LI B R.ARY OF THL UNIVERSITY or ILLINOIS 823 K61a 1850a v.l a: ,i/-'> ft'' \^ The person charging this material is re- sponsible for its return on or before the Latest Date stamped below. Theft, mutilation, and underlining of books are reasons for disciplinary action and may result in dismissal from the University. University of Illinois Library ; % 'Pf. NOV 2 ' 'm ^ AUG 2 8 if 99 NOV 8 199^ H')y umt m lOCft Jb, L161— O-1096 Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive in 2009 witii funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign http://www.archive.org/details/altonlocketailor01king ALTON LOCKE. TAILOR AND POET. ^n Stutobiograpftp. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. L LONDON: CHAPMAN AND HALL, 186, STRAND. MDCCCL. WHITING, BEAUFOllT HOUSE, STRAN1>. CONTEi\TS OF VOLUME I. CHAPTER I. PAGE A Poet's Childhood ...... 1 CHAPTER n. The Tailors' Workroom . . . . . . 24 CHAPTER in. Sandy Mackaje . ..... 45 CHAPTER IV. Tailors and Soldiers . . . , . . 56 CHAPTER V. The Sceptic's Mother . . . . , .73 CHAPTER VI. The Dulwich Gallery . . . . . . 87 CHAPTER Vir. First Love . . . . . . .107 CHAPTER Vni. Light in a Dark Place . . . . . . 121 CHAPTER IX. Poetry and Poets ...... 136, CHAPTER X. ^ How Folks turn Chartists . . . . . 145 IV CONTENTS. CHAPTER XL page " The Yard where the Gentlemen Live" . . .166 CHATTER Xn. Cambridge 180 CHAPTER XIII. The Lost Idol Found 195 CHAPTER XIV. A Cathedral Town 229 CHAPTER XV. The Man of Science . . . . . . 240 CHAPTER XVI. Cultivated Women . . . . . .248 CHAPTER XVII. Sermons in Stones . . . . . . . 254 CHAPTER XVIIL My Fall 263 CHAPTER XIX. Short and Sad 273 CHAPTER XX. Pegasus in Harness . . . • • .277 CHAPTER XXL The Sweater's Den 291 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. CHAPTER I. A POET'S CHILDHOOD. 1 AIM a Cockney among Cockneys. Italy and the Tropics, the Highlands and Devonshire, I know only in dreams. Even the Surrey hills, of whose loveliness I have heard so much, are to me a distant fairy-land, whose gleaming ridges I am worthy only to behold afar. With the exception of two journeys, never to be for- gotten, my knowledge of England is bounded by the horizon which encircles Richmond hill. My earliest recollections are of a suburban street; of its jumble of little shops and little terraces, each ex- hibiting some fresh variety of capricious ugliness; the little scraps of garden before the doors, with their dusty, stunted lilacs and balsam poplars, were my only forests; my only wild animals, the dingy, merry spar- rows, who quarrelled fearlessly on my window-sill, VOL. I. B i I 2 ALTON LOCKE, ignorant of trap or gun. From my earliest diildhood, through long nights of sleepless pain, as the midnight brightened into dawn, and the glaring lamps grew pale, I used to listen, with a pleasant awe, to the ceaseless roll of the market- waggons, bringing up to the great city the treasures of the gay green country, the land of fruits and flowers, for which I have yearned all my life in vain. They seemed to my boyish fancy mysterious messengers from another world : the silent, lonely night, in which they were the only moving things, added to the wonder. I used to get out of bed to gaze at them, and envy the coarse men and sluttish women who attended them, their labour among verdant plants and rich brown mould, on breezy slopes, under God's own clear sky. I fancied that they learnt what I knew I should have learnt there; I knew riot then that " the eye only sees that which it brings with it the power of seeing," When will their eyes be opened ? When will priests go forth into the highways and the hedges, and preach to the ploughman and the gipsy the blessed news, that there too, in every thicket and fallow field, is the house of God, — there, too, the gate of Heaven? I do not complain that I am a Cockney. That, too, is God's gift. He made me one, that I might learn to feel for poor wretches who sit stifled in reeking garrets and workrooms, drinking in disease with every breath, — bound in their prison-house of brick and iron, with their own funeral pall hanging over them, in that canopy of fog and poisonous smoke, from their cradle to their grave. I have drank of the cup of which they TADLOB AND POET. 3 drink. And so I liave leamt — if, indeed, I have leamt — to be a poet — a poet of the people. Tliat honour, surely, was worth buying with asthma, and rickets, and consumption, and weakness, and — worst of all to me — with ugliness. It was God's purpose about me; and, therefore, all circumstances combined to imprison me in London. I used once, when I worshipped circumstance, to fancy it my curse, Fate's injustice to me, which kept me from developing my genius, and asserting my rank among poets. I longed to escape to glorious Italy, or some other southern chmate, where natural beauty would have become the very element which I breathed ; and yet, what would have come of that? Should I not, as nobler spirits than I have done, have idled away my life in Elysian dreams, singing out Hke a bird into the air, inarticulately, purposeless, for mere joy and fullness of heart; and taking no share in the terrible question- ings, the terrible strugglings of this great, awful, blessed time — feeling no more the pulse of the great heart of England stirring me? I used, as I said, to call it the curse of circumstance that I was a sickly, decrepit Cockney. My mother used to tell me that it was the cross which God had given me to bear. I know now that she was right there. She used to say that my disease was God's will. I do not think, though, that she spoke right there also. I think that it was the will of the world and of the devil, of man's avarice [and laziness and ignorance. And so would my readers? perhaps, had they seen the shop in the city where I was bom and nursed, with its little garrets reeking with b2 4 ALTON LOCKE, human breath, its kitchens and areas with noisome sewers. A sanitary reformer would not be long in guessing the cause of my unhealthiness. He would not rebuke me — nor would she, sweet soul! now that she is at rest in bliss— for my wild longings to escape, for my envying the very flies and sparrows their wings that I might flee miles away into the country, and breathe the air of heaven once, and die. I have had my wish. I have made two journeys far away into the country, and they have been enough for me. My mother was a widow. My father, whom I cannot recollect, was a small retail tradesman in the city. He was unfortunate; and when he died, my mother came down, and lived penuriously enough, I knew not how till I fifrew older, down in that same suburban street. She had been brought up an Independent. After my father's death she became a Baptist, from conscientious scruples. She considered the Baptists, as I do, as the only sect who thoroughly embody the Calvinistic doctrines. She held it, as I do, an absurd and impious thing for those who beUeve mankind to be children of the devil till they have been consciously " converted," to baptise un- . conscious infants and give them the sign of God's mercy on the mere chance of that mercy being intended for them. When God had proved, by converting them, that they were not reprobate and doomed to hell by His absolute and eternal will, then, and not till then, dare man baptise them into His name. She dared not palm a presumptuous fiction on herself, and call it *' charity." So, though we had both been christened during my father's TAILOR AND POET. 5 lifetime, she pui'posed to have us rebaptised, if ever that happened — which, in her sense of the word, never hap- pened, I am afraid, to me. She gloried in her dissent; for she was sprung from old Puritan blood, which had flowed again and again beneath the knife of Star-Chamber butchers, and on the battle-fields of Naseby and Sedgemoor. And on winter evenings she used to sit with her Bible on her knee, while I and my little sister Susan stood beside her and listened to the stories of Gideon and Barak, and Samson and Jephthah, till her eye kindled up, and her thoughts passed forth from that old Hebrew time home into those English times which she fancied, and not untruly, like them. And we used to shudder, and yet listen with a strange fascination, as she told us how her ancestor called his seven sons off" their small Cambridge farm, and horsed and armed them himself to follow behind Cromwell, and smite kings and prelates with "the sword of the Lord and of Gideon." Whether she were right or wrong, what is it to me? What is it now to her, thank God? But those stories, and the strict, stern Puritan education, learnt from the Independents and not the Baptists, which accompanied them, had their effect on me, for good and ill. My mother moved by rule and method; by God's law, as she considered, and that only. She seldom smiled. Her word was absolute. She never com- manded twice, without punishing. And yet there were abysses of unspoken tenderness in her, as well as clear, sound, womanly sense and insight. But she thought 6 ALTON LOCKE, herself as much bound to keep down all tenderness as if she had been some ascetic of the middle ages — so do extremes meet ! It was " carnal," she considered. She had as yet no right to have any " spiritual affection" for us. We were still " children of wrath and of the devil," — not yet " convinced of sin," " converted, born again." She had no more spiritual bond with us, she thought, than she had with a heathen or a Papist. She dared not even pray for our conversion, earnestly as she prayed on every other subject. For though the majority of her sect would have done so, her clear logical sense would yield to no such tender inconsistency. Had it not been decided from all eternity? We were elect, or we were reprobate. Could her prayers alter that? If He had chosen us, He would call us in His own good time: and, if not, . Only, again and again, as I afterwards dis- covered from a journal of hers, she used to beseech God with agonised tears to set her mind at rest by revealing to her His will towards us. For that comfort she could at least rationally pray. But she received no answer. Poor, beloved mother 1 If thou couldst not read the answer, written in every flower and every sunbeam, written in the very fact of our existence here at all, what answer would have sufficed thee? And yet, with all this, she kept the strictest watch over our morality. Fear, of course, was the only mo- tive she employed ; for how could our still carnal under- standings be affected with love to God? And love to herself was too paltry and temporary to be urged by one who knew that her life was uncertain, and who was TAILOB AND POET. 7 always trying to go down to the deepest eternal ground and reason of everything, and take her stand upon that. So our god, or gods rather, till we were twelve years old, were hell, the rod, the ten commandments, and pubUc opinion. Yet under them, not they, but some- thing deeper far, both in her and us, preserved us pure. Call it natural character, conformation of the spirit, — conformation of the brain, if you Irke, if you are a sci- entific man and a phrenologist. I never yet could dis- sect and map out my own being, or my neighbour's, as you analysts do. To me, I myself, aye, and each person round me, seem one inexplicable whole ; to take away a single faculty whereof, is to destroy the harmony, the meaning, the hfe of all the rest. That there is a duality in us — a Hfelong battle between flesh and spirit — we all, alas ! know well enough ; but which is flesh and which is spirit, what philosophers in these days can tell us? Still less had we two found out any such duality or discord in ourselves; for we were gentle and obedient children. The pleasures of the world did not tempt us. We did not know of their existence ; and no foundlings educated in a nunnery ever grew up in more virginal and spotless innocence — if ignorance be such — than did Susan and I. The narrowness of my sphere of observation only con- centrated the faculty into greater strength. The few natural objects which I met — and they, of course, con- stituted my whole outer world (for art and poetry were tabooed both by my rank and my mother's sectarianism^ and the study of human beings only develops itself as 8 ALTON LOCKE, the boy grows into the man)— these few natural ob- jects, I say, I studied with intense keenness. I knew every leaf and flower in the Httle front garden; every cabbage and rhubarb-plant in Battersea-fields was won- derful and beautiful to me. Clouds and water I learnt to delight in, from my occasional lingerings on Batter- sea-bridge, and yearning westward looks toward the sun setting above rich meadows and wooded gardens, to me a forbidden El Dorado. I brought home wild-flowers and chance beetles and butterflies, and pored over them, not in the spirit of a naturalist, but of a poet. They were to me God's an- gels, shining in coats of mail and fairy masquerading dresses. I envied them their beauty, their freedom. At last I made up my mind, in the simple tenderness of a child's conscience, that it was wrong to rob them of the liberty for which I pined, — to take them away from the beautiful broad country whither I longed to follow them; and I used to keep them a day or two, and then, regretfully, carry them back, and set them loose on the first opportunity, with many compunctions of heart, when, as generally happened, they had been starved to death in the meantime. They were my only recreations after the hours of the small day-school at the neighbouring chapel, where I learnt to read, write, and sum; except, now and then, a London walk, with my mother holding my hand tight the whole way. She would have hoodwinked me, stopped my ears with cotton, and led me in a string, — kind, careful soul ! — if it had been reasonably safe on a TAILOR AND POET. 9 crowded pavement, so fearful was she lest I should be polluted by some chance sight or sound of the Babylon which she feared and hated — almost as much as she did the Bishops. The only books which I knew were the Pilgrim's Progress and the Bible. The former was my Shake- speare, my Dante, my Vedas, by which I explained eYerj fact and phenomenon of life. London was the City of Destruction, from which I was to flee; I was Christian ; the Wicket of the Way of Life I had strangely identified with the turnpike at Battersea-bridge end; and the rising ground of Mortlake and Wimbledon was the Land of Beulah — the Enchanted Mountains of the Shepherds. If I could once get there, I was saved : — a carnal view, perhaps, and a childish one; but there was a dim meaning and human reality in it never- theless. As for the Bible, I knew nothing of it really, beyond the Old Testament. Indeed, the life of Christ had little chance of becoming interesting to me. My mother had given me formally to understand that it spoke of mat- ters too deep for me; that, "till converted, the natural man could not understand the things of God :" and I obtained little more explanation of it from the two un- intelligible, dreary sermons to which I listened every dreary Sunday, in terror lest a chance shuffle of my feet, or a hint of drowsiness, — the natural result of the stifling gallery and glaring windows and gaslights, — should bring down a lecture and a punishment when I returned home. Oh, those ** sabbaths!" — days, not of 10 ALTON LOCKE, rest, but utter weariness, when tlie beetles and tke flowers were put by, and there was nothing to fill up the long vacuity but books of which I could not under- stand a word; when play, laughter, or even a stare out of window at the sinful, merry, sabbath-breaking pro- menaders, were all forbidden, as if the commandment had run, "In it thou shalt take no manner of amuse- ment, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter." By what strange ascetic perversion has that got to mean " keep- ing holy the sabbath-day?" Yet there was an hour's relief in the evening, when either my mother told us Old Testament stories, or some preacher or two came in to supper after meeting; and I used to sit in the corner and listen to their talk; not that I understood a word, but the mere struggle to understand — the mere watching my mother's earnest face — my pride in the reverent flattery with which the worthy men addressed her as "a mother in Israel/' were enough to fill up the blank for me till bed-time. Of "vital Christianity" I heard much; but, with all my efibrts, could find out nothing. Indeed, it did not seem interesting enough to tempt me to find out much. It seemed a set of doctrines, believing in which was to have a magical effect on people, by saving them from the everlasting torture due to sins and temptations which I had never felt. Now and then, believing, in obedience to my mother's assurances, and the solemn prayers of the ministers about me, that I was a child of hell, and a lost and miserable sinner, I used to have accesses of terror, and fancy that I should surely wake TAILOR AND POET. 11 next morning in everlasting flames. Once I put my finger a moment into the fii'e, as certain Papists, and Protestants too, have done, not only to themselves, but to their disciples, to see if it would be so very dread- fiilly painful; with what conclusions the reader may judge. . . . Still, I could not keep up the excitement. Why should I ? — The fear of pain is not the fear of sin, that 1 know of; and, indeed, the thing was unreal altogether in my case, and my heart, my common-sense rebelled against it again and again ; till at last I got a terrible whipping for taking my little sister's part, and saying that if she was to die, — so gentle, and obedient, and affectionate as she was, — God would be very unjust in sending her to hell-fire, and that I was quite certain He would do no such thing — unless He were the Devil: an opinion which I have since seen no reason to change. The confusion between the King of Hell and the King of Heaven has cleared up, thank God, since then ! So I was whipped and put to bed — the whipping altering my secret heart just about as much as the dread of hell-fire did. I speak as a Christian man — an orthodox Churchman (if you require that shibboleth). Was I so very wrong? What was there in the idea of religion which was pre- sented to me at home to captivate me? What was the use of a child's hearing of '• God's great love mani- fested in the scheme of redemption," when he heard, in the same breath, that the effects of that redemption were practically confined only to one human being out of a thousand, and that the otlier nine hundred and 12 ALTON LOCKE, ninety-nine were lost and damned from their birth-hour to all eternity — not only by the absolute will and repro- bation of God (though that infernal blasphemy I heard often enough), but also, putting that out of the question, by the mere fact of being born of Adam's race. And this to a generation to whom God's love shines out in every tree and flower and hedge-side bird; to whom the daily discoveries of science are revealing that love in every microscopic animalcule which peoples the stag- nant pool! This to working men, whose craving is only for some idea which shall give equal hopes, claims, and deliverances, to all mankind alike 1 This to work- ing men, who, in the smiles of their innocent children, see the heaven which they have lost — the messages of baby-cherubs, made in God's own image ! This to me, to whom every butterfly, every look at my little sister, contradicted the lie ! You may say that such thoughts were too deep for a child ; that I am ascribing to my boyhood the scepticism of my manhood ; but it is not so; and what went on in my mind goes on in the minds of thousands. It is the cause of the contempt into which not merely sectarian Protestantism, but Chris- tianity altogether, has fallen, in the minds of the thinking workmen. Clergymen, who anathematise us for wan- dering into Unitarianism — you, you have driven us thither. You must find some explanation of the facts of Christianity more in accordance with the truths which we do know, and will live and die for, or you can never hope to make us Christians; or, if we do return to the true fold, it will be as I returned, after long, miserable TAILOR AND POET. 13 years of darkling error, to a higlier truth than most of you have yet learned to preach. But those old Jewish heroes did fill my whole heart and soul. I learnt from them lessons which I never wish to unlearn. Whatever else I saw about them, this I saw, — that they were patriots, deliverers from that tyranny and injustice from which the child's heart, — *' child of the devil" though you may call him, — in- stinctively, and^ as I believe, by a divine inspiration, revolts. Moses leading his people out of Egypt; Gideon, Barak, and Samson, slaying their oppressors; David, hiding in the mountains from the tyrant, with his little band of those who had fled from the oppressions of an aristocracy of Nabals ; Jehu, executing God's vengeance on the kings — they were my heroes, my models ; they mixed themselves up with the dim legends about the Reformation-martyrs, Cromwell and Hampden, Sidney and Monmouth, which I had heard at my mother's knee. Not that the perennial oppression of the masses, in all ages and countries, had yet risen on me as an awful, torturing, fixed idea. I fancied, poor fool ! that tyranny was the exception, and not the rule. But it was the mere sense of abstract pity and justice which was delighted in me. I thought that these were old fairy tales, such as never need be realised again. I learnt otherwise in after years. I have often wondered since, why all cannot read the same lesson as I did in those old Hebrew Scriptures — that they, of all books in the world, have been wrested into proofs of the divine right of kings, the eternal 14 ALTON LOCKE, necessity of slavery ! But tlie eye only sees what it brings with it, the power of seeing. The upper classes, from their first day at school to their last day at college, read of nothing but the glories of Salamis and Mara- thon, of freedom and of the old repubhcs. And what comes of it? No more than their tutors know will come of it, when they thrust into the boys' hands books which give the lie in every page to their own political superstitions. But when I was just turned of thirteen, an altogether new fairy-land was opened to me by some missionary tracts and journals, which were lent to my mother by the ministers. Pacific coral islands and volcanoes, cocoa- nut groves and bananas, graceful savages with paint and feathers — what an El Dorado ! How I devoured them and dreamt of them, and went there in fancy, and preached small sermons as I lay in bed at night to Tahitians and New Zealanders, though I confess my spiritual eyes were, just as my physical eyes would have been, far more busy with the scenery than with the souls of my audience. However, that was the place for me, I saw clearly. And one day, I recollect it well, in the little dingy, foul, reeking, twelve-foot-square back yard, where huge smoky party-walls shut out every breath of air and almost all the light of heaven, I had climbed up between the water-butt and the angle of the wall for the purpose of fishing out of the dirty fluid which lay there, crusted with soot and alive with insects, to be renewed only three times in the seven days, some of the great larvae and kicking monsters which made up a large item in TAILOE AXD POET. 15 my list of wonders : all of a sudden the horror of the place came over me; those grim prison- walls above, with their canopy of lurid smoke ; the dreary, sloppy, broken pavement; the horrible stench of the stagnant cesspools; the utter want of form, colour, life, in the whole place, crushed me down, without my being able to analyse my feelings as I can now; and then came over me that dream of Pacific Islands, and the free, open sea; and 1 slid down from my perch, and bursting into tears threw myself upon my knees in the court, and prayed aloud to God to let me be a missionary. Half fearfully I let out my wishes to my mother when she came home. She gave me no answer; but, as I found out afterwards, — too late, alas ! for her, if not for me, — she, like Mary, had " laid up all these things, and treasured them in her heart." You may guess then my delight when, a few days afterwards, I heard that a real live missionary was coming to take tea with us. A man who had actually been in New Zealand ! — the thought was rapture. I painted him to myself over and over again ; and when, after the fiLi-st burst of fancy, I recollected that he might possibly not have adopted the native costume of that island, or, if he had, that perhaps it would look too strange for him to wear it about London, I settled within myself that he was to be a tall, venerable-looking man, like the por- traits of old Puritan divines which adorned our day- room; and as I had heard that " he was powerful in prayer," I adorned his right-hand with that mystic weapon *' all-prayer," with which Christian, when all 16 ALTON LOCKE. other means had failed, finally vanquishes the fiend — which instrument, in my mind, was somewhat after the model of an infernal sort of bill or halbert — all hooks, edges, spikes, and crescents — which I had passed, shud- dering, once, in the hand of an old suit of armour in Wardour- street. He came — and with him the two ministers who often drank tea with my mother; both of whom, as they played some small part in the drama of my after-life, I may as well describe here. The elder was a little, sleek, silver-haired old man, with a bland, weak face, just like a white rabbit. He loved me, and I loved him too, for there were always lollipops in his pocket for me and Susan. Had his head been equal to his heart ! — but what has been was to be — and the dissenting clergy, with a few noble exceptions among the Independents, arc not the strong men of the day — none know that better than the workmen. The old man's name was Bowyer. The other, Mr. Wigginton, was a younger man: tall, grim, dark, bilious, with a narrow forehead, retreating suddenly from his eyebrows up to a conical peak of black hair over his ears. He preached " higher doctrine," i.e., more fatalist and antinomlan than his gentler colleague, — and, having also a stentorian voice, was much the greater favourite at the chapel. I hated him — and if any man ever deserved hatred, he did. Well, they came. My heart was in my mouth as I opened the door to them, and sunk back again to the very lowest depths of my inner man when my eyes fell on the face and figure of the missionary — a squat, red- TAILOR AND POET. 17 faced, pig-eyed, low-browed man, with great soft lips that opened back to his very ears; sensuality, conceit, and cunning marked on every feature — an innate vul- garity, from which the artisan and the child recoil with an instinct as true, perhaps truer, than that of the cour- tier, showing itself in every tone and motion — I shrunk into a corner, so crestfallen that I could not even exert myself to hand round the bread-and-butter, for which I got duly scolded afterwards. Oh ! that man ! — how he bawled and contradicted, and laid down the law, and spoke to my mother in a fondling, patronising way, which made me, 1 knew not why, boil over with jealousy and indignation. How he filled his teacup half full of the white sugar to buy which my mother had curtailed her. yesterday's dinner — how he drained the few remaining drops of the three-pennyworth of cream, with which Susan was stealing off to keep it as an unexpected treat for my mother at breakfast the next morning — how he talked of the natives, not as St. Paul might of his converts, but as a planter might of his slaves ; overlaying all his unintentional confessions of his own greed and prosperity, mth cant, flimsy enough for even a boy to see through, while his eyes were not blinded with the superstition that a man must be pious who sufficiently interlards his speech with a jumble of old English picked out of our translation of the New Testament. Such was the man I saw. I don't deny- that all are not like him. I beheve there are noble men of all denominations, doing their best according to their light, all over the world ; but such was the one I saw — VOL. I. C IS ALTON LOCKE, and the men who are sent home to plead the missionary cause, "whatever the men may be like who stay behind and work, are, from my small experience, too often such. It appears to me to be the rule that many of those who go abroad as missionaries, go simply because they are men of such inferior powers and attain- ments that if they stayed in England they would starve. Three parts of his conversation, after all, was made up of abuse of the missionaries of the Church of Eng- land, not for doing nothing, but for being so much more successful than his own sect ; — accusing them, in the same breath, of being just of the inferior type of which he was himself, and also of being mere University fine gentlemen. Really, I did not wonder, upon his own showing, at the savages preferring them to him; and I was pleased to hear the old white-headed minister gently interpose at the end of one of his tirades — *' We must not be jealous, my brother, if the Establishment has discovered what we, I hope, shall find out some day, that it is not wise to draft our missionaries from the ofiscouring of the ministry, and serve God with that which costs us nothing except the expense of pro- viding for them beyond seas." There was somewhat of a roguish twinkle in the old man's eye as he said it, which emboldened me to whisper a question to him. *' Why is it, Sir, that in old times the heathens used to crucify the missionaries and burn them, and now they give them beautiful farms, and build them houses, and carry them about on their backs?" TAILOR AND POET. 19 The old man seemed a little puzzled, and so did the company, to whom he smilingly retailed my question. As nobody seemed inclined to offer a solution, I ven- tured one myself. " Perhaps the heathens are grown better than they used to be?" " The heart of man," answered the tall, dark minis- ter, " is, and ever was, equally at enmity with God." " Then, perhaps," I ventured again, " what the mis- sionaries preach now is not quite the same as what the missionaries used to preach in St. Paul's time, and so the heathens are not so angry at it?'^ My mother looked thunder at me, and so did all except my white-headed friend, who said, gently enough — " It may be that the child's words come from God." Whether they did or not, the child took very good care to speak no more words till he was alone with his mother; and then finished off that disastrous evening by a punishment for the indecency of saying, before his little sister, that he thought it '^a great pity the mis- sionaries taught black people to wear ugly coats and trousers; they must have looked so much handsomer running about with nothing on but feathers and strings ofsheUs." So the missionary dream died out of me, by a fooHsh and illogical antipathy enough; though, after all, it was a child of my imagination only, not of my heart ; and the fancy, having bred it, was able to kill it also. And David became my ideal. To be a shepherd-boy, and C2 20 ALTON LOCKE, sit among beautiful mountains, and sing hymns of my own making, and kill lions and bears, with now and then the chance of a stray giant — what a glorious life ! And if David slew giants with a sling and a stone, why should not I? — at all events, one ought to know how; so I made a sling out of an old garter and some string, and began to practise in the little back-yard. But my first shot broke a neighbour's window, value seven-pence, and the next flew back in my face, and cut my head open ; so I was sent supperless to bed for a week, till the seven-pence had been duly saved out of my hungry stomach — and, on the whole, I found the hymn-writing side of David's character the more fea- sible; so I tried, and with much brainsbeating, com- mitted the following lines to a scrap of dirty paper. And it was strangely significant, that in this, my first attempt, there was an instinctive denial of the very doc- trine of " particular redemption," which I had been hearing all my life, and an instinctive yearning after the very Being in whom I had been told I had "no part nor lot" till I was " converted." Here they are. I am not ashamed to call them, — doggrel though they be, — an inspiration from Him of whom they speak. If not from Him, good readers, from whom? Jesus, He loves one and all; Jesus, He loves children small ; Their souls are sitting round His feet, On high, before His mercy-seat. When on earth He walked in shame, Children small unto Him came; At His feet they knelt and prayed, On their heads His hands He laid. TAILOR AND POET. 21 Came a spirit on them then, Greater than of mighty men ; A spirit gentle, meek, and mild, A spirit good for king and child. Oh ! that spirit give to me, Jesus, Lord, where'er I be! But I did not finish them, not seeing very clearly what to do with that spirit when I obtained it; for, in- deed, it seemed a much finer thing to fight material ApoUyons with material swords of iron, like my friend Christian, or to go bear and lion hunting with David, than to convert heathens by meekness — at least, if true meekness was at all like that of the missionary whom I had lately seen. I showed the verses in secret to my little sister. My mother heard us singing them together, and extorted, grimly enough, a confession of the authorship. I ex- pected to be punished for them (I was accustomed weekly to be punished for all sorts of deeds and words, of the harmfulness of which I had not a notion). It was, therefore, an agreeable surprise when the old mi- nister, the next Sunday evening, patted my head, and praised me for them. '^ A hopeful sign of young grace, brother," said he to the dark tall man. " May we behold here an infant Timothy !" " Bad doctrine, brother, in that first line — bad doc- trine, which I am sure he did not learn from our excel- lent sister here. Remember, my boy, henceforth, that Jesus does not love one and all — not that I am angry with you. The carnal mind cannot be expected to un- 22 ALTON LOCKE, derstand divine things, any more than the beasts that perish. Nevertheless, the blessed message of the Gospel stands true, that Christ loves none but His Bride, the Church. His merits, my poor child, extend to none but the elect. Ah! my dear sister Locke, how de- lightful to think of the narrow way of discriminating grace ! How it enhances the believer'*s view of his own exceeding privileges, to remember that there be few that be saved !" I said nothing. I thought myself only too lucky to escape so well from the danger of having done any- thing out my own head. But somehow Susan and I never altered it when we sang it to ourselves. ***** I thought it necessary for the sake of those who might read my story, to string together these few scattered recollections of my boyhood, — to give, as it were, some sample of the cotyledon leaves of my young life-plant, and of the soil in which it took root, ere it was trans- planted — but I will not forestall my sorrows. After all, they have been but types of the woes of thousands who " die and give no sign." Those to whom the struggles of every, even the meanest, human being are scenes of an awful drama, every incident of which is to be noted with reverent interest, will not find them void of meaning ; while the life which opens in my next chapter is, perhaps, full enough of mere dramatic interest (and whose life is not, were it but truly written?) to amuse merely as a novel. Ay, grim and real is the action and suffering which begins with my next page, — TATLOE AND POET. 23 as you yourself would have found, high-born reader (if such chance to Hght upon this story), had you found yourself at fifteen, after a youth of convent-like seclu- sion, settled, apparently for life — in a tailor's workshop. Ay — laugh ! — we tailors can quote poetry as well as make your court-dresses : You sit in a cloud and sing, like pictured angels, And say the world runs smooth — while right below Welters the black fermenting heap of griefs Whereon your state is built 24 ALTON LOCKE, CHAPTER 11. THE TAILORS' WORKROOM. Have you done laughing? Then I will tell you how the thing came to pass. My father had a brother, who had steadily risen in life, in proportion as my father fell. They had both begun life in a grocer's shop. My father saved enough to marry, when of middle age, a woman of his own years, and set up a little shop, where there were far too many such already, in the hope — to him, as to the rest of the world, quite just and innocent — of drawing away as much as possible of his neighbours' custom. He failed, died — as so many small tradesmen do — of bad debts and a broken heart, and left us beggars. His brother, more prudent, had in the meantime, risen to be foreman; then he married, on the strength of his handsome person, his master's blooming widow; and rose and rose, year by year, till, at the time of which I speak, he was owner of a first-rate grocery establish- ment in the city, and a pleasant villa near Heme Hill, and had a son, a year or two older than myself, at King's College, preparing for Oxford and the Church — that being now- a- days the approved method of con- TAILOR AND POET. 25 verting a tradesman's son into a gentleman, — whereof let artizans, and gentlemen also, take note. My aristocratic readers- — if I ever get any, which I pray God I may — may be surprised at so great an inequality of fortune between two cousins ; but the thing is common in our class. In the higher ranks, a difference in income implies none in education or man- ners, and the poor " gentleman" is a fit companion for dukes and princes — thanks to the old usages of Norman chivalry, which after all were a democratic protest against the sovereignty, if not of rank, at least of money. The knight, however penniless, was the prince's equal, even his superior, from whose hands he must re- ceive knighthood; and the "squire of low degree," who honourably earned his spurs, rose also into that guild, whose qualifications, however barbaric, were still higher ones than any which the pocket gives. But in the commercial classes money most truly and fearfully '' makes the man." A difference in income, as you go lower, makes more and more difference in the supply of the common necessaries of life; and worse — in education and manners, in all which poHshes the man, till you may see often, as in my case, one cousin an Oxford undergraduate, and the other a tailor's journeyman. My uncle one day came down to visit us, resplendent in a black velvet waistcoat, thick gold chain, and acres of shirt-front; and I and Susan were turned to feed on our own curiosity and awe in the back-yard, while he and my mother were closeted together for an hour or so in 26 ALTON LOCKE, the living room. When he was gone, my mother called me in, and with eyes Avhich would have been tearful had she allowed herself such a weakness before us, told me very solemnly and slowly, as if to impress upon me the awfulness of the matter, that I was to be sent to a tailor's workrooms the next day. And an awful step it was in her eyes, as she laid her hands on my head and murmured to herself, " Behold, I send you forth as a lamb in the midst of wolves. Be ye, therefore, wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." And then, rising hastily to conceal her own emotion, fled upstairs, where we could hear her throw herself on her knees by the bedside, and sob piteously. That evening was spent dolefully enough, in a sermon of warnings against all manner of sins and temptations, the very names of which I had never heard, but to which, as she informed me, I was by my fallen nature altogether prone : and right enough was she in so saying, though, as often happens, the temptations from which I was in real danger were just the ones of which she had no notion — fighting more or less extinct Satans, as Mr. Carlyle says, and quite unconscious of the real, modern, man-devouring Satan close at her elbow. To me, in spite of all the terror which she tried to awaken in me, the change was not unwelcome; at all events, it promised me food for my eyes and my ears, — some escape from the narrow cage in which, though I hardly dare confess it to myself, I was beginning to pine. Little I dreamt to what a darker cage I was to be translated ! Not that I accuse my uncle of neglect TAILOR AND POET. 2? or cruelty, though the thing was altogether of his com- manding. He was as generous to us as society required him to be. We were entirely dependant on him, as my mother told me then for the first time, for support. And had he not a right to dispose of my pers POET. 53 ** He was Oliver Crom well's secretary," I added. " Did he teach you to disobey your mother?" asked my mother. I did not answer; and the old man, after turning over a few leaves, as if he knew the book well, looked up. *' 1 think, madam, you might let the youth keep these books, if he will promise, as I am sure he will, to see no more of Mr. Mackaye." I was ready to burst out crying, but I made up my mind and answered, *' I must see him once again, or he will think me so ungrateful. He is the best friend that I ever had, except you, mother. Besides, I do not know if he will lend me any, after this." My mother looked at the old minister, and then gave a sullen assent. " Promise me only to see him once — but I cannot trust you. You have deceived me once, Alton, and you may again !" " I shall not, I shall not," I answered proudly. " You do not know me" — and I spoke true. " You do not know yourself, my poor dear foolish child!" she replied — and that was true too. " And now, dear friends," said the dark man," let us join in offering up a few words of special intercession." We all knelt down, and I soon discovered that by the special intercession was meant a string of bitter and groundless slanders against poor me, twisted into the form of a prayer for my conversion, "if it were God's will." To which I responded with a closing '' Amen," 54 ALTON LOCKE, for which I was sorry afterwards, when I recollected that it was said in merely insolent mockery. But the little faith I had was breaking up fast — not altogether, surely, by my own fault.* At all events, from that day I w^as emancipated from modern Puritanism. The ministers both avoided all serious conversation with me; and my mother did the same ; while with a strength of mind, rare among women, she never alluded to the scene of that Sunday evening. It was a rule with her never to recur to what was once done and settled. What was to be, might be prayed over. But it was to be endured in silence ; yet wider and wider ever from that time opened the gulf between us. I w^ent trembling the next afternoon to Mackaye and told my story. He first scolded me severely for dis- obeying my mother. " He that begins o' that gate, laddie, ends by disobeying God and his ain conscience. Gin ye're to be a scholar, God will make you one — and if not, ye'll no mak' yourseP ane in spite o' Him and * The portraits of the minister and the missionary are surely exceptions to their class, rather than the average. The Baptists have had their Andrew Fuller and Robert Hall, and among mis- sionaries Dr. Carey, and noble spirits in plenty. But such men as those who excited Alton Locke's disgust are to be met with, in every sect ; in the Church of England, and in the Church of Rome. And it is a real and fearful scandal to the young, to see such men listened to as God's messengers, in spite of their utter want of any manhood or virtue, simply because they are " orthodox," each according to the shibboleths of his hearers, and possess that vulpine " discretion of dulness," whose miraculous might Dean Swift sets forth in his "Essay on the Fates of Clergymen." Such men do exist, and prosper ; and as long as they are allowed to do so, Alton Lockes will meet them, and be scandalised by them. — Ed. TAILOR AND POET. 55 His commandments." * And then lie filled his pipe and chuckled away in silence; at last, he exploded in a horse- laugh. " So ye gied the ministers a bit o' yer mind? * The deil's amang the tailors' in gude earnest, as the sang says. There's Johnnie Crossthwaite kicked the papist priest out o' his house yestreen; piiir ministers, it's ill times wi' them ! They gang about keckhng and screigh- ing after the working-men, like a hen that's hatched ducklings, when she sees them tak' the water. Little Dunkeld's coming to London sune, I'm thinking. HechI sic a parish, a parish, a parish; Hech ! sic a parish as little Dunkeld, They hae stickit the minister, hanged the precentor, Dung down the steeple, and drucken the bell." '•' But may I keep the books a little while, Mr. Mackaye ?" '^ Keep them till ye die, gin ye will. What is the worth o' them to me? What is the worth o' anything to me, puir auld deevil, that ha' no half-a-dizen years to live, at the furthest. God bless ye, my bairn ; gang hame, and mind your mither, or it's little gude books '11 do ye." 56 ALTON LOCKE, CHAPTER IV. TAILORS AND SOLDIERS. I WAS now thrown again utterly on my own re- sources. I read and re-read Milton's ' Poems' and Virgil's ' JEneid' for six more months at every spare moment; thus spending over them, I suppose, all in all, far more time than most gentlemen have done. I I found, too, in the last volume of Milton a few of his select prose works: the ' Areopagitica,' the ' De- fence of the English People,' and one or two more, in which I gradually began to take an interest; and, little of them as I could comprehend, I was awed by their tremendous depth and power, as well as excited by the utterly new trains of tliought into which they led me. Terrible was the amount of bodily fatigue which I had to undergo in reading at every spare moment, while walking to and fro from my work, while sitting up, often from midnight till dawn, stitching away to pay for the tallow- candle which I burnt, till I had to resort to all sorts of uncomfortable contrivances for keeping myself awake, even at the expense of bodily pain — Heaven forbid that I should weary my readers by describing them ! Young men of the upper classes, to whom study — pursue TAILOR AND POET. 57 it as intensely as you will — is but the business of the day, and every spare moment relaxation ; little you guess the frightful drudgery undergone by a man of the people who has vowed to educate himself, — to live at once two lives, each as severe as the whole of yours, — to bring to the self-imposed toil of intellectual improve- ment, a body and brain already worn out by a day of toilsome manual labour. I did it. God forbid, though, that I should take credit to myself for it. Hundreds more have done it, with still fewer advantages than mine. Hundreds more, an ever-increasing army of martyrs, are doing it at this moment: of some of them, too, perhaps you may hear hereafter. I had read through Milton, as I said, again and again ; I had got out of him all that my youth and my unregulated mind enabled me to get. I had devoured, too, not without profit, a large old edition of ' Fox's Martyrs,' which the venerable minister lent me, and now I was hungering again for fresh food, and again at a loss where to find it. I was hungering, too, for more than information — for a friend. Since my intercourse with Sandy ^lackaye had been stopped, six months had passed without my once opening my lips to any human being upon the subjects with which my mind was haunted day and night. I wanted to know more about poetry, history, politics, philosophy — all things in heaven and earth. But, above all, I wanted a faithful and sympathising ear into which to pour all ray doubts, discontents, and aspirations. My sister Susan, who was one year younger 58 ALTON LOCKE, than myself, was growing into a slender, pretty, hectic girl of sixteen. But she was altogether a devout Puritan. She had just gone through the process of conviction of sin and conversion ; and being looked upon at the chapel as an especially gracious professor, was cither unable or unwilling to think or speak on any subject, except on those to which I felt a growing distaste. She had shrunk from me, too, very much, since my ferocious attack that Sunday evening on the dark minister, who was her special favourite. I re- marked it, and it was a fresh cause of unhappiness and perplexity. At last I made up my mind, come what would, to force myself upon Crossthwaite. He was the only man whom I knew who seemed able to help me; and his very reserve had invested him with a mystery, which served to heighten my imagination of his powers. I waylaid him one day coming out of the work-room to go home, and plunged at once desperately into the matter. *' Mr. Crossthwaite, I want to speak to you. I want to ask you to advise me." *' I have known that a long time." " Then why did you never say a kind word to me?" " Because 1 was waiting to sec whether you were worth saying a kind word to. It was but the other day, remember, you were a bit of a boy. Now, I think, I may trust you with a thing or two. Besides, I wanted to see whether you trusted me enough to ask me. Now you've broke the ice at last, in with you, head and ears, and see what you can fish out." TAILOR AND POET. 59 " I am very unhappy " " That's no new disorder that I know of.*' "No; but I think the reason I am imhappy is a strange one; at least, I never read of but one person else in the same way. I want to educate myself, and I can't." '' You must have read precious little then, if you think yourself in a strange way. Bless the boy's heart I And what the dickens do you want to be educating yourself for, pray?" This was said in a tone of good-humoured banter, which gave me Courasre. He offered to walk home- wards with me ; and, as I shambled along by his side, I told him all my story and all my griefs. I never shall forget that walk. Every house, tree, turning, which we passed that day on our way, is in- dissolubly connected in my mind with some strange new thought which arose in me just at each spot; and recurs, so are the mind and the senses connected, as surely as I repass it. I had been telling him about Sandy Mackaye. He confessed to an acquaintance with him; but in a re- served and mysterious way, which only heightened my curiosity. We were going through the Horse Guards, and I could not help lingering to look with wistful admiration on the huge mustachoed war-machines who sauntered about the court-yard. A tali and handsome officer, blazing in scarlet and gold, cantered in on a superb horse, and, dismounting. 60 ALTON LOCKE, threw the reins to a dragoon as grand and gaudy as himself. Did I envy him ? Well — I was but seventeen. And there is something noble to the mind, as well as to the eye, in the great, strong man, who can fight — a completeness, a self-restraint, a terrible sleeping power in him. As Mr. Carlyle says, '' A soldier, after all, is one of the few remaining realities of the age. All other professions almost promise one thing, and perform — alas! what? But this man promises to fight, and does it; and, if he be told, will veritably take out a long sword and kill me." So thought my companion, though the mood in which he viewed the fact was somewhat difierent from my own. " Come on," he said, peevishly clutching me by the arm; " what do you want dawdling? Are you a nur- sery-maid, that you must stare at those red-coated butchers?" And a deep curse followed. *' What harm have they done you?" *' I should think I owed them turn enough." "What?" " They cut my father down at Sheffield, — perhaps with the very swords he helped to make, — because he would not sit still and starve, and see us starving round him, while those who fattened on the sweat of his brow, and on those lungs of his, whicli the sword-grinding dust was eating out day by day, were wantoning on venison and champagne. That's the harm they've done me, my chap !" " Poor fellows ! — they only did as they were ordered, I suppose." TAILOR AND POET. 61 " And what business have they to let themselves be ordered? What right, I say — what right has any free, reasonable soul on earth, to sell himself for a shilling a-day to murder any man, right or wrong — even his own brother or his own father — just because such a whiskered, profligate jackanapes as that officer, without learning, without any god except his own looking- glass and his opera-dancer — a fellow who, just because he is born a gentleman, is set to command grey-headed men before he can command his own meanest passions. Good heavens ! that the lives of free men should be en- trusted to such a stuffed cockatoo ; and that free men should be such traitors to their country, traitors to their own flesh and blood, as to sell themselves, for a shilling a-day and the smirks of the nursery-maids, to do that fellow's bidding !" " What are you a-grumbling about here, ray man? — gotten the cholera ?" asked one of the dragoons, a huge, stupid-looking lad. " About you, you young long-legged cut-throat," answered Crossthwaite, " and all your crew of traitors." " Help, help, coomrades o' mine !" quoth the dragoon, bursting with laughter; '^ I'm gaun be mcorthered wi' a little booy that's gane mad, and toorned Chartist." I dragged Crossthwaite ofi*; for what was jest to the soldiers I saw, by his face, was fierce enough earnest to him. We walked on a little, in silence. " Now," I said, " that was a good-natured fellow- enough, though he was a soldier. You and he might have cracked many a joke together, if you did but 62 ALTON LOCKE, understand each other; — and he was a countryman of yours, too." " I may crack something else besides jokes with him someday," answered he, moodily. " 'Pon my word, you must take care how you do it. He is as big as four of us." *' That vile aristocrat, the old Italian poet — what's his name? — Ariosto — ay! — he knew which quarter the wind was making for, when he said that fire-arms would be the end of all your old knights and gentlemen in armour, that hewed down unarmed innocents as if they had been sheep. Gunpowder is your true leveller — dash physical strength ! A boy's a man with a musket in his hand, my chap 1" *' God forbid," I said, " that I should ever be made a man of in that way, or you either. I do not think we are quite big enough to make fighters ; and if we were, what have we got to fight about .?" •'Big enough to make fighters?" said he, half to him- self; *^ or strong enough, perhaps? — or clever enough? — and yet Alexander was a little man, and the Petit Caporal, and Nelson, and Caesar, too; and so was Saul of Tarsus, and weakly he was into the bargain, ^sop was a dwarf, and so was Attila ; Shakespeare Avas lame ; Alfred, a rickety weakling; Byron, clubfooted; — so much for body versus spirit — brute force versus genius — genius." I looked at him ; his eyes glared like two balls of fire. Suddenly he turned to me. " Locke, my boy, Pve made an ass of myself, and TAILOR AND POET. 63 got into a rage, and broken a good old resolution of mine, and a promise that I made to my dear little woman — bless her ! — and said things to you that you ought to know nothing of for this long time ; but those red-coats always put me beside myself. God forgive me !'** And he held out his hand to me cordially. " I can quite understand your feeling deeply on one point," I said, as I took it, " after the sad story you told me; — but why so bitter on all? What is there so very wrong about things, that we must begin fighting about itr '* Bless your heart, poor innocent ! What is wrong? — what is not wroncr? Wasn't there enou^i^h in that talk with Mackaye, that you told me of just now, to show anybody that^ who can tell a hawk from a handsaw?" ^'^ Was it wrong iu him to give himself such trouble about the education of a poor young fellow, who has no tie on him, wbo can never repay him ?" " No ; that's just like him. He feels for the people, for he has been one of us. He worked in a printing- office himself many a year, and he knows the heart of the working-man. But he didn't tell you the whole truth about education. He daren't tell you. No one who has money dare speak out his heart;— not that he has much certainly; but, the cunning old Scot that he is, he lives by the present system of things, and he won't speak ill of the bridge which carries him over — till the time comes." I could not understand whither all this tended, and 64 ALTON LOCKE, walked on, silent and somewhat angry, at hearing the least slight cast on Mackaye. " Don't you see, stupid?" he broke out at last. " What did he say to you about gentlemen being crammed by tutors and professors? Have not you as good a right to them as any gentleman?" " But he told me they were no use — that every man must educate himself." " Oh ! all very fine to tell you the grapes are sour, when you can't reach them. Bah, lad ! Can't you see what comes of education? — that any dolt, provided he be a gentleman, can be doctored up at school and col- lege, enough to make him play his part decently-^-his mighty part of ruling us, and riding over our heads, and picking our pockets, as parson, doctor, lawyer, member of parliament — while we — you now, for in- stance — cleverer than ninety-nine gentlemen out of a hundred, if you had one-tenth the trouble taken with you that is taken with every pig-headed son of an aristocrat " *' Am I clever?" asked I, in honest surprise. " "What ! haven't you found that out yet? Don't try to put that on me. Don't a girl know when she's pretty, without asking her neighbours?" " Really, I never thought about it." " More simpleton you. Old Mackaye has, at all events ; though canny Scotchman that he is, he'll never say a word to you about it, yet he makes no secret of it to other people. I heard him the other day telling some of our friends that you were a thorough young genius." TAILOR AND POET. 65 " I blushed scarlet, between pleasure and a new feel- ing; was it ambition?" '' Why, hav'n't you a right to aspire to a college education as any do-nothing canon there at the abbey, lad?" " I don''t know that I have a right to anything." " What, not become what Nature intended you to become? What has she given you brains for, but to be educated and used? Oh! I heard a fine lecture upon that at our club the other night. There was a man there — a gentleman, too, but a thorough-going people's man, I can tell you, Mr. OTlynn. What an orator that man is to be sure ! The Irish -^schines, I hear they call him in Conciliation Hall. Isn't he the man to pitch into the Mammonites? ' Gentlemen and ladies,' says he, ' how long will a diaboHc society' — no, an effete society it was — * how long will an effete, emas- culate, and effeminate society, in the diabolic selfishness of its eclecticism, refuse to acknowledge what my im- mortal countryman, Burke, calls the " Dei voluntatem in rebus revelatam" — the revelation of Nature's will in the phenomena of matter ? the cerebration of each in the prophetic sacrament of the yet undeveloped possi- bilities of his mentation? The form of the brain alone, and not the possession of the vile gauds of wealth and rank, constitute man's only right to education — to the glories of art and science. Those beaming eyes and roseate lips beneath me proclaim a bevy of undeveloped Aspasias, of embryo Cleopatras, destined by Nature, and only restrained by man's injustice, from ruling the world VOL. L F 66 ALTON LOCKE, by their beauty's eloquence. Those massive and beet- ling brows, gleaming with the lambent flames of patri- otic ardour — what is needed to unfold them into a race of Shakspeares and of Gracchi, ready to proclaim with sword and lyre the divine harmonies of liberty, equahty, and fraternity, before a quailing universe?' " " It sounds very grand," replied I, meekly; " and I should like very much certainly to have a good educa- tion. But I can't see whose injustice keeps me out of one if I can't afford to pay for it." " Whose? Why, the parsons' to be sure. They've got the monopoly of education in England^ and they get their bread by it at their public schools and univer- sities; and of course it's their interest to keep up the price of their commodity, and let no man have a taste of it who can't pay down handsomely. And so those aristocrats of college dons go on rolling in riches, and fellowships, and scholarships, that were bequeathed by the people's friends in old times, just to educate poor scholars like you and me, and give us our rights as free men." '^ But I thought the clergy were doing so much to educate the poor. At least, I hear all the dissenting ministers grumbling at their continual interference." " Ay, educating them to make them slaves and bigots. They don't teach them what they teach their own sons. Look at the miserable smattering of general information — just enough to serve as sauce for their great first and last lesson of ' Obey the powers that be ' — whatever they be ; leave us alone in our comforts, TAILOR AND POET. 67 and starve patiently; do, like good boys, for it's God's will. And then, if a boy does show talent in school, do they help him up in Hfe? Not they; when he has just learnt enough to whet his appetite for more, they turn him adrift again, to sink and drudge — to do his duty, as they call it, in that state of life to which society and the devil have called him." " But there are innumerable stories of great English- men who have risen from the lowest ranks." " Ay; but where are the stories of those who have not risen — of all the noble geniuses who have ended in desperation, drunkenness, staiTation, suicide, because no one would take the trouble of lifting them up, and enabling them to walk in the path which Nature had marked out for them? Dead men tell no tales; and this old whited sepulchre, society, ain't going to turn informer against itself." *' I trust and hope," I said, sadly, " that if God intends me to rise, He will open the way for me; perhaps the very struggles and sorrows of a poor genius may teach him more than ever wealth and prosperity could." " True, Alton, my boy ! and that's my only comfort. It does make men of us, this bitter battle of life. We working men, when we do come out of the furnace, come out, not tinsel and papier mache, like those fops of red-tape statesmen, but steel and granite, Alton, my boy — that has been seven times tried in the fire : and woe to the papier mache gentleman that runs against F 2 68 ALTON LOCKE, US ! But," he went on, sadly, "for one who comes safe through the furnace, there are a hundred who crack in the burning. You are a young bear, my lad, with all your sorrows before you ; and you'll find that a working man's training is like the Red Indian children's. The few who are strong enough to stand it grow up warriors ; but all those who are not fire-and- water-proof by nature — just die, Alton, my lad, and the tribe thinks itself well rid of them." So that conversation ended. But it had implanted in my bosom a new seed of mingled good and evil, which was destined to bear fruit, precious perhaps as well as bitter. God knows it has hung on the tree long enough. Sour and harsh from the first, it has been many a year in ripening. But the sweetness of the apple, the potency of the grape, as the chemists tell us, are born out of acidity — a developed sourness. Will it be so with my thoughts ? Dare I assert, as I sit writing here, with the wild waters slipping past the cabin win- dows, backwards and backwards ever, every plunge of the vessel one forward leap from the old world — worn- out world I had almost called it, of sham civilisation and real penury — dare I hope ever to return and triumph? Shall I, after all, lay my bones among my own people, and hear the voices of freemen whisper in my dying ears? Silence, dreaming heart! Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof — and the good thereof also. Would that I had known that before ! Above all, that I had known TAILOR AND POET. 69 it on that night, when first the burning thought arose in my heart, that I was unjustly used; that society had not given me my rights. It came to me as a revelation, celestial-infernal, full of glorious hopes of the possible future in store for me through the perfect develop- ment of all my faculties; and full, too, of fierce present rage, wounded vanity, bitter grudgings against those more favoured than myself, which grew in time almost to cursing against the God who had made me a poor untutored working man, and seemed to have given me genius only to keep me in a Tantalus'-hell of unsatis- fied thirst. Ay, respectable gentlemen and ladies, I will confess all to you — you shall have, if you enjoy it, a fresh oppor- tunity for indulging that supreme pleasure which the press daily afibrds you of insulting the classes whose powers most of you know as little as you do their suffer- ings. Yes ; the Chartist poet is vain, conceited, ambitious, uneducated, shallow, inexperienced, envious, ferocious, scurrilous, seditious, traitorous. — Is your charitable vocabulary exhausted ? Then ask yourselves, how often have you yourself honestly resisted and con- quered the temptation to any one of these sins, when it has come across you just once in a way, and not as they came to me, as they come to thousands of the working men, daily and hourly, ' till their torments do, by length of time, become their elements ?' What, are we covetous, too? Yes ! And if those who have, like you, still covet more, what wonder if those who have nothing, covet something? Profligate too? Well, 70 ALTON LOCKE, though that imputation as a generality is utterly calum- nious, though your amount of respectable animal enjoy- ment per annum is a hundred times as great as that of the most self-indulgent artisan, yet, if you had ever felt what it is to want, not only every luxury of the senses, but even bread to eat, you would think more mercifully of the man who makes up by rare excesses, and those only of the limited kinds possible to him, for long intervals of dull privation, and says in his madness, " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die !" We have our sins, and you have yours. Ours may be the more gross and barbaric, but yours are none the less damnable; perhaps all the more so, for being the sleek, subtle, respectable, religious sins they are. You are frantic enough if our part of the press calls you hard names, but you cannot see that your part of the press repays it back to us with interest. We see those insults, and feel them bitterly enough ; and do not forget them, alas! soon enough, while they pass unheeded by your delicate eyes as trivial truisms. Horrible, unprincipled, villanous, seditious, frantic, blasphemous, are epithets, of course, when applied to — to how large a portion of the English people, you will some day discover to your astonishment. When will that day come, and how? In thunder, and storm, and garments rolled in blood? Or like the dew on the mown grass, and the clear shining of the sunhght after April rain? Yes, it was true. Society had not given me my rights. And woe unto the man on whom that idea, TAILOR AND POET. 71 true or false, rises lurid, filling all his thoughts with stifling glare, as of the pit itself. Be it true, be it false, it is equally a woe to believe it; to have to live on a negation; to have to worship for our only- idea, as hundreds of thousands of us have this day, the hatred of the things which are. Ay, though one of us here and there may die in faith, in sight of the promised land, yet is it not hard, when looking from the top of Pisgah into " the good time coming," to watch the years slipping away one by one, and death crawling nearer and nearer, and the people wearying themselves in the fire for very vanity, and Jordan not yet passed, the promised land not yet entered? while our little children die around us, like lambs beneath the knife, of cholera and typhus and con- sumption, and all the diseases which the good time can and will prevent; which^ as science has proved, and you the rich confess, might be prevented at once, if you dared to bring in one bold and comprehensive measure, and not sacrifice yearly the hves of thousands to the- idol of vested interests and a majority in the House. Is it not hard to men who smart beneath such things to- help crying aloud — '* Thou cursed Moloch-Mammon, take my Hfe if thou wilt; let me die in the wilderness,, for I have deserved it; but these little ones in mines and factories, in typhus- cellars, and Tooting pande- moniums, what have they done? If not in their fathers' cause, yet still in theirs, were it so great a sin to die upon a barricade?" 72 ALTON LOCKE, Or after all, my working brothers, is it true of our pro- mised land, even as of that Jewish one of old, that the priests' feet must first cross the mystic stream into the good land and large which God has prepared for us? Is it so indeed? Then in the name of the Lord of Hosts, ye priests of His, why will ye not awake, and arise, and go over Jordan, that the people of the Lord may follow you? TAILOR AND POET. ?3 CHAPTER V. THE SCEPTIC'S MOTHER. My readers will perceive, from what I have detailed^ that I was not likely to get any very positive ground of comfort from Crossthwaite ; and from within myself there was daily less and less hope of any. Daily the struggle became more intolerable between my duty to my mother and my duty to myself — that inward thirst for mental self-improvement, which, without any clear consciousness of its sanctity or inspiration, I felt, and could not help feeling, that I must follow. No doubt it was very self-willed and ambitious of me to do that which rich men's sons are flogged for not doing, and rewarded with all manner of prizes, scholarships, fellow- ships, for doing. But the nineteenth year is a time of life at which self-will is apt to exhibit itself in other people besides tailors ; and those religious persons who think it no sin to drive their sons on through classics and mathematics, in hopes of gaining them a station in life, ought not to be very hard upon me for driving myself on through the same path without any such selfish hope of gain — though perhaps the very fact of my having no wish or expectation of such advantage will 74 ALTON LOCKE, constitute in their eyes my sin and foil/, and prove that I was following the dictates merely of a carnal lust, and not of a proper worldly prudence. I really do not wish to be flippant or sneering. I have seen the evil of it as much as any man, in myself and in my own class. But there are excuses for such a fault in the working man. It does sour and madden him to be called presumptuous and ambitious for the very same aspirations which are lauded up to the skies in the sons of the rich — unless, indeed, he will do one little thing, and so make his peace with society. If he will desert his own class; if he will try to become a sham gentleman, a parasite, and, if he can, a Mammonite, the world will compliment him on his noble desire to '* rise in life^ He will have won his spurs, and be admitted into that exclusive pale of knighthood, beyond which it is a sin to carry arms even in self-defence. But if the working genius dares to be true to his own class — to stay among them — to regenerate them — to defend them — to devote his talents to those among whom God placed him and brought him up — then he is the demagogue, the incendiary, the fanatic, the dreamer. So you would have the monopoly of talent, too, exclusive worldlings? And yet you pre- tend to believe in the miracle of Pentecost, and the religion that was taught by the carpenter's Son, and preached across the world by fishermen ! I was several times minded to argue the question out with my mother, and assert for myself the same inde- pendence of soul which I was now earning for my body by my wages. Once I had resolved to speak to her TAILOR AND POET. 75 that very evening ; but, strangely enough, happening to open the Bible, which, alas ! I did seldom at that time, my eye fell upon the chapter where Jesus, after having justified to His parents His absence in the Temple, while hearing the doctors and asking them questions, yet went down with them to Nazareth after all, and was subject unto them. The story struck me vividly as a symbol of my own duties. But on reading further, I found more than one passage which seemed to me to convey a directly opposite lesson, where His mother and His brethren, fancying Him mad, attempted to interfere with His labours, and asserting their family rights as reasons for retaining Him, met with a peremptory re- buff. I puzzled my head for some time to find out which of the two cases was the more appHcable to my state of self-development. The notion of asking for teaching from on high on such a point had never crossed me. Indeed, if it had, I did not believe suffi- ciently either in the story or in the doctrines connected with it, to have tried such a resource. And so, as may be supposed, my growing self-conceit decided for me that the latter course was the fitting one. And yet I had not energy to carry it out. I was getting so worn out in body and mind from continual study and labour, stinted food and want of sleep, that I could not face the thought of an explosion, such as I knew must ensue, and I lingered on in the same un- happy state, becoming more and more morose in manner to my mother, while I was as assiduous as ever in all filial duties. But I had no pleasure in home. She 76 ALTON LOCKE, seldom spoke to me. Indeed, there was no common topic about which we could speak. Besides, ever since that fatal Sunday evening, I saw that she suspected me and watched me. I had good reason to believe that she set spies upon my conduct. Poor dear mother ! God forbid that I should accuse thee for a single care of thine, for a single suspicion even, prompted as they all were by a mother's anxious love. I would never have committed these things to paper, hadst thou not been far beyond the reach or hearing of them ; and only now, in hopes that they may serve as a warning, in some degree to mothers, but ten times more to children. For I sinned against thee, deeply and shamefully, in thought and deed, while thou didst never sin against me; though all thy caution did but hasten the fatal explo- sion which came, and perhaps must have come, under some form or other, in any case. I had been detained one night in the shop till late ; and on my return my mother demanded, in a severe tone, the reason of my stay; and on my telling her, answered as severely that she did not believe me ; that she had too much reason to suspect that I had been with bad companions. " Who dared to put such a thought into your head?" She *' would not give up her authorities, but she had too much reason to believe them." Again I demanded the name of my slanderer, and was refused it. And then I burst out, for the first time in my life, into a real fit of rage with her. I cannot tell how I dared to say what I did, but I was weak, TAILOR AND POET. 77 nervous, irritable — my brain excited beyond all natural tension. Above all, I felt that she was unjust to me; and my good conscience, as well as my pride, rebelled. " You have never trusted me," I cried; ''you have watched me " *' Did you not deceive me once already?" " And if I did," I answered, more and more excited, " have I not slaved for you, stinted myself of clothes to pay your rent? Have I not run to and fro for you like a slave, while I knew all the time you did not respect me or trust me? If you had only treated me as a child and an idiot, I could have borne it. But you have been thinking of me all the while as an incarnate fiend — dead in trespasses and sins — a child of wrath and the devil. What right have you to be astonished if I should do my father's works?" " You may be ignorant of vital rehgion," she an- swered; " and you may insult me. But if you make a mock of God's word, you leave my house. If you can laugh at religion, you can deceive me." The pent-up scepticism of years burst forth. "Mother,"! said, " don't talk tome about religion, and election, and conversion, and all that — I don't believe one word of it. Nobody does, except good kind people — (like you, alas! I was going to say, but the devil stopped the words at my lips) — who must needs have some reason to account for their goodness. That Bowyer — he's a soft heart by nature, and as he is, so he does — religion has had nothing to do with that, any more than it has with that black-faced, canting scoundrel who has been 78 ALTON LOCKE, telling you lies about me. Much his heart is changed He carries sneak and slanderer written in his face — and sneak and slanderer he will be, elect or none. Religion? Nobody believes in it. The rich don't; or they wouldn't fill their churches up with pews, and shut the poor out, all the time they are calling them brothers. They believe the gospel? Then why do they leave the men who make their clothes to starve in such hells on earth as our work room ? No more do the tradespeople believe in it ; or they wouldn't go home from sermon to sand the sugar, and put sloe-leaves in the tea, and send out lying puffs of their vamped- up goods, and grind the last farthing out of the poor creatures who rent their wretched stinking houses. And as for the workmen — they laugh at it all, I can tell you. Much good religion is doing for them ! You may see it's fit only for women and children — for go where you will, church or chapel, you see hardly anything but bonnets and babies ! I don't believe a word of it,— once and for all. I'm old enough to think for myself, and a free-thinker I will be, and believe nothing but what I know and understand." I had hardly spoken the words, when I would have given worlds to recal them — but it was to be — and it was. Sternly she looked at me full in the face, till my eyes dropped before her gaze. Then she spoke steadily and slowly : " Leave this house this moment. You are no son of mine henceforward. Do you think I will have my TAILOR AND POET. 7:9 daughter polluted by the company of an infidel and a blasphemer ?" " I will go,^' I answered fiercely; ^' I can get my own living at all events !'* And before I had time to think, I had rushed up stairs, packed up my bundle, not forgetting the precious books, and was on my way through the frosty echoing streets under the cold glare of the winter's moon. I had gone perhaps half a mile, when the thought of home rushed over me — the little room where I had spent my life — the scene of all my childish joys and sorrows — which I should never see again, for I felt that my departure was for ever. Then I longed to see my mother once again — not to speak to her — for I was at once too proud and too cowardly to do that — but to have a look at her through the window. One look — for all the while, though I was boihng over with rage and indignation, I felt that it was all on the surface — that in the depths of our hearts I loved her and she loved me. And yet I wished to be angry, wished to hate her. Strange contradiction of the flesh and spirit ! Hastily and silently I retraced my steps to the house. The gate was padlocked. I cautiously stole over the palings to the window — the shutter was closed and fast. I longed to knock — I lifted my hand to the door, and dare not; indeed, I knew that it was useless, in my dread of my mother's habit of stem determination. That room — that mother I never saw again. I turned away; sickened at heart, I was clambering back again, 80 ALTON LOCKE, looking behind me towards the window, when I felt a strong grip on my collar, and turning round, had a policeman's lantern flashed in my face. '' Hullo, young un, and what do you want here?" with a strong emphasis, after the fashion of ^policemen, on all his pronouns. " Hush! or you'll alarm my mother!" " Oh ! eh ! Forgot the latch-key, you sucking Don Juan, that's it, is it? Late home from the Victory?" I told him simply how the case stood, and entreated him to get me a night's lodging, assuring him that my mother would not admit me, or I ask to be ad- mitted. The policeman seemed puzzled, but after scratching his hat in lieu of his head for some seconds, replied, " This here is the dodge — you goes outside and lies down on the kerb-stone ; whereby I spies you asleeping in the streets, contrary to act o' parliament; whereby it is my duty to take you to the station-house ; whereby you gets a night's lodging free gracious for nothing, and company perwided by her Majesty." " Oh, not to the station-house!" I cried, in shame and terror. '^ Werry well; then you must keep moving all night continually, whereby you avoids the hact; or else you goes to a twopenny-rope shop and gets a lie down. And your bundle you'd best leave at my house. Two- penny-rope society a'n't particular. I'm going oiF my beat; you walk home with me and leave your traps. TAILOR AND POET. 81 Everybody knows me — Costello, V 21, that's my num- ber." So on I went with the kind-hearted man, who preached solemnly to me all the way on the fifth com- mandment. But I heard very little of it ; for before I had proceeded a quarter of a mile, a deadly faintness and dizziness came over me, I staggered, and fell against the railings. " And have you been a drinking arter all?" " I never a drop in my life nothing but bread- and-water this fortnight." And it was true. I had been paying for my own food, and had stinted myself to such an extent, that between starvation, want of sleep, and over-exertion, I was worn to a shadow, and the last drop had filled the cup; the evening's scene and its consequences had been too much for me, and in the middle of an attempt to ex- plain matters to the policeman, I dropped on the pave- ment, bruising my face heavily. He picked me up, put me under one arm and my bundle under the other, and was proceeding on his march, when three men came rollicking up. ^' Hullo, Poleax—Costello— What's that? Work for us? A demp unpleasant body?" "Oh, Mr. Bromley, sir! Hope you're well, sir! Werry rum go this here, sir ! I finds this cove in the streets. He says his mother turned him out o' doors. He seems very fair spoken, and very bad in he's head, and very bad in he's chest, and very bad in he's legs, VOL. I. G 82 ALTON LOCKE, he does. And I can't come to no conclusions respecting my conduct in this here case, nohow !" " MemoriaHse the Health of Towns Commission," suggested one. '* Bleed him in the great toe," said the second. *' Put a blister on the back of his left eye-ball," said a. third. " Case of male asterisks," observed the first. *^ Ej. Aquae pumpis -purss quantum suff. Applicatur extero pro re nata. J. Bromley, M.D., and don't he wish he may get through !" " Tip us your daddle, my boy," said the second speaker. " I'll tell you what, Bromley, this fellow's very bad. He's got no more pulse than the Pimlico sewer. Run him into the next pot'us. Here — you lay hold of him, Bromley — that last round with the cabman nearly put my humerus out." The huge, burly, pea-jacketed medical student — for such I saw at once he was — laid hold of me on the right tenderly enough, and walked me off between him and the pohceman. I fell again into a faintness, from which I was awakened by being shoved through the folding-doors of a gin shop, into a glare of light and hubbub of black- guardism, and placed on a settle, while my conductor called out — " Pots round, Mary, and a go of brandy hot with, for the patient. Here, young un ; toss it off, it'll make your hair grow." TAILOR AND POET. 83 I feebly answered that I never had drunk anything stronger than water. " High time to begin, then ; no wonder you're so ill. Well, if you won't, I'll make you " And taking my head under his arm, he seized me by the nose, while another poured the liquor down my throat — and certainly it revived me at once. A drunken drab pulled another drunken drab off the settle to make room for the " poor young man;" and I sat there with a confused notion that something strange and dreadful had happened to me, while the party drained their respective quarts of porter, and talked over the last boat-race with the Leander. " Now then, gen'I'men,^' said the policeman, '^ if you think he's recovered, we'll take him home to his mother; she ought for to take him in, surely." " Yes, if she has as much heart in her as a dried walnut." But I resisted stoutly; though I longed to vindicate my mother's affection, yet I could not face her. I en- treated to be taken to the station-house; threatened, in my desperation, to break the bar glasses, which, like Doll Tearsheet's abuse, only elicited from the police- man a solemn " Very well ;" and, under the unwonted excitement of the brandy, struggled so fiercely, and talked so incoherently, that the medical students inter- fered. " We shall have this fellow inphrenitis, or laryngitis, or dothen-enteritis, or some other itis, before long, if he's aggravated." g2 84 ALTON LOCKE, " And whichever it is, it'll kill him. He has no more stamina left than a yard of pump water." *' I should consider him chargeable to the parish," suggested the bar-keeper." *' Exactually so, my Solomon of licensed victuallers. Get a workhouse order for him, Costello." *' And I should consider, also, sir," said the licensed victualler, with increased importance, '* having been a guardian myself, and knowing the hact, as the parish couldn't refuse, because they're in power to recover all hexpenses out of his mother." "To be sure; it's all the unnatural old witch's fault." " No, it is not," said I, faintly. " Wait till your opinion's asked, young un. Go kick up the authorities, policeman." " Now, I'll just tell you how that'll work, gemmen," answered the policeman, solemnly. " I goes to the overseer — werry good sort o' man — but he's in bed. I knocks for half an hour. He puts he's nightcap out o' Avindy, and sends me to the relieving officer. Werry good sort of man he too; but he's in bed. I knocks for another half hour. He puts he's night- cap out o' windy — sends me to the medical officer for a certificate. Medical officer's gone to a midwifery case. I hunts him for an hour or so. He's got hold of a babby with three heads, or summat else ; and two more women a-calling out for him like blazes. ' He'll come to-morrow morning.' Now, I just axes your opinion of that there most procrastinationest go." The big student, having cursed the parochial autho- TAILOR AND POET. $5 rities in general, offered to pay for my night's lodging at the public-house. The good man of the house de- murred at first, but relented on being reminded of the value of a medical student's custom ; whereon, without more ado, two of the rough diamonds took me between them, carried me up stairs, undressed me, and put me into bed, as tenderly as if they had been women. " He'll have the tantrums before morning, I'm afraid," said one. *' Very likely to turn to typhus,^' said the other. " Well, I suppose — it's a horrid bore, but What must be must ; man is but dust, If you can't get crumb, 70U must just eat crust. Send me up a go of hot with, and I'll sit up with him till he's asleep, dead, or better." " Well, then, I'll stay too; we may just as well make a night of it here as well as anywhere else." And he pulled a short black pipe out of his pocket, and sat down to meditate with his feet on the hobs of the empty grate; the other man went down for the liquor ; while I, between the brandy and exhaustion, fell fast asleep, and never stirred till 1 woke the next morning with a racking headache, and saw the big student standing by my bedside, having, as I afterwards heard, sat by me till four in the morning. " Hullo, young un, come to your senses? Headache, eh? Slightly comato-crapulose? We'll give you some soda and salvolatile, and I'll pay for your breakfast." And so he did, and when he was joined by his com- panions on their way to St. George's, they were very 86 ALTON LOCKE, anxious, having heard my story, to force a few shillings on me " for luck," which, I need not say, I peremp- torily refused, assuring them that I could and would get my own living, and never take a farthing from any man . *' That's a plucky dog, though he's a tailor,'^ I heard them say, as, after overwhelming them with thanks, and vowing, amid shouts of laughter, to repay them every farthing I had cost them, I took my way, sick and stunned, towards my dear old Sandy Mackaye's street. Rough diamonds indeed! I have never met you again, but I have not forgotten you. Your early life may be a coarse, too often a profligate one — but you know the people, and the people know you: and your tenderness and care, bestowed without hope of repay- ment, cheers daily many a poor soul in hospital wards and fever-cellars — to meet its reward some day at the people's hands. You belong to us at heart, as the Paris barricades can tell. Alas ! for the society which stifles in after-life too many of your better feelings, by making you mere flunkeys and parasites, dependent for your livelihood on the caprices and luxuries of the rich. I TAILOR AND POET. 87 CHAPTER VL THE DULWICH GALLERY. Sandy Mackaye received me in a characteristic way — growled at me for half an hour for quarrelling with my mother, and when I was at my wit's end, suddenly offered me a bed in his house and the use of his Httle sitting-room — and, bliss too great to hope ! of his books also; and when I talked of payment, told me to hold my tongue and mind my own business. So I settled myself at once ; and that very evening he installed him- self as my private tutor, took down a Latin book, and set me to work on it. '^ An' mind ye, laddie," said he, half in jest and half in earnest, " gin I find ye pla3dng truant, and reading a' sorts o' nonsense instead of minding the scholastic methods and proprieties, I'll just bring ye in a bill at the year's end o' twa guineas a week for lodgings and tuition, and tak the law o' ye; so mind and read what I tell ye. Do ye comprehend noo?" I did comprehend, and obeyed him, determining to repay him some day — and somehow — how I did not very clearly see. Thus I put myself more or less into the old man's power; foolishly enough the wise world will 88 . ALTON LOCKE, say. But I had no suspicion in my character; and I could not look at those keen grey eyes, when, after staring into vacancy during some long preachment, they suddenly flashed round at me, and through me, full of fun and quaint thought, and kindly earnestness, and fancy that man less honest than his face seemed to pro- claim him. By-the-by, I have as yet given no description of the old eccentric's abode — an unpardonable omission, I sup- pose, in these days of Dutch painting and Boz. But the omission was correct, both historically and artisti- cally, for I had as yet only gone to him for books, books, nothing but books; and I had been blind to everything in his shop but that fairy-land of shelves, filled, in my simple fancy, with inexhaustible treasures, wonder-working, omnipotent, as the magic seal of Solomon. It was not till I had been settled and at work for several nights in his sanctum, behind the shop, that I began to become conscious what a strange den that sanctum was. It was so dark, that without a gas-light no one but he could see to read there, except on very sunny days. Not only were the shelves which covered every inch of wall crammed with books and pamphlets, but the little window was blocked up with them, the floor was piled with bundles of them, in some places three fee; deep, apparently in the wildest confusion — though there was some mysterious order in them which he understood, and symbolised, I suppose, by the various strange and TAILOR AND POET. 89 ludicrous nick-names on their tickets — for lie never was at fault a moment if a customer asked for a book, though it were buried deep in the chaotic stratum. Out of this book alluvium a hole seemed to have been dug near the fireplace, just big enougli to hold his arm-chair and a table, book-strewn like everything else, and gar- nished with odds and ends of MSS., and a snuffer-tray containing scraps of half-smoked tobacco, " pipe- dottles," as he called them, which were carefully re- smoked over and over again, till nothing but ash was left. His whole culinary utensils — for he cooked as well as eat in this strange hole — were an old rusty kettle, which stood on one hob, and a blue plate which, when washed, stood on the other. A barrel of ti'ue Aberdeen meal peered out of a corner, half buried in books, and " a keg o' whusky, the gift o' freens," peeped in like case out of another. This was his only food. " It was a' poison," he used to say, " in London. Bread full o' alum and bones, and sic filth — meat over-driven till it was a' braxy — water sopped wi' dead men's juice. Nae thing was safe but gude Scots' parritch and Athol brose." He carried his water-horror so far as to walk some quarter of a mile every morning to fill his kettle at a favourite pump. " Was he a cannibal, to drink out o' that pump hard-by, right under the kirkyard?" But it was httle he either ate or drank — he seemed to live upon tobacco. From four in the morning till twelve at night, the pipe never left his lips, except when he went into the outer shop. " It promoted meditation, and drove awa' 90 ALTON LOCKE, the lusts o' the flesh. Ech ! it was worthy o' that auld tyrant Jamie, to write his counter-blast to the poor man's freen ! The hypocrite ! to gang preaching the virtues o' evil-savoured smoke * ad daeraones abigendos' — and then rail again tobacco, as if it was no as gude for the purpose as auld rags and horn shavings?" Sandy Mackaye had a great fancy for political carica- tures, rows of which, there being no room for them on the walls, hung on strings from the ceiling — like clothes hung out to dry — and among them dangled various books to which he had taken an antipathy, principally High Tory and Benthamite, crucified, impaled through their covers, and suspended in all sorts of torturing atti- tudes. Among them, right over the table, figured a copy of Icon Basilike, dressed up in a paper shirt, all drawn over with figures of flames and devils, and sur- mounted by a peaked paper cap, like a victim at an autO'da-fe. And in the midst of all this chaos grinned from the chimney-piece, among pipes and pens, pinches of salt and scraps of butter, a tali cast of Michael An- gelo's well known skinless model — his pristine white defaced by a cap of soot upon the top of his scalpless skull, and every muscle and tendon thrown into horrible relief by the dirt which had lodged among the cracks. There it stood, pointing with its ghastly arm towards the door, and holding on its wrist a label with the following inscription : Here stand I, the working man, Get more off me if you can. I questioned Mackaye one evening about those hanged TAILOR AXD POET. 91 and crucified books, and asked him if he ever sold any of thera. " Ou, ay," he said; " if folks are fools enough to ask for them, I'll just answer a fool according to his folly." " But," I said, " Mr. Mackaye, do you think it right to sell books of the very opinions of which you disapprove so much?" '* Hoot, laddie, it's just a spoiling o' the Egyptians; so mind yer book, and dinna tak in hand cases o' con- science for ither folk. Ye'll ha' wark eneugh wi' yer ain before ye're dune." And he folded round his knees his Joseph's coat, as he called it, an old dressing-gown with one plaid sleeve, and one blue one, red shawl skirts, and a black broad- cloth back, not to mention innumerable patches of every imaginable stuff and colour, filled his pipe, and buried his nose in " Harrington's Oceana." He read at least twelve hours every day of his life, and that exclusively old history and politics, though his favourite books were Thomas Carlyle's works. Two or three evenings in the week, when he had seen me safe settled at my studies, he used to disappear mysteriously for several hours, and it was some time before I found out, by a chance expression, that he was attending some meeting or committee of working men. I begged him to take me there with him. But I was stopped by a laconic answer. " When ye're ready." *' And when shall I be ready, Mr. Mackaye?" *' Read yer book till I tell ye." 92 ALTON LOCKE, And he twisted himself into his best coat, which had once been black, squeezed on his httle Scotch cap, and went out. y^ yfi T^t ^ T^ I now found myself, as the reader may suppose, in an element far more congenial to my literary tastes, and which compelled far less privation of sleep and food in order to find time and means for reading ; and my health began to mend from the very first day. But the thought of my mother haunted me; and Mac- kaye seemed in no hurry to let me escape from it, for he insisted on my writing to her in a penitent strain, informing her of my whereabouts, and offering to return home if she should wish it. With feelings strangely mingled between the desire of seeing her again and the dread of returning to the old drudgery of surveil- lance, I sent the letter, and waited a whole week with- out any answer. At last, one evening, when I returned from work, Sandy seemed in a state of unusual exhila- ration. He looked at me again and again, winking and chuckling to himself in a way which showed me that his good spirits had something to do with my con- cerns; but he did not open on the subject till I had settled to my evening's reading. Then, having brewed himself an unusually strong mug of whisky-toddy, and brought out with great ceremony a clean pipe, he commenced. " Alton, laddie, I've been fiechting PhiHstines for ye the day." " Ah ! have you heard from my mother?'^ TAILOR AND POET. 93 " I wadna say that exactly ; but there's been a gran baillie body wi' me that calls himsel your uncle, and a braw young callant, a bairn o' his, I'm thinking." *' Ah ! that's my cousin George; and tell me — do tell me, what you said to them." '* Ou — that'll be mair concern o' mine than o' yourn. But ye're no going back to your mither." My heart leapt up with — ^joy ; there is no denying it — and then I burst into tears. *^ And she won't see me? Has she really cast me off?" " Why, that'll be verra much as ye prosper, I'm thinking. Ye're an unaccreedited hero, the noo, as Thomas Carlyle has it. ' But gin ye do weel by yoursel," saith the Psalmist, * ye'U find a' men speak well o' ye ' — if ye gang their gate. But ye're to gang to see your uncle at his shop o' Monday next, at one o'clock. Now stint your greeting, and read awa'." On the next Monday I took a holiday, the first in which I had ever indulged myself ; and having spent a good hour in scrubbing away at my best shoes and Sunday suit, started, in fear and trembling, for my uncle's " establishment." I was agreeably surprised, on being shown into the little back office at the back of the shop, to meet with a tolerably gracious reception from the good-natured Mammonite. He did not shake hands with me, it is true; — was I not a poor relation? But he told me to sit down, commended me for the excellent character which 94 ALTON LOCKE, he had of me both from my master and Mackaye, and then entered on the subject of my literary tastes. He heard I was a precious clever fellow. No wonder, I came of a clever stock; his poor dear brother had plenty of brains for everything but business. *' And you see, my boy" (with a glance at the big ledgers and busy shop without), " I knew a thing or two in my time, or I should not have been here. But without capital, I think brains a curse. Still we must make the best of a bad matter; and if you are inclined to help to raise the family name — not that I think much of book writers myself — poor starving devils, half of them — but still people do talk about them — and a man might get a snug thing as newspaper editor, with interest; or clerk to something or other — always some new company in the wind now — and I should have no objection, if you seemed likely to do us credit, to speak a word for you. I've none of your mother's confounded puritanical notions, I can tell you ; and, what's more, I have, thank Heaven, as fine a city connexion as any man. But you must mind and make yourself a good accountant — learn double entry on the Italian method — that's a good practical study; and if that old Sawney is soft enough to teach you other things gratis, he may as well teach you that too. I'll bet he knows something about it — the old Scotch fox. There now — that'll do — there's five shillings for you — mind you don't lose them — and if I hear a good account of you, why, perhaps — but there's no use making promises." TAILOR AND POET. 95 At this moment a tall, handsome young man, whom I did not at first recognise as my cousin George, swung into the office, and shook me cordially by the hand. " Hullo, Alton, how are you? Why, I hear you're coming out as a regular genius — breaking out in a new place, upon my honour ! Have you done mth him, governor?" " Well, I think I have. I wish you'd have a talk with him, my boy. I'm sorry I can't see more of him, but I have to meet a party on business at the West-end at two, and Alderman Tumbril and family dine with us this even- ing, don't they ? I think our small table will be full." " Of course it will. Come along with me, and we'll have a chat in some quiet out-of-the-way place. This city is really so noisy that you can't hear your own ears, as our dean says in lecture." So he carried me off, down back streets and alleys, a little puzzled at the extreme cordiahty of his manner. Perhaps it sprung, as I learned afterward to suspect, from his consistent and perpetual habit of ingratiating himself with every one whom he approached. He never cut a chimney-sweep if he knew him. And he found it pay. The children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of Hght. Perhaps it sprung also, as I began to suspect in the first hundred yards of our walk, from the desire of show- ing off before me the university clothes, manners, and gossip, which he had just brought back with him from Cambridge. I had not seen: him more than three or four times in 96 ALTON LOCKE, my life before, and then he appeared to me merely a tall, handsome, conceited, slangy boy. But I now found him much improved — in all externals at least. He had made it his business, I knew, to perfect himself in all athletic pursuits which were open to a Londoner. As he told me that day — he found it pay, when one got among gentlemen. Thus he had gone up to Cambridge a capital skater, rower, pugilist — and billiard player. Whether or not that last accomplishment ought to be classed in the list of athletic sports, he contrived, by his own account, to keep it in that of paying ones. In both these branches he seemed to have had plenty of opportunities of distinguishing himself at college; and his tall, powerful figure showed the fruit of these exercises in a stately and confident, almost martial, carriage. Something jaunty, perhaps swaggering, re- mained still in his air and dress, which yet sat not ungracefully on him; but I could see that he had been mixing in society more polished and artificial than that to which we had either of us been accustomed, and in his smart Rochester, well- cut trousers, and delicate French boots, he excited, I will not deny it, my boyish admiration and envy. " Well," he said, as soon as we were out of the shop, " which way? Got a holiday? And how did you intend to spend it?" '*I wanted very much," I said, meekly, "to see the pictures at the National Gallery." "Oh! ah! pictures don't pay ; but, if you like — much better ones at Dulwich — that's the place to go to TAILOR AND rOET. 97 — you can see the others any day — and at Dulwich, you know, they've got — why let me see — " And he ran over half-a-dozen outlandish names of painters, which, as I have never again met with them, I am inclined on the whole to consider as somewhat extemporaneous creations. However, I agreed to go. "Ah! capital — very nice quiet walk, and conve- nient for me — very little out of my way home. I'll walk there with you." '^ One word for your neighbour and two for yourself," thought I; but on we walked. To see good pictures had been a long-cherished hope of mine. Everything beautiful in form or colour was beginning of late to have an intense fascination for me. I had, now that I was emancipated, gradually dared to feed my greedy eyes by passing stares into the print-shop windows, and had learnt from them a thousand new notions, new emotions, new longings after beauties of Nature, which seemed destined never to be satisfied. But pictures, above all, foreign ones, had been, in my mother's eyes, Anathema Maranatha, as vile Popish and Pagan vanities, the rags of the scarlet woman no less than the surplice itself — and now, when it came to the point, I hesitated at an act of such awful disobedience, even though unknown to her. My cousin, however, laughed down my scruples, told me I was out of leading-strings now, and, which was true enough, that it was "a * * * * deal better to amuse oneself in picture galleries without leave, than hve a life of sneaking and lying under petticoat government, as all home-birds were sure to do in the long run." And VOL. I. H 98 . so I went on, while my cousin kept up a running fire of chat the whole way, intermixing shrewd, bold observa- tions upon every woman who passed, with sneers at the fellows of the college to which we were going — their idleness and luxury — the large grammar-school which they were bound by their charter to keep up, and did not — and hints about private interest in high quarters, through which their wealthy uselessness had been politely overlooked, when all similar institutions in the kingdom were subject to the searching examination of a government commission. Then there were stories of boat-races and gay noblemen, breakfast parties, and lectures on Greek plays, flavoured with a spice of Cam- bridge slang, all equally new to me — glimpses into a world of wonders, which made me feel, as I shambled along at his side, trying to keep step with his strides, more weakly and awkward and ignorant than ever. We entered the gallery. I was in a fever of ex- pectation. The rich sombre light of the rooms, the rich heavy warmth of the stove-heated air, the brilliant and varied colouring and gilded frames which embroidered the walls, the hushed earnestness of a few artists who were copy- ing, and the few visitors who were lounging from picture to picture, struck me at once with myste- rious awe. But my attention was in a moment concen- trated on one figure opposite to me at the furthest end. I hurried straight towards it. When I had got half-way up the gallery I looked round for my cousin. He had turned aside to some picture of a Venus which caught TAILOR AND POET. 99 my eye also, but which, I remember now, only raised in me then a shudder and a blush, and a fancy that the clergymen must be really as bad as my mother had taught me to believe, if they could allow in their galle- ries pictures of undressed women. I have learnt to ^dew such things differently now, tbank God. I have learnt that to the pure all things are pure. I have learnt the meaning of that great saying — the foundation of all art, as well as all modesty, all love, which tells us how *' the man and his wife were both naked, and not ashamed." But this book is the history of my mental growth ; and my mistakes as well as my discoveries are steps in that development, and may bear a lesson in them. How I have rambled ! But as that day was the turn- ing point of my whole short life, I may be excused for lingering upon every feature of it. Timidly, but eagerly, I went up to the picture, and stood entranced before it. It was Guido's St. Sebas- tian. All the world knows the picture, and all the world knows, too, the defects of the master, though in this instance he seems to have risen above himself, by a sudden inspiration, into that true naturalness, which is the highest expression of the Spiritual. But the very defects of the picture, its exaggeration, its theatricality, were especially calculated to catch the eye of a boy awaking out of the narrow dulness of Puritanism. The breadth and vastness of light and shade upon those manly limbs, so grand and yet so delicate, standing out against the background of lurid night, the helplessness of the bound arms, the arrow quivering in the shrink- h2 100 ALTON LOCKE, ing side, the upturned brow, the eyes in whose dark depths enthusiastic faith seemed conquering agony and shame, the parted lips, which seemed to ask, Hke those martyrs in the Revelations, reproachful, half-resigned, " O Lord how long?" Gazing at that picture since, I have understood how the idolatry of painted saints could arise in the minds even of the most educated, who were not disciplined by that stern regard for fact which is— or ought to be — the strength of Englishmen. I have understood the heart of that Italian girl, whom some such picture of St. Sebastian, perhaps this very one, excited, as the Venus of Praxiteles the Grecian boy, to hopeless love, madness, and death. Then I had never heard of St. Sebastian. I did not dream of any con- nexion between that, or indeed any picture, and Christianity; and yet, as I stood before it, I seemed to be face to face with the ghosts of my old Puritan fore- fathers, to see the spirit which supported them on pillories and scaffolds — the spirit of that true St. Mar- garet, the Scottish maiden whom Claverhouse and his soldiers chained to a post on the sea-sands to die by inches in the rising tide, till the sound of her hymns was slowly drowned in the dash of the hungry leaping waves. My heart swelled within me, my eyes seemed bursting from my head with the intensity of my gaze, and great tears, I knew not why, rolled slowly down my face. A woman's voice close to me, gentle yet of deeper tone than most, woke me from my trance. " You seem to be deeply interested in that picture?" TAILOR AND POET. 101 I looked round, yet not at the speaker. My eyes, before they could meet hers, were caught by an appari- tion the most beautiful I had ever yet beheld. And what — what — have I seen equal to her since? Strange, that 1 should love to talk of her. Strange, that I fret at myself now because I cannot set dov/n on paper line by line, and hue by hue, that wonderful loveliness of which But no matter. Had I but such an ima- gination as Petrarch, or rather, perhaps, had I his de- liberate cold self-consciousness, what volumes of similes and conceits I might pour out, connecting that peerless face and figure with all lovely things which heaven and earth contain. As it is, because I cannot say all, I will say nothing, but repeat to the end again and again, Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beyond all statue, picture, or poet's dream. Seventeen — slight but rounded, a masque and features dehcate and regular, as if fresh from the chisel of Praxiteles — I must try to describe after all, you see — a skin of alabaster (privet-flowers, Horace and Ariosto would have said, more true to Nature), stained with the faintest flush ; auburn hair, with that peculiar crisped wave seen in the old Italian pictures, and the warm, dark hazel eyes wliich so often accompany it ; lips like a thread of vermilion, some- what too thin, perhaps — but I thought little of that then; with such perfect finish and grace in every Hne and hue of her features and her dress, down to the little fingers and nails which showed through her thin gloves, that she seemed to my fancy fresh from the innermost chamber of some enchanted palace, " where 102 ALTON LOCKE, no air of heaven could visit her cheek too roughly." I dropped my eyes, quite dazzled. The question was repeated by a lady who stood with her, whose face I remarked then — as I did to the last, alas! — too little; dazzled at the first by outward beauty, perhaps because so utterly unaccustomed to it. ^' It is indeed a wonderful picture," I said, timidly. " May I ask what is the subject of it ?" ^* Oh! don't you know?" said the young beauty, with a smile that thrilled through me. "It is St. Sebastian." " I — I am very much ashamed," I answered, colour- ing up, " but I do not know who St. Sebastian was. Was he a Popish saint?" A tall, stately old man, who stood with the two ladies, laughed kindly. " No, Jiot till they made him one against his will; and at the same time, by putting him into the mill which grinds old folks young again, converted him from a grizzled old Roman tribune into the young Apollo of Popery." " You will puzzle your hearer, my dear uncle," said the same deep- toned woman's voice which had first spoken to me. " As you volunteered the Saint's name, Lillian, you shall also tell his history." Simply and shortly, with just feeling enough to send through me a fresh thrill of delighted interest, without trenching the least on the most stately reserve she told me the well-known history of the saint's martyrdom. If I seem minute in my description, let those who TAILOR AND POET. 103 read my story remember that such courteous dignity, however natural, I am bound to believe, it is to them, was to me an utterly new excellence in human nature. All my mother's Spartan nobleness of manner seemed unexpectedly combined with all my little sister's careless ease. " What a beautiful poem the story would make!" said I, as soon as I recovered my thoughts. " Well spoken, young man," answered the old gen- tleman. " Let us hope that your seeing a subject for a good poem will be the first step towards your "writing one." As he spoke, he bent on me two clear grey eyes, full of kindliness, mingled with practised discernment. I saw that he was evidently a clergyman; but what his tight silk stockings and peculiar hat denoted I did not know. There was about him the air of a man accus- tomed equally to thought, to men, and to power. And I remarked somewhat mahciously, that my cousin, who had strutted up towards us on seeing me talking to two ladies, the instant he causfht sio^ht of those black silk stockings and that strange hat, fell suddenly in counte- nance, and sidling off somewhat meekly into the back- ground, became absorbed in the examination of a Holy Family. I answered something humbly, I forget what, which led to a conversation. They questioned me as to my name, my mother, my business, my studies; while I revelled in the delight of stolen glances at my new- found Venus Victrix, who was as forward as any of 104 ALTON LOCKE, them in her questions and her interest. Perhaps she enjoyed, at least she could not help seeing, the admira- tion for herself which I took no pains to conceal. At last the old man cut the conversation short by a quiet " Good morning, sir," which astonished me. I had never heard words whose tone was so courteous and yet so chillingly peremptory. As they turned away, he repeated to himself once or twice, as if to fix them in his mind, my name and my master's, and awoke in me, perhaps too thoughtlessly, a tumult of vague hopes. Once and again the beauty and her companion looked back towards me, and seemed talking of me, and my face was burning scarlet, when my cousin swung up in his hard, off-hand way. '* By Jove, Alton, my boy ! you're a knowing fellow. I congratulate you ! At your years, indeed ! to rise a dean and two beauties at the first throw, and hook them fast!" " A dean !" I said, in some trepidation. ^ " Ay, a live dean — didn't you see the cloven fooj^^ sticking out from under his shoe-buckle? What Hews for your mother ! What will the ghosts of your grand- fathers to the seventh generation say to this, Alton? Colloguing in Pagan picture-galleries with shovel- hatted Philistines ! And that's not the worst, Alton," he ran on. " Those daughters of Moab — those daughters of Moab " " Hold your tongue," I said, almost crying with vexation. " Look there, if you want to save your good-temper. TAILOR AND POET. 105 There, she is looking back again — not at poor me, though. What a lovely girl she is ! — and a real lady — Vair noble — the rael genuine grit, as Sam Slick says, and no mistake. By Jove, what a face ! what hands ! what feet ! what a figure — in spite of crinolines and all abominations ! And didn't she know it? And didn't she know that you knew it too?" And he ran on, descanting coarsely on beauties which I dared not even have profaned by naming, in a way that made me, I knew not why, mad with jealousy and indignation. She seemed mine alone in all the world. What right had any other human being, above all, he, to dare to mention her ? I turned again to my St. Sebastian. That movement only brought on me a fresh volley of banter. " Oh, that's the dodge, is it, to catch intellectual fine ladies? — to fall into an extatic attitude before a picture — But then we must have Alton's genius, you know, to find out which the fine pictures are. I must read up that subject, by-the-by. It might be a paying one among the dons. For the present, here goes in for an attitude. Will this do, Alton?" And he arranged him- self admiringly before the picture in an attitude so ab- surd and yet so graceful, that 1 did not know wdiether to laugh at him or hate him. '^ At all events," he added, dryly, " it will be as good as playing the evangelical at Carus'*s tea-parties, or taking the sacrament regularly for fear one's testimo- nials should be refused." And then he looked at me, and through me, in his intense, confident way, to see that his hasty w^ords had not injured him with me. He 106 ALTON LOCKE, used to meet one's eye as boldly as any man I ever saw ; but it was not the simple gaze of honesty and innocence, but an imperious, searching look, as if defying scrutiny. His was a true mesmeric eye, if ever there was one. No wonder it worked the miracles it did. " Come along," he said, suddenly seizing my arm, " Don't you see they're leaving? Out of the gallery after them, and get a good look at the carriage and the arms upon it. I saw one standing there as we came in. It may pay us — you, that is — to know it again." We went out, I holding him back, I knew not why, and arrived at the outer gate just in time to see them enter the carriage and drive off. I gazed to the last, but did not stir. " Good boy," he said; " knowing still. If you had bowed, or showed the least sign of recognition, you would have broken the spell." But I hardly heard what he said, and stood gazing stupidly after the carriage as it disappeared. I did not know then what had happened to me. I know now, alas ! too well. TAILOR AND POET. 107 CHAPTER Vir. FIKST LOVE. Truly I said, I did not know what had happened to me. I did not attempt to analyse the intense, over- po-v^ering instinct which from that moment made the lovely vision I had seen the lodestar of all my thoughts. Even now, I can see nothing in those feelings of mine but simple admiration — idolatry if you will — of physical beauty. Doubtless there was more — doubtless — I had seen pretty faces before, and knew that they were pretty, but they had passed from my retina, hke the prints of beauties which I saw in the shop windows, without exciting a thought — even a conscious emotion of complacency. But this face did not pass away. Day and night I saw it, just as I had seen it in the gallery. The same playful smile — the same glance alternately turned to me, and the glowing picture above her head — and that was all I saw or felt. No child ever nestled upon its mother's shoulder with feeUngs more celestially pure, than those with which I counted over day and night each separate lineament of that ex- ceeding lovehness. Romantic ? extravagant ? Yes ; if the world be right in calling a passion romantic just in 108 ALTON LOCKE. proportion as it is not merely hopeless, but pure and unselfish, drawing its delicious power from no hope or faintest desire of enjoyment, but merely from simple delight in its object — then my passion was most roman- tic. I never thought of disparity in rank. Why should I? That could not blind the eyes of my imagi- nation. She was beautiful, and that was all, and all in all, to me; and had our stations been exchanged, or more than exchanged; had I been King Cophetua, and she the beggar-maid, I should have gloried in her just as much. Beloved sleepless hours, which I spent in picturing that scene to myself, with all the brilliance of fresh recol- lection I Beloved hours ! how soon you passed away ! Soon — soon my imagination began to fade; the traces of her features on my mind's eye became confused and dim ; and then came over me the fierce desire to see her again, that I might renew the freshness of that charm- ing image. Thereon grew up an agony of longing — an agony of weeks, and months, and years. Where could I find that face again? was my ruling thought from morning until eve. I knew that it was hopeless to look for her at the gallery where I had first seen her. My only hope was, that at some place of public resort at the West-end I might catch, if but for a moment, an in- spiring glance of that radiant countenance. I lingered round the Burton Arch and Hyde Park Gate — but in vain. I peered into every carriage, every bonnet that passed me in the thoroughfares — in vain. I stood patiently at the doors of exhibitions, and concerts, TAILOR AND POET. 109 and playhouses, to be shoved back by policemen, and insulted by footmen — but in vain. Tlien I tried the fashionable churches, one by one ; and sat in the free seats, to listen to prayers and sermons, not a word of which, alas ! I cared to understand, with my eyes searching carefully every pew and gallery, face by face ; always fancying, in self-torturing waywardness, that she might be just in the part of the gallery which I could not see. Oh ! miserable days of hope deferred, making the heart sick ! Miserable gnawing of disappointment with which I returned at nightfall, to force myself down to my books ! Equally miserable rack of hope on which my nerves were stretched every morning when I rose, counting the hours till my day's work should be over, and my mad search begin again ! At last " my torment did by length of time become my element." I returned steadily as ever to the studies which I had at first neglected, much to Mackaye's wonder and disgust; and the vain hunt after that face became a part of my daily task, to be got through ^ath the same dull, sullen effort, with which all I did was now transacted. Mackaye, I suppose, at first, attributed my absences, and idleness to my having got into bad company. But it was some weeks before he gently enough told me his suspicions, and they were answered by a burst of tears, and a passionate denial, which set them at rest for ever. But I had not courage to tell him what was the matter with me. A sacred modesty, as well as a sense of the impossibiHty of explaining my emotions, 110 ALTON LOCKE, held me back. I had a half-dread, too, to confess the whole truth, of his ridiculing a fancy, to say the least, so utterly impracticable ; and my only confidant was a pic- ture in the National Gallery, in one of the faces of which I had discovered some likeness to my Venus; and there I used to go and stand at spare half hours, and feel the happier for staring and staring, and whispering to the dead canvas the extravagances of my idolatry. But soon the bitter draught of disappointment began to breed harsher thoughts in me. Those fine gentlemen who rode past me in the park, who rolled by in car- riages, sitting face to face with ladies, as richly dressed, if not as beautiful, as she was — they could see her when they liked — why not I? What right had their eyes to a feast denied to mine? They, too, who did not appreciate, adore that beauty as I did — for who could worship her like me? At least they had not suffered for her as I had done ; they had not stood in rain and frost, fatigue and blank despair — watching — watching — month after month ; and I was making coats for them ! The very garment I was stitching at, might, in a day's time, be in her presence — touching her dress; and its wearer bowing, and smiling, and whispering — he had not bought that bliss by watching in the rain. It made me mad to think of it. I will say no more about it. That is a period of my life on which I cannot even now look back without a shudder. At last, after perhaps a year or more, I summoned up TAILOR AND POET. Ill courage to tell my story to Sandy Mackaye, and burst out with complaints more pardonable, perhaps, than rea- sonable. " Why have I not as good a right to speak to her, to move in the same society in which she moves, as any of the fops of the day? Is it because these aristocrats are more intellectual than I? I should not fear to measure brains against most of them now ; and give me the op- portunities which they have, and I would die if I did not outstrip them. Why have I not those opportuni- ties ? Is that fault of others to be visited on me ? Is it because they are more refined than I ? What right have they, if this said refinement be so necessary a qualifica- tion, a difference so deep — that without it, there is to be an everlasting gulf between man and man — what right have they to refuse to let me share in it, to give me the opportunity of acquiring it ?" " Wad ye ha' them set up a dancing academy for working men, wi' "manners tocht here to the lower classes?" They ^11 no break up their ain monopoly; trust them for it ! Na: if ye want to get amang them, I'll tell ye the way o't. Write a book o' poems, and ca' it " A Voice fra' the Goose, by a Working Tailor" — and then — why, after a dizen years or so of starving and scribbling for your bread, ye'U ha' a chance o' finding yoursel a lion, and a flunkey, and a licker o' trenchers — ane that jokes for his dinner, and sells his soul for a fine leddy's smile — till ye presume to think they're in earnest, and fancy yoursel a man o' the same blude as they, and fa' in love wi' one of them — and then they'll 112 ALTON LOCKE, teach you your level, and send ye off to gauge whusky like Burns, or leave ye to die in a ditch as they did wi' puir Thorn." *^Let me die, anywhere or any how, if I can but be near her — see her '' * ♦ Married to anither body ? — and nursing anither body's bairns? Ah boy, boy — do ye think that was what ye were made for; to please yersel wi' a woman's smiles, or e'en a woman's kisses — or to please yersel at all? How do ye expect ever to be happy, or strong, or a man at a', as long as ye go on looking to enjoy yersel — yersel? I ha' tried it. Mony was the year I looked for nought but my ain pleasure, and got it too, when it was a' Sandy Mackaye, bonny Sandy Mackaye, There he sits singing the lang simmer's day ; Lassies gae to him, And kiss him, and woo him — Na bird is sa merry as Sandy Mackaye. " • An' muckle good cam' o't. Ye may fancy I'm talking like a sour, disappointed auld carle. But I tell ye nay. I've got that's worth living for, though I am down- hearted at times, and fancy a's wrong, and there's na hope for us on earth, we be a' sic liars — a' liars, I think; 'a universal liars-rock substrawtum,' as Mr. Carlyle says. I'm a great liar often mysel, specially when I'm praying. Do ye think I'd live on here in this meeserable crankit auld bane-barrel of a body, if it w^as not for The Cause, and for the puir young fellows that come in to me whiles to get some book- learning about the gran' auld Roman times, when folks didna care for themselves, but for the nation, and a man TAILOR AND POET. 113 counted wife and bairns and money as dross and dung, in comparison with the great Roman city, that was the mither of them a', and wad last on, free and glorious, after they and their bairns were a' dead thegither? Hoot man ! If I had na The Cause to care for and to work for, whether I ever see it triumphant on earth or no — I'd just tak the cauld- water-cure off Waterloo- bridge, and mak' mysel a case for the Humane Society." *' And what is The Cause?" I asked. " Wud I tell ye? We want no ready-made freens o' The Cause. I dinna hauld wi' thae French indoctrinating pedants, that took to stick free opinions into a man as ye'd stick pins into a pincushion, to fa' out again the first shake. Na — The Cause must find a man, and tak hauld o' him, willy-nilly, and grow up in him like an inspiration, till he can see nocht but in the Hght o't. Puir bairn!" he went on, looking with a half-sad, half- comic face at me — " puir bairn — like a young bear, wi' a' your sorrows before ye ! This time seven years ye'U ha' no need to come speering and questioning what The Cause is, and the Gran Cause, and the Only Cause worth working for on the earth o' God. And noo gang your gate, and mak' fine feathers for foul birds. I'm gaun whar ye'll be ganging too, before long." As I went sadly out of the shop, he called me back. " Stay a wee, bairn; there's the Roman History for ye. There ye'll read what The Cause is, and how they that seek their ain are no worthy thereof." I took the book, and found in the legends of Brutus, and Codes, and Scaevola, and the retreat to the Mons VOL. I. I 114 ALTON LOCKE, Sacer, and the Gladiator's war, what The Cause was, and forgot awhile in those tales of antique heroism and patriotic self-sacrifice my own selfish longings and sor- rows. But, after all, the very advice which was meant to cure me of those selfish longings, only tended, by di- verting me from my living outward idol, to turn my thoughts more than ever inward, and tempt them to feed on their own substance. I passed whole days on the work-room floor in brooding silence — my mind peopled with an incoherent rabble of phantasms patched up from every object of which I had ever read. I could not control my day-dreams; they swept me away with them over sea and land, and into the bowels of the earth. My soul escaped on every side from my civilised dungeon of brick and mortar, into the great free world from which my body was debarred. Now I was the corsair in the pride of freedom on the dark blue sea. Now I wandered in fairy caverns among the bones of primaeval monsters. I fought at the side of Leonidas, and the Maccabee who stabbed the Sultan's elephant, and saw him crushed beneath its falling bulk. Now I was a hunter in tropic forests — I heard the parrots scream, and saw the humming-birds flit on from gor- geous flower to flower. Gradually I took a voluntary pleasure in calling up these images, and working out their details into words with all the accuracy and care for which my small knowledge gave me materials. TAILOR AND POET. 115 And as the self-induls^ent habit rrrew on me, I befjan to live two lives — one mechanical and outward, one in- ward and imaginative. The thread passed through my fingers without my knowing it ; I did my work as a machine might do it. The dingy stifling room, the wan faces of my companions, the scanty meals which I snatched, I saw dimly, as in a dream. The tropics, and Greece, the imaginary battles which I fought, the phantoms into whose mouths I put my thoughts, were real and true to me. They met me when I woke — they floated along beside me as I walked to work — they acted their fantastic dramas before me through the sleepless hours of night. Gradually certain faces among them became famihar — certain personages grew into coherence, as embodiments of those few types of charac- ter which had struck me the most, and played an analo- gous part in every fresh fantasia. Sandy Mackaye's face figured incongruously enough as Leonidas, Brutus, a Pilgrim Father; and gradually, in spite of myself, and the fear with which I looked on the recurrence of that dream, Lillian*s figure re-entered my fairy-land. I saved her from a hundred dangers ; I followed her through dragon-guarded caverns and the corridors of magic castles ; I walked by her side through the forests of the Amazon And now I began to crave for some means of ex- pressing these fancies to myself. Wliile they were mere thoughts, parts of me, they were unsatisfactory, how- ever delicious. I longed to put them outside me, that I might look at them and talk to them as permanent l2 116 ALTON LOCKE, independent things. First I tried to sketch them on the whitewashed walls of my garret, on scraps of paper begged from Mackaye, or picked up in the work-room. But from my ignorance of any rules of drawing, they were utterly devoid of beauty, and only excited my disgust. Besides, I had thoughts as well as objects to express — thoughts strange, sad, wild, about my own feelings, my own destiny, and drawing could not speak them for me. Then I turned instinctively to poetry : with its rules I was getting rapidly conversant. The mere desire of imitation urged me on, and when I tried, the grace of rhyme and metre covered a thousand defects. I tell my story, not as I saw it then, but as I see it now. A long and lonely voyage, with its monotonous days and sleep- less nights — its sickness and heart-loneliness, has given me opportunities for analysing my past history which were impossible then, amid the ceaseless in-rush of new images, the ceaseless ferment of their re-combination, in which my life was passed from sixteen to twenty- five. The poet, I suppose, must be a seer as long as he is a worker, and a seer only. He has no time to philo- sophise — to " think about thinking," as Goethe, I have somewhere read, says that he never could do. It is too often only in sickness and prostration and sheer de- spair, that the fierce voracity and swift digestion of his soul can cease, and give him time to know himself and God's dealings with him ; and for that reason it is good for him, too, to have been afflicted. I do not write all this to boast of it ; I am ready to TAILOR AND POET. 117 bear sneers at my romance — my day-dreams — my un- practical habits of mind, for I know that I deserve them. But such was the appointed growth of my un- educated mind; no more unheahhy a growth, if I am to believe books, than that of many a carefully trained one. High-bom geniuses, they tell me, have their idle visions as well as we working men; and Oxford has seen of late years as wild Icarias conceived as ever were fathered by a red Republic. For, indeed, we have the same flesh and blood, the same God to teach us, the same devil to mislead us, whether we choose to believe it or not. But there were excuses for me. We Lon- doners are not accustomed from our youth to the poems of a great democratic genius, as the Scotchmen are to their glorious Burns. We have no chance of such an early acquaintance with poetic art as that which enabled John Bethune, one of the great unrepresented — the starving Scotch day-labourer, breaking stones upon the parish roads, to write at the age of seventeen such words as these : Hail, hallow'd evening! sacred hour to me! Thy clouds of grey, thy vocal melody, Thy dreamy silence oft to me have brought A sweet exchange from toil to peaceful thought. Ye purple heavens ! how often has my eye, Wearied with its long gaze on drudgery, Look'd up and found refreshment in the hues That gild thy vest with colouring profuse ! 0, evening grey ! how oft have I admired Thy airy tapestry, whose radiance fired The glowing minstrels of the olden time. Until their very souls flow'd forth in rhyme. And I have listened, till my spirit grew Familiar with their deathless strains, and drew 118 ALTON LOCKE, From the same source some portion of the glow Which fill'd their spirits, when from earth below They scann'd thy golden imagery. And I Have consecrated thee, bright evening sky My fount of inspiration : and I fling My spirit on thy clouds — an offering To the great Deity of dying day, Who hath transfused o'er thee his purple ray. ***** After all, our dreams do little harm to the rich. Those who consider Chartism as synonymous with devil-worship, should bless and encourage them, for the very reason for which we working men ought to dread them ; for, quickened into prurient activity by the low, novel-mongering press, they help to enervate and besot all but the noblest minds among us. Here and there a Thomas Cooper, sitting in Stafford gaol, after a youth spent in cobbling shoes, vents his treasures of classic and historic learning in a " Purgatory of Suicides;" or a Prince becomes the poet of the poor, no less for having fed his boyish fancy with " The Arabian Nights" and " The Pilgrim's Progress." But, with the most of us, sedentary and monotonous occupations, as has long been known, create of themselves a morbidly-meditative and fantastic turn of mind. And what else, in Heaven's name, ye fine gentlemen — what else can a working man do with his imagination, but dream? What else will you let him do with it, oh ye education-pedants, who fancy that you can teach the masses as you would drill soldiers, every soul alike, though you will not bestir yourselves to do even that? Are there no dif- ferences of rank — God's rank, not man's — among us ? You have discovered, since your school-boy days, the TAILOK Am) POET. 11^ fallacy of the old nomenclature which civilly classed us all together as "the snobs/' '-'the blackguards;" which even — so strong is habit — tempted Burke him- self to talk of us as " the swinish multitude." You are finding yourselves wrong there. A few more years* experience, not in mis-educating the poor, but in watch- ing the poor really educate themselves, may teach you that we are not all by nature dolts and idiots; that there are differences of brain among us, just as great as there is between you ; that there are those among us whose education ought not to end, and will not end, with the putting off of the parish cap and breeches; whom it is cruelty, as well as folly, to toss back into the hell of mere manual drudgery, as soon as you have — if, indeed, you have been even so bounti- ful as that — excited in them a new thirst of the intellect and imagination. If you provide that craving with no wholesome food, you at least have no right to blame it if it shall gorge itself with poison. Dare for once to do a strange thing, and let yourself be laughed at; go to a workman's meeting— a Chartist meeting, if you will; and look honestly at the faces and brows of those so-called incendiaries, whom your venal caricaturists have taught you to believe a mixture of cur-dog and baboon — we, for our part, shall not be ashamed to show foreheads against your laughing House of Commons — and then say, what employment can those men find in the soulless routine of mechanical labour for the mass of brain which they almost universally possess ? They must either dream or agitate ; perhaps 120 ALTON LOCKE, they are now learning how to do both to some pur- pose. But I have found, by sad experience, that there is little use in declamation. I had much better simply tell my story, and leave my readers to judge of the facts, if, indeed, they will be so far courteous as to believe them. TAILOR AND POET. 121 CHAPTER VIII. LIGHT IN A DARK PLACE. So I made my first attempt at poetry — need I say that my subject was the beautiful Lillian? And need I say, too, that I was as utterly disgusted at my attempt to express her in words, as I had been at my trial with the pencil? It chanced also, that after hammering out half-a-dozen verses, I met with Mr. Tennyson's poems ; and the unequalled sketches of women that I found there, while they had, with the rest of the book, a new and abiding influence on my mind, were quite enough to show me my own fatal incompetency in that line. I threw my verses away, never to resume them. Per- haps I proved thereby the depth of my affection. Our mightiest feelings are always those which remain most unspoken. The most intense lovers and the greatest poets have generally, I think, written very little per- sonal love-poetry, while they have shown in fictitious characters a knowledge of the passion too painfully intimate to be spoken of in the first person. But to escape from my own thoughts, I could not help writing something; and to escape from my own private sorrows, writing on some matter with which I 122 ALTON LOCKE, had no personal concern. And so, after mucli casting about for subjects, Childe Harold and tbe old mis- sionary records contrived to celebrate a spiritual wed- ding in my brain, of wliich anomalous marriage came a proportionately anomalous offspring. My hero was not to be a pirate, but a pious sea- rover, who, with a crew of saints, or at least uncommonly fine fellows, who could be very manly and jolly, and yet all be good Christians, of a somewhat vague and latitudinarian cast of doctrine (for my own was becom- ing rapidly so), set forth under the red-cross flag to colonise and convert one of my old paradises, a South Sea Island. I forget most of the lines — they were probably great trash, but I hugged them to my bosom as a young mother does her first child. 'Tvras sunset in the lone Pacific world, The rich gleams fading in the western sky; Within the still Lagoon the sails were furled, The red-cross flag alone was flaunting high. Before them was the low and palm-fringed shore, Behind, the outer ocean's baflled roar. After which valiant plunge in medias res, came a great lump of description, after the manner of youths — of the island, and the white houses, and the banana groves, and above all, the single volcano towering over the whole, which Shaking a sinful isle with thundering shocks, Reproved the worshippers of stones and stocks. Then how a line of foam appears on the Lagoon, which is supposed at first to be a shoal of fish, but TAILOR AND POET. 123 turns out to be a troop of naked island beauties, swimming out to the ship. The decent missionaries were certainly guiltless of putting that into my head, whether they ever saw it or not — a great many things happening in the South Seas of which they find it con- venient to say nothing. I think I picked it up from Wallis, or Cook, or some other plain-spoken voyager. The crew gaze in pardonable admiration, but the hero, in a long speech, reproves them for their light- mindedness, reminds them of their sacred mission, and informs them that. The soldiers of the cross should turn their eyes From camal lusts and heathen vanities ; beyond which indisputable assertion I never got; for this being about the fiftieth stanza, I stopped to take breath a little ; and reading and re-reading, patching and touching continually, grew so accustomed to my bant- ling's face, that, like a mother, I could not tell whether it was handsome or hideous, sense or nonsense. I have since found out that the true plan, for myself at least, is to ^vrite off as much as possible at a time, and then lay it by and forget it for weeks — if I can, for months. After that, on returning to it, the miud regards it as something altogether strange and new, and can, or rather ought to, judge of it as it would of the work of another pen. But really, between conceit and disgust, fancying myself one day a great new poet, and the next a mere twaddler, I got so puzzled and anxious, that I deter- 124 ALTON LOCKE, mined to pluck up courage, go to Mackaye, and ask him to solve the problem for me. '* Hech, sirs, poetry ! I've been expecting it. I sup- pose it's the appointed gate o' a workman's intellectual life — that same lust o' versification. Aweel, aweel — let's hear." Blushing and trembling, I read my verses aloud in as resonant and magniloquent a voice as I could command. I thought Mackaye's upper lip would never stop length- ening, or his lower lip protruding. He chuckled in- tensely at the unfortunate rhyme between " shocks" and " stocks." Indeed, it kept him in chuckling matter for a whole month afterwards ; but when I had got to the shoal of naked girls, he could bear no more, and burst out — ** What the deevil ! is there no harlotry and idolatry here in England, that ye maun gang speering after it in the Cannibal Islands? Are ye gaun to be like they puir aristocrat bodies, that wad suner hear an Italian dog howl, than an English nightingale sing, and winna harken to Mr, John Thomas till he calls himself Giovanni Thomasino; or do ye tak yoursel for a sing- ing-bird, to go all your days tweedledumdeeing out into the lift, just for the lust o' hearing your ain clan clatter ? Will ye be a man or a lintie ? Coral Islands? Pacific? What do ye ken about Pacifies ? Are ye a cockney or a Cannibal Islander? Dinna stand there, ye gowk, as fusionless as a docken, but tell me that. Where do ye live?" TAILOR AND POET. 125 *' What do you mean, Mr. Mackaye !" asked I, witli a doleful and disappointed visage. *' Mean — why, if God had meant ye to write about Pacifies, He'd ha put ye there — and because He means ye to write aboot London town, He's put ye there — and gien ye an unco sharp taste o' the ways o't; and I'll ge ye anither. Come along wi' me." And he seized me by the arm, and hardly giving me time to put on my hat, marched me out into the streets, and away through Clare Market to St. Giles's. It was a foul, chilly, foggy Saturday night. From the butchers' and greengrocers' shops the gas-lights flared and flickered, wild and ghastly, over haggard groups of slip-shod dirty women, bargaining for scraps of stale meat and frostbitten veo^etables, wrano^lino: about short O ' CD weight and bad quality. Fish-stalls and fruit-stalls lined the edge of the greasy pavement, sending up odours as foul as the language of sellers and buyers. Blood and sewer-water crawled from under doors and out of spouts, and reeked down the gutters among ofial, animal and vegetable, in every stage of putrefaction. Foul vapours rose from cowsheds and slaughter-houses, and the doorways of undrained alleys, where the inhabitants carried the filth out on their shoes from the back yard into the court, and from the court up into the main street; while above, hanging like cliffs over the streets — those narrow, brawling torrents of filth, and poverty, and sin — the houses with their teeming load of Hfe were piled up into the dingy choking night. A ghastly, deafening, sickening sight it was. Go, scented 126 ALTON LOCKE, Belgravian ! and see what London is ! and then go to the library which God has given thee — one often fears in vain — and see what science says this London might be! ^' Ay," he muttered to himself, as he strode along, " sing awa ; get yoursel wi' child wi' pretty fancies and gran' words, like the rest of the poets, and gang to hell for it." "To hell, Mr. Mackaye?" '^Ay, to a verra real hell, Alton Locke, laddie — a warse ane than ony fiends' kitchen, or subterranean Smithfield that ye'li hear o' in the pulpits — the hell on earth o' being a flunkey, and a humbug, and a use- less peacock, wasting God's gifts on your ain lusts and pleasures — and kenning it — and not being able to get oot o'it, for the chains o' vanity and self-indulgence. I've warned ye. Now look there " He stopped suddenly before the entrance of a mise- rable alley — "Look! there's not a soul down that yard but's either beggar, drunkard, thief, or warse. Write aboot that I Say how ye saw the mouth o' hell, and the twa pillars thereof at the entry — the pawnbroker's shop o' one side and the gin palace at the other — twa monstrous deevils, eating up men, and women, and bairns, body and soul. Look at the jaws o' the monsters, how they open and open, and swallow in anither victim and anither. Write aboot that." " What jaws, Mr. Mackaye !" " They faulding-doors o' the gin shop, goose. Are na TAILOR AND POET. 127 they a mair damnable man-devouring idol than ony red- hot statue o' Moloch, or wicker Gogmagog, wherein thae auld Britons burnt their prisoners? Look at thae bare- footed, bare-backed hizzies, with their arms roun' the men's necks, and their mouths full o' vitriol and beastly words! Look at that Irishwoman pouring the gin down the babbie's throat ! Look at that raff o' a boy gaun out o' the pawnshop, where he's been pledging the handkerchief he stole the morning, into the gin shop, to buy beer poisoned wi' grains o' paradise, and cocculus indicus, and saut, and a' damnable, maddening, thirst-breeding, lust-breeding drugs ! Look at that girl that went in wi' a shawl on her back and cam' out wi'out ane! Drunkards frae the breast! — harlots frae the cradle ! — damned before they're born ! John Calvin had an inkling o' the truth there, I'm a' most driven to think, wi' his reprobation deevil's doctrines !" " Well — but — Mr. Mackaye, I know nothing about these poor creatures." " Then ye ought. "What do ye ken aboot the Pacific? Which is maist to your business ? — that bare-backed hizzies that play the harlot o' the other side o^ the warld, or these — these thousands o' bare- backed hizzies that play the harlot o' your ain side — made out o' your ain flesh and blude ? You a poet ! True poetry, like true charity, my laddie, begins at hame. If ye'll be a poet at a', ye maun be a cockney poet; and while the cockneys be what they be, ye maun write, like Jeremiah of old, o' lamentation and mourning and woe, for the sins o' your people. Gin 128 ALTON LOCKE, ye want to learn the spirit o' a people's poet, down wi* your Bible and read thae auld Hebrew prophets ; gin ye wad learn the style, read your Burns frae morning till night; and gin ye'd learn the matter, just gang after your nose, and keep your eyes open, and ye'll no miss it." "But all this is so — so unpoetical." " Hech! Is there no the heeven above them there, and the hell beneath them? and God frowning, and the deevil grinning? No poetry there! Is no the verra idea of the classic tragedy defined to be, man conquered by circumstance? Canna ye see it there? And the verra idea of the modern tragedy, man conquering circum- stance? — and I'll show ye that, too — in mony a garret where no eye but the gude God's enters, to see the patience, and the fortitude, and the self-sacrifice, and the luve stronger than death, that's shining in thae dark places o' the earth. Come wi' me, and see." We went on through a back street or two, and then into a huge, miserable house, which, a hundred years ago, perhaps, had witnessed the luxury, and rung to the laughter of some one great fashionable family, alone there in their glory. Now every room of it held its family, or its group of families — a phalanstery of all the fiends; — its grand staircase, with the carved ballustrades rotting and crumbling away piecemeal, converted into a common sewer for all its inmates. Up stair after stair we went, while wails of children, and curses of men, steamed out upon the hot stifling rush of air from every doorway, till, at the topmost story, we knocked at a TAILOR AND POET. 129 garret door. We entered. Bare it was of furniture, comfortless, and freezing cold ; but, with the exception of the plaster dropping from the roof, and the broken windows patched with rags and paper, there was a scrupulous neatness about the whole, which contrasted strangely with the filth and slovenliness outside. There was no bed in the room — no table. On a broken chair by the chimney sat a miserable old woman, fancying that she was warming her hands over embers which had long been cold, shaking her head, and muttering to herself with palsied hps about the guardians and the workhouse ; while upon a few rags on the floor lay a girl, ugly, small-pox-marked, hollow-eyed, emaciated, her only bedclothes the skirt of a large handsome new riding habit, at which two other girls, wan and tawdry, were stitching busily, as they sat right and left of her on the floor. The old woman took no notice of us as we entered; but one of the girls looked up, and, with a pleased gesture of recognition, put her finger up to her lips, and whispered, " Ellen's asleep." " I'm not asleep, dears,'^ answered a faint, unearthly voice; '* I was only praying. Is that Mr. Mackaye?" " Ay, my lasses ; but ha' ye gotten na fire the nicht?" *• No," said one of them, bitterly, " we've earned no fire to-night, by fair trade or foul either." The sick girl tried to raise herself up and speak, but was stopped by a frightful fit of coughing and expec- toration, as painful, apparently, to the sufferer as it was, I confess, disgusting even to me. I saw Mackaye slip something into the hand of one VOL. I. K laO. ALTON LOCKE, of the girls, and whisper, " A half-hundred of coals;" to which she replied with an eager look of gratitude that I never can forget, and hurried out. Then the sufferer, as if taking advantage of her absence, began to speak quickly and eagerly. "Oh, Mr. Mackaye — dear, kind Mr. Mackaye — do speak to her ; and do speak to poor Lizzy here ! I'm not afraid to say it before her, because she's more gentle like, and hasn't learnt to say bad words yet — but do speak to them, and tell them not to go the bad way, like all the rest. Tell them it'll never prosper. I know it is want that drives them to it, as it drives all of us — but tell them it's best to starve and die honest girls, than to go about with the shame and the curse of God on their hearts, for the sake of keeping this poor, miserable, vile body together a few short years more in this world o' sorrow. Do tell them, Mr. Mackaye." "I'm thinking," said he, with the tears running down his old, withered face, *' ye'U mak a better preacher at that text than I shall, Ellen." " Oh, no, no; who am I, to speak to them? — it's no merit o' mine, Mr. Mackaye, that the Lord's kept me pure through it all. I should have been just as bad as any of them, if the Lord had not kept me out of tempta- tion in His great mercy, by making me the poor, ill- favoured creature I am. From that time I was burnt when I was a child, and had the small-pox afterwards, oh ! how sinful I was, and repined and rebelled against the Lord ! And now I see it was all His blessed mercy to keep me out of evil, pure and unspotted for my dear TAILOR AND POET. 131 Jesus, when He comes to take me to himself. I saw Him last night, Mr. Mackaye, as plain as I see you now, all in a flame of beautiful wliite fire, smiling at me so sweetly ; and He showed me the wounds in His hands and His feet, and He said, " Ellen, my own child, those that sufier with me here, they shall be glorified with me hereafter, for I'm coming very soon to take you home." Sandy shook his head at all this with a strange ex- pression of face, as if he sympathised and yet disagreed, respected and yet smiled at the shape which her reli- gious ideas had assumed; and I remarked in the mean time that the poor girl's neck and arm were all scarred and distorted, apparently from the effects of a bum. " Ah," said Sandy, at length, " I tauld ye ye were the better preacher of the two ; yeVe mair comfort to gle Sandy than he has to gie the like o' ye. But how is the wound in your back the day?" Oh, it was wonderfully better ! the doctor had come and given her such blessed ease with a great thick leather he had put under it, and then she did not feel the boards through so much. '' But oh, Mr. Mackaye, I'm so afraid it will make me live longer to keep me away from my dear Saviour. And there's one thing, too, that's breaking my heart, and makes me long to die this very minute, even if I didn't go to Heaven at all, Mr. Mackaye." (And she burst out crying, and between her sobs it came out, as well as I could gather, that her notion was, that her illness was the cause of keeping the girls in " the bad way^'^ as she k2 132 ALTON LOCKE, called it.) ** For Lizzy here, I did hope that she had re- pented of it after all my talking to her ; but since I've been so bad, and the girls have had to keep me most o' the time, she's gone out of nights just as bad as ever." Lizzy had hid her face in her hands the greater part of this speech. Now she looked up passionately, almost fiercely — " Repent — I have repented — I repent of it every hour — I hate myself, and hate all the world because of it ; but I must — I must; I cannot see her starve, and I cannot starve myself. When she first fell sick she kept on as long as she could, doing what she could, and then between us we only earned three shillings a- week, and there was ever so much to take off for fire, and twopence for thread, and fivepence for candles; and then we were always getting fined, because they never gave us out the work till too late on purpose, and then they lowered prices again; and now Ellen can't work at all, and there's four of us with the old lady, to keep off two's work that couldn't keep themselves alone." '^ Doesn't the parish allow the old lady anything?" I ventured to ask. '^ They used to allow half-a-crown for a bit; and the doctor ordered Ellen things from the parish, but it isn't half of 'em she ever got ; and when the meat came, it was half times not fit to eat, and when it was her stomach turned against it. If she was a lady she'd be cockered up with all sorts of soups and jellies, and nice things, just the minute she fancied 'em, and lie on a water bed TAILOR AND POET. 1 33 instead of the bare floor — and so she ought ; but where's the parish 11 do that ? And the hospital wouldn't take her in because she was incurable; and, besides, the old un wouldn't let her go — nor into the union neither. When she's in a good-humour like, she'll sit by her by the hour, holding her hand and kissing of it, and nursing of it, for all the world like a doll. But she won't hear of the workhouse; so now, these last three weeks, they takes off all her pay, because they says she must go into the house, and not kill her daughter by keeping her out — as if they warn't a killing her them- selves." " No workhouse — no workhouse I" said the old wo- man, turning round suddenly, in a clear, lofty voice. '^ No worknouse, sir, for an officer's daughter." And she relapsed into her stupor. At that moment the other girl entered with the coals — but without staying to light the fire, ran up to Ellen with some trumpery dainty she had bought, and tried to persuade her to eat it. *'We have been telling Mr. Mackaye everything," said poor Lizzy. " A pleasant story, isn't it? Oh ! if that fine lady, as we're making that riding-habit for, would just spare only half the money that goes in dressing her up to ride in the park, to send us out to the colonies, wouldn't I be an honest girl there? — Maybe an honest man's wife ! Oh ! my God ! wouldn't I slave my fingers to the bone for him ! Wouldn't I mend my life then ! I couldn't help 134 ALTON LOCKE, it — it would be like getting into heaven out of hell. But now — we must — we must — ^I tell you. I shall go mad soon, I think, or take to drink. When I passed the gin shop down there just now, I had to run like mad for fear I should go in— and if I once took to that Now then to work again. Make up the fire, Mrs. * * * *, please do.'^ And she sat down and began stitching frantically at the riding-habit, from which the other girl had hardly lifted her hands or eyes for a moment during our vmi. We made a motion as if to go. ^' God bless you," said Ellen ; " come again soon, dear Mr. Mackaye." " Good-bye," said the elder girl ! ^^and good night to you. Night and day's all the same here — we must have this home by seven o'clock to-morrow morning. My lady's going to ride early they say, whoever she may be, and we must just sit up all night. It's often we haven't had our clothes off for a week together, from four in the morning till two the next morning sometimes — stitch, stitch, stitch. — Somebody's wrote a song about that — I'll learn to sing it — it '11 sound fitting-hke, up here." '* Better sing hymns," said Ellen. " Hymns for * * * * * *?" answered the other, and then burst out into that peculiar wild, ringing, fiendish laugh — has my reader never heard it ? I pulled out the two or three shillings which I pos- sessed, and tried to make the girls take them, for the sake of poor Ellen. TAILOR AND POET. 136 " No ; you're a working man, and we won't feed on you — you'll want it some day — all the trade's going the same way as we, as fast as ever it can !" Sandy and I went down the stairs. " Poetic element? Yon lassie, rejoicing in her dis- figurement and not her beauty, like the nuns of Peter- borough in auld time, — is there no poetry there? That puir lassie, dying on the bare boards and seeing her Saviour in her dreams, is there na poetry there, cal- lant? That auld body owre the fire, wi' her " an officer's dochter," is there na poetry there? That ither, prosti- tuting hersel to buy food for her freen — ^is there na poetry there ? — tragedy — With hues as when some mighty painter dips His pen in dyes of earthquake and eclipse. Ay, Shelley's gran' ; always gran'; but Fact is grander — God and Satan are grander. All around ye, in every gin shop and costermonger''s cellar, are God and Satan at death grips; every garret is a haill Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained: and will ye think it beneath ye to be the ' People's Poet?' " 136 ALTON LOCKE, CHAPTER IX. POETRY AND POETS. In the history of individuals, as well as in that of nations, there is often a period of sudden blossoming — a short luxuriant summer, not without its tornados and thunder-glooms, in which all the buried seeds of past observation leap forth together into life, and form, and beauty. And such with me were the two years that followed. I thought — I talked poetry to myself all day long. I wrote nightly on my return from work. I am astonished, on looking back, at the variety and quantity of my productions during that short time. My subjects were intentionally and professedly cockney ones. I had taken Mackaye at his word. I had made up my mind, that if I had any poetic power, I must do my duty therewith in that station of life to which it had pleased God to call me, and look at everything simply and faithfully as a London artizan. To this, I suppose, is to be attributed the little geniality and originality for which the public have kindly praised my verses ; — a geniality which sprung, not from the atmosphere whence I drew, but from the honesty and single-mindedness with which, I hope, I laboured. Not from the atrao- TAILOR AND POET. 137 sphere, indeed — that was ungenial enough; crime and poverty, all-devouring competition, and hopeless struggles against Mammon and Moloch, amid the roar of wheels, the ceaseless stream of pale, hard faces, intent on gain, or brooding over woe; amid endless prison-walls of brick, beneath a lurid, crushing sky of smoke and mist. It was a dark, noisy, thunderous element, that London life ; a troubled sea that cannot rest, casting up mire and dirt ; resonant of the clanking of chains, the o^rindinof of re- morseless machinery, the wail of lost spirits from the pit. And it did its work upon me ; it gave a gloomy colouring, a glare as of some Dantean "Inferno," to all my utterances. It did not excite me, or make me fierce — I was too much inured to it — but it crushed and saddened me ; it deepened in me that peculiar melancholy of intellectual youth, which Mr. Carlyle has christened for ever by one of his immortal nicknames, " Werterism;" I battened on my own melancholy. I believed, I loved to believe, that every face I passed bore the traces of discontent as deep as was my own — and was I so far wrong? Was I so far wrong either in the gloomy tone of my own poetry ? Should not a London poet's work just now be to cry, like the Jew of old, about the walls of Jerusalem — " Woe, woe to this city !" Is this a time to listen to the voices of singing- men and singing women? or to cry, " Oh ! that my head were a fountain of tears, that I might weep for the sins of my people?" Is it not noteworthy, also, that it is in this vein that the London poets have always been greatest? Which of poor Hood's lyrics have an equal 138 ALTON LOCKE, chance of immortality with " The Song of the Shirt" and " The Bridge of Sighs," rising, as they do, right out of the depths of that Inferno, subUme from their very simpHcity? Which of Charles Mackay's lyrics can com- pare for a moment with the Eschylean grandeur, the terrible rhythmic lilt of his "Cholera Chaunt" — Dense on the stream the vapours lay, Thick as wool on the cold highway; Spungy and dim each lonely lamp, Shone o'er the streets so dull and damp; The moonbeams could not pierce the cloud That swathed the city like a shroud ; There stood three shapes on the bridge alone, Three figures by the coping-stone ; Gaunt and tall and undefined, Spectres built of mist and wind. #♦**** I see his foot-marks east and west — I hear his tread in the silence fall — He shall not sleep, he shall not rest — He comes to aid us one and all. "Were men as wise as men might be, They would not Avork for you, for me, For him that cometh over the sea; But they will not hear the warning voice: The Cholera comes, — Rejoice ! rejoice ! He shall be lord of the swarming town ! And mow them down, and mow them down ! Not that I neglected, on the other hand, every means of extending the wanderings of my spirit into sunnier and more verdant pathways. If I had to tell the gay ones above of the gloom around me, I had also to go forth into the sunshine to bring home if it were but a wild- flower garland to those that sat in darkness and the shadow of death. That was all that I could offer them. The reader shall judge, when he has read this book TAILOR AND POET. 139 throughout, whether I did not at last find for them something better than even all the beauties of nature. But it was on canvas, and not among reahties, that I had to choose my garlands; and therefore the picture galleries became more than ever my favourite — ^haunt, I was going to say; but, alas ! it was not six times a-year that I got access to them. Still, when once every May I found myself, by dint of a hard-saved shilling, actually within the walls of that to me enchanted palace, the Royal Academy Exhibition — Oh, ye rich! who gaze round you at will upon your prints and pictures, if hunger is, as they say, a better sauce than any Ude invents, and fasting itself may become the handmaid of luxury, you should spend, as I did perforce, weeks and months shut out from every glimpse of Nature, if you would taste her beauties, even on canvas, with per- fect relish and childish self-abandonment. How I loved and blest those painters ! how I thanked Creswick for every transparent, shade-chequered pool; Fielding, for every rain-clad down; Cooper, for every knot of quiet cattle beneath the cool, grey willows ; Stanfield, for every snowy peak, and sheet of foam-fringed sapphire — each and every one of them a leaf out of the magic book which else was ever closed to me. Again, I say, how I loved and blest those painters ! On the other hand, I was not neglecting to read as well as to write poetry; and, to speak first of the highest, I know no book, always excepting Milton, which at once so quickened and exalted my poetical view of man and his history, as that great prose poem, the single epic of modern days. 140 Thomas Carlyle's *' French Revolution." Of the general effect which his works had on me, I shall say nothing : it was the same as they have had, thank God, on thousands of my class and of every other. But that book above all first recalled me to the overwhelming and yet ennobling knowledge that there was such a thing as Duty; first taught me to see in history not the mere farce-tragedy of man's crimes and follies, but the dealings of a righteous Ruler of the universe, whose ways are in the great deep, and whom the sins and errors, as well as the virtues and discoveries of man, must obey and justify. Then, in a happy day, I fell on Alfred Tennyson's poetry, and found there, astonished and delighted, the embodiment of thoughts about the earth around me which I had concealed, because I fancied them peculiar to myself. Why is it that the latest poet has generally the greatest influence over the minds of the young? Surely not for the mere charm of novelty? The reason is, that he, living amid the same hopes, the same temp- tations, the same sphere of observation as they, gives utterance and outward form to the very questions which, vague and wordless, have been exercising their hearts. And what endeared Tennyson especially to me, the working man, was, as I afterwards discovered, the alto- gether democratic tendency of his poems. True, all great poets are by their office democrats; seers of man only as man; singers of the joys, the sorrows, the aspira- tions common to all humanity ; but in Alfred Tennyson there is an element especially democratic, truly levelling ; TAILOR AND POET. 141 not his political opinions, about which I know nothing, and care less, but his handling of the trivial every-day sights and sounds of nature. Brought up, as I under- stand, in a part of England which possesses not much of the picturesque, and nothing of that which the vulgar call sublime, he has learnt to see that in all nature, in the hedgerow and the sandbank, as well as in the alp peak and the ocean waste, is a world of true sublimity, — a minute infinite, — an ever-fertile garden of poetic images, the roots of which are in the unfathom- able and the eternal, as truly as any phenomenon which astonishes and awes the eye. The descriptions of the desolate pools and creeks where the dying swan floated, the hint of the silvery marsh mosses by Mariana's moat, came to me like revelations. I always knew there was something beautiful, wonderful, sublime in those flowery dykes of Battersea-fields ; in the long gravelly sweeps of that lone tidal shore ; and here was a man who had put them into words for me ! This is what I call demo- cratic art — the revelation of the poetry which lies in common things. And surely all the age is tending in that direction : in Landseer and his doo^s — in Fieldino: and his downs, with a host of noble fellow-artists — and in all authors who have really seized the nation's mind, from Crabbe and Bums and Wordsworth to Hood and Dickens, the great tide sets ever onward, outward, towards that which is common to the many, not that which is exclusive to the few — towards the likeness of Him who causes His rain to fall on the just and on the unjust, and His sun to shine on the evil and the good; 142 ALTON LOCKE, Tvho knowetli the cattle upon a thousand hills, and all the beasts of the field are in His sight. Well~I must return to my story. And here some one may ask me, "But did you not find this true spiritual democracy, this universal knowledge and sympathy, in Shakspeare above all other poets?" It may be my shame to have to confess it ; but though I find it now, I did not then. I do not think, however, my case is singular: from what I can ascertain, there is even with regularly educated minds a period of life at which that great writer is not appreciated, just on account of his very greatness ; on account of the deep and large experience which the true understanding of his plays requires — ex- perience of man, of history, of art, and above all of those sorrows whereby, as Hezekiah says, and as I have learnt almost too well — " whereby men live, and in all which is the life of the spirit." At seventeen, indeed, I had devoured Shakspeare, though merely for the food to my fancy which his plots and incidents supplied, for the gorgeous colouring of his scenery ; but at the period of which I am now writing, I had exhausted that source of mere pleasure ; I was craving for more explicit and dog- matic teaching than any which he seemed to supply ; and for three years, strange as it may appear, I hardly ever looked into his pages. Under what circumstances I afterwards recurred to his exhaustless treasures, my readers shall in due time be told. So I worked away manfully with such tools and stock as I possessed, and of course produced, at first, like all young writers, some sufficiently servile imitations of my favourite poets. TAILOR AND FOET. 143 "Ugh!" said Sandy, " wha wants mongrels atween Bums and Tennyson ? A gude stock baith, but gin ye'd cross the breed ye raaun unite the spirits^ and no the manners^ o' the men. Why maun ilk a one the noo steal his neebor's barnacles before he glints out o' win- dows ? Mak a style for yoursel, laddie; ye 're na mair Scots' hind than ye are Lincolnshire laird ; sae gang yer ain gate and leave them to gang theirs; and just mak a gran, brode, simple Saxon style for yoursel.'^ " But how can 1, till I know what sort of a style it ought to be?" "01 but yon's amazing like Tom Sheridan's an- swer to his father. ' Tom,' says the auld man, ' I'm thinking ye maun tak a wife.' ^ Verra weel, father,* says the puir skellum ; * and wha's wife shall I tak ?' Wha's style shall I tak? say all the callants the noo. Mak a style as ye would mak a wife, by marrying her a' to yoursel; and ye'll nae mair ken what's your style till it's made, than ye'll ken what your wife's like till she's been mony a year by your ingle.'' " My dear Mackaye," I said, " you have the most unmerciful way of raising difficulties, and then leaving poor fellows to lay the ghost for themselves." " Hech, then, Tm a'thegither a negative teacher, as they ca' it in the new lallans. I'll gang out o' my gate to tell a man his kye are laired, but I'm no obligated thereby to pu' them out for him. After a', nae man is rid o' a difficulty till he's conquered it single-handed for himsel : besides, I'm nae poet, mair's the gude hap for you." 144 ALTON LOCKE, '^ Why, then?" "Och. och! they're puir, feckless, crabbit, unprac- tical bodies, they poets : but if it's your doom, ye maun dree it; and I'm sair afeard ye ha' gotten the disease o' genius, mair's the pity, and maun write, I suppose, willy-nilly. Some's folks booels are that made o' catgut, that they canna stir without chirrupping and screeking." However, cestro percifus, I wrote on; and in about two years and a half had got together " Songs of the Highways " enough to fill a small octavo volume, the circumstances of whose birth shall be given hereafter. Whether I ever attained to anything like an original style, readers must judge for themselves — the readers of the said volume I mean, for I have inserted none of those poems in this my autobiography ; first, because it seems too like puffing my own works; and next, be- cause I do not want to injure the as yet not over great sale of the same. But, if any one's curiosity is so far excited that he wishes to see what I have accomplished, the best advice which I can give him is, to go forth and buy all the working men's poetry which has appeared during the last twenty years, without favour or excep- tion; among which he must needs, of course, find mine, and also, I am happy to say, a great deal which is much better and more instructive than mine. I TAILOR AND POET. 145 CHAPTER X. HOW FOLKS TURN CHARTISTS. Those who read my story only for amusement, I advise to skip this chapter. Those, on the other hand, who really wish to ascertain what working men actually do suffer — to see whether their political discontent has not its roots, not merely in fanciful ambition, but in misery and slavery most real and agonizing — those in whose eyes the accounts of a system, or rather bar- baric absence of all system, which involves starvation, nakedness, prostitution, and long imprisonment in dun- geons worse than the cells of the Inquisition, will be in- vested with something at least of tragic interest, may, I hope, think it worth their while to learn how the clothes which they wear are made, and listen to a few occasional statistics, which, though they may seem to the wealthy mere lists of dull figures, are to the workmen symbols of terrible physical realities — of hunger, degradation, and despair.* • Facts still worse than those which Mr. Locke's story contains have been made public by the Morning Chronicle in a series of noble letters on " Labour and the Poor;" which we entreat all Christian people to " read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest." "That will be better for them;" as Mahomet, in similar cases, used to say. VOL. I. L 146 ALTON LOCKE, Well: one day our employer died. He had been one of the old sort of fashionable West- end tailors in the fast decreasing honourable trade ; keeping a modest shop, hardly to be distinguished from a dwelling-house, except by his name on the window blinds. He paid good prices for work, though not as good, of course, as he had given twenty years before, and prided himself upon having all his work done at home. His work- rooms, as I have said, were no elysiums; but still, as good, alas ! as those of three tailors out of four. He was proud, luxurious, foppish; but he was honest and kindly enough, and did many a generous thing by men who had been long in his employ. At all events, his journeymen could live on what he paid them. But his son, succeeding to the business, determined, like Rehoboam of old, to go a-head with the times. Fired with the great spirit of the nineteenth century — at least with that one which is vulgarly considered its especial glory — he resolved to make haste to be rich. His father had made money very slowly of late ; while dozens, who had begun business long after him, had now retired to luxurious ease and suburban villas. Why should he remain in the minority? Why should he not get rich as fast as he could? Why should he stick to the old, slow-going, honourable trade? Out of some 450 West-end tailors, there were not one hundred left who were old-fashioned and stupid enough to go on keeping down their own profits by having all their work done at home and at first-hand. Ridiculous scruples ! The government knew none such. Were not the army TAILOR AND POET. 147 clothes, the post-office clothes, the policemen's clothes, furnished by contractors and sweaters, who liired the work at low prices, and let it out again to joumeyroen at still lower ones? Why should he pay his men two shillings where the government paid them one? Were there not cheap houses even at the West-end, which had saved several thousands a year merely by reducing their workmen's wages ? And if the workmen chose to take lower wages, he was not bound actually to make them a present of more than they asked for ! They would go to the cheapest market for anything they wanted, and so must he. Besides, wages had really been quite exorbitant. Half his men threw each of them as much money away in gin and beer yearly, as would pay two workmen at a cheap house. Why was he to be robbing his family of comforts to pay for their extravagance? And charging his customers, too, unnecessarily high prices — it was really robbing the public ! Such, I suppose, were some of the arguments which led to an official announcement, one Saturday night, that our young employer intended to enlarge his esta- blishment, for the purpose of commencing business in the " show trade;" and that, emulous of Messrs. Aaron, Levi, and the rest of that class, magnificent alterations were to take place in the premises, to make room for which our work-rooms were to be demolished, and that for that reason — for of course it was only for that reason — all work would in future be given out, to be made up at the men's own homes. l2 148 ALTON LOCKE, Our employer's arguments, if they were such as I suppose, were reasonable enough according to the pre- sent code of commercial morality. But strange to say, the auditory, insensible to the delight with which the public would view the splendid architectural improve- ments — with taste too grovelling to appreciate the glories of plate-glass shop fronts and brass scroll work — too selfish to rejoice, for its own sake, in the beauty of arabesques and chandeliers, which though they never might behold the astonished public would — with souls too niggardly to leap for joy at the thought that gents would henceforth buy the registered guanaco vest, and the patent elastic omni-seasonum paletot half-a-crown cheaper than ever — or that needy noblemen would pay three pound-ten, instead of five pounds, for their foot- men's liveries — received the news, clod-hearted as they were, in sullen silence, and actually, when they got into the street, broke out into murmurs, perhaps into execrations. '^Silence!" said Crossthwaite ; "walls have ears. Come down to the nearest house of call, and talk it out like men, instead of grumbling in the street, like fish- fags." So down we went. Crossthwaite, taking my arm, strode on in moody silence — once muttering to himself bitterly — ** Oh, yes; all right and natural ! What can the little sharks do but follow the big ones?" We took a room, and Crossthwaite coolly saw us all in ; and locking the door, stood with his back against it. TAILOR AND POET. 149 " Now then, mind, ' One and all/ as the Comishmen say, and no peaching. If any man is scoimdrel enough to carry tales, Pll " " Do what?" asked Jemmy Downes, who had settled himself on the table with a pipe and a pot of porter. '* You am't the King of the Cannibal Islands, as I know of, to cut a cove's head off ?" "No; but if a poor man's prayer can bring God's curse down upon a traitor's head — it may stay on his rascally shoulders till it rots." "If ifs and answere pots and pans. — Look at Shechem Isaacs, that sold penknives in the street six months ago, now a- riding in his own carriage, all along of turning sweater. If God's curse is like that — Pll be happy to take any man's share of it." Some new idea seemed twinkling in the fellow's cunning bloated face as he spoke. I, and others also, shuddered at his words; but we all forgot them a mo- ment afterwards, as Crossthwaite began to speak. " We were all bound to expect this. Every work- ing tailor must come to this at last, on the present sys- tem ; and we are only lucky in having been spared so long. You all know where this will end — in the same misery as fifteen thousand out of twenty thousand of our class are enduring now. We shall become the slaves, often the bodily prisoners, of Jews, middlemen, and sweaters, who draw their livelihood out of our starvation. We shall have to face, as the rest have, ever decreasing prices of labour, ever increasing pro- fits made out of that labour bv the contractors who 150 ALTON LOCKE, will employ us — arbitrary fines, inflicted at the caprice of hirelings — the competition of women, and children, and starving Irish — our hours of work will increase one- third, our actual pay decrease to less than one-half; and in all this we shall have no hope, no chance of im- provement in wages, but ever more penury, slavery, misery, as we are pressed on by those who are sucked by fifties — almost by hundreds — yearly, out of the honour- able trade in which we were brought up, into the in- fernal system of contract work, which is devouring our trade and many others, body and soul. Our wives will be forced to sit up night and day to help us — our chil- dren must labour from the cradle without chance of going to school, hardly of breathing the fresh air of Heaven, — our boys, as they grow up, must turn beggars or paupers — our daughters, as thousands do, must eke out their miserable earnings by prostitution. And after all, a whole family will not gain what one of us had been doing, as yet, single-handed. You know there will be no hope for us. There is no use appealing to government or parliament. I don't want to talk politics here. 1 shall keep them for another place. But you can recollect as well as I can, when a deputation of us went up to a member of parliament — one that was re- puted a philosopher, and a political economist, and a liberal — and set before him the ever-increasing penury and misery of our trade and of those connected with it ; you recollect his answer — that, however glad he would be to help us, it was impossible — he could not alter the laws of nature — that wages were regulated by the TAILOR AND POET. 151 amount of competition among the men themselves, and that it was no business of government, or any one else, to interfere in contracts between the employer and em- ployed, that those things regulated themselves by the laws of political economy, which it was madness and suicide to oppose. He may have been a wise man. I only know that he was a rich one. Every one speaks well of the bridge which carries him over. Every one fancies the laws which fill his pockets to be God's laws. But I say this. If neither government nor members of parliament can help us, we must help ourselves. Help yourselves, and Heaven will help you. Combination among ourselves is the only chance. One thing we can do — sit still." " And starve !" said some one. " Yes, and starve ! Better starve than sin. I say, it is a sin to give in to this system. It is a sin to add our weight to the crowd of artizans who are now choking and strangling each other to death, as the prisoners did in the black hole of Calcutta. Let those who will, turn beasts of prey, and feed upon their fellows ; but let us at least keep ourselves pure. It may be the law of political civilisation, the law of nature, that the rich should eat up the poor, and the poor eat up each other. Then I here rise up and curse that law, that civilisation, that nature. Either I will destroy them, or they shall destroy me. As a slave, as an increased burden on my fellow- sufferers, I will not live. So help me God ! I will take no work home to my house ; and I call upon 152 ALTON LOCKE, every one here to combine, and to sign a protest to that effect." " What's the use of that, my good Mr. Cross- thwaite?" interrupted some one, querulously. " Don't you know what come of' the strike a few years ago, when this piece-work and sweating first came in? The masters made fine promises, and never kept ^em; and the men who stood out had their places filled up with poor devils who were glad enough to take the work at any price— just as ours will be. There's no use kicking against the pricks. All the rest have come to it, and so must we. We must live somehow, and half a loaf is better than no bread; and even that half-loaf will go into other men's mouths, if we don't snap at it at once. Besides, we can't force others to strike. We may strike and starve ourselves, but what's the use of a dozen striking out of 20,000?" *' Will you sign the protest, gentlemen^ or not?'* asked Crossthwaite, in a determined voice. Some half-dozen said they would, if the others would. " And the others won''t. Well, after all, one man must take the responsibility, and I am that man. I will sign the protest by myself. I will sweep a crossing — I will turn cress- gatherer, rag-picker; I will starve piecemeal, and see my wife starve with me ; but do the wrong thing I will not ! The Cause wants martyrs. If I must be one, I must." All this while my mind had been undergoing a TAILOR AND POEI 153 strknge perturbation. The notion of escaping that in- fernal work-room and the company I met there — of taking my work home, and thereby, as I hoped, gaining more time for study — at least, having my books on the spot ready at every odd moment, was most enticing. I had hailed the proposed change as a blessing to me, till I heard Crossthwaite's arguments: not that I had not known the facts before, but it had never struck me till then that it was a real sin against my class to make myself a party in the system by which they were allow- ing themselves (under temptation enough, God knows) to be enslaved. But now I looked with horror on the gulf of penury before me, into the vortex of which not only I, but my whole trade, seemed irresistibly sucked. I thought with shame and remorse of the few shil- lings which I had earned at various times by taking piece-work home, to buy my candles for study. I whispered my doubts to Crossthwaite, as he sat, pale and determined, watching the excited and querulous discus- sions among the other workmen. "What? So you expect to have time to read? Study, after sixteen hours a-day stitching? Study, when you cannot earn money enough to keep you from wasting and shrinking away day by day? Study, with your heart full of shame and indignation, fresh from daily insult and injustice? Study, with the black cloud of despair and penury in front of you? Little time, or heart, or strength, will you have to study, when you are making the same coats you make now, at half the price." 154 ALTON LOCKE, I put my name down beneath Crossthwaite's on the paper which he handed me, and went out with him. " Ay," he muttered to himself, " be slaves — what you are worthy to be, that you will be ! You dare not com- bine — you dare not starve — you dare not die — and there- fore you dare not be free ! Oh ! for six hundred men like Barbaroux's Marseillois — ' who knew how to die !' " *' Surely, Crossthwaite, if matters were properly re- presented to the government, they would not, for their own existence sake, to put conscience out of the question, allow such a system to continue growing." *' Government — government? You a tailor, and not know that government are the very authors of this system ? Not to know that they first set the example, by getting the army and navy clothes made by contrac- tors, and taking the lowest tenders? Not to know that the police clothes, the postmen's clothes, the convicts' clothes, are all contracted for on the same infernal plan, by sweaters, and sweater's sweaters, and sweater's sweater's sweaters, till government work is just the very last, lowest resource to which a poor starved-out wretch betakes himself to keep body and soul together? Why, the government prices, in almost every department, are half, and less than half, the very lowest living price. I tell you, the careless iniquity of government about these things will come out some day. It will be known, the whole abomination, and future generations will class it with the tyrannies of the Roman emperors and the Norman barons. Why, it's a fact, that the colonels of the regiments — noblemen, most of them — make their TAILOR AND POET. 155 own vile profit out of us tailors — out of the pauperism of the men, the slavery of the children, the prostitution of the women. They get so much a uniform allowed them by government to clothe the men with; and then — then, they let out the jobs to the contractors at less than half what government give them, and pocket the difference. And then you talk of appeahng to government !" " Upon my word," I said, bitterly, "we tailors seem to owe the army a double grudge. They not only keep under other artizans, but they help to starve us firsts and then shoot us, if we complain too loudly." " Oh, ho ! your blood's getting up, is it ? Then you're in the humour to be told what you have been hankering to know so long — where Mackaye and I go at night. We'll strike while the iron's hot, and go down to the Chartist meeting at * ""^ * * * '^Pardon me, my dear fellow," I said. "I cannot bear the thought of being mixed up in conspiracy — perhaps, in revolt and bloodshed. Not that I am afraid. Heaven knows, I am not. But I am too much harassed, miserable, already. I see too much wretchedness around me, to lend my aid in increasing the sum of sufiering, by a single atom, among rich and poor, even by righteous vengeance." " Conspiracy ? Bloodshed ? What has that to do with the Charter? It suits the venal Mammonite press well enough to jumble them together, and cry ' Murder, rape, and robbery,' whenever the six points are mentioned ; but they know, and any man of common sense ought to 156 ALTON LOCKE, know, that the Charter is just as much an open pol tical question as the Reform Bill, and ten times as much as Magna Charta was, when it got passed. What have the six points, right or wrong, to do with the question whether they can be obtained by moral force, and the pressure of opinion alone, or require what we call ulterior measures to get them carried? Come along!" So with him I went that night. " Well, Alton! where was the treason and murder? Your nose must have been a sharp one, to smell out any there. Did you hear anything that astonished your weak mind so very exceedingly, after all?" " The only thing that did astonish me, was to hear men of my own class — and lower still, perhaps, some of them — speak with such fluency and eloquence. Such a fund of information — such excellent English — where did they get it all?" ^' From the God who knows nothing about ranks. They're the unknown great — the unaccredited heroes, as Master Thomas Carlyle would say, whom the flunkeys aloft have not acknowledged yet — though they'll be forced to, some day, with a vengeance. Are you con- vinced, once for all?" " I really do not understand political questions, Crossthwaite." " Does it want so very much wisdom to understand the rights and the wrongs of all that ? Are the people TAILOR AND POET. 157 represented? Are you represented? Do you feel like a man that's got any one to fight your battle in parlia- ment, my young friend, eh?" " I'm sure I don't know " ** Why, what in the name of common sense — what interest or feeling of yours or mine, or any man's you ever spoke to, except the shopkeeper, do Alderman A*** or Lord C*** D**** represent? They repre- sent property — and we have none. They represent rank — we have none. Vested interests — we have none. Large capitals — those are just what crush us. Irrespon^ sibility of employers, slavery of the employed, competi- tion among masters, competition among workmen, that is the system they represent — they preach it — they glory in it. — Why, it is the very ogre that is eating us all up. They are chosen by the few, they represent the few, and they make laws for the many — and yet you don't know whether or not the people are represented !" We were passing by the door of the Victoria Theatre ; it was just half-price time — and the beggary and rascalit}' of London were pouring in to their low amusement, from the neighbouring gin palaces and thieves' cellars. A herd of ragged boys, vomiting forth slang, filtli, and blasphemy, pushed past us, compeUing us to take good care of our pockets. *' Look there ! look at the amusements, the training, the civilisation, which the government permits to the children of the people ! — These licensed pits of darkness, traps of temptation, profligacy, and ruin, triumphantly yawning night after night — and then tell me that the 158 ALTON LOCKE, people who see their children thus kidnapped into hell, are represented by a government who licenses such things r " Would a change in the franchise cure that?" '^ Household suffrage mightn't — but give us the Charter, and we'll see about it ! Give us tlie Charter, and we'll send workmen into parliament that shall soon find out whether something better can't be put in the way of the ten thousand boys and girls in London who live by theft and prostitution, than the tender mercies of the Victoria — a pretty name ! They say the Queen's a good woman — and I don't doubt it. I wonder often if she knows what her precious namesake here is like?" " But, really, I cannot see how a mere change in; representation can cure such things as that." " V/hy, didn't they tell us, before the Reform Bill, that extension of the suffrage was to cure everything.^ And how can you have too much of a good thing? We've only taken them at their word, we Chartists. Haven't all politicians been preaching for years that Eng- land's national greatness was all owing to her political- institutions — to Magna Charta, and the Bill of Rights, and representative parliaments, and all that? It was but the other day I got hold of some Tory paper, that talked about the English constitution, and the balance of queen, lords, and commons, as the 'Talismanic Palladium' of the country. ^Gad, we'll see if a move onward in the same line won't better the matter. If the balance of classes is such a blessed tiling, the sooner we get the balance equal, the better; for its rather lopsided just TAILOE AND POET. 159 now, no one can deny. So, representative institutions are the talismanic palladium of the nation, are they? The palladium of the classes that have them, I dare say; and that's the very best reason why the classes that haven't got 'em should look out for the same palla- dium for themselves. What's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, isn't it? We'll try — we'll see whether the tahsman they talk of has lost its power all of a sudden since '32 — whether we can't rub the magic ring a Httle for ourselves, and call up genii to help us out of the mire, as the shopkeepers and the gentlemen have done.^' ^ * * * * From that night I was a Chartist, heart and soul — and so were a million and a half more of the best arti- zans in England — at least, I had no reason to be ashamed of my company. Yes; I too, like Crossthwaite, took the upper classes at their word ; bowed down to the idol of political institutions, and pinned my hopes of salva- tion on ' the possession of one-tenthousandth part of a talker in the national palaver; True, I desired the Charter, at first (as I do, indeed, at this moment), as a means to glorious ends — not only because it would give a chance of elevation, a free sphere of action, to lowly worth and talent; but because it was the path to reforms, — so- cial, legal, sanatory, educational, — to which the veriest Tory — certainly not the great and good Lord Ashley — would not object. But soon, with me, and I am afraid with many, many more, the means became, by the frailty of poor human nature, an end, an idol in itself. I had so made up my mind that it was the only method of get- 160 ALTON LOCKE, ting what I wanted, that I neglected, alas ! but too often, to try the methods which lay already by me. " If we had but the Charter" — was the excuse for a thousand lazinesses, procrastinations. " If we had but the Char- ter" — I should be good, and free, and happy. Fool that I was ! It was within, rather than without, that I needed reform. And so I began to look on man (and too many of us, 1 am afraid, are doing so) as the creature and puppet of circumstances — of the particular outward system, social or political, in which he happens to find himself. An abominable heresy, no doubt ; but, somehow, it appears to me just the same as Benthamites, and economists, and high-churchmen, too, for that matter, have been preaching for the last twenty years with great applause from their respective parties. One set informs the world that it is to be regenerated by cheap bread, free trade, and that peculiar form of the " freedom of industry" which, in plain language, signifies *' the despotism of capital;" and which, whatever it means, is merely some outward system, circumstance, or " dodge," about man, and not in him. Another party's nostrum is more churches, more schools, more clergymen — excellent things in their way — better even than cheap bread, or free trade, provided only that they are excellent — that the churches, schools, clergymen, are good ones. But the party of whom I am speaking seem to us workmen to consider the quality quite a secondary consideration, compared with the quantity. They expect the world to be regenerated, not by becoming more a Church — TAILOR AND POET. 161 none would gladlier help them in bringing that about than the Chartists themselves, paradoxical as it may seem — but by being dosed somewhat more with a certain ^' Church system," circumstance, or '^ dodge." For my part, I seem to have learnt that the only thing to rege- nerate the world is not more of any system, good or bad, but simply more of the Spirit of God. About the supposed omnipotence of the Charter I have found out my mistake. I believe no more in *' Morison's- Pill -remedies," as Thomas Carlyle calls them. Talismans are worthless. The age of spirit- compelling spells, whether of parchment or carbuncle, is past — if, indeed, it ever existed. The Charter will no more make men good, than political economy, or the observance of the Church Calendar — a fact which we working men, I really beheve, have, under the pressure of wholesome defeat and God-sent affliction, found out sooner than our more "enlightened" fellow- idolaters. But, at that time, as I have confessed abeady, we took our betters at their word, and be- lieved in Morison's Pills. Only, as we looked at the world from among a class of facts somewhat different from theirs, we differed from them proportionably as to our notions of the proper ingredients in the said Pill. ***** But what became of our protest? It was received — and disregarded. As for turning us off, we had, de facto ^ like Coriolanus banished the Romans, turned our master off. All the other hands, VOL. I. M 162 ALTON LOCKE, some forty in number, submitted and took the yoke upon tbem, and went down into the house of bondage, knowing whither they went. Every man of them is now a beggar, compared with what he was then. Many are dead in the prime of life of consumption, bad food and lodging, and the peculiar diseases of our trade* Some have not been heard of lately — we fancy them imprisoned in some sweaters' dens — but thereby hangs a tale, whereof more hereafter. But it was singular, that every one of the six who had merely professed their conditional readiness to sign the protest, were contumeliously discharged the next day, without any reason being assigned. It was evident that tnere had been a traitor at the meeting ; and every one suspected Jemmy Downes, especially as he fell into the new system with suspiciously strange alacrity. But it was as impossible to prove the offence against him as to punish him for it. Of that wretched man, too, and his subsequent career, I shall have somewhat to say here- after. Verily, there is a God who judgeth the earth ! But now behold me and my now intimate and beloved friend, Crossthwaite, with nothing to do — a gentlemanlike occupation; but, unfortunately, in our class, involving starvation. What was to be done ? We applied for work at several '' honourable shops;" but at all we received the same answer. Their trade was de- creasing — the public ran daily more and more to the cheap show shops — and they themselves were forced, in order to compete with these latter, to put more and more of their work out at contract prices. Facilis de- TAILOR AND POET. 163 scensus Avemi! Having once been hustled out of the serried crowd of competing workmen, it was impossible to force our way in again. So, a week or ten days past, our little stocks of money w^ere exhausted. I was downhearted at once; but Crossthwaite bore up gaily enough. " Katie and I can pick a crust together without snarl- ing over it. And, thank God, I have no children, and never intend to have, if I can keep true to myself, till the good times come." *' Oh! Crossthwaite, are not children a blessing?" *' Would they, be a blessing to me now? No, my lad. — Let those bring slaves into the world who will ! I will never beget children to swell the numbers of those w^ho are trampling each other down in the struggle for daily bread, to minister in ever deepening poverty and misery to the rich man's luxury — perhaps his lust." " Then you believe in the Malthusian doctrines?" *' I believe them to be an infernal lie, Alton Locke; though good and wise people like Miss Martineau may sometimes be deluded into preaching them. I believe there^s room on English soil for twice the num- ber there is now; and when we get the Charter we'll prove it ; we'll show that God meant living human heads and hands to be blessings and not curses, tools and not burdens. But in such times as these, let those who have waives be as though they had none — as St. Paul said, when he told his people under the Roman em- peror to be above begetting slaves and martyrs. A man M 2 164 ALTON LOCKE, of the people should keep himself as free from incum- brances as he can just now. He will find it all the more easy to dare and suffer for the people, when their turn comes "" And he set his teeth firmly, almost savagely. " I think I can earn a few shillings, now and then, by writing for a paper I know of. If that won't do, I must take up agitating for a trade, and live by spouting, as many a Tory member as well as Radical ones do. A man may do worse, for he may do nothing. At all events, my only chance now is to help on the Charter; for the sooner it comes the better for me. And if I die — why, the little woman won't be long in coming after me, I know that well; and there's a tough business got well over for both of us !" '' Hech," said Sandy, " To every man Death comes but once a life — as my countryman, Mr. Macaulay, says, in thae gran' Roman ballants o' his. But for ye, Alton, laddie, ye're owre young to start off in the People's Church Meeli- tant, sae just bide wi' me, and the barrel o' meal in the corner there winna waste, — nae mair than it did wi' the widow o' Zareptha; a tale which coincides sae weel wi' the everlasting righteousnesses, that I'm at times no inclined to consider it a' thegither mythical." But I, with thankfulness which vented itself through my eyes, finding my lips alone too narrow for it, refused to eat the bread of idleness. '' A weel, then, ye'll just mind the shop, and dust the t TAILOR AND POET. 165 books whiles; I'm getting auld and stiff, and ha' need o' help i' the business." " Xo/' I said; '' you say so out of kindness; but if you can afford no greater comforts than these, you cannot afford to keep me in addition to yourself." *' Hech, then ! How do ye ken that the auld Scot eats a' he makes? I was na born the spending side o' Tweed, my man. But gin ye daur, why dinna ye pack up your duds, and the poems wi' them, and gang till your cousin i' the university? he'll surely put you in the way o' publishing them. He's bound to it by blude ; and there's na shame in asking him to help you towards reaping the fruits o' your ain labours. A few punds on a bond for repayment when the edition was sauld, noo, — I'd do that for mysel'; but I'm thinking ye'd better try to get a list o' subscribers. Dinna mind your independence; it's but spoiling the Egyptians, ye ken; and thae bit ballants will be their money's worth, I'll warrant, and tell them a wheen facts they're no that well acquentit wi'. Hech? Johnnie, my Chartist?" " Why not go to my uncle?" ''Puir sugar-and-spice-selling baillie bodie ! is there aught in his ledger about poetry, and the incom- mensurable value o' the products o' genius? Gang till the young scholar: he's a canny one, too, and he'll ken it to be worth his while to fash himsel a wee anent it." So I packed up my little bundle, and lay awake all that night in a fever of expectation about the as yet unknown world of green fields and w^oods through which my road to Cambridge lay. 166 ALTON LOCKE, CHAPTER XL " THE YARD WHERE THE GENTLEMEN LIVE." I MAY be forgiven, surely, if I run somewhat into detail about this my first visit to the country. I had, as I have said before, literally never been farther a-field than Fulham or Battersea Rise. One Sunday evening, indeed, I had got as far as Wandsworth Common; but it was March, and, to my extreme dis- appointment, the heath w^as not in flower. But, usually, my Sundays had been spent entirely in study ; which to me was rest, so worn out were both my body and my mind with the incessant drudgery of my trade, and the slender fare to which I restricted myself. Since I had lodged with Mackaye, certainly, my food had been better. I had not required to stint my appe- tite for money wherewith to buy candles, ink, and pens. My wages, too, had increased with my years, and alto- gether I found myself gaining in strength, though I had no notion how much I possessed till I set forth on this walk to Cambridge. It was a glorious morning at the end of May ; and when I escaped from the pall of smoke which hung over TAILOE AND POET. 167 the city, I found the sky a sheet of cloudless blue. How I watched for the ending of the rows of houses, which lined the road for miles — the great roots of London, running far out into the country, up which poured past me an endless stream of food, and merchandise, and human beings — the sap of the huge metropolitan life- tree ! How each turn of the road opened a fresh hne of terraces or villas, till hope deferred made the heart sick, and the country seemed — like the place where the rainbow touches the ground, or the El Dorado of Raleigh's Guiana settlers — always a little farther off ! How, between gaps in the houses right and left, I caught tantalizing glimpses of green fields, shut from me by dull lines of high-spiked paHngs ! How I peeped through gates and over fences at trim lawns and gardens, and longed to stay, and admire, and speculate on the names of the strange plants and gaudy flowers ; and then hurried on, always expecting to find something still finer a-head — something really worth stopping to look at — till the houses thickened again into a street, and I found myself, to my disappointment, in the nridst of a town ! And then more villas and palings ; and then a village; — when would they stop, those endless houses? At last they did stop. Gradually the people whom I passed began to look more and more rural, and more toil-worn and ill-fed. The houses ended, cattle yards and farm buildings appeared; and right and left, far away, spread the low rolling sheet of green meadows and corn fields. Oh, the joy! The lawns with their 168 ALTON LOCKE, high elms and firs, the green hedgerows, the dehcate hue and scent of the fresh clover fields, the steep clay banks where I stopped to pick nosegays of wild flowers, and became again a child,— and then recollected my mother, and a walk with her on the river bank towards the Red House. I hurried on again, but could not be unhappy, while my eyes ranged free, for the first time in my life, over the chequered squares of cultivation, over glittering brooks, and hills quivering in the green haze, while above hung the skylarks, pouring out their souls in melody. And then, as the sun grew hot, and the larks dropped one by one into the growing corn, the new delight of the blessed silence ! I listened to the stillness; for noise had been my native element; I had become in London quite unconscious of the ceaseless roar of the human sea, casting up mire and dirt. And now, for the first time in my life, the crushing, con- fusing hubbub had flowed away, and left my brain calm and free. How I felt at that moment a capability of clear, bright meditation, which was as new to me, as I believe it would have been to most Londoners in my position. I cannot help fancying that our unnatural atmosphere of excitement, physical as well as moral, is to blame for very much of the working men's restlessness and fierceness. As it was, I felt that every step forward, every breath of fresh air, gave me new life. I had gone fifteen miles before I recollected, that for the first time for many months, I had not coughed since I rose. So on I went, down the broad, bright road, which TAILOR AND POET. 169 seemed to beckon me forward into the unknown ex- panses of human life. The world was all before me, where to choose, and I saw it both with ray eyes and my imagination, in the temper of a boy broke loose from school. My heart kept holiday. I loved and blessed the birds which flitted past me, and the cows which lay dreaming on the sward. I recollect stopping with delight at a picturesque descent into the road, to watch a nursery garden, full of roses of every shade, from brilliant yellow to darkest purple ; and as I wondered at the innumerable variety of beauties which man's art had developed from a few poor and wild species, it seemed to me the most dehght- ful life on earth, to follow in such a place the primaeval trade of gardener Adam; to study the secrets of the flower world, the laws of soil and climate ; to create new species, and gloat over the living fruit of one's own science and perseverance. And then I recollected the tailor's shop, and the Charter, and the starvation, and the oppression, which I had left behind, and ashamed of my own selfishness, went hurrying on again. At last I came to a wood — the first real wood that I had ever seen ; not a mere party of stately park trees growing out of smooth turf, but a real wild copse ; tan- gled branches and grey stems fallen across each other; deep, ragged underwood of shrubs, and great ferns like princes' feathers, and gay beds of flowers, blue and pink and yellow, with butterflies flitting about them, and trailers that climbed and dangled from bough to bough — a poor, commonplace bit of copse, I dare say, in the 170 ALTON LOCKE, world's eyes, but to me a fairy wilderness of beautiful forms, mysterious gleams and shadows, teeming with. manifold life. As I stood looking wistfully over tlie gate, alternately at the inviting vista of the green em- broidered path, and then at the grim notice over my head, " All trespassers prosecuted," a young man came up the ride, dressed in velveteen jacket and leather gaiters, sufficiently bedrabbled with mud. A fishing- rod and basket bespoke him some sort of destroyer, and I saw in a moment that he was " a gentleman.^' After all, there is such a thing as looking like a gentleman. There are men whose class no dirt or rags could hide, any more than they could Ulysses. I have seen such men in plenty among workmen, too; but, on the whole, the gentlemen — by whom I do not mean just now the rich — have the superiority in that point. But not, please God, for ever. Give us the same air, water, exercise, education, good society, and you will see whether this ''haggardness," this " coarseness," &c., &c., i'ov the list is too long to specify, be an accident, or a property, of the man of the people. "May I go into your wood?" asked I at a venture, curiosity conquering pride. " Well ! what do you want there, my good fellow?" " To see what a wood is like — I never was in one in my Hfe." " Humph ! well — you may go in for that, and wel- come. Never was in a wood in his life ! — poor devil !" " Thank you !" quoth I. And I slowly clambered over the gate. He put his hand carelessly on the top rail, TAILOR AND POET. 171 vaulted over it like a deer, and then turned to stare at me. " Hullo ! I say — I forgot — don't go far in, or ramble up and down, or you'll disturb the pheasants." I thanked him again for what license he had given me — went in, and lay down by the path-side. Here, I suppose, by the rules of modern art, a pic- turesque description of the said wood should follow ; but I am the most incompetent person in the world to write it. And, indeed, the whole scene was so novel to me, that I had no time to analyse; I could only enjoy. I recollect lying on my face and fingering over the de- licately cut leaves of the weeds, and wondering whether the people who lived in the country thought them as wonderful and beautiful as I did; — and then I re- collected the thousands whom I had left behind, who, like me, had never seen the green face of God's earth ; and the answer of the poor gamin in St. Giles's, who, Avhen he Avas asked what tlie country was, answered, '' the yard lohere ike gentlemen live iclien they go out of town''' — significant that, and pathetic; — then I wondered whether the time would ever come when society would be far enough advanced to open to even such as he a glimpse, if it were only once a year, of the fresh, clean face of God's earth; — and then I became aware of a soft mysterious hum, above me and around me, and turned on my back to look whence it proceeded, and saw the leaves, gold — green and transparent in the sunlight, quivering against the deep heights of the empyrean blue ; and hanging in the sunbeams that 172 ALTON LOCKE, pierced the foliage, a thousand insects, like specks of fire, that poised themselves motionless on thrilling wings, and darted away, and returned to hang motionless again; — and I wondered what they eat, and whether they thought about anything, and whether they enjoyed the sunlight; — and then that brought back to me the times when I used to lie dreaming in my crib on sum- mer mornings, and watched the flies dancing reels between me and the ceilings ; — and that again brought the thought of Susan and my mother ; and I prayed for them — not sadly — I could not be sad there ; — and prayed that we might all meet again some day and live happily together; perhaps in the country, where I could write poems in peace ; and then, by degrees, my sentences and thoughts grew incoherent, and in happy, stupid animal comfort, I faded away into a heavy sleep, which lasted an hour or more, till I was awakened by the efforts of certain enterprising great black and red ants, who were trying to found a small Algeria in my left ear. I rose and left the wood, and a gate or two on, stopped again to look at the same sportsman fishing in a clear silver brook. I could not help admiring with a sortof childish wonder the graceful and practised aim with which he directed his tiny bait, and called up mysterious dimples on the surface, which in a moment increased to splashings and strugglings of a great fish, compelled, as if by some invisible spell, to follow the point of the bending rod till he lay panting on the bank. I confess, in spite of all my class prejudices against " game-pre- serving aristocrats," I almost envied the man; at least I TAILOR AND POET. 173 seemed to understand a little of the universally attractive charms which those same outwardly contemptible field sports possess; the fresh air, fresh fields and copses, fresh running brooks, the exercise, the simple freedom, the excitement just sufficient to keep alive expectation and banish thought. — After all, his trout produced much the same mood in him as my turnpike road did in me. And perhaps the man did not go fishing or shooting every day. The laws prevented him from shooting, at least, all the year round ; so sometimes there might be something in which he made himself of use. An honest, jolly face too he had — not without thought and strength in it. " Well, it is a strange world," said I to myself, "where those who can, need not; and those who cannot, must !" Then he came close to the gate, and I left it just in time to see a little group arrive at it — a woman of his own rank, young, pretty, and simply dressed, with a little boy, decked out as a Highlander, on a shaggy Shetland pony, which his mother, as I guessed her to be, was leading. And then they all met, and the little fellow held up a basket of provisions to his father, who kissed him across the gate, and hung his creel of fish behind the saddle, and patted the mother's shoulder, as she looked up lovingly and laughingly in his face. Altogether, a joyous, genial bit of Nature? Yes, Nature. Shall I grudge simple happiness to the few, because it it as yet, alas ! impossible for the many ? And yet the whole scene contrasted so painfully with me — with my past, my future, my dreams, my wrongs, 174 ALTON LOCKE, that I could not look at it; and with a swelling heart I moved on — all the faster because I saw they were look- ing at me and talking of me, and the fair wife threw after me a wistful, pitying glance, which I was afraid might develop itself into some offer of food or money — a thing which I scorned and dreaded, because it involved the trouble of a refusal. Then, as I walked on once more, my heart smote me. If they had wished to be kind, why had I grudged them the opportunity of a good deed ? At all events, I might have asked their advice. In a natural and harmonious state, when society really means brotherhood, a man could go up to any stranger, to give and receive, if not succour, yet still experience and wisdom : and was I not bound to tell them what I knew? was sure that they did not know ? Was I not bound to preach the cause of my class wherever I went? Here were kindly people who, for aught I knew, would do right the moment they were told where it was wanted ; if there was an accursed artificial gulf between their class and mine, had I any right to complain of it, as long as I helped to keep it up by my false pride and surly reserve? No! I would speak my mind henceforth — I would testify of what I saw and knew of the wrongs, if not of the rights, of the artizan, before -whomsoever I might come. Oh ! valiant conclusion of half an hour's self- tormenting scruples ! How I kept it, remains to be shown. I really fear that I am getting somewhat trivial and prolix : but there was hardly an incident in my two days' tramp which did not give me some small fresh insight TAILOR AND POET. 175 into the terra incognita of the country ; and there may be those among my readers, to whom it is not uninte- resting to look, for once, at even the smallest objects with a cockney workman's eyes. Well, I trudged on — and the shadows lengthened, and I grew footsore and tired ; but every step was new, and won me forward with fresh excitements for my cu- riosity. At one village I met a crowd of Kttle, noisy, happy boys and girls pouring out of a smart new Gothic school- house. I could not resist the temptation of snatching a glance through the open door. I saw on the walls maps, music charts, and pictures. How I envied those little urchins! A solemn, sturdy elder, in a white cravat, evidently the parson of the parish, was patting children's heads, taking down names, and laying down the law to a shrewd, prim young schoolmaster. Presently, as I went up the village, the clergyman strode past me, brandishing a thick stick and humming a chant, and joined a motherly-looking wife, who, bas- ket on arm, was popping in and out of the cottages, looking alternately serious and funny, cross and kindly — I suppose, according to the sayings and doings of the folks within. "Come," I thought, " this looks like work at least." And as I went out of the village, I accosted a labourer, who was trudging my way, fork on shoulder, and asked him if that was the parson and his wife ? I was surprised at the difficulty with which I got into conversation with the man ; at his stupidity, feigned 176 ALTON LOCKE, or real, I could not tell which ; at the dogged, suspicious reserve with which he eyed me, and asked me whether I was " one of they parts?" and whether I was a Lon- doner, and what I wanted on the tramp, and so on, before he seemed to think it safe to answer a single question. He seemed, like almost every labourer lever met, to have something on his mind ; to live in a state of perpetual fear and concealment. When, however, he found I was both a cockney and a passer-by, he began to grow more communicative, and told me, " Ees — that were the parson, sure enough." " And what sort of man was he?" " Oh ! he was a main kind man to the poor; leastwise in the matter of visiting 'em, and praying with 'em, and getting 'em to put into clubs, and such like ; and his lady too. Not that there was any fault to find with the man about money — but 'twasn't to be expected of him." " Why, was he not rich?" *' Oh, rich enough to the likes of us. But his own tithes here arn't more than a thirty pounds we hears tell; and if he'd hadn't summat of his own, he couldn't do not nothing by the poor ; as it be, he pays for that ere school all to his own pocket, next part. All the rest o' the tithes goes to some great lord or other — they say he draws a matter of a thousand a-year out of the parish, and not a foot ever he sot into it; and that's the way ■with a main lot o' parishes, up and down."" This was quite a new fact to me. " And what sort of folks were the parsons all round ?" " Oh, some of all sorts, good and bad. About six TAILOE AND POET. 177 and half a-dozen. There's two or three nice young gen- tlemen come'd round here now, but they're all what's- 'era-a-call-it ? — some sorto' papishes; — leastwise, they has prayers in the church every day, and doesn't preach the Gospel, no how, I hears by my wife, and she knows all about it, along of going to meeting. Then there's one over thereaway, as had to leave his living — he knows why. He got safe over seas. If he had been a poor man, he'd a been in =?«=**** gaol, safe enough, and soon enough. Then there's two or three as goes a-hunting — not as I sees no harm in that ; if a man's got plenty of money, he ought to enjoy himself, in course: but still he can't be here and there too, to once. Then there's two or three as is bad in their healths, or thinks themselves so — or else has livings summer^ else ; and they lives summer' or others, and has curates. Mam busy chaps is they curates, always, and wonderful hands to preach ; but then, just as they gets a little knowing- like at it, and folks gets to like 'em, and run to hear 'em, off they pops to summat better ; and in course they're right to do so ; and so we country-folks get nought but the young colts, afore they're broke, you see." *' And what sort of a preacher was his parson?" '' Oh, he preached very good Gospel. Not that he went very often hisself, acause he couldn't make out the meaning of it; he preached too high, like. But his wife said it was uncommon good Gospel ; and surely when he come to visit a body, and talked plain English, like, not sermon-ways, he was a very pleasant man to VOL. I. N 178 ALTON LOCKE, heer, and his lady uncommon kind to nurse folk. They sot up with me and my wife, they two did, two whole nights, when we was in the fever, afore the officer could get us a nurse." " Well," said I, " there are some good parsons left." " Oh, yes; there's some very good ones — each one after his own way; and there'd be more on 'em, if they did but know how bad we labourers was off. Why bless ye, I mind when they was very different. A new parson is a mighty change for the better, mostwise, we finds. Why, when I was a boy, we never had no school- ing. And now mine goes and learns singing and jobrafy, and ciphering, and sich like. Not that I sees no good in it. We was a sight better off in the old times, when there weren't no schooling. Schooling harn't made wages rise, nor preaching neither." " But surely," I said, " all this religious knowledge ought to give you comfort, even if you are badly off." " Oh ! religion's all very well for them as has time for it ; and a very good thing — we ought all to mind our latter end. But I don't see how a man can hear sermons with an empty belly; and there's so much to fret a man, now, and he's so cruel tired coming home o' nights, he can't nowise go to pray a lot, as gentlefolks does." "But are you so ill off?" " Oh ! he'd had a good harvesting enough; but then he owed all that for he's rent; and he's club-money wasn't paid up, nor he's shop. And then, with he's wages — " (I forget the sum — under ten shilHngs), " how TAILOR AND POET. 179 could a man keep liis mouth full, when he had five children? And then, folks is so unmarciful — Fil just tell you what they says to me, now, last time I was over at the board " And thereon he rambled off into a long jumble of medical-officers, and relieving-officers, and Farmer This, and Squire That, which indicated a mind as ill-educated as discontented. He cursed, or rather grumbled at — for he had not spirit, it seemed, to curse anything — the New Poor Law ; because it " ate up the poor, flesh and bone;" — bemoaned the " Old Law," when " the Vestry was forced to give a man whatsomdever he axed for, and if they didn't he'd go to the magistrates and make 'em, and so sure as a man got a fresh child, he went and got another loaf allowed him next vestry, like a Christian ;" — and so turned through a gate, and set to work forking up some weeds on a fallow, leaving me many new thoughts to digest. That night, I got to some town or other, and there found a night's lodging, good enough for a walking traveller. X 2 180 ALTON LOCKE, CHAPTER XII. CAMBEIDGE. When I started again next morning, I found myself so stiff and footsore, that I could hardly put one leg before the other, much less walk upright. I was really quite in despair, before the end of the first mile ; for I had no money to pay for a lift on the coach, and I knew, besides, that they would not be passing that way for several hours to come. So, with aching back and knees, I made shift to limp along, bent almost double, and ended by sitting down for a couple of hours, and looking about me, in a country which would have seemed dreary enough, I suppose, to any one but a freshly-liberated captive, such as I was. At last I got up and limped on, stiffer than ever from my rest, when a gig drove past me towards Cambridge, drawn by a stout cob, and driven by a tall, fat, jolly-looking farmer, who stared at me as he passed, went on, looked back, slackened his pace, looked back again, and at last came to a dead stop, and hailed me in a broad nasal dialect — " Whor be ganging, then, boh?" '' To Cambridge." TAILOR AND POET. 181 " Thew'st na git there that gate. Be'est thee honest man?" " I hope so," said I, somewhat indignantly. "What's trade?" "A tailor,'' I said. " Tailor ! — guide us ! Tailor a-tramp ? Bam't ac- coostomed to tramp, then?" " I never was out of London before," said I, meekly; for I was too worn-out to be cross — lengthy and imper- tinent as this cross-examination seemed. " Oi'll gie thee lift; dee yow joomp in. Gae on, powney ! Tailor, then ! Oh ! ah ! tailor," saith he. I obeyed most thankfully, and sat crouched together, looking up out of the corner of my eyes at the huge tower of broad-cloth by my side, and comparing the two red shoulders of mutton which held the reins, with my own wasted, white, woman-like fingers. I found the old gentleman most inquisitive. He drew out of me all my story — questioned me about the way " Lunnon folks" lived, and whether they got ony shooting or "pattening" — whereby I found he meant skating — and broke in, every now and then, with ejacu- lations of childish wonder, and clumsy sympathy, on my accounts of London labour and London misery. " Oh, father, father ! — I wonders they bears it. TJs'n in the fens wouldn't stand that likes. They'd roit, and roit, and roit, and tak' oot the dook-gunes to un — they would, as they did five-and-twenty year agone. Never to goo ayond the housen ! — never to goo ayond 182 ALTON LOCKE, the housen ! Kill me in a three montlis, that would — bor', then !" ** Are you a farmer?" I asked, at last, thinking that my turn for questioning was come. " I bean't varmer; I be yooman born. Never paid rent in moy life, nor never wool. I farms my own land, and my vathers avore me, this ever so mony hoondred year. I've got the swoord of 'em to home, and the helmet that they fut with into the wars, then when they chopped off the king's head — what was the name ofum?" '^Charles the First?" " Ees — that's the booy. We was Parliament side — true Britons all we was, down into the fens, and Oliver Cromwell, as dug Botsham lode, to the head of us. You coom down to Metholl, and I'll shaw ye a country. I'll shaw 'ee some'at like bullocks to call, and some- 'at like a field o** beans — I wool, — none o' this here darned ups and downs o' hills" (though the country through which we drove was flat enough, I should have thought, to please any one), " to shake a body's victuals out of his inwards — all so flat as a barn's floor, for vorty mile on end — there's the country to live in ! — and vour sons — or was vour on 'em — every one on 'em fifteen stone in his shoes, to patten again' any man from Whit'sea Mere to Denver Sluice, for twenty pounds o' gold; and there's the money to lay down, and let the man as dare cover it, down with his money, and on w? his pattens, thirteen-inch runners, down the wind, again' ether a one o' the bairns !" TAILOB AND POET. 183 And lie jingled in liis pocket a heavy bag of gold, and winked, and chuckled, and then suddenly checking himself, repeated in a sad, dubious tone, two or three times, " vour on 'em there was — vour on 'em there was;" and relieved his feelings, by springing the pony into a canter till he came to a public house, where he pulled up, called for a pot of hot ale, and insisted on treating me. I assured him that I never drank fermented Hquors. " Aw? Eh? How can yow do that then? Die o' cowdi' the fen, that gate, yow would. Love ye then ! they as dlnnot tak' spirits down thor, tak' their pennord o' elevation, then — women-folk especial." " What's elevation?" " Oh ! ho I ho ! — yow goo into druggist's shop o' market-day, into Cambridge, and you'll see the Httle boxes, doozens and doozens, a' ready on the counter; and never a ven-man's wife goo by, but what calls in for her pennord o' elevation, to last her out the week. Oh ! ho ! ho ! Well, it keeps women-folk quiet, it do ; and it's mortal good agin ago pains." *' But what is it?" " Opium, bor' ahve, opium I'** *' But doesn't it ruin their health? I should think it the very worst sort of drunkenness." " Ow, well, yow moi say that — mak'th *em cruel thin then, it do; but what can bodies do i' th' ago? Bot it's a bad thing, it is. Harken yow to me. Did'st ever know one called Porter, to yowr trade?" 184 ALTON LOCKE, I thought a httle, and recollected a man of that name, who had worked with us a year or two before-r a great friend of a certain scatter-brained Irish lad, brother of Crossthwaite's wife. " Well, I did once, but I have lost sight of him twelve months, or more." The old man faced sharp round on me, swinging the little gig almost over, and then twisted himself back again, and put on a true farmer-like look of dogged, stolid reserve. We rolled on a few minutes in silence. ^' Dee yow consider, now, that a mon mought be lost, like, into Lunnon?" *' How lost?" " Why, yow told o' they sweaters — dee yow think a mon might get in wi' one o' they, and they that mought be looking vor un not to vind un T' " I do, indeed. There was a friend of that man Porter got turned away from our shop, because he wouldn't pay some tyrannical fine for being saucy, as they called it, to the shopman ; and he went to a sweater's — and then to another; and his friends have been tracking him up and down this six months, and can hear no news of him." " Aw ! guide us ! And what'n, think yow, be gone wi' un ?" *' I am afraid he has got into one of those dens, and has pawned his clothes, as dozens of them do, for food, and so can't get out." TAILOE AND POET. 185 "• Pawned his clothes for victuals ! To think o' that, noo ! But if he had work, can't he get victuals?" *' Oh !*' I said, "there's many a man who, after work- ing seventeen or eighteen hours a-day, Sundays and all, without even time to take off his clothes, finds him- self brought in in debt to his tyrant at the week's end. And if he gets no work, the villain won't let him leave the house ; he has to stay there starving, on the chance of an hour's job. I tell you, I've known half-a-dozen men imprisoned in that way, in a little dungeon of a garret, where they had hardly room to stand upright, and only just space to sit and work between their beds, without breathing the fresh air, or seeing God's sun, for months together, with no victuals but a few slices of bread-and-butter, and a little slop of tea, twice a-day, till they were starved to the very bone." *• Oh, my God ! my God !" said the old man, in a voice which had a deeper tone of feeling than mere sym- pathy with others' sorrow was likely to have produced. There was evidently something behind all these iniqui- ries of his. I longed to ask him if his name, too, was not Porter. *' Aw yow knawn Billy Porter? What was a like? Tell me, now — what was a like, in the Lord's name ! what was a like unto?" " Very tall and bony," I answered. " Ah! sax feet, and more? and a yard across? — but a was starved, a was a' thin, though, maybe, when yow sawn un? — and beautiful fine hair, hadn't a, like a lass's?" 186 ALTON LOCKE, *' The man I knew had red hair," quoth I. " Ow, ay, an' that it wor, red as a rising sun, and the curls of un like go widen guineas ! And thou knew'st Billy Porter ! To think o' that, noo— " Another long silence. " Could you find un, dee yow think, noo, into Lunnon? Suppose, now, there was a mon 'ud gie — may be five pund — ten pund — twenty pund, by * * * — twenty pund down, for to ha' him brocht home safe and soun' — Could yow do't, bor'? I zay, could yow do't?" *' I could do it as well without the money as with, if I could do it at all. But have you no guess as to where he is?" He shook his head sadly. " We — that's to zay, they as wants un — hav'n'theerd tell of un vor this three year — three year coom Whitsun- tide as ever was — " And he wiped his eyes with his cufi: " If you will tell me all about him, and where he was last heard of, I will do all I can to find him.^^ "Will ye, noo? will ye? The Lord bless ye for zaying that" — And he grasped my hand in his great iron fist, and fairly burst out crying. "Was he a relation of yours?" I asked, gently. " My bairn — my bairn — my eldest bairn. Dinnot yow ax me no moor — dinnot then, bor'. Gie on yow powney, and yow goo leuk vor un." Another long silence. TAILOR AND POET. 187 " Pve a been to Lunnon, looking vor un." Another silence. *' I went up and down, up and down, day and night, day and night, to all pot-houses as I could zee; vor, says I, he was a' ways a main chap to drink, he was. Oh, deery me ! and I never cot zight on un — and noo I be most spent, I be " — And he pulled up at another public-house, and tried this time a glass of brandy. He stopped, I really think, at every inn between that place and Cambridge, and at each tried some fresh compound; but his head seemed, from habit, utterly fire-proof. At last, we neared Cambridge, and began to pass groups of gay horsemen, and then those strange caps and gowns — ugly and unmeaning remnant of obsolete fashion. The old man insisted on driving me up to the gate of Trinity, and there dropped me, after I had given him my address, entreating me to " vind the bairn, and coom to zee him down to Metholl. But dinnot goo ax for Farmer Porter — they's all Porters there away. Yow ax for Wooden-house Bob — that's me ; and if I bam't to home, ax for Mucky Billy — that's my brawther — we're all gotten our names down to ven ; and if he bam't to home, yow ax for Frog-hall — that's where my sister do Hve; and they'll all veed ye, and lodge ye, and welcome come. We be all like one, doon in the Ten ; and do ye, do ye, vind my bairn !" And he trundled on, down the narrow street. 188 ALTON LOCKE, I was soon directed, by various smart-looking ser- vants, to my cousin's rooms ; and after a few mistakes, and wandering up and down noble courts and cloisters, swarming with gay young men, whose jaunty air and dress seemed strangely out of keeping with the stern antique solemnity of the Gothic buildings around, espied my cousin's name over a door; and, uncertain how he might receive me, I gave a gentle, half-apologetic knock, which was answered by a loud *' Come in !" and I entered on a scene, even more incongruous than any- thing 1 had seen outside. "If we can only keep away from that d * * * * d Jesus as far as the corner, I don't care." " If we don't run into that first Trinity before the willows, I shall care with a vengeance." " If we don't, it's a pity," said my cousin. *' Wad- ham ran up by the side of that first Trinity yesterday, and he said that they were as well gruelled as so many posters, before they got to the stile." This unintelligible, and, to my inexperienced ears, blasphemous conversation, proceeded from half-a-dozen powerful young men, in low-crowned sailor's hats and flannel trousers, some in striped jerseys, some in shooting- jackets, some smoking cigars, some beating up eggs in sherry; while my cousin, dressed like " a fancy water- man," sat on the back of a sofa, puffing away at a huge meerschaum. " Alton ! why, what wind on earth has blown you here?' I TAILOR AND POET. 189 By the tone, the words seemed rather an inquiry as to what wind would be kind enough to blow me back again. But he recovered his self-possession in a moment. *' Delighted to see you ! Where's your portmanteau? Oh— left it at the Bull ! Ah ! I see. Very well, we'll send the gyp for it in a minute, and order some luncheon. We're just going down to the boat-race. Sorry I can't stop, but we shall all be fined — not a moment to lose. I'll send you in luncheon as I go through the butteries ; then, perhaps, you'd like to come down and see the race. Ask the gyp to tell you the way. Now, then, follow your noble captain, gentlemen — to glory and a supper." And he bustled out with his crew. While I was staring about the room, at the jumble of Greek books, boxing-gloves, and luscious prints of pretty women, a shrewd-faced, smart man entered, much better dressed than myself. *' What would you like, sir? Ox-tail soup, sir, or gravy-soup, sir? Stilton cheese, sir, or Cheshire, sir? Old Stilton, sir, just now." Fearing lest many words might betray my rank — and, strange to say, though I should not have been afraid of confessing myself an artisan before the '^ gentlemen" who had just left the room, I was ashamed to have my low estate discovered, and talked over with his compeers, by the flunkey who waited on them — I answered, " Anything — I really don't care," in as aristocratic and off-hand a tone as I could assume. 190 ALTON LOCKE, '^ Porter or ale, sir?" " Water," without a '* thank you," I am ashamed to say, for I was not at that time quite sure whether it was well-bred to be civil to servants. The man vanished, and re-appeared with a savoury luncheon, silver forks, snowy napkins, smart plates — I felt really quite a gentleman. He gave me full directions as to my " way to the boats, sir;" and I started out much refreshed; passed through back streets, dingy, dirty, and profligate-look- ing enough; out upon wide meadows, fringed with enormous elms; across a ferry ; through a pleasant village, with its old grey church and spire; by the side of a sluggish river, alive with wherries ; along a towing-path swarming with bold, bedizened women, who jested with the rowers, — of their profession, alas ! there could be no doubt. I had walked down some mile or so, and just as I heard a cannon, as I thought, fire at some distance, and wondered at its meaning, I came to a sudden bend of the river, with a church-tower hanging over the stream on the opposite bank, a knot of tall poplars, weeping willows, rich lawns, sloping down to the water's side, gay with bonnets and shawls ; while, along the edge of the stream, light, gaudily-painted boats appa- rently waited for the race, — altogether the most brilliant and graceful group of scenery which I had beheld in my little travels. I stopped to gaze ; and among the ladies on the lawn opposite, caught sight of a figure — my heart leapt into my mouth ! Was it she at last? It TAILOR AND POET. 191 was too far to distinguish features ; tlie dress was alto- gether different — but was it not she ? I saw her move across the lawn, and take the arm of a tall, venerable- looking man; and his dress was the same as that of the Dean, at the Dulwich Gallery — was it ? was it not ? To have found her, and a river between us ! It was ludi- crously miserable — miserably ludicrous. Oh, that ac- cursed river, which debarred me from certainty, from bhss ! I would have plunged across — but there were three objections — first, that I could not swim; next, what could I do when I had crossed? and thirdly, it might not be she after all. And yet I was certain — instinctively certain — that it was she, the idol of my imagination for years. If I could not see her features under that little white bonnet, I could imagine them there ; they flashed up in my memory as fresh as ever. Did she remember my features, as I did hers? Would she know me again? Had she ever even thought of me, from that day to this? Fool! But there I stood, fascinated, gazing across the river, heedless of the racing-boats, and the crowd, and the roar that was rushing up to me at the rate of ten miles an hour, and in a moment more, had caught me, and swept me away with it, whether I would or not, along the towing-path, by the side of the foremost boats. Oh, the Babel of horse and foot, young and old ! the cheering, and the exhorting, and the objurgations of number this, and number that ! and the yeUing of the 192 ALTON LOCKE, most sacred names, intermingled too often with oaths. — And yet, after a few moments, I ceased to wonder either at the Cambridge passion for boat-racing, or at the ex- citement of the spectators. ' * Honi soit qui mal y pense^ It was a noble sport — a sight such as could only be seen in England — some hundred of young men, who might, if they had chosen, been lounging effeminately about the streets, subjecting themselves voluntarily to that intense exertion, for the mere pleasure of toil. The true English stuff came out there ; I felt that, in spite of all my prejudices — the stuff which has held Gibraltar and conquered at Waterloo — which has created a Bir- mingham and a Manchester, and colonised every quarter of the globe — that grim, earnest, stubborn energy , which, since the days of the old Romans, the English possess alone of all the nations of the earth. I was as proud of the gallant young fellows, as if they had been my brothers — of their courage and endurance (for one could see that it was no child's-play, from the pale faces, and panting lips), their strength and activity, so fierce and yet so cultivated, smooth, harmonious, as oar kept time with oar, and every back rose and fell in concert — and felt my soul stirred up to a sort of sweet madness, not merely by the shouts and cheers of the mob around me, but by the loud, fierce pulse of the rowlocks, the swift whispering rush of the long, snake-like eight oars, the swirl and gurgle of the water in their wake, the grim, breathless silence of the straining rowers. My blood boiled over, and fierce tears swelled into my eyes; for I, too. TAILOR AND POET. 193 was a man, and an Englishman; and when I caught sight of my cousin, pulling stroke to the second boat in the long line, with set teeth and flashing eyes, the great muscles on his bare arms springing up into knots at every rapid stroke, I ran and shouted among the mad- dest and the foremost. But I soon tired, and, footsore as I was, began to find my strength fail me. I tried to drop behind, but found it impossible in the press. At last, quite out of breath, I stopped; and instantly received a heavy blow from behind, which threw me on my face. I looked up, and saw a huge long-legged grey horse, with his knees upon my back, in the act of falling over me. His rider, a little ferret- visaged boy, dressed in sporting style, threw himself back in the saddle, and recovered the horse in an instant, with a curse at me, as I rolled down the steep bank into the river, among the laughter and shouts of the women, who seemed to think it quite a grand act on the part of the horseman. " Well saved, upon my word, my lord !" shouted out a rider beside him. '•' Confound the snob ! — I'm glad he got his ducking. What do the fellows want here, getting in a gentleman's way?' " For shame, Swindon ! the manis hurt," said another rider, a very tall and handsome man, Avho pulled up his horse, and, letting the crowd pass, sprang off to my assistance. " Leave him alone, Lord Lynedale," said one of the VOL. 1. O 194 ALTON LOCKE, women ; "let him go home and ask his mammy to hang him out to dry." *' Why do you bother yourself with such muffs?" &c. &c. &c. But I had scrambled out, and stood there dripping, and shaking with rage and pain. " I hope you are not much hurt, my man?" asked the nobleman, in a truly gentlemanlike, because truly gen- tle, voice, and he pulled out half-a-crown, and offered it to me, saying, " I am quite ashamed to see one of my own rank behave in a way so unworthy of it/' But I, in my shame and passion, thrust back at once the coin and the civility. ^^ I want neither you nor your money," said I, limp- ing off down the bank. " It serves me right, for getting among you cursed aristocrats." How the nobleman took my answer I did not stay to see, for I was glad to escape the jeers of the bystan ding- blackguards, male and female, by scrambling over the fences, and making my way across the fields back to Cambridge. TAILOR AND POET. 195 CHAPTER Xm. THE LOST IDOL FOUXD. Ox my return, I found my cousin already at home, in high spirits at having, as he informed me, " bumped the first Trinity." I excused myself for my dripping state, simply by saying that I had slipped into the river. To tell him the whole of the story, while the insult still rankled fresh in me, was really too disagreeable both to my memory and my pride. Then came the question, "What had brought me to Cambridge?" I told him all, and he seemed honestly to sympathise with my misfortunes. " Never mind ; well make it all right somehow. Those poems of yours — you must let me have them and look over them ; and I dare say I shall persuade the gover- nor to do something with them. After all, it's no loss for you ; you couldn't have gone on tailoring — much too sharp a fellow for that; — you ought to be at college, if one could only get you there. These sizarships, now, were meant for just such cases as yours — clever fellows who could not afford to educate themselves; but, like everything in the university, the people for whom they o2 196 ALTON LOCKE, are meant never get them. Do you know what the golden canon is, Alton, for understanding all university questions?" ''No." " Then I'll tell you. That the employment of any money whatsoever, for any purpose whatsoever, is a certain sign that it was originally meant for some purpose totally different." '^What do you mean?" I asked. " Oh ! you shall stay here with me a few days, and you'll soon find out. Hush! now; don't come the independent dodge. One cousin may visit another, I hope, without contracting obligations, and all that. I'll find you a bedroom out of college, and you'll live in my rooms all day, and I'll show you a thing or two. How do you like the university?" "The buildings," I said, "strike me as very noble and reverent." " They are the only noble and reverent things you'll find here, I can tell you. It's a system of humbug, from one end to the other. But the Dons get their living by it, and their livings too, and their bishopricks, now and then ; and I intend to do the same, if I have a chance. Do at Rome as Rome does." And he lighted his pipe, and winked knowingly at me. I mentioned the profane use of sacred names, which had so disgusted me at the boat-race. He laughed. " Ah ! my dear fellow, it's a very fair specimen of Cambridge — shows what's the matter with us all — putting new wine into old bottles, and into young TAILOR AND POET. 197 bottles, too_, as you'll see at my supper party to- night." " Really," I said, "I am not fit for presentation at any such aristocratic amusements." " Oh! I'll lend you clothes till your own are dried; and as for behaviour, hold your tongue, and don't put your knife in your mouth, are quite rules enough to get any man mistaken for a gentleman here." And he laughed again in his peculiar sneering way. " By-the-bye, don't get drunk; for in vino Veritas. You know what that means." " So well," I answered, "that I never intend to touch a drop of fermented liquor." " Capital rule for a poor man. I've got a strong head, luckily. If I hadn't, I should keep sober on principle. It's great fun to have a man taking you into his confidence after the second bottle ; and then to see the funk he's in next day, when he recollects he's shown you more of his hand than is good for his own game." All this sickened me ; and I tried to turn the con- versation, by asking him what he meant by new wine in old bottles? "Can't you see? The whole is monastic — dress, immarried fellows, the very names of the colleges. I dare say it did very well for the poor scholars in the middle ages, who, three-fourths of them, turned either monks or priests ; but it won^t do for the young gentle- men of the 19th century. Those very names of colleges are of a piece -with the rest. The colleges were dedi- cated to various sacred personages and saints, to secure 198 ALTON LOCKE, their interest in heaven for the prosperity of the college; but who believes in all that now? And there- fore the names remain only to be desecrated. The men can't help it. They must call the colleges by their names." " Why don't they alter the names .^" I said. " Because, my dear fellow, they are afraid to alter anything, for fear of bringing the whole rotten old house down about their ears. They say themselves, that the slightest innovation will be a precedent for destroying the whole system, bit by bit. Why should they be afraid of that, if they did not know that the whole system would not bear canvassing an instant? That's why they retain statutes that can't be observed ; because they know, if they once began altering the statutes the least, the world would find out how they have themselves been breaking the statutes. That's why they keep up the farce of swearing to the Thirty- Nine Articles, and all that; just because they know, if they attempted to alter the letter of the old forms, it would come out, that half the young men of the uni- versity don't believe three words of them at heart. They know the majority of us are at heart neither churchmen nor Christians, nor even decently moral: but the one thing they are afraid of is scandal. So they connive at the young men's ill-doings ; they take no real steps to put down profligacy; and, in the mean time, they just keep up the forms of Church of England- ism, and pray devoutly that the whole humbug may last out their time. There isn't one Don in a hundred who has any personal influence over the gownsmen. TAILOR AND POET. 199 A man may live here from the time he's a fresh-man, to the time he's taken his degree, without ever being spoken to as if he had a soul to be saved; imless he happens to be one of the Simeonite party ; and they are getting fewer and fewer every year; and in ten years more there won't be one of them left, at the present rate. Besides, they have no influence over the rest of the under-graduates. They are very good, excel- lent fellows in their way, I do believe ; but they are not generally men of talent ; and they keep entirely to themselves ; and know nothing, and care nothing, for the questions of the day." And so he rambled on, complaining and sneering, till supper time ; when we went out and lounged about the venerable cloisters, while the room was being cleared and the cloth laid. To describe a Cambridge supper party among gay young men is a business as httle suited to my taste as to my powers. The higher classes ought to know pretty well what such things are like ; and the working men are not altogether ignorant, seeing that Peter Priggins and other university men have been turning Alma Mater's shame to as lucrative account in their fictions, as the^ Irish scribblers have that of their mother country. But I must say, that I was utterly disgusted ; and Avhen, after the removal of the eatables, the whole party, twelve or fourteen in number, set to work to drink hard and deliberately at milk punch, and bishop, and copus, and grog, and I know not what other in- ventions of bacchanalian luxury, and to sing, one after another, songs of the most brutal indecency, I was glad 200 ALTON LOCKE, to escape into the cool night air, and under pretence of going home, wander up and down the King'^s Parade, and watch the tall gables of King's College Chapel, and the classic front of the senate-house, and the stately tower of St. Mary's, as they stood, stern and silent, bathed in the still glory of the moonshine, and seeming to watch, with a steadfast sadness, the scene of frivolity and sin, pharisaism, formalism, hypocrisy, and idleness, below. Noble buildings ! and noble institutions ! given freely to the people, by those who loved the people, and the Saviour who died for them. They gave us what they had, those mediaeval founders : whatsoever narrowness of mind or superstition defiled their gift was not their fault, but the fault of their whole age. The best they knew they imparted freely, and God will reward them for it. To monopolise those institutions for the rich, as is done now, is to violate both the spirit and the letter of the foundations; to restrict their studies to the limits of middle-age Romanism,* their conditions of admission to those fixed at the Reformation, is but a shade less wrongful. The letter is kept — the spirit is thrown away. You refuse to admit any who are not members of the Church of England; — say, rather, any who will not sign the dogmas of the Church of England, whether * This, like the rest of Mr. Locke's Cambridge reminiscences, may appear to many exaggerated and unfair. But he seems to be speaking of both universities, and at a time when they had not even commenced the process of reformation. We fear, however, that in spite of many noble exceptions, his picture of Cambridge represents, if not the whole truth, still the impression which she leaA-^es on the minds of too many, strangers and, alas! students also. — Ed. TAILOR AND POET. 201 they believe a word of tliern or not. Useless formalism ! ■which lets through the reckless, the profligate, the ignorant, the hypocritical; and only excludes the honest and the conscientious, and the mass of the intel- lectual working men. And whose fault is it that they are not members of the Church of England? Whose fault is it, I ask ? Your predecessors neglected the lower orders, till they have ceased to reverence either you or your doctrines; — you confess that, among yourselves, freely enough. You throw the blame of the present ■wide-spread dislike to the Church of England on her sins during " the godless 18th century." Be it so. Why are those sins to be visited on us? Why are we to be shut out from the universities, which were founded for us, because you have let us grow up, by millions, heathens and infidels, as you call us? Take away your subterfuge ! It is not merely because we are bad churchmen that you exclude us, else you would be cro^wding your colleges, now, with the talented poor of the agricultural districts, who, as you say, remain faith- ful to the church of their fathers. But are there six labourers' sons educating^ in the universities at this moment? No! The real reason for our exclusion, churchmen or not, is because we are poor — because we cannot pay your exorbitant fees, often, as in the case of bachelors of arts, exacted for tuition which is never given, and residence which is not permitted — because we could not support the extravagance which you not only permit, but encourage, because, by your own un- blushing confession, it insures the university '• the sup- port of the aristocracy." 202 ALTON LOCKE, *' But, on religious points, at least, you must abide by the statutes of the university." Strange argument, truly, to be urged literally by English Protestants in possession of Roman Catholic bequests ! If that be true in the letter, as well as in the spirit, you should have given place long ago to the Dominicans and the Franciscans. In the spirit it is true, and the Reformers acted on it when they rightly con- verted the universities to the uses of the new faith. They carried out the spirit of the founders' statutes by making the universities as good as they could be, and lettinoj them share in the new liffht of the Elizabethan age. But was the sum of knowledge, human and divine, perfected at the Reformation? Who gave the Reformers, or you, who call yourselves their representa- tives^ a right to say to the mind of man, and to the teaching of God's Spirit, '* Hitherto, and no farther!" Society and mankind, the children of the Supreme, will not stop growing for your dogmas — much less for your vested interests ; and the righteous law of mingled development and renovation, applied in the sixteenth century, must be re-applied in the nineteenth ; while the spirits of the founders, now purged from the super- stitions and ignorances of their age, shall smile from heaven, and say, " So would we have had it, if we had lived in the great nineteenth century, into which it has been your privilege to be born." But such thoughts soon passed away. The image which I had seen that afternoon upon the river-banks, had awakened imperiously the frantic longings of past years; and now it re-ascended its ancient throne, and TAILOR AND POET. 203 tyrannously drove forth every other object, to keep me alone with its own tantalizing and torturing beauty. I did not think about her — No ; I only stupidly and stead- fastly stared at her with my whole soul and imagination, through that long sleepless night ; and in spite of the fatigue of my journey, and the stiffness proceeding from my fall and wetting, I lay tossing till the early sun poured into my bedroom window. Then I arose, dressed myself, and went out to wander up and down the streets, gazing at one splendid building after another, till I found the gates of King's College open. I entered eagerly, through a porch which, to my un- tutored taste, seemed gorgeous enough to form the entrance to a fairy palace, and stood in the quadrangle, rivetted to the spot by the magnificence of the huge chapel on the right. If I had admired it the night before, I felt inclined to worship it this morning, as I saw the lofty buttresses and spires, fretted with all their gorgeous carving, and " storied windows richly dight," sleeping in the glare of the newly risen sun, and throwing their long shadows due westward down the sloping lawn, and across the river which dimpled and gleamed below, till it was lost among the towering masses of crisp elms and rose- garlanded chestnuts in the rich gardens beyond. Was I delighted? Yes — and yet no. There is a painful feeling in seeing anything magnificent which one cannot understand. And perhaps it was a mor- bid sensitiveness, but the feeling was strong upon me that I was an interloper there— out of harmony with the scene and the system which had created it ; that I 204 ALTON LOCKE, mlglit be an object of unpleasant curiosity, periiaps of scorn (for I bad not forgotten tbe nobleman at the boat- race), auiid those monuments of learned luxury. Per- haps, on the other hand, it was only from the instinct which makes us seek for solitude under the pressure of intense emotions, when we have neither language to express them to ourselves, nor loved one in whose silent eyes we may read kindred feelings — a sympathy which wants no words. Whatever the cause was, when a party of men, in their caps and gowns, approached me down the dark avenue which led into the country, I was glad to shrink for concealment behind the weeping-willow at the foot of the bridge, and slink off unobserved to breakfast with my cousin. We had just finished breakfast, my cousin was light- ing his meerschaum, when a tall figure past the win- dow, and the taller of the noblemen, whom I had seen at tlie boat-race, entered the room with a packet of papers in his hand. "Here, Locule mi! my pocket-book — or rather, to stretch a bad pun till it bursts, my pocket-dictionary. I require the aid of your benevolently-squandered talents for the correction of these proofs. I am, as usual, both idle and busy this morning; so draw pen, and set to work for me." " I am exceedingly sorry, my lord," answered George, in his most obsequious tone, " but I must work this morning with all my might. Last night, recollect, was given to triumph, Bacchus, and idleness." " Then find some one who will do them for me, my Ulysses polumechane, polutrope, panurge." TAILOR AND POET. 205 " I shall be most happy (with a half-frown and a wince) to play Panurge to your lordship's Pantagruel, on board the new yacht." " Oh, I am perfect in that character, I suppose? And is she, after all, like Pantagruel's ship, to be loaded with hemp? Well, we must try two or three milder carofoes first. But come, find me some starving 2:eniu3 — some graeculus esuriens " " Who will ascend to the heaven of your lordship's eloquence for the bidding?" " Five shillings a sheet — there will be about two of them, I think, in the pamphlet." " IMay 1 take the liberty of recommending my cousin here?" *' Your cousin?" And he turned to me, who had been examining with a sad and envious eye the con- tents of the bookshelves. Our eyes met, and first a faint blush, and then a smile of recognition, passed over his magnificent countenance. " I think I had — I am ashamed that I cannot say the pleasure, of meeting him at the boat-race yester- day." ]\Iy cousin looked inquiringly and vexed at us both. The nobleman smiled. " Oh, the shame was ours, not his." " I cannot think," I answered, "that you have any reasons to remember with shame your own kindness and courtesy. As for me," I went on bitterly, " I sup- pose a poor journeyman tailor, who ventures to look on at the sports of gentlemen, only deserves to be ridden over." 206 ALTON LOCKE, " Sir," he said, looking at me with a severe and searching glance, *' your bitterness is pardonable — ^but not your sneer. You do not yourself think what you say, and you ought to know that I think it still less than yourself. If you intend your irony to be useful, you should keep it till you can use it courageously against the true offenders." I looked up at him fiercely enough, but the placid smile which had returned to his face disarmed me. " Your class," he went on, "^ blind yourselves and our class as much by wholesale denunciations of us, as Ave, alas ! who should know better, do by wholesale denunciations of you. As you grow older, you will learn that there are exceptions to every rule." " And yet the exception proves the rule." " Most painfully true, sir. But that argument is two- edged. For instance, am I to consider it the exception or the rule, when I am told, that you, a journeyman tailor, are able to correct these proofs for me?" " Nearer the rule, I think, than you yet fancy." " You speak out boldly and well; but how can you judge what I may please to fancy? At all events, I will make trial of you. There are the proofs. Bring them to me by four o'clock this afternoon, and if they are well done, I will pay you more than I should to the average hack-writer, for you will deserve more." I took the proofs; he turned to go, and by a side- look at George beckoned him out of the room. I heard a whispering in the passage : and I do not deny that my heart beat high with new hopes, as I caught unwillingly the words — TAILOPw AND POET. 207 " Such a forehead ! — such an eye ! — such a contour of feature as that ! — Locule mi — that boy ought not to be mending trousers/' My cousin returned, half laughing, half angry. " Alton, you fool, why did you let out that you were a snip?'^ *' I am not ashamed of my trade.'" " I am, then. However, you've done with it now; and if you can't come the gentleman, you may as well come the rising genius. The self-educated dodge pays well just now; and after all, you've hooked his lordship — thank me for that. But you'll never hold him, you impudent dog, if you pull so hard on him" — He went on, putting his hands into his coat-tail pockets, and sticking himself in front of the fire, like the Delphic Pythoness upon the sacred tripod, in hopes, I suppose, of some oracular afSatus — "You will never hold him, I say, if you pull so hard on him. You ought to ' My lord' him for months yet, at least. You know, my good fellow, you must take every possible care to pick up what good-breeding you can, if I take the trouble to put you in the way of good society, and tell you where my private bird's-nests are, like the green school- boy some poet or other talks of." " He is no lord of mine," I answered, " in any sense of the word, and therefore I shall not call him so." " Upon my honour I here is a young gentleman who intends to rise in the world, and then commences by trying to walk through the first post he meets ! Noodle I can't you do like me, and get out of the carts' way 208 ALTON LOCKE, when tliey come by? If you intend to go ahead, you must just dodge in and out, like a dog at a fair. ' She stoops to conquer ' is my motto, and a precious good one too." " I have no wish to conquer Lord Lynedale, and so I shall not stoop to him." " I have, then; and to very good purpose, too. I am his whetstone, for polishing up that classical wit of his on, till he carries it into Parliament to astonish the country squires. He fancies himself a second Goethe ; I hav'n't forgot his hitting at me, before a large supper party, with a certain epigram of that old turkey-cock's, about the whale having his unmentionable parasite — and the great man likewise. Whale, indeed ! I bide my time, Alton, my boy — I bide my time ; and then let your grand aristocrat look out ! If he does not find the supposed whale-unmentionable a good stout holding harpoon, with a tough line to it, and a long one, it's a pity, Alton, my boy I" And he burst into a coarse laugh, tossed himself down on the sofa, and re-lighted his meerschaum. '^ He seemed to me," I answered, " to have a peculiar courtesy and liberality of mind towards those below him in rank.^' '' Oh! he had, had he? Now, I'll just put you up to a dodge. He intends to come the Mirabeau — fancies his mantle has fallen on him — prays before the fellow's bust, I believe, if one knew the truth, for a double portion of his spirit ; and therefore it is a part of his game to ingratiate himself with all pot-boy-dom, TAILOR AND POET. 209 while at heart he is as proud, exclusive an aristocrat, as ever wore nobleman's hat. At all events, you may get something out of him, if you play your cards well — or, rather, help me to play mine ; for I consider him as my property, and you only as my aide-de-camp." *' I shall play no one's cards," I answered, sulkily. " I am doing work fairly, and shall be fairly paid for it, and keep my own independence." " Independence ! hey-day ! Have you forgotten that, after all, you are my — guest, to call it by the mildest term ?" " Do you upbraid me with that?" I said, starting up. " Do you expect me to live on your charity, on con- dition of doing your dirty work? You do not know me, sir. I leave your roof this instant !" " You do not !" answered he, laughing loudly, as he sprang over the sofa, and set his back against the door. " Come, come, you Will o' the Wisp, as full of flights, and fancies, and vagaries, as a sick old maid ! can't you see which side your bread is buttered? Sit down, I say ! Don't you know that I'm as good-natured a fellow as ever lived, although I do parade a little Gil Bias morality now and then, just for fun's sake? Do you think I should be so open with it, if I meant anything very diaboHc? There — sit down, and don't go into Eang Cambyses' vein, or Queen Hecuba's tears, either, which you seem inclined to do." " I know you have been very generous to me," said I, penitently, " but a kindness becomes none when you are upbraided with it." VOL. I. P 210 ALTON LOCKE, ^' So say the copybooks — I deny it. At all events, I'll say no more ; and you shall sit down there, and write as still as a mouse, till two, while I tackle this never- to-be-enough - by-unhappy - third - years'- men - execrated Griffin's Optics." At four that afternoon, I knocked, proofs in hand, at the door of Lord Lynedale's rooms in the King's Parade. The door was opened by a little elderly groom, grey- coated, grey-gaitered, grey -haired, grey-visaged. He had the look of a respectable old family retainer, and his exquisitely neat groom's dress gave him a sort of interest in my eyes. Class costumes, relics though they are of feudalism, carry a charm with them. They are symbolic, definitive; they bestow a personality on the wearer, which satisfies the mind, by enabling it instantly to classify him, to connect him with a thousand stories and associations; and to my young mind, the wiry, shrewd, honest, grim old serving-man seemed the in- carnation of "all the wonders of Newmarket, and the hunting-kennel, and the steeple-chase, of which I had read, with alternate admiration and contempt, in the newspapers. From between his legs peeped out a mass of shaggy grizzled hair, containing a Skye-terrier's eyes, and a long snout, which, by its twisting and sniffing, seemed investigating whether my trousers came within the biting degree of shabbiness. " And what do you want here, young man?'* TAILOR AND POET. 211 " I was bidden bj Lord Lynedale to come here at four with these papers." "Oh, yes! very likely! that's an old story; and to be paid money, I guess?" '' And to be paid money." " Not a doubt on't. Then you must wait a little longer, like the rest of you bloodsuckers. Go back, and tell your master, that he need n't send your sort here any more, with his post obits, and postmortems, and the like devilry. The old earl's good to last these three months more, the lord be praised. Therefore, come, sir — you go back to your master, and take him my compliments, and ******.» " I have no master," quoth I, puzzled, but half laughing; for I liked the old fellow's iron honest visage. " No master, eh? then darned if you shall come in. Comes on your own account, eh? Got a Uttle bit of paper for his lordship in that bundle ?" " I told you already that I had," said I, peevishly. *' Werry good; but you didn't tell me whether they come from the bayleaves or not." ** Nonsense ! Take the papers in yourself, if you like." *' Oh, you young wagabond! Do you take me for Judas Iscarioi? And what do you expect — to set a man on serving a writ on a man's own master? Wait a bit, till I gets the hors'up, that's all, and I'll show you what's what." If I could not understand him, the dog did ; for he p2 212 ALTON LOCKE, ran instantly at my legs, secured a large piece of my best trowsers, and was returning for a second, if I had not, literally, in my perplexity, thrust the clean proofs into his mouth, which he worried and shook, as if they had been the grandfather of all white mice. At this moment, the inner door opened, and Lord Lyne- dale appeared. There was an explanation, and a laugh, in which I could not but join, in spite of the torn trowsers, at the expense of the groom. The old man retired, mingling his growls with those of the terrier, and evidently quite disappointed at my not being a dun — an honest, douce barn-door fowl, and not Jera nature, and fair game for his sporting propensities. Lord Lynedale took me into the inner room, and bade me sit down while he examined the proofs. I looked round the low-wainscottcd apartment, with its narrow mullioned windows, in extreme curiosity. What a real nobleman's abode could be like, was naturally worth examining, to one who had, all his life, heard of the aristocracy as of some mythic Titans — whether fiends or gods, being yet a doubtful point — altogether enshrined on " cloudy Olympus," invisible to mortal ken. 'The shelves were gay with Morocco, Russia leather, and gilding — not much used, as I thought, till my eye caught one of the gorgeously-bound volumes lying on the table in a loose cover of polished leather — a refinement of which poor I should never have dreamt. The walls were covered with prints, which soon turned my eyes from everything else, to range delighted over Landseers, Turners, Roberts's Eastern sketches, the ancient Italian TAILOR AND POET. 213 masters ; and I recognised, with a sort of friendly affec- tion, an old print of my favourite St. Sebastian, in the Dulwich Gallery. It brought back to my mind a thousand dreams, and a thousand sorrows. "Would those dreams be ever realised? Might this new acquaintance possibly open some pathway towards their fulfilment? — some vista towards the attainment of a station where they would, at least, be less chimerical? — And at that thought, my heart beat loud with hope. The room was choked up with chairs and tables, of all sorts of strange shapes and problematical uses. The floor was strewed with skins of bear, deer, and seal. In a corner lay hunting-whips and fishing-rods, foils, boxing-gloves, and gun-cases; while over the chimney- piece, an array of rich Turkish pipes, all amber and enamel, contrasted curiously with quaint old swords and daggers — bronze classic casts, upon gothic oak brackets, and fantastic scraps of continental carving. On the centre- table, too, reigned the same rich profusion, or, if you will, confusion— MSS. " Notes in Egypt," '' Goethe's Wal- verwandschaften," Murray's hand-books, and " Plato's Republic." What was there not there? And I chuckled iuAvardly, to see how BeiCs Life in London and the Ecclesiologiat had, between them, got down " McCul- loch on Taxation," and were sitting, arm-in-arm, trium- phantly astride of him. Everything in the room, even to the flagrant flowers in a German glass, spoke of a travelled and cultivated luxury — manifold tastes and powers of self-enjoyment and self-improvement, which Heaven forgive me if I envied, as I looked upon them. 2 14 ALTON LOCKE, If I, now, had had one-twentieth part of those books, prints, that experience of hfe, not to mention that physical strength and beauty, which stood towering there before the fire — so simple — so utterly unconscious of the innate nobleness and grace which shone out from every motion of those stately limbs and features — all the delicacy which blood can give, combined, as one does sometimes see, with the broad strength of the proletarian — so dif- ferent from poor me !— and so different too, as I recol- lected with perhaps a savage pleasure, from the miser- able, stunted specimen of over-bred imbecility which had ridden over me the day before ! A strange ques- tion that of birth ! and one in which the philosopher, in spite of himself, must come to democratic conclu- sions. For, after all, the physical and intellectual superiority of the high-born is only preserved, as it was in the old Norman times, by the continual practi- cal abnegation of the very caste-lie on which they pride themselves — by continual renovation of their race, by intermarriage with the ranks below them. The blood of Odin flowed in the veins of Norman William ; true — and so did the tanner's of Falaise ! At last he looked up, and spoke courteously — " I'm afraid I have kept you long ; but now, here is for your corrections, which are capital. I have really to thank you for a lesson in writing English." And he put a sovereign into my hand. " I am very sorry," said I, " but I have no change." " Never mind that. Your work is well worth the money." TAILOB AND POET. 215 '*But," I said, "you agreed with me for five shil- ings a sheet, and I do not wish to be rude, but I cannot accept your kindness. We working-men make a rule of abiding by our wages, and taking nothing which looks like " '^ Well, well — and a very good rule it is. I suppose, then, I must find out some way for you to earn more. Good-afternoon." And he motioned me out of the room, followed me down- stairs, and turned off towards the College Gardens. I wandered up and down, feeding my greedy eyes, till I found myself again upon the bridge where I had stood that morning, gazing with admiration and astonish- ment at a scene which I have often expected to see paint- ed or described, and which, nevertheless, in spite of its unique magnificence, seems strangely overlooked by those who cater for the public taste, with pen and pencil. Tlie vista of bridges, one after another, span- ning the stream ; the long line of great monastic palaces, all unhke, and yet all in harmony, sloping down to the stream, with their trim lawns and ivied-walls, their towers and buttresses; and opposite them, the range of rich gardens and noble timber-trees, dimly seen through which, at the end of the gorgeous river avenue, towered the lofty buildings of St. John's. The whole scene, under the glow of a rich May afternoon, seemed to me a fragment out of the " Arabian Nights " or Spenser's " Fairy Queen.'' I leaned upon the parapet, and gazed, and gazed, so absorbed in wonder and enjoyment, that I was quite unconscious, for some time, that Lord 216 ALTON LOCKE, Lynedale was standing by my side, engaged in the same employment. He was not alone. Hanging on his arm was a lady, whose face, it seemed to me, I ought to know. It certainly was one not to be easily for- gotten. She was beautiful, but with the face and figure rather of a Juno than a Venus — dark, imperious, restless — the lips almost too firmly set, the brow almost too massive and projecting — a queen, rather to be feared than loved — but a queen still, as truly royal as the man into whose face she was looking up with eager admiration and delight, as he pointed out to her eloquently the several beauties of the landscape. Her dress was as plain as that of any quaker ; but the grace of its arrangement, of every line and fold, was enough, without the help of the heavy gold bracelet on her wrist, to proclaim her a fine lady; by which term, I wish to express the result of that perfect education in taste and manner, down to every gesture, which Heaven forbid that I, professing to be a poet, should undervalue. It is beautiful; and therefore I welcome it, in the name of the Author of all beauty. I value it so highly, that I would fain see it extend, not merely from Belgravia to the tradesman's villa, but thence, as I believe it one day will, to the labourer's hovel, and the needlewoman's garret. Half in bashfulness, half in the pride which shrinks from anything like intrusion, I was moving away ; but the nobleman, recognising me with a smile and a nod, made some observation on the beauty of the scene before us. Before I could answer, however, I saw that his com- panion's eyes were fixed intently on my face. TAILOR AND POET. 217 '* Is this," she said to Lord Lyncdale, "the young person of whom you were speaking to me just now? I fancy that I recollect him/ though, I dare say, he has forgotten me." If I had forgotten the flice, that voice, so peculiarly rich, deep, and marked in its pronunciation of every syllable, recalled lier instantly to my mind. It was the dark lady of the Dulwich Gallery ! *^I met you, I think," I said, " at the picture-gallery at Dulwich, and you were kind enough, and and some persons who were with you, to talk to me about a picture there." ** Yes; Guido's St. Sebastian. You seemed fond of reading, then. I am glad to see you at college." I explained, that I was not at college. That led to fresh gentle questions on her part, till I had given her all the leading points of my liistory. There was nothing in it of which I ought to have been ashamed. She seemed to become more and more interested in my story, and her companion also. *' And have you tried to write? I recollect my uncle advising you to try a poem on St. Sebastian. It was spoken, perhaps, in jest; but it will not, I hope, have been labour lost, if you have taken it in earnest." " Yes — I have written on that and on other subjects, during the last few years." '* Then, you must let us see them, if you have them with you. I think my uncle, Arthur, might like to look over them; and if they were fit for publication,; he might be able to do something towards it." 218 ALTON LOCKE, " At all events," said Lord Lynedale, " a self-edu- cated author is always interesting. Bring any of your poems, tliat you have with you, to the Eagle this after- noon, and leave them there for Dean Winnstay; and to-morrow morning, if you have nothing better to do, call there between ten and eleven o'clock." He wrote me down the dean's address, and nod- ding, a civil good morning, turned away with his queenly companion, while I stood gazing after him, wondering whether all noblemen and high-born ladies were like them in person and in spirit — a question, which, in spite of many noble exceptions, some of them well known and appreciated by the working-men, I am afraid must be answered in the negative. I took my MSS. to the Eagle, and wandered out once more, instinctively, among those same magnificent trees at the back of the colleges, to enjoy the pleasing torment of expectation. '• My uncle !" was he the same old man whom I had seen at the gallery ; and if so, was Lil- lian with him? Delicious hope ! And yet, what if she was with him — what to me? But yet I sat silent, dream- ing, all the evening, and hurried early to bed — not to sleep, but to lie and dream on and on, and rise almost before light, eat no breakfast, and pace up and down, waiting impatiently for the hour at which I was to find out whether my dream was true. And it was true! The first object I saw, when I entered the room, was Lillian, looking more beautiful than ever. The child of sixteen had blossomed into the woman of twenty. The ivory and vermilion of the TAILOR AND POET. 219 complexion had toned down together into still richer hues. The dark hazel ejes shone with a more liquid lustre. The figure had become more rounded, without losing a line of that fairy lightness, with which her light morning-dress, with its delicate French semitones of colour, gay and yet not gaudy, seemed to harmonize. The little plump jewelled hands — the transparent chest- nut hair, banded round the beautiful oval masque — the tiny feet, which, as Suckling has it, " Underneath her petticoat Like little mice peeped in and out" I could have fallen down, fool that I was ! and wor- shipped what ? I could not tell then, for I cannot tell even now. The dean smiled recognition, bade me sit down, and disposed my papers, meditatively, on his knee. I obeyed him, trembling, choking — my eyes devouring my idol — forgetting why I had come — seeing nothing but her — listening for nothing but the opening of those lips. I believe the dean was some sentences deep in his ora- tion, before I became conscious thereof. " And I think I may tell you, at once, that I have been very much surprised and gratified with them. They evince, on the whole, a far greater acquaintance with the English classic models, and with the laws of rhyme and melody, than could have been expected from a young man of your class — macte virtute puer. Have you read any Latin?" " A little." And I went on staring at Lillian, who looked up, furtively, from her work, every now and then. 220 ALTON LOCKE, to steai a glance at me, and set my poor heart thumping still more fiercely against my side. " Very good; you will have the less trouble, then, in the preparation for college. You will find out for your- self, of course, the immense disadvantages of self-educa- tion. The fact is, my dear lord '^ (turning to Lord Lynedale), " it is only useful as an indication of a capa- bility of being educated by others. One never opens a book written by working-men, without shuddering at a hundred faults of style. However, there are some very tolerable attempts among these — especially the imitations of Milton's " Comus." Poor, I had by no means intended them as imitations ; but such, no doubt, they were. *' I am sorry to see that Shelley has had so much influence on your writing. He is a guide as irregular in taste, as unorthodox in doctrine ; though there are some pretty things in him now and then. And you have caught his melody tolerably here, now " " Oh, that is such a sweet thing!" said Lillian. " Do you know, I read it over and over last night, and took it up stairs with me. How very fond of beautiful things you must be, Mr. Locke, to be able to describe so pas- sionately the longing after them." That voice once more ! It intoxicated me, so that I hardly knew what I stammered out — something about working-men having very few opportunities of indulg- ing the taste for — I forget what. I believe I was on the point of running off into some absurd compliment, but I caught the dark lady's warning eye on me. TAILOR AND POET 221 " Ah, yes! I forgot. I dare say it must be a very stupid life. So little opportunity, as he says. What a pity he is a tailor, papa ! Such an unimaginative em- ployment ! How delightful it would be to send him to college, and make him a clergyman !" Fool that I was! I fancied — what did I not fancy? Nev^er seeing how that very '* /?e " bespoke the indif- ference — the gulf between us. I was not a man — an equal; but a thing — a subject, who was to be talked over, and examined, and made into something like themselves, of their supreme and undeserved benevo- lence. " Gently, gently, fair lady ! We must not be as head- long as some people would kindly wish to be. If this young man really has a proper desire to rise into a higher station, and I find him a fit object to be assisted in that praiseworthy ambition, why, I think he ought to go to some training college ; St. Mark's, I should say, on the whole, might, by its strong Church principles, give the best antidote to any little remaining taint of sans-culottism. You understand me, my lord? And, then, if he distinguished himself there, it would be time to think of getting him a sizarship." " Poor Pegasus in harness I" half smiled, half sighed, the dark lady. " Just the sort of youth," whispered Lord Lynedale, loud enough for me to hear, " to take out with us to the Mediterranean, as secretary — s'il y avait la de la mo- rale, of course — " Yes — and of course, too, the tailor's boy was not ex- 222 ALTON LOCKE, pected to understand Frencli. But the most absurd thing was, how every body, except perhaps the dark lady, seemed to take for granted that I felt myself exceed- ingly honoured, and must consider it, as a matter of course, the greatest possible stretch of kindness thus to talk me over, and settle everything for me, as if I was not a living soul, but a plant in a pot. Perhaps they were not unsupported by experience. I suppose too many of us would have thought it so ; there are flunkeys in all ranks, and to spare. Perhaps the true absurdity was the way in which I sat, demented, inarticulate, star- ing at Lillian, and only caring for any word which seemed to augar a chance of seeing her again; instead of saying, as I felt, that I had no wish whatever to rise above my station ; no intention whatever of being sent to training-schools or colleges, or anywhere else at the expense of other people. And therefore it was that I submitted blindly, when the dean, who looked as kind, and was really, I believe, as kind, as ever was human being, turned to me with a solemn authoritative voice — " "Well, my young friend, I must say that I am, on the whole, very much pleased with your performance. It corroborates, my dear lord, the assertion, for which I have been so often ridiculed, that there are many real men, capable of higher things, scattered up and down among the masses. Attend to me, sir !" (a hint which I suspect I very much wanted). " Now, recollect; if it should be hereafter in our power to assist your prospects in life, you must give up, once and for all, the bitter tone against the higher classes, which I am sorry to see in TAILOR AND POET. 223 your MSS. As you know more of the world, you will find that the poor are not by any means as ill-used as they are taught, in these days, to believe. The rich have their sorrows too — no one knows it better than I" (and he played pensively with his gold pencil case) — *' and good and evil are pretty equally distributed among all ranks, by a just and merciful God. I advise you most earnestly, as you value your future success in life, to give up read- ing those unprincipled authors, whose aim is to excite the evil passions of the multitude ; and to shut your ears betimes to the extravagant calumnies of demagogues, who make tools of enthusiastic and imaginative minds, for their own selfish aggrandisement. Avoid politics; the workman has no more to do with them than the clergy- man. We are told, on divine authority, to fear God and the king, and meddle not with those who are given to change. Rather put before yourself the example of such a man as the excellent Dr. Brown, one of the richest and most respected men of the university, with whom I hope to have the pleasure of dining this evening — and yet that man actually, for several years of his life, worked at a carpenter's bench !" I too had something to say about all that. I too knew somethincr about demasrosjues and workinor-men : but the sight of Lillian made me a coward; and I only sat silent as the thought flashed across me, half ludicrous, half painful, by its contrast, of another who once worked at a carpenter's bench, and fulfilled his mission — not by an old age of wealth, respectability, and port wine; but 224 ALTON LOCKE, on the cross of Calvary. After all, the worthy old gen- tleman gave me no time to answer. " Next — I think of showing these MSS. to my pub- lisher, to get his opinion as to whether they are worth printing just now. Not that I wish you to build much on the chance. It is not necessary that you should be a poet. I should prefer mathematics for you, as a methodic discipline of the intellect. Most active minds write poetry, at a certain age — I wrote a good deal, I recollect, myself. But that is no reason for publishing. This haste to rush into print is one of the bad signs of the times — a symptom of the unhealthy activity which was first called out by the French revolution. In the Elizabethan age, every decently-educated gentleman was able, as a matter of course, to indite a sonnet to his mistress's eyebrow, or an epigram on his enemy; and yet he never dreamt of printing them. One of the few rational things I have met with, Eleanor, in the works of your very objectionable pet Mr. Carlyle — though indeed his style is too intolerable to have allowed me to read much — is the remark that " speech is silver" — ' silvern ' he calls it pedantically — ' while silence is golden.' " At this point of the sermon, Lillian fled from the room, to my extreme disgust. But still the old man prosed — " I think, therefore, that you had better stay with your cousin for the next week. I hear from Lord Lyne- dale, that he is a very studious, moral, rising young man ; and I only hope that you will follow his good TAILOR AND POET. 225 example. At the end of the week I shall return home, and then I shall be glad to see more of you at my house at D * * * *, about * * * * miles from this place. Good morning." I went, in rapture at the last announcement — and yet my conscience smote me. I had not stood up for the working-men. I had heard them calumniated, and held my tongue — but I was to see Lillian. I had let the dean fancy I was willing to become a pensioner on his bounty — that I was a member of the Church of Eng land, and willing to go to a Church Training School — but I was to see Lillian. I had lowered myself in my own eyes — but I had seen Lillian. Perhaps I exagge- rated my own offences : however that my be, love soon silenced conscience, and I almost danced into my cousin's rooms on my return. That week passed rapidly and happily, I was half amused with the change in my cousin's demeanour. I had evidently risen immensely in his eyes ; and I could not help applying, in my heart, to him, Mr. Carlyle*s dictum about the valet species — how they never honour the unaccredited hero, having no eye to find him out till properly accredited, and countersigned, and ac- coutred with full uniform and diploma by that great God, Public Opinion. I saw through the motive of his new-fledged respect for me — and yet I encouraged it ; for it flattered my vanity. The world must forgive me. It was something for the poor tailor to find him- VOL. I. Q 226 ALTON LOCKE, self somewliat appreciated at last, even outwardly. And besides, this said respect took a form which was very tempting to me now — though the w^eek before it was just the one which I should have repelled with scorn. George became very anxious to lend me money, to order me clothes at his own tailor's, and set me up in various little toilet refinements, that I might make a respectable appearance at the dean's. I knew that he consulted rather the honour of the family, than my good; but I did not know that his aim was also to get me into his power ; and I refused more and more weakly at each fresh offer, and at last consented, in an evil hour, to sell my own independence, for the sake of indulging my love- dream, and appearing to be what I was not. I saw a good deal more of the young university men that week. I cannot say that my recollections of them were pleasant. A few of them were very bigoted Tractarians — some of whom seemed to fancy that a dilettante admiration for crucifixes and Gothic architec- ture, was a form of religion, which, by its extreme per- fection, made the virtues of chastity and sobriety quite unnecessary — and the rest, of a more ascetic and moral turn, seemed as narrow, bitter, flippant, and un-earnest young men as I had ever met, dealing in second-hand party statements, gathered, as I could discover, entirely from periodicals of their own party — taking pride in reading nothing but what was made for them, indulging in the most violent nick-names and railing, and escaping from anything like severe argument by a sneer or an expression of theatrical horror at so " painful" a notion. I TAILOR AND POET. 227 I had good opportunities of seeing what they were really like; for my cousin seemed to take delight in tormenting them — making them contradict themselves, getting them into dilemmas, and putting them into passions, — while the whole time he professed to be of their party, as indeed he was. But his consciousness of power, and his natural craft, seemed to make him consider his own party as his private preserve for sporting over; and when he was tired with the amusement, he used to try to call me in, and set me by the ears with his guests, which he had no great trouble in doing. And then, when he saw me at all confused, or borne down by statements from authors, of whose very names I had never heard, or by expressions of horror and surprise which made me suspect that I had uncon- sciously committed myself to an absurdity, he used to come " hurling into the midst of the press," hke some knight at a tournament, or Socrates when he saved Alcibiades at Dehum, and, by a dexterous repartee, turn the tide of battle, and get me off safe — taking care, by-the-bye, to hint to me the obhgation which he considered himself to have conferred upon me. But the great majority of the young men whom I met were even of a lower stamp. I was utterly shocked and disappointed at the contempt and unbelief with which they seemed to regard everything beyond mere animal enjoyment, and here and there the selfish ad- vantage of a good degree. They seemed, if one could judge from appearances, to despise and disbelieve every- thing generous, enthusiastic, enlarged. Thoughtful- Q2 228 ALTON LOCKE, ness was a " bore;" — earnestness, " romance." Above all, they seemed to despise tlie university itself. The " Dons" were " idle, fat old humbugs;" chapel, *' a hum- bug too;" tutors, "humbugs" too, who played into the tradesmen's hands, and charged men high fees for lectures not worth attending — so that any man who wanted to get on, was forced to have a private tutor, besides his college one. The university-studies were '^a humbug" — no use to man in after-life. The masters of arts were *' humbugs " too; for " they knew all the evils, and clamoured for reform till they became Dons them- selves; and then, as soon as they found the old system pay, they settled down on their lees, and grew fat on port wine, like those before them." They seemed to consider themselves in an atmosphere of humbug — living in a lie — out of which lie-element those who chose were very right in making the most, for the gaining of fame or money. And the tone which they took about everything — the coarseness, hoUowness, Gil Bias selfishness — was just what might have been ex- pected. Whether they were right or wrong in their complaints, I, of course, have no means of accurately knowing. But it did seem strange to me, as it has to 'others, to find in the mouths of almost all the gowns- men, those very same charges against the universities which, when working men dare to make them, excite outcries of " calumny,"^' sedition/' "vulgar radicalism," " attacks on our time-honoured insitutions," &c., &c. I TAILOK AND POET. 229 CHAPTER XIV. A CATHEDRAL TOWN. At length, the wished-for day had arrived; and, with my cousin, I was whirling along, full of hope and desire, toward the cathedral town of D * * * * — through a flat fen country, which, though I had often heard it described as ugly, struck my imagination much. The vast height and width of the sky-arch, as seen from those flats as from an ocean — the grey haze shrouding the horizon of our narrow land-view, and closing us in, till we seemed to be floating through in- finite space, on a little platform of earth ; the rich poplar-fringed farms, with their herds of dappled oxen — the luxuriant crops of oats and beans — the tender green of the tall rape, a plant till then unknown to me — the long, straight, silver dykes, with their gaudy carpets of strange floating water-plants, and their black banks, studded with the remains of buried forests — the innumerable draining-mills, with their creaking sails and groaning wheels — the endless rows of pollard willows, through which the breeze moaned and rung, as through 230 ALTON LOCKE, the strings of some vast JEolian harp ; the little island knolls in that vast sea of fen, each with its long village street, and delicately taper spire ; all this seemed to me to contain an element of new and peculiar beauty. " Why !" exclaims the reading public, if perchance it ever sees this tale of mine, in its usual purient longing after anything like personal gossip, or scandalous anec- dote — " why, there is no cathedral town which begins with a D ! Through the fen, too ! He must mean either Ely, Lincoln, or Peterborough; that's certain." Then, at one of those places, they find there is a dean — not of the name of Winnstay, true — " but his name begins with a W; and he has a pretty daughter — no, a niece ; well, that's very near it ; — it must be him. No; at another place — there is not a dean, true — but a canon, or an archdeacon — something of that kind; and he has a pretty daughter, really ; and his name begins — not with W, but with Y ; well, that's the last letter of Winnstay, if it is not the first: that must be the poor man ! What a shame to have exposed his family secrets in that way!" And then a whole circle of myths grow up round the man's story. It is credibly ascertained that I am the man who broke into his house last year, after having made love to his housemaid, and stole his writing-desk and plate — else, why should a burglar steal family-letters, if he had not some interest in them? And before the matter dies away, some worthy old gentleman, who has not spoken to a w^orking man since he left his living, thirty years ago, and hates a radical as he does the Pope, receives TAILOR AND POET. 231 two or three anonymous letters, condoling with him on the cruel betrayal of his confidence — base ingratitude for undeserved condescension, ^c, &c.; and, perhaps, with an enclosure of good advice for his lovely daughter. But, wherever D * * * * is, we arrived there; and with a beating heart, I — and I now suspect my cousin also — walked up the sunny slopes, where the old convent had stood, now covered with walled gardens and noble timber trees, and crowned by the richly-fretted towers of the cathedral, which we had seen, for the last twenty miles, growing gradually larger and more distinct across the level flat. '^ Ely?" " No ; Lincoln !" " Oh ! but really, it's just as much like Peterborough!" Never mind, my dear reader ; the essence of the fact, as I think, lies not quite so much in the name of the place, as in what was done there — to which I, with all the little respect which I can muster, entreat your attention. It is not from false shame at my necessary ignorance, but from a fear lest I should bore my readers with what seems to them trivial, that I refrain from dilat- ing on many a thing, which struck me as curious in this my first visit to the house of an English gentleman. I must say, however, though I suppose that it will be numbered, at least, among trite remarks, if not among trivial ones, that the wealth around me certainly struck me, as it has others, as not very much in keeping with the office of one who professed to be a minister of the Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth. But I salved over that feeling, being desirous to see everything in the brightest light, with the recollection that the dean had a private 232 ALTON LOCKE, fortune of his own ; though it did seem, at moments, that if a man has solemnly sworn to devote himself, body and soul, to the cause of the spiritual welfare of the nation, that vow might be not unfairly construed to include his money, as well as his talents, time, and health : unless, perhaps, money is considered by spiritual persons as so worthless a thing, that it is not fit to be given to God — a notion which might seem to explain how a really pious and universally respected arch- bishop, living within a quarter of a mile of one of the worst infernas of destitution, disease, filth, and profligacy — can yet find it in his heart to save 120,000/., out of church revenues, and leave it to his family; thougli it will not explain how Irish bishops can reconcile it to their consciences to leave behind them, one and all, large fortunes — for I suppose from fifty to a hundred thousand pounds is something — saved from fees and tithes, taken from the pockets of a Roman Catholic population, whom they have been put there to convert to Protestantism for the last three hundred years — with what success, all the world knows. Of course, it is a most impertinent, and almost a blasphemous thing, for a working man to dare to men- tion such subjects. Is it not " speaking evil of digni- ties?" Strange, by-the-bye, that merely to mention facts, without note or comment, should be always called *' speaking evil !" Does not that argue ill for the facts themselves? Working men think so ; but what matter what '' the swinish multitude" think? When I speak of wealth, I do not mean that the TAILOR AND POET. 233 dean's household would have been considered by his own class at all too luxurious. He would have been said, I suppose, to live in a " quiet, comfortable, gentle- manlike way" — "everything very plain and very good." It included a butler — a quiet, good-natured old man — who ushered us into our bedrooms; a footman, who opened the door — a sort of animal for which I have an extreme aversion — young, silly, conceited, over-fed, florid — who looked just the man to sell his soul for a livery, twice as much food as he needed, and the oppor- tunity of unlimited flirtations with the maids; and a coachman, very like other coachmen, whom I saw taking a pair of handsome carriage-horses out to exercise, as we opened the gate. The old man, silently and as a matter of course, un- packed for me my little portmanteau (lent me by my cousin, and placed my things neatly in various drawers — went down, brought up a jug of hot water, put it on the washing-table — told me that dinner was at six — that the half-hour bell rang at half-past five— and that, if I wanted anything, the footman would answer the bell (bells seeming a prominent idea in his theory of the universe) — and so left me, wondering at the strange fact that free men, with free wills, do sell themselves, by the hundred thousand, to perform menial offices for other men, not for love, but for money; becoming, to define them strictly, bell- answering animals; and are honest, happy, contented, in such a life. A man-servant, a soldier, and a Jesuit, are to me the three great wonders of humanity— three forms of moral suicide, for which I 234 ALTON LOCKE, never had the slightest gleam of sympathy, or even comprehension. ***** At last we went down to dinner, after my personal adornments had been carefully superintended by my cousin, who gave me, over-and -above, various warnings and exhortations as to my behaviour; which, of course, took due effect, in making me as nervous, constrained, and affected, as possible. When I appeared in the drawing-room, I was kindly welcomed by the dean, the two ladies, and Lord Lynedale. But as I stood fidgeting and blushing, sticking my arms, and legs, and head, into all sorts of quaint posi- tions — trying one attitude, and thinking it looked awk- ward, and so exchanging it for another, more awkward still — my eye fell suddenly on a slip of paper, which had conveyed itself, I never knew how, upon the pages of the Illustrated Book of Ballads, which I was turning over : — " Be natural, and you will be gentlemanlike. If you wish others to forget your rank, do not forget it your- self. If you wish others to remember you with plea- sure, forget yourself; and be just what God has made you." I could not help fancying that the lesson, whether intentionally or not, was meant for me ; and a passing impulse made me take up the slip, fold it together, and put it in my bosom. Perhaps it was Lillian's hand- writing ! I looked round at the ladies ; but their faces were each buried behind a book. TAILOR AND POET. 235 We went in to dinner; and, to my delight, I sat next to my goddess, while opposite me was my cousin. Luckily, I had got some directions from him as to what to say and do, when my wonders, the servants, thrust eatables and drinkables over my shoulders. Lillian and my cousin chatted away about church- architecture, and the restorations which were going on at the cathedral ; while I, for the first-half of dinner, feasted my eyes with the sight of a beauty, in which I seemed to discover every moment some new excellence. Every time I looked up at her, my eyes dazzled, my face burnt, my heart sank, and soft thrills ran through every nerve. And yet, Heaven knows, my emotions were as pure as those of an infant. It was beauty, longed for, and found at last, Avhich I adored as a thing not to be possessed, but worshipped. The desire, even the thought, of calling her my own, never crossed my mind. I felt that I could gladly die, if by death I could pur- chase the permission to watch her. I understood, then, and for ever after, the pure devotion of the old knights and troubadours of chivalry. I seemed to myself to be their brother — one of the holy guild of poet-lovers. I was a new Petrarch, basking in the light-rays of a new Laura. I gazed, and gazed, and found new life in gazing, and was content. But my simple bliss was perfected, when she suddenly turned to me, and began asking me questions on the very points on which I was best able to answer. She talked about poetry, Tennyson and Wordsworth ; asked me if I understood Browning's Sordello; and then comforted me, after my stammering confession that 236 ALTON LOCKE, I did not, by telling me she was delighted to hear that ; for she did not understand it either, and it was so pleasant to have a companion in ignorance. Then she asked, if I was much struck with the buildings in Cambridge? — had they inspired me with any verses yet? — I was bound to write something about them — and so on ; making the most commonplace remarks look brilliant, from the ease and liveliness with which they v/ere spoken, and the tact with which they were made pleasant to the listener : while I won- dered at myself, for enjoying from her lips the flippant, sparkling tattle, which had hitherto made young women to me objects of unspeakable dread, to be escaped by crossing the street, hiding behind doors, and rushing blindly into back-yards and coal-holes. The ladies left the room ; and I, with Lillian's face glowing bright in my imagination, as the crimson orb remains on the retina of the closed eye, after looking intently at the sun, sat listening to a pleasant discussion between the dean and the nobleman, about some coun- try in the East, which they had both visited, and greedily devouring all the new facts which they incidentally brought forth out of the treasures of their highly-cul- tivated minds. I was agreeably surprised (don't laugh, reader) to find that I was allowed to drink water; and that the other men drank not more than a glass or two of wine, after the ladies had retired. I had, somehow, got both lords and deans associated in my mind with infinite swillings of port wine, and bacchanalian orgies, and sat down, at first, in much fear and trembling, lest I should TAILOR AND POET. 237 be compelled to join, under penalties of salt-and- water ; but I had made up my mind, stoutly, to bear anything rather than get drunk; and so I had all the merit of a temperance-martyr, without any of its disagreeables. "Well," said 1 to myself, smiling in spirit, "what would my Chartist friends say if they saw me here? Not even Crossthwaite himself could find a flaw in the appreciation of merit for its own sake, the courtesy and condescension — ah ! but he would complain of it, simply for being condescension." But, after all, what else could it be? Were not these men more experi- enced, more learned, older than myself ? They were my superiors; it was in vaiu for me to attempt to hide it from myself. But the wonder was, that they themselves were the ones to appear utterly unconscious of it. They treated me as an equal; they welcomed me — tlie young viscount and the learned dean — on the broad ground of a common humanity; as I believe hundreds more of their class would do, if we did not ourselves take a pride in estranging them from us — telling them that fraternization between our classes is impossible, and then cursing them for not fraternizing with us. But of that, more here- after. At all events, now my bliss was perfect. No ! I was wrong — a higher enjoyment than all awaited me, when, going into the drawing-room, I found Lillian singing at the piano. I had no idea that music was capable oi expressing and conveying emotions so intense and en- nobling. My experience was confined to street-music, and to the bawling at the chapel. And, as yet, Mr. 238 ALTON LOCKE, Hullah had not risen into a power more enviable than that of kings, and given to every workman a free entrance into the magic world of harmony and melody, where he may prove his brotherhood with Mozart and Weber, Beethoven and Mendelssohn. Great unconscious dema- gogue ! — leader of the people, and labourer in the cause of divine equality ! — thy reward is with the Father of the people ! The luscious softness of the Italian airs overcame me •with a delicious enervation. Every note, every interval, each shade of expression spoke to me — I knew not what: and yet they spoke to my heart of hearts. A spirit out of the infinite heaven seemed calling to my spirit, which longed to answer — and was dumb — and could only vent itself in tears, which welled unconsciously forth, and eased my heart from the painful tension of excitement. * * * * Her voice is hovering o'er my soul — it lingers, O'ershadowing it with soft and thrilling wings; The blood and life within those snowy fingers Teach witchcraft to the instrumental strings. My brain is wild, my breath comes quick, The blood is listening in my frame ; And thronging shadows, fast and thick, Fall on my overflowing eyes. My heart is quivering like a flame; As morning-dew that in the sunbeam dies, I am dissolved in these consuming ecstasies. * * * * The dark lady. Miss Staunton, as I ought to call her, saw my emotion, and, as I thought unkindly, checked the cause of it at once. "Pray do not give us any more of those die-away TAILOR AND POET. 239 Italian airs, Lillian. Sing something manful, German or English, or anything you like, except those senti- mental wailings." Lillian stopped, took another book, and commenced, after a short prelude, one of my own songs. Surprise and pleasure overpowered me more utterly than the soft southern melodies had done. I was on the point of springing up and leaving the room, when my raptures were checked by our host, who turned round, and stopped short in an oration on the geology of Upper Egypt. " What's that about brotherhood and freedom, Lil- lian? We don't want anything of that kind here." *' It's only a popular London song, papa,"" answered she, with an arch smile. *^ Or likely to become so," added Miss Staunton, in her marked dogmatic tone. " Pm very sorry for London, then." And he re- turned to the deserts. 240 ALTON LOCKE, CHAPTER XV. THE MAN OF SCIENCE. After breakfast the next morning, Lillian retired, saying laughingly, that she must go and see after her clothing-club and her dear old women at the almshouse, which, of course, made me look on her as more an angel than ever. And while George was left with Lord Lyne- dale, I was summoned to a private conference with the dean, in his study. I found him in a room lined with cabinets of curiosi- ties, and hung all over with strange horns, bones, and slabs of fossils. But I was not allowed much time to look about me; for he commenced at once on the subject of my studies, by asking me whether I was willing to prepare myself for the university by entering on the study of mathematics? I felt so intense a repugnance to them, that at the risk of offending him — perhaps, for aught I knew, fatally — I dared to demur. He smiled ^' I am convinced, young man, that even if you in- tended to follow poetry as a profession — and a very poor one you will find it — yet you will never attain to any TAILOK AND POET. 241 excellence therein, without far stricter mental discipline than any to which you have been accustomed. That is why I abominate our modern poets. They talk about the glory of the poetic vocation, as if they intended to be kings and world-makers, and all the while they indulge themselves in the most loose and desultory habits of thought. Sir, if they really believed their own gran- diloquent assumptions, they would feel that the responsi- bility of their mental training was greater, not less, than any one^s else. Like the Quakers, they fancy that they honour inspiration by supposing it to be only extraordi- nary and paroxysmic : the true poet, Hke the rational Christian, believing that inspiration is continual and orderly, that it reveals harmonious laws, not merely excites sudden emotions. You understand me?" I did, tolerably; and subsequent conversations with him fixed the thoughts sufiiciently in my mind, to make me pretty sure that I am giving a faithful verbal transcript of them. '^ You must study some science. Have you read any logic?" I mentioned Watts' " Logic," and Locke "On the Use of the Understanding" — two books well known to reading artizans. " Ah," he said; " such books are very well, but they are merely popular. ' Aristotle,' ^ Ritter on Induction,* and Kant's ' Prolegomena' and ' Logic' — when you had read them some seven or eight times over, you might consider yourself as knowing somewhat about the matter." VOL. I. R 242 " I have read a little about induction in Whately." *' All — very good book, but popularv*^ Did you find that your metbod of tliougbt received any benefit from it?" *' The truth is — I do not know whether I can quite express myself clearly — but logic, like mathematics, seems to tell me too little about things. It does not enlarge my knowledge of man or nature; and those are what I thirst for. And you must remember — I hope I am not wrong in saying it — that the case of a man of your class, who has the power of travelling, of reading what he will, and seeing what he will, is very different from that of an artizan, whose chances of observa- tion are so sadly limited. You must forgive us, if we are unwilling to spend our time over books which tell us nothing about the great universe outside the shop-windows." He smiled compassionately. '' Very true, my boy. There are two branches of study, then, before you, and by either of them a competent subsistence is possible, with good interest. Philology is one. But before you could arrive at those depths in it which connect with ethnology, history, and geography, you would require a lifetime of study. There remains yet another. I see you stealing glances at those natural curiosities. In the study of them, you would find, as I believe more and more daily, a mental discipline superior even to that which language or mathematics give. If I had been blest with a son — but that is neither here nor there — it was my intention to have educated him almost entirely as a I TAILOR AND POET. 243 naturalist. I tHnk I should like to try the experiment on a young man like yourself." Sandy Mackaye's definition of legislation for the masses, "Fiat experimentum in corpore vili," rose up in my thoughts^ and, half unconsciously, past my lips. The good old man only smiled. " That is not my reason, Mr. Locke. I should choose, by preference, a man of your class for experiments, not because the nature is coarser, or less precious in the scale of creation, but because I have a notion, for which, hke many others, I have been very much laughed at, that you are less sophisticated, more^ simple and fresh from nature's laboratory, than the young persons of the upper classes, who begin from the nursery to be more or less trimmed up, and painted over by the artificial state of society — a very excellent state, mind, Mr. Locke. Civi- lisation is, next to Christianity of course, the highest blessing; but not so good a state for trying anthro- pological experiments on." I assured him of my great desire to be the subject of such an experiment; and was encouraged by his smile to tell him something about my intense love for natural objects, the mysterious pleasure which I had taken, from my boyhood, in trying to classify them, and my visits to the British Museum, for the purpose of getting at some general knowledge of the natural groups. "Excellent," he said, "young man; the very best sign I have yet seen in you. And what have you read on these subjects?" I mentioned several books: Bingley, Bewick, " Humboldt's Travels," "The Voyage of the r2 244 Beagle/' various scattered articles in the Penny and Saturday Magazines, &c., &c. '^ Ah !" he said, " popular — you will find, if you will allow me to give you my experience " I assured him that I was only too much honoured — and I truly felt so. I knew myself to be in the presence of my rightful superior — my master on that very point of education which I idolised. Every sen- tence which he spoke gave me fresh light on some mat- ter or other ; and I felt a worship for him, totally irrespec- tive of any vulgar and slavish respect for his rank or wealth. The working man has no want for real reverence. Mr. Carlyle's being a " gentleman," has not injured his influence with the people. On the contrary, it is the artizan's intense longing to find his real lords and guides, which makes him despise and execrate his sham ones. Whereof let society take note. "Then," continued he, '^ your plan is to take up some one section of the subject, and thoroughly exhaust that. Universal laws manifest themselves only by particular instances. They say, man is the microcosm, Mr. Locke ; but the man of science finds every worm and beetle a microcosm in its way. It exemplifies, directly or indi- rectly, every physical law in the universe, though it may not be two lines long. It is not only a part, but a mirror, of the great whole. It has a definite relation to the whole world, and the whole world has a relation to it. Really, by-the-bye, I cannot give you a better instance of what I mean, than in my little diatribe on the Geryon Trifurcifer, a small reptile which I found. TAILOR AND POET. 245 some years ago, inhabiting the mud of the salt-lakes of Balkhan, which fills up a long-desired link between the Chelonia and the Perenni branchiate Batrachians, and, as I think, though Professor Brown diflfers from me, connects both with the Herbivorous Cetacea. — Professor Brown is an exceedingly talented man, but a little too cautious in accepting any one's theories but his own. There it is," he said, as he drew out of a drawer a little pamphlet of some thirty pages — " an old man's darling. I consider that book the outcome of thirteen years' labour." " It must be very deep," I replied, " to have been worth such long-continued study." " Oh ! science is her own reward. There is hardly a great physical law which I have not brought to bear on the subject of that one small animal; and above all — what is in itself worth a life's labour — I have, I believe, discovered two entirely new laws of my own, though one of them, by-the-bye, has been broached by Profes- sor Brown since, in his lectures. He might have men- tioned my name in connexion with the subject, for I certainly imparted my ideas to him, two years at least before the delivery of those lectures of his. Professor Brown is a very great man, certainly, and a very good man, but not quite so original as is generally supposed. Still, a scientific man must expect his little disappoint- ments and injustices. If you were behind the scenes in the scientific world, I can assure you, you would find as much party-spirit, and unfairness, and jealousy, and emu- 246 ALTON LOCKE, lation there, as anywhere else. Human nature, human nature, everywhere I" I said nothing, but thought the more ; and took the book, promising to study it carefully. '^ There is Cuvier's ' Animal Kingdom,' and a dic- tionary of scientific terms to help you ; and mind, it must be got up thoroughly, for I purpose to set you an examination or two in it, a few days hence. Then I shall find out whether you know what is worth all the information in the world." " What is that, sir?" " The art of getting information — artem discendi, Mr. Locke, wherewith the world is badly provided just now, as it is overstocked with the artem legejidi — the knack of running the eye over books, and fancying that it understands them, because it can talk about them. You cannot play that trick with my Geryon Trifurcifer, I assure you; he is as dry and tough as his name. But, believe me, he is worth mastering, not because he is mine, but simply because he is tough." I promised all dihgence. " Very good. And be sure, if you intend to be a poet for these days (and I really think you have some faculty for it), you must become a scientific man. Science has made vast strides, and introduced entirely new modes of looking at nature; and poets must live up to the age. I never read a word of Goethe's verse, but I am convinced that he must be the great poet of the day; just because he is the only one who has TAILOK AND POET, 247 taken the trouble to go into the details of practical science. And, in the mean time, I will give you a lesson myself. I see you are longing to know the con- tents of these cabinets. You shall assist me, by writing out the names of this lot of shells, just come from Aus- traha, which I am now going to arrange." I set to work at once, under his directions; and passed that morning, and the two or three following, delightfully. But I question whether the good dean would have been well satisfied, had he known how all his scientific teaching confirmed my democratic opinions. The mere fact, that I could understand these things when they were set before me, as well as any one else, was to me a simple demonstration of the equality in worth, and therefore in privilege, of all classes. It may be answered, that I had no right to argue from myself to the mob ; and that other working geniuses have no right to demand universal enfranchisement for their whole class, just because they, the exceptions, are fit for it. But surely it is hard to call such an error, if it be one, " the insolent assumption of democratic conceit," &c. &c. Does it not look more like the humility of men who are unwilling to assert for themselves peculiar excellence, peculiar privileges; who, like the apostles of old, want no glory, save that which they cannot share with the outcast and the slave? Let society, among other matters, take note of that. 248 ALTON LOCKE, CHAPTER XVI. CULTIVATED WOMEN. I WAS thus brought in contact, for the first time in my life, with two exquisite specimens of cultivated womanhood ; and they naturally, as the reader may well suppose, almost entirely engrossed my thoughts and interest. Lillian, for so I must call her, became daily more and more agreeable; and tried, as I fancied, to draw me out, and show me off to the best advantage ; whether from the desire of pleasing herself, or pleasing me, I know not, and do not wish to know — but the consequences to my boyish vanity were such as are more easy to imagine, than pleasant to describe. Miss Staunton, on the other hand, became, I thought, more and more unpleasant; not that she ever, for a moment, outstepped the bounds of the most perfect courtesy ; but her manner, which was soft to no one except to Lord Lynedale, was, when she spoke to me, especially dicta- torial and abrupt. She seemed to make a point of carping at chance words of mine, and of setting me down suddenly, by breaking in with some severe, pithy observation, on conversations to which she had been listen- TAILOR AND POET. 249 ing unobserved. She seemed, too, to view witli dislike anything like cordiality between me and Lillian — a dis- like, which I was actually at moments vain enough (such a creature is man !) to attribute to — ^jealousy ! ! ! till I began to suspect and hate her, as a proud, harsh, and exclusive aristocrat. And my suspicion and hatred re- ceived their confirmation, when, one morning, after an evening even more charming than usual, LilHan came down, reserved, peevish, all but sulky, and showed that that bright heaven of sunny features had room in it for a cloud, and that an ugly one. But I, poor fool, only pitied her; made up my mind that some one had ill-used her; and looked on her as a martyr — perhaps to that harsh cousin of hers. That day was taken up with writing out answers to the dean's searching questions on his pamphlet, in which, I beheve, I acquitted myself tolerably; and he seemed far more satisfied with my commentary, than I was with his text. He seemed to ignore utterly any- thing like religion, or even the very notion of God, in his chains of argument. Nature was spoken of as the wilier and producer of all the marvels which he describes; and every word in the book, to my astonishment, might have been written, just as easily, by an Atheist, as by a dignitary of the Church of England. I could not help, that evening, hinting this defect, as delicately as I could, to my good host, and was some- what surprised to find that he did not consider it a defect at all. 250 ALTON LOCKE, "I am in nowise anxious to weaken the antithesis between natural and revealed religion. Science may help the former, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the latter. She stands on her own ground, has her own laws, and is her own reward. Christianity is a matter of faith and of the teaching of the Church. It must not go out of its way for science, and science must not go out of her way for it; and where they seem to differ, it is our duty to believe that they are reconcilable by fuller knowledge, but not to clip truth in order to make it match with doctrine." " Mr. Carlyle," said Miss Staunton, in her abrupt way, ^.' can see that the God of Nature is the God of man." " Nobody denies that, ray dear.'* *^ Except in every word and action; else why do they not write about Nature as if it was the expression of a living, loving spirit, not merely a dead machine?" " It may be very easy, my dear, for a Deist like Mr. Carlyle to see his God in Nature ; but if he would accept the truths of Christianity, he would find that there were deeper mysteries in them than trees and animals can explain." " Pardon me, sir," I said, " but I think that a very large portion of thoughtful working men agree with you, though, in their case, that opinion has only in- creased their difficulties about Christianity. They com- plain, that they cannot identify the God of the Bible with the God of the world around them; and one of TAILOK AND POET. 251 their great complaints against Christianity is, that it demands assent to mysteries which are independent of, and even contradictory to, the laws of Nature." The old man was silent. *' Mr. Carlyle is no Deist," said j\Iiss Staunton; " and I am sure, that unless the truths of Christianity con- trive soon to get themselves justified by the laws of science, the higher orders will believe in them as Httle as Mr. Locke informs us that the working classes do." " You prophesy confidently, my darling." " Oh, Eleanor is in one of her prophetic moods to- night," said Lillian, slyly. " She has been foretelling me I know not what misery and misfortune, just because I choose to amuse myself in my own way." And she gave another sly pouting look at Eleanor, and then called me to look over some engravings, chatting over them so charmingly ! — and stealing, every now and then, a pretty, saucy look at her cousin, which seemed to say, " I shall do what I like, in spite of your predictions." This confirmed my suspicions that Eleanor had been trying to separate us; and the suspicion received a further corroboration, indirect, and perhaps very unfair, from the lecture which I got from my cousin after I went up-stairs. He had been flattering me very much lately about " the impression" I was making on the family, and tormenting me by compliments on the clever way in which I " played my cards;" and when I denied in- dignantly any such intention, patting me on the back, 252 ALTON LOCKE, and laughing me down in a knowing way, as mucli as to say tliat he was not to be taken in by my professions of simplicity. He seemed to judge every one by him- self, and to have no notion of any middle characters, between the mere green-horn and the deliberate schemer. But to-night, after commencing with the usual compliments, he went on : " Now, first let me give you one hint, and be thankful for it. Mind your game with that Eleanor — Miss Staunton. She is a regular tyrant, I happen to know ; a strong-minded woman, with a vengeance. She manages every one here ; and unless you are in her good books, don't expect to keep your footing in this house, my boy. So just mind and pay her a little more attention, and Miss Lillian a little less. After all, it is worth the trouble. She is uncommonly well read; and says con- founded clever things, too, when she wakes up out of the sulks ; and you may pick up a wrinkle or two from her, worth pocketing. You mind what she says to you. You know she is going to be married to Lord Lyne- dale?" I nodded assent. " Well, then, if you want to hook him, you must secure her first." *' I want to hook no one, George ; 1 have told you that a thousand times." " Oh, no ! certainly not — by no means ! Why should you?" said the artful dodger. And he swung, laughing, out of the room, leaving in my mind a strange suspicion, of which I was ashamed, though I could not shake it TAILOR AND POET. 253 off, that he had remarked Eleanor's wish to cool my admiration for Lillian, and was willing, for some pur- pose of his own, to further that wish. The truth is, I had very little respect for him, or trust in him; and I was learning to look, habitually, for some selfish motive in all he said or did. Perhaps, if I had acted more boldly upon Avhat I did see, I should not have been here now. i 254 ALTON LOCKE, CHAPTER XVII. SERMONS IN STONES. The next afternoon was tlie last but one of my stay at D * * * *. We were to dine late, after sunset, and, before dinner, we went into the cathedral. The choir had just finished practising. Certain exceedingly ill- looking men, whose faces bespoke principally sensuality and self-conceit, and whose function was that of praising God, on the sole qualification of good bass and tenor voices, were coming chattering through the choir gates; and behind them, a group of small boys were suddenly transforming themselves from angels into sinners, by tearing oflftheir white surplices, and pinching and poking each other noisily as they passed us, with as little reverence as Voltaire himself could have desired. I had often been in the cathedral before — indeed, we attended the service daily, and I had been appalled, rather than astonished, by what I saw and heard: the unintelligible service — the irreverent gabble of the choristers and readers — the scanty congregation — the meagre portion of the vast building which seemed to be turned to any use : but never more than that even- ing, did I feel the desolateness, the doleful inutility, of TAILOR AND POET. 255 that vast desert nave, witli its aisles and transepts — built for some purpose or other now extinct. Tlie whole place seemed to crush and sadden me; and I could not re-echo Lillian's remark — *' How those pillars, rising story above story, and those lines of pointed arches, all lead the eye heaven- ward! It is a beautiful notion, that about pointed architecture being symbolic of Christianity." " I ought to be very much ashamed of my stupidity," I answered; " but I cannot feel that, though I beheve I ought to do so. That vast groined roof, with its enor- mous weio^ht of hanonno^ stone, seems to crush one — to bar out the free sky above. Those pointed windows, too — how gloriously the western sun is streaming through them! but their rich hues only dim and deface his light. I can feel what you say, when I look at the cathedral on the outside ; there, indeed, every Hne sweeps the eye upward — carries it from one pinnacle to another, each with less and less standing-ground, till at the summit the building gradually vanishes in a point, and leaves the spirit to wing its way unsupported and alone into the ether. Perhaps," I added, half bitterly, " these cathedrals may be true symbols of the superstition which created them — on the outside, offering to enfranchise the soul and raise it up to heaven ; but when the dupes had entered, giving them only a dark prison, and a crushing bondage, which neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear." " You may sneer at them, if you will, Mr. Locke," said Eleanor, in her severe, abrupt way. " The working 256 ALTON LOCKE, classes would have been badly off without them. They were, in their day, the only democratic institution in the world ; and the only socialist one, too. The only chance a poor man had of rising by his worth, was by coming to the monastery. And bitterly the working classes felt the want of them, when they fell. Your own Cobbett can tell you that." "Ah!" said Lillian, "how different it must have been four 'hundred years ago ! — how solemn and pic- turesque those old monks must have looked, gliding about the aisles 1 — and how magnificent the choir must have been, before all the glass and carving, and that beau- tiful shrine of St. * * * *, blazing with gold and jewels, were all plundered and defaced by those horrid Puritans !" " Say, reformer-squires," answered Eleanor; " for it was they who did the thing; only it was found con- venient, at the Restoration, to lay on the people of the 17th century the iniquities which the country-gentle- men committed in the 16th." ^ " Surely," I added, emboldened by her words, " if the monasteries were what their admirers say, some method of restoring the good of the old system, without its evil, ought to be found ; and would be found, if it were not " I paused, recollecting whose guest I was. " If it were not, I suppose," said Eleanor, " for those lazy, overfed, bigoted hypocrites, the clergy. That, I presume, is the description of them to which you have been most accustomed. Now, let me ask you one question. Do you mean to condemn, just now, the TAILOE AND POET. 257 Churcli as it was, or the Church as it is, or the Church as it ought to be ? Radicals have a habit of confusing those three questions, as they have of confusing other things when it suits them." "Really," I said — for my blood was rising — '• I do think that, with the confessed enormous wealth of the clergy, the cathedral establishments especially, they might do more for the people." " Listen to me a little, Mr. Locke. The laity now- a-daystake a pride in speaking evil of the clergy, never seeing that if they are bad, the laity have made them so. Why, what do you impute to them ? Their worldliness, their being like the world, like the laity round them — like you, in short? Improve yourselves, and by so doing, if there is this sad tendency in the clergy to imitate you, you will mend them ; if you do not find that after all, it is they who will have to mend you. * As with the people, so with the priest,' is the ever- lasting law. "When, fifty years ago, all classes were drunkards, from the statesman to the peasant, the clergy were drunken also, but not half as bad as the laity. Now the laity are eaten up with covetousness and ambi- tion; and the clergy are covetous and ambitious, but not half as bad as the laity. The laity, and you work- ing men especially, are the dupes of frothy, insincere, official rant, as Mr. Carlyle would call it, in Parliament, on the hustings, at every debating society and Chartist meeting; and therefore the clergyman's sermons are apt to be just what people like elsewhere, and what, there- fore, they suppose people will like there." VOL. I. S 258 ALTON LOCKE, " If, then," I answered, ^' in spite of your opinions, you confess the clergy to be so bad, why are you so angry with men of our opinions, if we do plot sometimes a little against the Church?" " I do not think you know what my opinions are, Mr. Locke. Did you not hear me just now praising the monasteries, because they were socialist and demo- cratic ? But why is the badness of the clergy any reason for pulling down the Church? That is another of the confused irrationalities into which you all allow yourselves to fall. What do you mean by crying shame on a man for being a bad clergyman, if a good clergyman is not a good thing? If the very idea of a clergyman was abominable, as your Church- destroyers ought to say, you ought to praise a man for being a bad one, and not acting out this same abominable idea of priesthood. Your very outcry against the sins of the clergy shows that, even in your minds, a dim notion lies somewhere that a clergyman's vocation is, in itself, a divine, a holy, a beneficent one." *' I never looked at it in that light, certainly," said I, somewhat staggered. " Very likely not. One word more, for I may not have another opportunity of speaking to you as I would on these matters. You working men complain of the clergy for being bigoted and obscurantist, and hating the cause of the people. Does not nine-tenths of the blame of that lie at your door ? I took up, the other day, at hazard, one of your favourite liberty-preaching newspapers ; and I saw books advertised in it, whose TAILOR AND POET. 259 names no modest woman should ever behold; doctrines and practices advocated in it, from which all the honesty, the decency, the common human feeling which is left in the EngKsh mind, ought to revolt, and does revolt. You cannot deny it. Your class has told the world that the cause of liberty, equahty, and fra- ternity, the cause which the working masses claim as theirs, identifies itself with blasphemy and indecency, with the tyrannous persecutions of trades-unions, with robbery, assassination, vitriol-bottles, and midnight incendiarism. And then you curse the clergy for taking you at your word ! Whatsoever they do, you attack them. If they believe you, and stand up for common morality, and for the truths which they know are all-important to poor as well as rich, you call them bigots and persecutors; while if they neglect, in any way, the very Christianity for beheving which you insult them, you turn round and call them hypocrites. Mark my words, Mr. Locke, till you gain the respect and confidence of the clergy, you will never rise. The day will come when you will find that the clergy are the only class who can help you. Ah, you may shake your head. I warn you of it. They were the only bulwark of the poor against the mediaeval tyranny of Rank; you will find them the only bulwark against the modern tyranny of Mammon." I was on the point of intreating her to explain herself further, but at that critical moment Lillian interposed. " Now, stay your prophetic glances into the future; here come Lynedale and papa." And in a moment, S2 260 ALTON LOCKE, Eleanor's whole manner and countenance altered — the petulant, wild unrest, the harsh, dictatorial tone vanished; and she turned to meet her lover, with a look of tender, satisfied devotion, which trans- figured her whole face. It was most strange, the power he had over her. His presence, even at a dis- tance, seemed to fill her whole being with rich quiet life. She watched him with folded hands, like a mystic worshipper, waiting for the afflatus of the spirit; and, suspicious and angry as I felt towards her, I could not help being drawn to her by this revelation of depths of strong healthy feeling, of which her usual manner gave so little sign. This conversation thoroughly puzzled me ; it showed me that there might be two sides to the question of the people's cause, as well as to that of others. It shook a little my faith in the infallibility of my own class, to hear such severe animadversions on them, from a person who professed herself as much a disciple of Carlyle as any working man, and who evidently had no lack, either of intellect to comprehend, or boldness to speak out, his doctrines; who could praise the old monasteries for being democratic and socialist, and spoke far more severely of the clergy than I could have done — because she did not deal merely in trite words of abuse, but showed a real analytic insight into the causes of their short-coming. * * * * That same evening, the conversation happened to turn on dress, of which Miss Staunton spoke scornfully TAILOR AND POET. 261 and disparagingly, as mere useless vanity and frippery — an empty substitute for real beauty of person as well as the higher beauty of mind. And I, emboldened by the courtesy with which I was always called on to take my share in everything that was said or done, ven- tured to object, humbly enough, to her notions. " But is not beauty," I said, " in itself a good and blessed thing, softening, refining, rejoicing the eyes of all who behold?" (and my eyes, as I spoke, involuntarily rested on Lillian's face — who saw it, and blushed). *' Surely nothing which helps beauty is to be despised. And, without the charms of dress, beauty, even that of expression, does not really do itself justice. How many lovely and loveable faces there are, for instance, among the working classes, which, if they had but the advan- tages which ladies possess, might create dehght, respect, chivalrous worship, in the beholder — but are now never appreciated, because they have not the same fair means of displaying themselves which even the savage girl of the South Sea Islands possesses I" Lillian said it was so very true — she had really never thought of it before — and, somehow, I gained courage to go on. " Besides, dress is a sort of sacrament, if I may use the word — a sure sign of the wearer's character; ac- cording as any one is orderly, or modest, or tasteful, or joyous, or brilliant" — and I glanced again at Lilhan — " those excellences, or the want of them, are sure to show themselves, in the colours they choose, and the cut of their garments. In the workroom, I and a friend of mine used often to amuse ourselves over the 262 ALTON LOCKE, clothes we were making, by speculating from tliem on the sort of people the wearers were to be ; and I fancy we were not often wrong." My cousin looked daggers at me, and for a moment I fancied I had committed a dreadful mistake in men- tioning my tailor-life. So I had in his eyes, but not in those of the really well-bred persons round me. " Oh, how very amusing it must have been ! I think I shall turn milliner, Eleanor, for the fun of divining every one's little failings from their caps and gowns !" " Go on, Mr. Locke," said the dean, who had seemed buried in the '^ Transactions of the Royal Society." *' The fact is novel, and I am more obliged to any one who gives me that, than if he gave me a bank-note. The money gets spent and done with; but I cannot spend the fact: it remains for life as permanent capital, re- turning interest and compound-interest ad iiifinitum. By-the-bye, tell me about those same workshops. I have heard more about them than I like to believe true." And I did tell him all about them ; and spoke, my blood rising as I went on, long and earnestly, perhaps eloquently. Now and then I got abashed, and tried to stop; and then the dean informed me that I was speaking well and sensibly, while Lillian entreated me to go on. She had never conceived such things pos- sible — it was as interesting as a novel, &c., &c.; and Miss Staunton sat with compressed lips and frowning brow, apparently thinking of nothing but her book, till I felt quite angry at her apathy — for such it seemed to me to be. ) TAILOR AIS^D POET. 263 CHAPTER XVIII. ]MY F/VXL. And now the last day of our stay at D * * * * had arrived, and I had as yet heard nothing of the prospects of my book; though, indeed, the company in which I had found myself had driven literary ambition, for the time being, out of my head, and bewitched me to float down the stream of daily circumstance, satisfied to snatch the enjoyment of each present moment. That morning, however, after I had fulfilled my daily task of arranging and naming objects of natural history, the dean settled himself back in liis arm-chair, and bidding me sit do"\vn, evidently meditated a business- conversa- tion. He had heard from his publisher, and read his letter to me. "The poems were on the whole much liked. The most satisfactory method of publishing for all par- ties, would be by procuring so many subscribers, each agreeing to take so many copies. In consideration of the dean's known literary judgment and great influence, the publisher would, as a private favour, not object to take the risk of any further expenses." 264 ALTON LOCKE, So far everything sounded cliarming. The method was not a very independent one, but it was the only one ; and I should actually have the delight of having published a volume. But, alas ! " he thought that the sale of the book might be greatly facilitated, if certain passages of a strong political tendency were omitted. He did not wish personally to object to them as statements of facts, or to the pictorial vigour with which they were expressed ; but he thought that they were somewhat too strong for the present state of the public taste; and though he should be the last to allow any private con- siderations to influence his weak patronage of rising talent, yet, considering his present connexion, he should hardly wish to take on himself the responsibility of publishing such passages, unless with great modifica- tions." "You see," said the good old man, " the opinion of respectable practical men, who know the world, exactly coincides with mine. I did not like to tell you that I could not help in the publication of your MSS. in their present state; but I am sure, from the modesty and gentleness which I have remarked in you, your readi- ness to listen to reason, and your pleasing freedom from all violence or coarseness in expressing your opinions, that you will not object to so exceedingly reasonable a request, which, after all, is only for your good. Ah ! young man," he went on, in a more feeling tone than I had yet heard from him, " if you were once embroiled in that political world, of which you know so little, you would soon be crying like David, ' Oh, that I had wings TAILOR AND POET. 265 like a dove, then would I flee away and be at rest !' Do you fancy that you can alter a fallen world ? What it is, it always has been, and will be to the end. Every ^'-^'^ age has its political and social nostrums, my dear young man, and* fancies them infallible; and the next genera- tion arises to curse them as failures in practice, and superstitious in theory, and try some new nostrum of its own." I sighed. " Ah ! you may sigh. But we have each of us to he disenchanted of our dream. There was a time once when I talked republicanism as loudly as raw youth.^ ever did — when I had an excuse for it, too ; for when ": I was a boy, I saw the French Revolution; and it was no wonder if young, enthusiastic brains were excited by all sorts of wild hopes — ' perfectibility of the species,' 'rights of man,' ^universal liberty, equality, and bro- therhood.' — My dear sir, there is nothing new under the sun; all that, is stale and trite to a septuagenarian, who has seen where it all ends. I speak to you freely, because I am deeply interested in you. I feel that this is the important question of your life, and that you have talents, the possession of which is a heavy responsibility. Eschew poHtics, once and for all, as I have done. I might have been, I may tell you, a bishop at this mo- ment, if I had condescended to meddle again in those party questions of which my youthful experience sick- ened me. But I knew that I should only weaken my own influence, as that most noble and excellent man. Dr. Arnold, did, by interfering in poUtics. The poet, 266 ALTON LOCKE, like the clergyman and the philosopher, has nothing to do with politics. Let them choose the better part, and it shall not be taken from them. The world may rave," he continued, waxing eloquent as he approached his favourite subject — " the world may rave, but in the study there is quiet. The world may change, Mr. Locke, and will ; but * the earth abideth for ever/ Solomon had seen somewhat of politics, and social im- provement, and so on; and behold, then, as now, * all was vanity and vexation of spirit. That which is crooked cannot be made straight, and that which is wanting cannot be numbered. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun ? The thing which hath been, it is that which shall be, and there is no new thing under the sun. One generation passeth away, and another cometh ; but the earth abideth for ever,' No wonder that the wisest of men took refuge from such experience, as I have tried to do, in talking of all herbs, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that groweth on the wall ! *' Ah ! Mr. Locke," he went on, in a soft, melancholy, half-abstracted tone — "ah! Mr. Locke, I have felt deeply, and you will feel some day, the truth of Jarno's saying in ' Wilhelm Meister,' when he was wandering alone in the Alps, with his geological hammer, * These rocks, at least, tell me no lies, as men do.' Aye; there is no lie in Nature, no discord in the revelations of science, in the laws of the universe. Infinite, pure, un- f alien, earth-supporting Titans, fresh as on tjie morning of creation, those great laws endure ; your only true TAILOE AND POET. 267 democrats, too — for nothing is too great or too small for them to take note of. No tiniest gnat, or speck of dust, but they feed it, guide it, and preserve it. — Hail and snow, wind and vapour, fulfilling their Maker's word ; and like him, too, hiding themselves from the wise and prudent, and revealing themselves unto babes. Yes,^ Mr. Locke; it is the childlike, simple, patient, reve- rent heart, which science at once demands and culti- vates. To prejudice or haste, to self-conceit or am- bition, she proudly shuts her treasuries — to open them to men of humble heart, whom this world thinks simple dreamers — her Newtons, and Owens, and Faradays. Why should you not become such a man as they? You have the talents — you have the love for nature, you seem to have the gentle and patient spirit, which, indeed, will grow up more and more in you. if you become a real student of science. Or, if you must be a poet, why not sing of Nature, and leave those to sing political squabbles, who have no eye for the beauty of her repose? How few great poets have been politicians !" I gently suggested Milton. " Ay ! he became a great poet only when he had de- serted politics, because they had deserted him. In blindness and poverty, in the utter failure of all his national theories, he wrote the works which have made him immortal. Was Shakspeare a politician? or any one of the great poets who have arisen during the last thirty years? Have they not all seemed to consider it a 268 ALTON LOCKE, sacred duty to keep themselves, as far as they could, out of party-strife?" I quoted Southey, Shelley, and Burns, as instances to the contrary; but his induction was completed already, to his own satisfaction. " Poor dear Southey was a great verse- maker, rather than a great poet; and I always consider that his party- prejudices and party-writing narrowed and harshened a mind which ought to have been flowing forth freely and lovingly towards all forms of life. And as for Shelley and Burns, their politics dictated to them at once the worst portions of their poetry and of their practice. Shelley, what little I have read of him, only seems himself when he forgets radicalism for nature; and you would not set Burns's life or death, either, as a model for imitation in any class. Now, do you know, I must ask you to leave me a little. I am somewhat fatigued with this long discussion" (in which, certainly, I had borne no great share); "and I am sure, that after all I have said, you will see the pro- priety of acceding to the publisher's advice. Go and think over it, and let me have your answer by post- time." I did go and think over it — too long for my good. If I had acted on the first impulse, I should have re- fused, and been safe. These passages were the very pith and marrow of the poems. They were the very words which I had felt it my duty, my glory, to utter. I, who had been a working man, who had experienced all their sorrows and temptations — I, seemed called by TAILOR AND POET. 269 every circumstance of my life to preach their cause, to expose their wrongs — I to quash my convictions, to stuhi fy my book, for the sake of popularity, money, patronage ! And yet — all that involved seeing more of Lillian. They were only too powerful inducements in themselves, alas ! but I believe I could have resisted them tolerably, if they had not been backed by love. And so a struggle arose, which the rich reader may think a very fantastic one, though the poor man will understand it, and surely pardon it also — seeing that he himself is Man. Could I not, just once in a way, serve God and Mammon at once? — or rather, not Mammon, but Venus: a worship which looked to me, and really was in my case, purer than all the Mariolatry in Pope- dom. After all, the fall might not be so great as it seemed — perhaps I was not infallible on these same points. (It is wonderful how humble and self-denying one becomes when one is afraid of doing one^s duty.) Perhaps the dean might be right. He had been re- publican himself once, certainly. The facts, indeed, which I had stated, there could be no doubt of; but I might have viewed them througli a prejudiced and angry medium — I might have been not quite logical in my deductions from them — I might. In short, between " perhapses" and " mights," I fell — a very deep, real, damnable fall; and consented to emasculate my poems, I and become a flunkey and a dastard. I I mentioned my consent that evening to the party; the dean purred content thereat. Eleanor, to my astonishment, just said, sternly and abruptly, 270 ALTON LOCKE, *' Weak!" and then turned away, while Lillian began : " Oh! what a pity ! And really they were some of the prettiest verses of all ! But of course my father must know best; you are quite right to be guided by him, and do whatever is proper and prudent. After all, papa, I have got the naughtiest of them all, you know, safe. Eleanor set it to music, and wrote it out in her book; and 1 thought it so charming that I copied it." What Lillian said about herself, I drank in as greedily as usual ; what she said about Eleanor, fell on a heedless ear, and vanished, not to re- appear in my recollection till . But I must not anticipate. So it was all settled pleasantly ; and I sat up that evening, writing a bit of verse for LiUian, about the Old Cathedral, and " Heaven-aspiring towers," and '' Aisles of cloistered shade," and all that sort of thing; which I did not believe, or care for; but I thought it would please her, and so it did ; and I got golden smiles and compliments for my first, though not my last, in- sincere poem. I was going fast down hill, in my hurry to rise. However, as I said, it was all pleasant enough. I was to return to town, and there await the dean's orders; and, most luckily, I had received that morn- ing from Sandy Mackaye a characteristic letter : "Gowk, Telemachus, hearken I Item 1. Ye'r fou wi' the Circean cup, aneath the shade o' shovel hats and steeple-houses. " Item 2. I, cuif-Mentor that I am,' wearing out TAILOR AND POET. 271 a gude pair o' gude Scots brogues, that my sister's husband's third cousin sent me a towmond gane fra Aberdeen, rinning ower the town to a' journals, re- spectable and ither, anent the sellin' o' your ' Auto- biography of an Engine-Boiler in the Vauxhall-road,' the whilk I ha' disposit o' at the last, to O'Flynn's Weekly Warwhoop ; and gin ye ha' ony mair sic trash in your head, ye may get your meal whiles out o' the same kist; unless, as I sair misdoubt, ye're praying abeady, like Eli's bairns, ' to be put into ane o' the priest's offices, that ye may eat a piece o' bread.' '* Ye'll be coming the-morrow? I'm lane without ye; though I look for ye surely to come ben wi' a gowd shoulder-knot, and a red nose." This letter, though it hit me hard, and made me, I confess, a little angry at the moment with my truest friend, still offered me a means of subsistence, and enabled me to decline safely the pecuniary aid which I dreaded the dean's offering me. And yet I felt dispirited and ill at ease. My conscience would not let me enjoy the success I felt I had attained. But next morning I saw Lillian; and I forgot books, people's cause, conscience, and everything. ***** I went home by coach — a luxury on which my cousin insisted — as he did on lending me the fare ; so that in all I owed him somewhat more than eleven pounds. But I was too happy to care for a fresh debt, and home I went, considering my fortune made. My heart fell, as I stepped into the dingy little old 272 ALTON LOCKE, shop. "Was it the meanness of the place, after the comfort and elegance of my late abode? Was it disappointment at not finding Mackaye at home? Or was it that black-edged letter which lay waiting for me on the table? I was afraid to open it; I knew not why. I turned it over and over several times, trying to guess whose the handwriting on the cover might be ; the post- mark was two days old; and at last I broke the seal. " Sir, — This is to inform you, that your mother, Mrs. Locke, died this morning, a sensible sinner, not without assurance of her election ; and that her funeral is fixed for Wednesday, the 29 th instant. " The humble servant of the Lord's people, "J. WiGGINTON." TAILOK AND POET. 273 CHAPTER XIX. SHOET AXD SAD. I SHALL pass over the agonies of the next few days. There is self-exenteration enough and to spare in my story, without dilating on them. They are too sacred to pubhsh, and too painful, alas ! even to recal. I write my story, too, as a working man. Of those emotions which are common to humanity, I shall say but little — except when it is necessary to prove that the working man has feelincrs like the rest of his kind. But those feehnD:s may, in this case, be supplied by the reader's own ima- gination. Let him represent them to himself as bitter, as remorseful as he will, he will not equal the reality. True, she had cast me off; but had I not rejoiced in that rejection which should have been my shame? True, I had fed on the hope of some day winning reconciliation, by winning fame; but before the fame had arrived, the reconciliation had become impossible. I had shrunk from going back to her, as I ought to have done, in fiHal humiHty, and, therefore, I was not allowed to go back to her in the pride of success. Heaven knows, I had not forgotten her. Night and YOL. I. T 274 ALTON LOCKE, clay I. had tliouglit of lier with prayers and blessings; but I had made a merit of my own love to her — my forgiveness of her, as I dared to call it. I had pam- pered my conceit with the notion that I was a martyr in the cause of genius and enlightenment. How hollow, w^indy, heartless, all that looked now. There ! I will say no more. Heaven preserve any who read these pages, from such days and nights as I dragged on till that funeral, and for weeks after it was over, when I had sat once more in the little old chapel, with all the memories of my childhood crowding up, and tantalizing me with the vision of their simple peace — never, never to return! I heard my mother's dying pangs, her prayers, her doubts, her agonies, for my reprobate soul, dissected for the public good by my old enemy, Mr. Wigginton, who dragged in, among his fulsome eulogies of my mother's " signs of grace," rejoicings that there were " babes span-long in hell." I saw my sister Susan, now a tall handsome woman, but become all rigid, sour, with coarse grim lips, and that crushed, self-conscious, reserved, almost dishonest look about the eyes, common to fanatics of every creed. I heard her cold farewell, as she put into my hands certain notes and diaries of my mother's, which she had bequeathed to me on her death-bed. I heard myself proclaimed inheritor of some small ma,tters of furniture, which had belonged to her; told Susan, carelessly, to keep them for herself; and went forth, fancying that the curse of Cain was on my brow. I took home the diary; but several days elapsed before TAILOR AND POET. 275 I had courage to open it. Let the words I read there be as secret as the misery which dictated them. I had broken my mother^s heart ! — no I I had not I — The infe^al superstition which taught her to fancy that Heaven's love was narrower than her own — that God could hate his creature, not for its sins, but for the very nature which he had given it — that, that had killed her! And I remarked, too, with a gleam of hope, that in several places where sunshine seemed ready to break throus^h the black cloud of fanatic orloom — where she seemed incHned not merely to melt towards me (for there was, in every page, an under-current of love, deeper than death, and stronger than the grave), but also to dare to trust God on my behalf — beholcl lines carefully erased, page after page torn out, e\ddently long after the MSS. were written. I believe, to this day, that either my poor sister or her father-confessor was the perpetrator of that act. The fraus pia is not yet extinct; and it is as inconvenient now as it was in popish times, to tell the whole truth about saints, when they dare to say or do things which will not quite fit into the for- mulae of their sect. But what was to become of Susan? Though my uncle continued to her the allowance which he had made to my mother, yet I was her natural protector — and she was my only tie on earth. Was I to lose her, too? Might we not, after all, be happy together, in some little hole in Chelsea, like Elia and his Bridget? That question was solved for me. She declined my T 2 276 ALTON LOCKE, offers ; saying, that she could not live with any one whose religious opinions differed from her own, and that she had already engaged a room at the house of a Christian friend ; and was shortly to be united to that dear man of God, Mr. Wigginton, who was to be re- moved to the work of the Lord in Manchester. I knew the scoundrel, but it would have been im- possible for me to undeceive her. Perhaps he was only a scoundrel — perhaps he would not ill-treat her. And yet — my own little Susan ! my playfellow I my only tie on earth ! — to lose her — and not only her, but her respect, her love! — And my spirit, deep enough already, sank deeper still into sadness ; and I felt myself alone on earth, and clung to Mackaye as to a father — and a father indeed that old man was to me ! TAILOR AND POET. 277 CHAPTER XX. PEGASUS IX HAENESS. But, in sorrow or in joy, I had to earn my bread; and so, too, had CrosstKwaite^ poor fellow ! How he contrived to feed himself and his little Katie for the next few years, is more than I can tell; at all events, he worked hard enough. He scribbled, agitated; ran from London to Manchester, and Manchester to Brad- ford, spouting, lecturing — sowing the east wind, I am afraid, and Httle more. Whose fault was it? What could such a man do, with that fervid tongue, and heart, and brain of his, in such a station as his, such a time as this? Society had helped to make him an agitator. Society has had, more or less, to take the consequences of her own handiwork. For Cross- thwaite did not speak without hearers. He could make the fierce, shrewd, artizan nature flash out into fire — not always celestial, nor always, either, infernal. So he agitated, and lived — how, I know not. That he did do so, is evident from the fact that he and Katie are at this moment playing chess in the cabin, before 278 ALTON LOCKE, my eyes, and making love, all the wliile, as if they had not been married a week Ah, well ! I, however, had to do more than get my bread ; I had to pay off those fearful eleven pounds odd, which, now that all the excitement of my stay at D * * * had been so sadly quenched, lay like lead upon my memory. jMy list of subscribers filled slowly, and I had no power of increasing it, by any canvassings of my owm. My imcle, indeed, had promised to take two copies, and my cousin one ; not wishing, of course, to be so uncommer- cial as to run any risk, before they had seen whether my poems would succeed. But, Avith those exceptions, the dean had it all his own way ; and he could not be ex- pected to forego his own literary labours for my sake; so, through all that glaring summer, and sad foggy autumn, and nipping winter, I had to get my bread as I best could — by my pen. Mackaye grumbled at my writing so much, and so fast, and sneered about i\\Q furor scrihendi. But it was hardly fair upon me. " My mouth craved it of me," as Solomon says, I had really no other means of livelihood. Even if I could have got employment as a tailor, in the honourable trade, I loathed the business utterly — perhaps, alas! to confess the truth, I was beginning to despise it. I could bear to think of myself as a poor genius, in connexion with my new wealthy and high-bred patrons; for there was precedent for the thing. Penniless bards and squires of low degree, low- born artists, ennobled by their pictures — there was something grand in the notion of mind triumphant over the inequalities of rank,and associating with the great and TAILOR AND POET. 279 Avealthy, as tlieir spiritual equal, on the mere footing of its own innate nobility; no matter to what den it might return, to convert it into a temple of the Muses, by the glorious creations of its fancy, &c. &c. But to go back daily from the drawing-room and the publisher's to the goose and the shop-board, was too much for my weak- ness, even if it had been physically possible, as, thank Heaven, it was not. So I became a hack writer, and sorrowfully, but deliberately, " put my Pegasus into heavy harness," as my betters had done before me. It was miserable work, there is no denying it — only not worse than tailoring. — To try and serve God and Mammon too ; to make miser- able compromises daily, between the two great incom- patabilities, what was true, and what would pay; to speak my mind, in fear and trembling, by hints, and halves, and quarters ; to be daily hauling poor truth just up to the top of her well, and then, frightened at my own success, let her plump down again to the bottom; to sit there, trying to teach others, while my mind was in a whirl of doubt; to feed others' intellects, while my own were hungering; to grind on in the PhiKstino's mill, or occasionally make sport for them, hke some weary- hearted clown grinning in a pantomime, in a "light article," as blind as Sampson, but not, alas I as strong, for indeed my Delilah of the "West-end had clipped my locks, and there seemed little chance of their growing again. That face and that drawing-room flitted before me from morning till eve, and enervated and distracted my already over-wearied brain. 280 ALTON LOCKE, I had no time, besides, to concentrate my thouglits sufficiently for poetry; no time to wait for inspiration. From the moment I had swallowed my breakfast, I had to sit scribbling off my thoughts anyhow in prose; and soon my own scanty stock was exhausted, and I was forced to beg, borrow, and steal notions and facts, wherever I could get them. Oh ! the misery of having to read, not what I longed to know, but what I thought would pay ! — to skip page after page of interesting mat- ter, just to pick out a single thought or sentence which could be stitched into my patchwork ! — and then the still greater misery of seeing the article which I had sent to press a tolerably healthy and lusty bantling, appear in print next week, after suffering the inquisition- tortures of the editorial censorship, all maimed, and squinting, and one-sided, with the colour rubbed off its poor cheeks, and generally a villanous hang-dog look of ferocity, so different from its birth-smile that I often did not know my own child again I — and then, when I dared to remonstrate, however feebly, to be told, by way of comfort, that the public taste must be consulted ! It gave me a hopeful notion of the said taste, certainly; and often and often I groaned in spirit over the temper of my own class, which not only submitted to, but de- manded, such one-sided bigotry, prurience, and ferocity, from those who set up as its guides and teachers. Mr. OTlynn, editor of the Weekly Warwhoop, whose white slave I now found myself, was, I am afraid, a pretty faithful specimen of that class, as it existed before the bitter lesson of the 10th of April brought TAILOR AND POET. 281 the Chartist working men and the Chartist press to their senses. Thereon sprang up a new race of papers, whose moral tone, whatever may be thought of their poHtical or doctrinal opinions, was certainly not inferior to that of the Whig and Tory press. The Commonwealth, the Standard of Freedom, the Plain Speaker, were reprobates, if to be a Chartist is to be a reprobate : but none except the most one-sided bigots could deny them the praise of a stern morality and a lofty earnestness, a hatred of evil and a craving after good, which would often put to shame many a paper among the oracles of Belgravia and Exeter Hall. But those were the days of lubricity and O'Flynn. Not that the man was an un- redeemed scoundrel. He was no more profligate, either in his literary or his private morals, than many a man who earns his hundreds, sometimes his thousands, a year, by prophesying smooth things to Mammon, crying in daily leaders, " Peace ! peace !" when there is no peace, and daubing the rotten walls of careless luxury and self- satisfied covetousness with the untempered mortar of party statistics and garbled foreign news — till "the storm shall fall, and the breaking thereof cometh suddenly in an instant." Let those of the respectable press who are \ without sin, cast the first stone at the unrespectable. Many of the latter class, who have been branded as traitors and villains, were single-minded, earnest, valiant men ; and, as for evenOTlynn, and those worse than him, what was really the matter with them was, that they were too honest — they spoke out too much of their whole minds. Bewildered, like Lear, amid the social storm. 282 ALTON LOCKE, they had determined, like him, to become "unsophisti- cated," " to owe the worm no silk, the cat no perfume" — seeing, indeed, that if they had, they could not have paid for them; so they tore off, of their own will, the peacock's feathers of gentility, the sheep's clothing of moderation, even the fig-leaves of decent reticence, and became just what they really were — just what hundreds more would become, who now sit in the high places of the earth, if it paid them as well to be unrespectable as it does to be re- spectable ; if the selfishness and covetousness, bigotry and ferocity, which are in them, and more or less in every man, had happened to enlist them against existing evils, instead of for them. O'Flynn would have been gladly as respectable as they; but, in the first place, he must have starved ; and in the second place, he must have lied ; for he believed in his own radicalism with his whole soul. There was a ribald sincerity, a frantic courage in the man. He always spoke the truth when it suited him, and very often when it did not. He did see, which is more than all do, that oppression is oppres- sion, and humbug, humbug. He had faced the gallows before now, without flinching. He had spouted rebel- lion in the Birmingham Bullring, and elsewhere, and taken the consequences like a man ; while his colleagues left their dupes to the tender mercies of broadswords and bayonets, and decamped in the disguise of sailors, old women, and dissenting preachers. He had sat three months in Lancaster Castle, the Bastile of England, one day perhaps to fall like that Parisian one, for a libel which he never wrote, because he would not betray his TAILOR AND POET. 283 cowardly contributor. He had twice pleaded liis own cause, without help of attorney, and showed himself as practised in every law-quibble and practical cheat as if he had been a regularly-ordained priest of the blue-bag ; and each time, when hunted at last into a corner, had turned valiantly to bay, with wild witty Irish eloquence, " worthy," as the press say of poor misguided !Mitchell^ " of a better cause." Altogether, a much-enduring Ulysses, unscrupulous, tough-hided, ready to do and suffer anything fair or foul, for what he honestly be- lieved — if a confused, virulent positiveness be worthy of the name " belief" — to be the true and righteous cause. Those who class all mankind compendiously and com- fortably under the two exhaustive species of saints and villains, may consider such a description garbled and impossible. I have seen few men, but never yet met I among those few either perfect saint or perfect villain. I draw men as I have found them — inconsistent, piece- meal, better than their own actions, worse than their own opinions, and poor O'Flynn among the rest. Not that there were no questionable spots in the sun of his fair fame. It was whispered that he had in old times done dirty work for Dublin Castle bureaucrats — nay, that he had even, in a very hard season, written court poetry for the Morning Post ; but all these little pecca- dilloes he carefully veiled in that kindly mist which hung over his youthful years. He had been a medical student, and got plucked, his foes declared, in his ex- amination. He had set up a savings-bank, which broke. He had come over from Ireland, to agitate for 284 ALTON LOCKE, "repale" and " rint," and, like a wise man as he was, had never gone back again. He had set up three or four papers in his time, and entered into partnership with every leading democrat in turn ; but his papers failed, and he quarrelled with his partners, being addicted to profane swearing and personalities. And now at last, after Ulyssean wanderings, he had found rest in the office of the Weeklj/ Wai whoop, if rest it could be called, that perennial hurricane of plotting, railing, sneering, and bombast, in which he lived, never writing a line, on principle, till he had w^orked himself up into a passion. I will dwell no more on so distasteful a subject. Such leaders, let us hope, belong only to the past — to the youthful self-will and licentiousness of democracy; and as for reviling O'Flynn, or any other of his class, no man has less right than myself, I fear, to cast stones at such as they. I fell as low as almost any, beneath the besetting sins of my class; and shall I take merit to myself, because God has shown me, a little earlier per- haps than to them, somewhat more of the true duties and destinies of The Many? Oh, that they could see the depths of my affection to them! Oh, that they could see the shame and self-abasement with which, in rebuking their sins, I confess my own ! If they are apt to be flippant and bitter, so was I. If they lust to destroy, without knowing what to build up instead, so did I. If they make an almighty idol of that Electoral Reform, which ought to be, and can be, only a prelimi- nary means, and expect final deliverance from " their TAILOR AND POET. 285 twenty-thousandth part of a talker in the national palaver," so did I. Unhealthy and noisome as was the literary atmosphere in which I now found myself, it "was one to my taste. The very contrast between the peaceful, intellectual luxury which I had just witnessed, and the misery of my class and myself, quickened my de- light in it. In bitterness, in sheer envy, 1 threw my whole soul into it, and spoke evil, and rejoiced in evil. It was so easy to find fault ! It pampered my own self-conceit, my own discontent, while it saved me the trouble of inventing remedies. Yes ; it was indeed easy to find fault. " The world was all before me, where to choose." In such a disorganised, anomalous, grumbling, party embittered element as this English society, and its twin pauperism and luxury, I had but to look straight before me to see my prey. And thus I became daily more and more cynical, fierce, reckless. My mouth was filled with cursing — and too often justly. And all the while, like tens of thousands of my class, I had no man to teach me. Sheep scattered on the hills, we were, that had no shep- herd. What wonder if our bones lay bleaching among rocks and quagmires, and wolves devoured the heritage of God? Mackaye had nothing positive, after all, to advise or propound. His wisdom was one of apophthegms and maxims, utterly impractical, too often merely negative, as was his creed, which, though he refused to be classed with any sect, was really a somewhat undefined Unitarianism — or rather Islamism. He could say, 286 ALTON LOCKE, witli the old Moslem, '' God is great — who hath resisted his will?" And he believed what he said, and lived manful and pure, reverent and self-denying, by that belief, as the first Moslem did. But that was not enough. " Not enough? Merely negative?" No — that \YSiS positive enough, and mighty; but I repeat it, it was not enough. He felt it so him- self; for he grew daily more and more cynical, more and more hopeless about the prospects of his class and of all humanity. Why not? Poor suffering wretches! what is it to them to know that " God is great," unless you can prove to them that God is also merciful? Did he indeed care for men at all? — was what I longed to know; was all this misery and misrule around us his will — his stern and necessary law — his lazy con- nivance ? And were we to free ourselves from it by any frantic means that came to hand? or had he ever inter- fered himself ? Was there a chance, a hope, of his interfering now, in our own time, to take the matter into his own hand, and come out of his place to judge the earth in righteousness? That was what we wanted to know; and poor Mackaye could give no comfort there. ^' God was great — the wicked would be turned into hell." Aye — the few wilful, triumphant wicked; but the millions of suffering, starving wicked, the victims of society and circumstance — what hope for them? " God was great." And for the clergy, our professed and salaried teachers, all I can say is — and there are TAILOK AXD POET. 287 tens, perhaps liundreds of thousands of workmen who can re-echo my words — with the exception of the dean and my cousin^ and one who shall be mentioned here- after, a clergyman never spoke to me in my life. Why should he ? Was I not a Chartist and an Infidel ? The truth is, the clergy are afraid of us. To read the Dispatch; is to be excommunicated. Young men's classes? Honour to them, however few they are — however hampered by the restrictions of religious bigotry and political cowardice. But the working men, whether rightly or wTongly, do not trust them ; they do not trust the clergy who set them on foot; they do not expect to be taught at them the things they long to know — to be taught the whole truth in them about liistory, politics, science, the Bible. Tliey suspect them to be mere tubs to the whale — mere substitutes for education, slowly and late adopted, in order to stop the mouths of the importunate. They may misjudge the clergy; but whose fault is it if they do? Clergymen of England ! — look at the history of your Establishment for the last fifty years, and say, what wonder is it if the artizan mistrust you? Every spiritual reform, since the time of John Wesley, has had to establish itself in the teeth of insult, calumny, and persecution. Every ecclesiastical reform comes not from within, but from without your body. Mr. Horsman, struggling against every kind of temporising and trickery, has to do the work which bishops, by virtue of their seat in the House of Lords, ought to have been doing years ago. Everywhere we see the clergy, with a few persecuted 288 ALTON LOCKE, exceptions (like Dr. Arnold), proclaiming themselves the advocates of Toryism, the dogged opponents of our -political liberty, living either by the accursed system of pew-rents, or else by one which depends on the high price of corn ; chosen exclusively from the classes who crush us down; prohibiting all free discussion on reli- gious points; commanding us to swallow down, with faith as passive and implicit as that of a Papist, the very creeds from which their own bad example, and their scandalous neglect, have, in the last three generations, alienated us; never mixing with the thoughtful working men, except in the prison, the hospital, or in extreme old age; betraying, in every tract, in every sermon, an ignorance of the doubts, the feelings, the very language of the masses, which would be ludicrous, were it not accursed before God and man. And then will you show us a few tardy improvements here and there, and ask us, indignantly, why we distrust you? Oh ! gentle- men, if you cannot see for yourselves the causes of our distrust, it is past our power to show you. We must leave it to God. ^ ^ ^ ^ vk But to return to my own story. I had, as I said before, to live by my pen; and in that painful, confused, maimed way, I contrived to scramble on the long winter through, writing regularly for the Weekly War- ivhoop, and sometimes getting an occasional scrap into some other cheap periodical, often on the very verge of starvation, and glad of a handful of meal from Sandy's widow's barrel. If I had had more than my share of TAILOR AXD POET. 289 feasting in tKe summer, I made the balance even, during those frosty months, by many a bitter fast. And, here let me ask you, gentle reader, who are just now considering me ungentle, virulent, and noisy, did you ever, for one day in your whole life, literally, in- voluntarily, and in spite of all your endeavours, longings, and hungerings, not get enough to eat? If you ever have, it must have taught you several things. But all this while, it must not be supposed that I had forgotten my promise to good Farmer Porter, to look for his missing son. And, indeed, Crossthwaite and I were already engaged in a similar search for a friend of his — the young tailor, who, as I told Porter, had been lost for several months. He was the brother of Cross- thwaite's wife, a passionate, kind-hearted Irishman, Mike Kelly by name, reckless and scatter-brained enough to get himself into every possible scrape, and weak enough of will never to get himself out of one. For these two, Crossthwaite and I had searched from one sweater's den to another, and searched in vain. And though the present interest and exertion kept us both from brooding over our own difficulties, yet in the long run, it tended only to embitter and infuriate our minds. The frightful scenes of hopeless misery which we wit- nessed — the ever widening pit of pauperism and slavery, gaping for fresh victims day by day, as they dropped out of the fast lessening "honourable trade," into the ever-increasing miseries of sweating, piece-work, and starvation-prices ; the horrible certainty that the same process which was devouring our trade, was VOL. I. U 290 ALTON LOCKE, slowly, but surely, eating up every other also; the knowledge that there was no remedy, no salvation for us in man, that political economists had declared such to be the law and constitution of society, and that our rulers had believed that message, and were determined to act upon it; — if all these things did not go far to- wards maddening us, we must have been made of sterner stuff than any one who reads this book. At last, about the middle of January, just as we had given up the search as hopeless, and poor Katie's eyes were getting red and swelled with daily weeping, a fresh spur was given to our exertions, by the sudden ap- pearance of no less a person than the farmer himself. Vf hat ensued upon his coming, must be kept for another chapter. TAILOR AND POET. 291 CHAPTER XXI. THE SWEATER'S DEN. I WAS greedily devouring Lane's " Arabian Nights," which had made their first appearance in the shop that day. Mackaye sat in his usual place, smoking a clean pipe, and assisting his meditations by certain mysterious chironomic signs; while opposite to him was Farmer Porter — a stone or two thinner than when I had seen him last, but one stone is not much missed out of seventeen. His forehead looked smaller, and his jaws larger than ever; and his red face was sad, and fur- rowed with care. Evidently, too, he was ill at ease about other matters besides his son. He was looking out of the corners of his eyes, first at the skinless cast on the chimney- piece, then at the crucified books hanging over his head, as if he considered them not altogether safe com- panions, and rather expected something "uncanny" to lay hold of him from behind — a process which involved the most horrible contortions of visage, as he carefully abstained from stirring a muscle of his neck or body, U2 292 ALTON LOCKE, but sat bolt upright, his elbows pinned to his sides, and his knees as close together as his stomach would permit, like a huge corpulent Egyptian Memnon — the most ludicrous contrast to the little old man op- posite, twisted up together in his Joseph's coat, like some wizard magician in the stories which I was read- ing. A curious pair of '^poles'' the two made; the mesothet whereof, by no means a " punctiim indiffe- rens^'' but a true connecting spiritual idea, stood on the table — in the whisky-bottle. Farmer Porter was evidently big with some great thought, and had all a true poet's bashfulness about publishing the fruit of his creative genius. He looked round again at the skinless man, the caricatures, the books ; and, as his eye wandered from pile to pile, and shelf to shelf, his face brightened, and he seemed to gain courage. Solemnly he put his hat on his knees, and began solemnly brushing it with his cuff. Then he saw me watching him, and stopped. Then he put his pipe solemnly on the hob, and cleared his throat for action, while I buried my face in the book. " Them's a sight o' lamed beuks, Muster Mackaye?" " Humph r " Yow maun ha' got a deal o' scholarship among they, noo?^' " Humph!" " Dee yow think, noo, yow could find of my boy out of un, by any ways o' conjuring like?" '^ By what?" I TAILOE AND TOET. 293 " Conjuring — to strick a perpendicular, noo, or say the Lord's Prayer backwards?" " Wadna ye prefer a meeracle or twa?" asked Sandy, after a long pull at the whisky-toddy. " Or a few efreets?" added I. " Whatsoever you likes, gentlemen. You're loest judges, to be sure," answered Farmer Porter, in an awed and helpless voice. " Aweel — I'm no that disinclined to believe in the occult sciences. I dinna baud a'thegither wi' Sal- verte. There was mair in them than Magia naturalis, Pm thinking. Mesmerism and magic-lanterns, benj and opium, winna explain all facts, Alton, laddie. Doot- less they were an unco' barbaric an' empiric method o' expressing the gran' truth o' man's mastery ower matter. But the interpenetration o' the spiritual an' physical worlds is a gran' truth too ; an' aiblins the Deity might ha' allowed witchcraft, just to teach that to puir barbarous folk — signs and wonders, laddie, to mak' them believe in somewhat mair than the beasts that perish : an' so ghaists an' warlocks might be a necessary element o' the difine education in dark and carnal times. But I've no read o' a case in which necromancy, nor geomancy, nor coskinomancy, nor onyither mancy, was applied to sic a purpose as this. Unco gude they were, may be, for the discovery o' stolen spunes — but no that o' stolen tailors." Farmer Porter had Hstened to this harangue, with mouth and eyes gradually expanding between awe and 294 tlie desire to comprehend ; but at tlie last sentence liis countenance fell. " Sql'm thinking, Mister Porter, that the best witch in siccan a case is ane that ye may find at the police- ofhce." *'Anan?" " Thae detective police are gran' necromancers an' canny in their way: an' I just took the liberty, a week agone, to ha' a crack wi' ane o' 'em. And noo, gin ye're inclined, we'll leave the whusky awhile, an' gang up to that cave o' Trophawnius, ca'd by the vulgar Bow-street, an' speir for tidings o' the twa lost sheep." So to Bow-street we went, and found our man, to whom the farmer bowed with obsequiousness most un- like his usual burly independence. He evidently half suspected him to have dealings with the world of spirits : but whether he had such or not, they had been utterly unsuccessful; and we walked back again, with the farmer between us half-blubbering — " I tell ye, there's nothing like ganging to a wise 'ooman. Bless ye, I mind one up to Guy Hall, when I was a barn, that two Irish reapers coom down, and murthered her for the money — and if you lost aught she'd vind it, so sure as the church — and a mighty hand to cure burns; and they two villains coom back, after harvest, seventy mile to do it — and when my vather's cows was shrew-struck, she made un be draed under a brimblc as growed together at the both ends, she a praying like mad all the time; and they never got TAILOR AND POET. 295 nothing but fourteen shilling and a crooked sixpence; for why, the devil carried off all the rest of her money : and I seen um both a-hanging in chains by "Wisbeach river, -svith my own eyes. So when they Irish reapers comes into the vens, our chaps always says, ' Yow goo to Guy Hall, there's yor brithren a-waitin' for yow,' and that do make um joost mad loike, it do. I tell ye there's nowt like a wise 'ooman, for vinding out the likes o' this." At this hopeful stage of the argument I left them, to go to the Magazine office. As I passed through Covent Garden, a pretty young woman stopped me under a gas-lamp. I was pushing on, when I saw that it was Jemmy Downes's Irish wife, and saw, too, that she did not recognise me. A sudden instinct made me stop and hear what she had to say. *' Shure then, and yer a tailor, my young man?" '' Yes," I said, nettled a little that my late loathed profession still betrayed itself in my gait. " From the counthry?" I nodded, though I dare not speak a white lie to that effect. I fancied that, somehow, through her I might hear of poor Kelly and his friend Porter. " Ye '11 be wanting work thin?" *' I have no work." " Och then, it's I can show ye the flower o' work, 1 can. Bedad, there's a shop I know of where ye'll earn — ^bedad, if ye're the ninth part of a man, let alone a handy young fellow like the looks of you — och, ye'll earn thirty shillings the week, to the very least — 296 ALTON LOCKE, an' beautiful lodgings; — ocli, thin, just come and see 'em — as cliape as mother's milk! Come along thin — och, it's the beauty ye are — ^just the nate figure for a tailor." The fancy still possessed me; and I went with her through one dingy back street after another. She seemed to be purposely taking an indirect road, to mislead me as to my whereabouts; but after a half-hour's walking, I knew, as well as she, that we were in one of the most miserable slop-working nests of the East-end. She stopped at a house door, and hurried me in, up to the first floor, and into a dirty, slatternly parlour, smelling infamously of gin; where the first object I beheld was Jemmy Downes, sitting before the fire, three- parts drunk, with a couple of dirty, squalling children on the hearth-rug, whom he was kicking and cuffing alternately. " Och, thin, ye villain, bating the poor darlints whin- ever I lave ye a minute !" and pouring out a volley of Irish curses, she caught up the urchins, one under each arm, and kissed and hugged them till they were nearly choked. " Och, ye plague o' my life — as drunk as a baste; an' *[ brought home this darlint of a young gentleman to help ye in the business." Downes got up, and steadying himself by the table, leered at me with lack-lustre eyes, and attempted a little ceremonious politeness. How this was to end I did not see; but I was determined to carry it through, on the chance of success, infinitely small as that might be. TAILOR AND POET. 297 '' An' I've told him thirty shillings a ^Yeek's the least he'll earn; and charges for board and lodging only seven shilhngs." "Thirty! — she lies; she's always a lying; don't you mind her. Five-and -forty is the werry lowest figure. Ask my respectable and most piousest partner, Shemei Solomons. Why, blow me — it's Locke !" "Yes, it is Locke; and surely you're my old friend, Jemmy Downes? Shake hands. What an unexpected pleasure to meet you again !" " Werry unexpected pleasure. Tip us your daddlc ! De-lighted — dehghted, as 1 was a saying, to be of the least use to yer. Take a caulker ? Summat heavy, then? No? ' Tak' a drap o' kindness yet, for auld langsyne?' " " You forget I was always a teetotaller." " Ay," with a look of unfeigned pity. " An' you're a going to lend us a hand? Oh, ah! perhaps you'd like to begin ? Here's a most beautiful uniform, now, for a markis in her Majesty's Guards; we don't mention names — tarn't business like. P'r'aps you'd like best to work here to-night, for company — ' for auld langsyne, my boys ;' and 111 introduce yer to the gents up-stairs to-morrow." "No," I said; "I'll go up at once, if you've no objection." " Och, thin, but the sheets isn't aired — no — faix; and I'm thinking the gentleman as is a going isn^t gone yet." But I insisted on going up at once ; and, grumbling, she followed me. I stopped on the landing of the 298 ALTON LOCKE, second floor, and asked wliicli way ; and seeing her in no hurry to answer, opened a door, inside which I heard the hum of many voices, saying in as sprightly a tone as I could muster, that I supposed that was the workroom. As I had expected, a fetid, choking den, with just room enough in it for the seven or eight sallow, starved beings, who, coatless, shoeless, and ragged, sat stitching, each on his truckle-bed. I glanced round; the man whom I sought was not there. My heart fell ; why it had ever risen to such a pitch of hope I cannot tell; and half- cursing myself for a fool, in thus wildly thrusting my head into a squabble, I turned back and shut the door, saying — "A very pleasant room, ma'am, but a leetle too crowded." Before she could answer, the opposite door opened; and a face appeared — unwashed, unshaven, shrunken to a skeleton. I did not recognise it at first. " Blessed Vargen ! but that wasn't your voice, Locke?" *' And who are you?" ^' Tear and ages ! and he don't know Mike Kelly !" My first impulse was to catch him up in my arms, and run down stairs with him. I controlled myself, however, not knowing how far he might be in his tyrant's power. But his voluble Irish heart burst out at once — *'0h! blessed saints, take me out o' this!— take me TAILOR AND POET. 299 out, for the love of Jesus !^ — take me out o' tliis hell, or I'll go mad intirely ! Och ! will nobody have pity on poor sowls in purgatory — here in prison like negur slaves? We're starved to the bone, we are, and kilt intirely with cowld." And as he clutched my arm, with his long, skinny, trembhng fingers, I saw that his hands and feet were all chapped and bleeding. Neither shoe nor stocking did he possess; his only garments were a ragged shirt and trousers ; and — and, in horrible mockery of his own misery, a grand new flowered satin vest, which to-morrow was to figure in some gorgeous shop- window ! *' Och! INTother of Heaven!" lie went on, wildly, " when will I get out to the fresh air? For five months I haven''t seen the blessed light of sun, nor spoken to the praste, nor ate a bit o' mate, barring bread-and-butter. Shure, its all the blessed sabbaths and saints' days Fve been a working Kke a hay then Jew, and niver seen the insides o' the chapel to confess my sins, and me poor sowl's lost intirely — and they've pawned the relaver * this fifteen weeks, and not a boy of us iver sot foot in the street since." " Vot's that row?" roared at this juncture Downes's voice from below. '* Och, thin," shrieked the woman, *' here's that thief * A coat, we understand, which is kept by the coatless -vrretches in these sweaters' dungeons, to be used by each of them in turn when they want to go out. — Editor. 300 ALTON LOCKE, o' the warld, Micky Kelly, slandhering o' us afore the blessed heaven, and he owing 21. 145. \d. for his board an' lodgin', let alone pawn-tickets, and goin' to rin away, the black-hearted ongrateful sarpent !" And she began yelling indiscriminately " Thieves!" " Murder!" " Blasphemy !" and such otlicr ejaculations, Avhich (the English ones at least) had not the slightest reference to the matter in hand. " I'll come to him !" said Downes, with an oath, and rushed stumbling up the stairs, while the poor wa-etch sneaked in again, and slammed the door to. Downes battered at it, but was met with a volley of curses from the men inside ; while, profiting by the Babel, I blew out the light, ran down-stairs, and got safe into the street. In two hours afterwards, Mackaye, Porter, Cross- thwaite and I, were at the door, accompanied by a policeman, and a search-warrant. Porter had insisted on accompanying us. He had made up his mind that his son was at Downes's ; and all representations of the smallness of his chance were fruitless. He worked himself up into a state of complete frenzy, and flou- rished a huge stick in a way which shocked the policeman's orderly and legal notions. " That may do very well down in your country, sir; but you aren't a goin' to use that there weapon here, you know, not by no hact o' Parliament as I knows on." " Ow, it's joost a way I ha' wi' me." And the TAILOR AXD POET. 301 stick was quiet for fifty yards or so, and then re- commenced smashing imaginary skulls. " You'll do somebody a mischief, sir, with that. You'd much better a lend it me." Porter tucked it under his arm for fifty yards more ; and so on, till we reached Downes's house. The policeman knocked; and the door was opened, cautiously, by an old Jew, of a most un-" Caucasian " cast of features, however " high nosed/' as Mr. Disraeli has it. The policeman asked to see Michael Kelly. " Michaelsh ? I do't know such namesh — " But before the parley could go further, the farmer burst past poHceman and Jew, and rushed into the passage, roaring, in a voice which made the very windows rattle, " Billy Poorter ! Billy Poorter ! whorbeyow? whor be yow?" We all followed him up-stairs, in time to see him charging valiantly, with his stick for a bayonet, the small person of a Jew-boy, who stood at the head of the stairs in a scientific attitude. The young rascal planted a dozen blows in the huge carcase — he might as well have thumped the rhinoceros in the Regent's Park; the old man ran right over him, with- out stopping, and dashed up the stairs; at the head of which— oh, joy! — appeared a long, shrunken, red- liaired figure, the tears on its dirty cheeks glittering in the candle-glare. In an instant, father and son were in each other's arms. 302 ALTON LOCKE, *' Oh, my bam ! my barn ! my barn 1 my barn !" and then the old Hercules held him off at arm's length, and looked at him with a wistful face, and hugged him again with '^ My barn I my barn !'^ He had nothing else to say. Was it not enough? And poor Kelly danced frantically around them, hurrahing; his own sorrows forgotten in his friend's deliverance. The Jew-boy shook himself, turned, and darted down- stairs past us ; the policeman quietly put out his foot, tripped him headlong, and jumping down after him, extracted from his grasp a heavy pocket-book. *' Ah ! my dear mothersh's dying gift ! Oh, dear ! oh dear ! give it back to a poor orphansh !" " Didn't I see you take it out o' the old un's pocket — you young villain?^' answered the maintainer of order, as he shoved the book into his bosom, and stood with one foot on his writhing victim, a complete nine- teenth-century St. Michael. " Let me hold him," I said, " while you go up-stairs." *' You hold a Jew-boy ! — you hold a mad cat !" an- swered the policeman, contemptuously — and with justice — for at that moment Downes appeared on the first- floor landing, cursing and blaspheming. " He's my 'prentice ! he's my servant ! I've got a bond, with his own hand to it, to serve me for three years. I'll have the law of you — I will !" Then the meaning of the big stick came out. The old man leapt down the stairs, and seized Downes. "You're the tyrant as has locked my barn up here!" TAILOR AND POET. 303 and a thrashing commenced, which it made my bones ache only to look at. Downes had no chance ; the old man felled him on liis face in a couple of blows, and taking both hands to his stick, hewed away at him as if he had been a log. " I waint hit a's head ! I waint liit a's head !" — whack, whack. "Let me be!" — whack, whack — puff. "It does me gnde, it does me gude !" puff, puff^ puff — whack. " Pve been a bottling of it up for three years, come Whitsuntide!" — whack, whack, whack — while ^rackaye and Crossthwaite stood coolly looking on, and the wife shut herself up in the side-room, and screamed murder. The unhappy pohceman stood at his wit's end, between the prisoner below, and the breach of the peace above, bellowing in vain, in the Queen's name, to us, and to the grinning tailors on the landing. At last, as Downes's life seemed in danger, he wavered ; the Jew-boy seized the moment, jumped up, upsetting the constable, dashed Hke an eel between Crossthwaite and Mackaye, gave me a back-handed blow in passing, which I felt for a week after, and vanished through the street-door, which he locked after him. " Very well !" said the functionary, rising solemnly, and pulhng out a note-book — " Scar under left eye, nose a little twisted to the right, bad chilblains on the hands. You'll keep till next time, young man. Now, you fat gentleman up there, have you done a quahfying of yourself foiNew gate ?" 304 ALTON LOCKE, The old man had run up-stairs again, and was hugging his son; but when the poHceman lifted Downes, he rushed back to his victim, and begged, like a great school-boy, for leave to " bet him joost won bit moor." '- Let me bet un ! I'll pay un !— I'll pay all as my son owes un ! Marcy me ! where's my pooss?" and so on raged the Babel, till we got the two poor fellows safe out of the house — we had to break open the door to do it, thanks to that imp of Israel. For God's sake, take us too !" almost screamed five or six other voices. "They're all in debt — every onesh; they sha'n't go till they paysh, if there's law in England^" whined the old Jew, who had re-appeared. " I'll pay for 'em — I'll pay every farden, if so be as they treated ray boy well. Here, you, Mr. Locke, there's the ten pounds as I promised you. Why, whor is my pooss?" The policeman solemnly handed it to him. He took it, turned it over, looked at the policeman half fright- ened, and pointed with his fat thumb at Mackaye. ^' Well, he said as you was a conjuror — and sure he was ri2;ht." He paid me the money. I had no mind to keep it in such company; so I got the poor fellows' pawn-tickets, and Crossthwaite and I took their things out for them. When we returned, we found them in a group in the passage, holding the door open, in their fear lest we should be locked up, or entrapped in some way. TAILOE AND POET. 305 Their spirits seemed utterly broken. Some three or four went off to lodge where they could; the majority went up-stairs again to work. That, even that dungeon, was their only home — their only hope, as it is of thou- sands of ' ^ free " Englishmen at this moment. We returned, and found the old man with his new- found prodigal sitting on his knee, as if he had been a baby. Sandy told me afterwards, that he had scarcely kept him from carrying the young man all the way home ; he was convinced that the poor fellow was dying of starvation. I think really he was not far wrong. In the corner sat Kelly, crouched together hke a baboon, blubbering, hurrahing, invoking the saints, cursing the sweaters, and blessing the present company. We were afraid, for several days, that his wits were seriously affected. And, in his old arm-chair, pipe in mouth, sat good Sandy Mackaye, wiping his eyes with the many-coloured sleeve, and moraUsing to himself, sotto voce : *' Tlie auld Romans made slaves o' their debitors; sae did the Anglo-Saxons, for a' good ]Major Cartwright has writ to the contrary. But I didna ken the same Christian practice was part o' the Breetish constitution. Aweel, aweel — atween Riot Acts, Government by Commissions, and ither little extravagants and codicils o' Mammon's making, it's no that easy to ken, the day, what is the Breetish constitution, and what isn't. Tak' a drappie, Billy Porter, lad?" *' Never again so long as I live. I've learnt a lesson and a half about that, these last few months." VOL. I. X 306 • ALTON LOCKE. " Aweel, moderation's best, but abstinence better than naething. Nae man sail deprive me o' my leeberty, but I'll tempt nae man to gie up his." And he actually put the whisky-bottle by into the cupboard. The old man and his son went home next day, promising me, if I would but come to see them, " twa hundert acres o' the best partridge-shooting, and wild dooks as plenty as sparrows ; and to live in clover till I bust, if I liked." And so, as Bunyan has it, they went on their way, and I saw them no more. END OF VOL. I. CHAPMAN AND HALL'S SERIES, HANDSOMELY BOUND IN CLOTH, PKICE 9s. EACH VOLUME. WORKS ALREADY PUBLISHED: ALTON LOCKE, Tailok a>t) Poet. An Autobiography. 2 vols. Just pvblished. TWO YEARS' RESIDENCE IN A LEVANTINE FA^HLY. By Bayle St, Joh>', Author of " Advextures in the Ltbian Desert," '&c. FANNY SERVE Y; or, the Mother's Choice. A Novel. 2 vols. RA3IBLES ANT) OBSERVATIONS IN NTW SOUTH WALES. By J. P. TOWNSEND. 1 VoL THE LIFE OF SL^DHLLEN ROBESPIERRE, wrra Extracts from HIS Unpcblished Correspoxdence. By G. H. Lewes. 1 vol. MARY BARTON: a Tale of ilASCHESTER Life. Third Edition. 2 vols. THE HALF-SISTERS: a Novel. By Gekaldine E. Jewsbuky, Author of " ZoE." 2 vols. THE BACHELOR OF THE ALBANY. By the Author of " The Falcon Family." Second Edition. 1 vol. WAYFARING SKETCHES a^ioxg the Greeks and Turks, and on the Shores of the Danube. By a Seven Years' Resident in Greece. Second Edition. 1 vol. RANTHORPE : a No^-el. By G. H. Lewes. 1 vol. LRTS OF SBION LORD LOVAT, and of DUNCAN FORBES of CULLODEN. From Original Sources. By John Hill Burton. 1 vol. CAMP ANT) BARRACK-ROOM ; or, the British Ajoiy as it is. 1 vcL FATHER DARCY: an Historical Ro3l\nce. By the Author of " Mount SoREL," " E3IILIA WYNDHA5I," &C. 2 Vols. THE LIFE OF GEORGE CANNING. By Robert Bell, Author of the " Lives of the Poets," &c. 1 vol. LONG ENGAGEMENTS: a Tale of the Affghan Rebellk>n. 1 vol. THE FALCON FAMILY; or, Yol'ng Ieelan-d: a Satiricai. Noa-el. By the Author of " My Uncle the Curate." Second Edition. 1 vol. THE LIFE OF MOZART, ln-cluding his Ccmjrespondence. By Edward Holmes. 1 vol. THE WHITEBOY: a Story of Irelant) in 1822. By Mrs. S. C. Hall. 2 vols. MOUNT SOREL. Bv the Author of the •• Two Old Men's Tales." 2 voLs.