Chapter XIII (part 2 of 2)

Chapter XIII (part 2 of 2)

how have I pondered over this, when a boy! how have I longed for some authentic memoir of the witch to clear up the obscurity!--Was the story extant in the Chronicles of Algiers? Could I get at it by some fortunate introduction to the Algerine ambassador? Was a voyage thither practicable? The Spectator (I knew) went to Grand Cairo, only to measure a pyramid. Was not the object of my quest of at least as much importance?--The blue-eyed hag--could she have done any thing good or meritorious? might that Succubus relent? then might there be hope for the devil. I have often admired since, that none of the commentators have boggled at this passage--how they could swallow this camel--such a tantalising piece of obscurity, such an abortion of an anecdote.

At length I think I have lighted upon a clue, which may lead to show what was passing in the mind of Shakspeare when he dropped this imperfect rumour. In the "accurate description of Africa, by John Ogilby (Folio), 1670," page 230, I find written, as follows. The marginal title to the narrative is--

Charles the Fifth besieges Algier

In the last place, we will briefly give an Account of the Emperour Charles the Fifth, when he besieg'd this City; and of the great Loss he suffer'd therein.

This Prince in the Year One thousand five hundred forty one, having Embarqued upon the Sea an Army of Twenty two thousand Men aboard Eighteen Gallies, and an hundred tall Ships, not counting the Barques and Shallops, and other small Boats, in which he had engaged the principal of the Spanish and Italian Nobility, with a good number of the Knights of Maltha; he was to Land on the Coast of Barbary, at a Cape call'd Matifou. From this place unto the City of Algier a flat Shore or Strand extends it self for about four Leagues, the which is exceeding favourable to Gallies. There he put ashore with his Army, and in a few days caused a Fortress to be built, which unto this day is call'd The Castle of the Emperor.

In the meantime the City of Algier took the Alarm, having in it at that time but Eight hundred Turks, and Six thousand Moors, poorspirited men, and unexercised in Martial affairs; besides it was at that time Fortifi'd onely with Walls, and had no Out-works: Insomuch that by reason of its weakness, and the great Forces of the Emperour, it could not in appearance escape taking. In fine, it was Attaqued with such Order, that the Army came up to the very Gates, where the Chevalier de Sauignac, a Frenchman by Nation, made himself remarkable above all the rest, by the miracles of his Valour. For having repulsed the Turks, who having made a Sally at the Gate call'd Babason, and there desiring to enter along with them, when he saw that they shut the Gate upon him, he ran his Ponyard into the same, and left it sticking deep therein. They next fell to Battering the City by the Force of Cannon; which the Assailants so weakened, that in that great extremity the Defendants lost their Courage, and resolved to surrender.

But as they were thus intending, there was a Witch of the Town, whom the History doth not name, which went to seek out Assam Aga, that Commanded within, and pray'd him to make it good yet nine Days longer, with assurance, that within that time he should infallibly see Algier delivered from that Siege, and the whole Army of the Enemy dispersed, so that Christians should be as cheap as Birds. In a word, the thing did happen in the manner as foretold; for upon the Twenty first day of October in the same Year, there fell a continual Rain upon the Land, and so furious a Storm at Sea, that one might have seen Ships hoisted into the Clouds, and in one instant again precipitated into the bottom of the Water: insomuch that that same dreadful Tempest was followed with the loss of fifteen Gallies, and above an hundred other Vessels; which was the cause why the Emperour, seeing his Army wasted by the bad Weather, pursued by Famine, occasioned by wrack of his Ships, in which was the greatest part of his Victuals and Ammunition, he was constrain'd to raise the Siege, and set Sail for Sicily, whither he Retreated with the miserable Reliques of his Fleet.

In the mean time that Witch being acknowledged the Deliverer of Algier, was richly remunerated, and the Credit of her Charms authorized. So that ever since Witchcraft hath been very freely tolerated; of which the Chief of the Town, and even those who are esteem'd to be of greatest Sanctity among them, such as are the Marabou's, a Religious Order of their Sect, do for the most part make Profession of it, under a goodly Pretext of certain Revelations which they say they have had from their Prophet Mahomet.

And hereupon those of Algier, to palliate the shame and the reproaches that are thrown upon them for making use of a Witch in the danger of this Siege, do say, that the loss of the Forces of Charles V., was caused by a Prayer of one of their Marabou's, named Cidy Utica, which was at that time in great Credit, not under the notion of a Magitian, but for a person of a holy life. Afterwards in remembrance of their success, they have erected unto him a small mosque without the Babason Gate, where he is buried, and in which they keep sundry Lamps burning in honour of him: nay they sometimes repair thither to make their Sala, for a testimony of greater Veneration.

Can it be doubted for a moment, that the dramatist had come fresh from reading some older narrative of this deliverance of Algier by a witch, and transferred the merit of the deed to his Sycorax, exchanging only the "rich remuneration," which did not suit his purpose, to the simple pardon of her life? Ogilby wrote in 1670; but the authorities to which he refers for his Account of Barbary are--Johannes de Leo, or Africanus--Louis Marmol--Diego de Haedo--Johannes Gramaye--Bræves--Cel. Curio--and Diego de Torres--names totally unknown to me--and to which I beg leave to refer the curious reader for his fuller satisfaction.

L.

ORIGINAL LETTER OF JAMES THOMSON

(1824)

The following very interesting letter has been recovered from oblivion, or at least from neglect, by our friend Elia, and the public will no doubt thank him for the deed. It is without date or superscription in the manuscript, which (as our contributor declares) was in so "fragmentitious" a state as to perplex his transcribing faculties in the extreme. The poet's love of nature is quite evident from one part of it; and the "poetical posture of his affairs" from another. Whether regarded as elucidating the former or the latter, it is a document not a little calculated to excite the attention of the curious as well as the critical. We could ourselves write an essayful of conjectures from the grounds it affords both with respect to the author's poems and his pride. But we must take another opportunity, or leave it to his next biographer.

DEAR SIR,

I would chide you for the slackness of your correspondence; but having blamed you wrongeously[47] last time, I shall say nothing till I hear from you, which I hope will be soon.

[47] Sic in MS.

There's a little business I would communicate to you before I come to the more entertaining part of our correspondence.

I'm going (hard task) to complain, and beg your assistance. When I came up here I brought very little money along with me; expecting some more upon the selling of Widehope, which was to have been sold that day my mother was buried. Now it is unsold yet, but will be disposed of as soon as can be conveniently done; though indeed it is perplexed with some difficulties. I was a long time living here at my own charges, and you know how expensive that is; this, together with the furnishing of myself with clothes, linen, one thing and another, to fit me for any business of this nature here, necessarily obliged me to contract some debts. Being a stranger, it is a wonder how I got any credit; but I cannot expect it will be long sustained, unless I immediately clear it. Even now, I believe it is at a crisis--my friends have no money to send me, till the land is sold; and my creditors will not wait till then. You know what the consequence would be. Now the assistance I would beg of you, and which I know, if in your power, you will not refuse me, is a letter of credit on some merchant, banker, or such like person in London, for the matter of twelve pounds; till I get money upon the selling of the land, which I am at last certain of, if you could either give it me yourself, or procure it: though you owe it not to my merit, yet you owe it to your own nature, which I know so well as to say no more upon the subject: only allow me to add, that when I first fell upon such a project, (the only thing I have for it in my present circumstances,) knowing the selfish inhumane temper of the generality of the world, you were the first person that offered to my thoughts, as one to whom I had the confidence to make such an address.

* * * * *

Now I imagine you are seized with a fine romantic kind of melancholy on the fading of the year--now I figure you wandering, philosophical and pensive, amidst brown withered groves; whilst the leaves rustle under your feet, the sun gives a farewell parting gleam, and the birds--

Stir the faint note, and but attempt to sing.

Then again, when the heavens wear a more gloomy aspect, the winds whistle and the waters spout, I see you in the well-known cleugh, beneath the solemn arch of tall, thick, embowering trees, listening to the amusing lull of the many steep, moss-grown cascades; while deep, divine contemplation, the genius of the place, prompts each swelling, awful thought. I am sure you would not resign your place in that scene at an easy rate:--None ever enjoyed it to the height you do, and you are worthy of it. There I walk in spirit, and disport in its beloved gloom. This country I am in is not very entertaining; no variety but that of woods, and them we have in abundance. But where is the living stream? the airy mountain? or the hanging rock? with twenty other things that elegantly please the lover of Nature. Nature delights me in every form. I am just now painting her in her most luxurious dress; for my own amusement, describing winter as it presents itself. After my first proposal of the subject--

I sing of winter, and his gelid reign; Nor let a ryming insect of the spring Deem it a barren theme, to me 'tis full Of manly charms: to me, who court the shade, Whom the gay seasons suit not, and who shun The glare of summer. Welcome, kindred glooms! Drear awful wintry horrors, welcome all! &c.

After this introduction, I say, which insists for a few lines further, I prosecute the purport of the following ones:--

Nor can I, O departing Summer! choose But consecrate one pitying line to you: Sing your last temper'd days and sunny balms, That cheer the spirits and serene the soul.

Then terrible floods, and high winds, that usually happen about this time of the year, and have already happened here (I wish you have not felt them too dreadfully); the first produced the enclosed lines; the last are not completed. Mr. Rickleton's poem on Winter, which I still have, first put the design into my head--in it are some masterly strokes that awakened me--being only a present amusement, it is ten to one but I drop it whenever another fancy comes across. I believe it had been much more for your entertainment, if in this letter I had cited other people instead of myself; but I must refer that till another time. If you have not seen it already, I have just now in my hands an original of Sir Alexander Brands (the crazed Scots knight of the woeful countenance), you would relish. I believe it might make Mis[48] John catch hold of his knees, which I take in him to be a degree of mirth, only inferior, to fall back again with an elastic spring. It is very [here a word is waggishly obliterated] printed in the Evening Post: so, perhaps you have seen these panegyrics of our declining bard; one on the Princess's birth-day; the other on his Majesty's, in [obliterated] cantos, they are written in the spirit of a complicated craziness. I was lately in London a night, and in the old play-house saw a comedy acted, called Love makes a Man, or the Fop's Fortune, where I beheld Miller and Cibber shine to my infinite entertainment. In and about London this month of September, near a hundred people have died by accident and suicide. There was one blacksmith tired of the hammer, who hung himself, and left written behind him this concise epitaph:--

I, Joe Pope, Lived without hope And died by a rope.

Or else some epigrammatic Muse has belied him.

Mr. Muir has ample fund for politics in the present posture of affairs, as you will find by the public news. I should be glad to know that great minister's frame just now. Keep it to yourself--you may whisper it too in Mis John's ear. Far otherwise is his lately mysterious brother, Mr. Tait, employed. Started a superannuated fortune, and just now upon the full scent. It is comical enough to see him amongst the rubbish of his controversial divinity and politics, furbishing up his antient rusty gallantry.

Yours, sincerely, J. T.

Remember me to all friends, Mr. Rickle, Mis John, Br. John, &c.

[48] Mas?

BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF MR. LISTON

(1825)

The subject of our Memoir is lineally descended from Johan De L'Estonne (see Doomesday Book, where he is so written) who came in with the Conqueror, and had lands awarded him at Lupton Magna, in Kent. His particular merits or services, Fabian, whose authority I chiefly follow, has forgotten, or perhaps thought it immaterial, to specify. Fuller thinks that he was standard-bearer to Hugo De Agmondesham, a powerful Norman Baron, who was slain by the hand of Harold himself at the fatal battle of Hastings. Be this as it may, we find a family of that name flourishing some centuries later in that county. John Delliston, Knight, was high sheriff for Kent, according to Fabian, quinto Henrici Sexti; and we trace the lineal branch flourishing downwards--the orthography varying, according to the unsettled usage of the times, from Delleston to Leston, or Liston, between which it seems to have alternated, till, in the latter end of the reign of James I, it finally settled into the determinate and pleasing dissyllabic arrangement which it still retains. Aminadab Liston, the eldest male representative of the family of that day, was of the strictest order of Puritans. Mr. Foss, of Pall Mall, has obligingly communicated to me an undoubted tract of his, which bears the initials only, A. L. and is entitled, "the Grinning Glass: or Actor's Mirrour, wherein the vituperative Visnomy of vicious Players for the Scene is as virtuously reflected back upon their mimetic Monstrosities as it has viciously (hitherto) vitiated with its vile Vanities her Votarists." A strange title, but bearing the impress of those absurdities with which the title pages of that pamphlet-spawning age abounded. The work bears date 1617. It preceded the Histriomastix by fifteen years; and as it went before it in time, so it comes not far short of it in virulence. It is amusing to find an ancestor of Liston's thus bespattering the players at the commencement of the seventeenth century. "Thinketh He (the actor), with his costive countenances, to wry a sorrowing soul out of her anguish, or by defacing the divine denotement of destinate dignity (daignely described in the face humane and no other) to reinstamp the Paradice-plotted similitude with a novel and naughty approximation (not in the first intention) to those abhorred and ugly God-forbidden correspondences, with flouting Apes' jeering gibberings, and Babion babbling-like, to hoot out of countenance all modest measure, as if our sins were not sufficing to stoop our backs without He wresting and crooking his members to mistimed mirth (rather malice) in deformed fashion, leering when he should learn, prating for praying, goggling his eyes (better upturned for grace), whereas in Paradice (if we can go thus high for His profession) that devilish Serpent appeareth his undoubted Predecessor, first induing a mask like some roguish roistering Roscius (I spit at them all) to beguile with Stage shows the gaping Woman, whose Sex hath still chiefly upheld these Mysteries, and are voiced to be the chief Stage-haunters, where, as I am told, the custom is commonly to mumble (between acts) apples, not ambiguously derived from that pernicious Pippin (worse in effect than the Apples of Discord) whereas sometimes the hissing sounds of displeasure, as I hear, do lively reintonate that snake-taking-leave, and diabolical goings off, in Paradice."

The puritanic effervescence of the early Presbyterians appears to have abated with time, and the opinions of the more immediate ancestors of our subject to have subsided at length into a strain of moderate Calvinism. Still a tincture of the old leaven was to be expected among the posterity of A. L.

Our hero was an only son of Habakuk Liston, settled as an Anabaptist minister upon the patrimonial soil of his ancestors. A regular certificate appears, thus entered in the church book at Lupton Magna. "Johannes, filius Habakuk et Rebeccæ Liston, Dissentientium, natus quinto Decembri, 1780, baptizatus sexto Februarii sequentis; Sponsoribus J. et W. Woollaston, unâ cum Maria Merryweather." The singularity of an Anabaptist minister conforming to the child rites of the church, would have tempted me to doubt the authenticity of this entry, had I not been obliged with the actual sight of it, by the favour of Mr. Minns, the intelligent and worthy parish clerk of Lupton. Possibly some expectation in point of worldly advantages from some of the sponsors, might have induced this unseemly deviation, as it must have appeared, from the practice and principles of that generally rigid sect. The term Dissentientium was possibly intended by the orthodox clergyman as a slur upon the supposed inconsistency. What, or of what nature, the expectations we have hinted at, may have been, we have now no means of ascertaining. Of the Wollastons no trace is now discoverable in the village. The name of Merryweather occurs over the front of a grocer's shop at the western extremity of Lupton.

Of the infant Liston we find no events recorded before his fourth year, in which a severe attack of the measles bid fair to have robbed the rising generation of a fund of innocent entertainment. He had it of the confluent kind, as it is called, and the child's life was for a week or two despaired of. His recovery he always attributes (under Heaven) to the humane interference of one Doctor Wilhelm Richter, a German empiric, who, in this extremity, prescribed a copious diet of Saur Kraut, which the child was observed to reach at with avidity, when other food repelled him; and from this change of diet his restoration was rapid and complete. We have often heard him name the circumstance with gratitude; and it is not altogether surprising, that a relish for this kind of aliment, so abhorrent and harsh to common English palates, has accompanied him through life. When any of Mr. Liston's intimates invite him to supper, he never fails of finding, nearest to his knife and fork, a dish of Saur Kraut.

At the age of nine we find our subject under the tuition of the Rev. Mr. Goodenough (his father's health not permitting him probably to instruct him himself), by whom he was inducted into a competent portion of Latin and Greek, with some mathematics, till the death of Mr. Goodenough, in his own seventieth, and Master Liston's eleventh year, put a stop for the present to his classical progress.

We have heard our hero with emotions, which do his heart honour, describe the awful circumstances attending the decease of this worthy old gentleman. It seems they had been walking out together, master and pupil, in a fine sunset, to the distance of three quarters of a mile west of Lupton, when a sudden curiosity took Mr. Goodenough to look down upon a chasm, where a shaft had been lately sunk in a mining speculation (then projecting, but abandoned soon after, as not answering the promised success, by Sir Ralph Shepperton, Knight, and member for the county). The old clergyman leaning over, either with incaution, or sudden giddiness (probably a mixture of both), suddenly lost his footing, and, to use Mr. Liston's phrase, disappeared; and was doubtless broken into a thousand pieces. The sound of his head, &c. dashing successively upon the projecting masses of the chasm, had such an effect upon the child, that a serious sickness ensued, and even for many years after his recovery he was not once seen so much as to smile.

The joint death[s] of both his parents, which happened not many months after this disastrous accident, and were probably (one or both of them) accelerated by it, threw our youth upon the protection of his maternal great aunt, Mrs. Sittingbourn. Of this aunt we have never heard him speak but with expressions amounting almost to reverence. To the influence of her early counsels and manners, he has always attributed the firmness with which, in maturer years, thrown upon a way of life, commonly not the best adapted to gravity and self-retirement, he has been able to maintain a serious character, untinctured with the levities incident to his profession. Ann Sittingbourn (we have seen her portrait by Hudson) was stately, stiff, tall, with a cast of features strikingly resembling the subject of this memoir. Her estate in Kent was spacious and well-wooded; the house, one of those venerable old mansions which are so impressive in childhood, and so hardly forgotten in succeeding years. In the venerable solitudes of Charnwood, among thick shades of the oak and beech (this last his favourite tree), the young Liston cultivated those contemplative habits which have never entirely deserted him in after years. Here he was commonly in the summer months to be met with, with a book in his hand--not a play-book--meditating. Boyle's Reflections was at one time the darling volume, which in its turn was superseded by Young's Night Thoughts, which has continued its hold upon him through life. He carries it always about him; and it is no uncommon thing for him to be seen, in the refreshing intervals of his occupation, leaning against a side scene, in a sort of Herbert of Cherbury posture, turning over a pocket edition of his favourite author.

But the solitudes of Charnwood were not destined always to obscure the path of our young hero. The premature death of Mrs. Sittingbourn, at the age of 70, occasioned by incautious burning of a pot of charcoal in her sleeping chamber, left him in his 19th year nearly without resources. That the stage at all should have presented itself as an eligible scope for his talents, and, in particular, that he should have chosen a line so foreign to what appears to have been his turn of mind, may require some explanation.

At Charnwood then we behold him thoughtful, grave, ascetic. From his cradle averse to flesh meats, and strong drink; abstemious even beyond the genius of the place; and almost in spite of the remonstrances of his great aunt, who, though strict, was not rigid; water was his habitual drink, and his food little beyond the mast, and beech nuts, of his favourite groves. It is a medical fact, that this kind of diet, however favourable to the contemplative powers of the primitive hermits, &c., is but ill adapted to the less robust minds and bodies of a later generation. Hypochondria almost constantly ensues. It was so in the case of the young Liston. He was subject to sights, and had visions. Those arid beech nuts, distilled by a complexion naturally adust, mounted into an occiput, already prepared to kindle by long seclusion, and the fervour of strict Calvinistic notions. In the glooms of Charnwood he was assailed by illusions, similar in kind to those which are related of the famous Anthony of Padua. Wild antic faces would ever and anon protrude themselves upon his sensorium. Whether he shut his eyes, or kept them open, the same illusions operated. The darker and more profound were his cogitations, the droller and more whimsical became the apparitions. They buzzed about him thick as flies, flapping at him, flouting him, hooting in his ear, yet with such comic appendages, that what at first was his bane, became at length his solace; and he desired no better society than that of his merry phantasmata. We shall presently find in what way this remarkable phenomenon influenced his future destiny.

On the death of Mrs. Sittingbourn, we find him received into the family of Mr. Willoughby, an eminent Turkey merchant, resident in Birchin-lane, London. We lose a little while here the chain of his history; by what inducements this gentleman was determined to make him an inmate of his house. Probably he had had some personal kindness for Mrs. Sittingbourn formerly; but however it was, the young man was here treated more like a son than a clerk, though he was nominally but the latter. Different avocations, the change of scene, with that alternation of business and recreation, which in its greatest perfection is to be had only in London, appear to have weaned him in a short time from the hypochondriacal affections which had beset him at Charnwood. In the three years which followed his removal to Birchin-lane, we find him making more than one voyage to the Levant, as chief factor for Mr. Willoughby, at the Porte. We could easily fill our biography with the pleasant passages which we have heard him relate as having happened to him at Constantinople, such as his having been taken up on suspicion of a design of penetrating the seraglio, &c.; but, with the deepest convincement of this gentleman's own veracity, we think that some of the stories are of that whimsical, and others of that romantic nature, which, however diverting, would be out of place in a narrative of this kind, which aims not only at strict truth, but at avoiding the very appearance of the contrary.

We will now bring him over the seas again, and suppose him in the counting-house in Birchin-lane, his protector satisfied with the returns of his factorage, and all going on so smoothly that we may expect to find Mr. Liston at last an opulent merchant upon 'Change, as it is called. But see the turns of destiny! Upon a summer's excursion into Norfolk, in the year 1801, the accidental sight of pretty Sally Parker, as she was called (then in the Norwich company), diverted his inclinations at once from commerce; and he became, in the language of common-place biography, stage-struck. Happy for the lovers of mirth was it, that our hero took this turn; he might else have been to this hour that unentertaining character, a plodding London merchant.

We accordingly find him shortly after making his debut, as it is called, upon the Norwich boards, in the season of that year, being then in the 22d year of his age. Having a natural bent to tragedy, he chose the part of Pyrrhus in the Distressed Mother, to Sally Parker's Hermione. We find him afterwards as Barnwell, Altamont, Chamont, &c.; but, as if nature had destined him to the sock, an unavoidable infirmity absolutely discapacitated him for tragedy. His person at this latter period, of which I have been speaking, was graceful, and even commanding; his countenance set to gravity; he had the power of arresting the attention of an audience at first sight almost beyond any other tragic actor. But he could not hold it. To understand this obstacle we must go back a few years to those appalling reveries at Charnwood. Those illusions, which had vanished before the dissipation of a less recluse life, and more free society, now in his solitary tragic studies, and amid the intense calls upon feeling incident to tragic acting, came back upon him with tenfold vividness. In the midst of some most pathetic passage, the parting of Jaffier with his dying friend, for instance, he would suddenly be surprised with a fit of violent horse laughter. While the spectators were all sobbing before him with emotion, suddenly one of those grotesque faces would peep out upon him, and he could not resist the impulse. A timely excuse once or twice served his purpose, but no audiences could be expected to bear repeatedly this violation of the continuity of feeling. He describes them (the illusions) as so many demons haunting him, and paralysing every effect. Even now, I am told, he cannot recite the famous soliloquy in Hamlet, even in private, without immoderate bursts of laughter. However, what he had not force of reason sufficient to overcome, he had good sense enough to turn into emolument, and determined to make a commodity of his distemper. He prudently exchanged the buskin for the sock, and the illusions instantly ceased; or, if they occurred for a short season, by their very co-operation added a zest to his comic vein; some of his most catching faces being (as he expresses it) little more than transcripts and copies of those extraordinary phantasmata.

We have now drawn out our hero's existence to the period when he was about to meet for the first time the sympathies of a London audience. The particulars of his success since have been too much before our eyes to render a circumstantial detail of them expedient. I shall only mention that Mr. Willoughby, his resentments having had time to subside, is at present one of the fastest friends of his old renegado factor; and that Mr. Liston's hopes of Miss Parker vanishing along with his unsuccessful suit to Melpomene, in the autumn of 1811 he married his present lady, by whom he has been blest with one son, Philip; and two daughters, Ann, and Angustina [ ? Augustina].

A VISION OF HORNS

(1825)

My thoughts had been engaged last evening in solving the problem, why in all times and places the horn has been agreed upon as the symbol, or honourable badge, of married men. Moses' horn, the horn of Ammon, of Amalthea, and a cornucopia of legends besides, came to my recollection, but afforded no satisfactory solution, or rather involved the question in deeper obscurity. Tired with the fruitless chase of inexplicant analogies, I fell asleep, and dreamed in this fashion.

Methought certain scales or films fell from my eyes, which had hitherto hindered these little tokens from being visible. I was somewhere in the Cornhill (as it might be termed) of some Utopia. Busy citizens jostled each other, as they may do in our streets, with care (the care of making a penny) written upon their foreheads; and something else, which is rather imagined, than distinctly imaged, upon the brows of my own friends and fellow-townsmen.

In my first surprise I supposed myself gotten into some forest--Arden, to be sure, or Sherwood; but the dresses and deportment, all civic, forbade me to continue in that delusion. Then a scriptural thought crossed me (especially as there were nearly as many Jews as Christians among them), whether it might not be the children of Israel going up to besiege Jericho. I was undeceived of both errors by the sight of many faces which were familiar to me. I found myself strangely (as it will happen in dreams) at one and the same time in an unknown country, with known companions. I met old friends, not with new faces, but with their old faces oddly adorned in front, with each man a certain corneous excrescence. Dick Mitis, the little cheesemonger in St. * * * *'s Passage, was the first that saluted me, with his hat off--you know Dick's way to a customer--and, I not being aware of him, he thrust a strange beam into my left eye, which pained and grieved me exceedingly; but, instead of apology, he only grinned and fleered in my face, as much as to say, "it is the custom of the country," and passed on.

I had scarce time to send a civil message to his lady, whom I have always admired as a pattern of a wife,--and do indeed take Dick and her to be a model of conjugal agreement and harmony,--when I felt an ugly smart in my neck, as if something had gored it behind, and turning round, it was my old friend and neighbour, Dulcet, the confectioner, who, meaning to be pleasant, had thrust his protuberance right into my nape, and seemed proud of his power of offending.

Now I was assailed right and left, till in my own defence I was obliged to walk sideling and wary, and look about me, as you guard your eyes in London streets; for the horns thickened, and came at me like the ends of umbrellas poking in one's face.

I soon found that these towns-folk were the civillest best-mannered people in the world, and that if they had offended at all, it was entirely owing to their blindness. They do not know what dangerous weapons they protrude in front, and will stick their best friends in the eye with provoking complacency. Yet the best of it is, they can see the beams on their neighbours' foreheads, if they are as small as motes, but their own beams they can in no wise discern.

There was little Mitis, that I told you I just encountered--he has simply (I speak of him at home in his own shop) the smoothest forehead in his own conceit--he will stand you a quarter of an hour together contemplating the serenity of it in the glass, before he begins to shave himself in a morning--yet you saw what a desperate gash he gave me.

Desiring to be better informed of the ways of this extraordinary people, I applied myself to a fellow of some assurance, who (it appeared) acted as a sort of interpreter to strangers--he was dressed in a military uniform, and strongly resembled Colonel----, of the guards;--and "pray, Sir," said I, "have all the inhabitants of your city these troublesome excrescences? I beg pardon, I see you have none. You perhaps are single." "Truly, Sir," he replied with a smile, "for the most part we have, but not all alike. There are some, like Dick, that sport but one tumescence. Their ladies have been tolerably faithful--have confined themselves to a single aberration or so--these we call Unicorns. Dick, you must know, is my Unicorn. [He spoke this with an air of invincible assurance.] Then we have Bicorns, Tricorns, and so on up to Millecorns. [Here me-thought I crossed and blessed myself in my dream.] Some again we have--there goes one--you see how happy the rogue looks--how he walks smiling, and perking up his face, as if he thought himself the only man. He is not married yet, but on Monday next he leads to the altar the accomplished widow Dacres, relict of our late sheriff."

"I see, Sir," said I, "and observe that he is happily free from the national goitre (let me call it), which distinguishes most of your countrymen."

"Look a little more narrowly," said my conductor.

I put on my spectacles, and observing the man a little more diligently, above his forehead I could mark a thousand little twinkling shadows dancing the horn-pipe, little hornlets and rudiments of horn, of a soft and pappy consistence (for I handled some of them), but which, like coral out of water, my guide informed me would infallibly stiffen and grow rigid within a week or two from the expiration of his bachelorhood.

Then I saw some horns strangely growing out behind, and my interpreter explained these to be married men, whose wives had conducted themselves with infinite propriety since the period of their marriage, but were thought to have antedated their good men's titles, by certain liberties they had indulged themselves in, prior to the ceremony. This kind of gentry wore their horns backwards, as has been said, in the fashion of the old pig-tails; and as there was nothing obtrusive or ostentatious in them, nobody took any notice of it.

Some had pretty little budding antlers, like the first essays of a young faun. These, he told me, had wives, whose affairs were in a hopeful way, but not quite brought to a conclusion.

Others had nothing to show, only by certain red angry marks and swellings in the foreheads, which itched the more they kept rubbing and chafing them; it was to be hoped that something was brewing.

I took notice that every one jeered at the rest, only none took notice of the sea-captains; yet these were as well provided with their tokens as the best among them. This kind of people, it seems, taking their wives upon so contingent tenures, their lot was considered as nothing but natural,--so they wore their marks without impeachment, as they might carry their cockades, and nobody respected them a whit the less for it.

I observed, that the more sprouts grew out of a man's head, the less weight they seemed to carry with them; whereas, a single token would now and then appear to give the wearer some uneasiness. This shows that use is a great thing.

Some had their adornings gilt, which needs no explanation; while others, like musicians, went sounding theirs before them--a sort of music which I thought might very well have been spared.

It was pleasant to see some of the citizens encounter between themselves; how they smiled in their sleeves at the shock they received from their neighbour, and none seemed conscious of the shock which their neighbour experienced in return.

Some had great corneous stumps, seemingly torn off and bleeding. These, the interpreter warned me, were husbands who had retaliated upon their wives, and the badge was in equity divided between them.

While I stood discerning these things, a slight tweak on my cheek unawares, which brought tears into my eyes, introduced to me my friend Placid, between whose lady and a certain male cousin, some idle flirtations I remember to have heard talked of; but that was all. He saw he had somehow hurt me, and asked my pardon with that round unconscious face of his, and looked so tristful and contrite for his no-offence, that I was ashamed for the man's penitence. Yet I protest it was but a scratch. It was the least little hornet of a horn that could be framed. "Shame on the man," I secretly exclaimed, "who could thrust so much as the value of a hair into a brow so unsuspecting and inoffensive. What then must they have to answer for, who plant great, monstrous, timber-like, projecting antlers upon the heads of those whom they call their friends, when a puncture of this atomical tenuity made my eyes to water at this rate. All the pincers at Surgeons' Hall cannot pull out for Placid that little hair."

I was curious to know what became of these frontal excrescences, when the husbands died; and my guide informed me that the chemists in their country made a considerable profit by them, extracting from them certain subtle essences:--and then I remembered, that nothing was so efficacious in my own for restoring swooning matrons, and wives troubled with the vapours, as a strong sniff or two at the composition, appropriately called hartshorn--far beyond sal volatile.

Then also I began to understand, why a man, who is the jest of the company, is said to be the butt--as much as to say, such a one butteth with the horn.

I inquired if by no operation these wens were ever extracted; and was told, that there was indeed an order of dentists, whom they call canonists in their language, who undertook to restore the forehead to its pristine smoothness; but that ordinarily it was not done without much cost and trouble; and when they succeeded in plucking out the offending part, it left a painful void, which could not be filled up; and that many patients who had submitted to the excision, were eager to marry again, to supply with a good second antler the baldness and deformed gap left by the extraction of the former, as men losing their natural hair substitute for it a less becoming periwig.

Some horns I observed beautifully taper, smooth, and (as it were) flowering. These I understand were the portions brought by handsome women to their spouses; and I pitied the rough, homely, unsightly deformities on the brows of others, who had been deceived by plain and ordinary partners. Yet the latter I observed to be by far the most common--the solution of which I leave to the natural philosopher.

One tribute of married men I particularly admired at, who, instead of horns, wore, engrafted on their forehead, a sort of hornbook. "This," quoth my guide, "is the greatest mystery in our country, and well worth an explanation. You must know that all infidelity is not of the senses. We have as well intellectual, as material, wittols. These, whom you see decorated with the Order of the Book--are triflers, who encourage about their wives' presence the society of your men of genius (their good friends, as they call them)--literary disputants, who ten to one out-talk the poor husband, and commit upon the understanding of the woman a violence and estrangement in the end, little less painful than the coarser sort of alienation. Whip me these knaves--[my conductor here expressed himself with a becoming warmth]--whip me them, I say, who with no excuse from the passions, in cold blood seduce the minds, rather than the persons, of their friends' wives; who, for the tickling pleasure of hearing themselves prate, dehonestate the intellects of married women, dishonouring the husband in what should be his most sensible part. If I must be ---- [here he used a plain word] let it be by some honest sinner like myself, and not by one of these gad-flies, these debauchers of the understanding, these flattery-buzzers." He was going on in this manner, and I was getting insensibly pleased with my friend's manner (I had been a little shy of him at first), when the dream suddenly left me, vanishing--as Virgil speaks--through the gate of Horn.

ELIA.

THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEFUNCT[49]

(1825)

Nought but a blank remains, a dead void space, A step of life that promised such a race.--DRYDEN.

Napoleon has now sent us back from the grave sufficient echoes of his living renown: the twilight of posthumous fame has lingered long enough over the spot where the sun of his glory set, and his name must at length repose in the silence, if not in the darkness of night. In this busy and evanescent scene, other spirits of the age are rapidly snatched away, claiming our undivided sympathies and regrets, until in turn they yield to some newer and more absorbing grief. Another name is now added to the list of the mighty departed, a name whose influence upon the hopes and fears, the fates and fortunes of our countrymen, has rivalled, and perhaps eclipsed that of the defunct "child and champion of Jacobinism," while it is associated with all the sanctions of legitimate government, all the sacred authorities of social order and our most holy religion. We speak of one, indeed, under whose warrant heavy and incessant contributions were imposed upon our fellow-citizens, but who exacted nothing without the signet and the sign manual of most devout Chancellors of the Exchequer. Not to dally longer with the sympathies of our readers, we think it right to premonish them that we are composing an epicedium upon no less distinguished a personage than the Lottery, whose last breath, after many penultimate puffs, has been sobbed forth by sorrowing contractors, as if the world itself were about to be converted into a blank. There is a fashion of eulogy, as well as of vituperation; and though the Lottery stood for some time in the latter predicament, we hesitate not to assert that "multis ille bonis flebilis occidit." Never have we joined in the senseless clamour which condemned the only tax whereto we became voluntary contributors, the only resource which gave the stimulus without the danger or infatuation of gambling, the only alembic which in these plodding days sublimised our imaginations, and filled them with more delicious dreams than ever flitted athwart the sensorium of Alnaschar.

[49] Since writing this article, we have been informed that the object of our funeral-oration is not definitively dead, but only moribund. So much the better; we shall have an opportunity of granting the request made to Walter by one of the children in the wood, and "kill him two times." The Abbé de Vertot having a siege to write, and not receiving the materials in time, composed the whole from his invention: shortly after its completion, the expected documents arrived, when he threw them aside, exclaiming--"You are of no use to me now; I have carried the town."

Never can the writer forget when, as a child, he was hoisted upon a servant's shoulder in Guildhall, and looked down upon the installed and solemn pomp of the then drawing Lottery. The two awful cabinets of iron, upon whose massy and mysterious portals, the royal initials were gorgeously emblazoned, as if after having deposited the unfulfilled prophecies within, the King himself had turned the lock and still retained the key in his pocket;--the blue-coat boy, with his naked arm, first converting the invisible wheel, and then diving into the dark recess for a ticket;--the grave and reverend faces of the commissioners eyeing the announced number;--the scribes below calmly committing it to their huge books;--the anxious countenances of the surrounding populace, while the giant figures of Gog and Magog, like presiding deities, looked down with a grim silence upon the whole proceeding,--constituted altogether a scene, which combined with the sudden wealth supposed to be lavished from those inscrutable wheels, was well calculated to impress the imagination of a boy with reverence and amazement. Jupiter, seated between the two fatal urns of good and evil, the blind Goddess with her cornucopia, the Parcæ wielding the distaff, the thread of life, and the abhorred shears, seemed but dim and shadowy abstractions of mythology, when I had gazed upon an assemblage exercising, as I dreamt, a not less eventful power, and all presented to me in palpable and living operation. Reason and experience, ever at their old spiteful work of catching and destroying the bubbles which youth delighted to follow, have indeed dissipated much of this illusion, but my mind so far retained the influence of that early impression, that I have ever since continued to deposit my humble offerings at its shrine whenever the ministers of the Lottery went forth with type and trumpet to announce its periodical dispensations; and though nothing has been doled out to me from its undiscerning coffers but blanks, or those more vexatious tantalizers of the spirit, denominated small prizes, yet do I hold myself largely indebted to this most generous diffuser of universal happiness. Ingrates that we are! are we to be thankful for no benefits that are not palpable to sense, to recognise no favours that are not of marketable value, to acknowledge no wealth unless it can be counted with the five fingers? If we admit the mind to be the sole depositary of genuine joy, where is the bosom that has not been elevated into a temporary elysium by the magic of the Lottery? Which of us has not converted his ticket, or even his sixteenth share of one, into a nest-egg of Hope, upon which he has sate brooding in the secret roosting-places of his heart, and hatched it into a thousand fantastical apparitions?

What a startling revelation of the passions if all the aspirations engendered by the Lottery could be made manifest! Many an impecuniary epicure has gloated over his locked-up warrant for future wealth, as a means of realising the dream of his namesake in the Alchemist,--

"My meat shall all come in in Indian shells, Dishes of agate set in gold, and studded With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths and rubies; The tongues of carps, dormice, and camels' heels Boil'd i' the spirit of Sol, and dissolved in pearl, (Apicius' diet 'gainst the epilepsy;) And I will eat these broths with spoons of amber, Headed with diamant and carbuncle.---- My footboy shall eat pheasants, calvered salmons, Knots, godwits, lampreys; I myself will have The beards of barbels served:--instead of salads Oil'd mushrooms, and the swelling unctuous paps Of a fat pregnant sow, newly cut off, Dress'd with an exquisite and poignant sauce, For which I'll say unto my cook-'There's gold, Go forth, and be a knight!'"

Many a doating lover has kissed the scrap of paper whose promissory shower of gold was to give up to him his otherwise unattainable Danaë: Nimrods have transformed the same narrow symbol into a saddle, by which they have been enabled to bestride the backs of peerless hunters; while nymphs have metamorphosed its Protean form into

"Rings, gaudes, conceits, Knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats,"

and all the braveries of dress, to say nothing of the obsequious husband, the two-footman'd carriage, and the opera-box. By the simple charm of this numbered and printed rag, gamesters have, for a time at least, recovered their losses, spendthrifts have cleared off mortgages from their estates, the imprisoned debtor has leapt over his lofty boundary of circumscription and restraint, and revelled in all the joys of liberty and fortune; the cottage-walls have swelled out into more goodly proportion than those of Baucis and Philemon; poverty has tasted the luxuries of competence, labour has lolled at ease in a perpetual arm-chair of idleness, sickness has been bribed into banishment, life has been invested with new charms, and death deprived of its former terrors. Nor have the affections been less gratified than the wants, appetites, and ambitions of mankind. By the conjurations of the same potent spell, kindred have lavished anticipated benefits upon one another, and charity upon all. Let it be termed a delusion; a fool's paradise is better than the wise man's Tartarus: be it branded as an Ignis fatuus, it was at least a benevolent one, which instead of beguiling its followers into swamps, caverns, and pitfalls, allured them on with all the blandishments of enchantment to a garden of Eden, an ever-blooming elysium of delight. True, the pleasures it bestowed were evanescent, but which of our joys are permanent? and who so inexperienced as not to know that anticipation is always of higher relish than reality, which strikes a balance both in our sufferings and enjoyments. "The fear of ill exceeds the ill we fear," and fruition, in the same proportion, invariably falls short of hope. "Men are but children of a larger growth," who may amuse themselves for a long time in gazing at the reflection of the moon in the water, but, if they jump in to grasp it, they may grope for ever, and only get the farther from their object. He is the wisest who keeps feeding upon the future, and refrains as long as possible from undeceiving himself, by converting his pleasant speculations into disagreeable certainties.

The true mental epicure always purchased his ticket early, and postponed enquiry into its fate to the last possible moment, during the whole of which intervening period he had an imaginary twenty thousand locked up in his desk,--and was not this well worth all the money? Who would scruple to give twenty pounds interest for even the ideal enjoyment of as many thousands during two or three months? "Crede quod habes, et habes," and the usufruct of such a capital is surely not dear at such a price. Some years ago, a gentleman in passing along Cheapside saw the figures 1069, of which number he was the sole proprietor, flaming on the window of a lottery-office as a capital prize. Somewhat flurried by this discovery, not less welcome than unexpected, he resolved to walk round St. Paul's that he might consider in what way to communicate the happy tidings to his wife and family; but upon repassing the shop, he observed that the number was altered to 10,069, and upon enquiry, had the mortification to learn that his ticket was a blank, and had only been stuck up in the window by a mistake of the clerk. This effectually calmed his agitation, but he always speaks of himself as having once possessed twenty thousand pounds, and maintains that his ten minutes' walk round St. Paul's was worth ten times the purchase-money of the ticket. A prize thus obtained has moreover this special advantage;--it is beyond the reach of fate, it cannot be squandered, bankruptcy cannot lay siege to it, friends cannot pull it down, nor enemies blow it up; it bears a charmed life, and none of woman born can break its integrity, even by the dissipation of a single fraction. Show me the property in these perilous times that is equally compact and impregnable. We can no longer become enriched for a quarter of an hour; we can no longer succeed in such splendid failures; all our chances of making such a miss have vanished with the last of the Lotteries.

Life will now become a flat, prosaic routine of matter-of-fact, and sleep itself, erst so prolific of numerical configurations and mysterious stimulants to lottery adventure, will be disfurnished of its figures and figments. People will cease to harp upon the one lucky number suggested in a dream, and which forms the exception, while they are scrupulously silent upon the ten thousand falsified dreams which constitute the rule. Morpheus will stifle Cocker with a handful of poppies, and our pillows will be no longer haunted by the book of numbers.

And who, too, shall maintain the art and mystery of puffing in all its pristine glory when the lottery professors shall have abandoned its cultivation? They were the first, as they will assuredly be the last, who fully developed the resources of that ingenious art; who cajoled and decoyed the most suspicious and wary reader into a perusal of their advertisements by devices of endless variety and cunning: who baited their lurking schemes with midnight murders, ghost stories, crim-cons, bon-mots, balloons, dreadful catastrophes, and every diversity of joy and sorrow to catch newspaper-gudgeons. Ought not such talents to be encouraged? Verily the abolitionists have much to answer for!

And now, having established the felicity of all those who gained imaginary prizes, let us proceed to show that the equally numerous class who were presented with real blanks, have not less reason to consider themselves happy. Most of us have cause to be thankful for that which is bestowed, but we have all, probably, reason to be still more grateful for that which is withheld, and more especially for our being denied the sudden possession of riches. In the Litany indeed, we call upon the Lord to deliver us "in all time of our wealth;" but how few of us are sincere in deprecating such a calamity! Massinger's Luke, and Ben Jonson's Sir Epicure Mammon, and Pope's Sir Balaam, and our own daily observation, might convince us that the devil "now tempts by making rich, not making poor." We may read in the Guardian a circumstantial account of a man who was utterly ruined by gaining a capital prize:--we may recollect what Dr. Johnson said to Garrick, when the latter was making a display of his wealth at Hampton Court,--"Ah, David! David! these are the things that make a death-bed terrible;"--we may recall the Scripture declaration, as to the difficulty a rich man finds in entering into the Kingdom of Heaven, and combining all these denunciations against opulence, let us heartily congratulate one another upon our lucky escape from the calamity of a twenty or thirty thousand pound prize! The fox in the fable, who accused the unattainable grapes of sourness, was more of a philosopher than we are generally willing to allow. He was an adept in that species of moral alchemy, which turns every thing to gold, and converts disappointment itself into a ground of resignation and content. Such we have shown to be the great lesson inculcated by the Lottery when rightly contemplated; and if we might parody M. de Chateaubriand's jingling expression,--"le Roi est mort, vive le Roi," we should be tempted to exclaim, "The Lottery is no more--long live the Lottery!"

UNITARIAN PROTESTS

IN A LETTER TO A FRIEND OF THAT PERSUASION NEWLY MARRIED

(1825)

Dear M----, Though none of your acquaintance can with greater sincerity congratulate you upon this happy conjuncture than myself, one of the oldest of them, it was with pain I found you, after the ceremony, depositing in the vestry-room what is called a Protest. I thought you superior to this little sophistry. What, after submitting to the service of the Church of England--after consenting to receive a boon from her, in the person of your amiable consort--was it consistent with sense, or common good manners, to turn round upon her, and flatly taunt her with false worship? This language is a little of the strongest in your books and from your pulpits, though there it may well enough be excused from religious zeal and the native warmth of nonconformity. But at the altar--the Church of England altar--adopting her forms and complying with her requisitions to the letter--to be consistent, together with the practice, I fear, you must drop the language of dissent. You are no longer sturdy Non Cons; you are there Occasional Conformists. You submit to accept the privileges communicated by a form of words, exceptionable, and perhaps justly, in your view; but, so submitting, you have no right to quarrel with the ritual which you have just condescended to owe an obligation to. They do not force you into their churches. You come voluntarily, knowing the terms. You marry in the name of the Trinity. There is no evading this by pretending that you take the formula with your own interpretation, (and so long as you can do this, where is the necessity of Protesting?): for the meaning of a vow is to be settled by the sense of the imposer, not by any forced construction of the taker: else might all vows, and oaths too, be eluded with impunity. You marry then essentially as Trinitarians; and the altar no sooner satisfied than, hey presto, with the celerity of a juggler, you shift habits, and proceed pure Unitarians again in the vestry. You cheat the Church out of a wife, and go home smiling in your sleeves that you have so cunningly despoiled the Egyptians. In plain English, the Church has married you in the name of so and so, assuming that you took the words in her sense, but you outwitted her; you assented to them in your sense only, and took from her what, upon a right understanding, she would have declined to give you.

This is the fair construction to be put upon all Unitarian marriages as at present contracted; and as long as you Unitarians could salve your consciences with the equivoque, I do not see why the Established Church should have troubled herself at all about the matter. But the Protesters necessarily see further. They have some glimmerings of the deception; they apprehend a flaw somewhere; they would fain be honest, and yet they must marry notwithstanding; for honesty's sake, they are fain to dishonestate themselves a little. Let me try the very words of your own Protest, to see what confessions we can pick out of them.

"As Unitarians therefore we (you and your newly espoused bride) most solemnly protest against the service (which yourselves have just demanded) because we are thereby called upon, not only tacitly to acquiesce, but to profess a belief in a doctrine which is a dogma, as we believe, totally unfounded." But do you profess that belief during the ceremony; or are you only called upon for the profession but do not make it? If the latter, then you fall in with the rest of your more consistent brethren, who waive the Protest; if the former, then, I fear, your Protest cannot save you.

Hard and grievous it is, that in any case an institution so broad and general as the union of man and wife should be so cramped and straitened by the hands of an imposing hierarchy, that to plight troth to a lovely woman a man must be necessitated to compromise his truth and faith to Heaven; but so it must be, so long as you chuse to marry by the forms of the Church over which that hierarchy presides.

Therefore, say you, we Protest. O poor and much fallen word Protest! It was not so that the first heroic reformers protested. They departed out of Babylon once for good and all; they came not back for an occasional contact with her altars; a dallying, and then a protesting against dalliance; they stood not shuffling in the porch, with a Popish foot within, and its lame Lutheran fellow without, halting betwixt. These were the true Protestants. You are--Protesters.

Besides the inconsistency of this proceeding, I must think it a piece of impertinence--unseasonable at least, and out of place, to obtrude these papers upon the officiating clergyman--to offer to a public functionary an instrument which by the tenor of his function he is not obliged to accept, but, rather, he is called upon to reject. Is it done in his clerical capacity? he has no power of redressing the grievance. It is to take the benefit of his ministry and then insult him. If in his capacity of fellow Christian only, what are your scruples to him, so long as you yourselves are able to get over them, and do get over them by the very fact of coming to require his services? The thing you call a Protest might with just as good a reason be presented to the churchwarden for the time being, to the parish clerk, or the pew opener.

The Parliament alone can redress your grievance, if any. Yet I see not how with any grace your people can petition for relief, so long as, by the very fact of your coming to Church to be married, they do bonâ fide and strictly relieve themselves. The Upper House, in particular, is not unused to these same things called Protests, among themselves. But how would this honorable body stare to find a noble Lord conceding a measure, and in the next breath, by a solemn Protest disowning it. A Protest there is a reason given for non-compliance, not a subterfuge for an equivocal occasional compliance. It was reasonable in the primitive Christians to avert from their persons, by whatever lawful means, the compulsory eating of meats which had been offered unto idols. I dare say the Roman Prefects and Exarchats had plenty of petitioning in their days. But what would a Festus, or Agrippa, have replied to a petition to that effect, presented to him by some evasive Laodicean, with the very meat between his teeth, which he had been chewing voluntarily rather than abide the penalty? Relief for tender consciences means nothing, where the conscience has previously relieved itself; that is, has complied with the injunctions which it seeks preposterously to be rid of. Relief for conscience there is properly none, but what by better information makes an act appear innocent and lawful, with which the previous conscience was not satisfied to comply. All else is but relief from penalties, from scandal incurred by a complying practice, where the conscience itself is not fully satisfied.

But, say you, we have hard measure; the Quakers are indulged with the liberty denied to us. They have [? are]; and dearly they have earned it. You have come in (as a sect at least) in the cool of the evening; at the eleventh hour. The Quaker character was hardened in the fires of persecution in the seventeenth century; not quite to the stake and faggot, but little short of that; they grew up and thrived against noisome prisons, cruel beatings, whippings, stockings. They have since endured a century or two of scoffs, contempts; they have been a bye-word, and a nay-word; they have stood unmoved: and the consequence of long conscientious resistance on one part is invariably, in the end, remission on the other. The legislature, that denied you the tolerance, which I do not know that at that time you even asked, gave them the liberty which, without granting, they would have assumed. No penalties could have driven them into the Churches. This is the consequence of entire measures. Had the early Quakers consented to take oaths, leaving a Protest with the clerk of the court against them in the same breath with which they had taken them, do you in your conscience think that they would have been indulged at this day in their exclusive privilege of Affirming? Let your people go on for a century or so, marrying in your own fashion, and I will warrant them before the end of it the legislature will be willing to concede to them more than they at present demand.

Either the institution of marriage depends not for its validity upon hypocritical compliances with the ritual of an alien Church; and then I do not see why you cannot marry among yourselves, as the Quakers, without their indulgence, would have been doing to this day; or it does depend upon such ritual compliance, and then in your Protests you offend against a divine ordinance. I have read in the Essex-street Liturgy a form for the celebration of marriage. Why is this become a dead letter? O! it has never been legalised; that is to say, in the law's eye it is no marriage. But do you take upon you to say, in the view of the gospel it would be none? Would your own people at least look upon a couple so paired, to be none? But the case of dowries, alimonies, inheritances, &c. which depend for their validity upon the ceremonial of the Church by law established--are these nothing? That our children are not legally Filii Nullius--is this nothing? I answer, nothing; to the preservation of a good conscience, nothing; to a consistent Christianity, less than nothing. Sad worldly thorns they are indeed, and stumbling blocks, well worthy to be set out of the way by a legislature calling itself Christian; but not likely to be removed in a hurry by any shrewd legislators, who perceive that the petitioning complainants have not so much as bruised a shin in the resistance; but, prudently declining the briars and the prickles, nestle quietly down in the smooth two-sided velvet of a Protesting Occasional Conformity.--I am, dear sir,

With much respect, yours, &c.

ELIA.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MR. MUNDEN

In a letter to the Editor

(1825)

Hark'ee, Mr. Editor. A word in your ear. They tell me you are going to put me in print--in print, Sir. To publish my life. What is my life to you, Sir? What is it to you whether I ever lived at all? My life is a very good life, Sir. I am insured at the Pelican, Sir. I am threescore years and six--six; mark me, Sir: but I can play Polonius, which, I believe, few of your corre--correspondents can do, Sir. I suspect tricks, Sir: I smell a rat; I do, I do. You would cog the die upon us; you would, you would, Sir. But I will forestall you, Sir. You would be deriving me from William the Conqueror, with a murrain to you. It is no such thing, Sir. The town shall know better, Sir. They begin to smoke your flams, Sir. Mr. Liston may be born where he pleases, Sir; but I will not be born at Lup--Lupton Magna, for any body's pleasure, Sir. My son and I have looked over the great map of Kent together, and we can find no such place as you would palm upon us, Sir; palm upon us, I say. Neither Magna nor Parva, as my son says, and he knows Latin, Sir; Latin. If you write my life true, Sir, you must set down, that I, Joseph Munden, comedian, came into the world upon Allhallows' day, Anno Domini, 1759--1759; no sooner nor later, Sir: and I saw the first light--the first light, remember, Sir, at Stoke Pogis--Stoke Pogis, comitatu Bucks, and not at Lup--Lup[ton] Magna, which I believe to be no better than moonshine--moonshine; do you mark me, Sir? I wonder you can put such flim flams upon us, Sir; I do, I do. It does not become you, Sir; I say it--I say it. And my father was an honest tradesman, Sir: he dealt in malt and hops, Sir, and was a Corporation man, Sir, and of the Church of England, Sir, and no Presbyterian; nor Ana--Anabaptist, Sir, however you may be disposed to make honest people believe to the contrary, Sir. Your bams are found out, Sir. The town will be your stale puts no longer, Sir; and you must not send us jolly fellows, Sir--we that are comedians, Sir,--you must not send us into groves and Char--Charnwoods, a moping, Sir. Neither Charns, nor charnel houses, Sir. It is not our constitutions, Sir. I tell it you--I tell it you. I was a droll dog from my cradle. I came into the world tittering, and the midwife tittered, and the gossips spilt their caudle with tittering. And when I was brought to the font, the parson could not christen me for tittering. So I was never more than half baptized. And when I was little Joey, I made 'em all titter; there was not a melancholy face to be seen in Pogis. Pure nature, Sir. I was born a comedian. Old Screwup, the undertaker, could tell you, Sir, if he were living. Why, I was obliged to be locked up every time there was to be a funeral at Pogis. I was--I was, Sir. I used to grimace, at the mutes, as he called it, and put 'em out with my mops and my mows, till they couldn't stand at a door for me. And when I was locked up, with nothing but a cat in my company, I followed my bent with trying to make her laugh, and sometimes she would, and sometimes she would not. And my schoolmaster could make nothing of me: I had only to thrust my tongue in my cheek--in my cheek, Sir--and the rod dropped from his finger: and so my education was limited, Sir. And I grew up a young fellow, and it was thought convenient to enter me upon some course of life that should make me serious; but it wouldn't do, Sir. And I was articled to a drysalter. My father gave forty pounds premium with me, Sir. I can show the indent--dent--dentures, Sir. But I was born to be a comedian, Sir: so I ran away, and listed with the players, Sir; and I topt my parts at Amersham and Gerrard's Cross, and played my own father to his face, in his own town of Pogis, in the part of Gripe, when I was not full seventeen years of age, and he did not know me again, but he knew me afterwards; and then he laughed, and I laughed, and, what is better, the drysalter laughed, and gave me up my articles for the joke's sake: so that I came into court afterwards with clean hands--with clean hands--do you see, Sir?

[Here the manuscript becomes illegible for two or three sheets onwards, which we presume to be occasioned by the absence of Mr. Munden, jun. who clearly transcribed it for the press thus far. The rest (with the exception of the concluding paragraph, which seemingly is resumed in the first hand writing) appears to contain a confused account of some lawsuit, in which the elder Munden was engaged; with a circumstantial history of the proceedings on a case of Breach of Promise of Marriage, made to or by (we cannot pick out which) Jemima Munden, spinster, probably the comedian's cousin, for it does not appear he had any sister; with a few dates, rather better preserved, of this great actor's engagements--as "Cheltenham (spelt Cheltnam) 1776;" "Bath, 1779;" "London, 1789;" together with stage anecdotes of Messrs. Edwin, Wilson, Lee Lewis, &c. over which we have strained our eyes to no purpose, in the hope of presenting something amusing to the public. Towards the end the manuscript brightens up a little, as we have said, and concludes in the following manner.]

----stood before them for six and thirty years, [we suspect that Mr. Munden is here speaking of his final leave-taking of the stage] and to be dismissed at last. But I was heart-whole, heart-whole to the last, Sir. What though a few drops did course themselves down the old veteran's cheeks; who could help it, Sir? I was a giant that night, Sir; and could have played fifty parts, each as arduous as Dozy. My faculties were never better, Sir. But I was to be laid upon the shelf. It did not suit the public to laugh with their old servant any longer, Sir. [Here some moisture has blotted a sentence or two.] But I can play Polonius still, Sir; I can, I can.

Your servant, Sir,

JOSEPH MUNDEN.

THE "LEPUS" PAPERS

(1825)

I.--MANY FRIENDS

Unfortunate is the lot of that man, who can look round about the wide world, and exclaim with truth, I have no friend! Do you know any such lonely sufferer? For mercy sake send him to me. I can afford him plenty. He shall have them good, cheap. I have enough and to spare. Truly society is the balm of human life. But you may take a surfeit from sweetest odours administered to satiety. Hear my case, dear VARIORUM, and pity me. I am an elderly gentleman--not old--a sort of middle-aged-gentleman-and-a-half--with a tolerable larder, cellar, &c.; and a most unfortunately easy temper for the callous front of impertinence to try conclusions on. My day times are entirely engrossed by the business of a public office, where I am any thing but alone from nine till five. I have forty fellow-clerks about me during those hours; and, though the human face be divine, I protest that so many human faces seen every day do very much diminish the homage I am willing to pay to that divinity. It fares with these divine resemblances as with a Polytheism. Multiply the object and you infallibly enfeeble the adoration. "What a piece of work is Man! how excellent in faculty," &c. But a great many men together--a hot huddle of rational creatures--Hamlet himself would have lowered his contemplation a peg or two in my situation. Tædet me harum quotidianarum formarum. I go home every day to my late dinner, absolutely famished and face-sick. I am sometimes fortunate enough to go off unaccompanied. The relief is restorative like sleep; but far oftener, alas! some one of my fellows, who lives my way (as they call it) does me the sociality of walking with me. He sees me to the door; and now I figure to myself a snug fire-side--comfortable meal--a respiration from the burthen of society--and the blessedness of a single knife and fork. I sit down to my solitary mutton, happy as Adam when a bachelor. I have not swallowed a mouthful, before a startling ring announces the visit of a friend. O! for an everlasting muffle upon that appalling instrument of torture! A knock makes me nervous; but a ring is a positive fillip to all the sour passions of my nature:--and yet such is my effeminacy of temperament, I neither tie up the one nor dumbfound the other. But these accursed friends, or fiends, that torture me thus! They come in with a full consciousness of their being unwelcome--with a sort of grin of triumph over your weakness. My soul sickens within when they enter. I can scarcely articulate a "how d'ye." My digestive powers fail. I have enough to do to maintain them in any healthiness when alone. Eating is a solitary function; you may drink in company. Accordingly the bottle soon succeeds; and such is my infirmity, that the reluctance soon subsides before it. The visitor becomes agreeable. I find a great deal that is good in him; wonder I should have felt such aversion on his first entrance; we get chatty, conversible; insensibly comes midnight; and I am dismissed to the cold bed of celibacy (the only place, alas! where I am suffered to be alone) with the reflection that another day has gone over my head without the possibility of enjoying my own free thoughts in solitude even for a solitary moment. O for a Lodge in some vast wilderness! the den of those Seven Sleepers (conditionally the other six were away)--a Crusoe solitude!

What most disturbs me is, that my chief annoyers are mostly young men. Young men, let them think as they please, are no company singly for a gentleman of my years. They do mighty well in a mixed society, and where there are females to take them off, as it were. But to have the load of one of them to one's own self for successive hours conversation is unendurable.

There was my old friend Captain Beacham--he died some six years since, bequeathing to my friendship three stout young men, his sons, and seven girls, the tallest in the land. Pleasant, excellent young women they were, and for their sakes I did, and could endure much. But they were too tall. I am superstitious in that respect, and think that to a just friendship, something like proportion in stature as well as mind is desirable. Now I am five feet and a trifle more. Each of these young women rose to six, and one exceeded by two inches. The brothers are proportionably taller. I have sometimes taken the altitude of this friendship; and on a modest computation I may be said to have known at one time a whole furlong of Beachams. But the young women are married off, and dispersed among the provinces. The brothers are left. Nothing is more distasteful than these relics and parings of past friendships--unmeaning records of agreeable hours flown. There are three of them. If they hunted in triples, or even couples, it were something; but by a refinement of persecution, they contrive to come singly; and so spread themselves out into three evenings molestation in a week. Nothing is so distasteful as the sight of their long legs, couched for continuance upon my fender. They have been mates of Indiamen; and one of them in particular has a story of a shark swallowing a boy in the bay of Calcutta. I wish the shark had swallowed him. Nothing can be more useless than their conversation to me, unless it is mine to them. We have no ideas (save of eating and drinking) in common. The shark story has been told till it cannot elicit a spark of attention; but it goes on just as usual. When I try to introduce a point of literature, or common life, the mates gape at me. When I fill a glass, they fill one too. Here is sympathy. And for this poor correspondency of having a gift of swallowing and retaining liquor in common with my fellow-creatures, I am to be tied up to an ungenial intimacy, abhorrent from every sentiment, and every sympathy besides. But I cannot break the bond. They are sons of my old friend.

LEPUS

II.--READERS AGAINST THE GRAIN

No one can pass through the streets, alleys, and blindest thoroughfares of this Metropolis, without surprise at the number of shops opened everywhere for the sale of cheap publications--not blasphemy and sedition--nor altogether flimsy periodicals, though the latter abound to a surfeit--but I mean fair re-prints of good old books. Fielding, Smollett, the Poets, Historians, are daily becoming accessible to the purses of poor people. I cannot behold this result from the enlargement of the reading public without congratulations to my country. But as every blessing has its wrong side, it is with aversion I behold springing up with this phenomenon a race of Readers against the grain. Young men who thirty years ago would have been play-goers, punch-drinkers, cricketers, &c. with one accord are now--Readers!--a change in some respects, perhaps, salutary; but I liked the old way best. Then people read because they liked reading. He must have been indigent indeed, and, as times went then, probably unable to enjoy a book, who from one little circulating library or another (those slandered benefactions to the public) could not pick out an odd volume to satisfy the intervals of the workshop and the desk. Then if a man told you that he "loved reading mightily, but had no books," you might be sure that in the first assertion at least he was mistaken. Neither had he, perhaps, the materials that should enliven a punch-bowl in his own cellar; but if the rogue loved his liquor, he would quickly find out where the arrack, the lemons, and the sugar dwelt--he would speedily find out the circulating shop for them. I will illustrate this from my own observation. It may detract a little from the gentility of your columns when I tell your Readers that I am--what I hinted at in my last--a Bank Clerk. Three and thirty years ago, when I took my first station at the desk, out of as many fellows in office one or two there were that had read a little. One could give a pretty good account of the Spectator. A second knew Tom Jones. A third recommended Telemachus. One went so far as to quote Hudibras, and was looked on as a phenomenon. But the far greater number neither cared for books, nor affected to care. They were, as I said, in their leisure hours, cricketers, punch-drinkers, play-goers, and the rest. Times are altered now. We are all readers; our young men are split up into so many book-clubs, knots of literati; we criticise; we read the Quarterly and Edinburgh, I assure you; and instead of the old, honest, unpretending illiterature so becoming to our profession--we read and judge of every thing. I have something to do in these book-clubs, and know the trick and mystery of it. Every new publication that is likely to make a noise, must be had at any rate. By some they are devoured with avidity. These would have been readers in the old time I speak of. The only loss is, that for the good old reading of Addison or Fielding's days is substituted that never-ending flow of thin novelties which are kept up like a ball, leaving no possible time for better things, and threatening in the issue to bury or sweep away from the earth the memory of their nobler predecessors. We read to say that we have read. No reading can keep pace with the writing of this age, but we pant and toil after it as fast as we can. I smile to see an honest lad, who ought to be at trap-ball, laboring up hill against this giant load, taking his toil for a pleasure, and with that utter incapacity for reading which betrays itself by a certain silent movement of the lips when the reader reads to himself, undertaking the infinite contents of fugitive poetry, or travels, what not--to see them with their snail pace undertaking so vast a journey as might make faint a giant's speed; keeping a volume, which a real reader would get through in an hour, three, four, five, six days, and returning it with the last leaf but one folded down. These are your readers against the grain, who yet must read or be thought nothing of--who, crawling through a book with tortoise-pace, go creeping to the next Review to learn what they shall say of it. Upon my soul, I pity the honest fellows mightily. The self-denials of virtue are nothing to the patience of these self tormentors. If I hate one day before another, it is the accursed first day of the month, when a load of periodicals is ushered in and distributed to feed the reluctant monster. How it gapes and takes in its prescribed diet, as little savoury as that which Daniel ministered to that Apocryphal dragon, and not more wholesome! Is there no stopping the eternal wheels of the Press for a half century or two, till the nation recover its senses? Must we magazine it and review [it] at this sickening rate for ever? Shall we never again read to be amused? but to judge, to criticise, to talk about it and about it? Farewel, old honest delight taken in books not quite contemporary, before this plague-token of modern endless novelties broke out upon us--farewel to reading for its own sake!

Rather than follow in the train of this insatiable monster of modern reading, I would forswear my spectacles, play at put, mend pens, kill fleas, stand on one leg, shell peas, or do whatsoever ignoble diversion you shall put me to. Alas! I am hurried on in the vortex. I die of new books, or the everlasting talk about them. I faint of Longman's. I sicken of the Constables. Blackwood and Cadell have me by the throat.

I will go and relieve myself with a page of honest John Bunyan, or Tom Brown. Tom anybody will do, so long as they are not of this whiffling century.

Your Old-fashioned Correspondent,

LEPUS.

III.--MORTIFICATIONS OF AN AUTHOR

If you have a son or daughter inclinable to the folly of Authorship, pray warn them by my example of the mortifications which are the constant attendants upon it. I do not advert to the trite instances of unfair and malignant reviewing, though that is not nothing--but to the mortifications they may expect from their friends and common acquaintance. I have been a dabler this way, and cannot resist flinging out my thoughts occasionally in periodical publications. I was the chief support of the * * * * * * * * * Magazine while it lasted, under the signature of OLINDO. All my friends guessed, or rather knew, who OLINDO was; but I never knew one who did not take a pleasure in affecting to be ignorant of it. One would ask me, whether I had read that clever article in the * * * * * * * * * Magazine of this month (and here I began to prick up my ears) signed "ZEKIEL HOMESPUN."--(Then my ears would flap down again.)--Another would praise the verses of "X. Y. Z.;" a third stood up for the "Gipsy Stranger;" a long rambling tale in prose, with all the lengthiness, and none of the fine-heartedness and gush of soul of A----n C----m to recommend it. But never in a single instance was Olindo ever hinted at. I have sifted, I have pumped them (as the vulgar phrase is) till my heart ached, to extort a pittance of acknowledgment. I have descended to arts below any animal but an Author, who is veritably the meanest of Heaven's creatures, and my vanity has returned upon myself ungratified, to choke me. When I could bear their silence no longer and have ventured to ask them how they liked "such a Paper;" a cold, "O! was that yours?" is the utmost I ever obtained from them. A fellow sits at my desk this morning, spelling The New Times over from head to tail, and I know that he will purposely skip over this article, because he suspects me to be LEPUS. So confident am I of this, and of his deliberate purpose to torment me, that I have a great mind to give you his character--knowing that he will not read it--but I forbear him at present. They have two ways of doing it. "The * * * * * * * * * Magazine is very sprightly this month, Anticlericus has some good hits, the Old Baker is capital," and so forth. Or the same Magazine is "unusually dull this month," especially when Olindo happens to have an article better or longer than usual. I publish a book now and then. In the very nick of its novelty, the honey moon, as it were--when with pride I have placed my bantling on my own shelves in company with its betters, a friend will drop in, and ask me if I have anything new; then, carefully eluding mine, he will take down The Angel of the World, or Barry Cornwall, and beg me to lend it him. "He is particularly careful of new books." But he never borrows me. To one Lady I lent a little Novel of mine, a thing of about two hours' reading at most, and she returned it after five weeks' keeping, with an apology that she had "so small time for reading." I found it doubled down at the last leaf but one--just at the crisis of what I conceived to be a very affecting catastrophe. O if you write, dear Reader, keep the secret inviolable from your most familiar friends. Do not let your own father, brother, or your uncle, know it: not even your wife. I know a Lady who prides herself upon "not reading any of her husband's publications," though she swallows all the trash she can pick up besides; and yet her husband in the world's eye is a very respectable author, and has written some Novels in particular that are in high estimation. Write--and all your friends will hate you--all will suspect you. Are you happy in drawing a character? Shew it not for yours. Not one of your acquaintance but will surmise that you meant him or her--no matter how discordant from their own. Let it be diametrically different, their fancy will extract from it some lines of a likeness. I lost a friend--a most valuable one, by shewing him a whimsical draught of a miser. He himself is remarkable for generosity, even to carelessness in money matters; but there was an expression in it, out of Juvenal, about an attic--a place where pigeons are fed; and my friend kept pigeons. All the waters in the Danube cannot wash it out of his pate to this day, but that in my miser I was making reflections upon him. To conclude, no creature is so craving after applause, and so starved and famished for it, as an author: none so pitiful, and so little pitied. He sets himself up prima facie as something different from his brethren, and they never forgive him. 'Tis the fable of the little birds hooting at the bird of Pallas.

LEPUS.

IV.--TOM PRY

My friend TOM PRY is a kind, warm-hearted fellow, with no one failing in the world but an excess of the passion of Curiosity. He knows every body's name, face, and domestic affairs. He scents out a match three months before the parties themselves are quite agreed about it. Like the man in the play, homo est and no human interest escapes him. I have sometime wondered how he gets all his information. Mere inquisitiveness would not do his business. Certainly the bodily make has much to do with the character. The auricular organs in my friend Tom do not lie flapping against his head as with common mortals, but they perk up like those of a hare at form. The lowest sound cannot elude him. Every parlour and drawing-room is to him a whispering gallery. His own name, pronounced in the utmost compression of susurration, they say, he catches at a quarter furlong interval. I suspect sometimes that the faculty of hearing with him is analogous to the scent in some animals. He seems hung round with ears, like the pagan emblem of Fame, and to imbibe sounds at every pore. You cannot take a walk of business or pleasure, but you are taxed with it by him next morning, with some shrewd guess at the purpose of it. You dread him as you would an inquisitor, or the ubiquitarian power of the old Secret Tribunal. He is the bird of the air, who sees the matter. He has lodgings at a corner house, which looks out four ways; and though you go a round about way to evade his investigation, you are somehow seen notwithstanding. He sees at multiplied angles. He is a sort of second memory to all his friends, an excellent refresher to a dull or obvious conscience; for he can repeat to you at any given time all that ever you have done in your life. He should have been a death-bed confessor. His appetite for information is omnivorous. To get at the name only of a stranger whom he passes in the street, he counts a God-send; what further he can pick up is a luxury. His friends joke with him about his innocent propensity, but the bent of nature is too deeply burned in to be removed with such forks. Usque recurrit. I myself in particular had been rallying him pretty sharply one day upon the foible, and it seemed to impress him a little. He asked no more questions that morning. But walking with him in St. James's Park in the evening, we met an old Gentleman unknown to him, who bowed to me. I could see that Tom kept his passion within with great struggles. Silence was observed for ten minutes, and I was congratulating myself on my friend's mastery over this inordinate appetite of knowing every thing, when we had not past the Queen's gate a pace or two, but the fire burnt within him, and he said, as if with indifference, "By the way, who was that friend of yours who bowed to you just now?" He has a place in the Post-office, which I think he chose for the pleasure of reading superscriptions. He is too honorable a man, I am sure, to get clandestinely at the contents of a letter not addressed to him, but the outside he cannot resist. It tickles him. He plays about the flame, as it were; contents himself with a superficial caress, when he can get at nothing more substantial. He has a handsome seal, which he keeps to proffer to such of his friends as have not one in readiness, when they would fold up an epistle; nay, he will seal it for you, and pays himself by discovering the direction. As I have no directionary secrets, I generally humour him with pretending to have left my seal at home (though I carry a rich gold one, which was my grandfather's, always about me), to gratify his harmless inclination. He is the cleverest of sealing a letter of any man I ever knew, and turns out the cleanest impressions. It is a neat but slow operation with him--he has so much more time to drink in the direction. With all this curiosity, he is the finest tempered fellow in the world. You may banter him from morning to night, but never ruffle his temper. We sometimes raise reports to mislead him, as that such a one is going to be married next month, &c.; but he has an instinct, as I called it before, which prevents his yielding to the imposition. He distinguishes at hearing between giddy rumour and steady report. He listens with dignity, and his prying is without credulity.

LEPUS.

V.--TOM PRY'S WIFE

You say you were diverted with my description of the "Curious Man." Tom is in some respects an amusing character enough, but then it is by no means uncommon. But what power of words can paint Tom's wife? My pencil faulters while I attempt it. But I am ambitious that the portraits should hang side by side: they may set off one another. Tom's passion for knowledge in the pursuit is intense and restless, but when satisfied it sits down and seeks no further. He must know all about every thing, but his desires terminate in mere science. Now as far as the pure mathematics, as they are called, transcend the practical, so far does Tom's curiosity, to my mind, in elegance and disinterestedness, soar above the craving, gnawing, mercenary (if I may so call it) inquisitiveness of his wife.

Mrs. Priscilla Pry must not only know all about your private concerns, but be as deeply concerned herself for them: she will pluck at the very heart of your mystery. She must anatomise and skin you, absolutely lay your feelings bare. Her passions are reducible to two, but those are stronger in her than in any human creature--pity and envy. I will try to illustrate it. She has intimacy with two families--the Grimstones and the Gubbins's. The former are sadly pinched to live, the latter are in splendid circumstances: the former tenant an obscure third floor in Devereux Court, the latter occupy a stately mansion in May-fair. I have accompanied her to both these domiciles. She will burst into the incommodious lodging of poor Grimstone and his wife at some unseasonable hour, when they are at their meagre dinner, with a "Bless me! what a dark passage you have! I could hardly find my way up stairs! Isn't there a drain somewhere? Well, I like to see you at your little bit of mutton!" But her treat is to catch them at a meal of solitary potatoes. Then does her sympathy burgeon, and bud out into a thousand flowers of rhetorical pity and wonder; and it is trumpeted out afterwards to all her acquaintance, that the poor Grimstones were "making a dinner without flesh yesterday." The word poor is her favorite; the word (on my conscience) is endeared to her beyond any monosyllable in the language. Poverty, in the tone of her compassion, is somehow doubled; it is emphatically what a dramatist, with some licence, has called poor poverty. It is stark-naked indigence, and never in her mind connected with any mitigating circumstances of self-respect and independence in the owner, which give to poverty a dignity. It is an object of pure pity, and nothing else. This is her first way. Change we the scene to May-fair and the Gubbins's. Suppose it a morning call:--

"Bless me!--(for she equally blesses herself against want and abundance)--what a style you do live in! what elegant curtains! You must have a great income to afford all these things. I wonder you can ever visit such poor folks as we!"--with more to the same purpose, which I must cut short, not to be tedious. She pumps all her friends to know the exact income of all her friends. Such a one must have a great salary. Do you think he has as much as eight hundred a year--seven hundred and fifty perhaps? A wag once told her I had fourteen hundred--(Heaven knows we Bank Clerks, though with no reason to complain, in few cases realise that luxury)--and the fury of her wonder, till I undeceived her, nearly worked her spirits to a fever. Now Pry is equally glad to get at his friends' circumstances; but his curiosity is disinterested, as I said, and passionless. No emotions are consequent upon the satisfaction of it. He is a philosopher who loves knowledge for its own sake; she is not content with a lumen siccum (dry knowledge, says Bacon, is best); the success of her researches is nothing, but as it feeds the two main springs between which her soul is kept in perpetual conflict--Pity, and Envy.

LEPUS.

VI.--A CHARACTER

A desk at the Bank of England is prima facie not the point in the world that seems best adapted for an insight into the characters of men; yet something may be gleaned from the barrenest soil. There is EGOMET, for instance. By the way, how pleasant it is to string up one's acquaintance thus, in the grumbler's corner of some newspaper, and for them to know nothing at all about it; nay, for them to read their own characters and suspect nothing of the matter. Blessings on the writer who first made use of Roman names. It is only calling Tomkins--Caius; and Jenkins--Titus; or whipping Hopkins upon the back of Scævola, and you have the pleasure of executing sentence with no pain to the offender. This hanging in effigy is delightful; it evaporates the spleen without souring the blood, and is altogether the most gentlemanly piece of Jack-Ketchery imaginable.

EGOMET, then, has been my desk-fellow for thirty years. He is a remarkable species of selfishness. I do not mean that he is attentive to his own gain; I acquit him of that common-place manifestation of the foible. I shoot no such small deer. But his sin is a total absorption of mind in things relating to himself--his house--his horse--his stable--his gardener, &c. Nothing that concerns himself can he imagine to be indifferent to you.--He does my sympathy too much honour. The worst is, he takes no sort of interest whatever in your horse, house, stable, gardener, &c. If you begin a discourse about your own household economy and small matters, he treats it with the most mortifying indifference. He has discarded all pronouns for the first-personal. His inattention, or rather aversion, to hear, is no more than what is a proper return to a self-important babbler of his own little concerns; but then, if he will not give, why should he expect to receive, a hearing? "There is no reciprocity in this."

There is an egotism of vanity; but his is not that species either. He is not vain of any talent, or indeed properly of any thing he possesses; but his doings and sayings, his little pieces of good or ill luck, the sickness of his maid, the health of his pony, the question whether he shall ride or walk home to-day to Clapham, the shape of his hat or make of his boot; his poultry, and how many eggs they lay daily--are the never-*ending topics of his talk. Your goose might lay golden eggs without exciting in him a single curiosity to hear about it.

He is alike throughout; his large desk, which abuts on mine--nimium vicini, alas! is a vast lumber chest composed of every scrap of most insignificant paper, even to dinner invitation cards, every fragment that has been addressed to him, or in any way has concerned himself. My elbow aches with being perpetually in the way of his sudden jerking it up, which he does incessantly to hunt for some worthless scrap of the least possible self-reference; this he does without notice, and without ceremony. I should like to make a bonfire of the ungainful mass--but I should not like it either; with it would fall down at once all the structure of his pride--his fane of Diana, his treasure, his calling, the business he came into the world to do.

I said before, he is not avaricious--not egotistical in the vain sense of the word either; herefore the term selfishness, or egotism, is improperly applied to his distemper; it is the sin of self-fullness. Neither is himself, properly speaking, an object of his contemplation at all; it is the things, which belong or refer to himself. His conversation is one entire soliloquy; or it may be said to resemble Robinson Crusoe's self-colloquies in his island: you are the parrot sitting by. Begin a story, however modest, of your own concerns (something of real interest perhaps), and the little fellow contracts and curls up into his little self immediately, and, with shut ears, sits unmoved, self-centred, as remote from your joys or sorrows as a Pagod or a Lucretian Jupiter.

LEPUS.

REFLECTIONS IN THE PILLORY

(1825)

[About the year 18--, one R----d, a respectable London merchant (since dead), stood in the pillory for some alleged fraud upon the Revenue. Among his papers were found the following "Reflections," which we have obtained by favour of our friend Elia, who knew him well, and had heard him describe the train of his feelings upon that trying occasion almost in the words of the MS. Elia speaks of him as a man (with the exception of the peccadillo aforesaid) of singular integrity in all his private dealings, possessing great suavity of manner, with a certain turn for humour. As our object is to present human nature under every possible circumstance, we do not think that we shall sully our pages by inserting it.--Editor.]

Scene, opposite the Royal Exchange

Time, Twelve to One, Noon

Ketch, my good fellow, you have a neat hand. Prithee, adjust this new collar to my neck, gingerly. I am not used to these wooden cravats. There, softly, softly. That seems the exact point between ornament and strangulation. A thought looser on this side. Now it will do. And have a care in turning me, that I present my aspect due vertically. I now face the orient. In a quarter of an hour I shift southward--do you mind?--and so on till I face the east again, travelling with the sun. No half-points, I beseech you; N.N. by W. or any such elaborate niceties. They become the shipman's card, but not this mystery. Now leave me a little to my own reflections.

Bless us, what a company is assembled in honour of me! How grand I stand here! I never felt so sensibly before the effect of solitude in a crowd. I muse in solemn silence upon that vast miscellaneous rabble in the pit there. From my private box I contemplate with mingled pity and wonder the gaping curiosity of those underlings. There are my Whitechapel supporters. Rosemary Lane has emptied herself of the very flower of her citizens to grace my show. Duke's place sits desolate. What is there in my face, that strangers should come so far from the east to gaze upon it? [Here an egg narrowly misses him.] That offering was well meant, but not so cleanly executed. By the tricklings, it should not be either myrrh or frankincence. Spare your presents, my friends; I am no-ways mercenary. I desire no missive tokens of your approbation. I am past those valentines. Bestow these coffins of untimely chickens upon mouths that water for them. Comfort your addle spouses with them at home, and stop the mouths of your brawling brats with such Olla Podridas; they have need of them. [A brick is let fly.] Discase not, I pray you, nor dismantle your rent and ragged tenements, to furnish me with architectural decorations, which I can excuse. This fragment might have stopped a flaw against snow comes. [A coal flies.] Cinders are dear, gentlemen. This nubbling might have helped the pot boil, when your dirty cuttings from the shambles at three ha'-pence a pound shall stand at a cold simmer. Now, south about, Ketch. I would enjoy australian popularity.

What my friends from over the water! Old benchers--flies of a day--ephemeral Romans--welcome! Doth the sight of me draw souls from limbo? Can it dispeople purgatory--ha!

What am I, or what was my father's house, that I should thus be set up a spectacle to gentlemen and others? Why are all faces, like Persians at the sun-rise, bent singly on mine alone? It was wont to be esteemed an ordinary visnomy, a quotidian merely. Doubtless, these assembled myriads discern some traits of nobleness, gentility, breeding, which hitherto have escaped the common observation--some intimations, as it were, of wisdom, valour, piety, and so forth. My sight dazzles; and, if I am not deceived by the too familiar pressure of this strange neckcloth that envelopes it, my countenance gives out lambent glories. For some painter now to take me in the lucky point of expression!--the posture so convenient--the head never shifting, but standing quiescent in a sort of natural frame. But these artizans require a westerly aspect. Ketch, turn me.

Something of St. James's air in these my new friends. How my prospects shift, and brighten! Now if Sir Thomas Lawrence be any where in that group, his fortune is made for ever. I think I see some one taking out a crayon. I will compose my whole face to a smile, which yet shall not so predominate, but that gravity and gaiety shall contend as it were--you understand me? I will work up my thoughts to some mild rapture--a gentle enthusiasmus--which the artist may transfer in a manner warm to the canvass. I will inwardly apostrophize my tabernacle.

Delectable mansion, hail! House, not made of every wood! Lodging, that pays no rent; airy and commodious; which, owing no window tax, art yet all casement, out of which men have such pleasure in peering and overlooking, that they will sometimes stand an hour together to enjoy thy prospects! Cell, recluse from the vulgar! Quiet retirement from the great Babel, yet affording sufficient glimpses into it! Pulpit, that instructs without note or sermon-book, into which the preacher is inducted without tenth or first fruit! Throne, unshared and single, that disdainest a Brentford competitor! Honour without co-rival! Or hearest thou rather, magnificent theatre in which the spectator comes to see and to be seen? From thy giddy heights I look down upon the common herd, who stand with eyes upturned as if a winged messenger hovered over them; and mouths open, as if they expected manna. I feel, I feel, the true Episcopal yearnings. Behold in me, my flock, your true overseer! What though I cannot lay hands, because my own are laid, yet I can mutter benedictions. True otium cum dignitate! Proud Pisgah eminence! Pinnacle sublime! O Pillory, 'tis thee I sing! Thou younger brother to the gallows, without his rough and Esau palms; that with ineffable contempt surveyest beneath thee the grovelling stocks, which claims presumptuously to be of thy great race. Let that low wood know, that thou art far higher born! Let that domicile for groundling rogues and base earth-kissing varlets envy thy preferment, not seldom fated to be the wanton baiting-house, the temporary retreat, of poet and of patriot. Shades of Bastwick and of Prynne hover over thee--Defoe is there, and more greatly daring Shebbeare--from their (little more elevated) stations they look down with recognitions. Ketch, turn me.

I now veer to the north. Open your widest gates, thou proud Exchange of London, that I may look in as proudly! Gresham's wonder, hail! I stand upon a level with all your kings. They, and I, from equal heights, with equal superciliousness, o'er-look the plodding, money-hunting tribe below; who, busied in their sordid speculations, scarce elevate their eyes to notice your ancient, or my recent, grandeur. The second Charles smiles on me from three pedestals?[50] He closed the Exchequer: I cheated the Excise. Equal our darings, equal be our lot.

[50] A statue of Charles II. by the elder Cibber, adorns the front of the Exchange. He stands also on high, in the train of his crowned ancestors, in his proper order, within that building. But the merchants of London, in a superfœtation of loyalty, have, within a few years, caused to be erected another effigy of him on the ground in the centre of the interior. We do not hear that a fourth is in contemplation.--Editor.

Are those the quarters? 'tis their fatal chime. That the ever-winged hours would but stand still! but I must descend, descend from this dream of greatness. Stay, stay, a little while, importunate hour hand! A moment or two, and I shall walk on foot with the undistinguished many. The clock speaks one. I return to common life. Ketch, let me out.

THE LAST PEACH

(1825)

I am the miserablest man living. Give me counsel, dear Editor. I was bred up in the strictest principles of honesty, and have passed my life in punctual adherence to them. Integrity might be said to be ingrained in our family. Yet I live in constant fear of one day coming to the gallows.

Till the latter end of last autumn I never experienced these feelings of self-mistrust which ever since have embittered my existence. From the apprehension of that unfortunate man whose story began to make so great an impression upon the public about that time, I date my horrors. I never can get it out of my head that I shall some time or other commit a forgery, or do some equally vile thing. To make matters worse I am in a banking-house. I sit surrounded with a cluster of bank-notes. These were formerly no more to me than meat to a butcher's dog. They are now as toads and aspics. I feel all day like one situated amidst gins and pit-falls. Sovereigns, which I once took such pleasure in counting out, and scraping up with my little thin tin shovel (at which I was the most expert in the banking-house), now scald my hands. When I go to sign my name I set down that of another person, or write my own in a counterfeit character. I am beset with temptations without motive. I want no more wealth than I possess. A more contented being than myself, as to money matters, exists not. What should I fear?

When a child I was once let loose, by favour of a Nobleman's gardener, into his Lordship's magnificent fruit garden, with free leave to pull the currants and the gooseberries; only I was interdicted from touching the wall fruit. Indeed, at that season (it was the end of Autumn) there was little left. Only on the South wall (can I forget the hot feel of the brickwork?) lingered the one last peach. Now peaches are a fruit I always had, and still have, an almost utter aversion to. There is something to my palate singularly harsh and repulsive in the flavour of them. I know not by what demon of contradiction inspired, but I was haunted by an irresistible desire to pluck it. Tear myself as often as I would from the spot, I found myself still recurring to it, till, maddening with desire (desire I cannot call it), with wilfulness rather--without appetite--against appetite, I may call it--in an evil hour I reached out my hand, and plucked it. Some few rain drops just then fell; the sky (from a bright day) became overcast; and I was a type of our first parents, after the eating of that fatal fruit. I felt myself naked and ashamed; stripped of my virtue, spiritless. The downy fruit, whose sight rather than savour had tempted me, dropt from my hand, never to be tasted. All the commentators in the world cannot persuade me but that the Hebrew word in the second chapter of Genesis, translated apple, should be rendered peach. Only this way can I reconcile that mysterious story.

Just such a child at thirty am I among the cash and valuables, longing to pluck, without an idea of enjoyment further. I cannot reason myself out of these fears: I dare not laugh at them. I was tenderly and lovingly brought up. What then? Who that in life's entrance had seen the babe F----, from the lap stretching out his little fond mouth to catch the maternal kiss, could have predicted, or as much as imagined, that life's very different exit? The sight of my own fingers torments me; they seem so admirably constructed for ---- pilfering. Then that jugular vein, which I have in common----; in an emphatic sense may I say with David, I am "fearfully made." All my mirth is poisoned by these unhappy suggestions. If, to dissipate reflection, I hum a tune, it changes to the "Lamentations of a Sinner." My very dreams are tainted. I awake with a shocking feeling of my hand in some pocket.

Advise with me, dear Editor, on this painful heart-malady. Tell me, do you feel any thing allied to it in yourself? do you never feel an itching, as it were--a dactylomania--or am I alone? You have my honest confession. My next may appear from Bow-street.

SUSPENSURUS.

"ODES AND ADDRESSES TO GREAT PEOPLE"

(1825)

The Odes and Addresses are Thirteen in number. The metre is happily varied from the familiar epistolary verse to the Eton College stanza, and loftier parodies of Gray, &c. Among the Great People addressed are--Graham the Aeronaut, Mr. McAdam, Mrs. Fry, Martin of Galway, R. W. Elliston, Esq., &c. &c. from which the reader may gather that the Addresses are not mere unqualified or fulsome dedications. They have, in fact, a fund of fun. They remind us of Peter Pindar, and sometimes of Colman; they have almost as much humour, and they have rather more wit. A too great aim at brilliancy is their excess. We do not think that in any work there can be too much brilliancy of the same kind. We are not of opinion with those critics who condemn Cowley for excess of wit. We could have borne with a double portion of it, and have never cried "Hold." What we allude to is a mixture of incompatible kinds; the perpetual recurrence of puns in these little effusions of humour; puns uncalled for, and perfectly gratuitous, a sort of make-weight; puns, which, if missed, leave the sense and the drollery full and perfect without them. You may read any one of the addresses, and not catch a quibble in it, and it shall be just as good, nay better; for the addition of said quibble only serves to puzzle with an unnecessary double meaning. A pun is good when it can rely on its single self; but, called in as an accessory, it weakens--unless it makes the humour, it enfeebles it. All this critical prosing is not quite a fair introduction to the pleasant specimen we subjoin, from the pleasantest morceau in the volume, which we throw upon the taste of our pantomime-going readers, with a hearty confidence in their sympathies. The subject is no less a one than their and our Joe--the immortal Grimaldi.

Joseph! they say thou'st left the stage. To toddle down the hill of life, And taste the flannell'd ease of age, Apart from pantomimic strife--

* * * * *

Ah, where is now thy rolling head! Thy winking, reeling, drunken eyes, (As old Catullus would have said,) Thy oven-mouth, that swallow'd pies-- Enormous hunger--monstrous drowth!-- Thy pockets greedy as thy mouth!

Ah, where thy ears, so often cuff'd!-- Thy funny, flapping, filching hands!-- Thy partridge body, always stuff'd With waifs, and strays, and contrabands!-- Thy foot--like Berkeley's Foote--for why? 'Twas often made to wipe an eye! =X=

Ah, where thy legs--that witty pair! For "great wits jump"--and so did they! Lord! how they leap'd in lamp-light air! Caper'd--and bounc'd--and strode away!-- That years should tame the legs--alack! I've seen spring thro' an Almanack!

But bounds will have their bound =X=--the shocks Of Time will cramp the nimblest toes: And those that frisk'd in silken clocks May look to limp in fleecy hose--

* * * * *

And gout, that owns no odds between The toe of Czar and toe of Clown, Will visit--but I did not mean To moralize, though I am grown Thus sad.--Thy going seem'd to beat A muffled drum for Fun's retreat!

* * * * *

Oh, how will thy departure cloud The lamp-light of the little breast! The Christmas child will grieve aloud To miss his broadest friend and best,--

* * * * *

For who like thee could ever stride! Some dozen paces to the mile!-- The motley, medley coach provide-- Or like Joe Frankenstein compile The vegetable man complete!-- A proper Covent Garden feat!

Or, who like thee could ever drink, Or eat,--swill, swallow--bolt--and choke! Nod, weep, and hiccup--sneeze and wink?-- Thy very yawn was quite a joke! Tho' Joseph, Junior, acts not ill, "There's no Fool like the old Fool" still!

All that is descriptive here is excellent. It seems to us next in merit to some of Cibber's dramatic comic portraitures, Joe, the absolute Joe, lives again in every line. We have just set our mark X against two puns to exemplify our foregoing remarks. The first of them is a positive stop to the current of our joyous feelings. What possible analogy, or contrast even, can there be between a comic gesture of Grimaldi, and the serious misfortunes of the lady, except in verbal sound purely? The sound is good, because the humour lies in the pun, and moreover has reference to Milton's

----at one bound High over leaps all bounds.

A pun is a humble companion to wit, but disdains to be a train-bearer merely. But these poems are rich in fancies, which, in truth, needed not such aid.

THE RELIGION OF ACTORS

(1826)

The world has hitherto so little troubled its head with the points of doctrine held by a community, which contributes in other ways so largely to its amusement, that, before the late mischance of a celebrated tragic actor, it scarce condescended to look into the practice of any individual player, much less to inquire into the hidden and abscondite springs of his actions. Indeed it is with some violence to the imagination that we conceive of an actor as belonging to the relations of private life, so closely do we identify these persons in our mind with the characters which they assume upon the stage. How oddly does it sound, when we are told that the late Miss Pope, for instance--that is to say, in our notion of her, Mrs. Candour--was a good daughter, an affectionate sister, and exemplary in all the parts of domestic life! With still greater difficulty can we carry our notions to church, and conceive of Liston, kneeling upon a hassock; or Munden uttering a pious ejaculation, "making mouths at the invisible event." But the times are fast improving; and, if the process of sanctity begun under the happy auspices of the present licenser go on to its completion, it will be as necessary for a comedian to give an account of his faith, as of his conduct. Fawcett must study the five points; and Dicky Suett, if he were alive, would have to rub up his catechism. Already the effects of it begin to appear. A celebrated performer has thought fit to oblige the world with a confession of his faith; or, BR----'S RELIGIO DRAMATICI. This gentleman, in his laudable attempt to shift from his person the obloquy of Judaism, with the forwardness of a new convert, in trying to prove too much, has, in the opinion of many, proved too little. A simple declaration of his Christianity was sufficient; but, strange to say, his apology has not a word about it. We are left to gather it from some expressions which imply that he is a Protestant; but we did not wish to inquire into the niceties of his orthodoxy. To his friends of the old persuasion the distinction was impertinent; for what cares Rabbi Ben Kimchi for the differences which have split our novelty? To the great body of Christians that hold the Pope's supremacy--that is to say, to the major part of the Christian world--his religion will appear as much to seek as ever. But perhaps he conceived that all Christians are Protestants, as children and the common people call all that are not animals, Christians. The mistake was not very considerable in so young a proselyte; or he might think the general (as logicians speak) involved in the particular. All Protestants are Christians; but I am a Protestant; ergo, &c. as if a marmoset, contending to be a man, overleaping that term as too generic and vulgar, should at once roundly proclaim himself to be a gentleman. The argument would be, as we say, ex abundanti. From whichever cause this excessus in terminis proceeded, we can do no less than congratulate the general state of Christendom upon the accession of so extraordinary a convert. Who was the happy instrument of the conversion, we are yet to learn: it comes nearest to the attempt of the late pious Doctor Watts to christianize the Psalms of the Old Testament. Something of the old Hebrew raciness is lost in the transfusion; but much of its asperity is softened and pared down in the adaptation. The appearance of so singular a treatise at this conjuncture has set us upon an inquiry into the present state of religion upon the stage generally. By the favour of the churchwardens of Saint Martin's in the Fields, and Saint Paul's Covent-Garden, who have very readily, and with great kindness, assisted our pursuit, we are enabled to lay before the public the following particulars.--Strictly speaking, neither of the two great bodies is collectively a religious institution. We had expected to have found a chaplain among them, as at Saint Stephen's, and other court establishments; and were the more surprised at the omission, as the last [? late] Mr. Bengough, at the one house, and Mr. Powell at the other, from a gravity of speech and demeanour, and the habit of wearing black at their first appearances in the beginning of fifth, or the conclusion of fourth acts, so eminently pointed out their qualifications for such office. These corporations then being not properly congregational, we must seek the solution of our question in the tastes, attainments, accidental breeding, and education of the individual members of them. As we were prepared to expect, a majority at both houses adhere to the religion of the church established, only that at one of them a pretty strong leaven of Catholicism is suspected: which, considering the notorious education of the manager at a foreign seminary, is not so much to be wondered at. Some have gone so far as to report that Mr. T----y, in particular, belongs to an order lately restored on the Continent. We can contradict this: that gentleman is a member of the Kirk of Scotland; and his name is to be found, much to his honour, in the list of Seceders from the congregation of Mr. Fletcher. While the generality, as we have said, are content to jog on in the safe trammels of national orthodoxy, symptoms of a sectarian spirit have broken out in quarters where we should least have looked for it. Some of the ladies at both houses are deep in controverted points. Miss F----e, we are credibly informed, is a sub, and Madame V---- a supra-lapsarian.

Mr. Pope is the last of the exploded sect of the Ranters. Mr. Sinclair has joined the Shakers. Mr. Grimaldi, Senior, after being long a Jumper, has lately fallen into some whimsical theories respecting the Fall of Man; which he understands, not of an allegorical, but a real tumble, by which the whole body of humanity became, as it were, lame to the performance of good works. Pride he will have to be--nothing but a stiff-neck; irresolution--the nerves shaken; an inclination to sinister paths--crookedness of the joints; spiritual deadness--a paralysis; want of charity--a contraction in the fingers; despising of government--a broken head; the plaister--a sermon; the lint to bind it up--the text; the probers--the preachers; a pair of crutches--the old and new law; a bandage--religious obligation: a fanciful mode of illustration derived from the accidents and habits of his past calling spiritualised, rather than from any accurate acquaintance with the Hebrew text, in which report speaks him but a raw scholar.--Mr. Elliston, from all that we can learn, has his religion yet to choose; though some think him a Mu[g]gletonian.

A POPULAR FALLACY

(1826)

That a deformed person is a lord.--After a careful perusal of the most approved works that treat of nobility, and of its origin, in these realms in particular, we are left very much in the dark as to the original patent, in which this branch of it is recognised. Neither Camden in his "Etymologie and Original of Barons," nor Dugdale in his "Baronage of England," nor Selden (a more exact and laborious enquirer than either) in his "Titles of Honour," afford[s] a glimpse of satisfaction upon the subject. There is an heraldic term, indeed, which seems to imply gentility, and the right to coat armour, (but nothing further) in persons thus qualified. But the sinister bend is more probably interpreted, by the best writers on this science, of some irregularity of birth, than of bodily conformation. Nobility is either hereditary, or by creation, commonly called patent. Of the former kind, the title in question cannot be, seeing that the notion of it is limited to a personal distinction, which does not necessarily follow in the blood. Honours of this nature, as Mr. Anstey very well observes, descend moreover in a right line. It must be by patent then, if any thing. But who can show it? How comes it to be dormant? Under what king's reign is it pretended? Among the grounds of nobility cited by the learned Mr. Ashmole, after "Services in the Field or in the Council Chamber," he judiciously sets down "Honours conferred by the sovereign out of mere benevolence, or as favouring one subject rather than another, for some likeness or conformity observed (or but supposed) in him to the royal nature;" and instances the graces showered upon Charles Brandon, who "in his goodly person being thought not a little to favour the port and bearing of the king's own majesty, was by that sovereign, King Henry the Eighth, for some or one of these respects, highly promoted and preferred." Here, if any where, we thought we had discovered a clue to our researches. But after a painful investigation of the rolls and records under the reign of Richard the Third, or Richard Crouchback, as he is more usually designated in the chronicles, from a traditionary stoop, or gibbosity in that part,--we do not find that that monarch conferred any such lordships, as are here pretended, upon any subject, or subjects, on a simple plea of "conformity" in that respect to the "royal nature." The posture of affairs in those tumultuous times, preceding the battle of Bosworth, possibly left him at no leisure to attend to such niceties. Further than his reign we have not extended our enquiries; the kings of England who preceded, or followed him, being generally described by historians to have been of straight and clean limbs, the "natural derivative (says Daniel[51]) of high blood, if not its primitive recommendation to such ennoblement, as denoting strength and martial prowess--the qualities set most by in that fighting age." Another motive, which inclines us to scruple the validity of this claim, is the remarkable fact, that none of the persons, in whom the right is supposed to be vested, do ever insist upon it themselves. There is no instance of any of them "sueing his patent," as the law-books call it; much less of his having actually stepped up into his proper seat, as, so qualified, we might expect that some of them would have had the spirit to do, in the House of Lords. On the contrary, it seems to be a distinction thrust upon them. "Their title of Lord (says one of their own body, speaking of the common people) I never much valued, and now I entirely despise: and yet they will force it upon me as an honour which they have a right to bestow, and which I have none to refuse."[52] Upon a dispassionate review of the subject, we are disposed to believe that there is no right to the peerage incident to mere bodily configuration; that the title in dispute is merely honorary, and depending upon the breath of the common people; which in these realms is so far from the power of conferring nobility, that the ablest constitutionalists have agreed in nothing more unanimously, than in the maxim that the King is the sole fountain of honour.

[51] History of England, "Temporibus Edwardi Primi et sequentibus."

[52] Hay on Deformity.

REMINISCENCES OF JUKE JUDKINS, ESQ., OF BIRMINGHAM

(1826)

I am the only son of a considerable brazier in Birmingham, who dying in 1803, left me successor to the business, with no other incumbrance than a sort of rent-charge, which I am enjoined to pay out of it, ninety-three pounds sterling per annum to his widow, my mother; and which the improving state of the concern, I bless God, has hitherto enabled me to discharge with punctuality. (I say, I am enjoined to pay the said sum, but not strictly obligated; that is to say, as the will is worded, I believe the law would relieve me from the payment of it; but the wishes of a dying parent should in some sort have the effect of law.) So that though the annual profits of my business, on an average of the last three or four years, would appear to an indifferent observer, who should inspect my shop-books, to amount to the sum of one thousand three hundred and three pounds, odd shillings, the real proceeds in that time have fallen short of that sum to the amount of the aforesaid payment of ninety-three pounds sterling annually.

I was always my father's favourite. He took a delight to the very last in recounting the little sagacious tricks, and innocent artifices, of my childhood. One manifestation thereof I never heard him repeat without tears of joy trickling down his cheeks. It seems that when I quitted the parental roof (August 27th, 1788,) being then six years and not quite a month old, to proceed to the Free School at Warwick, where my father was a sort of trustee, my mother--as mothers are usually provident on these occasions--had stuffed the pockets of the coach, which was to convey me and six more children of my own growth, that were going to be entered along with me at the same seminary, with a prodigious quantity of gingerbread, which I remember my father said was more than was needed; and so indeed it was, for if I had been to eat it all myself, it would have got stale and mouldy before it had been half spent. The consideration whereof set me upon my contrivances how I might secure to myself as much of the gingerbread as would keep good for the next two or three days, and yet none of the rest in a manner be wasted. I had a little pair of pocket compasses which I usually carried about me for the purpose of making draughts and measurements, at which I was always very ingenious, of the various engines and mechanical inventions, in which such a town as Birmingham abounded. By the means of these, and a small penknife, which my father had given me, I cut out the one half of the cake, calculating that the remainder would reasonably serve my turn, and subdividing it into many little slices, which were curious to see for the neatness and niceness of their proportion, I sold it out in so many pennyworths to my young companions, as served us all the way to Warwick, which is a distance of some twenty miles from this town; and very merry, I assure you, we made ourselves with it, feasting all the way. By this honest stratagem I put double the prime cost of the gingerbread into my purse, and secured as much as I thought would keep good and moist for my next two or three days eating. When I told this to my parents on their first visit to me at Warwick, my father (good man) patted me on the cheek, and stroked my head, and seemed as if he could never make enough of me; but my mother unaccountably burst into tears, and said "it was a very niggardly action," or some such expression, and that "she would rather it would please God to take me,"--meaning, God help me, that I should die--"than that she should live to see me grow up a mean man"--which shows the difference of parent from parent, and how some mothers are more harsh and intolerant to their children than some fathers; when we might expect quite the contrary. My father, however, loaded me with presents from that time, which made me the envy of my schoolfellows. As I felt this growing disposition in them, I naturally sought to avert it by all the means in my power; and from that time I used to eat my little packages of fruit, and other nice things, in a corner so privately, that I was never found out. Once, I remember, I had a huge apple sent me, of that sort which they call cats' heads. I concealed this all day under my pillow; and at night, but not before I had ascertained that my bedfellow was sound asleep, which I did by pinching him rather smartly two or three times, which he seemed to perceive no more than a dead person, though once or twice he made a motion as if he would turn, which frightened me--I say, when I had made all sure, I fell to work upon my apple; and though it was as big as an ordinary man's two fists, I made shift to get through it before it was time to get up; and a more delicious feast I never made,--thinking all night what a good parent I had (I mean my father) to send me so many nice things, when the poor lad that lay by me had no parent or friend in the world to send him any thing nice; and thinking of his desolate condition, I munched and munched as silently as I could, that I might not set him a longing if he overheard me: and yet for all this considerateness, and attention to other people's feelings, I was never much a favourite with my school-fellows, which I have often wondered at, seeing that I never defrauded any one of them of the value of a halfpenny, or told stories of them to their master, as some little lying boys would do, but was ready to do any of them all the services in my power, that were consistent with my own well doing. I think nobody can be expected to go further than that. But I am detaining my reader too long in the recording of my juvenile days. It is time that I should go forward to a season when it became natural that I should have some thoughts of marrying, and, as they say, settling in the world. Nevertheless my reflections on what I may call the boyish period of my life may have their use to some readers. It is pleasant to trace the man in the boy; to observe shoots of generosity in those young years, and to watch the progress of liberal sentiments, and what I may call a genteel way of thinking, which is discernible in some children at a very early age, and usually lays the foundation of all that is praiseworthy in the manly character afterwards.

With the warmest inclinations towards that way of life, and a serious conviction of its superior advantages over a single one, it has been the strange infelicity of my lot, never to have entered into the respectable estate of matrimony. Yet I was once very near it. I courted a young woman in my twenty-seventh year--for so early I began to feel symptoms of the tender passion! She was well to do in the world, as they call it; but yet not such a fortune as, all things considered, perhaps I might have pretended to. It was not my own choice altogether; but my mother very strongly pressed me to it. She was always putting it to me, that "I had comings in sufficient, that I need not stand upon a portion." Though the young woman, to do her justice, had considerable expectations, which yet did not quite come up to my mark, as I told you before. She had this saying always in her mouth, that "I had money enough, that it was time I enlarged my housekeeping, and to show a spirit befitting my circumstances." In short, what with her importunities, and my own desires in part co-operating--for, as I said, I was not yet quite twenty-seven--a time when the youthful feelings may be pardoned, if they show a little impetuosity--I resolved, I say, upon all these considerations, to set about the business of courting in right earnest. I was a young man then; and having a spice of romance in my character (as the reader has doubtless observed long ago), such as that sex is apt to be taken with, I had reason in no long time to think my addresses were any thing but disagreeable.

Certainly the happiest part of a young man's life is the time when he is going a courting. All the generous impulses are then awake, and he feels a double existence in participating his hopes and wishes with another being. Return yet again for a brief moment, ye visionary views--transient enchantments! ye moonlight rambles with Cleora in the Silent Walk at Vauxhall--(N.B. about a mile from Birmingham, and resembling the gardens of that name near London, only that the price of admission is lower)--when the nightingale has suspended her notes in June to listen to our loving discourses, while the moon was overhead (for we generally used to take our tea at Cleora's mother's before we set out, not so much to save expenses, as to avoid the publicity of a repast in the gardens, coming in much about the time of half-price, as they call it)--ye soft intercommunions of soul, when exchanging mutual vows we prattled of coming felicities! The loving disputes we have had under those trees, when this house (planning our future settlement) was rejected, because though cheap it was dull; and the other house was given up, because though agreeably situated it was too high-rented--one was too much in the heart of the town, another was too far from business. These minutiæ will seem impertinent to the aged and the prudent. I write them only to the young. Young lovers, and passionate as being young (such were Cleora and I then) alone can understand me. After some weeks wasted, as I may now call it, in this sort of amorous colloquy, we at length fixed upon the house in the High-street, No. 203, just vacated by the death of Mr. Hutton of this town, for our future residence. I had till that time lived in lodgings (only renting a shop for business) to be near to my mother; near I say, not in the same house with her, for that would have been to introduce confusion into our housekeepings, which it was desirable to keep separate. O, the loving wrangles, the endearing differences, I had with Cleora, before we could quite make up our minds to the house that was to receive us--I pretending for argument sake that the rent was too high, and she insisting that the taxes were moderate in proportion; and love at last reconciling us in the same choice. I think at that time, moderately speaking, she might have had any thing out of me for asking. I do not, nor shall ever regret that my character at that time was marked with a tinge of prodigality. Age comes fast enough upon us, and in its good time will prune away all that is inconvenient in these excesses. Perhaps it is right that it should do so. Matters, as I said, were ripening to a conclusion between us, only the house was yet not absolutely taken--some necessary arrangements, which the ardour of my youthful impetuosity could hardly brook at that time (love and youth will be precipitate)--some preliminary arrangements, I say, with the landlord respecting fixtures--very necessary things to be considered in a young man about to settle in the world, though not very accordant with the impatient state of my then passions--some obstacles about the valuation of the fixtures, had hitherto precluded (and I shall always think providentially) my final closes with his offer, when one of those accidents, which, unimportant in themselves, often arise to give a turn to the most serious intentions of our life, intervened, and put an end at once to my projects of wiving and of housekeeping. I was never much given to theatrical entertainments; that is, at no time of my life was I ever what they call a regular play-goer; but on some occasion of a benefit-night, which was expected to be very productive, and indeed turned out so, Cleora expressing a desire to be present, I could do no less than offer, as I did very willingly, to 'squire her and her mother to the pit. At that time it was not customary in our town for tradesfolk, except some of the very topping ones, to sit as they now do in the boxes. At the time appointed I waited upon the ladies, who had brought with them a young man, a distant relation, whom it seems they had invited to be of the party. This a little disconcerted me, as I had about me barely silver enough to pay for our three selves at the door, and did not at first know that their relation had proposed paying for himself. However, to do the young man justice, he not only paid for himself, but for the old lady besides, leaving me only to pay for two, as it were. In our passage to the theatre, the notice of Cleora was attracted to some orange wenches that stood about the doors vending their commodities. She was leaning on my arm, and I could feel her every now and then giving me a nudge, as it is called, which I afterwards discovered were hints that I should buy some oranges. It seems it is a custom at Birmingham, and perhaps in other places, when a gentleman treats ladies to the play,--especially when a full night is expected, and that the house will be inconveniently warm, to provide them with this kind of fruit, oranges being esteemed for their cooling property. But how could I guess at that, never having treated ladies to a play before, and being, as I said, quite a novice at these kind of entertainments? At last she spoke plain out, and begged that I would buy some of "those oranges," pointing to a particular barrow. But when I came to examine the fruit, I did not think that the quality of it was answerable to the price. In this way I handled several baskets of them, but something in them all displeased me. Some had thin rinds, and some were plainly over ripe, which is as great a fault as not being ripe enough, and I could not (what they call) make a bargain. While I stood haggling with the women, secretly determining to put off my purchase till I should get within the theatre, where I expected we should have better choice, the young man, the cousin, who it seems had left us without my missing him, came running to us with his pockets stuffed out with oranges, inside and out, as they say. It seems, not liking the look of the barrow fruit, any more than myself, he had slipped away to an eminent fruiterer's about three doors distant, which I never had the sense to think of, and had laid out a matter of two shillings in some of the best St. Michael's, I think, I ever tasted. What a little hinge, as I said before, the most important affairs in life may turn upon! The mere inadvertence to the fact that there was an eminent fruiterer's within three doors of us, though we had just passed it without the thought once occurring to me, which he had taken advantage of, lost me the affections of my Cleora. From that time she visibly cooled towards me, and her partiality was as visibly transferred to this cousin. I was long unable to account for this change in her behaviour, when one day accidentally discoursing of oranges to my mother alone, she let drop a sort of reproach to me, as if I had offended Cleora by my nearness, as she called it, that evening. Even now, when Cleora has been wedded some years to that same officious relation, as I may call him, I can hardly be persuaded that such a trifle could have been the motive to her inconstancy; for could she suppose that I would sacrifice my dearest hopes in her to the paltry sum of two shillings, when I was going to treat her to the play, and her mother too (an expense of more than four times that amount), if the young man had not interfered to pay for the latter, as I mentioned? But the caprices of the sex are past finding out; and I begin to think my mother was in the right; for doubtless women know women better than we can pretend to know them.

ELIA.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO HONE'S EVERY-DAY BOOK AND TABLE BOOK

(1825-1827)

I.--REMARKABLE CORRESPONDENT

(1825)

To the Editor of the Every-Day Book

Sir,--I am the youngest of Three hundred and sixty-six brethren--there are no fewer of us--who have the honour, in the words of the good old Song, to call the Sun our Dad. You have done the rest of our family the favour of bestowing an especial compliment upon each member of it individually--I mean, as far as you have gone; for it will take you some time before you can make your bow all round--and I have no reason to think that it is your intention to neglect any of us but poor Me. Some you have hung round with flowers; others you have made fine with martyrs' palms and saintly garlands. The most insignificant of us you have sent away pleased with some fitting apologue, or pertinent story. What have I done, that you dismiss me without mark or attribute? What though I make my public appearance seldomer than the rest of my brethren? I thought that angels' visits had been accounted the more precious for their very rarity. Reserve was always looked upon as dignified. I am seen but once, for four times that my brethren obtrude themselves; making their presence cheap and contemptible, in comparison with the state which I keep.

Am I not a Day (when I do come) to all purposes as much as any of them. Decompose me, anatomise me; you will find that I am constituted like the rest. Divide me into twenty-four, and you shall find that I cut up into as many goodly hours (or main limbs) as the rest. I too have my arteries and pulses, which are the minutes and the seconds.

It is hard to be dis-familied thus, like Cinderella in her rags and ashes, while her sisters flaunted it about in cherry-coloured ribbons and favors. My brethren forsooth are to be dubbed; one, Saint Day; another, Pope Day; a third, Bishop Day; the least of them is Squire Day, or Mr. Day, while I am--plain Day. Our house, Sir, is a very ancient one, and the least of us is too proud to put up with an indignity. What though I am but a younger brother in some sense--for the youngest of my brethren is by some thousand years my senior--yet I bid fair to inherit as long as any of them, while I have the Calendar to show; which, you must understand, is our Title Deeds.

Not content with slurring me over with a bare and naked acknowledgement of my occasional visitation in prose, you have done your best to deprive me of my verse-honours. In column 310 of your Book, you quote an antique scroll, leaving out the last couplet, as if on purpose to affront me. "Thirty days hath September"--so you transcribe very faithfully for four lines, and most invidiously suppress the exceptive clause:--

Except in Leap Year, that's the time When February's days hath twenty and--

I need not set down the rhyme which should follow; I dare say you know it very well, though you were pleased to leave it out. These indignities demand reparation. While you have time, it will be well for you to make the amende honorable. Ransack your stores, learned Sir, I pray of you, for some attribute, biographical, anecdotical, or floral, to invest me with. Did nobody die, or nobody flourish--was nobody born--upon any of my periodical visits to this globe? does the world stand still as often as I vouchsafe to appear? Am I a blank in the Almanac? alms for oblivion? If you do not find a flower at least to grace me with (a Forget Me Not would cheer me in my present obscurity), I shall prove the worst Day to you you ever saw in your life; and your Work, instead of the Title it now vaunts, must be content (every fourth year at least) to go by the lame appellation of

The Every-Day--but--one--Book.

Yours, as you treat me,

TWENTY NINTH OF FEBRUARY.

II.--CAPTAIN STARKEY

(1825)

To the Editor of the Every-Day Book

DEAR SIR,

I read your account of this unfortunate Being, and his forlorn piece of self-history, with that smile of half-interest which the Annals of Insignificance excite, till I came to where he says "I was bound apprentice to Mr. William Bird, an eminent writer and Teacher of languages and Mathematics," &c.--when I started as one does on the recognition of an old acquaintance in a supposed stranger. This then was that Starkey of whom I have heard my Sister relate so many pleasant anecdotes; and whom, never having seen, I yet seem almost to remember. For nearly fifty years she had lost all sight of him--and behold the gentle Usher of her youth, grown into an aged Beggar, dubbed with an opprobrious title, to which he had no pretensions; an object, and a May game! To what base purposes may we not return! What may not have been the meek creature's sufferings--what his wanderings--before he finally settled down in the comparative comfort of an old Hospitaller of the Almonry of Newcastle? And is poor Starkey dead?----

I was a scholar of that "eminent writer" that he speaks of; but Starkey had quitted the school about a year before I came to it. Still the odour of his merits had left a fragrancy upon the recollection of the elder pupils. The school-room stands where it did, looking into a discoloured dingy garden in the passage leading from Fetter Lane into Bartlett's Buildings. It is still a School, though the main prop, alas! has fallen so ingloriously; and bears a Latin inscription over the entrance in the Lane, which was unknown in our humbler times. Heaven knows what "languages" were taught in it then; I am sure that neither my Sister nor myself brought any out of it, but a little of our native English. By "mathematics," reader, must be understood "cyphering." It was in fact a humble day-school, at which reading and writing were taught to us boys in the morning, and the same slender erudition was communicated to the girls, our sisters, &c. in the evening. Now Starkey presided, under Bird, over both establishments. In my time, Mr. Cook, now or lately a respectable Singer and Performer at Drury-lane Theatre, and Nephew to Mr. Bird, had succeeded to him. I well remember Bird. He was a squat, corpulent, middle-sized man, with something of the gentleman about him, and that peculiar mild tone--especially while he was inflicting punishment--which is so much more terrible to children, than the angriest looks and gestures. Whippings were not frequent; but when they took place, the correction was performed in a private room adjoining, whence we could only hear the plaints, but saw nothing. This heightened the decorum and the solemnity. But the ordinary public chastisement was the bastinado, a stroke or two on the palm with that almost obsolete weapon now--the ferule. A ferule was a sort of flat ruler, widened at the inflicting end into a shape resembling a pear,--but nothing like so sweet--with a delectable hole in the middle, to raise blisters, like a cupping-glass. I have an intense recollection of that disused instrument of torture--and the malignancy, in proportion to the apparent mildness, with which its strokes were applied. The idea of a rod is accompanied with something ludicrous; but by no process can I look back upon this blister-raiser with any thing but unmingled horror.--To make him look more formidable--if a pedagogue had need of these heightenings--Bird wore one of those flowered Indian gowns, formerly in use with schoolmasters; the strange figures upon which we used to interpret into hieroglyphics of pain and suffering. But boyish fears apart--Bird I believe was in the main a humane and judicious master.

O, how I remember our legs wedged in to those uncomfortable sloping desks, where we sat elbowing each other--and the injunctions to attain a free hand, unattainable in that position; the first copy I wrote after, with its moral lesson "Art improves Nature;" the still earlier pothooks and the hangers some traces of which I fear may yet be apparent in this manuscript; the truant looks side-long to the garden, which seemed a mockery of our imprisonment; the prize for best spelling, which had almost turned my head, and which to this day I cannot reflect upon without a vanity, which I ought to be ashamed of--our little leaden inkstands, not separately subsisting, but sunk into the desks; the bright, punctually-washed morning fingers, darkening gradually with another and another ink-spot: what a world of little associated circumstances, pains and pleasures mingling their quotas of pleasure, arise at the reading of those few simple words--"Mr. William Bird, an eminent Writer and Teacher of languages and mathematics in Fetter Lane, Holborn!"

Poor Starkey, when young, had that peculiar stamp of old-fashionedness in his face, which makes it impossible for a beholder to predicate any particular age in the object. You can scarce make a guess between seventeen and seven and thirty. This antique cast always seems to promise ill-luck and penury. Yet it seems, he was not always the abject thing he came to. My Sister, who well remembers him, can hardly forgive Mr. Thomas Ranson for making an etching so unlike her idea of him, when he was a youthful teacher at Mr. Bird's school. Old age and poverty--a life-long poverty she thinks, could at no time have so effaced the marks of native gentility, which were once so visible in a face, otherwise strikingly ugly, thin, and care-worn. From her recollections of him, she thinks that he would have wanted bread, before he would have begged or borrowed a halfpenny. If any of the girls (she says) who were my school-fellows should be reading, through their aged spectacles, tidings from the dead of their youthful friend Starkey, they will feel a pang, as I do, at ever having teased his gentle spirit. They were big girls, it seems, too old to attend his instructions with the silence necessary; and however old age, and a long state of beggary, seem to have reduced his writing faculties to a state of imbecility, in those days, his language occasionally rose to the bold and figurative, for when he was in despair to stop their chattering, his ordinary phrase was, "Ladies, if you will not hold your peace, not all the powers in heaven can make you." Once he was missing for a day or two; he had run away. A little old unhappy-looking man brought him back--it was his father--and he did no business in the school that day, but sate moping in a corner, with his hands before his face; and the girls, his tormentors, in pity for his case, for the rest of that day forbore to annoy him. I had been there but a few months (adds she) when Starkey, who was the chief instructor of us girls, communicated to us as a profound secret, that the tragedy of "Cato" was shortly to be acted by the elder boys, and that we were to be invited to the representation. That Starkey lent a helping hand in fashioning the actors, she remembers; and but for his unfortunate person, he might have had some distinguished part in the scene to enact; as it was, he had the arduous task of prompter assigned to him, and his feeble voice was heard clear and distinct, repeating the text during the whole performance. She describes her recollection of the cast of characters even now with a relish. Martia, by the handsome Edgar Hickman, who afterwards went to Africa, and of whom she never afterwards heard tidings,--Lucia, by Master Walker, whose sister was her particular friend; Cato, by John Hunter, a masterly declaimer, but a plain boy, and shorter by the head than his two sons in the scene, &c. In conclusion, Starkey appears to have been one of those mild spirits, which, not originally deficient in understanding, are crushed by penury into dejection and feebleness. He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to Society, if Fortune had taken him into a very little fostering, but wanting that, he became a Captain--a by-word--and lived, and died, a broken bulrush.

C. L.

III.--TWELFTH OF AUGUST

(1825)

To the Editor of the Every-Day Book

THE HUMBLE PETITION OF AN UNFORTUNATE DAY

Sir,

I am a wronged Day. I appeal to you as the general patron of the family of the Days. The candour with which you attended to the expostulations of a poor relative of ours--a sort of cousin thrice removed[53]--encourages me to hope that you will listen to the complaint of a Day of rather more consequence. I am the Day, Sir, upon which it pleased the course of nature that your gracious Sovereign should be born. As such, before his Accession, I was always observed and honoured. But since that happy event, in which naturally none had a greater interest than myself, a flaw has been discovered in my title. My lustre has been eclipsed, and--to use the words of one of your own poets,--

I fade into the light of common day.

[53] Twenty-ninth day of February [see page 349].

It seems, that about that time, an Impostor crept into Court, who has the effrontery to usurp my honours, and to style herself the King's-birth-Day, upon some shallow pretence that, being St. George's-Day, she must needs be King-George's-Day also. All-Saints-Day we have heard of, and All-Souls-Day we are willing to admit; but does it follow that this foolish Twenty-third of April must be All-George's-Day, and enjoy a monopoly of the whole name from George of Cappadocia to George of Leyden, and from George-a-Green down to George Dyer?

It looks a little oddly that I was discarded not long after the dismission of a set of men and measures, with whom I have nothing in common. I hope no whisperer has insinuated into the ears of Royalty, as if I were any thing Whiggishly inclined, when, in my heart, I abhor all these kind of Revolutions, by which I am sure to be the greatest sufferer.

I wonder my shameless Rival can have the face to let the Tower and Park Guns proclaim so many big thundering fibs as they do, upon her Anniversary--making your Sovereign too to be older than he is, by an hundred and odd days, which is no great compliment one would think. Consider if this precedent for ante-dating of Births should become general, what confusion it must make in Parish Registers; what crowds of young heirs we should have coming of age before they are one-and-twenty, with numberless similar grievances. If these chops and changes are suffered, we shall have Lord-Mayor's-Day eating her custard unauthentically in May, and Guy Faux preposterously blazing twice over in the Dog-days.

I humbly submit, that it is not within the prerogatives of Royalty itself, to be born twice over. We have read of the supposititious births of Princes, but where are the evidences of this first Birth? why are not the nurses in attendance, the midwife, &c. produced?--the silly story has not so much as a Warming Pan to support it.

My legal advisers, to comfort me, tell me that I have the right on my side; that I am the true Birth-Day, and the other Day is only kept. But what consolation is this to me, as long as this naughty-kept creature keeps me out of my dues and privileges?

Pray take my unfortunate case into your consideration, and see that I am restored to my lawful Rejoicings, Firings, Bon-Firings, Illuminations, &c.

And your Petitioner shall ever pray,

Twelfth Day of August.

IV.--THE ASS

(1825)

For Hone's Every-Day Book

Mr. Collier, in his "Poetical Decameron" (Third Conversation) notices a Tract, printed in 1595, with the author's initials only, A. B., entitled "The Noblenesse of the Asse: a work rare, learned, and excellent." He has selected the following pretty passage from it. "He (the Ass) refuseth no burthen, he goes whither he is sent without any contradiction. He lifts not his foote against any one; he bytes not; he is no fugitive, nor malicious affected. He doth all things in good sort, and to his liking that hath cause to employ him. If strokes be given him, he cares not for them; and, as our modern poet singeth,

'Thou wouldst (perhaps) he should become thy foe, And to that end dost beat him many times; He cares not for himselfe, much lesse thy blow.'"[54]

[54] Who this modern poet was, says Mr. C., is a secret worth discovering.--The wood-cut on the title of the Pamphlet is--an Ass with a wreath of laurel round his neck.

Certainly Nature, foreseeing the cruel usage which this useful servant to man should receive at man's hand, did prudently in furnishing him with a tegument impervious to ordinary stripes. The malice of a child, or a weak hand, can make feeble impressions on him. His back offers no mark to a puny foeman. To a common whip or switch his hide presents an absolute insensibility. You might as well pretend to scourge a school-boy with a tough pair of leather breeches on. His jerkin is well fortified. And therefore the Costermongers "between the years 1790 and 1800" did more politicly than piously in lifting up a part of his upper garment. I well remember that beastly and bloody custom. I have often longed to see one of those refiners in discipline himself at the cart's tail, with just such a convenient spot laid bare to the tender mercies of the whipster. But since Nature has resumed her rights, it is to be hoped, that this patient creature does not suffer to extremities; and that to the savages who still belabour his poor carcase with their blows (considering the sort of anvil they are laid upon) he might in some sort, if he could speak, exclaim with the philosopher, "Lay on: you beat but upon the case of Anaxarchus."

Contemplating this natural safeguard, this fortified exterior, it is with pain I view the sleek, foppish, combed and curried, person of this animal, as he is transmuted and disnaturalized at Watering Places, &c. where they affect to make a palfrey of him. Fie on all such sophistications!--It will never do, Master Groom. Something of his honest shaggy exterior will still peep up in spite of you--his good, rough, native, pineapple coating. You cannot "refine a scorpion into a fish, though you rince it and scour it with ever so cleanly cookery."[55]

[55] Milton: from memory.

The modern poet, quoted by A. B., proceeds to celebrate a virtue, for which no one to this day had been aware that the Ass was remarkable.

One other gift this beast hath as his owne, Wherewith the rest could not be furnished; On man himselfe the same was not bestowne, To wit--on him is ne'er engendered The hatefull vermine that doth teare the skin And to the bode [body] doth make his passage in.

And truly when one thinks on the suit of impenetrable armour with which Nature (like Vulcan to another Achilles) has provided him, these subtle enemies to our repose, would have shown some dexterity in getting into his quarters. As the bogs of Ireland by tradition expel toads and reptiles, he may well defy these small deer in his fastnesses. It seems the latter had not arrived at the exquisite policy adopted by the human vermin "between 1790 and 1800."

But the most singular and delightful gift of the Ass, according to the writer of this pamphlet, is his voice; the "goodly, sweet, and continual brayings" of which, "whereof they forme a melodious and proportionable kinde of musicke," seem to have affected him with no ordinary pleasure. "Nor thinke I," he adds, "that any of our immoderne musitians can deny, but that their song is full of exceeding pleasure to be heard; because therein is to be discerned both concord, discord, singing in the meane, the beginning to sing in large compasse, then following on to rise and fall, the halfe note, whole note, musicke of five voices, firme singing by four voices, three together or one voice and a halfe. Then their variable contrarieties amongst them, when one delivers forth a long tenor, or a short, the pausing for time, breathing in measure, breaking the minim or very least moment of time. Last of all to heare the musicke of five or six voices chaunged to so many of Asses, is amongst them to heare a song of world without end."

There is no accounting for ears; or for that laudable enthusiasm with which an Author is tempted to invest a favourite subject with the most incompatible perfections. I should otherwise, for my own taste, have been inclined rather to have given a place to these extraordinary musicians at that banquet of nothing-less-than-sweet-sounds, imagined by old Jeremy Collier (Essays, 1698; Part. 2.--On Music.) where, after describing the inspirating effects of martial music in a battle, he hazards an ingenious conjecture, whether a sort of Anti-music might not be invented, which should have quite the contrary effect of "sinking the spirits, shaking the nerves, curdling the blood, and inspiring despair, and cowardice and consternation." "Tis probable" he says, "the roaring of lions, the warbling of cats and screech-owls, together with a mixture of the howling of dogs, judiciously imitated and compounded, might go a great way in this invention." The dose, we confess, is pretty potent, and skilfully enough prepared. But what shall we say to the Ass of Silenus (quoted by TIMS), who, if we may trust to classic lore, by his own proper sounds, without thanks to cat or screech-owl, dismaid and put to rout a whole army of giants? Here was Anti-music with a vengeance; a whole Pan-Dis-Harmonicon in a single lungs of leather!

But I keep you trifling too long on this Asinine subject. I have already past the Pons Asinorum, and will desist, remembering the old pedantic pun of Jem Boyer, my schoolmaster:--

Ass in præsenti seldom makes a WISE MAN in futuro.

C. L.

V.--IN RE SQUIRRELS

(1825)

For the Every-Day Book

What is gone with the Cages with the climbing Squirrel and bells to them, which were formerly the indispensable appendage to the outside of a Tinman's shop, and were in fact the only Live Signs? One, we believe, still hangs out on Holborn; but they are fast vanishing with the good old modes of our ancestors. They seem to have been superseded by that still more ingenious refinement of modern humanity--the Tread-mill; in which human Squirrels still perform a similar round of ceaseless, improgressive clambering; which must be nuts to them.

We almost doubt the fact of the teeth of this creature being so purely orange-coloured, as Mr. Urban's correspondent gives out. One of our old poets--and they were pretty sharp observers of nature--describes them as brown. But perhaps the naturalist referred to meant "of the colour of the Maltese orange,"[56] which is rather more obfuscated than your fruit of Seville, or Saint Michael's; and may help to reconcile the difference. We cannot speak from observation, but we remember at school getting our fingers into the orangery of one of these little gentry (not having a due caution of the traps set there), and the result proved sourer than lemons. The Author of the Task somewhere speaks of their anger as being "insignificantly fierce," but we found the demonstration of it on this occasion quite as significant as we desired; and have not been disposed since to look any of these "gift horses" in the mouth. Maiden aunts keep these "small deer" as they do parrots, to bite people's fingers, on purpose to give them good advice "not to venture so near the cage another time." As for their "six quavers divided into three quavers and a dotted crotchet," I suppose, they may go into Jeremy Bentham's next budget of Fallacies, along with the "melodious and proportionable kinde of musicke," recorded in your last number of another highly gifted animal [see page 358].

C. L.

[56] Fletcher in the "Faithful Shepherdess."--The Satyr offers to Clorin,

--grapes whose lusty blood Is the learned Poet's good, Sweeter yet did never crown The head of Bacchus; nuts more brown Than the squirrels' teeth that crack them.----

VI.--AN APPEARANCE OF THE SEASON

(1826)

Apology will scarcely be required for introducing a character, who at this season of the year comes forth in renovated honours, and may aptly be termed one of its ever-blues--not a peculiar of either Farringdons, nor him of Cripplegate, or St. Giles in the Fields, or of any ward or precinct within the bills: not this or that "good man"--but the universal parish beadle. "How Christmas and consolatory he looks! how redolent of good cheer is he! He is a cornucopia--an abundance. What pudding sleeves!--what a collar, red, and like a beef steak, is his! He is a walking refreshment! He looks like a whole parish, full, important--but untaxed. The children of charity gaze at him with a modest smile. The straggling boys look on him with confidence. They do not pocket their marbles. They do not fly from their familiar gutter. This is a red letter day; and the cane is reserved for to-morrow."

For the pleasant verbal description we are indebted to an agreeable writer in the "London Magazine;"[57] his corporal lineaments are "borrowed" (with permission) from a new caricature,[58] if it may be given so low a name, wherein this figure stands out, the very gem and jewel, in a grouping of characters of all sorts and denominations assembled with "infinite fancy" and "fun," to illustrate the designer's views of the age. It is a graphic satire of character rather than caricatura; mostly of class-characters, not persons; wherein the ridicule bears heavily, but is broad and comprehensive enough to shift from one neighbour to another.

[57] For Dec., 1822.

[58] The Progress of Cant; designed and etched by one of the authors of "Odes and Addresses to Great People;" and published by T. Maclean, Haymarket, L. Relfe, Cornhill; and Dickenson, New Bond-Street.

VII.--THE MONTHS

(1826)

For the Every-Day Book

Rummaging over the contents of an old stall at a half book, half old iron shop, in an alley leading from Wardour-street to Soho-square yesterday, I lit upon a ragged duodecimo, which had been the strange delight of my infancy, and which I had lost sight of for more than forty years:--the "QUEEN-LIKE CLOSET, or RICH CABINET:" written by Hannah Woolly, and printed for R. C. & T. S. 1681; being an abstract of receipts in cookery, confectionary, cosmetics, needlework, morality, and all such branches of what were then considered as female accomplishments. The price demanded was sixpence, which the owner (a little squab duodecimo of a character himself) enforced with the assurance that his "own mother should not have it for a farthing less." On my demurring at this extraordinary assertion, the dirty little vendor reinforced his assertion with a sort of oath, which seemed more than the occasion demanded: "and now (said he) I have put my soul to it." Pressed by so solemn an asseveration, I could no longer resist a demand which seemed to set me, however unworthy, upon a level with his dearest relations; and depositing a tester, I bore away the tattered prize in triumph. I remembered a gorgeous description of the twelve months of the year, which I thought would be a fine substitute for those poetical descriptions of them which your Every-Day Book had nearly exhausted out of Spenser. This will be a treat, thought I, for friend HONE. To memory they seemed no less fantastic and splendid than the other. But, what are the mistakes of childhood!--on reviewing them, they turned out to be only a set of common-place receipts for working the seasons, months, heathen gods and goddesses, &c. in samplars! Yet as an instance of the homely occupations of our great-grandmothers, they may be amusing to some readers: "I have seen," says the notable Hannah Woolly, "such Ridiculous things done in work, as it is an abomination to any Artist to behold. As for Example: You may find in some Pieces, Abraham and Sarah, and many other Persons of Old time, Cloathed, as they go now a-daies, and truly sometimes worse; for they most resemble the Pictures on Ballads. Let all Ingenious Women have regard, that when they work any Image, to represent it aright. First, let it be Drawn well, and then observe the Directions which are given by Knowing Men. I do assure you, I never durst work any Scripture-Story without informing my self from the Ground of it: nor any other Story, or single Person, without informing my self both of the Visage and Habit; As followeth.

"If you work Jupiter, the Imperial feigned god, He must have long Black-Curled-hair, a Purple Garment trimmed with Gold, and sitting upon a Golden Throne, with bright yellow Clouds about him."

The Twelve Months of the Year

March:

Is drawn in Tawny, with a fierce aspect, a Helmet upon his head, and leaning on a Spade, and a Basket of Garden Seeds in his Left hand, and in his Right hand the Sign of Aries; And Winged.

April.

A Young Man in Green, with a Garland of Mirtle, and Hawthorn-Buds; Winged; in one hand Primroses and Violets, in the other the Sign Taurus.

May.

With a sweet and lovely Countenance, clad in a Robe of White and Green, embroidered with several Flowers, upon his Head a garland of all manner of Roses; on the one hand a Nightingale, in the other a Lute. His Sign must be Gemini.

June.

In a Mantle of dark Grass-green, upon his Head a garland of Bents, Kings-Cups, and Maiden-hair; in his Left hand an Angle, with a box of Cantharides, in his Right, the Sign Cancer, and upon his arms a Basket of seasonable Fruits.

July.

In a Jacket of light Yellow, eating Cherries; with his Face and Bosom Sun-burnt; on his Head a wreath of Centaury and wild Tyme; a Seith on his shoulder, and a Bottle at his girdle: carrying the Sign Leo.

August.

A Young Man of fierce and Cholerick aspect, in a Flame-coloured Garment; upon his Head a garland of Wheat and Rye, upon his Arm a Basket of all manner of ripe Fruits, at his Belt a Sickle. His Sign Virgo.

September.

A merry and cheerful Countenance, in a Purple Robe, upon his Head a Wreath of red and white Grapes, in his Left hand a handful of Oats, withal carrying a Horn of Plenty, full of all manner of ripe-Fruits, in his Right hand the Sign Libra.

October.

In a Garment of Yellow and Carnation, upon his head a garland of Oak-leaves with Akorns, in his Right hand the Sign Scorpio, in his Left hand a Basket of Medlars, Services, and Chesnuts; and any other Fruits then in Season.

November.

In a Garment of Changeable Green and Black upon his Head, a garland of Olives with the Fruit in his Left hand, Bunches of Parsnips and Turnips in his Right. His Sign Sagittarius.

December.

A horrid and fearful aspect, clad in Irish-Rags, or coarse Freez girt unto him, upon his Head three or four Night-Caps, and over them a Turkish Turbant; his Nose red, his Mouth and Beard clog'd with Isicles, at his back a bundle of Holly, Ivy or Misletoe, holding in fur'd Mittens the Sign of Capricornus.

January.

Clad all in White, as the Earth looks with the Snow, blowing his Nails; in his Left Arm a Billet, the Sign Aquarius standing by his side.

February.

Cloathed in a dark Skie-colour, carrying in his Right hand the Sign Pisces.

The following receipt, "To dress up a Chimney very fine for the Summer time, as I have done many, and they have been liked very well" may not be unprofitable to the house-wives of this century.

"First, take a pack-thred, and fasten it even to the inner part of the Chimney, so high as that you can see no higher as you walk up and down the House; you must drive in several Nails to hold up all your work; then get good store of old green Moss from Trees, and melt an equal proportion of Bees-wax and Rosin together, and while it is hot, dip the wrong ends of the Moss in it, and presently clap it upon your pack-thred, and press it down hard with your hand; you must make hast, else it will cool before you can fasten it, and then it will fall down; do so all round where the pack-thred goes, and the next row you must joyn to that so that it may seem all in one; thus do till you have finished it down to the bottom: then take some other kind of Moss, of a whitish-colour and stiff, and of several sorts or kinds, and place that upon the other, here and there carelessly, and in some places put a good deal, and some a little; then any kind of fine Snail-shells, in which the Snails are dead, and little Toad stools, which are very old, and look like Velvet, or any other thing that is old and pretty; place it here and there as your fancy serves, and fasten all with Wax and Rosin. Then for the Hearth of your Chimney, you may lay some Orpan-Sprigs in order all over, and it will grow as it lies; and according to the Season, get what flowers you can, and stick in as if they grew, and a few sprigs of Sweet-Bryer: the Flowers you must renew every Week; but the Moss will last all the Summer, till it will be time to make a fire; and the Orpan will last near two Months. A Chimney thus done doth grace a Room exceedingly."

One phrase in the above should particularly recommend it to such of your female readers, as, in the nice language of the day, have done growing some time: "little toad stools, &c. and any thing that is old and pretty." Was ever antiquity so smoothed over? The culinary recipes have nothing remarkable in them, besides the costliness of them. Every thing (to the meanest meats) is sopped in claret, steeped in claret, basted with claret, as if claret were as cheap as ditch water. I remember Bacon recommends opening a turf or two in your garden-walks, and pouring into each a bottle of claret, to recreate the sense of smelling, being no less grateful than beneficial. We hope the chancellor of the exchequer will attend to this in his next reduction of French wines, that we may once more water our gardens with right Bordeaux. The medical recipes are as whimsical as they are cruel. Our ancestors were not at all effeminate on this head. Modern sentimentalists would shrink at a cock plucked and bruised in a mortar alive, to make a cullis; or a live mole baked in an oven (be sure it be alive) to make a powder for consumption.--But the whimsicalest of all are the directions to servants--(for this little book is a compendium of all duties,)--the footman is seriously admonished not to stand lolling against his master's chair, while he waits at table; for "to lean on a Chair when they wait, is a particular favour shown to any superior Servant, as the Chief Gentleman, or the Waiting Woman when she rises from the Table." Also he must not "hold the Plates before his mouth to be defiled with his Breath, nor touch them on the right (inner) side." Surely Swift must have seen this little treatise.

C. L.

Hannah concludes with the following address, by which the self-estimate which she formed of her usefulness, may be calculated:--

Ladies, I hope you're pleas'd, and so shall I, If what I've Writ, you may be gainers by: If not; it is your fault, it is not mine, Your benefit in this I do design. Much labour and much time it hath me cost, Therefore I beg, let none of it be lost. The Mony you shall pay for this my Book, You'l not repent of, when in it you look. No more at present to you I shall say, But wish you all the happiness I may.

H. W.

VIII.--REMINISCENCE OF SIR JEFFERY DUNSTAN

(1826)

To the Editor of the Every-Day Book

To your account of sir Jeffery Dunstan in columns 829-30 (where, by an unfortunate Erratum the effigies of two Sir Jefferys appear, when the uppermost figure is clearly meant for sir Harry Dimsdale) you may add, that the writer of this has frequently met him in his latter days, about 1790 or 1791, returning in an evening, after his long day's itinerancy, to his domicile--a wretched shed in the most beggarly purlieu of Bethnal Green, a little on this side the Mile-end Turnpike. The lower figure in that leaf most correctly describes his then appearance, except that no graphic art can convey an idea of the general squalor of it, and of his bag (his constant concomitant) in particular. Whether it contained "old wigs" at that time I know not, but it seemed a fitter repository for bones snatched out of kennels, than for any part of a Gentleman's dress even at second hand.

The Ex-member for Garrat was a melancholy instance of a great man whose popularity is worn out. He still carried his sack, but it seemed a part of his identity rather than an implement of his profession; a badge of past grandeur; could any thing have divested him of that, he would have shown a "poor forked animal" indeed. My life upon it, it contained no curls at the time I speak of. The most decayed and spiritless remnants of what was once a peruke would have scorned the filthy case; would absolutely have "burst its cearments." No, it was empty, or brought home bones, or a few cinders possibly. A strong odour of burnt bones, I remember, blended with the scent of horse-flesh seething into dog's meat, and only relieved a little by the breathings of a few brick kilns, made up the atmosphere of the delicate suburban spot, which this great man had chosen for the last scene of his earthly vanities. The cry of "old wigs" had ceased with the possession of any such fripperies; his sack might have contained not unaptly a little mould to scatter upon that grave, to which he was now advancing; but it told of vacancy and desolation. His quips were silent too, and his brain was empty as his sack; he slank along, and seemed to decline popular observation. If a few boys followed him, it seemed rather from habit, than any expectation of fun.

Alas! how changed from him, The life of humour, and the soul of whim, Gallant and gay on Garrat's hustings proud.

But it is thus that the world rewards its favourites in decay. What faults he had, I know not. I have heard something of a peccadillo or so. But some little deviation from the precise line of rectitude, might have been winked at in so tortuous and stigmatic a frame. Poor Sir Jeffery! it were well if some M.P.'s in earnest had passed their parliamentary existence with no more offences against integrity, than could be laid to thy charge! A fair dismissal was thy due, not so unkind a degradation; some little snug retreat, with a bit of green before thine eyes, and not a burial alive in the fetid beggaries of Bethnal. Thou wouldst have ended thy days in a manner more appropriate to thy pristine dignity, installed in munificent mockery (as in mock honours you had lived)--a Poor Knight of Windsor!

Every distinct place of public speaking demands an oratory peculiar to itself. The forensic fails within the walls of St. Stephen. Sir Jeffery was a living instance of this, for in the flower of his popularity an attempt was made to bring him out upon the stage (at which of the winter theatres I forget, but I well remember the anecdote) in the part of Doctor Last. The announcement drew a crowded house; but notwithstanding infinite tutoring--by Foote, or Garrick, I forget which--when the curtain drew up, the heart of Sir Jeffery failed, and he faultered on, and made nothing of his part, till the hisses of the house at last in very kindness dismissed him from the boards. Great as his parliamentary eloquence had shown itself; brilliantly as his off-hand sallies had sparkled on a hustings; they here totally failed him. Perhaps he had an aversion to borrowed wit; and, like my Lord Foppington, disdained to entertain himself (or others) with the forced products of another man's brain. Your man of quality is more diverted with the natural sprouts of his own.

C. L.

IX--MRS. GILPIN RIDING TO EDMONTON

(1827)

Then Mrs. Gilpin sweetly said Unto her children three, "I'll clamber o'er this style so high, And you climb after me."

But having climb'd unto the top, She could no further go, But sate, to every passer by A spectacle and show.

Who said "Your spouse and you this day Both show your horsemanship, And if you stay till he comes back, Your horse will need no whip."

The sketch, here engraved, (probably from the poet's friend Romney,) was found with the above three stanzas in the hand-writing of Cowper, among the papers of the late Mrs. Unwin. It is to be regretted that no more was found of this little Episode, as it evidently was intended to be, to the "Diverting History of Johnny Gilpin." It is to be supposed that Mrs. Gilpin, in the interval between dinner and tea, finding the time to hang upon her hands, during her husband's involuntary excursion, rambled out with the children into the fields at the back of the Bell, (as what could be more natural?) and at one of those high aukward styles, for which Edmonton is so proverbially famed, the embarrassment represented, so mortifying to a substantial City Madam, might have happened; a predicament, which leaves her in a state, which is the very Antipodes to that of her too loco-motive husband; in fact she rides a restive horse.--Now I talk of Edmonton styles, I must speak a little about those of Enfield, its next neighbour, which are so ingeniously contrived--every rising bar to the top becoming more protuberant than the one under it--that it is impossible for any Christian climber to get over, without bruising his (or her) shins as many times as there are bars. These inhospitable invitations to a flayed skin, are planted so thickly too, and are so troublesomely importunate at every little paddock here, that this, with more propriety than Thebes of old, might be entitled Hecatompolis: the Town of the Hundred Gates, or styles.

A SOJOURNER AT ENFIELD.

July 16, 1827.

X.--THE DEFEAT OF TIME;

OR, A TALE OF THE FAIRIES

(1827)

Titania, and her moonlight Elves, were assembled under the canopy of a huge oak, that served to shelter them from the moon's radiance, which, being now at her full noon, shot forth intolerable rays--intolerable, I mean, to the subtil texture of their little shadowy bodies--but dispensing an agreeable coolness to us grosser mortals. An air of discomfort sate upon the Queen, and upon her Courtiers. Their tiny friskings and gambols were forgot; and even Robin Goodfellow, for the first time in his little airy life, looked grave. For the Queen had had melancholy forebodings of late, founded upon an ancient Prophecy, laid up in the records of Fairy Land, that the date of Fairy existence should be then extinct, when men should cease to believe in them. And she knew how that the race of the Nymphs, which were her predecessors, and had been the Guardians of the sacred floods, and of the silver fountains, and of the consecrated hills and woods, had utterly disappeared before the chilling touch of man's incredulity; and she sighed bitterly at the approaching fate of herself and of her subjects, which was dependent upon so fickle a lease, as the capricious and ever mutable faith of man. When, as if to realise her fears, a melancholy shape came gliding in, and that was--TIME, who with his intolerable scythe mows down Kings and Kingdoms; at whose dread approach the Fays huddled together, as a flock of timorous sheep, and the most courageous among them crept into acorn cups, not enduring the sight of that ancientest of Monarchs. Titania's first impulse was to wish the presence of her false Lord, King Oberon, who was far away, in the pursuit of a strange Beauty, a Fay of Indian Land--that with his good lance and sword, like a faithful knight and husband, he might defend her against TIME. But she soon checked that thought as vain, for what could the prowess of the mighty Oberon himself, albeit the stoutest Champion in Fairy Land, have availed against so huge a Giant, whose bald top touched the skies. So in the mildest tone she besought the Spectre, that in his mercy he would overlook, and pass by, her small subjects, as too diminutive and powerless to add any worthy trophy to his renown. As she besought him to employ his resistless strength against the ambitious Children of Men, and to lay waste their aspiring works, to tumble down their towers and turrets, and the Babels of their pride, fit objects of his devouring Scythe, but to spare her and her harmless race, who had no existence beyond a dream; frail objects of a creed; that lived but in the faith of the believer. And with her little arms, as well as she could, she grasped the stern knees of TIME, and waxing speechless with fear, she beckoned to her chief attendants, and Maids of Honour, to come forth from their hiding places, and to plead the Plea of the Fairies. And one of those small delicate creatures came forth at her bidding, clad all in white like a Chorister, and in a low melodious tone, not louder than the hum of a pretty bee--when it seems to be demurring whether it shall settle upon this sweet flower or that, before it settles--set forth her humble Petition. "We Fairies," she said, "are the most inoffensive race that live, and least deserving to perish. It is we that have the care of all sweet melodies, that no discords may offend the Sun, who is the great Soul of Music. We rouse the lark at morn; and the pretty Echos, which respond to all the twittering quire, are of our making. Wherefore, great King of Years, as ever you have loved the music which is raining from a morning cloud, sent from the messenger of day, the Lark, as he mounts to Heaven's gate, beyond the ken of mortals; or if ever you have listened with a charmed ear to the Night Bird, that

in the flowery spring, Amidst the leaves set, makes the thickets ring Of her sour sorrows, sweeten'd with her song:

spare our tender tribes; and we will muffle up the sheep-bell for thee, that thy pleasure take no interruption, whenever thou shall listen unto Philomel."

And TIME answered, that "he had heard that song too long; and he was even wearied with that ancient strain, that recorded the wrongs of Tereus. But if she would know in what music TIME delighted, it was, when sleep and darkness lay upon crowded cities, to hark to the midnight chime, which is tolling from a hundred clocks, like the last knell over the soul of a dead world; or to the crush of the fall of some age-worn edifice, which is as the voice of himself when he disparteth kingdoms."

A second female Fay took up the Plea, and said, "We be the handmaids of the Spring, and tend upon the birth of all sweet buds; and the pastoral cowslips are our friends, and the pansies; and the violets, like nuns; and the quaking hare-bell is in our wardship; and the Hyacinth, once a fair youth, and dear to Phœbus."

Then TIME made answer, in his wrath striking the harmless ground with his hurtful scythe, that "they must not think that he was one that cared for flowers, except to see them wither, and to take her beauty from the rose."

And a third Fairy took up the Plea, and said, "We are kindly Things; and it is we that sit at evening, and shake rich odours from sweet bowers upon discoursing lovers, that seem to each other to be their own sighs; and we keep off the bat, and the owl, from their privacy, and the ill-boding whistler; and we flit in sweet dreams across the brains of infancy, and conjure up a smile upon its soft lips to beguile the careful mother, while its little soul is fled for a brief minute or two to sport with our youngest Fairies."

Then SATURN (which is TIME) made answer, that "they should not think that he delighted in tender Babes, that had devoured his own, till foolish Rhea cheated him with a Stone, which he swallowed, thinking it to be the infant Jupiter." And thereat in token he disclosed to view his enormous tooth, in which appeared monstrous dints, left by that unnatural meal; and his great throat, that seemed capable of devouring up the earth and all its inhabitants at one meal. "And for Lovers," he continued, "my delight is, with a hurrying hand to snatch them away from their love-meetings by stealth at nights, and to ravish away hours from them like minutes whilst they are together, and in absence to stand like a motionless statue, or their leaden Planet of mishap (whence I had my name), till I make their minutes seem ages."

Next stood up a male fairy, clad all in green, like a forester, or one of Robin Hood's mates, and doffing his tiny cap, said, "We are small foresters, that live in woods, training the young boughs in graceful intricacies, with blue snatches of the sky between; we frame all shady roofs and arches rude; and sometimes, when we are plying our tender hatches, men say, that the tapping wood-pecker is nigh: and it is we that scoop the hollow cell of the squirrel; and carve quaint letters upon the rinds of trees, which in sylvan solitudes sweetly recall to the mind of the heat-oppressed swain, ere he lies down to slumber, the name of his Fair One, Dainty Aminta, Gentle Rosalind, or Chastest Laura, as it may happen."

SATURN, nothing moved with this courteous address, bade him be gone, or "if he would be a woodman, to go forth, and fell oak for the Fairies' coffins, which would forthwith be wanting. For himself, he took no delight in haunting the woods, till their golden plumage (the yellow leaves) were beginning to fall, and leave the brown black limbs bare, like Nature in her skeleton dress."

Then stood up one of those gentle Fairies, that are good to Man, and blushed red as any rose, while he told a modest story of one of his own good deeds. "It chanced upon a time," he said, "that while we were looking cowslips in the meads, while yet the dew was hanging on the buds, like beads, we found a babe left in its swathing clothes--a little sorrowful deserted Thing; begot of Love, but begetting no love in others; guiltless of shame, but doomed to shame for its parents' offence in bringing it by indirect courses into the world. It was pity to see the abandoned little orphan, left to the world's care by an unnatural mother, how the cold dew kept wetting its childish coats; and its little hair, how it was bedabbled, that was like gossamer. Its pouting mouth, unknowing how to speak, lay half opened like a rose-lipt shell, and its cheek was softer than any peach, upon which the tears, for very roundness, could not long dwell, but fell off, in clearness like pearls, some on the grass, and some on his little hand, and some haply wandered to the little dimpled well under his mouth, which Love himself seemed to have planned out, but less for tears than for smilings. Pity it was, too, to see how the burning sun scorched its helpless limbs, for it lay without shade, or shelter, or mother's breast, for foul weather or fair. So having compassion on its sad plight, my fellows and I turned ourselves into grasshoppers, and swarmed about the babe, making such shrill cries, as that pretty little chirping creature makes in its mirth, till with our noise we attracted the attention of a passing rustic, a tender-hearted hind, who wondering at our small but loud concert, strayed aside curiously, and found the babe, where it lay on the remote grass, and taking it up, lapt it in his russet coat, and bore it to his cottage, where his wife kindly nurtured it, till it grew up a goodly personage. How this Babe prospered afterwards, let proud London tell. This was that famous Sir Thomas Gresham, who was the chiefest of her Merchants, the richest, the wisest. Witness his many goodly vessels on the Thames, freighted with costly merchandise, jewels from Ind, and pearls for courtly dames, and silks of Samarcand. And witness more than all, that stately Bourse (or Exchange) which he caused to be built, a mart for merchants from East and West, whose graceful summit still bears, in token of the Fairies' favours, his chosen crest, the Grasshopper. And, like the Grasshopper, may it please you, great King, to suffer us also to live, partakers of the green earth!"

The Fairy had scarce ended his Plea, when a shrill cry, not unlike the Grasshopper's, was heard. Poor Puck--or Robin Goodfellow, as he is sometimes called--had recovered a little from his first fright, and in one of his mad freaks had perched upon the beard of old TIME, which was flowing, ample, and majestic, and was amusing himself with plucking at a hair, which was indeed so massy, that it seemed to him that he was removing some huge beam of timber rather than a hair; which TIME by some ill chance perceiving, snatched up the Impish Mischief with his great hand, and asked "What it was?"

"Alas!" quoth Puck, "A little random Elf am I, born in one of Nature's sports, a very weed, created for the simple sweet enjoyment of myself, but for no other purpose, worth, or need, that ever I could learn. 'Tis I, that bob the Angler's idle cork, till the patient man is ready to breathe a curse. I steal the morsel from the Gossip's fork, or stop the sneezing Chanter in mid Psalm; and when an infant has been born with hard or homely features, mothers say, that I changed the child at nurse; but to fulfil any graver purpose I have not wit enough, and hardly the will. I am a pinch of lively dust to frisk upon the wind, a tear would make a puddle of me, and so I tickle myself with the lightest straw, and shun all griefs that might make me stagnant. This is my small philosophy."

Then TIME, dropping him on the ground, as a thing too inconsiderable for his vengeance, grasped fast his mighty Scythe; and now not Puck alone, but the whole State of Fairies had gone to inevitable wreck and destruction, had not a timely Apparition interposed, at whose boldness TIME was astounded, for he came not with the habit, or the forces, of a Deity, who alone might cope with TIME, but as a simple Mortal, clad as you might see a Forester, that hunts after wild coneys by the cold moonshine; or a Stalker of stray deer, stealthy and bold. But by the golden lustre in his eye, and the passionate wanness in his cheek, and by the fair and ample space of his forehood [forehead], which seemed a palace framed for the habitation of all glorious thoughts, he knew that this was his great Rival, who had power given him to rescue whatsoever victims Time should clutch, and to cause them to live for ever in his immortal verse. And muttering the name of SHAKSPEARE, TIME spread his Roc-like wings, and fled the controuling presence. And the liberated Court of the Fairies, with Titania at their head, flocked around the gentle Ghost, giving him thanks, nodding to him, and doing him curtesies, who had crowned them henceforth with a permanent existence, to live in the minds of men, while verse shall have power to charm, or Midsummer moons shall brighten.

* * * * *

What particular endearments passed between the Fairies and their Poet, passes my pencil to delineate; but if you are curious to be informed, I must refer you, gentle reader, to the "Plea of the [Midsummer] Fairies," a most agreeable Poem, lately put forth by my friend, Thomas Hood: of the first half of which the above is nothing but a meagre, and a harsh, prose-abstract. Farewell.

ELIA.

The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

(1827)

Charles Lamb born in the Inner Temple 10 Feb. 1775 educated in Christ's Hospital afterwards a clerk in the Accountants office East India House pensioned off from that service 1825 after 33 years service, is now a Gentleman at large, can remember few specialities in his life worth noting except that he once caught a swallow flying (teste suâ manu); below the middle stature, cast of face slightly Jewish, with no Judaic tinge in his complexional religion; stammers abominably and is therefore more apt to discharge his occasional conversation in a quaint aphorism or a poor quibble than in set and edifying speeches; has consequently been libelled as a person always aiming at wit, which, as he told a dull fellow that charged him with it, is at least as good as aiming at dulness; a small eater but not drinker; confesses a partiality for the production of the juniper berry, was a fierce smoker of Tobacco, but may be resembled to a volcano burnt out, emitting only now and then a casual puff. Has been guilty of obtruding upon the Public a Tale in Prose, called Rosamund Gray, a Dramatic Sketch named John Woodvil, a Farewell Ode to Tobacco, with sundry other Poems and light prose matter, collected in Two slight crown Octavos and pompously christened his Works, tho' in fact they were his Recreations and his true works may be found on the shelves of Leadenhall Street, filling some hundred Folios. He is also the true Elia whose Essays are extant in a little volume published a year or two since; and rather better known from that name without a meaning, than from anything he has done or can hope to do in his own. He also was the first to draw the Public attention to the old English Dramatists in a work called "Specimens of English Dramatic Writers who lived about the time of Shakspeare," published about 15 years since. In short all his merits and demerits to set forth would take to the end of Mr. Upcott's book and then not be told truly. He died[59] 18---- much lamented.

Witness his hand, CHARLES LAMB.

10th Apr 1827.

[59] To any Body--Please to fill up these blanks.

SHAKSPEARE'S IMPROVERS

(1828)

To the Editor of The Spectator

Sir,--Partaking in your indignation at the sickly stuff interpolated by Tate in the genuine play of King Lear, I beg to lay before you certain kindred enormities that you may be less aware of, which that co-dilutor of Sternhold and Hopkins,[60] with his compeers, were suffered--nay, encouraged--by an English public of a century and a half ago, to perpetrate upon the dramas of Shakspeare. I speak from imperfect recollection of one of these new versions which I have seen, namely, Coriolanus--by the same hand which touched up King Lear; in which he, the said Nahum, not deeming his author's catastrophe enough striking, makes Aufidius (if my memory fail me not) violate the person of the wife, and mangle the body of the little son, of his Roman rival! Shadwell, another improver, in his version of Timon of Athens, a copy of which (167-7/8) is lying before me, omits the character of Flavius, the kind-hearted Steward--that fine exception to the air of general perfidy in the play, which would else be too oppressive to reader or spectator; and substitutes for it a kind female, who is supposed to be attached to Timon to the last: thus making the moral of the piece to consist in showing--not the hollowness of friendships conciliated by a mere undistinguishing prodigality, but--the superiority of woman's love to the friendships of men. Evandra too has a rival in the affections of the noble Athenian. So impossible did these blockheads imagine it to be, to interest the feelings of an audience without an intrigue, that the misanthrope Timon must whine, and the daughterly Cordelia must whimper, their love affections, before they could hope to touch the gentle hearts in the boxes! Had one of these gentry taken in hand to improve the fine Scriptural story of Joseph and his Brethren, we should have had a love passion introduced, to make the mere fraternal interest of the piece go down--an episode of the amours of Reuben, or Issachar, with the fair Mizraim of Egypt.--Thus Evandra closes the eyes of Shadwell's dying Timon; who, it seems, has poisoned himself.

[60] New Version of the Singing Psalms, by Nahum Tate, and Nicholas Brady.

Evan. Oh my dear Lord! why do you stoop and bend Like flowers o'ercharged with dew, whose yielding stalks Cannot support them? Timon. So now my weary pilgrimage on earth Is almost finish'd! Now, my best Evandra, I charge thee by our loves, our mutual loves, Live, and live happy after me; and if A thought of Timon comes into thy mind, And brings a tear from thee-- (What then? why then) --let some diversion Banish it.--

And so, after some more drivel of the same stamp, the noble Timon dies. And was not this a dainty dish to set before an audience of the Duke's Theatre in the year 167-7/8? Yet Betterton then acted Timon, and his wife Evandra.

I now come to the London acting edition of Macbeth of the same date, 1678 (played, if I remember, by the same players, at the same house); from which I made a few rough extracts, when I visited the British Museum for the sake of selecting from the "Garrick Plays." As I can scarcely expect to be believed upon my own word, as to what our ancestors at that time were willing to accept for Shakspeare, I refer the reader to that collection to verify my report. Who the improver was in this instance, we are left to guess, for the title-page leaves us to conjecture. Possibly the players, each one separately, contributed his new reading, which was silently adopted. Flesh and blood could not at this time of day submit to a thorough perusal of the thing; but, from a glance or two of casual inspection, I am enabled to lay before the reader a few flowers. In one of the lyric parts, Hecate is made to say--

----on a corner of the moon A drop my spectacles have found. I'll catch it.

Hecate, the solemn president of classic enchantments, thence adopted into the romantic--the tri-form Hecate--wearing spectacles to assist old sight!--(No. 4 or No. 5, as the opticians class them, is not said)--one may as well fancy Cerberus in a bran new collar, or the "dreaded name of Demogorgon" in jack-boots. Among the "ingredients of the caldron," is enumerated, not a tiger's, but--what reader?--

----a Dutchman's chawdron!

We were about that time engaged in a war with Holland.--Again, Macduff being about to journey across the heath--the "blasted heath"--answers his lady, who courteously demands of him, "Are you a-foot?"--

Knowing the way to be both short and easy, And that the chariot did attend me here, I have adventured----

From which we may infer, that the Thane of Fife lived as a nobleman ought to do, and--kept a carriage. Again, the same nobleman, on the morning after Duncan's murder, says:--"Rising this morning early, I went to look out of my window. I could scarce see further than my breath." And indeed the original author informs us, that it had been a "rough night;" so that the improver does not wander far from his text. The exquisite familiarity of this prose patch was doubtlessly intended by the improver to break the tiresome monotony of Shakspeare's blank verse. In conclusion, Lady Macbeth is brought in repentant, and counselling her husband to give up the crown for conscience sake!--Item, she sees a ghost, which is all the time invisible to him. Such was the Macbeth which Betterton acted, and a contemporary audience took on trust for Shakspeare's.

C. L.

SATURDAY NIGHT

(1829)

There is a Saturday Night--I speak not to the admirers of Burns--erotically or theologically considered; HIS of the "Cotter's" may be a very charming picture, granting it to be but half true. Nor speak I now of the Saturday Night at Sea, which Dibdin hath dressed up with a gusto more poignant to the mere nautical palate of un-Calvanized South Britons. Nor that it is marketing night with the pretty tripping Servant-maids all over London, who, with judicious and economic eye, select the white and well-blown fillet, that the blue-aproned contunder of the calf can safely recommend as "prime veal," and which they are to be sure not to over-brown on the morrow. Nor speak I of the hard-handed Artisan, who on this night receives the pittance which is to furnish the neat Sabbatical dinner--not always reserved with Judaical rigor for that laudable purpose, but broken in upon, perchance, by inviting pot of ale, satisfactory to the present orifice. These are alleviatory, care-consoling. But the Hebdomadal Finale which I contemplate hath neither comfort nor alleviation in it; I pronounce it, from memory, altogether punitive, and to be abhorred. It is--Saturday Night to the School-boy!

Cleanliness, saith some sage man, is next to Godliness. It may be; but how it came to sit so very near, is the marvel. Methinks some of the more human virtues might have put in for a place before it. Justice--Humanity--Temperance--are positive qualities; the courtesies and little civil offices of life, had I been Master of the Ceremonies to that Court, should have sate above the salt in preference to a mere negation. I confess there is something wonderfully refreshing, in warm countries, in the act of ablution. Those Mahometan washings--how cool to the imagination! but in all these superstitions, the action itself, if not the duty, is voluntary. But to be washed perforce; to have a detestable flannel rag soaked in hot water, and redolent of the very coarsest coarse soap, ingrained with hard beads for torment, thrust into your mouth, eyes, nostrils--positively Burking you, under pretence of cleansing--substituting soap for dirt, the worst dirt of the two--making your poor red eyes smart all night, that they might look out brighter on the Sabbath morn, for their clearness was the effect of pain more than cleanliness.--Could this be true religion?

The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel. I am always disposed to add, so are those of Grandmothers. Mine--the Print has made her look rather too young--had never-failing pretexts of tormenting children for their good. I was a chit then; and I well remember when a fly had got into a corner of my eye, and I was complaining of it to her, the old Lady deliberately pounded two ounces or more of the finest loaf sugar that could be got, and making me hold open the eye as wide as I could--all innocent of her purpose--she blew from delicate white paper, with a full breath, the whole saccharine contents into the part afflicted, saying, "There, now the fly is out." 'Twas most true--a legion of blue-bottles, with the prince of flies at their head, must have dislodged with the torrent and deluge of tears which followed. I kept my own counsel, and my fly in my eye when I had got one, in future, without troubling her dulcet applications for the remedy. Then her medicine-case was a perfect magazine of tortures for infants. She seemed to have no notion of the comparatively tender drenches which young internals require--her potions were any thing but milk for babes. Then her sewing up of a cut finger--pricking a whitloe before it was ripe, because she could not see well,--with the aggravation of the pitying tone she did it in.

But of all her nostrums--rest her soul--nothing came up to the Saturday Night's flannel--that rude fragment of a Witney blanket--Wales spins none so coarse--thrust into the corners of a weak child's eye with soap that might have absterged an Ethiop, whitened the hands of Duncan's She-murderer, and scowered away Original Sin itself. A faint image of my penance you see in the Print--but the Artist has sunk the flannel--the Age, I suppose, is too nice to bear it: and he has faintly shadowed the expostulatory suspension of the razor-strap in the hand of my Grandfather, when my pains and clamours had waxed intolerable. Peace to the Shades of them both! and if their well-meaning souls had need of cleansing when they quitted earth, may the process of it have been milder than that of my old Purgatorial Saturday Night's path to the Sabbatical rest of the morrow!

NEPOS.

ESTIMATE OF DE FOE'S SECONDARY NOVELS

(1829)

It has happened not seldom that one work of some author has so transcendantly surpassed in execution the rest of his compositions, that the world has agreed to pass a sentence of dismissal upon the latter, and to consign them to total neglect and oblivion. It has done wisely in this, not to suffer the contemplation of excellencies of a lower standard to abate, or stand in the way of the pleasure it has agreed to receive from the master-piece.

Again it has happened, that from no inferior merit of execution in the rest, but from superior good fortune in the choice of its subject, some single work shall have been suffered to eclipse, and cast into shade the deserts of its less fortunate brethren. This has been done with more or less injustice in the case of the popular allegory of Bunyan, in which the beautiful and scriptural image of a pilgrim or wayfarer (we are all such upon earth), addressing itself intelligibly and feelingly to the bosoms of all, has silenced, and made almost to be forgotten, the more awful and scarcely less tender beauties of the "Holy War made by Shaddai upon Diabolus," of the same author; a romance less happy in its subject, but surely well worthy of a secondary immortality. But in no instance has this excluding partiality been exerted with more unfairness than against what may be termed the secondary novels or romances of De Foe.

While all ages and descriptions of people hang delighted over the "Adventures of Robinson Crusoe," and shall continue to do so we trust while the world lasts, how few comparatively will bear to be told, that there exist other fictitious narratives by the same writer--four of them at least of no inferior interest, except what results from a less felicitous choice of situation. Roxana--Singleton--Moll Flanders--Colonel Jack--are all genuine offspring of the same father. They bear the veritable impress of De Foe. An unpractised midwife that would not swear to the nose, lip, forehead, and eye, of every one of them! They are in their way as full of incident, and some of them every bit as romantic; only they want the uninhabited Island, and the charm that has bewitched the world, of the striking solitary situation.

But are there no solitudes out of the cave and the desert? or cannot the heart in the midst of crowds feel frightfully alone? Singleton, on the world of waters, prowling about with pirates less merciful than the creatures of any howling wilderness; is he not alone, with the faces of men about him, but without a guide that can conduct him through the mists of educational and habitual ignorance; or a fellow-heart that can interpret to him the new-born yearnings and aspirations of unpractised penitence? Or when the boy Colonel Jack, in the loneliness of the heart (the worst solitude), goes to hide his ill-purchased treasure in the hollow tree by night, and miraculously loses, and miraculously finds it again--whom hath he there to sympathise with him? or of what sort are his associates?

The narrative manner of De Foe has a naturalness about it, beyond that of any other novel or romance writer. His fictions have all the air of true stories. It is impossible to believe, while you are reading them, that a real person is not narrating to you every where nothing but what really happened to himself. To this, the extreme homeliness of their style mainly contributes. We use the word in its best and heartiest sense--that which comes home to the reader. The narrators everywhere are chosen from low life, or have had their origin in it; therefore they tell their own tales, (Mr. Coleridge has anticipated us in this remark,) as persons in their degree are observed to do, with infinite repetition, and an overacted exactness, lest the hearer should not have minded, or have forgotten, some things that had been told before. Hence the emphatic sentences marked in the good old (but deserted) Italic type; and hence, too, the frequent interposition of the reminding old colloquial parenthesis, "I say"--"mind"--and the like, when the story-teller repeats what, to a practised reader, might appear to have been sufficiently insisted upon before: which made an ingenious critic observe, that his works, in this kind, were excellent reading for the kitchen. And, in truth, the heroes and heroines of De Foe, can never again hope to be popular with a much higher class of readers, than that of the servant-maid or the sailor. Crusoe keeps its rank only by tough prescription; Singleton, the pirate--Colonel Jack, the thief--Moll Flanders, both thief and harlot--Roxana, harlot and something worse--would be startling ingredients in the bill of fare of modern literary delicacies. But, then, what pirates, what thieves, and what harlots is the thief, the harlot, and the pirate of De Foe? We would not hesitate to say, that in no other book of fiction, where the lives of such characters are described, is guilt and delinquency made less seductive, or the suffering made more closely to follow the commission, or the penitence more earnest or more bleeding, or the intervening flashes of religious visitation, upon the rude and uninstructed soul, more meltingly and fearfully painted. They, in this, come near to the tenderness of Bunyan; while the livelier pictures and incidents in them, as in Hogarth or in Fielding, tend to diminish that "fastidiousness to the concerns and pursuits of common life, which an unrestrained passion for the ideal and the sentimental is in danger of producing."

CLARENCE SONGS

(1830)

To the Editor of The Spectator

Sir,--You have a question in your paper, what songs, and whether any of any value, were written upon Prince WILLIAM, our present Sovereign. Can it have escaped you, that the very popular song and tune of "Sweet lass of Richmond Hill" had reference to a supposed partiality of that Prince for a lass of Richmond? I have heard who she was, but now forget. I think it was a damsel of quality. I remember, when I was a schoolboy at Christ's Hospital, about eight-and-forty years since, having had my hearing stunned with the burthen (which alone I retain) of some ballad in praise and augury of the Princely Midshipman:--

"He's royal, he's noble, he's chosen by me,[61] Britain's Isle to protect, and reign Lord of the Sea!"

and my old ears yet ring with it.

[61] It is Neptune who predicts this.

Allusions to the same personage were at that time rife in innumerable ballads, under the notion of a sweet William; but the ballads are obliterated. The song of "Sweet William Taylor, walking with his lady gay"--from the identity of names, I suppose--usually followed the Neptunian song. The late TOM SHERIDAN bears away the credit of this. But was it possible he could have been the author of it in 1782 or 1783? Perhaps he made it his own by communicating a deeper tinge of vulgarity to it, exchanging "William" for "Billy." I think the rogue snugged it in as his own, hoping it was a forgotten ditty.

C. L.

CLARENCE SONGS.--No. II

Sir,--A friend has just reminded me of a ballad made on occasion of some shipboard scrape into which our Royal Midshipman had fallen; in which, with a romantic licence, the rank of the young sailor is supposed to have been unknown, and a corporal infliction about to have been put into execution. This is all he can recover of it. He was

----"order'd to undress, Sir! But very soon they did espy The star upon his breast, Sir: And on their knees they soon did fall, And all for mercy soon did call."

The burden was "Long live Duke William," or something to that effect. So you see, his Majesty has enjoyed his laureats by anticipation.

C. L.

I know the town swarmed with these Clarence songs in the heyday of his young popularity. Where are they?

RECOLLECTIONS OF A LATE ROYAL ACADEMICIAN

(1831)

What Apelles was to the Grecian Alexander, the same to the Russian was the late G---- D----. None but Apelles might attempt the lineaments of the world's conqueror; none but our Academician could have done justice to the lines of the Czar, and his Courtiers. There they hang, the labour of ten plodding years, in an endless gallery, erected for the nonce, in the heart of Imperial Petersburgh--eternal monuments of barbarian taste submitting to half-civilized cunning--four hundred fierce Half-Lengths, all male, and all military; like the pit in a French theatre, or the characters in Timon as it was last acted, with never a woman among them. Chaste sitters to Vandyke, models of grace and womanhood; and thou Dame Venetia Digby, fairest among thy fair compeers at Windsor, hide your pure pale cheeks, and cool English beauties, before this suffocating horde of Scythian riflers, this male chaos! Your cold oaken frames shall wane before the gorgeous buildings,

With Tartar faces thronged, and horrent uniforms.

One emperor contended for the monopoly of the ancient; two were competitors at once for the pencil of the modern Apelles. The Russian carried it against the Haytian by a single length. And if fate, as it was at one time nearly arranged, had wafted D. to the shores of Hayti--with the same complacency in his art, with which he persisted in daubing in, day after day, his frozen Muscovites, he would have sate down for life to smutch in upon canvass the faces of blubber-lipped sultanas, or the whole male retinue of the dingy court of Christophe. For in truth a choice of subjects was the least of D.'s care. A Goddess from Cnidus, or from the Caffre coast, was equal to him; Lot, or Lot's wife; the charming widow H., or her late husband.

My acquaintance with D. was in the outset of his art, when the graving tools, rather than the pencil, administered to his humble wants. Those implements, as is well known, are not the most favourable to the cultivation of that virtue, which is esteemed next to godliness. He might "wash his hands in innocency," and so metaphorically "approach an altar;" but his material puds were any thing but fit to be carried to church. By an ingrained economy in soap--if it was not for pictorial effect rather--he would wash (on Sundays) the inner oval, or portrait, as it may be termed, of his countenance, leaving the unwashed temples to form a natural black frame round a picture, in which a dead white was the predominant colour. This, with the addition of green spectacles, made necessary by the impairment, which his graving labours by day and night (for he was ordinarily at them for sixteen hours out of the twenty-four) had brought upon his visual faculties, gave him a singular appearance, when he took the air abroad; in so much, that I have seen a crowd of young men and boys following him along Oxford-street with admiration, not without shouts; even as the Youth of Rome, we read in Vasari, followed the steps of Raphael with acclamations for his genius, and for his beauty, when he proceeded from his work-shop to chat with Cardinals and Popes at the Vatican.

The family of D. were not at this time in affluent circumstances. His father, a clever artist, had outlived the style of art, in which he excelled most of his contemporaries. He, with the father of the celebrated Morland, worked for the shop of Carrington and Bowles, which exists still for the poorer sort of caricatures, on the North side of St. Paul's Church Yard. They did clever things in colours. At an inn in Reading a screen is still preserved, full of their labours; but the separate portions of either artist are now undistinguishable. I remember a Mother teaching her Child to read (B. Barton has a copy of it); a Laundress washing; a young Quaker, a beautiful subject. But the flower of their forgotten productions hangs still at a public house on the left hand, as thou arrivest, Reader, from the now Highgate archway, at the foot of the descent where Crouch End begins, on thy road to green Hornsey. Turn in, and look at it, for the sight is well worth a cup of excusatory cyder. In the parlour to the right you will find it--an antiquated subject--a Damsel sitting at her breakfast table in a gown of the flowered chintz of our grandmothers, with a tea-service before her of the same pattern. The effect is most delicate. Why have these harmonies--these agrémens--no place in the works of modern art?

With such niceties in his calling D. did not much trouble his head, but, after an ineffectual experiment to reconcile his eye-sight with his occupation, boldly quitted it, and dashed into the beaten road of common-place portraiture in oil. The Hopners, and the Lawrences, were his Vandykes, and his Velasquezes; and if he could make any thing like them, he insured himself immortality. With such guides he struggled on through laborious nights and days, till he reached the eminence he aimed at--of mediocrity. Having gained that summit, he sate down contented. If the features were but cognoscible, no matter whether the flesh resembled flesh, or oilskin. For the thousand tints--the grains--which in life diversify the nose, the chin, the cheek--which a Reynolds can but coarsely counterfeit--he cared nothing at all about them. He left such scrupulosities to opticians and anatomists. If the features were but there, the character of course could not be far off. A lucky hit which he made in painting the dress of a very dressy lady--Mrs. W--e--, whose handsome countenance also, and tall elegance of shape, were too palpable entirely to escape under any masque of oil, with which even D. could overlay them--brought to him at once, an influx of sitters, which almost rivalled the importunate calls upon Sir Thomas. A portrait, he did soon after, of the Princess Charlotte, clenched his fame. He proceeded Academician. At that memorable conjuncture of time it pleased the Allied Sovereigns to visit England.

I called upon D. to congratulate him upon a crisis so doubly eventful. His pleasant housekeeper seemed embarrassed; owned that her master was alone. But could he be spoken with? With some importunity I prevailed upon her to usher me up into his painting-room. It was in Newman-street. At his easel stood D., with an immense spread of canvas before him, and by his side a--live Goose. I enquired into this extraordinary combination. Under the rose he informed me, that he had undertaken to paint a transparency for Vauxhall, against an expected visit of the Allied Sovereigns to that place. I smiled at an engagement so derogatory to his new-born honours; but a contempt of small gains was never one of D.'s foibles. My eyes beheld crude forms of warriors, kings, rising under his brush upon this interminable stretch of cloth. The Wolga, the Don, and the Nieper, were there, or their representative River Gods; and Father Thames clubbed urns with the Vistula. Glory with her dazzling Eagle was not absent, nor Fame, nor Victory. The shade of Rubens might have evoked the mighty allegories. But what was the Goose? He was evidently sitting for a something.

D. at last informed me, that having fixed upon a group of rivers, he could not introduce the Royal Thames without his swans. That he had enquired the price of a live swan, and it being more than he was prepared to give for it, he had bargained with the poulterer for the next thing to it; adding significantly, that it would do to roast, after it had served its turn to paint swans by. Reader, this is a true story.

So entirely devoid of imagination, or any feeling for his high art, was this Painter, that for the few historical pictures he attempted, any sitter might sit for any character. He took once for a subject The Infant Hercules. Did he chuse for a model some robust antique? No. He did not even pilfer from Sir Joshua, who was nearer to his own size. But from a show he hired to sit to him a child in years indeed, (though no Infant,) but in fact a precocious Man, or human portent, that was disgustingly exhibiting at that period; a thing to be strangled. From this he formed his Infant Hercules. In a scriptural flight he next attempted a Sampson in the lap of Dalilah. A Dalilah of some sort was procureable for love or money, but who should stand for the Jewish Hercules? He hired a tolerably stout porter, with a thickish head of hair, curling in yellowish locks, but lithe--much like a wig. And these were the robust strengths of Sampson.

I once was a witness to a family scene in his painting closet, which I had entered rather abruptly, and but for his encouragement, should as hastily have retreated. He stood with displeased looks eyeing a female relative--whom I had known under happier auspices--that was kneeling at his feet with a baby in her arms, with her eyes uplifted and suppliant. Though I could have previously sworn to the virtue of Miss ----, yet casual slips have been known. There are such things as families disgraced, where least you would have expected it. The child might be ----; I had heard of no wedding--I was the last person to pry into family secrets--when D. relieved my uneasy cogitations by explaining, that the innocent, good-humoured creature before me (such as she ever was, and is now that she is married) with a baby borrowed from the public house, was acting Andromache to his Ulysses, for the purpose of transferring upon canvas a tender situation from the Troades of Seneca.

On a subsequent occasion I knocked at D.'s door. I had chanced to have been in a dreamy humour previously. I am not one that often poetises, but I had been musing--coxcombically enough in the heart of Newman-street, Oxford Road--upon Pindus, and the Aonian Maids. The Lover of Daphne was in my mind--when, answering to my summons, the door opened, and there stood before me, laurel-crowned, the God himself, unshorn Apollo. I was beginning to mutter apologies to the Celestial Presence--when on the thumb of the right hand of the Delian (his left held the harp) I spied a pallet, such as painters carry, which immediately reconciled me to the whimsical transformation of my old acquaintance--with his own face, certainly any other than Grecianesque--into a temporary image of the oracle-giver of Delphos. To have impersonated the Ithacan was little; he had been just sitting for a God.--It would be no incurious enquiry to ascertain what the minimum of the faculty of imagination, ever supposed essential to painters along with poets, is, that, in these days of complaints of want of patronage towards the fine arts, suffices to dub a man a R----l A----n.

Not only had D. no imagination to guide him in the treatment of such subjects, but he had no relish for high art in the productions of the great masters. He turned away from them as from something foreign and irrelative to him, and his calling. He knew he had neither part nor portion in them. Cozen him into the Stafford or the Angerstein Gallery, he involuntarily turned away from the Baths of Diana--the Four Ages of Guercino--the Lazarus of Piombo--to some petty piece of modern art that had been inconsistently thrust into the collection through favour. On that he would dwell and pore, blind as the dead to the delicacies that surrounded him. There he might learn something. There he might pilfer a little. There was no grappling with Titian, or Angelo.

The narrowness of his domestic habits to the very last, was the consequence of his hard bringing up, and unexpected emergence into opulence. While rolling up to the ears in Russian rubles, a penny was still in his eyes the same important thing, which it had with some reason seemed to be, when a few shillings were his daily earnings. When he visited England a short time before his death, he reminded an artist of a commission, which he had executed for him in Russia, the package of which was "still unpaid." At this time he was not unreasonably supposed to have realized a sum little short of half a million sterling. What became of it was never known; what gulf, or what Arctic vorago, sucked it in, his acquaintance in those parts have better means of guessing, than his countrymen. It is certain that few of the latter were any thing the better for it.

It was before he expatriated himself, but subsequently to his acquisition of pictorial honours in this country, that he brought home two of his brother Academicians to dine with him. He had given no orders extraordinary to his housekeeper. He trusted, as he always did, to her providing. She was a shrewd lass, and knew, as we say, a bit of her master's mind.

It had happened that on the day before, D. passing near Clare Market by one of those open shambles, where tripe and cow-heel are exposed for sale, his eye was arrested by the sight of some tempting flesh rolled up. It is a part of the intestines of some animal, which my olfactory sensibilities never permitted me to stay long enough to enquire the name of. D. marked the curious involutions of the unacquainted luxury; the harmony of its colours--a sable vert--pleased his eye; and, warmed with the prospect of a new flavour, for a few farthings he bore it off in triumph to his housekeeper. It so happened that his day's dinner was provided, so the cooking of the novelty was for that time necessarily suspended.

Next day came. The hour of dinner approached. His visitors, with no very romantic anticipations, expected a plain meal at least; they were prepared for no new dainties; when, to the astonishment of them, and almost of D. himself, the purchase of the preceding day was served up piping hot--the cook declaring, that she did not know well what it was, for "her master always marketed." His guests were not so happy in their ignorance. They kept dogs.

I will do D. the justice to say, that on such occasions he took what happened in the best humour possible. He had no false modesty--though I have generally observed, that persons, who are quite deficient in that mauvais[e] honte, are seldom over-troubled with the quality itself, of which it is the counterfeit.

By what arts, with his pretensions, D. contrived to wriggle himself into a seat in the Academy, I am not acquainted enough with the intrigues of that body (more involved than those of an Italian conclave) to pronounce. It is certain, that neither for love to him, nor out of any respect to his talents, did they elect him. Individually he was obnoxious to them all. I have heard that, in his passion for attaining this object, he went so far as to go down upon his knees to some of the members, whom he thought least favourable, and beg their suffrage with many tears.

But death, which extends the measure of a man's stature to appearance; and wealth, which men worship in life and death, which makes giants of punies, and embalms insignificance; called around the exequies of this pigmy Painter the rank, the riches, the fashion of the world. By Academic hands his pall was borne; by the carriages of nobles of the land, and of ambassadors from foreign powers, his bier was followed; and St. Paul's (O worthy casket for the shrine of such a Zeuxis) now holds--ALL THAT WAS MORTAL OF G. D.

THE LATIN POEMS OF VINCENT BOURNE

(1831)

A complete translation of these poems is a desideratum in our literature. Cowper has done one at least, out of the four which he has given us, with a felicity almost unapproachable. Few of our readers can be ignorant of the delightful lines beginning with:--

"There is bird, which by its coat----"

A recent writer has lately added nine more to the number; we wish he would proceed with the remainder, for of all modern Latinity, that of Vincent Bourne is the most to our taste. He is "so Latin," and yet "so English" all the while. In diction worthy of the Augustan age, he presents us with no images that are not familiar to his countrymen. His topics are even closelier drawn; they are not so properly English, as Londonish. From the streets, and from the alleys, of his beloved metropolis he culled his objects, which he has invested with an Hogarthian richness of colouring. No town picture by that artist can go beyond his BALLAD-SINGERS; Gay's TRIVIA alone, in verse, comes up to the life and humour of it.

Quæ septem vicos conterminat una columna, Consistunt nymphæ Sirenum ex agmine binæ; Stramineum capiti tegimen, collumque per omne Ingentes electri orbes: utrique pependit Crustato vestis cœno, limoque rigescens Crure usque a medio calcem defluxit ad imum. Exiguam secum pendentem ex ubere natam Altera; venales dextrâ tulit altera chartas. His vix dispositis, pueri innuptæque puellæ Accurrunt: sutor primus, cui lorea vitta Impediit crines, humili, quæ proxima stabat, Proruit è cellâ, chartas, si forte placerent, Empturus; namque ille etiam se carmine multo Oblectat, longos solus quo rite labores Diminuit, fallitque hybernæ tædia noctis. Collecti murmur sensim increbrescere vulgi Auditi, et excurrit nudis ancilla lacertis. Incudem follesque et opus fabrile relinquens, Se densæ immiscet plebi niger ora Pyracmon. It juxta, depressum ingens cui mantica tergum Incurvat, tardo passu; simul ille coronam Aspectat vulgi, spe carminis arrigit aures; Statque moræ patiens, humeris nec pondera sentit. Sic ubi Tartareum Regem Rhodopeïus Orpheus Threiciis studuit fidibus mulcere, laboris Immemor, Æolides stupuit modulamina plectri, Nec sensit funesti onera incumbentia saxi. Sæbe interventus rhedæ crepitantis, ab illo Vicorum, ant illo, stipantem hinc inde catervam Dividit; at rursus coëunt, ubi transiit illa, Ut coëunt rursus, puppis quas dividit, undæ.

Canticulæ interea narraverat argumentum Altera Sirenum, infidi perjuria nautæ, Deceptamque dolo nympham; tum flebile carmen Flebilibus movit numeris, quos altera versu Alterno excepit: patulis stant rictibus omnes: Dextram ille acclinat, lævam ille attentius aurem, Promissum carmen captare paratus hiatu. Longa referre mora est, animum quâ vicerit arte Virgineum juvenis. Jam poscunt undique chartas Protensæ emptorum dextræ, quas illa vel illa Distribuit, cantatque simul: neque ferreus iste Est usquam auditor, dulcis cui lene camæna Non adhibet tormentum, et furtivum elicit assem. Stat medios inter baculoque innititur Irus; Nec tamen hic loculo parcit, sed prodigus æris Emptor adest, solvit pretium, carmenque requirit. Fors juxta adstabat vetula iracundior æquo; Quæ loculo ex imo invitum, longumque latentem Depromens vix tandem obolum, Cedo, fœmina, chartam, Inquit; ut æternum monumentum in pariete figam, Cum laribus mansurum ipsis, quam credula nymphis Pectora sint; fraudis quam plena, et perfida nautis.

* * * * *

Where seven fair Streets to one tall Column[62] draw, Two Nymphs have ta'en their stand, in hats of straw; Their yellower necks huge beads of amber grace, And by their trade they're of the Sirens' race. With cloak loose-pinn'd on each, that has been red, But long with dust and dirt discoloured Belies its hue; in mud behind, before, From heel to middle leg becrusted o'er. One a small infant at the breast does bear; And one in her right hand her tuneful ware, Which she would vend. Their station scarce is taken, When youths and maids flock round. His stall forsaken, Forth comes a Son of Crispin, leathern-capt, Prepared to buy a ballad, if one apt To move his fancy offers. Crispin's sons Have, from uncounted time, with ale and buns Cherish'd the gift of Song, which sorrow quells; And, working single in their low-rooft cells, Oft at the tedium of a winter's night With anthems warbled in the Muses' spight. Who now hath caught the alarm? The Servant Maid Hath heard a buzz at distance; and, afraid To miss a note, with elbows red comes out. Leaving his forge to cool, Pyracmon stout Thrusts in his unwash'd visage. He stands by, Who the hard trade of Porterage does ply With stooping shoulders. What cares he? he sees The assembled ring, nor heeds his tottering knees, But pricks his ears up with the hopes of song. So, while the Bard of Rhodope his wrong Bewail'd to Proserpine on Thracian strings, The tasks of gloomy Orcus lost their stings, And stone-vext Sysiphus forgets his load. Hither and thither from the sevenfold road Some cart or wagon crosses, which divides The close-wedged audience; but, as when the tides To ploughing ships give way, the ship being past, They re-unite, so these unite as fast. The older Songstress hitherto has spent Her elocution in the argument Of their great Song in prose; to wit, the woes Which Maiden true to faithless Sailor owes-- Ah "Wandering He!"--which now in loftier verse Pathetic they alternately rehearse. All gaping wait the event. This Critic opes His right ear to the strain. The other hopes To catch it better with his left. Long trade It were to tell, how the deluded Maid A victim fell. And now right greedily All hands are stretching forth the songs to buy, That are so tragical; which She, and She, Deals out, and sings the while; nor can there be A breast so obdurate here, that will hold back His contribution from the gentle rack Of Music's pleasing torture. Irus' self, The staff-propt Beggar, his thin-gotten pelf Brings out from pouch, where squalid farthings rest, And boldly claims his ballad with the rest. An old Dame only lingers. To her purse The penny sticks. At length, with harmless curse, "Give me," she cries--"I'll paste it on my wall, While the wall lasts, to show what ills befal Fond hearts, seduced from Innocency's way; How Maidens fall, and Mariners betray."

[62] Seven Dials.

In the same style of familiar painting, and replete with the same images of town life, picturesque as it was comparatively in the days of Gay, and of Hogarth, are the various Poematia--to the "Bellman"--"Billinsgate"--the "Law Courts"--the "Licensed Victualler"--the "Quack"--the "Quaker's Meeting" cum multis aliis--of this most classical of Cockney Poets. In a different strain is the following piece of tenderness:--

IN STATUAM SEPULCHRALEM INFANTIS DORMIENTIS

Infans venuste, qui sacros dulces agens In hoc sopores marmore, Placidissimâ quiete compôstus jaces, Et inscius culpæ et metûs, Somno fruaris, docta quem dedit manus Sculptoris; et somno simul, Quem nescit artifex vel Ars effingere Fruaris Innocentiæ.

* * * * *

Beautiful Infant, who dost keep Thy posture here, and sleep'st a marble sleep, May the repose unbroken be, Which the fine Artist's hand hath lent to thee! While thou enjoy'st along with it That which no Art or Craft could ever hit, Or counterfeit to moral sense, The Heav'n-infused sleep of Innocence.

We have selected these two versions from a little volume lately published by Mr. Lamb, to which he has strangely given the misnomer of "Album Verses."

ALBUM VERSES! why, in the whole collection there are not twenty pages out of one hundred and fifty (and cast the acrostics in, to swell the amount) that have the smallest title to come under this denomination. There is a Tragic Drama, filling up more than a third of the book. The rest is composed of--Translations from V. Bourne, nine in number--just so many Verses, and no more, expressly written for Albums--and the rest might have been written any where. But Mr. L. will be wiser another time, than to stand Godfather to his own poetry. A sensible Publisher is always the best names-man on these occasions.

But if to write in Albums be a sin, Lord help Wordsworth--Coleridge--Southey--Sir Walter himself--who have not been always able to resist the solicitations of the fair owners of these modern nuisances. Southey has owned to some score, and Mr. L.'s offences in this kind, we have said, do not exceed the number of the Muses. This may be said even of them, that they are not vague verses--to the Moon, or to the Nightingale--that will fit any place--but strictly appropriate to the person that they were intended to gratify; or to the species of chronicle which they were destined to be recorded in. The Verses to a "Clergyman's Lady"--to the "Wife of a learned Serjeant"--to a "Young Quaker"--could have appeared only in an Album, and only in that particular person's Album they were composed for.

We are no friend to Albums. We early set our face against them in a short copy of verses, which we publish only for our own justification. To the question:--

WHAT IS AN ALBUM?

'Tis a Book kept by modern young Ladies for show, Of which their plain Grandmothers nothing did know; A Medley of Scraps, half verse, and half prose, And some things not very like either, God knows; Where wise folk and simple alike do combine, And you write your nonsense, that I may write mine. Throw in a fine Landscape, to make it complete-- A Flower-piece--a Foreground--all tinted so neat, As Nature herself, could she see it, would strike With envy to think that she ne'er did the like. Next forget not to stuff it with Autographs plenty, All writ in a style so genteel, and so dainty, They no more resemble folk's ord'nary writing, Than lines, penn'd with pains, do extemp'ral enditing; Or our every day countenance (pardon the stricture) The faces we make when we sit for our picture. Thus you have, dearest--, an Album complete--

We forget the rest--but seriously we deprecate with all our powers the unfeminine practice of this novel species of importunity. We have known Young Ladies--ay, and of those who have been modest and retiring enough upon other occasions--in quest of these delicacies, to besiege, and storm by violence, the closets and privatest retirements of a literary man, to whom they have had an imperfect, or, perhaps, no introduction at all. But the disease has gone forth. Like the daughters of the horseleech in the Proverbs, the requisition of every female now is, Contribute, Contribute. "From the Land's End to the Farthest Thule the cry has gone out, and who shall resist it? Assuming then, that Album Verses will be written, where was the harm, if Mr. L. first taught us how they might be best, and most characteristically written?"

Amid the vague, dreamy, wordy, matterless Poetry of this empty age, the verses of such a writer as Bourne (who was a Latin Prior) are invaluable. They fix upon something; they ally themselves to common life and objects; their good nature is a Catholicon, sanative of coxcombry, of heartlessness, and of fastidiousness. Vale, Lepidissimum Caput. [63]

[63] Of this writer we only know, that he was an usher some seventy years since at Westminster School; and that Dr. Johnson (who knew him) speaks of him always affectionately as "poor Vinny Bourne."

THE DEATH OF MUNDEN

(1832)

To the Editor of The Athenæum

Dear Sir,--Your communication to me of the death of Munden made me weep. Now, Sir, I am not of the melting mood. But, in these serious times, the loss of half the world's fun is no trivial deprivation. It was my loss (or gain shall I call it?) in the early time of my play-going, to have missed all Munden's acting. There was only he, and Lewis at Covent Garden, while Drury Lane was exuberant with Parsons, Dodd, &c., such a comic company as, I suppose, the stage never showed. Thence, in the evening of my life, I had Munden all to myself, more mellowed, richer perhaps than ever. I cannot say what his change of faces produced in me. It was not acting. He was not one of my "old actors." It might be [he was] better. His power was extravagant. I saw him one evening in three drunken characters. Three Farces were played. One part was Dosey--I forget the rest:--but they were so discriminated, that a stranger might have seen them all, and not have dreamed that he was seeing the same actor. I am jealous for the actors who pleased my youth. He was not a Parsons or a Dodd, but he was more wonderful. He seemed as if he could do anything. He was not an actor, but something better, if you please. Shall I instance Old Foresight, in "Love for Love," in which Parsons was at once the old man, the astrologer, &c. Munden dropped the old man, the doater--which makes the character--but he substituted for it a moon-struck character, a perfect abstraction from this earth, that looked as if he had newly come down from the planets. Now, that is not what I call acting. It might be better. He was imaginative; he could impress upon an audience an idea--the low one perhaps of a leg of mutton and turnips; but such was the grandeur and singleness of his expressions, that that single expression would convey to all his auditory a notion of all the pleasures they had all received from all the legs of mutton and turnips they had ever eaten in their lives. Now, this is not acting, nor do I set down Munden amongst my old actors. He was only a wonderful man, exerting his vivid impressions through the agency of the stage. In one only thing did I see him act--that is, support a character; it was in a wretched farce, called "Johnny Gilpin," for Dowton's benefit, in which he did a cockney; the thing ran but one night; but when I say that Liston's Lubin Log was nothing to it, I say little; it was transcendant. And here, let me say of actors--envious actors--that of Munden, Liston was used to speak, almost with the enthusiasm due to the dead, in terms of such allowed superiority to every actor on the stage, and this at a time when Munden was gone by in the world's estimation, that it convinced me that artists (in which term I include poets, painters, &c.), are not so envious as the world think. I have little time, and therefore enclose a criticism on Munden's Old Dosey and his general acting, by a gentleman, who attends less to these things than formerly, but whose criticism I think masterly.

C. LAMB.

THOUGHTS ON PRESENTS OF GAME, &c.

(1833)

"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 participation is methinks unitive, as the old theologians phrase it."--LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA.

Elia presents his acknowledgments to his "Correspondent unknown," for a basket of prodigiously fine game. He takes for granted that so amiable a character must be a reader of the Athenæum. Else he had meditated a notice in The Times. Now if this friend had consulted the Delphic 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 disguised in fine feathers. But a hare roasted hard and brown--with gravy and melted butter!--old Mr. Chambers, 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. Perhaps that was over-doing 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 pronounces that a hare, to be truly palated, must be roasted. Jugging sophisticates her. In our way it eats so "crips," as Mrs. Minikin says. Time was, when Elia was not arrived at his taste, that he preferred to all luxuries a roasted Pig. But he disclaims all such green-sickness appetites 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 supposition, that he had carried up into mature life the prepossessions of childhood. From the worthy Vicar of Enfield he acknowledges a tithe contribution of extraordinary sapor. The ancients must have loved hares. Else why adopt the word lepores (obviously from lepus) but for some subtle analogy between the delicate flavour of the latter, and the finer relishes of wit in what we most poorly translate pleasantries. The fine madnesses of the poet are the very decoction of his diet. Thence is he hare-brained. Harum-scarum is a libellous 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 conduces them to form the very tit-bit of the admirers of this noble animal. Noble will I call her, in spite of her detractors, who from occasional demonstrations of the principle of self-preservation (common to all animals) infer in her a defect of heroism. Half a hundred horsemen with thrice the number of dogs, scour the country in pursuit of puss across three countries; and because the well-flavoured beast, weighing the odds, is willing to evade the hue and cry, with her delicate ears shrinking perchance from discord--comes the grave Naturalist, Linnæus perchance or Buffon, and gravely sets down the Hare as a--timid animal. Why, Achilles or Bully Dawson, would have declined the preposterous combat.

In fact, how light of digestion we feel after a hare! How tender its processes after swallowing! What chyle it promotes! How etherial! 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.

TABLE-TALK BY THE LATE ELIA

(1833 and 1834)

The greatest pleasure I know, is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.

'Tis unpleasant to meet a beggar. It is painful to deny him; and, if you relieve him, it is so much out of your pocket.

Men marry for fortune, and sometimes to please their fancy; but, much oftener than is suspected, they consider what the world will say of it; how such a woman in their friends' eyes will look at the head of a table. Hence, we see so many insipid beauties made wives of, that could not have struck the particular fancy of any man, that had any fancy at all. These I call furniture wives; as men buy furniture pictures, because they suit this or that niche in their dining parlours.

Your universally cried-up beauties are the very last choice which a man of taste would make. What pleases all, cannot have that individual charm, which makes this or that countenance engaging to you, and to you only perhaps, you know not why. What gained the fair Gunnings titled husbands, who, after all, turned out very sorry wives? Popular repute.

It is a sore trial when a daughter shall marry against her father's approbation. A little hard-heartedness, and aversion to a reconcilement, is almost pardonable. After all, Will Dockwray's way is perhaps the wisest. His best-loved daughter made a most imprudent match; in fact, eloped with the last man in the world that her father would have wished her to marry. All the world said that he would never speak to her again. For months she durst not write to him, much less come near him. But, in a casual rencounter, he met her in the streets of Ware;--Ware, that will long remember the mild virtues of William Dockwray, Esq. What said the parent to his disobedient child, whose knees faltered under her at the sight of him? "Ha! Sukey, is it you?" with that benevolent aspect, with which he paced the streets of Ware, venerated as an angel, "come and dine with us on Sunday;" then turning away, and again turning back, as if he had forgotten something, he added, "and Sukey, do you hear, bring your husband with you." This was all the reproof she ever heard from him. Need it be added, that the match turned out better for Susan than the world expected?

"We read the Paradise Lost as a task," says Dr. Johnson. Nay, rather as a celestial recreation, of which the dullard mind is not at all hours alike recipient. "Nobody ever wished it longer;"--nor the moon rounder, he might have added. Why, 'tis the perfectness and completeness of it, which makes us imagine that not a line could be added to it, or diminished from it, with advantage. Would we have a cubit added to the stature of the Medicean Venus? Do we wish her taller?

Lear. Who are you? Mine eyes are not o' the best: I'll tell you straight ... Are you not Kent?

Kent. The same; Your servant Kent. Where is your servant Caius?

Lear. He's a good fellow, I can tell you that; He'll strike, and quickly too: he's dead and rotten.

Kent. No, my good Lord; I am the very man----

Lear. I'll see that straight----

Kent. That from your first of difference and decay, Have follow'd your sad steps.

Lear. You are welcome hither ...

Albany. He knows not what he says; and vain it is That we present us to him.

Edgar. Look up, my Lord.

Kent. Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass! He hates him much. That would upon the rack of this rough world Stretch him out longer.

So ends 'King Lear,' the most stupendous of the Shakspearian dramas; and Kent, the noblest feature of the conceptions of his divine mind. This is the magnanimity of authorship, when a writer, having a topic presented to him, fruitful of beauties for common minds, waives his privilege, and trusts to the judicious few for understanding the reason of his abstinence. What a pudder would a common dramatist have raised here of a reconciliation scene, a perfect recognition, between the assumed Caius and his master!--to the suffusing of many fair eyes, and the moistening of cambric handkerchiefs. The old dying king partially catching at the truth, and immediately lapsing into obliviousness, with the high-minded carelessness of the other to have his services appreciated, as one that

----served not for gain, Or follow'd out of form,

are among the most judicious, not to say heart-touching, strokes in Shakspeare.

Allied to this magnanimity it is, where the pith and point of an argument, the amplification of which might compromise the modesty of the speaker, is delivered briefly, and, as it were, parenthetically; as in those few but pregnant words, in which the man in the old 'Nut-brown Maid' rather intimates than reveals his unsuspected high birth to the woman:--

Now understand, to Westmorland, Which is my heritage, I will you bring, and with a ring, By way of marriage, I will you take, and Lady make.

Turn we to the version of it, ten times diluted, of dear Mat. Prior--in his own way unequalled, and a poet now-a-days too much neglected--"In me," quoth Henry, addressing the astounded Emma--with a flourish and an attitude, as we may conceive:--

In me behold the potent Edgar's heir, Illustrious Earl! him terrible in war, Let Loire confess.

And with a deal of skimble-skamble stuff, as Hotspur would term it, more, presents the Lady with a full and true enumeration of his Papa's rent-roll in the fat soil by Deva.

But of all parentheses, (not to quit the topic too suddenly,) commend me to that most significant one, at the commencement of the old popular ballad of Fair Rosamund:--

When good King Henry ruled this land, The second of that name,

Now mark--

(Besides the Queen) he dearly loved A fair and comely dame.

There is great virtue in this besides.

* * * * *

Amidst the complaints of the wide spread of infidelity among us, it is consolatory that a sect is sprung up in the heart of the metropolis, and is daily on the increase, of teachers of that healing doctrine, which Pope upheld, and against which Voltaire directed his envenomed wit. We mean those practical preachers of optimism, or the belief that Whatever is is best--the Cads of Omnibuses; who, from their little back pulpits--not once in three or four hours, as those proclaimers of "God and his prophet" in Mussulman countries; but every minute, at the entry or exit of a brief passenger, are heard, in an almost prophetic tone, to exclaim--(Wisdom crying out, as it were, in the streets,)--ALL'S RIGHT.

* * * * *

Advice is not so commonly thrown away as is imagined. We seek it in difficulties. But, in common speech, we are apt to confound with it admonition; as when a friend reminds one that drink is prejudicial to the health, &c. We do not care to be told of that which we know better than the good man that admonishes. M---- sent to his friend L----, who is no water-drinker, a twopenny tract 'Against the Use of Fermented Liquors.' L---- acknowledged the obligation, as far as to twopence. Penotier's advice was the safest after all:

"I advised him----"

But I must tell you. The dear, good-meaning, no-thinking creature, had been dumb-founding a company of us with a detail of inextricable difficulties, in which the circumstances of an acquaintance of his were involved. No clue of light offered itself. He grew more and more misty as he proceeded. We pitied his friend, and thought,

God help the man so wrapt in error's endless maze:

when, suddenly brightening up his placid countenance, like one that had found out a riddle, and looked to have the solution admired, "At last," said he, "I advised him----"

Here he paused, and here we were again interminably thrown back. By no possible guess could any of us aim at the drift of the meaning he was about to be delivered of. "I advised him," he repeated, "to have some advice upon the subject." A general approbation followed; and it was unanimously agreed, that, under all the circumstances of the case, no sounder or more judicious counsel could have been given.

A laxity pervades the popular use of words. Parson W---- is not quite so continent as Diana, yet prettily dissembleth his frailty. Is Parson W---- therefore a hypocrite? I think not. Where the concealment of a vice is less pernicious than the bare-faced publication of it would be, no additional delinquency is incurred in the secrecy. Parson W---- is simply an immoral clergyman. But if Parson W---- were to be for ever haranguing on the opposite virtue,--choosing for his perpetual text, in preference to all other pulpit topics, the remarkable resistance recorded in the 39th of Exodus--dwelling, moreover, and dilating upon it--then Parson W---- might be reasonably suspected of hypocrisy. But Parson W---- rarely diverteth into such line of argument, or toucheth it briefly. His ordinary topics are fetched from "obedience to the powers that are"--"submission to the civil magistrate in all commands that are not absolutely unlawful;" on which he can delight to expatiate with equal fervour and sincerity. Again, to despise a person is properly to look down upon him with none, or the least possible emotion. But when Clementina, who has lately lost her lover, with bosom heaving, eyes flashing, and her whole frame in agitation, pronounces, with a peculiar emphasis, that she "despises the fellow," depend upon it that he is not quite so despicable in her eyes as she would have us imagine.--One more instance:--If we must naturalize that portentous phrase, a truism, it were well that we limited the use of it. Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism. For example: A good name helps a man on in the world. This is nothing but a simple truth, however hackneyed. It has a distinct subject and predicate. But when the thing predicated is involved in the term of the subject, and so necessarily involved that by no possible conception they can be separated, then it becomes a truism, as to say, A good name is a proof of a man's estimation in the world. We seem to be saying something when we say nothing. I was describing to F---- some knavish tricks of a mutual friend of ours. "If he did so and so," was the reply, "he cannot be an honest man." Here was a genuine truism--truth upon truth--inference and proposition identical; or rather a dictionary definition usurping the place of an inference.

* * * * *

The vices of some men are magnificent. Compare the amours of Henry the Eighth and Charles the Second. The Stuart had mistresses--the Tudor kept wives.

We are ashamed at sight of a monkey--somehow as we are shy of poor relations.

C---- imagined a Caledonian compartment in Hades, where there should be fire without sulphur.

Absurd images are sometimes irresistible. I will mention two. An elephant in a coach-office gravely coming to have his trunk booked;--a mermaid over a fish-kettle cooking her own tail.

It is the praise of Shakspeare, with reference to the play-writers, his contemporaries, that he has so few revolting characters. Yet he has one that is singularly mean and disagreeable--the King in Hamlet. Neither has he characters of insignificance, unless the phantom that stalks over the stage as Julius Cæsar, in the play of that name, may be accounted one. Neither has he envious characters, excepting the short part of Don John, in Much Ado about Nothing. Neither has he unentertaining characters, if we except Parolles, and the little that there is of the Clown, in All's Well that Ends Well.

It would settle the dispute, as to whether Shakspeare intended Othello for a jealous character, to consider how differently we are affected towards him, and for Leontes in the Winter's Tale. Leontes is that character. Othello's fault was simply credulity.

Is it possible that Shakspeare should never have read Homer, in Chapman's version at least? If he had read it, could he mean to travesty it in the parts of those big boobies, Ajax and Achilles? Ulysses, Nestor, and Agamemnon, are true to their parts in the Iliad: they are gentlemen at least. Thersites, though unamusing, is fairly deducible from it. Troilus and Cressida are a fine graft upon it. But those two big bulks----

It is a desideratum in works that treat de re culinariâ, that we have no rationale of sauces, or theory of mixed flavours; as to show why cabbage is reprehensible with roast beef, laudable with bacon; why the haunch of mutton seeks the alliance of currant jelly, the shoulder civilly declineth it; why loin of veal (a pretty problem), being itself unctuous, seeketh the adventitious lubricity of melted butter; and why the same part in pork, not more oleaginous, abhorreth from it; why the French bean sympathizes with the flesh of deer; why salt fish points to parsnip, brawn makes a dead set at mustard; why cats prefer valerian to hearts-ease, old ladies vice versâ--though this is rather travelling out of the road of the dietetics, and may be thought a question more curious than relevant;--why salmon (a strong sapor per se,) fortifieth its condition with the mighty lobster sauce, whose embraces are fatal to the delicater relish of the turbot; why oysters in death rise up against the contamination of brown sugar, while they are posthumously amorous of vinegar; why the sour mango and the sweet jam [? yam] by turns court, and are accepted by, the compliable mutton hash--she not yet decidedly declaring for either. We are as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery. We feed ignorantly, and want to be able to give a reason of the relish that is in us; so that if Nature should furnish us with a new meat, or be prodigally pleased to restore the phœnix, upon a given flavour, we might be able to pronounce instantly, on philosophical principles, what the sauce to it should be--what the curious adjuncts.

THE DEATH OF COLERIDGE

IN THE ALBUM OF MR. KEYMER

(1834)

When I heard of the death of Coleridge, it was without grief. It seemed to me that he long had been on the confines of the next world,--that he had a hunger for eternity. I grieved then that I could not grieve. But since, I feel how great a part he was of me. His great and dear spirit haunts me. I cannot think a thought, I cannot make a criticism on men or books, without an ineffectual turning and reference to him. He was the proof and touchstone of all my cogitations. He was a Grecian (or in the first form) at Christ's Hospital, where I was deputy Grecian; and the same subordination and deference to him I have preserved through a life-long acquaintance. Great in his writings, he was greatest in his conversation. In him was disproved that old maxim, that we should allow every one his share of talk. He would talk from morn to dewy eve, nor cease till far midnight, yet who ever would interrupt him,--who would obstruct that continuous flow of converse, fetched from Helicon or Zion? He had the tact of making the unintelligible seem plain. Many who read the abstruser parts of his "Friend" would complain that his works did not answer to his spoken wisdom. They were identical. But he had a tone in oral delivery, which seemed to convey sense to those who were otherwise imperfect recipients. He was my fifty years old friend without a dissension. Never saw I his likeness, nor probably the world can see again. I seem to love the house he died at more passionately than when he lived. I love the faithful Gilmans more than while they exercised their virtues towards him living. What was his mansion is consecrated to me a chapel.

CHS. LAMB.

EDMONTON, November 21, 1834.

CUPID'S REVENGE

(Date unknown)

Leontius, Duke of Lycia, who in times past had borne the character of a wise and just governor, and was endeared to all ranks of his subjects, in his latter days fell into a sort of dotage, which manifested itself in an extravagant fondness for his daughter Hidaspes. This young maiden, with the Prince Leucippus, her brother, were the only remembrances left to him of a deceased and beloved consort. For her nothing was thought too precious. Existence was of no value to him but as it afforded opportunities of gratifying her wishes. To be instrumental in relieving her from the least little pain, or grief, he would have lavished his treasures to the giving away of the one half of his dukedom.

All this deference on the part of the parent had yet no power upon the mind of the daughter to move her at any time to solicit any unbecoming suit, or to disturb the even tenor of her thoughts. The humility and dutifulness of her carriage seemed to keep pace with his apparent willingness to release her from the obligations of either. She might have satisfied her wildest humors and caprices; but in truth no such troublesome guests found harbor in the bosom of the quiet and unaspiring maiden.

Thus far the prudence of the Princess served to counteract any ill effects which this ungovernable partiality in a parent was calculated to produce in a less virtuous nature than Hidaspes's; and this foible of the duke's, so long as no evil resulted from it, was passed over by the courtiers as a piece of harmless frenzy.

But upon a solemn day--a sad one as it proved for Lycia--when the returning anniversary of the Princess's birth was kept with extraordinary rejoicings, the infatuated father set no bounds to his folly, but would have his subjects to do homage to her for that day, as to their natural sovereign; as if he, indeed, had been dead, and she, to the exclusion of the male succession, was become the rightful ruler of Lycia. He saluted her by the style of Duchess; and with a terrible oath, in the presence of his nobles, he confirmed to her the grant of all things whatsoever that she should demand on that day, and for the six next following; and if she should ask any thing the execution of which must be deferred until after his death, he pronounced a dreadful curse upon his son and successor, if he failed to see to the performance of it.

Thus encouraged, the Princess stepped forth with a modest boldness, and, as if assured of no denial, spake as follows:

But before we acquaint you with the purport of her speech, we must premise, that in the land of Lycia, which was at that time pagan, above all their other gods the inhabitants did in an especial manner adore the deity who was supposed to have influence in the disposing of people's affections in love. Him, by the name of God Cupid, they feigned to be a beautiful boy, and winged, as indeed, between young persons these frantic passions are usually least under constraint; while the wings might signify the haste with which these ill-judged attachments are commonly dissolved, and do indeed go away as lightly as they come, flying away in an instant to light upon some newer fancy. They painted him blindfolded, because these silly affections of lovers make them blind to the defects of the beloved object, which every one is quick-sighted enough to discover but themselves; or because love is for the most part led blindly, rather than directed by the open eye of the judgment, in the hasty choice of a mate. Yet, with that inconsistency of attributes with which the heathen people commonly over-complimented their deities, this blind love, this Cupid, they figured with a bow and arrows; and, being sightless, they yet feigned him to be a notable archer and an unerring marksman. No heart was supposed to be proof against the point of his inevitable dart. By such incredible fictions did these poor pagans make a shift to excuse their vanities, and to give a sanction to their irregular affections, under the notion that love was irresistible; whereas, in a well-regulated mind, these amorous conceits either find no place at all, or, having gained a footing, are easily stifled in the beginning by a wise and manly resolution.

This frenzy in the people had long been a source of disquiet to the discreet Princess, and many were the conferences she had held with the virtuous Prince, her brother, as to the best mode of taking off the minds of the Lycians from this vain superstition. An occasion, furnished by the blind grant of the old Duke, their father, seemed now to present itself.

The courtiers, then, being assembled to hear the demand which the Princess should make, began to conjecture, each one according to the bent of his own disposition, what the thing would be that she should ask for. One said, "Now surely she will ask to have the disposal of the revenues of some wealthy province, to lay them out--as was the manner of Eastern princesses--in costly dresses and jewels becoming a lady of so great expectancies." Another thought that she would seek an extension of power, as women naturally love rule and dominion. But the most part were in hope that she was about to beg the hand of some neighbor prince in marriage, who, by the wealth and contiguity of his dominions, might add strength and safety to the realm of Lycia. But in none of these things was the expectation of these crafty and worldly-minded courtiers gratified. For Hidaspes, first making lowly obeisance to her father, and thanking him on bended knees for so great grace conferred upon her--according to a plan preconcerted with Leucippus--made suit as follows:

"Your loving care of me, O princely father, by which in my tenderest age you made up to me for the loss of a mother at those years when I was scarcely able to comprehend the misfortune, and your bounties to me ever since, have left me nothing to ask for myself, as wanting and desiring nothing. But for the people whom you govern I beg and desire a boon. It is known to all nations that the men of Lycia are noted for a vain and fruitless superstition--the more hateful as it bears a show of true religion, but is indeed nothing more than a self-pleasing and bold wantonness. Many ages before this, when every man had taken to himself a trade, as hating idleness far worse than death, some one that gave himself to sloth and wine, finding himself by his neighbours rebuked for his unprofitable life, framed to himself a God whom he pretended to obey in his dishonesty; and, for a name, he called him Cupid. This God of merely man's creating--as the nature of man is ever credulous of any vice which takes part with his dissolute conditions--quickly found followers enough. They multiplied in every age, especially among your Lycians, who to this day remain adorers of this drowsy Deity, who certainly was first invented in drink, as sloth and luxury are commonly the first movers in these idle love-passions. This winged Boy--for so they fancy him--has his sacrifices, his loose Images set up in the land through all the villages--nay, your own sacred palace is not exempt from them--to the scandal of sound devotion and dishonour of the true Deities, which are only they who give good gifts to man--as Ceres, who gives us corn; the planter of the olive, Pallas; Neptune, who directs the track of ships over the great ocean, and binds distant lands together in friendly commerce; the inventor of medicine and music, Apollo; and the cloud-compelling Thunderer of Olympus. Whereas the gifts of this idle Deity--if, indeed, he have a being at all out of the brain of his frantic worshipers, usually prove destructive and pernicious. My suit, then, is, that this unseemly Idol throughout the land be plucked down and cast into the fire; and that the adoring of the same may be prohibited on pain of death to any of your subjects henceforth found so offending."

Leontius, startled at this unexpected demand from the Princess, with tears besought her to ask some wiser thing, and not to bring down upon herself and him the indignation of so great a God.

"There is no such God as you dream of," said then Leucippus, boldly, who had hitherto forborne to second the petition of the Princess; "but a vain opinion of him has filled the land with love and wantonness. Every young man and maiden that feel the least desire to one another, dare in no case to suppress it, for they think it to be Cupid's motion, and that he is a God!"

Thus pressed by the solicitations of both his children, and fearing the oath which he had taken, in an evil hour the misgiving father consented; and a proclamation was sent throughout all the provinces for the putting down of the Idol, and the suppression of the established Cupid-worship.

Notable, you may be sure, was the stir made in all places among the priests, and among the artificers in gold, in silver, or in marble; who made a gainful trade, either in serving at the altar or in the manufacture of the images no longer to be tolerated. The cry was clamorous as that at Ephesus, when a kindred Idol was in danger; for "great had been Cupid of the Lycians." Nevertheless the power of the Duke, backed by the power of his more popular children, prevailed; and the destruction of every vestige of the old religion was but as the work of one day throughout the country.

And now, as the Pagan chronicles of Lycia inform us, the displeasure of Cupid went out--the displeasure of a great God--flying through all the dukedom, and sowing evils. But upon the first movers of the profanation his angry hand lay heaviest, and there was imposed upon them a strange misery, that all might know that Cupid's revenge was mighty. With his arrows hotter than plagues, or than his own anger, did he fiercely right himself; nor could the prayers of a few concealed worshipers, nor the smoke arising from an altar here and there which had escaped the general overthrow, avert his wrath, or make him cease from vengeance, until he had made of the once flourishing country of Lycia a most wretched land. He sent no famines--he let loose no cruel wild beasts among them--inflictions, with one or other of which the rest of the Olympian deities are fabled to have visited the nations under their displeasure--but took a nearer course of his own, and his invisible arrows went to the moral heart of Lycia, infecting and filling court and country with desires of unlawful marriages, unheard-of and monstrous affections, prodigious and misbecoming unions.

The symptoms were first visible in the changed bosom of Hidaspes. This exemplary maiden--whose cold modesty, almost to a failing, had discouraged the addresses of so many princely suitors that had sought her hand in marriage--by the venom of this inward pestilence came on a sudden to cast eyes of affection upon a mean and deformed creature, Zoilus by name, who was a dwarf, and lived about the palace, the common jest of the courtiers. In her besotted eyes he was grown a goodly gentleman. And to her maidens, when any of them reproached him with the defect of his shape in her hearing, she would reply that, "to them, indeed, he might appear defective, and unlike a man, as, indeed, no man was like unto him, for in form and complexion he was beyond painting. He is like," she said, "to nothing that we have seen; yet he doth resemble Apollo, as I have fancied him, when, rising in the east, he bestirs himself, and shakes day-light from his hair." And, overcome with a passion which was heavier than she could bear, she confessed herself a wretched creature, and implored forgiveness of God Cupid, whom she had provoked, and, if possible, that he would grant it to her, that she might enjoy her love. Nay, she would court this piece of deformity to his face; and when the wretch, supposing it to be done in mockery, has said that he could wish himself more ill-shaped than he was, so it could contribute to make her Grace merry, she would reply, "Oh, think not that I jest! unless it be a jest not to esteem my life in comparison with thine--to hang a thousand kisses in an hour upon those lips--unless it be a jest to vow that I am willing to become your wife, and to take obedience upon me." And by his "own white hand," taking it in hers--so strong was the delusion--she besought him to swear to marry her.

The term had not yet expired of the seven days within which the doting Duke had sworn to fulfil her will, when, in pursuance of this frenzy, she presented herself before her father, leading in the dwarf by the hand, and, in the face of all the courtiers, solemnly demanding his hand in marriage. And when the apish creature made show of blushing at the unmerited honour, she, to comfort him, bade him not to be ashamed, for "in her eyes he was worth a kingdom."

And now, too late, did the fond father repent him of his dotage. But when by no importunity he could prevail upon her to desist from her suit, for his oath's sake he must needs consent to the marriage. But the ceremony was no sooner, to the derision of all present, performed, than, with the just feelings of an outraged parent, he commanded the head of the presumptuous bridegroom to be stricken off, and committed the distracted princess close prisoner to her chamber, where, after many deadly swoonings, with intermingled outcries upon the cruelty of her father, she, in no long time after, died, making ineffectual appeals, to the last, to the mercy of the offended Power--the Power that had laid its heavy hand upon her, to the bereavement of her good judgment first, and, finally, to the extinction of a life that might have proved a blessing to Lycia.

Leontius had scarcely time to be sensible of her danger before a fresh cause for mourning overtook him. His son Leucippus, who had hitherto been a pattern of strict life and modesty, was stricken with a second arrow from the Deity, offended for his overturned altars, in which the prince had been a chief instrument. The God caused his heart to fall away, and his crazed fancy to be smitten with the excelling beauty of a wicked widow, by name Bacha. This woman, in the first days of her mourning for her husband, by her dissembling tears and affected coyness had drawn Leucippus so cunningly into her snares, that, before she would grant him a return of love, she extorted from the easy-hearted prince a contract of marriage, to be fulfilled in the event of his father's death. This guilty intercourse, which they covered with the name of marriage, was not carried with such secrecy but that a rumor of it ran about the palace; and by some officious courtier was brought to the ears of the old Duke, who, to satisfy himself of the truth, came hastily to the house of Bacha, where he found his son courting. Taking the Prince to task roundly, he sternly asked who that creature was that had bewitched him out of his honor thus. Then Bacha, pretending ignorance of the Duke's person, haughtily demanded of Leucippus what saucy old man that was, that without leave had burst into the house of an afflicted widow to hinder her paying her tears (as she pretended) to the dead. Then the Duke declaring himself, and threatening her for having corrupted his son, giving her the reproachful terms of witch and sorceress, Leucippus mildly answered that he "did her wrong." The bad woman, imagining that the Prince for very fear would not betray their secret, now conceived a project of monstrous wickedness, which was no less than to insnare the father with the same arts which had subdued the son; that she might no longer be a concealed wife, nor a princess only under cover, but by a union with the old man become at once the true and acknowledged Duchess of Lycia. In a posture of humility she confessed her ignorance of the Duke's quality, but, now she knew it, she besought his pardon for her wild speeches, which proceeded, she said, from a distempered head, which the loss of her dear husband had affected. He might command her life, she told him, which was now of small value to her. The tears which had accompanied her words, and her mourning weeds (which, for a blind to the world, she had not yet cast off) heightening her beauty, gave a credence to her protestations of her innocence. But the duke continuing to assail her with reproaches, with a matchless confidence, assuming the air of injured virtue, in a somewhat lofty tone she replied, that, though he were her sovereign, to whom in any lawful cause she was bound to submit, yet, if he sought to take away her honor, she stood up to defy him. That, she said, was a jewel dearer than any he could give her, which so long as she should keep she should esteem herself richer than all the Princes of the earth that were without it. If the Prince, his son, knew any thing to her dishonor, let him tell it. And here she challenged Leucippus before his father to speak the worst of her. If he would, however, sacrifice a woman's character to please an unjust humor of the Duke's, she saw no remedy, she said, now he was dead (meaning her late husband) that with his life would have defended her reputation.

Thus appealed to, Leucippus, who had stood a while astonished at her confident falsehoods, though ignorant of the full drift of them, considering that not the reputation only, but probably the life of a woman whom he had so loved, and who had made such sacrifices to him of love and beauty, depended upon his absolute concealment of their contract, framed his mouth to a compassionate untruth, and with solemn asseverations confirmed to his father her assurances of her innocence. He denied not that with rich gifts he had assailed her virtue, but had found her relentless to his solicitations; that gold nor greatness had any power over her. Nay, so far he went on to give force to the protestations of this artful woman, that he confessed to having offered marriage to her, which she, who scorned to listen to any second wedlock, had rejected.

All this while Leucippus secretly prayed to Heaven to forgive him while he uttered these bold untruths, since it was for the prevention of a greater mischief only, and had no malice in it.

But, warned by the sad sequel which ensued, be thou careful, young reader, how in any case you tell a lie. Lie not, if any man but ask you, "How you do?" or "What o'clock it is?" Be sure you make no false excuse to screen a friend that is most dear to you. Never let the most well-intended falsehood escape your lips. For Heaven, which is entirely Truth, will make the seed which you have sown of Untruth to yield miseries a thousand-fold upon yours, as it did upon the head of the ill-fated and mistaken Leucippus.

Leontius, finding the assurances of Bacha so confidently seconded by his son, could no longer withhold his belief, and, only forbidding their meeting for the future, took a courteous leave of the lady, presenting her at the same time with a valuable ring, in recompense, as he said, of the injustice which he had done her in his false surmises of her guiltiness. In truth, the surpassing beauty of the lady, with her appearing modesty, had made no less impression upon the heart of the fond old Duke than they had awakened in the bosom of his more pardonable son. His first design was to make her his mistress; to the better accomplishing of which Leucippus was dismissed from the court, under the pretext of some honorable employment abroad. In his absence, Leontius spared no offers to induce her to comply with his purpose. Continually he solicited her with rich offers, with messages, and by personal visits. It was a ridiculous sight if it were not rather a sad one, to behold this second and worse dotage, which by Cupid's wrath had fallen upon this fantastical old new lover. All his occupation now was in dressing and pranking himself up in youthful attire to please the eyes of his new mistress. His mornings were employed in the devising of trim fashions, in the company of tailors, embroiderers, and feather-dressers. So infatuated was he with these vanities, that when a servant came and told him that his daughter was dead--even she, whom he had but lately so highly prized--the words seemed spoken to a deaf person. He either could not or would not understand them; but, like one senseless, fell to babbling about the shape of a new hose and doublet. His crutch, the faithful prop of long aged years, was discarded; and he resumed the youthful fashion of a sword by his side, when his years wanted strength to have drawn it. In this condition of folly it was no difficult task for the widow, by affected pretenses of honour and arts of amorous denial, to draw in this doting Duke to that which she had all along aimed at, the offer of his crown in marriage. She was now Duchess of Lycia! In her new elevation the mask was quickly thrown aside, and the impious Bacha appeared in her true qualities. She had never loved the Duke her husband, but had used him as the instrument of her greatness. Taking advantage of his amorous folly, which seemed to gain growth the nearer he approached to his grave, she took upon her the whole rule of Lycia; placing and displacing at her will all the great officers of state; and filling the court with creatures of her own, the agents of her guilty pleasures, she removed from the Duke's person the oldest and trustiest of his dependents.

Leucippus, who at this juncture was returned from his foreign mission, was met at once with the news of his sister's death and the strange wedlock of the old Duke. To the memory of Hidaspes he gave some tears. But these were swiftly swallowed up in his horror and detestation of the conduct of Bacha. In his first fury he resolved upon a full disclosure of all that had passed between him and his wicked step-mother. Again he thought, by killing Bacha, to rid the world of a monster. But tenderness for his father recalled him to milder counsels. The fatal secret, nevertheless, sat upon him like lead, while he was determined to confide it to no other. It took his sleep away, and his desire of food; and if a thought of mirth at any time crossed him the dreadful truth would recur to check it, as if a messenger should have come to whisper to him of some friend's death! With difficulty he was brought to wish their Highnesses faint joy of their marriage; and, at the first sight of Bacha, a friend was fain to hold his wrist hard to prevent him from fainting. In an interview which after, at her request, he had with her alone, the bad woman shamed not to take up the subject lightly; to treat as a trifle the marriage vow that had passed between them; and seeing him sad and silent, to threaten him with the displeasure of the Duke, his father, if by words or looks he gave any suspicion to the world of their dangerous secret. "What had happened," she said, "was by no fault of hers. People would have thought her mad if she had refused the Duke's offer. She had used no arts to entrap his father. It was Leucippus's own resolute denial of any such thing as a contract having passed between them which had led to the proposal."

The Prince, unable to extenuate his share of blame in the calamity, humbly besought her, that "since by his own great fault things had been brought to their present pass, she would only live honest for the future; and not abuse the credulous age of the old Duke, as he well knew she had the power to do. For himself, seeing that life was no longer desirable to him, if his death was judged by her to be indispensable to her security, she was welcome to lay what trains she pleased to compass it, so long as she would only suffer his father to go to his grave in peace, since he had never wronged her."

This temperate appeal was lost upon the heart of Bacha, who from that moment was secretly bent upon effecting the destruction of Leucippus. Her project was, by feeding the ears of the Duke with exaggerated praises of his son, to awaken a jealousy in the old man that she secretly preferred Leucippus. Next, by wilfully insinuating the great popularity of the Prince (which was no more indeed than the truth) among the Lycians, to instill subtle fears into the Duke that his son had laid plots for circumventing his life and throne. By these arts, she was working upon the weak mind of the Duke almost to distraction, when, at a meeting, concocted by herself between the Prince and his father, the latter taking Leucippus soundly to task for these alleged treasons, the Prince replied only by humbly drawing his sword, with the intention of laying it at his father's feet, and begging him, since he suspected him, to sheathe it in his own bosom, for of his life he had been long weary. Bacha entered at the crisis, and ere Leucippus could finish his submission, with loud outcries alarmed the courtiers, who, rushing into the presence, found the Prince, with sword in hand indeed, but with far other intentions than this bad woman imputed to him, plainly accusing him of having drawn it upon his father! Leucippus was quickly disarmed; and the old Duke, trembling between fear and age, committed him to close prison, from which, by Bacha's aims, he never should have come out alive but for the interference of the common people, who, loving their Prince, and equally detesting Bacha, in a simultaneous mutiny, arose and rescued him from the hands of the officers.

The court was now no longer a place of living for Leucippus, and, hastily thanking his countrymen for his deliverance, which in his heart he rather deprecated than welcomed, as one that wished for death, he took leave of all court hopes, and, abandoning the palace, betook himself to a life of penitence in solitudes.

Not so secretly did he select his place of penance, in a cave among lonely woods and fastnesses, but that his retreat was traced by Bacha; who, baffled in her purpose, raging like some she-wolf, dispatched an emissary of her own to destroy him privately.

There was residing at the court of Lycia at this time a young maiden, the daughter of Bacha by her first husband, who had hitherto been brought up in the obscurity of a poor country abode with an uncle, but whom Bacha now publicly owned, and had prevailed upon the easy Duke to adopt as successor to the throne in wrong of the true heir, his suspected son Leucippus.

This young creature, Urania by name, was as artless and harmless as her mother was crafty and wicked. To the unnatural Bacha she had been an object of neglect and aversion; and for the project of supplanting Leucippus only had she fetched her out of retirement. The bringing-up of Urania had been among country hinds and lasses; to tend her flocks or superintend her neat dairy had been the extent of her breeding. From her calling she had contracted a pretty rusticity of dialect, which, among the fine folks of the court, passed for simplicity and folly. She was the unfittest instrument for an ambitious design that could be chosen, for her manners in a palace had a tinge still of her old occupation, and to her mind the lowly shepherdess's life was best.

Simplicity is oft a match for prudence; and Urania was not so simple but she understood that she had been sent for to court only in the Prince's wrong, and in her heart she was determined to defeat any designs that might be contriving against her brother-in-law. The melancholy bearing of Leucippus had touched her with pity. This wrought in her a kind of love, which, for its object, had no further end than the well-being of the beloved. She looked for no return of it, nor did the possibility of such a blessing in the remotest way occur to her--so vast a distance she had imaged between her lowly bringing up and the courtly breeding and graces of Leucippus. Hers was no raging flame, such as had burned destructive in the bosom of poor Hidaspes. Either the vindictive God in mercy had spared this young maiden, or the wrath of the confounding Cupid was restrained by a Higher Power from discharging the most malignant of his arrows against the peace of so much innocence. Of the extent of her mother's malice she was too guileless to have entertained conjecture; but from hints and whispers, and, above all, from that tender watchfulness with which a true affection, like Urania's, tends the safety of its object--fearing even where no cause for fear subsists--she gathered that some danger was impending over the Prince, and with simple heroism resolved to countermine the treason.

It chanced upon a day that Leucippus had been indulging his sad meditations, in forests far from human converse, when he was struck with the appearance of a human being, so unusual in that solitude. There stood before him a seeming youth, of delicate appearance, clad in coarse and peasantly attire. "He was come," he said, "to seek out the Prince, and to be his poor boy and servant, if he would let him." "Alas! poor youth," replied Leucippus, "why do you follow me, who am as poor as you are?" "In good faith," was his pretty answer, "I shall be well and rich enough if you will but love me." And saying so, he wept. The Prince, admiring this strange attachment in a boy, was moved with compassion; and seeing him exhausted, as if with long travel and hunger, invited him into his poor habitation, setting such refreshments before him as that barren spot afforded. But by no entreaties could he be prevailed upon to take any sustenance; and all that day, and for the two following, he seemed supported only by some gentle flame of love that was within him. He fed only upon the sweet looks and courteous entertainment which he received from Leucippus. Seemingly he wished to die under the loving eyes of his master. "I can not eat," he prettily said, "but I shall eat to-morrow." "You will be dead by that time," said Leucippus. "I shall be well then," said he, "since you will not love me." Then the prince asked him why he sighed so: "To think," was his innocent reply, "that such a fine man as you should die, and no gay lady love him." "But you will love me," said Leucippus. "Yes, sure," said he, "till I die; and when I am in heaven I shall wish for you."--"This is a love," thought the other, "that I never yet heard tell of: but come, thou art sleepy, child; go in, and I will sit with thee." Then, from some words which the poor youth dropped, Leucippus, suspecting that his wits were beginning to ramble, said, "What portends this?"--"I am not sleepy," said the youth, "but you are sad. I would that I could do anything to make you merry. Shall I sing?" But soon, as if recovering strength, "There is one approaching," he wildly cried out. "Master, look to yourself--"

His words were true; for now entered, with provided weapon, the wicked emissary of Bacha that we told of; and, directing a mortal thrust at the Prince, the supposed boy, with a last effort, interposing his weak body, received it in his bosom, thanking the Heavens in death that he had saved "so good a master."

Leucippus, having slain the villain, was at leisure to discover, in the features of his poor servant, the countenance of his devoted sister-in-law! Through solitary and dangerous ways she had sought him in that disguise; and, finding him, seems to have resolved upon a voluntary death by fasting: partly, that she might die in the presence of her beloved; and partly, that she might make known to him in death the love which she wanted boldness to disclose to him while living; but chiefly, because she knew that by her demise all obstacles would be removed that stood between her Prince and his succession to the throne of Lycia.

Leucippus had hardly time to comprehend the strength of love in his Urania when a trampling of horses resounded through his solitude. It was a party of Lycian horsemen, that had come to seek him, dragging the detested Bacha in their train, who was now to receive the full penalty of her misdeeds. Amidst her frantic fury upon the missing of her daughter the old Duke had suddenly died, not without suspicion of her having administered poison to him. Her punishment was submitted to Leucippus, who was now, with joyful acclaims, saluted as the rightful Duke of Lycia. He, as no way moved with his great wrongs, but considering her simply as the parent of Urania, saluting her only by the title of "Wicked Mother," bade her to live. "That Reverend title," he said, and pointed to the bleeding remains of her child, "must be her pardon. He would use no extremity against her, but leave her to Heaven." The hardened mother, not at all relenting at the sad spectacle that lay before her, but making show of dutiful submission to the young Duke, and with bended knees, approaching him, suddenly, with a dagger, inflicted a mortal stab upon him; and, with a second stroke stabbing herself, ended both their wretched lives.

Now was the tragedy of Cupid's wrath awfully completed; and, the race of Leontius failing in the deaths of both his children, the chronicle relates that, under their new Duke, Ismenus, the offense to the angry Power was expiated; his statues and altars were, with more magnificence than ever, re-edified; and he ceased thenceforth from plaguing the land.

Thus far the Pagan historians relate erring. But from this vain Idol story a not unprofitable moral may be gathered against the abuse of the natural, but dangerous, passion of love. In the story of Hidaspes we see the preposterous linking of beauty with deformity; of princely expectancies with mean and low conditions, in the case of the Prince, her brother; and of decrepit age with youth in the ill end of their doting father, Leontius. By their examples we are warned to decline all unequal and ill-assorted unions.

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