevation. He was mag- * Clown. Wliat is tlie opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl ? Mai. Tliat the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird. Clown. What thinkest thou of his opinion? Mai. I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve of his opinion. 166 TEE ESSA TS OF ELIA. nificent 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' affection, gradually to work, you would have thought that the hero of La Mancha in person stood before you. How he went smiling to him- self ! with what ineffable carelessness would he twirl his gold chain! what a dream it wasi 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 obtruded itself, it was a deep sense of pitiable infirmity of man's nature, that can lay him open to euch fren- zies; but, in truth, you rather admired than pitied the lunacy while it lasted, you felt that an hour of such mis- take was worth an age with the eyes open. AVho 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 principality 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. 0! shake not the castles of his pride — endure yet for a season, bright moments of confidence — " 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; but Dodd was it, as it came out of nature's hands. It might be said to remain in piiris naturalihus. In ex- pi'essing slowness of apprehension, this actor surpassed all others. You could see the first dawn of an idea stealing slowly over his countenance, climbing up by little and little, with a painful process, till it cleared up at last to the fullness of a twilight conception — its highest meridian. He seemed to keep back his intellect, as some have had ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 167 the power to retard their [pulsation. Tlie 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 understanding 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-and-twenty years ago, that walking in the gardens of Gray^s Inn — they were then far finer than they are now — the accursed Verulam 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 remembered 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 im^Dress of his foot upon their gravel walksyf Taking my afternoon solace on a summer day upon the aforesaid terrace, a comely sad personage came toward 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 mortality. 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 toward a venerable stranger, and which rather denotes an inclination to greet him, than any positive motion of the body to that elfect — 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 Fojipington, 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 tliousand agreeable im- 168 THE ESS A YS OF ELIA. pertinences? Was this the face, full of thought and care- fulness, 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 — which I had so often despised, made mocks at, made merry with. The remembrance of the freedoms which I had taken with it came upon me with a reproach of insult. I could have asked it pardon. I thought it looked upon me with a sense of injury. There is something strange as well as sad in seeing actors, your pleasant fellows particularly, subjected to and suffering the common lot; their fortunes, their casualties, their 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. He had quitted the stage some months; and, as I learned afterward, 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 theater, doing gentle penance for a life of 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, he ^*^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 lifetime he delighted to be called, and time hath ratified the appella- tion — lieth buried on the north side of the cemetery of * Dodd was a man of reading, and left at liis death a choice collec- tion of old English literature. I should judge him to have been a man of wit. I know one instance of an impromptu which no length of study could have bettered. My merry friend, Jem White, had seen him one evening in Aguecheek, and recognizing Dodd the next day in Fleet Street, was irresistibly 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 unusual address from a stranger, with a courteous half-rebuking wave of the hand, put him off with an " Away, Fool." ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 169 Holy Paul, to whose service his nonage and tender years were dedicated. Tliere are those 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." What clipped his wings, or made it expedient that he should exchange the holy for the profane state; whether he had 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 an occupation which professeth to ^^ commerce with the skies/' I could never rightly learn; but we find him, after tlie probation of a twelvemonth or so, reverting to a secu- lar condition and become one oi us. I think he was not altogether of that timber out of which 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, with which he invested himself with so much humility after his deprivation, and which he wore so long with so much blameless satisfaction to himself and to the public, and be accepted for a surplice, his white stole and albe. The first fruits of his secularization v/as an engagement upon the boards of Old Drury, at which theater 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 Good fellow 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, per- haps, remotely from his ecclesiastical education, foreign to his prototype of La! Thousands of hearts yet respond to the chuckling La! of Dicky Suett, brought back to their remembrance by the faithful transcript of his friend Mathew'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 170 THE ESSA T8 OF ELIA. composition. Had he had but two grains (nay, half a grain) of it, he coukl never have supported himself upon those two spider^s strings, which served him (in the latter part of his unmixed existence) as legs. A doubt or a scrapie must have made him totter, a sigh have puffed him down; the weight of a frown had staggered him, a wrinkle made him lose his balance. But on he went, scrambling upon those airy stilts of his, with Robin Goodfellow, " through brake, through briar," reckless of a scratched face or a torn doublet. Shakespeare foresaw him when he framed his fools and jesters. They have all the true Suett stamp, a loose and shambling gait, a slippery tongue, this last the ready mid- wife to a without-pain-clelivered jest; in words, light as air, venting truths deep as the center; with idlest rhymes 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 favorites with the town than any actors before or after. The difference, I take it, was this : Jack was more heloved for his sweet, good-natured, moral pretensions. Dicky was more liked 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 Shakespeare says of Love, too young to know what conscience is. He put us into Vestals 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 burden of that death; and, when Death came himself, not in metaphor, to fetch Dicky, it is recorded of him by Robert Palmer, who kindly watched his exit, that he received the last stroke, neither varying Jiis accustomed tranquillity, nor tune, with the simple ex- clamation, worthy to have been recorded in his epitaph, '' La! La! Bohbij ! " The elder Palmer (of stage-trading celebrity) commonly played Sir Toby in those days ; but there is a solidity of wit in the jests of that half-Falstaff wliich he did not quite fllJ out. He was as much too showy as Moody (who some- times took the part) was dry and sottish. In sock or buskin there was an air of swaggering gentility about Jack Palmer. ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 171 He was n goitlemaii with a slight infusion of the footman. His brother Bob (of recenter memory), who was his shadow in everything while he lived, and dwindled into less than a shadow afterward — was a (jentUman with a little stronger infusion of the latter imjredient ; that was all. It is amaz- ing how a little of the more or less makes a difference in these things. When you saw Bobby in the '* Duke^s Serv- ant,"* you said, ^MVhat a pity such a pretty fellow was only a servant ! " AVhen you saw Jack figuring in Captain Absolute, you thought you could trace his promotion to some lady of quality who fancied the handsome fellow in his topknot, and had bought him a commission. There- fore 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 personcs were supposed to know nothing at all about it. The lies of Young AVilding, and the sentiments in Joseph Surface, were 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 indis- pensable to scenes of interest) is not required, or would rather interfere to diminish your pleasure. The fact is, you do not believe in such characters as Surface, the villain of artificial comedy, even while you read or see them. If you did, they would shock and not divert you. When Ben, in Love for Love, returns from sea, the following ex- quisite dialogue occurs at his first meeting with his father: Sir Sampson. Thou hast been many a weary league, Ben, since I saw tliee. Ben. Ey, ey, been. Been far enough, and that be all. Well, father, and how do all at home ? how does brother Dick and brother Val? Sir Sampson. Dick! body o' me, Dick has been dead these two years. 1 writ you word when you were at Leghorn. Ben. Mess, that's true; Marry, I had forgot. Dick's dead, as you say — well, and how ? — I have a many questions to ask you. * High Life Below Stairs. 172 THE ESS A YS OF ELIA. Here is an instance of insensibility which in real life would be revolting, or rather in real life could not have co-existed with the v/arm-hearted temperament of the character. But when you read it in the sjiirit with which such playful selections and specious combinations rather than strict viekqjhrases of nature should be taken^ or when you saw 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 creation of Congreve's fancy, a dreamy combination of all the accidents of a sailor^s character — his contempt of mone}^, his credulity to women, with that necessary estrangement from liome which it is just within the verge of credibility to suppose might produce such an hallucina- tion as is here described. We never think the worse of Ben for it, or feel it as a stain upon his character. But when an actor comes, and instead of the delightful phan- tom — the creature dear to half-belief — which Bannister exhibited, displays before our eyes a downright 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 good- ness of purpose, he gives to it a downright daylight under- standing, 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 disturbed; a real man has got in among the dramatis personm, 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 or second gallery. ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY. The artificial Comedy, or Comedy of manners, is quite extinct on our stage. Congreve and Farquhar 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 ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY. 173 characters 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 wson 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. AVe 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 sen- timental comedy — but a tyrant far more pernicious to our pleasures which has succeeded to it, the exclusive and all- devouring drama of common life; where the moral point is everything; where, instead of the fictitious half -believed personages of the stage (the phantoms of old comedy), we recognize ourselves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolks, allies, patrons, enemies — the same as in life — with an interest in what is going on so hetirty and substantial, that we cannot afford our moral judgment, in its deepest and most vital results, to compromise or sluinber for a moment. What is tliere transacting, 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 cany our fireside concerns to the theater with us. We do not go thither like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to confirm our experi- ence of it; to make assurance double, and take a bond of fate. We must live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was the mournful privilege of Ulysses to descend twice to the shades. iVll that neutral ground of character, which stood between vice and virtue; or which in fact was indifferent to neither, where neither properly was called in question; that happy breathing-place from the burden of a perpetual moral questioning — the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry — is broken up and disfranchised, as injurious to the interests of society. The privileges of the place are taken away by law. We 174 TEE ESSA TS OF ELIA. dare not dally with images, or names, of wrong. We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread infection from the scenic representation of disorder, 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 precau- tion against the breeze and sunshine. 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 world with no meddling restrictions — to get into recesses, whither the hunter cannot follow me— Secret shades Of woody Ida's inmost grove, While 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 contentedly for having respired the breath of an imaginary freedom. I 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 Wycherley^'s — comedies. I am the gayer at least for it; and I could never connect those sports of a witty fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn from them to imitation of 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 alike), and place it in a modern play, and my virtuous indignation shall rise 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 ^;o/i"ce 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 in- capable of making a stand as a Swedenborgian 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 Mira- bels, the Dorimants and the Lady Touchwoods, in their own sphere, do not offend my moral sense; in fact, they ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY. 175 do not appeal to it at all. They seem engaged in their proper element. They break through no laws or conscien- tious restraints. They know of none. Tlioy have got out of Christendom into the land — what shall I call it? — 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 what- ever to the world that is. No good person can be justly offended as a spectator, because no good person suffers on the stage. Judged morally, every character in these plays — the few exceptions only are mistakes — is alike essentially vain and worthless. The great art of Congreve is especially shown in this, that he has entirely excluded from his scenes — some little generosities in the part of Angelica perhaps excepted — not only anything like a fault- less 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) was 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 Avhom you absolutely care nothing — for you neither hate nor love his personages — and I think it is owing to this very indiffer- ence for any, that you endure the whole. He has spread a privation of moral light, I will call it, rather than by the ugly name of palpable darkness, over his creations; and his shadows flit before you without distinction or preference. Had he introduced a good character, 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, which now are none, because we think them none. Translated into real life, the characters of his, and his friend Wycherley's dramas, are profligates and strumpets — the business of their brief existence, the undivided pursuit of lawless gallantry. No other spring of action, or pos- sible motive of conduct, is recognized; principles which, universally acted upon, must reduce this frame of things to a chaos. But we do them wrong in so translating them. No such effects are produced, in tlieir world. When we are among them, we are among a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our usages. No reverend institutions 176 THE ESSA TS OF ELIA. are insulted by their proceedings — for they have none among them. No peace of families is violated — for no families ties exist among them. No 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 affection^s depth and wedded faith are not of the growth of that soil. There is neither right nor wrong — gratitude or its opposite — claim or duty — paternity 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, lil^e 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. Amid the mortifying circumstances attendant upon growing old, it is something to have seen the School for Scandal in its glory. This comedy grew out of Oongreve and Wycherley, but gathered some allays of the senti- mental comedy which followed theirs. It is impossible that it should be now 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 plausibil- ity, the measured step, the insinuating voice — to express it in a word — the downright acted villainy of the part, so different from the pressure of conscious actual wickedness, the hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy, which made Jack so deservedly a favorite in that character, I must needs conclude the present generation of play-goers more virtuous than myself, or more dense. I freely confess that he divided the palm with me with his better brother; that in fact, I liked him quite as well. Not but there are pas- sages — like that, for instance, where Joseph is made to re- fuse a pittance to a poor relation — incongruities which ON TUE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY. 177 Sheridan was forced upon by the attempt to join the arti- ficial with the sentimental comedy, either of which must destroy the 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 manner of Palmer in this character coun- teracted every disagreeable impression which you might have received from the contrast, supposing them real, be- tween the two brothers. You did not believe in Joseph with the same faith with which you believed in Charles. The latter was a pleasant reality, the former a no less pleasant poetical foil to it. The comedy, I have said, is incongruous; a mixture of Congreve with sentimental in- compatibilities; the gaity upon the w^hole is buoyant; but it required the consummate art of Palmer to reconcile the discordant elements. A player with Jack's talents, if we had one now, would not dare to do the part in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid every turn which might tend to unreal- ize, and so to make the character fascinating. He must take his cue from his spectators, who would expect a bad man and a good man as rigidly opposed to each other as the deathbeds of those geniuses are contrasted in the prints, which I am sorry to say have disappeared from the windows of my old friend Carrington Bowles, of St. Paul's Church-yard memory — (an exhibition as venerable as the adjacent cathedral, and almost coeval) of the bad and good man at the hour of death; v/here the ghastly apprehensions of the former — and truly the grim phan- tom with his reality of a toasting-fork is not to be de- spised — so finely contrast with the meek complacent kiss- ing of the rod — taking it in like honey and butter — with which the latter submits to the scythe of the gentle bleeder, Time, who wields his lancet with the apprehensive finger of a popular young ladies' surgeon. What flesh, like loving grass, would not covet to meet half-way the stroke of such a delicate mower? John Palmer was twice an actor in this exquisite part. He was playing to you all the while that he was playing 178 THE ES8A YS OF ELIA. upon Sir Peter and his lady. You had the first intima- tion of a sentiment before it was on his hps. His altered voice was meant to you, and you were to suppose that his fictitious co-flutterers on the stage perceived nothing at all of it. What was it to you if that half reality, the husband, was overreached by the puppetry — or the thin thing (Lady Teazle^s reputation) was persuaded it was dying of a plethory? The fortunes of Othello and Desdemona were not concerned in it. Poor Jack has passed from the stage in good time, that he did not live to this our age of seriousness. The pleas- ant old Teazle King, too, is gone in good time. His manner would scarce have passed current in our day. We must love or hate, acquit or condemn, censure or pity, exert our detestable coxcombry of moral judgment upon everything. Joseph Surface, to go down now, must be a downright revolting villain — no compromise — his first appearance must shock and give horror — his specious plausibilities, which the pleasurable faculties of our fathers welcomed with such hearty greet- ings, knowing that no harm (dramatic harm even) could come, or was meant to come, of them, must inspire a cold and killing aversion. Charles (the real canting person of the scene — for the hypocrisy of Joseph has its ulterior legit- imate ends, but his brother^s i^rofessions of a good heart center in downright self-satisfaction) must be loved, and Joseph hated. To balance one disagreeable reality with another. Sir Peter Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old bachelor bridegroom, whose teasings (while King acted it) were evidently as much played off at you, as they were meant to concern anybody on the stage; he must be a real person, capable in law of sustaining an injury — a person toward whom duties are to be acknowl- edged — the genuine crwi. con. antagonist of the villain- ous seducer Joseph. To realize him more, his sufferings under his unfortunate match must have the downright pungency of life — must (or should) make you not mirthful but uncomfortable, just as the same predicament would move you in a neighbor or old friend. The delicious scenes which give the play its name and zest, must affect you in the same serious manner as if you heard the reputation of a dear female friend attacked in ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY. 179 your real, presence. Crabtree and Sir Benjamin — those poor snakes that live but in the sunshine of your mirth — must be ripened by this hot-bed process of realization into asps or amphisba^nas; and Mrs. Candor — 0! frightful! become a hooded serpent. 0! who that remembers Parsons and Dodd — the wasp and butterfly of the School for Scandal — in those two characters; and charming, natural Miss Pope, the perfect gentlewoman as distinguished from the fine lady of comedy, in this latter part, would forego the true scenic delight, the escape from life, the oblivion of consequences, the holiday barring out of the pedant Reflection; those Saturnalia of two or three brief hours, well won from the world — to sit instead at one of our modern plays, to have his coward conscience (that forsooth must not be left for a moment) stimulated with perpetual appeals; dulled rather, and blunted, as a faculty without repose must be; and his moral vanity pampered with images of notional justice, notional beneficence, lives saved without the spectator's risk, and fortunes given away that cost the author nothing? No piece was, perhaps, ever so completely cast in all its parts as this manager's comedy. Miss Farren had succeeded to Mrs. Abington in Lady Teazle; and Smith, the original Charles, had retired when I first saw it. The rest of the characters, with very slight exceptions, remained. I remember it was then the fashion to cry down John Kemble, who took the part of Charles after Smith; but, I thought, very unjustly. Smith, I fancy, was more airy, and took the eye with a certain gaiety of person. He brought with him no somber recollections of tragedy. He had not to expiate the fault of having pleased beforehand in lofty declamation. He had no sins of Hamlet or of Richard to atone for. His failure in these parts was a pass- port to success in one of so opposite a tendency. But, as far as I could judge, the weighty sense of Kemble made up for more personal incapacity than he had to answer for. His harshest tones in this part came steeped and duLMfied in good humor. He made his defects a grace. His exact declamatory manner, as he managed it, only served to con- vey the points of his dialogue with more precision. It seemed to head the shafts to carry them deeper. Not one of his sparkling sentences was lost. I remember minutely 180 THE ESSA TS OF ELlA. how he delivered each in succession, and cannot by any effort imagine how any of them conld he altered for the better. No man could deliver brilliant dialogue — the dia- logue of Congreve or of Wycherley, because none understood it — half so well as John Kemble. His Valentine, in Love for Love, was, to my recollection, faultless. He flagged sometimes in the intervals of tragic joassion. He would slumber over the level parts of an heroic character. His Macbeth has been known to nod. But he always seemed to me to be particularly alive to pointed and witty dialogue. The relaxing levities of tragedy have not been touched by any since him, the playful court-bred spirit in which he condescended to the players in Hamlet, the sportive relief Avhich he threw into the darker shades of Richard, dis- appeared with him. He had his sluggish moods, his tor- pors, but they were the halting-stones and resting-place of his tragedy, politic savings, and fetches of the breath, hus- bandry of the lungs, where nature pointed him to be an economist rather, I think, than errors of the judgment. They were at worst less painful than the eternal torment- ing unappeasable vigilance, the *^^lidless dragon eyes," of present fashionable tragedy. ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN. Not many nights ago I had come home from seeing this extraordinary performer in Cockletop; and when I retired to my pillow his whimsical image still stuck by me, in a manner as to threaten sleep. In vain I tried to divest my- self of it by conjuring up the most opposite associations. I resolved to be serious. I raised up the gravest topics of life; private misery, public calamity. All would not do: There the antic sate Mocking our state his queer visnomy, his bewildering costume, all the strange things which he had raked together, his serpentine rod swagging about in his pocket, Cleopatra's tear, and the rest of his relics; O'Keefe's wild farce, and Ms wilder commen- tary; till the passion of laughter, like grief in excess, re- ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN. 181 lieved itself by its own weight, inviting the sleep which in the first instance it had driven away. But I was not to escape so easily. No sooner did I fall into slumbers than the same image^ only more perplexing, assailed me in the shape of dreams. Not one Munden, but five hundred, were dancing before me, like the faces which, whether you will or no, come when you have been taking opium — all the strange combinations, which this strangest of all strange mortals ever shot his proper countenance into, from the day he came commissioned to dry up the tears of the town for the loss of the now almost forgotten Edwin. for the power of the pencil to have fixed them when I awoke ! A season or two since there was exhibited a Hogarth gallery. I do not see why there should not be a Munden gallery. In richness and variety the latter would not fall far short of the former. There is one face of Farley, one face of Knight, one (but what a one it is!) of Listen; but Munden has none that you can properly pin down and call his. When you think he has exhausted his battery of looks, in unaccountable war- fare with your gravity, suddenly he sprouts out an entirely new set of features, like Hydra. He is not one, but legion; not so much a comedian, as a company. If his name could be multiplied like his countenance, it might fill a play-bill. He, and he alone, literally makes faces; applied to any other person, the phrase is a mere figure, denoting certain modifications of the human countenance. Out of some invisible wardrobe he dips for faces, as his friend Suett used for wigs, and fetches them out as easily. I should not be surprised to see him some day put out the head of a river-horse; or come forth a pewitt, or lapwing, some feathered metamorphosis. I have seen this gifted actor in Sir Christopher Curry, in old Dornton, diffuse a glow of sentiment which has made the pulse of a crowded theater beat like that of one man; when he has come in aid of the pulpit, doing good to the moral heart of a people. I have seen some faint approaches to this sort of excellence in other players. But in the grand grotesque of farce, Munden stands out as single and unaccompanied as Hogarth. Hogarth, strange to tell, had no followers. The school of Munden began, and mustend^ with himself. 182 THE ESS A TS OF ELIA. Can any man zuonder, like him ? can any man see ghosts, like him? or fight with his oimi shadoio — '^ sessa" — as he does in that strangely neglected thing, the cobbler of Pres- ton, where his alternations from the cobbler to the mag- nifico, and from the magnifico to the cobbler, keep the brain of the spectator in as wild a ferment as if some Arabian Night were being acted before him. AVho like him can throw, or ever attempted to throw, a preter- natural interest over the commonest daily life objects? A table or joint-stool, in his conception, rises into a dignity equivalent to Cassiopeia^s chair. It is invested with con- stellatory importance. You could not speak of it with more deference, if it were mounted into the firmament. A beggar in the hands of Michael Angelo, says Fuseli, rose the Patriarch of Poverty. So the gusto of Munden antiquates and ennobles what it touches. His pots and his ladles are as grand and primal as the seething-pots and hooks seen in old prophetic vision. A tub of butter, con- templated by him, amounts to a Platonic idea. He under- stands a leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands won- dering, amid the commonplace materials of life, like primeval man with the sun and stars about him. The Last Essays of Elia. BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. I DO NOT know a pleasure more affecting than to range at will over the deserted apartments of some fine old family mansion. The traces of extinct grandeur admit of a better passion than envy: and contemplations on the great and good, whom we fancy in succession to have been its inhabitants, weave for us illusions, incompatible with the bustle of modern occupancy, and vanities of foolish present aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I think, at- tends us between entering an empty and a crowded church. In the latter it is chance but some present human frailty, an act of inattention on the part of some of the auditory, or a trait of affectation, or worse, vainglory, on that of the preacher, puts us by our best thoughts, disharmonizing the place and the occasion. But wouldst thou know the beauty of holiness? go alone on some week-day, borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse the cool aisles of some country church; think of the piety that has kneeled there — the congregations, old and young, that have found consolation there — the meek pastor, the docile parishioner. With no disturbing emotions, no cross conflicting compari- sons, drink in the tranquillity of the i^lace, till thou thyself become as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies that kneel and weep around thee. Journeying northward lately I could not resist going some few miles out of my road to look upon the remains of an old great house with which I had been impressed in this way in infancy. I was apprised that the owner of it had lately pulled it down; still I had a vague notion that it could not all have perished, that so much solidity with 184 THE ESS A YS OF ELIA. magnificence could not have been crushed all at once into the mere dust and rubbish which I found it. The work of ruin had proceeded with a swift hand in- deed, and the demolition of a few weeks had reduced it to an antiquity. I was astonished at the indistinction of everything. Where had stood the great gates? What bounded the court-yard? Whereabout did the out-houses commence? A few bricks only lay as representatives of that which was so stately and so spacious. Death does not shrink up his human victim at this rate. The burnt ashes of a man weigh more in their propor- tion. Had I seen these brick-and- mortar knaves at their pro- cess of destruction, at the plucking of every panel I should have felt the varlets at my heart. I should have cried out to them to spare a plank at least out of the cheerful store- room, in whose hot window-seat I used to sit and read Cowley, with the grass-plot before, and the hum and flap- pings of that one solitary wasp that ever haunted it about me. It is in mine ears now, as oft as summer returns; or a panel of the yellow-room. Why, every plank and panel of that house for me had magic in it. The tapestried bedrooms — tapestry so much better than painting — not adorning merely, but peopling the wainscots — at which childhood ever and anon would steal a look, shifting its coverlid (replaced as quickly) to exercise its tender courage in a momentary eye-encounter with those stern bright visages, staring reciprocally — all Ovid on the walls, in colors vivider than his description. Actaeon in mid sprout, with the unappeasable prudery of Diana; and the still more provoking and almost culinary coolness of Dan Phoebus, eel fashion, deliberately divest- ing of Marsyas. Then, that haunted room — in which old Mrs. Battle died — whereinto I have crept, but always in the daytime, with a passion of fear; and a sneaking curiosity, terror- tainted, to hold communication with the past. Hoiv shall they Miild it iip again? It was an old deserted place, yet not so long deserted that the traces of the splendor of past inmates were every- where apparent. Its furniture was still standing — even to BLAKESMOOR IN H SUIRE. 185 the tarnished gilt leather battledores and crumbling feathers of shuttlecocks in the nursery, which told that children had once played there. But I was a lonely child, and had the range at will of every apartment, knew every nook and corner, wondered and worshiped everywhere. The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother of thought as it is the feeder of love, of silence and admira- tion. So strange a passion for the place possessed me in those years that, though there lay — 1 shame to say how few rods distant from the mansion — half hid by trees, what I judged some romantic lake, such was the spell which bound me to the house, and such my carefulness not to pass its strict and proper precincts, that the idle waters lay unexplored for me; and not till late in life, curiosity prevailing over elder devotion, I found, to my astonish- ment, a pretty brawling brook had been the Lacus Incog- nitus of my infancy. Variegated views, extensive pros- pects, and those at no great distance from the house — I was told of such — what were they to me, being out of the boundaries of my Eden? So far from a wish to roam, I would have drawn, methought, still closer the fences of my chosen prison, and have been hemmed in by a yet securer cincture of those excluding garden walls. I could have exclaimed with the garden-loving poet: Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines; Curl me about, ye gadding vines; And oh so close your circles lace. That I may never leave this place; But, lest your fetters prove too weak, Ere I your silken bondage break. Do you, O brambles, chain me too, And, courteous briars, nail me through.* I was here as in a lonely temple. Snug firesides, tl>e low-built roof, parlors ten feet by ten, frugal boards, and all the homeliness of home — these were the condition of my birth, the wholesome soil which I was planted in. Yet, without impeachment to their tenderest lessons, I am not sorry to have had glances of something beyond, and to have taken, if but a peep, in childhood, at the contrast- ing accidents of a great fortune. * Marvell, on Appleton House, to the Lord Fairfax. 186 THE BSSA YS OF ELIA. To have the feeling of gentility, it is not necessary to have been born gentle. The pride of ancestry may be had on cheaper terms than to be obliged to an importunate race of ancestors; and the coatless antiquary in his unem- blazoned cell, revolving the long line of a Mowbray^s or De Clifford's pedigree, at those sounding names may warm himself into as gay a vanity as those who do inherit them. The claims of birth are ideal merely, and what herald shall go about to strip me of an idea? Is it trenchant to their swords? can it be hacked off as a spur can? or torn away like a tarnished garter? What, else, were the families of the great to us? What pleasure should we take in their tedious genealogies, or their capitulatory brass monuments? What to us the uninterrupted current of their bloods, if our own did not answer within us to a cognate and corresponding elevation? Or wherefore, else, tattered and diminished 'Scut- cheon that hung upon the time-worn walls of th}^ princely stairs, Blakesmoor! have I in childhood so oft stood poring upon thy mystic characters — thy emblematic sup- porters, with their prophetic " Eesurgam'' — till, every dreg of peasantry purging off, I received into myself Very Gentility? Thou wert first in my morning eyes; and of nights hast detained my steps from bedward, till it was but a step from gazing at thee to dreaming on thee. This is the only true gentry by adoption; the veritable change of blood, and not as empirics have fabled, by transfusion. Who it was by dying that had earned the splendid trophy, I know not, I inquired not; but its fading rags, and colors cobweb-stained, told that its subject was of two centuries back. And what if my ancestor at that date was some Damcetas, feeding flocks, not his own, upon the hills of Lincoln, did I in less earnest vindicate to myself the family trappings of this once proud ^gon? repaying by a back- ward triumph the insults he might possibly have heaped in his life- time upon my poor pastoral progenitor. If it were presumption so to speculate, the present owners of the mansion had least reason to complain. They had long forsaken the old house of their fathers for newer BLAKESMOOR IN H SUIRE. 187 trifle ; and I was left to appropriate to myself what images I could pick up, to raise my fancy, or to soothe my vanity. I was the true descendant of those old W s, and not the present family of that name, who had fled the old waste places. Mine was that gallery of good old family portraits, which as I have gone over, giving them in fancy my own family name, one and then another would seem to smile, reaching forward from the canvas to recognize the new relationship; while the rest looked grave, as it seemed, at the vacancy in their dwelling, and thoughts of fled posterity. The beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery, and a lamb — that hung next the great bay window — with the bright yellow H shire hair, and eye of watchet hue — so like my Alice! — I am persuaded she was a true Elia — Mildred Elia, I take it. Mine, too, Blakesmoor, was thy noble Marble Hall, with its mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Caesars — stately busts in marble — ranged round; of whose countenances, young reader of faces as I was, the frowning beauty of Nero, I remember, had most of my wonder; but the mild Galba had my love. There they stood in the coldness of death, yet freshness of immortality. Mine, too, thy lofty Justice Hall, with its one chair of authority, high -backed and wickered, once the terror of luckless poacher, or self-forgetf ul maiden — so common since, that bats have roosted in it. Mine too — whose else? — thy costly fruit-garden, with its sun-backed southern wall; the ample pleasure-garden, rising backward from the house in triple terraces, with flower-pots now of palest lead, save that a speck here and there saved from the element, bespake their pristine state to have been gilt and glittering; the verdant quarters back warder still; and, stretching still beyond, in old for- mality, thy fiery wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel, and the day-long murmuring wood-pigeon, with that antique image in the center, God or Goddess I wist not; but child of Athens or old Rome paid never a sincerer worship to Pan or to Sylvanus in their native groves than I to that fragmental mystery. 188 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. Was it for this that I kissed my childish hands too fervently in your idol-worship, walks and windings of Blakesmoor! for this, or what sin of mine, has the plough passed over your pleasant places? I sometimes think that as men, when they die, do not die all, so of their extinguished habitations there may be a hope — a germ to be revivified. POOR RELATIONS. A Poor Relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of impertinent correspondenc}^ an odious ap- proximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of our prosperity; an unwelcome remembrancer, a perpetually recurring mortification, a drain on your purse, a more intolerable dun upon your pride, a drawback upon success, a rebuke to your rising, a stain in your blood, a blot on your ^scutcheon, a rent in your garment, a death^s head at your banquet, Agathocle^s pot, a Mordecai in your gate, a Lazarus at your door, a lion in your path, a frog in your chamber, a fly in your ointment, a mote in your eye, a triump to your enemy, an apology to your friends, the one thing not needful, the hail in harvest, the ounce of sour in a pound of sweet. He is known by his knock. Your heart telleth you ^' That is Mr. ." A rap, between familiarity and respect ; that demands, and at the same time seems to despair of, entertainment. He entereth smiling and em- barrassed. He holdeth out his hand to you to shake, and draweth it back again. He casually looketh in about dinner-time — when the table is full. He offereth to go away, seeing you have company, but is induced to stay. He filleth a chair, and your visitor^s two children are ac- commodated at a side-table. He never cometh upon 02:)en days, when your wife says, with some complacency, " My dear, perhaps Mr. will drop in to-day. ^^ He remem- bereth birthdays, and professeth he is fortunate to have stumbled upon one. He declareth against fish, the turbot being small, yet suflereth himself to be importuned into a slice against his first resolution. He sticketh by the port, POOR RELATIONS. 189 yet he will be prevailed upon to empty the remainder glass of claret, if a stranger press it upon him. He is a puzzle to the servants, who are fearful of being too ob- sequious, or not civil enough, to him. The guests think '' they have seen him before." Every one speculateth upon his condition; and the most part take him to be a tide- waiter. He calleth you by your Christian name to imply that his other is the same with your own. He is too familiar by half, yet you wish he had less diffidence. With half his familiarity he might pass for a casual de- pendent; with more boldness, he would be in no danger of being taken for what he is. He is too humble for a friend, yet taketh on him more state than befits a client. He is a worse guest than a country tenant, inasmuch as he bring- eth up no rent, yet "tis odds, from his garb and demeanor, that your guests take him for one. He is asked to make one at the whist table; refuseth on the score of poverty, and resents being left out. AVhen the company breaks up, he proffereth to go for a coach, and lets the servant go. He recollects your grandfather, and will thrust in some mean and quite unimportant anecdote of the family. He knew it when it was not quite so flourishing as " he is blest in seeing it now.^' He reviveth past situations, to insti- tute what he calleth favorable comparisons. With a reflect- ing sort of congratulation he will inquire the price of your furniture, and insults you with a special commendation of your window-curtains. He is of opinion that the urn is the more elegant shape ; but, after all, there was some- thing more comfortable about the old tea-kettle, which you must remember. He dare say you must find a great con- venience in having a carriage of your own, and appealeth to your lady if it is not so. Inquireth if you have had your arms done on vellum yet; and did not know, till lately, that such-and-such had been the crest of the family. His memory is unseasonable; his compliments perverse; his talk a trouble; his stay pertinacious; and when he goeth away, you dismiss his chair into a corner as pre- cipitately as possible, and feel fairly rid of two nuisances. There is a worse evil under the sun, and that is a female poor relation. You may do something with the other; you may pass him off tolerably well; but your indigent she-relative is hopeless. '^ He is an old humorist," you 190 THE E8SA TS OF ELIA. may say, '^and affects to go threadbare. His circum- stances are better than folks would take them to be. You are fond of having a character at your table, and truly he is one.'' But in the indications of female pov- erty there can be no disguise. No woman dresses below herself from caprice. The truth must out without shuffling. •' She is plainly related to the L 's ; or what does she at their house?" She is, in all probability, your wife's cousin. Nine times out of ten, at least, this is the case. Her garb is something between a gentle- woman and a beggar, yet the former evidently predomi- nates. She is most provokingiy humble, and ostentatiously sensible to her inferiority. He may require to be repressed sometimes — aliquando sufflaminandus erat — but there is no raising her. You send her soup at dinner, and she begs to be helped — after the gentlemen. Mr. re- quests the honor of taking wine with her; she hesitates between Port and Madeira, and chooses the former be- cause he does. She calls the servant 8ir; and insists on not troubling him to hold her plate. The housekeeper patronizes her. The children's governess takes upon her to correct her, when she has mistaken the piano for a harpsichord. Richard Amlet, Esq., in the play, is a notable instance of the disadvantages to which this chimerical notion of affinity constituting a claim to acquaintance, may subject the spirit of a gentleman. A little foolish blood is all that is between him and the lady with a great estate. His stars are perpetually crossed by the malignant maternity of an old woman, who persists in calling him ^^ her son Dick." But she has wherewithal in the end to recompense his in- dignities, and float him again upon the brilliant surface, under which it had been her seeming business and pleasure all along to sink him. All men, besides, are not of Dick's temperament. I knew an Amlet in real life, who, want- ing Dick's buoyancy, sank indeed. Poor W was of my own standing at Christ's, a fine classic, and a youth of promise. If he had a blemish, it was too much pride; but its quality was inoffensive; it was not of that sort which hardens the heart, and serves to keep inferiors at a dis- tance; it only sought to ward off derogation from itself. It was the principle of self-respect carried as far as it could POOR RELATIONS. 191 go, without infringing upon tluit respect which he would have every one else equally maintain for himself, lie would have you to think alike with him on this topic. Many a quarrel have I had witli him, when we were rather older boys, and our tallness made us more obnoxious to observation in the blue clothes, because 1 would not thread the alleys and blind ways of tlie town with him to elude notice, wlien wc have been out together on a holiday in the streets of this sneering and prying metropolis. W went, sore with these notions, to Oxford, where the dignity and sweetness of a scholar's life, meeting with the alloy of a humble introduction, wrought in him a passion- ate devotion to the place, with a profound aversion from the society. The servitor's gown (worse than his school array) clung to him with Sessian venom. He thought himself ridiculous in a garb, under which Latimer must have walked erect, and in which Hooker, in his young days, possibly flaunted in a vein of no discommendable vanity. In the depth of college shades, or in his lonely chamber, the poor student shrunk from observation. He found shelter among books, which insult not; and studies, that ask no questions of a youth's finances. He was lord of his library, and seldom cared for looking out beyond his domains. The healing influence of studious pursuits was upon him to soothe and to abstract. He was almost a healthy man, when the waywardness of his fate broke out against him with a second and worse malignity. The father of W had hitherto exercised the humble pro- fession of house-painter, at N , near Oxford. A sup- posed interest with some of the heads of colleges had now induced him to take up his abode in that city, with the hope of being employed upon some public works which were talked of. From that moment I read in the counte- nance of the young man the determination which at length tore him from academical pursuits for ever. To a person unacquainted with our universities, the distance between the gownsmen and the townsmen, as they are called — the trading part of the latter especially — is carried to an excess that would ap^Dear harsh and incredible. The temper- ament of AV 's father was diametrically the reverse of his own. Old W was a little, busy, cringing trades- man, who, with his son upon his arm, would stand bowing 192 THE ESSA T8 OF ELIA. and scraping, cap in hand, to an3^thing that wore the semblance of a gown — insensible to the winks and opener remonstrances of the young man, to whose chamber-fellow, or equal in standing, perhaps, lie was thus obsequiously and gratuitously ducking. Such a state of things could not last. W must change the air of Oxford, or be suffocated. He chose the former; and let the sturdy moralist, who strains the point of the filial duties as high as they can bear, censure the dereliction; he cannot esti- mate the struggle. I stood with W , the last after- noon I ever saw him, under the eaves of his paternal dwell- ing. It was in the fine lane leading from the High Street to the back of college, where W kejDt his rooms. He seemed thoughtful and more reconciled. I ventured to rally him — finding him in a better mood — upon a rep- resentation of the Artist Evangelist, which the old man, whose affairs were beginning to flourish, had caused to be set up in a splendid sort of frame over his really handsome shop, either as a token of prosperity or badge of gratitude to his saint. W looked \\^ at the Luke, and, like Satan, ^' knew his mounted sign — and fled." A letter on his father's table, the next morning, announced that he had accepted a commission in a regiment about to embark for Portugal. He was among the first who perished before the walls of St. Sebastian. I do not know how, upon a subject which I began with I treating half seriously, I should have fallen upon a recital \so eminently i^ainful; but this theme of poor relationship \is replete with so much matter for tragic as well as comic associations, that it is difficult to keep the account distinct without blending. The earliest impressions which I re- ceived on this matter are certainly not attended with any- thing painful, or very humiliating, in the recalling. At my father's table (no very si^lendid one) was to be found, every Saturday, the mysterious figure of an aged gentleman, clothed in neat black, of a sad yet comely appearance. His deportment was of the essence of gravity; his words few or none; and I was not to make a noise in his pres- ence. I had little inclination to have done so, for my cue was to admire in silence. A particular elbow-chair was appropriated to him, which was in no case to be violated. A peculiar sort of sweet pudding, which appeared on POOR RELATIONS. 193 no otlier occasion, distinguished tliedaysof his coming. I used to think him a prodigiously rich man. All I could make out of him was, that he and my father had been school-fellows, a world ago, at Lincoln, and that he came from the Mint. The Mint I knew to be a place where all the money was coined — and I thought he was the owner of all that money. Awful ideas of the Towcn* twined them- selves abont his presence. lie seemed above human infirmi- ties and passions. A sort of melancholy grandeur invested him. From some inexplicable doom I fancied him obliged to go about in an eternal suit of mourning; a captive — a stately being let out of the Tower on Saturdays. Often have I wondered at the temerity of my father, who, in spite of an habitual general respect which we all in common manifested toward him, would venture now and then to stand up against him in some argument touching their youthful days. The houses of the ancient city of Lincoln are divided (as most of my readers know) between the dwellers on the hill and in the valley. This marked dis- tinction formed an obvious division between the boys who lived above (however brought together in a common school) and the boys whose paternal residence was on the plain; a sufficient cause of hostility in the code of these young Grotiuses. My father had been a leading Mount- aineer; and would still maintain the general superiority in skill and hardihood of the Above Boys (his own faction) over the Beloio Boys (so were they called), of which party his contemporary had been a chieftain. Many and hot were the skirmishes on this topic — the only one upon which the old gentleman was ever brought out — and bad blood bred; even sometimes almost to the recommencement (so I expected) of actual hostilities. But my father, who scorned to insist npon advantages, gener- ally contrived to turn the conversation u^oon some adroit by-commendation of the old Minister ; in the general preference of which, before all other cathedrals in the island, the dweller on the hill, and the plain-born, could meet on a conciliating level, and lay down their less im- portant differences. Once only I saw the old gentleman really ruffled, and I remember with anguish the thought that came over me: " Perhaps he will never come here again. ^' He had been pressed to take another plate of the 194 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. viand, which I have already mentioned as the indispen- sable concomitant of his visits. He had refnsed with a resistance amounting to rigor, when my aunt, an old Lincolnian, but who had something of this, in common with my cousin Bridget, that she would sometimes press civility out of season, uttered the following memorable ap- plication — " Do take another slice, Mr. Billet, for you do not get 23udding every day/' The old gentleman said nothing at the time, but he took occasion in the course of tlie evening, when some argument had intervened between them, to utter with an emphasis which chilled the company, and which chills me now as I write it — " Woman, you are superannuated!" John Billet did not survive long after the digesting of this affront; but he survived long enough to assure me that peace was actually restored; and, if I remember aright, another pudding was discreetly substituted in the place of that which had occasioned the offense. He died at the Mint (anno 1781) where he had long held what he accounted a comfortable independence; and with five pounds, fourteen shillings, and a penny, which were found in his escritoir after his decease, left the world, blessing God that he had enongh to bury him, and that he had never been obliged to any man for a sixpence. This was — a Poor Relation. DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING. To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with the forced product of another man's brain. Now I think a man of qual- ity and breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own. — Lord Foppington, in " The Eelapse." Aisr INGENIOUS acquaintance of my own was so much struck with this bright sally of his Lordship, that he has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality. At the hazard of losing some credit on this head, I mnst confess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to other people's tli oughts. I dream away my life in others' speculations. I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me. DETACnED TUOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING. 195 I have uo repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read anything which I call a hook. There are things in that shape which I cannot allow for such. In this catalogue of hooks tuliich are no hooks — hihlia a-hibUa — I reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards, bound and lettered on the back, Scientitic Treatises, Almanacs, Statutes at Large: the works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame, Jenyns, and generally, all those volumes which ^' no gentleman^s library should be without:" the Histories of Flavins Josephus (that learned Jew), and Paley's Moral Philosophy. With these exceptions, I can read almost anything. I bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so unexcluding. I confess that it moves my spleen to see these things in hooks' clothing perched upon shelves, like false saints, usurjiers of true shrines, intruders into the sanctuary, thrusting out the legitimate occupants. To reach down a well-bound semblance of a volume, and hope it some kind-hearted play-book, then, opening what '^seem its leaves," to come bolt upon a withering Population Essay. To expect a Steele or a Farquhar, and find Adam Smith. To view a Avell-arranged assortment of block-headed En- cyclopaedias (Anglicanas or Metropolitanas) set out in an array of russia, or morocco, when a tithe of that good leather would comfortably re-clothe my shivering folios, would renovate Paracelsus himself, and enable old Ray- mund LuUy to look like himself again in the world. I never see these imposters, but I long to strip them, to warm my ragged veterans in their spoils. To be strong-backed and neat-bound is the desideratum of a volume. Magnificence comes after. This, when it can be afforded, is not to be lavished upon all kinds of books indiscriminately. I would not dress a set of maga- zines, for instance, in full suit. The dishabille, or half- binding (with russia backs ever) is our costume. A Shakespeare or a Milton (unless the first editions) it were mere foppery to trick out in gay apparel. The possession of them confers no distinction. Tlie exterior of them (the things tliemselves being so common), strange to say, raises no sweet emotions, no tickling sense of property in the 196 THE ESS A YS OF ELIA. owner. Thomson's Seasons, again, looks best (I maintain it) a little torn and dog's-eared. How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves, and worji- out appearance, nay, the very odor (beyond russia) if we would not forget kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old "Circulating Library" Tom Jones, or Vicar of Wakefield! How they speak of the thousand thumbs that have turned over their pages with delight! of the lone sempstress, whom they may have cheered (milliner, or hard-working mantua-maker) after her long day's needle-toil, running far into midnight, when she has snatched an hour, ill spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in spelling out their enchanting contents! Who would have them a whit less soiled? What better con- dition could we desire to see them in? In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from binding. Fielding, Smollett, Sterne and all that class of perpetually self-reproductive volumes — Great Nature's Stereotypes — we see them individually perish with less regret, because we know the copies of them to be "eterne." But where a book is at once both good and rare — where the individual is almost the species, and when that perishes. We know not where is that Promethean torch That can its light relumine, — such a book, for instance, as the Life of the Duke of Newcastle, by his Duchess; no casket is rich enough, no casings sufficiently durable, to honor and keep safe such a jewel. Not only rare volumes of this description, which seem hopeless ever to be reprinted, but old editions of writers, such as Sir Philip Sydney, Bishop Taylor, Milton in his prose works, Fuller, of whom we have reprints, yet the books themselves, though they go about, and are talked of here and there, we know have not endenizened them- selves (nor possibly ever will) in the national heart, so as to become stock books; it is good to possess these in durable and costly covers. I do not care for a First Folio of Shakespeare. (You cannot make a 2^et book of an author whom everybody reads.) I rather prefer the com- mon editions of Rowe and Tonson, without notes, and DETACHED TIIOVGIITS ON BOOKS AND READING. 197 with plates, which, being so execrably bad, serve as maps or modest remembrances, to the text; and, without pre- tending to any supposable emulation with it, are so much better than the Sliakespeare gallery engravings, which did. I have a community of feeling with my countrymen about his plays, and I like these editions of him best which have been oftenest tumbled about and handled. On the contrary, I cannot read Beaumont and Fletcher but in Folio. The Octavo editions are painful to look at. I have no sympathy with them. If they were as much read as the current editions of the other poet, I sliould prefer them in that shape to the older one. I do not know a more heart- less sight than the reprint of the Anatomy of Melancholy. What need was there of unearthing the bones of that fan- tastic old great man, to expose them in a winding-sheet of the newest fashion to modern censure? what hapless sta- tioner could dream of Burton ever becoming popular? The wretched Malone could not do worse, when he bribed the sexton of Stratford church to let him whitewash the painted effigy of old Shakespeare, which stood there, in rude but lively fasliion depicted, to the very color of the cheek, the eye, the eyebrow, hair, the very dress he used to wear — the only authentic testimony we had, however imperfect, of these curious parts and parcels of him. They covered him over with a coat of white paint. By , if I had been a justice of peace for Warwickshire, I would have clapped both commentator and sexton fast in the stocks, for a pair of meddling sacrilegious varlets. I think I see them at their work — these sapient trouble- tombs. Shall I be thought fantastical if I confess that the names of some of our poets sound sweeter, and have a finer relish to the ear — to mine, at least — than that of Milton or of Shakespeare? It may be that the latter are more staled and rung upon in common discourse. The sweetest names, and which carry a perfume in the mention, are Kit Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley. Much depends upon loheu and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes, before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up tlie Fairy Queen for a stop-gap or a volume of Bishop Andre wes' sermons? Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be 198 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA, played before you enter npon him. But he brings his music, to which, who listens, had need bring docile thoughts and purged ears. Winter evenings — tlie world shut out — with loss of cere- mony the gentle Shakespeare enters. At such a season the Tempest, or his own Winter^s Tale. These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud — to 3^ourself, or (as it chances) to some single person listening. More than one, and it degenerates into an audience. Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness. A newspaper, read out, is intolerable. In some of the Bank offices it is the custom (to save so much individual time) for one of the clerks — who is the best scholar — to com- mence upon the Times or the Chronicle and recite its entire contents aloud 7J?'0 iono jmllico. With every advantage of lungs and elocution, the effect is singularly vapid. In bar- bers^ shops and public-houses a fellow will get up and spell out a paragraph, which he communicates as some discovery. Another follows with Ids selection. So the entire journal transpires at length by piecemeal. Seldom-readers are slow readers, and without this expedient no one in the company would probably ever travel through the contents of a whole paper. Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment. What an eternal time that gentleman in black, at Nando's, keeps the paper! I am sick of hearing the waiter bawling out incessantly, ^' The Chronicle is in hand. Sir." Coming into an inn at night — having ordered your Slipper — what can be more delightful than to find lying in the window-seat, left there time out of mind by the carelessness of some former guest, two or three numbers of the old Town and Country Magazine, with its amusing tete-d-tete pictures — " The Royal Lover and Lady G ;" "' The Melting Platonic and the old Beau," — and such-like antiquated scandal ? Would you exchange it at that time, and in that place, for a better book ? Poor Tobin, who latterly fell blind, did not regret it so much for the weightier kinds of reading — the Paradise DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND HEADING. 199 Lost, or Comus, he could have read to him — bnt he missed the pleasure of skimming over with his own eye a maga- zine, or a light pamphlet. I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some cathedral alone, and reading Candide. I do not remember a more whimsical surprise than hav- ing been once detected — by a familiar damsel — reclining at my ease upon tlie grass, on Primrose Hill (her Cythera) reading Pamela. There was nothing in the book to make a man seriously ashamed at the exposure ; but as she seated herself down by me, and seemed determined to read in company, I could have wished it had been any other book. We read on very sociably for a few images ; and, not find- ing the author much to her taste, she got up, and went away. Gentle casuist, I leave it to thee to conjecture, whether the blush (for there was one between us) was the property of the nymph or the swain in this dilemma. From me you shall never get the secret. I am not much a friend to out-of doors reading. I can- not settle my spirits to it. I knew a Unitarian minister, who was generally to be seen upon Snow Hill (as yet Skin- ner's Street was not), between the hours of ten and eleven in the morning, studying a volume of Lardner. I own this to have been a strain of abstraction bej^ond my reach. I used to admire how he sidled along, keeping clear of secular contacts. An illiterate encounter with a porter's knot, or a bread basket, would have quickly put to flight all the theology I am master of, and have left me worse than indifferent to the five points. There is a class of street readers, whom I can never con- template without affection — the poor gentry, who, not hav- ing wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a little learning at the open stalls — the owner, with his hard eye, casting envious looks at them all the while, and thinking when they will have done. Venturing tenderly, page after page, expecting every moment when he shall interpose his inter- dict, and yet unable to deny themselves tlie gratification, they '^snatch a fearful joy.'' Martin B , in this way, by daily fragments, got through two volumes of Clarissa, when the stall-keeper damped his laudable ambition, by asking him (it was in his younger days) whether he meant to pur- chase the work. M. declares, that under no circumstance ;200 TEE ESSA YS OF ELIA, in his life did he ever peruse a book with half the satisfac- tion which he took in those uneasy snatches. A quaint poetess of our day has moralized upon this subject in two very touching but homely stanzas: I saw a boy witli eager eye Open a book upon a stall, And read, as he'd devour it all; Which, when the stall-man did espy, Soon to the boy I heard him call, *' You, Sir, you never buy a book, Therefore in one you shall not look." The boy pass'd slowly on, and with a sigh He wish'd he never had been taught to read, Then of the old churl's books he should have had no need. Of sufferings the poor have many, Which never can the rich annoy. I soon perceived another boy, Who look'd as if he had not any Food, for that day at least — enjoy The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder. This boy's case, then thought I, is surely harder, Thus hungry, longing, thus without a penny, Beholding choice of dainty-dressed meat: No wonder if he wished he ne'er had learn'd to eat. STAGE ILLUSION. A PLAT is said to be well or ill acted, in proportion to the scenical illusion produced. Whether such illusion can in any case be perfect, is not the question. The nearest approach to it, we are told, is when the actor appears wholly unconscious of the presence of spectators. In tragedy, in all which is to affect the feelings, this undivided attention to his stage business seems indispensible. Yet it is, in fact, dispensed with every day by our cleverest tragedians; and while these references to an audience, in the shape of rant or sentiment, are not too frequent or palpable, a sufficient quantity of illusion for the purposes of dramatic interest maybe said to be produced in spite of them. But, tragedy apart, it may be inquired whetlier, in certain characters in comedy, especially those which are a little extravagant, or which involve some notion repugnant to the moral sense, it is not a proof of the highest skill in the comedian when, without absolutely appealing to an audience, he keeps up a STA GE ILL USION, 201 tacit understanding with them; and makes them, uncon- sciously to themselves, a party in the scene. The utmost nicety is required in the mode of doing this; but we speak only of the great artists in the profession. The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is, perhaps, cowardice. To see a coward do7ie to the life upon a stage would produce anything but mirth. Yet we most of us remember Jack Bannister's cowards. Could anything be more agreeable, more pleasant? We loved the rogues. How was tliis effected but by the exquisite art of the actor in a i^erpetual subinsinuation to us, the spectators, even in the extremity of the shaking fit, that he was not half such a coward as we took him for? We saw all the com- mon symptoms of the malady upon him; the quivering lip, the cowering knees, the teeth chattering; and could have sworn " that man was frightened." But we forgot all the while, or kept it almost a secret to ourselves, that he never once lost his self-possession; that he let out, by a thousand droll looks and gestures, meant at tis, and not at all sup- posed to be visible to his fellows in the scene, that his con- fidence in his own resources had never once deserted him. AVas this a genuine picture of a coward; or not rather a likeness, which the clever artist contrived to palm upon us instead of an original; while we secretly connived at the delusion for the purpose of greater pleasure, than a more genuine counterfeiting of the imbecility, helplessness, and utter self-desertion, which we know to be concomitants of cowardice in real life, could have given us? Why are misers so hateful in the world, and so endurable on the stage, but because the skillful actor, by a sort of subreference, rather than direct appeal to us, disarms the character of a great deal of its odiousness, by seeming to engage our compassion for the insecure tenure by which he holds his money-bags and parchments? By this subtle vent half of the hatefulness of the character — the self-closeness with which in real life it coils itself up from the sympathies of men — evaporates. The miser becomes sympathetic; i. c, is no genuine miser. Here again a diverting likeness is substituted for a very disagreeable reality. Spleen, irritability — the pitiable infirmities of old men, which produce only pain to behold in the realities, counter- 202 THE BSSA YS OF ELIA. feited upon a stage, divert not altogether for the comic appendages to them, but in part from an inner conviction that they are deing acted before us; that a likeness only is going on, and not the thing itself. They please by being done under the life, or beside it; not to the life. When Gattie acts an old man, is he angry indeed? or only a pleasant counterfeit, just enough of a likeness to recognize, without pressing upon us the uneasy sense of a reality? Comedians, paradoxical as it may seem, may be too natural. It was the case with a late actor. Nothing could be more earnest or true than the manner of Mr. Emery; this told excellently in his Tyke, and characters of a tragic cast. But when he carried the same rigid exclusiveness of attention to the stage business, and willful blindness and oblivion of everything before the curtain into his comedy, it produced a harsh and dissonant effect. He was out of keeping with the rest of the ch^cmiatis personm. There was as little link between him and them as betwixt himself and the audience. He was a third estate — dry, repulsive and unsocial to all. Individually considered, his execution was masterly. But comedy is not this unbending thing; for this reason, that the same degree of credibility is not required of it as to serious scenes. The degrees of credibility demanded to the two things may be illustrated by the different sort of truth which we expect when a man tells us a mournful or a merry story. If we suspect the former of falsehood in any one tittle, we reject it altogether. Our tears refuse to flow at a suspected imposition. But the teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth. ^Tis the same with dramatic illusion. We confess we love in comedy to see an audience natural- ized behind the scenes — taken into the interest of the drama, welcomed as by-standers, however. There is some- thing ungracious in a comic actor holding himself aloof from all participation or concern with those who are come to be diverted by him. Macbeth must see the dagger and no ear but his own be told of it; but an old fool in farce may think he sees sometliing, and by conscious words and looks express it, as plainly as he can speak, to pit, box and gallery. When an im^oertineut in tragedy, an Osric, for instance, breaks in upon the serious j^'^issions of the scene, TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON, 203 we approve of the contempt with whicli he is treated. But when the pleasant impertinent of comedy, in a piece purely meant to give delight and raise mirth out of whimsical perplexities, worries the studious man with taking up his leisure, or making his house his home, the same sort of contempt expressed (however mUiiral) would destroy the balance of delight in the spectators. To make the intrusion comic, the actor who plays the annoyed man must a little desert luiture; he must, in short, be thinking of the audience, and express only so much dissatisfaction and peevishness as is consistent with the pleasure of comedy. In other words, his perplexity must seem half put on. If he repel the intruder with the sober set face of a man in earnest, and more especially if he deliver his expostulations in a tone which in the world must neces- sarily provoke a duel, his real-life manner will destroy the whimsical and purely dramatic existence of the other character (which to render it comic demands an antagonist comicality on the part of the character opposed to it), and convert what was meant for mirth, rather than belief, into a downright piece of impertinence indeed, which would raise no diversion in us, but rather stir pain, to see inflicted in earnest upon any worthy person. A very judicious actor (in most of his parts) seems to have fallen into an error of this sort in his playing with Mr. Wrench in the farce of Free and Easy. Many instances would be tedious; these may suffice to show that comic acting at least does not always demand from the performer that strict abstraction from all refer- ence to an audience which is exacted of it; but that in some cases a sort of compromise may take place, and all the pur^ioses of dramatic delight be attained by a judicious understanding, not too oj^enly announced, between the ladies and gentlemen — on both sides of the curtain. TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON. JoYOUSEST of once embodied spirits, whither at length hast thou flown? to what genial region are we permitted to conjecture that thou hast flitted? Art thou sowing thy wild oats yet (the harvest-time 204 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. was still to come with thee) upon casnal sands of Avernus? or art thou enacting Rover (as we would gladlier think) by wandering Elysian stream? This uiortal frame, while thou didst play thy brief antics amongst us, was in truth anything but a prison to thee, as the vain Platonist dreams of this body to be no better than a county gaol, forsooth, or some house of durance vile, whereof the five senses are the fetters. Thou knewest better than to be in a hurry to cast off these gyves; and had notice to quit, I fear, before thou wert quite ready to abandon this fleshy tenement. It was thy Pleasure-House, thy Palace of Dainty Devices, thy Louvre, or thy White- Hall. What new mysterious lodging dost thou tenant now? or when may we exj^ect thy aerial house-warming? Tartarus we know, and we have read of the Blessed Shades; now cannot I intelligibly fancy thee in either? Is it too much to hazard a conjecture, that (as the school- men admitted a receptacle apart for Patriarchs and un- chrisom babes) there may exist — not far perchance from that store-house of all vanities, which Milton saw in visions — a Limbo somewhere for Players? and that Up thither like aerial vapors fly- Both all Stage things, and all that in Stage things Built their fond hopes of glory, or lasting fame ? All the unaccomplished works of Authors' hands, Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixed, Damn'd upon earth, fleet thither — Play, opera, farce, with all their trumpery. There, by the neighboring moon (by some not improp- erly supposed thy Eegent Planet u2')on earth), mayst thou not still be acting thy managerial pranks, great disem- bodied Lessee? but Lessee still, and still a manager. In Green Rooms, imi^ervious to mortal eye, the muse beholds thee wielding posthumous empire. Thin ghosts of Figurantes (never 2-)lump on earth) circle thee in endlessly, and still their song is Fie on sivful Phantasy ! Magnificent were thy capriccios on this globe of earth, Robert William Elliston! for as yet we know not thy new name in heaven. It irks me to think that, stripped of thy regalities, thou rO TUB SHADE OF F.LLISTON. 205 sliouldst ferry over, a j^oor forked sluide, in crazy Stygian wlierry. Metliinks I hear the old boatiiiaii, paddling by the weedy wharf, with raucid voice, bawling ^'Sculls, ScullsI" to which, with waving lumd and majestic action, thou deignest no reply, other than in two curt nionosvUables, **No: Oars." But the laws of Pluto's kingdom know small difference between king and cobbler, manager and call-boy; and, if haply your dates of life were conterminate, you are quietly taking your passage, cheek by cheek (0 ignoble leveling of Deatli) with the shade of some recently departed candle- snuffer. But mercy! what strippings, what tearing off of histrionic robes and private vanities I what denudations to the bone, before the surly Ferryman will admit you to set a foot within his battered lighter. Crowns, scepter ; shield, sword, and tuncheon ; thy own coronation robes (for thou hast brought the whole property-man's wardrobe with thee, enough to sink a navy); the judge's ermine; the coxcomb's wig; the snuff- box a la Foi)2nn(jton — all must overboard, he positively swears — and that Ancient Mariner brooks no denial; for, since the tiresome monodrame of the old Thracian Harper Charon, it is to be believed, hath shown small taste for theatricals. Ay, now 'tis done. You are just boat-weight; imva et puta a7iinia. But, bless me, how little you look! So shall we all look — kings and keysars — stripped for the last voyage. But the murky rogue pushes off. Adieu pleasant, and thrice pleasant shade! with my parting thanks for many a heavy hour of life lightened by thy harmless extravaganzas, public or domestic. Rhadamanthus, who tries the lighter causes below, leav- ing to his two brethren the heavy calendars — honest Rhadamanth, always partial to players, weighing their particolored existence here upon earth — making account of the few foibles that may have shaded thy real life, as we call it (though, substantially, scarcely less a vapor than thy idlest vagaries upon the boards of the Drury), as but of so many echoes, natural repercussions, and results to be 206 - THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. expected from the assumed extravagancies of thy secondarij or vwck life, nightly upon a stage, after a lenient castiga- tion with rods lighter than of those Mednsean ringlets, but just enough to ^^whip the offending Adam out of thee," shall courteously dismiss thee at the right hand gate — tlie o. p. side of Hades — that conducts to masques and merry-makings in the Theater Royal of Proserpine. PLAUDITO, ET VALETO. ELLISTONIANA. My acquaintance with the pleasant creature whose loss we all deplore, was but slight. My first introduction to E., which afterward ripened into an acquaintance a little on this side of intimacy, was over a counter in the Leamington ^pii Library, then newly entered upon by a branch of his family. E., whom nothing misbecame, to auspicate, I suppose, the filial concern, and set it a-going with a luster, was serving in person two damsels fair, who had come into the shop ostensibly to in- quire for some new publication, but in reality to have a sight of the illustrious shopman, hoping some conference. With what an air did he reach down the volume, dispas- sionately giving his opinion of the worth of the work in question, and launching out into a dissertation on its com- parative merits with those of certain publications of a similar stamp, its rivals, his enchanted customers fairly hanging on his lips, subdued to their authoritative sentence. So have I seen a gentleman in comedy acting the shopman. So Lovelace sold his gloves in King Street. I admired the histrionic art by which he contrived to carry clean away every notion of disgrace from the occupation he had so generously submitted to; and from that hour I Judged him, with no after repentance, to be a person with whom it would be a felicity to be more acquainted. To descant upon his merits as a comedian would be superfluous. With his blended private and professional habits alone I have to do; that harmonious fusion of the manners of the player into those of every-day life, which brought the stage boards into streets and dining-parlors, and kept up the play when the play was ended. "I like ELLISrONIANA. 207 Wrench," a friend was saying to bini one day, "• because lie is the same natural, easy creature on the s^.age that he is off." '^My case exactly," retorted Elliston, with a charming forgetfidness, that the converse of a proposition does not always lead to the same conclusion. "I am the same person o//' the stage that I am om." The inference, at first sight, seems identical; but examine it a little, and it confesses only, that the one performer was never, and the other always, acting. And in truth this was the charm of Elliston's private deportment. You had spirited performance always going on before your eyes with nothing to pay. As where a monarch takes up his casual abode for the night, the poorest hovel which he honors by his sleeping in it, becomes i2)so facto for that time a palace; so wherever Elliston walked, sat, or stood still, there was the theater. He carried al)out with him his pit, boxes and galleries, and set uj) his portable play-house at corners of streets, and in the market-places. Upon flintiest pavements he trod the boards still; and if his theme chanced to be passionate, the green baize carpet of tragedy spontaneously rose beneath his feet. Now this was hearty, and showed a love for his art. So Apelles always painted — in thought. So Gr. D. always poetises. I hate a lukewarm artist. I have known actors — and some of them of Elliston^s own stamp — who shall have agreeably been amusing you in the part of a rake or a coxcomb, through the two or three hours of their dramatic existence; but no sooner does the curtain fall with its leaden clatter, but a spirit of lead seems to seize on all their faculties. They emerge sour, morose persons, intolerable to their families, servants, etc. Another shall have been expanding your heart with gener- ous deeds and sentiments, till it even beats wath yearnings of universal sympathy; you absolutely long to go home and do some good action. The play seems tedious, till you can get fairly out of the house, and realize your laudable intentions. At length the final bell rings, and this cordial representative of all that is amiable in human breasts steps forth — a miser. Elliston was more of a piece. Did he 2)Jay Ranger? and did Ranger fill the general bosom of the town with satisfaction? why should lie not be Ranger, and diffuse the same cordial satisfaction among his private 208 THE E8SA Y8 OF ELIA. circles? with Ids temperament, Ins animal spirits, Z^fsgood nature, his follies perchance, could he do better than identify himself with his impersonation? Are we to like a pleasant rake, or coxcomb, on the stage, and give our- selves airs of aversion for the identical character, presented to us in actual life? or what would the performer have gained by divesting himself of the impersonation? Could the man Elliston have been essentially different from his part, even if he had avoided to reflect to us studiously, in private circles, the airy briskness, the forwardness, the scape-goat trickeries of the prototype? '^ But there is something not natural in this everlasting acting; we want the real man/' Are you quite sure that it is not the man himself, whom you cannot, or will not see, under some adventitious trap- pings which, nevertheless, sit not at all inconsistently upon him? What if it is the nature of some men to be highly artificial? The fault is least reprehensible in lolayers. Gibber was his own Foppington, with almost as much wit as Vanbrugh could add to it. " My conceit of his person " — it is Ben Jonson speak- ing of Lord Bacon — '^ was never increased toward him by \)\s>])lace or honors. But I have, and do reverence him for the greatness, that was only ^^roper to himself; in that he seemed to me ever one of the greatest men, that had been in many ages. In his adversity I ever prayed that Heaven would give him strength ; for greatness he could not want/' The quality here commended was scarcely less conspicu- ous in the subject of these idle reminiscences than in my Lord Verulam. Those who have imagined that an unex- pected elevation to the direction of a great London theater affected the consequence of Elliston, or at all changed his nature, knew not the essential greatness of the man whom they disparage. It was my fortune to encounter him near St. Dunstan's Church (which, with its punctual giants, is now no more than dust and a shadow), on the morning of his election to that high office. Grasping my hand with a look of significance, he only uttered — " Have you heard the news?" — then, with another look following up the blow, he subjoined, "1 am the future manager of Drury Lane Theater/" Breathless as he saw me, he stayed not ELLISTONIANA. 209 for congratulation or reply, but mutely stalked away, leaving me to cliew upon his new-blown dignities at leisure. In fact, nothing could be said to it. Expressive silence alone could muse his praise. This was in his great style. But was he less great (be witness, ye powers of Equanimity, that supported in the ruins of Carthage the consular exile, and more recently transmuted, for a more illustrious exile, the barren constableship of Elba into an image of Imperial France), when, in melancholy after- years, again, much nearer the same spot, I met him, when that scepter had been wrested from his hand, and his dominion was curtailed to the petty managership, and part proprietorship, of the small Olympic, his Elha? He still played nightly upon the boards of Drury, but in parts, alas! allotted to him, not magnificently distributed by him. Waiving his great loss as nothing, and magnificently sinking the sense of fallen material grandeur in the more liberal resentment of depreciations done to his more lofty intellectual pretensions, " Have you heard " (his customary exordium) — ^* have you heard, ^^ said he, ^^how they treat me? they put me in comedy.'' Thought I — but his finger on his lips forbade any verbal interruption — ^' where could they have put you better?" Then, after a pause, " Where I formerly played Komeo, I now play Mercutio;" and so again he stalked away, neither staying, nor caring for responses. 0, it was a rich scene — but Sir A C , the best of story-tellers and surgeons, who mends a lame narrative almost as well as he sets a fracture, alone could do justice to it — that I was a witness to, in the tarnished room (that had once been green) of that same little Olympic. There, after his deposition from Imperial Drury, he substituted a throne. That Olympic Hill was his "highest heaven;" himself "^^ Jove in his chair." There he sat in state, while before him, on complaint of prompter, was brought for judgment — how shall I describe her? — one of those little tawdy things that flirt at the tails of choruses, a proba- tioner for the town, in either of its senses, the pertest little drab, a dirty fringe and appendage of the lamp's smoke, who, it seems, on some disapprobation expressed by a ^' highly respectable " audience, had precipitately quitted 210 TEE ES8A TS OF ELIA. her station on the boards, and withdrawn her small talents in disgust. " And how dare yon/^ said her manager, assuming a censorial severity which would have crushed the confidence of a Vestris, and disarmed that beautiful Eebel herself of her professional caprices — I verily believe, he thought her standing before him — 'Miow dare you, madam, withdraw yourself, without a notice, from your theatrical duties?" ^'I Avas hissed, sir." ^'^ And you have the presumption to decide upon the taste of the town?" '* I don^t know that, sir, but I will never stand to be hissed," was the subjoinder of young Confidence; when gathering up his features into one significant mass of wonder, pity and expostulatory in- dignation, in a lesson never to have been lost upon a creature less forward than she who stood before him^ his words were these: " They have hissed me." ^Twas the identical argument a fortiori, wliich the son of Peleus uses to Lycaon trembling under his lance, to persuade him to take his destiny with a good grace. " I too am mortal." And it is to be believed that in both cases the rhetoric missed of its application for want of a proper understanding with the faculties of the respective recipients. '^ Quite an opera pit," he said to me, as he was cour- teously conducting me over the benches of his Surrey Theater, the last retreat, and recess of his every-day waning grandeur. Those who knew Elliston, will know of the manner in which he pronounced the latter sentence of the few words I am about to record. One proud day to me he took his roast mutton with us in the Temple, to which I had super- added a preliminary haddock. After a rather plentiful partaking of the meager banquet, not unrefreshed with the humbler sort of liquors, I made a sort of apology for the humility of the fare, observing that for my own part I never ate but one dish at dinner. ^^ I too never eat but one thing at dinner," was his reply, then after a pause, ^^ reckoning fish as nothing." The manner was all. It was as if by one peremptory sentence he had decreed the annihilation of all the savory esculents, which the pleasant and nutritious-food-giving Ocean pours forth upon poor humans from her watery bosom. This was greatness. THE OLD MARGATE HOT. 211 tempered with considerate tenderness to the feelings of his scanty but welcoming entertainer. Great wert thou in thy life, Robert William Elliston! and }iot lessejied in thy death, if report speak triil}^, which says that thou didst direct that thy mortal remains should repose under no inscription but one of pure Latinity. Classical was thy bringing up! and beautiful was the feeling on thy last bed, which, connecting the man with the boy, took thee back to thy latest exercise of imagi- nation to the days when, undreaming of Theaters and Managerships, thou wert a scholar, and an early ripe one, under the roofs builded by the munificent and pious Colet. For thee the Pauline Muses weej). In elegies, that shall silence this crude prose, they shall celebrate thy praise. THE OLD MARGATE HOY. I AM fond of passing my vacations (I believe I have said so before) at one or other of the Universities. Next to these my choice would fix me at some woody spot, such as the neighborhood of Henley affords in abundance, on the banks of my beloved Thames. But somehow or other my cousin contrives to wheedle me, once in three or four seasons, to a watering-place. Old attachments cling to her in spite of experience. AVe have been dull at Worthing one summer, duller at Brighton another, dullest at Eastbourn a third, and at this moment doing dreary penance at Hast- ings! and all because we were happy many years ago for a brief week at Margate. That was our first sea-side experi- ment, and many circumstances combined to make it the most agreeable holiday of my life. We had neither of us seen the sea, and we had never before been from home so long together in company. Can I forget thee, thou old Margate Hoy, w^ith thy weather-beaten, sunburnt captain, and his rough accom- modations — ill exchanged for the foppery and fresh- water niceness of the modern steam-packet? To the winds and waves thou committedst thy goodly freightage, and didst ask no aid of magic fumes, and spells, and boiling cal- drons. With the gales of heaven thou wentest swimmingly! or^ when it was pleasure, stoodest still with sailor-like 212 THE ESSA T8 OF ELIA. patience. Thy course was natural, not forced, as in a hot-bed; nor didst thou go poisoning the breath of ocean with sulphureous smoke — a great sea chimera, chimneying and fnrnacing the deep; or liker to that fire-god parching up Scamander. Can I forget thy honest, yet slender crew, with their coy reluctant responses (yet to the suppression of anything like contempt) to the raw questions, which we of the great city would be ever and anon putting to them, as to the uses of this or that strange naval implement? Specially can I forget thee, thou happy medium, thou shade of refuge between us and them, conciliating interjireter of their skill to our simplicity, comfortable ambassador between sea and land! whose sailor-trousers did not more convincingly assure thee to be an adopted denizen of the former, than thy white cap, and whiter apron over them, with thy neat-fingered practice in thy culinary vocation, bespoke thee to have been of inland nurture heretofore — a master cook of Eastcheap? How busily didst thou ply thy multifarious occupation, cook, mariner, attendant, cham- berlain; here, there, like another Ariel, flaming at once about all parts of the deck, yet with kindlier ministrations; not to assist the tempest, but, as if touched with a kindred sense of our infirmities, to soothe the qualms which that untried motion might haply raise in our crude land-fancies. And when the o^erwashing billows drove us below deck (for it was far gone in October, and we had stiff and bloAving weather) how did thy officious ministerings, still catering for our comfort, with cards and cordials, and thy more cordial conversation, alleviate the closeness and the con- finement of thy else (truth to say) not very savory, nor very inviting little cabin! With these additaments to boot, we had on board a fellow-passenger, whose discourse in verit}'" might have beguiled a longer voyage than we meditated, and have made mirth and wonder abound as far as the Azores. He was a dark, Spanish-complexioned young man, re- markably handsome, with an officer-like assurance, and an insuppressible volubility of assertion. He was, in fact, the greatest liar I had met with then, or since. He was none of your hesitating, half-story tellers (a most painful description of mortals) who go on sounding your THE OLD MARGATE HOT. 213 belief, aud only giving you us nuich as they see you can swallow at a time — the nibbling pickpockets of your patience — but one who committed downright daylight depredations upon his neighbor's faith. He did not stand shivering u23on the brink, but was a hearty, thor- ough-paced liar, and plunged at once into the depths of your credulity. I partly believe, he made pretty sure of his company. Not many rich, not many wise or learned, composed at that time the common stowage of a Mar- gate packet. We were, I am afraid, a set of as unsea- soned Londoners (let our enemies give it a worse name) as x\ldermanbury, or Watling Street, at that time of day, could have supplied. There might be an exception or two among us, but I scorn to make any invidious distinctions among such a jolly, companionable ship's company as those were whom I sailed with. Something too must be con- ceded to the Genius Loci. Had the confident fellow told us half the legends on land which he favored us with on the other element, I flatter myself the good sense of most of us would have revolted. But we were in a new world, with everything unfamiliar about us, and the time and place disposed us to the reception of any prodigious marvel whatsoever. Time has obliterated frotn my memory much of his wild f ablings; and the rest would appear but dull, as written, and to be read on shore. He had been Aid-de- camp (among other rare accidents and fortunes) to a Per- sian Prince, and at one blow had stricken off the head of the King of Cari mania on horseback. He, of course, mar- ried the Prince's daughter. I forget what unlucky turn in the politics of that court, combining with the loss of his consort, was the reason of his quitting Persia; but, with the rapidity of a magician, he transported himself, along with his hearers, back to England, where we still found him in the confidence of great ladies. There was some story of a princess — Elizabeth, if I remember — having in- trusted to his care an extraordinary casket of jewels, upon some extraordinary occasion; but, as I am not certain of the name or circumstance at this distance of time, I must leave it to the royal daughters of England to settle the honor among themselves in private. I cannot call to mind half his pleasant wonders; but I perfectly remem- ber that, in the course of his travels, he had seen a 214 THE ESSA T8 OF ELIA. phoenix; and he obligingly undeceived us of the vulgar error that there is but one of that species at a time, assuring us that they were not uncommon in some parts of Upper Egypt. Hitherto he had found the most implicit listeners. His dreaming fancies had transported us beyond the ^'ignorant present." But when (still hardying more and more in his triumphs over our simplic- ity) he went on to affirm that he had actually sailed through the legs of the Colossus at Ehodes, it really became necessary to make a stand. And here I must do justice to the good sense and intrepidity of one of our party, a youth, that had hitherto been one of his most deferential auditors, who, from his recent reading, made bold to assure the gentleman, that there must be some mistake, as ^' the Colussus in question had been de- stroyed long since;" to whose opinion, delivered with all modesty, our hero was . obliging enough to concede thus much, that ^^the figure w^as indeed a little damaged." This was the only opposition he met with, and it did not at all seem to stagger him, for he proceeded with his fables, which the same youth appeared to swallow with still more complacency than ever, confirmed, as it were, by the extreme candor of that concession. With these prodi- gies he wheedled us on till we came in sight of the Eecul- vers, which one of our own company (having been the voyage before) immediately recognizing, and pointing out to us, was considered by us as no ordinary seaman. All this time sat upon the edge of. the deck quite a dif- ferent character. It was a lad, apparently very poor, very infirm, and very patient. His eye was ever on the sea, with a smile; and, if he caught now and then some snatches of these wild legends, it was by accident, and they seemed not to concern him. The waves to him whispered more pleasant stories. He was as one being with us, but not of us. He heard the bell of dinner ring without stirring; and when some of us pulled out our private stores — our cold meat and our salads — he produced none, and seemed to want none. Only a solitary biscuit lie had laid in; pro- vision for the one or two days and nights, to which these vessels then were oftentimes obliged to prolong their voy- age. Upon a nearer acquaintance with him, which he seemed neither to court nor decline, we learned that he THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 215 was going to Margate, with the hope of being admitted into the Infirmary there for sea-bathing. His disease was a scrofuhi, which appeared to have eaten all over him. He expressed great ho2:)es of a cure; and when we asked him whether he had any friends where he was going, he replied, "'he had no friends." These pleasant, and some mournful passages, with the first sight of the sea, co-operating with youth, and a sense of holidays, and out-of-door adventure, to me that had been pent up in populous cities for many months before, have left upon my mind the fragrance as of summer days gone by, bequeathing nothing but their remembrance for cold and wintry hours to chew ujDon. Will it be thought a digression (it may spare some un- welcome comparisons) if I endeavor to account for the dis- satisfaction which I have heard so many persons confess to have felt (as I did myself feel in part on this occasion), at the sight of the sea for the first time? I think the reason usually given — referring to the incapacity of actual objects for satisfying our preconceptions of them — scarcely goes deep enough into the question. Let the same j^erson see a lion, an elephant, a mountain, for the first time in his life, and he shall perhaps feel himself a little mortified. The things do not fill up that space which the idea of them seemed to take up in his mind. But they have still a correspondency to his first notion, and in time grow up to it, so as to produce a very similar impression: enlarging themselves (if I may say so) uj^oti familiarity. But the sea remains a disappointment. Is it not, that in tlie latter we had expected to behold (absurdly, I grant, but I am afraid, by the law of imagination, unavoidably) not a definite object, as those wild beasts, or that mountain compassable by the eye, but all the sea at once, the commensurate axtaCtOXIST of the earth? I do not say we tell our- selves so much, but the craving of the mind is to be satis- fied with nothing less. I will suppose the case of a young person of fifteen (as I then was) knowing nothing of the sea, but from description. He comes to it for the first time — all that he has been reading of it all his life, and that the most enthusiastic part of life; all he has gathered from naratives of wandering seamen; what he has gained from true voyages, and what he cherishes as credulously ^16 THE ESSA T8 OF ELIA. from romance and poetry, crowding their images, and ex- acting strange tributes from expectation. He thinks of the great deep, and of those who go down unto it; of its thousand isles, and of the vast continents it washes; of its receiving the mighty Plata, or Orellana, into its bosom, without disturbance, or sense of augmentation; of Biscay swells and the mariner For many a day, and many a dreadful niglit, Incessant laboring round the stormy Cape; of fatal rocks, and the ^^still-vexed Bermoothes;" of great whirlpools, and the water-sj^out ; of sunken ships, and sumless treasures swallowed up in the unrestoring depths; of fishes and quaint monsters, to which all that is terrible on earth Be but as bugs to frighten babes withal, Compared with the creatures in the sea's entral; of naked savages, and Juan Fernandez ; of pearls, and shells; of coral beds, and of enchanted isles; of mermaids' grots. I do not assert that in sober earnest he expects to be shown all these wonders at once, but he is under the tyranny of a mighty faculty, which haunts him with confused hints and shadows of all these; and when the actual object opens first upon him, seen (in tame weather, too, most likely) from our unromantic coasts — a speck, a slij) of sea-water, as it shows to him — what can it prove but a very unsatis- fying and even diminutive entertainment? Or if he has come to it from the mouth of a river, was it much more than the river widening? and, even out of sight of land, what had he but a flat watery horizon about him, nothing comparable to the vast o'er-curtaining sky, his familiar ob- ject, seen daily without dread or amazement? Who, in similar circumstances, has not been tempted to exclaim with Charoba, in the poem of Gebir, Is this the mighty ocean ? is this all ? I love town or country; but this detestable Cinque Port is neither. I hate these scrubbed shoots, thrusting out their starved foliage from between the horrid fissures of THE OLD MARGATE HOY, 21'}' dusty innutritions rocks, which the amateur calls ^^ verdure to the edge of the sea." I require woods, and they show me stunted coppices. I cry out for the water-brooks, and pant for fresh streams, and inland murmurs. I cannot stand all day on the naked beach, watching the capricious hues of the sea, shifting like the colors of a dying mullet. 1 am tired of looking out at the windows of this island- prison, I would fain retire into the interior of my cage. While I gaze upon the sea, I want to be on it, over it, across it. It binds me in with chains, as of iron. My thoughts are abroad. I should not so feel in Staffordshire. There is no home for me here. There is no sense of home at Hastings. It is a place of fugitive resort, an hetero- geneous assemblage of sea-mews and stock-brokers, Amphi- trites of the town, and misses that coquet with the ocean. If it were what it was in its jDrimitive shape, and what it ought to have remained, a fair, honest fishing-town, and no more, it were something — with a few straggling fisher- men's huts scattered about, artless as its cliffs, and with their materials filched from them, it were something. I could abide to dwell with Meshecli; to assort with fisher- swains and smugglers. There are, or I dream there are, many of this latter occupation here. Their faces become the place. I like a smuggler. He is the only honest thief. He robs nothing but the revenue — an abstraction I never greatly cared about. I could go out with them in their mackerel boats, or about their less ostensible business, with some satisfaction. I can even tolerate those poor victims to monotony, who from day to day pace along the beach, in endless progress and recurrence, to watch their illicit coun- trymen — townsfolk or brethren, perchance — whistling to the sheathing and unsheathing of their cutlasses (their only solace), who under the mild name of preventive service, keep up a legitimated civil warfare in the deplorable ab- sence of a foreign one, to show their detestation of run hollands, and zeal for old England. But it is the visitants from town, that come here to say that they have been here, with no more relish of the sea than a pond-perch or a dace might be supposed to have, that are my aversion. I feel like a foolish dace in these regions, and have as little tolera- tion for myself here as for them. Wliat can they want here? If they had a true relish of the ocean, why have they brought 218 TEE E8SA Y8 OF ELIA. all this land luggage with them? or why j^itch their civilized tents in the desert? What mean these scanty book- rooms — marine libraries as they entitle them — if the sea were, as they would have us believe, a book ^' to read strange matter in?" what are their foolish concert-rooms, if they come, as they would fain be thought to do, to listen to the music of the waves? All is false and hollow pretension. They come because it is the fashion, and to spoil the nature of the place. They are mostly, as I have said, stock-brokers ; but I have w^atched the better sort of them — now and then, an honest citizen of the old stamp, in the simplicity of his heart, shall bring down his wife and daughters to taste the sea breezes. I always know the date of their arrival. It is easy to see it in their countenance. A day or two they go wandering on the shingles, picking up cockle-shells, and thinking them great things ; but, in a poor week, imagination slackens ; they begin to discover that cockles produce no pearls, and then, then! if I could interpret for the pretty creatures (I know^ they have not the courage to confess it themselves), how gladly would they exchange their sea-side rambles for a Sunday walk on the greensward of their accustomed Twickenham meadows! I would ask one of these sea-charmed emigrants, wdio think they truly love the sea, with all its wild usages, what would their feelings be if some of the unsophisticated aborigines of this place, encouraged by their courteous questionings here, should venture, on the faith of such assured sympathy between them, to return the visit, and come up to see London. I must imagine them with their fishing-tackle on their back, as we carry our town necessaries. What a sensation would it cause in Loth- bury! What vehement laughter would it not excite among The daughters of Clieapside, and wives of Lombard Street! I am sure that no town-bred or inland-born subjects can feel their true and natural nourishment at the sea-places. Nature, where she does not mean us for mariners and vagabonds, bid us stay at home. The salt foam seems to nourish a spleen. I am not half so good-natured as by the THE CONVALESCENT. 219 milder waters of my natural river. I would exchange these sea-gulls for swans, and scud a swallow forever about the banks of Thamesis. THE CONVALESCENT. A PRETTY severe fit of indisposition which, under the name of a nervous fever, has made a prisoner of me for some weeks past, and is but slowly leaving me, has re- duced me to an incapacity of reflecting upon any topic foreign to itself. Expect no healthy conclusions from me this month, reader ; I can offer you only sick men's dreams. And truly the whole state of sickness is such ; for what else is it but a magnificent dream for a man to lie a-bed, and draw daylight curtains about him ; and, shut- ting out the sun, to induce a total oblivion of all the works which are going on under it? To become insensible to all the operations of life, except the beatings of one feeble pulse? If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick-bed. How the patient lords it there ; what caprices he acts without con- trol ! how king-like he sways his pillow — tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and molding it, to the ever- varying requisitions of his throbbing temples. He changes sides oftener than a politician. Now he lies full length, then half length, obliquely, transversely, head and feet quite across the bed; and none accuses him of tergiversation. Within the four curtains he is absolute. They are his Mare Clausum. How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! he is his own exclusive object. Supreme self- ishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty. 'Tis the Two Tables of Law to him. He has nothing to think of but how to get well. What passes out of doors, or within them, so he hear not the jarring of them, affects him not. A little while ago he was greatly concerned in the event of a lawsuit, which was to be the making or the marring of his dearest friend. He was to be seen trudging about upon 220 TEE ESSA T8 OF ELIA, this man^s errand to fifty quarters of the town at once, jogging this witness, refreshing that solicitor. The cause was to come on yesterday. He is absolutely as indifferent to the decision as if it were a question to be tried at Pekin. Perad venture from some whispering going on about the house, not intended for his hearing, he picks up enough to make him understand that things went cross-grained in the court yesterday, and his friend is ruined. But the Avord "friend,^' and the word ^*^ruin,'^ disturb him no more than so much jargon. He is not to think of anything but how to get better. What a world of foreign cares are merged in that absorb- ing consideration! He has put on the strong armor of sickness, he is wraj^ped in the callous hide of suffering; he keeps his sympathy, like some curious vintage, under trusty lock and key, for his own use only. He lies pitying himself, honing and moaning to himself; he yearneth over himself; his bowels are even melted within him, to think what he suffers; he is not ashamed to weep over himself. He is for ever plotting how to do some good to himself ; studying little stratagems and artificial alleviations. He makes the most of himself; dividing himself, by an allowable fiction, into as many distinct individuals as he hath sore and sorrowing members. Sometimes he medi- tates, as of a thing ^part from him, upon his poor aching head, and that dull pain which, dozing or waking, lay in it all the 23ast night like a log, or palpable substance of pain, not to be removed without opening the very skull, as it seemed, to take it thence. Or he pities his long, clammy, attenuated fingers. He compassionates himself all over; and his bed is a very discipline of humanity, and tender heart. He is his own sympathizer; and instinctively feels that none can so well perform that office for him. He cares for few spectators to his tragedy. Only that punctual face of the old nurse pleases him, that announces his broths and his cordials. He likes it because it is so unmoved, and be- cause he can pour forth his feverish ejaculations before it as unreservedly as to his bed-2:)ost. To the world's business he is dead. He understands not TUE CONVALESCENT, 221 what the callings and occupations of mortals are; only he has a glimmering conceit of some such thing, when the doctor makes his daily call; and even in the lines on that busy face he reads no multiplicity of patients^ but solely conceives of himself as tke .^iich man. To what other un- easy couch the good man is hastening — when he slips out of his chamber, folding up his thin douceur so carefully, for fear of rustling — is no speculation which he can at present entertain. He thinks only of the regular return of the same phenomenon at the same hour to-morrow. Household rumors touch him not. Some faint murmur, indicative of life going on within the house, soothes him, while he knows not distinctly what it is. He is not to know anything, not to think of anything. Servants gliding up or down the distant staircase, treading as upon velvet, gently keep his ear awake, so long as he troubles not himself further than with some feeble guess at their errands. Exacter knowledge would be a burden to him; he can just endure the pressure of conjecture. He opens his eye faintly at the dull stroke of the muffled knocker, and closes it again without asking ^'Whowasit?" He is flattered by a gen- eral notion that inquiries are making after him, but he cares not to know the name of the inquirer. In the general stillness, and awful hush of the house, he lies in state, and feels his sovereiguty. To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives. Compare the silent tread and quiet ministry, almost by the eye only, with which he is served, with the careless demeanor, the unceremonious goings in and out (slapping of doors, or leaving them open) of the very same attendants, when he is getting, a little better, and you will confess, that from the bed of sickness (throne let me rather call it) to the elbow chair of convalescence, is a fall from dignity amounting to a deposition. How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature! Where is now the space, which he occuj^ied so lately, in his own, in the family's eye? The scene of his regalities, his sick-room, which was his presence-chamber, where he lay and acted his despotic fancies — how is it reduced to a common bedroom I The trimness of the very bed has something pretty and unmean- ing about it. It is made every day. How unlike to that 222 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. wavy, many-furrowed, oceanic surface, which it presented so short a time since, when to make it was a service not to be thought of at oftener than three or four day revolutions, when the patient was witli pain and grief to be lifted for a little while out of it, to submit to the encroachments of unwelcome neatness and decencies which his shaken frame deprecated; then to be lifted into it again, for another three or four day's respite, to flounder it out of shape again, while every fresh furrow was an historical record of some shifting posture, some uneasy turning, some seeking for a little ease; and the shrunken skin scarce told a truer story than the crumpled coverlid. Hushed are those mysterious sighs, those groans, so much more awful, while we knew not from what caverns of vast hidden suffering they proceeded. The Lernean pangs are quenched. The riddle of sickness is solved; and Philoctetes is become an ordinary personage. Perhaps some relic of the sick man's dream o,f greatness survives in the still lingering visitations of the medical attendant. But how is he, too, changed with everything else? Can this be he — this man of news, of chat, of anec- dote, of everything but physic — can this be he, who so lately came between the patient and his cruel enemy, as on some solemn embassy from Nature, erecting herself into a high meditating party? Pshaw! 'tis some old woman. Farewell with him all that made sickness pompous — the spell that hushed the household — the desert-like stillness, felt throughout its inmost chambers, the mnte attendance, the inquiry by looks, the still softer delicacies of self- attention, the sole and single eye of distemper alonely fixed upon itself — world-thoughts excluded, the man a world unto himself, his own theater: What a speck is lie dwindled into! In this flat swamp of convalescence, left by the ebb of sickness, yet far enough from the terra firma of established health, your note, dear Editor, reached me, requesting an article. In Articulo Mortis, thought I; but it is some- thing hard — and the quibble, wretched as it was, relieved me. The summons, unseasonable as it appeared, seemed to link me on again to the petty businesses of life, which I had lost sight of; a gentle call to activity, however SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS. 223 trivial; a wholesome weaning from that preposterous dream of self-absorption, the puffy state of sickness, in which I confess to liave lain so long, insensible to the magazines and monarchies of the world alike; to its laws, and to its literature. The hypochondriac flatus is sub- siding; the acres, which in imagination I had spread over — for the sick man swells in the sole contemplation of his single sufferings, till he becomes a Tityus to himself — are wast- ing to a span; and for the giant of self-importance, which I was so lately, you have me once again in my natural pre- tensions — the lean and meager figure of your insignificant Essayist. SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS. So FAR from the position holding true, that great wit (or genius, in our modern way of speaking) has a neces- sary alliance with insanity, the greatest wits, on the con- trary, will ever be found to be the saiiest writers. It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakespeare. The greatness of wit, by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to be understood, manifests itself in the admirable balance of all the faculties. Madness is the disproportion- ate straining or excess of any one of them. " So strong a wit," says Cowley, speaking of a poetical friend, -did Nature to liim frame, As all things but liis judgment overcame; His judgment like tlie lieavenly moon did sliow, Tempering that mighty sea below." The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own experience, be- sides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject, but has dominion over it. In the groves of Eden he walks familiar as in his native paths. He ascends the empyrean heaven, and is not intoxicated. He treads the burning marl without dismay; he wins his flight with- out self-loss through realms of chaos " ^n old night." Or 224 THE ESS A YS OF ELIA. if, abandoning himself to that severer chaos of a '' human mind untuned/^ he is content awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate mankind (a sort of madness) with Timon, neither is that madness, nor this misanthropy, so un- checked, but that, never letting the reins of reason wholly go, while most he seems to do so, he has his better genius still whispering at his ear, with the good servant Kent sug- gesting saner counsels, or with the honest steward Flavins recommending kindlier resolutions. Where he seems most to recede from humanity he will be found the truest to it. From beyond the scope of Nature, if he summon possible existences, he subjugates them to the law of her consist- ency. He is beautifully loyal to that sovereign directress, even when he appears most to betray and desert her. His ideal tribes submit to policy; his very monsters are tamed to his hand, even as that wild sea-brood, shepherded by Proteus. He tames, and he clothes them with attributes of flesh and blood, till they wonder at themselves, like Indian Islanders forced to submit to European vesture. Caliban, the Witches, are as true to the laws of their ov/n nature (ours with a difference), as Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth. Herein the great and the little wits are differenced; that if the latter wander ever so little from nature or actual ex- istence, they lose themselves and their readers. Their phantoms are lawless; their visions nightmares. They do not create, which implies shaping and consistency. Their imaginations are not active — for to be active is to call some- thing into act and form — but passive, as men in sick dreams. For the supernatural, or something superadded to what we know of nature, they give you the plainly non-natural. And if this were all, and that these mental hallucinations were discoverable only in the treatment of subjects out of nature, or transcending it, the judgment might with some plea be pardoned if it ran riot, and a little wantonized: but even in the describing of real and every day life, that which is before their eyes, one of these lesser wits shall more deviate from nature — show more of that inconsequence, which has a natural alliance with frenzy — than a great genius in his " maddest fits," as Wither some- where calls them. We appeal to any one that is acquainted with the common run of Lane's novels, as they existed gome twenty or thirty years back, those scanty intellectual SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS. 225 viands of the whole female reading public, till a happier genius arose, and expelled forever the innutritions phantoms, whether he had not found his brain more ^' be- tossed," his memor}' more puzzled, his sense of when and where more confounded, among tlie improbable events, the incoherent incidents, the inconsistent characters, or no characters, of some third-rate love-intrigue, where the persons shall be a Lord Glendamour and a Miss Rivers, and the scene only alternate between Bath and Bond Street, a more bewildering dreaminess induced upon him than he has felt wandering over all the fairy-grounds of Spenser. In the productions we refer to, nothing but the names and places is familiar; the persons are neither of this world nor of any other conceivable one; an endless stream of activities without purpose, of purposes destitute of motive: we meet phantoms in our known walks; fantasques only christened. In the poet v\^e have names which announce fiction; and we have absolutely no place at all, for the things and persons of the Fairy Queen prate not of their " whereabout. ^^ But in their inner nature, and the law of their speech and actions, we are at home, and upon ac- quainted ground. The one turns life into a dream; the other to the wildest dreams gives the sobrieties of every- day occurrences. By w^iat subtle art of tracing the mental processes it is effected, we are not philosophers enough to explain, but in that wonderful episode of the cave of Mammon, in which the Money God aj^pears first in the lowest form of a miser, is then a worker of metals, and becomes the god of all the treasures of the world; and has a daughter. Ambition, before whom all the world kneels for favors — with the Hes^^erian fruit, the waters of Tanta- lus, with Pilate washing his hands vainly, but not imper- tinently, in the same stream — that we should be at one moment in the cave of an old hoarder of treasures, at the next at the forge of the Cyclops, in a palace and yet in hell, all at once, with the shifting niutations of the most rambling dream, and our judgment yet all the time awake, and neither able nor willing to detect the fallacy, is a proof of that hidden sanity which still guides the poet in the wildest seeming aberrations. It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a copy of the mind^s conceptions in sleep; it is, in some sort — but 226 THE ES8A YS OF ELIA. what a copy! Let the most romantic of us, that has been entertained all night with the spectacle of some wild and magnificent vision, recombine it in the morning, and try it by his waking judgment. That which appeared so shift- ing, and yet so coherent, while that faculty was passive, when it comes under cool examination shall appear so reasonless and so unlinked, that we are ashamed to have been so deluded; and to have taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a god. But the transitions in this episode are every whit as violent as in the most extravagant dream, and yet the waking judgment ratifies them. CAPTAIN JACKSON. Amon'G the deaths in our obituary for this month, I observe with concern ^' At his cottage on the Bath Road, Captain Jackson. ^^ The name and attribution are com- mon enough ; but a feeling like reproach persuades me that this could have been no other in fact than my dear old friend, who some five-and-twenty years ago rented a tenement, which he was pleased to dignify with the appel- lation here used, about a mile from Westbourn Green. Alack, how good men, and the good turns they do us, slide out of memory, and are recalled but by the surprise of some such sad memento as that which now lies before us! He whom I mean was a retired half-pay officer, with a wife and two grown-up daughters, whom he maintained with the i^ort and notions of gentlewomen uj^on that slender professsional allowance. Comely girls they were, too. And was I in danger of forgetting this man? — his cheerful suppers, the noble tone of hospitality, wdien first you set your foot in the cottage — the anxious ministerings about you, where little or nothing (God knows) was to be ministered. Althea^s horn is a poor ^^latter — the power of self-enchantment, by which, in his magnificent wishes to entertain you, he multiplied his means to bounties. You saw with your bodily eyes indeed what seemed a bare scrag, cold savings from the foregone meal, remnant hardly sufficient to send a mendicant from the door con- tented. But in the copious will, the reveling imagination CAPTAIN JACKSON. 227 of your host, the " mind, the mind. Master Shallow," wliole beeves were spread before you — hecatombs — no end appeared to the profusion. It was the widow^s cruse — the loaves and fishes; carving could not lessen, nor helping diminish it ; the stamina were left, the elemental bones still fiourished, divested of its accidents. " Let us live while we can,^^ methinks I hear the open- handed creature exclaim; ^Svhile we have, let us not want," '* here is plenty left;" "^want for nothing" — with many more such hospitable sayings, the spurs of appetite, and old concomitants of smoking boards and feast- oppressed chargers. Then sliding a slender ratio of Single Gloucester upon his wife's plate, or the daughters', he would convey the remnant rind into his own, with a merry quirk of *' the nearer the bone," etc., and declaring that he universally preferred the outside. For we had our table distinctions, you are to know, and some of us in a manner sat above the salt. None but his guest or guests dreamed of tasting flesh luxuries at night, the fragments were vere hospitihus sacra. But of one thing or another there was always enough, and leavings; only he would sometimes finish the remainder crust, to show that he wished no savings. Wine we had none; nor, except on very rare occasions, spirits; but the sensation of wine was there. Some thin kind of ale I remember — '' British beverage," he would say! ''Push about, my boys;" ''Drink to your sweet- hearts, girls. " At every meager draught a toast must ensue, or a song. All the forms of good liquor were there, with none of the effects wanting. Shut your eyes, and you would swear a capacious bowl of punch was foaming in the center, with beams of generous Port or Madeira radiating to it from each of the table corners. You got flustered, without knowing whence; tipsy upon words; and reeled under the jDOtency of his unperforming Bacchana- lian encouragements. We had our songs — " Why, Soldiers, Why," and the " British Grenadiers" — in which last we were all obliged to bear chorus. Both the daughters sang. Their pro- ficiency was a nightly theme — the masters he liad given them, the " no exj^ense" which he spared to accomplish 228 THE E88A TS OF ELI A. them in a science ^' so necessary to young women/^ But then — they could not sing 'Svithout the instrument." Sacred, and, by me, never-to-be-violated, secrets of pov- erty! Should I disclose your honest aims at grandeur, your makeshift efforts at magnificence? Sleep, sleep, with all thy broken keys, if one of the bunch be extant ; thrummed by a thousand ancestral thumbs; dear, cracked spinnet of dearer Louisa! Without mention of mine, be dumb, thou thin accompanier of her thinner warble! A veil be spread over the dear delighted face of the well- deluded father, who now haply listening to cherubic notes, scarce feels sincerer pleasure than when she awakened thy time-shaken chords responsive to the twittering of that slender image of a voice. We were not without our literary talk either. It did not extend far, but as far as it went it was good. It was bottomed well; had good grounds to go upon. In the cottage was a room, which tradition authenticated to have been the same in which Glover, in his occasional retire- ments, had penned the greater part of his Leonidas. This circumstance was nightly quoted, though none of the present inmates, that I could discover, aj^peared ever to have met witli the poem in question. But that was no matter. Glover had written there, and the anecdote was pressed into the account of the family importance. It diffused a learned air through the apartment, the little side casement of which (the poet's study window), opening upon a superb view as far as the pretty spire of Harrow, over domains and patrimonial acres, not a rood nor square yard whereof our host could call his own, yet gave occasion to an immoderate expansion — of vanity shall I call it? — in his bosom, as he showed the min a glowing summer even- ing. It was all his, he took it all in, and communicated rich portions of it to his guests. It was a part of his largess, his hospitality; it was going over his grounds; he was lord for the time of showing them, and you the im- j)licit lookers-up to his magnificence. He was a juggler, who threw mists before your eyes; you had no time to detect his fallacies. He would sa}^, " Hand me the silver sugar-tongs;" and before you could discover it was a single spoon, and that ^7/«/e6?, he would disturb and captivate your imagination by a misnomer of CAPTAIN JACKSON. 229 " the urn" for a tea-kettle; or by calling a homely bench a sofa. Rich men direct you to their furniture, poor ones divert you from it; he neither did one nor the other, but by simply assuming that everything was handsome about him, you were positively at a demur what you did, or did not see, at tlie cottage. "With nothing to live on, he seemed to live on everything. He had a stock of wealth in his mind; not that which is properly termed Content, for in truth he was not to be contained at all, but overflowed all bounds by the force of a magnificent self-delusion. Enthusiasm is catching ; and even his wife, a sober native of Xortli Britain, who generally saw things more as they were, was not proof against the continual collision of his credulity. Her daughters were rational and discreet young women; in the main, perhaps, not insensible to their true circumstances. I have seen them assume a thoughtful air at times. But such was the preponderating opulence of his fancy, that I am persuaded not for any half-hour together did they ever look their own prospects fairly in the face. There was no resisting the vortex of his temperament. His riotous imagination conjured up handsome settlements before their eyes, which kept them up in the eye of the world too, and seem at last to have realized themselves; for they both have married since, I am told, more than respectably. It is long since, and my memory waxes dim on some subjects, or I should wish to convey some notion of the manner in which the pleasant creature described the cir- cumstances of his own wedding-day. I faintly remember something of a chaise-and-four, in which he made his entry into Glasgow on that morning to fetch the bride home, or carry her thither, I forget which. It so com- pletely made out the stanza of the old ballad: When we came down through Glasgow town, We were a comely sight to see; My love was clad in black velvet, •And I myself in cramasie. I suppose it was the only occasion upon which his own actual splendor at all corresponded with the workrs notions on that subject. In homely cart, or traveling caravan, by whatever humble vehicle they chanced to be 230 THE ES8A T8 OF ELIA. transported in less prosi^erons days, the ride through Glasgow came back upon his fancy, not as a humiliating contrast, but as a fair occasion for reverting to that one day's state. It seemed an ^^ equipage etern '^ from which no power of fate or fortune, once mounted, had power thereafter to dislodge him. There is some merit in putting a handsome face upon indigent circumstances. To bully and swagger away the sense of them before strangers, may not be always discom- mendable. Tibbs and Bobadil, even when detected, have more of our admiration than contempt. But for a man to jout the cheat upon himself; to play the Bobadil at home; and, steeped in poverty up to the lips, to fancy himself all the while chin-deep in riches, is a strain of constitutional philosophy, and a mastery over fortune, which was reserved for my old friend Captain Jackson. THE SUPEEANNUATED MAN. Sera tamen respexit Libertas. — Virgil. A Clerk I was in London gay. — O'Keefe. If perad venture, reader,- it has been thy lot to waste the golden years of thy life — thy shining youth— in the irk- some confinement of an office; to have thy prison days pro- longed through middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of release or respite; to have lived to forget that there are such things as holidays, or to remem- ber them but as the prerogatives of childhood; then, and then only, will you be able to ai3preciate my deliverance. It is now six-and-thirty years since I took my seat at the desk in Mincing Lane. Melancholy was the transition at fourteen from the abundant playtime, and the frequently intervening vacations of school-days, to the eight, nine, and sometimes ten hours' a day attendance at the counting- house. But time partially reconciles us to anything. I gradually became content — doggedly contented, as wild animals in cages. It is true I had my Sundays to m5^self; but Sundays, ad- mirable as the institution of them is for j^^^i'P^^^^ ^^ wor- THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 231 ship, are for that very reason the very worst adapted for days of unbending and recreation, hi particuhir, there is a gloom for me attendant upon a city Sunday, a vveiglit in the air. I miss the cheerful cries of London, the music, and the ballad-singers — the buzz and stirring murmur of the streets. Those eternal bells depress me. The closed shops repel me. Prints, pictures, all the glittering and endless succession of knacks and gewgaws, and ostenta- tiously displayed wares of tradesmen, which make a week- day saunter through the less busy parts of the metropolis so delightful, are shut out. Xo book-stalls deliciously to idle over, no busy faces to recreate the idle man who con- templates them ever ^Dassing by — the very face of business a charm by contrast to his temporary relaxation from it. Xothing to be seen but unhappy countenances — or half- happy at best — of emancipated ^prentices and little trades- folks, with here and there a servant-maid that has got leave to go out, who, slaving all the week, with the habit has lost almost the capacity of enjoying a free hour; and livelily expressing the hollowness of a day^s pleasuring. The very strollers in the fields on that day look anything but comfortable. But besides Sundays, I had a day at Easter, and a day at Christmas, with a full week in the summer to go and air myself in my native fields of Hertfordshire. This last was a great indulgence; and the prospect of its recurrence I believe, alone kept me up through the year, and made my durance tolerable. But when the week came round, did the glittering phantom of the distance keep touch with me, or rather was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent in restless pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the most of them? Where was the quiet, where the promised rest? Before I had a taste of it, it was vanished. I was at the desk again, counting upon the fifty-one tedious weeks that must intervene before such another snatch would come. Still the prospect of its coming threw something of an illumination upon the darker side of my cajotivity. Without it, as I have said, I could scarcely have sustained my thraldom. Independently of the rigors of attendance, I have ever been haunted with a sense (perhaj^s a mere caprice) of inca- pacity for business. This, during my latter years, had in- 232 THE ESS A YS OF ELI A. creased to such a degree that it was visible in all the lines of my countenance. My health and my good spirits flagged. I had perpetually a dread of some crisis to which I should be found unequal. Besides my daylight servitude, I served over again all night in my sleep, and would awake with terrors of imaginary false entries, errors in my accounts, and the like. I was fifty years of age, and no prospect of emancipation presented itself. I had grown to my desk, as it were; and the wood had entered into my soul. My fellows in the office would sometimes rally me upon the trouble legible in my countenance; but I did not know that it had raised the suspicions of any of my employers, when, on the fifth of last month, a day ever to be remem- bered by me, L , the junior partner in the firm, call- ing me on one side, directly taxed me with my bad looks, and frankly inquired the cause of them. So taxed, I honestly made confession of my infirmity, and added that I was afraid I should eventually be obliged to resign his service. He spoke some words of course to hearten me, p.nd there the matter rested. A whole week I remained laboring under the impression that I had acted impru- dently in my disclosure; that I had foolishly given a handle against myself, and had been anticipating my own dismissal. A week passed in this manner — the most anxious one, I verily believe, in my whole life — when on the evening of the 12th of April, just as I was about quit- ting my desk to go home (it might be about eight o'clock), I received an awful summons to attend the presence of the wliole assembled firm in the formidable back parlor. I thought now my time is surely come, I have done for myself, I am going to be told that they have no longer occasion for me. L , I could see, smiled at the terror I was in, which was a little relief to me, when to my utter astonishment B , the eldest partner, began a formal harangue to me on the length of my services, my very meritorious conduct during the whole of the time (the deuce, thought I, how did he find out that? I protest I never had the confidence to think as much). He went on to descant on the expediency of retiring at a certain time of life (how my heart panted I), and asking me a few questions as to the amount of my own property, of which I have a little, ended with a proposal, to which his three partners THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 233 nodded a grave assent, that I should accept from the lioiise^ whicli I had served so well, a pension for life to the amount of two-thirds of my accustomed salary — a mag- nificent offer. I do not know what I answered, between surprise and gratitude, but it was understood that I accepted their proposal, and 1 was told that I was free from that hour to leave their service. I stammered out a bow, and at just ten minutes after eight I went home — forever. This noble benefit — gratitude forbids me to con- ceal their names — I owe to the kindness of the most munificent firm in the world — the house of Boldero, Merryweather, Bosanquet and Lacy. Esto perpetua! For the first day or two I felt stunned, overwhelmed. I could only apprehend my felicity; I was too confused to taste it sincerely. I wandered about, thinking I was happy, and knowing that I was not. I was in the condi- tion of a prisoner in the old Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty years' confinement. I could scarce trust myself with myself. It was like passing out of Time into Eternity — for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have all his Time to himself. It seemed to me that I had more time on my hands than I could ever manage. From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me. And here let me caution persons grown old in active business, not lightly, nor without weigh- ing their own resources, to forego their customary employ- ment all at once, for there may be danger in it. I feel it by myself, but I know that my resources are sufficient; and now that those first giddy raptures have subsided, I have a quiet home-feeling of the blessedness of my con- dition. I am in no hurry. Having all holidays, I am as though I had none. If Time hung heavy upon me, I could walk it away; but I do not walk all day long, as I used to do in those old transient holidays, thirty miles a day, to make the most of them. If Time were trouble- some, I could read it away; but I do not read in that vio- lent measure, with which, having no time my own but candlelight Time, I used to weary out my head and eye- 234 THE ES8A T8 OF ELIA. sight in bygone winters. I walk, read, or scribble (as now) just when the fit seizes me. I no longer hunt after pleasure; I let it come to me. I am lilce the man that's born, and has his years come to him, In some green desert. "Years!" you will say; ^^what is this superannuated sim- pleton calculating upon? He has already told us he is past fifty." I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true Time, which a n^in can properly call his own — that w^iich he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people^s Time, not his. The remnant of my poor days, long or short, is at least multiplied for me threefold. Sly next ten years, if I stretch so far, will be as long as any preceeding thirty. 'Tis a fair rule-of- three sum. Among the strange fantasies which beset me at the com- mencement of my freedom, and of which all traces are not yet gone, one was, that a vast tract of time had intervened since I quitted the Counting-house. I could not con- ceive of it as an affair of yesterday. The partners, and the clerks with whom I had for so many years, and for so many hours in each day of the year, been closely asso- ciated — being suddenly removed from them — they seemed as dead to me. There is a fine passage which may serve to illustrate this fancy in a Tragedy by Sir Kobert How- ard, speaking of a friend^s death: 'Twas bnt just now he went away; I have not since liad time to slied a tear; And yet tlie distance does the same appear As if he had been a thousand years from me. Time takes no measure in Eternity. To dissipate this awkward feeling, I have been fain to go among them once or twice since; to visit my old desk- fellows — my co-brethren of tlie quill — that I had left be- low in the state militant. Not all the kindness with which they received me could quite restore to me that pleasant familiarity which I had heretofore enjoyed among them. We cracked some of our old jokes, but methought they THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 235 went off but faintly. My old desk, the peg where I hung my hat, were ap2)ropriated to another. I knew it must be, but I could not take it kindly. D 1 take me, if I did not feel some remorse — beast, if I had not — at quitting my old compeers, the faithful partners of my toils for six- and-thirty years, that soothed for me with their jokes and conundrums the ruggedness of my professional road. Had it been so rugged then, after all? or was I a coward simply? Well, it is too late to repent; and I also know that these suggestions are a common fallacy of the mind on such occasions. But my heart smote me. I had vio- lently broken the bands betwixt us. It was at least not courteous. I shall be some time before I get quite recon- ciled to the separation. Farewell, old cronies, yet not for long, for again and again I will come among ye, if I shall have your leave. Farewell, Ch , dry, sarcastic, and friendly I Do , mild, slow to move, and gentle- manly! PI , officious to do, and to volunteer, good services ! and thou, thou dreary pile, fit mansion for a Gresham or a Whittington of old, stately house of Merchants ; with thy labyrinthine passages, and light- excluding, pent-up offices, where candles for one-half the year supplied the place of the sun's light; unhealthy con- tributor to my weal, stern fosterer of my living, farewell! In thee remain, and not in the obscure collection of some wandering book-seller, my ^^ works!" There let them rest, as I do from my labors, piled on thy massy shelves, more MSS. in folio than ever Aquinas left, and full as useful. My mantle I bequeath among ye. A fortnight has passed since the date of my first com- munication. At that period I was approaching to tran- quillity, but had not reached it. I boasted of a calm indeed, but it was comparative only. Something of the first flutter was left; an unsettling sense of novelty; the dazzle to weak eyes of unaccustomed light. I missed my old chains, forsooth, as if they had been some necessary part of my apparel. I was a poor Carthusian, from strict cellular discipline suddenly by some revolution returned upon the world. I am now as if I had never been other than my own master. It is natural for me to go where I please, to do what I please. I find myself at eleven o'clock in the day in Bond Street, and it seems to me that I have 236 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. been sauntering there at that very hour for years past. I digress into Soho, to explore a book-stall. Methinks I have been thirty years a collector. There is nothing strange nor new in it. I find myself before a fine picture in the morn- ing. Was it ever otherwise? What is become of Fish Street Hill? Where is Fenchurch Street? Stones of old Mincing Lane, which I have worn with my daily pilgrim- age for six-and-thirty years, to the footsteps of what toil- worn clerk are your everlasting flints now vocal? I in- dent the gayer flags of Pall Mall. It is 'Change time, and I am strangely among the Elgin marbles. It was no hyperbole when I ventured to compare the change in my condition to passing into another world. Time stands still in a manner to me. I have lost all distinction of season. I do not know the day of the week or of the month. Each day used to be individually felt by me in its reference to the foreign post-days; in its distance from, or propinquity to, the next Sunday. I had my Wednesday feelings, my Saturday nights' sensations. The genius of each day was upon me distinctly during the whole of it, affecting my appetite, spirits, etc. The phantom of the next day, with the dreary five to follow, sat as a load upon my poor Sab- bath recreations. What charm has washed that Ethiop white? What is gone of Black Monday? All days are the same. Sunday itself — that unfortunate failure of a holiday, as it too often proved, what with my sense of its fugitiveness, and over-care to get the greatest quantity of pleasure out of it — is melted down into a week- clay. I can spare to go to church now, without grudging the huge cantle which it used to seem to cut out of the holiday. I have time for everything. I can visit a sick friend. I can interrupt the man of much occupation when he is busiest. I can insult over him with an invita- tion to take a day's pleasure with me to Windsor this fine May morning. It is Lucretian pleasure to behold the poor drudges, whom I have left behind in the world, carking and caring; like horses in a mill, drudging on in the same eternal round — and what is it all for? A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him Nothing-to-do; he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING. 237 life contemplative. Will no kindly earthquake come and swallow up those accursed cotton-mills? Take me that lumber of a desk there, and bowl it down As low as to the fiends. I am no longer , clerk to the firm of, etc. I am Retired Leisure. I am to be met with in trim gardens. I am already come to be known by my vacant face and careless gesture, perambulating at no fixed pace, nor with any settled purpose. I walk about; not to and from. They tell me, a certain cum dignitate air, that has been buried so long with my other good parts, has begun to shoot forth in my person. I grow into gentility per- ceptibly. When I take up a newspaper, it is to read the state of the opera. Ojnis opevatum est. I have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked task- work, and have the rest of the day to myself. THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WEITING. It is an ordinary criticism, that my Lord Shaftesbury and Sir William Temple are models of the genteel style in writing. We should prefer saying — of the lordly, and the gentlemanly. Nothing can be more unlike, than the inflated finical rhapsodies of Shaftesbury and the plain natural chit-chat of Temple. The man of rank is dis- cernible in both writers; but in the one it is only insinu- ated gracefully, in the other it stands out offensively. The peer seems to have written with his coronet on, and his earFs mantle before him ; the commoner in his elbow-chair and undress. What can be more pleasant than the way in which the retired statesman peeps out in his essays, penned by the latter in his delightful retreat at Shene? They scent of Nimeguen and the Hague. Scarce an authority is quoted under an ambas- sador. Don Francisco de Slelo, a " Portugal envoy in England," tells him it was frequent in his country for men, spent with age and other decays, so as they could not hope for above a year or two of life, to ship them- selves away in a Brazil fleet, and after their arrival there to go on a great length, sometimes of twenty or thirty 238 THE ESSA Y8 OF ELIA, years, or more, by the force of that vigor they recovered with that remove. ^^ Whether such an effect (Temple beautifully acids) might grow from the air, or the fruits of that climate, or by approaching nearer the sun, which is the fountain of light and heat, when their natural heat was so far decayed ; or whether the piercing out of an old man^s life were worth the pains ; I cannot tell : perhaps the play is not worth the candle/^ Monsieur Pompone, " French Ambassador in his (Sir William^s) time at The Hague,'^ certifies him, that in his life he had never heard of any man in France that arrived at a hundred years of age; a limitation of life which the old gentleman imputes to the excellence of their climate, giving them such a liveliness of temper and humor as disposes them to more pleasures of all kinds than in other countries ; and moralizes upon the matter very sen- sibly. The *'late Eobert Earl of Leicester'^ furnishes him with a story of a Countess of Desmond, married out of England in Edward the Fourth^s time, and who lived far in King James' reign. The '''same noble person " gives him an account, how such a year, in the same Feign, there went aboiit the country a set of morrice-dancers, com- posed of ten men who danced, a Maid Marian, and a tabor and pipe ; and how these twelve, one with another, made up twelve hundred years. '^ It was not so much (says Temple) that so many in one small county (Hert- fordshire) sliould live to that age as that they should be in vigor and in humor to travel and to dance.'' Mon- sieur Zulichem, one of his ''^ colleagues at The Hague," informs him of a cure for the gout; which is confirmed by another '^Envo}^," Monsieur Serinchamps, in that town, who had tried it. Old Prince Maurice of Nassau recommends to him the use of hammocks in that com- plaint; having been allured to sleep, while suffering under it himself, by the '^ constant motion or swinging of those airy beds." Count Egmont and the Ehinegrave who " was killed last summer before Maestricht," impart to him their experiences. But the rank of the writer is never more innocently disclosed than when he takes for granted the compli- ments paid by foreigners to his fruit-trees. For the taste and perfection of what we esteem the best, he can truly TEE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING. 239 say that the French, who liave eaten his peaches and grapes at Shene in no very ill year, have generally con- cluded that the last are as good as any they have eaten in France on this side Fontainebleau ; and the first as good as they have eat in Gascony. Italians have agreed his white figs to be as good as any of that sort in Italy, which is the earlier kind of white fig there; for in the lat- ter kind and the blue, we cannot come near the warmer climates, no more than in the Frontignac or Muscat grai^e. His orange- trees, too, are as large as any he saw when he was young in France, except those of Fontainebleau; or what lie had seen since in the Low Countries, except some very old ones of the Prince of Orange's. Of grapes he had the honor of bringing over four sorts into England, which he enumerates, and supposes that they are all by this time pretty common among some gardeners in his neighborhood, as well as several persons of quality; for he ever thought all things of this kind "the commoner they are made the better/' The garden pedantry with which he asserts that 'tis to little purpose to plant any of the best fruits, as peaches or grapes, hardly, he doubts, beyond Northampton- shire at the farthest northward; and praises the- " Bishop of Munster at Cosevelt," for attempting nothing beyond cherries in that cold climate; is equally pleasant and in character. "I may perhaps" (he thus ends his sweet Garden Essay with a joassage worthy of Cowley) " be allowed to know something of this trade, since I have so long al- lowed myself to be good for nothing else, which few men will do, or enjoy their gardens, without often looking abroad to see how other matters pla}^, what motions in the state, and what invitations the}'' may hope for into other scenes. For my own part, as the country life, and this part of it more particularly, were the inclination of my youth itself, so they are the pleasures of my age; and I can truly say that, among many great employments that have fallen to my share, I have never asked or sought for any of them, but have often endeavored to escape from them, into the ease and freedom of a private scene, where a man may go his own way and his own pace in the common paths and circles of life. The measure of choosing well is whether a man likes what he has chosen, which, I thank God, has be- fallen me; and though among the follies of my life, build- 240 THE E8SA 78 OF ELIA. ing and planting have not been the least, and have cost me more than I have the confidence to own; yet they have been fully recompensed by the sweetness and satisfaction of this retreat, where, since my resolution taken of never entering again into any public employments, I have passed five years without ever once going to town, though I am almost in sight of it, and have a house there always ready to receive me. Nor has this been any sort of afl'ectation, as some have thought it, but a mere want of desire or humor to make so small a remove; for when I am in this corner I can truly say with Horace, Me quoties reficit, etc. ' Me, when tlie cold Digentian stream revives, What does my friend believe I think or ask? Let me yet less possess, so I may live, Whate'er of life remains, unto myself. May I have books enough; and one year's store. Not to depend upon each doubtful hour; This is enough of mighty Jove to pray, Who, as he pleases, gives and takes away.' " The writings of Temple are, in general, after this easy copy. On one occasion, indeed, his wit, which was mostly subordinate to nature and tenderness, has seduced him into a string of felicitous antitheses; which, it is obvious to re- mark, have been a model to Addison and succeeding essay- ists. '^ Who would not be covetous, and with reason," he sa3^s, *^if health could be purcliased with gold? who not ambitious, if it were at the command of jDower, or restored by honor? but, alas ! a white staff will not help gouty feet to walk better than a common cane; nor a blue ribband bind up a wound so well as a fillet. The glitter of gold, or of diamonds, will but hurt sore eyes instead of curing them; and an aching head will be no more eased by wearing a crown than a common nightcap." In a far better style, and more accordant with his own humor of plainness, are the con- cluding sentences of his '^Discourse upon Poetry." Temple took a part in the controversy about the ancient and the modern learning; and with that partiality so natural and so graceful in an old man, whose state engagements had left him little leisure to look into modern productions, while his retirement gave him occasion to look back upon the classic studies of his youth, decided in favor of the latter. ^^ Certain it is," he says, *^ that whether the fierce- THE OENTEEL STYLE IN WRITINO. 241 ness of the Gothic humors, or noise of their perpetual wars, frighted it away, or that the unequal mixture of the modern languages would not bear it — the great heights and excel- lency ))otli of poetry and music fell with the Roman learn- ing and empire, and have never since recovered the admiration and applauses that before attended them. Yet, such as there are amongst us, they must be confessed to be the softest and the sweetest, the most general and most innocent amusements of common time and life. They still find room in the courts of princes, and the cottages of shepherds. They serve to revive and animate the dead calni of poor and idle lives, and to allay or divert the violent passions and perturbations of the greatest and the busiest men. And both these effects are of equal use to human life; for the mind of man is like the sea, which is neither agreeable to the beholder nor the voyager, in a calm or in a storm, but is so to both when a little agitated by gentle gales; and so the mind, when moved by soft and easy passions or affections. I know very well that many who pretend to be wise by the forms of being grave, are apt to despise both poetry and music, as toys and trifles too light for the use or entertainment of serious men. But whoever find themselves wholly insensible to their charms, would, I think, do well to keep their own counsel, for fear of reproaching their own temper, and bringing the good- ness of their natures, if not of their understandings, into question. While this world lasts, I doubt not but the pleasure and request of these two entertainments will do so too ; and happy those that content themselves with these, or any other so easy and so innocent, and do not trouble the world or other men, because they cannot be quiet themselves, though nobody hurts them.^'' "When all is done (he concludes), human life is at the greatest and the best but like a froward child, that must be played with, and humored a little, to keep it quiet, till it falls asleep, and then the care is over.^' 242 THE ESSA T8 OF ELIA, BARBAEA S- On" the noon of the 14th of November, 1743 or 1744, I forget which it was, just as the clock had strucli one, Barbara S , with her accustomed jjunctuality, ascended the long, rambling staircase, with awkward interposed landing-places, which led to the office, or rather a sort of box with a desk in it, whereat sat the then treasurer of (what few of our readers may remember) the old Bath Theater. All over the island it was the custom, and remains so I believe to this day, for the players to receive their weekly stipend on the Saturday. It was not much that Barbara had to claim. The little maid had just entered her eleventh year; but her important station at the theater, as it seemed to her, with the benefits which she felt to accrue from her pious application of her small earnings, had given an air of womanhood to her steps and to her behavior. You would have taken her to have been at least five years older. Till latterly she had merely been employed in choruses, or where children were wanted to fill up the scene. But the manager, observing a. diligence and adroitness in her above her age, had for some few months past intrusted to her the performance of whole parts. You may guess the self-consequence of the promoted Barbara. She had already drawn tears in young Arthur; had rallied Eichard with infantine petulance in the Duke of York; and in her turn had rebuked that petulance when she was Prince of Wales. She would have done the elder child in Morton^s pathetic afterpiece to the life; but as yet the " Children in the Wood '^ was not. Long after this little girl was grown an aged woman, I have seen some of these small parts, each making two or three pages at most, copied out in the rudest hand of the then prompter, who doubtless transcribed a little more care- fully and fairly for the grown-up tragedy ladies of the estab- lishment. But such as they were, blotted and scrawled, as for a child^s use, she kept them all; and in the zenith of lier after reputation it was a delightful sight to behold them bound up in costliest morocco, each single, each small part BARBARA S . 243 making a book, witli fine clasps, gilt-splashed, etc. She had conscientiously kept them as they had been delivered to her; not a blot had been effaced or tampered with. They were precious to her for their affecting remembranc- ings. They were her principia, her rudiments; the ele- mentary atoms; the little steps by which she pressed for- ward to perfection. "What," she would say, ''could India-rubber, or a pumice-stone, have done for these darlings?" I am in no hurry to begin my story; indeed, I have little or none to tell, so I will just mention an observation of hers connected with that interesting time. Not long before she died I had been discoursing with her on the quantity of real present emotion which a great tragic performer experiences during acting. I ventured to think, that though in the first instance such players must have possessed the feelings which they so powerfully called up in others, yet by frequent repetition those feelings must become deadened in great measure, and the performer trust to the memory of past emotion rather than express a present one. She indignantly repelled the notion that with a truly great tragedian the operation, by which such effects were pro- duced upon an audience, could ever degrade itself into what was purely mechanical. With much delicacy, avoid- ing to instance in her 5(?//"-experience, she told me that so long ago as when she used to play the part of the Little Son to Mrs. Porter's Isabella (I think it was), when that impressive actress has been bending over her in some heart- rending colloquy, she has felt real hot tears come trickling from her, which (to use her powerful expression) have per- fectly scalded her back. I am not quite so sure that it was Mrs. Porter; but it was some great actress of that day. The name is indifferent; but the fact of the scalding tears I most distinctly remember. I was always fond of the society of players, and am not sure that an impediment in my speech (which certainly kept me out of the pulpit), even more than certain personal dis- qualifications, which are often got over in that profession, did not prevent me at one time of life from adopting it. I have had the honor (I must ever call it) once to have been admitted to the tea-table of Miss Kelly. I have played at 244 THE ESS A YS OF ELIA. serious whist with Mr. Listen. I have chatted with ever good-humored Mrs. Charles Kemble. I have conversed as friend to friend with her accomplished husband. I have been indulged with a classical conference with Macready; and with a sight of the Pla3^er-picture gallery, at Mr. Mathews', when the kind owner, to remunerate me for my love of the old actors (whom he loves so much), went over it with me, supplying to his capital collection what alone the artist could not give them — voice; and their living mo- tion. Old tones, half-faded, of Dodd, and Parsons, and Baddeley, have lived again for me at his bidding. Only Edwin he could not restore to me. I have supped with ; but I am growing a coxcomb. As I was about to say, at the desk of the then treasurer of the old Bath Theater, not Diamond's, presented herself the little Barbara S . The parents of Barbara had been in reputable circum- stances. The fatlier had practiced, I believe, as an apothecary in the town. But his practice, from causes which I feel my own infirmity too sensibly that way to arraign, or perhaps from that pure infelicity which accom- panies some people in their walk through life, and which it is impossible to lay at the door of imprudence, was now reduced to nothing. They were, in fact, in the very teeth of starvation, when the manager, who knew and respected them in better days, took the little Barbara into his company. At the period I commenced with, her slender earnings were the sole support of the family, including two younger sisters. I must throw a veil over some mortifying circum- stances. Enough to say, that her Saturday's pittance was the only chance of a Sunday's (generally their only) meal of meat. One thing I will only mention, that in some child's part, where in her theatrical character she was to sup off a roast fowl (0 joy to Barbara I) some comic actor, who was for the night caterer for this dainty — in the mis- guided humor of his part, threw over the dish such a quantity of salt (0 grief and pain of heart to Barbara!) that when he crammed a portion of it into her mouth, she was obliged splutteringly to reject it; and what with shame of her ill-acted part, and pain of real appetite at BARBARA S . 245 missing such a dainty, her little heart sobbed almost to breaking, till a flood of tears, which the well-fed specta- tors were totally unable to comprehend, mercifully relieved her. This was the little starved, meritorious maid, who stood before old Kavenscroft, the treasurer, for her Saturday's payment. Kavenscroft was a man, I have heard many old theatrical people besides herself say, of all men least calculated for a treasurer. He had no head for accounts, paid away at random, kept scarce any books, and summing up at the week's end, if he found himself a pound or so deficient, blest himself that it was no worse. Now Barbara's weekly stipend was a bare half-guinea. By mistake he popped into her hand a whole one. Barbara tripped away. She was entirely unconscious at first of the mistake. God knows, Kavenscroft would never have discovered it. But when she had got down to the first of those un- couth landing-places, she became sensible of an unusual weight of metal pressing in her little hand. Now mark the dilemma. She was by nature a good child. From her parents and those about her, she had imbibed no contrary influence. But then they had taught her nothing. Poor men's smoky cabins are not always porticoes of moral philos- ophy. This little maid had no instinct to evil, but then she might be said to have no fixed principle. She had heard honesty commended, but never dreamed of its ap- plication to herself. She thought of it as something which concerned grown-up people, men and women. She had never known temptation, or thought of preparing resist- ance against it. Her first impulse was to go back to the old treasurer, and explain to him his blunder. He was already so con- fused with age, besides a natural want of punctuality, that slie would have had some difficulty in making him under- stand it. She saw that in an instant. And then it was such a bit of money! And then the image of a larger allowance of butcher's meat on their table the next day came across her, till her little eyes glistened, and her mouth moistened. But then Mr. Kavenscroft had always been so good-natured, had stood her friend behind the 246 THE ESS A YS OF ELIA. scenes, and even recommended her promotion to some of her little parts. But again the old man was reputed to be worth a world of money. He was supposed to have fifty pounds a year clear of the theater. And then came staring upon her the figures of her little stockingless and shoeless sisters. And when she looked at her own neat white cotton stockings, which her situation at the theater had made it indispensable for her mother to provide for her, with hard straining and pinching from the family stock, and thought how glad she would be to cover their poor feet with the same — and how then they could accom- pany her to rehearsals, which they had hitherto been pre- cluded from doing, by reason of their unfashionable attire, in these thoughts she reached the second landing-place — the second, I mean, from the top — for there was still another left to traverse. Now virtue support Barbara! And that never-failing friend did step in — for at that moment a strength not her own, I have heard her say, was revealed to her — a reason above reasoning — and with- out her own agency, as it seemed (for she never felt her feet to move), she found herself transported back to the individual desk she had just quitted, and her hand in the old hand of Eavenscroft, who in silence took back the refunded treasure, and who had been sitting (good man) insensible to the lapse of minutes, which to her were anxious ages, and from that moment a deep peace fell upon her heart, and she knew the quality of honesty. A year or two's unrepining application to her profession brightened u^d the feet and the prospects of her little sis- ters, set the whole family upon their legs again, and re- leased her from the difficulty of discussing moral dogmas upon a landing-place. I have heard her say that it was a surprise, not much short of mortification to her, to see the coolness with which the old man pocketed the ditference, which had caused her such mortal throes. This anecdote of herself I had in the year 1800, from the mouth of the late Mrs. Crawford,* then sixty-seven * The maiden name of this lady was Street, which she changed by successive marriages for those of Dancer, Barry and Crawford. She was Mrs. Crawford, a third time a widow, when I knew her. THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY. 247 years of age (she died soon after); and to her struggles upon this childish occasion I have sometimes ventured to think her indebted for that power of rending the heart in the representation of conflicting emotions, for which in after y^^irs she was considered as little inferior (if at all so in the part of Lady Kandolph) even to Mrs. Siddons. THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY. IK A LETTER TO R S- , ESQ. Though in some points of doctrine, and perhaps of dis- cipline, I am diffident of lending a perfect assent to that church which you have so worthily historified, yet may the ill time never come to me, when with a chilled heart or a portion of irreverent sentiment, I shall enter her beautiful and time-hallowed edifices. Judge, then, of my mortifica- tion when, after attending the choral anthems of last Wednesday at Westminster, and being desirous of renew- ing my acquaintance, after lapsed years, with the tombs and antiquities there, I found myself excluded; turned out like a dog, or some profane person, into the common street, with feelings not very congenial to the place, or to the solemn service which I had been listening to. It was a jar after that music. You had your education at Westminster; and doubtless among those dim aisles and cloisters you must have gathered much of that devotional feeling in those young years on which your purest mind feeds still — and may it feed! The antiquarian spirit, strong in you, and grace- fully blending ever w4th the religious, may have been sown in you among those wrecks of splendid mortality. Y^'ou owe it to the place of your education; you owe it to your learned fondness for the architecture of your an- cestors; you owe it to the venerableness of your ecclesi- astical establishment, which is daily lessened and called in question through these practices, to speak aloud your sense of them; never to desist raising your voice against them, till they be totally done away with and abolished; till the doors of Westminster Abbey be no longer closed against the decent, though ]ow-in-purse, enthusiast, or blameless devotee, who must commit an injury against 248 THE MSA TS OF ELIA. liis family ecoTiom}^, if he would be indulged with a bare admission within its walls. You owe it to the decencies which you wish to see maintained in its impressive serv- ices, that our cathedral be no longer an object of inspec- tion to the poor at those times only, in Avhich they must rob from their attendance on the worship every minute which they can bestow upon the fabric. In vain the public prints have taken up this subject, in vain such poor, nameless writers as myself ex2:)ress their indignation. A word from you, sir — a hint in your Journal — would be sufficient to fling open the doors of the Beautiful Temple again, as we can remember them when we were boys. At that time of life what would the imaginative faculty (such as it is) in both of us have suffered if the entrance to so much reflection had been obstructed by the demand of so much silver! If we had scraped it up to gain an occasional admission (as we certainly should have done), would the sight of those old tombs have been as impres- sive to us (while we have been weighing anxiously prudence against sentiment) as when the gates stood open as those of the adjacent park; when we could walk in at any time, as the mood brought us, for a shorter or longer time, as that lasted? Is the being shown over a place the same as silently for ourselves detecting the genius of it? In no part of our beloved Abbey now can a person find entrance (out of service-time) under the sum of tiuo shillings. The rich and the great will smile at the anti-climax, presumed to lie in these two short words. But you can tell them, sir, how much quiet worth, how much capacity for enlarged feeling, how much taste and genius, may co-exist, especially in youth, with a purse incompetent to this demand. A respected friend of ours, during his late visit to the metropolis, presented himself for admission to St. Paul's. At the same time a decently clothed man, with as decent a wife and child, were bargaining for the same indulgence. The price was only twojDence each person. The poor but decent man hesitated, desirous to go in; but there were three of them, and he turned away reluctantly. Perhaps he wished to have seen the tomb of Nelson. Per- haps the interior of the Cathedral was his object. But in the state of his finances, even sixpence might reasonably seem too much. Tell the aristocracy of the country (no AMICUS REDIVIVU8. 249 man can do it more impressively); instruct them of what viihie tliese insignificant pieces of mone}^ these minims to their sight, may be to their humbler brethren. Shame these sellers-out of the Temple. Stifle not the suggestions of your better nature with the pretext, that an indis- criminate admission would expose the Tombs to violation. Remember your boy days. Did you ever see or hear of a mob in the Abbey while it was free to all? Do the rabble come there, or trouble their heads about such speculations? It is all that you can do to drive them into your churches; they do not voluntarily offer themselves. They have, alas! no passion for antiquities; for tomb of king or prelate, sage or poet. If they had, they would be no longer the rabble. For forty years that I have known the Fabric, the only well-attested charge of violation adduced has been — a ridiculous dismemberment committed upon the efligy of that amiable spy. Major Andre. And is it for this, the wanton mischief of some school -boy, fired perhaps with raw notions of Transatlantic Freedom, or the remote possibility of such a mischief occurring again, so easily to be prevented by stationing a constable within the walls, if the vergers are incompetent to the duty — is it upon such wretched pretences that the people of England are made to pay a new Peter^s Pence, so long abrogated; or must content themselves with contemplating the ragged exterior of their Cathedral? The mischief was done about the time that you were a scholar there. Do you know anything about the unfortunate relic? AMICUS REDIVIVUS. Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas ? I DO NOT know when I have experienced a stranger sensation than on seeing my old friend, G. D., who had been paying me a morning visit, a few Sundays back, at my cottage at Islington, upon taking leave, instead of turn- ing down the right-hand path by which he had entered — with staff in hand, and at noonday, deliberately march right forward into the midst of the stream that runs by us, and totally disappear. 250 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. A spectacle like this at dusk wonlcl have been appalling enough; but in the broad, open daylight, to witness such an unreserved motion toward self-destruction in a valued friend took from me all power of speculation. How I found my feet I know not. Consciousness was quite gone. Some spirit, net my own, whirled me to the spot. I remember nothing but the silvery apparition of a good white head emerging; nigh which a staff (the hand unseen that wielded it) pointed upward, as feeling for the skies. In a moment (if time was in that time) he was on my shoulders, and I — freighted with a load more precious than his who bore Anchises. And here I cannot but do justice to the officious zeal of sundry passers-by, who, albeit arriving a little too late to participate in the honors of the rescue, in philanthropic shoals came thronging to communicate their advice as to the recovery; prescribing variously the application, or non- application of salt, etc., to the person of the patient. Life, meantime, was ebbing fast away, amid the stifle of conflicting judgments, when one, more sagacious than the rest, by a bright thought, proposed sending for the Doctor. Trite as the counsel was, and impossible, as one should think, to be missed on — shall I confess? — in this emergency it was to me as if an Angel had spoken. Great previous exertions — and mine had not been inconsiderable — are commonly followed by a debility of purpose. This was a moment of irresolution. MoNOCULUS — for so, in default of catching his true name, I choose to designate the medical gentleman who now appeared — is a grave, middle-aged person, who with- out having studied at the college, or truckled to the pedantry of a diploma, hath employed a great portion of his valuable time in experimental processes upon the bodies of unfortunate fellow-creatures, in whom the vital spark, to mere vulgar thinking, would seem extinct and lost for ever. He omitteth no occasion of obtruding his services, from a case of common surfeit suffocation to the ignobler obstructions, sometimes induced by a too willful applica- tion of the plant cannabis outwardly. But though he de- clineth not altogether these drier extinctions, his occupa- tion tendeth, for the most part, to water-practice; for the convenience of which he hath judiciously fixed his quarters AMICUS REDIVIVU8. 251 near the grand repository of the stream mentioned, where day and night, from his little watch-tower at the Middle- ton's Head, he listeneth to detect the wrecks of drowned mortality — partly, as he saith, to be upon the spot — and 2)artly, because the liquids which he nseth to prescribe to himself and his patients, on these distressing occasions, are ordinarily more conveniently to be found at these common hostelries than in the shops and phials of the apothecaries. His ear hath arrived to such finesse by practice that it is reported he can distinguish a plunge at half a furlong dis- tance, and can tell if it be casual or deliberate. He wear- eth a medal, suspended over a suit, originally of a sad brown, but which, by time and frequency of nightly div- ings, has been dinged into a true professional sable. He passeth by the name of Doctor, and is remarkable for want- ing his left eye. His remedy — after a sufficient applica- tion of warm blankets, friction, etc., is a simple tumbler, or more, or the purest Cognac, with water, made as hot as the convalescent can bear it. Where he findeth, as in the case of my friend, a squeamish subject, he condescendeth to be the taster; and showeth, by his own exa'mple, the in- nocuous nature of the prescription. Nothing can l3e more kind or encouraging than this procedure. It addeth con- fidence to the patient, to see his medical adviser go hand in hand with himself in the remedy. When the doctor swalloweth his own draught, what peevish invalid can re- fuse to pledge him in the potion? In fine, Monoculus is a humane, sensible man, who, for a slender pittance, scarce enough to sustain life, is content to wear it out in the endeavor to save the lives of others — his pretensions so moderate, that with difficulty I could press a crown uj^on him, for the price of restoring the existence of such an in- valuable creature to society as G. D. It was pleasant to observe the effect of the subsiding alarm upon the nerves of the dear absentee. It seemed to have given a shake to memory, calling up notice after notice of all the providential deliverances he had ex- perienced in the course of his long and innocent life. Sitting up on my couch — my couch which, naked and void of furniture hitherto, for the salutary repose which it administered, shall be honored with costly valance, at some price, and henceforth be a state- bed at Colebrook, 252 THE ESSA TS OF ELIA. — he discoursed of marvelous escapes — by carelessness of nurses; by pails of gelid, and kettles of the boiling element, in infancy; by orchard pranks, and snapping twigs, in school-boy frolics; by descent of tiles at Trump- ington; and of heavier tomes at Pembroke; by studious watchings, inducing frightful vigilance ; by want, and the fear of want, and all the sore throbbings of the learned head. Anon, he would burst oat into little frag- ments of chanting, of songs long ago, ends of deliver- ance hymns, not remembered before since childhood, but coming up now, when his heart was made tender as a child's — for the tremor cordis, in the retrospect of a recent deliverance, as in a case of impending danger, acting upon an innocent heart, will produce a self-tender- ness, which we should do ill to christen cowardice; and Shakespeare, in the latter crisis, has made his good Sir Hugh to remember the sitting by Babylon, and to mutter of shallow rivers. Waters of Sir Hugh Middleton, what a spark you were like to have extinguished forever! Your salubrious streams to this city, for now near two centuries, would hardly have atoned for what you were in a moment wash- ing away. Mockery of a river — liquid artifice — wretched conduit! henceforth rank with canals and sluggish aque- ducts. Was it for this that, smit in boyhood wdth the explorations of that Abyssinian traveler, I paced the vales of Amwell to explore your tributary springs, to trace your salutary waters sparkling through green Hertfordshire, and cultured Enfield parks? Ye have no swans, no Naiads, no river god — or did the benevolent hoary aspect of my friend tempt ye to suck him in, that ye also might have the tutelary genius of your waters? Had he been drowned in Cam, there would have been some consonancy in it; but what willows had ye to wave and rustle over his moist se^oulture? or having no name, besides that unmeaning assumption of eternal novity, did ye think to get one by the noble prize, and henceforth to be termed the Stream Dyerian? And could sucli spacious virtue find a grave Beneath, tlie impostliumed bubble of a wave ? AMICUS REDIVIVUS. 253 I protest, George, you shall not venture out again — no, not by daylight — without a sufficient pair of spectacles — in your musing moods especially. Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it. Yon shall not go wandering into Euripus with Aristotle, if we can hel]) it. Fie, man, to turn dipper at your years, after your many tracts in favor of sprinkling only! I have nothing but w^ater in my head o'nights since this frightful accident. Sometimes I am with Clarence in his dream. At others, I behold Christian beginning to sink, and crying out to his good brother Hopeful (that is, to me), *'I sink in deep waters; the billows go over my head, all the waves go over me. Selah." Then I have before me Palinurus, just letting go the steerage. I cry out too late to save. Next follow a mournful procession, suicidal faces, saved against their will from drowning; dolefully trailing a length of reluctant gratefulness, with ropy weeds pendent from locks of watchet hue; constrained Lazari, Pluto^s half- subjects, stolen fees from the grave, bilking Oharon of his fare. At their head Arion — or is it Gr. D. ? — in his singing garments marcheth singly, with harp in hand, and votive garland, which Machaon (or Dr. Hawes) snatcheth straight, intending to suspend it to the stern God of Sea. Then follow dismal streams of Lethe, in which the half -drenched on earth are constrained to drown downright, by wharfs where Ophelia twice acts her muddy death. And, doubtless, there is some notice in that invisible world when one of us approacheth (as my friend did so lately) to their inexorable precincts. When a soul knocks once, twice, at Death's door, the sensation aroused within the palace must be considerable; and the grim Feature, by modern science so often dispossessed of his prey, must have learned by tiiis time to pity Tantalus. A pulse assuredly was felt along the line of the Elysian shades, when the near arrival of G. D. was announced by no equivocal indications. From their seats of Asphodel arose the gentler and the graver ghosts — poet, or historian — of Grecian or of Roman lore — to crown with unfading chaplets the half-finished love-labors of their unwearied scholiast. Him Markland expected, him Tyrwhitt hoped 254 THE ES8A T8 OF ELIA, to encounter, him the sweet lyrist of Peter House, whom he had barely seen upon earth,* with newest airs prepared to greet ; and patron of the gentle Christ^s boy, who should have been his patron through life — the mild Askew, with longing aspirations leaned foremost from his vener- able ^sculapian chair, to welcome into that happy com- pany the matured virtues of the man, whose tender scions in the boy he himself upon earth had so prophetically fed and watered. SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY. Sydn^ey^s Sockets — I speak of the best of them — are among the very best of their sort. They fall below the plain moral dignity, the sanctity, and high yet modest spirit of self-approval, of Milton, in his compositions of a similar structure. They are in truth what Milton, cen- suring the Arcadia, says of that work (to which they are a sort of after-tune or application), " vain and amatorious" enough, yet the things in their kind (as he confesses to be true of the romance) may be ^'full of worth and wit.^' They savor of the Courtier, it must be allowed, and not of the Commonwealthsman. But Milton was a Courtier when he wrote the Masque at Ludlow Castle, and still more a Courtier when he composed the Arcades. When the national struggle was to begin, he becomingly cast these vanities behind him; and if the order of time had thrown Sir Philip upon the crisis which preceded the revolution, there is no reason why he should not have acted the same part in that emergency, which has glorified the name of a later Sydney. He did not want for plainness or boldness of spirit. His letter on the French match may testify he could speak his mind freely to princes. The times did not call him to the scaffold. The Sonnets which we oftenest call to mind of Milton were the compositions of his maturest years. Those of Sydney, which I am about to produce, were written in the very heyday of his blood. They are stuck full of * Graium tantum vidit. BOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY. 255 amorous fancies — far-fetclied conceits, befitting his occu- pation ; for True Love thinks no labor to send out Thoughts upon the vast and more than Indian voyages, to bring home rich pearls, outlandish wealth, gums, jewels, spicery, to sacrifice in self-deprecating similitudes, as shadows of true amiabilities in the Beloved. "We must be Lovers — or at least the cooling touch of time, the circum ^jrcBcordia frigus, must not have so damped our faculties as to take away our recollection that we Avere once so — before we can duly appreciate the glorious vanities and graceful hyperboles of the passion. The images which lie before our feet (though by some accounted the only natural) are least natural for the high Sydnean love to ex- press its fancies by. They may serve for the loves of Tibullus, or the dear Author of the School-mistress; for passions that creep and whine in Elegies and Pastoral Ballads. I am sure Milton never loved at this rate. I am afraid some of his addresses {ad Leonoram I mean) have rather erred on the further side; and that the poet came not much short of a religious indecorum, when he could thus apostrophize a singing- girl: Angelus unicuique suus (sic credite gentes) Obtigit aetlieieis ales ab ordinibus. Quid minim, Leonora, tibi si gloria major, Nam tua praesentem vox sonat ipsa Deum Aut Deus, aut vacui certe mens tertia coeli Per tua secreto guttura serpit agens; Serpit agens, facilisque docet mortalia corda Sensim immortali assuescere posse sono. Quod si cuncta quidem Deus est, per cunctaque fusus. In te una loquitur, cetera mutus habet. This is loving in a strange fashion; and it requires some candor of construction (besides the slight darken- ing of a dead language) to cast a veil over the ugly ap- 2:)earance of something very like blasphemy in the last two verses. I think the Lover would have been staggered if he had gone about to express the same thought in English. I am sure Sydney has no flights like this. His extrava- ganzas do not strike at the sky, though he takes leave to adopt the pale Dian into a fellowship with his mortal passions. 256 THE ES8A YS OF BLIA, I. With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skiesl How silently; and with how wan a face! What! may it be, that even in heavenly place That busy Archer his sharp arrow tries ? Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case; I read it in thy looks, thy languished grace To me, that feel the like, thy state descries. Then, even of fellowship, O Moon, tell me, Is constant love deem'd there but want of wit ? Are beauties there as proud as here they be ? Do they above love to be loved, and yet Those lovers scorn, whom that love doth possess? Do they call virtue there — uiigratefulness ! The last line of this poem is a little obscured by trans- position. He means, Do they call ungratefulness there a virtue ? IL Come, Sleep, Sleep, the certain knot of peace, The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe, The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release. The indifferent judge between the high and low; With shield of proof shield me from out the prea^e * Of those fierce darts despair at me doth throw; make in me those civil wars to cease: 1 will good tribute pay if thou do so. Take thou of me sweet pillows, sweetest bed; A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light; A rosy garland and a weary head. And if these things, as being thine by right, Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me, Livelier than elsewhere, Stella's image see. III. The curious wits, seeing dull pensiveness Bewray itself in my long- settled eyes. Whence those same fumes of melancholy rise, With idle pains, and missing aim, do guess. Some, that know how my spring I did address, Deem that my Muse some fruit of knowledge plies. Others, because the Prince my service tries, Think, that I think state errors to redress; But harder judges judge, aml)ition's rage. Scourge of itself, still climbing slippery ])]ace, Holds my young brain captiv'd in golden cage. O fools, or over- wise! alas, the race Of all my thoughts hath neither stop nor start. But only Stella's eyes, and Stella's heart. _ * Press. SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY. 257 IV. Becaiise I oft in dark abstracted guise Seem most alone in greatest company, With dearth of words, or answers quite awry, To them that woukl make speech of speech arise; They deem, and of their doom the rumor tiies, That poison foul of buhblino; Pride doth lie So in my swelling breast that only I Fawn on myself, and others do despise; Yet Pride, I think, doth not my soul possess, Which looks too oft in the unfaltering glass; But one worse is^xAt—Amhition—l confess. That makes me oft my best friends overpass. Unseen, unheard— while Thought to highest place Bends all his powers, even unto Stella's grace. Having this day, my horse, my hand, my lance, Guided so w^ell* that I obtained the prize, Both by the judgment of the English eyes, And of some sent from that sweet enemy, France; Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance; Townsfolk my strength; a daintier judge applies^ His praise to sleight, which from good use doth rise Some luckv wits impute it but to chance; Others, because of both sides I do take My blood from them, who did excel in this. Think Nature me a man of arms did make. How far thev shot awry! the true cause is, Stella look'd on, and from her heavenly face Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race. VI. In martial sports I have my cunning tried, And yet to break more staves did me address, Whife with the people's shouts (I must confess) Youth, luck and praise, even fill'd my veins with pride- When Cupid having me (his slave) descried In Mars' livery, prancing in the press, ■'' What now. Sir Fool! " said he; "I would no less: Look here, I say." I look'd, and Stella spied. Who hard bv made a window send forth light. My heart then quaked, then dazzled were mine eyes; One hand forgot to rule, th' other to fight; Nor trumpet's sound I heard, nor friendly cries. My foe came on, and beat the air for me— Till that her blush made me my shame to see. 258 TEE ES8A TS OF ELIA, VII. No more, my dear, no more these counsels try; give my passions leave to run their race; Let Fortune lay on me her worst disgrace; Let folk o'ercharged with brain against me cry; Let clouds bedim my face, break in mine eye; Let me no steps, but of lost labor, trace; Let all the earth with scorn recount my case — But do not will me from my love to fly. 1 do not envy Aristotle's wit, Nor do aspire to Caesar's bleeding fame; Nor aught do care, though some above me sit; Nor hope, nor wish, another course to frame, But that which once may win thy cruel heart: Thou art my wit, and thou my virtue art. VIII. Love still a boy, and oft a wanton, is, School'd only by his mother's tender eye; What wonder, then, if he his lesson miss, When for so soft a rod dear play he try ? And yet my Star, because a sugar'd kiss In sport I suck'd, while she asleep did lie. Doth lour, nay chide, nay threat, for only this. Sweet, it was saucy Love, nor humble I, But no 'sense serves; she makes her wrath appear In Beauty's tlirone — see now who dares come near Those scarlet judges, threat'ning bloody pain? O heav'nly Fool, thy most kiss- worthy face Anger invests with such a lovely grace. That anger's self I needs must kiss again. IX. I never drank of Aganippe well. Nor ever did in shade of Tempe sit, And Muses scorn with vulgar brains to dwell; Poor lay-man I, for sacred rites unfit. Some do I hear of Poet's fury tell. But (God wot) wot not what they mean by it; And this I swear by blackest brook of hell, I am no pick-purse of another's wit. How falls it then, that with so smooth an ease My thoughts I speak, and what I speak doth flow In verse, and that my verse best wits doth please ? Guess me the cause — what is it thus? — fye, no! Or so? — much less. How then? sure thus it is, My lips are sweet, inspir'd with Stella's kiss. SOME tiONNETS OF SIR rUlLIP SYDNEY. 259 Of all the kings that ever here did reign, Edward, naaied Fourth, as first in praise T name. Not for his fair outside, nor well-lined brain— Although less gifts imp feathers oft on Fame. Nor that he could, young-wise, wise- valiant, frame His sire's revenge, join'd with a kingdom's gain; And, gain'd by Mars could yet mad Mars so tarne, That Balance weigh'd what Sword did late ol)tain. Nor that he made the Floure-de-luce so 'fraid. Though strongly hedged of bloody Lion's paws, That witty Lewis to him a tribute paid. Nor this, nor that, nor any such small cause — . But only, for this worthy knight durst prove To lose his crown rather than fail his love. XI. happy Thames, that didst my Stella bear, 1 saw thyself, with many a smiling line Upon thy cheerful face, Joy's livery wear, While those fair planets on thy streams did shine. The boat for joy could not to dance forbear. While wanton winds, with beauty so divine Ravish'd, stay'd not, till in her golden hair They did themselves (O sweetest prison) twine. And fain those ^ol's youth there would their stay Have made; but, forced by nature still to fly. First did with puffing kiss those locks display. She, so dishevell'd, blush'd; from window I With sight thereof cried out, O fair disgrace, Let Honor's self to thee grant highest place 1 XIL Highway, since you my chief Parnassus be; And that my Muse, to some ears not unsweet, Tempers her words to trampling horses' feet, More soft than to a chamber melody; Now blessed You bear onward blessed Me To Her, where I my heart safe left shall meet, My Muse and I must you of duty greet With thanks and wishes, wishing thankfully. Be you still fair, honor'd by public heed, By no encroachment wrong'd nor time forgot; Nor blamed for blood, nor shamed for sinful deed. And that you know, I envy you no lot Of highest wish, I wish you so much bliss. Hundreds of years you Stella's feet may kiss. 260 THE ES8A T8 OF BLIA. Of the foregoing, the first, the second and the last son- net, are my favorites. But the general beauty of them all is, that they are so perfectly characteristical. The spirit of '^'learning and of chivalry, ^^ of which union, Spenser has entitled Sydney to have been the '^president,'' shines through them. I confess I can see nothing of the *' jejune" or ^'frigid" in them; much less of the ^' stiff " and "^^ cumbrous," which I have sometimes heard objected to the Arcadia. The verse runs off swiftly and gallantly. It might have been tuned to the trumpet; or tempered (as himself expresses it) to *' trampling horses' feet." They abound in felicitous phrases — O heav'nly Fool, thy most kiss-worthy face — — Eighth Sonnet. Sweet pillows, sweetest bed; A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light; A rosy garland, and a weary head. — Second Sonnet. That sweet enemy, France — — Fifth Sonnet. But they are not rich in words only, in vague and un- localized feelings — the failing too much of some poetry of the present day — they are full, material and circumstan- tiated. Time and place appropriates every one of them. It is not a fever of passion wasting itself upon a thin diet of dainty words, but a transcendent jjassion pervading and illuminating action^ pursuits, studies, feats of arms, the opinions of contemporaries and his judgment of them. An historical thread runs through them, which almost affixes a date to them; marks the when and luhere they were written. I have dwelt the longer upon what I conceive the merit of these poems, because I have been hurt by the wanton- ness (I wish I could treat it by a gentler name) with which W. H. takes every occasion of insulting the memory of Sir Philip Sydney. But the decisions of the Author of Table Talk, etc. (most profound and subtle where they are, as for the most part, just), are more safely to be relied upon, on subjects and authors he has partiality for, than on such as he has conceived an accidental prejudice against. Milton wrote sonnets^ and was a king-hater; and SOME SCMNETS OF SIR PHILIP SYDNEY. 20 1 it was congt'iiial perliaps to sacrifice a courtiur to a patriot. But I was unwilling to lose a fine idea from my mind. The noble inniges, ptissions, sentiments cind poetical deli- cacies of character, scattered all over the Arcadia (spite of some stilfness and encumberment), justify to me the character which his contemporaries have left us of the writer. I cannot think with the Critic, that Sir Philip Sydney was that opprobrious fliinf/ which a foolish noble- man in his insolent hostility chose to term him. 1 call to mind the epitaph made on him, to guide me to juster thoughts of him, and I repose upon the beautiful lines in the ^'Friend's Passion for his Astrophel/' printed with the Elegies of Spenser and others. You knew — who knew not Astropliel ? (That I should live to say I knew, And have not in possession still!) Things known permit me to renew — Of Lim you know Lis merit sucli, I cannot say — you hear — too much. Within these woods of Arcady He chief delight and pleasure took; And on the mountain Partheny, Upon the crystal liquid brook, The Muses met him every day. That taught him sing, to write, and say. When he descended down the mount, His personage seemed most divine: A thousand graces one might count Upon his lovely cheerful eyne. To hear him speak, and sweetly smile, You were in Paradise the while. A sweet attractive kind of grace; A full assurance given by looks; Continual comfort in a face, The lineaments of Gospel hooks — I trow that count'nance cannot lye, Whose thoughts are legible in the eye. * * * * * Above all others this is he, Which erst approved in his song, That love and honor might agree. And that pure love will do no wrong. Sweet saints it is no sin or blame To love a man of virtuous name. 262 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. Did ever love so sweetly breathe In any mortal breast before; Did never Muse inspire beneath A Poet's brain with finer store! He wrote of Love with high conceit, And Beauty rear'd above her height. Or let any one read the deeper sorrows (grief running into rage) in the Poem, the last in the collection accom- panying the above, which from internal testimony I believe to be Lord Brooke, beginning with *' Silence angmenteth grief,'*'' and then seriously ask himself, whether the sub- ject of such absorbing and confounding regrets could have been that thing which Lord Oxford termed him. NEWSPAPERS THIETY-FIVE YEARS AGO. Dan Stuart once told us that he did not remember that he ever deliberately walked into the exhibition at Somerset House in his life. He might occasionally have escorted a party of ladies across the way that were going in, but he never went in of his own head. Yet the office of the Morning Post newspaper stood then just where it does now — we are carying you back, reader, some thirty years or more — with its gilt-giobe-topped front facing that emporium of our artists' grand Annual Exposure. We sometimes wish that we had observed the same abstinence with Daniel. A word or two of D. S. He ever appeared to us one of the finest-tempered of Editors. Perry, of the Morning Chronicle, was equally pleasant, with a dash, no slight one either, of the courtier. S. was frank, plain and English all over. We have worked for both these gentlemen. It is soothing to contemplate the head of the Ganges; to trace the first little bubblings of a mighty river. With holy reverence to approach the rocks, Whence glide the streams renowned in ancient song. Fired with a perusal of the Abyssinian Pilgrim's ex- ploratory ramblings after the cradle of the infant Nilus, we well remember on one fine summer holiday (a ^^ whole day's leave " we called it at Christ's hospital) sallying forth at rise of sun, not very well provisioned either for NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 203 such an undertaking, to trace the current of the New Iviver — Middletonian stream! — to its scaturient source, as -we had read, in meadows by fair Am well, (lallantly did we commence our solitary quest — for it was essential to the dignity of a Discovery, that no eye of school -boy, save our own, should beam on the detection. By flowery spots, and verdant lanes skirting Ilornsey, Hope trained us on in many a baffling turn; endless, hopeless meanders, as it seemed; or as if the jealous waters had dodged us, reluctaut to have the humble spot of their nativity revealed; till spent, and nigh famished, before set of the same sun, we sat down somewhere by Bowes Farm near Tottenham, with a tithe of our proposed labors only yet accomjflished; sorely convinced in ^\)\Y\t that that Brucian enterprise was as yet too arduous for our young shoulders. Not more refreshing to the thirsty curiosity of the traveler is the tracing of some mighty waters up to their shallow fontlet, than it is to a pleased and candid reader to go back to the inexperienced essays, the first callow flights in authorship, of some established name in litera- ture: from the Gnat which preluded to the ^neid, to the Duck which Samuel Johnson trod on. In those days, every Morning Paper, as an essential re- tainer to its establishment, kept an author, who was bound to furnish daily a quantum of witty paragraphs. Six- pence a joke, and it was thought pretty high too, was Dan Stuart^s settled remuneration in these cases. The chat of the day — scandal, but above all, dress — furnished the material. The length of no paragraph was to exceed seven lines. Shorter they might be, but they must be poignant. A fashion of ^^(?.s7^, or rather ^j/^^^'-colored hose for the ladies, luckily coming up at the juncture when we were on our probation for the place of Chief Jester to S.^s Paper, established our reputation in that line. We were pronounced a ^' capital hand.'^ the conceits which we varied upon red in all its prismatic differences! From the trite and obvious flower of Cvtherea, to the flamins: costume of the lady that has her sitting upon '^many waters. "" Then there was the collateral topic of ankles. What an occasion to a truly chaste writer, like ourself, of touching that nice brink, and yet never tumbling over it. 264 TEE ESS A YS OF ELIA. of a seemingly ever approximating something ^* not quite proper ;" while, like a skillful posture-master, balancing between decorums and their opposites, he keeps the line, from which a hair^s-breadth deviation is destruction; hov- ering in the confines of light and darkness, or where '^both seem either;" a hazy, uncertain delicacy; Autolycus-like in the play, still putting off his expectant auditory with *' Whoop, do me no harm, good man!" But above all, that conceit arrided us most at that time, and still tickles our midriff to remember, where, allusively to the flight of Astraea — ultima Coelcstum terras reliquit — we pronounced, in reference to the stockings still, that Modesty, taking HER FINAL LEAVE OF MORTALS, HER LAST BLUSH WAS VISIBLE IN HER ASCENT TO THE HeAVENS BY THE TRACT OF THE GLOWING INSTEP. This might be called the crown- ing conceit; and was esteemed tolerable writing in those days. But the fashion of jokes, with all other things, passes away; as did the transient mode which had so favored us. The ankles of our fair friends in a few weeks began to re- assume their whiteness, and left us scarce a leg to stand upon. Other female whims followed, but none, methought, so pregnant, so invitatory of shrewd conceits, and more .than single meanings. Somebody has said that to swallow six cross-buns daily consecutively for a fortnight would surfeit the stoutest digestion. But to have to furnish so many Jokes daily, and that not for a fortnight but for a long twelvemonth, as we were constrained to do, was a little harder exaction. '^ Man goeth forth to his work until the evening" — from a reasonable hour in the morning, we 23resume it was meant. Now, as our main occupation took us from eight until five every day in the city; and as our evening hours, at that time of life, had generally to do with anything rather than business, it follows that the only time we could spare for this manufactory of jokes — our supplementary liveli- hood, that supplied us in every want beyond mere bread and cheese — was exactly that part of the day which (as we have heard of No Man^s Land) may be fitly denominated No Man's Time; that is, no time in which a man ought to be up and awake in. To speak more plainly, it is at that time of an hour, or an hour and a half's duration, in NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 2G5 which a man, whoso occasions call hiiu up so preposter- ously, has to wait for his breakfast. those headaches at dawn of day, when at live, or half- past five in summer, and not much later in the dark seasons, we were compelled to rise, having been perhaps not above four hours in bed (for we were no go-to-beds with the lamb, though we anticipated the lark ofttimes in her rising; we like a parting cup at midnight, as all young men did before these effeminate times, and to have our friends about us; we were not constellated under Aquarius, that watery sign, and therefore incapable of Bacchus, cold, washy, bloodless ; we were none of yonr Basilian water- sponges, nor had taken our degrees at Mount Ague; we were right topping Capulets, jolly companions, we and they). Bnt to have to get up, as we said before, curtailed of half our fair sleep, fasting, with only a dim vista of re- freshing bohea in the distance, to be necessitated to rouse ourselves at the detestable rap of an old hag of a domestic, who seemed to take a diabolical pleasure in her announce- ment that it was ^' tinieto rise;" and whose chappy knuck- les we have often yearned to amputate, and string them up at our chamber door, to be a terror to all such un- seasonable rest-breakers in future. " Facil " and sweet, as Virgil sings, had been the '^ descending" of the over-night, balmy the first sinking of the heavy head upon the pillow; but to get up, as he goes on to say, — revocare gradus, superasque evadere ad auras — and to get up, moreover, to make jokes with malice pre- pended — there was the ''labor," there the ''work." No Egyptian taskmaster ever devised a slavery like to that, our slavery. ISTo fractious operants ever turned out for half the tyranny which this necessity exercised upon us. Half a dozen jests in a day (bating Sundays too), why, it seems nothing! We make twice the number every day in our lives as a matter of course, and claim no Sabbatical exemptions. But then they come into our head. But when the head has to go out to them — when the mountain must go to Mohomet — Reader, try for once, only for a short twelvemonth. It was not every week that a fashion of pink stockings 266 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. came up; but mostly, instead of it, some rugged untract- able subject; some topic impossible to be contorted into the risible; some feature, ujoon which no smile could play: some flint, from which no process of ingenuity could procure a scintillation. There they lay; there your appointed tale of brick-making was set before you, which you must finish, with or without straw, as it hap- pened. The craving dragon — the PuUic — like him in BePs Temple — must be fed, it expected its daily rations; and Daniel, and ourselves, to do us justice, did the best we could on this side bursting him. While we were wringing out coy sprightlinesses for the Post, and writhing under the toil of what is called '^ easy writing," Bob Allen, our quondam school-fellow, was tapping his impracticable brains in a like service for the Oracle. Not that Robert troubled himself much about wit. If his paragraphs had a sprightly air about them, it was sufficient. He carried this nonchalance so far at last, that a matter of intelligence, and that no very important one, was not seldom palmed upon his em- ployers for a good jest; for example sake — ^'Walking yesterday morning casually doion Snoto Hill, who should we meet hut Mr. Deputy Humphreys! lue rejoice to add that the loorthy Deputy appeared to enjoy a good state of health. We do not rememher ever to have seen him look hetter." This gentleman so surprisingly met upon Snow Hill, from some peculiarities in gait or gesture, was a constant butt for mirth to the small paragraph-mongers of the day; and our friend thought that he might have his fling at him with the rest. We met A. in Holborn shortly after this extra- ordinary rencounter, which he told with tears of satisfac- tion in his eyes, and chuckling at the anticipated effects of its announcement next day in the paper. We did not quite comprehend where the wit of it lay at the time; nor was it easy to be detected, when the thing came out advantaged by type and letter-press. He had better have met anything that morning than a Common Council Man. His services were shortly after dispensed with, on the plea that his paragraphs of h\te had been deficient in point. The one in question, it must be owned, had an air, in the opening especially, proper to awaken curiosity; and the sentiment, or moral, wears NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE TEARS AGO. ;eG7 the aspect of humanity and good neighborly feeling. But isoinehow the conclusion was not judged altogether to answer to the magnificent promise of the premises. AVe traced our friend's pen afterward in the True Briton, the Star, the Traveller, from all which he was successively dis- missed, the proprietors having "no further occasion for his services." Nothing was easier than to detect him. When wit failed, or topics ran low, there constantly ap- peared the following: ''It is not generally hnoivn that the three Blue Balls at the Pawnhrokers' shops are the ancient arms of Lonihardy. The Lombards were the first money- hrohers in Europe.''' Bob has done more to set the public right on this important point of blazonry than the whole College of Heralds. The ai^pointment of a regular wit has long ceased to be a part of the economy of a Morning Paper. Editors find their own jokes, or do as well without them. Parson Este and Topham brought up the set custom of '^ witty paragraphs" first in the WoAd. Boaden was a reigning paragraphist in his day, and succeeded poor Allen in the Oracle. But, as we said, the fashion of jokes passes away; and it would be difficult to discover in the bio- grapher of Mrs. Siddons any traces of that vivacity and fancy which charmed the whole town at the commence- ment of the present century. Even the prelusive deli- cacies of the present writer — the curt ^^ Astrsean allu- sion " — would be thought pedantic and out of date in these days. From the office of the Morning Post (for we may as well exhaust our Newspaper Reminiscences at once) by change of property in the paper, we were transferred (mortifying exchange I) to the office of the Albion Newspaper, late Rackstrow's Museum in Fleet Street. What a transition, from a handsome apartment, from rosewood desks and silver inkstands, to an office — no office, but a den rather, but just redeemed from the occupation of dead monsters, of which it seemed redolent — from the center of loyalty and fashion, to a focus of vulgarity and sedition! Here in murky closet, inadequate from its square contents to the receipt of the two bodies of editor and humble paragraph- maker, together at one time, sat in the discharge of his new editorial functions (the ^'Bigod" of Elia) the re- doubted John Fenwick. 268 THE ESS A TS OF ELIA. F., without a guinea in his pocket, and having left not many in the pockets of his friends whom he might com- mand, had purchased (on tick doubtless) the whole and sole Editorship, Proprietorship, with all the rights and titles (such as they were worth) of the Albion from one Lovell; of whom we know nothing, save that he had stood in the pillory for a libel on the Prince of Wales. With this hopeless concern — for it had been sinking ever since its commencement, and could now reckon upon not more than a hundred suliscribers — F. resolutely determined upon pulling down the Government in the first instance, and making both our fortunes by way of corollary. For seven weeks and more did this infatuated democrat go about borrowing seven-shilling pieces, and lesser coin, to meet the daily demands of the Stamp Office, which allowed no credit to publications of that side in politics. An out- cast from j)oliter brear], we attached our small talents to the forlorn fortunes of our friend. Our occupation now was to write treason. Eecollections of feelings, whicb were all that now re- mained from our first boyish heats kindled by the French Revolution, when, if we were misled, we erred in the com- pany of some who are accounted very good men now — rather than any tendency at this time to Republican doc- trines — assisted us in assuming a style of writing, while the paper lasted, consonant in no very undertone to the right earnest fanaticism of F. Our cue was now to insinuate, rather than recommend, possible abdications. Blocks, axes, Whitehall tribunals were covered with flowers of so cunning a periphrasis — as Mr. Bayes says, never naming the thing directly — that the keen eye of an Attorney-Gen- eral was insufficient to detect the lurking snake among them. There were times, indeed, when we sighed for our more gentleman-like occupation under Stuart. But with change of masters it is ever change of service. Already one paragraph, and another, as we learned afterward from a gentleman at the Treasury, had begun to be marked at that office, with a view of its being submitted at least to the attention of the proper Law Officers; when an unlucky or rather lucky epigram from our pen, aimed at Sir J s M h, who was on the eve of departing for India to reap the fruits of his apostasy, as F. pronounced it (it is ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART 2G9 hardly worth pjirticuhirizing), happening to offend tlie nice sense of J..ord (or, as he then delighted to be called, Citizen) Stanhope, deprived F. at once of the last hope of a guinea from the last patron that stuck by us; and breaking up our establishment, left us to the safe, but somewhat mortifying, neglect of the Crown Lawyers. It was about this time, or a little earlier, that Dan Stuart made that curious confession to us, that he had " never deliberately walked into an Exhibition at Somerset House in his life." BA.RRENNESS OF THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY IN THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. Hogarth excepted, can we produce any one painter within the last fifty years, or since the humor of exhibit- ing began, that has treated a story imaginatively 2 By this we mean, upon whom his subject has so acted, that it has seemed to direct liim — not to be arranged by him. Any upon whom its leading or collateral points have im- pressed themselves so tyrannically that he dared not treat it otherwise lest he should falsify a revelation? Any that has imparted to his compositions, not merely so much truth as is enough to convey a story with clearness, but that individualizing property which should keep the sub- jest so treated distinct in feature from every other subject, however similar, and to common apprehensions almost identical; so that we might say, this and this part could have found an appropriate place in no other picture in the world but this? Is there anything in modern art — we will not demand that it should be equal — but in any way ana- logous to what Titian has effected in that wonderful bringing together of two times in the '^Ariadne," in the National Gallery? Precipitous, with his reeling satyr rout about him repeopling and re-illuming suddenly the waste places, drunk with a new fury beyond the grape, Bacchus, born in fire, tire-like flings himself at the Cretan. This is the time present. With this telling of the story, an artist, and no ordinary one, might remain richly proud. Guido, in his harmonious version of it, saw no farther. But from the depths of the imaginative spirit Titian has 270 TEE ESSA TS OF ELIA. recalled past time, and laid it contributory with the present to one simultaneous effect. With the desert all ringing with the mad cymbals of his followers, made lucid with the presence and new offers of a god, as if unconscious of Bacchus, or but idly casting her eyes as upon some uncon- cerning pageant — her soul undistracted from Theseus — Ariadne is still pacing the solitary shore in as much heart- silence, and in almost the same local solitude, with which she awoke at day-break to catch the forlorn last glances of the sail that bore away the Athenian. Here are two points miraculously co-uniting; fierce society, with the feeling of solitude still absolute; noon- day revelations, with the accidents of the dull gray dawn unquenched and lingering; the iwesent Bacchus, with the ])ast Ariadne: two stories, with double Time; separate, and harmonizing. Had the artist made the woman one shade less indifferent to the God; still more, had she ex- pressed a rapture at his advent, where would have been the story of the mighty desolation of the heart previous? merged in the insipid accident of a flattering offer met with a welcome acceptance. The broken heart for Theseus was not likely to be pieced up by a God. We have before us a fine rough print, from a picture by Raphael in the Vatican. It is the Presentation of the new-born Eve to Adam by the Almighty. A fairer mother of mankind we might imagine, and a goodlier sire perhaps of men since born. But these are matters sub- ordinate to the conception of the situation, displayed in this extraordinary production. A tolerable modern artist would have been satisfied with tempering certain raptures of connubial anticipation, with a suitable acknowledgment to the Giver of the blessing, in the countenance of the first bridegroom: something like the divided attention of the child (Adam was here a child-man) between the given toy, and the mother who had just blest it with the bauble. This is the obvious, the first-sight view, the suiDerficial. An artist of a higher grade, considering the awful presence they were in, would have taken care to sub- tract something from the expression of the more human passion, and to heighten the more spiritual one. This would be .as much as an exhibition-goer, from the opening of Somerset House to last year's show, has been encouraged to ON TEE PROD UGTIONS OF MODERN ART. 271 look for. It is obvious to hint at a lower expression yet, in a picture that, for respects of drawing and coloring, might be deemed not wholly inadmissible within these art- fostering walls, in which the raptures should be as ninety- nine, the gratitude as one, or perhaps zero. By neither the one passion nor the other has Raphael expounded the situation of Adam. Singly upon his brow sits the absorb- ing sense of wonder at the created miracle. The moment is seized by the intuitive artist, perhaps not self-conscious of his art, in which neither of the conflicting emotions — a moment how abstracted! — have had time to spring up, or to battle for indecorous mastery. We have seen a land- scape of a justly-admired neoteric, in which he aimed at delineating a fiction, one of the most severely beautiful in antiquity — the gardens of the Hesperides. To do Mr. justice, he had painted a laudable orchard, with fitting se- clusion, and a veritable dragon (of which a Polypheme, by Poussin, is somehow a fac-simile for the situation), looking over into the world shut out backward, so that none but a *^ still-climbing Hercules" could hope to catch a peep at the admired Ternary of Recluses. No conventual porter could keep his keys better than this custos with the '' lidless eyes." He not only sees that none do intrude into that privacy, but, as clear as daylight, that none but Her miles ant Diaholus by any manner of means cct7i. So far all is well. We have absolute solitude here or nowhere. Ah extra, the damsels are snug enough. But here the artist's courage seems to have failed him. He began to pity his pretty charge, and to comfort the irksomeness, has peopled their solitude with a bevy of fair attendants, maids of honor, or ladies of the bed-chamber, according to the ap- proved etiquette at a court of the nineteenth century; giv- ing to the whole scene the air of a/e/e chamjjetre^ii we will but excuse the absence of the gentlemen. This is well, and AA^atteauish. But what is become of the solitary mystery — the Daughters three, That sing around the golden tree ? This is not the way in which Poussin would have treated this subject. The paintings, or rather the stupendous architectural 272 THE E88A TS OF ELIA. designs, of a modern artist, have been urged as objections to the theory of our motto. They are of a character, we confess, to stagger it. His towered structures are of the highest order of the material sublime. Whether they were dreams, or transcripts of some elder workmanship — Assy- rian ruins old — restored by this mighty artist, they satisfy our most stretched and craving conceptions of the glories of the antique world. It is a pity that they were ever peopled. On that side, the imagination of the artist halts, and appears defective. Let us examine the point of the story in the ^^ Belshazzar's Feast.'' We will introduce it by an apposite anecdote. The court historians of the day record, that at the first dinner given by the late King (then Prince Kegent) at the Pavilion, the following characteristic frolic was played off. The guests Avere select and admiring; the banquet profuse and admirable; the lights lustrous and oriental; the eye was perfectly dazzled with the display of plate, among which the great gold salt-cellar, brought from the regalia in the Tower for this especial purpose, itself a tower, stood conspicuous for its magnitude. And now the Rev. , the then admired court Chaplain, was proceeding with the grace, when, at a signal given, the lights were suddenly overcast, and a huge transparency was discovered, in which glittered in gold letters — ■ " Brightoi^" — Earthquake — Swallow-up-Aliye! " Imagine the confusion of the guests; the Georges and garters, jewels, bracelets, moulted upon the occasion! The fans dropped, and picked up the next morning by the sly court-pages! Mrs. Fitz-what's-her-name fainting, and the Countess of holding the smelling-bottle, till the good-humored Prince caused harmony to be restored by calling in fresh candles, and declaring that the whole was nothing but a pantomime lioax, got up by the ingenious Mr. Farley, of Covent Garden, from hints which his Poyal Highness himself had furnished. Then imagine the in- finite applause that followed, the mutual rallyings, the declarations that ^'they were not much frightened," of the assembled galaxy. The point of time in the picture exactly answers to the appearance of the transparency in the anecdote. The ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 273 huddle, the flutter, the bustle, the escape, the aliinii, uud the mock altirm; the prettiuesses heightened by coiistenia- tiou; the courtiers fear which was flattery; and the lady's which was aifectation; all that we may conceive to have taken jjlace in a mob of Brighton courtiers, sympathizing with the well-acted surprise of their sovereign; all this, and no more, is exhibited by the well-dressed lords and ladies in the llall of Belus. Just this sort of consterna- tion we have seen among a flock of disquieted wild geese at the report only of a gun having gone otf ! But is this vulgar fright, this mere animal anxiety for the preservation of their persons — such as we have wit- nessed at a theater, when a slight alarm of fire has been given — an adequate exponent of a supernatural terror? the way in which the finger of God, writing judgments, would have been met by the withered conscience? There is a human fear, and a divine fear. The one is disturbed, restless, and bent upon escape; the other is bowed down, effortless, passive. When the spirit appeared before Eliphaz in the visions of the night, and the hair of his flesh stood up, was it in the thoughts of the Temanite to ring the bell of his chamber, or to call up the servants? But let us see in the text what there is to justify all this huddle of vulgar consternation. From the words of Daniel it appears that Belshazzar had made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand. The golden and silver vessels are gorgeously enumerated, with the princes, the king's concubines, and his wives. Then follows: " In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king's palace; and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. Then the king's countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosened, and his knees smote one against another." This is the ^^lain text. By no hint can it be otherwise inferred, but that the appearance was solely confined to the fancy of Belshazzar, that his single brain was troubled. Not a word is spoken of its being seen by any else there present, not even by the queen herself, who merely under- takes for the interpretation of the phenomenon, as related 274 THE ES8A YS OF ELIA, to her, doubtless, by her husband. The lords are simply said to be astonished; i.e. at the trouble and the change of countenance in their sovereign. Even the prophet does not appear to have seen the scroll, which the king saw. He recalls it only, as Joseph did the Dream to the King of Egypt. '' Then was the part of the hand sent from him [the Lord], and this writing was written." He speaks of the phantasm as past. Then what becomes of this needless multiplication of the miracle? this message to a royal conscience, singly expressed — for it was said, '*^Thy kingdom is divided," simultaneously impressed upon the fancies of a thousand courtiers, who were implied in it neither directly nor grammatically ? But, admitting the artist's own version of the story, and that the sight was seen also by the thousand courtiers — let it have been visible to all Bab3don — as the knees of Bel- shazzar were shaken, and his countenance troubled, even so would the knees of every man in Babylon, and their countenances, as of an individual man, have been troubled; bowed, bent down, so would they have remained, stupor- fixed, with no thought of struggling with that inevitable judgment. Not all that is optimally possible to be seen, is to be shown in every picture. The eye delightedly dwells upon the brilliant individualities in a ^^ Marriage at Oana," by Veronese, or Titian, to the very texture and color of the wedding garments, the ring glittering upon the bride's finger, the metal and fashion of the wine-pots; for at such seasons there is leisure and luxury to be curious. But in a " day of judgment," or in a ^^ day of lesser horrors, yet divine," as at the impious feast of Belshazzar, the eye should see, as the actual eye of an agent or patient in the immediate scene would see, only in masses and indistinc- tion. Not only the female atlire and jewelry exposed to the critical eye of the fashion, as minutely as the dresses in a Lady's Magazine, in the criticised picture — but perhaps the curiosities of anatomical science, and studied diversities of posture, in the falling angels and sinners of Michael Angelo — have no business in their great subjects. There was no leisure for them. By a wise falsification, the great masters of painting got ON THE PROD UCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 275 at their true conclusions; by not showing the actual appear- ances, that is, all that was lo be seen at any given moment by an indilferent eye, but only what the eye might be sup- posed to see in tlie doing or suffering of some portentous action. Suppose tlie moment of the swallowing up of Pompeii. There they were to be seen — houses, columns, architectural proportions, differences of public and private buildings, men and women at their standing occupations, the diversified thousand postures, attitudes, dresses, in some confusion truly, but physically they were visible. But what eye saw them at that eclipsing moment, which reduces confusion to a kind of unity, and when the senses are up- turned from their proprieties, when sight and hearing are a feeling only? A thousand years have passed, and we are at leisure to contemplate the weaver fixed standing at his shuttle, the baker at his oven, and to turn over with anti- quarian coolness the pots and pans of Pompeii. ^^Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, and thou. Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.^' Who, in reading this magnifi- cent Hebraism, in his conception, sees aught but the heroic son of Nun, with the outstretched arm, and the greater and lesser light obsequious? Doubtless there were to be seen hill and dale, and chariots and horsemen, on open plain, or winding by secret defiles, and all the circumstances and stratagems of war. But whose eyes would have been con- scious of this array at the interposition of the synchronic miracle? Yet in the picture of this subject by the artist of the ^' Belshazzar's Feast ^^ — no ignoble work, either — the marshaling and landscape of the war is everything, the miracle sinks into an anecdote of the day; and the eye may '^ dart through rank and file traverse '^ for some minutes, before it shall discover, among his armed followers, which is Joshua ! Not modern art alone, but ancient, where only it is to be found, if anywhere, can be detected erring, from defect of this imaginative faculty. The world has nothing to show of the preternatural in painting, transcending tlie figure of Lazarus bursting his grave-clothes, in the great picture at Angerstein's. It seems a thing between two beings. A ghastly horror at itself struggles with newly- apprehending gratitude at second life bestowed. It cannot forget that it was a ghost. It has hardly felt that it is a body. It has to tell of the world of spirits. Was it from 276 THE E8SA YS OF ELIA, a feeling, that the crowd of half-impassioned by-standers, and the still more irrelevant herd of passers-by at a dis- tance, who have not heard, or but faintly have been told of the passing miracle, admirable as they are in design and hue, for it is a glorified work, do not respond adequately to the action, that the single figure of the Lazarus has been attributed to Michael Angelo, and the mighty Sebastian unfairly robbed of the fame of the greater half of the interest? Now that there were not indifferent passers-by within actual scope of the eyes of those present at the miracle, to whom the sound of it had but faintly, or not at all, reached, it would be hardihood to deny; but would they see them? or can the mind in the conception of it admit of such unconcerning objects; can it think of them at all? or what associating league to the imagination can there be between the seers and the seers not, of a presential miracle? AVere an artist to paint upon demand a picture of a Dryad, we will ask whether, in the present low state of expectation, the patron would not, or ought not be fully satisfied with a beautiful naked figure recumbent under wide-stretched oaks? Dis-seat those woods, and place the same figure among fountains, and falls of pellucid water, and you have a — Naiad! Not so in a rough print we have seen after Julio Romano, we think — for it is long since — there, by no process, with mere change of scene, could the figure have reciprocated characters. Long, grotesque, fan- tastic, yet with a grace of her own, beautiful in convolu- tion and distortion, linked to her connatural tree, co-twist- ing with its limbs her own, till both seemed either — these, animated branches; those, disanimated members — yet the animal and vegetable lives sufficiently kept distinct — his Dryad lay — an approximation of two natures, which to conceive it must be seen; analogous to, not the same with, the delicacies of Ovidian transformations. To the lowest subjects, and, to a superficial comprehen- sion, the most barren, the Great Masters gave loftiness and fruitfulness. The largo eye of genius saw in the meanness of present objects their capabilities of treatment from their relations to some grand Past or Future. How has Ra23hael — we must still linger about the Vatican — treated the humble craft of the ship-builder_, in /m* '' Building of the Ark?" ON THE rilOnUCTlUNlS OF MOJJEUN ART. 277 It is iu that scriptunil series, to which we huve referred, luid whicli, judging frome some fine rough old griiphic sketches of them which we possess, seem to be of a iiigher imd more poetic grade than even the Cartoons. The dim of sight are the timid and the shrinking. There is a cow- ardice in modern art. As the Frencliman, of whom Col- eridge's friend made the prophetic guess at Rome, from the beard and horns of the Moses of Michael Angelo col- lected no inferences beyond that of a He Goat and a Cor- nuto; so from this subject, of mere mechanic promise, it would instinctively turn away, as from one incapable of in- vestiture with any grandeur. The dock-yards at Woolwich would object derogatory associations. The depot at Chatham would be the mote and the beam in its intellec- tual eye. But not to the nautical preparations in the ship- yards of Civita Yecchia did Raphael look for instructions, when he imagined the building of the vessel that was to be conservatory of the wrecks of the species of drowned mankind. In the intensity of the action he keeps ever out of sight the meanness of the operation. There is the Patri- arch, in calm forethought, and with holy prescience, giving directions. And there are his agents — the solitary but suf- ficient Three — hewdng, sawing, every one with the might and earnestness of a Demiurgus; under some instinctive rather than technical guidance! giant-muscled; every one a Hercules; or liker to those Vulcanian Three, that in sounding caverns under Mongibello wrought in fire — Brontes, and black Steropes, and Pyracmon. So work the workmen that should repair a world. Artists again err in the confounding oi poetic with picto- rial subjects. In the latter, the exterior accidents are nearly everything, the unseen qualities as nothing. Othello^s color — the infirmities and corpulence of a Sir John Falstalf — do they haunt us perpetually in the read- ing? or are they obtruded upon our conceptions one time for ninety-nine that we are lost in admiration at the respec- tive moral or intellectual attributes of the character? But in a picture Othello is always a Blackamoor; and the other only Plump Jack. Deeply corporealized, and enchained hopelessly in the groveling fetters of ex- ternality, must be the mind, to which, in its better moments, the image of the high-souled, high intelligenced 278 THE ESS A YS OF ELIA. Quixote — the errant Star of Knighthood, made more tender by eclipse — has never presented itself divested from the unhallowed accompaniment of a Sancho, or a rabblement at the heels of Eosinante. That man has read his books by halves; he has laughed, mistaking his author's purport, which was — tears. The artist that pictures Quixote (and it is in this degrading point that he is every season held up at our exhibitions) in the shallow ho23e of exciting mirth, would have joined the rabble at the heels of his starved steed. We wish not to see that counterfeited, which we would not have wished to see in the reality. Conscious of the heroic inside of the noble Quixote, who, on hearing that his withered, person was passing, would have stepped over his threshold to gaze upon his forlorn habiliments, and the " strange bed-fellows which misery brings a man acquainted with?'^ Shade of Cervantes! who in thy second part could put into the mouth of thy Quixote those high aspirations of a super-chivalrous gallantry, where he replies to one of the shepherdesses, apprehensive that he would spoil their pretty net- works, and inviting him to be a guest with them, in accents like these: " Truly, fairest Lady, Actason was not more astonished when he saw Diana bath- ing herself at the fountain, than I have been in beholding your beauty. I commend the manner of your pastime, and thank you for your kind offer ; and if I may serve you, so I may be sure you will be obeyed, you may com- mand me ; for my profession is this, To show myself thankful, and a doer of good to all sorts of people, especially of the rank that your person shows you to be; and. if those nets, as they take up but a little piece of ground, should take up the whole world, I would seek out new worlds to pass through, rather than break them: and (he adds) that you may give credit to this my exaggeration, behold at least he that promiseth you this, is Don Quixote de la Mancha, if haply this name hath come to your hearing." Illustrious romancer! were the ^^fine frenzies, '^ which jDossessed the brain of thy own Quixote, a fit subject, as in this second part, to be ex- posed to the jeers of duennas and serving-men? to be monstered, and shown up at the heartless banquets of great men? Was that pitiable infirmity, which in thy ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 279 first part misleads him, ahixtijs from, within, into half- ludicrous, but more than hali-compassiouable and admir- able errors, not inlliction enough from heaven, that men by studied artilices must devise and practice upon the humor, to inflame where they should soothe it? Why, Goneril would have blushed to practice upon the abdicated king at this rate, and the she-wolf Kegan not have endured to play the pranks u^^on his fled wits which thou first made thy Quixote sufl'er in Duchesses' halls, and at the hands of that unworthy nobleman.* In the first adventures, even, it needed all the art of the most consummate artist in the book way that the world hath yet seen, to keep up in the mind of the reader the heroic attributes of the character without relaxing; so as absolutely that they shall suffer no alloy from the debasing fellowship of the clown. If it ever obtrudes itself as a disharmony, are we inclined to laugh; or not, rather, to indulge a contrary emotion? Cervantes, stung, perchance, by the relish with which Ms reading public had received the fooleries of the man, more to their palates than the generosities of the master, in the sequel let his pen run riot, lost the harmony and the balance, and sacrificed a great idea to the taste of his contemporaries. We know that in the present day the knight has fewer admirers than the squire. Anticipat- ing, what did actually happen to him — as afterward it did to his scarce inferior follower, the author of ''Guz- man de Alfarache'' — that some less knowing hand Avould prevent him by a spurious second part ; and judging that it would be easier for his competitor to outbid him in the comicalities than in the romance of his work, he abandoned his knight, and has fairly set up the squire for his hero. For what else has he unsealed the eyes of Sancho? and instead of that twilight state of semi- insan- ity, the madness at second hand, the contagion, caught from a stronger mind infected; that war between native cunning and hereditary deference, with which he has hitherto accompanied his master, two for a pair almost, does he substitute a downright knave, with open eyes, for * Yet from this Second Part, our cried-up pictures are mostly- selected; the waiting- women with beards, etc. 280 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. his own ends only following a confessed madman; and offering at one time to lay, if not actually laying, hands npon him! From the moment that Sancho loses his reverence, Don Quixote is become a treatable lunatic. Our artists handle him accordingly. THE WEDDING. I DO NOT know when I have been better pleased than at being invited last week to be present at the wedding of a friend^s daughter. I like to make one at these ceremonies, which to us old people give back our youth in a manner, and restore our gayest season, in the remembrance of our own success, or the regrets, scarcely less tender, of our own youthful disappointments, in this point of a settle- ment. On these occasions I am sure to be in good humor for a week or two after, and enjoy a reflected honeymoon. Being without a family, I am flattered with these tempo- rary adoptions into a friend^s family; I feel a sort of cousinhood, or uncleship, for the season; I am inducted into degrees of affinity ; and, in the participated socialities of the little community, I lay down for a brief while my solitary bachelorship. I carry this humor so far that I take it unkindly to be left out, even when a funeral is going on in the house of a dear friend. But to my subject. The union itself had been long settled, but its celebra- tion had been hitherto deferred, to an almost unreasonable state of suspense in the lovers, by some invincible preju- dices which the bride's father had unhappily contracted npon the subject of the too early marriages of females. He has been lecturing any time these five years, for to that length the courtshi]) had been protracted, upon the j^ro- priety of putting off the solemnity, till the lady should have completed her five-and -twentieth year. We all began to be afraid that a suit, which as yet had abated of none of its ardors, might at last be lingered on, till passion had time to cool, and love go out in the experiment. But a little wheedling on the part of his wife, who was by no means a party to these overstrained notions, joined to some serious expostulations on that of his friends, who, THE WEDDING. 281 from the growing infirmities of the old gentleman, could not promise ourselves many years^ enjoyment of his com- pany, and were anxious to bring matters to a conclusion during his lifetime, at length prevailed; and on Monday last the daughter of my old friend. Admiral , having attained the womanly age of nineteen, was conducted to the church by her pleasant cousin J , who told some few years older. Before the youthful part of my female readers express their indignation at the abominable loss of time occa- sioned to the lovers by the preiDosterous notions of my old friend, they will do well to consider the reluctance which a fond parent naturally feels at parting with his child. To this unwillingness, I believe, in most cases may be traced the difference of opinion on this point between child and parent, whatever pretences of interest or prudence may be held out to cover it. The hard- heartedness of fathers is a fine theme for romance writers, a sure and moving topic; but is there not something untender, to say no more of it, in the hurry which a beloved child is sometimes in to tear herself from the paternal stock, and commit herself to strange graftings? The case is heightened where the lady, as in the present instance, happens to be an only child. I do not under- stand these matters experimentally, but I can make a shrewd guess at the wounded pride of a parent upon these occasions. It is no new observation, I believe, that a lover in most cases has no rival so much to be feared as the father. Certainly there is a jealousy in unjiarallel subjects.^ which is a little less heartrending than the passion which we more strictly christen by that name. Mothers^ scruples are more easily got over; for this reason, I sup- pose, that the protection transferred to a husband is less a derogation and a loss to their authority than to the paternal. Mothers, besides, have a trembling foresight, which paints the inconveniences (impossible to be con- ceived in the same degree by the other parent) of a life of forlorn celibacy, which the refusal of a tolerable match may entail upon their child. Mothers^ instinct is a surer guide here than the cold reasonings of a father on such a topic. To this instinct may be imputed, and by it alone may be excused, the unbeseeming artifices by which some 382 THE ESSA T8 OF ELIA. wives push on the matrimonial projects of their daughters, which the husband, however approving, shall entertain with comparative indifference. A little shamelessness on this head is pardonable. With this explanation, forward- ness becomes a grace, and maternal importunity receives the name of a virtue. But the parson stays, while I pre- posterously assume his office; I am preaching while the bride is on the threshold. Nor let any of my female readers suppose that the sage reflections which have just escaped me have the obliquest tendency of application to the young lady who, it will be seen, is about to venture upon a change in her condition, at a mature and competent age, and not without the fullest approbation of all parties. I only deprecate very liasty marriages. It had been fixed that the ceremony should be gone though at an early hour, to give time for a little dejeuue afterward, to which a select party of friends had been invited. We were in church a little before the clock struck eight. Nothing could be more judicious or graceful than the dress of the brides-maids — the three charming Miss For- esters — on this morning. To give the bride an oppor- tunity of shining singly, they had come habited all in green. I am ill at describing female apparel; but Avhilp she stood at the altar in vestments white and candid as her thoughts, a sacrificial whiteness, they assisted in robes such as might become Diana^s nymphs — Foresters indeed — as such who had not yet come to the resolution of putting off cold virginity. These young maids, not being so blest as to have a mother living, I am told, keep single for their father's sake, and live altogether so happy with their re- maining parent, that the hearts of their lovers are ever broken with the ^^rospect (so inauspicious to their hopes) of such uninterrupted and provoking home-comfort. Gal- lant girls! Each a victim worthy of Iphigenia! I do not know what business I have to be present in solemn places. I cannot divest me of an unseasonable disposition to levity upon the most awful occasions. I was never cut out for a public functionary. Ceremony and I have long shaken hands; but I could not resist the importunities of the young lady's father, whose gout un- TUB WEDDING. 283 happily confined him at home, to act as parent on this occasion and give away tlie bride. Something hidicroiis occurred to me at this most serious of all moments — a sense of my unfitness to have the disposal, even in imagina- tion, of the sweet young creature beside me. 1 fear I was betrayed to some lightness, for the awful eye of the parson — and the rector^s eye of St. Mildred^s in the Poul- try is no trifle of a rebuke — was npon me in an instant, souring my incipient jest to the tristful severities of a funeral. This was the only misbehavior which I can plead to upon this solemn occasion, unless what was objected to me after the ceremony, by one of the handsome Miss T s, be accounted a solecism. She was pleased to say that she had never seen a gentleman before me give away a bride, in black. Now black has been my ordinary apparel so long — indeed, I take it to be the proper costume of an author — the stage sanctions it — that to have appeared in some lighter color would have raised more mirth at my expense than the anomaly had created censure. But I could perceive that the bride's mother, and some elderly ladies present (God bless them!) would have been well content, if I had come in any other color than that. But I got over the omen by a lucky apologue, which I remem- bered out of Pilpay, or some Indian author, of all the birds being invited to the linnet's wedding, at which, when all the rest came in their gayest feathers, the raven alone apologized for his cloak because ^'he had no other." This tolerably reconciled the elders. But with the young people all was merriment, and shaking of hands, and congratulations, and kissing away the bride's tears, and kissing from her in return, till a young lady, who assumed some experience in these matters, having worn the nuptial bands some four or five weeks longer than her friend, rescued her, archly observing, with half an eye upon the bridegroom, that at this rate she would have ^^none left." My friend the Admiral was in fine wig and buckle on this occasion — a striking contrast to his usual neglect of personal appearance. He did not once shove up his bor- rowed locks (his custom ever at his morning studies) to betray the few gray stragglers of his own beneath them. He wore an aspect of thoughtful satisfaction. I trembled 284 THE ESSA T8 OF ELI A. for the hour, which at length approached, when after a protracted hreakfast of three hours — if stores of cold fowls, tongues, hams, botargoes, dried fruits, wines, cordials, etc., can deserve so meager an appellation — the coach was announced, which was to come to carry off the bride and bridegroom for a season, as custom has sensibly ordained, into the country; upon which design, wishing them a felicitous journey, let us return to the assembled guests. As when a well-graced actor leaves the stage, Tlie eyes of men Are idly bent on liim that enters next, SO idly did we bend our eyes upon one another, when the chief performers in the morning^s pageant had vanished. None told his tale. None sipped her glass. The poor Admiral made an effort — it was not much. 1 had anticipated so far. Even the infinity of full satis- faction, that had betrayed itself through the prim looks and quiet deportment of his lady, began to wane into something of misgiving. No one knew whether to take their leave or stay. We seemed assembled ujoon a silly occasion. In this crisis, betwixt tarrying and departure, I must do justice to a foolish talent of mine, which had otherwise like to have brought me into disgrace in the fore-part of the day; I mean a jDOwer, in any emergency, of thinking and giving vent to all manner of strange non- sense. In this awkward dilemma I found it sovereign. I rattled off some of my most excellent absurdities. All were willing to be relieved, at any expense of reason, from the pressure of the intolerable vacuum which had suc- ceeded to the morning bustle. By this means I was fortunate in keeping together the better part of the com- pany to a late hour; and a rubber of whist (the AdmiraFs favorite game) with some rare strokes of chance as well as skill, which came opportunely on his side — lengthened out till midnight — dismissed the old gentleman at last to his bed with comparatively easy spirits. I have been at my old friend^s various times since. I do not know a visiting place where every guest is so perfectly at his ease; nowhere, where harmony is so strangely the result of confusion. Everybody is at cross purposes, yet UPON Tne NEW-TEARS COMING OF AGE. 285 the effect is so much better than uniformity. Contra- dictory orders ; servants pulling one way ; master and mistress driving some other, yet both diverse ; visitors huddled up in corners ; chairs unsymmetrized ; cr.ndles disposed by chance ; meals at odd hours, tea and supper at once, or the latter preceding the former; the host and the guest conferring, yet each upon a different topic, each understanding himself, neither trying to understand or hear the other; draughts and politics, chess and political economy, cards and conversation on nautical matters, going on at once, without the hope, or indeed the wish, of distinguishing them, make it altogether the most per- fect Concordia discors you shall meet with. Yet some- how the old house is not quite what it should be. The Admiral still enjoys his pipe, but he has no Miss Emily to fill it for him. luc instrument stands where it stood, but she is gone, whose delicate touch could sometimes for a short minute appease the warring elements. He has learned, as Marvel expresses it, to " make his destiny his choice." He bears bravely up, but he does not come out with his flashes of wild wit so thick as formerly. His sea-songs seldomer escape him. His wife, too, looks as if she wanted some younger body to scold and set to rights. We all miss a junior presence. It is wonderful how one young maiden freshens up and kee^DS green the paternal roof. Old and young seem to have an interest in her so long as she is not absolutely disposed of. The youthfulness of the house is flown. Emily is married. REJOICINGS UPON THE NEW-YEAR'S COMING OF AGE. The Old Yeai^ being dead, and the New Yea}' coming of age, which he does, by Calendar Law, as soon as the breath is out of the old gentleman's body, nothing would serve the young spark but he must give a dinner upon the occasion, to which all the Days in the year were in- vited. The Festivals, whom he dejouted as his stewards, were mightily taken with the notion. They had been engaged time out of mind, they said, in providing mirth and orood cheer for mortals below; and it was time thev 286 THE ESS A TS OF ELIA. should have a taste of their own bounty. It was stiffly debated among them whether the Fasts should be ad- mitted. Some said the appearance of such lean, starved quests, with their mortified faces, would pervert the ends of the meeting. But the objection was overruled by ChHsUnas Day, who had a design upon Ash Wednesday (as you shall hear), and a mighty desire to see how the old Dominie would behave himself in his cups. Only the Vigils were requested to come with their lanterns, to light the gentlefolks home at night. All the Days came to their day. Covers were pro- vided for three hundred and sixty-five guests at the principal table; with an occasional knife and fork at the side-board for the Twenty-ninth of February. I should have told you that cards of invitation had been issued. The carriers were the Hom^s; twelve little merry, whirligig foot-pages, as you should desire to see, that went all round, and found out the persons invited well enough, with the exception of Easter Day, Shrove Tuesday, and a few such Moveables, who had lately shifted their quarters. Well, they all met at last — foul Days, fine Days, all sorts of Days, and a rare din they made of it. There was nothing but. Hail! fellow Day, well met, brother j)ay — sister Day; only Lady Day kept a little on the aloof, and seemed somewhat scornful. Yet some said Twelfth Day cut her out and out, for she came in a tiffany suit, white and gold, like a queen on a frost-cake, all royal, glittering and Fpiphano2is. The rest came, some in green and some in white — but old LeJit and his family were not yet out of mourning. Kainy Days came in dripping; and sunshiny Days helped them to change their stockings. Wedding Day was there in his mar- riage finery, a little the worse for wear. Pay Day came late, as he always does ; and Doomsday sent word he might be expected. ijjW/ Fool (as my young lord's jester) took upon- him- self to marshal the guests, and wild work he made with it. It would have posed old Erra Pater to have found out any given Day in the year to erect a scheme upon — good Days, bad Days, were so shuffled together, to the confounding of all sober horoscopy. UPON THE NEW-YEAR'S COMING OF AGK 287 lie had stuck tlio ywenlff-Firsi of Jidlv next to the T went If- Second of Deceniber, and the former looked like a Maypole siding a marrow-bone. A.sli Wednesdmj got wedged in (as was concerted) between CJiristmffK and Lord Mayor's Day.s. Lord! how belaid about him! Nothing but barons of beef and turkeys would go down with him, to the great greasing and detriment of his new sack-cloth bib and tucker. And still C/rri.slvias Day was at his elbow, plying him with the wassail-bowl, till he roared, and hiccuppM, and protested there was no faith in dried ling, but commended it to the devil for a sour, windy, acrimonious, censorious, hy-po-crit-crit-critical mess, and no dish for a gentleman. Then he dipped his fist into the middle of the great custard that stood before his left-hand oieighbor, and daubed his hungry beard all over with it, till you would have taken him for the Last Day in Deceniber, it so hung in icicles. At another part of the table. Shrove Tuesday was help- ing the Second of September to some cock broth, which courtesy the latter returned with the delicate thigh of a hen pheasant, so that there was no love lost for that matter. The Last of Lent was spunging upon Shrove- tide's pancakes; which April Fool perceiving, told him that he did well, for pancakes were proper to a good fry- day. In another part, a hubbub arose about the Thirtieth of January, who, it seems, being a sour, puritanic character, that thought nobody^s meat good or sanctified enough for him, had smuggled into the room a calf's head, w^hich he had had cooked at home for that purpose, thinking to feast thereon incontinently; but as it lay in the dish, March Many weathers, who is a very fine lady, and subject to the meagrims, screamed out there was a '^ human head in the j^latter," and raved about Herodias' daughter to that degree that the obnoxious viand was obliged to be re- moved; nor did she recover her stomach till she had gulj^ed down a Restorative, confected of Oak Apple, which the merry Twenty-Ninth of May always carries about with him for that purpose. The king's health* being called for after this, a notable * King George IV, 288 THE ES8A T8 OF ELIA. dispute arose between the Twelfth of August (a zealous old Whig gentlewoman) and the T loenty- Third of April (a new-fangled lady of the Tory stamp), as to which of them should have the honor to propose it. August grew hot upon the matter, affirming time out of mind the prescrip- tive right to have lain with her, till her rival had basely supplanted her; whom she represented as little better than a kept mistress, who went about in fine clothes, while she (the legitimate Birthday) had scarcely a rag, etc. Ajjril Fool, being made mediator, confirmed the right, in the strongest form of words, to the appellant, but de- cided for peace sake, that the exercise of it should remain with the i^resent possessor. At the same time, he slyly rounded the first lady in the ear, that an action might lie against the Crown for M-geny. It beginning to grow a little duskish, Candlemas lustily bawled out for lights, which was opposed by all the Days, who protested against burning daylight. Then fair water was handed round in silver ewers, and the sa7ne lady was observed to take an unusual time in Washing herself. May Day, with that sweetness which is peculiar to her, in a neat speech proposing the health of the founder, crowned her goblet (and by her example the rest of the company) with garlands. This being done, the lordly Neiv Year, from the upper end of the table, in a cordial but somewhat lofty tone, returned thanks. He felt proud on an occasion of meeting so many of his worthy father^s late tenants, promised to improve their farms, and at the same time to abate (if anything was found unreasonable) in their rents. ^ At the mention of this, the four Quarter Days invol- untarily looked at each other, and smiled ; April Fool whistled to an old tune of ^* New Brooms;" and a surly old rebel at the farther end of the table (who was discov- ered to be no other than the Fifth of Novem'ber'\ muttered out, distinctly enough to be heard by the whole company, words to this effect, that ^^when the old one is gone, he is a fool that looks for a better." Which rudeness of his, the guests resenting, unanimously voted his expulsion; and the malcontent was thrust out neck and heels into the cellar, as the properest place for such a houtefeu and fire- brand as he ha^ shown liimself to be. UPON THE NEW-YEARS GOMINO OF AGE. 28i» Onler being restored — the young lord (wlio, to say truth, had been a little ruffled, and put beside his oratory) in as few and yet as obliging words as possible, assured them of entire welcome; and, with a graceful turn, singling out poor Twcnty-XiiiUi of Fehrndry, that had sat all this wliile mumchance at the side-board, begged to couple his health with that of the good company before him — which he drank accordingly; observing that he had not seen his lionest face any time these four years, with a number of endearing expressions besides. At the same time removing the solitary Day from the forlorn seat which had been assigned him, he stationed him at his own board, some- where between the Greek Calends and Latter Lammas. Ash Wednesday being now called upon for a song, with his eyes fast stuck in his head, and as well as the Canary he had swallowed would give him leave, struck up a Carol, which Christmas Bay had taught him for the nonce; and was followed by the latter, who gave ^^ Miserere" in fine style, hitting off the mumping notes and lengthened drawl of Old Mortification with infinite humor. Ajjril Fool swore they had exchanged conditions; but Good Friday was observed to look extremely grave; and Sunday held her fan before her face that she might not be seen to smile. Shrovc-tide, Lord Mayor^s Day, and Ajjril Fool, next joined in a glee — Which is the properest day to drink ? in which all the Days chiming in, made a merry burden. They next fell to quibbles and conundrums. The ques- tion being proposed, who had the greatest number of fol- lowers — the Quarter Days said there could be no question as to that; for they had all the creditors in the world dog- ging their heels. But April Fool gave it in favor of the Forty Days before Faster; because the debtors in all cases outnumbered the creditors, and they kept Lent all the year. All this while Valentine's Day kept conrting pretty May, who sat next him, slipping amorous hillets-doiix under the table, till the Dog Days (who are naturally of a warm constitution) began to be jealous, and to bark and rage exceedingly. Airril Fool, who likes a bit of sport 290 THE ESS A YS OF ELIA. above measure^ ami had some pretensions to the lady be- sides, as being but a cousin once removed, clapped and halloo'd them on; and as fast as their indignation cooled, those mad wags, tlie Einher Days, were at it with their bellows, to blow it into a flame; and all was in a ferment, till old Madam Sejduagesima (who boasts herself the Mother of the Days) wisely diverted the conversation with a tedious tale of the lovers which she could reckon Avhen she was young, and of one Master Rogation Day in ])q,v- ticular, who was forever putting the question to her; but she kept him at a distance, as the chronicle would tell — by which I apprehend she meant the Almanack. Then she rambled on to the Days that were gone, the good old Days, and so to the Days hefore the Flood — which plainly showed her old head to be little better than crazed and doited. Day being ended, the Days called for their cloaks and greatcoats, and took their leave. Lord Mayor's Day went off in a Mist, as usual; Shortest Day in a deep black Fog, that wrapped the little gentleman all round like a hedge-hog. Two Vigils — so watchmen are called in heaven — saw Ohristmas Day safe home — the}'' had been used to the business before. Another Vigil — a stout, sturdy patrol, called the Eve of St. Christopher — seeing Ash Wednesday in a condition little better than he should be — e^en whipped him over his shoulders, pick-a-back fashion, and Old Mortification went floating home singing: On tlie bat's back I do fly, and a number of old snatches besides, between drunk and sober; but very few Aves or Penitentiaries (you may be- lieve me) were among them. Longest Day set off west- ward in beautiful crimson and gold — the rest, some in one fashion, some in another; but Valentine and pretty May took their departure together in one of the prettiest silvery twilights a Lover's Day could wish to set in. OLD CHINA. 291 OLD CHINA. I HAVE an almost feminine partiality for old china. When I go to see any great house, I inquire for the china- closet, and next for the picture-gallery. I cannot defend the order of preference, but by saying that we have all some taste or other, of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering distinctly that it was an acquired one. I can call to mind the first play, and the first exhibition, that I was taken to; but I am not conscious of a time when china jars and saucers were introduced into my imagination. I had no repugnance then — why should I now have? — to those little, lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques, that, under the notion of men and women, float about, uncir- cumscribed by any element, in that world before perspec- tive — a china tea-cup. I like to see my old friends, whom distance cannot diminish, figuring up in the air (so they appear to our optics), yet on terra firma still — for so we must in courtesy interpret that speck of deeper blue, which the decorous artist, to prevent absurdity, had made to spring up beneath their sandals. I love the men with women's faces, and women, if pos- sible, with still more womanish expressions. Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, handing tea to a lady from a salver — two miles off. See how distance seems to set off respect! And here the same lady, or another — for likeness is identity on tea-cups — is stepping into a little fairy boat, moored on the hither side of this calm garden river, with a dainty mincing foot, which in a right angle of incidence (as angles go in our world) must infallibly land her in the midst of a flowery mead — a furlong off on the other side of the same strange stream! Further on — if far or near can be predicated of their world — see horses, trees, pagodas, dancing the hays. Here — a cow and rabbit couchant, and co-extensive — so objects show, seen through the lucid atmosphere of fine Cathav. I was pointing out to my cousin last evening, over our Hyson (which we are old-fashioned enough to drink un- 292 THE ESS A TS OF ELIA. mixed still of an afternoon), some of these s^jeciosa mir- acula upon a set of extraordinary old blue china (a recent purchase) which we were now for the first time using; and could not help remarking how favorable circumstances had been to us of late years, that we could afford to please the eye sometimes with trifles of this sort — when a passing sentiment seemed to overshade the brows of my companion. I am quick at detecting these summer clouds in Bridget. ^' I wish the good old times would come again," she said, '^when we were not quite so rich. I do not mean that I want to be poor; but there was a middle state," so she was pleased to ramble on, *' in which I am sure we were a great deal happier. A purchase is but a purchase, now that you have money enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph. When we coveted a cheap luxury (and, 0! how much ado I had to get you to con- sent in those times!) we were used to have a debate two or three days before, and to weigh the for and against, and think what we might sjoare it out of, and what saving we could hit upon, that should be an equivalent. A thing was worth buying then, when we felt the money that we paid for it. ^^ Do you remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you, till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare — and all because of that folio Beau- mont and Fletcher, which you dragged home late at night from Barker^s in Covent Garden? Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a determination till it was near ten o'clock of the Saturday night, when you set off from Islington, fearing you should be too late — and when the old book-seller with some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bed- ward) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures — and when you lugged it home, wishing it were twice as cum- bersome — and when you presented it to me — and when we were exploring the perfectness of it (collating, you called it) — and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves with paste, which your impatience would not suffer to be left till day-break — was there no pleasure in being a poor man? or can those neat black clothes which you wear now and are so careful to keep brushed, since we have become OLD CHINA. 293 rich and finiciil — give you half the honest vanity with which you flaunted it about in that overworn suit — your old corbeau — for four or five weeks longer than you should have done, to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen — or sixteen shillings was it? — a great affair we thougiit it then — which you had lavished on the old folio. Now you can afford to buy any book that pleases you, but I do not see that you ever bring me home any nice old pur- chases now. '' When you came home with twenty apologies for laying out a less number of shillings upon that print after Lion- ardo, which we christened the ' Lady Blanch ' when you looked at the purchase, and thought of the money — and thought of the money, and looked again at the picture — was there no pleasure in being a poor man? Now, you have nothing to do but to walk into Colnaghi^s, and buy a wilderness of Lionardos. Yet do you? " Then, do you remember our pleasant walks to Enfield, and Potter's bar, and Waltham, when we had a holiday — holidays and all other fun are gone now we are rich — and the little hand-basket in which I used to deposit our day's fare of savory cold lamb and salad — and how you would pry about at noon-tide for some decent house, where we might go in and produce our store — only paying for the ale that you must call for — and speculate upon the looks of the landlady, and whether she was likely to allow us a table- cloth — and wish for such another honest hostess as Izaak Walton has described many a one on the pleasant banks of the Lea, when he went a fishing — and sometimes they would prove obliging enough, and sometimes they would look grudgingly upon us — but we had cheerful looks still for one another, and would eat our plain food savorily, scarcely grudging Piscator his Trout Hall? Now, when we go out a day's pleasuring, which is seldom, moreover, we ride part of the way, and go into a fine inn, and order the best of dinners, never debating the expense, which, after all, never has half the relish of those chance country snaps, when we were at the mercy of uncertain usage, and a precarious welcome. '^ You are too proud to see a play anywhere now but in the pit. Do you remember where it was we used to sit, when we saw the Battle of Ilexham, and the Surrender of 294 THE EGSA YS OF ELIA. Calais, and Bannister and Mrs. Bland in the Children in the Wood — when we squeezed out our shilling apiece to sit three or four times in a season in the one- shilling galler}' — wliere you felt all the time that you ought not to have brought me — and more strongly I felt obli- gation to you for having brought me — and the pleasure was the better for a little shame — and when the curtain drew up, what care we for our place in the house, or what mattered it where we were sitting, when our thoughts were with Rosalind in Arden, or with Viola at the Court of Illyria? You used to say that the gallery was the best place of ail for enjoying a play socially; that the relish of such exhibitions must be in proportion to the infrequency of going; that the couipany we met there, not being in gen- eral readers of plays, were obliged to attend the more, and did attend, to what was going on on the stage, because a word lost would have been a chasm which it was impos- sible for them to fill u]). With such reflections we con- soled our pride then, and I appeal to you whether, as a woman, I met generally with less attention and accommo- dation than I have done since in more expensive situa- tions in the house? The getting in, indeed, and the crowding up those inconvenient staircases, was bad enough, but there was still a law of civility to women recognized to quite as great an extent as we ever found in other pas- sages, and how a little difficulty overcome heightened the snug seat and the play afterward! Now we can only pay our money and walk in. You cannot see, you say, in the galleries now. I am sure we saw, and heard too, well enough then, but sight, and all, I think, is gone with our poverty. '^ There was pleasure in eating strawberries before they became quite common; in the first dish of peas, while they were yet dear, to have them for a nice supper, a treat. What treat can we have now? If we were to treat our-. selves now — that is, to have dainties a little above our means, it would be selfish and wicked. It is the very little more that we allow ourselves beyond what the actual poor can get at, that makes what I call a treat — when two people living together as we have done, now and then indulge themselves in a cheap luxury, which both like; while each apologizes, and is willing to take both OLD cnWA. 295 halves of the blame to his single share. I see no harm in people making much of themselves, in that sense of the word. It may give them a hint how to make much of others. But now, what I mean by the word, we never do make much of ourselves. None but the poor can do it. I do not mean the veriest poor of all, but persons as we were, just above poverty. *' I know what you were going to say, that it is mighty pleasant at the end of the year to make all meet — and much ado we used to have every thirty-first night of De- cember to account for our exceedings — many a long face did you make over your puzzled accounts, and in contriv- ing to make it out liow we had spent so much, or that we had not spent so much, or that it was impossible we should spend so much next year, and still we found our slender capital decreasing; but then, betwixt ways, and projects, and compromises of one sort or another, and talk of curtailing this charge, and doing without that for the future, and the hope that youth brings, and laughing spirits (in which you were never poor till now), we pock- eted up our loss, and in conclusion, with Musty brimmers' (as we used to quote it out of hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton, as you called him), we used to welcome in the '^coming guest.' Now we have no reckoning at all at the end of the old year; no flattering promises about the new year doing better for us." Bridget is so sparing of her speech on most occasions, that when she gets into a rhetorical vein, I am careful how I interrupt it. I could not help, however, smiling at the phantom of wealth which her dear imagination had conjured up out of a clear income of poor hundred pounds a year. *^ It is true w^e were happier when we were poorer, but we were also younger, my cousin. I am afraid we must put up with the excess, for if we were to shake the superflux into the sea, we should not much mend ourselves. That Ave had much to struggle with, as we grew uj) together, we have reason to be most thankful. It strengthened and knit our compact closer. We could never have been what we have been to each other, if we had always had the sufficiency which you now complain of. The resisting power, those natural dilations of the youthful bpirit, which circumstances can 296 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. not straiten — with us are long since passed away. Com- petence to age is supplementary youth, a sorry supplement indeed, but I fear the best that is to be had. We must ride where we formally walked: live better and lie softer — and shall be wise to do so — than we had means to do in those good old days you speak of. Yet could those days return, could you and I once more walk our thirty miles a day, could Bannister and Mrs. Bland again be young, and you and I be young to see them, could the good old one shil- ling gallery days return — they are dreams, my cousin, now but could you and I at this moment, instead of this quiet argument, by our well-carpeted fireside, sitting on this luxurious sofa — be once more struggling up those incon- venient staircases, pushed about and squeezed, and elbowed by the poorest rabble of poor gallery scramblers — could I once more hear those anxious shrieks of yours, and the delicious Thanh God, we are safe, which always followed, when the topmost stair, conquered, let in the first light of the whole cheerful theater down beneath us — I know not the fathom line that ever touched a descent so deep as I would be willing to bury more wealth in than Croesus had, or the great Jew E is supposed to have, to purchase it. And now do just look at that merry little Chinese waiter holding an umbrella, big enough for a bed-tester, over the head of that pretty insipid half- Madonna-ish chit of a lady in that very blue summer- house.^^ THE CHILD ANGEL ; A DREAM. I CHAKCED upon the prettiest, oddest, fantastical thing of a dream the other night, that you shall hear of. I had been reading the ^^ Loves of the Angels," and went to bed with my head full of speculations, suggested by that extraordinary legend. It had given birth to innu- merable conjectures; and, I remember the last waking thought, which I gave expression to on my pillow, was a sort of wonder, " what could come of it?" I was suddenly transported, how or whither I could scarcely make out — but to some celestial region. It was not the real heavens, neither — not the downright bible heaven THE GUILD ANGEL; A DREAM. 207 — but ci kind of fairyland heaven, about which a poor human fancy may have leave to sport and air itself, I will hope, without presumption. Methought what wild things dreams are! I was present — at what would you imagine? — at an angeFs gossiping. Whence it came, or how it came, or who bid it come, or wliether it came purely of its own head, neither you nor I know; but there lay, sure enough, wrapt in its little cloudy swaddling-bands — a child ange-1. Sun-tlireuds — filmy beams — ran through the celestial napery of what seemed its princely cradle. All the winged orders hovered round, watching when the new-born should open its yet closed eyes; which when it did, first one and then ihe other, with a solicitude and apprehension, yet not sucli as, stained with fear, dim the expanding eyelids of mortal infants, but as if to explore its path in those its unhereditary palaces — what an inextinguishable titter that time spared not celestial visages! Nor wanted there to my seeming — 0, the inexplicable simpleness of dreams! — bowls of that cheering nectar, — which mortals caudle call below. Nor were wanting faces of female ministrants, stricken in years, as it might seem, so dexterous were those heavenly attendants to counterfeit kindly similitudes of earth, to greet with terrestrial child-rites the young inesent, which earth had made to heaven. Then were celestial harpings heard, not in full sym- phony, as those by which the spheres are tutored; but, as loudest instruments on earth speak oftentimes, muffled; so to accommodate their sound the better to the weak ears of the imperfect-born. And, with the noise of these sub- dued soundings, the Angelet sprang forth, fluttering its rudiments of pinions, but forthwith flagged and was re- covered into the arms of those full-winged angels. And a wonder it was to see how, as years went round in heaven, a year in dreams is as a day, continually its white shoulders put forth buds of wings, but wanting the perfect angelic nutriment, auon was shorn of its aspiring, and fell flutter- ing, still cauglit by angel hands, for ever to pnt forth shoots, and to fall fluttering, because its birth was not of the unmixed vigor of heaven. 298 ' THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. And a name was given to the Babe Angel, and it was to be called Ge- Urania, because its production was of earth and heaven. And it could not taste of death, by reason of its adoption into immortal palaces; but it was to know weakness, and reliance, and the shadow of human imbecility; and it went with a lame gait; but in its goings it exceeded all mortal children in grace and swiftness. Then pity first sprang up in angelic bosoms; and yearnings (like the human) touched them at the sight of the immortal lame one. And with pain did then first those Intuitive Essences, with pain and strife to their natures (not grief), put back their bright intelligences, and reduce their ethereal minds, schooling them to degrees and slower processes, so to adapt their lessons to the gradual illumination (as must needs be) of the half-earth born; and what intuitive notices they could not repel (by reason that their nature is to know all things at once) the half-heavenly novice, by the better part of its nature, aspired to receive into its understanding; so that Humility and Aspiration went on even-paced in the instruction of the glorious Amphibium. But, by reason that Mature Humanity is too gross to breathe the air of that super-subtile region, its portion was, and is, to be a child for ever. And because the human part of it might not press into the hearts and inwards of the palace of its adoption, those full-natured angels tended it by turns in the purlieus of the palace, where were shady groves and rivulets, like the green earth from which it came; so Love, with Voluntary Hu- mility, waited upon the entertainment of the new-adopted. And myriads of years rolled round (in dreams Time is nothing), and still it kept, and is to keep, perpetual child- hood, and is the Tutelar Genius of Childhood upon earth, and still goes lame and lovely. By the banks of the river Pison is seen, lone sitting by the grave of the terrestrial Adah, whom the angel Nadir loved, a Child; but not the same which I saw in heaven. A mournful hue overcasts its lineaments; nevertheless, a correspondency is between the child by the grave, and that celestial orphan, whom I saw above; and the dimness of the grief upon the heavenly, is a shadow or emblem of that which stains the beauty of the terrestrial. And this cor- respondency is not to be understood but by dreams. CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 299 And in the arcliives of liociveu I bud gnice to read, how thiit once the jingel Nadir, being exiled from his phice for mortal passion, upspringing on tbe wings of parental love (such power had parental love for a moment to suspend the else-irrevocable law) appeared for a brief instant in his station, and, depositing a wondrous Birth, straightway dis- appeared, and tbe palaces knew him no more. And this charge was the self-same Babe, who goeth lame and lovely, but Adah sleepeth by the river Pisou. CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKAED. Dehortatioxs from the use of strong liquors have been the favorite topic of sober declaimers in all ages, and have been received with abundance of applause by water- drinking critics. But with the patient himself, the man that is to be cured, unfortunately their sound has seldom prevailed. Yet the evil is acknowledged, the remedy simple. Abstain. No force can oblige a man to raise the glass to his head against his will. ""Tis as easy as not to steal, not to tell lies. Alas! the hand to pilfer, and the tongue to bear false witness, have no constitutional tendency. These are actions indifferent to them. At the first instance of the reformed will, they can be brought off without a murmur. The itch- ing finger is but a figure in speech, and the tongue of the liar can with the same natural delight give forth useful truths with which it has been accustomed to scatter their pernicious contraries. But when a man has commenced sot pause, thou sturdy moralist, thou person of stout nerves and a strong head, whose liver is hapjiily untouched, and ere thy gorge riseth at the name which I had written, first learn what tbe thing is; how much of compassion, how much of human allowance, thou mayest virtuously mingle with thy disapprobation. Trample not on the ruins of a man. Exact not, under so terrible a penalty as infamy, a resuscitation from a state of death almost as real as that from which Lazarus rose not but by a miracle. Begin a reformation, and custom will make it easy. But what if the beginning be dreadful, the first steps not like 300 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA, climbing a mountain but going through fire? what if the whole system must undergo a change violent as that which we conceive of the mutation of form in some insects? what if a process comparable to flaying alive be to be gone through? is the weakness that sinks under such struggles to be confounded with the pertinacity which clings to other vices, which have induced no constitutional necessity, no engagement of the whole victim, body and soul? I have known one in that state, when he has tried to abstain but for one evening, — though the poisonous potion had long ceased to bring back its first enchantments, though he was sure it would rather deepen his gloom than brighten it, — in the violence of the struggle, and the necessity he had felt of getting rid of the present sensation at any rate, I have known him to scream out, to cry aloud, for the anguish and pain of the strife within him. Why should I hesitate to declare that the man of whom I speak is myself ? I have no puling apology to make to mankind. I see them in one way or another deviating from the pure reason. It is to my own nature alone I am accountable for the woe that I have brought upon it. I believe that there are constitutions, robust heads and iron insides, whom scarce any excesses can hurt; whom brandy (I have seen them drink it like wine), at all events whom wine, taken in ever so plentiful a measure, can do no worse injury to than just to muddle their faculties, per- haps never very pellucid. On them this discourse is wasted. They would but laugh at a weak brother, who, trying his strength with them, and coming off foiled from the contest, would fain persuade them that such agonistic exercises are dangerous. It is to a very different descrip- tion of persons I speak. It is to the weak — the nervous; to those who feel the want of some artificial aid to raise their spirits in society to what is no more than the ordinary pitch of all around them without it. This is the secret of our drinking. Such must fly the convivial board in the first instance, if they do not mean to sell themselves for their term of life. Twelve years ago I had completed my six and-twentieth year. I had lived from the period of leaving school to that time pretty much in solitude. My companions were chiefly books, or at most one or two living ones of my own book- CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 301 ioving and sober stamp. I rose early, went to bed be- times, and tbe faculties wliicli God had given me, I have reason to think, did not rust in me unused. About that time I fell in with some companions of a different order. They were men of boisterous spirits, sitters up a-nights, disputants, drunken; yet seemed to have something noble about them. We dealt about the wit, or what passes for it after midnight, joviality. Of the quality called fancy I certainly possessed a larger share than my companions. Encouraged by their applause, I set up for a professed joker! I, who of all men am least fitted for such an occupation, having, in addition to the greatest difficulty which I experience at all times of find- ing words to express my meaning, a natural nervous im- pediment in my speech! Reader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any character but that of a wit. When you find a tickling relish upon your tongue disposing you to that sort of con- versation, especially if you find a preternatural flow of ideas setting in upon you at the first sight of a bottle and fresh glasses, avoid giving way to it as you would fly your greatest destruction. If you cannot crush the power of fancy, or that within you which you mistake for such, divert it, give it some other play. Write an essay, pen a character or description, but not as I do now, with tears trickling down your cheeks. To be an object of compassion to friends, of derision to foes; to be suspected by strangers, stared at by fools; to be esteemed dull when you cannot be witty: to be applauded for witty when you know that you have been dull; to be called upon for the extemporaneous exercise of that faculty which no premeditation can give; to be spurred on to efforts which end in contempt; to be set on to provoke mirth which procures the procurer hatred; to give ])leasure and be paid with squinting malice; to swallow draughts of life-destroying wine which are to be distilled into airy breath to tickle vain auditors; to mortgage miserable mor- rows for nights of madness; to waste whole seas of time upon those who pay it back in little inconsiderate drops of grudging applause, are the wages of buffoonery and death. Time, which has a sure stroke at dissolving all con- nections which have no solider fastenings than this liquid 302 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. cement, more kind to me than my own taste or penetra- tion, at length opened my eyes to the supposed qualities of my first friends. No trace of them is left but in the vices which they introduced, and the habits they infixed. In them my friends survive still and exercise ample re- tribution for any supposed infidelity that I may have been guilty of toward them. My next more immediate companions were and are per- sons of such intrinsic and felt worth, that though acciden- tally their acquaintance has proved pernicious to me, I do not know that if the thing were to do over again, I should have the courage to eschew the mischief at the price of for- feiting the benefit. I came to them reeking from the steams of my late overheated notions of companionship; and the slightest fuel which they unconsciously afforded, was sufficient to feed my own fires into a propensity. They were no drinkers; but, one from professional habits, and another from a custom derived from his father, smoked tobacco. The devil could not have devised a more subtle trap to re-take a backsliding penitent. The trans- ition, from gulping down draughts of liquid fire to puffing out innocuous blasts of dry smoke, was so like cheating him. But he is too hard for us when we hope to commute. He beats us at barter; and when we think to set off a new failing against an old infirmity, 'tis odds but he puts the trick upon us of two for one. That (comparatively) white devil of tobacco brought with him in the end seven worse than himself. It were impertinent to carry the reader through all the processes by which, from smoking at first with malt liquor, I took by degrees through thin wines, through stronger wine and water, through small punch to those juggling compositions, which under the name of mixed liquors, slur a great deal of brandy or other poison under less and less water continually, until they come next to none, and so to none at all. But it is hateful to disclose the secrets of my Tartarus. I should repel my readers, from a mere incapacity of believing me, were I to tell them what tobacco has been to me, the drudging service Avhich I have paid, the slavery "which I have vowed to it. How, when I have resolved to quit it, a feeling as of ingratitude has started up; how it CONFESSIONIS OF A DRUNKARD. 303 has put on personal claims and made the demands of a friend upon me. How the reading of it casually in a book, as where Adams takes his whiff in the chimney- corner of some inn in Joseph Andrews, or Piscator in the Complete Angler breaks his fast upon a morning pipe in that delicate room Piscatoribus Sacrum, has in a moment broken down the resistance of weeks. How a pipe was ever in my midnight path before me, till the vision forced me to realize it; how then its ascending vapors curled, its fragrance lulled, and the thousand delicious ministerings conversant about it, employing every faculty, extracted the sense of pain. How from illuminating it came to darken, from a quick solace it turned to a negative relief, thence to a restlessness and dissatisfaction, thence to a positive misery. How, even now, when the whole secret stands confessed in all its dreadful truth before me, I feel myself linked to it beyond the power of revocation. Bone of my bone Persons not accustomed to examine the motives of their actions, to reckon up the countless nails that rivet the chains of habit, or perhaps being bound by none so obdurate as those I have confessed to, may recoil from this as from an overcharged picture. But what short of such a bondage is it, which in spite of protesting friends, a weeping wife and a reprobating world, chains down many a poor fellow, of no original indisposition to goodness, to his pipe and his pot? I have seen a print after Correggio, in which three female figures are ministering to a man who sits fast bound at the root of a tree. Sensuality is soothing him. Evil Habit is nailing him to a branch, and Repugnance at the same instant of time is applying a snake to his side. In his face is feeble delight, the recollection of past rather than perception of present pleasures, languid enjoyment of evil with utter imbecility to good, a Sybaritic effemi- nacy, a submission to bondage, the springs of the will gone down like a broken clock, the sin and the suffering co-instantaneous, or the latter forerunning the former, remorse preceding action — all this represented in one point of time. When I saw this, I admired the wonderful skill of the painter. But when I went away, I wept, because I thought of my own condition. 304 THE ESSA TS OF ELIA. Of that there is no hope that it should ever change. The waters have gone over me. But out of the black depths, could I be heard, I would cry out to all those who have but set a foot in the perilous flood. Could the youth, to whom the flavor of his first wine is delicious as the opening scenes of life or the entering upon some newly- discovered paradise, look into my desolation, and be made to understand what a dreary thing it is when a man shall feel himself going down a precipice with open eyes and a passive will, to see his destruction and have no power to stop it, and yet to feel it all the way emanating from him- self; to perceive all goodness emptied out of him, and yet not to be able to forget a time when it was otherwise; to bear about the piteous spectacle of his own self-ruins: could he see my fevered eye, feverish with last night^s drinking, and feverishly looking for this night's repe- tition of the folly; could he feel the body of the death out of which I cry hourly with feebler and feebler outcry to be delivered, it were enough to make him dash the sparkling beverage to the earth in all the pride of its mantling temptation; to make liim clasp his teeth, and not undo 'em To suffer wet damnation to run tliro' em. Yea, but (methinks I hear somebody object) if sobriety be that fine thing you would have us to understand, if the comforts of a cool brain are to be preferred to that state of heated excitement which you describe and deplore, what hinders in your instance that you do not return to those habits from which you would induce others never to swerve? if the blessing be worth preserving, is it not worth recovering? Recovering I — if a wish could transport me back to those days of youth, when a draught from the next clear spring could slake any heats which summer suns and youthful exercise had power to stir up in the blood, how gladly would I return to thee, pure element, the drink of children and of child-like holy hermit! In my dreams I can sometimes fancy thy cool refreshment purling over my burning tongue. But my waking stomach rejects it. That which refreshes innocence only makes me sick and faint. But is there no middle way between total abstinence and CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. 305 the excess which kills you? For your sake, reader, and that you may never attain to my experience, with pain I must utter the dreadful truth, that there is none — none that I can find. In my stage of habit (I speak not of habits less confirmed — for some of them I believe the advice to be most prudential), in the stage which I have reached, to stop short of that measure which is sufficient to draw on torpor and sleep, the benumbing apopleptic sleep of the drunkard, is to have taken none at all. The pain of the self-denial is all one. And what that is, I had rather the reader should believe on my credit, than know from his own trial. He will come to know it, whenever he shall arrive in that state in which, paradoxical as it may appear, reason shall only visit him through intoxication; for it is a fearful truth, that the intellectual faculties by repeating acts of intemperance may be driven from their orderly sphere of action, their clear daylight ministeries, until they shall be brought at last to depend, for the faint manifesta- tion of their departing energies, upon the returning periods of the fatal madness to which they owe their devastation. The drinking man is never less himself than during his sober intervals. Evil is so far his good.* Behold me, then, in the robust period of life, reduced to imbecility and decay. Hear me count my gains, and the profits which I have derived from the midnight cup. Twelve years ago I was possessed of a healthy frame of mind and body. I was never strong, but I think my con- stitution (for a weak one) was as happily exempt from the tendency to any malady as it was possible to be. I scarce knew what it was to ail anything. Now, except when I am losing myself in a sea of drink, I am never free from those uneasy sensations in head and stomach, which are so much worse to bear than any definite pains or aches. At that time I was seldom in bed after six in the morn- ing, summer and winter. I awoke refreshed, and seldom without some merry thoughts in my head, or some piece * When poor M painted his last picture with a pencil in one trembling hand, and a glass of brandy and water in the other, his fingers owed the comparative steadiness with which they were enabled to go through their task in an imperfect manner, to a tem- porary firmness derived from a repetition of practices, the genera) effect of which had shaken both them and him so terribly, 306 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. of a song to welcome the new-born day. Now, the first feeling which besets me, after stretching out the hours of recumbence to their last possible extent, is a forecast of the wearisome day that lies before me, with a secret wish that I could have lain on still, or never awaked. Life itself, my waking life, has much of the confusion, the trouble, and obscure perplexity, of an ill dream. In the day time I stumble upon dark mountains. Business, which, though never very particularly adapted to my nature, yet as something of necessity to be gone through, and therefore best undertaken with cheerfulness, I used to enter upon with some degree of alacrity, now wearies, affrights, perplexes me. I fancy all sorts of dis- couragements, and am ready to give up an occupation which gives me bread, from a harassing conceit of inca- pacity. The slightest commission given me by a friend, or any small duty which I have to perform for myself, as giving orders to a tradesman, etc., haunts me as a labor impossible to be got through. So much the springs of action are broken. The same cowardice attends me in all my intercourse with mankind. I dare not promise that a friend^s honor, or his cause, would be safe in my keeping, if I were put to the expense of any manly resolution in defending it. So much the springs of moral action are deadened within me. My favorite occupations in times past now cease to entertain. I can do nothing readily. Application for ever so short a time kills me. This poor abstract of my condition was penned at long intervals; with scarcely an attempt at connection of thought, which is now difficult to me. The noble passages which formerly delighted me in history or poetic fiction now only draw a few tears, allied to dotage. My broken and dispirited nature seems to sink before anything great and admirable. I perpetually catch myself in tears, for any cause, or none. It is inexpressible how much this infirmity adds to a sense of shame, and a general feeling of deterioration. These are some of the instances, concerning which I can say with truth, that it was not always so with me. Shall I lift up the veil of my weakness any further? or is this disclosure sufficient? POPULAR FALLACIES. 30? I am a poor nameless egotist, who liiive no vanity to con- sult by these Confessions. I know not whether I shall be laughed at, or heard seriously. Such as they are, I com- mend them to the reader's attention, if he find his own case any way touched. I have told him what I am come to. Let him stop in time. POPULAE FALLACIES. I. — THAT A BULLY IS ALWAYS A COWARD. This axiom contains a principle of compensation, which disposes us to admit the truth of it. But there is no safe trusting to dictionaries and definitions. We should more willingly fall in with this popular language, if we did not find brutality sometimes awkwardly coupled with valor in the same vocabulary. The comic writers, with their poetical justice, have contributed not a little to mislead us upon this point. To see a hectoring fellow exposed and beaten upon the stage, has something in it wonderfully diverting. Some people^'s share of animal spirit is notori- ously low and defective. It has not strength to raise a vapor, or furnish out the wind of a tolerable bluster. These love to be told that huffing is no part a valor. The truest courage witli them is that which is the least noisy and obtrusive. But confront one of these silent heroes with the swaggerer of real life, and his confidence in the theory quickly vanishes. Pretensions do not uniformly bespeak non-performance. A modest, inoffensive deport- ment does not necessarily imply valor; neither does the absence of it justify us in denying that quality. Hick- man wanted modesty — we do not mean him of Clarissa — but who ever doubted his courage? Even the poets — upon whom this equitable distribution of qualities should be most binding — have thought it agreeable to nature to de- part from the rule upon occasion. Harapha, in the '^Agonistes," is indeed a bully upon the received notions. Milton has made him at once a blusterer, a giant, and a dastard. But Almanzor, in Dryden, talks of driving armies singly before him — and does it. Tom Brown had a shrewder insight into this kind of character than either of his predecessors. lie divides the palm more equably, 308 THE ESS A YS OF ELIA. ana allows his hero a sort of dimidiate pre-eminence: ^' Bully Dawson kicked by half the town, and half the town kicked by Bully Dawson." This was true distribu- tive justice. II. — THAT ILL-GOTTEiq" GAIK ]N"EVER PROSPERS. The weakest part of mankind have this saying com- monest in their mouth. It is the trite consolation admin- istered to the easy dupe, when he has been tricked out of his money or estate, that the acquisition of it will do the owner no good. But the rogues of this world — the pru- denter part of them at least, know better; and if the observation had been as true as it is old, would not have failed by this time to have discovered it. They have pretty sharp distinctions of the fluctuating and the perma- nent. "Lightly come, lightly go," is a proverb which they can very well afford to leave, when they leave little else, to the losers. They do not always find manors, got by rapine or chicanery, insensibly to melt away as the poets will have it; or that all gold glides, like thawing snow, from the thief^s hand that grasjDS it. Church land, alienated to lay uses, was formerly denounced to have this slippery quality. But some portions of it somehow always stuck so fast that the denunciators have been fain to postpone the prophecy of refundment to a late posterity. III. — THAT A MAK MUST NOT LAUGH AT HIS OWl^" JEST. The severest exaction surely ever invented upon the self-denial of poor human nature! This is to expect a gentleman to give a treat without partaking of it; to sit esurient at his own table, and commend the flavor of his venison upon the absurd strength of his never touching it himself. On the contrary, we love to see a wag taste his own joke to his party; to watch a quirk or a merry conceit flickering upon the lips some seconds before the tongue is delivered of it. If it be good, fresh, and racy — begotten of the occasion; if he that utters it never thought it before, he is 'naturally the first to be tickled with it, and any sup- pression of such com^^lacence we hold to be churlish and insulting. What does it seem to imply but that your POPULAR FALLACIES. 309 company is weak or foolish to be moved by an image or a fancy, that shall stir you not at all, or but faintly? This is exactly the Iiiunor of the fine gentleman in Mandeville, who, while he dazzles his guests with the display of some costly toy, affects himself to '^see nothing considerable in it." IV. — THAT SUCH A ON"E SHOWS HIS BREEDIN"G — THAT IT IS EASY TO PERCEIVE HE IS NO GENTLEMA^ST. A SPEECH from the poorest sort of people, which always indicates that the party vituperated is a gentleman. The very fact which they deny, is that which galls and exas- perates them to use this language. The forbearance with which it is usually received is a proof what interpretation the by-stander sets upon it. Of a kin to this, and still less politic, are the phrases with which, in their street rhetoric, they ply one another more grossly; He is a poor creature. He lias not a rag to cover , etc.; though this last, we confess, is more frequently applied by females to females. They do not perceive that the satire glances upon themselves. A poor man, of all things in the world, should not upbraid an antagonist with poverty. Are there no other topics — as, to tell him his father was hanged, his sister, etc., without exposing a secret which should be kept snug between them; and doing an affront to the order to which they have the honor equally to be- long? All this while they do not see how the wealthier man stands by and laughs in his sleeve at both. V. — THAT THE POOR COPY THE VICES OF THE RICH. A SMOOTH text to the latter; and, preached from the pulpit, is sure of a docile audience from the pews lined with satin. It is twice sitting upon velvet to a foolish squire to be told that he, and not pei^verse nature, as the homilies would make us imagine, is the true cause of all the irregularities in his parish. This is striking at the root of free-will indeed, and denying the originality of sin in any sense. But men are not such implicit sheep as this comes to. If the abstinence from evil on the part of the upper classes is to derive itself from no higher principle than the 310 TEE ESSA T8 OF ELIA. apprehension of setting ill patterns to the lower, we beg leave to discharge them from all squeamishness on that score: they may even take their fill of pleasures, where they can find them. The Genius of Poverty, hampered and straitened as it is, is not so barren of invention but it can trade upon the staple of its own vice, without drawing upon their capital. The poor are not quite such servile imitators as they take them for. Some of them are very clever artists in their way. Here and there, we find an original. Who taught the poor to steal — to pilfer? They did not go to the great for school-masters in these faculties surely. It is well if in some vices they allow us to be — no copyists. In no other sense is it true that the poor copy them, than as servants may be said to take after their mas- ters and mistresses, when they succeed to their reversionary cold meats. If the master, from indisposition, or some other cause, neglect his food, the servant dines notwith- standing. '' 0, but (some will say) the force of example is great." We knew a lady who was so scrupulous on this head that she would put up with the calls of the most impertinent visitor rather than let her servant say she was not at home, for fear of teaching her maid to tell an untruth; and this in the very face of the fact, which she knew well enough, that the wench was one of the greatest liars upon the earth without teaching; so much so, that her mistress possibly never heard two words of consecutive truth from her in her life. But nature must go for nothing; exam- ple must be everything. This liar in grain, who never opened her mouth without a lie, must be guarded against a remote inference, which she (pretty casuist!) might pos- sibly draw from a form of words — literally false, but essen- tially deceiving no one — that under some circumstances a fib might not be so exceedingly sinful — a fiction, too, not at all in her own way, or one that she could be suspected of adopting, for few servant- wenches care to be denied to visitors. This word example reminds us of another fine word which is in use upon these occasions — encouragement, '^ People in our sphere must not be thought to give encouragement to such proceedings." To such a frantic height is this pri!iciple capable of being carried that we have known in- POPULAR FALLACIES. 311 dividuals who have tliought it within the scope of their in- fluence to sanction despair, and give eclat to suicide. A domestic in the family of a country member hxtely de- ceased, from love, or some unknown cause, cut his throat, but not successfully. The poor fellow was otherwise much loved and respected; and great interest was used in his be- half, upon his recovery, that he might be permitted to re- tain his place; his word being first pledged, not without some substantial sponsors to promise for him, that the like should never happen again. His master was inclinable to kee23 him, but his mistress thought otherwise; and John in the end was dismissed, her ladyship declaring that she *^ could not think of encouraging any such doings in the county. ^^ VI. — THAT ENOUGH IS AS GOOD AS A FEAST. Not a man, woman, or child, in ten miles round Guild- hall, who really believes this saying. The inventor of it did not believe it himself. It was made in revenge by somebody, who was disappointed of a regale. It is a vile, cold-scrag- of-mutton sophism; a lie palmed upon the palate, which knows better things. If nothing else could be said for a feast, this is sufficient, that from the super- flux there is usually something left for the next day. Morally interpreted, it belongs to a class of proverbs which have a tendency to make us undervalue money. Of this cast are those notable observations, that money is not health; riches cannot purchase everything: the metaphor which makes gold to be mere muck, with the morality which traces fine clothing to the sheep^'s back, and de- nounces pearl as the unhandsome excretion of an oyster. Hence, too, the phrase which imputes dirt to acres, a sophistry so barefaced that even the literal sense of it is true only in a wet season. This, and abundance of similar sage saws assuming to inculcate content, we verily be- lieve to have been the invention of some cunning bor- rower, who had designs upon the purse of his wealthier neighbor, which he could only ho2:»e to carry by force of these verbal jugglings. Translate any one of these say- ings out of the artful metonymy which envelopes it, and the trick is apparent. Goodly legs and shoulders of 31^ ■ THE ES8A TS OF ELI A. mutton, exhilarating cordials, books, pictures, the oppor- tunities of seeing foreign countries, independence, heart's ease, a man's own time to himself, are not muck, however we may be pleased to scandalize with that appellation the faithful metal that provides them for us. VII. — OF TWO DISPUTAKTS, THE WARMEST IS GEI^ERALLY T^ THE WROKG. Our experience would lead us to quite an opposite con- clusion. Temper, indeed, is no test of proof; but warmth and earnestness are a proof at least of a man's own con- viction of the rectitude of that which he maintains. Coolness is as often the result of an unprincipled indiffer- ence to truth or falsehood, as of a sober confidence in a man's own side in a dispute. Nothing is more insulting sometimes than the appearance of this philosophic temper. There is little Titubus, the stammering law- stationer in Lincoln's Inn — we have seldom known this shrewd little fellow engaged in an argument where we were not con- vinced he had the best of it, if his tongue would but fairly have seconded him. When he has been spluttering excellent broken sense for an hour together, writhing and laboring to be delivered of the point of dispute, the very gist of the controversy knocking at his teeth, which like some obstinate iron grating still obstructed its deliverance, its puny frame convulsed, and face reddening all oyer at an unfairness in the logic which he wanted articulation to expose, it has moved our gall to see a smooth, portly fellow of an adversary, that cared not a button for the merits of the question, by merely laying his hand upon the head of the stationer, and desiring him to be calm (your tall disputants have always the advantage), with a provoking sneer carry the argument clean from him in the opinion of all the by-standers, who have gone away clearly convinced that Titubus must have been in the wrong, be- cause he was in a passion; and that Mr. , meaning his opponent, is one of the fairest and at the same time one of the most dispassionate arguers breathing. POPULAR FALLACIES. 313 VIII. — THAT VERBAL ALLUSIONS ARE NOT WIT, BECAUSE THEY WILL NOT BEAR A TRANSLATION. The same might be said of the wittiest local allusions. A custom is sometimes as difficult to explain to a foreigner as a pun. AVhat would become of a great part of the wit of the last age, if it were tried by this test? How would certain topics, as aldermanity, cuckoldry, have sounded to a Terentian auditory, though Terence himself had been alive to translate them? Se?iator tirbamis with Curruca to boot for a synonym, would but faintly have done the business. Words, involving notions, are hard enough to render; it is too much to expect us to trans- late a sound, and give an elegant version to a jingle. The Virgilian harmony is not translatable but by substitut- ing harmonious sounds in another language for it. To Latinize a pun, we must seek a pun in Latin that will answer to it; as, to give an idea of the double endings in Hudibras, we must have recourse to a similar practice in old monkish doggrel. Dennis, the fiercest oppugner of 2)uns in ancient or modern times^ professes himself highly tickled with the ^^a stick/^ chiming to *^ ecclesiastic." Yet what is this but a species of pun, a verbal consonance? IX. — THAT THE WORST PUNS ARE THE BEST. If by worst be only meant the most far-fetched and startling, we agree to it. A pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect. It is an antic which does not stand upon manners, but comes bounding into the presence, and does not show the less comic for being dragged in sometimes by the head and shoulders. What though it limp a little, or prove defective in one leg? all the better. A pun may easily be too curious and artificial. AVho has not at one time or other been at a party of pro- fessors (himself perhaps an old offender in that line), where, after ringing a round of the most ingenious conceits, every man contributing his shot, and some there the most expert shooters of the day; after making a poor word run the gauntlet till it is ready to drop; after hunting and winding it through all the possible ambages of similar sounds; after 314 THE ESSA Y8 OF ELIA. squeezing, and hauling, and tugging at it, till the very milk of it will not yield a drop further, suddenly some obscure, unthought-of fellow in a corner, who was never ^prentice to the trade, whom the company for very pity passed over, as we do by a known poor man when a money- subscription is going round, no one calling upon him for his quota — has all at once come out with something so whimsical, yet so pertinent; so brazen in its pretensions, yet so impossible to be denied; so exquisitely good, and so deplorably bad, at the same time — that it has proved a Robin Hood's shot; anything ulterior to that is despaired of; and the party breaks up, unanimously voting it to be the very worst (that is, best) pun of the evening. This species of wit is the better for not being perfect in all its parts. What it gains in completeness it loses in natural- ness. The more exactly it satisfies the critical the less hold it has upon some other faculties. The puns which are most entertaining are those which will least bear an analysis. Of this kind is the following, recorded with a sort of stigma, in one of Swift's Miscellanies. An Oxford scholar, meeting a porter who was carrying a hare through the streets, accosts him with this extra- ordinary question; *^ Prithee, friend, is that thy own hair or a wig?" There is no excusing this, and no resisting it. A man might blur ten sides of 23aper in attempting a defence of it against a critic who should be laughter-proof. The quibble in itself is not considerable. It is only a new turn given by a little false pronunciation to a very common though not very courteous inquiry. Put by one gentleman to another at a dinner-party, it would have been vapid; to the mistress of the house, it would have shown much less wit than rude- ness. We must take in the totality of time, place, and 23erson; the pert look of the inquiring scholar, the despond- ing looks of the puzzled porter; the one stopping at leisure, the other hurrying on with his burden; the innocent though rather abrupt tendency of the first member of the question, with the utter and inextricable irrelevancy of the second; the place, a public street, not favorable to frivolous investi- gations; the affrontive quality of the primitive inquiry (the common question) invidiously transferred to the derivative (the new turn given to it) in the implied satire; namely, POPULAR FALLACIES. 315 that few of that tribe are expected to eat of the good things whicli they carry, they being in most conntries con- sidered ratlier as the temporary trustees than owners of such dainties, which the fellow was beginning to understand; but then the wig again conies in, and he can make nothing of it; all put together constitute a picture; Hogarth could have made it intelligible on canvas. Yet nine out of ten critics will pronounce this a very bad pun, because of the defectiveness in the concluding member, which is its very beauty, and constitutes the surprise. The same person shall cry up for admirable the cold quibble from Virgil about the broken Cremona;* because it is made out in all its parts, and leaves nothing to the imagination. AVe venture to call it cold ; because, of thousands who have admired it, it would be difficult to find one who has heartily chuckled at it. As appealing to the judgment merely (setting the risible faculty aside), we must pronounce it a monument of curious felicity. But as some stories are said to be too good to be true, it may with equal truth be asserted of this biverbal allusion that it is too good to be natural. One cannot help suspecting that the incident was invented to fit the line. It would have been better had it been less perfect. Like some Virgilian hemistichs, it has suffered by filling up. The nimium Vicina was enough in conscience; the Cremojice afterward loads it. It is, in fact, a double pun; and we have always observed that a superfoetation in this sort of wit is dangerous. When a man has said a good thing, it is seldom politic to follow it up. We do not care to be cheated a second time; or, perhaps the mind of man (with reverence be it spoken) is not capacious enough to lodge two puns at a time. The impression, to be forcible, must be simultaneous and undivided. X. — THAT HANDSOME IS THAT HANDSOME DOES. Those who use this proverb can never have seen Mrs. Conrady. The soul, if we may believe Plotinus, is a ray from the celestial beauty. As she partakes more or less of this *Swih. 316 THE ESSA 7S OF ELIA. heavenly light, she informs, with corresponding characters, the fleshy tenement which she chooses, and frames to her- self a suitable mansion. All which only proves that the soul of Mrs. Conrady, in her pre-existent state, was no great judge of archi- tecture. To the same effect, in a hymn in honor of beauty, divine Spenser jjlatonisiiig sings : Every spirit as it is more pure, And liatli in it tlie more of heavenly liglit. So it the fairer body dotli procure To liabit in, and it more fairly diglit With cheerful grace and amiable sight. For of the soul the body form doth take: For soul is form, and doth the body make. But Spenser, it is clear, never saw Mrs. Conrady. These poets, we find, are no safe guides in philosophy; for here, in his very next stanza but one, is a saving clause, which throws us all out again, and leaves us as much to seek as ever: Yet oft it falls, that many a gentle mind Dwells in deformed tabernacle drown'd. Either by chance, against the course of kind. Or through unaptness in the substance found, Which it assumed of some stubborn ground. That will not yield unto her form's direction, But is performed with some foul imperfection. From which it would follow that Spenser had seen some- body like Mrs. Conrady. The spirit of this good lady — her previous anima — must have stumbled upon one of these untoward tabernacles which he speaks of. A more rebellious commodity of clay for a ground, as the poet calls it, no gentle mind, and sure hers is one of the gentlest, ever had to deal with. Pondering ujDon her inexplicable visiage — inexplicable, we mean, but by this modification of the theory — we have come to a conclusion that, if one must be plain i-t is better to be plain all over, than amid a tolerable residue of features to hang out one that shall be exceptionable. Iso one can say of Mrs. Conrady's countenance that it would be better if she had but a nose. It is impossible to POPULAR FALLACIES. 317 pull her to pieces in this manner. We have seen the most malicious beauties of lier own sex baffled in the attempt at a selection. The lotU-cu.^cmble delies particuhirizing. It is too complete — too consistent, as we say — to admit of these invidious reservations. It is not as if some Apelles had picked out here a lip — and there a chin — out of the collected ugliness of Greece, to frame a model by. It is a symmetrical whole. We challenge the minutest con- noisseur to cavil at any part or parcel of the countenance in question; to say that this, or that, is improperly placed. We are conyinced that true ugliness, no less than is affirmed of true beauty, is the result of harmony. Like that, too, it reigns without a competitor. No one ever saw Mrs. Conrady without pronouncing her to be the plainest woman that he ever met with in the course of his life. The first time that you are indulged with a sight of her face, is an era in your existence ever after. You are glad to have seen it — like Sconehenge. No one can pretend to forget it. No one ever apologized to her for meeting her in the street on such a day and not knowing her: the pretext would be too bare. Nobody can mistake her for another. Nobody can say of her, " I think I have seen that face somewhere, but I cannot call to mind where." You must remember that in such a parlor it first struck you — like a bust. You wondered where the owner of the house had picked it up. You wondered more when it began to move its lips — so mildly too! No one ever thought of asking her to sit for her picture. Lockets are for remembrance; and it would be clearly superfluous to hang an image at your heart, which, once seen, can never be out of it. It is not a mean face either; its entire originality precludes that. Neither is it of that order of plain faces which improve upon acquaintance. Some very good but ordinary people, by an unwearied perseverance in good offices, put a cheat upon our eyes; juggle our senses out of their natural impres- sions; and set us upon discovering good indications in a countenance, which at first sight promised nothing less. We detect gentleness, which had escaped us, lurking about an under lip. But when Mrs. Conrady has done you a service, her face remains the same; when she has done you a thousand, and you know that she is ready to double the number, still it is that individual face. Neither can you 318 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. say of it, that it would be a good face if it were not marked by the small-pox — a compliment which is alwa3/s more admissive than excusatory — for either Mrs. Conrady never had the small-pox; or, as we say, took it kindly. No, it stands upon its own merits fairly. There it is. It is her mark, her token; that which she is known by. XI. — THAT AVE MUST NOT LOOK A GIFT HORSE IN THE MOUTH : Nor a lady's age in the parish register. We hope we have more delicacy than to do either; but some faces spare us the trouble of these dental inquiries. And what if the beast, which my friend would force upon my ac- ceptance, prove, upon the face of it, a sorry Eosinante, a lean, ill-favored jade, whom no gentleman could think of setting up in his stables? Must I, rather than not be obliged to my friend, make her a comjoanion to Eclipse or Lightfoot? A horse-giver, no more than a horse-seller, has a right to palm his spavined article upon us for good ware. An equivalent is expected in either case; and, with my own good-will, I could no more be cheated out of my thanks than out of my money. Some people have a knack of putting upon you gifts of no real value, to engage you to substantial gratitude. We thank them for nothing. Our friend Mitis carries this humor of never refusing a present to the very point of absurdity — if it were possible to couple the ridiculous with so much mis- taken delicacy and real good-nature. Not an apartment in his fine house (and he has a true taste in household decora- tions), but is stuffed up with some preposterous print or mirror — the worst adapted to his panels that may be — the presents of his friends that know his weakness; while his noble Vandykes are displaced to make room for a set of daubs, the work of some wretched artist of his acquaint- ance, who, having had them returned upon his hands for bad likenesses, finds his account in bestowing them here gratis. The good creature has not the heart to mortify the painter at the expense of an honest refusal. It is pleasant (if it did not vex one at the same time) to see him sitting in his dining parlor, surrounded with obscure aunts and cousins to God knows whom, while the true Lady Marys POPULAR FALLACIES. 319 and Lady Bettys of liis own honorable family, in favor to these adopted friglits, are consigned to the staircase and the lumber- room. In like manner, his goodly shelves are one by one stripped of his favorite old authors, to give place to a col- lection of presentation copies — the flour and bran of modern l)()etry. A presentation copy, reader — if haply you are yet in- nocent of snch favors — is a copy of a book which does not sell, sent yon by the author, with his foolish autograph at the beginning of it; for which, if a stranger, he oidy demands your friendship; if a brother author, he expects from you a book of yours, which does sell, in return. We can sjieak to ex- perience, having by us a tolerable assortment of these gift- horses. Not to ride a metaphor to death, we are willing to acknowledge that in some gifts there is sense. A dupli- cate out of a friend^s library (where he has more than one copy of a rare author) is intelligible. There are favors, short of the pecuniary — a thing not fit to be hinted at among gentlemen — which confer as much grace upon the acceptor as the offerer; the kind, we confess, which is most to our palate, is of those little conciliatory missives, which for their vehicle generally choose a hamper — little odd presents of game, fruit, perhaps wine — though it is essen- tial to the delicacy of the latter that it be home-made. We love to have our friend in the country sitting thus at our table by proxy; to apprehend his presence (though a hundred miles may be between us) by a turkey, whose goodly aspect reflects to us his ^^ plump corpusculum;" to taste him in grouse or woodcock; to feel him gliding down in the toast peculiar to the latter; to concorporate him in a slice of Canterbury brawn. This is indeed to have him within ourselves; to know him intimately; such participa- tion is, methinks, nnitive, as the old theologians phrase it. For these considerations we should be sorry if certain re- strictive regulations, which are thought to bear hard upon the peasantry of this country, were entirely done away with. A hare, as the law now stands,makes many friends. Cains conciliates Titius (knowing his goill) with a leash of partridges. Titius (suspecting his partiality for them)i)asses them to Lucius, who, in his turn, preferring his friend's relish to his own, makes them over to Marcius; till in their ever-widening progress, and round of unconscious circum- migration, they distribute the seeds of harmony over half 320 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. a parish. We are well-disposed to this kind of sensible remembrances; and are the less apt to be taken by those little airy tokens — impalpable to the palate — which, under the names of rings, lockets, keepsakes, amuse some peoj^le's fancy mightily. We could never away with these indigest- ible trifles. They are the very kickshaws and foppery of friendship. XII. — THAT HOME IS HOME THOUGH IT IS NEVER SO HOMELY. Homes there are, we are sure, that are no homes; the home of the very poor man, and another which we shall speak of presently. Crowded places of cheap entertain- ment, and the benches of alo-houses, if they could speak, might bear mournful testimony to the first. To them the very poor man resorts for an image of the home which he cannot find at home. For a starved grate, and a scanty firing, that is not enough to keep alive the natural heat in the fingers of so many shivering children with their mother, he finds in the depths of winter always a blazing hearth, and a hob to warm his pittance of beer by. Instead of the clamors of a wife, made gaunt by famish- ing, he meets with a cheerful attendance beyond the merits of the trifle which he can afford to spend. He has companions which his home denies him, for the very poor man has no visitors. He can look into the goings on of the world, and speak a little to politics. At home there are no politics stirring but the domestic. All interests, real or imaginary, all topics that should expand the mind of man, and connect him to a sympathy with general existence, are crushed in the absorbing consideration of food to be obtained for the family. Beyond the price of bread, news is senseless and impertinent. At home there is no larder. Here there is at least a show of plenty; and while he cooks his lean scrap of butcher's meat before the common bars, or munches his humbler cold viands, his relishing bread and cheese with an onion, in a corner, where no one reflects upon his poverty, he has a sight of the substantial joint providing for the landlord and his family. He takes an interest in the dressing of it; and while he assists in removing the trivet from the fire, he feels that POPULAR FALLACIES. 321 there is such a thing as beef and cabbage, which he was beginning to forget at home. All this while he deserts his wife and children. But what wife, and what children! Prosperous men, who object to this desertion, imagine to themselves some clean contented family like that which they go home to. But look at the countenance of the poor wives who follow and persecute their good man to the door of the public house, which he is about to enter, when something like shame would restrain him, if stronger misery did not induce him to pass the threshold. That face, ground by want, in which every cheerful, every con- versable lineament has been long effaced by misery, is that a face to stay at home with? is it more a woman, or a wild cat? alas I it is the face of the wife of his youth, that once smiled npon him. It can smile no longer. What com- forts can it share? wdiat burthens can it lighten? Oh, ^tis a fine thing to talk of the humble meal shared together! But what if there be no bread in the cupboard? The in- nocent prattle of his children takes out the sting of a man's poverty. But the children of the very poor do not prattle. It is none of the least frightful features in that condition, that there is no childishness in its dwellings. Poor people, said a sensible old nurse to us once, do not bring np their children; they drag them ujd. The little careless darling of the wealthier nursery, in their hovel is transformed betimes into a premature re- flecting person. Xo one has time to dandle it, no one thinks it worth while to coax it, to soothe it, to toss it up and down, to humor it. There is none to kiss away its tears. If it cries, it can only be beaten. It has been j^rettily said, that '' a babe is fed with milk and praise." But the ailment of this poor babe was thin, unnourishing; the return to its little baby tricks, and eiforts to engage attention, bitter ceaseless objurgation. It never had a toy, or knew what a coral meant. It grew up without the lullaby of nurses, it was a stranger to the patient fondle, the hushing cares, the attracting novelty, the costlier plaything, or the cheaper off-hand contrivance to divert the child; the prattled nonsense (best sense to it), the wise impertinences, the wholesome lies, the apt story interposed, that puts a stop to present sufferings, and awakens the passions of ^oung wonder. It was never 322 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. sung to — no one ever told to it a tale of the nursery. It was dragged up, to live or to die as it ha^Dpened. It had no young dreams. It broke at once into the iron realities of life. A child exists not for the very poor as any object of dalliance; it is only another mouth to be fed, a pair of little hands to be betimes inured to labor. It is the rival, till it can be the co-operator, for food with the l^arent. It is never his mirth, his diversion, his solace: it never makes him young again, with recalling his young times. The children of the very poor have no young times. It makes the very heart to bleed to overhear the casual street-talk between a poor woman and her little girl, a woman of the better sort of poor, in a condition rather above the squalid beings which we have been con- templating. It is not of toys, of nursery books, of summer holidays (fitting that age): of the promised sight, or play; of j)raised sufficiency at school. It is of mangling and clear-starching, of the price of coals, or of potatoes. The questions of the child, that should be the very outpourings of curiosity in idleness, are marked with forecast and melancholy providence. It has come to be a woman before it was a child. It has learned to go to market; it chaffers, it haggles, it envies, it murmurs; it is knowing, acute, sharpened; 'it never prattles. Had we not reason to say that the home of the very poor is no home? There is yet another home, which we are constrained to deny to be one. It has a larder, which the home of the poor man wants; its fireside conveniences, of which the poor dream not. But with all this, it is no home. It is — the house of a man that is infested with many visitors. May we be branded for the veriest churl, if we deny our heart to the many noble-hearted friends that at times exchange their dwelling for our poor roof! It is not of guests that we complain, but of endless, purposeless visitants; droppers-in, as they are called. We sometimes wonder from what sky they fall. It is the very error of the position of our lodging; its horoscopy was ill calcu- lated, being just situate in a medium — a plaguy suburban mid-space — fitted to catch idlers from town or country. We are older than we were, and age is easily put out of its way. We have fewer sands in our glass to reckon upon, and we cannot brook to see them drop in endlessly succeed- POPULAR FALLACIES. 323 ing impertinences. At our time of life, to be alone some- times is as needful as sleep. It is tlie refreshing sleep of the day. The growing infirmities of age manifest them- selves in nothing more strongly than in an inveterate dis- like of interruption. The thing which we are doing, we wish to be permitted to do. We have neither much knowledge nor devices; but there are fewer in the place to which we hasten. We are not willingly put out of our way, even at a game of nine-pins. While youth was, we had vast reversions in time future; we are reduced to a present pittance, and obliged to economize in that article. We bleed away our moments now as hardly as our ducats. We cannot bear to have our thin wardrobe eaten and fretted into by moths. We are willing to barter our good time with a friend, who gives us in exchange his own. Herein is the distinction between the genuine guest and the visitant. This latter takes your good time, and gives you his bad in exchange. The guest is domestic to you as your good cat, or household bird; the visitant is your fly, that flaps in at your window and out again, leaving nothing but a sense of disturbance and victuals spoiled. The inferior functions of life begin to move heavily. We can not concoct our food with interruptions. Our chief meal, to be nutritive, must be solitary. With difficulty we can eat before a guest; and never understood what the relish of public feasting meant. Meats have no sapor, nor digestion fair play, in a crowd. The unexpected coming in of a visitant stops the machine. There is a punctual generation who time their calls to the precise commencement of your dining-hour — not to eat — but to see you eat. Our knife and fork drop instinctively, and we feel that we have swal- lowed our latest morsel. Others again show their genius, as we have said, in knocking the moment you have just sat down to a book. They have a peculiar compassionate sneer, with which they ^' hope that they do not interrupt your studies. ^^ Though they flutter off the next moment, to carry their impertinences to the nearest student that they can call their friend, the tone of the book is spoiled; we shut the leaves, and with Dante's lovers, read no more that day. It were well if the effect of intrusion were simply co-extensive with its presence, but it mars all the good hours afterward. These scratches in appearance 324 THE ES8A TS OF ELIA, leave an orifice that closes not hastily. ''^ It is a prosti- tution of the bravery of friendship/^ says worthy Bishop Taylor, ^' to spend it upon impertinent people, who are, it may be, loads to their families, but can never ease m.y loads. This is the secret of their gaddings, their visits, and morning calls. They too have homes, which are — no homes. XIII. — THAT YOU MUST LOVE ME AN^D LOVE MY DOG. '^GooD sir, or madam, as it may be, we most willingly embrace the offer of your friendship. We have long known your excellent qualities. We have wished to have you nearer to us; to hold you within the very innermost fold of our heart. We can have no reserve toward a person of your open and noble nature. The frankness of your humor suits us exactly. We have been long looking for such a friend. Quick, let us disburden our troubles into each other's bosom; let us make our single joys shine by redupli- cation. But yap, yap, yap ! what is this confounded cur? he has fastened his tooth, which is none of the bluntest, just in the fleshy part of my leg." '* It is my dog, sir. You must love him for my sake. Here, Test, Test, Test!'' '^ But he has bitten me." *^ Ay, that he is apt to do, till you are better acquainted with him. I have had him three years. He never bites me." Yap, yap, yap ! ''He is at it again." '' Oh, sir, you must not kick him. He does not like to be kicked. I expect my dog to be treated with all the respect due to myself." " But do you always take him out with you, when you go a friendship-hunting?" '' Invariably. 'Tis the sweetest, prettiest, best-condi- tioned animal. I call him my test — the touchstone by which to try a friend. No one can properly be said to love me, who does not love him." ''Excuse us, dear sir, or madam, aforesaid, if upon further consideration we are obliged to decline the other- wise invaluable offer of your friendship. We do not like dogs." POPULAR FALLACIES. 325 ''Mighty well, sir, you know the conditions; you may have worse offers. Come along, Test." The above dialogue is not so imaginary, but that, in the intercourse of life, we have had frequent occasions of breaking off an agreeable intimacy by reason of these canine appendages. They do not always come in the shape of dogs ; tliey sometimes wear the more plausible and human character of kinsfolk, near acquaintances, my friend's friend, his partner, his wife, or his children. We could never yet form a friendship — not to speak of more delicate correspondence — however much to our taste, without the intervention of some third anomaly, some impertinent clog affixed to the relation — the understood dog in the proverb. The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture; like a school- boy's holiday, with a task affixed to the tail of it. What a delightful companion is , if he did not always bring his tall cousin with him I He seems to grow with him; like some of those double births which we remember to have read of with such wonder and delight in the old ''Athenian Oracle,'' where Swift commenced author by writing Pindaric Odes (what a beginning for him!) upon Sir William Temple. There is the picture of the brother, with the little brother peeping out at his shoulder; a species of fraternity, which we have no name of kin close enough to comprehend. When comes, poking in his head and shoulder into your room, as if to feel his entry, you think, surely you have now got him to yourself — what a three hours' chat we shall have! — but ever in the haunch of him, and before his diffident body is well disclosed in your apart- ment, appears the haunting shadow of the cousin, overpeer- ing his modest kinsman, and sure to overlay the expected good talk with his insufferable procerity of stature, and un- corresponding d warfishness of observation. Misfortunes sel- dom come alone. 'Tis hard when a blessing comes accom- panied. Cannot we like Sempronia, without sitting down to chess with her eternal brother; or know Sulpicia, without knowing all the round of her card-playing relations? — must my friend's brethren of necessity be mine also? must we be hand and glove with Dick Selby the parson, or Jack Selby the calico-printer, because W. S., who is neither, but a ripe wit and a critic, has the misfortune to claim a com- 326 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. mon parentage with them? Let him lay down his brothers; and 'tis odds but we will cast him in a pair of ours (we have a superflux) to balance the concession. Let F. H. lay down his garrulous uncle; and Honorius dis- miss his vapid wife, and superfluous establishment of six boys: things between boy and manhood — too ripe for play, too raw for conversation — that come in, impudently staring his father's old friend out of countenance ; and will neither aid nor let alone the conference; that we may once more meet upon equal terms, as we were wont to do in the disengaged state of bachelorhood. It is well if your friend, or mistress, be content with these canicular probations. Few young ladies but in this sense keep a dog. But while Rutilia hounds at you her tiger aunt; or Ruspina expects you to cherish and fondle her viper sister, whom she has preposterously taken into her bosom, to try stinging conclusions upon your con- stancy, they must not complain if the house be rather thin of suitors. Scylla must have broken off many ex- cellent matches in her time, if she insisted upon all that loved her loving her dogs also. An excellent story to this moral is told of Merry, of Delia Cruscan memory. In tender youth he loved and courted a modest appanage to the Opera — in truth, a dancer — who had won him by the artless contrast between her manners and situation. She seemed to him a native violet, that had been transplanted by some rude accident into that exotic and artificial hot-bed. Nor, in truth, was she less genuine and sincere than she appeared to him. He wooed and won this flower. Only for appearance sake, and for due honor to the bride's relations, she craved that she might have the attendance of her friends and kindred at the approaching solemnity. The request was too ami- able not to be conceded; and in this solicitude for concili- ating the good- will of mere relations, he found a presage of her superior attentions to himself, when the golden shaft should have *^ killed the flock of all affections else." The morning came: and at the Star and Garter, Richmond — the place appointed for the breakfasting — accompanied with one English friend, he impatiently awaited what re- inforcements the bride should bring to grace the ceremony. A rich muster she had made. They came in six coaches — POPULAR FALLACIES. 327 the whole corps du Ballet — French, Italian, men and women. Monsieur de B., the famous 2)irouetter of the day, led his fair spouse, but craggy, from the banks of the Seine. The Prima Donna had sent her excuse. But the first and second Buffa were there; and Signor Sc , and Signora Ch , and Madame V , with a countless cavalcade besides of chorusers, figurantes! at the sight of whom Merry afterward declai"ed, that ^'then for the first time it struck him seriously, that he was about to marry — a dancer.'' But there was no help for it. Besides, it was her day; these were, in fact, her friends and kinsfolk. The assemblage, though whimsical, was all very natural. But when the bride — handing out of the last coach a still more extraordinary figure than the rest — presented to him as \\QV father — the gentleman that was to give her away — no less a person than Signor Delpini himself — with a sort of pride, as much as to say. See what I have brought to do us honor! — the thought of so extraordinary a paternity quite overcame him; and slipping away nnder some pre- tence from the bride and her motley adherents, poor Merry took horse from the back yard to the nearest sea- coast, from which, shipping himself to America, he shortly after consoled himself with a more congenial match in the person of Miss Brunton; relieved from his intended clown father, and a bevy of painted bufl:'as for bride-maids. XIV. — THAT WE SHOULD KISE WITH THE LARK. At what precise minute that little airy musician dolfs his night-gear, and prepares to tune up his unseasonable matins, we are not naturalist enough to determine. But for a mere human gentleman — that has no orchestra busi- ness to call him from his warm bed to such preposterous exercises — we take ten, or half after ten (eleven, of course, during this Christmas solstice), to be the very earliest hour at which he can begin to think of abandoning his pillow. To think of it, we say; for to do it in earnest requires an- other half hours good consideration. Not but there are pretty sun-rising, as we are told, and such like gawds, abroad in the world, in summer-time especially, some hours before what we have assigned; which a gentleman may see, as they say, only for getiing up. But having been tempted 328 THE ESS A TS OF ELIA. once or twice, in earlier life, to assist at those ceremonies, we confess our curiosity abated. We are no longer ambi- tious of being the sun's courtiers, to attend at his morning levees. We hold the good hours of the dawn too sacred to waste them upon such observances; which have in them, besides, something Pagan and Persic. To say truth, we Qever anticipated our usual hour, or got up with the sun (as 'tis called), to go a journey, or upon a foolish whole day's pleasuring, but we suffered for it all the long hours after in listlessness and headaches; Nature herself suflti- ciently declaring her sense of our presumption in aspiring to regulate our frail waking courses by the measures of that celestial and sleepless traveler. We deny not that there is something sprightly and vigorous, at the outset especially, in these break-of-day excursions. It is flatter- ing to get the start of a lazy world; to conquer Death by proxy in his image. But the seeds of sleep and mortality are in us; and we pay usually, in strange qualms before night falls, the penalty of the unnatural inversion. There- fore, while the busy part of mankind are fast huddling on their clothes, are already up and about their occupations, content to have swallowed their sleep by wholesale; we choose to linger abed and digest our dreams. It is the very time to recombine the wandering images, which night in a confused mass presented; to snatch them from forget- fulness; to shape and mold them. Some peoj^le have no good of their dreams. Like fast feeders, they gulp them too grossly, to taste them curiously. We love to chew the cud of a foregone vision; to collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again, with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies; to drag into daylight a struggling and half- vanishing nightmare; to handle and examine the terrors or the airy solaces. We have too much respect for these spiritual communications to let them go so lightly. We are not so stupid, or so careless as that Im- perial forgetter of his dreams, that we should need a seer to remind us of the form of them. They seem to us to have as much significance as our waking concerns; or rather to import us more nearly, as more nearly we ap- proach by years to the shadowy world, whither we are hastening. We have shaken hands with the world's busi- ness; we have done with it; we have discharged ourselves POPULAR FALLACIES. 320 of it. Why should we get up? we hiive neither suit to solicit, nor affairs to manage. The drama has shut in upon us at the fourth act. We have nothing here to ex- pect, but in a short time a sick-bed, and a dismissal. We delight to anticipate death by such shadows as night affords. We are already half acquainted with ghosts. We were never much in the world. Disappointment early struck a dark veil between us and its dazzling illusions. Our spirits showed gray before our hairs. The mighty changes of the world already appear as but the vain stuff out of which dramas are composed. We have asked no more of life than what the mimic images in play-houses present us with. Even those types have waxed fainter. Our clock appears to have struck. We are superannu- ated. In this dearth of mundane satisfaction, we con- tract politic alliances with shadows. It is good to have friends at court. The extracted media of dreams seem no ill introduction to that spiritual presence, upon which, in no long time we expect to be thrown. We are trying to know a little of the usages of that colony; to learn the language and the faces we shall meet w'ith there, that we may be the less awkward at our first coming among them. We willingly call a phantom our fellow, as knowing we shall soon be of their dark companionship. Therefore we cherish dreams. We try to spell in them the alphabet of the invisible world; and think we know already how it shall be with us. Those uncouth shapes which, while we clung to flesh and blood, affrighted us, have become familiar. We feel attenuated into their meager essences, and have given the hand of half-way approach to incor- poreal being. We once thought life to be something; but it has unaccountably fallen from us before its time. There- fore we choose to dally with visions. The sun has no pur- poses of ours to light us to. Why should we get up? XV. — THAT WE SHOULD LIE DOWN" WITH THE LAMB. We could never quite understand the philosophy of this arrangement, or the wisdom of our ancestors in sending us for instruction to these woolly bed-fellows. A sheep, when it is dark, has nothing to do but to shut his silly eyes, and sleep if he can. ]\ran found out long sixes. 330 THE E8SA YS OF ELIA. Hail, candle-light! without disparagement to sun or moon, the kindliest luminary of the three — if we may not rather style thee their radiant deputy, mild viceroy of the moon! We love to read, talk, sit silent, eat, drink, sleep by candle- light. They are everybody's sun and moon. This is our peculiar and household planet. Wanting it, what savage unsocial nights must our ancestors have spent, wintering in caves and unillumined fastnesses! They must have lain about and grumbled at one another in the dark. What repartees could have passed, when you must have felt about for a smile, and handled a neighbor's cheek to be sure that he understood it? This accounts for the seriousness of the elder poetry. It has a, somber cast (try Hesiod or Ossian), derived from the tradition of those unlantern^d nights. Jokes came in with candles. We wonder how they saw to pick up a pin, if they had any. How did they sup? what a melange of chance carving must have made of it? Here one had got a leg of a goat when he wanted a horse's shoulder; there another had dipped his scooped palm in a kid-skin of wild honey, when he meditated right mare's milk. There is neither good eating nor drinking in fresco. Who, even in these civilized times, has never experienced this, when at some economic table he has commenced dining after dusk, and waited for the flavor till the lights came? The senses absolutely give and take reciprocally. Can you tell pork from veal in the dark? or distinguish Sherry from pure Malaga? Take away the candle from the smoking man; by the glimmering of the left ashes, he knows that he is still smoking, but he knows it only by an inference; till the restored light, coming in aid of the olfactories, reveals to both senses the full aroma. Then how he redoubles his puffs! how he burnishes! there is absolutely no such thing as reading but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry arbors; but it was labor thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam come about you, hovering and teasing, like so many coquettes, that will have you all to their self and are jealous of your abstractions. By the midnight taper, the writer digests his meditations. By the same light we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the flame, the odor. It is a mockery, all that is reported of the influential Phoebus. No true poem POPULAR FALLACIES. 331 ever owed its birth to the sun's light. They are ab- stracted works, Things that were horn, when none but the still night. And his dumb candle, saw his pinching throes. Marry, daylight — daylight might furnishes the images, the crude material; but for the fine shapings, the true turning and filing (as mine author hath it), they must be content to hold their inspiration of the candle. The mild internal light, that reveals them, like fires on the domestic hearth, goes out in the sunshine. Night and silence call out the starry fancies. Milton's Morning Hymn in Paradise, we would hold a good w^ager, was penned at midnight; and Taylor's rich description of a sunrise smells decidedly of the taper. Even ourself, in these our humbler lucubra- tions, tune our best-measured cadences (prose has her cadences) not unfrequently to the charm of the drowsier watchman, ^^ blessing the doors;" or the wild sweep of winds at midnight. Even now a loftier speculation than we have yet attempted courts our endeavors. We would indite something about the solar system. Betty hrioig the candles. XVI. — THAT A SULKY TEMPER IS A MISFORTUNE. We grant that it is, and a very serious one — to a man's friends, and to all that have to do with him; but whether the condition of the man himself is so much to be deplored, may admit of a question. We can speak a little to it, being ourself but lately recovered — we whisper it in con- fidence, reader — out of a long and desperate fit of the sullens. Was the cure a blessing? The conviction which wrought it, came too clearly to leave a scruple of the fanciful injuries, for they were mere fancies, which had provoked the humor. But the humor itself was too self-pleasing while it lasted — we know how bare we lay ourself in the confession — to be abandoned all at once with the grounds of it. We still brood over wrongs which we know to have been imaginary ; and for our old ac- quaintance N , whom we find to have been a truer friend than we took him for, we substitute some phan- tom — a Caius or a Titius — as like him as we dare to form 332 THE ESSA Y8 OF ELIA, it, to wreak our yet unsatisfied resentments on. It is mortifying to fall at once from the pinnacle of neglect; to forego the idea of having been ill-used and contumaciously treated by an old friend. The first thing to aggrandize a man in his own conceit is to conceive of himself as neglected. There let him fix if he can. To undeceive him is to deprive him of the most tickling morsel within the range of self-complacency. No flattery can come near it. Happy is he who suspects his friend of an injustice; but supremely blest, who thinks all his friends in a conspiracy to dej)ress and undervalue him. There is a pleasure (avc sing not to the profane) far beyond the reach of all that the world counts joy, a deep, enduring satisfaction in the depths, where the superficial seek it not, of discontent. Were we to recite one- half of this mystery, which we were let into by our late dissatisfaction, all the world would be in love with disrespect; we should wear a slight for a brace- let, and neglects and contumacies would be the only matter for courtship. Unlike to that mysterious book in the Apocalypse, the study of this mystery is unpalatable only in the commencement. The first sting of a suspicion is grievous ; but wait, out of that wound, which to flesh and blood seemed so difficult, there is balm and honey to be extracted. Your friend passed you on such or such a day, having in his company one that you conceived worse than ambiguously disposed toward you, passed you in the street without notice. To be sure, he is something short-sighted; and it was in your power to have accosted him. But facts and sane inferences are trifles to a true adept in the science of dissatisfaction. He must have seen you; and S , who was Avith him, must have been the cause of the contempt. It galls you, and well it may. But have patience. Go home and make the worst of it, and you are a made man from this time. Shut yourself up, and — rejecting, as an enemy to your peace, every whispering suggestion that but insinuates there may be a mistake — reflect seriously upon the many lesser instances which you had begun to perceive, in proof of your friend^s disaffection toward you. None of them singly was much to the purpose, but the aggregate weight is positive; and you have this last affront to clench them. Thus far tlie process is anything but agreeable. But now to your relief POPULAR FALLACIES. 333 comes the comparative faculty. You conjure up all the kind feelings you liave had for your friend; wliat you have been to him, and what you would have been to him, if he would have suffered you; how you defended him in this or that place; and his good name — his literary reputation, and so forth, was always dearer to you than your own! Your heart, spite of itself, yearns toward him. You could weep tears of blood but for a restraining pride. How say you? do you not yet begin to apprehend a com- fort? some allay of sweetness in the bitter waters? Stop not here, nor penuriously cheat yourself of your reversions. You are on vantage ground. Enlarge your speculations, and take in the rest of your friends, as a spai'k kindles more sparks. Was there one among them who has not to you proved hollow, false, slippery as water? Begin to think that the relation itself is inconsistent with mortality. That the very idea of friendship, with its component parts, as honor, fidelity, steadiness, exists but in your single bosom. Image yourself to yourself as the only possible friend in a world incapable of that communion. Now the gloom thickens. The little star of self-love twinkles, that is to encourage you through deeper glooms than this. You are not yet at the half point of your elevation. You are not yet, believe me, half sulky enough. Adverting to the world in general (as these circles in the mind will spread to infinity), reflect with what strange injustice you have been treated in quarters where (setting gratitude and the expectation of friendly returns aside as chimeras) you j^re- tended no claim beyond justice, the naked due of all men. Think the very idea of right and fit fled from the earth, or your breast the solitary receptacle of it till you have swelled yourself into at least one hemisphere; the other being the vast Arabia Stony of your friends and the world aforesaid. To grow bigger every moment in your own conceit, and the world to lessen; to defy yourself at the expense of your species; to judge the world — this is the acme and supreme point of your mystery — these the true Pleasures OF ScLKiXESS. We profess no more of this grand secret than what ourself experimented on one rainy afternoon in the last week, sulking in our study. We had proceeded to the penultimate point, at which the true adept seldom stops, where the consideration of benefit forgot is about to 334 THE ES8A T8 OF ELIA. merge in the meditation of general injustice — when a knock at the door was followed by the entrance of the very friend whose not seeing of us in the morning (for we will now confess the case our own), an accidental over- sight had given rise to so much agreeable generalization! To mortify us still more, and take down the whole flatter- ing superstructure which pride had piled upon neglect, he had brought in his hand the identical S , in whose favor we had suspected him of the contumacy. Assevera- tions were needless, where the frank manner of them both was convictive of the injurious nature of the suspicion. We fancied that they perceived our embarrassment; but were too proud, or something else, to confess to the secret of it. We had been but too lately in the condition of the noble patient in Argos: Qui se credebat miros audire tragoedos, In vacuo laetus sessor plausorque theatre — and could have exclaimed with equal reason against the friendly hands that cured us — Pol, me occidistis, amici, Non servastis, ait; cui sic extorta voluptas, Et demptus per vim mentis gratissimus error. NOTES. RECOLLECTIONS OF THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE. (London Magazine, August, 1820.) Chakles Lamb left Christ's Hospital in the year 1789, at the age of fourteen, and at some date within the next two years he obtained a situation in the South-Sea House. His father's employer, Samuel Salt, the Bencher of the Inner Temple, was a Deputy-Governor of the South-Sea House at the time, and it was doubtless by the influ- ence of this kind friend that the appointment was obtained. Charles' elder brother, John, was already a cleric in the oflace. In the Royal Calendar for 1792 John Lamb's name appears as holding the position of Deputy-Accountant. Other of the names mentioned by Lamb in this- Essay are also found in the official records of the day. John Tipp, on whose promotion to the office of Accountant (as " John Tipp, Esq."), John Lamb succeeded to the post just mentioned; W. Evans, Deputy-Cashier in 1791; Thomas Tame, Deputy-Cashier in 1793; and Richard Plumer, Deputy-Secretary in 1800. Lamb's fondness for gratuitous mystification is thus curiously illustrated in the insinuation toward the close of the Essay that the names he has recorded are fictitious, after all. Lamb's old colleague, Elia, whose name he borrowed, has not (as far as I am aware) been yet traced in the annals of the office. But he probably held, like Lamb himself, a very subordinate position. A full account of the famous South-Sea Bubble will be found in Lord Stanhope's History, and also in Chambers' Book of Dayn. For an account of the constitution of the Company at the end of the last century, Hughscm's Walks through London (1805) may be consulted. He says: "Notwithstanding the terms of the charter by which we are to look upon this Company as merchants, it is observable that they never carried on any considerable trade, and now they have no trade. They only receive interest for their capital which is in the hands of the Government, and £8,000 out of the Treasury toward the expense attending the management of their affairs, which is done by a (governor, Sub-Governor, Deputy-Governor, and twenty - one Directors annually chosen on the 6th of February by a majority of votes." Pennant (who is referred to in this Essay, and wrote in 1790) says: " In this (Threadneedle) Street also stands the South-Sea House, the place in which the Company did business, when it had any to transact." 336 THE E88A Y8 OF ELIA, Henry Man, the Wit, etc. — The two "forgotten volumes" — " Mis- cellaneous Works in Verse and Prose of the late Henry Man. London, 1802," are now before me. Tliey contain a variety of light and amusing papers in verse and prose. The humor of them, how- ever, is naturally still more out of date now than in Lamb's day. One of the epigrams found there may be said to have become classi- cal, that upon the two Earls (Spencer and Sandwich) who invented respectively "half a coat" and "half a dinner." Henry Man was Deputy-Secretary in 1793. Rattle-headed Pluiner. — Lamb had a special interest in the family bearing this name, because his grandmother, Mary Field, was for more than half a century housekeeper at the Dower House of the family, Blakesware in Hertfordshire. The present Mr. Plumer, of AUerton, Totness, a grandson of Richard Plumer of the South-Sea House, by no means acquiesces in the tradition here recorded as to his grandfather's origin. He believes that though the links are missing, Richard Plumer was descended in regular line from the Baronet, Sir Walter Plumer, who died at the end of the seventeenth century. Lamb's memory has failed him here in one respect. The "Bachelor Uncle," Walter Plumer, uncle of William Plumer, of Blakesware, was most certainly not a bachelor (see the pedigree of the family in Cussans' Hertfordshire). Lamb is further inaccurate as to the connection of this Walter Plumer with the affair of the franks. A reference to Johnson's Life of Cave will show that it was Cave, and not Plumer, who was summoned before the House of Commons. Walter Plumer, member for Aldborough and Appleby, had given a frank to the Duchess of Marlborough, which had been challenged by Cave, who held the post of Clerk of the Franks in the House of Commons. For this. Cave was cited before the House as a Breach of Privilege. In the passage on John Tipp, Lamb, speaking of his fine suit of rooms in Threadneedle Street, adds : " I know not who is the occupier of them now. When the Essay first appeared in the London Magazine, the note in brackets was appended. Thus we learn that John Lamb was still, in 1820, occupying rooms in the old building. Mild, child -like, pastoral M . — "Maynard hang'd himself" (Lamb's "Key"). Mr. T. Maynard was chief clerk of the Old Annuities and Three per Cents from 1788 to 1793. His name does not appear in the almanacs of the day after this date. OXFORD IN THE VACATION. (Jjon^ou Magazine, October, 1820.) Lamb was fond of spending his annual holiday in one or other of the great university towns, more often perhaps in Cambridge. It. was on one such visit, it will be remembered, that Charles and Mary first made the acquaintance of little Emma Isola. On its first appear- ance in the London, the paper was dated "August 5, 1820, From my rooms facing the Bodleian." A sonnet written a year before at NOTES. 337 Cambridge, tells of the cliarm that University associations bad for one who bad been del>arred tbrougb infirmity of bealtb and poverty from a university education: " I was not trained in Academic bowers, And to those learned streams I nothing owe Which copious from those twin fair founts do flow; Mine have been anything but studious hours. Yet can I fancy, wandering 'mid thy towers, Myself a nursling, Granta, of thy lap; My brow seems tightening with the Doctor's cap, And I walk gowned; feel unusual powers. Strange forms of logic clothe my admiring speech, Old Kamus' ghost is busy at my brain; And my skull teems with notions infinite. Be still, ye reeds of Camus, while I teach Truths which transcend the searching schoolmen's vein, And half had staggered that stout Stagirite! " "Andrew and John, men famous in old times,'' quoted, quite at random, from Paradise Lost, ii. 7. G. D. — George Dyer (1755-1841), educated at Christ's Hospital and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. A compiler and editor and general worker for the book-sellers, short-sighted, absent-minded and simple, for whom Lamb had a life-long affection. He compiled, among other books, a History of the University and Colleges of Cambridge, and contributed the original matter (preface excepted) to Valpy's edition of the Classics. The account of him given by Crabb Robin- son in his Diary well illustrates Lamb's frequent references to this singular character. "He was one of the best creatures, morally, that ever breathed. He was the son of a watchman in Wapping, and was put to a charity school by some pious Dissenting ladies. He afterward went to Christ's Hospital, and from there was sent to Cambridge. He was a scholar, but to the end of his days (and he lived to be eighty-five) was a book-seller's drudge. He led a life of literary labor in poverty. He made indexes, corrected the press, and occasionally gave lessons in Latin and Greek. When an under- graduate at Cambridge he became a hearer of Robert Robinson, and consequently a Unitarian. This closed the church against him, and he never had a fellowship. . . „ He wrote one good book — Tlte Life of Robert Robinson, which I have heard Wordsworth mention as one of the best works of biography in the language. . . . Dyer had the kindest heart and simplest manners imaginable. It was lit- erally the case with him that he would give away his last guinea. Not many years before his death he married his laundress, by the advice of his friends — a very worthy woman. He said to me once, * Mrs. Dyer is a woman of excellent natural sense, but she is not literate.' That is, she could neither read nor write. Dyer was blind for a few years before his death. I used occasionally to go on a Sunday morning to read to him, . . . After he came to London, Dyer lived always in some very humble chambers in Clifford's Inn. Fleet Street." 338 THE ES8A Y8 OF ELIA, Our friend M.'s in Bedford Square.— M.. was Basil Montagu, Q.C., and editor of Bacon. Mrs. M. was of course Irving's "noble lady," so familiar to us from Carlyle's Eeminiscences. " Pretty A. S." was Mrs. Montagu's daughter, Anne Skepper, afterward tlie wife of Mr. Procter (Barry Cornwall). In his Memoir of Lamb, Mr. Procter sig- nificantly remarks that he could vouch personally for the truth of tills anecdote of Dyer's absent-mindedness. Still less have I curiosity to disturb the elder repose of MSS. — In the London Magazine was appended the following note: ' ' There is something to me repugnant at any time in written hand. The text never seems determinate. Print settles it. I had thought of the Lycidas as of a full-grown beauty — as springing up with all its parts absolute — till, in an evil hour, I was shown the original copy of it, together with the other minor poems of its author, in the liberty of Trinity, kept like some treasure, to be proud of. I wish they had thrown them in the Cam, or sent them after the latter Cantos of Spenser, into the Irish Channel. How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore! interlined, corrected, as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure! as if they might have been otherwise, and just as good! as if inspiration were made up of parts, and these fluctuating, successive, indifferent! I will never go into the workshop of any great artist again, nor desire a sight of his picture till it is fairly off the easel ; no, not if Raphael were to be alive again, and painting another Galatea." CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO. (London Magazine, November, 1820.) The first collected edition of " Lamb's Prose and Verse appeared in the year 1818, published by C. and J. Oilier. Among other papers it contained one entitled Recollections of Christ's Hospital. The Essay was a reprint from the Gentleman' s Magazine for June, 1813, where it originally owed its appearance to an alleged abuse of the presentation system in force at the Blue Coat School. This earlier article on Christ's Hospital had been written in a ser- ious and genuine vein of enthusiasm for the value and dignity of the old Foundation, Lamb now seems to have remembered that there were other aspects of school-boy life under its shelter that might be profitably dealt with. The " poor friendless boy," in whose char- acter he now writes, was his old school-fellow Coleridge, and the general truth of the sketch is shown by Coleridge's own reference to his school-days in the early chapters of his Biographia Literaria. " In my friendless wanderings on our leave-days (for I was an orphan, and had scarce any connections in London) highly was I delighted if any passenger, especially if he were dressed in black, would enter into conversation with me." Lamb's love of mystification shows itself in this Essay in many forms. "Sweet Calne in Wiltshire " is a quite gratuitous substitu- tion for Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire, the home after which young NOTES. 339 Coleridge did actually yearn. Moreover, as will be seen, the dis- guise of identity with Coleridge is dropped altogether toward the close of the Essay. The general account of the school here given, it is interesting to compare with that given by Leigh Hunt in his autobiography. L. '« governor (so we called the patron who presented us to the founda- tion) lived in a manner binder his parental roof. — It was under Samuel Salt's roof that John Lamb and his family lived, and as the ])resentation to Christ's was obtained from a friend of Salt's, Lamb considers it fair to speak of the old Bencher as the actual benefactor. TTiere was one II . — Hodges (Lamb's " Key"), "To feed our mind with idle portraiture," a line apparently extemporized by Lamb as a translation of the passage in Virgil to which he refers, " animum picturd pascit inani." " 'Ticas said He ate strange flesh." As usual, a new quotation formed out of Lamb's general recollec- tion of an old one. He had in his mind, no doubt, a passage in Anthony and Cleopatra (Act I. Sc. 4): " It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh Which some did die to look on." Mr. Hathaway, the then Steicard. — Perry was steward in Lamb's day (see the fonner Essay on Christ's Hospital). Leigh Hunt says of his successor: " The name of the steward, a thin stiff man of invincible formality of demeanor, admirably fittei to render encroachment impossible, was Hathaway. We of the grammar school used to call him ' the Yeoman ' on account of Shakespeare having married the daughter of a man of that name, designated as ' a substantial yeoman.' " The Rev. James Boyer became upper master of Christ's in 1777. For the better side of Boyer's qualifications as a teacher, see Qo\e- ridge's Biog in p7da Lite jYiria, the passage beginning, "At school I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time a very severe master." Elsewhere Coleridge entirely confirms Lamb's and Leigh Hunt's accounts of Boyer's violent temper and severe discipline. Lamb never reached the position of Grecian, but it is the tradition in Christ's Hospital that he was under Boyer's instruction some time before leaving school. T7ie Rev. Mattheio Field. — Some charming additional traits in this character, entirely confirming Lamb's account, will be found in Leigh Hunt's autobiography. " A man of a more handsome incompetence for his situation perhaps did not exist. He came late of a morning; went away soon in the afternoon; and used to walk up and down, lan- guidly bearing his cane, as if it were a lily, and hearing our eternal 340 THE E88A TS OF ELIA, Dominuses and As in praesentis with an air of ineffable endurance. Often lie did not liear at all. It was a joke with us when any of our friends came to the door, and we asked his permission to go to them, to address him with some preposterous question wide of the mark; to which he used to assent. We would say, for instance, ' Are you not a great fool, sir ? ' or ' Isn't your daughter a pretty girl ? ' to which he would reply, 'Yes, child.' When he condescended to hit us with the cane, he made a face as if he were taking physic." TJie Atithor of the Country Spectator. — For an amusing account of the origin of this periodical, see Mozley's Reminiscences of Oriel College, vol. ii. addenda. Br. T e. — Dr. Trollope, who succeeded Boyer as head-master. Th .—Thornton (Lamb's " Key "). Poor S .— " Scott, died in Bedlam " (Lamb's " Key "). lllfated M . — " Maunde, dismiss'd school " (Lamb's " Key"). " Finding some of Edicard's Race Unhappy, pass their annals by." Slightly altered from Matt. Prior's Carmen Soecula/re for 1700 (stanza viii.) — "Janus, mighty deity, Be kind, and as thy searching eye Does our modern story trace. Finding some of Stuart's race Unhappy, pass their annals by." C. V. Le O. — Charles Valentine Le Grice and a younger brother of the name of Samuel were Grecians and prominent members of the school in Lamb's day. They were from Cornwall. Charles became a clergyman and held a living in his native county. Samuel went into the army, and died in the West Indies. It was he who was staying in London in the autumn of 1796, and showed himself a true friend to the Lambs at the season of the mother's death. Lamb writes to Coleridge, " Sam Le Grice, who was then in town, was with me the three or four first days, and was as a brother to me; gave up every hour of his time to the very hurting of his health and spirits in constant attendance, and humoring my poor father; talked with him, read to him, played at cribbage with him." He was a " mad wag," according to Leigh Hunt, who tells some pleasant anec- dotes of him, but must have been a good hearted fellow. " Le Grice the elder was a wag," adds Hunt, " like his brother, but more staid. He went into the church as he ought to do, and married a rich widow. He published a translation, abridged, of the celebrated pastoral of Longus; and report at school made him the author of a little anonymous tract on the Art of Peking the Fire." NOTES. 341 " Which two I heJiold," etc. — Tliis is Fuller's account of the wit- combats between Ben Jonson and Shakespeare, 2'he Junior Le O. and F. — The latter of these was named Favell, also a Grecian in the school. These two, according to Leigh Hunt, when at the university wrote to the Duke of York to ask for com- missions in the army. "The Duke good-naturedly sent them." Favell was killed in the Peninsula. We shall meet with him again, under a different initial, in the essay on Poor Relations. THE TWO RACES OF MEN. (London Magazine, December, 1820.) Ralph Bigod. — John Fen wick, editor of the Albion. See later essay on Newspapers I'hirty-fixie Yea^s Ago. ' ' To slacken virtue and abate her edge Than prompt her to do aught may merit praise." — Paradise Regained, ii, 455. Comberhatch, more properly Comberback, the name adopted by Coleridge, when he enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons, in Decem- ber, 1793. He gave his name to the authorities as Silas Titus Com- berback, with initials corresponding to his own, perhaps in order that the marks on his clothes might not raise suspicion. *' Being at a loss when suddenly asked my name," he writes, "I answered Comberback; and, verily, my habits were so little equestrian, that my horse, I doubt not, was of that opinion." Wayward, Spiteful K. — Kenny, the dramatist, who married a French woman and lived for some years at Versailles. Lamb visited him there in 1822. " Unworthy land, to harbor such a sweetness.^'' I have not been able as yet to trace this quotation to its source. S. T. C. — Of course, Coleridge again. It is a good illustration of Lamb's fondness for puzzling that having to instance his friend, he indicates him three times in the same essay by a different alias. Coleridge's constant practice of enriching his own and other's books with these marginalia is well known. NEW-YEAR'S EVE. (London Magazine, January, 1821.) It was probably this paper, together with that on Witches and other Night Fears, which so shocked the moral sense of Southey, and led to his lamenting publicly, in the pages of the Quarterly, the "absence of a sounder religious feeling" in the Essays of Elia. The melancholy scepticism of its strain would appear to have struck others at the time. A graceful and tenderly remonstrative copy of 342 THE ESSA Y8 OF ELIA. verses, suggested by it, appeared in the London Magazine for August, 1821, signed " Olen." Lamb noticed tbem in a letter to his publisher, Mr. Taylor, of July 30. "You will do me injustice if you do not convey to the writer of the beautiful lines, which I here return to you, my sense of the extreme kindness which dictates them. Poor Elia (call him Ellia) does not pretend to so very clear revelations of a future state of being as ' Olen ' seems gifted with. He stumbles about dark mountains at best; but he knows at least how to be thankful for this life, and is too thankful, indeed, for cer- tain relationships lent him here, not to tremble for a possible resumption of the gift." Lamb thinks that the verses may have been by James Montgom- ery, who was on the staff of the London, but I have not found them reprinted in any collected edition of Montgomery's poems. " I saw the skirts of the departing year." From the first strophe of Coleridge's " ode to the departing Year," as originally printed in the Bristol edition of his poems in 1796. He afterward altered the line to " I saw the train of the departing Year." " Welcome the coming, sj^eed the parting guest." From Pope's translation of the Odyssey (Book xv. line 84). Alice W n. — According to Lamb's "Key," for Winterton. In any case the fictitious name by which Lamb chose to indicate the object of his boyish attachment, whose form and features he loved to dwell on in his early sonnets, Rosamund Gray, and afterward in his essays. We shall meet her again later on. ''Sweet assurance of a look." — From Lamb's favorite Elegy on Philip Sidney, by Matthew Roy don. From what have I not fallen, if the child I remember icas indeed tnyself. — The best commentary on this passage is that supplied by Lamb's beautiful sonnet, written as far back as 1795: " We are two pretty babes; the youngest she, The youngest, and the loveliest far (I ween). And Innocence her name: the time has been We two did love each other's company; Time was, we too had wept to have been apart. But when, by show of seeming good beguiled, I left the garb and manners of a child. And my first love for man's society. Defiling with the world ray virgin heart — My loved companion dropt a tear, and fled, And hid in deepest shades her aAvful head. Beloved! who shall tell me, where thou art? In what delicious Eden to be found ? That I may seek thee, the wide world around." NOTES. 343 MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST. (London Magazine, February, 1821.) There is probably no evidence existing as to the original of Mrs. Battle. Several of Lamb's commentators have endeavored to prove her identity with Mary Field, Lamb's grandmother, so long resident with the Plumer family; the sole fact common to them being that Lamb represents Mrs. Battle (in the essay on Blakesnioor) as having died at Blakesvvare, where also Mrs. Field ended her days. But any one who will read, after the present essay, Lamb's indisputably gen- uine and serious verses on Mrs. Field's death {Hie Grandame) will feel that to have transformed her into this ' ' gentlewoman born " with the fine "last century countenance," would have been little short of a mauvaise plaisanteHe, of which Lamb was not likely to have been guilty. Mr. Bowles. — William Lisle Bowles brought out his edition of Pope in 1807. Bridget Elia. — The name by which Lamb always indicates his sister in this series of essays. A CHAPTER ON EARS. (London Magazine, March, 1821.) Lamb's indifference to music is one of the best-known features of his personality. Compare the admirably humorous verses, " Free Thoughts on several Eminent Composers," beginning — " Some cry up Haydn, some Mozart, Just as the whim bites; for my part I do not care a farthing candle For either of them, or for Handel, — Cannot a man live free and easy Without admiring Pergolesi ? Or through the world with comfort go That never heard of Dr. Blow ?" My friend A.' s — Doubtless Lamb's friend William Ayrton, the well-known musical critic of that day (1777-1858). Party in a parlor, etc. — From a stanza in the original draft of Wordsworth's Peter Bell. The stanza was omitted in all editions of the poem after the first (1819). "My good Catholic friend Nov. ." — Vincent Novello, the well- known organist and composer, father of Mde. Clara Novello and Mrs. Cowden Clarke (1781-1861). rapt above earth, And possess joys not promised at my birth. "As I thus sat, these and other sights had so fully possessed my soul with content that I thought, as the poet has happily expressed it: 344 THE E8SA T8 OF ELI A. I was for that time lifted above eartli; And possessed joys not promised at my birth." — Walton's Complete Angler, Part I., chap. 4. ALL FOOL'S DAY. (London Magazine, April, 1821.) TJie crazy old church clock, And the beicildered chimes. — Wordsworth, " The Fountain: a Conversation." Ha! honest R. — According to Lamb's "Key," one Ramsay, who kept the " London Library " in Ludgate Street. Orannlle 8. — Granville Sharp, the abolitionist, died in 1813. King Pandion, he is dead; All thy friends are lapt in lead. From the verses on a Nightingale, beginning " As it fell upon a day." • formerly ascribed to Shakespeare, but now known to be written by Richard Barnfield. A QUAKERS' MEETING. (London Magazine, April, 1821.) ** Boreas and Cesias and Argestes loud." — Milton, Paradise Lost, x. 699. sands, ignoble things, Dropt from the ruined sides of kings. From " Lines on the Tombs in Westminster Abbey," by Francis Beaumont. How reverend is the view of these hushed heads. Looking tranquillity! A good example of Lamb's habit of constructing a quotation out of his general recollection of a passage. The lines he had in his mind are from Congreve's Mourning Bride, Act 11. , Scene 1: " How reverend is the face of this tall pile, Whose ancient pillars rear their marble heads To bear aloft its arched and ponderous roof. By its own weight made steadfast and immovable, Looking tranquillity." The writings of John Woolman. — " A journal of the life, gospel labors and Christian experiences of t'hat faithful minister of Jesus Christ, John Woolman, late of Mount Holly, in the Province of NOTES. 345 Jersey, North America" (1720-1772). Woolman was an American Quaker of Luiuble origin, an 'illiterate tailor,' one of the first who had 'misgivings about the institution of slavery.' Crabb Robinson, to whom Lamb introduced the book, becomes rapturous over it. ' ' His religion is love ; his whole existence and all his passions were love!" ''Forty feeding like one.'' From Wordsworth's verses, written in March, 1801, beginning: " The cock is crowing. The stream is flowing," I have noted elsewhere Lamb's strong native sympathy with the Quaker spirit and Quaker manners and customs, a sympathy so marked that it is difficult to believe it was not inherited, and that on one or other side of his parentage he had not relations with the Society of Friends. His picture of the Quakerism of sixty years ago is of almost historical value, so great are the changes that have since divided the Society against itself. THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOL-MASTER. (London Magazine. May, 1821.) My friend M. — Thomas Manning, the mathematician and explorer, whose acquaintance Lamb made early in life at Cambridge. Even a child, that " plaything for an hour."— One of Lamb's quota- tions from himself. The phrase occurs in a charming poem of three stanzas, in the Poetry for Children: " A child's a plaything for an hour; Its pretty tricks we try For that or for a longer space; Then tire and lay it by. *' But I knew one that to itself All seasons could control; That would have mocked the sense of pain Out of a grieved soul. " Thou straggler into loving arms, Young climber up of knees, When 1 forget thy thousand wayis, Then life and all shall cease." IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. (London Magazine, August, 1821.) John Bunele. — "The Life of John Buncle, Esq.; containing var- ious observations and refiections, made in several parts of the world, and many extraordinary relations." By Thomas Amory (175(>-66). 346 TEE ESS A TS OF ELIA. Amory was a staunch Unitarian, an earnest moralist, a humorist, and eccentric to the verge of insanity — four qualifications which would appeal irresistibly to Lamb's sympathies. A graceful figure, after Leonardo da Vinci. — This print, a present to Lamb from Crabb Robinson, in 1816, was of Leonardo da Vinci's Vierge aux Rochers. It was a special favorite with Charles and Mary, and is the subject of some verses by Charles. B ZDOuld have been more in keeping if he had abided by the faith of his forefathers. — Braham, the singer. In a letter to Manning, Lamb describes him as a compound of the ' ' Jew, the gentleman, and the angel." " To sit a guest with Daniel at his pulse." Slightly altered from Paradise Regained, Book ii. , line 278. / was traveling in a stage-coach with three male (Quakers. — This adventure happened not to Lamb, but to Sir Anthony Carlisle, the surgeon from whom Lamb had the anecdote. WITCHES AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. (London Magazine, October, 1821.) Headless bear, black man, or a2)e. — From "The Author's Abstract of Melancholy," prefixed to Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Dear little T. H. — Thornton Hunt, Leigh Hunt's eldest boy. This passage is interesting as having provoked Southey's violent attack on Leigh Hunt and his principles, in the Quarterly Review for January, 1833. ' ' names tohose sense we see 7iot Fray us icith things that be not." — From Spenser's Epithalamium, line 343. / have formerly traveled among the Westmoreland Fells. — See Lamb's letter to Manning, in 1802, describing his and Mary's visit to Coleridge at Keswick. "We got in in the evening, traveling in a post-chaise from Penrith, in the midst of a gorgeous sunset, which transmuted all the mountains into colors. We thought we had got into Fairyland. . . . Such an impression I never received from objects of sight before, nor do I suppose that I can ever again." VALENTINE'S DAY. (Leigh Hunt's Indicator, February 14, 1821.) ** Brushed with the hiss of rustling wings." — Paradise Lost, i. 768. NOTES. 347 " Gives a very echo to the throne lohere hope is seated." — Another of Lamb's adaptations of Shakespeare. The original is in Twelfth Night (Act II. Sc.4). A little later on will be noticed a similar free-and-easy use of a passage from Wordsworth. E. B. — Edward Francis Burney (1760-1848), a portrait painter, and book illustrator on a large scale. He was a cousin of Mde. D'Arblay, and not a half-brother as stated in Lamb's "Key." His name may be seen "at the bottom of many a well-executed vignette in the way of his profession " in the periodicals of his aay. He illustrated for Harrisor, the World, Tatler, Ouardian, Adventurer, etc., besides the Arabian Nights, and novels of Richardson and Smollett. MY RELATIONS. (London Magazine, June, 1821.) In these two successive essays, and in that on the Benchers of the Inner Temble, Lamb draws portraits of singular interest to us, of his father, aunt, brother and sister — all his near relations with one exception. The mother's name never occurs in letter or published writing after the first bitterness of the calamity of September, 1796, had passed away. This was doubtless out of consideration for the feelings of his sister. Very noticeable is the frankness with which he describes the less agreeable side of the character of his brother John, who was still living, and apparently on quite friendly terms with Charles and Mary. I had an aunt. — A sister of John Lamb the elder, who generally lived with the family, and contributed something to the common income. After the death of the mother, a lady of comfortable means, a relative of the family, offered her a home, but the arrange- ment did not succeed, and the aunt returned to die among her own people. Charles writes, just before her death in February, 1797, " My poor old aunt, who was the kindest creature to me when 1 was at school, and used to bring me good things; when I, schoolboy-like, used to be ashamed to see her come, and open her apron, and bring out her basin with some nice thing which she had saved for me, the good old creature is now dying. She says, poor thing, she is glad she is come home to die with me. I was always her favorite." See also the lines "written on the day of my aunt's funeral," in the little volume of Blank Verse, by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb, published in 1798. Brother or sister, 1 never had any to know them. — In this and the next sentence is a curious blending of fact and fiction. Besides John and Mary, four other children had been born to John and Elizabeth Lamb, in the Temple, between the years 1762 and 1775, but had apparently not survived their infancy. Two daughters had been 348 THE E88A YS OF ELIA. christened Elizabetli, one in 1762, and another after her death in 1768. John and Mary Lamb are now to be described as cousins, under the names of James and Bridget Elia. C'harles Lamb actually had relations, in that degree, living in Hertfordshire, in the neighbor- hood of Wheathampstead. James is an inexplicable cousin. — The mixture of the man of the world, dilettante and sentimentalist — not an infrequent combina- tion — is here described with graphic power. All that we know of John Lamb, the "broad, burly, jovial," living his bachelor life in chambers at the old Sea-House, is supported and confirmed by this passage. Touching his extreme sensibility to the physical sufferings of animals, there is a letter of Charles to Crabb Robinson of the year 1810, which is worth noting. " My brother, whom you have met at my rooms (a plump, good-looking man of seven-and-forty), has written a book about humanity, which I transmit to you herewith. Wilson, the publisher, has put it into his head that you can get it reviewed for him. I dare say it is not in the scope of your review, but if you could put it into any likely train he would rejoice. For, alas ! our boasted humanity partakes of vanity. As it is, he teases me to death with choosing to suppose that I could get it into all the Reviews at a moment's notice. I, who have been set up as a mark for them to throw at, and would willingly consign them all to Megaera's snaky locks ! But here's the book, and don't show it to Mrs. Collier, for I remember she makes excellent eel soup, and the leading points of the book are directed against that very process." Through the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire. From an early sonnet of Lamb's. MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE. (London Magazine, July, 1821.) Bridget Elia. — Mary Lamb. The lives of the brother and sister are so bound together that the illustrations of their joint life afforded by this essay, and that on Old China, are of singular interest. They show us the brighter and happier intervals of that life, without which, indeed, it could hardly have been borne for those eight-and- thirty years. In 1805, during one of Mary Lamb's periodical attacks of uiaiiia, and consequent absences from home, Charles writes, "I am a fool bereft of her co-operation. 1 am used to look up to her in the least and biggest perplexities. To say all that I find her would be more than, I think, anybody could possibly understand. She is older, wiser, and better than I am, and all my wretched imperfections I cover to myself by thinking on her goodness." Compare also the sonnet written by Charles, in one of his "lucid intervals" when himself in confinement, in 1796, ending with the words : the mighty debt of love I owe, Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend. " NOTES. 349 The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End, or Mackerel End. — The place, now further contiaoted into " Mack rye End," is about a mile and a half from Wlieathampstead, on the Luton Uranch of the Great Northern Kailvvay. On leaving the Wheathampstead Station, the traveler must follow the road which runs along the valley toward Luton, nearly parallel with the railway for about a mile, to a group of houses near the "Cherry Trees." At this point he will turn short to the right, and then take the first turning on his left, along the edge of a pretty little wood. He will soon see the venerable old Jacobean mansion, properly called Mackrye End, and close to it a whitish farm-house, which is the one occupied by Lamb's relatives, the Uladmaus, at the time of the pilgrimage recorded in this essay. The present writer has visited the spot, also in the " heart of June," and bears the pleasantest testimony to its rural beauty and seclusion. The farm-house has had an important addition to it since Lamb's day, but a large portion of the building is evidently still the same as when the " image of welcome" came forth from it to greet the brother and sister. May I, without presumption, call attention to the almost unique beauty of this prose idyll ? " But thou that didst appear so fair To fond imagination. — Wordsworth's Yarrow Visited. B. F. — Barron Field, who accompanied Lamb and his sister on this expedition. See the essay on Distant Correspondents. Compare a letter of Lamb to Manning in May, 1819. " How are my cousins, the Gladmans, of Wheathampstead, and farmer Bruton ? Mrs. Bruton is a glorious woman. ' Hail, Mackery End.' This is a fragment of a blank verse poem which I once meditated, but got no further." MY FIRST PLAY. (London Magazine, December, 1821.) The only landed property I could ever call my own. — A piece of humorous fabrication, as usual. The first appearance to me of Mrs. Siddons in Isabella. — One of Lamb's earliest, perhaps his first sonnet, was inspired by this great actress. It was published, among some of Coleridge's, in the columns of the Morning Chronicle in 1794. As when a child, on some long winter's night Affrighted clinging to its grandam's knees, With eager, wondering and perturbed delight Listens strange tales of fearful dark decrees Muttered to wretch by necromantic spell ; Or of those hags, who, at the witching time Of murky midnight, ride the air sublime. 350 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA. And mingle foul embrace with fiends of Hell » Cold Horror drinks its blood ! Anon the tear More gentle starts, to hear the beldame tell Of pretty babes that loved each other dear, Murdered by cruel Uncle's mandate fell: Even such the shivering joys thy tones impart. Even so thou, Siddons, meltest my sad heart 1 MODERN GALLANTRY. (London Magazine, November, 1822.) Joseph Paice, of Bread Street HUl, merchant. — A gentleman of whom not much seems to be known, save from this essay and Edwards' sonnet. Thomas Edwards, author of Canons of Criticism., a very acute commentary upon Warburton's emendations of Shakes- peare, was a mediocre poet, but his sonnets are carefully constructed on the Miltonic scheme, which, perhaps, accounts for Lamb's exag- gerated epithet. Tlie sonnet may be given here as at least a curiosity: To Mr. J. Paice. Joseph, the worthy son of worthy sire, Who well repay'st thy pious parents' care To train thee in the ways of Virtue fair. And early with the Love of Truth inspire, What further can my closing eyes desire To see, but that by wedlock thou repair The waste of death; and raise a virtuous heir To build our House, e'er I in peace retire ? Youth is the time for Love: Then choose a wife. With prudence choose; 'tis Nature's genuine voice; And what she truly dictates must be good; Neglected once that prime, our remnant life Is soured, or saddened, by an ill-timed choice, Or lonely, dull and friendless solitude. THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. (London Magazine, September, 1821.) Charles Lamb was born on the 10th of February, 1775, in Crown Office Row, Temple, where Samuel Salt, a Bencher of the Inn, owned two sets of chambers. This was Lamb's home for the seven years preceding his admission into Christ's Hospital in 1782, and afterward, in holiday seasons, till he left school in 1789, and later, at least till Salt's death in 1792. A recent editor of Lamb's works has stated that, with the exception of Salt, almost all the names of Benchers given in this essay are " purely imaginary." The reverse of this is the fact. All the names here celebrated are to be found in the records of the honorable society. NOTES. 351 There lolien they camcy whereas those hricky towers. — Spenser's Prothalaviion, stanza viii. Of building strong, albeit of Paper hight. Paper Buildings, facing King's Bench Walk in the Temple. The line is doubtless improvised for the occasion. That fine Elizabethan, hall. — The hall of the Middle Temple. The fountain still plays, but " quantum mutatus." Ah ! yet doth beauty like a dial liand. — Shakespeare's Sonnet, No. 104. " Carmd it out quaintly in the sun." —III. Henry VL, ii. 5. The roguish eye of J II. — Jekyll, the Master in Chancery. The wit, and friend of wits, among the old Benchers — the Sir George Rose of his day. Called to the Bench in 1805; died 1837. Thomas Coventry — Called to the Bench in 1776; died in 1797. Samuel Salt.— Called to the Bench in 1782; died in 1792. The Bencher in whom Lamb had the most peculiar interest. John Lamb, the father, was in the service of Salt for some five and forty years — he acting as clerk and confidential servant, and his wife as house- keeper. As we have seen, Mr. Salt occupied two seats of chambers in Crown Oifice Row, forming a substantial house. He had two indoor servants, besides John and Elizabeth Lamb, and kept his car- riage. Salt died in 1792. By his will, dated 1786, he gives " To my servant, John Lamb, who has lived with me near forty years," £500 South Sea stock; and "to Mrs. Lamb £100 in money, well deserved for her care and attention during my illness." By a codicil, dated December 20, 1787, his executors are directed to employ John Lamb to receive the testator's "Exchequer annuities of £210 and £14 during their term, and to pay him £10 a year for his trouble so long as he shall receive them," a delicate and ingenious way of retaining John Lamb in his service, as it were, after his own decease. By a later codicil, he gives another hundred pounds to Mrs. Lamb. These benefactions, and not the small pension erroneously stated, on the authority of Talfourd, in my memoir of Lamb, formed the pro- vision made by Salt for his faithful pair of attendants. The appoint- ment of Charles to the clerkship in the India House in 1792 must have been the last of the many kind acts of Samuel Salt to the family. Where the Lamb family moved to after Salt's death in 1792, and how they struggled on between that date and the fatal year of 1796, is one of the unsettled points of Lamb's history. Mary Lamb's skill with her needle was probably used as a means- of increasing the common income. Crabb Robinson tells us of an arti- cle on needlework contributed by her some years later to one of the magazines, 352 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA, The unfortunate Miss Blandy. — The heroine of a cause celebre in the year 1752. Her whole story will be found, dproxtos of the town of Henly, in Mr. Leslie's charming book on the Thames, entitled Our Rider. Miss Blandy, the daughter of an attorney at Henly, with good expectations from her father, attracted the attention of an adventurer, a certain Captain Cranstoun. The father disapproved of the intimacy, and the Captain entrusted Miss Blandy with a cer- tain powder which she administered to her father with a fatal result. Her defense was that she believed the powder to be of the nature of a love-philter, which would have the effect of making her father well -affected toward her lover. The defence was not successful, and Miss Blandv was found guilty of murder, and executed at Oxford, in April," 1752. Susan P . — Susannah Pierson, sister of Salt's brother-Bencher, Peter Pierson, mentioned in this essay, and one of Salt's executors. By his second codicil, Salt bequeaths her, as a mark of regard, £500; his silver inkstand; and the "works of Pope, Swift, Shakespeare, Addison and Steele;" also Sherlock's Sermons (Sherlock had been Master of the Temple), and any other books she likes to choose out of his library, hoping that, "by reading and reflection," they will ' ' make her life more comfortable. " How oddly touching this bequest seems to us, in the light thrown on it by Lamb's account of the relation between Salt and his friend's sister! What a pleasant glimpse again is here afforded of the ' ' spacious closet of good old English reading," into which Charles and Mary were "tumbled," as he told us, at an early age, when they " browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage." / knew tJiis Lovel. — Lamb's father, John Lamb. The sketch of him given in Mr. Procter's menioir of Charles, taken doubtless from the portrait here mentioned, confirms the statement of a general resemblance to Garrick. Mrs. Arthur Tween, a daughter of Randal Norris, has in her possession a medallion portrait of Samuel Salt, executed in plaster of Paris by John Lamb. He published a collec- tion of his verses, " Poetical Pieces on Several Occasions," in a rough pamphlet of quarto size. A few lines from the (rather doggerel) verses describing the life of a footman in the last century (doubtless reflecting his own experiences of the time when he wore " the smart new livery ") may be given as a sample of his efforts in the manner of " Swift and Prior." The footman has just been sent on an errand to inquire after the health of a friend of his mistress who has lost her monkey: " Then up she mounts — down I descend, To shake hands with particular friend; And there I do some brothers meet. And we each other kindly greet; Then cards they bring and cribbage-board, And I must play upon their word, Altho' I tell them I am sent To know how th' night a lady spent. NOTES. 353 * Pho! make excuse, and have one bout, And say the lady was ^one out;' Th' advice I take, sit down and say, * What is the sum for which we play V * I care not much,' another cries, ' But let it be for Wets and Drys.' " " A remnant most forlorn of what he icas." — One of Lamb's quota- tions from himself. It occurs in the lines (February, 1797) "written on the day of my aunt's funeral:" " One parent yet is left — a wretched thing, A sad survior of his buried wife, A palsy-smitten, childish, old, old man, A semblance most forlorn of what he was, A merry cheerful man." John Lamb died toward the close of the year 1797. Peter Pierson.— Called to the Bench 1800, died 1808. It will be seen that Salt and Pierson, though friends and contemporaries at the Bar, were not so as Benchers. Salt had been some years dead wheil his friend was called to the Bench. Daines Barrington. — The antiquarv, naturalist and correspondent of White of Selborne. Called to the Bench 1777, died 1800. Thomas Barton.— Cslled to the Bench 1775, died 1791. John Read.— CdiWed. to the Bench 1793, died in 1794. Twopeny. — There never was a Bencher of the Inner Temple of this name. The gentleman here mentioned, Mr. Richard Twopeny, was a stock broker, a member of the Kentish family of that name, who, being a bachelor, lived in chambers in the Temple. On his retire- ment from business he resided at West Mailing in Kent, and died in 1809, at the age of eighty-two. Mr. Edward Twopeny, of Wood- stock, Sittingbourne, a great-nephew of this gentleman, remembers him well, and informs me that he w^as, as Lamb describes him, re- markably thin. Lamb evidently recalled him as a familiar figure in the Temple in his own childish days, and supposed him to have been a member of the Bar. Mr. Twopeny held the important position of stock-broker to the Bank of England John TTArt?'?-?/.— Called to the Bench 1801, died in 1812. Richard Jackson.— CaWed to the Bench 1770, died 1787. This gen- tleman was member for New Romney and a member of Lord Shel- burne's Government in 1782. From his wide reading and extraordi- nary memory he was known, beyond the circle of his brother- Benchers, as " the Omniscient." Dr. Johnson (reversing the usual order of his translations) styles him the "all-knowing." See Bosirell, under date of April, 1776: "No, sir, Mr. Thrale is to go by my advice to Mr. Jackson (the all-knowing), and get from him a plan for seeing the most that can be seen in the time that we have to travel." 354 THE ES8A T8 OF ELIA. James Mingay. — Called to the Bencli 1785, died 1812. Mr. Mingay was an eminent King's Counsel, and ih liis day a powerful rival at the Bar of Thomas Erskine — according to an obituary notice in the Gentleman'' s Magazine of "a persuasive oratory, infinite wit, and most excellent fancy." His retort upon Erskine, about the shoe- buckles, goes to confirm this verdict. Baron Maseres. — Cursitor Baron of the Exchequer, a post which he filled for fifty years. Born 1731, died May, 1824. He persevered to the end of his days in wearing the costume of the reign in which he was born. B. N. — Randal Norris, for many years Sub-Treasurer and Librarian of the Inner Temple. At the age of fourteen he was articled to Mr. Walls of Paper Buildings, and from that time, for more than half a century, resided in the Inner Temple. His wife was a native of Widford, the village adjoining Blakesware, in Hertfordshire, and a friend of Mrs. Field, the housekeeper, and there was thus a double tie connecting Randal Norris with Lamb's family. His name appears early in Charles' correspondence. At the season of his mother's death, he tells Coleridge that Mr. Norris had been more than a father to him, and Mrs. Norris more than a mother. Mr. Norris died in the Temple iii January, 1827, at the age of seventy-six, and was buried in the Temple church -yard. Talfourd misdates the event by a year. It was then that Charles Lamb wrote to Crabb Robinson — " In him I have a loss the world cannot make up. He was my friend and my father's friend all the life I can remember. I seem to have made foolish friendships ever since. Those are the friendships which outlive a second generation. Old as I am waxing, in his eyes I was still the child he first knew me. To the last he called me Charley. I have none to call me Charley now." GRACE BEFORE MEAT. (London Magazine, November, 1821.) G . — Coleridge. C. V. L. — Charles Valentine le Grice, Lamb's school-fellow at Christ's Hospital. See the Essay on that Institution. Some one recalled a legend. — Leigh Hunt tells the story in his account of Christ's Hospital: "Our dress was of the coarsest and quaintest kind, but was respected out of doors, and is so. It con- sisted of a blue drugget gown, or body, with ample skirts to it; a yellow vest underneath in winter time; small clothes of Russia duck; worsted yellow stockings; a leathern girdle; and a little black worsted cap, usually carried in the hand. I believe it was the ordinary dress of children in humble life during the reign of the Tudors. We used to flatter ourselves that it was taken from the monks, and there went a monstrous tradition, that at one period it consisted of blue velvet with silver buttons. It was said, also, that NOTES. 355 during the blissful era of the blue velvet we had roast mutton for supper, but that the small clothes not being then in existence, and the mutton suppers too luxurious, the eatables were given up for the ineffables." The following beautiful passage from the Recreations and Studies hy a Country Clergyman of the Eighteenth Century (John Murray, 1882), shows that others, besides Lamb, had thought the main thought of this essay. The writer is describing, in 1781, the drive from Huddersfield, along the banks of the Calder: "I never felt anything so fine: I shall remember it and thank God for it as long as I live. I am sorry I did not think to say grace after it. Are we to be grateful for nothing but beef and pudding ? to thank God for life, and not for happiness?" DREAM CHILDREN; A REVERIE. (London Magazine, January, 1822.) The mood in which Lamb was prompted to this singularly affect- ing confidence was clearly due to a family bereavement, a month or two before the date of the essay. I may be allowed to repeat words of my own, used elsewhere, on this subject. " Lamb's elder brother John was then lately dead. A letter to Wordsworth, of March, 1822, mentions his death as even then recent, and speaks of a certain ' deadness to everything ' which the writer dates from that event. The ' broad, burly, jovial ' John Lamb (so Talfourd describes him) had lived his own easy prosperous life up to this time, not altogether avoiding social relations with his brother and sister, but evidently absorbed to the last in his own interests and pleasures. The death of this brother, wholly unsympathetic as he was with Charles, served to bring home to him his loneliness. He was left in the world with but one near relation, and that one too often removed from him for months at a time by the saddest of afflictions. No wonder if he became keenly aware of his solitude." The emotion discernible in this essay is absolutely genuine; the blending of fact with fiction in the details is curiously arbitrary. Their great-grandmother Field. — Lamb's grandmother, Mary Field, for more than fifty years housekeeper at Blakesware, a dower-house of the Hertfordshire family of Plumers, a few miles from Ware. William Plumer, who represented his county for so many years in Parliament, was still living, and Lamb may have disguised the whereabouts of the "great house" out of consideration for him. Why he substituted Norfolk is only matter for conjecture. Perhaps there were actually scenes from the old legend of the Children in the Wood carved upon a chimney piece at Blakesware; possibly there was some old story in the annals of the Plumer family touching the mysterious disappearance of two children, for whicli it pleased Lamb to substitute the story of the familiar l)allad. llis grandmother, as he has told us in his lines The Grandanie, was deeply versed "in anecdote domestic." 356 THE E88A YS OF ELIA, Wliicli afterward came to decay, and was nearly pulled down. — The dismantling of the Blakesware house had, therefore, begun, it appears, before the death of Williaui Plumer. Cussans, in his History of Hertfordshire, says it was pulled down in 1822. Perhaps the complete demolition was not carried out till after Mr. Plumer's death in that year. The "other house " was Gilston, the principal seat of the Plumers, some miles distant. See notes on the essay Blakesmoor in Hertfordshire. And then I told how, ichen she came to die. — Mrs. Field died in the summer of 1792, and was buried in the adjoining church -yard of Widford. Her grave-stone with the name and date of death, August 5, 1792, is still to be seen, and is one of the few tangible memorials of Lamb's family history still existing. By a curious fatality it narrowly escaped destruction in the great gale of October, 1881, when a tree was blown down across it, considerably reducing its proportions. John L. — Of course John Lamb, the brother. Whether Charles was ever a "lame-footed" boy, through some temporary cause, we cannot say. We know that at the time of the mother's death John Lamb was suffering from an injury to his foot, and made it (after his custom) an excuse for not exerting himself unduly. See the letter of Charles to Coleridge written at the time. "My brother, little disposed (I speak not without tenderness for him) at any time to take care of old age and infirmities, had now, with his bad leg, an exemption from such duties. " I courted the fair AliceW n. — In my memoir of Charles Lamb, I have given the reasons for identifying Alice W n with the Anna of the early sonnets, and again with the form and features of the vil- lage maiden described as Rosamund Gray. The girl who is celebrated under these various names won the heart of Charles Lamb while he was yet little more than a boy. He does not care to conceal from us that it was in Hertfordshire, while under his grandmother's roof, that he first met her. The Beauty ' ' with the yellow Hertfordshire hair — so like my Alice," is how he describes the portrait in the picture gallery at Blakesware. Moreover, the "winding wood- walks green " where he roamed with his Anna, can hardly be un- connected with the " walks and windings of Blakesmoor," apostro- phized at the close of that beautiful essay. And there is a group of cottages called Blenheim, not more than half a mile from the site of Blakesware House, where the original Anna, according to the tradi- tions of the village, resided. ' ' Alice W n" is one of Lamb's deliberate inventions. In the key to the initials employed by him in his essays, he explains that Alice W n stood for Alice Winter- ton, but that the name was "feigned." Anna was, in fact, the nearest clue to the real name that Lamb has vouchsafed. Her actual name was, I have the best reason to believe, Ann Simmons. She afterward married Mr. Bartram, the pawnbroker of Princes Street, Leicester Square. The complete history of this episode in NOTES. 357 Lamb's life will probably never come to light. There are many obvious reasons why any idea of marriage should have been in- definitely abandoned. The poverty in Lamb's home is one such reason; and one, even more decisive, may have been the discovery of the taint of madness that was inherited, in more or less degree, by all the children. Why Lamb chose the particular alids of Winter- ton, under which to disguise his early love, will never be known. It was a name not unfamiliar to him, being that of the old steward in Colman's play of the Iroti Chest, a part created by Lamb's favorite comedian Dodd. The play was first acted in 1796, about the time when the final se})aratiou of the lovers seems to have taken place. In illustration of Lamb's fondness for children, I have the pleasure of adding the following pretty letter to a child, not hitherto printed, it was written to a little girl (one of twin-sisters), the daughter of Kenney the dramatist, after Lamb and his sister's visit to the Ken- n^ys, at Versailles, in September, 1822. The letter has been most kindly placed at my disposal by my friend Mr. W. J. JeafEreson, waose mother was the Sophy of the letter. At the close of a short note to Mrs. Kenney, Lamb adds: " Pray deliver what follows to my dear wife, Sophy: "My dear Sophy — The few short days of connubial felicity which I passed with you among the pears and apricots of Versailles were sone of the happiest of my life. But they are flown ! 'And your other half, your dear co-twin — that she-you — that almost equal sharer of my affections — you and she are my better half, a quarter apiece. She and you are my pretty sixpence, you the head, and she the tail. Sure, Heaven that made you so alike must pardon the error of an inconsiderate moment, should I for love of 70U, love her too well. Do you think laws were made for lovers? I tLink not. "Adieu, amiable pair. ' ' Yours, and yours, "C. Lamb. "P. 8. — I inclose half a dear kiss apiece for you." DISTANT CORRESPONDENTS. (London Magazine, March, 1822.) 3. ii^.— Barron Field. Born October 23, 1786. He was educated for the Bar and practiced for some years, going the Oxford Circuit. In 1816 he married, and went out to New South Wales as Judge of the Supreme Court at Sydney. In 1824 he returned to England, having resigned his judgeship, but two or three years afterward he was appointed Chiel -Justice of Gibraltar. He died at Torquay in 1846. His brother, Francis John Field, was a fellow-clerk of Charles Lamb's at the India House, which was, perhaps, the origin of the acquaintance. Barron Field edited a volume of papers {Geographical Memoirs) on New South Wales for Murray, and the appendix con- tains some short poems, entitled First Fruits of Australian Poetry. Some papers of his are to be found in Leigh Hunt's JRejiector, to which Lamb also contributed. BoS THE ES8A TS OF ELIA. One of Mrs. Rowe's superscriptions. — Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe (1674- 1737), an exemplary person, and now forgotten moralist in verse and prose. Among other works she wrote. Friendship in Death — in Twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living. The following are from the "superscriptions" of these letters: "To Sylvia from Alexis;" " From Cleander to his Brother, endeavoring to reclaim him from his extravagances;" " To Emilia from Delia, giving her a description of the invisible regions, and the happy state of the in- habitants of Paradise." The late Lord C. — The second Lord Camelford, killed in a duel with Mr. Best, in 1804. The day before his death he gave directions that his body should be removed " as soon as may be convenient to a country far distant — to a spot not near the haunts of men, but where the surrounding scenery may smile upon my remains. It is situated on the borders of the lake of St. Lampierre, in the Canton of Berns, and three trees stand in the particular spot." The center tree le desired might be taken up, and his body being there deposited im- mediately replaced. At the foot of this tree, his lordship added, he had formerly passed many solitary hours contemplating the muta- bility of human affairs. — Annual Register for 1804. Ay me! while thee the sea and sounding shores Hold far away. — Lycidas, quoted incorrectly, as usual J. W. — James White, Lamb's school-fellow at Christ's Hospi:al. Died in 1820. THE PRAISE OF CHIMNEY-SWEEPERS. (London Magazine, May, 1822.) A sable cloud Turns forth her silver lining on the night. — Milton, Comus, line 228. My pleasant friend Jem White. — James White, a school-fellow of Lamb's at Christ's Hospital, and the author of a Shakespearian squib suggested by the Ireland Forgeries — "Original Letters, etc., of Sir John Falstaff and his friends, now first made public by a gentleman, a descendant of Dame Quickly, from genuine manuscripts which have been in the possession of the Quickly family near four hundred years." It was published in 1795, and Southey believed that Lamb had in some way a hand in it. The Preface in particular bears some traces of his peculiar vein, but Lamb's enthusiastic recommendation of the book to his friends seems to show that it was in the main the production of James White. Thejeu d' esprit is not more successful than such parodies usually are. White took to journalism in some form, and was at the time of his death in March, 1820, an " agent of Provincial newspapers." His annual supper to the little climbing NOTES. 359 boys was imitated by many charitable persons in London and other large towns. Our triiMy rompaidon, Bigod. — Lamb's old friend and editor John Fenwick, of the Albion. See Essay on the Two Races of Men. Golden lads and lasses must. — Gymheline, Act iv. , Sc, 2. Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. It is curious that in this essay Lamb does not even allude to the grave subject of the cruelties incident to the climbing-boys' occupa- tion — a question which for some years past had attracted the atten- tion of philanthropic persons, in and out of Parliament. A year or two later, however, he made a characteristic offering to the cause. In 1824 James Montgomery, of Sheffield, edited a volume of prose and verse — TJue Chimney -Siceeper's Friend and Climbing -hoy's Album, to which many writers of the day contributed. Lamb, who had been applied to, sent Blake's poem — The Chimney -Siceeper. It was headed, ' ' Communicated by Mr. Charles Lamb, from a very rare and curious little work " — doubtless a true description of the Songs of Innocence in 1824. It is noteworthy that, before sending it, this incorrigible joker could not refrain from quietly altering Blake's " Little Tom Dacre " into "Little Tom Toddy." A COMPLAINT OF THE DECAY OF BEGGARS, IN THE METROPOLIS. ( London Magazine, June, 1822.) Each degree of it is mocked by its " neighbor grice." — A reference, apparently, to Timon of Athens, iv. 3. every grice of fortune Is smoothed by that below." Unfastidious Vincent Bourne (1697-1747). — The "dear Vinny Bourne " of Cowper, who had been his pupil at Westminster. Cow- per, it will be remembered, translated many of Bourne's Latin verses. A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG. (London Magazine, September, 1822.) The tradition as to the origin of cooking, which is, of course, the salient feature of this essay, had been communicated to Lamb, he here tells us, by his friend* M., Thomas Manning, whose acquaint- ance he had made long ago at Cambridge, and who since those days had spent much of his life in exploring China and Thibet. Lamb says the same thing in one of his private letters, so we may accept it 360 THE ESSA TS OF ELIA. as a literal fact. The question therefore arises wlietlier Manning Lad found tlie legend existing in any form in China, or whether Lamb's detail of the Chinese manuscript is wholly fantastic. It is at least certain that the story is a very old one, and appears as early as the third century, in the writings of Porphyry of Tyre. The follow- ing passage, a literal translation from the Treatise De Abstinentid of that philosopher, sets forth one form of the legend: * ' Asclepiades, in his work on Cyprus and Phoenice, writes as fol- lows: ' Originally it was not usual for anything having life to be sacrificed to the gods — not that there was any law on the subject, for it was supposed to be forbidden by the law of nature. At a certain period, however (tradition says), when blood was required in atone- ment for blood, the first victim was sacrificed, and was entirely con- sumed by fire. On one occasion, in later times, when a sacrifice of this kind was being offered, and the victim in process of being burned, a morsel of its flesh fell to the ground. The priest, who was standing: by, immediately picked it up, and on removing his fingers from the burnt flesh, chanced to put them to his mouth, in order to assuage the pain of the burn. As soon as he had tasted the burnt flesh he conceived a strange longing to eat of it, and accord- ingly began to eat the flesh himself, and gave some to his wife also. Pygmalion, on hearing of it, directed that the man and his wife should be put to death, by being hurled headlong from a rock, and appointed another man to the priest's oifice. When, moreover, not long after this man was offering the same sacrifice, and in the same way ate of the flesh, he was sentenced to the same punishment. When, how- ever, the thing made further progress, and men continued to offer sacrifice, and in order to gratify their appetite could not refrain from the flesh, but regularly adopted the habit of eating it, all punish- ment for so doing ceased to be- inflicted.' " Manning may have been aware of this passage, and have told the story in his own language to Charles Lamb. It is worth noticing that in 1823, the year following the appearance of this essay, Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, published a translation of certain Treatises of Porphyry, including the Be Ahstinentid. It is possible that Manning may, on some occasion, have learned the tradition from Taylor. Recent editors of Lamb have asserted, without offering any suflScient evidence, that he owed the idea of this rhapsody on the Pig to an Italian Poem, by Tigrinio Bistonio, published in 1761, at Modena, entitled Oli Elogi eld Porco (Tigrinio Bistonio was the pseudonym of the Abate Giuseppe Ferrari). Mr. Richard Garnett, of the British Museum, to whom I am indebted for calling my attention to the passage in Porphyry, has kindly examined for me the Italian poem in question, and assures me that he can find in it no resemblance whatever to Lamb's treatment of the same theme. There is no affec- tation in Lamb's avowal of his fondness for this delicacy. Toward the close of his life, however, Roast Pig declined somewhat in his favor, and was superseded by hare and other varieties of game. Indeed Lamb was as fond of game as Cowper was of fish; and as in Cowper's case, 'his later letters constantly open with acknowledgments of some recent offering of the kind from a good-natured correspondent. NOTES. 3G1 Ere sin could Uight or sorrow fade. Death came with timely care. From Colerido:e's Epitaph on an Infant. It must have been with iinusiuil glee that Lamb here borrowed half of his friend's quatrain. The ej)itai)h had appeared in the very earliest volume to which ho was himself a contributor — the little volume of Coleridge's poems, published in 1796, l)y Joseph Cottle, of Bristol. The lines are there allotted a whole page to themselves. It was over London Bridge. — The reader will not fail to note the audacious indifference to fact that makes Lamb assert in a parenthesis that his school was on the other side of London Bridge and that he was afterward ' ' at St. Omer's. " ON THE BEHAVIOR OF MARRIED PEOPLE. (London Magazine, September, 1822). The essay had previously appeared, in 1811, in Leigh Hunt's Meflector. ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. (London Magazine, February, 1822.) This essay was originally one of three which appeared in the London under the title of The Old Actors. When Lamb collected and edited his essays for publication in a volume in 1823, he abridged and rearranged them under diiTerent headings. Many of Lamb's favorites, here celebrated, had died or left the stage almost before Lamb entered manhood, showing how early his critical faculty had matured. Bensley, whose performance of Malvolio he has analyzed in such a masterly way, retired from his profession in 1796, and Palmer in 1798. Parsons died in 1795, and Dodd in the autumn of 1796, three months after quitting the stage. Suett survived till 1805, and Mrs. Jordan till 1816. ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY (London Magazine, April, 1822.) Originally the second part of the essay on The Old Actors. This essay is noteworthy as having provoked a serious remonstrance from Lord Macaulay, in reviewing Leigh Hunt's edition of the Restoration Dramatists. Lamb's apology for the moral standards of Congreve and Wycherley is simply an exercise of ingenuity, or rather, as Hartley Coleridge pointed out, is an apology for himself — Charles Lamb — who found himself quite able to enjoy the unparalleled wit of Congreve without being in any way thrown oft" his moral balance. 362 THE ESSA T8 OF ELIA, It is in a letter to Moxon on Leigh Hunt's proposed edition tkat Hartley Coleridge's comment occurs. He writes: " Nothing more or better can be said in defense of these writers than what Lamb has said in his delightful essay on The Old Actors; w^hich is, after all, rather an apology for the audiences who applauded and himself who delighted in their plays, than for the plays themselves. . , . But Lamb always took things by the better handle." ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN. (London Magazine, October, 1822.) CocMetop. — In O'Keefe's farce of Modern Antiques; or, The Merry Mourners. There the antic sate Mocking our state. — Adapted from Richard II., Act iii. Sc. 2. NOTES. 363 The Last Essays of Elia. The Second Series of Elia was published in a collected form by- Mr. Moxon in 1833. It was furnished with a Preface, purporting to be written by "a friend of the late Elia," announcing his death, and commenting freely on his character and habits. This Preface (written, of course, by Lamb himself) is placed in the present edition at the beginning of the volume. Elia is here supposed to have died in the interval between the publication of the First and Second Series. From the opening sentences we should conclude that it was at first intended as a postscript to the First Series, and indeed it originally appeared in the London Magazine for January, 1823. But this design, if ever entertained, was not carried out. I have spoken in my Introduction of the estimate here pronounced by Lamb himself on his own writings, as in my memoir of Lamb I had occasion to deal with the same Preface as throwing light on the causes of his unpopularity. In each case he shows a rare degree of self-knowledge. If they stood alone they would entirely account for Carlyle's harsh verdict. " Few professed literati were of his coun- cils," and he would* be little disposed to show the serious side of himself, still less the better side of his humor, to such as Carlyle. In addition to the evidence of such friends as Hood, Patmore and Procter, confirming Lamb's own account, I may here add a piece of additional testimony from Hazlitt. It occurs in the essay "On Coffee-House Politicians," one of the Table- Talk series: " I will, however, admit that the said Elia is the worst company in the world in bad company, if it be granted me that in good com- pany he is nearly the best that can be. He is one of those of whom it may be said. Tell me your company and I'll tell you your manners. He is the creature of sympathy, and makes good whatever opinion you seem to entertain of him. He cannot outgo the apprehensions of the circle, and invariably acts up or down to the point of refinement or vulgarity at which they pitch him. He appears to take a pleasure in exaggerating the prejudices of strangers against him, a pride in confirming the prepossessions of friends. In whatever scale of intel- lect he is placed, he is as lively or as stupid as the rest can be for their lives. If you think him odd and ridiculous, he becomes more and more so every minute, a lafolie, till he is a wonder gazed at by all. Set him against a good wit and a ready apprehension, and he brightens more and more — 364 THE E8SA Y8 OF ELIA. * Or like a gate of steel Fronting the sun, receives and renders back Its figure and its heat.' " BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. (London Magazine, September, 1834.) Blakesmoor, as has been already observed, was Blakesware, a dower-house of the Plumers, about five miles from Ware, in Hert- fordshire. If there were ever any doubt on the subject, Lamb's own words are decisive. In a letter to Bernard Barton, of August 10, 1827, occurs the following charming passage: "You have well described your old-fashioned paternal hall. Is it not odd that every one's recollections are of some such place? I had my Blakesware (' Blakesmoor' in the London). Nothing fills a child's mind like a large old mansion, better if un- or partially occupied: peopled with the spirits of deceased members of the county and justices of the Quorum. Would I were buried in the peopled solitudes of one with my feelings at seven years old ? Those marble busts of the emperors, they seemed as if they were to stand forever, as they had stood from the living days of Rome, in that old marble hall, and I to partake of their permanency. Eternity was, while I thought not of time. But he thought of me, and they are toppled down, and corn covers the spot of the noble old dwelling and its princely gardens. I feel like a grasshopper that, chirping about the grounds, escaped the scythe only by my littleness." In face of this letter it might seem strange that most of Lamb's editors have unhesitatingly asserted that the original of Lamb's Blakesmoor was GUlston, the other seat of the Plumers, near Harlow, in the same county. The origin of the mistake is to be found in the history of the Plumer property, after the death of Mr. William Plumer, the member for Higham Ferrers, in 1822. Mr. Plumer died without children, and left his estates at Blakesware and Gilston to his widow. The house at Blakesware, which, as we have seen, had been partially dismantled in Mr. Plumer's lifetime, was now pulled to the ground — its principal contents having been already removed to the other house at Gilston. It was after its final demolition that Lamb paid the visit here recorded to look once more on the remains of a place associated with so many happy memories. The widow, Mrs. Plumer, not long after her first husband's death, married Com- mander Lewin, of the Royal Navy, and finally, after his death, married for the third time, in 1828, Mr. Ward, author of the once popular novel Tremaine. On marrying Mrs. Plumer-Lewin, Mr. Ward received the royal permission to take and use the name of Plumer as a prefix to that of Ward. Mr, and Mrs. Plumer- Ward continued to reside at the family residence of the Plumers at Gilston. Mr. P. G. Patmore, the father of the present Mr. Coventry Patmore, made the acquaintance of Mr. Plumer- Ward in 1824, and in a book, entitled My Friends and Acquaintance, published in 1854, NOTES. 365 gave an interesting- account of Mr. Ward, together with a full description, supplied by that gentleman himself, of the furniture and general arrangements of Gilston House. Among these af)pear the Twelve Caesars and the Marble Hall, and other features of the old house at Blakesware, familiar to readers of Charles Lamb, which had been in fact removed from the one house to the other. Mr. Patmore, apnarently ignorant of the existence of any other residence belonging to the Plumers, at once assumed that (iilston had l)een the house celebrated by Lamb, and announced the discovery with some natural exultation. From that time Mr. Patmore's version of the facts has been generally accepted, (iilston House was pulled down in 185L The contents, except such as were used for the new house erected at a short distance, were sold by auction. The Twelve Caesars, and many other things, went to Wardour Street. Nothing remains of Blakesware save the "firry wilderness" and the faint undulations in the grassy meadow, where the ample pleasure garden rose backward in triple terraces. But the rural tran- quillity of the surrounding country is still unchanged, and that depth and warmth of coloring in the foliage that gives to the Hertfordshire landscape a character all its own. It is a day well spent to make an excursion from the country town of Ware, and wander over the site of the old place, and among the graves of Widford church-yard. It will be felt then how, with this "cockney of cockneys," the beauty of an English home — a "haunt of ancient peace" — had passed into his life and become a part of his genius and himself. I was the true descendant of those old W s. — Lainb disguises the family of Plumer under this change of initial. He certainly did not mean the Wards — Mr. Ward not having become connected with the family of Plumer till several years later than the date of this essay. So like my Alice ! — See notes on Dream Children in the first series of the essays. Compare with this essay Mary Lamb's story of ' ' the Young Mahommedan " in Mrs. Leicester's School. Blakesware is there again described as remembered by Mary Lamb when a child. POOR RELATIONS. (London Magazine^ May, 1823.) Richard Amlet, Esq., in the play. — See Vanbrugh's comedy, The Confederacy. Poor W . — The Fa veil of the essay, Christ's Hospital Five- and-thirty Years Ago. Lamb, in his " Key" to the initials used by him, has written against the initial F., there employed: " Favell left Cambridge, because he was asham'd of his father, who was a house- painter there." He was a Grecian in the school in Lamb's time, and when at Cambridge wrote to the Duke of York for a commission in 366 THE ESSA TS OF ELIA, the army, whicli was sent him. Lamb here changes both his friend's name and his University. Like Satan, ' ' kneio his moxmted sign — and fled. " — See the concluding lines of Paradise Lost, Book iv. , of which this is a more than usually free adaptation. In the incident referred to, the angel Gabriel and Satan are on the point of engaging in struggle, when '' The Eternal, to prevent such horrid fray, Hung forth in heaven his golden scales." Satan's attention being called to the sight, The fiend looked up, and knew His mounted scale aloft: nor more: but fled Murmuring, and with him fled the shades of night." DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING. (London 3Iagazine, July, 1822.) TJie wretched Malone. — This happened in 1793, on occasion of Malone's visit to Stratford to examine the municipal and other records of that town, for the purposes of his edition of Shakespeare, Martin B . — Martin Charles Burney, the only son of Admiral Burney, and one of Lamb's life-long friends. Lamb dedicated to him the second volume of his collected writings in 1818, in a pre- fatory sonnet, in which he says — " In all my threadings of this worldly maze (And I have watched thee almost from a child), Free from self-seeking, envy, low design, I have not found a whiter soul than thine." Martin Burney was originally an attorney, but left that branch of the profession for the Bar, where, however, he was not successful. Mr. Burney died in London in 1852. A quaint poetess of our day. — Mary Lamb. The lines will be found in Charles and Mary Lamb's Poetry for Children. STAGE ILLUSION. (London Magazine, August, 1825.) TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON. {^Englishman'' s Magazine, August, 1831.) Tip thither like aerial vapors fly. A parody of the well-known description of the Limbo of Vanity in the third book of Paradise Lost. NOTES. 367 ELLISTONIANA. (Englishman'' s Magazine, August, 1831.) O. D. — George Dyer. Sir A C . — Sir Anthony Carlisle, tlie surgeon. These two papers were prompted by the death of the popular comedian in July, 1831. THE OLD MARGATE HOY. (London Magazine, July, 1823.) Charles and Mary Lamb had actually, as here stated, passed a week's holiday together at Margate, when the former was quite a boy. In his early days of authorship Charles had utilized the expe- rience for a sonnet, one of the first he published — " written at mid- night by the sea-side after a voyage." It is amusing to note these two different treatments of the same theme: " O winged bark ! how swift along the night Passed thy proud keel; nor shall I let go by Lightly of that dread hour the memory. When wet and chilly on thy deck I stood Unbonneted, and gazed upon the flood." *' For many a day, and many a dreadful night, Incessant laboring round the stormy Gape. " — Authorship unknown. " Be hut as bugs tofearen hates icithal. Compared tcith the creatures in the sea's entral. " — Spenser, Fairy Queen, Book ii. Canto xii. The daughters of GJieapside and wives of Lombard Street. — Imper- fectly remembered from the Ode to Master Anthony Stafford, by Thomas Randolph (1605-1635): There from the tree We'll cherries pluck, and pick the strawberry; And every day Go see the wholesome country girls make hay, Whose brown hath lovelier grace Than any painted face That I do know Hyde Park can show. , Where I had rather gain a kiss than meet (Though some of them in greater state Might court my love with plate) The beauties of the Cheap, and wives of Lombard Street. 368 THE ES8A YS OF ELIA, THE CONVALESCENT. (London Magazine, July, 1825.) Lamb had an illness of the kind here described in the winter of 1824-25, and the condition in which it left him seems to have been one of the causes of his proposed retirement from the India House. As with all the other essays which savor of the autobiographical, the freshness and precision of the experience is one of its great charms. SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS. {Nexv Monthly Magazine, May, 1826. ; " So strong a icit" says Coidey. — From Cowley's fine lines — a t/ue ** In memoriam " — On the death of William Hervey. The common run of Lane's novels. — Better known as the novels of the Minerva Press, from which Lane, the publisher, issued innu- merable works. That wonderful episode of the Cave of Mammon. — See Fairy Queen, Bookii., Canto vii., the Legend of Sir Guy on. CAPTAIN JACKSON. (London Magazine, November, 1824.) It has been suggested that this exquisite character-sketch may have been taken from Lamb's old friend, Mr. Randal Norris, of the Inner Temple. An obvious objection to this theory — that Mr. Norris was still living when the sketch appeared (he did not die till 1827) is not so conclusive as it might seem. ■ Lamb was in the habit of describing living persons with a surprising frankness. The account of James Elia, for example, in My Relations, was written and published in his brother's lifetime. Mr. Norris had two daughters, and although Sub-Treasurer to the Inner Temple, was never apparently in very flourishing circumstances. The very unlikeness of most of the inci- dents here recorded to those of Randal Norris' actual life, is quite after Lamb's custom. Mr. Norris lived and died in the Temple; he was not "steeped in poverty to the lips," and his wife was not a Scotchwoman, but a native of Widford, in Hertfordshire, and a friend of old Mrs. Field. Lamb may have introduced the significant reference to the wedding-day on purpose to amuse his sister. When Randal Norris was married (his daughter tells me) Miss Lamb was brides-maid, and the happy pair, in company with Miss Lamb, spent the day together at Richmond. When we came down through Glasgow town. Froir the beautiful old ballad, a special favorite with Lamb, " Waly, waly, up the bank. And waly, waly, down the brae," NOTES. 360 THE SUPERANUATED MAN. (London Magazine, May, 1825.) An account, substantially true to facts, of Lamb's retirement from the India House. This event occurred on the last Tuesday of March, 1825, and Lamb, after his custom, proceeded to make it a subject for his next essay of Elia, He here transforms the directors of the India House into a private firm of merchants. The names Boldero, Merry- weather, and the others, were not those of directors of the company at the time of Lamb's retirement. Lamb retired on a pension of £450, being two-thirds of his salary at that date. Nine pounds a year was deducted to assure a pension to Mary Lamb in the event of her surviving her brother. " Here am I," writes Charles to Words- worth shortly afterward, "after thirty-three years' slavery, sitting in my own room at eleven o'clock, this finest of all April mornings, a freed man, with £441 a year for the remainder of my life, live I as long as John Dennis, who outlived his annuity and starved at ninety." thafs horn, and has his years come to him, In some green desert. I regret much that I have not succeeded in tracing this beautiful passage to its source. It has a ring of the Arcadia. A Tragedy hy Sir Rohert Hoicard. — The lines are from The Vestal Virgin, or the Roman Ladies, Act v., Sc. 1. Sir Robert Howard (1626-1698) was Dryden's brother-in-law, and joint author with him of the Indian Queen. As loiD as to the fiends. — From the dramatic fragment, concerning Priam's slaughter, declaimed by the player in Hamlet. Of Lamb's fellow-clerks in the India House, referred to here by their initials, Ch was a Mr. Chambers, and Do a Mr. Henry Dodwell, evidently one of Lamb's most intimate friends in the office. Their names occur together in an unpublished letter of Lamb's to Mr. Dodwell, now lying before me. It is addressed " H. Dodwell, Esq., India House, London-. (In his absence may be opened by Mr. Chambers.)" The letter is so characteristic thai I may be allowed to quote some passages. It is written from Calne in Wiltshire, where Lamb was spending his summer holiday, in July, 1816: "My dear Fellow — I have been in a lethargy this long while and forgotten London, Westminster, Mary bone, Paddington; they all went clean out of my head, till happening to go to a neighbor's in this good borough of Calne, for want of whist-players we fell upon Commerce. The word awoke me to a remembrance of my profes- sional avocations and the long-continued strife which I have been these twenty-four years endeavoring to compose between those grand Irreconcilables — Cash and Commerce. I instantly called for an almanac, which, with some difficulty was procured at a fortune- teller's in the vicinity (for the happy holiday people here having 370 TEE ESS A YS OF ELI A, notliing to do keep no account of time), and found that by dint of duty I must attend to Leadenliall on Wednesday morning next, and sliail attend accordingly. . . . Adieu ! Ye fields, ye slieplierds and — lierdesses, and dairies, and cream-pots, and fairies, and dances upon the green. I come ! I come ! Don't drag me so hard by the hair of my head, Genius of British India ! I know my hour is come — Faustus must give up his soul, O Lucifer, O Mephistopheles ! Can you make out what this letter is about ? I am afraid to look it over. Ch. Lamb. "Calne, Wilts. Friday, July something. Old Style, 1816. No new styles here — all the styles are old, and some of the gates too for that matter." THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING. {New Monthly Magazine, March, 1826.) This essay as originally published, formed one of the series of Po2)ular Fallacies— with, the title, "That my Lord Shaftsbury and Sir William Temple are models of the Genteel Style of Writing." My Lord Shaftesbury. — Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, and author of the Characteristics. In his essay on Books and' Beading hsLmb had said, "I can read anything which I call a book. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low." The essays of Temple here cited are those Of Oardening, Of Health and Long Life, The Cure of the Gout by Moxa, and Of Poetry. BARBARA S . (London Magazine, April, 1825.) The note appended by Lamb to this essay, as to the heroine being named Street, and having three times changed her name by succes- sive marriages, is one ef the most elaborate of his fictions. The real heroine of the story, as admitted by Lamb at the time, was the admirable comedian, Fanny Kelly, an attached friend of Charles and Mary Lamb, who has just died (December, 1882) at the advanced age of ninety-two. In the year 1875 Miss Kelly furnished Mr. Charles Kent, who was editing the centenary edition of Lamb's works, with her own interesting version of the anecdote. It was in 1799, when Fanny Kelly was a child of nine, that the incident occurred, not at the old Bath Theater, but at Drury Lane where she had been admitted as a "miniature chorister," at a salary of a pound a week. After his manner. Lamb has changed every detail — the heroine, the site of the theater, the amount of the salary, the name of the treas- urer. Even following Charles Lamb, Miss Kelly has told her own story with much graphic power. Miss Kelly, with the "divine plain face," was a special favorite of Lamb's. See his sonnets " To Miss Kelly," and " To a celebrated female performer in The Blind Boy." NOTES. 371 Sne would have done the elder child in Morton's pathetic afterpiece to the life. — This is an ingenious way of intimating that Miss Kelly did play the elder child in the Children in the Wood. The drama was lirst produced in 1793. The incident of the roast-fowl and the spilt salt, recorded later on, occurs in the last scene of this play. The famished children, just rescued from the wood, are fed by the faithful Walter with a roast chicken, over which he has just before, in his agitation, upset the salt-box. THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY. (London Magazine, October, 1823.) The concluding paragraphs of Lamb's letter to Southey, remon- strating with him for his remarks upon certain characteristics of Lamb's writings. The Quarterly Bevieio for January, 1823, con- tained an article by Southey on Bishop Gregoire and the spread of the Theo-philanthropists in France. The first series of Elia was then on the point of being published in book-form, and Southey thought to do the book a good turn by paying it an incidental com- pliment. Having to deal with the spread of free-thought in Eng- land, Southey went on to say that unbelief might rob men of hope, but could not banish their fears. ' ' There is a remarkable proof of this," he added, "in Elia's essays, a book which wants only a sounder religious feeling, to be as delightful as it is original," and proceeded to quote from the essay on Witches and other Night Fears, Lamb's account of the nervous terrors of "dear little T. H." — known to be Thornton Hunt, Leigh Hunt's eldest boy. The moral drawn by Southey may be easily guessed. These nervous terrors were the natural result of the absence of definite Christian teaching in the systems of Leigh Hunt and others of the Radical set. Lamb was hurt by the attack on himself, but still more by the reflections on his friends; and the greater part of his letter is employed in defending Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt. The breach with Southey was soon healed, and the old affectionate inter- course renewed. If only for this reason, it is intelligible why Lamb did not care to reproduce the entire letter when he published the last Essays of Elia in a collected form. I have dealt with the subject at some length in my memoir of Lamb. AJVIICUS REDIVIVUS. (London Magazine, December, 1823.) For an account of G. D. — George Dyer — see notes to the essay, Oxford in the Vacation. The incident had actually occurred a few weeks only before the date of this essay. Mr. Procter supplements the account here given with some amusing particulars: " I happened to go to Lamb's house about an hour after his rescue and restoration to dry land, and met Miss Lamb in the passage in a state of great alarm; she was whimpering, and could only utter, ' Poor Mr. Dyer ! Poor Mr. Dyer ! ' in tremulous tones. I went upstairs aghast, and 372 THE ESSA YS OF ELIA, found tliat tlie involuntary diver had been placed in bed, and tbat Miss Lamb bad administered brandy and water, as a well-establisbed preventive against cold. Dyer, unaccustomed to anything stronger than the * crystal spring, ' was sitting upright in the bed perfectly delirious. His hair had been rubbed up, and stood out like so many needles of iron-gray. ' I soon found out where I was,' he cried out to me, laughing; and then he went wandering on, his words taking flight into regions where no one could follow." And could such spacious virtue find a grave. Lamb had headed this essay with an appropriate quotation from Milton's Lycidas. He now cites a less famous poem from the collec- tion of tributary verse in which Lycidas made its first appearance — the little volume of Elegies on the death of Edward King, published at Cambridge, in 1638. The couplet here quoted is from the contri- bution to this volume by John Cleveland, the Cavalier. It runs thus in the original: ** But can this spacious virtue find a grave Within th' imposthumed bubble of a wave." The sweet lyrist of Peter House. — The poet Gray. The mild Askew.'— AjoXhowj Askew, M. D. SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. (London Magazine, September, 1823.) In the year 1820 William Hazlitt delivered a course of lectures at the Surrey Institution on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. In the sixth lecture of the course he dealt, among other writers, with Sidney, on whose Arcadia he made an elaborate onslaught. "It is to me," he says, " one of the greatest monuments of the abuse of intellectual power upon record. It puts one in mind of the Court dresses and preposterous fashions of the time, which are grown obsolete and disgusting. It is not romantic, but scholastic; not poetry, but casuistry; not nature but art, and the worst sort of art, which thinks it can do better than nature. Of the number of fine things that are constantly passing through the author's mind, there is hardly one that he has not contrived to spoil, and to spoil pur- posely and maliciously, in order to aggrandize our idea of himself " — with much more in the same strain. In the course of his remarks he describes the sonnets inlaid in t\x% Arcadia Si's, "jejune, far-fetched and frigid," the very words cited by Lamb in his essay; and it is clear that Hazlitt's lecture was the immediate cause of the present paper. It is a lesson of high value to contrast Lamb's and Hazlitt's esti- mate of Sidney. Hazlitt possessed acuteness, wide reading, and had command of an excellent style, but he was (through political bias, among other causes, as Lamb suggests) out of spmpathy with the subject. Moreover, Lamb was a poet. His few sentences beginning, NOTES. 373 " But tliey are not rich in words only," are truer and more satisfying than the whole of llazlitt's minute analysis. / am afraid some of his addresses (" ad Leonoram " I mean) ha/ce rather erred on the other side. — Cowper translated most of Milton's Latin poems in skillful imitation of the Miltonic verse. It is signifi- cant that he "drew the line" at this exorbitant piece of flattery, which remains untranslated by him. Lord Oxford. — The "foolish nobleman," just before mentioned. Sidney was grossly insulted by the young earl in a tennis court, where they had met for play. According to Fulke Greville, the earl called Sidney "a puppy" — the "opprobrious thing" alluded to by Lamb. It is worth noting that two centuries later another earl (Horace Walpole) made an equally memorable and insolent attack upon Sidney. See the notice of Fulke Greville in Walpole's Royal and Noble Authors. There is a touching incident associating Lamb's last days with those of Sidney. The last letter written by Lamb before the fatal issue of his accident was to Mrs. George Dyer, concerning the safety of a certain book belonging to Mr. Cary, of the British Museum, which Lamb had left by accident at her house. The book was the Theatrum Poetarurn of Edward Philips, Milton's nephew. On the recovery of the volume it was found that the page was turned down at the notice of Philip Sidney. It was on this incident that Cary wrote his charming lines: " So should it be, my gentle friend; Thy leaf last closed at Sidney's end. Thou too, like Sidney, would'st have giyen The water, thirsting, and near Heaven; Nay, were it wine, filled to the brim. Thou hadst looked hard — but given, like him." NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. {Englishman'' s Magazine^ October, 1831.) The title of this essay was first given to it when it appeared in the Last Essays of Elia in 1833. The date, therefore, to which it refers is the year 1798, or thereabouts. Lamb's connection with the news- paper world began even earlier than this. He seems to have owed his first introduction to it to Coleridge, who published some of his own earliest verse in the columns of the Morning Chronicle. Cole- ridge was contributing sonnets to this paper as early as the year 1794, and among them appeared Lamb's sonnets (perhaps a joint composition with his friend) on Mrs. Siddons. After this period, until Coleridge's return from Germany at the end of 1799, we have no means of tracing Lamb's hand in the newspapers; but from 1800 to 1803 frequent mention is made in Lamb's correspondence of his employment in the capacity described in this essay. It was his time of greatest poverty and struggle, when the addition of an extra fifty 374 THE ESS A YS OF ELI A. pounds a year to liis income was of tlie greatest importance. Cole- ridge appears to have introduced Lamb to Daniel Stuart, the editor of the Morning Post. He was writing in the same year for the Albion, the final collapse of which, by the help of Lamb's epigram, is here described. " The Albion is dead," he writes to Manning on this occasion, " dead as a nail in door — my revenues have died with it; but I am not as a man without hope." He had now got an intro- duction through his friend George Dyer, to the Morning Chronicle, under the editorship of Perry. In 1802 he was trying an entirely new line of writing in the Momnng Post — turning into verse prose translations of German poems supplied by Coleridge. A specimen of Lamb's work of this kind has been preserved — Thekla's song in Wal- lenstein. " As to the translations," he writes to Coleridge, " let me do two or three hundred lines, and then do you try the nostrums upon Stuart in any way you please." His connection with the newspapers came to an end in 1803. *' I have given up two guineas a week to the Post,'' he writes to Manning, "and regained my health and spirits, which were upon the wane. I grew sick, and Stuart unsat- isfied. Lusisti satis, tempus abire est. I must cut closer, that's all." Daniel Stuart — who lived till 1846 — published in the Gentleman's Magazine for June, 1838, an account of his dealings with Coleridge, Wordsworth and Lamb. It is amusing to hear the other side of the story He says, "as for good Charles Lamb, I could never make anything of his writings. Coleridge repeatedly pressed me to settle him on a salary, but it would not do. Of politics he knew nothing; and his drollery was vapid when given in short paragraphs for a newspaper." Certainly no style was ever less fitted for journalism, in any department, than Lamb's. Bob Allen — 02ir quondam scliool-fellow. — He was a Grecian at Christ's Hospital in Lamb's time. See the story of him, and his handsome face, in the essay on the Blue Coat School. John Fenwick. — The Ralph Bigod of the essay, The two Races of Men. An unlucky, or rather lucky, epigram from our pen. The alleged apostasy of Sir James Mackintosh consisted in his having accepted, at the hands of Mr. Addington, the office of Recorder of Bombay, in 1804. His Vindicice Gallicce were published in 1791. Lamb's epi- gram was the following: " Though thou'rt like Judas, an apostate black, In the resemblance one thing dost thou lack; When he had gotten his ill-purchased pelf, He went away and wisely hang'd himself: This thou may do at last, yet much I doubt If thou hast any bowels to gush out ! " BARRENNESS OF THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY IN THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. {The Aihenceum, JanuRvy and February, 1833.) NOTES. 375 THE WEDDING. (London Magazine, June, 1825.) There is no clue existing, that I am aware of, to the incident related in this essay. The mention of an admiral among Lamb's friends naturally suggests Admiral Burney, but when this essay was first written the admiral had been four years in his grave. And yet the association "of the character with the game of whist, a special fav- orite with the Burney family, seems to show that he had his old friend in his mind. It is at least a curious coincidence that when Lamb revised the Essay for the Last Essays of Ella, he was himself looking for- ward to a bereavement strictly parallel to that of the old admiral. He and Mary were about to lose, by marriage, one who had been to them as an only child. Emma Isola married Mr. Moxon, in July, 1833. Lamb might indeed have said of himself, " He bears bravely up, but he does not come out with his flashes of wild wit so thick as formerly . . . the youthfulness of the house is fiown." Did he perchance remember, as he quoted his favorite Mar veil, that the poet was bidding good-by to one who had been his pupil, as Emma Isola had been Lamb's ? In the lines on Appleton House, Marvell predicts the marriage of Mary Fairfax — " While her glad parents must rejoice, And make their destiny their choice." REJOICINGS UPON THE NEW-YEAR'S COMING OF AGE. (London Magazine, January, 1823.) OLD CHINA. (London Magazine, March, 1823.) This beautiful essay tells its own story — this time, we may be sure, without romance or exaggeration of any kind. It is a contribu- tion of singular interest to our understanding of the happier days of Charles and Mary's united life. Dancing the hays. — The hays was an old English dance, involving some intricate figures. It seems to have been known in England up to fifty years ago. The dance is often referred to in the writers whom Lamb most loved. Herrick, for example, has — " On holy-days, when Virgins meet To dance the Heyes, with nimble feet." THE CHILD ANGEL ; A DREAM. (London Magazine, June, 1823.) Thomas Moore's Loves of the Angels had appeared in the year 1823. Lamb, as we may well believe, was not in general attracted to this poet, but there were reasons why this particular poem may have 376 TEE ESSA Y8 OE ELIA, been an exception to tlie rule. It was based upon the translation in tlie Septuagint of tbe second verse in the sixtli chapter of Genesis — "Angels of God " instead of " Sons of God." " In addition to the fitness of the subject for poetry," Moore writes in his preface, "it struck me also as capable of affording an allegorical medium, through which might be shadowed out the fall of the soul from its original purity — the loss of light and happiness which it suffers in the pur- suit of this world's perishable pleasures — and the punishments, both from conscience and Divine justice, with which impurity, pride and presumptuous inquiry into the awful secrets of God are sure to be visited." This vein of thought had a strange fascination for Lamb, as we know from his reflections in NeiD- Tear's Eve, and his beauti- ful sonnet on Innocence. The topic, in short, may have attracted him, rather than Moore's fluent verse and boudoir metaphysics. It may be doubted whether he meant his sequel to the poem to be in any sense an allegory. It is probably fantastic merely. CONFESSIONS OF A DRUNKARD. (London Magazine, August, 1822.) This essay in its original shape was one of a series of temperance tracts, edited by Basil Montagu. In the Quarterly Review for April, 1822, appeared an article on Dr. Reid's treatise on Hypoclioiidriads and other Nervous Affections. These Confessions of a Drunkard were there referred to as "a fearful picture of the consequences of intemperance," which the reviewer went on to say, " we have reason to know is a true tale." I may be allowed to finish the story in words used by me elsewhere. ' ' In order to give the author the opportunity of contradicting this statement, the tract was reprinted in the London in the following August under the signature of Elia. To it were appended a few words of remonstrance with the Quarterly reviewer for assuming the literal truthfulness of these confessions, but accompanied with certain significant admissions that showed Lamb had no right to be seriously indignant. ' It is, indeed, ' he writes, ' a compound extracted out of his long observation of the effects of drinking upon all the world about him; and this accumu- lated mass of misery he hath centered (as the custom is with judi- cious essayists) in a single figure. We deny not that a portion of his own experiences may have passed into the picture (as who, that is not a washy fellow, but must at some time have felt the after-operation of a too generous cup?); but then how heightened! how exaggerated! how little within the sense of the review, when a part in their slander- ous usage must be understood to stand for the whole. ' The truth is that Lamb, in writing his tract, had been playing with edge-tools, and could hardly have complained if they turned against himself. It would be those who knew Lamb, or at least the circumstances of his life best, who would be most likely to accept these confessions as true." There is, in short, a thread of fact running through this paper, though with exaggerations and additions in abundance. The reference to the excessive indulgence in smoking we have too good reason for accepting as genuine. When some one watched him per- NOTES. 377 sistently emit dense volumes of smoke during the greater part of an evening, and asked bim how he had contrived to do it, he answered, " I toiled after it, sir, as some men toil after virtue." Compare his Ode to Tobacco. and not undo 'em, To suffer wet damnation to run thro' 'm. From the Revenger's Tragedy by Cyril Tourneur. Vindici is addressing the skull of his dead lady: . " Here's an eye. Able to tempt a great man — to serve God ; A pretty hanging lip, that has forgot how to dissemble. Methinks this mouth should make a swearer tremble; A drunkard clasp his teeth, and not undo 'om. To suffer wet damnation to run through 'em." POPULAR FALLACIES. ( The Neio Monthly Magazine, January to September, 1826.) Lamb writes to Wordsworth in 1833, when the volume was newly out: " I want you in the Po'pular Fallacies to like the ' home that is no home,' and ' rising with the lark.' " The former of these natu- rally interested Lamb deeply, for it contains a hardly - disguised account of his own struggles with the crowd of loungers and good- natured friends who intruded on his leisure hours, and hindered his reading and writing. There is little to call for a note in these papers. The pun of Swift's criticised — with rare acumen — in the Fallacy, "that the worst puns are the best," was on a lady's mantua dragging to the ground a Cremona violin. Swift is said to have quoted Virgil's line — "Mantua vse miserse nimium vincina Cremonae." THE Ein). BURT'S HOME LIBRARY. Comprising two hundred and fifty titles of standard works, em- bracing fiction, essays, poetry, history, travel, etc., selected from the world's best literature, written by authors of world-wide repu- tation. Printed from large type, on good paper, and bound in handsome cloth binding, uni- form with this volume. Price, 75 cents per copy. Adam Bede. By George Eliot, ^sop's Fables. Alhambra, The. 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