Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

Four o’clock strikes. The company are all but gone, and the musicians “put up” with their absence. A few “_figures_,” however, remain, that have never been danced, and the hostess, who is all urbanity and turbanity, kindly hopes that they will stand up for “one set more.” The six figures jump at the offer; they “wake the Harp,” get the fiddlers into a fresh scrape, and “the Lancers” are put through their exercise. This may be called the Dance of Death, for it ends every thing. The band is disbanded, and the Ball takes the form of a family circle. It is long past the time when church-yards yawn, but the mouth of Mamma opens to a bore, that gives hopes of the Thames Tunnel. Papa, to whom the Ball has been anything but a force-meat one, seizes eagerly upon the first eatables he can catch, and with his mouth open and his eyes shut, declares, in the spirit of an “Examiner” into such things, that a “Party is the madness of many for the gain of a few.” The son, heartily tired of a suit of broad cloth cut narrow, assents to the proposition, and having no further use for his curled head, lays it quietly on the shelf. The daughter droops; art has had her Almack’s, and nature establishes a Free and Easy. Grace throws herself, skow-wow any-how, on an ottoman, and Good Breeding crosses her legs. Roses begin to relax, and Curls to unbend themselves; the very Candles seem released from the restraints of gentility, and getting low, some begin to smoke, while others indulge in a gutter. Muscles and sinews feel equally let loose, and by way of a joke, the cramp ties a double-knot in Clarinda’s calf.

Clarinda screams. To this appeal the maternal heart is more awake than the maternal eyes, and the maternal hand begins hastily to bestow its friction, not on the leg of suffering, but on the leg of the sofa. In the mean time, paternal hunger gets satisfied; he eats slower, and sleeps faster, subsiding, like a gorged Boa Constrictor, into torpidity; and in this state, grasping an extinguished candle, he lights himself up to bed. Clarinda follows, stumbling through her steps in a doze-à-doze; the brother is next, and Mamma having seen with half an eye, or something less, that all is safe, winds up the procession.

Every Ball, however, has its rebound, and so has this in their dreams--with the mother who has a daughter, as a Golden Ball; with the daughter, who has a lover, as an eye-ball; with his son, who has a rival, as a pistol-ball; but with the father, who has no dreams at all, as nothing but the blacking-ball of oblivion.

LITERARY AND LITERAL.

THE March of Mind upon its mighty stilts,
(A spirit by no means to fasten mocks on,)
In travelling through Berks, Beds, Notts, and Wilts,
Hants--Bucks, Herts, Oxon,
Got up a thing our ancestors ne’er thought on,
A thing that, only in our proper youth,
We should have chuckled at--in sober truth,
A Conversazione at Hog’s Norton!

A place whose native dialect, somehow,
Has always by an adage been affronted,
And that it is all _gutturals_, is now
Taken for grunted.

Conceive the snoring of a greedy swine,
The slobbering of a hungry Ursine Sloth--
If you have ever heard such creature dine--
And--for Hog’s Norton, make a mix of both!--

O shades of Shakspeare! Chaucer! Spenser!
Milton! Pope! Gray! Warton!
O Colman! Kenny! Planche! Poole! Peake!
Pocock! Reynolds! Morton!
O Grey! Peel! Sadler! Wilberforce! Burdett!
Hume! Wilmot Horton!
Think of your prose and verse, and worse--delivered in Hog’s
Norton!--

The founder of Hog’s Norton Athenæum
Framed her society
With some variety
From Mr. Roscoe’s Liverpool museum;
Not a mere pic-nic, for the mind’s repast,
But tempting to the solid knife-and-forker,
It held its sessions in the house that last
Had killed a porker.

It chanced one Friday,
One Farmer Grayley stuck a very big hog,
A perfect Gog or Magog of a pig-hog,
Which made of course a literary high day,--
Not that our Farmer was a man to go
With literary tastes--so far from suiting ’em,
When he heard mention of Professor _Crowe_,
Or Lalla-_Rookh_, he always was for shooting ’em!
In fact in letters he was quite a log,
With him great Bacon
Was literally taken.

And Hogg--the Poet--nothing but a Hog!
As to all others on the list of Fame,
Although they were discuss’d and mention’d daily,
He only recognised one classic name,
And thought that _she_ had hung herself--_Miss Baillie_!

To balance this, our Farmer’s only daughter
Had a great taste for the Castalian water--
A Wordsworth worshipper--a Southey wooer,--
(Though men that deal in water-colour cakes
May disbelieve the fact--yet nothing’s truer)
She got the _bluer_
The more she dipped and dabbled in the _Lakes_.
The secret truth is, Hope, the old deceiver,
At future Authorship was apt to hint,
Producing what some call the _Type-us_ Fever,
Which means a burning to be seen in print.

Of learning’s laurels--Miss Joanna Baillie--
Of Mrs. Hemans--Mrs. Wilson--daily
Dreamt Anne Priscilla Isabella Grayley;
And Fancy hinting that she had the better
Of L.E.L. by one initial letter,
She thought the world would quite enraptur’d see

“LOVE LAYS AND LYRICS
BY
A P I G.”

Accordingly, with very great propriety,
She joined the H. N. B. and double S.,
That is,--Hog’s Norton Blue Stocking Society;
And saving when her Pa his pigs prohibited,
Contributed
Her pork and poetry towards the mess.

This feast, we said, one Friday was the case
When farmer Grayley--from Macbeth to quote--
Screwing his courage to the “sticking place,”
Stuck a large knife into a grunter’s throat;--
A kind of murder that the law’s rebuke
Seldom condemns by shake of its peruke,
Showing the little sympathy of _big-wigs_
With _pig-wigs_!

The swine--poor wretch!--with nobody to speak for it,
And beg its life, resolved to have a squeak for it;
So--like the fabled swan--died singing out,
And, thus, there issued from the farmer’s yard
A note that notified without a card,
An invitation to the evening rout.

And when the time came duly,--“At the close of
The day,” as Beattie has it, “when the ham--”
Bacon and pork were ready to dispose of,
And pettitoes and chit’lings too, to cram,--

Walked in the H. N. B. and double S.’s,
All in appropriate and swinish dresses,
For lo! it is a fact, and not a joke,
Although the Muse might fairly jest upon it,
They came--each “Pig-faced Lady,” in that bonnet
We call _a poke_.

The Members all assembled thus, a rare woman
At pork and poetry was chosen _chairwoman_;--
In fact, the bluest of the Blues, Miss Ikey,
Whose whole pronunciation was so piggy,
She always named the authoress of “_Psyche_”--
As Mrs. _Tiggey_!

And now arose a question of some moment,--
What author for a lecture was the richer,
Bacon or Hogg? there were no votes for Beaumont,
But some for _Flitcher_;
While others, with a more sagacious reasoning,
Proposed another work,
And thought their pork
Would prove more relishing from Thomson’s Season-ing!

But, practised in Shakspearian readings daily--
O! Miss Macaulay! Shakspeare at Hog’s Norton!--
Miss Anne Priscilla Isabella Grayley
Selected _him_ that evening to snort on.
In short, to make our story not a big tale,
Just fancy her exerting
Her talents, and converting
The Winter’s Tale to something like a pig-tale!
Her sister auditory
All sitting round, with grave and learned faces,
Were very plauditory,
Of course, and clapped her at the proper places;
Till fanned at once by fortune and the Muse,
She thought herself the blessedest of Blues.
But Happiness, alas! has blights of ill,
And Pleasure’s bubbles in the air explode;--
There is no travelling through life but still
The heart will meet with breakers on the road!

With that peculiar voice
Heard only from Hog’s Norton throats and noses,
Miss G., with Perdita, was making choice
Of buds and blossoms for her summer posies,
When coming to that line, where Proserpine
Lets fall her flowers from the wain of Dis;
Imagine this--
Uprose on his hind legs old Farmer Grayley,
Grunting this question for the club’s digestion,
“Do _Dis’s Waggon_ go from the Ould Bäaley?”

THE ACCIDENT.

“We thought she never would ride it out, and expected her every
moment to go to pieces.”--NAVAL SKETCH BOOK.

“THERE you go, you villain--that’s the way to run over people! There’s a little boy in the road--you’d better run over _him_, for you won’t call out to him, no, not you, for a brute as you are! You think poor people an’t common Christians,--you grind the faces of the poor, you do. Ay, cut away, do--you’ll be Wilful Murdered by the Crowner some day! I’ll keep up with you and tell the gentlemen on the top! Women wasn’t created for you to gallop over like dirt, and scrunch their bones into compound fractions.--Don’t get into his coach, Ma’am! he’s no respect for the sects--he’ll lay you up in the hospital for months and months, he will, the inhuman hard-hearted varmin!”

The speaker, a little active old woman, had run parallel with the coach some fifty yards, when it stopped to take up a lady who was as prompt as ladies generally are, in giving dinner instructions to the cook, and setting domestic lessons to the housemaid, besides having to pack a parcel, to hunt for her clogs, to exchange the cook’s umbrella for her own, and to kiss all her seven children. Mat, thus reduced to a door-mat, was unable to escape the volley which the Virago still poured in upon him; but he kept a most imperturbable face and silence till he was fairly seated again on the box.

“There, gentlemen,” said he, pointing at the assailant with his whip; “that’s what I call gratitude. Look at her figure now, and look at what it was six months ago. She never had a waist till I run over her.”

“I hope, friend, thee art not very apt to make these experiments on the human figure,” said an elderly Quaker on the roof. “Not by no means,” answered Mat; “I have done very little in the accidental line--nothing worth mentioning. All the years I’ve been on the road, I’ve never come to a kill on the spot; them sort o’things belongs to Burrowes, as drives over one with the Friend in Need, and he’s got quite a name for it. He’s called ‘Fatal Jack.’ To be sure, now I think of it, I was the innocent cause of death to one person, and she was rather out of the common.” “You fractured her limbs, p’r’aps?” inquired one of the outsides. “No such thing,” said Mat, “there was nothing fractious in the case; as to running over her limbs, it was the impossible thing with a woman born without legs and arms.” “You must allude to Miss Biffin,” said the outsider--“the Norfolk phenomenon.”

“Begging your pardon,” said Mat, “it was before the Phenomenon was started. It was one of the regular old long-bodied double-coaches, and I drove it myself. Very uneasy they were; for springs at that time hadn’t much spring in ’em; and nobody on earth had thought of Macadaming Piccadilly. You could always tell whether you were on the stones, or off, and no mistake. I was a full hour behind time--for coaches in them days wasn’t called by such names as Chronometers and Regulators, and good reason why. So I’d been plying a full hour after time, without a soul inside, except a barrel of natives for a customer down the road: at last, a hackney-coach pulls up, and Jarvey and the waterman lifts Miss Biffin into my drag. Well, off I sets with a light load enough, and to fetch up time astonished my team into a bit of a gallop--and it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to keep one’s seat on the box, the coach jumped so over the stones. Well, away I goes, springing my rattle till I come to the gate at Hyde Park Corner, where one of my insides was waiting for me--and not very sorry to pull up, for the breath was almost shook out of my bellows. Well, I opens the door, and what do I see lying together at the bottom of the coach, but Miss Biffin bruised unsensible, and the head out of the barrel of oysters!”

“I do hope, friend,” said the elderly Quaker, “that thou didst replace them on their seats.”

“To be sure I did,” answered Mat, “and the oysters took it quietly enough, without opening their mouths; but it didn’t go quite so smooth with Miss B. She talked of an action for damages, and consulted counsel; but, Lord bless you, when it came to taking steps agin us, she hadn’t a leg to stand upon!”

SONNET.

TO LORD WHARNCLIFFE, ON HIS GAME-BILL.

I’m fond of partridges, I’m fond of snipes,
I’m fond of black cocks, for they’re very good cocks--
I’m fond of wild ducks, and I’m fond of woodcocks--
And grouse that set up such strange moorish pipes.
I’m fond of pheasants with their splendid stripes--
I’m fond of hares, whether from Whig or Tory--
I’m fond of capercailzies in their glory,--
Teal, widgeons, plovers, birds in all their types:
All these are in your care, Law-giving Peer,
And when you next address your Lordly Babel,
Some clause put in your Bill, precise and clear,
With due and fit provision to enable
A man that holds all kinds of game so dear
To keep, like Crockford, a good Gaming Table.

LITERARY REMINISCENCES.

No. I.

TIME was, I sat upon a lofty stool,
At lofty desk, and with a clerkly pen
Began each morning, at the stroke of ten,
To write in Bell and Co.’s commercial school;
In Warnford Court, a shady nook and cool,
The favourite retreat of merchant men;
Yet would my quill turn vagrant even then,
And take stray dips in the Castalian pool.
Now double entry--now a flowery trope--
Mingling poetic honey with trade wax--
Blogg, Brothers--Milton--Grote and Prescott--Pope--
Bristles--and Hogg--Glyn Mills and Halifax--
Rogers--and Towgood--Hemp--the Bard of Hope--
Barilla--Byron--Tallow--Burns--and Flax!

MY commercial career was a brief one, and deserved only a sonnet in commemoration. The fault, however, lay not with the muses. To commit poetry indeed is a crime ranking next to forgery in the counting-house code; and an Ode or a song dated Copthall Court, would be as certainly noted and protested as a dishonoured bill. I have even heard of an unfortunate clerk, who lost his situation through being tempted by the jingle to subscribe under an account current

“Excepted all errors
Made by John Ferrers,”

his employer emphatically declaring that Poetry and Logwood could never coexist in the same head. The principal of _our_ firm on the contrary had a turn for the Belles Lettres, and would have winked with both eyes at verses which did not intrude into an invoice or confuse their figures with those of the Ledger. The true cause of my retirement from Commercial affairs was more prosaic. My constitution, though far from venerable, had begun to show symptoms of decay: my appetite failed, and its principal creditor, the stomach, received only an ounce in the pound. My spirits daily became a shade lower--my flesh was held less and less firmly--in short, in the language of the price current, it was expected that I must “submit to a decline.” The Doctors who were called in, declared imperatively that a mercantile life would be the death of me--that by so much sitting, I was hatching a whole brood of complaints, and that no Physician would insure me as a merchantman from the Port of London to the next Spring. The Exchange, they said, was against me, and as the Exchange itself used to ring with “Life let us Cherish,” there was no resisting the advice. I was ordered to abstain from Ashes, Bristles, and Petersburg yellow candle, and to indulge in a more generous diet--to take regular country exercise instead of the Russia Walk, and to go to bed early even on Foreign Post nights. Above all I was recommended change of air, and in particular the bracing breezes of the North. Accordingly I was soon shipped as per advice, in a Scotch Smack, which “_smacked_ through the breeze,” as Dibdin sings so merrily, that on the fourth morning we were in sight of the prominent old Steeple of “Bonny Dundee.”

My Biographer, in the Book of Gems, alludes to this voyage, and infers from some verses--“Gadzooks! must one swear to the truth of a song?”--that it sickened me of the sea. Nothing can be more unfounded. The marine terrors and disagreeables enumerated in the poem, belong to a Miss Oliver, and not to me, who regard the ocean with a natural and national partiality. Constitutionally proof against that nausea which extorts so many wave-offerings from the afflicted, I am as constant as Captain Basil Hall himself, in my regard “for the element that never tires.” Some washy fellows, it is true, _Fresh_-men from Cambridge and the like, affect to prefer river or even pond water for their aquatics--the tame ripple to the wild wave, the prose to “the poetry of motion.” But give _me_ “the multitudinous sea,” resting or rampant, with all its variable moods and changeable colouring. Methought, when pining under the _maladie du pays_, on a hopeless, sick bed, inland, in Germany, it would have relieved those yearnings but to look across an element so instinct with English associations, that it would seem rather to unite me to than sever me from my native island. And, truly, when I did at last stand on the brink of the dark blue sea, my home-sick wishes seemed already half fulfilled, and it was not till many months afterwards that I actually crossed the Channel. But I am, besides, personally under deep obligations to the great deep. Twice, indeed, in a calm, and in a storm, has my life been threatened with a salt-water catastrophe; but that quarrel has long been made up, and forgiven, in gratitude for the blessing and bracing influence of the breezes that smack of the ocean brine. Dislike the sea!--With what delight aforetime used I to swim in it, to dive in it, to sail on it! Ask honest Tom Woodgate, of Hastings, who made of me, for a landsman, a tolerable boatsman. Even now, when do I feel so easy in body, and so cheerful in spirit, as when walking hard by the surge, listening, as if expecting some whisperings of friendly but distant voices, in its eternal murmuring. Sick of the sea! If ever I have a water-drinking fancy, it is a wish that the ocean brine had been sweet, or sour instead of salt, so as to be potable; for what can be more tempting _to the eye_ as a draught, than the pure fluid, almost invisible with clearness, as it lies in some sandy scoop, or rocky hollow, a true “Diamond of the Desert,” to say nothing of the same living liquid in its effervescing state, when it sparkles up, hissing and bubbling in the ship’s wake--the very Champaigne of water! Above all what intellectual solar and soothing syrup have I not derived from the mere contemplation of the boundless main,--the most effectual and innocent of mental sedatives, and often called in aid of that practical philosophy it has been my wont to recommend in the present work. For whenever, owing to physical depression, or a discordant state of the nerves, my personal vexations and cares, real or imaginary, become importunate in my thoughts, and acquire, by morbid exaggeration, an undue prominence and importance, what remedy then so infallible as to mount to my solitary seat in the look-out, and thence gaze awhile across the broad expanse, till in the presence of that vast horizon, my proper troubles shrink to their true proportions, and I look on the whole race of men, with their insignificant pursuits, as so many shrimpers! But this is a digression--We have made the harbour of Dundee, and it is time to step ashore in “stout and original Scotland,” as it is called by Doctor Adolphus Wagner, in his German edition of Burns[2].

Like other shipments, I had been regularly addressed to the care of a consignee:--but the latter, not anxious, probably, to take charge of a hobbledehoy, yet at the same time unwilling to incur the reproach of having a relative in the same town and not under the same roof, peremptorily declined the office. Nay, more, she pronounced against me a capital sentence, so far as returning to the place from whence I came, and even proceeded to bespeak my passage and reship my luggage. Judging from such vigorous measures the temper of my customer, instead of remonstrating, I affected resignation, and went with a grave face through the farce of a formal leave-taking; I even went on board, but it was in company with a stout fellow who relanded my baggage; and thus, whilst my transporter imagined, good easy soul! that the rejected article was sailing round St. Abb’s Head, or rolling off the Bass, he was actually safe and snug in Dundee, quietly laughing in his sleeve with the Law at his back. I have a confused recollection of meeting, some three or four days afterwards, a female cousin on her road to school, who at sight of me turned suddenly round, and galloped off towards home with the speed of a scared heifer.

My first concern was now to look out for some comfortable roof, under which “for a consideration” one would be treated as one of the family. I entered accordingly into a treaty with a respectable widower, who had no sons of his own, but in spite of the most undeniable references, and a general accordance as to terms, there occurred a mysterious hitch in the arrangement, arising from a whimsical prepossession which only came afterwards to my knowledge--namely, that an English laddie, instead of supping parritch, would inevitably require a rump-steak to his breakfeast! My next essay was more successful; and ended in my being regularly installed in a boarding-house, kept by a Scotchwoman, who was not so sure of my being a beefeater. She was a sort of widow, with a seafaring husband “as good as dead,” and in her appearance not unlike a personification of _rouge et noir_, with her red eyes, her red face, her yellow teeth, and her black velvet cap. The first day of my term happened to be also the first day of the new year, and on stepping from my bed-room, I encountered our Hostess--like a witch and her familiar spirit--with a huge bottle of whiskey in one hand, and a glass in the other. It was impossible to decline the dram she pressed upon me, and very good it proved, and undoubtedly strong, seeing that for some time I could only muse its praise in expressive silence, and indeed, I was only able to speak with “a _small still_ voice” for several minutes afterwards. Such was my characteristic introduction to the Land of Cakes, where I was destined to spend the greater part of two years, under circumstances likely to materially influence the colouring and filling up of my future life.

To properly estimate the dangers of my position, imagine a boy of fifteen, at the Nore, as it were, of life, thus left dependent on his own pilotage for a safe voyage to the Isle of Man; or conceive a juvenile Telemachus, without a Mentor, brought suddenly into the perilous neighbourhood of Calypso and her enchantments. It will hardly be expected, that from some half-dozen of young bachelors, there came forth any solemn voice didactically warning me in the strain of the sage Imlac to the Prince of Abyssinia. In fact, I recollect receiving but one solitary serious admonition, and that was from a she cousin of ten years old, that the Spectator I was reading on a Sunday morning, “was no the Bible.” For there was still much of this pious rigour extant in Scotland, though a gentleman was no longer committed to Tolboothia Infelix, for an unseasonable promenade during church time. It was once, however, my fortune to witness a sample of the _ancien régime_ at an evening party composed chiefly of young and rather fashionable persons, when lo! like an Anachronism confounding times past with times present, there came out of some corner an antique figure, with quaintly cut blue suit and three-cornered hat, not unlike a very old Greenwich Pensioner, who taking his stand in front of the circle, deliberately asked a blessing of formidable length on the thin bread and butter, the short cake, the marmalade, and the Pekoe tea. And here, _en passant_, it may be worth while to remark, for the benefit of our Agnews and Plumtres, as illustrating the intrinsic value of such sanctimonious pretension, that the elder Scotland, so renowned for armlong graces, and redundant preachments, and abundant psalm-singing, has yet bequeathed to posterity a singularly liberal collection of songs, the reverie of Divine and Moral, such as “can only be sung when the punch-bowl has done its work and the wild wit is set free[3].”

To return to my boarding-house, which with all its chairs, had none appropriated to a Professor of Moral Philosophy. In the absence of such a monitor, nature, fortunately for myself, had gifted me with a taste for reading, which the languor of ill-health, inclining me to sedentary habits, helped materially to encourage. Whatever books, good, bad, or indifferent, happened to come within my reach, were perused with the greatest avidity, and however indiscriminate the course, the balance of the impressions thence derived was decidedly in favour of the allegorical lady, so wisely preferred by Hercules when he had to make his election between Virtue and Vice. Of the material that ministered to this appetite, I shall always regret that I did not secure, as a literary curiosity--a collection of halfpenny Ballads, the property of a Grocer’s apprentice, and which contained, amongst other matters, a new version of Chevy Chase, wherein the victory was transferred to the Scots. In the mean time, this bookishness acquired for me a sort of reputation for scholarship amongst my comrades, and in consequence my pen was sometimes called into requisition, in divers and sometimes delicate cases. Thus for one party, whom the Gods had not made poetical, I composed a love-letter in verse; for another, whose education had been neglected, I carried on a correspondence with reference to a tobacco manufactory in which he was a sleeping partner; whilst, on a graver occasion, the hand now peacefully setting down these reminiscences, was employed in penning a most horrible peremptory invitation to pistols and twelve paces, till one was nicked. The facts were briefly these. A spicy-tempered captain of Artillery, in a dispute with a superior officer, had rashly cashiered himself by either throwing up or tearing up his commission. In this dilemma he arrived at Dundee, to assume a post in the Customs, which had been procured for him by the interest of his friends. To his infinite indignation, however, he found that instead of a lucrative surveyorship, he had been appointed a simple tide-waiter! and magnificent was the rage with which he tore, trampled, and danced on the little official paper book wherein he had been set to tick off, bale by bale, a cargo of “infernal hemp.” Unluckily, on the very day of this revelation, a forgery was perpetrated on the local Bank, and those sapient Dogberries, the town officers, saw fit to take up our persecuted ex-captain, on the simple ground that he was the last stranger who had entered the town. Rendered almost frantic by this second insult, nothing would serve him in his paroxysm but calling somebody out, and he pitched at once on the cashier of the defrauded Bank. As the state of his nerves would not permit him to write, he entreated me earnestly to draw up a defiance, which I performed, at the expense of an agony of suppressed laughter, merely to imagine the effect of such a missive on the man of business--a respectable powdered, bald, pudgy, pacific little body, with no more idea of “going out” than a cow in a field of clover. I forget the precise result--but certainly there was no duel.

[2] The Baron Dupotet de Sennevoy and Doctor Elliotson, will
doubtless be glad to be informed, that the inspired Scottish
Poet was a believer in their magnetismal mysteries--at least in
the article of reading a book behind the back. In a letter to
Mr. Robert Ainslie, is the following passage in proof. “I have
no doubt but scholarcraft may be caught, as a Scotchman catches
the itch--by friction. How else can you account for it that born
blockheads, by mere dint of _handling_ books, grow so wise that
even they themselves are equally convinced of and surprised at
their own parts? I once carried that philosophy to that degree,
that in a knot of country folks, who had a library amongst them,
and who, to the honour of their good sense, made me factotum
in the business; one of our members, a little wiselook, squat,
upright, jabbering body of a tailor, I advised him instead of
turning over the leaves, _to bind the book on his back_. Johnnie
took the hint, and as our meetings were every fourth Saturday,
and Pricklouse having a good Scots mile to walk in coming, and
of course another in returning, Bodkin was sure to lay his hand
on some heavy quarto or ponderous folio; with and under which,
wrapt up in his gray plaid, he grew wise as he grew weary all
the way home. He carried this so far, that an old musty Hebrew
Concordance, which we had in a present from a neighbouring
priest, _by mere dint of applying it as doctors do a blistering
plaster, between his shoulders_, Stitch, in a dozen pilgrimages,
acquired as much rational theology as the said priest had done by
forty years’ perusal of its pages.”

[3] A. Cunningham.

ODE TO PERRY,

THE INVENTOR OF THE PATENT PERRYAN PEN.

“In this good work, Penn appears the greatest, usefullest of God’s
instruments. Firm and unbending when the exigency requires it--soft
and yielding when rigid inflexibility is not a desideratum, fluent
and flowing, at need, for eloquent rapidity--slow and retentive
in cases of deliberation--never spluttering or by amplification
going wide of the mark--never splitting, if it can be helped, with
any one, but ready to wear itself out rather in their service--all
things as it were with all men, ready to embrace the hand of Jew,
Christian or Mahometan,--heavy with the German, light with the
Italian, oblique with the English, upright with the Roman, backward
in coming forward with the Hebrew,--in short, for flexibility,
amiability, constitutional durability, general ability, and
universal utility, it would be hard to find a parallel to the great
Penn.”

PERRY’S CHARACTERISTICS OF A SETTLER.

I.

O! Patent, Pen-inventing Perrian Perry!
Friend of the Goose and Gander,
That now unplucked of their quill-feathers wander,
Cackling, and gabbling, dabbling, making merry,
About the happy Fen,
Untroubled for one penny-worth of pen,
For which they chant thy praise all Britain through,
From Goose-Green unto Gander-Cleugh!--

II.

Friend to all Author-kind--
Whether of Poet or of Proser,--
Thou art composer unto the composer
Of pens,--yea, patent vehicles for Mind
To carry it on jaunts, or more extensive
_Perry_grinations through the realms of Thought;
Each plying from the Comic to the Pensive,
An Omnibus of intellectual sort!

III.

Modern Improvements in their course we feel;
And while to iron-railroads heavy wares,
Dry goods, and human bodies, pay their fares,
Mind flies on steel,
To Penrith, Penrhyn, even to Penzance.
Nay, penetrates, perchance,
To Pennsylvania, or without rash vaunts,
To where the Penguin haunts!

IV.

In times bygone, when each man cut his quill
With little Perryan skill,
What horrid, awkward, bungling tools of trade
Appear’d the writing implements home-made!
What Pens were sliced, hew’d, hack’d, and haggled out,
Slit or unslit, with many a various snout,
Aquiline, Roman, crooked, square, and snubby,
Stumpy and stubby;
Some capable of ladye-billets neat,
Some only fit for Ledger-keeping Clerk,
And some to grub down Peter Stubbs his mark,
Or smudge through some illegible receipt;
Others in florid caligraphic plans,
Equal to Ships, and wiggy Heads, and Swans!

V.

To try in any common inkstands, then,
With all their miscellaneous stocks,
To find a decent pen,
Was like a dip into a lucky box:
You drew,--and got one very curly,
And split like endive in some hurly-burly;
The next, unslit, and square at end, a spade;
The third, incipient pop-gun, not yet made;
The fourth a broom; the fifth of no avail,
Turn’d upwards, like a rabbit’s tail;
And last, not least, by way of a relief,
A stump that Master Richard, James, or John,
Had tried his candle-cookery upon,
Making “roast-beef!”

VI.

Not so thy Perryan Pens!
True to their M’s and N’s,
They do not with a whizzing zig-zag split,
Straddle, turn up their noses, sulk, and spit,
Or drop large dots,
Huge fullstop blots,
Where even semicolons were unfit.
They will not frizzle up, or, broom-like, drudge
In sable sludge--
Nay, bought at proper “Patent Perryan” shops,
They write good grammar, sense, and mind their stops;
Compose both prose and verse, the sad or merry--
For when the Editor, whose pains compile
The grown-up Annual, or the Juvenile,
Vaunteth his articles, not women’s, men’s,
But lays “by the most celebrated Pens,”
What means he but thy Patent Pens, my Perry?

VII.

Pleasant they are to feel!
So firm! so flexible! composed of steel
So finely temper’d--fit for tenderest Miss
To give her passion breath,
Or Kings to sign the warrant stern of death--
But their supremest merit still is this,
Write with them all your days,
Tragedy, Comedy, all kinds of plays--
(No Dramatist should ever be without ’em)--
And, just conceive the bliss,--
There is so little of the goose aboot ’em,
One’s safe from any hiss!

VIII.

Ah! who can paint that first great awful night,
Big with a blessing or a blight,
When the poor Dramatist, all fume and fret,
Fuss, fidget, fancy, fever, funking, fright,
Ferment, fault-fearing, faintness--more f’s yet:
Flushed, frigid, flurried, flinching, fitful, flat,--
Add famished, fuddled, and fatigued, to that;
Funeral, fate-foreboding--sits in doubt,
Or rather doubt with hope, a wretched marriage,
To see his Play upon the stage come out;
No stage to him! it is Thalia’s carriage,
And he is sitting on the spikes behind it,
Striving to look as if he didn’t mind it!

IX.

Witness how Beazley vents upon his hat
His nervousness, meanwhile his fate is dealt:
He kneads, moulds, pummels it, and sits it flat,
Squeezes and twists it up, until the felt
That went a Beaver in, comes out a Rat!
Miss Mitford had mis-givings, and in fright,
Upon Rienzi’s night,
Gnaw’d up one long kid glove, and all her bag,
Quite to a rag.
Knowles has confess’d he trembled as for life
Afraid of his own “Wife;”
Poole told me that he felt a monstrous pail
Of water backing him, all down his spine,--
“The ice-brook’s temper”--pleasant to the chine!
For fear that Simpson and his Co. should fail.
Did Lord Glengall not frame a mental pray’r,
Wishing devoutly he was Lord knows where?
Nay, did not Jerrold, in enormous drouth,
While doubtful of Nell Gwynne’s eventful luck,
Squeeze out and suck
More oranges with his one fevered mouth,
Than Nelly had to hawk from North to South?
Yea, Buckstone, changing colour like a mullet,
Refused, on an occasion, once, twice, thrice,
From his best friend, an ice,
Lest it should hiss in his own red-hot gullet.

X.

Doth punning Peake not sit upon the points
Of his own jokes, and shake in all his joints,
During their trial?
’Tis past denial.
And does not Pocock, feeling, like a peacock,
All eyes upon him, turn to very meacock?
And does not Planché, tremulous and blank,
Meanwhile his personages tread the boards,
Seem goaded by sharp swords,
And call’d upon himself to “walk the plank?”
As for the Dances, Charles and George to boot,
What have they more
Of ease and rest, for sole of either foot,
Than bear that capers on a hotted floor?

XI.

Thus pending--does not Mathews, at sad shift
For voice, croak like a frog in waters fenny?--
Serle seem upon the surly seas adrift?--
And Kenny think he’s going to Kilkenny?--
Haynes Bayly feel Old ditto, with the note
Of Cotton in his ear, a mortal grapple
About his arms, and Adam’s apples
Big as a fine Dutch codling in his throat?
Did Rodwell, on his chimney-piece, desire
Or not to take a jump into the fire?
Did Wade feel as composed as music can?
And was not Bernard his own Nervous Man?
Lastly, don’t Farley, a bewildered elf,
Quake at the Pantomime he loves to cater,
And ere its changes ring, transform himself?--
A frightful mug of human delf?
A spirit-bottle--empty of “the cratur”?
A leaden-platter ready for the shelf?
A thunderstruck dumb-waiter?

XII.

To clench the fact,
Myself once guilty, of one small rash act,
Committed at the Surrey
Quite in a hurry,
Felt all this flurry,
Corporal worry,
And spiritual scurry,
Dram-devil--attic curry!
All going well
From prompter’s bell,
Until befel
A hissing at some dull imperfect dunce--
There’s no denying,
I felt in all four elements at once!
My head was swimming, while my arms were flying,
My legs for running--all the rest was frying!

XIII.

Thrice welcome, then, for this peculiar use,
Thy pens so innocent of goose!
For this shall Dramatists, when they make merry,
Discarding Port and Sherry,
Drink--“Perry!”
Perry, whose fame, pennated, is let loose
To distant lands,
Perry, admitted on all hands,
Text, running, German, Roman,
For Patent Perryans approach’d by no man!
And when, ah me! far distant be the hour!
Pluto shall call thee to his gloomy bow’r,
Many shall be thy pensive mourners, many!
And Penury itself shall club its penny,
To raise thy monument in lofty place;
Higher than York’s, or any son of War;
Whilst Time all meaner effigies shall bury,
On due pentagonal base,
Shall stand the Parian, Perryan, perriwig’d Perry
Perch’d on the proudest peak of Penman Mawr!

SKETCHES ON THE ROAD.

THE CHECK-STRING.

THOSE who have travelled much, as inside passengers in a long stage-coach, whilst they admired the facility of starting off with one, must have occasionally remarked the difficulty of stopping with it, just at the point where it would be convenient to be set down. An ailing man may not have voice enough to lock all the four wheels at once; and should he be, as is probable, a nervous man besides, he will not without some hesitation make up his mind to request of some stentorian neighbour the loan of a set of lungs. In a six-inside coach, the timid occupier of a middle seat has no chance whatever, unless to take advantage of the first casual halt, or an upset. Even in the four-inside vehicle, a weakly, shy traveller’s case is equally hopeless, supposing the passengers on the roof to have properly tucked up the skirts of their great and little coats. To a bold, brassy fellow even, with a tongue like a trumpet, it is anything but an easy affair to say woh! with any effect to a Dart that is flying at twelve miles within the hour. The coachman, who ought to hear, will not: the horses hear but do not understand: the coach cannot hear: the outsiders admire the pace too much to hear anything but the patter of the hoofs. At last, when he has succeeded, the stout gentleman with the big voice, who wants to run home, finds generally that he has a good hundred yards or two allowed him of law, measured, as the Irish always mete it out, _backwards_.

It was after a more serious dilemma,--for a little nervous bashful man with a little squeaking voice like Punch’s, though he was not so fond of exhibiting it, after suffering himself to be carried two miles beyond his house, had at last fractured the small bone of his leg, by opening the door in despair and jumping out,--that a discussion ensued in the Brighton “Age” as to the best means of being let out to order. Many different methods had been proposed before the little florid plump gentleman in black delivered his opinion, with his back to the horses.

“For my own part, ratiocinating on hackney-coaches, I should hypothetically propose check-strings.”

“Lord forbid!” exclaimed a voice from the other seat, on the same side. Nobody remembered to have heard that voice before, from London to Crawley Common.

The friend to check-strings seemed thunderstruck by the explosion. He screwed himself round to take a look at his neighbour--didn’t like him at all--turned back again--stole another look--liked him worse than before--then looked for the third time, and hated him. His seat became uneasy--he had found a choke-pear, very like a hedgehog, and very like a bull terrier, he could neither kill it nor let it alone. It clung to him like a burr which you pull off your hat that it may stick on your right-hand glove, thence to be transferred to the left-hand one, and so on alternately till you finally get rid of it on your pantaloons. The “Lord forbid,” like Macbeth’s “Amen,” stuck in his throat--it buzzed in his head like a fly in a horse’s ear. However, he held his uncomfortable peace till silence itself became insupportable. At last he broke out:

“Humph! Doubtful as I am whether common coach conversation ought to be tied by strict rules of logic, still I cannot suppress the remark, that when one gentleman syllogistically brings forward a proposition of check-strings, for another gentleman to cry ‘Lord forbid,’ does not appear to my mind to be following a regular line of argument. But perhaps the forbidding gentleman will have the goodness to explain the colloquial anomaly.”

The forbidding gentleman thus appealed to, good-humouredly apologised. It was a mere slip of the tongue, he said: the words escaped from him involuntarily; but his fellow-traveller would probably excuse him, in consideration of the fact, that on account of a check-string he had lost the only hope of affluence he ever had in his life.

“Indeed, Sir! why then I excuse the colloquial irregularity with all my heart,” said the warm man, putting both his hands into his pockets; “but, upon my life, Sir, it must have been a very extraordinary consequence.”

“A very simple one, Sir,” returned the other. “The facts are briefly these: my maternal uncle had lately returned from India with an immense fortune, a handsome portion of which was my own in expectance, on no worse authority than his own promise. He was a widower with an only daughter, with whom, and himself, I one evening found myself in the carriage, on our way to a dinner-party given by a nobleman, then intimately connected with East Indian affairs. We were very late: and my uncle, the Nabob, who rode backward, was extremely fidgety, insisting that we were going beyond our destination. Every other minute he was thrusting his head out of the front window to dispute with the coachman, who in truth, was a little less sober, and more obstinate, than became him. And so we went onwards, till my uncle’s temper, always irritable, was worked up almost to combustion. In such moods he was rather apt to give vent to serio-comic ebullitions; and my ill-fortune has gifted me with risible muscles of exquisite sensibility. I was in the very midst of an ill-smothered laugh, when my fair cousin, giving me a sudden push, and then clasping her hands, exclaimed that we were going past the house. I instantly jumped up and made for the check-string, but with no more effect than if I had pulled at anything else. Gracious Heaven! I had better have pulled the string of a shower-bath, full of scalding hot water, to pour itself on my devoted head!--By that one infernal pull, Sir, I pulled myself out of half a plum!”

“A sad pull, indeed, Sir!” said the florid plump man in black. “But--humph--begging your pardon, Sir, I cannot really derive any such deduction from the premises.”

“A moment’s patience, Sir,” continued the unfortunate coach-stopper. “Lord forbid check-strings,--Lord forbid all strings whatever! I was in despair, Sir. I could have sunk through the bottom of the carriage!--I believe I went down on my knees. I said everything I could think of--and begged fifty thousand pardons, but my uncle was obdurate. ‘Pray don’t mention it,’ he said, in his most caustic tone--‘it has saved me fifty thousand pounds. It’s a very good practical joke, although it will not read quite so well in my will.’”

“But surely, Sir,” objected the plump man, “your uncle never acted on a conclusion, jumped to, as I may say, by such very imperfect inferences?”

“You did not know my uncle, Sir,” answered the unfortunate kinsman, with a deep sigh. “But you shall judge of his character from the clause itself:--Item, I give and bequeath to my jocose nephew, Arthur Carruthers Oliphant, _for pulling his uncle’s pigtail_, the sum of one shilling, sterling.”

THE UNDYING ONE.

“He shall not die.”--_Uncle Toby._

I.

OF all the verses, grave or gay,
That ever whiled an hour,
I never knew a mingled lay
At once so sweet and sour,
As that by Ladye Norton spun,
And christened “The Undying One.”

II.

I’m very certain that she drew
A portrait, when she penn’d
That picture of a perfect Jew,
Whose days will never end:
I’m sure it means my Uncle Lunn,
For he is an Undying One.

III.

Those twenty years he’s been the same,
And may be twenty more;
But Memory’s Pleasures only claim
His features for a score;
Yet in that time the change is none--
The image of th’ Undying One!

IV.

They say our climate’s damp and cold,
And lungs are tender things;
My uncle’s much abroad and old,
But when “King Cole” he sings,
A Stentor’s voice, enough to stun,
Declares him an Undying One.

V.

Others have died from needle-pricks,
And very slender blows;
From accidental slips or kicks,
Or bleedings at the nose;
Or choked by grape-stone, or a bun--
But he is the Undying One!

VI.

A soldier once, he once endur’d
A bullet in the breast--
It might have kill’d--but only cured
An asthma in the chest;
He was not to be slain with gun,
For he is the Undying One.

VII.

In water once too long he dived,
And all supposed him beat,
He seem’d so cold--but he revived
To have another heat,
Just when we thought his race was run,
And came in fresh--th’ Undying One!

VIII.

To look at Meux’s once he went,
And tumbled in the vat--
And greater Jobs their lives have spent
In lesser boils than that,--
He left the beer quite underdone,
No bier to the Undying One!

IX.

He’s been from strangulation black,
From bile, of yellow hue,
Scarlet from fever’s hot attack,
From cholera morbus blue;
Yet with these dyes--to use a pun--
He still is the Undying One.

X.

He rolls in wealth, yet has no wife
His three per Cents. to share;
He never married in his life,
Or flirted with the fair;
The sex he made a point to shun,
For beauty an Undying One.

XI.

To judge him by the present signs,
The future by the past,
So quick he lives, so slow declines,
The Last Man won’t be last,
But buried underneath a ton
Of mould by the Undying One!

XII.

Next Friday week, his birth-day boast,
His ninetieth year he spends,
And I shall have his health to toast
Amongst expectant friends,
And wish--it really sounds like fun--
Long life to the Undying One!

A GIPSY PARTY.

“Come stain your cheeks with nut or berry,
You’ll find a gipsy’s life is merry.”--GIPSY GLEE.

I DO not know what imp of mischief could have put such a fancy into the dreaming head of Mrs. Carnaby, except Puck--but on a fine morning in August she awoke with a determination to get up a gipsy party, and have a day’s pleasure “under the green-wood tree.” She opened her mind therefore to Mr. C----, as soon as he had opened his eyes, and before breakfast they had arranged the whole affair. Hornsey Wood was stale, and Norwood was rejected, for the very paradoxical reason that it was such a haunt for Gipsies; and Mrs. Carnaby meant to take even her youngest children. After a good deal of debating, Hainault was the Forest fixed upon;--it lay so handy to Whitechapel, and the redletter day was marked to be the Wednesday in the following week, because then Master Carnaby would only lose half a day’s schooling.

Accordingly, on the Wednesday, the Dryads of Wanstead were startled by the rumble of a well-laden tax-cart up that avenue which once led to a princely mansion; and the vehicle at last stopped, and set down its insides and outsides just where the lines of trees branch off into another verdant alley. “It was,” Mrs. Carnaby remarked, “a delicious green spot, and very handy to the Green Man for getting porter.” Mrs. C---- was assisted out of the cart; and then Miss C---- was lifted out by Mr. Hodges; and then the children were lifted out by the Mother; and then the nursemaid, an awkward plainlooking girl that nobody helped, tumbled out. In the mean time, Master C---- jumped out, all agog after blackberrying and birdnesting; and had swarmed half up a tree before his mother’s vigilance discovered, at a single glance, that he was tearing his trowsers, and had his best clothes on. This was a bad setting out for the boy; and the horse was not better, for directly he got out of harness, and felt himself free and at grass, after two or three preliminary kicks and plunges, it occurred to him to indulge in a roll, and so he rolled over a pigeon pie that was unfortunately unpacked, and finished by getting very much up with his fore-legs in a basket of ginger beer. But it was only a moment of enthusiasm; and, like other old nags, he betook himself to eating his green grass salad as gravely as a judge. None of the performers were fortunate in their debut. The first thing Mrs. Carnaby did in her hurry to save the pop, was to pop down one of the children on the basket of knives and forks; but it was a sharp child and soon got up again: and the first thing the other twin did was to trip over a stump, and fall, as Betty nursemaid said, “with its face in a fuz.” The first thing Mr. Hodges did, was to take Miss Carnaby round the waist and give her a smacking kiss; in return for which, as her first act, she gave him a playful push, that sent him, with his white ducks, into a muddy miniature pond, that had recently been stirred up by a cow in search of a cold bath. The first thing that Mr. C---- did was to recommend some brandy as a preventive against catching cold; but the last thing the brandy bottle had done had been to stay at home in the cupboard. Mr. Hodges, therefore, walked off to the Green Man for his health’s sake; and Master Carnaby sneaked off, nobody knew where, for the sake of blackberries;--while the Nursemaid, for the sake of society, took a romantic walk with the two twins, and a strange footman. Gipsies are a wandering race, and all the performers topped their parts; the very horse roamed away like a horse that had neither parish nor settlement: and Mr. Carnaby would have gone roaming after him, if his Wife and Daughter had not hung round his neck and made him swear not to leave ’em till the others returned, which was afterwards softened down to taking a little walk, provided he didn’t go out of sight and hearing. In the mean time Mrs. and Miss C---- laid the cloth, and began to review the eatables, not without lamenting over the smash of the pigeon pie; and when they came to plan their second course they found that the chief remove, a cold round of beef, had been pinned on the way down by a favourite bull-dog, that Master Carnaby had smuggled into the party. Luckily for the dog, he had also gone roving, with the whole forest before him, as naturally as if he had belonged to Bampfylde Moore Carew, the King of the Gipsies.