^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY The Gift of OLIVER mCY m ^ /S /\ ^ /S ^ m THE ESSAYS OE ELIA. FIRST SERIES. THE ESSAYS OF ELIA BY CHARLES LAMB. I FIRST SERIES. GEORGE P. NEW-YORK : PUTNAM, 155 BROADWAY. 1849. 2z^r} PREFACE. BY A FRIEND OF THE LATE ELIA. This poor gentleman, who for some months past had been in a declining way, hath at length paid his final tribute to nature. To say truth, it is time he were gone. The humor of thè thing, if there ever was much in it, was pretty well exhausted ; and a two years' and a half existence has been a tolerable duration for a phantom. I am now at liberty to confess, that much which I have heard objected to my late friend's writings was well-found¬ ed. Crude they are, I grant you—a sort of unlicked, incon¬ dite things—villainously pranked in an affected array of antique modes and phrases. They had not been his, if they had been other than such ; and better it is, that a writer should be natural in a self-pleasing quaintness, than.to affect a naturalness (so called) that should he strange to him. Egotistical they have been pronounced by some who did not know, that what he tells us, as of himself, was often true only (historically) of another ; as in a former Essay (to save many instances)—where under x\\e first person (his favorite figure) he shadows forth the forlorn estate of a country-boy placed at a London school, far from his friends and connexions—^in direct opposition to his own early his¬ tory. If it be egotism to imply and twine with his own identity the griefs and affections of another—making him¬ self many, or reducing many unto himself—then is the skil¬ ful novelist, who all along brings in his hero or heroine, speaking of themselves, the greatest egotist of all ; who TI PREFACE. yet has never, therefore, been accused of that narrowness. And how shall the intenser dramatist escape being faulty,) who doubtless, under cover of passion uttered by another, oftentimes gives blameless vent to his most inward feelings, and expresses his own story modestly ? My late friend was in many respects a singular charac¬ ter. Those who did not like him, hated him ; and some, who once liked him, afterwards became his bitterest haters. ' The truth is, he gave himself too little concern what he. uttered, and in whose presence. He observed neither time nor place, and would e'en out with what came uppermost. With the severe religionist he would pass for a free-thinker ; while the other faction set him down for a bigot, or per¬ suaded themselves that he belied his sentiments. Few un¬ derstood him ; and I am not certain that at all times he . quite understood himself. He too much affected that dan¬ gerous figure—irony. He sowed doubtful speeches, and reaped plain, unequivocal hatred. He would interrupt the gravest discussion with some light jest ; and yet, perhaps, not quite irrelevant in ears that could understand it. Your long and much talkers hated him. The informal habits of his mind, joined to an inveterate impediment of speech, forbade him to be an orator ; and he seemed determined that no one else should play that part when he was presents- He was petit and ordinary in his person and appearance. I have seen him sometimes in what is called good company, but where he has been a stranger, sit silent, and be sus¬ pected for an odd fellow ; till some unlucky occasion pro¬ voking it, he would stutter out some senseless pun (not - altogether senseless, perhaps, if rightly taken), which has stamped his character for the evening. It was hit or miss with him ; but nine times out of ten, he contrived by this device to send away a whole company his enemies.- His conceptions rose kindlier than his utterance, and his happiest impromptus had the appearance of effort. He has been accused of trying to be witty, when in truth he was PREFACE. vii out struggling to give his poor thoughts articulation. He chose his companions for some individuality of character which they manifested. Hence, not many persons of science, and few professed literati, were of his councils. They were, for the most^part, persons of an uncertain fortune ; and, as to such people commonly nothing is more obnoxious than a gentleman of settled (though moderate) income, he -passed with most of them for a great miser. To my knowledge this was a mistake. His intimados, to confess a truth, were in the world's eye a ragged regiment. He found them floating on the surface of society ; and the color, or something else, in the weed pleased him. The burrs stuck to him—but they were good and loving burrs for all that. He never greatly cared for the society of what are called good people. If any of these were scandalized (and oflences were sure to arise), he could not help it. When he has been remon¬ strated with for not making more concessions to the feelings of good people, he would retort by asking, what one point did these good people ever concede to him ? He was tem¬ perate in his meals and diversions, but always kept a little on this side of abstemiousness. Only in the use of the In¬ dian weed he might be thought a little excessive. He took it, he would say, as a solvent of speech. Marry—as the friendly vapor ascended, how his prattle would curl up sometimes with it I the ligaments which tongue-tied him^ were loosened, and the stammerer proceeded a statist I I do not know whether I ought to bemoan or rejoice that my old friend is departed. His jests were beginning to^ grow obsolete, and his stories to be found out. He felt the approaches of age ; 'and while he pretended to cling to life, you saw how slender were the ties left to bind him. Dis¬ coursing with him latterly on this subject, he expressed himself with a pettishness, which I thought unworthy of him. In our walks about his suburban retreat (as he called it) at Shacklewell, some children belonging to a school of industry had met us, and bowed and curtseyed, as he.^ T¡ÍÍ PREFACE. thought, in an especial manner to Mm. " They take me for a visiting governor," he muttered earnestly. He had a ho^r, which he carried to a foible, of looking like any¬ thing important and parochial. He thought that he ap¬ proached nearer to that stamp daily. He had a general aversion from being treated like a grave or respectable character, and kept a wary eye upon the advances of age that should so entitle him. Hejierded always, while it was possible, with people younger than himself. He did not conform to the march of time, but was dragged along in the procession. His manners lagged behind his years.*. He was too much of the boy-man. The toga virilis never sate gracefully on his shoulders.- The impressions of infancy had burnt into him, and he resented the impertinence of manhood. These were weaknesses ; but such as they were, they are a key to explicate some of his writings. CONTENTS. f - pao* ^Thb Sottth-Sea Hottse*. l \c>xfori> in the vacation' 9 ^Christ's Hospital Fivb-and-Thirtv Years Ago 15 %The Two Races of Mení 28 •^New-Year's Eve 34 ^Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist 41 A Chapter on Ears 43 4 ll Fools', Day ;. 53 Quakers' Meeting. . j 57 " he Old and the New Schoolmaster ■. 52 mperfect syMPATHIESÎ - 71 V/itches,-and Other Night Fears 80 Valentine's Day 87 '^^My Relations si Mackery'End, in Hertfordshire 98 My First Play 103^ Modern Gallantry 108 ♦WThe Olh Benchers of the Inner Temple; 113 "^race Before Meat '124 ^Dream-Children; a ReverieT - 4;^1 Distant,Correspondents 135 ^^he Praise of Chimney-Sweepers 141 A/Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis. . 148 ' A Disser-sation upon Roast Pig 155 A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behavior of Married People • 164 On Some oy the Old Actors 171 ^ On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century 183 On the Acting of Munden 191 ELIA. THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE. Readee, in thy passage from the Bank—where thou hast been receiving thy half-yearly dividends (supposing thou art a lean an- ^ auitant like myself)—to the Flower Pot, to secure a place for Dalston, or Shacklewell, or some other thy suburban retreat northerly,—didst thou never observe a melancholy-looking, hand¬ some, brick and stone edifice, to the left—where Threadneedle- street abuts upon Bishopsgate ? I dare say thou hast often ad¬ mired its magnificent portals ever gaping wide, and disclosing to view a grave court, with cloisters, and pillars, with few or no traces of goers-in or comers-out—-a desolation something like Balclutha's.* This was once a house of trade,—a centre of busy interests. The throng of merchants was here—the quick pulse of gain— ami here some forms of business are still kept up, though the •,oul be long since fled. Here are still to be seen stately porticos ; imposing staircases, offices roomy as the state apartments in pal¬ aces—deserted, or thinly peopled with a few straggling clerks ; tiie still more sacred interiors of court an^ committee-rooms, with venerable faces of beadles, door-keepers—directors seated in form on solemn days (to proclaim a dead dividend), at long worm-eaten tables, that have been mahogany, with tarnished gilt-leather cov- cixugs, supporting massy silver inkstands long since dry j—the oaken wainscots hung with pictures of deceased governors and sub-governors, of queen Anne, and the two first monarchs of the Brunswick dynasty :—huge charts, which subsequent discoveries • I passed by the walls of Balclutha, and they were desolate.—OmhajI. 9 9 ELIA, have antiquated ; dusty maps of Mexico, dim as dreams,—and soundings of the Bay of Panama ! The long passages hung with buckets, appended, in idle row, to walls, whose substance might "defy any, short of the last conflagration :—with vast ranges of cellerage under all, where dollars and pieces-of-eight once lay, an " unsunned heap," for Mammon to have solaced his solitary heart withal,—long since dissipated, or scattered into air at the blast of the breaking of that famous Bubble. Such is the South-Sea House. At least, such it was forty years ago, when I knew it,—a magnificent relic ! What altera¬ tions may have been made in it since, I have had no opportunities of verifying. Time, I. take for granted, has not freshened it. No wind has resuscitated the face of the sleeping waters. A thicker crust by this time stagnates upon it. The moths, that were then battening upon its obsolete ledgers and day-books, have rested from their depredations, but other light generations have succeeded, making fine fret-work among their single and double entries. Layers of dust have accumulated (a superfœtation of dirt !) upon the old layers, that seldom used to be disturbed, save by some curious finger, now and then, inquisitive to explore the mode of book-keeping in Queen Anne's reign ; or, with less hal¬ lowed curiosity, seeking to unveil some of the mysteries of that tremendous hoax, whose extent the petty peculators of our day look back upon with the same expression of incredulous admira¬ tion, and hopeless ambition of rivalry, as would become the puny face of modern conspiracy contemplating the Titan size of Vaux's superhuman plot. Peace to the manes of the Bubble ! Silence and destitution - are upon thy walls, proud house, for a memorial ! Situated as thou art, in the very heart of stirring and living commerce,—amid the fret and fever of speculation—with the Bank, and the 'Change, and the India-house about thee, in the hey-day of present prosperity, with their important faces, as it were, insulting thee, their poor neighbour out of business—to the y idle and merely contemplative,—to such as me, old house ! there is a charm in thy quiet :—a cessation—a coolness from business —an indolence almost cloistral—which is delightful ! With what reverence have I paced thy great bare rooms and courts at even- THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE. S tide ! They spoke of the past :—the shade of some dead ac¬ countant, with visionary pen in ear, would flit by me, stiff as in life. Living accounts and accountants puzzle me. I have no skill in figuring. But thy great dead tomes, which scarce three degenerate clerks of the present day could lift from their en¬ shrining shelves—with their old fantastic flourishes, and decora¬ tive rubric interlacings—their sums in triple columniations, set down with formal superfluity of ciphers—with pious sentences at the beginning, without which our religious ancestors never ven¬ tured to open a book of business, or bill of lading—the costly vellusa covers of some of them almost persuading us that we art- got into some hetter library,—are very agreeable and edifying spectacles. I can look upon these defunct dragons with compla¬ cency. Thy heavy odd-shaped ivory-handled pen-knives (our ancestors had everything on a larger scale than we have hearts j for) are as good as anything from Herculaneum. The pounce- boxes of our days have gone retrograde. The very clerks which I remember in the South-Sea House— - I speak of forty years back—had an air very different from those in the public offices that I have had to do with since. They par¬ took of the genius of the place ! They were mostly (for the establishment did not admit of su¬ perfluous salaries) bachelors. Generally (for they had not much to do) persons of a curious and speculative turn of mind. Old- fashioned, for a reason mentioned before. Humourists, for they were of all descriptions ; and, not having been brought together -n early life (which has a tendency to assimilate the members of corporate bodies to each other), but, for the most part, placed in this house in ripe Or middle age, they necessarily carried into it their separate habits and oddities, unqualified, if I may so speak, as into a common stock. Hence they formed a sort of Noah's ark. Odd fishes. A lay-monastery. Domestic retainers in a great house, kept more for show than use. Yet pleasant fellows, full of chat—and not a few among them had arrived at consider¬ able proficiency on the German flute. The cashier at that time was one Evans, a Cambro-Briton. He had something of the choleric complexion of his countrymen stamped on his visage, but was a worthy sensible man at bottom. 4 ELIA. He wore his hair, to the last, powdered and frizzed out, in the fashion which I remember to have seen in caricatures of what were termed, in m^ young days, Maccaronies. He was the last of that race of beaux.' Melancholy as a gib-cat over his counter all the forenoon, I think I see him, making up his cash (as they call it) with tremulous fingers, as if he feared every one about him was a defaulter ; in his hypochondry ready to imagine him¬ self one ; haunted, at least, with the idea of the possibility of his becoming one ; his tristful visage clearing up a little over his roast neck of veal at Anderton's at two (where his picture still hangs, taken a little before his death by desire of the mastfr of the coffee-house, which he had frequented for the last five-and- twenty years), but not attaining the meridian of its animation till evening brought on the hour of tea and visiting. The simulta¬ neous sound of his well-known rap at the door with the stroke of the clock announcing six, was a topic of never-failing mirth in the families which this dear old bachelor gladdened with his presence. Then was his forte, his glorified hour ! How would he chirp, and expand, over a muffin ! How would he dilate into secret history ! His countryman. Pennant himself, in particular, could not be more eloquent than he in relation to old and new London—the site of old theatres, churclies, streets gone to decay—where Rosamond's Pond stood—the Mulberry-gardens —and the Conduit in Cheap—with many a pleasant anecdote^ derived from paternal tradition, of those grotesque figures which Hogarth has immortalized in his picture of Noon,—the worthy descendants of those heroic confessors, who, flying to this country, from the wrath of Louis the Fourteentii and his dragoons, kept alive the flame of pure religion in the sheltering obscurities of Hog-lane, and the vicinity of the Seven Dials ! Deputy, under Evans, was Thomas Tame. He had the air and stoop of a nobleman. You would have taken him for one, had you met him in one of the passages leading to Westminster- hall. By stoop, I mean that gentle bending of the body forwards, which, in great men, must be supposed to be the effect of an ha¬ bitual condescending attention to the applications of their inferiors. While he held you in converse, you felt strained to the height in the colloquy. The conference over, you were at leisure to smile THE SO)TH-SEA HOUSE. 5 at the comparative insignificance of the pretensions which had just awed you. His intellect was of the shallowest order. It did not reach to a saw or a proverb. His mind was in its origi- nal state of white paper. A sucking-babe might have posed him. What was it then ? Was he rich ? Alas, no ! Thomas Tame was very poor. Both he and his wife looked outwardly gentle- folks, when I fear all was not well at all times within. She had a neat meagre person, which it was evident she had not sinned in over-pampering ; but in its veins was noble blood. She traced her descent, by some labyrinth of relationship, which I never thoroughly understood,—much less can explain wi'h any heraldic certainty at this time of day,—to the illustrious, but unfortunate house of Derwentwater. This was the secret of Thomas's stoop. This was the thought—the sentiment—the bright solitary star of your lives,—ye mild and happy pair,—which cheered you in the night of intellect, and in the obscurity of your station ! This was to you instead of riches, instead of rank, instead of glitter¬ ing attainments: and it was worth them altogether. You insult¬ ed none with it ; but, while you wore it as a piece of defensive armour only, no insult likewise could reach you through it. Decus et solamen. Of quite another stamp was the then accountant, John Tipp. He neither pretended to high blood, nor, in good truth, cared one fig about the matter. He " thought an accountant the greatest character in the world, and himself the greatest accountant in it." Yet John was not without his hobby. The fiddle relieved his vacant hours. He sang, certainly, with other notes than to the Orphean lyre. He did, indeed, scream and scrape most abom¬ inably. His fine suite of official rooms in Threadneedle-street, which, without anything very substantial appended to them, were enough to enlarge a man's notions of himself that lived in them, (I know not who is the occupier of them now,) resounded fort¬ nightly to the notes of a concert of " sweet breasts," as our an- cestors would have called them, culled from club-rooms and or¬ chestras—chorus singers—first and second violoncellos—double basses—and clarionets—who ate his coid mutton, and drank his punch, and praised his ear. He sate like Lord Midas among them. But at the desk Tipp was quite another sort of creature. s ELIA. Thence all ideas, that were purely ornamental, were banished. You could not speak of anything romantic without rebuke. Pol¬ itics were excluded. A newspaper was thought too refined and abstracted. The whole duty of man consisted in writing off div¬ idend warrants. The striking of the annual balance in the com¬ pany's books (which, perhaps, differed from the balance of last year in the sum of 25L Is. 6d.) occupied his days and nights foi a month previous. Not that Tipp was blind to the deadness of things (as they call them in the city) in his beloved house, or did not sigh for a return of the old stirring days when South Sea hopes were young—(he was indeed equal to the wielding of any the most intricate accounts of the most fiourishing company in these or those days) :—but to a genuine accountant the difference of proceeds is as nothing. The fractional farjhing is as dear to his heart as the thousands which stand before it. He is the true actor, who, whether his part be a prince or a peasant, must act it with like intensity. With Tipp fo'rm was everything. His life was formal. His actions seemed ruled with a ruler. His pen was not less erring than his heart. He made the best executor in the world ; he was plagued with incessant executorships ac¬ cordingly, which excited his spleen and soothed his vanity in equal ratios. He would swear (for Tipp swore) at the little or¬ phans, whose rights he would guard with a tenacity like the grasp of the dying hand, that commended their interests to his protec¬ tion. With all this there was about him a sort of timidity—(his few enemies used to give it a worse name)—a something which, in reverence to the dead, we will place, if you please, a little on this side of the heroic. Nature certainly had been pleased to endow John Tipp with a sufficient measure of the principle of self-preservation. There is a cowardice which we do not de¬ spise, because it has nothing base or treacherous in its elements ; it betrays itself, not you : it is mere temperament ; the absence of the romantic and the enterprising ; it sees a lion in the way, and will not, with Fortinbras, " greatly find quarrel in a straw," when some supposed honour is at stake. Tipp never mounted the box of a stage-coach in his life ; or leaned against the rails of a balcony ; or walked upon the ridge of a parapet ; or looked down a precipice j or let off a gun j or went upon a water-party j » THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE. T or would willingly let you go, if he could have helped it : neither was it recorded of him, that for lucre, ot for intimidation, he ever forsook friend or principle. Whom next shall we summon from the dusty dead, in whom common qualities become uncommon ? Can I forget thee, Henry Man, the wit, the polished man of letters, the author, of the South Sea House ? who never enteredst thy office in a morning, or quit- tedst it in mid-day—(what didst thou in an office ?)—without .some quirk that left a sting ! Thy gibes and thy jokes are now extinct, or survive but in two forgotten volumes, which I had the good fortune to rescue from a stall in Barbican, not three days ago, and found thee terse, fresh, epigrammatic, as alive. Thy wit is a little gone by in these fastidious days—thy topics are staled by the " new-born gauds " of the time :—but great thou used to be in Public Ledgers, and in Chronicles, upon Chatham, and Shelburne, and Rockingham, and Howe, and Bifrgoyne, and Clinton, and the war which ended in the tearing from Great Brit¬ ain her rebellious colonies,—and Keppel, and Wilkes, and Saw- bridge, and Bull, and Dunning, and Pratt, and Richmond,—and such small politics. A little less facetious, and a great deal more obstreperous, was fine rattling, rattle-headed Plumer. He was descended,—not in a right line, reader, (for his lineal pretensions, like his persona^ favoured a little of the sinister bend,) from the Plumers of Hert fordshire. So tradition gave him out ; and certainly family fea¬ tures not a little sanctioned the opinion. Certainly old Walter Plumer (his reputed author) had been a rake in his days, and visited much in Italy, and had seen the world. He was uncle, bachelor-uncle to the fine old whig still living, who has represent¬ ed the county in so many successive parliaments, and has a fine old mansion near Ware. Walter flourished in George the Sec¬ ond's days, and was the same who was summoned before the^ House of Commons about a business of franks, with the old Du¬ chess of Marlborough. You may read of it in Johnson's Life of Cave. Cave came off cleverly in that business. It is certain our Plumer did nothing to discountenance the rumour. He rather seemed pleased whenever it was, with all gentleness, insinuated. 8 ELIA. But, besides his family pretensions, Plumer was an engaging fel¬ low, and sang gloriously. Not so sweetly sang Plumer as thou sangest, mild, child-lilie, pastoral M ; a flute's breathing less divinely whispering than thy Arcadian melodies, when, in tones worthy of Arden, thou didst chant that song sung by Amiens to the banished Duke, which proclaims the winter wind more lenient than for a man to be ungrateful. Thy sire was old surly M , the unapproach¬ able church-warden of Bishopsgate. He knew not what he did, when he begat thee, like spring, gentle offspring of blustering winter :—only unfortunate in thy ending, which should have been mild, conciliatory, swan-like. Much remains to sing. Many fantastic shapes rise up, but they must be mine in private :—already have I fooled the reader to the top of his bent ;—else could I omit that strange creature Woollett, tt'ho existed in trying the question, and bought litiga¬ tions ?—and still stranger, inimitable, solemn Hep worth, from whose gravity Newton might have deduced the law of gravita¬ tion. How profoundly would he nib a pen—^jvith what delibera¬ tion would he wet a wafer ! But it is time to close—night's wheels are rattling fast over me—it is proper to have done with this solemn mockery. Reader, what if I have been playing with thee all this while ? —peradventure the very names, which I have summoned up be¬ fore thee, are fantastic—insubstantial—like Henry Pimpernel, and old John Naps of Greece : Be satisfled that something answering to them nas had a being. Their importance is from the past. OXFORD IN THE VACATION. OXFORD IN THE VACATION. Casting a preparatory glance at the bottom of this article—as the wary connoisseur in prints, with cursory eye, (which, while it reads, seems as though it read not,) never fails to consult the quis sculpsit in the corner, before he pronounces some rare piece to be a Vivares, or a Woollet methinks Í hear you exclaim. Read¬ er, Who is Elia ? Because in my last I tried to divert thee with some half-forgot¬ ten humours of some old clerks defunct, in an old house of busi¬ ness, long since gone to decay, doubtless you have already set me down in your mind as one of the self-same college a votary of the desk—a notched and cropt scrivener—one that sucks his sustenance, as certain sick people are said to do, through a quill. Well, I do agnize something of the sort. I confess that it is my humour, my fancy—in the fore-part of the day, when the mind of your man of letters requires some relaxation—(and none better than such as at first sight seems most abhorrent from his beloved studies)—to while away some good hours of my time in the contemplation of indigos, cottons, raw silks, piece-goods, flowered or otherwise. In the first place ***♦♦» and then it sends you home with such increased appetite to your books ♦ * * * jjQf jQ jjjat your outside 1 sheets, and waste wrappers of foolscap, do receive into them, most kindly and naturally, the impression of sonnets, epigrams, essays •«—so that the very parings of a counting.house are, in some sort, the settings up of an author. The enfranchised quill, that has plodded all the morning among the cart-rucks of figures and ci¬ phers, frisks and curvets so at its ease over the flowery carpet- ground of a midnight dissertation.—It feels its promotion. •***"■ So that you see, upon the whole, the 10 ELIA. literary dignity of Elia is very little, if at all, compromised in the condescension. Not that, in my anxious detail of the many commodities inci- dental to the life of a public office, I would be thought blind to certain flaws, which a cunning carper might be able to pick in this Joseph's vest. And here I must have leave, in the fulness of mj' soul, to regret the abolition, and doing-away-with altogether, of those consolatory interstices, and sprinklings of freedom, through the four seasons,—the red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days. There was Paul, and Stephen, and Barnabas— Andrew and John, men famous in old times, —we were used to keep all their days holy, as long back as 1 was at school at Christ's. I remember their effigies, by the sam# token, in the old Basket Prayer Book. There hung Peter in his uneasy posture holy Bartlemy in the troublesome act of flay¬ ing, after the famous Marsyas by Spagnoletti. 1 honoured them all, and could almost have wept the defalcation of Iscariot —so much did we love to keep holy memories sacred :-rOnly me- thought I a little grudged at the coalition of the ietter Jude with Simon—clubbing (as it were) their sanctities ■ together, to make up one poor gaudy-day between them—as an economy unworthy of the dispensation. These were bright visitations in a scholar's and a clerk's life— " far off their coming shone."—I was as good as an almanac in those days. I could have told you such a saint's-däy falls out next week, or the week after. Peradventure the Epiphany, by some periodical infelicity, would, once in six years, merge in a Sabbath. Now am I little better than one of the profane. Let me not be thought to arraign the wisdonj of my civil superiors, who have judged the further observation of these holy tides to be papistical, superstitious. Only in a custom of such long stand¬ ing, methinks, if their Holinesses the Bishops had, in decency, been flrst sounded but I am wading out of my depths. I am not the man to decide the limits of civil and ecclesiastical authority - ■ I am plain Elia—no Seiden, nor Archbishop Usher—though OXFORD IN THE VACATION 11 at present in the thick of their books, here in the heart of learn¬ ing, under the shadow of the mighty Bodley. I can here play the gentleman, enact the student. To such a rne as myself, who has been defrauded in his young years of the ?weet food of academic institution, nowhere is so pleasant, to while away a few idle weeks at, as one or other of the Universi¬ ties. Their vacation too, at this time of the year, falls in so pat with Qurs. Here I can take my walks unmolested, and fancy myself of what degree or standing I please. I seem admitted ad eundem. I fetch up past opportunities. I can rise at the chapel- bell, and dream that it rings for me. In moods of humility I can be a Sizar, or a Servitor. When the peacock vein rises, I strut a Gentleman Commoner. In graver moments, 1 proceed Master of Arts. Indeed I do not think I am much unlike that respecta¬ ble character. I have seen your dim-eyed vergers, and bed- makers in spectacles, drop a bow or a curtsy, as I pass, wisely mistaking me for something of the sort. I go about in black, which favours the notion. Only in Christ Church reverend quad¬ rangle, I can be content to pass for nothing short of a Seraphic Doctor. The walks at these times are so much one's own,—the tall trees of Christ's, the groves of Magdalen ! The halls deserted, and with open doors inviting one to slip in unperceived, and pay a devoir to some Founder, or noble or royal Benefactress^that should have been ours), whose portrait seems to smile upon their over-looked beadsman, and to adopt me for their own. Then, to take a peep in by the way at the butteries, and sculleries, redolent of antique hospitality : the immense caves of kitchens, kitchen fire-places, cordial recesses ; ovens whose first pies were baked four centuries ago ; and spits which have cooked for Chau¬ cer ! Not the meanest minister among the dishes but is hallowed to me through his imagination, and the -Cook goes forth a Man¬ ciple. ■Antiquity ! thou wondrous charm, what art thou ? that, being nothing, art everything ! When thou wert, thou wert not anti¬ quity—then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration ; thou thy¬ self being to thyself flat, jejune, modem ! .What mystery lurks 12 ELIA. in this retroversion ? or what half Januses* are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever re¬ vert ! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything ! the past is everything, being nothing ! What were thy dark ages ? Surely the sun rose as brightly then as now, and man got him to his work in the morning. Why- is it we can never hear mention of them without an accompany¬ ing feeling, as though a palpable obscure had dimmed the face of things, and that our ancestors wandered to and fro groping ! Above all thy rarities, old Oxenford, what do most arride and solace me, are thy repositories of mouldering learning, thy shelves What a place to be in is an old library V It seems as though all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their, labours to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as in somè dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learnibg, walking amid their foliage j and the odouiLof their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard. Still le.ss have I curiosity to disturb the elder repose of MSS. Those variœ lectiones, so tempting to the more erudite palates, do but disturb and unsettle my faith. I am no Herculanean raker.' The credit of the three witnesses might have slept unimpeached for me. I leave these curiosities to Porson, and to G. D.— whom, by the way, I found busy as a moth over some rotten archive, rummaged out of some seldom-explored press, in a nook at Oriel. With long poring, he is grown almost into a hook. He stood as passive as one by the side of the old shelves. I longed to new- coat him in russia, and assign him his place. He might have mustered for a tall Scapula. D. is assiduous in his visits to these seats of learning. No in¬ considerable portion of his moderate fortune, I apprehend, is con¬ sumed in journeys between them and Clitford's-inn where, like a dove on thi asp's nest, he has long taken up his uncon¬ scious abode, amid an incongruous assembly of attorneys, attor- • JanusQs of one face.—Sir Thomas Browh. OXFORD IN THE VACATION. 13 neys' clerks, apparitors, promoters, vermin of the law, among whom he sits " in calm and sinless peace." The fangs of the law pierce him not—the winds of litigation blow over his humble chambers—the hard sheriff's officer moves his hat as he passes- legal nor illegal discourtesy touches him—none thinks of offering violence or injustice to him—you would as soon " strike an ab¬ stract idea." D. has been engaged, he tells me, through a course of labori¬ ous years, in an investigation into all curious matter connected with the two Universities ; and has lately lit upon a MS. collec¬ tion of charters, relative to C , by which he hopes to settle some disputed points—particularly that long controversy between them as to priority of foundation. The ardour with which he engages in these liberal pursuits, I am afraid, has not met with all the encouragement it deserved, either here, or at C . Your caputs, an(^heads of colleges, care less than anybody else about these questions.—Contented to suck the milky fountains of their Alma Maters, without inquiring into the venerable gentle¬ women's years, they rather hold such curiosities to be impertinent —unreverend. They have their good glebe lands in manu, and care not much to rake into the title dqeds. I gather at least so much from other sources, for D. is not a man to complain. • D. started like an unbroke heifer, when I interrupted him. A priori it was not very probable that we should have met in Oriel. But D. would have done the same, had I accosted him on the sudden in his own walks in Clifford'^s-inq, or in the Temple. In addition to a provoking short-sightedness (the effect of late studies and watchings at the midnight oil) D. is the most absent of men. He made a call the other morning at our friend M.'s in Bedford-square ; and, finding nobody at home, was ushered into the hall, where, asking for pen and ink, with great exactitude of purpose he enters rne his name in the book—which ordinarily lies about in such places, to record the failures of the untimely or unfortunate visitor—and takes his leave with many ceremonies, and professions of regret. Some two or three hours after, his walking destinies returned him into the same neighbourhood again, and again the quiet image of the fire-side circle at M.'s—Mrs. M. presiding at it like a Queen Lar, with pretty A. S. at her 14 ELIA. side—strikiag irresistibly on his fancy, he makes another call (forgetting that they were "certainly not to return from the country before that ^ay week"), and disappointed a second time, inquires for pen and paper as before ; again the book is brought, and in the line just above that in which he is about to print his second name (his re-script)—his first name (scarce dry) looks out upon him like another Sosia, or as if a man should suddenly en¬ counter his own duplicate !—The effect may be conceived. D. made many a good resolution against any such lapses in future. I hope he will not keep them too rigorously. For with G. D.—to be absent from the body, is sometimes (not to speak it profanely) to be present with the Lord. At the very time when, personally encountering thee, he passes on with no recognition or, being stopped, starts like a thing surprised —at that moment, reader, he is on Mount Tabor—or Parnassus —or co-sphered with Plato—or, with Harrington, framing " im¬ mortal commonwealths"—devising some plan of amelioration to thy country, or thy species peradventure meditating some individual kindness or courtesy, to be done to thee thyself, the re¬ turning consciousness of which made him to start so guiltily at thy obtruded personal presence. D. is delightful anywhere, but he is at the best in such places as these. He cares not much for Bath. He is out of his ele¬ ment at Buxton, at Scarborough, or Harrowgate. The Cam and the Isis are to him " better than all the waters of Damascus." On the Muses' hill he is happy, and good, as one of the Shepherds on the Delectable Mountains ; and when he goes about with you to show you the halls and colleges, you think you have with you the Interpreter at the He ise Beautiful. CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO. 15 CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE-ANB-THIRTT TEARS AGO. In Mr. Lamb's "Works," published a year or two since, 1 find a magnificent eulogy on my old school*, such as it was, or now appears to him to have been, between the years 1782 and 1789. It happens very oddly, that my own standing at Christ's was nearly corresponding with his ; aÄ, with all gratitude to him for his enthusiasm for the cloisters, I think he has contrived to bring together whatever can be said in praise of them, drop, ping all the other side of the argument most ingeniously. I remember L. at school ; and can well recollect that he had some peculiar advantages, which I and others of his schoolfellows had not. His friends lived in town, and were near at hand ; and he had the privilege of going to see them, almost as often as he wished, through some invidious distinction, which was denied to us. The present worthy sub-treasurer to the Inner Temple can explain how that happened. He had his tea and hot rolls in a morning, while we were battening upon our quarter of a penny loaf—our crug—moistened with attenuated small beer, in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched leathern jack it was poured from. Our Monday's milk porritch, blue and tasteless, and the peas soup of Saturday, coarse and choking, were enriched for him with a slice of " extraordinary bread and butter," from the Jiot-loaf of the Temple. The Wednesday's mess of millet, some¬ what less repugnant—(we had three banyan to four meat days in the week)—was endeared to his palate with a lump of double-re- fined, and a smack of ginger (to make it go down the more glibly) or the fragrant cinnamon. In lieu of our half-pickled Sundays, or quite fresh boiled beef on Thu'rsdays (strong as caro equina), * Recollections of Christ's Hospital. 16 ELIA. with detestable marigolds floating in the pail to poison the broth— cur scanty mutton scrags on Fridays—and rather more savoury, but grudging portions of the same flesh, rotten-roasted or rare, on the Tuesdays (the only dish which excited our appetites, and disappointed our stomachs, in almost equal proportion)—he had his hot plate of roast veal, or the more tempting griskin (exotics unknown to our palates), cooked in the paternal kitchen (a great tiling), and brought him daily by his maid or aunt ! I remember the good old relative (in whom love forbade pride) squatting down upon some odd slone in a by-nook of the cloisters, disclosing the viands (of higher regale than those cates which the ravens min¬ istered to the Tishbite) ; and the contending passions of L. at the unfolding. There was love for the bringer ; shame for the thing brought, and th^ manner of its bringing ; sympathy for those who were too many to share in it ; and, at the top of all, hunger (eldest, strongest of the passions !) predominant, breaking down the stony fences of shame, and awkwardness, and a troub¬ ling over-consciousness. I was a poor friendless boy. My parents, and those who ' should care for me, were far away. Those few acquaintances of theirs, which they could reckon upon being kind to me in the great city, after a little forced notice, which they had the grace to take of me on my first arrival in town, soon grew tired of my holiday visits. They seemed to them to recur too often, though I thought them few enough ; and, one after another, they all fail¬ ed me, and I felt myself alone among six hundred playmates. O the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early home¬ stead ! The yearnings which I used to have towards it in those unfledged years ! How, in my dreams, would my native town (far in the west) come back, with its church, and trees, and faces ! How I would wake weeping, and in the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calme in Wiltshire ! To this late hour of my life, I trace impressions left by the rec¬ ollection of those friendless holidays. The long warm days of summer never return but they bring with them a gloom from the haunting memory of those whole-day-leaves, when, by some strange arrangement, we were turned out, for the live-long day, upon our own hands, whether we had friends to go to, or none. CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVK-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO. 17 I remember those bathing excursions to the New-River, which L. recalls with such relish, better, I think, than he can—for he was a home-seeking lad, and did not mucii care for such water- pastimes :—How merrily we would sally forth into the fields ; and strip under the first warmth of the sun ; and wanton like young dace in the streams ; getting us appetites for noon, which those of us that were pennyless (our scanty morning crust long since exhausted) had not the means of allaying—while the cattle, and the birds, and the fishes, were at feed about us and we had nothing to satisfy our cravings—the very beauty of the ■ day, and the exercise of the pastime, and the sense of liberty, setting a keener edge upon them !—How faint and languid, finally, we would return, towards night-fall, to our desired morsel, half-rejoicing, half-reluctant, that the hours of our uneasy liberty had expired ! • It was worse in the days of winter, to go prowling about the streets objectless—shivering at cold windows of print-shops, to extract a little amusement ; or haply, as a last resort in the hopes of a little novelty, to pay a fifty-times repeated visit (where our individual faces should be as well known to the warden as those of his own charges) to the Lions in the Tower—to whose levee, by courtesy immemorial, we had a prescriptive title to admission. L.'s governor (so we called the patron who presented us to the foundation) lived in a manner under his paternal roof. Any complaint which he had to make was sure of being attended to. This was understood at Christ's, and was an effectual screen to him against the severity of masters, or worse tyranny of the monitors. The oppressions of these young brutes are heart-sick¬ ening to call to recollection. I have been called out of my bed, and waked for the purpose, in the coldest winter nights—and this not once, but night after night—in my shirt, to receive the disci¬ pline of a leathern thong, with eleven other sufferers, because it pleased my callow overseer, when there has been any talking heard after we were gone to bed, to make the six last beds in the 'dormitory, where the youngest children of us slept, answerable for an offence they neither dared to commit, nor had the power to hinder. The same execrable tyranny drove the younger part of us from the fires, when our feet were perishing with snow ; and, PART I. 3 18 ELIA. under the cruelest penalties, forbade the indulgence of a drink of water, when we lay in sleepless summer nights, fevered with the season, and the day's sports. There was one H , who, I learned, in after days, was seen expiating some maturer offence in the hulks. (Do I flatter my self in fancying that this might be the planter of that name, who suffered—at Nevis, I think, or St. Kitts,—some few years since ? My friend Tobin was the benevolent instrument of bringing him to the gallows.) This petty Nero actually branded a boy, who had offended him, with a red-hot iron ; and nearly starved forty of us, with exacting contributions, to the one half of our bread, to pamper a young ass, which, incredible as it may seem, with the connivance of the nurse's daughter (a young flame of his) he had contrived to smuggle in, and keep upon the leads of the ward, as they called otw dormitories. This game went on for better than a week, till the foolish beast, not able to fare well but he must cry roast meat—happier than Caligula's minion, could he have kept his own counsel—but, foolisher, alas ! than any of his species in the fables—waxing fat, and kicking, in the fulness of bread, one unlucky minute would needs proclaim his good fortune to the world below j and, laying out his simple throat, blew such a ram's-horn blast, as (toppling down the walls of his own Jeri¬ cho) set concealment any longer at defiance. The.client was dis¬ missed, with certain attentions, to Smithfield ; but I never under¬ stood that the patron underwent any censure on the occasion. This was in the stewardship of L.'s admired Perry. Under the same facile administration, can L. have forgotten the cool impunity with which the nurses used to carry away openly, in open platters, for their own tables, one out of two of every hot joint, which the careful matron had been seeing scru¬ pulously weighed out for our dinners ? These things were daily practised in that magnificent apartment, which L. (grown con¬ noisseur since, we presume) praises so highly for the grand paint¬ ings " by Verrio, and others," with which it is " hung round and adorned." But the sight of sleek well-fed blue-coat boys in pic¬ tures was, at that time, I believe, little consolatory to him, or us, the living ones, who saw the better part of our provisions carried CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO. 19 away before our faces by harpies ; and ourselves reduced (with the Trojan in the Hall of Dido) To feed our mind with idle portraiture. L. has recorded the repugnance of the school to gags, or the fat of fresh beef boiled ; and sets it down to some superstition. But these unctuous morsels are never grateful to young palates (children are universally fat-haters), and in strong, coarse, boiled meats, unsalted, are detestable. A gag-eater in our time was equivalent to a goule, and held in equal detestation. suf¬ fered under the imputation : 'Twas said He ate strange flesh. He was observed, after dinner, carefully to gather up the rem¬ nants left at his table (not many, nor very choice fragments, you may credit me,—and, in an especial manner, these disreputable morsels, which he would convey away, and secretly stow in the settle that stood at his bedside. None saw when he ate them. It was rumoured that he privately devoured them in the night. He was watched, but no traces of such midnight practices were discoverable. Some reported, that, on leave-days, he had been seen to carry out of the bounds a large blue check handkerchief, full of something. This then must be the accursed thing. Con¬ jecture next was at work to imagine how he could dispose of it. Some said he sold it to the beggars. This belief generally pre¬ vailed. He went about moping. None spake to him. No one would play with him. He was excommunicated ; put out of the pale of the school. He was too powerful a boy to be beaten, but he underwent every mode of that negative punishment, which is more grievous than many stripes. Still he persevered. At length he was observed by two of his school-fellows, who were deter¬ mined to get at the secret, and had traced him one leave-day for that purpose, to enter a large worn-out building, such as there exist specimens of in Chancery-lane, which are let out to various scales of pauperism, with open door and a common staircase. After him they silently slunk in, and followed by stealth up four 20 ELIA. flights, and saw him tap at a poor wicket, which was opened by an aged woman, meanly clad. Suspicion was now ripened into certainty. The informers had secured their victim. They had him in their toils. Accusation was formally preferred, and retri- hution most signal was looked for. Mr. Hathaway, the then steward (for this happened a little after my time,) with that pa- tient sagacity which tempered all his conduct, determined to in¬ vestigate the matter, before he proceeded to sentence. The result was, that the supposed mendicants, the receivers or purchasers of the mysterious scraps, turned out to be the parents of , an honest couple come to decay— whom this seasonable supply had, in all probability, saved from mendicancy ; and that this young stork, at the expense of his own good name, had all this while been only feeding the old birds !—The governors on this occasion, much to their honour, voted a present relief to the family of , and presented him with a silver medal. The lesson which the steward read upon rash judgment, on the occasion of publicly delivering the medal to , I believe would not be lost upon his auditory.—I had left school then, but I well remember . He was a tall, shambling youth, with a cast in his eye, not at all calculated to conciliate hostile prejudices. I have since seen him carrying a baker's basket. I think I heard he did not do quite so well by himself, as he had done by the old folks. I was a hypochondriac lad ; and the sight of a boy in fetters, upon the day of my first putting on the blue clothes, was not ex¬ actly fitted to assuage the natural terrors of initiation. I was of tender years, barely turned of seven ; and had only read of such things in books, or seen them but in dreams. I was told he had run away. This was the punishme it for the first offence.—As a novice I was soon after taken to see the dungeons. These were little, square. Bedlam cells, where a boy could just lie at his length upon straw and a blanket—a mattress, I think, was after¬ wards substituted—with a peep of light, let in askance, from a prison-orifice at top, barely enough to read by. Here the poor boy was locked in by himself all day, without sight of any but the porter who brought him his bread and water—who might not speak to him ; or of the beadle, who came twice a week to call him out to receive his periodical chastisement, which was almost CHRISrS HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO. ¿1 welcome, because it separated him for a brief interval from soli, tude :—and here he was shut up by himself of nights out of the reach of any sound, to suffer whatever horrors the weak nerves, and superstition incident to his time of life, might subject him to.* This was the penalty for the second offence. M'^ouldst thou like, reader, to see what became of him in the next degree ? The culprit, who had been a third time an offender, and whose expulsion was at this time deemed irreversible, was brought forth, as at some solemn auto dafe, arrayed in uncouth and most ap¬ palling attire—all trace of his late " watchet weeds " carefully effaced, he was exposed in a jacket resembling those which Lon¬ don lamplighters formerly delighted in, with a cap of the same. The effect of this divestiture was such as the ingenious devisers of it could have anticipated. With his pale and friglited features, it was as if some of those disfigurements in Dante had seized upon him. In this disguisement he was brought into the hall fj.'s favorite «tóte-roow),.where awaited him the whole number of his school-fellows, whose joint lessons and sports he was thence¬ forth to share no more ; the awful pi-esence of the steward, to be seen for the last time ; of the executioner beadle, clad in his state robe for the occasion ; and of two faces more, of direr import, because never but in these extremities visible. These were governors ; two of whom by choice, or charter, were always ac¬ customed to officiate at these Ultima Supplicia ; not to mitigate (so at least we understood it), but to enforce the uttermost stripe. Old Bamber Gascoigne, and Peter Aubert, I remember, were col¬ leagues on one occasion, when the beadle turning rather pale a glass of brandy was ordered to prepare him for the mysteries. The scourging was, after the old Roman fashion, long and stately. The lictor accompanied the criminal quite round the hall. We were generally too faint with attending to the previous disgusting circumstances, to make accurate report with our eyes of the de- * One or two instances of lunacy, or attempted suicide, accordingly, at length convinced the ^vernors of the impolicy of this part of the sentence, and the midnight torrore to the spirits was dispensed with.—This fancy of dungeons for children was a sprout of Howard's brain ; for which (saving the reverence due to Holy Paul) methinks, 1 could willingly spit upon his statue. 22 ELIA. gree of corporal suffering inflicted. Report, of course, gave out the back knotty and livid. After scourging, he was made over, in his San Benito, to his friends, if he had any (but commonly such poor runagates were friendless), or to his parish-officer, who, to enhance the effect of the scene, had his station allotted to him on the outside of the half gate. These solemn pageantries were not played off so often as to spoil the general mirth of the community. We had plenty of exercise and recreation after school hours ; and, for myself, I must confess, that I was never happier, than in lliem. The Upper and the Lower Grammar School were held in the same room ; and an imaginary line only divided their bounds. Their character was as different as that of the inhabitants on the two sides of the Pyrenees. The Rev. James Boyer was the Upper Master ; but tlie Rev. Matthew Field presided over that portion of the apartment of which I had the good fortune to be a member. We lived a life as careless as birds. We talked and did just what we pleased, and nobody molested us. We carried an acci¬ dence, or a grammar, for form : but, for any trouble it gave us, we might take two years in getting thi-ough the verbs deponent, and another two in forgetting all that we had learned about them. There was now and then the formality of saying a lesson, but if you had not learned it, a brush across the shoulders (just enough to disturb a fly) was the sole remonstrance. Field never used the rod ; and in truth he wielded the cane with no great good will—holding it " like a dancer." It looked in his hands rather like an emblem than an instrument of authority ; and an emblem, too, he was asliamed of. He was a good easy man, that did not care to ruffle his own peace, nor perhaps set any great conside¬ ration upon the value of juvenile time. He came among us, now and then, but often stayed away whole days from us ; and when he came it made no difference to us—^he had his private room to retire too, the short time he stayed, to be out of the sound of our noise. Our mirth and uproar went on. We had classics of our own, without being beholden to " insolent IJi-eece or haughty Rome," that passed current among us—Peter Wilkins—the Ad¬ ventures of. the Hon. Captain Robert Boyle—the Fortunate Blue Coat Boy—and the like. Or we cultivated a turn for mechanic CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS. AOO. 23 and scientific operations ; making little sun-dials of paper : or weaving those ingenious parentheses called cat-cradles ; or mak¬ ing dry peas to dance upon the end of a tin pipe ; or studying the art military over the laudable game " French and English," and a hundred other such devices to pass away the time—mixing the useful with the agreeable—as would have made the souls of Rousseau and John Locke chuckle to have seen us. Matthew Field belonged to. that class of modest divines who affect to mix in equal proportion the gentleman, the scholar, and the Christian ; but, I know not how, the first ingredient is gene¬ rally found to be the predominating dose in the composition. He was engaged in gay parties, or with his courtly bow at some episcopal levee, when he should have been attending upon us. He had for many years the classical charge of a hundred chil¬ dren, during the four or five first years of their education ; and his very highest form seldom proceeded further than two or three of the introductory fables of Pheedrus. How things were suffered to go on thus I cannot guess. Boyer, who was the proper person to have remedied these abuses, always affected, perhaps felt, a delicacy in interfering in a province not strictly his own. I have not been without my suspicions, that he was not altogether dis¬ pleased at the contrast we presented to his end of the school. We were a soil of Helots to his young Spartans. He would sometimes, with ironic deference, send to borrow a rod of the Under Master, and then, with Sardonic grin, observe to one of his upper boys, " how neat and fresh the twigs looked." While his pale students were battering their brains over Xenophon and Plato, with a silence as deep as that enjoined by the Samite, we were enjoying ourselves at our ease in our little Goshen. We saw a little into the secrets of his discipline, and the prospect did but the more reconcile us to our lot. His thunders rolled inno¬ cuous for us ; his storms came near, but never touched us ; con¬ trary to Gideon's miracle, while all around were drenched, our fleece was dry.* His boys turned out the better scholars ; we, I suspect, have the advantage in temper. His pupils cannot speak of him without something of terror allaying their gratitude ; the * Cowley £4 LÎ.IA. remembrance of Field comes back with all tlie sootliing images of indolence, and summer slumbers, and work like play, and in¬ nocent idleness, and Elysian exemptions, and life itself a " play¬ ing holiday." Though sufficiently removed from the jurisdiction of Boyer, we were near enough (as I have said) to understand a little of his system. We occasionally heard sounds of the TJlulanies, and caught glances of Tartarus. B. was a rabid pedant. His Eng¬ lish style was crampt to barbarism. His Easter anthems (for his duty obliged him to those periodical flights) were grating as scrannel pipes.*—He would.laugh, ay, and heartily, but then it must be at Flaccus's quibble about Rex or at the trisHs se- veriias in vultu, or inspicere in palmas, of Terence—thin jests, which at their first broaching could hardly have had vis enough to move a Roman muscle.—He had two wigs, both pedantic, but of different omen. The one serene, smiling, fresh-powdered, be- tokening a mild day. The other, an old, discolored, unkempt, angry caxon, denoting frequent and bloody execution. Wo to the school, when he made his morning appearance in his passy, or passionate wig. No comet expounded surer.—J. B. had a heavy hand. I have known him double his knotty fist at a poor trembling child (the maternal milk hardly dry upon its lips) with a " Sirrah, do you presume to set your wits at me ?"—Nothing was more common than to see him make a headlong entry into the school-room, from his inner recess, or library, and, with turbulent eye, singling out a lad, roar out, " Od's my life, sirrah " (his favorite adjuration), " I have a greatmind to whip you,"—then, with as sudden a retracting impulse, fling back into bis lair—and, after a cooling lapse of some minutes (during which all but the culprit had totally forgotten the context) drive headlong out again, * In this and everything B. was the antipodes of his coadjutor. While the former was digging his brains for crude anthems, worth a pig-nut, F would be recreating his gentlemanly fancy in the more flowery walks of the Muses. A little dramatic effusion of his, under the name of Vertumnus and Pomona, is not yet forgotten by the chroniclers of that sort of literature. It was accepted by Garrick, but the town did not give it. their sanction.—B. used to say of it, in a way of half-compliment, half-irony, that itwas ton clas¬ sical for representation. CHRISTS HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO. 25 piecing out his imperfect sense, as if it had been some Devil's Litany, with the expletory yell—"and I will, too."—In his gentler moods, when the rahidus furor was assuaged, he had re¬ sort to an ingenious method, peculiar, for what I have heard, to himself, of whipping the boy, and reading the Debates, at the same time ; a paragraph, and a lash between ; which in those times, when parliamentary oratory was most at a height and flourishing in these realms, was not calculated to impress the patient with a veneration for the diffuser graces of rhetoric. Once, and but once, the yplifted rod was known to fall ineffec¬ tual from his hand—when droll squinting W— having been caught putting the inside of the master's desk to a use for which the architect had clearly not designed it, to justify himself, with great simplicity averred, that he did not know that the thing had been fore¬ warned. This exquisite irrecognition of any law antecedent to the oral or declaratory, struck so irresistibly upon the fancy of all who heard it (the pedagogue himself not excepted)—that remis¬ sion was unavoidable. L. has given credit to B.'s great merits as an instructor. Cole¬ ridge, in his literary life, has pronounced a more intelligible and ample encomium on them. The author of the Country Spectator doubts not to compare him with the ablest teachers of antiquity. Perhaps we cannot dismiss him better than with the pious ejacula- ' tion of C., when he heard that his old master was on his death, bed : " Poor J. B. !—may all his faults be forgiven ; and may he be wafted to bliss by little cherub boys all head and wings, with no bottoms to reproach his sublunary infirmities." Under him were many good and sound scholars bred.—First Grecian of my time was Lancelot Pepys Stevens, kindest of boys and men, since Co-grammar-master (and inseparable companion) with Dr. T e. What an edifying spectacle did this brace of friends present to those who remembered the anti-socialities of their predecessors!—You never met the one by chance in the street without a wonder, which was quickly dissipated by the almost immediate sub-appearance of the other. Generally arm- in-arm, these kindly coadjutors lightened for each other the toil¬ some duties of their profession, and when, in advanced age, one found it convenient to retire, the other was not long in discovering z« ELIA. that it suited him to lay down the fasces also. Oh, it is pleasant, as it is rare, to find the same arm linked in yours at forty, which at thirteen helped it to turn over the Cicero de Amicitia, or some tale of Antique Friendship, which the young heart even then was burning to anticipate !—Co-Grecian with S. was Th ,who has since executed with ability various diplomatic functions at the Northern courts. Th was a tall, dark, saturnine youth, sparing of speech, with raven locks.—Thomas Fanshaw Middle- ton followed him (now Bishop of Calcutta), a scholar and a gen¬ tleman in his teens. He has the repijtation of an excellent critic ; and is author (besides the Country Spectator) of a Treatise on the Greek Article, against Sharpe. M. is said to bear his mitre high in India, where the regni noviias (I dare say) sufficiently justifies the bearing. A humility quite as primitive as that of Jewel or Hooker might not be exactly fitted to impress the minds of those Anglo-Asiatic diocesans with a reverence for home insti¬ tutions, and the church which those fathers watered. The man¬ ners of M. at school, though firm, were mild and unassuming.— Next to M. (if not senior to him) was Richards, author of the Aboriginal Britons, the most spirited of the Oxford Prize Poems ; a pale, studious Grecian.—Then followed poor S , ill-fated M ! of these the Muse is silent. Finding some of Edward's race Unhappy, pass their annals by. Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of thy fandies, with hope like a fiery column before thee—^the dark pillar not yet turned—Samuel Taylor Coleridge—Logician, Metaphysician, Bard!—How have I seen the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the gari of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charily-loy f—Many were the "wit combats" (to dally awhile with the words of old Fuller) between him and C. V. Le G , CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO, SI " which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon, and an Eng. lish man of war ; Master Coleridge, like the former, was built far higher in learning, solid, but slow in his performances. C. V. L., with the English man of war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advan- ttfge of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention." Nor shalt thou, their compeer, be quickly forgotten, Allen, with the cordial smile, and still more cordial laugh, with which thou wert wont to make the old Cloisters shake, in thy cognition of some poignant jest of theirs ; or the anticipation of some more material, and peradventure practical one, of thine own. Extinct are those smiles, with that beautiful countenance, with which (for thou wert the Nirem formosus of the school), in the days of thy maturer waggery, thou didst disarm the wrath of infuriated town- damsel, who, incensed by provoking pinch, turning tigress-like round, suddenly converted by thy angel look, exchanged the half- formed terrible " bl ," for a gentler greeting—" bless thy hand¬ some face !" Next follow two, who ought to be now alive, and the friends of Elia—^the junior Le G and F ; who impelled, the former by a roving temper, the latter by too quick a sense of neglect— ill capable of enduring the slights poor Sizars are sometimes sub¬ ject to in our seats of learning—exchanged their Alma Mater for the camp ; perishing, one by climate, and one on the plains of Salamanca ; — Le G , sanguine, volatile, sweet-natured ; F dogged, faithful, anticipative of insult, warm-hearted, with something of the old Roman height about him. Fine, frank-hearted Fr , the present master of Hertford, with Marmaduke T , mildest of Missionaries—and both my good friends still—close the catalogue of Grecians in my time. 28 ELIA, THE TWO RACES OF MEN. The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men who lend. To these two original diversities may be reduced all those impertinent classifications of Gothic and Celtic tribes, white men, black men, red men. All the dwellers upon earth, " Parthians, and Modes, and Elamites," flock hither, and do na¬ turally fall in with one or other of these primary distinctions. The infinite superiority of the former, which I choose to designate as the great race, is discernible in their figure, port, and a certain instinctive sovereignty. The latter are born degraded. "He shall serve his brethren." There is something in the air of one of this cast, lean and suspicious ; contrasting with the open, trust¬ ing, generous manners of the other. Observe who have been the greatest borrowers of all ages— Alcibiades—FalslafF—Sir Richard Steele—our late incomparable Brinsley—what a family likeness in all four ! What a careless, even deportment hath your borrower ! what rosy gills ! what a beautiful reliance on Providence doth he mani¬ fest,—taking no more thought than lilies ! What contempt for money,—^accounting it (yours and mine especially) no better than dross ! What a liberal confounding of those pedantic distinctions of tneum and tuum ! or rather, what a noble simplification of lan¬ guage (beyond Tooke), resolving these suppased opposites into one clear, intelligible pronoun adjective !—What near approaches doth he make to the primitive communüy,—^to the extent of one half of the principle at least. , He is the true taxer who " calleth all the world up to be taxed fHE TWO RACES OF MEN. 29 and the distance is as vast between him and one of us, as subsisted between the Augustan Majesty and the poorest obolary Jew that paid it tribute-pittance at Jerusalem !—His exactions, too, have such a cheerful, voluntary air ! So far rémoved from your sour parochial or state-gatherers,—^those ink-horn varlets, who carry their want of welcome in their faces ! He cometh to you with a smile, and troubleth you with no receipt ; confining himself to no set season. Every day is his Candlemas, or his Feast of Holy Michael. He applieth the kne lormentum of a pleasant look to your purse,—which to that gentle warmth expands her silken leaves, as naturally as the cloak of the traveller, for which sun and wind contended ! He is the true Propontic which never ebbeth ! The sea which taketh handsomely at each man's hand. In vain the victim, whom he delighteth to honor, struggles with destiny ; he is in the net. Lend therefore cheerfully, O man, ordained to lend—that thou lose not in the end, with thy worldly penny, the reversion promised. Combine not preposterously in thine own person the penalties of Lazarus and of Dives !—^but, when thou seest the proper authority coming, meet it smilingly, as it were half-way. Come, a handsome sacrifice ! See how light He makes of it ! Strain not courtesies with a noble enemy. Reflections like the foregoing were forced upon my mind by the death of my old friend, Ralph Bigod, Esq., who parted this life, on Wednesday evening ; dying, as he had lived, without much trouble. He boasted himself a descendent from mighty ancestors of that name, who heretofore held ducal dignities in this realm. In his actions and sentiments he belied not the stock to which he pretended. Early in life he found himself invested with ample revenues ; which, with that noble disinterestedness which I have noticed as inherent in men of the great race, he took almost im¬ mediate measures entirely to dissipate and bring to nothing : for there is something revolting in the idea of a king holding a pri- } vate purse ; and the thoughts of Bigod were all regal. Thus furnished by the very act of disfurnishment j getting rid of the cumbersome luggage of riches, more apt (as one sings) To slacken virtue, and abate her edge. Than prompt her to do aught may merit praise. 30 ELIA. he set forth, like some Alexander, upon his great enterprise, " bor¬ rowing and to borrow !" In his periegesis, or triumphant progress throughout this island, it has been calculated that he laid a tythe part of the inhabitants under contribution. I reject this estimate as greatly exagge¬ rated : but having had the honor of accompanying my friend divers times, in his perambulations about this vast city, I own I was greatly struck at first with the prodigious number of faces we met, who claimed a sort of respectful acquaintance with us. He was one day so obliging as to explain the phenomenon. It seems, these were his tributaries; feeders of his exchequer; gentlemen, his good friends (as he was pleased to express him¬ self), to whom he had occasionally been beholden for a loan. Their multitudes did no way disconcert him. He rather took a pride in numbering them ; and, with Comus, seemed pleased to be " stocked with so fair a herd." With such sources, it was a wonder how he contrived to keep his treasury always empty. He did it by force of an aphorism, which he had often in his mouth, that " money kept longer than three days stinks." So he made use of it while it was fresh, A good part he drank away (for he was an excellent toss-pot) ; some he gave away, the rest he threw away, literally tossing and hurling it violently from him—as boys do burrs, or as if it had been infectious,—into ponds, or ditches, or deep holes, inscrutable cavities of the earth ;—or he would bury it (where he would never seek it again) by a river's side under some bank, which (he would facetiously observe) paid no interest—but out away from him it must go peremptorily, as Hagar's oflspring into the wilder¬ ness, while it was sweet. He never missed it. The streams were perennial which fed his fisc. When new supplies became necessary, the first person that had the felicity to fall in with him, friend or stranger, was sure to contribute to the deficiency. For Bigod had an undeniable way with him. He had a cheerful, open exterior, a quick jovial eye, a bald forehead, just touched with grey {cana ßdes). He anticipated no excuse,, and found none. And, waiving for a while my theory as to the great race, I would put it to the most untheorising reader, who may at times have disposable coin in his pocket, whether it is not more repug- THE TWO RACES OF MEN. 31 nant to the kindliness of his nature to refuse such a one as I am describing, than to say no to a poor petitionary rogue (your has- tard borrower), who, by his mumping visnomy, tells you, that he expects nothing better ; and, therefore, whose preconceived notions and expectations you do in reality so much less shock in the refusal. When I think of this man; his fiery glow of heart ; his swell of feeling ; how magnificent, how ideal he was ; how great at the midnight hour ; and when I compare with him the compa¬ nions with whom I have associated since, I grudge the saving of a few idle ducats, and think that I am fallen into the society of lenders, and little men. To one like Elia, whose treasures are rather cased in leather covers than closed in iron coffers, there is a class of alienators more formidable than that which I have touched upon ; I mean your lorrowers of hooks—those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes. There is Comberbatch, matchless in his depredations ! That foul gap in the bottom shelf facing you, like a great eye- tooth knocked out—(you are now with me in my little back study in Bloomsbury, reader !) with the huge Switzer-like tomes on each side (like the Guild-hall giants, in their reformed posture, guardant of nothing). once held the tallest of my folios, Opera Bonaventura, choice and massy divinity, to which its two sup¬ porters (school divinity also, but of a lesser calibre,—Bellarmine, and Holy Thomas), showed but as dwarfs,—itself an Ascapart !— that Comberbatch abstracted upon the faith of a theory he holds, which is more easy, I confess, for me to suffer by than to refute, namely, that the title to property in a book (my Bonaventure, for instance), is in exact ratio to the claimant's powers of under¬ standing and appreciating the same." Should he go on acting upon this theory, which of our shelves is safe ? The slight vacuum in the left-hand case—^two shelves from the ceiling—scarcely distinguishable but by the quick eye of a loser— was whilom the commodious resting-place of Brown on Urn Burial. C. will hardly allege that he knows more about that treatise than I do, who introduced it to him, and was indeed the first (of the moderns) to discover its beauties—but so have I 32 ELIA. known a foolish lover to praise his mistress in the presence of a rival more qualified to carry her off than himself. Just below, Dodsley's dramas want their fourth volume, where Vittoria Co- rombona is ! The remainder nine are as distasteful as Priam's refuse sons, when the Fates lorrowed Hector. Here stood the Anatomy of Melancholy, in sober state. There loitered the Complete Angler ; quiet as in life, by some stream side. In yon¬ der nook, John Bunde, a widower-volume, with " eyes closed," mourns his ravished mate. One justice I must do my friend, that if he sometimes, like the sea, sweeps away a treasure, at another time, sea-like, he throws up as rich an equivalent to match it. I have a small under-col- lection of this nature (my friend's gatherings in his various calls), picked up, he has forgotten at what odd places, and deposited with as little memory at mine. I take in these orphans, the twice-deserted. These proselytes of the gate are welcome as the true Hebrews. There they stand in conjunction ; natives, and naturalized. The latter seem as little disposed to inquire out their true lineage as I am. I charge no warehouse-room fof these deodands, nor shall ever put myself to the ungentlemanly trouble of advertising a sale of them to pay expenses. To lose a volume to C. carries some sense and meaning in it. You are sure that he will make one hearty meal on your viands, if he can give no account of the platter after it. But what moved thee, wayward, spiteful K., to be so importunate to carry off with thee, in spite of tears and adjurations to thee to forbear, the Letters of that princely woman, the thrice noble Margaret Newcastle ?—knowing at the time, and knowing that I knew also, thou most assuredly wouldst never turn over one leaf of the illustrious folio :—what but the mere spirit of contradiction, and childish love of getting the better of thy friend ? Then, worst cut of all ! to transport it with thee to the Gallican land— Unworthy land to harbor such a sweetness, A virtue in which all ennobling thoughts dwelt. Pure thoughts, kind thoughts, high thoughts, her sex's wonder ! ———hadst thou not thy play-books, and books of jests and fancies, about thee, to keep thee merry, even as thou keepest all compa- THE TWO RACES OF MEN. 33 nies with thy quips and mirthful tales ? Child of the Green¬ room, it was unkindly done of thee. Thy wife, too, that part- French, better-part English-woman !—that she could fix upon no other treatise to bear away, in kindly token of remembering us, than the works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brook—of which no Frenchman, nor woman of France, Italy, or England, was ever by nature constituted to comprehend a tittle !—Was there not Zim¬ merman on Solitude ? y Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate collection, be shy of showing it j or if thy heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy books ; but let it be to such a one as S. T. C.—he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury ; enriched with annotations tripling their value. I have had experience. Many are these precious MSS. of his—(in matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity not unfrequently, vying with the originals) in no very clerkly band—legible in my Daniel ; in old Burton ; in Sir Thomas Browne ; and those ab¬ struser cogitations of the Greville, now, alas ! wandering in Pagan lands. I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library, against S. T. C. PART I 4 34 ELIA. NEW TEAR'S EVE. Every man hath two birthrdays : two days, at least, in every year, which set him upon revolving tlie lapse of time, as it affects his mortal duration. The one is that which in an especial manner he termeth his. In the gradual desuetude df old observances, this custom of solemnizing our proper birth-day hath nearly passed away, or is left to children, who reflect nothing at all about the matter, nor understand anything in it beyond cake and orange. But the birth of a New Year is of an interest too wide to he pre¬ termitted by king or cobbler. No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of ouf com¬ mon Adam. Of all sound of all bells—(bells, th í music nighest bordering upon heaven)—most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year. I never hear it without a gathering-up of my mind to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelvemonth ; all I have done or suffered, perform¬ ed or neglected—in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth, as when a person dies. It takes a personal color ; not was it a poetical flight in a contemporary, when he exclaimed, I saw the skirts of the departing Year. It is no more than what in sober sadness every one of us seems to be conscious of, in that awful leave-taking. I am sure I felt it, and all feit it with me, last night ; though some of my companions affected rather to manifest an exhilaration at the birth of the com¬ ing year, than any very tender regrets for the decease of its pre¬ decessor. But I am none of those who— NEW YEAR'S EVE. 35 Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest. I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties ; new books, new faces, new years,—from some mental twist which makes it diffi¬ cult in me to face the prospective. I have almost ceased to hope ; and am sanguine only in the prospects of other (former) years. I plunge into foregone visions and conclusions. I encounter pell- mell with past disappointments. I am armor-proof against old discouragements. I forgive, or overcome in fancy, old adversa¬ ries. I play over again for love, as the gamesters phrase it, games, for which I once paid so dear. I would scarce now have any of those untoward accidents and events of my life reversed. I would no more alter them than the incidents of some well-con- trived novel. Methinks it is better that I should have pined away seven of my goldenest years, when I was thrall to the fair hair, and fairer eyes, of Alice W n, than that so passionate a love-adventure should be lost. It was better that our family should have missed that legacy, which old Dorrell cheated us of, than that I should have at this moment two thousand pounds in banco, and be without the idea of the specious old rogue. In a degree beneath manhood, it is my infirmity to look back upon those early days. Do I advance a paradox, when I say, that, skipping, over the intervention of forty years, a man may have leave to love himself, without the imputation of self-love ? If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is introspec¬ tive—and mine is painfully so—can have a less respect for his present identity, than I have for the man Elia. I know him to be light, and vain, and humorsome ; a notorious * * * ; addicted to * * * » : averse from counsel, neither taking it nor offering it ;—* * * besides ; a stammering buffoon ; what you will ; lay it on, and spare not : I subscribe to it all, and much more than thou canst be willing to lay at his door but for the child Elia, that "other me," there, in the back-ground—I must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that young master—with as little reference, I protest, to this stupid changeling of five-and-forty, as if it had been a child of some other house, and not of my parents. I can cry over its patient small-pox at five, and rougher medica¬ ments. I can lay its poor fevered head upon the sick pillow at 30 ELIA. Christ's and awake with it in surprise at the gentle posture of maternal tenderness hanging over it, that unknown had watched its sleep. I know how it shrank from any the least colw of false¬ hood. God help thee, Elia, how art thou changed !—Thou art sophisticated.—I know how honest, how courageous (for a weak¬ ling) it was—^how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful ! From what have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself,—and not some dissembling guardian, presenting a false identity, to give the rule to my unpractised steps, and regulate the tone of my moral being ! That I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, in such retrospection, may be the symptom of some sickly idiosyn- crasy. Or is it owing to another cause : simply, that being with¬ out wife or family, I have not learned to project myself enough out of myself ; and having no offspring of my own to dally with, I turn back upon memory, and adopt my own early idea, as my heir and favorite ? If these speculations seem fantastical to thee, reader—(a busy man, perchance), if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am singularly conceited only, I retire, im¬ penetrable to ridicule, under the phantom cloud of Elia. The elders, with whom I was brought up, were of a character not likely to let slip the sacred observance of any old institution ; and the ringing out of the Old Year was kept by Jjiem with cir¬ cumstances of peculiar ceremony.—In those days the sound of those midnight chimes, though it seemed to raise hilarity in all around, me, never failed to bring a train of pensive imagery into my fancy. Yet I then scarce conceived what it meant, or thought of it as a reckoning that concerned me. Not childhood alone bu. the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life ; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December. But now, shall I confess a truth ?—I feel these audits but too powerfully. I begin to count the probabilities of my duration, and to grudge at the expenditure of moments and shortest periods, like misers' farthings. In pro¬ portion as the years both lessen and shorten, I set more count upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon NEW YEAR'S EVE. 37. the spoke of the great wheel. I am not content to pass away " like a weaver's shuttle." Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity ; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with * this green earth ; the face of town and country ; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am- content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived ; I, and my friends : to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age ; or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the gAve.—Any altera¬ tion, on this earth of mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and dis¬ composes me. My household-gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood. They do not willingly seek Lavinian shores. A new state of being staggers me. Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle¬ light and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and iranv ilxeJf-—do these things go out with life ? gh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios ! must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge armfulls) in my embra¬ ces ? Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading ? - Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the smiling indications which point me to them here,—the recognizable face—the " sweet assurance of a look"—? ""In winter this intolerable disinclination to dying—^to give it its mildest name—does more especially haunt and beset me. In a genial August noon, beneath a sweltering sky, death is almost problematic. At those times do such poor snakes as myself enjoy an immortality. Then we expand and bourgeon. Then we are as strong again, as valiant again, as wise again, and a great deal taller. The blast that nips and shrinks me, puts me in thoughts of death. All things allied to the insubstantial, wait upon thai 38 ELIA. master feeling ; cold, numbness, dreams, perplexity ; moonlight itself, with its shadowy and spectral appearances,—that cold ghost of the sun, or Phoebus' sickly sister, like that innutritious one denounced in the Canticles :—Î am none of her minions— hold with the Persian. Whatever thwarts, or puts me out of my way, brings death ' into my mind. All partial evils, like humors, run into thak capi¬ tal plague-sore. I have heard some profess an indifference to life. Such hail the end of their existence as a port of refuge ; and speak of the grave as of some soft arms, in which they may slumber as on a pillow. Some have wooed death but out upon thee, I say, thou foul, ugly phantom ! I detest, abhor, exe¬ crate, and (with Friar John) give thee to six-score thousand devils, as in no instance to be excused or tolerated, but shunned as an universal viper ; to be branded, proscribed, and spoken evil of. In no way can I be brought to digest thee, thou thin, melan¬ choly Privation, or more frightful and confounding Positive ! Those antidotes, prescribed against the fear of thee, are alto¬ gether frigid and insulting, like thyself. For what satisftiction hath a man, that he shall " lie down with kings and emperors in death," who in his life-time never greatly coveted the society of such bed-fellows ?—or, forsooth, that " so shall the fairest face appear ?"—why, to comfort me, must Alice W n be a goblin ? More than all, I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbe¬ coming familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that " Such as he now is I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps as thou imaginest. In the mean time I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy better's ! Thy New Years' days are past. I survive, a jolly candidate for 1821. Another cup of wine—and while that tura-coat bell, that just now mournfully chanted the obse¬ quies of 1820 departed, with changed notes lustily rings in a successor, let us attune to its peal the song made, on a like occa¬ sion, by hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton. NEW-YEAR'S EVE. 39 THE NEW YEAR. Hark the cock crows, and yon bright star Tells us the day himself's not far ; And see where, breaking from the night. He gilds the western hills with light. With him old Janus doth appear. Peeping into the future year. With such a look as seems to say. The prospect is not good that way. Thus do we rise ill sights to see, And 'gainst ourselves to prophesy ; When the prophetic fear of things A more tormenting mischief brings. More full of soul-tormenting gall Than direst mischiefs can befall. But stay ! but stay ! methinks my sight. Better inform'd by clearer light. Discerns sereneness in' that brow. That all contracted seem'd but now. His reversed face may show distaste. And frown upon the ills are past ; But that which this way looks is clear. And smiles upon the New-born Year. He looks too from a place so high. The Year lies open to his eye ; And all the moments open are To the exact discoverer. Yet more and more he smiles upon The happy revolution. Why should we then suspect or fear The influences of a year. So smiles upon us the first morn. And speaks us good so soon as born ? Plague on't ! the last was ill enough. This cannot but make better proof ; Or, at the worst, as we brushed through The last, why so we may this too ; And then the next in reason should Be superexcellently good ; For the worst ills we daily see Have no more perpetuity Than the best fortunes that do fall Which also bring us wherewithal Longer their being to support. 4ft ELIA. Than those do of the other sort : And who has one good year in three. And yet repines at destiny, ^ Appears ungrateful in the case. And merits not the good he has. Then let us welcome the New Guest With lusty brimmers of the best ; Mirth always should Good Fortune meet And renders e'en Disaster sweet : And though the Princess turn her back. Let us but line ourselves with sack. We better shall by far hold out. Till the next Year she face about How say you, reader—do not these verses smack of the rough magnanimity of the old English vein ? Do they not fortify like a cordial ; enlarging the heart, and productive of sweet blood, and generous spirits, in the concoction ? Where be those puling fears of death, just now expressed or affected ?—Passed like a cloud—absorbed in the purging sunlight of clear poetry—clean washed away by a wave of genuine Helicon, your only Spa for these hypochondries—And now another cup of the generous ! and a merry New Year, and many of them to you all, my masters ! MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST. 41 MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST. " A CLEAR fire, a clean hearth, and the rigor of the game." This was the celebrated vñsh of old Sarah Battle (now with God), who, next to her devotions, loved a good game of whist. She was none of your.lukewarm gamesters, your half-and-half play¬ ers, who have no objection to take a hand, if you want one to make up a rubber ; who affirm that they have no pleasure in winning ; that they like to win one game and lose another ; that they can while away an hour very agreeably at a card-table, but are indifferent whether they play or no ; and will desire an ad¬ versary who has slipped a wrong card to take it up and play another. These insufferable triffers are tbe curse of a table. One of these flies will spoil a whole pot. Of such it may be said that they do not play at cards, but only play at playing at them. Sarah Battle was none of that breed. She detested them, as I do, from her heart and soul, and would not, save upon a striking emergency, willingly seat herself at the same table with them. She loved a thorough-paced partner, a determined enemy. She took, and gave, no concessions. She hated favors. She never made a revoke, nor ever passed it over in her adversary without exacting the utmost forfeiture. She fought a good fight : cut and thrust. She held not her good sword (her cards) " like a dancer." She sate bolt upright ; and neither showed you her cards nor desired to see yours. All people have their blind side—their superstitions ; and I have heard her declare, under the rose, that hearts was her favorite suit. I never in my life—and I knew Sarah Battle many of the best years of it—saw her take out her snuff-box when it was her turn to play ; or snuff a candle in the middle of a game ; or ring for 42 ELIA. a servant till it was fairly over. She never introduced, or con¬ nived at, miscellaneous conversation during its process. As she emphatically observed, cards were cards ; and if I ever saw un- mingled distaste in her fine last-century countenance, it was at the airs of a young gentleman of a literary turn, who had been with difficulty persuaded to take a hand ; and who, in his excess of candor, declared, that he thought there was no harm in un¬ bending the mind now and then, after serious studies, in recrea¬ tions of that kind ! She could not bear to have her noble occu¬ pation, to which she wound up her faculties, considered in that light. It was her business, her duty, the thing she came info the world to do,—and she did it. She unbent her mind afterwards, over a book. Pope was her favorite author : his Rape of the Lock her favorite work. She once did me the favor to play over with me (with the cards) his celebrated game of Ombre in that poem; and to explain to me how far it agreed with, and in what points it would be found to differ from, tradrille. Her illustrations were apposite and poignant ; and I had the pleasure of sending the substance of them to Mr. Bowles ; but I suppose they came too late to be inserted among his ingenious notes upon that author. Quadrille, she has often told me, was her first love ; but whist had engaged her maturer esteem. The former, she said, was showy and specious, and likely to allure young persons. The uncertainty and quick shifting of partners—a thing which the constancy of whist abhors ;—the dazzling supremacy and regal investiture of Spa dille—absurd, as she justly observed, in the pure aristocracy of whist, where his crown and garter gave him no proper power above his brother-nobility of the Aces;—^the giddy vanity, so taking to the inexperienced, of playing alone ; above all, the overpowering attractions of a Sam Prendre Vole,—to the triumph of which there is certainly nothing parallel or approaching, in the contingencies of whist ;—all these, she would say, make quadrille a game of captivation to the young and enthusiastic. But whist was the solider game : that was her word. It was a long meal : not, like quadrille, a feast of snatches. One or two rubbers might co-extend in duration with an evening. They gave time to form rooted friendships, to cultivate steady enmities. She despised the MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST. .43 chance-Started, capricious, and ever-fluctuating alliances of the other. The skirmishes of quadrille, she would say, reminded her of the petty ephemeral embroilments of the little Italian states, depicted by Machiavel : perpetually changing postures and con- nexions ; bitter foes to-day, sugared darlings to-morrow ; kissing and scratching in a breath ;—but the wars of whist were com. parable to the long, steady, deep-rooted, rational, antipathies of the great French and English nations. A grave simplicity was what she chiefly admired in her fa¬ vorite game. There was nothing silly in it, like the nob in crib- bage—nothing superfluous. No flushes—that most irrational of all pleas that a reasonable being can set up :—that any one should claim four by virtue of holding cards of the same mark and color, without reference to the playing of the game, or the indi- vidual worth or pretensions of the cards themselves ! She held tliis to be a solecism ; as pitiful an ambition at cards as allitera¬ tion is in authorship. She despised superficiality, and looked deeper than the color of things. Suits were soldiers, she would say, and must have an uniformity of array to distinguish them : but what should we say to a foolish squire, who should claim a merit from dressing up his tenantry in red jackets, that never were to be marshalled—never to take the field ?—She even wished that whist were more simple than it is ; and, in my mind, would have stripped it of some appendages, which, in the state of human frailty, may be venially and even commendably, -allowed of. She saw no reason for the deciding of the trump by the turn of the card. Why not one suit always trumps ?—Why two colors, when the mark of the suits would have sufficiently distinguished them without it ?— " But the eye, my dear Madam, is agreeably refreshed with the variety. Man is not a creature of pure reason—he must have his senses delightfully appealed to. We see it in Roman Catholic countries, where the music and the paintings draw in many to worship, whom.your quaker spirit of unsensualising would have kept out.—You yourself have a pretty collection of paintings— but confess to me, whether, walking in your gallery at Sandham, among thos. clear Vandykes, or among the Paul Potters in the ante-room, ) du ever felt your bosom glow with an elegant delight. 44 ELIA at all comparable to that you have it in your power to experience most evenings over a well-arranged assortment of the court cards 1 —^the pretty antic habits, like heralds in a procession—the gay triumph-assuring scarlets—the contrasting deadly-killing sables— the 'hoary majesty of spades'—Pam in all his glory !— "^11 these might be dispensed with ; and with their naked names upon the drab pasteboard, the game might goon very well pictureless. But the beauty of cards would be extinguished for ever. Stripped of all that is imaginative in them, they must degenerate into mere gambling. Imagine a dull deal board, or drum head, to spread them on, instead of that nice verdant carpet (next to nature's), fittest arena for those courtly combatants to play their gallant jousts and tourneys in !—Exchange those deli¬ cately-turned ivory markers—(work of Chinese artist, unconscious of their symbol,—or as profanely slighting their true application as the arrantest Ephesian journeyman that turned out those little shrines for the goddess)—exchange them for little bits of leather (our ancestor's money) or chalk aifd a slate ! "— The old lady, with a smile, confessed the soundness of my /Dgic, and to her approbation of my arguments on her favorite topic that evening, I have always fancied myself indebted for the legacy of a curious cribbage-board, made of the finest Sienna marble, which her maternal uncle (old Walter Plumer, whom I have elsewhere celebrated) brought with him from Florence :— this, and a trifle of five hundred pounds, came to me at her death. The former bequest (which I do not least value) I have kept with religious care ; though she herself, to confess a truth, was never greatly taken with cribbage. It was an essentially vulgar game, I have heard her say,—disputing with her uncle, who was very partial to it. She could never heartily bring her mouth to pro¬ nounce " Go "—or " That's ago." She called it an ungrammati- cal game. The pegging teased her. I once knew her to forfeit a rubber (a guinea stake), because she would not »take advantage of the turn-up knave, which would have given it her, but which she must have claimed by the disgraceful tenure of declaring " two for his heeh." There is something extremely genteel in this sort of self-denial. Sarah Battle was a gentlewo nan born. MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST. 45 Piquet she held the best game at the cards for two persons, though she would ridicule the pedantry of the terms—^such as pique—repique—^the capot—^they savored (she thought) of affec¬ tation. But games for two, or even three, she never greatly cared for. She loved the quadrate, or square. She would argue thus : ^—Cards are warfare : the ends are gain, with glory. But cards are war, in disguise of a sport ; when single adversaries en¬ counter, the ends proposed are too palpable. By themselves, it is too close a fight ; with spectators, it is not much bettered. No looker-on can be interested, except for a bet, and then it is a mere affair of money ; he cares not for your luck sympathetically, or for your play.—Three are still worse ; a mere naked war of every man against every man, as in cribbage, without league or alliance ; or a rotation of petty and contradictory interests, a succession of heartless leagues, and not much more hearty infractions of them, as in tradrille.—But in square games {she meant whist), all that is possible to be attained in card-playing is accomplished. There are the incentives of profit with honor, common to every species —^though the latter can be but very imperfectly enjoyed in those other games, where the spectator is only feebly a participator. But the parties in whist are spectators and principals too. They are a theatre to themselves, and a looker-on is not wanted. He is rather worse than nothing, and an impertinence. Whist abhors neutrality, or interests beyond its sphere. You glory in some surprising stroke of skill or fortune, not because a cold—or even an interested—bystander witnesses it, but because your partner sympathizes in the contingency. You win for two. You triumph for two. Two are exalted. Two again are mortified ; which divides their disgrace, as the conjunction doubles (by taking off the invidiousness) your glories. Two losing to two are better reconciled, than one to one in that close butchery. The hostile feeling is weakened by multiplying the channels. War becomes a civil game.—By such reasonings as these the old lady was ac¬ customed to defend her favorite pastime. No inducement could ever prevail upon her to play at any game, where chance entered into the composition,ybr nothing. Chance, she would argue—and here again admire the subtlety of her conclusion; —chance is nothing, but where something else depends 46 ELIA. upon it. It is obvious that cannot he glory. What rational cause of exultation could it give to a man to turn up size ace a hundred times together by himself? or before spectators, where no stake was depending ?—Make a lottery of a hundred thousand tickets with but one fortunate number—and what possible principle of our nature, except stupid wonderment, could it gratify to gain that ' number as many times successively, without a prize ?— Therefore she disliked the mixture of chanee in backgammon, where it was not played for money. She called it ftwlish, and those people idiots, who were taken with a lucky hit under such circumstances. Games of pure skill were as little to her fancy. Played for a stake, they were a mere system of over-reaching. Played for glory they were a mere setting of one man's wit,— his memory, or «combination-faculty rather—against "another's ; like a mock-engagement at a review, bloodless and profitless. She could not conceive a game wanting the sprightly infusion of chance, the handsome excuses of good fortune. Two people playing at chess in a comer of a room, whilst whist was stirring in the centre, would inspire her with insufferable horror and ennui. Those well-cut similitudes of Castles, and Knights, the imagery of the board, she would argue (and I think in this case justly), were entirely misplaced and senseless. Those hard head-contests can in no instance ally with the fancy. They reject form and color. A pencil and dry-slate (she used to say) were the proper arena for such combatants. To those puny objectors against cards, as nurturing the bad passions, she would retort, that man is a gaming animal. He must be always trying to get the better in something or other :— that this passion can scarcely be more safely expended than upon a game at cards : that cards are a temporary illusion ; in truth, a mere drama ; for we do but play at being mightily concerned, where a few idle shillings are at stake, yet, during the illusion, we are as mightily concerned as those whose stake is crowns and kingdoms. They are a sort of dream-fighting ; much ado ; great battling, and little bloodshed ; mighty means for disproportioned ends ; quite as diverting, and a great deal more innoxious, than many of those more serious games of life, which men play, with¬ out esteeming them to be such. MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST. 47 With great deference to the old lady's judgment on these mat¬ ters I think I have experienced some moments in my life, when playing at cards for nothing has even been agreeable. When I am in sickness, or not in the best spirits, I sometimes call for the cards, and play a game at piquetybr hve with my cousin Bridget —Bridget Elia. • I grant there is something sneaking in it with a tooth¬ ache, or a sprained ankle,—when you are subdued and humble, —^you are glad to put up with an inferior spring of action. There is such a thing in nature, I am convinced, as sick whist. I grant it is not the highest style of man—I deprecate the manes of Sarah Battle—she lives not, alas ! to whom I should apologise. At such times, those terms which my old friend objected to, come in as something admissible.—I love to get a tierce or a quatorze, though they mean nothing. I am subdued to an in¬ ferior interest. Those shadows of winning amuse me. That last game I had with my sweet cousin (I capotted her)— (dare I tell thee how foolish I am ?)—I wished it might have lasted for ever, though we gained nothing, and lost nothing, though it was a mere shade of play : I would be content to go on in that idle folly for ever. The pipkin should be ever boiling, that was to prepare the gentle lenitive to my foot, which Bridget was doomed to apply after the game was over : and, as I do not much relish appliances, there it should ever bubble. Bridget and I should be ever playing. 4S ELIA. A CHAPTER ON EARS I HAVE no ear.— Mistake me not, reader—^nor imagine that I am by nature des¬ titute of those exterior twin appendages, hanging ornaments, and (architecturally speaking) handsome volutes to the human capi¬ tal. Better my mother had never home me.—I am, I think, rather delicately than copiously provided with those conduits; and I feel no disposition to envy the mule for his plenty, or the mole for her exactness, in those ingenious labyrinthine inlets— those indispensable side-intelligencers. Neither have I incurred, or done anything to incur, with Defoe, that hideous disfigurement, which constrained him to draw upon assurance^to feel " quite unabashed," and at ease upon that article. I was never, I thank my stars, in the pillory ; nor, if I read them aright, is it within the compass of my destiny, that I ever should be. When therefore I say that I have no ear, you will understand me to mean—-for music. To say that this heart never melted at the concord of sweet sounds, would be a foul self-libel. " Water parted from the sea " never fails to move it strangely. So does " In irfancy." But they were used to be sung at her harpsichord (the old-fashioned instrument in vogue in those days) by a gentlewoman—the gentlest, sure, that ever merited the appella¬ tion—the sweetest—why should I hesitate to name Mrs. S , once the blooming Fanny Weatheral of the Temple—who had power to thrill the soul of Elia, small imp as he was, even in his long coats ; and to make him glow, tremble, and blush with a passion, that not faintly indicated the day-spring of that absorb. A CHAPTER ON EARS. 49 ing sentiment which was afterwards destined to overwhelm and subdue his nature quite for Alice W n. 1 even think that sentimentally I am disposed to harmony. But organically I am incapable of a tune. I have been practising " God save the King" all my life; whistling and humming of it over to myself in solitary corners ; and am not yet arrived, they tell me, within many quavers of it. Yet hath the loyalty of Elia never been impeached. I am not without suspicion, that I have an undeveloped faculty of music within me. For thrumming, in my wild way, on my friend A.'s piano, the other morning, while he was engaged in an adjoining parlor,—on his return he was pleased to say, " he thonghl it could not he the maid !" On his first surprise at hearing the keys touched in somewhat an airy and masterful way, not dream¬ ing of me, his suspicions had lighted on Jenny. But a grace, snatched from a superior refinement, soon convinced him that some being—technically perhaps deficient, but higher informed from a principle common to all the fine arts—had swayed the keys to a mood which Jenny, with all her (less cultivated) enthu¬ siasm, could never have elicited from them. I mention this as a proof of my friend's penetration, and not with any view of dis¬ paraging Jenny. Scientifically I could never be made to understand (yet have I taken some pains) what a note in music is ; or how one note should differ from another. Much less in voices can I distinguish a soprano- from a tenor. Only sometimes the thorough-bass I contrive to guess at, from its being supereminently harsh and dis¬ agreeable. I tremble, however, for my misapplication of the simplest terms of that which I disclaim. While I profess my ignorance, I scarce know what to say 1 am ignorant of. I hate, perhaps, by misnomers. Sostenuto and adagio stand in the like relation of obscurity to me ; and Sol, Fa, Mi, Re, is as conjuring as BaraKpton. It is hard to stand alone in an age like this,—(constituted to the quick and critical perception of all harmonious combinations, I verily believe, beyond all preceding ages, since Jubal stumbled upon the gamut) to remain, as it were, singly unimpressible to the magic influences of an art, which is said to hava such an FART I. 5 54 ELIA. especial stroke at soothing, elevating, and refining the passions. —Yet, rather than break the candid current of my confessions, I must avow to you, that I have received a great deal more pain than pleasure from this so cried-up faculty. I am constitutionally susceptible of noises. A carpenter's hammer, in a warm summer noon, will fret me into more than midsummer madness. But those unconnected, unset sounds are nothing to the measured malice of music. The ear is passive to those single strokes ; willingly enduring stripes while it hath no task to con. To music it cannot be passive. It will strive— mine at least will—'spite of its inaptitude, to thread the maze ; like an unskilled eye painfully poring upon hieroglyphics. I have sat through an Italian Opera, till, for sheer pain, and inex¬ plicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded streets, to solace myself with sounds which I was not obliged to follow, and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, harren attention ! I take refuge in the unpretending assemblage of honest common-life sounds ;—and the purgatory of the Enraged Musician becomes my paradise. I have sat at an Oratorio (that profanation of the purposes of the cheerful playhouse) watching the faces of the auditory in the pit (what a contrast to Hogarth's Laughing Audience !) im¬ moveable, or affecting some faint emotion—^till (as some have said, that our occupations in the next world will be but a shadow of what delighted us in this) I have imagined myself in some cold Theatre in Hades, where some of Xhe forms of the earthly one should be kept up, with none of the enjoyment ; or like that Party in a parlor All silent, and all damned. Above all, those insufferable concertos, and pieces of music, as they are called, do plague and embitter my apprehensions. Words are something j but to be exposed to an endless battery of mere sounds ; to be long a dying, to lie stretched upon a rack of roses ; to keep up languor by unintermitted eflbrt ; to pile honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweetness ; to fill up sound with feeling, and strain ideas to keep A CHAPTER ON EARS. SI pace with it ; to gaze on empty frames, and be forced to make the pictures for yourself ; to Yead a book, all slops, and be obliged to supply the verbal matter; to invei.t extempore tragedies to answer to the vague gestures of an inexplicable rambling mime— these are faint shadows o^what I have undergone from a series of the ablest-executed pieces of this empty instrumental music. I deny not, that in the opening of a concert, I have experienced something vastly lulling and agreeable:—afterwards followeth the languor and the oppression.—Like that disappointing book in Patmos; or, like the comings on of melancholy, described by Burton, doth music make her first insinuating approaches :—" Most pleasant it is to such as are melancholy given to walk alone in some solitary grove, betwixt wood and water, by some brook side, and to meditate upon some delightsome and pleasant subject, which shall affect him most, amahllis insania, and mentis gratissimus error. A most incomparable delight to build castles in the air, to go smiling to themselves, acting an infinite variety of parts, which they suppose, and strongly imagine, they act, or that they see done.—So delightsome these toys at first, they could spend whole days and nights without sleep, even whole years in such contem¬ plations, and fantastical meditations, which are like so many dreams, and will hardly be drawn from them—winding and un¬ winding themselves as so many clocks, and still pleasing their humors, until at the last the scene turns upon a sudden, and they being now habituated to such meditations and solitary places, can endure no company, can think of nothing but harsh and dis- tasteful subjects. Fear, sorrow, suspicion, subrusticus pudor, discontent, cares, and weariness of life, surprise them on a sudden and they can think of nothing else ; continually suspecting, no sooner are their eyes open, but this infernal plague of melancholy seizeth on them, and terrifies their souls, representing some dismal object to their minds; which now, by no means, no labor, no persuasions, they can avoid, they canno* be rid of, they cannot resist." Something like this " scene turning " I have experienced at the evening parties, at the house of my good Catholic friend iVat» ; who, by the aid of a capital organ, himself the most 53 ELIA. finished of players, converts his drawing-room into a chapel, his week days into Sundays, and these^atter iüto minor heavens.* When my friend commences upon one of those solemn anthems, which peradventure struck upon my heedless ear, rambling in the side aisles of the dim Abbey, some ^ve-and-thirty years since, waking a new sense, and putting a soul of old religion into my young apprehension—(whether it be thai, in which the Psalmist, weary of the persecutions of bad men, wisheth to himself dove's wings—or tlud other, which, with a like measure of sobriety and pathos, inquireth by what means the young man shall best cleanse his mind)—a holy calm pervadeth me.—I am for the time rapt above earth, And possess joys not promised at my birth. But when this master of the spell, not content to have laid a soul prostrate, goes on, in his power, to inflict more bliss than lies in her capacity to receive,—impatient to overcome her "earthly " with his " heavenly,"—still pouring in, for protracted hours, fresh waves and fresh from the sea of sound, or from that ine.vhausted German ocean, above which, in triumphant progress, dolphin-seated, ride those Arions Haydn and Mozart., with their attendant Tritons, Bach, Beethoven, and a countless tribe, whom to attempt to reckon up would but plunge me again in the deeps,—I stagger under the weight of harmony, reeling to and fro at my wits' end ;—clouds, as of frankincense, oppress me—priests, altars, censers, dazzle before me—the genius of his religion hath me in her toils—^a shadowy triple tiara invests the brow of my friend, late so naked, so ingenuous—he is Pope,—and by him sits, like as in the anomaly of dreams, a she-Pope too,—tricoroneted like himself!—I am converted, and yet a Protestant ;—at once maïïeus hereticorum, and myself grand heresiarch : or three heresies centre in my person :—I am Marcion, Ebion, and Cerinthus—Gog and Magog —what not ?—^till the coming in of the friendly supper-tray dissi- pates the figment, and a draught of true Lutheran beer (in which chiefly my friend shows himself no bigot) at once reconciles me to the rationalities of a purer faith ; and restores to me the genuine imterrifying aspects of my pleasant-countenanced host and hostess. • I have been there, and still would go; 'Tis like a little heavn below.—Dr. Watts. ALL FOOLS' DAY". 53 ALL FOOLS' DAY. The compliments of the season to my worthy masters, and a merry first of April to us all ! Many happy returns of this day to y(yj—and you—and you. Sir—nay, never frown, man, nor put a long face upon the matter. Do not we know one another ? what need of ceremony among friends ? we have all a touch of that same—you understand me— a speck of the motley. Beshrew the man who on such a day as this, the general festival, should affect to stand aloof. I am none of those sneakers. I am free of the corporation, and care not who knows it. He that meets me in the forest to-day, shall meet with no wise-acre, I can tell him. Stultus sum. Translate me that, and take the meaning of it to yourself for your pains. What ! man, we have four quarters of the globe on our side, at the least computation. Fill us a cup of that sparkling gooseberry—we will drink no wise, melancholy, politic port on this day—and let us troll the catch of Amiens—due ad me—due ad me—^how goes it ? Here shall he see Gross fools as he. Now would I give a trifle to know historically and authentically, who was the greatest fool that ever lived. I would certainly give him in a bumper. Marry, of the present breed, I think I could without much difficulty name you the party. Remove your cap a little further, if you please : it hides my bauble. And now each man bestride his hobby, and dust away his bells to what tune he pleases. I will give you, for my part, The crazy old church clock. And the bewildered chimes. 64 ELIA. Good master Empedocles, you are welcome. It is long since you went a salamander-gathering down .Etna. Worse than sam¬ phire-picking by some odds. 'Tis a mercy your worship did not singe your mustachios. Ha ! Cleombrotus ! and what salads in faith did you light upon at the bottom of the Mediterranean ! You were founder, I take it, of the disinterested sect of the Calenturists. Gebir, my old free-mason, and prince of plasterers at Babel, bring in your trowel, most Ancient Grand ! You have claim to a seat here at my right hand, as patron of the stammerers. You left your work, if I remember Herodotus correctly, at eight hundred million toise% or thereabout, above the level of the sea. Bless us, what a long bell you must have pulled, to call your top workmen to their nunchion on the low grounds of Shinar. Or did you send up your garlic and onions by a rocket ? I am a rogue if I am not ashamed to show you our Monument on Fish-street Hill, after your altitudes. Yet we think it somewhat. What, the magnanimous Alexander in tears ?—cry, baby, put its finger in its eye, it shall have another globe, round as an orange, pretty moppet ! Mister Adams 'odso, I honor your coat—pray do us the favor to read to us that sermon, which you lent to Mistress Slip¬ slop—the twenty and second in your portmanteau there—on Female Incontinence—the same—it will come in most irre¬ levantly and impertinently seasonable to the time of the day- Good Master Rayniund Lully, you look wise- Pray correct that error. Duns, spare your definitions. I must fine you a bumper, or a paradox. We will have nothing said or done syllogistically this day. Remove those logical forms, waiter, that no gentleman break the tender shins of his apprehension stumbling across them. Master Stephen, you are late.—Ha ! Cokes, is it you ?—Ague- cheek, my dear knight, let me pay my devoir to you.—Master Shallow, your worship's poor servant to command.—Master Silence, I will ise few words with you.—Slender, it shall go hard if I edge not you in somewhere.—You six will engross all the poor wit of the company to-day.—I know it, I know it. Ha! honest R , my fine old Librarian of Ludgate, time ALL FOOLS' DAY. 55 out of mind, art thou here again ? Bless thy doublet, it is not over-new, threadbare as thy stories :—what dost thou flitting about the world at this rate ?—^Thy customers are extinct, defunct, bed- rid, have ceased to read long ago.—Thou goest still among them, seeing if, peradventure, thou canst hawk a volume or two.—Giood Granville S , thy last patron is flown. King Pandion, he is dead, All thy friends are lapt in lead.— Nevertheless, noble R , come in, and take your seat here, between Armado and Quisada ; for in true courtesy, in gravity, in fantastic smiling to thyself, in courteous smiling upon others, in the goodly ornature of well-apparelled speeeh, and the commenda¬ tion of wise sentences, thou art nothing inferior to those accom¬ plished Dons of Spain. The spirit of chivalry forsake me for ever, when I forget thy singing the song of Macheath, which de¬ clares that he might be happy with either, situated between those two ancient spinsters—when I forget the inimitable formal love which thou didst make, turning now to the one, and now to the other, with that Malvolian smile—as if Cervantes, not Gay, had written it for his hero; and as if thousands of periods must revolve, before the mirror of courtesy could have given his invidi¬ ous preference between a pair of so goodly-propertied and merito¬ rious-equal damsels. * * » * * * * To descend from these altitudes, and not to protract our Fool's Banquet beyond its appropriate day,—for I fear the second of April is not many hours distant—in sober verity I will confess a truth to thee, reader. I love a Fool—as naturally, as if I were of kith and kin to him. When a child, with child-like apprehen¬ sions, that dived not below the surface of the matter, I read those Parables—not guessing at the involved wisdom—I had more yearnings towards that simple architect, that built his house upon the sand, than I entertain^gd-for his more cautious neighbor ; I grudged at the hard censure pronounced upon the quiet soul that kept his talent ; and—prizing their simplicity beyond the more provident, and, to my apprehension, somewhat unfeminine wariness pf their competitors—I felt a kindliness, that almost amounted to a tendre, for those flve thoughtless virgins.—I have never made an 66 * ELIA. acquaintance since, that lasted ; or a friendship, that answered with any that had not some tincture of the absurd in their charac¬ ters. I venerate an honest obliquity of understanding. The more laughable blunders a man shall commit in your company, the more tests he giveth you, that he will not betray or overreach you. I love the safety, which a palpable hallucination warrants ; the security, which a word out of season ratifies. And take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition. It is. observed, that " the fool- isher the fowl or fish,—woodcocks,—dotterels,—cod's-heads, &c., the finer the flesh thereof," and what are commonly the world's received fools, but such whereof the world is not worthy ? and what have been some of the kindliest patterns of our species, but so many darlings of absurdity, minions of the goddess, and her white boys ?—Reader, if you wrest my words beyond their fair construction, it is you, and not I, that are the April Fool. A QUAKERS' MEETING. 51 A QUAKERS' MEETING. % still-born Silence ! thou that art Flood-gate of the deeper heart 1 Offspring of a heavenly kind ! Frost o' the mouth, and th^w o,' the mind ! Secrecy's confidant, and he Who makes religion mystery ! Admiration's speaking'st tongue ! Leave, thy desert shades among. Reverend hermits' hallow'd cells. Where retired devotion dwells ! With thy enthusiasms come. Seize our tongues, and strike us dumb !* Reader, would'st thou know what true peace and quiet mean ; would'st thou find a refuge from the noises and clamors of the multitude ; would'st thou enjoy at once solitude and society ; would'st thou possess the depth of thy own spirit in stillness, without being shut out from the consolatory faces of thy species ; would'st thou be alone, and yet accompanied ; solitary, yet not desolate ; singular, yet not without some to keep thee in counte- nance ; a unit in aggregate ; a simple in composite :—come with me into a Quakers' Meeting. Dost thou love silence deep as that " before the winds were made ?" go not out into the wilderness, descend not into the pro¬ fundities of the earth ; shut not up thy casements ; nor pour wax into the little cells of thy ears, with little faith'd self-mistfusting Ulysses.—Retire with me into a Quakers' Meeting. For a man to refrain even from good words, and to hold his peace, it is commendable ; but for a multitude, it is great mastery. * From " Poems of all Sorts," by Richard Fleckno, 1653. 6? ELIA. What is the stillness of the desert, compared with this place ? what the uncommunicating muteness of fishes ?—here the goddess reigns and revels.—" Boreas, and Cesias, and Argestes loud," do not with their inter-confounding uproars more augment the brawl ■—nor the waves of the blown Baltic with their clubbed sounds— than theM* opposite (Silence her sacred self) is multiplied and rendered more intense by numbers, and by sympathy. She too hath her deeps, that call unto deeps. Negation itself hath a positive more and less j and closed eyes would seem to obscure the great obscurity of midnight. There are wounds which an imperfect solitude cannot heal. By imperfect I mean that which a man enjoyeth by himself. The perfect is that which he can sometimes attain in crowds, but no¬ where so absolutely as in a Quakers' Meeting.—Those first her¬ mits did certainly understand this principle, when they retired into Egyptian solitudes, not singly but in shoals, to enjoy one another's want of conversation. The Carthusian is bound to his brethren by this agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness. In secular occasions, what so pleasant jas to be reading a book through a long winter evening, with a friend sitting by—say, a wife—he, or she, too (if that be probable), reading another, without inter¬ ruption, or oral communication ?—can there be no sympathy without the gabble of words ?—away with this inhuman, shy, sin¬ gle, shade and cavern-haunting solitariness. Give me. Master Zimmermann, a sympathetic solitude. To pace alone in the cloisters, or side aisles of some cathedral, time-stricken ; Or under hanging mountains, Or by the fall of fountains ; is but a vulgar luxury, compared with that which those enjoy, who come together for the purposes of more complete, abstracted solitude. This is the loneliness " to be felt."—The Abbey Church of Westminster hath nothing so solemn, so spirit-soothing, as the naked walls and benches of a Quakers' Meeting. Here are no tombs, no inscriptions, Sands, ignoble things, Dropt from the ruined sides of kings— A QUAKERS' MEETING. 59 but here is something, which throws Antiquity herself into the fore-ground—Silence—eldest of things—language of^old Night— primitive Discourser—to which the insolent decays of moulder¬ ing grandeur have but arrived by a violent, and, as we may say, unnatural progression. * How reverend is the view of these hushed heads. Looking tranquillity ! Nothing-plotting, naught-caballing, unmischievous synod ! con- vocation without intrigue ! parliament without debate ! what a lesson dost thou read to council, and to consistory !—if my pen treat of you lightly—as haply it will wander—yet my spirit hath gravely felt the wisdom of your custom, when sitting among you in deepest peace, which some out-welling tears would rather con¬ firm than disturb, I have reverted to the times of your beginnings, and the sowings of the seed by Fox and Dewesbury. I have witnessed that, which brought before my eyes your heroic tran¬ quillity, inflexible to the rude jests and serious violences of the insolent soldiery, republican or royalist, sent to molest you—for ye sate betwixt the ñres of two persecutions, the outcast and oflT- scouring of church and presbytery. I have seen the reeling sea- ruflian, who had wandered into your receptacle, wiih the avowed intentioñ of disturbing your quiet, from the very spirit of the place receive in a moment a new heart, and presently sit among ye as a lamb amidst lambs. And I remember Penn before his accusers, and Fox in the bail-dock, where he was lifted up in spirit, as he tells us, and "the Judge and the Jury became as dead men under his feet." Reader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would recommend to you, above all church-narratives, to read Sewel's History of the Quakers. It is in folio, and is the abstract of the Journals of Fox and the primitive Friends. It is far more edifying and affect¬ ing than anything you will read of Wesley and his colleagues. Here is nothing to stagger you, nothing to make you mistrust, no suspicion of alloy, no drop or dreg of the worldly or ambitious spirit. You will here read the true story of that much-injured, ridiculed man (who perhaps hath been a by-word in your mouth), —^James Naylor : what dreadful sufferings, with what patience, 60 ELIA. he endured, even to the boring through of his tongue with red- hot irons, without a murmur ; and with what strength of mind, when the delusion he had fallen into, which-they stigmatised for blasphemy, had given way to clearer thoughts, he could renounce his error, in a strain of the beautiiullest humility, yet keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker still !—so different from the prac¬ tice of your common converts from enthusiasm, who, when they apostatize, apostatize all, and think they can never get far enough from the society of their former errors, even to the renunciation of some saving truths, with which they had been mingled, not implicated. Get the Writings of John Woolman by heart j and love the early Quakers. How far the followers of these good men in our days have kept to the primitive spirit, or in what proportion they have substituted formality for it, the Judge of Spirits can alone determine. I have seen faces in their assemblies, upon which the dove sate visibly brooding. Others again I have watched, when my thoughts should have been better engaged, in which I could possibly detect nothing but a blank inanity. But quiet was in all, and the dispo¬ sition to unanimity, and the absence of the fierce controversial workings. If the spiritual pretensions of the Quakers have abated, at least they make few pretences. Hypocrites they certainly are not, in their preaching. It is -seldom indeed that you shall see one get up amongst them to hold forth. Only now and then a trembling, female, generally ancient, voice is heard—you can¬ not guess from what part of the meeting it proceeds—with a low, buzzing musical sound, laying out a few words which "she ' thought might suit the condition of some present," with a quaking diffidence, which leaves no possibility of supposing that anything of female vanity was mixed up, where the tones were so full of tenderness, and a restraining modesty. The men, for what I have observed, speak seldomer. Once only, and it was some years ago, I witnessed a sample of the old Foxian orgasm. It was a man'of giant stature, who, as Wordsworth phrases it, might have danced " from head to foot equipt in iron mail." His frame was of iron too. But he was malleable. I saw him shake all over witli the spirit—I dare not A QUAKERS' MEEIXNG. $1 say of delusion. The strivings of the outer man were unutter¬ able ; he seemed not to speak, but to be spoken from. I saw the strong man bowed down, and his knees to fail ; his joints all seemed loosening :.it was a figure to set off against Paul Preaeh- ing.; the words he uttered were few and sound ; he was evidently resisting his will—keeping down his own word-wisdom with more mighty effort, than the world's orators strain for theirs. " He had been a wit in his youth," he told us, with expressions of a sober remorse. And it was not till long after the impression had begun to wear away, that I was enabled, with something like a smile, to recall the striking incongruity of the confession—understanding the term in its worldly acceptation—with the frame and physiog¬ nomy of the person before me. His brow would have scared away the Levities—^the Jocos Risusque—faster than the Loves fled the face of Dis at Enna. By vAt, even in his youth, I will be sworn he understood something far within the limits of an allowable liberty. More frequently the Meeting is broken up without a word hav¬ ing been spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go away with a sermon not made with hands. You have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius ; or as in some den, where that fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the Tongue, that un¬ ruly member, has strangely lain tied up and captive. You have bathed with stillness. O when the spirit is sore fretted, even tired to sickness of the janglings and nonsense-noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it is, to go and seat yourself, for a quiet half houi', upon some undisputed corner of a bench, among the gentle Quakers ! Their garb and stillness conjoined, present a uniformity, tran¬ quil and herd-like—as in the pasture—" forty feeding like one." The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving a soil ; and cleanliness in them to be something more than the absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress is a lily ; and wlien they come up in bands to their Whitsun-conferences, whitening the easterly streets of the metropolis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, they show like tioops of the Shining Ones. «52 ELIA. THE OID AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. My reading has been lamentably desultory and immethodical. Odd, out of the way, old English plays, and treatises, have sup. plied me with most of my notions, and ways of feeling. In every¬ thing that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure among the franklins, or country gentlemen, in king John's days. I know less geography than a school-boy of six weeks' standing. To me a map of old Ortelius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout Africa merges into Asia ; whether Ethiopia lie in one or other of those great divisions ; nor can form the remot¬ est conjecture of the position of New South Wales, or Van Die- men's Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence with a very dear friend in the first-named of these two Terrae Incognitae. I have no astronomy. J do not know where to look for the Bear, or Charles's Wain; the place of any star ; or the name of any of them at sight. I guess at Venus only by her brightness—and if the sun on some portentous morn were to make his first appear¬ ance in the West, I verily believe, that, while all the world were gasping in apprehension about me, I alone should stand unterri- fied, from sheer incuriosity and want of observation. Of history and chronology I possess some vague points, such as one cannot help picking up in the course of miscellaneous study ; but I never deliberately sat down to a chronicle, even of my own country. I have most dim apprehensions of the four great monarchies ; and sometimes the Assyrian, sometimes the Persian, floats as ßrst, in my fancy. I make the widest conjectures concerning Egypt, and her shepherd kings. My friend M., with great pains-taking, got me to think I understood the first proposition in Euclid, but THE OLL ANL THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. 63 gave me over in despair at the second I am entirely unacquaint¬ ed with the modern languages ; and, like a better man than my- self, have " small Latin and less Greek." I am a stranger to the shapes and texture of the commonest trees, herbs, flowers—not from the circumstance of my being town-born—for I should have brought the same inobservant spirit into the world with me, had I flrst seen it " on Devon's leafy shores,"—and am no less at a loss among purely town-objects, tools, engines, mechanic processes. Not that I affect ignorance—but my head has not many mansions, nor spacious ; and I have been obliged to fill it with such cabinet curiosities as it can hold without aching. I sometimes wonder how I have passed my probation with so little discredit in the world, as I have done, upon so meagre a stock. But the fact is, a man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out, in mixed company ; everybody is so much more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your ac- quisitions. But in a tète-à-tète there is no shuffling. The truth will out. There is nothing which I dread so much, as the being left alone for a quarter of an hour with a sensible, well-informed man that does not know me. I lately got into a dilemma of this sort. In one of my daily jaunts between Bishopsgate and Shackle- well, the coach stopped to take up a staid-looking gentleman, about the wrong side of thirty, who was giving his parting direc¬ tions (while the steps were adjusting), in a tone of mild authority, to a tall youth, who seemed to be neither his clerk, his son, nor his servant, but something partaking of all three. The youth was dismissed, and w|| drove on. As we were the sole passen¬ gers, he naturally enough addressed his conversation to me ; and we discussed the merits of the fare, the civility and punctuality of the driver ; the circumstance of an opposition coach having been lately set up, with the probabilities of its success—^to all which I was enabled to return pretty satisfactory answers, having been drilled into this kind of etiquette by some years' daily prac¬ tice of riding to and fro in the stage aforesaid—when he suddenly alarmed me by a startling question, whether I had seen the show of prize cattle that morning in Smithfield 1 Now as I had not leen it, and do not greatly care for such sort of exhibitions, I was 64 ELIA. obliged to return a cold negative. He seemed a little mortified, as well as astonished, at my declaration, as (it appeared) he was just come fresh from the sight, and doubtless had hoped to com¬ pare notes on the subject. However, he assured me that I had lost a fine treat, as it far exceeded the show of last year. We were now approaching Norton Falgate, when the sight of some shop-goods ticketed freshened him up into a dissertation upon the cheapness of cottons this spring. I was now a little in heart, as the nature of my morning avocations had brought me into some sort of familiarity with the raw material ; and I was surprised to find how eloquent I was becoming on the state of the India mar¬ ket—when, presently, he dashed my incipient vanity to the earth at once, by inquiring whether I had ever made any calculation as to the value of the rental of all the retail shops in London. Had he asked of me, what song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among the women, I might, with Sir Thomas Browne, have hazarded a " wide solu¬ tion."* My companion saw my embarrassment, and, the alms¬ houses beyond Shoreditch just coming in view, with great good¬ nature and dexterity shifted his conversation to the subject of public charities ; which led to the comparative merits of provision for the poor in past and present times, with observations on the old monastic institutions, and charitable orders ; but, finding me rather dimly impressed with some glimmering notions from old poetic associations, than strongly fortified with any speculations reducible to calculation on the subject, he gave the matter up} and, the country beginning to open more and more upon us, as we approached the turnpike at Kingslanc^the destined termina¬ tion of his journey), he put a home thrust upon me, in the most unfortunate position he could have chosen, by advancing some queries relative to the North Pole Expedition. While I was mut¬ tering out something about the Panorama of those strange regions (which I had actually seen), by way of parrying the question, the coach stopping relieved me from any further apprehensions. My companion getting out, left me in the comfortable possession of my ignorance ; and I heard him, as he went off, putting ques- Urn Burial. THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. 65 tíons to an outside passenger, who had alighted with him, regarding an epidemic disorder, that had been rife about Dalston ; and which my friend assured him had gone through five or six schools in that neighborhood. The truth now flashed upon me, that my companion was a schoolmaster ; and that the youth, whom he had parted from at our first acquaintance, must have been one of the bigger boys, or the usher. He was evidently a kind-hearted man, who did not seem so much desirous of provoking discussion by the questions which he put, as of obtaining information at any rate. It did not appear that he took any interest, either, in such kind of inquiries, for their own sake ; but that he was in some way bound to seek for knowledge. A greenish-colored coat, which he had on, forbade me to surmise that he was a clergyman. The adventure gave birth to some reflections on the difference between persons of his profession in past and present times. Rest to the souls of those fine old Pedagogues ; the breed, long since extinct, of the Lilys, and the Linacres : who believing that all learning was contained in the languages which they taught, and despising every other acquirement as superficial and useless, came-to their task as to a sport ! Passing from infancy to age, they dreamed away all their days as in a grammar-school. Re¬ volving in a perpetual cycle of declensions, conjugations, syntaxes, and prosodies ; renewing constantly the occupations which had charmed their studious childhood ; rehearsing continually the part of the past ; life- must have slipped from them at last like one day. They were always in their first garden, reaping bar- vests of their golden time,' among their Flori and their Spici- Jegfa ; in Arcadia stilL^but kings ; the ferule of their slhiy not much harsher, but of uke dignity with that mild sceptre attributed to king Basileus ; the Greek and Latin, their stately Pamela and their Philoclea ; with the occasional duncery of some untoward tyro, serving for a refreshing interlude of a Mopsa, or a clown Damœtas ! With what a savor doth the Preface to Colet's, or (as it is sometimes called) Paul's Accidence, set forth ! " To exhort every man to the learning of grammar, that intendeth to attain the understanding of the tongues, wherein is contained a great treasury of wisdom and knowledge,, it would seem but vain and PART 1. 6 6S ELIA. lost labor ; for so much as it is known, that nothing can surely be ended, whose beginning is either feeble or faulty ; and no building be perfect whereas the foundation and groundwork is ready to fall, and unable to uphold the burden of the frame." How well doth this stately preamble (comparable with those which Milton commendeth as " having been the usage to prefix to some solemn law, then fii'st promulgated by Solon, or Lycur- gus") correspond with and illustrate that pious zeal for conformity, expressed in a succeeding clause, which would fence about gram- mar-rules with the severity of faith articles as for the diver¬ sity of grammars, it is well profitably taken away by the king majesties wisdom, who foreseeing the inconvenience, and favora¬ bly providing the remedie, caused one kind of grammar by sundry learned men to be diligently drawn, and so to be set ogt, only everywhere to be taught for the use of learners, and for the hurt in changing of schoolmaisters." What a,gtisio in that which follows : " wherein it is profitable that he [the pupil] can orderly decline his noun, and his verb." His noun !, The fine dream is fading away fast ; and the least concern of a teacher in the present day is to inculcate grammar-rules. The modern schoolmaster is expected to know a little of every¬ thing, because his pupil is required not to be entirely ignorant of anything. He must be superficially, if I may so say, omniscient. He is to know something of pneumatics ; of chemistry • of what¬ ever is curious, or proper to excite the attention of the youthful mind ; an insight into mechanics is desirable, with a touch of statistics; the quality of soils, «fee., botany, the constitution of his countrjy, cum muliis aliis. You may get |^notion of some part ot his expected duties by consulting the famous Tractate on Educa¬ tion addressed to Mr. Hartlib. All these things—these, or the desire of them—he is expected to instil, not by set lessons from professors, which he may charge in the bill, but at school-intervals, as he walks the streets, or saunters through green fields (those natural instructors), with his pupils. The least part of what is expected from him, is to be done in school-hours. He must insinuate knowledge at the mollia témpora fandt. He must seize every occasion—the season- of the year—the time of the day—^a passing cloud—a rainbow— THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. 67 a waggon of hay—a regiment of soldiers going by—to inculcate something useful. He can receive no pleasure from a casual glimpse of Nature, but must catch at it as an object of instruc¬ tion. He must interpret beauty into the picturesque. He can¬ not relish a beggar-man, or a gipsy, for thinking of the suitable improvement. Nothing comes to him, not spoiled by the sophis¬ ticating medium of moral uses. The Universe—^that Great Book, as it has been called—is to him indeed, to all intents and pur¬ poses, a book, out of which he is doomed to read tedious homilies to distasting school-boys.—Vacations themselves are none to him, he is only rather worse off than before ; for commonly he has some intrusive upper-boy fastened upon him at such times ; some cadet of a great family; some neglected lump of nobility, or gentry; that he must drag after him to the play, to the Panorama, to Mr. Hartley's Orrery, to the Panopticon, or into the country, to a friend's house, or his favorite watering-place. Wherever he ' goes, this uneasy shadow attends him. A boy is at his board, and in his path, and in all his movements. He is boy-rid, sick of perpetual boy., . Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates ; but they are unwholesome companions for grown people. The re¬ straint is felt nb less on the one side, than on the other.—Even a child, that " plaything for an hour," tires always. The noises of children, playing their own fancies—as I now hearken to them by fits, sporting on the green before my window, while I am engaged in these grave speculations at my neat suburban retreat atShackle- ~well—by distance made more sweet—inexpressibly take from the labor of my task. It is like writing to music. They seem to modulate my periods. They ought at least to do so—for in the voice of that tender age there is a kind of poetry, far unlike the harsh prose-accents of man's conversation.—I should but spoil their sport, and diminish my own sympathy for them, by mingling in their pastime. I would not be domesticated all my days with a person of very superior capacity to my own—not, if I know myself at all, from any considerations of jealousy or self-comparison, for the occa¬ sional communion with such minds has constituted the fortune and felicity of my life—^but the habit of too constant intercourse with 68 ^ ELIA. spirits above you, instead of raising you, keeps you down. Too frequent doses of original thinking from others, restrain what lesser portion of that faculty you may possess of your own. You get entangled in another man's mind, even as you lose yourself in another man's grounds. You are walking with a tall Tarlet, whose strides out-pace yours to lassitude. The con¬ stant operation of such potent agency would reduce me, I am convinced, to imbecility. You may derive thoughts from others; your way of thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own. Intellect may be imparted, but not each man's intellectual frame.— As little as I should wish to be always thus dragged upward, as little (or rather still less) is it desirable to be stunted downwards by your associates. The trumpet does not more stun you by its loudness, than a whisper teases you by its provoking inaudibility. Why are we never quite at our ease in the presence of a school¬ master ?—because we are conscious that he is not quite at his' ease in ours. He is awkward, and out of place, in the society of his equals. He comes like Gulliver from among hk little people, and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding to yours. He cannot meet you on the square. He wants a point given him, like an indifierent whist-player. He is so used to teaching, that he wants to be teaching you. One of these professors, upon my complaining that these little sketches of mine were anything but methodical, and that I was unable to make them otherwise,-kindly ofiered to instruct me in the method by which young gentlemen in his seminary were taught to compose English themes.—The jests of a schoolmaster are coarse, or thin. They do not tell out of school. He is under the restraint of a formal or didactive hy¬ pocrisy in company, as a clergyman is under a moral one. He can no more let his intellect loose in society, than the other can his inclinations.—He is forlorn among his coevals ; his juniors cannot he his friends. " I take blame to myself," said a sensible man of this profes¬ sion, writing to a friend respecting a youth who had quitted his school abruptly, " that your nephew was not more attached to me. But persons in my situation are more to be pitied, than can well be imagined. We are surrounded by young, and, consequently, THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER. 69 ardently affectionate hearts, but we can never hope to share an atom of their affections. The relation of master and scholar for- bids this. How pleasing this must be to you, how 1 envy your feel¬ ings ! my friends will sometimes say to me, when they see young ihenVhom I have educated, return after some years' absence from school, their eyes shining with pleasure, while they shake hands with their old master, bringing a present of game to me, or a toy to my wife, and thanking me in the warmest terms for my care of their education. A holiday is begged for the boys ; the house is a scene of happiness ; I, only, am sad at heart.—This fine-spirited and warm-hearted youth, who fancies he repays his master with gratitude for the care of his boyish years—this young man—in the eight long years I watched over him with a parent's anxiety, never could repay me with one look of genuine feeling. He was proud, when I praised ; he was submissive, when I re¬ proved him •, but he did never love me—and what he now mis- i- takes for gratitude and kindness for me, is but the pleasant sensation, which all persons feel at revisiting the scenes of their boyish hopes and fears ; and the seeing on equal terms the man they were accustomed to look up to with reverence. My wife too," this interesting correspondent goes on to say, " my once darling Anna, is the wife of a schoolmaster.—When I married her—knowing that the wife of a schoolmaster ought to be a busy notable creature, and fearing that my gentle Anna would ill supply the loss of my dear bustling mother, just then dead, who never sat still, was in every part of the house in a moment, and whom J was obliged sometimes to threaten to fasten down in a chair, to save her from fatiguing herself to death—I expressed my fears that I was bringing her into a way of fife unsuitable to her ; and she, who loved me tenderly, promised for my sake to exert her¬ self to perform the duties of her new situation. She promised, and she has kept her word. What" wonders will not woman's love perform 1—My house is managed with a propriety and decorum unknown in other schools ; my boys are well fed, look healthy, and have every proper accommodation ; and all this performed with a careful economy, that never descends to meanness. But I have lost my gentle helpless Anna !—When we sit down to en¬ joy an hour of repose after the fatigues of the day, I am compelled 70 ELIA. to listen to what have been her useful (and they are really useful) employments through the day, and what she proposes for her to¬ morrow's task. Her heart and her features are changed by the duties of her situation. To the boys she never appears other than the master's wife, and she looks up to me as the hoys' master ; to whom all show of love and affection would be highly improper, and unbecoming the dignity of her situation and mine. Yet tMs my gratitude forbids me to hint to her. For my sake she sub¬ mitted to be this altered creature, and can I reproach her for it ?" For the communication of this letter, I am indebted to my cousin Bridget. IMPERFECT SYMPATHIEN. n IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. I am of a constitution so general, that it consorts and sympathizeth with all things ; I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy in anything. Those natural repugnances do not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch.—Religio Medici. That the author of the Religio Medici, mounted upon the airy stilts of abstraction, conversant about notional and conjectural essences ; in whose categories of Being the possible took the up- per hand of the actual ; should have overlooked the impertinent individualities of such poor concretions as mankind, is not much to be admired. It is rather to be wondered at, that in the genus of animals he should have condescended to distinguish that spe¬ cies at all. For myself—earth-bound and fettered to the scene of my activities,— Standing on earth, not rapt above the sky, I confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, national or in- dividual, to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no indifferent eye upon things or persons. Whatever is, is to me a matter of taste or distaste ; or when once it becomes indifferent, it begins to be disrelishing. I am, in plainer words, a bundle of preju¬ dices—^made up of likings and dislikings—the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, antipathies. In a certain sense, I hope it may be said of me that I am a lover of my species. I can feel for all Indifferently, but I cannot feel towards all equally. The more purely-English word that expresses, sympathy, w-'l better explain my meaning. I can be a friend td a worthy man, who 72 ELIA. upon another account cannot be my mate or fellow. I cannot like all people alike.* I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair. They cannot like me—and in truth. I never knew one of that nation who at¬ tempted to do it. There is soijoething more plain and ingenuous in their mode of proceeding. We know one another at first sight. There is an order of imperfect intellects (under which mine must be content to rank), which in its constitution is es¬ sentially anti-Caledonian. The owners of the sort of faculties I allude to, have minds rather suggestive than comprehensive. They have no pretences to much clearness or precision in their ideas, or in their manner of expressing them. Their intellectual wardrobe (to confess fairly) has few whole pieces in it. They are content with fragments and scattered pieces of Truth. She presents no full front to them—a feature or side-face at the most. Hints and glimpses, germs and crude essays at a system, is the utmost they pretend to. They beat up a little game peradven- • I would be understood as confining myself to the subject of imperfect sympathies. To nations or classes of men there can be no direct antipathy. There may be individuals born and constellated so opposite to another in¬ dividual nature, that the same sphere cannot hold them. I have ^met with my moral antipodes, and can believe the story of two persons meeting (who never saw one another before in their lives) and instantly fighting. We by proof find there should be 'Twixt man and man such an antipathy. That though he can show no just reason why For any former wrong or injury. Can neither find a blemish in his fame. Nor aught in face or feature justly blame. Can challenge or accuse him of no evil. Yet notwithstanding hates him as a devil. The lines are from old Heywood's " Hierarchie of Angels," and he sub¬ joins a curious story in confirmation, of a Spaniard who attempted to assassinate a King Ferdinand of Spain, and being put to the rack could give no other reason for the deed but an inveterate antipathy which be had taken to the first sight of the Kine. The cause which to that act compell'd him Was, he ne'er loved him since he first beheld him. IMPERFECT äVMPATHIES 73 ture—^and leave it to knottier heads, more robust constitutions, to run it down. The light that lights them is not steady and polar, but mutable and shifting : waxing, and again waning. Their conversation is accordmgly. They will throw out a random word in or out of season, and be content to let it pass for what it is worth. They cannot speak always as if they were upon their oath—but must be understood, speaking or writing, with some abatement. They seldom wait to mature a pi'oposition, but e'en bring it to market in the green ear. They delight to impart their defective discoveries as they arise, without waiting for their full development. They are no systematizers, and would but err more by attempting it. Their minds, as I said before, are suggestive merely. The brain of a true Caledonian (if I am not mistaken) is constituted upon quite a different plan. His Minerva is born in panoply. You are never admitted to see his ideas in their growth—if, indeed, they do grow, and are not rather put together upon principles of clock-work. You never catch his mind in an undress. He never hints or suggests anything, but unlades his stock of ideas in perfect order and completeness. He brings his total wealth into company, and gravely unpacks it. His riches are always about him. He never stoops to catch a glittering something in your presence to share it with you, before he quite knows whether it be true touch or not. You cannot cry halves to anything that» he finds. He does not find, but bring. You never witness his first apprehension of a thing. His understand¬ ing is always at its meridian—you never see the first dawn, the early streaks.—He has no falterings of self-suspicion. Surmises, guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, semi-consciousnesses, partial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo conceptions, have no place in his brain, or vocabulary. The twilight of dubiety never falls upon him. Is he orthodox—he has no doubts. Is he an infidel —^he has none either. Between the affirmative and the negative there is no border-land with him. You cannot hover with him upon the confines of truth, or wander in the maze of a probable argument. He always keeps the path. You cannot make ex¬ cursions with him—for he sets you right. His taste never fluc¬ tuates. His morality never abates. He cannot compromise, or understand middle actions. There can be but a right and a 14 líLIA. wrong. His conversation is as a book. His affirmations have the sanctity of an oath. You must speak upon the squar^with him. He stops a metaphor like a suspected person in an enemy's country. " A healthy book !"—said onè of his countrymen to me, who had ventured to give that appellation to John Bunde, —" Did I catch rightly what you said ? I have heard of a man in health, and of a healthy state of body, but I do not see how that epithet can be properly applied to a book." Above all, you must beware of indirect expressions before a Caledonian. Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein of it. Remember you are upon your oath. I have a print of a graceful female after Leonardo da Vinci, which I was showing off to Mr. ****. After he had examined it minutely, I ventured to ask him how he liked my beauty (a foolish name it goes by among my friends)—when he very gravely assured me that " he had considerable respect for my character and talents" (so he was pleased to say), " but had not given himself much thought about the degree of my personal pretensions." The mis¬ conception staggered me, but did not seem much to disconcert him.—Persons of this nation are particularly fond of affirming a truth—which nobody doubts. They do not so properly affirm, as annunciate it. They do indeed appear to have such a love of truth (as if, like virtue, it were valuable for itself) that all truth becomes equally valuable, whether the proposition that con¬ tains it be new or old, disputed, or such as is impossible to be¬ come a subject of disputation. I was present not long since afa party of North Britons, where a son of Bums was expected ; and happened to drop a silly expression (in my South British way), that I wished it were the father instead of the son—when four of them started up at once to inform me, that " that was im¬ possible, because he was dead." An impracticable wish, it seems, was more than they could conceive. Swift has hit off this part of their character, namely, their love of truth, in his biting way, but with an illiberality that necessarily confines the passage to the margin.* The tediousness of these people is certainly pro- * There are some people who think tl ey sufficiently acquit themselves, and entertain their company, with relating facts of no consequence, not at all out of the road of such common incidents as happen every day : and IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 75 vokiijg. I wonder if they ever tire one another ?—In my early life I kad a passionate fondness for the poetry of Burns. I have sometimes foolishly hoped to ingratiate myself with his country, men by expressing it. But I have always found that a true Scot resents your admiration of his compatriot, even more than he would your contempt of him. The latter he imputes to your " imperfect acquaintance with many of the words which he uses and the same objection makes it a presumption in you to suppose that you can admire him.—Thompson they seem to have forgot¬ ten. Smollett they have neither forgotten nor forgiven, for his delineation of Rory and his companion, upon their first introduc¬ tion to our metropolis.—Speak of Smollett as a great genius, and they will retort upon you Hume's History compared with Ms Continuation of it. What if the historian had continued Hum- phrey Clinker ? - I have, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews. They are a piece of stubborn antiquity, compared with which Stonehenge is in its nonage. They date beyond the pyramids. But I should not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse with any of that nation. I confess that I have not the nerves to enter their synagogues. Old prejudices cling about me. I cannot shake off the story of Hugh of Lincoln. Centuries of injury, contempt, and hate, on the one side,—of cloaked revenge, dissimulation, and hate, on the other, between our and their fathers, must and ought, to affect the blood of the children. I cannot believe it can run clear and kindly yet ; or that a few fine words, such as candor, liberality, the light of a nineteenth century, can close up the breaches of so deadly a disunion. A Hebrew is nowhere congenial to me. He is least distasteful on 'Change—for the mercantile spirit levels all distinctions, as all are beauties in the dark. I boldly confess that I do not relish the approximation of Jew and Christian, which has become so fashionable. The reciprocal endearments have, to this I have observed more frequently among the Scots than any other na¬ tion, who are very careful not to omit the minutest circumstances of time or place ; which kind of discourse, if it were not a little relieved by the uncouth terms and phrases, as well as accent and gesture peculiar to that country would be ha^y tolerable —Hints towards an Essay on Conver¬ sation. 76 me, something hypocritical and unnatural in them. I do not like to see the Church and Synagogue kissing and congeeing in awkward postures of an affected civility. If they are converted, why do they not come over to us altogether ? Why keep up a form of separation, when the life of it is fled ? If they can sit with us at table, why do they keck at our cookery ? I do not understand these half convertîtes. Jews christianizing—Christians judaizing—puzzle me. 1 like fish or flesh. A moderate Jew is a more confounding piece of anomaly than a wet Quaker. The spirit of the synagogue is essentially separative. B would have been more in keeping if he had abided by the faith of his forefathers. There is a fine scorn in his face, which nature meant to be of Christians. The Hebrew spirit is strong in him, in spite of his proselytism. He cannot conquer the Shibboleth. How it breaks out, when he sings, " The Children of Israel passed through the Red Sea !" The auditors, for the moment, are as Egyptians to him, and he rides over our necks in triumph. There is no mis¬ taking him. B has a strong expression of sense in his coim- tenance, and it is confirmed by his singing. The foundation of his vocal excellence is sense. He sings with understanding, as Kemble delivered dialogue. He would sing the Commandments, and give an appropriate character to each prohibition. His nation, in general, have not over-sensible countenances. How should they ?—but you seldom see a silly expression among them Gain, and the pursuit of gain, sharpen a man's visage. I never heard of an idiot being born among them.—Some admire the Jewish female-physiognomy. I admire it—but with trembling. Jael had those full dark inscrutable eyes. In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces—or rather masks—that have looked out kindly upon oncin casual encounters in the streets and highways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls—these "images of God cut in ebony." But I should not like to associate with them, to share my meals and my good-nights with them—because they are black. I love Quaker ways, and Quaker worship. Í venerate the Quaker principles. It does me good for the rest of the day when IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 77 I meet any of their people in my path. When I am ruffled or disturbed hy any occurrence, the sight, or quiet voice of a Quaker, acts upon me as a ventilator, lightening the air, and taking off a load from the bosom. But I cannot like the Quakers (as Desdemona would say) " to live with them." I am all over sophisticated—with humors, fancies, craving hourly sympathy. I must have books, pictures, theatres, chit-chat, scandal, jokes, ambiguities, and a thousand whim-whams, which their simpler taste can do without. I should starve at their primitive banquet. My appetites are too high for the salads which (according to Evelyn) Eve dressed for the angel, my gusto too excited To sit a guest with Daniel at his pulse. « The indirect answers which Quakers are often found to return to a question put to them may be explained, I think, without the vulgar assumption, that they are more given to evasion and equi¬ vocating than other people. They naturally look to their words more carefully, and are more cautious of committing themselves. They have a peculiar character to keep up on this head. They stand in a manner upon their veracity. - A Quaker is by law exempted from taking án oath. The custom of resorting to jan oath in extreme cases, sanctified as it is by all religious antiquity, is apt (it must be confessed) to introduce into the laxer sort of minds the notion of two kinds of truth—the one applicable to the solemn affairs of justice, and the other to the common proceed¬ ings of daily intercourse. As truth bound upon the conscience by an oath can be but truth, so in the common affirmations of the shop and the market-place a latitude is expected, and conceded upon questions wanting this solemn covenant. Something less than truth satisfies. It is common to hear a person say, " You do not expect me to speak as if I were upon my oath." Hence a great deal of incorrectness and inadvertency, short of falsehood, creeps into ordinary conversation ; and a kind of secondary or laic-truth is tolerated, where clergy-truth—oath-truth, by the nature of the circumstances, is not required. A Quaker knows none of this distinction. His simple affirmation being received, upon the most sacred occasions, without any further test, stamps a value upon the words which he is to use upon the most indiffer. 78 ELIA. ent topics of life. He looks to them, naturally, with more severity. You can have of him no more than his word. He knows, if he is caught tripping in a casual expression, he forfeits, for himself at least, his claim to the invidious exemption. He knows that his syllables are weighed—and how far a conscious¬ ness of this particular watchfulness, exerted against a person, has à tendency to produce indirect answers, and a diverting of the question by honest means, might be illustrated, and the practice justified, by a more sacred example than is proper to be adduced upon this occasion. The admirable presence of mind, which is notorious in Quakers upon all contingencies, might be traced to this imposed self-watchfulness—^if it did not seem rather an hum¬ ble and secular scion of that old stock of religious constancy, which never bent or faltered, in the Primitive Friends, or gave way to the winds of persecution, to the violence of judge or ac¬ cuser, under trials and racking examinations. " You will never be the wiser, if I sit here answering your questions till midnight," said one of those upright Justicers to Penn, who had been putting law-cases with a puzzling subtlety. " Thereafter as the answers may be," retorted the Quaker. The astonishing composure of this people is sometimes ludicrously displayed in lighter instan¬ ces.—I was travelling in a stage-coach with three male Quakers, buttoned up in the straitest non-conformity of their sect. We stopped to bait at Andover, where a meal, partly tea apparatus, partly supper, was set before us. My friends confined themselves to the tea-table. I in my way took supper. When the landlady brought in the bill, the eldest of my companions discovered that she had charged for both meals. This was resisted. Mine hos¬ tess was very clamorous and positive. Some mild arguments were used on the part of the Quakers, for which the heated mind of the good lady seemed by no means a fit recipient. The guard came in with his usual peremptory notice. The Quakers pulled out their money and formally tendered it—so much for tea—I, in humble imitation, tendering mine—for the supper which I had taken. She would not relax in her demand. So they all three quietly put up their silver, as did myself, and marched out of the room, the eldest and gravest going first, with myself closing up the rear, who thought I could not do better than follow the exam- IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 79 pie of such grave and warrantable personages. We got in. The steps went up. The coach drove off. Tiie murmurs of mine hostess, not very indistinctly or ambiguously pronounced, became after a time inaudible—and now my conscience, which the whim¬ sical scene had for a while suspended, beginning to give some twitches, I waited, in the hope that some justification would be offered by these serious persons for the seeming injustice of their conduct. To my great surprise, not a syllable was dropped on the subject. They sate as mute as at a meeting. At length the eldest of them broke silence, in inquiring of his next neighbor, " Hast thou heard how indigos go at the Indian House ?" and the question operated as a soporific on my moral feeling as far as Exeter. sc ELIA WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. We are too hasty when we set down our ancestors in the gross for fools, for the monstrous inconsistencies (as they seem to us) involved in their creed of witchcraft. In the relations of this visible world we find them to have been as rational, and shrewd to detect an historic anomaly, as ourselves. But wheii once the invisible world was supposed to be opened, and tbe lawless agency of bad spirits assumed, what measures of probability, of decency, of fitness, or proportion—of that which distinguishes the likely from the palpable absurd—could they have to guide them in the rejection or admission of any particular testimony ?—That maid¬ ens pined away, wasting inwardly as their waxen images con- sumed before a fire—^that corn was lodged, and cattle lamed— that whirlwinds uptore in diabolic revehy the oaks of the forest —or that spits and kettles only danced a fearful-innocent vagary about some rustic's kitchen, when no wind was stirring—were all equally probable where no law of agency was understood. That the prince of the powers of darkness, passing by the flower and pomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege to the weak fan¬ tasy of indigent eld—has neither likelihood nor unlikelihood à priori to us, who have no measure to guess at his policy, or stand¬ ard to estimate what rate those anile souls may fetch in the devil's market. Nor, when the wicked are expressly symbolised by a goat, was it to be wondered at so much, that he should come some¬ times in that body, and assert his metaphor.—That the intercourse was opened at all between both worlds, was perhaps the mistake —^but that once assumed, I see no reason for disbelieving one attested story of this nature more than another on the score of ab¬ surdity. There is no law to judge of the lawless, or canon by which a dream may be criticised. WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. 81 I have sometimes thought that I could not have existed in the days of received witchcraft ; that I could not have slept in a vil¬ lage where one of those reputed hags dwelt. Our ancestors were bolder or more obtuse. Amidst the universal belief that these wretches were in league with the author of all evil, holding hell tributary to their muttering, no simple Justice of the Peace seems to have scrupled issuing, or silly Headborough serving a warrant upon them—as if they should subpœna Satan !—Prospero in his boat, with his books and wand about him, suffers himself to be conveyed away at the mercy of his enemies to an unknown island. He might have raised a storm or two, we think, on the passage. His acquiescence is in exact analogy to the non-resist¬ ance of witches to the constituted powers.—What stops the Fiend in Spenser from tearing Guyon to pieces—or who had made it a condition of his prey, that Guyon must take assay of the glorious, bait—we have no guess. We do not know the laws of that couni try. From my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about witches and witch-stories. My maid, and more legendary aunt, supplied me with good store. But I shall mention the accident which di¬ rected my curiosity originally into this channel. In my father's book-closet, the History of the Bible by Stackhouse occupied a distinguished station. The pictures with which it abounds—one of the ark, in particular, and another of Solomon's temple, deline¬ ated with all the fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the spot—attracted my childish attention. There was a picture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen. We shall come to that hereafter. Stack- house is in two huge tomes—and there was a pleasure in remov¬ ing folios of that magnitude, which, with infinite straining, was as much as I could manage, from the situation which they occupied upon an upper shelf. I have not met with the work from that time to this, but I remember it consisted of Old Testament stories, orderly set down, with the objection appended to each story, and the solution of the objection regularly tacked to tbat. The objec- tioK was a summary of whatever difficulties had been opposed to the credibility of the history, by the shrewdness of ancient or modern infidelity, drawn up with an almost complimentary excess PAET I, 7 82 ELIA, of candor. The solution was brief, modest and satisfactory. The bane and antidote were both before you. To doubts so put, and so quashed, there seemed to be an end for ever. The dragon lay dead, for the foot of the veriest babe to trample on. But—like as was rather feared than realized from that slain monster in Spenser—from the womb of those crushed errors young dragonets would creep, exceeding the prowess of so tender a Saint George as myself to vanquish. The habit of expecting objections to every passage, set me upon starting more objections, for the glory of finding a solution of my own for them. I became staggered and perplexed, a sceptic in long-coats. The pretty Bible stories which I had read, or heard read in church, lost their purity and sincerity of impression, and were turned into so many historic or chronologic theses to he defended against whatever impugners. I was not to disbelieve them, but—the next thing to that—I was to be quite sure that some one or other would or had disbelieved them. Next to making a child an infidel, is the letting him know that there are infidels at all. Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength. O, how ugly sound scriptural doubts from the mouth of a babe and a suckling !—I should have lost myself in these mazes, and have pined away, I think, with such unfit sustenance as these husks afforded, but for a fortunate piece of ill-fortune, which about this time bt fel me. Turning over the picture of the ark with too much haste, I unhappily made a breach in its ingenious fabric—driving my inconsiderate finger right through the two large quadrupeds—the elephant, and the camel—that stare (as well they might) out of the two last windows next the steerage in that unique piece of naval architecture. Stack- house was henceforth locked up, and became an interdicted trea¬ sure. With the book, the objections and solutions gradually clear¬ ed out of my head, and have seldom returned since in any force to trouble me.—But there was one impression which I had im¬ bibed from Stackhouse, which no lock or bar could shut out, and which was destined to try my childish nerves rather more seri¬ ously.—That detestable picture ! I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The night-time, solitude, and the dark, were my hell. The sufforings I endured In this nature would justify the »xpression. I never laid my WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. 83 head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life—so far as memory serves in things so long ago—^without an assurance, which realized its own prophecy, of seeing some frightful spectre. Be old Stackhouse then acquitted in part, if I say, that to his picture of the Witch raising up Sam¬ uel—(O that old man covered with a mantle !)—I owe—^not my midnight terrors, the hell of my infancy—but the shape and manner of their visitations. It was he who dressed up for me a hag that nightly sate upon my pillow—a sure bedfellow, when my aunt or my maid was far from me. All day long, while the book was permitted me, I dreamed waking over his delineation, and at night (if I may use so bold an expression) awoke into sleep, and found the vision true. I durst not, even in the day¬ light, once enter the chamber where I slept, without my lace turned to the window, aversely from the bed where my witch- ridden pillow was.—Parents do not know what they do when they leave tender babes alone to go to sleep in the dark. The feeling about for a friendly arm—^the hoping for a familiar voice—^when they wake screaming—and find none to soothe them—what a ter¬ rible shaking it is to their poor nerves ! The keeping them up till midnight, through candle-light and the unwholesome hours, as they are called,—^would, I am satisfied, in a medical point of view, prove the better caution. That detestable picture, as I have said, gave the fashion to my dreams—if dreams they were —for the scene of them was invariably the room in which I lay. Had I never met with the picture, the fears would have come self-pictured in some shape or other— Headless bear, black man, or ape— but, as it was, my imaginations took that form.—It is not book, or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these ter¬ rors in children. They can at most but give them a direction. Dear little T. H., who of all children has been brought up with the most scrupulous exclusion of every taint of superstition—who was never allowed to hear of goblin or apparition, or scarcely to be told of bad men, or to read or hear of any distressing story— finds all this world of fear, from which he has been so rigidly 84 ELIA. excluded ah extra, in his own " thick-coming fancies and from his little midnight pillow, this nurse-child of optimism will start at shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in sweats to which the reveries of the cell-damned murderer are tranquillity. Grorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeeras dire—stories of Celœno and the Harpies—may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition—but they were there before. They are transcripts, types—the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that, which we know in a waking sense to he ialse, come to affect us at all ?—or Names, whose sense we see not. Fray us with things that be not ? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, con¬ sidered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury 1—O, least of all ! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body—or, without the body, they would have been the same. All the cruel, tormenting, defined devils in Dante—tearing, mangling, choking, stifling, scorching demons— are they one-half so fearful to the spirit of a man, as the simple idea of a spirit unembodied following him— Like one that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread. And having once turn'd round, walks on And turns no more his head ; Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.* That the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual—that h is strong in proportion as it is objectless upon earth—that it pre¬ dominates in the period of sinless infancy—are difficulties, the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadow-land of pre-existence. My night-fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. I confess an occasional night-mare ; but I do not, as in early youth, keep'a stud of them. Fiendish faces, with the extinguished taper, will * Mr. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT FEARS. 85 come and look at me ; but I know them for mockeries, even while I cannot elude their presence, and I fight and grapple with them. For the credit of my imagination, I am almost ashamed to say how tame and prosaic my dreams are grown. They are never romantic, seldom even rural. They are of architecture and of buildings—cities abroad, which I have never seen, and hardly have hope to see. I have traversed, for the seeming length of a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon—their churches, palaces, squares, market-places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an Ine.xpressihle sense of delight,—a map-like distinctness of trace— and a day-light vividness of vision, that was all hut being awake.— I have formerly travelled among the Westmoreland fells—my highest Alps,—hut they, are objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recognition ; and I have again and again awoke with ineffectual struggles of the inner eye, to make out a shape in any way whatever, of Helvellyn. Methought I was in that country, hut the mountains were gone. The poverty of my dreams mor¬ tifies me. There is Coleridge, at his will, can conjure up icy domes, and pleasure-houses for Kuhla-Khan, and Abyssinian maids, and songs of Ahora, and caverns. Where Alph, the sacred river, runs, to solace his night solitudes—when I cannot muster a fiddle. Barry Cornwall has his tritons and his nereids gamboling before him in nocturnal visions, and proclaiming sons horn to Neptune— when my stretch of imaginative activity can hardly, in the night season, raise up the ghost of a fish-wife. To set my failures in somewhat a mortifying light—it was after reading the noble Dream of this poet, that my fancy ran strong upon these marine spectra ; and the poor plastic power, such as it is, within me set to work, to humor my folly in a sort of dream that very night. Methought I was upon the ocean billows at some sea nuptials, riding and mounted high, with the customary train sounding their conches before me (I myself, you may he sure, the leading god), and jollily we went careering over the main, till just where Ino Leucothea should have greeted me (I think it was Ino) with a white embrace, the billows gradually subsiding, fell from a sea- roughness to a sea-calm, and thence to a river motion, and that 86 ELIA. river (as happens in the familiarisation of dreams) was no other than the gentle Thames, which landed me in the wafture of a placid wave or two, alone, safe and inglorious, somewhere at the foot of Lambeth palace. The degree of the soul's creativeness in sleep might furnish no whimsical criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident in the same soul waking. Ân old gentleman, a friend of mine, and a humorist, used to carry this notion so far, that when he saw any stripling of his acquaintance ambitious of becoming a poet, his first question would be,—" Young man, what sort of dreams have you ?" I have so much faith in my old friend's theory, that when I feçl that idle vein returning upon me, I presently subside into my proper element of prose, remembering those eluding nereids, and that inauspicious inland landing. VALENTINE'S DAY. 87 VALENTINE'S DAY. Hail to thy returning festival, old Bishop Valentine ! Great is thy name in the rubric, thou venerable Arch-flamen of Hymen ! Immortal Go-between; who and what manner of person art thou? Art thou but a name, typifying the restless principle which im¬ pels poor humans to seek perfection in union 1 or wert thou indeed a mortal prelate, with thy tippet and thy rochet, thy apron on, and decent lawn sleeves? Mysterious personage! like unto thee, assuredly there is no other mitred father in the calendar; not Jerome, nor Ambrose, nor Cyril ; nor the consigner of undipt infants to eternal torments, Austin, whom all mothers hate ; nor he who hated all mothers. Origen ; nor Bishop Bull, nor Arch- bishop Parker, nor Whitgift. Thou comest attended with thou¬ sands and ten thousands of little Loves, and the air is Brushed with the hiss of rustling wings. Singing Cupids are thy choristers and thy precentors ; and instead of the crosier, the mystical arrow is borne before thee. In other words, this is the day on which those charming little missives, yclept Valentines, cross and intercross each other at every street and turning. The weary and all for-spent two-penny postman sinks beneath a load of delicate embarrassments, not his own. It is scarcely credible to what an extent this ephemeral courtship is carried on in this loving town, to the great enrichment of porters, and detriment of knockers and bell-wires. In these little visual interpretations, no emblem is so common as the heart, —that little three-cornered exponent of all our hopes and fears,— the bestück and bleeding heart ; it is twisted and tortured into 88 ELIA. more allegories and affectations than an opera hat. What authority we have in history or mythology for placing the head¬ quarters and metropolis of God Cupid in this anatontical seat rather than in any other, is not very clear ; but we have got it, and it will serve as well as any other. Else we might easily imagine, upon some other system which might have prevailed for anything which our pathology knows to the contrary, a lover addressing his mistress, in perfect simplicity of feeling, " Madam, my liver and fortune are entirely at your disposal or putting a delicate question, " Amanda, have yoil a midriff to bestow ?" But custom has settled these things, and awarded the seat of sentiment to the aforesaid triangle, while its less fortunate neigh¬ bors wait at animal and anatomical distance. Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door. It " gives a very echo to the throne where hope is seated." But its issues seldom answer to this oracle within. It is so seldom that just the person we want to see comes. But of all the clamorous visitations the welcomest in expectation is the sound that ushers in, or seems to usher in a Valentine. As the raven himself was hoarse that an¬ nounced the fatal entrance of Duncan, so the knock of the post¬ man on this day is light, airy, confident, and befitting one that bringeth good tidings. It is less mechanical than on other days ; you will say, " That is not the post I am sure." Visions of Love, of Cupids, of Hymens !—delightful eternal common-places, which "having been will always be which no school-boy nor school¬ man can write away ; having your irreversible throne in the fancy and affections—what are your transports, when the happy maiden, opening with careful finger, careful not to break the emblematic seal, bursts upon the sight of some well-designed allegory, some type, some youthful fancy, not without verses— Lovers all, A madrigal, or some such device, not over abundant in sense—young Love disclaims it,—and not quite silly—^something between wind and water, a chorus where the sheep might almost join the shepherd, as they did, or as I apprehend they did, in Arcadia. VALENTIKE'S DAY. 89 All Valentines are not foolish ; and I shall not easily forget thine, my kind friend (if I may have leave to call you so) E. B. —E. B. lived opposite a young maiden whom he had often seen, unseen, from his parlor window in C—e street. She was all joyousness and innocence, and just of an age to enjoy receiving ^ a Valentine, and just of a temper to bear the disappointment of missing one with good humor. E. B. is an artist of no common powers ; in the fancy parts of designing, perhaps inferior to none ; his name is known at the bottom of many a well-executed vignette in the way of his profession, but no further ; for E. B. is modest, and the world meets nobody half-way. E. B. meditated how he could repay this young maiden for many a favor which she had done him unknown ; for when a kindly face greets us, though but passing by, and never knows us again, nor we it, we should feel it as an obligation ; and E. B. did. This good artist set himself at work to please the damsel. It was just before Valen¬ tine's day three years since. He wrought, unseen and unsus¬ pected, a wondrous work. We need not say it was on the finest _^gilt paper with borders—full, not of common hearts and heartless allegory, but all the prettiest stories of love from Ovid, and older poets than Ovid (for E. B. is a scholar). There was Pyramus and Thisbe, and be sure Dido was not forgot, nor Hero and Leander, and swans more than sang in Cayster, with mottoes and fanciful devices, such as beseemed,—a work in short of magic. Iris dipt the woof. This on Valentine's eve he commended to the all-swallowing indiscriminate orifice—(O ignoble trust !)—of the common post ; but the humble medium did its duty, and from his watchful' stand, the next morning he saw the cheerful messenger knock, and by and by the precious charge delivered. He saw, unseen, the happy girl unfold the Valentine, dance about, clap her hands, as one after one the pretty emblems unfolded themselves. She danced about, not with light love, or foolish expectations, for she had no lover ; or, if she had, none she knew that could have created those bright images which delighted heri It was more like some fairy present ; a God-send, as our familiap-ly pious an¬ cestors termed a benefit received where the benefactor was un¬ known. It would do her no harm. It would do her good for ever after.. It is good to love the unknown. I only give this as 90 ELIA. a specimen of E. B. and his modest way of doing a concealed kindness. Good morrow to my Valentine, sings poor Ophelia ; and no better wish, but with better auspices, we wish to all faithful lovers, who are not too wise to despise old legends, but are con¬ tent \o rank themselves humble diocesans of old Bishop Valentine and his true church. EARLY RELATIONS. 91 MY RELATIONS. I AM arrived at that point of life at which a man may account it a blessing, as it is a singularity, if he have either of his parents surviving. I have not that felicity—and sometimes think feel¬ ingly of a passage in Browne's Christian Morals, where he speaks of a man that hath lived sixty or seventy years in the world. " In such a compUss of time," he says, " a man may have a close apprehension what it is to be forgotten, when he hath lived to find none who could remember his father, or scarce¬ ly the friends of his youth, and may sensibly see with what a face in no long time Oblivion will look upon himself." I had an aunt, a dear and good one. She was one whom sin¬ gle blessedness had soured to the world. She often used to say, that I was the only thing in it which she loved ; and, when she thought I was quitting it, she grieved over me with a mother's tears. A partiality quite so exclusive my reason cannot altogether ap¬ prove. She was from morning till night poring over good books, and devotional exercises. Her favorite volumes were, Thomas a Ifempis, in Stanhope's translation ; and a Roman Catholic Prayer Book, with the matins and complines regularly set down,—terms which I was at that time too young to understand. She persisted in reading them, although admonished daily concerning their Pa¬ pistical tendency ; and went to church every Sabbath as a good Protestant should do. These were the only books she studied ; though, I think at one period of her life, she told me, she had read with great satisfaction the Adventures of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman. Finding the door of the chapel in Essex street open one day—it was in the infancy of that heresy—she went in, liked the sermon, and the manner of worship, and fre¬ quented it at intervals for some time after. She came not for 92 ELIA. doctrinal points, and never missed them. With some little asperi¬ ties in her constitution, which I have above hinted at, she was a steadfast, friendly being, and a fine old Christian. She was a woman of strong sense, and a shrewd mind—extraordinary at a repartee ; one of the few occasions of her breaking silence—else she did not much value wit. The only secular employment I remember to have seen her engaged in, was, the splitting of French beans,' and dropping them into a china basin of fair wa¬ ter. The odor of those tender vegetables to this day comes backN upon my sense, redolent of soothing recollections. Certainly it i is the most delicate of culinary operations. V Male aunts, .as somebody calls them, I had none—^to remember. By the uncle's side I may have been said to have been born an orphan. Brother, or sister, I never had any—to know them. A sister, I think, that should have been- Elizabeth, died in both our infancies. What a comfort, or what a care, may I not have missed in her !—But I have cousins sprinkled about in Hertford- shire—besides two, with whom I have been all my life in habits of the closest intimacy, and whom I may term cousins par excellence. These are James and Bridget Elia. They are older than myself by twelve, and ten, years ; and neither of them seems disposed, in matters of advice and guidance, to waive any of the prerogatives which primogeniture confers. May they con¬ tinue still in the same mind ; and when they shall be seventy-five, and seventy-three, years old (I cannot spare them sooner), persist in treating me in my grand climacteric precisely as a stripling, or- younger brother ! James is an inexplicable cousin. Nature hath her unities, which not every critic can penetrate ; or, if we feel, we cannot explain them. The pen of Yorick, and of none since his, could have drawn J. E. entire—those fine Sharidean lights and shades, which make up his story. I must limp after in my poor antithe¬ tical manner, as the fates have given me grace and talent. J. E., then, to the eye of a common observer at least—seemeth made up of contradictory principles. The genuine child of impulse, the frigid philosopher of prudence—the phlegm of my cousin's doctrine is invariably at war with his temperament, which is high sanguine. With always some fire-new project in his brain, J. E. MY RELATIONS. "93 is the systematic opponent of innovation, and crier down of every¬ thing that has not stood the test of age and experiment. With a hundred fine notions chasing one another hourly in his fancy, he is startled at the least approach to the romantic in others : and, determined by his own sense in everything, commends you to the guidance of common sense on all occasions.—With a touch of the eccentric in all which he does, or says, he is only anxious that you should not commit yourself by doing anything absurd or sin¬ gular. On my once letting slip at table, that I was not fond of a certain popular dish, he begged me at any rate not to say so—for the world would think me mad. He disguises a passionate fond¬ ness for works of high art (whereof he hath amassed a choice col¬ lection), under the pretext of buying only to sell again—that his enthusiasm may give no encouragement to yours. Yet, if it were so, why does that piece of tender, pastoral Domenichino hang still by his wall ?—is the ball of his sight much more dear to him ?— or what picture-dealer can talk like him ? Whereas mankind in general are observed to warp their spe¬ culative conclusions to the bent of their individual humors, his theories are sure to be in diametrical opposition to his constitu¬ tion. He is courageous as Charles of Sweden, upon instinct ; chary of his person upon principle, as a travelling Quaker. He has been preaching up to me, all my life, the doctrine of bowing to the great—^the necessity of forms, and manner, to a man's get- tmj-on in the world. He himself never aims at either, that I can . discover,—and has a spirit that would stand upright in the pre¬ sence of the Cham of Tartary. It is pleasant to hear him dis¬ course of patience—extolling it as the truest wisdom—and to see him during the last seven minutes that his dinner is getting ready. j[^Nature never ran up in her haste a more re.stless piece of work¬ manship than when she moulded this impetuous cousin—and Art never turned out a more elaborate orator than he can display him¬ self to be, upon this favorite topic of the advantages of quiet and contentedness in the state, whatever it be, that we are placed in. He is triumphant on this theme, when he has you safe in one of those short stages that ply for the western road, in a very obstruct¬ ing manner, at the foot of John Murray's street, where you get in when it is empty, and are expected to wait till the vehicle hath ELIA. completed her just freight—a trying three-quarters of an hour to some people. He wonders at your fidgetiness—" where could we be better than we are, thus silting, thus consulting ?"—" prefers, for his part, a state of rest to locomotion,"—with an eye all the while' upon the coachman,—^till at length, waxing out of all patience, at your want of it, he breaks out into a pathetic remonstrance at the fellow for detaining us so long over the time which he had pro¬ fessed, and declares peremptorily, that " the gentleman in the coach is determined to get out, if he does not drive on that instant." Very quick at inventing an argument, or detecting a sophistry, he is incapable of attending you in any chain of arguing. In- deed he makes wild work with logic, and seems to jump at most admirable conclusions by some process not at all akin to it. Con- sonantly enough to this, he hath been heard to deny, upon certain occasions, that there exists such a faculty at all in man as reason ; and wondereth how man came first to have a conceit of it—en- forcing his negation with all the might of reasoning he is master of. He has some speculative notions against laughter, and will maintain that laughing is not natural to him—when peradventure the next moment his lungs shall crow like Chanticleer. He says^^ some of the best things in the world, and declareth that wit is his aversion. It was he who said, upon seeing the Eton boys at play in their grounds—What a pity to think, that these fine ingenuous lads in a few years will all he changed into frivolous Members of Parliament ! His youth was fiery, glowing, tempestuous—and in age he dis- covereth no symptom of cooling. This is that which I admire in him. I hate people who meet Time half-way. I am for no com¬ promise with that inevitable spoiler. While he lives, J. E. will take his swing. It does me good, as I walk towards the street of my daily avocation, on some fine May morning, to meet him marching in a quite opposite direction, with a jolly handsome presence, and shining sanguine face, that indicates some purchase in his eye—a Claude or a Hobbima—for much of his enviable leisure is consumed at Christie's and Phillips's—or where not, to pick up pictures, and such gauds. On these occasions he mostly Btoppeth me, to read a short lecture on the advantage a person MY RELATIONS. »3 like me possesses above himself, in having his time occupied with business which he must do ; assureth me that he often feels it hang heavy on his hands j wishes he had fewer holidays, and goes oñ^ Westward Ho ¡—chanting a tune to Pall Mall, perfectly convinced that he has convinced me—wjiile I proceed in my opposite direc¬ tion tuneless. It is pleasant again to see this Professor of Indifference doing the honors of his new purchase, when he has fairly housed it. You must view it in every light, till he has found the best- placing it at this distance, and at that, but always suiting the focus of your sight to his own. You mpst spy at it through your fingers, to catch the aerial perspective, though you assure him that to you the landscape shows much more agreeable without that artifice. Wo be to the luckless wight, who does not only not respond to his rapture, but who should drop an unsea¬ sonable intimation of preferring one of his anterior bargains to the present ! The last is always his best hit—his " Cynthia of the minute." Alas I how many a mild Madonna have I known to come in—a Raphael !—keep its ascendency for a few brief moons—^then, after certain intermedial degradations, from the front drawing-room to the back gallery, thence to the dark parlor, adopted in turn by each of the Carracci, under successive lower¬ ing ascriptions of filiation, rnildly breaking its fall—consigned to the oblivious lumber-room, go out at last a Lucca Giordano, or plain Carlo Maratti !—which things when I beheld, musing upon the chances and mutabilities of fate below, hath made me to reflect upon the altered condition of great personages, or that woful Queen of Richard the Second— set forth in pomp. She came adorned hither like sweet May Sent back like Hollowmass or shortest day. With great love for you, J. E. hath but a limited sympathy with what you feel or do. He lives in a world of his own, and makes slender guesses at what passes in your mind. He never pierces the marrow of your habits. He will tell an old estab¬ lished playgoer, that Mr. Such-a-one, of So-and-so (naming one of the theatres), is a very lively comedian-^as a piece of news ' 96 ELIA. He advertised me but the other day of some pleasant green lanes which he had found out for me, knowing me to he a great walker in my own immediate vicinity, who have haunted the identical spot any time these twenty years ! He has not much respect for that class of feelings which goes by thç name of sentimental. He applies the definition of real evil to bodily sufferings exclusively, and rejecteth all others as imaginary. He is affected by the sight, or the bare supposition, of a creature in pain, to a degree which I have never witnessed out of womankind. A constitu¬ tional acuteness to this class of sufferings may in part account for this. The animal tribe in particular he taketh under his especial protection. A broken-winded or spur-galled horse is sure to find an .advocate in him. An over-loaded ass is his client for ever. He is the apostle to the brute kind—^the never-failing friend of those who have none to care for them. The contemplation of a lobster boiled, or eels skinned alive, will wring him so, that " all for pity he could die." It will take the savor from his palate, and the rest from his pillow, for days and nights. With the intense feeling of Thomas Clarkson, he wanted only the steadiness of pursuit, and unity of purpose, of that " true yoke-fellow with ' Time," to have effected as much for the Animal, as he hath done for the Negro Creation. But my uncontrollable cousin is but imper¬ fectly formed for purposes which demand co-operation. He can¬ not wait. His amelioration-plans must be ripened in a day. For this reason he has cut but an equivocal figure in benevolent soci¬ eties, and combinations for the alleviation of human sufferings. His zeal constantly makes him to outrun, and put out, his coad¬ jutors. He thinks of relieving, while they think of debating. He was black-balled out of a society for the Relief of * * * * * ******, because the fervor of his humanity toiled beyond the formal apprehension, and creeping processes, of his associates. 1 shall always consider this distinction as a patent of nobility in the Elia family ! Do I mention these seeming inconsistencies to smile at, or up¬ braid, my unique cousin ? Marry, heaven, and all good manners, and the understanding that should be between kinsfolk, forbid! With all the strangenesses of this strangest of the Elias—I would not have him in one jot or tittle other than he is ; neither would MY RELATIONS. 97 m : I barter or exchange my wild kinsman for the most exact, regu¬ lar, and everyway consistent kinsman breathing. In my next, reader, I may perhaps give you some account of my cousin Bridget—if you are not already surfeited with cousins ;—and take you by the hand, if you are willing to go with us, on an excursion which we made a summer or two since, in search of more cousins— Through the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire PART I. 8 gs ELIA. MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE. Bridget Elia has been my housekeeper for many a long year. I have obligations to Bridget, extending beyond the period of memory. We house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness j with such tolerable comfort, upon the whole, that I, for one, find in myself no sort of disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash king's offspring, to bewail my celibacy. We agree pretty well in our tastes and habits— yet so, as " with a difference." We are generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings—as it should be among near relations. Our sympathies are rather understood, than expressed ; and once, upon my dissembling a tone in my voice more kind than ordinary, my cousin burst into tears, and complained that I was altered. We are both great readers in different directions. While I am hanging over (for the thousandth time) some passage in old Burton, or .one of his strange contemporaries, she is abstracted in some modern tale, or adventure, whereof our common reading- table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies. Narrative teases me. I have little concern in the progress of events. She must have a story—well, ill, or indifferently told—so there be life stirring in it, and plenty of good or evil accidents. The fluc¬ tuations of fortune in fiction—and almost in real life—have ceased to interest, or operate but dully upon me. Out-of-the-way humors and opinions—heads with some diverting twist in them— the oddities of authorship please me most. My cousin has a native disrelish of anything that sounds odd or bizarre. Nothing goes down with her, that is quaint, irregular, or out of the road of common sympathy. She " holds Nature more clever." I can pardon her blindness to the beautiful obliquities the Religio MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE. 99 Medici ; but she must apologise to me for certain disrespectful in¬ sinuations, which she has been pleased to throw out latterly, touch¬ ing the intellectuals of a dear favorite of mine, of the last century but one—the thrice noble, chaste, and virtuous,—but again some¬ what ftintastical, and original-brained, generous Margaret New¬ castle. It has been the lot of my cousin, oftener perhaps than I could have wished, to have had for her associates and mine, free-think¬ ers—^leaders, and disciples, of novel philosophies and systems j but she neither wrangles with, nor accepts, their opinions. That which was good and venerable to her, when a child, retain? its authority over her mind still. She. never juggles or plays tricks with her understanding. We are both of us inclined to be a little too positive ; and I have observed the result of our disputes to be almost uniformly this—^that in matters of fact, dates, and circumstances, it turns out, that I was in the right, and my cousin in the wrong. But where we have differed upon moral points ; upon something pro-^ per to be done, or let alone ; whatever heat of opposition, or steadiness of conviction, I set out with, I am sure always, in the long-run, to be brought over to her way of thinking. I must touch upon the foibles of my kinswoman with a gentle hand, for Bridget does not like to be told of her faults. She hath an awkward trick (to say no worse of it) of reading in company ; at which times she will answer yes or no to a question, without fully understanding its purport—which is provoking, and derogatory in the highest degree to the dignity of the putter of the said question. Her presence of mind is equal to the most pressing trials of life, but will sometimes desert her upon trifling occasions. When the purpose requires it, and is a thing of moment, she can speak to it greatly ; but in matters which are not stuff of the conscience, she hath been known sometimes to let slip a word less seasonably. Her education in youth was not much attended to ; and she happily missed all that train of female garniture, which passeth by the name of accomplishments. She was tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious closet of gqpd old English reading, without much selection or prohibition, and browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage. Had I twenty 100 ELIA. girls, they should be brought up exactly in this fashion. I know not whether their chance in wedlock might not be diminished by it ; but I can answer for it, tbat it makes (if the worst come to the worst) most incomparable old maids. In a season of distress, she is the truest comforter j but in the teasing accidents, and minor perplexities, which do not call out the will to meet them, she sometimes maketh matters worse by an excess of participation. If-she does not always divide your trouble, upon the pleasanter occasions of life she is sure always to treble your satisfaction. She is excellent to be at play with, or upoff a visit ; but best, when she goes a journey with you. We made an excursion together a few summers since, into Hertfordshire, to beat up the quarters of some of our less-known relations in that fine corn county. The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End ; or Mackerel End, as it is spelt, perhaps more properly, in some old maps of Hertfordshire; a farm-house,—delightfully situated within a gentle walk from Wheathampstead. I can just remember having been there, on a visit to a great-aunt, when I was a child, under the care of Bridget ; who, as I have said, is older than myself by some ten years. I wish that I could throw into a heap the re¬ mainder of our joint existences ; that we might share them in equal division. But that is impossible. The house was at that time in the occupation of a substantial yeoman, who had married my grandmother's sister. His name was Gladman. My grand¬ mother was a Bruton, married to a Field. The Gladmans and the Brutons are still flourishing in that part of the county, but the Fields are almost extinct. More than forty years had elapsed since the visit I speak of ; and, for the greater portion of that period, we had lost sight of the other two branches also. Who or what sort of persons inherited Mackery End—kindred or strange folk—we were afraid almost to conjecture, but deter¬ mined some day to explore. By somewhat a circuitous route, taking the noble park at Luton in our way from Saint Albans, we arrived at the spot of our anxious curiosity about noon. The sight of the old farm-house, though every trace of it was effaced from my recollection, affected me with a pleasure which I had n 3t experienced for many a year. MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE. 101 For though I had forgotten it, lee had never forgotten being there together, and we had been talking about Mackery End all our lives, till memory on my part became mocked with a phantom of itself, and I thought I knew the aspect of a place, which, when present, O how unlike it was to that, which I had conjured up so many times instead of it ! Still the air breathed balmily about it ; the season was in the " heart of June," and I could say with the poet. But thou, that didst appear so fair To fond imagination. Dost rival in the light of day Her delicate creation ! Bridget's was more a waking bliss than mine, for she easily remembered her old acquaintance again—some altered features, of course, a little grudged at. At first, indeed, she was ready to disbelieve for joy ; but the scene soon re-confirmed itself in her affections—and she traversed every outpost of the old man¬ sion, to the wood-house, the orchard, the place where tiie pigeon- house had stood (house and birds were alike flown)—with a breathless impatience of recognition, which was more pardonable perhaps than decorous at the age of fifty odd. But Bridget in some things is behind her years. The only thing left was to get into the house—and that was a difficulty whicii to me singly would have been insurmountable ; for I am terribly shy in making myself known to strangers and out-of-date kinsfolk. Love, .stronger than scruple, winged my cousin in without me ; but she soon returned with a creature that might have sat to a sculptor for the image of Welcome. It was the youngest of the Gladnrians ; who, by marriage with a Bruton, had become mistress of the old mansion. A comely brood are the Brutons. Six of tiieni, females, were noted as the handsomest 3wng women in the county. But this adopted Bruton, in my mind, was better than they all—more comely. She was born too late to have remembered me. She just recollected in early life to have had her cousin Bridget once pointed out to her, climbing a stile. But the name of kindred, and of cousinship, was enough. Those slender ties, that prove slight as gossamer in the rending 102 ELIA. atmosphere of a metropolis, bind faster, as we found it, in hearty, homely, loving Hertfordshire.—In five minutes we were as thoroughly acquainted as if we had been born and bred up toge¬ ther ; were familiar, even to the calling each other by our Chris¬ tian names. So Christians should call one another. To have seen Bridget, and her—it was like the meeting of the two scrip¬ tural cousins ! There was a grace and dignity, an amplitude of form and stature, answering to her mind, in this farmer's wife, which would have shined in a palace—or so we thought it. We were made welcome by husband and wife equally—we, and our friend that was with us.—I had almost forgotten him—but B. F. will not so soon forget that meeting, if peradventure he shall read this on the far distant shores where the kangaroo haunts. The fatted calf was made ready, or rather was already so, as if in an¬ ticipation of our coming ; and, after an appropriate glass of native wine, never let me forget with what honest pride this hospitable cousin made us proceed to Wheathampstead, to introduce us (as some new-found rarity) to her mother and sister Gladmans, who did indeed know something more of us, at a time when she almost knew nothing.—With what corresponding kindness we were re¬ ceived by them also—how Bridget's memory, exalted by the occasion, warmed into a thousand half-obliterated recollections of things and persons, to my utter astonishment, and her own—and to the astoundment of B. F. who sat by, almost the only thing that was not a cousin there,—old effaced images of more than half-forgotten names and circumstances still crowding back upon her, as words written in lemon come out upon exposure to a friendly warmth,—when I forget all this, then may my country cousins forget me ; and Bridget no more remember, that in the days of weakling infancy I was her tender charge—as I have been her care in foolish manhood since—in those pretty pa.storal walks, long ago, about Mackery End, in Hertfordshire, my first play. 103 MY FIRST PLAY. At the north end of Cross-court there yet stands a portal, of some architeetural pretensions, though reduced to humble use, serving at present for an entrance to a printing-office. This old door-way, if you are young, reader, you may not know was the identical pit entrance to old Drury—Garrick's Drury—all of it that is left. I never pass it without shaking some forty years from off my shoul¬ ders, recurring to the evening when I passed through it to see my first fiUxy. The afternoon had been wet, and the condition of our going (the elder folks and myself) was, that the rain should cease. With what a beating heart did I wateh from the window the pud¬ dles, from the stillness of which I was taught to prognosticate the desired cessation ! I seem to remember the last spfrt, and the glee with which I ran to announce it. We went with orders, which my godfather F. had sent us. He kept the oil shop (now Davies's) at the corner of Featherstone- buildings, in Holborn. F. was a tall grave person, lofty in speech, and had pretensions above his rank. He associated in those days with John Palmer, the comedian, whose gait and bearing he seemed to copy ; if John (which is quite as likely) did not rather borrow somewhat of his manner from my godfather. He was also known to, and visited by, Sheridan. It was to his house in Holborn that young Brinsley brought his first wife on her elope¬ ment with him from a boarding-school at *Bath—the beautiful Maria Linley. My parents were present (over a quadrille table) when he arrived in the evening with his harmonious charge. From either of these connexions it may be inferred that my god¬ father could command an order for the then Drury-lane theatre at pleasure—and, indeed, a pretty liberal issue of those cheap billets, 104 ELIA. in Brinsley's çasy autograph, I have heard him say was the sole remuneration which he had received for many years' nightly illu¬ mination of the orchestra and various avenues of that theatre— and he was content it should be so. The honor of Sheridan's familiarity—or supposed familiarity—was better to my godfather than money. F. was the most gentlemanly of oilmen ; grandiloquent, yet courteous. His delivery of the commonest matters of fact was Ciceronian. He had two Latin words almost constantly in his mouth (how odd sounds Latin from an oilman's lips !) which my better knowledge since has enabled me to correct. In strict pro¬ nunciation they should have been sounded vice versa—but in those young years they impressed me with more awe than they would now do, read aright from Seneca or Varro—in his own peculiar pronunciation, monosyllabically elaborated, or Anglicized, into something like verse verse. By an imposing manner, and the help of these distorted syllables, he climbed (but that was little) to the highest parochial honors which St. Andrew's has to bestow. He is dead—and thus much I thought due to his memory, both for my first orders (little wondrous talismans !—slight keys, and insignificant to outward sight, but opening to me more than Ara¬ bian paradise?!) and moreover that by his testamentary benefi¬ cence I came into possession of the only landed property which I could ever call my own—situate near the road-way village of pleasant Fuckeridge, in Hertfordshire. When I journeyed down to take possession, and planted my foot on my own ground, the stately habits of the donor descended upon me, and I strode (shall I confess the vanity ?) with larger paces over my allotment of three-quarters of an acre, with its commodious mansion in the midst, with the feeling of an English freeholder that all betwixt sky and centre was my own. The estate has passed into more prudent hands, and nothing but an agrarian can restore it. In those days were pit orders. Beshrew the uncomfortable manager who abolished them !—with one of these we went. I remember the waiting at the door—not that which is left—but between that and an inner door in shelter—O when shall I be such an expectant again !—with the cry of nonpareils, an indispensable play-house accompaniment in those days. As near as I can MY FIRST PLAY. recollect, the fashionable pronunciation of the theatrical fruiter- esses then was, " Chase some oranges, chase some numparels, chase a bill of the play —chase pro choose. But when we got in, and I beheld the green curtain that veiled a heaven to my imagination, which was soon to be disclosed—^the breathless anti¬ cipations I endured ! I had seen something like it in the plate prefixed to Troilus and Cressida, in Rowe's Shakspeare—the tent scene with Diomede—and a sight of that plate can always bring back in a measure the feeling of that evening.—The boxes at that time, full of well-dressed women of quality, projected over the pit : and the pilasters reaching down were adorned with a glistering substance (1 know not what) under glass (as it seemed), resembling—a homely fancy—^but I judged it to be sugar-candy— yet, to my raised imagination, divested of its homelier qualities, it appeared a glorified candy !—The orchestra lights at length arose, those " fair Auroras !" Once the bell sounded. It was to ring out yet once again—and incapable of the anticipation, I reposed my shut eyes in a sort of resignation upon the maternal lap. It rang the second time. The curtain drew up—I was not past six years old and the play was Artaxerxes ! I had dabbled a little in the Universal History—the ancient part of it—and here was the court of Persia.—It was being ad¬ mitted to a sight of the past. I took no proper interest in the action going on, for I understood not its import—but I heard the word Darius, and I was in the midst of Daniel. All feeling was absorbed in vision. Gorgeous vests, gardens, palaces, princesses, passed before me. I knew not players. I was in Persepolis for the time, and the burning idol of their devotion almost converted me into a worshipper. I was awe-struck, and believed those sig¬ nifications to be something more than elemental fires. It was all enchantment and a dream. No such pleasure has since visited me but in dreams.—Harlequin's invasion followed ; where, I re¬ member, the transformation of the magistrates into reverend bel¬ dams seemed to me a piece of grave historic justice, and the tailor carrying his own head to be as sober a verity as the legend of St. Denys. The next play to which I was taken was the Lady of the Manor, of which, with the exception of some scenery, very faint 106 ELIA. ^li* - ■ ■ - — . 4 ,1 M 4,^ ^1. ... MM traces are left in my memory. It was followed by a pantomime called Lun's Ghost—a satiric touch, I apprehend, upon Rich, not long since dead—hut to my apprehension (too ^cere for satire), Lun was as remote a piece of antiquity as Lud—^the &ther of a line of Harlequins—^transmitting his dagger of lath (the wooden sceptre) through countless ages. I saw the primeval Motley come fnnn his silent tomb in a ghastly vest of white patch-work, like the apparition of a dead rainbow. So Harlequins (thought I) loolu when they are dead. My third play followed in quick succession. It was the Way of the World. I think I must have sat at it as grave as a judge ; for, I remember, the hysteric afiectations of good Lady Wish£»t affected me like some solemn tragic passion. Robinson Crusoe followed ; in. which Crusoe, man Friday, and the parrot, were as good and authentic as in the story.—^The clownery and pantaloon- ery of these pantomimes have clean passed out of my head. I believe, I not, more laughed at them, than at the same age I should have been disposed to laugh at the grotesque Gothic heads (seeming to me then replete with devout meaning), that gape, and grin, in stone around the inside of the old Round Church (my church) of the Templars. I saw these plays in the season 1781-2, when I was ficm six to seven years old. After the intervention of six or seven other years (for at school all play-going was inhibited) I again entered the doors of a theatre. That old Artaxerxes evening had never done ringing in my fancy. I expected the same feelings to come again with the same occasion. But we differ from ourselves less at sixty and sixteen, than the latter does from six. In that inter¬ val what had I not lost ! At the first period I knew nothing, understood nothing, discriminated nothing. I felt all, loved all, wondered all— Was nourished, I could not tell how— I had left the temple a devotee, and was returned a rationalist. ^ The same things were there materially ; but the emblem, the reference, was gone !—The green curtain was no longer a veil, árawn between two worlds, the unfolding of which was to bring back past ages to present a " royal ghost,"—but a certain MV FIRST PLAY 107 qwuatity of green baize, which was to separate tíie audience for a given time from certain of their iellowmen who were to come forward and pretend those parts. The lights—the orchestra lights •-Hîame up a clumsy machinery. The first ring, and the second ring, was now but a trick of the prompter's bell—which had been, like foe note of a cuckoo, a phantom of a voice, no hand seen or guessed at which ministered to its warning. The actors were men and women painted. I thought the &ult was in them ; but it was in myself, and the alteration which those many centuries,—of six short twelve-months—^had wrought in me.—^Perhaps it was fortunate for me that the play of the evening was but an indifièrent comedy, as it gave me" time to crop some unreasonable expecta¬ tions, which might have interfered with the genuine emotions with which I was soon after enabled to enter upon foe first appearance to me of Mrs. Siddcms in Isabella. Comparison and retrospection soon yielded to the present attraction of the scene ; and the theatre became to me, upon a new stock, foe most delightful of recrea¬ tions. 108 ELIA. MODEKN GALLANTRY. In comparing modern with ancient manners, we are pleased to compliment ourselves upon the point of gallantry; a certain obsequiousness, or deferential respect, which we are supposed to pay to females, as females. I shall believe that this principle actuates our conduct, when I can forget, that in the nineteenth century of the era from which we date our civility, we are but just beginning to leave off the very frequent practice of whipping females in public, in common with the coarsest male oiFenders. I shall believe it to be influential, when I can shut my eyes to the fact, that in England women are still occasionally—hanged. I shall believe in it, when actresses are no longer subject to be hissed off a stage by gentlemen. I shall believe in it, when Dorimant hands a ñsh-wife across the kennel ; or assists the apple-woman to pick up her wandering fruit, which some unlucky dray has just dissipated. I shall believe in it, when the Dorimants in humbler life, who would be thought in their way notable adepts in this refinement, shall act upon it in places where they are not known, or think themselves not observed—when'l shall see the traveller for some rich tradesman part with his admired box-coat, to spread it over the defenceless shoulders of the poor woman, who is passing to her parish on the roof of the same stage-coach with him, drenched in the rain—when I shall no longer see a woman standing up in the pit of a London theatre, till she is sick and faint with the exertion, with men about her, seated at their ease, and jeering at her dis¬ tress ; till one, that seems to have more manners or conscience than the rest, significantly declares " she should be welcome to MODERN GALLANTRY. 109 his seat, if she were a little younger and handsomer." Place this dapper warehouseman, or that rider, in a circle of their own female acquaintance, and you shall confess you have not seen a politer-bred man in Lothbury. Lastly, I shall begin to believe that there is some such principle influencing our conduct, when more than one-half of the drudgery and coarse servitude of the world shall cease to be performed by women. Until that day comes, I shall never believe this boasted point to be anything more than a conventional fiction j a pageant got up betwixt the sexes, in a certain rank, and at a certain time of life, in which both find their account equally. I shall be even disposed to rank it among the salutary fictions of life, when in polite circles I shall see the same attentions paid to age as to youth, to homely features as to handsome, to coarse complexions as to clear—to the woman, as she is a woman, not as she is a beauty, a fortune, or a title. I shall believe it to be something more than a name, when a well-dressed gentleman in a well-dressed company can advert to the topic 0Îfemale old age without exciting, and intending to excite, a sneer when the phrases " antiquated virginity," and such a one has " overstood her market," pronounced in good company, shall raise immediate ofience in man, or woman, that shall bear them spoken. ^ Joseph Paice, of Bread-street-hill, merchant, and one of the Di¬ rectors of the South-Sea company—the same to whom Edwards, the Shakspeare commentator, has addressed a fine sonnet—was the only pattern of consistent gallantry I have met with. He •teiJc-me under his shelter at an early age, and bestowed some pahm Upon me. I owe to his precepts and example whatever there is of the man of business (and that is not much) in my com¬ position. It was not his fault that 1 did not profit more. Though bred a Presbyterian, and brought up a merchant, he was the finest gentleman of his time. He had not one system of attention to females in the drawing-room, and another in the shop, or at the stall. I do not mean that he made no distinction. But he never lost sight of sex, or overlooked it in the casualties of a disadvan¬ tageous situation. I have seen him stand bareheaded—smile if 110 ELIA. you please—to a poor servant girl, while she has been inquiring of him the way to some street—in such a posture of unforced civility, as neither to embarrass her in the acceptance, nor him¬ self in the offer, of it. He was no dangler, in the common accep- tation of the word, after women ; but he reverenced and upheld, in every form in which it came before him, womanhood. I have seen him—nay, smile not—^tenderly escorting a market-woman, whom he had encountered' in a shqwer, exalting his umbrella over her poor basket of fruit, that it might receive no damage, with as much carefulness as if she had been a Countess. To the reverend form of Female Eld he would yield the wall (though it were to an ancient beggar-woman) with more ceremony than we can afford to show our grandams. He was the Preux Chevalier of Age ; the Sir Calidore, or Sir Tristan, to those who have no Calidores or Tristans to defend them. The roses, that had long faded thence, still bloomed for him in those withered and yellow cheeks. He was never married, but in his youth he paid his addresses to the beautiful Susan Winstanley—old Winstanley's daughter of Clapton—who dying in the early days of their courtship, con¬ firmed in him the resolution of perpetual bachelorship. It was during their short courtship, he told me, that he had been one day treating his mistress with a profusion of civil speeches—the com¬ mon gallantries—to which kind of thing she had hitherto mani¬ fested no repugnance—but in this instance with no effect. He could not obtain from her a decent acknowledgment in return. She rather seemed to resent his compliments. He could not set it down to caprice, for the lady had always shown herself above that littleness. "When he ventured on the following day, finding her a little better humored, to expostulate with her on her cold¬ ness of yesterday, she confessed, with her usual frankness, that she had no sort of dislike to his attentions ; that she could even endure some high-flown compliments ; that a young woman placed in her situation had a right to expect all sort of civfl things said to her ; that she hoped she could digest a dose of adulation, short of insincerity, with as little injury to her humility as most young women : but that—a little before he had commenced his compli¬ ments—she had overheard him by accident, in rather rough Ian- MODERN GALLANTRY. in guage, rating a young woman, who had not brought home his cravats quite at the appointed time, and she thought to herself, " As I am Miss Susan Winstaiiley, and a young lady—a reputed beauty, and known to be a fortune,—I can have my choice of the finest- speeches from the mouth of this very fine gentleman who is courting me—but if I had been poor Mary Such-a-one {naming tlie milliner),—and had failed of bringing home the cravats to the ap- pointed hour—though perhaps I had sat up half the night to for¬ ward them—what sort of compliments should I have received then ?—And my woman's pride came to my assistance j and I thought, that if it were only to do me honor, a female, like myselfj might have received handsomer usage : and I was determined not to accept any fine speeches, to the compromise of that sex, the belonging to which was after all my strongest claim and title to them." I think the lady discovered both generosity, and a just way of thinking, in this rebuke which she gave her lover ; and I have sometimes imagined, that the uncommon strain of courtesy, which through life regulated the actions and behavior of my friend to¬ wards all of womankind indiscriminately, owed its happy origin to this seasonable lesson from the lips of his lamented mistress. I wish the whole female world would entertain the same notion of these things that Miss Winstanley showed. Then we should see something of the spirit of cor^stent gallantry ; and no longer witness the anomaly of the same man—a pattern of true polite¬ ness to a wife—of cold contempt, or rudeness, to a sister—^the idolater of his female mistress—the disparager and despiser of his no less female aunt, or unfortunate—still female—maiden cousin. Just so much respect as a woman derogates from her own sex, in whatever condition placed—her handmaid, or dependent—she de¬ serves to have diminished from heiself on that score ; and proba¬ bly will feel the diminution, when youth, and beauty, and advan¬ tages, not inseparable from sex, shall lose of their attraction. What a woman should demand of a man in courtship, or after it, is first—respect for her as she is a woman ;—and next to that— to be respected by him above all other women. But let her stand upon her female character as upon a foundation ; and let the at- 112 ELIA. tentions, incident to individual preference, be so many pretty ad- ditaments and ornaments—as many, and as fanciful, as you please —to that main structure. Let her first lesson be with sweet Susan Winstanley—to reverence her sex. THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. 113 THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. I WAS born, and passed the first seven years of my life, in the Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I had almost said—for in those young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places ?— these are of my oldest recollections. I repeat, to this day, no verses to myself more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, than those of Spenser, where he speaks of this spot. There when they came, whereas those hricky towers, The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride. Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers. There whylome wont the Templer knights to bide. Till they decayed through pride. Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis. What a transition for a countryman visiting London for the first time— the passing from the crowded Strand or Fleet-street, by unexpected avenues, into its magnificent ample squares, its classic green re¬ cesses ! What a cheerful, liberal look hath that part of it, which, from three sides, overlooks the greater garden ; that goodly pile Of building strong, albeit of Paper hight, confronting with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more fantas¬ tically shrouded one, named of Harcourt, with the cheerful Crown- office Row (place of my kindly engendure), right opposite the stately stream, which washes the garden-foot with her yet scarcely trade-polluted waters, and seems but just weaned from her Twickenham Naiades ! a man would give something to have been born in such places. What a collegiate aspect has that fine PART I. 9 114 ELIA. Elizabethan hall, where the fountain plays, which I have made to rise and fall, how many times ! to the astoundment of the young urchins, my contemporaries, who, not being able to guess at its recopdite machinery, were almost tempted to hail the wondrous work as magic ! What an antique air had the now almost efiaced sun-dials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals with that Time which they measured, and to take their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light ! How would the dark line steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to detect its movement, never catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrests of sleep ! Ah ! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived ! What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelmenb ^ of lead and brass,, its pert or solemn dulness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like structure, and silent heart- language of the old dial ! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished ? If its busi¬ ness-use be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance. It spoke of moderate labors, of pleasures not protracted after sun-set, of temperance, and good hours. It was the primitive clock, the horologue of the first world. Adam could scarce have missed it in Paradise. It was the measure appropriate for sweet plants and flowers to spring by, for the birds to apportion their silver warb- lings by, for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by. The shepherd " carved it out quaintly in the sun and, turning philosopher by the very occupation, provided it with mottoes more touching than tombstones. It was a pretty device of the gardener, recorded by Marvell, who, in the days of artificial gardening, made a dial out of herbs and flowers. I must quote his verses a little higher up, for they are full, as all his serious poetry was, of a witty delicacy. They will not come in awkwardly, I hope, in a talk of fountains and svm-dials. He is speaking of sweet garden scenes :— What wondrous life is this I lead ! Ripe apples drop about my head. THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE. lis The luscious clusters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine. The nectarine, and curious peach. Into my hands themselves do reach. Stumbling on melons, as I pass, Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass. Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less Withdraws into i^ happiness. The mind, that ocean, where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find ; Yet it creates, transcending these. Far other worlds, and other seas ; Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade. Here at the fountain's sliding foot. Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root. Casting the body's vest aside. My soul into the boughs does glide ; There, like a bird, it sits and sings. Then wets and claps its silver wings. And, till prepaie I seem to remember a poor old grateful kind of creature, blink¬ ing, and looking up with his no eyes in the sun— Is it possible I could have steeled my purse against him ? Perhaps I had no small change. Reader, do not be frightened at the hard words, imposition, im¬ posture—give, and ask no questions. Cast thy bread upon the waters. Some have unawares (like this Bank clerk) entertained angels. Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress. Act a charity sometimes. When a poor creature (outwardly and visibly such) comes before thee, do not stay to inquire whether the " seven small children," in whose name he implores thy as¬ sistance, have a veritable existence. Rake not into the bowels of unwelcome truth, to save a halfpenny. It is good to believe him. If he be not all that he pretendeth,- give, fend under a per¬ sonate father of a family, think (if thou pleasest) that thou hast relieved an indigent bachelor. When they come with their coun¬ terfeit looks, and mumping tones, think them players. You pay your money to see a comedian feign these things, which, concern¬ ing these poor people, thou canst not certainly teil whetlter they are feigned or not. 156 ELIA. A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG. Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, ^hich my friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me,^ for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is not obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius in the second chapter of his Mundane Mutations, where he designates a kind of golden age by the term of Cho-fang, literally the Cooks' Holiday. The wiaauscript goes on to say, that the art of roast¬ ing, or rather broiling (whkh i take to be the eider brother) was accidentally discovered in the manner following. The swine, herd, Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one morning, as his manner was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his eldest son Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who being fond of playing with fire, as younkers of his age commonly are, let some sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quick¬ ly, spread the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion, / till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry antediluvian make-shift of a building, you may think it) what was of much more importance, a fine litter of new-farrowed pigs, no less than nine in number, perished. China pigs have been "es¬ teemed a luxury all over the East, from the remotest periods that we read of. Bo-bo was in the utmost consternation, as you may think, not so much for the sake of the tenement, which his father and he could easily build up again with a few dry branches, and the labor of an hour or two, at any time, as for the loss of the pigs. While he was thinking what he should say to his father, and wringing his hands over the smoking remnants of one of those un¬ timely sufferers, an odor assailed his nostrils, unlike any scent A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG. 157 which he had before experienced. What could it proceed from ? —not from the burnt cottage—he had smelt that smell before— indeed this was by no means the first accident of the kind which had occurred through the negligence of this unlucky young fire¬ brand. Much less did it resemble that of any known herb, weed, or flower. A premonitory moistening at the same time overflowed his nether lip. He knew not what to think. He next stooped down to feel the pig, if there were any signs of life in it. He burnt his fingers, and to cool them he applied them in his booby fashion to his mouth. Some of the crumbs of the scorched skin had come away with his fingprs, and for the first time in his life (in the world's life indeed, for before him no man had known it) he tasted—crackling ! Again he felt and fumbled at the pig. It did not burn him so much now, still he licked his fingers from a sort of habit. The truth at length broke into his slow understand¬ ing, that it was the pig that smelt so, and the pig that tasted so delicious ; and surrendering himself up to the new-born pleasure, he fell to tearing up whole handfulls of the scorched skin with the flesh next it, and was cramming it down his throat in his beastly fashion, when his sire entered amid the smoking rafters, armed with retributory cudgel, and finding how aflairs stood, began to rain blows upon the young rogue's shoulders, as thick as hail¬ stones, which Bo-bo heeded not any more than if they had been flies. The tickling pleasure, which he. experienced in his lower regions, had rendered him quite callous to any inconveniences he might feel in those remote quarters. His father might lay on, but he could not beat him from his pig, till he had fairly made an end of it, when, becoming a little more sensible of his situation, something like the following dialogue ensued. " You graceless whelp, what have you got there devouring ? Is it not enough that you have burnt me down three houses with your dog's tricks, and be hanged to you ! but you must be eating fire, and I know not what—what have you got there I say ?" " 0 father, the pig, the pig ! do come and taste how nice the burnt pig eats." The ears of Ho-ti tingled with horror. He cursed his son, and he cursed himself that ever he should beget a son that should eat burnt pig. ' 158 ELIA. Bo-bo, whose scent was wonderfully sharpened since morning, soon raked out another pig, and fairly rending it asunder, thrust the lesser half hy main force into the fists of Ho-ti, still shouting out, " Eat, eat, eat the burnt pig, father, only taste—O Lord !" —with such-like barbarous ejaculations, cramming all the while as if he would choke. Ho-ti trembled in every joint while he grasped the abominable thing, wavering whether he should not put his son to death for an unnatural young monster, when the crackling scorching his fingers, as it had done his son's, and applying the same remedy to them, he in his turn tasted some of its flji'vor, which, make what sour mouths he would for a pretence, proved not altogether displeasing to him. In conclusion (for the manuscript here is a little tedious) both father and son fairly sat down to the mess, and never left off till they had despatched all that remained of the litter. Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the secret escape, fijr the neighbors would certainly have stoned them for a couple of abo¬ minable wretches, who could think of improving upon the good meat which God had sent them. Nevertheless, strange stories get about. It was observed that Ho-ti's cottage was burnt down now more frequently than ever. Nothing but fires from this time forward. Some would break out in broad day, others in the night-time. As often as the sow farrowed, so sure was the house of Ho-ti to be in a blaze ^ and Ho-ti himself, which was the more remarkable, instead of chastising his son, seemed to grow more indulgent to him than ever. At length they were watched, the terrible mystery discovered, and father and son summoned to take their trial at Pekin, then an inconsiderable assize town. Evi¬ dence was given, the obnoxious food itself produced in court, and verdict about to be pronounced, when the foreman of the jury begged that some of the burnt pig, of which the culprits stood ac¬ cused, might be handed into the box. He handled it, and they all handled it ; and burning their fingers, as Bo-bo and his father had done before them, and nature prompting to each of them the same remedy, against the face of all the facts, and the clearest charge which judge had ever given,—to the surprise of the whole court, townsfolk, strangers, reporters, and all present—without A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG. 159 leaving the box, or any manner of consultation whatever, they brought in a simultaneous verdict of Not Guilty. The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked at the manifest iniquity of the decision : and when the court was dismissed, went privily, and bought up all the pigs that could be had for love or money. In a few days his Lordship's town-house was observed to be on fire. The thing took wing, and now there was nothing to be seen but fire in every direction. Fuel and pigs grew enor¬ mously dear all over the district. The insurance-offices one and all shut up shop. People built slighter and slighter every day, until it was feared that the very science of architecture would in no long time be lost to the world. Thus this custom of firing houses continued, till in process of time, says my manuscript, a sage arose, like our Locke, who made a discovery, that the flesh of swine, or indeed of any other animal, might be cooked (burnt, as they called' it) without the necessity of consuming a whole house to dress it. i, Then first began the rude form of a gridiron. Roasting by the string or spit came in a century or two later, I forget in whose dynasty. By such slow degrées, concludes the manuscript, do the most useful, and seemingly the most obvious arts, make their way among mankind Without placing too implicit faith in the account above given, it must be agreed, that if a worthy pretext for so dangerous an experiment as setting houses on fire (especially in these days) could be assigned in favor of any culinary object, that pretext and excuse might be found in koast pig. Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edibilis, I will main¬ tain it to be the most delicate—jninceps obsoniorum. 'I speak not of your grown porkers—things between pig and pork—those hobbydehoys—but a young and tender suckling— under a moon old—^guiltless as yet of the sty—with no original speck of the amor immunditiœ, the hereditary failing of the first parent, yet manifest—his voice as yet not broken, but something between a childish treble and a grumble—the mild forerunner, or prcßludium of a grunt. He must be roasted. I am not ignorant that our ancestors ate them seethed, or boiled—^but what a sacrifice of the exterior tegument ! 160 ELIA. There is no flavor comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over-roasted, crackling, as it is well called—the very teeth are invited to their share of the plea¬ sure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resistance— with the adhesive oleaginous—O call it not fat ! but an indefin-, able sweetness growing up to it—the tender blossoming of fat— fat cropped in the bud—taken in the shoot—in the first innocence —the cream and quintessence of the child-pig's yet pure food the lean, no lean, but a kind of animal manna—or, rather, fat and lean (if it must be so) so blended and running into each other, that both together make but one ambrosian result, or com¬ mon substance. Behold him, while he is " doing"—it seemeth rather a refresh, ing warmth,1han a scorching heat, that he is so passive to. How equably he twirleth round the string !—Now he is just done. To see the extreme sensibility of that tender age ! he hath wept out his pretty eyes—radiant jellies—shooting stars.— See him in the dish his second cradle, how meek he lieth !— wouldst thou have had this innocent grow up to the grossness and indocility which too often accompany maturer swinehood ? Ten to one he would have proved a glutton, a sloven, an obstinate, disagreeable animal—wallowing in all manner of filthy conversa¬ tion—from these sins he is happily snatched away— Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade Death came with timely care— his memory is odoriferous—no clown curseth, while his stomach half rejecteth, the rank bacon—no coalheaver bolteth him in reeking sausages—he hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful stom¬ ach of the judicious epicure—and for such a tomb might be con¬ tent to die. He is the best of sapors. Pine-apple is great. She is indeed almost too transcendant—a delight, if not sinful, yet so like to sinning that really a tender-conscienced person would do well to pause—too ravishing for mortal taste, she woundeth and ex- coriateth thß lips that approach her—like lovers' kissesi she biteth —she is a pleasure bordering on pain from the fierceness and in¬ sanity of her relish—but she stoppeth at the palate—she med- A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG. 161 dleth not with the appetite—and the coarsest hunger might barter her consistently for a mutton chop. Pig—let me speak his praise—is no less provocative of the appçtite, th&n he is satisfactory to the criticalness of the ctmsorioua palate. The strong man may batten on him, and the weakling refuseth not his mild juices. ynlike fo mankind's mixed characters, a bundle of virtues and vices, inexplicably intertwisted, and not to be unravelled without hazard, he is good throughout. No part of him is better or worse than another. He helpeth, as far as his little means ex¬ tend, all around. • He is the least envious of banquets. He is all neighbors' fare. I am one of those, who freely and ungrudgingly impart a share of the good things of this life which fall to their lot (few as mine are in this kind) to a friend. I protest I take as great an interest in my friend's pleasures, his relishes, and proper satisfactions, as in mine own. " Presents," I often say, " endear Absents." Hares, pheasants, partridges, snipes, barn-door chickens (those " tame villatic fowl "), capons, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I dispense as freely as I receive them. I love to taste them, as it were, upon the tongue of my friend. But a stop must be put somewhere. One would not, like Lear, " give everything." I make my stand upon pig. Methinks it is an ingratitude to the Giver of all good flavors, to extra-domiciliate, or send out of the house, slightingly (under pretext of friendship, or I know not what), a blessing so particularly adapted, predestined, I may say, to my individual palate—It argues an insensibility. I remember a touch of conscience in this kind at school. My good old aunt, who never parted from me at the end of a holiday without stuffing a sweetmeat, or some nice thing, into my pocket, bad dismissed me one evening with a âmoking plum-cake, fresh from the oven. In my way to school (it was over London bridge) a grey-headed old beggar saluted me (I have no doubt, at this time of day, that he was a counterfeit). I had no pence to con¬ sole him with, and in the vanity of self-denial, and the very cox¬ combry of charity, schoolboy-like, I made him a present of—the whole cake ! I walked on a little, buoyed up, as one is on such PAKT I. X2 162 ELIA occasions, with a sweet soothing of self-satisfaction ; but before I had got to the end of the bridge, my better feelings returned, and I burst into tears, thinking how ungrateful I had been to my good aunt, to go and give her good gift away to a stranger that I had never seen before, and who might be a bad man for aught I knew : and then I thought of the pleasure my aunt would be taking in thinking that I—I myself, and not another—would eat her nice cake—and what should I say to her the next time I saw her—how naughty I was to part with her pretty present !—and the odor of that spicy cake came back upon my recollection, and the pleasure and the curiosity I had taken in seeing her make it, and her joy when she sent it to the oven, and how disappointed she would feel that I had never had a bit of it in my mouth at last—and I blamed my impertinent spirit of alms-giving, and out-oftplace hypocrisy of goodness ; and above all I wished never to see the face again of that insidious, good-for-nothing, old grey impostor. Our ancestors were nice in their metliod of sacrificing those ' tender victims. We read of pigs whipt to death with something of a shock, as we hear of any obsolete custom. The age of dis¬ cipline is gone by, or it would be curious to inquire (in a philo¬ sophical light merely) what effect this process might have towards intenerating and dulcifying a substance, naturally so mild and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs. It looks like refining a violet. Yet we should be cautious, while we condenm the inhumanity, how we censure the wisdom of the practice. It might impart a gusto.— I remember an hypothesis, argued upon by the young students, when I was at St. Omer's, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides, " Whether, supposing that the fla¬ vor of a pig who obtained his death by whipping ( per flagella- timem extremam) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using that method of putting the ani¬ mal to death V I forget the decision. His sauce should be considered. Decidedly, a few bread crumbs, done up with his liver and brains, and a dash of mild A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG. 163 sage. But banish, dear Mrs. Cook, I beseech you, the'whole onion tribe. Barbecue your whole hogs to your palate, steep them in shalots, stuff them out with plantations of the rank and guilty garlic ; you cannot poison them, or make them stronger than they are—but consider, he is a weakling—a flower. 164 ELIA. A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT OF THE BEHAVIOR OF MARRIED PEOPLE, As a single man, I have spent a good deal of my time in noting down the infirmities of Married People, to console myself for those superior pleasures, which they tell me I have lost by re¬ maining as I am. I cannot say that the quarrels of men and their wives ever made any great impression upon me, or had much tendency to strengthen me in those anti-social resolutions, which I took up long ago upon more substantial considerations. What oftenest offends me at the houses of married persons where I visit, is an, error of quite a different description ; it is that they are too loving. Not too loving neither : that does not explain my meaning. Besides, why should that offend me ? The very act of separating themselves from the rest of the world, to have the fuller enjoy¬ ment of each other's society, implies that they prefer one another to all the world. But what I complain of is, that they carry this preference so undisguisedly, they perk it up in the faces of us single people so shamelessly, you cannot be in their company a moment without being made to feel, by some indirect hint or open avowal, that you are not the object of this preference. Now there are some things which give no offence, while implied or taken for granted merely ; but expressed, there is much offence in them. If a man \»ere to accost the first homely-featured or plain-dressed young woman of A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT. 165 his acquaintance, and tell her bluntly, that she was not handsome or rich enough for him, and he could not marry her, he would deserve to be kicked for his ill manners ; yet no less is implied in the fact, that having access and opportunity of putting the question to her, he has never yet thought fit to do it. The young woman understands this as clearly as if it were put into words ; but no reasonable young woman would think of making this the ground of a quarrel. Just as little right have a married couple to tell me by speeches, and looks that are scarce less plain than speeches, that I am not the happy man—^the lady's choice. It is enough that I know that I am not : I do not want this perpetual reminding. The display of superior knowledge or riches may be made suf¬ ficiently mortifying ; but these admit of a ^luativer The know¬ ledge which is brought out to insult me, may accidentally improve me ; and in the rich man's houses and pictures, his parks and gardens, I have a temporary usufruct at least. But the display of married happiness has none of these palliatives ; it is through¬ out pure, unrecompensed, unqualified insult. Marriage by its best title is a monopoly, and not of the least invidious sort. It is the cunning of most possessors of any exclu¬ sive privilege to keep their advantage as much out of sight as possible, that their less favored neighbors, seeing little of the bene¬ fit, may be less disposed to question the right. i But these mar¬ ried monopolists thrust the most obnoxious part of their, patent into our faces.'' Nothing is to me more distasteful than that entire complacency and satisfaction which beam in the countenances of a new-mar¬ ried couple—in that of the lady particularly ; it tells you, that her lot is disposed of in this world : that you can have no hopes of her. It is true, I have none ; nor wishes either, perhaps ; but this is one of those truths which ought, as I said before, to be taken for granted, not expressed. The excessive airs which those people give themselves, founded on the ignorance of us unmarried people, would be more offen¬ sive if they were less irrational. We will allow them ta imder- stan^the mysteries belonging to their own craft better than we, who have not had the happiness to be made free of the company : 166 ELIA. but their arrogance is not content withia these limits. If a single person presume to offer his opinion in their presence, though upon the most indifferent subject, he is immediately silenced as an in. competent person. Nay, a young married lady of my acquaint¬ ance, who, the best of the jest was, had not changed her condi- tion above a fortnight before, in a question on which I had the misfortune to differ from her, respecting the properest mode of breeding oysters for the London market, had the assurance to ask with a sneer, how such an old Bachelor as I could pretend to know anything about such matters ! But what I have spoken of hitherto is nothing to the airs which these creatures give themselves when they come, as'they gene¬ rally do, to have children. When I consider how little of a rarity children are—that every street and blind alley swarms with them—that the poorest people commonly have them in most abun¬ dance—that there are few marriages that are not blest with at least one of these bargains—how often they turn out ill, and de- ^feat the fond hope of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty, disgrace, the gallows, &c., I cannot for my life tell what cause for pride there can possibly be in having them. If they were young phoenixes, indeed, that were born but one in a year, there might be a pretext. But when they are so common I do not advert to the insolent merit which they assume with their husbands on these occasions. Let them look to that. But why we, who are not their natural-born subjects, should be ex¬ pected to bring our spices, myrrh, and incense—our tribute and homage of admiration—I do not see. " Like as the arrows in the hand of the giant, even so are the young children so says the excellent office in our Prayer-book appointed for the churching of women. " Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them So say I ; but then don't let him discharge his quiver upon us that are weaponless ; let "hem be arrows, but not to gall and stick us. I have generally observed that these arrows are double-headed : they have two forks, to be sure to hit with one or the other. As for instance, where you come into a house which is full of children, if you happen to take no notice of them (you are thinking of something else, per. a'bACHELOR'S complaint. ,167 haps, and turn a deaf ear to their innocent caresses), you are set dówn as untractable, morose, a hater of children. On the other hand, if you find them more than usually engaging-^if you are taken with their pretty manners, and set about in earnest to romp and play with them, some pretext or other is sure to be found for sending them out of the room ; they are too noisy or boisterous, or Mr. does not like children. With one or other of these forks the arrow is sure to hit you. I could forgive their jealousy, and dispense with toying with their brats, if it gives them any pain ; but I think it unreasonable to be called upon to love them, where I see no occasion—^to^love a whole^family, perhaps eight, nine, or ten indiscriminately—^to love all the pretty dears, because children are so engaging !. I know there is a proverb, " Love me, love my dog that is not always so very practicable, particularly if the dog be set upon you to tease you or snap at you in sport. But a dog, or a lesser thing—any inanimate substance, as a keepsake, a watch or a ring, a tree, or the place where we last parted when my friend went away upon a long absence, I can make shift to love, because I love him, and anything that reminds me of him, provided it be in ■its nature indifferent, and apt to receive whatever hue fancy can give it. But children have a real character, and an essential be¬ ing of themselves : they are amiable or unamiable per se ; I must bve or hate them, as I see cause for either in their quali¬ ties. A child's nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded as a mere appendage to another being, and to be loved or hated accordingly : they stand with me upon their own stock, as much as men and women do. Oh ! but you will say, sure it is an attractive age—^there is something in the tender years of infancy that of itself charms us ? That is the very reason why I am more nice about them. I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature, not even excepting the delicate crea¬ tures which bear them ; but the prettier the kind of a thing is, the more desirable it is that it should be pretty of its kind. One daisy differs not much from another in glory ; but a violet should • look and smell the daintiest. I was always rather squeamish in my women and children. But this is not the worst : one must be admitted into their fami- 168 ELIA. liarity at least, before they can complain of inattention. It implies visits, and some kind of intercourse. But if the husband he a man with whom you have lived on a friendly footing before marriage —if you did not come in on the wife's side—if you did not sneak into the house in her train, hut were an old friend in fast habits of intimacy before their courtship was so much as thought on,— look about you—^your tenure is precarious—before a twelvemonth j shall roll over your head, you shall find your old friend gradually I grow cool and altered towards you, and at last seek opportunities of breaking with you. I have scarce a married friend of my ac¬ quaintance, upon whose firm faith I can rely, whose friendship did not commence after the -period of his marriage. With some limitations, they can endure that j but that the good man should have dared to enter inta a solemn league of friendship in which they were not consulted, though it happened before they knew him,—before they that are now man and wife ever met,—^this is intolerable to them. Ever}' long friendship, every old authentic intimacy, must be brought into their office to be new stamped with their currency, as a sovereign prince calls in the good old money that was coined in some reign before he was bom or thought of, to be new marked and minted with the stamp of his authority, before he will let it peiss current in the world. You may guess what luck generally befalls such a rusty piece of metal as I am in these new mintings. Innumerable are the ways which they take to insult and worm you out of their husbands' confidence. Laughing at all you say with a kind of wonder, as if you were a queer kind of fellow that said good things, hut an oddity, is one of the ways ;—^they have a particular kind of .stare for the purpose ;—till at last the husband, who used to defer to your judgment, and would pass over some excrescences of understanding and manner for the sake of a gene¬ ral vein of observation (not quite vulgar) which he perceived in you, begins to suspect whether you are not altogether a humorist, —a fellow well enough to have consorted with in his bachelor days, but not quite so proper to be introduced to ladies. This may be called the staring way ; and is that which has oñenest * been put m practice against me. Then there is the exaggerating way, or the way of irony •, that A BACHELOR'S COMPLAINT. 169 is, where they find you an object of especial regard with their husband, who is not so easily to be shaken from the lasting attach¬ ment founded on esteem which he has conceived towards you, by never qualified exaggerations to cry up all that you say or do, till the good man, who understands well enough that it is all done in compliment to him, grows weary of the debt of gratitude which is due to so much candor, and by relaxing a little on his part, and taking down a peg or two in his enthusiasm, sinks at length to the kindly level of moderate esteem—that " decent affection and com¬ placent kindness " towards you, where she herself tan join in sympathy with him without much stress and violence to her sincerity. Another way (for the ways they have to accomplish so desira¬ ble a purpose are infinite) is, with a kind of innocent simplicity, continually to mistake what it was which first made their husband fond of you. If an esteem for something excellent in your moral character was that which riveted the chain which she is to break, upon any imaginary discovery of a want of poignancy in your conversation, she will cry, " I thought, my dear, you described your friend, Mr. , as a great wit ?" If, on the other hand, it was for some supposed charm in your conversation that he first grew to like you, and was content for this to overlook some trifling irregularities in your moral deportment, upon the first notice of any of these she as readily exclaims, " This, my dear, is your good Mr. !" One good lady whom I took the liberty of ex¬ postulating with for not showing me quite so much respect as I thought due to her husband's old friend, had the candor to confess to me that she had often heard Mr. speak of me before mar¬ riage, and that she had conceived a great desire to be acquainted with me, but that the sight of me had very much disappointed her expectations ; for from her husband's representations of me, she had formed a notion that she was to see a fine, tall officer-like- looking man (I use her very words), the very reverse of which/ proved to be the truth. This was candid ; and I bad the civility not to ask her in return, how she came to pitch upon a standard of personal accomplishments for her husband's friends which dif¬ fered so much from his own ; for my friend's dimensions as near as possible approximate to mine ; he standing five feet five in his 170 El.I A. shoes, in which I have the advantage of him by about half an inch ; and he no more than myself exhibiting any indications of a martial character in his air or countenance. These are some of the mortifications which I have encountered in the absurd attempt to visit at their houses. To enumerate them all would be a vain endeavor; I shall therefore just glance at the very common impropriety of which married ladies are guilty,— of treating us as if we were their husbands, and vice versâ. ' I mean, when they use us with familiarity, and their husbands with ceremony. Testacea, for instance, kept me. the other night two or three hours beyond my usual time of supping, while she was fretting because Mr. did not come home, till the oysters were all spoiled, rather than she would be guilty of the impolite¬ ness of touching one in his absence. This was reversing the point of good manners ; for ceremony is an invention to take off the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the object of love and esteem with a fellow-creature than some other person is. It endeavors to make up, by superior at¬ tentions in little points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater. Had Testacea kept the oysters back for me, and withstood her husband's importunities to go to supper, she would have acted according to the strict rules of pro¬ priety. I know no ceremony that ladies are bound to observe to their husbands, beyond the point of a modest behavior and deco¬ rum : therefore I must protest against the vicarious gluttony of Cerasia, who at her own table sent away a dish of Morellas, which ). was applying to with great good-will, to her husband at the other end of the table, and recommended a plate of less extraordi¬ nary gooseberries to ;ny un wedded palate in their stead. Neither can I excuse the wanton affront of But I am weary of stringing up all my married acquaintance by Roman denominations. Let them amend and change their manners, or I promise to record the full-length English of their names, to the terror of all such desperate offenders in future. ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 171 ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTOES. The casual sight of an old Play Bill, which I picked up the other day—know not by what chance it was preserved so long— tempts me to call to mind a few of the Flayers, who make the principal figure in it. It presents the cast of parts of the Twelfth Night, at the old Drury-lane Theatre two-and-thirty years ago. There is something very touching in these old remembrances. They make us think how we once used to read a Play Bill—^not, as now peradventure, singling out a favorite performer, and cast¬ ing a negligent eye over the rest ; but spelling out every name, down to the very mutes and servants of the scene ;—when it was a matter of no small moment to us whether Whitfield, or Packer, took the part of Fabian ; when Benson, and Burton, and Philli- more—^names of small account—had an importance, beyond what we can be content to attribute now to the time's best actors.— " Orsino, by Mr. Barrymore."—What a full Shakspearian sound it carries ! how fresh to memory arise the image, and the manner, of the gentle actor ! Those who have only seen Mrs. Jordan within the last ten or fifteen years, can have no adequate notion of her performance of such parts as Ophelia ; Helena, in All's Well that Ends Well ; and Viola in this play. Her voice had latterly acquired a coarse¬ ness, which suited well enough with her Nells and Hoydens, but in those days it sank, with her steady melting eye, into the heart. Her joyous parts—in which her memory now chiefly lives—in her youth were outdone by her plaintive ones. There is no giv¬ ing an account how she delivered the disguised story of her love for Orsino. It was no set speech, that she had foreseen, so as to jveave it into an harmonious period, line necessarily following 172 ELIA. line, to make up the music—^yet I have heard it so spoken, or rather read, not without its grace and beauty—but, when she had declared her sister's history to be a " blank," and that she " never told her love," there was a pause, as if the story had ended—and then the image of the " worm in the bud," came up as a new suggestion—and the heightened image of " Patience" still followed after that, as by some growing (and not mechanical) process, thought springs up aftear thought, I would almost say, as they were watered by her tears. So in those fine lines— Write loyal cantos of contemned love— Halloo your name to the reverberate hills— there was no preparation made in the foregoing image for that which was to follow. She used no rhetoric in her passion ; or it was nature's own rhetoric, most legitimate then, when it seemed altogether without rule or law. Mrs. Powel (now Mrs. Renard), then in the pride of her beauty, made an admirable Olivia. She was particularly excellent in her unbending scenes in conversation with the Clown. I have seen some Olivias—and those very sensible actresses too—who in these interlocutions have seemed to set their wits at the jester, and to vie conceits with him in downright emulation. But she used him for her sport, like what he was, to trifie a leisure sentence or two with, and then to be dismissed, and she to be the Great Lady still. She touched the imperious fantastic humor of the charac¬ ter with nicety. Her fine spacious person filled the scene. .The part of Malvolio has, in my judgment, been so often mis¬ understood, and the general merits of the actor, who then played it, so unduly appreciated, that I shall hope for pardon, if I am a little prolix upon these points. Of all the actors who flourished in my time—a melancholy phrase if taken aright, reader—Bensley had most of the swell of soul, was greatest in the delivery of heroic conceptions, the emo¬ tions consequent upon the presentment of a great idea to the fancy. He had the true poetical enthusiasm—the rarest faculty among players. None that I remember possessed even a portion of that fine madness which he threw out in Hotspur's famous rant about glory, or the transports of the Venetian incendiary at-the ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 173 vision of the fired city. His voice had the dissonance, and at times the inspiriting effect, of the trumpet. His gait was uncouth and stiff, but no way embarrassed by affectation ; and the through-bred gentleman was uppermost in every movement. He seized the moment of passion with greatest truth ; like a faithful cloek, never striking before the time ; never anticipating or leading you to anticipate. He was totally destitute of trick and artifice. He seemed come upon the stage to do the poll's message simply, and he did it with as genuine fidelity as the nuncios in Homer deliver the errands of the gods. He let the passion or the sentiment do its own work without prop or bolstering. He would have scorned to mountebank it ; and betrayed none of that cleverness which is the bane of serious acting. For this reason, his lago was the only endurable one I remember to have seen. No spectator from his action could divine more of his artifice than Othello was supposed to do. His confessions in soliloquy alone put you in possession of the mystery. There were no by-intimations to make the audience fancy their own discernment so much greater than that of the Moor—who commonly stands like a great helpless mark set up for mine Ancient, and a quantity of barren specta¬ tors, to shoot their bolts at. The lago of Bensley did not go to work so grossly. There was a triumphant tone about the char¬ acter, natural to a general consciousness of power ; but none of that petty vanity which chuckles and cannot contain itself upon any little successful stroke of its knavery—as'is common with your small villains, and green probationers in mischief. It did not clap or crow before its time. It was not a man setting his wits at a child, and winking all the while at other children who are mightily pleased at being let into the secret ; but a consum¬ mate villain entrapping a noble nature into toils, against which no discernment was available, where the manner was as fathom¬ less as the purpose seemed dark, and without motive. The part of Malvolio, in the Twelfth Night, was performed by Bensley, with a richness and a dignity, of which (to judge from some re¬ cent castings of that character) the very tradition must be worn out from the stage. No manager in those days would have dreamed of giving it to Mr. Baddeley, or Mr. Parsons : when Bensley was occasionally absent from the theatre, John Kemble 174 ELIA. thought it no derogation to succeed to the part. Malvolio is not essentially ludicrous. He becomes comic but by accident. He is cold, austere, repelling ; but dignified, consistent, and, for what appears, rather of an over-stretched morality. Maria describes him as a sort of Puritan ; and he might have worn his gold chain with honor in one of our old round-head families, in the service of a Lambert, or a Lady Fairfax. But his morality and his manners are misplaced in Illyria. He is opposed to the propei; levities of the piece, and falls in the unequal contest. Still his pride, or his gravity (call it which you will), is inherent, and native to the man, not mock or affected, which latter only are the fit objects to excite laughter. His quality is at the best unlovely, but neither buffoon nor contemptible. His bearing is lofty, a lit¬ tle above his station, but probably not much above his deserts. We see no reason why he should not have been brave, honorable, accomplished. His careless committal of the ring to the ground (which he was commissioned to restore to Cesario), bespeaks a generosity of birth and feeling. His dialect on all occasions is that of a gentleman, and a man of education. We must not confound him with the eternal old low steward of comedy. He is master of the household to a great princess ; a dignity probably conferred upon him for other respects than age or length of service. Olivia, at the first indication of his supposed madness, declares that she " would not have him miscarry for half of her dowry." Does this look as if the character was meant to appear little or insigni¬ ficant ! Once, indeed, she accuses him to his face—of what ?— of being " sick of self-love,"—^but with a gentleness and consider, ateness which could not have been, if she had not thought that - this particular infirmity shaded some virtues. His rebuke to the knight, and his sottish revellers, is sensible and spirited ; and when we take into consideration the unprotected condition of his mistress, and the strict regard with which her state of real or dis¬ sembled mourning would draw the eyes of the world upon her house-affairs, Malvolio might feel the honor of the family in some sort in his keeping ; as it appears not that Olivia had any more brothers, or kinsmen, to look to it—for Sir Toby had dropped all such nice respects at the buttery-hatch. That Malvolio Was meant to be represented as possessing e.stimable qualities, the ex- ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 175 pression of the Duke, in his anxiety to have him reconciled, almost infers : " Pursue him, and entreat him to a peace." Even in his abused state of cliains and darkness, a sort of greatness seems never to desert him. He argues highly and well with the supposed Sir Topas, and philosophizes gallantly upon his straw.* There must have been some shadow of worth about the man ; he must have been something more than a mere vapor—a thing of straw, or Jack in office—before Fabian and Maria could have ventured sending him upon a courting-errand to Olivia. There was some consonancy (as he would say) in the undertaking, or the jest would have been too bold even for that house of misrule. Bensley, accordingly, threw over the part an air of Spanish loftiness. He looked, spake, and moved like an old Castillan. He was starch, spruce, opinionated, but his superstructure of pride seemed bottomed upon a sense of worth. There was something in it beyond the coxcomb. It was big and swelling, but you could not be sure that it was hollow. You might wish to see it taken down, but you felt that it was upon an elevation. He was mag¬ nificent from the outset ; but when the decent sobrieties of the character began to give way, and the poison of self-love, in his conceit of the Countess's affection, gradually to work, you would have thought that the hero of La Mancha in person stood before you. How he went smiling to himself ! with what ineffable care¬ lessness would he twirl his gold chain ! what a dream it was ! you were infected with the illusion, and did not wish that it should he removed ! you had no room for laughter ! if an unseasonable reflection of morality intruded itself, it was a deep sense of the pitiable infirmity of man's nature, that can lay him open to such frenzies—but in truth you rather admired than pitied the lunacy while it lasted. You felt that an hour of such mistake was worth an age with the eyes open. Who would, not wish to live but for a day in the conceit of such a lady's love as t)livia ? Why, the Duke would have given his principality but for a quarter of a minute, sleeping or waking, to have been so deluded. The man * Clown. Wfiat is tlie opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl? Mai. That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird. Clown. What thinkest thou of his opinion ? Mai. I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve of his opinion. 176 ELIA. seemed to tread upon air, to taste manna, to walk with his head in the clouds, to mate Hyperion. O ! shake not the castles of his pride—endure yet for a season, bright moments of confidence— " stand still, ye watches of the element," that Malvolio may be still in fancy fair Olivia's lord !—but fate and retribution say no —I hear the mischievous titter of Maria—the witty taunts of Sir Toby—the still more insupportable triumph of the foolish knight —the counterfeit Sir Topas is unmasked and " thus the whirli¬ gig of time," as the true clown hath it, " brings in his revenges." I confess that I never saw the catastrophe of this character, while Bensley played it, without a kind of tragic intere.st. There was good foolery too. Few now remember Dodd. What an Ague- cheek the stage lost in him I Lovegrove, who came nearest to the old actors, revived the character some few seasons ago, and made it sufficiently grotesque ; but Dodd was il, as it came out of nature's hands. It might be said to remain in puris naturalibus. In expressing slowness of apprehension, this actor sui-passed all others. You could see the first dawn of an idea stealing slowly over his countenance, climbing up by little and little, with a pain¬ ful process, till it cleared up at last to the fullness of a twilight conception—its highest meridian. He seemed to keep back his intellect, as some have had the power to retard their pulsation. The balloon takes less time in filling, than it took to cover the expansion of his broad moony face over all its quarters with ex¬ pression. A glimmer of understanding would appear in a cor¬ ner of his eye, and for lack of fuel go out again. A part of his forehead would catch a little intelligence, and be a long time in communicating it to the remainder. I am ill at dates, but I think it is now better than five-and- twenty years ago, that walking in the gardens of Gray's Inn— they were then far finer than they are now—the accursed Veru- 1am Buildings had not encroached on all the east side of them, cutting out delicate green crankles, and shouldering away one of two of the stately alcoves of the terrace—the survivor stands gap¬ ing and relationless as if it remembered its brother—they are still the best gardens of any of the Inns of Court, my beloved Tem¬ ple not forgotten—have the gravest character, their aspect being altogether reverent and lawbreathing—Bacon has left the impress ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 177 of his foot upon their gravel walks—taking my afternoon solace on a summer day upon the aforesaid terrace, a comely sad per- sonage came toward me, whom, from his grave air and deportment, I judged to be one of the old Benchers of the Inn. He had a se¬ rious thoughtful forehead, and seemed to be in meditations of mor¬ tality. As I have an instinctive awe of old Benchers, I was pass¬ ing him with that sort of subindicative token of respect which one is apt to demonstrate towards a venerable stranger, and which rather denotes an inclination to greet him, than any positive mo¬ tion of the body to that effect—a species of humility and will- worship which I observe, nine times out of ten, rather puzzles than pleases the person it is offered to—when the face turning full upon me, strangely identified itself with that of Dodd. Upon close inspection I was not mistaken. But could this sad thought¬ ful countenance be the same vacant face of folly which I had hailed so often under circumstances of gaiety ; which I had never seen without a smile, or recognized but as the usher of mirth ; that looked out so formally flat in Foppington, so frothily pert in Tattle, so impotently busy in Backbite j so blankly divested of all meaning, or resolutely expressive of none, in Acres, in Fribble, and a thousand agreeable impertinences ? Was this the face— full of thought and carefulness—that had so often divested itself at will of every trace of either to give me diversion, to clear my cloudy face for two or three hours at least of its furrows ? Was this- the face—manly, sober, intelligent—which I had so often despised, made mocks at, made merry with ? The remembrance of the freedoms which I had taken with it came upon me with a reproach of insult. I could have asked it pardon. I thought it looked upon me with a sense of injury. There is something strange as well as sad in seeing actors—your pleasant fellows par¬ ticularly—subjected to and suffering the common lot ;—their for¬ tunes, their casualties, their deaths, seem to belong to the scene, their actions to be amenable to poetic justice only. We can hardly connect them with more awful responsibilities. The death of this fine actor took place shortly after this meeting. He had quitted the stage some months ; and, as I learned afterwards, had been in the habit of resorting daily to these gardens almost to the day of his decease. In these serious walks probably he was di- PAKT I. 13 .78 ELIA. vesting himself of many scenic and some real vanities—weaning himself from the frivolities of the lesser and the greater theatre— doing gentle penance for a life of no very reprehensible fooleries —taking off by degrees the buffoon mask which he might feel he had worn too long—and rehearsing for a more solemn cast of part. Dying, he " put on the weeds of Dominic."* If few can remember Dodd, many yet living will not easily forget the pleasant creature, who in those days enacted the part of the Clown to Dodd's Sir Andrew. Richard, or rather Dicky Suett—for so in his life-time he delighted to be called, and time hath ratified the appellation—^lieth buried on the north side of the cemetery of Holy Paul, to whose service his nonage and tender years were dedicated. There are who do yet remember him at that period—his pipe clear and harmonious. He would often speak of his chorister days, when he was " cherub Dicky." What clipped his wings, or made it expedient that he should exchange the holy for the profane state ; whether he had lost his good voice (his best recommendation to that office), like Sir John, " with hallooing and singing of anthems ;" or whether he was adjudged to lack something, even in those early years, of the gravity indispensable to an occupation which professeth to " com¬ merce with the skies "—I could never rightly learn ; but we find him, after the probation of a twelvemonth or so, reverting to a secular condition, and become one of us. I think he was not altogether of that timber out of which cathe- dral seats and sounding-boards are hewed. But if a glad heart —kind, and therefore glad—be any part of sanctity, then might the robe of Motley, with which he invested himself with so much humility after his deprivation, and which he wore so long with so * Dodd was a man of reading, and had left at his death a choice collection of old English literature. I should judge him to have been a man of wit. I knew one instance of an impromptu which no length of study could have bettered. My merry friend, Jem White, had seen him one evening in Aguecheek, and recognizing Dodd the next day in Fleet, street, was irre¬ sistibly impelled to take off his hat and salute him as the identical Knight of the preceding evening with a " Save you, Sir Andrew." Dodd, not at all disconcerted at this unusual address from a stranger, with a courteous half-rebuking waive of th^ hand, put him off with an " Away, Fool " ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 179 much blameless satisfaction to himself and to the public, be ac¬ cepted for a surplice—his white stole, and alhe. The first fruits of his secularization was an engagement upon the boards of Old Drury, at which theatre he commenced, as I have been told, with adopting the name of Parsons in old men's characters. At the period in which most, of us knew him, he was no more an imitator than he was in any true sense himself imita¬ ble. He was the Robin Goodfellow of the stage. He came in to trouble all things with a welcome perplexity, himself no whit troubled for the matter. He was known, like Puck, by his note —Ha ! Ha ! Ha !—sometimes deepening to Ho ! Ho ! Ho ! with an irresistible accession, derived, perhaps, remotely from his ecclesiastical education, foreign to his prototype of,—O La! Thousands of hearts yet respond to the chuckling O La ! of Dicky Suett, brought back to their remembrance by the faithful transcript of his friend Mathews' mimicry. The " force of nature could no further go." He drolled upon the stock of these two syllables richer than the cuckoo. Care, that troubled all the world, was forgotten in his compo¬ sition. Had he had but two grains (nay, half a grain-) of it, he could never have supported himself upon those two spider's strings, which served him (in the latter part of his unmixed ex¬ istence) as legs. A doubt or scruple must have made him totter, a sigh have puffed him down ; the weight of a frown had stag¬ gered him, a wrinkle made him lose his balance. But on he went, scrambling upon those airy stilts of his, with Robin Good- fellow, " thorough brake, thorough briar," reckless of a scratched face or a torn doublet. Shakspeare foresaw him, when he framed his fools and jesters. They have all the true Suett stamp, a loose and shambling gait, a slippery tongue, this last the ready midwife to a without-pain- delivered jest ; in words, light as air, venting truths deep as the centre ; with idlest rhymes tagging conceit when busiest, singing with Lear in the tempest, or Sir Toby at the buttery hatch. Jack Bannister and he had the fortune to be more of personal i&vorites with the town than any actors before or after. The dif¬ ference, I take it, was this :—Jack was more helmed for his sweet, 180 ELIA. good-natured, moral pretensions. Dicky was more liked for his sweet, good-natured, no pretensions at all. Your whole con¬ science stirred with Bannister's performance of Walter in the Children in the Wood—but Dicky seemed like a thing, as Shak- speare says of Love, too young to know what conscience is. He put us into Vesta's days. Evil fled before him—not as from Jack, as from an antagonist,—but because it could not touch him, any more than a cannon-ball a fly. He was delivered from the burthen of that death ; and, when Death came himself, not in metaphor, to fetch Dicky, it is recorded of him by Robert Palmer, who kindly watched his exit, that he received the last stroke, neither varying his accustomed tranquillity, nor tune, with the simple exclamation, worthy to have been recorded in his epitaph —O La ! O La ! Bobby ! The elder Palmer (of stage-treading celebrity) commonly played Sir Toby in those days ; but there is a solidity of wit in the jests of that half-Falstaff which he did not quite fill out. - He was as much too showy as Moody (who sometimes took the part) was dry and sottish. In sock or buskin there was an air of swaggering gentility about Jack Palmer. He was a gentleman with a slight infusion of the footman. His brother Bob (of recenter memory), who was his shadow in everything while he lived, and dwindled into less than a shadow afterwards—was a gentleman with a little stronger infusion of the latter ingredient ; that was all. It is amazing how a little of the more or less makes a difference in these tilings. When you saw Bobby in the Duke's Servant,* you said, " What a pity such a pretty fellow was only a servant !" When you saw Jack figuring in Captain Absolute, you thought you could trace his pi-omotion to some lady of quality who fan¬ cied the handsome fellow in his topknot, and had bought him a commission. Therefore Jack in Dick Amlet was insuperable. Jack had two voices, both plausible, hypocritical, and insinuat¬ ing ; but his secondary or supplemental voice still more decisively histrionic than his common one. It was reserved for the specta¬ tor ; and the dramatis personse were supposed to know nothing at all about it. The lus of young Wilding, and Jhe sentiments in * High I ife Below Stairs ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS. 181 Joseph Surface, were thus marked out in a sort of italics to the audience. This secret correspondence with the company before the curtain (which is the bane and death of tragedy) has an ex¬ tremely happy effect in some kinds of comedy, in the more highly artiñcial comedy of Congreve or of Sheridan especially, where the absolute sense of reality (so indispensable to scenes of interest) is not required, or would rather interfere to diminish your pleasure. The fact is, you do not believe in such characters as Surface— the villain of artificial comedy—even while you read or see them. If you did, they would shock and not divert you. When Ben, in Love for Love, returns from sea, the following exquisite dialogue occurs at his first meeting with his father :— Sir Sampson. Thou hast been many a weary league, Ben, since I saw thee. Ben. Ey, ey, been ! Been far enougb, and that be all.—Well, father, and how do all at home .' how does brother Dick, and brother Vail ? Sir Sampson. Dick ! body o' me, Dick has been dead these two years. I writ you word when you were at Leghorn. Ben. Mess, that's true ; Marry, 1 had forgot. Dick's dead, as you say —Well, and how ?—I have a many questions to ask you— Here is an instance of insensibility which in real life would be revolting, or rather in real life could not have co-existed with the warm-hearted temperament of the character. But when you read it in the spirit with which such playful selections and specious com¬ binations rather than strict metaphrases of nature should be taken, or when you saw Bannister play it, it neither did, nor does, wound the moral sense at all. For what is Ben—the pleasant sailor which Bannister gives us—but a piece of satire—a creation of Congreve's fancy—a dreamy combination of all the accidents of a sailor's character—his contempt of money—his credulity to women—with that necessary estrangement from home which is just within the verge of credibility to suppose might produce such aíThallucination as is here deseribed. We never think the worse of Ben for it, or feel it as a stain upon his cnaracter. But wheñ an actor comes, and instead of the delightful phantom—the crea¬ ture dear to half-belief—which Bannister exhibited—displays be¬ fore our eyes a downright concretion of a Wapping sailor—a jolly warm-hearted Jack Tar—and nothing else—when instead l82 ELIA. of investing it with a delicious confusedness of the head, and a veering undirected goodness of purpose—he gives to it a down- right daylight understanding, and a full consciousness of its ac¬ tions ; thrusting forward the sensibilities of the character with a pretence as if it stood upon nothing else, and was to be judged by them alone—we feel the discord of the thing ; the scene is dis¬ turbed ; a real man has got in among the dramatis personas, and puts them out. We want the sailor turned out. We feel that his true place is not behind the curtain, but in the first or second gallery. THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY. 183 ON THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY. The artificial Comedy, or Comedy of manners, is quite extinct on our stage. Congreve and Farquhar show their heads once in seven years only, to be exploded and put down instantly. The times cannot bear them. Is it for a few wild speeches, an occa¬ sional licence of dialogue ? I think not altogether. The business of their dramatic characters will not stand the moral test. We screw everything up to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an evenjng, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications of profiigacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent or guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left. We see a stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours' duration, and of no after con¬ sequence, with the severe eyes which inspect real vices with their bearings upon two worlds. We are spectators to a plot or intrigue (not reducible in life to the point of strict morality), and take it all for truth. We substitute a real for a dramatic person, and/ judge him accordingly. We try him in our courts, from which there is no appeal to the dramatis personcB, his peers. We have been spoiled with—not sentimental comedy—but a tyrant far more pernicious to our pleasures which has succeeded to it, the exclu¬ sive and all-devouring drama of common life : where the moral point is everything ; where, instead of the fictitious half-believed personages of the stage (the phantoms of old comedy), we recog¬ nize ourselves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk, allies, patrons, enemies,—the same as in life,—with an interest in what is going on so hearty and substantial, that we cannot afford our moral judgment, in its deepest and most vital results, to compromise or slumber for a moment. What is there transacting, by no modifi- 184 ELIA. cation is made to affect us in any other manner than the same events or characters would do in our relationships-of life. We carry our fire-side concerns to the theatre with us. We do not go thither, like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to confirm our experience of it ; to make assurance double, and take a bond of fate. We must live our toilsome lives twice over, as it was the mournful privilege of Ulysses to descend twice to the shades. All that neutral ground of character, which stood between vice and virtue ; or which in fact was indifferent to neither, where neither properly was called in question ; that happy breathing-place from the burden of a perpetual moral ques¬ tioning—the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry—^is broken up and disfranchised, as injurious to the interests of society. The privileges of the place are taken away by law. We dare not dally with images, or names, of wrong. We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread infection from the scenic representation of disorder, and fear a painted pustule. In our anxiety that our morality should not take cold, we wrap it up in a great blanket surtout of precaution against the breeze and sun¬ shine. I confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer for) I am glad for a season to»take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience,—not to live always in the precincts of the law-courts,—but now and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no meddling restrictions—to get into recesses, whither the hunter cannot follow me— Secret shades Of woody Ida's inmost grove. While yet there was no fear of Jove. I come back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy for it. I wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of an imaginary freedom. I do not know how it is with others, but I feel the better always for the perusal of one of Congreve's—nay, why should I not add even of Wycherley's— comedies. I am the gayer at least for it ; and I could never connect those sports of a witty fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn from them to imitation in rea/i life. They are a " THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY. 18.1 world of themselves almost as much as fairy-land. Take one of their characters, male or female (with few exceptions they are alike), and place it in a modern plaj', and my virtuous indignation shall rise against the profligate wrefch as warmly as the Catos oAthe pit could desire ; because in a modern play I am to judge of tlie right and the wrong. The standard of police is the measure of political justice. The atmosphere will blight it, it cannot live here. It has got into a nioral world, where it has no business, from which it must needs fall headlong ; as dizzy, and incapable of making a stand, as a Swedenborgian bad spirit that has wandered unawares into the sphere of one of his Good Men, or Angels. But in its own world do we feel the creature is so very bad ?— The Fainalls and the Mirables, the Dorimants and the Lady Touchwoods, in their own sphere, do not offend my moral sense ; in fact they do not appeal to it at all. They seem engaged in their proper element. They break through no laws, or conscien¬ tious restraints. They know of none. They have got out of Christendom into the land—what shall I call it ?—of cuckoldry— the Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect freedom. It is altogether a speculative scene of things, which has no reference whatever to the world that is. No good person can be justly offended as a spectator, because no good person suffers on the stage. Judged morally, every character in these plays—the few exceptions only are mistakes—is alike essentially vain and worthless. The great art of Congreve is especially shown in this, that he has entirely excluded from his scenes,— some little generosities in the part of Angelica perhaps excepted, —not only anything like a faultless character, but any pretensions to goodness or good feelings whatsoever. Whether he did this designedly, or instinctively, the effect is as happy, as the design (if design) was bold. I used to wonder at the strange power which his Way of the World in particular possesses of interesting you all along in the pursuits of characters, for whom you absolutely care nothing—for you neither hate nor love his personages—and I think it is owing to this very indifference for any, that you endure the whole. He has spread a privation of moral light, I will call it, rather than by the ugly name of palpable darkness, over "his creations ; and his shadows flit before you without distinction or 186 ELIA. preference. Had he introduced a goai character, a single gush of moral feeling, a revulsion of the judgment to actual life and actual duties, the impertinent Goshen would have only lighted to the discovery of deformities* which now are none, because we think them none. Translated into real life, the characters of his, and his friena Wycherley's dramas, are profligates and strumpets,—the business of their brief existence, the undivided pursuit of lawless gallantry. No other spring of action, or possible motive of conduct, is recog¬ nized ; principles which, universally acted upon, must reduce this frame of things to a chaos. But we do them wrong in so translat¬ ing them. No such effects are produced in their world. When we are among them, we are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our usages. No reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings—for they have none among them. No peaee of families is violated—for no family ties exist among them. No purity of the marriage bed is stained—for none is supposed to have a being. No deep affections are disquieted, no holy wedlock bands are snapped asunder—for affection's depth and wedded faith are not of the growth of that soil. There is neither right nor wrong,—^gratitude or its opposite,—claim or duty, —paternity or sonship." Of what consequence is it to Virtue, or how is she at all concerned about it, whether Sir Simon, or Dap- perwit, steal away Miss Martha ; or who is the father of Lord Froth's or Sir Paul Pliant's children ? The whole is a passing pageant, where we should sit as uncon¬ cerned at the issues, for life or death, as at a battle of the frogs and mice. But, like Don Quixote, we take part against the puppets, and quite as impertinently. We dare not contemplate an Atlantis, a scheme, out of which our coxcombical moral sense is for a little transitory ease excluded. We have not the courage to imagine a state of things for which there is neither reward nor punishment. We cling to the painful necessities of shame and blame. We would indict our very dreams. Amidst the mortifying circumstances attendant upon growing old, it is something to have seen the School for Scandal in its glory. This comedy grew out of Congreve and Wycherley, but gathered some alloys of the sentimental comedy which followed THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY. 187 theii-s. It is impossible that it should he now acted, though it con¬ tinues, at long intervals, to he announced in the hills. Its hero, when Palmer played it at least, was Joseph Surface. When I remember the gay boldness, the graceful solemn plausibility, the measured step, the insinuating voice—to express it in a word— tlie downright acted villainy of the part, so different from the pressure of conscious actual wickedness,—the hypocritical assump. tion of hypocrisy,—which made Jack so deservedly a favorite in that character, I must needs conclude the present generation of playgoers more virtuous than myself, or more dense. I freely confess that he divided the palm with me with his better brother ; that, in fact, I liked him quite as well. Not but there are passages, —like that, for instance, where Joseph is made to refuse a pittance to a poor relation,—incongruities which Sheridan was forced upon by the attempt to join the artificial with the senti¬ mental comedy, either of which must destroy the other—but over these obstructions Jack's manner floated him so lightly, that a refusal from him no more siiocked you, than the easy compliance of Charles gave you in reality any pleasure ; you got over the paltry question as quickly as you could, to get back into the regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns. The highly artificial manner of Palmer in this character counteracted every disagreeable impression which you might have received from the contrast, supposing them real, between the two brothers. You did not believe in Joseph with the same faith with which you believed in Charles. The latter was a pleasant reality, the former a no less pleasant poetical foil to it. The comedy, I have said, is incongruous ; a mixture of Congreve with sentimental incompati- bilities : the gaiety upon the whole is buoyant ; but it required the consummate art of Palmer to reconcile the discordant elements. A player with Jack's talents, if we had one now, would not dare to do the part in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid every turn which might tend to unrealize, and so to make the character fascinating. He must take his cue from his spec¬ tator, who would expect a bad man and a good man as rigidly opposed to each other as the death-beds of those geniuses are con¬ trasted in the prints, which I am sorry to say have disappeared from the windows of my old friend Carrington Bowles, of St. 188 ELIA. Paul's Church-yard memory—(an e.xhibition as venerable as the adjacent cathedral, and almost coeval) of the bad and good man at the hour of death ; where tlie ghastly apprehensions of the for¬ mer,—and truly the grim phantom with his reality of a toasting- fork is not to be despised,—^so finely contrast with the meek com¬ placent kissing of the rod,—taking it in like honey and butter,'— with which the latter submits to the scythe of the gentle bleeder, Time, who wields his lancet with the apprehensive finger of a popular young ladies' surgeon. What flesh, like loving grass, would not covet to meet half-way the stroke of such a delicate mower ?—John Palmer was twice an actor in this exquisite part. He was playing to you all the while that he was playing upon Sir Peter and his lady. You had the first intimation of a sentiment before it was on his lips. His altered voice was meant to you, and you were to suppose that his fictitious co-flutterers on the stage perceived nothing at all of it. What was it to you if that half reality, the husband, was overreached by the puppetry—or the thin thing (Lady Teazle's reputation) was persuaded it was dying of a plethory ? The fortunes of Othello and Desdemona were not concerned in it. Poor Jack has passed from the stage in good time, that he did not live to this our age of seriousness. The plea¬ sant old Teazle King, too, is gone in good time. His manner would scarce have passed current in our day. We must love or hate—acquit or condemn—censure or pity—exert our detestable coxcombry of moral judgment upon everything. Joseph Surface, to go down now, must be a downright revolting villain—no compro¬ mise—his first appearance must shock and give horror—his specious plausililities, which the pleasurable faculties of our fathers wel¬ comed with such hearty greetings, knowing that no harm (dra¬ matic harm even) could come, or was meant to come, of them, must inspire a cold and killing aversion. Charles (the real cant¬ ing person of the scene—for the hj'pocrisy of Joseph has its ulte¬ rior legitimate ends, but his brother's professions of a good heart centre in downright self-satisfaction) must be loved and Joseph hated. To balance one disagreeable reality with another. Sir Peter Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old bachelor bridegroom, whose leasings (while King acted it) were evidently as much played off at you, as they were meant to con- THE ARTIFICIAL COMEDY OF THE LAST CENTURY. 189 eern anybody on the stage—he must be a real person, capable in law of sustaining an injury—a person towards whom duties are to be acknowledged—the genuine crim. con. antagonist of the vil¬ lainous seducer Joseph. To realize him more, his sufferings under his unfortunate match must have the downright pungency of life —^must (or should) make you not mirthful but uncomfortable, just as the same predicament would move you in a neighbor or old friend. The delicious scenes which give the play its name and zest, must affect you in the same serious manner as if you heard the reputation of a dear female friend attacked in 5-our real pre¬ sence. Crabtree and Sir Benjamin—those poor snakes that live but in the sunshine of your mirth—must be ripened by this hot¬ bed process of realization into asps or amphisbaenas ; and Mrs. Candor—O ! frightful !—become a hooded serpent. Oh ! who that remembers Parsons and Dodd—the wasp and butterfly of the School for Scandal—in those two characters ; and charming natu¬ ral Miss Pope, the perfect gentlewoman as distinguished from the fine lady of comedy, in this latter part—would forego the true scenic delight—^the escape from life—^the oblivion of consequences —^the holiday barring out of the pedant Reflection—those Satur¬ nalia of two or three brief hours, well won from the world—to sit instead at one of our modern plays—to have his coward conscience (that forsooth must not be left for a moment) stimulated with per¬ petual appeals—dulled rather, and blunted, as a faculty without repose must be—and his moral vanity pampered with images of notional justice, notional beneficence, lives saved without the spectators' risk, and fortunes given away that cost the author nothing ? No piece was, perhaps, ever so completely cast in all its parts as this manageres comedy. Miss Parren had succeeded to Mrs. Abington in Lady Teazle ; and Smith, the original Charles, had retired when I first saw it. The rest of the characters, with very slight exceptions, remained. I remember it was then the fashion to cry down John Kemble, who took the part of Charles after Smith ; but, I thought, very unjustly. Smith, I fancy, was more airy, and took the eye with a certain gaiety of person. He brought with him no sombre recollections of tragedy. He had "not to expiate the fault of having pleased beforehand in lofty de- 190 ELIA. clamation. He had no sins of Hamlet or of Richard to atone for. His failure in these parts was a passport to success in one of so opposite a tendency. But as far as I could judge, the weighty sense of Kemble made up for more personal incapacity than he had to answer for. His harshest tones in this part came steeped, and dulcified in good-humor. He made his defects a grace. His exact declamatory manner, as he managed it, only served to convey the points of his dialogue with more precision. It seemed to head the shafts to carry them deeper. Not one of his sparkling sentences was lost. I remember minutely how he delivered each in succession, and cannot by any efibrt imagine how any of them could be altered for the better. No man could deliver brilliant dialogue—^the dialogue of Congreve or of Wycherley—because none understood it—half so well as John Kemble. His Valentine, in Love for Love, was, to my recollection, faultless. He flagged sometimes in the intervals of tragic passion. He would slumber over the level parts of an heroic character. His Macbeth has been known to nod. But he always seemed to me to be particu¬ larly alive to pointed and witty dialogue. The relaxing levities of tragedy have not been touched by any since him—^the playful court-bred spirit in which he condescended to the players in Hamlet—^the sportive relief which he threw into the darker shades of Richard—disappeared with him. He had his sluggish moods, his torpors—but they were the halting-stones and resting-place of his tragedy—politic savings, and fetches of the breath—hus¬ bandry of the lungs, where nature pointed him to be an economist —rather, I think, than errors of the judgment. They were, at worst, less painful than the eternal tormenting unappeasable vigi¬ lance,—the " lidless dragon eyes," of present fashionable tragedy. ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN. 191 * ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN. Not many nights ago, I had come home from seeing this extra¬ ordinary performer in Cockletop ; and when I retired to my pil¬ low, his whimsical image still stuck by me, in a manner as to threaten sleep. In vain I tried to divest myself of it, by conjur¬ ing up the most opposite associations. I resolved to he serious. I raised up the gravest topics of life ; private misery, public ca¬ lamity. All would not do : There the antic sate Mocking our state his queer visnomy—his bewildering costume—all the strange things Which he had raked together—his serpentine rod, swagging about in his pocket-Cleopatra's tear, and the rest of his relics— O'Keefe's wild farce, and Ms wilder commentary—till the pas¬ sion of laughter, like grief in excess, relieved itself by its own weight, inviting the sleep which in the first instance it had driven away. But I was not to escape so easily. No sooner did I fall into slumbers, than the same image, only more perplexing, assailed me in the shape of dreams. Not one Munden, but five hundred, were dancing before me, like the faces which, whether you will or no, come when you have been taking opium—all the strange combinations, which this strangest of all strange mortals ever shot his proper countenance into, from the day he came commissioned to dry up the tears of the town for the loss of the now almost for¬ gotten Edwin. O for the power of the pencil to have fixed them when I awoke ! A season or two since, there was exhibited a 192 ELIA. Hogarth gallery. I do not see v/hy there should not be a Mun¬ den gallery. In richness and variety, the latter would not fall far short of the former. There is one face of Farley, one face of Knight, one (but what a one it is !) of Liston ; but Munden has none that you can properly pin down, and call his. When you think he hâs ex¬ hausted his battery of looks, in unaccountable warfare with your gravity, suddenly he sprouts out an entirely new set of features, like Hydra. He is not one, but legion ; not so much a comedian, as a company. If his name could be multiplied like his coun¬ tenance, it might fill a play-bill. He, and he alone, literally makes faces : applied to any other person, the phrase is a mere figure, denoting certain modifications of the human countenance. Out of some invisible wardrobe he dips for faces, as his friend Suett used for wigs, and fetches them out as easily. I should not be surprised to see him some day put out the head of a river-horse ; or come forth a pewitt, or lapwing, some feathered metamorphosis. I have seen this gifted actor in Sir Christopher Curry—in Old Dornten—diffuse a glow of sentiment which has made the pulse of a crowded theatre beat like that of one man ; when he has come in aid of the pulpit, doing good to the moral heart of a people. I have seen some faint approaches to this .sort of ex¬ cellence in other players. But in the grand grotesque of farce, Munden stands out as single and unaccompanied as Hogarth. Hogarth, strange to tell, had no followers. The school of Mun¬ den began, and must end, with himself. Can any man wonder, like him ? can any man see ghosts, like him ? or fight with his own shadow—" sessa"—as he does in that strangely-neglected thing, the Cobbler of Preston—where his alternations from the Cobbler to the Magnifico, and from the Magnifico to the. Cobbler, keep the brain of the spectator in as wild a ferment, as if some Arabian Night were being acted be¬ fore him. Who like him can throw, or ever attempted to throw, a preternatural interest over the commonest daily-life objects ? A table or a joint-stool, in ftis conception, rises into a dignity equivaleflt to Cassiopeia's chair. It is invested with constellatory importance. You could not speak of it with more deference, if ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN. 193 it were mounted into the firmament. A beggar in the hands of Michael Angelo, says Fuseli, rose the Patriarch of Poverty. So the gusto of Munden antiqmates and ennobles what it touches. His pots and his ladles are afe^ grand and primal as the seething- pots and hooks seen in old prophetic vision. A tub of butter, contemplated by him, amounts to a Platonic idea. He under¬ stands a leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid the common-place materials of life, like primeval man with -he sun and stars about him. PAKT I. END OF THE FIRST SERIES. 14 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA SECOND SERIES'. THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. BY CHARLES LAMB. SECOND SERIES. GEORGE P. NEW-YORK : PUTNAM, 155 BROADWAY. 1849. CONTENTS. »Arn . BlAKESMOOR IK H SHIRE 1 Poor Relations ' 7 Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading 14 Stage Illusion 21 To THfe Shade of Ei^liston 25 Ellistoniana 28 The Old Margate Hoy 34 The Convalescent 42 Sanity of True Genius 47 Captain Jackson 51 The Superannuated Man 56 The Genteel Style in Writing 64 Barbara S 67 The Tombs in the Abbey 75 Amicus Redivitus 78 Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sydney 83 Newspapers Thirty-five Years Ago 92 Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions OF Modern Art 100 The Wedding Ill Rejoicings upon the New Year's Coming of Age 117 Confessions of a Drunkard ; 123- Old China 132 The Child Angel ; a Dream 138 Popular Fallacies I. That a Bully is always a Coward 141 II. That ill-gotten gain never prospers 142 III. That a man must not laugh at his own jest. ....... ib. IV. That such a One shows his Breeding.—That it is easy • TO PERCEIVE HE IS NO GENTLEMAN 143 ^ V. That the Poor copy the Vices of the Rich 144 ^ VI That Enough is as good as a Feast 145 X CONTENTS VIL Of two Disputants the warmest rs generalut in the wrong 146 VIII. That Verbal Allusions are not Wit, because thet will not bear translation 147 IX. That the Worst Puns are the Best 14S X. That Handsome is that Handsome does 150 XI. That we must not look a Gift-Horse in the Mouth... . 153 XII. That Home is Home though it is never so Homelt 155 XIII. That tou must love me, and love mt Dog 159 XIV. That we should rise with the Lark 162 XV. That we should lie down with the Lamb 164 XVI. That a sulkt temper is a misfortune .....' 166 ELIA. BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. I DO not know a pleasure more affecting than to range at will over the deserted apartments of some fine old family mansion. The traees of extinct grandeur admit of a better passion than envy : and contemplations on the great and good, whom we fancy in succession to have been its inhabitants, weave for us illusions, incompatible with the bustle of modern occupancy, and vanities of foolish present aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I think, attends us between entering an empty and a crowded church. In the latter it is chance but some present human frailty —an act of inattention on the part of some of the auditory—or a trait of affectation, or worse, vain-glory on that of the preacher —puts us by our best thoughts, disharmonizing the place and the occasion. But wouldst thou know the beauty of holiness ?—go alone on some week-day, borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse the cool aisles of some country church : think of the piety that has kneeled there—the congregations, old and young, that have found consolation there—the meek pastor—the 'docile parishioner. With no disturbing emotions, no cross con¬ flicting comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of the place, till thou thyself become as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies that kneel and weep around thee. Journeying northward lately, I could not resist going some few miles out of my road to look upon the remains of an old great PART II. 2 2 ELIA. house with which I had been impressed in this way in infancy. I was apprised that the owner of it had lately pulled it down ; still I had a vague notion that it could not all have perished, that so much solidity with magnificence could not have been crushed all at once into the mere dust and rubbish which I found it. The work of ruin had proceeded with a swift hand indeed, and the demolition of a few weeks had reduced it to—an anti- quity. I was astonished at the indistinction of everything. Where had stood the great gates ? What bounded the court-yard ? Whereabout did the out-houses commence ? A few bricks only lay as representatives of that which was so stately and so spa¬ cious. Death does not shrink up his human victim at this rate. The burnt ashes of a man weigh more in their proportion. Had I seen these brick-and-mortar knaves at their process of destruction, at the plucking of every panel I should have felt the varlets at my heart. I should have cried out to them to spare a plank at least out of the cheerful store-room, in whose hot window- seat I used to sit and read Cowley, with the grass-plot before, and the hum and flappings of that one solitary wasp that ever haunted it about me—^it is in mine ears now, as oft as summer returns; or a panel of the yellow room. Why, every plank and panel in that house for me had magic , in it. . The tapestried bed-rooms—tapestry so much better than painting—not adorning merely, but peopling the wainscots—at which childhood ever and anon would steal a look, shifting its coverlid (replaced as quickly) to exercise its tender courage in a momentary eye-encounter with those stern bright visages, staring reciprocally—all Ovid on the walls, in colors vivider than his descriptions. Actseon in mid sprout, with the unappeasable pru¬ dery of Diana ; and the still more provoking, and almost culinary coolness of Dan Phoebus, eel-fashion, deliberately divesting of Marsyas. Then, that haunted room—in which old Mrs. Battle died— whereinto I have crept, but always in the day time, with a pas¬ sion of fear ; and a sneaking curiosity, terror-tainted, to hold communication with the past. How shall they build it up again ? BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 3 It was an old deserted place, yet not so long deserted but that traces of the splendor of past inmates were everywhere apparent. Its furniture was still standing—even to the tarnished gilt leather battledoors, and crumbling feathers of shuttlecocks in the nursery, which told that children had once played there. But I was a lonely child, and had the range at will of every apartment, knew every nook and corner, wondered and worshipped every, where. The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother of thought, as it is the feeder of love, and silence, and admiration. So strange: a passion for the plaee possessed me in those years, that, though there lay—I shame to say how few roods distant from, the man¬ sion—half hid by trees, what I judged some romantic lake, such was the spell which bound me to the house, and sueh my careful¬ ness not to pass its strict and proper precincts, that the idle waters lay unexplored for me ; and not till late in life, curiosity prevail¬ ing over elder devotion, I found, to my astonishment, a pretty brawling brook had been the Lacus Incognitus of my infancy. Variegated views, extensive prospects—and those at no great distance from the house—I was told of' such—what were they to me, being out of the boundaries of my Eden ? So far from a wish to roam, I would have drawn, methought, still closer the fences of my chosen prison ; and have been hemmed in by a yet securer cincture of those excluding garden walls. I could have exclaimed with that garden-loving poet— Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines ; Curl me about, ye gadding vines ; And oh so close your circles lace. That I may never leave this place ; But, lest your fetters prove too weak. Ere I your silken bondage break. Do you, O brambles, chain me too. And courteous briars, nail me through. I was here as in a lonely temple. Snug fire-sides—^the low- built roof—parlors ten feet by ten—frugal boards, and all the home¬ liness of home—^these were the condition of my birth—^the whole¬ some soil which I was planted in. Yet, without impeachment to their tenderest lessons, I am not sorry to have had glances of ft ELIA. something beyond ; and to have taken, if hut a peep, in child¬ hood, at the contrasting-accidents of'a great fortune, r To have the feeling of gentility, it is not necessary to have been born gentle. The pride of ancestry may he had on cheaper terms than to be obliged to an importunate race of ancestors ; and the coatless antiquary in his unemblazoned cell, revolving the long line of a IVÏôwbray's or De Cliflbrd's pedigree, at those sounding names may warm himself into as gay a vanity as these who do inherit them. The claims of birth are ideal merely, and what herald shall go about to strip me of an idea ? Is it trenchant to their swords ? can it he hacked off as a spur can ? or torn away like a tarnished garter ? What else were the families of the great to us ? what pleasure should we take in their tedious genealogies, or their capitulatory brass monuments ? What to us the uninterrupted current of their bloods, if our own did not answer within us to a cognate and correspondent elevation 1 Or wherefore else, O tattered and diminished 'Scutcheon that hung upon the time-worn walls of thy princely stairs, Blakes- Mooa ! have I in childhood so oft stood poring upon the mystic characters—^thy emblematic supporters, with their prophetic " Resurgam "—^till, every dreg of peasantry purging off, I re¬ ceived into myself Very Gentility ? Thou wert first in my morning eyes ; and of nights hast detained my steps from bed- ward, till it was but a step from gazing at thee to dreaming on thee. This is the only true gentry by adoption ; the veritable change of blood, and not, as empirics have fabled, by transfusion. Who it was by dying that had earned the splendid trophy, I know not, I inquired not ; but its fading rags, and colors cobweb- stained, told that its^ubject was of two centuries back. And what if my ancestor at that date was some Damoetas— feeding flocks—not his own, upon the hills of Lincoln—did I in less earnest vindicate to myself the family trappings of this once proud jEgon ? repaying by a backward triumph the insults he might possibly have heaped in his life-time upon my poor pastoral progenitor. If it were presumption so to speculate, the present owners of BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. S the mansion had least reason to complain. They had long for¬ saken the old house of their fathers for a newer trifle ; and I was left to appropnSte to myself what images I could pick up, to raise my fancy, or soothe my vanity. I was the true descendant of those old W s j and not the present family of that name, who had fled the old waste 'places. Mine was that gallery of good old family portraits, wEich as I have gone over, giving them iîTfancy my own family name, one and then another—would seem to smile, reaching forward from the canvas, to recognize the new relationship ; while the rest looked grave, as it seemed, a't the vacancy in their dwelling, and thoughts of fled posterity. * That Beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery, and a lamb —that hung next the great bay window—with the bright yel¬ low H shire hair, and eye of watchet hue—so like my Alice !—I am persuaded she was a true Elia—Mildred Elia, I take it. Mine too, Blakesmoor, was thy noble Marble Hall with its mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Caesars—stately busts in marble—ranged round ; of whose countenances, young reader of faces as I was, the frowning beauty of Nero, I remember, had most of my wonder ; but the mild Galba had my love. There they stood in the coldness of death, yet freshness of immor¬ tality. Mine too thy lofty Justice Hall, with its one chair of authority, high-backed and wickered, once the terror of luckless poacher, or self-forgetful maiden—so common since, that bats have roosted in it. Mine too—^whose else ?—^thy costly fruit-garden, with its sun- baked southern wall ; the ampler pleasure-garden, rising back¬ wards from the house in triple terraces, with flower-pots now of palest lead, save that a speck here and there, saved from the ele¬ ments, bespake their pristine state to have been gilt and glit¬ tering ; the verdant quarters backwarder still ; and stretching still beyond, in old formality, thy firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel, and the day-long murmuring wood-pigeon, with that antique image in the centre, God or Goddess I wist not ; but child of Athens or old Rome paid never a sincerer worship e ELIA. to Pan or to Sylvanus in their native groves, than I to that frag¬ mentai mystery. Was it for this, that I kissed my childish hands too fervently in your idol-worship, walks and windings of Blakesmoor ! for this, or what sin of mine has the plough passed over your pleasant places? I sometimes think that as men, when they die, do not die all, so of their extinguished habitations there may be a hope—a germ to be revivified. POOR RELATIONS. POOR RELATIONS. A Poor Relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature—a piece of impertinent correspondency—an odious approximation—a haunting conscience—a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of our prosperity—an unwelcome remembrancer—a perpetually recurring mortification—a drain on your purse, a more intolerable dun upon your pride—a drawback upon success —a rebuke to your rising—a stain in your blood—a blot on your 'scutcheon—a rent in your garment—a death's-head at your ban¬ quet—Agathocles' pot—a Mordecai in your gate, a Lazarus at your door—a lion in your path—a frog in your chamber—a fly in your ointment—a mote in your eye—a triumph to your enemy, an apology to your friends—the one thing not needful—the hail in harvest—^the ounce of sour in a pound of sweet. He is known by his knock. Your heart telleth you " That is Mr. ." A rap, between familiarity and respect ; that de¬ mands, and at the same time seems to despair of, entertainment. He entereth smiling and—embarrassed. He holdeth out his hand to you to shake, and—draweth it back again. He casuçilly look- eth in about dinner-time—when the table is full. He offereth to go away, seeing you have company—but is induced to stay. He filleth a chair, and your visitor's two children'are accommodated at a side table. He never cometh upon open days, when your wife says with some complacency, " My dear, perhaps Mr. will drop in to-day." He remembereth birth-days—and profess- eth he is fortunate to have stumbled upon one. He declareth against fish, the turbot being small—yet he sufiereth himself to be importuned into a slice, against his first resolution. He stick- eth by the port—^yet will be prevailed upon to empty the remain- 8 ELIA. der glass of claret, if a stranger press it upon- him. He is a puzzle to the servants, who are fearful of being too obsequious, or not civil enough, to him. The guests think " they have seen him before." Every one speculateth upon his condition ; and the most part take him to be—^a tide-waiter. He calleth you by your Christian name, to imply that his other is the same with your own. He is too familiar by half, yet you wish he had less diffi¬ dence. With half the familiarity, he might pass for a casual dependant ; with more boldness, he would be in no danger of be¬ ing taken for what he is. He is too humble for a friend ; yet taketh on him more state than befits a client. He is a worse guest than a country tenant, inasmuch as he bringeth up no rent —^yet 'tis odds, from his garb and demeanor, that your guests take him for one. He is asked to make one at the whist table ; re- fuseth on the score of poverty, and—resents being left out. When the company break up, he proffereth to go for a coach— and lets the servant go. He recollects your grandfather ; and will thrust in some mean and quite unimportant anecdote—of the family. He knew it when it was not quite so flourishing as " he is blest in seeing it now." He reviveth past situations, to insti¬ tute what he calleth—favorable comparisons. With a reflecting sort of congratulation, he will inquire the price of your furniture ; and insults you with a special commendation of your window- curtains. He is of opinion that the urn is the more elegant shape, but, after all,'there was something more comfortable about the old tea-kettle—which you must remember. He dare say you must find a great convenience in having a carriage of your own, and appealeth to your lady if it is not so. Inquireth if you have had your arms done on vellum yet ; and did not know, till lately, that such-and-such had been the crest of the family. His memory is unseasonable ; his compliments perverse ; his talk a trouble ; his stay pertinacious ; and when he goeth away, you dismiss his chair into a corner, as -precipitately as possible, and feel fairly rid of two nuisances. There is a worse evil under the sun, and that is—a female Poor Relation. You may do something with the other; you may pass him off tolerably well ; but your indigent she-relative is hopeless. " He is an old humorist," you may say, " and aifecta POOR RELATIONS. 0 to go threadbare. His circumstances are better than folks woulcLtake tbem to be. You are fond of having a Character at your table, and truly be is one." But in the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No woman dresses below herself from caprice? The truth must out without shuf¬ fling. " She is plainly related to the L s ; or what does she at their house ?" She is, in all probability, your wife's cousin. Nine times out of ten, at least, this is the case. Her garb is something between a gentlewoman and a beggar, yet the former evidently predominates. She is most provokingly humble, and ostentatiously sensible to her inferiority. He may require to be repressed sometimes—aliquando sufflaminandus erat—but there is no raising her. You send her soup at dinner, and she begs to be helped—after the gentlemen. Mr. requests the honor of taking wine with her ; she hesitates between Port and Madeira, and chooses the former—because he does. She calls the servant Sir ; and insists on not troubling him to hold her plate. The housekeeper patronises her. The children's governess takes upon her to correct her, when she has mistaken the piano for harpsichord. Richard Amlet, Esq., in the play, is a notable instance of the disadvantages to which this chimerical notion of affinity constitut¬ ing a claim to acquaintance, may subject the spirit of a gentleman. A little foolish blood is all that is betwixt him and a lady with a great estate. His stars are perpetually crossed by the malig¬ nant maternity of an old woman, who persists in calling him "her son Dick." But she has wherewithal in the end to recom¬ pense his indignities, and float him again upon the brilliant sur¬ face, under which it had been her seeming business and pleasure all along to sink him. All men, besides, are not of Dick's tem¬ perament. I knew an Amlet in real life, who, wanting Dick's buoyancy, sank indeed. Poor W was of my own standing at Christ's, a fine classic, and a youth of promise. If he had a blemish, it was too much pride ; but its quality was inoffensive ; it was not of that sort which hardens the heart, and serves to keep inferior» at a distance ; it only sought to ward off derogation from itself. It was the principle of self-respect carried as far as it could go, without infringing upon that respect, which he would have every one else equally maintain for himself. He would 10 ELIA. have you to think alike with him on this topic. Many a quarrel have I had with him, when we were rather older boys, and our tallness maide us more obnoxious to observation in the blue clothes, because I would not thread the alleys and blind ways of the town with him to elude notice, when we Hhve been out together on a holiday in the streets of this sneering and prying metropolis. W went, sore with these notions, to Oxford, where the dig. nity and sweetness of a scholar's life, meeting with the alloy of an humble introduction, wrought in him a passionate devotion to the place, with a profound aversion from the society. The ser¬ vitor's gown (worse than his school array) clung to him with Nessian venom. He thought himself ridiculous in a garb, under which Latimer must have walked erect, and in which Hooker, in his young days, possibly flaunted in a vein of no discommendable vanity. In the depth of college shades, or in his lonely chamber, the poor student shrank from observation. He found shelter among books, which insult not ; and studies, that ask no questions of a youth's finances. He was lord of his library, and seldom cared for looking out beyond his domains. The healing influ¬ ence of studious pursuits was upon him, to soothe and to abstract. He was almost a healthy man—when the waywardness of his fate broke out against him with a second and worse malignity. The father of W had hitherto exercised the humble profes¬ sion of house-painter at N , near Oxford. A supposed inte¬ rest with some of the heads of colleges had now induced him to take up his abode in that city, with the hope of being employed upon some public works which were talked of. From that moment I read in the countenance of the young man the determination which at length tore him from academical pursuits for ever. To a person unacquainted with our universities, the distance between the gownsmen and the townsmen, as they are called—the trading part of the latter especially—is carried to an excess that would appear harsh and incredible. The temperament of W 's father was diametrically the reverse of his own. Old W was a little, busy, cringing tradesman, who, with his son upon his arm, would stand bowing and scraping, cap in hand, to anything that wore the semblance of a gown—^insensible to the winks and opener remonstrances of the young man, to whose chamber-fel- POOR RELATIONS. 11 low, or equa. in standing, perhaps, he was thus obsequiously and gratuitously ducking. Such a state of things could not last. W must change the air of Oxford, or be suñbcated. He chose the former ; and let the sturdy moralist, who strains the point of the filial duties as high as they can bear, censure the dereliction ; he cannot estimate the struggle. I stood with W , the last afternoon i ever saw him, under the eaves of his paternal dwelling. It was in the fine lane leading from the High street to the back of * * * * college, where W kept his rooms. He seemed thoughtful and more reconciled. I ventured to rally him—finding him in a better mood—upon a representation of the Artist Evangelist, which the old man, whose afiairs were begin¬ ning to flourish, had caused to be set up in a splendid sort of frame over his really handsome shop, either as a token of pros¬ perity or badge of gratitude to his saint. W looked up at the Luke, and, like Satan, "knew his mounted sign—^and fled." A letter on his father's table the next morning announced that he had accepted a commission in a regiment about to embark for Portugal. He was among the first who perished before the walls of St. Sebastian. I do not know how, upon a subject which I began with treating half seriously, I should have fallen upon a recital so eminently painful ; but this theme of poor relationship is replete with so much matter for tragic as well as comic associations, that it is dif¬ ficult to keep the account distinct without blending. The earliest impressions which I received on this matter, are certainly not at¬ tended with anything painful, or very humiliating, in the recall¬ ing. At my father's table (no very splendid one) was to be found every Saturday, the mysterious figure of an aged gentleman, clothed in neat black, of a sad yet comely appearance. His de¬ portment was of the essence of gravity ; his words few or none ; and I was not to make a noise in his presence. I had little incli¬ nation to have done so—for my cue was to admire in silence. A particular elbow chair was appropriated to him, which was in no case to be violated. A peculiar sort of sweet pudding, which ap¬ peared on no other occasion, distinguished the days of his coming. I used to think him a prodigiously rich man. All I could make out of him was, that he and my father had been schoolfellows, a 12 ELIA. world ago, at Lincoln, and that he came from the Mint. The Mint I knew to be a place where all the money was coined—^and I thought he was the owner of all that money. Awful ideas of the Tower twined themselves about his presence. He seemed above human infirmities and passions. A sort of melancholy grandeur invested him. From some inexplicable doom 1 fancied him obliged to go about i» an eternal suit of mourning ; a captive —a stately being, let out of the Tower on Saturdays. Often have I wondered at the temerity of my father, who, in spite of an habitual general respect which we all in common manifested towards him, would venture now and then to stand up against him in some argument, touching their youthful days. The houses of the ancient city of Lincoln are divided (as most of my readers know) between the dwellers on the hill and in the valley. This marked distinction formed an obvious division between the boys who lived above (however brought together in a common school) and the boys whose paternal residence was on the plain j a suf¬ ficient cause of hostility in the code ofthese young Grotiuses. My father had been a leading Mountaineer ; and would still maintain the general superiority, in skill and hardihood, of the Above Boys (his own faction) over the Below Boys (so were they called), of which party his contemporary had been a chieftain. Many and hot were the skirmishes on this topic—the only one upon which the old gentleman was ever brought out—and bad blood bred ; even sometimes almost to the recommencement (so I expected) of actual hostilities. But my father, who scorned to insist upon ad¬ vantages, generally contrived to turn the conversation upon some adroit by-commendation of the old Minster ; in the general pre* ference of which, before all other cathedrals in the island, the dweller on the hill and the plain-born, could meet on a conciliating level, and lay dowp their less important differences. Once only I saw the old gentleman really ruffled, and Í remembered with anguish the thought that came over me : " Perhaps he will never come here again." He had been pressed to take another plate of the viand, which I have already mentioned as the indispensable concomitant of his visits. He had refused with a resistance amounting to rigor—when my aunt, an old Lincolnian, but who had something of this, in common with my cousin Bridget, that POOR RELATIONS. 13 she would sometimes press civility out of season—uttered the fol¬ lowing memorable application—" Do take another slice, Mr. Billet, for you do not get pudding every day." The old gentleman said nothing at the time—but he took oecasion in the course of the evening, when some argument had intervened between them, to utter with an emphasis which chilled the company, and which chills me now as I write it—" Woman, you are superannuated !" John Billet did not survive long, after the digesting of this affront j but he survived long enough to assure me that peace was actually restored ! and, if I remember aright, another pudding was dis¬ creetly substituted in the plaee of that which had occasioned the offence. He died at the Mint (anno 1781), where he had long held, what he accounted, a comfortable independence ; and with five pounds, fourteen shillings, and a penny, which were found in his escrutoire, after his decease, left the world, blessing God that he had enough to bury him, and that he had never been obliged to any man for a sixpence. This was—a Poor Relation. 14 ELIA. DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING. To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with the forced product of another man's brain. Now I think a man of quality and breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own. An ingenious acquaintance of my own was so much struck with this bright sally of his Lordship, that he has left off reading alto¬ gether, to the great improvement of his originality. At the hazard of losing some credit on this head, I must confess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to other people's thoughts. I dream away my life in others' speculations. I love to lose my¬ self in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am read¬ ing ; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me. I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read, anything which I call a hook. There are things in that shape which I cannot allow ) for such. In this catalogue of books which are no hooks—hihlia a-hihlia— I reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket-Books, Draught Boards, bound and lettered on the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacks, Statutes at Large : the works of Hume, Gibbon, Ro¬ bertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and generally all those volumes which " no gentleman's library should be without the Histories of Flavius Josephus (that learned Jew), and Paley's Moral Philo¬ sophy. With these exceptions, I can read almost anything. I bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so unexcluding. I confess that it moves my spleen to see these things in hooks' clothing perched upon shelves like false saints, usurpers of true shrines, intruders into the sanctuary, thrusting out the legitimate DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING 15 occupants. To reach down a well-bound semblance of a volume, and hope it some kind-hearted play-book, then, opening what " seem its leaves," to come bolt upon a withering Population Es¬ say. To expect a Steele, or a Farquhar, and find—Adam Smith. To view a well-arranged assortment of block-headed Encyclopae¬ dias (Anglicanas or Metropolitanas) set out in an array of russia, or morocco, when a tithe of that good leather would comfortably reclothe my shivering folios ; would renovate Paracelsus himself, and enable old Raymond Lully to look like himself again in the world. I never see these impostors, but I long to strip them, to warm my ragged veterans in their spoils. To be strong-backed and neat-bound is the desidei'atum of a volume. Magnificence comes after. This, when it can be afforded, is not to be lavished upon all kinds of books indiscrimi¬ nately. I would not dress a set of Magazines, for instance, in full suit. The dishabille, or half-binding (with russia backs ever) is our costume. A Shakspeare, or a Milton (unless the first editions), it were mere foppery to trick out in gay apparel. The possession of them confers no distinction. The exterior of them (the things themselves being so common), strange to say, raises no sweet emotions, no tickling sense of property in the owner. Thomson's Seasons, again, looks best (I maintain it) a little torn and dog's-eared. How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves, and worn-out appearance, nay the very odor (beyond russia), if we would not forget kind feelings in fastidious¬ ness, of an old " Circulating Library " Tom Jones, or Vicar of Wakefield ! How they speak of the thousand thumbs that have turned over their pages with delight!—of the lone sempstress, whom they may have cheered (milliner, or hard-working mantua- maker) after her long day's needle-toil, running far into midnight, when she has snatched an hour, ill spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in spelling out their enchant¬ ing contents ! Who would have them a whit less soiled ? What better condition could we desire to see them in ? In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from binding. Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and all that class of perpetu¬ ally self-reproductive volumes—Great Nature's Stereotypes—we see them individually perish with less regret, because we know 1« ELIA. the copies of them to be " eterae." But where a book is at once both good and rare—where the individual is almost the species, and when that perishes, We know not where is that Promethean torch That can its light relumine— such a book, for instance, as the Life of the Duke of Newcastle, by his Duchess—no casket is rich enough, no casing sufficiently durable, to honor and keep such a jewel safe. Not only rare volumes of this description, which seem hopeless ever to be reprinted ; but old editions of writers, such as Sir Philip Sydney, Bishop Taylor, Milton in his prose works. Fuller— of whom we have reprints, yet the books themselves, though they go about, and are talked of here and there, we know, have not endenizened themselves (nor possibly ever will) in the national heart, so as to become stock books—it is good to possess these in durable and costly covers. I do not care for a First Folio of Shakspeare. I rather prefer the common editions of Rowe and Tonson, without notes, and with plates, which, being so execrably bad, serve as maps, or modest remembrancers, to the text ; and without pretending to any supposable emulation with it, are so much better than the Shakspeare gallery engravings, which did. I have a community of feeling with my countrymen about his Plays, and I like those editions of him best, which have been oflenest tumbled about and handled.—On the contrary, I cannot read Beaumont and Fletcher but in Folio. The Octavo editions are painful to look at. I have no sympathy with them. If they were as much read as the current editions of the other poet, I should prefer them in that shape to the older one. I do not know a more heartless sight than the reprint of the Anatomy of Melan¬ choly. What need was there of unearthing the bones of that fan¬ tastic old great man, to expose them in a winding-sheet of the newest fashion to modern censure 1 what hapless stationer could dream of Burton ever becoming popular ?—The wretched Malone could not do worse, when he bribed the sexton of Stratford church to let him whitewash the painted effigy of old Shakspeare, which stood there, in rude but lively fashion depicted, to the very color of the cheek, the eye, the eye-brow, hair, the very dress he used DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING. 11 to wear—^the only authentic testimony we had, however imperfect, of these curious parts and parcels of him. They covered him over with a coat of white paint. By , if I had been a jus¬ tice of peace for Warwickshire, I would have clapt both com¬ mentator and sexton fast in the stocks, for a pair of meddling sacrilegious varlets. I think I see them at their work—these sapient trouble-tombs. Shall I be thought fantastical, if I confess, that the names o< some of our poets sound sweeter, and have a finer relish to the ear—^to mine, at least—than that of Milton or of Shakspeare 1 It may be, that the latter are more staled and rung upon in com¬ mon discourse. The sweetest names, and which carry a perfume in the mention, are, Kit Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Haw- thomden, and Cowley. Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes, before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Fairy Queen for a stop-gap, or a volume of Bishop Andrewes' sermons ? Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who listens, had need hring docile thoughts, and purged ears. Winter evenings—the world shut out—^with less of ceremony the gentle Shakspeare enters. At such a season, the Tempest, or his own Winter's Tale— These two poets you cannot avoid rea