UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN BOOKSTACKS TALES OF THE GREAT ST. BERNARD. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. I. THE SQUIRE'S TALE. THE WALLACHIAN'S TALE. LONDON : HENRY COLBURN, NEW BURLINGTON STREET. 1828. PRIMrP F.Y A. J. VALPY, P.ED LION COUET, FTEET ST&EET. o CO To those who may take the trouble of reading these Tales, and may be perplexed by their slight allusions to Alpine scenery ; the Author would recommend a glance at Mr. Brockedon's " Passes of the Alps," a work of no less fidelity than graphic skill and beauty. He also wishes to mention that the briefer Tales, towards the close of these volumes, have already appeared in a more hasty shape in some scattered publications. TALES GREAT ST BERNARD. TOL. I. TALES THE GREAT ST. BERNARD In the summer of 1825, after rambling for some months through the delicious country that holds the Lake of Geneva in its bosom, like the sculpture of one of our rich old frames, a circle of fruit, flowers, shepherdesses and their sheep, all in glorious gilding round a huge mirror, I made my lingering way to the Alps. The choice of passes lay before me ; and I chose the Great St. Bernard as the least fre- quented by " gentlemen who travel for a week," as leading deepest into the heart of the mountains, and, not least, as connected with the most glittering fragment of modern history. 4 THE GREAT ST. BERNARD. Travelling has, like every thing else, its troubles ; but it has its lessons too. Its wis- dom to me was, to make no delay for second thoughts, and to communicate my project to no living thing. The first only wastes time; the latter only encumbers the traveller with com- missions or company. I thus escaped orders for the purchase of coral- beads, amulets from the countless shrines of Our Lady, and Lombard poodles. I escaped the much more formidable burden of a celebrated hunter after the sub- lime, who had publicly and flatteringly de- clared that, " with a man of my taste," he would be content to roam Mont Blanc for a year together — of a geologist, who, loaded with a whole camel's weight of chemistry, would have marched with me hammer in hand to the ends of the earth ; and finally, and it is not without a blush that I say it — of a coterie of six pretty girls of the very first London world, who, with the new ardour of their sex, and the true English reliance on the gallantry of other countries, had sallied out under the sole wing of their own virtues, to explore the native THE GREAT ST. BERNARD. 5 soil of romance, Rousseau, and the Ranz de vache. With what pang of heart I thus left behind me enthusiasm, science, and beauty, I must not now venture to describe. But the sacrifice was made. I sighed a secret and a long farewell to blue lake, brown vineyard, and, as I hoped, the face of my countrymen, and with a dog, a valet, and a guide, set off for Martigny on " a burning day on the first of September." The antiquarians and monks have been equally busy in this route, and there is scarcely a rock unhonoured by a lapidary record or a legend of the church. The antiquarian boldly points out the identical spot where the lieute- nant of the " immortal Julius" smote the half naked tribes of the Alps, built cities, and com- pelled the robber-savages to learn the more civilised arts of plunder that distinguished their masters. The monk has his more pictu- resque tales of castles built by submissive dae- mons, bodies walking without their heads, and friars impervious to passion, ambition, and Sold. The curiosity to the traveller whose 6 THE GREAT ST. BERNARD. faith may not be vigorous enough for the monk or the antiquarian, is in the perfect representa- tion of African building and Arabian manners to be found in every village of his route. The houses are such as would not seem strange to a Hottentot fresh from his krall, nor the system of pilfering the stranger much to be surpassed from the Euphrates to the heads of Babel- mandel. From the valley in which the " arrowy Rhone" lies glittering like the arrow before it takes its flight, the road winds through a broken and rude country, but striking for its noble views of the distant landscape. The evening found me sitting on a knoll above Marti gny, luxuriating in the fresh air, of it- self an unspeakable luxury after the merciless scorching of a Swiss day, and delighting my eye with its last vision of the great Alpine am- phitheatre. The mountain air is well known to give a vigorous and pronounced colour to the landscape, and an artist of the pen or pencil might here set up his tent, and worship the Saint Gothard, with its crest in the sky, dyed THE GREAT ST. BERNARD. 7 blood-red, as if the French and Russians were still battling among its snows, a gigantic altar to human, folly, covered with the blood of fools. Down the valley, and far beyond, I gazed on a glorious expanse of pictured country, sur- mounted by the range of the Jura lifting its unnumbered pinnacles, gold-tipt, like a city of cathedrals. And before me, robed with a cloud of the purest purple, above which shone its forehead of perpetual snow, rose the mountain of the Great St. Bernard. Here my com- parisons failed, and I was forced to be satisfied with the simple grandeur of this sovereign of the landscape. My valet was an Italian, and of course had but one emblem for greatness. He said that " it put him in mind of the pope surrounded by the cardinals." The cluster of snowy peaks, and the scarlet and purple ves- tures that clothed their sides, made the simili- tude not worse than those that find their way into many a journal ; and I prudently acqui- esced in my valet's discovery. From Bourg and Bouvernier, villages built on the unquestionable plan of their most bar- 8 THE GREAT ST. BERNARD. barian forefathers, I wound my way along the edge of the rough and roaring Drance, through the wreck of hill, forest, and valley, wrought by the inundation of 1818, when the river, checked in its course by an avalanche in the hills above, swelled into a lake, and at length bursting its icy barrier, thundered down upon the country below. To this scene of ruin suc- ceeded the often praised and pleasant path through the vale of Entremont, a long and bright vision of fields covered with cattle and cultivation. Thus far the lovers of their ease come in the little cars of the country, and the more heroic on foot. But the mountain here prohibits the " char f the pedestrian gene- rally has had enough of glory ; and, but for the mules that await them, many a tourist would check his course on this spot, and leave the Great St. Bernard to the smuggler, the pedlar, and the monk. At the little village of St. Pierre the true Alps begin ; and an old gate, leading to an old bridge over a ravine that would stop the march of an army, let me in to the wonders of the THE GREAT ST. BERNARD. 9 mountain world — forests wild and endless, looking the true children of the storm — soli- tary cascades, darting down hills of naked rock — craggy paths, too rough and narrow for any tread but that of the mule— and long vistas of abrupt hills sullen coloured, as if the storm had impressed them with its own dye, and guiding the eye to the Mount Velan, towering above the pass of the convent. From this village ascends the region of the avalanches, marked by the ruins of the plain of Prou, and the still more expressive emblems of the Chalets for the reception of the dead, and of the unfor- tunates caught in the tempests. A narrow plateau of snow, which even August does not always dissolve—abridge over the torrent — and a brief mule-path once passed — the Hospice is seen, like a windowed rock, crouching under the central hills of the Great St. Bernard. As I was under no English necessity of Hying through the country, like a fugitive from the law, I proposed to take up my quarters at the convent for a few days; and I know no pleasanter place where a man disposed to take 10 THE GREAT ST. BERNARD. the world as it goes could spend his time, at least until winter drove him from his aery. He has the variety of a large household without the bustle of an inn ; the cheerfulness of a table d'hote free from the vulgarity of the travelling mob that beset Switzerland ; and the society of a body of gentlemen, who will not make it the price of their friendship to run away with your daughter, play you out of your estate, or shoot you if you demur to either. If I could be a summer monk, and change my vows, like my clothes, with the winter, I know no fraternity that offers stronger tempta- tions than the Augustins of the Saint Bernard. To escape the bustle of the world, yet be in the world ; to have moving before our eyes an easy succession of society — a constant living phantasmagoria, often highly piquant, and always amusing ; to indulge in literature, without the toils of authorship, the teazing of dilettanti, or the agonies of exulting criticism ; to ramble over a sun-clad kingdom of mountains, with the kingship undisputed among all the royal and heroic strugglers for a grave ten thousand feet THE GREAT ST. BERNARD. 11 below; to "sit on rocks, and muse o'er flood and fell ;" to turn painter, poet, pilgrim, and dreamer, at one's own discretion, and without having the fear of living man before our eyes ; and to do all this with the saving and singular consciousness that we are doing some good in our vocation, that humanity is the better for us, and that our place would be missed among man- kind — Utopia might grow pale to the beatitudes of the little republic under the protection of St. Augustin, and the shadow of Mont Velan, existente astute. But summer is unfortunately a rare guest, and its visit one of the shortest possible dura- tion. The sunshine that subdues the plain, with the fidelity of a wife, is, at the famous Hospice, capricious as a first love. I had en- tered its walls on a day made in the prodigality of the finest season of the year. The snowy scalps of the hills were interspersed with stripes of verdure that had seen the light for the first time within memory : the bee, that more than all creation beside gives assurance of summer to my ear, was roaming and humming away among 12 THE GREAT ST. BERNARJX the thistle-down and mosses that even the Al- pine frost is not always able to kill. I could imagine in the air that passed in slight gusts from time to time, the odours of the Italian flowers. I lingered long at the gate of the convent, enjoying the magnificent serenity of the sky, the air, and the hills ; and felt no tri- vial reluctance at abandoning so alluring a con- templation for a corridor crowded with servants, and a chamber imbedded in a wall as thick as if it had to stand a siege. Even the indulgence of the convent table could not wean me from the conviction that I could have got through my travel pleasantly enough, though the Hospice had, like the Santa Casa, been transported on the backs of angels to some new Loretto, " many a league and far." But I had not been two hours under its roof before a burst of wind, that reminded me of nothing but the roar of Niagara, shot down the side of Mont Velan ; stripped away the gathered snow of half a century in an immense sheet, and hurled it full upon the convent. All was in instant commotion within. The table was THE GREAT ST. BERNARD. 13 deserted by the chief part of the brotherhood, who hurried to see that the casements and doors were made secure. The ground- floor of the building, which is occupied with stables, and storehouses for wood and the other supplies of the convent, was a scene of immediate con- fusion, from the crowding in of the menials and peasantry. I ventured one glance from my window. Summer was gone at once ; and " the winter wild" was come in its stead. The sun was blotted out of the heavens : snow in every shape that it could be flung into by the most furious wind, whirlpool, drift, and hill, flashed and swept along. Before evening it was four- teen feet high in front of the Hospice. We could keep our fingers from being icicles only by thrusting them almost into the blazing wood fires ; the bursts of wind shook the walls like cannon shot ; and I made a solemn recantation of all my raptures on the life of an Augustin of St. Bernard. As the night fell, the storm lulled at intervals, and I listened with anxiety to the cries and noises that announced the danger of travellers 14 THE GREAT ST. BERNARD. surprised in the storm. The fineness of the season had tempted many to cross the moun- tain without much precaution against the change, and the sounds of horns, bells, and the barking of the dogs as the strangers arrived, kept me long awake. By morning the convent was full; the world was turned to universal snow ; the monks came down girded for their winter excursions; the domestics were busy equipping the dogs; fires blazed, cauldrons smoked ; every stranger was pelissed and furred up to the chin, and the whole scene might have passed for a Lapland carnival. But the Hospice is provided for such casualties ; and after a little unavoidable tumult, all its new inhabi- tants were attended to with much more than the civility of a continental inn, and with infinitely less than its discomfort. The gentlemen adjourn- ed to the reading room, where they found books and papers, which probably seldom passed the Ita- lian frontier. The ladies turned over the port- folios of prints, many of which are the donations of strangers who had been indebted to the hos- pitality of the place ; or amused themselves at THE GREAT ST. BERNARD. 15 the piano in the drawing-room, for music is there above the flight of the lark ; or pored over the shelves to plunge their souls in some " flatter- ing tale" of hope and love, orange groves, and chevaliers plumed, capped, and guitarred into irresistible captivation. The scientific mani- pulated the ingenious collection of the mountain minerals made by the brotherhood. Haifa dozen herbals from the adjoining regions lay open for the botanist ; a finely bound and decorated album, that owed obligations to every art but the art of poetry, lay open for the pleasantries, the me- morials, and the wonderings of every body ; and for those who loved sleep best there were eighty beds. With such " appliances and means to boot," we had no great right to complain even of the sudden stoppage that prevented us from pour- ing down upon Italy or Switzerland, as our course might be. The politeness of the brother- hood is proverbial; their dinners were by no means unworthy of our approbation, even had more of us graduated at the Rocher de Cancale ; their wine was good, and their conversation was 16 THE GREAT ST. BERNARD. better. Some of them were men of fine tastes, not the less popular with our ladies for being developed in fine countenances, just earthly enough to tell the tender a tale of disappointed feelings, and just sallow and saintly enough to sublimate the tale into the proper degree of spi- rituality. Some of them had been military, and after figuring at half the courts of Europe, " the glass of fashion and the mould of form" to a generation of noble imitators, had decided that all was vanity, abandoned the delusions of love and war, and fled to a retreat where neither mistress nor monarch could molest them more ; and even the o! woWo) were persons of considerable information, as might be expected from their literary means, stimulated and kept in action by the constant influx of strangers from every cultivated portion and stirring scene of the world. All went on well for a few days ; but the storm still raged, Or paused only to gather in fresh gusts of tremendous violence, and heap up our doorways and casements with higher mounds of snow. Winter, merciless in this his THE GREAT ST. BERNARD. 17 own land, had completely set in, and many a gentle murmur at length began to arise from the gentler sex at the recollection, that while they were shut up like the princess of the fairy tale in this palace of ice, the world on both sides of them was redolent of joy and au- tumn; that a twelve hours' drive would take them into the centre of a flowery paradise ; and that no power short of magic could carry them through those twelve hours. The men bore their calamity much worse, as usual, and many an ejaculation both loud and deep was min- gled with the clouds from the Meershaum of German, Russ and Pole. The Frenchman grew weary of his tabatiere, and even of the sound of his own voice. Pleasantry died a slow but a cer- tain death. The piano was touched with a rarer and a more reluctant finger. The wits had ex- hausted their epigrams, and the philosophers felt the difficulty of dragging out the day. Disclaiming for myself the honours of any title, above that of a mere rambler, the various shapes in which the general misfortune worked upon the individual sufferer were to me a new 18 THE GREAT ST. BERNARD. source of amusement. But among the crowd for whom all the bounties of earth and heaven seemed to have been cancelled by a shower of snow, I could discover but one man of my own school. I was struck by his countenance of easy good- humour, yet mixed with lines of strong thought. The face was thoroughly English, and was therefore rational and manly; it might have been even handsome in its early day ; but from fifty to sixty years had passed over it, and left the traces of their march. In our casual intercourse we fell into some exchanges of opi- nion that made us gradually intimate, and he gave the highest English proof of civility by making me known to his lady and daughters. On some allusion of mine to those sources of happiness, and incidentally hinting my surprise at the taste of my fortunate countrymen for living in every country but their own — " Sir, you must not include me among the number of voluntary fugitives," said my new friend with a smile ; " I have run away from England, not through taste, but through abso- THE GREAT ST. BERNARD. 19 lute compulsion. I was too lucky, too impor- tant, and too rich, to be able to live at home; so I am come abroad to be nobody, to be good for nothing, and to be happy." I shook my head at the paradox. " You cannot comprehend this," said he. " Well, then, that you may believe I am neither the man in the iron-mask, nor the writer of Junius, I must let you into the facts of the brief. Hear the case, and you will acquit me." THE SQUIRE'S TALE THE WOF.S OF WEALTH. THE SQUIRE'S TALE. THE WOES OF WEALTH. CHAPTER I. I WAS bred to the bar, and practised in Westminster Hall for some years with what was considered remarkable success in the pro- fession ; for, at the end of my fifth year, I was neither in debt nor in despair, and was enabled, with the profits of my practice, actually to pur- chase a new wig and gown. The novelty of being able to produce such proofs of my talents, while it excited the envy of nine-tenths of my competitors, attracted to me the smiles of some of those old practitioners who knew every step of the road to triumph; and more than one 24 THE squire's tale. solicitor hinted at the advantage of securing his services in clerkships and so forth, when in the fulness of my honours I should be on the Bench. The wisest of us all are sometimes dreamers, and I will own that I thought those solicitors by much the most sagacious of their profession. To sit on hot pillows nine hours a day for nine months of the year, in air saturated with law and lawyers— to hear no sound from one end of life to the other but the brawling of barristers, witnesses, and culprits — and to secure a splen- did reversion of gout, with my whole soul im- mersed in the revilings and rogueries of every offender that justice could fish up from the great sewer of English iniquity, rose before my eyes with the brightness of a vision. There were times when even the highest grade of the profession, the keeping of the King's consci- ence, seemed scarcely beyond my grasp ; when, to the occupation of the courts, I rejoicingly added the occupation of the cabinet, and contemplated the delight of flying full speed from the chancery seat, to the throne of the THE WOES OF WEALTH. 25 Lords, bringing an ear still tingling with the squabbles of counsel, to hear the squabbles repeated in the shape of appeals; and then finishing the day by superintending a debate till midnight, on corn laws, reform, and the Catholic Question. But the race is not always to the swift. In the same midsummer circuit when I saw six king's counsel and two judges give way to the respective demands of gout, dropsy, and asthma, the natural fruit of success in their trade, I was seized at Lincoln by the fen-fever, which, after chaining me to my bed for six months, left me in such a state of debility that, on taking the advice of my pillow against the advice of all " my friends," I abandoned the hope of ever dying lord chancellor. The law had, however, taught me one thing, that every man who will take the trouble of judging for himself, is the best judge of his own affairs. It taught me another too, that there is no crime more easily forgiven than the re- tirement of a rival. Armed thus against the regrets of my contemporaries, and the advice of vol. I. B 26 THE squire's tale. my most pertinacious friends, T made up my mind at once ; sold off my law-books, rendered invaluable as they were by many a fragment of random poetry, the product of briefless hours, and occasionally illuminated with pen and ink caricatures of some of the most formidable blockheads of the profession ; and finally shook off the dust of my feet against the gates of Westminster. I had inherited a small freehold of a few hundreds a year, about fifty miles from London. To this I sent down my remaining chattels, and in three days from my bidding farewell to the smoke and uproar of the great city, to ambition and the frowning majesty of the " fourfold bench," I was sitting at a casement overlooking a quiet valley covered with cows and clover, and discussing a cool bottle of wine to the song of goldfinches and linnets, without a tear for operas, silk gowns, or debates in Lords or Commons. Arthur Young advises a settler in the country to make his first application to the parson ; but a writer on husbandry can think of nothing but THE WOES OF WEALTH. 27 tithes. I made my first application to the par- son ; but it was to marry me. In one of my annual visits I had found a pretty creature straying among my carnations and roses, as blooming as themselves, and as innocent as the butterfly that shook its yellow wings over them. She fled like a fawn, and though I was not sportsman enough to pursue, I did what was just as absurd ; I took her image with me, and saw it for the next six months impasted on the brown pages of my folios. The sylph-like shape started upon me from the statutes-at- large ; and many a time I saw the coral lip and blue eye gleaming from parchment as wrinkled as her grandmother. The heart of man has been long said to be a craving thing, a void that must be filled. The virtuoso fills it with Roman potsherds, buttons of King Brute, and farthings of Queen Elizabeth. The connoisseur fills it with undoubted portraits of Shakspeare manufactured within the week, noseless statues, and canvas covered with de- formity. The old bachelor is proud of being the last possessor of a queue, of adhering to 28 THE squire's tale. powder with a fidelity strong even to the grave, and of exhibiting the most ridiculous figure that walks the round world. The old lady, destitute of other delights, satiates her vacuity with cats, china, and the affections of canary birds. But my tastes did not lie in those directions, and yet I had my vacuity too. Neither the love of law, nor the ambition of the woolsack, had stopped up the gulf, though they pre- vented it's spreading, like the gulf of Curtius, to the absorption of the whole man. The hub- bub of the courts, where glorious uncertainty sits of old, and like Milton's fiend, by " deci- sion more embroils the fray," might deafen for the hour my acute perception of those whisper- ings which told me of the folly of wasting life on the fooleries and fallacies of mankind, of turning my brain into a box of black-letter and dusty bitterness, and of struggling through forty or fifty years of obsolete study, obscure quarrel, and exhausted lungs, only to die of the gout at last ; but the moment of my quitting the clamour of the noonday Themis for my THE WOES OF WEALTH. 29 lonely chambers in the Temple always brought back my rustic fantasies ; and nothing but a fortitude worthy of a dancing bear, or of a mo- narch standing out the bows and congratu- lations of a levee day, had often prevented my inlaying my briefs with bucolics, and turning poet during term. Now, however, the self- denial was at an end. I had registered a vow against " making the worse appear the better reason" for the rest of my days ; and on a day propitious to affairs of the heart, I dis- covered that my sylph had no objection to be married, and that she would as soon be married to me as to any one else. She was the thirteenth daughter of our curate, a sound divine, who served three churches on seventy pounds a year. He was honest enough to feign no hesitation where he felt none ; and I was made, as the world phrases it, a happy man. I may be forgiven for talking of this period of my life, for it was my pleasantest. My sylph had laid aside her wings without giving up her playfulness. She was pretty and fond ; 30 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. she thought me by much the wisest and most learned personage the sun shone on; and grieved as she was by the superior finery of a sugar-baker's establishment, whose labours sweetened half the coffee of Europe, and whose wealth unluckily overflowed in a new mansion and preposterous demesne within a stone's- throw of our cottage, she preserved, at least, the average temper of the matrimonial state. While she was busy with domestic cares, I was plying my pen ; and statesmen yet unborn may thank me for the gratuitous wisdom of the hints that I threw out in the shape of pamphlet and paragraph. But the world is an ungrateful one after all ; and I was not summoned to the privy-council. In this primitive way I glided on for twenty years ; famous for the earliest roses, the largest cucumbers, and the two prettiest daughters in the county. I played the castanets, spoke French, and interpreted a turnpike-act, all better than any man for fifty miles round. I was applied to for cheap law by the ploughmen, wisdom by the puzzled magistrates; and was THE WOES OF WEALTH. 31 even occasionally consulted in his Greek by the excellent curate, whose Oxford recollections were considerably rubbed out by the wear and tear of half a century : even the sugar-baker, in his less exalted moments, admitted that I was rather an intelligent kind of person for a man of five hundred a year. Yet if this mighty refiner's praise were flattering to my vanity,, his opulence was fatal to my peace. The live- ries, equipage, and banquets of Mr. Molasses disturbed my wife's pillow ; and every new dinner of three courses turned our bread into bitterness. But the county election drew on ; and the >ugar-baker, rich enough to purchase the souls and bodies of a province, began his canvass by a double expansion of his hospitality. Laced liveries twice as deep, dinners twice as sump- tuous, balls twice as frequent, and guests flock- ing in crowds, stimulated my wife's vexation to the utmost pitch. Many a keen glance was le- velled at the humiliating contrast of our wood- bine-faced cottage with the mighty mansion of yellow brick that towered like a mountain of 32 THE squire's tale. flame above our trees ; many a murmur I heard at the folly of abandoning a profession in which a man " might be a lord, v instead of being ex- tinguished by a trader ; and from time to time a curtain-lecture exploded so directly on my head, that if I were younger, I might have been frightened into flying the country, bury- ing myself in parchments again, and dying a chancellor after all. THE WOES OF WEALTH. 33 CHAPTER II. Winter was at hand. My fields looked frown ingly j birds, fruits, and flowers, had all deserted the welkin ; and I was wandering- down the dreariest path of our dreariest com- mon, merely to escape the flood of showy equi*- pagefl that rolled to Molasses' house for tin double purpose of banqueting and congratulat- ing the owner on the arrival of his intended son-in-law, Sir Mordecai Muscavado, the junior partner of the firm, " from a continental tour," when my meditation on the unequal distribution of wealth in this world was broken by a horse- man's bursting upon me from a turn of the road. The collision was more formidable to the cavalier than to me ; for while it merely 34 THE squire's tale. flung me into the thicket, it laid him in the centre of the slough. The plunge was com- plete, and never was the world nearer losing an eminent solicitor ; for such, on removing a complete mask of the richest marl in our county from his visage, I discovered him to be, and one of the old predictors of my fame and fortune besides. His prediction had turned out partly true ; for he produced from the very penetralia of his surtout a huge enclosure, black-edged, sealed with triple seals, and directed to me in the sternest hand of the scrivener. I had never much loved the professional visage, and I had always thought that the whole apparatus of mourning letters ought to be abolished by act of parliament; for let them come from whom they will, they put the sub- ject in bodily fear ; those outward and visible signs of evil being also utterly useless, telling us nothing but that evil is somewhere in the wind, and propagating the terror, even where no one would care a farthing for the intelligence when the mysterious mischief was opened. They put it in the power, too, of every fool who has THE WOES OF WEALTH. 35 lost an infant of three minutes old, or a grand- mother of a century, to throw a whole communi- ty into alarm, until his black-edged stock is out. I confess that I never receive one of those mis- sives of death without anticipating the mortality of every soul I value upon the face of the globe. I held the packet in my hand, trembling to open it and know what new stroke of fate was falling upon me ; for I was hopeless of any ex- planation from the mouth of the half-choked solicitor. At length he muttered the name of an old relative of mine, whom I had seen but once, then quarrelled with and shrunk from ever after. He had been in the military ser- vice of the East India Company ; had risen to rank .; seen every man round him fall in the field, die of claret, or go off in the cholera; until, surprised at his own escape, he had thrown up his commission, returned to Europe, and sat himself down in the suburbs of London, a lonely wretch, to complain of want of society; an idler, to lament his having nothing to do ; an abjurer of his kindred, to upbraid them with having de* 36 THE squire's tale. serted him ; and with ten thousand pounds a year, to execrate the dearness of the times, the weight of taxes, and the difficulty of enjoying himself without ruin. Twenty years had thus rolled over this human mummy, only to make his skin more shrivelled, his mind more peevish, and his fortune more cumbrous: he could not be more useless, idle, or lonely. Life at length wore out. The report of his illness drew round him flocks of relations on the wing, like the crows, and with nearly the same purpose. He enjoyed one moment in his twenty years — it was when, in writing his will, he cut off every soul of them with a shilling a piece; and after pondering whether he should leave his opulence to pay the national debt, or to be battled for in Chancery to the ruin of them all, a final impulse of scorn poured the golden stream upon the only one who had never fol- lowed or flattered him in life, and who had left him to die without watching the hour for his plunder. I was the lucky man, Never was solicitor received as was this man THE WOES OF WEALTH. 37 of mire on his introduction to my family. The whole household were in ecstacy. My wife, no longer the sylph culling lilies and roses, but a handsome, solid matron, deep in the secrets of the cuisine— my daughters, two tall and glow- ing creatures, on the verge of womanhood — the very housemaid under my roof saw, with the quickness of the sex, the whole glittering fu- ture. I too, philosopher as I thought myself, was not without my splendid follies ; and when at length we sat down to our supper, not even the din of Mr. Molasses' closing festival, the rattling of carriages, and the squabbles of foot- men, were heard in the strife of delighted tongues, the scorn of my wife for the mush- room money of trade, and the rapture of my fair daughters at the prospect of a season in London. The solicitor too, happy that his neck was not broken, relaxed from his professional grim- ness, and told bar stories, valuable for at least their age. My best bottle of claret was broached ; and before I bade the world good night, there 38 THE squire's tale. was not a more exhilarated sensorium under the canopy of the stars. The hour ought to have been happy, for it was the last that I ever experienced. THE WOES OF WEALTH. 39 CHAPTER III. Time pressed. I set off at day-break for London ; plunged into the tiresome details of legateeship ; and after a fortnight's toil, infinite weariness, and longings to breathe in any atmo- sphere unchoked by a million of chimneys, to sleep where no eternal rolling of equipages should disturb my rest, and to enjoy society without being trampled on by dowagers fifty deep, I saw my cottage-roof once more. But where was the cheerfulness that once made it more than a palace to me ? The remittances that I had made from London were already conspiring against my quiet. I could scarcely -get a kiss from either of my girls, they were in such merciless haste to 40 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. make their dinner "toilet." My kind and comely wife was actually not to be seen ; and her apology, delivered by a coxcomb in silver lace to the full as deep as any in the sugar- baker's service, was, that " his lady would have the honour of waiting on me as soon as she was dressed." This was of course the puppy's own version of the message; but its meaning was clear, and it was ominous. Dinner came at last : the table was loaded with awkward profusion ; but it was as close an imitation as we could yet contrive of our opu- lent neighbour's display. No less than four footmen, discharged as splendid superfluities from the household of a duke, waited behind our four chairs, to make their remarks on our style of eating in contrast with the polished performances at their late master's. But Mrs. Molasses had exactly four. The argument was unanswerable. Silence and sullenness reigned through the banquet ; but on the retreat of the four gentlemen who did us the honour of attending, the whole tale of evil burst forth. What is the popularity of man ? THE WOES OF WEALTH. 41 The whole family had already dropped from the highest favouritism into the most angry disrepute. A kind of little rebellion raged against us in the village : we were hated, scorned, and libelled on all sides. My unlucky remittances had done the deed. The village milliner, a cankered old carle, who had made caps and bonnets for the vicinage during the last forty years, led the battle. The wife and daughters of a man of East Indian wealth were not to be clothed like meaner souls ; and the sight of three London bonnets in my pew had set the old sempstress in a blaze. The flame was easily propagated. The builder of my chaise-cart was irritated at the handsome barouche in which my family now moved above the heads of mankind. The ru- mour that champagne had appeared at the cottage roused the indignation of the honest vintner who had so long supplied me with port ; and professional insinuations of the modi- fied nature of this London luxury were em- ployed to set the sneerers of the village against me and mine. Our four footmen had been 42 THE squire's tale. instantly discovered by the eye of our opulent neighbour; and the competition was at once laughed at as a folly, and resented as an insult. Every hour saw some of my old friends falling away from me. An unlucky cold, which seized one of my daughters a week before my return, had cut away my twenty years' acquaintance, the village-doctor, from my cause; for the illness of an " heiress" was not to be cured by less than the first medical authority of the province. The supreme iEsculapius was ac- cordingly called in ; and his humbler brother swore, in the bitterness of his soul, that he would never forget the affront on this side of death's door. The inevitable increase of dig- nity which communicated itself to the manners of my whole household did the rest; and if my wife held her head high, never was pride more peevishly retorted. Like the performers in a pillory, we seemed to have been elevated only for the benefit of a general pelting. Those were the women's share of the mis- chief; but I was not long without administering in person to our unpopularity. The report of THE WOES OF WEALTH. 43 my fortune had, as usual, been enormously ex- aggerated ; and every man who had a debt to pay, or a purchase to make, conceived himself " bound to apply first to his old and excellent friend, to whom the accommodation for a month or two must be such a trifle." If I had listened to a tenth of those compliments, " their old and excellent friend" would have only preceded them to a jail. In some instances I complied, and so far only showed my folly ; for who loves his creditor I My refusal of course increased the host of my enemies ; and I was pronounced purse-proud, beggarly, and unworthy of the notice of the " true gentlemen, who knew how to spend their money." Yet, though I was to be thus abandoned by my fox-hunting friends, I was by no means to feel myself the inhabitant of a solitary world. If the sudden discovery of kindred could cheer me under my calamities, no man might have passed a gayer life. For a long succession of years I had not seen a single relative. Not that they altogether disdained even the humble hospitalities of my cottage, or the humble help 44 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. of my purse ; on the contrary, they liked both exceedingly, and would have exhibited their affection in enjoying them as often as I pleased. But I had early adopted a resolution, which I recommend to all men. I made use of no disguise on the subject of our mutual tenden- cies. I knew them to be selfish, beggarly in the midst of wealth, and artificial in the fulness of protestation. I disdained to play the farce of civility with them. I neither kissed nor quarrelled with them ; but I quietly shut my door, and at last allowed no foot of their gene- ration inside it. They hated me mortally in consequence, and I knew it. I despised them, and I conclude they knew that too. But I was resolved that they should not despise me; and I secured that point by not suffering them to feel that they had made me their dupe. The nabob's will had not soothed their tempers ; and I was honoured with their most smiling animosity. But now, as if they were hidden in the ground like weeds only waiting for the shower, a THE WOES OF WEALTH. 45 new and boundless crop of relationship sprang up. Within the first fortnight after my return, I was overwhelmed with congratulations from east, west, north, and south ; and every post- script pointed with a request for my interest with boards and public offices of all kinds ; with India presidents, treasury secretaries, and colonial patrons, for the provision of sons, nephews, and cousins, to the third and fourth generation. My positive declarations that I had no in- fluence with ministers were received with reso- lute scepticism. I was charged with old obliga- tions conferred on my grandfathers and grand- mothers, and, finally, had the certain knowledge that my gentlest denials were looked upon as a compound of selfishness and hypocrisy. Before a month was out, I had extended my sources of hostility to three-fourths of the kingdom, and contrived to plant in every corner some indi- vidual who looked on himself as bound to say the worst he could of his heartless, purse-proud, and abjured kinsman. I should have sturdily borne up against all 46 THE squire's tale. this while I could keep the warfare out of my own county. But what man can abide a daily skirmish round his house ? I began to think of retreating while I was yet able to show my head ; for, in truth, I was sick of this perpetual belligerency. I loved to see happy human faces. I loved the meeting of those old and humble friends to whose faces, rugged as they were, I was accustomed. I liked to stop and hear the odd news of the village, and the still odder versions of London news that transpired through the lips of our established politicians. I liked an occasional visit to our little club, where the exciseman, of fifty years standing, was our oracle in politics ; the attorney, of about the same duration, gave us opinions on the drama, philosophy, and poetry, all equally unindebted to Aristotle; and my mild and excellent father- in-law, the curate, shook his silver locks in gentle laughter at the discussion. I loved a supper in my snug parlour with the choice half dozen ; a song from my girls, and a bottle after they were gone to dream of bow-knots and bar- gains for the next day. THE WOES OF WEALTH. 47 But my delights were now all crushed. Another Midas, all I touched had turned to gold ; and I believe in my soul that, with his gold, I got credit for his ass's ears. However, I had long felt that contempt for popular opinion which every man feels who knows of what miserable materials it is made — how much of it is mere absurdity — how much malice — how much more the frothy foolery and maudlin gossip of the empty of this empty ge- neration. " What was it to me if the grown children of our idle community, the male babblers, and the female cutters-up of charac- ter, voted me, in their common-place souls, the blackest of black sheep ? I was still strong in the solid respect of a few worth them all." Let no man smile when I say that, on reckoning up this Theban band of sound judg- ment and inestimable fidelity, I found my muster reduced to three, and those three of so unromantic a class as the grey-headed excise- man, the equally grey-headed solicitor, and the curate. But let it be remembered that a man must 48 THE squire's tale. take his friends as fortune wills ; that he who can even imagine that he has three is under rare circumstances; and that, as to the ro- mance, time, which mellows and mollifies so many things, may so far extract the professional virus out of exciseman and solicitor, as to leave them both not incapable of entering into the ranks of humanity. THE WOES OF WEALTH. 49 CHAPTER IV. In my vexation I called on the old man of revenue, whom I found, not at the receipt of custom, but perplexing his ancient eyes over a long sheet of closely written paper. I let loose my griefs without delay, and exclaimed against the immeasurable folly of my applicants — "a set of hollow and stupid knaves, not one of whose faces I had ever seen, or ever desired to see ; whom, if I ever knew, I had totally forgotten — a tribe of leeches, that would never have stirred from the bottom of their pool but to drain me, if they could, of my blood." " Just the way of the world," said my vene- rable friend, glancing down his laborious manu- script. " Every man who gets any thing by the vol. i. o 50 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. wheel of fortune is supposed to have ten times as much to give, and to have nothing to do but to throw money right and left down every mouth that opens for it. And the thing is more preposterous still in your case, who could not know one of them." " No, not from the king of Timbuctoo," was my affirmation. " There's the point," observed my comforter. " The goods of this life always bring their troubles, and one of them undoubtedly is this kind of canvass for your interest for strangers. Though, for old friends, the matter would of course be somewhat different." " Totally ; there is nothing that I should do with greater pleasure than any service in my power for an old friend." " Then you have saved yourself the trouble of reading my cramp hand; for I was on the point of asking you to forward my memorial to the chairman of the customs. The collectorship of the county is vacant : a word from a man of your fortune will command the place ; and the thing will be done at once." THE WOES OF WEALTH. 51 I was astonished : this ardent candidate was sixty-five if he was an hour. I knew that nothing short of a general revolution could give him the place, or short of a miracle make him equal to its duties. As to " my interest," I vainly attempted to prove that I had no more than himself. He had made up his mind on the subject. We parted decorously, but I saw that I was erased from my old friend's tablets for ever. As I was walking down the street, vexed, and yet laughing at the cross-grained fate that clung to me, I smote against the solicitor. In my vexation I told him the story of my late inter- view, which he enjoyed prodigiously. " The old fool," cried he, "longing for the loaves and fishes still? Why, he might have had his superannuation allowance a dozen years ago. But avarice, avarice, the bane of age ! And to ask so lucrative a situation too ! and of all men, from you, who keep so much aloof from politics and party !" " Me, who could scarcely get a frank from a county member! who pocket none of the ur iu* Lift, 52 THE squire's tale. nation's money ! me, who know no one, who keep up no connexion, who am forgotten, and desire to be forgotten!" "All true; yet, my good friend, there are those who cannot be forgotten, let them do what they will. The early ornaments of their profes- sion, whose loss to the bar and to the country is still, I can tell you, from my personal knowledge, spoken of on circuit, cannot be without influ- ence; many an inquiry I have heard made after you among the solicitors of standing, and many a glass have we drunk to your health at the Lion and Crown." The compliment was received like all ad- dressed to a man's vanity ; and in the fervour of the moment, I heartily shook my old com- panion's ink-distained hand. " In answering these good wishes for your health and happiness, wherever you were," pur- sued he, " I always added, from my own know- ledge, that neither outside nor inside the bar, and neither following the profession, nor in- dulging himself in retirement, the otium cum dignitate, as friend Horace calls it, was there a THE WOES OF WEALTH. 53 living man who took greater pleasure in doing every kindness to his friends." The speech was made in a tone of sincerity that touched me. I am not flint or iron ; I hate imposture, and could resist the most pa- thetic speech that ever fell in honey from the lip of chicane. But " here was nature." I felt that here was truth besides ; and if any man will say that something like a tear stole down from eyes albeit unused to the melting mood — why, let him say it, I shall not contradict him. " Right, my good friend," was my reply, when I could get rid of this womanish weak- ness, " Right, whatever the world may think of me, it shall never have it to say that I turned my back on my old companions, that money had the power to shut up my heart, or that I refused a friend any service to the extent of my means." The solicitor shook my hand in turn, and then clearing his voice, and with a look of remark- able modesty, for his profession, informed me, that having long had a wish to retire from the 54 THE squire's tale. active labours of his office, and having- heard that a place under the chancellor was vacant, he, after some consideration, had made up his mind to apply for it, through me. I was astonished, y I had never even seen the high officer in whose hand was the place. Besides, had I not just declared my utter want of influence with public men 1 and had he not just acknowledged the folly of our old associ- ate?" "The case is wholly different," was the answer, in an unusual sharpness of tone. " That old fool is already past his labour ; he asked for a place under government, which has already more mouths than it can feed ; and he asked for it from a man who notoriously has never had any connexion with government, never so much as had a job of a turnpike-road, nor a commission for a cousin in the militia. Whereas I apply for a professional situation which must be filled by a man of ability, experience, and character, and apply for it to a member of the profession, retired, 'tis true, yet still well known to the body in general ; and who, if he may not THE WOES OF WEALTH. 55 be on personal terms with the Lord Chancellor, must have influence from his fortune. Besides, the difference in our ages is important, the ex- ciseman being at least sixty-nine or seventy, and I being, at my last birth-day, but sixty-five." I was absurd enough to reason with the can- didate ; but he was resolute in his demand of my interference. All the logic of Westminster Hall could not have convinced him that a man of ten thousand a year was not able to make him any thing short of the keeper of the seals himself. In vexation, I was prevailed on to write a letter to an almost casual ac- quaintance in the chancery court, inquiring how the situation was to be obtained. My cor- respondent took more trouble on the subject than I could have expected, and carried my letter to the great functionary, who laughed at us all three, but politely wrote a line to regret that the place had been already disposed of. The line was enclosed by me to the candidate with additional regrets ; but from that hour he never looked at the same side of the street with 56 THE squire's tale. me. I shook my head over the vanity of age and the fickleness of friendship; he shook his over the faithlessness of human promises, and the selfishness of sudden fortune. His em- ployment gave him the range of all our society, such as it was ; and every soul was made a party to his convictions that I would not stir a finger for the behoof of any being under the sun. I was a stubborn fellow where I had to resist direct wrong ; but here I was beset by glances, whispers, and inuendoes, of which I could make nothing. Defence was idle when there was nothing to repel ; and I had no alternative but that of drawing a rampart round my house, or showing off in a style of equipage and dinner- pomp that would dazzle and dine the county out of its ill-will. I had seen the feeding expe- dient successful in more instances than one, and our two representatives had just wiped off a remarkably thick stain of political trimming by a brace of new-built barouches and a couple of venison feasts, which, however, diminished the THE WOES OF WEALTH. 57 hostility in the most effective style, for the haunches killed two of the fattest and most furious patriots of our corporation. But I had my objections to this mode of teaching the world to swallow its discontent. Of all the miseries of human life, I had the most incurable aversion to three ; a dinner of three hours ; the conversation of the squires after it ; and the conversation of the ladies of the squires after that again. I had no taste for the bottle, no ear for the feats of fox-hunting ; and, let me be forgiven for the acknowledg- ment, no capacity for the eloquence that over its coffee excruciated alike, character, fashions, and the mother-tongue. Yet, was I to live a hermit, at the moment too when I felt most able and most inclined to expand my social circle ? In this dilemma, I ordered my horse, and took the road to have a quiet dinner with my best and my last friend, my venerable father-in-law. The ride through the fields exorcised half the livid daemons that flitted about my brain ; the cheerful blast that sent the clouds flying along the sky of summer-blue 58 THE squire's tale. chased away my vapours ; and by the time of coming within sight of the little tenement in which the curate sheltered himself, his old wife and his ancient cat, the associates of many a long year of lonely comfort, I could have joined in a canzonet with the robins that opened their little red throats on every hawthorn round me. The willing hospitality of the old man and his female sharer in the good and ill of fifty years ; the air of gentle tranquillity in every thing that I saw, even the contented purring of the sleek cat that lay turning her shining sides to the last gleam of a superb sunset, threw a covering of peace over my mind, and, as we drank our coffee at the door of a garden sending up a "steam of rich distilled perfumes" through the twilight, I congratulated my venerable re- lative on the lot which had been cast in such an abode of quiet happiness. " Here," said I, "if the eye is to be de- lighted by natural beauty, or the heart to be soothed by secure enjoyment, what can man ask more than the scene around us, and the spot from which we view it ? I am sick of the mi- THE WOES OF WEALTH. 59 serable restlessness that throws away actual enjoyment for a shadow. At this hour, thou- sands who might possess every real happiness of which the human heart is capable, are flinging it away in pursuit of things as empty as air, or as deleterious as so much poison." " Right, my dear son," said the curate, '* the desire of more money than we can enjoy, and more power than we can manage, is the grand absurdity of mankind. When I hear of the days and nights of ambition, I first feel indig- nant, and then learn to pity the blindness of our species. Yet the passion is sometimes so strange, that neither pity nor indignation can keep us from laughing at its victims. Your story of the two candidates is ludicrous, yet melancholy. What would become of our poor old friend the exciseman, torn away from all his usual haunts, to be pushed about in the bustle of a sea-port, and harassed with the new details of a weight of business to which his greenest years would probably have been unequal? And more ludicrous still, the veteran solicitor I Could not even his classic recollections remind (>0 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. him of the philosopher's advice to the King of Epirus, and teach him to enjoy his quiet with- out fighting his way only to put it in danger?" " I sincerely wish, my dear sir," said I, " that you would take the two idiots to task ; for to me they will not listen for a moment. Invite them to such a dinner as you have given to me ; make them forget their canvassing and corre- spondence in this landscape ; and let us wash away all our quarrels in a bottle of my best port, which you shall have by to-morrow morning." " Agreed," said my relative. M I shall have the table planted on this very spot ; show them my hill and dale, my garden and orchard, and all my comforts lying under the eye, and ask them is it not madness at their age to think of change?" The sun had now dipped beyond the hills, and my groom brought my horse. As I was putting my foot into the stirrup, the curate came towards me. " There was one little matter," said he, " that I had intended to write about, but I may as well take the opportunity of men- tioning it at once. I this morning received a THE WOES OF WEALTH. 01 letter from a friend whom I had requested to give me the earliest notice" — I listened ; but the sentence was broken short, and not resumed again till after the curate had stooped down and recovered his composure, by patting the head of the worn-out spaniel that tottered after him from the parlour. " The matter is this," said he, advancing his quivering hand to my horse's crest, and with his conscious eye cast down — " your pleasant conversation did not give me time to men- tion it before. My friend's letter states that my rector is in a precarious state of health. Now he holds two livings : this living, of which I am the unworthy curate, has, I know, been promised to the squire's second hope long ago. But the other benefice — in short, my dear sir, if you would apply for it on my part, those things are always at the disposal of the county members : half a dozen lines from a man of your fortune would make me rector of Spunge- moor parish, and happy for life." I could not believe him serious, and showed my opinion by bursting out into laughter. He was visibly offended. " You must not class me," 62 THE squire's tale, said he, "with the two fools that we have been talking of. The circumstances are totally of another character; they asked for situations in the gift of government and of a law lord, and asked them from a man who never had any con- nexion with government, and who had long given up all connexion with the law. You gave the two dotards the proper answer. But I apply for a favour to which my services should give me a claim of themselves ; — and to a personal relative, who needs only express his wish on the subject. With our members who know his inte- rest at the election, and who would not think of a refusal, a word makes me a rector ; the first step to an archdeaconry, thence to a deanery ; and from that the way is open, Heaven knows how far." " Perhaps even to Lambeth," said I. " No, no," said he with a smile : " yet, when a man once becomes conspicuous — " I attempted to soothe him by representing the infinite discomfort which he must feel in breaking up all his long cemented associations ; leaving his old people for strangers ; and en- tering in all points on a new course of labour, THE WOES OF WEALTH. 03 independently of the notorious reputation of the new parish for riot, wildness, and disgusts of every kind. " A conscientious minister must not shrink from doing his duty, however laborious," was the meek answer, with heavenward hands and eyes. " But, my dear sir, the difficulty which might task the most vigorous diligence of early life, ought not to be laid on the shoulders of one so long serving in the ranks of the church, though still so excellent as yourself." " So long in her ranks ! and what better claim can there be to preferment ? As to age, I am only seventy-three. My last rector lived to seventy-five ; and there has been an instance of a bishop living to ninety." This he spoke with the palpable consciousness of an unanswerable argument ; and I made no attempt to answer it. I bade him good night ; and throwing the reins on my horse's neck, moved slowly home, wrapt in meditation at the compound called man. The meditation convinced me that my vene- 64 THE squire's tale, rable friend would be made so thoroughly wretched by change, even if it were to lift him to the primacy, that it cost me a long letter to try to convince him that I was in the right, and he in the wrong. I should have known the fate of my letter from the fate of all written with the same purpose. He was more convinced than ever of his having exercised the soundest judgment that could enter into the human brain. I owed something to the man who had given me his daughter for better for worse ; and though I should have as willingly volunteered the pil- lory, I wrote to the county member, a monstrous aristocrat, who cultivated democracy. I scorned him on both grounds : his personal pride dis- gusted me, and his beggarly truckling to the rabble whom, in the insolence of his secret soul, he looked upon as the pebble under his feet, disgusted me still more. Yet in his hand lay the benefice ; and from that hand I must at- tempt to extract it. The attempt was loathingly made. In the most polite of answers the pro- mise was given ; and fatal was the gift. THE WOES OF WEALTH. 65 The rector died within the month : he was a fat, jovial, and jocose person, who let things take their own way, and thought that no one should repent but a poacher. My excellent father-in-law was of another mould, and he set himself to work reform. But Spunge-moor parish defied his climacterical vigour. It bor- dered an extent of shore fertile in nothing but the most daring smugglers that ever shipped brandy from Boulogne. It was a wilderness lashed and dashed by every tempest that swept from every point of the heaven ; and where it was peopled at all, its population was divided among gypsies, paupers, and poachers, thick- ening up like its thistles, even against the ana- thema of the late rector, magistrate and first- rate shot as he was ; the genus smuggler com- prehending all these classes occasionally, and being regularly recruited from them all. Among those rebellious tribes, what hope was there for the solitary patriarch, verging on his century ? His flowers, his landscape, and his early flock, were equally lost to him ; and when I saw him fixed in the fulness of his desires, I G6 THE SQUIRE'3 TALE. saw as wretched a man as ever deplored the folly of change. Here, at least, he could attach no blame to me. But my success in obtaining his object drew down additional county obloquy on the suitor, as one who would take the most humiliating steps to aggrandise the most im- potent member of his family, while he would not take the most obvious, easy, and honourable for a friend. This I might disregard ; but by the removal of the curate I had myself extin- guished my third and last associate ; and I had now to fight the world alone. THE WOES OF WEALTH. 67 CHAPTER V. My alternative was now to be put in prac- tice ; and I determined to draw the rampart strong and high round myself. I had, in the spirit of Walpole's proverb, contrived to make one man unhappy, if not ungrateful ; and by the same act, to make a hundred doubly dis- contented. But I was at no time a great wor- shipper of the world's good graces ; so, wrap- ping myself up in my philosophy, I ordered all visitors to be shut out, broke up a whole sum- mer's plan of dinners and tea-drinkings, to the amazement of my wife, and the violent surprise, wrath, and gossiping of the crowd, who with all their scorn were willing enough to feed upon 68 THE squire's tale. the prodigal; and having thus set the seal to my crimes, and proved to the satisfaction of every tongue of the thousand that I was either mad, or a bankrupt, or both, took to my library, plunged among my papers, and translated the first book of the Iliad into as stubborn verse as ever was hammered upon the anvil of Cowper. But what earthly appetite can feed upon Ambrosia for ever ? Heroes and battles, des- cended deities, and all Olympus in arms, were fine contrasts to village squabbles ; but the rapture wore off in a week. My nature was social ; I had been accustomed for many a long year to the easy commerce with my fellows, that costs no outlay of brains, and is content with no more formidable venture than the news of the day. I loved to hear the babbling of my linsey-wolsey compatriots upon matters not much more level to their comprehension than the Copernican system ; and to receive the in- telligence of subverted cabinets, battles to be fought, and nations to be undone, from the daily circle of politicians gathered about our post-office like nestlings open-mouthed for THE WOES OF WEALTH. 69 their daily food. But this was at an end. The civility was perhaps still there ; but the better thing, the cordiality, was gone. But had I no home? I had, and one so suddenly sumptuous, that I dreaded to touch any thing for fear of dismantling fifty invalu- able things of or-molu, japan, and china ; chefs- d'oeuvre every trinket of them. My chairs were figured satin, too costly to be looked at ; for they were enveloped in eternal bibs and tuckers of canvas, and too delicate to bear any of the rustic usage, the leanings, loungings, and book burdens, that to me constituted the whole excellence of a chair. Wherever I trod, there reposed some specimen of the arts too exquisite for human feet; and after having once in my hasty entrance from the garden trodden, black as gunpowder, the Brussels countenance of the great Blucher on a carpet unmatched on this side of the Channel, I in- terdicted myself the pleasure of treading on carpets for the time to come. I liked quiet. The hand of the workman was in full activity from morning till night. I hated to be 70 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. driven from my customary room. A new ukase had ordered it to be fitted up in the style of a library comporting the lord of ten thousand a year. It was fitted up accordingly, and I never knew comfort in it again. My rough-backed old books were driven into banishment for strangers in morocco, which I never desired to touch ; and my rambling pencil sketches, my treasured let- ters, my rather dusty memoranda, all the clinging recollections, the pleasant records of old days, old dreams, and old friends, were put under sen- tence of eternal exile. Twenty years were extinguished in a week of papering, painting, and general renovation ; and to make the change more unpalatable still, the whole was under the superintendence of a Decorator, a " professor" of puttings up and pullings down, a coxcomb from London, of su- preme authority in matters of taste, and who made himself commander-in-chief of every soul in the house from the moment of his alighting from his " britchska." This Raphael of paper- stainers I was, by regular contract, obliged to entertain at my table, where he exhibited him- THE WOES OF WEALTH. 71 self so perfect a connoisseur in claret and cham- pagne, that I had only to swallow my wine in silence ; and talked so familiarly of princes and dukes, whom he had whitewashed into ele- gance, that he half turned the heads of my wife and daughters. He rode my horses, taught my maid-servants ho w to rouge, established a billiard- table in my house, to which he gave a gene- ral invitation to his professional acquaintances ; and by his dinner converse inflamed my four footmen into a demand for an increase of wages, and an allowance for eau de Cologne. I bore all this for a while. Strong inclina- tions to kicking the puppy out sometimes nearly mastered me. But I kept my foot in peace ; until one evening, straying to find a quiet moment in a lonely part of my garden, I heard the fellow ranting a tragedy speech in the most Parisian style. The speech was fol- lowed by a scream, and the sight of my younger daughter Emily rushing towards me in the highest possible indignation. The Decorator followed half tipsy. I interrupted his speech by an application to his feelings from the foot 72 THE squire's tale. that had so long been kept in reluctant peace. He was astonished, but he had mingled with too many potentates to feel much abashed. His natural ease speedily returned, and he actually made his proposals for my daughter on the spot. It was answered by a repetition of the discipline. The puppy grew impudent, and talked of country bumpkins. He had fully earned a third application to his sensibilities, and he got what he earned. My last kick sent him down the steps of my hall-door. I had now satiated my wrath, done my duty, and cleared my table of a nuisance. But what is to be had for nothing in this world of debt and credit? On the other side of the ac- count, I had laid grounds for an action ; I had sent a puppy to scatter scandal like wildfire wherever he showed his impudent face ; and I had left my house half furnished within a week of a masquerade, which, in all my scorn of man- kind, my wife had insisted on giving, for the acknowledged purpose of returning the fetes that my luckless legacy had already brought upon us, but, as I verily believe, with the pious THE WOES OF WEALTH. 7-3 intention of breaking the hearts of the whole Molasses dynasty finally and for ever. The fete was inevitable ; for in the very hour in which I expelled the decorator, the cards had been despatched ; and I had the indulgence of receiving at once the compliments of the dynasty that they would be " proud of the honour," &c, a horse-load of billets to the same eiFect from our whole population, and a notice of action for " an assault on the person of Augustus Frederic Byron Ultramarine, Esq., — damages laid at five thousand pounds!" Here was a consequence of being just twenty times as rich as I ever expected to be. I could muster up a show of resolution now and then ; and, like a falling Caesar, in this extremity of my dictatorship, I determined to show the ori- ginal vigour of my character. I became a re- former of the house, ordered my four footmen into my presence, and gave them a lecture on general conduct, which, if they had the sense to understand, would have been worth all the lace on their livery. They bowed, withdrew, and in the next five minutes sent in a paper signed by VOL. I. D 74 THE SQUIRE'S tale. the four " requesting their conge" I never signed any thing in my life with half the pleasure. The female authorities below stairs were beyond my province and my hope ; but the dignified resignation of their flirts rendered it a matter of delicacy that the ladies of the scul- lery should send in their resignation too. It was most graciously accepted. I turned them out root and branch, and on that night sat down in a house containing not a female but my wife, daughters, and an old housekeeper, too purblind to flirt, and too lame to run away. A neigh- bouring cow-boy was summoned to tend my horses, and I had the honour of locking my own hall-door. Troublesome as all this was, yet when I at length sat down to supper, there was something so pleasant in the universal quiet contrasted with the customary hubbub of the house, and so unquestionable a relief in escaping from the supervision of the tall varlets behind our chairs, that our first sensation was one of comfort. The room, 'tis true, was but half finished by my sublime friend Ultramarine. The ceilings were THE WOES OF WEALTH. 75 but half covered with flying' nymphs and celes- tial flute and guitar players, tossing their fair forms over pillows of every coloured cloud that Bond-street fancy could feign. The walls were one half fresco and the other half in their ori- ginal dishabille, and the tender Chatelar sang to the fickle and beautiful Mary within an inch of a fox in full gallop, followed by a host of as dingy hunters as fox-chase ever supplied. But the distress was so ludicrous, that I had not felt so much inclined to make light of trou- ble since the first hour of my legacy ; and, if the truth were to be told, we were all much of the same mind. I saw my wife's brow cleared more than dance or dinner had cleared it for the last three months ; my girls told their pleasan- tries of the domestic gang by whom I had been so lately beset ; and before our little unattended meal was done, I had almost imagined myself into the quiet and incalculable happiness of old times. My wife had been the " rose and ex- pectancy of the fair state" for many a mile round in her youth. She was still handsome ; 76 THE squire's tale. time had not diminished a grain of my fondness for the generous heart and loving hand that had so long taken the chances of the world with me. I perhaps loved her more ; or our feelings had become so entirely one, that I never dreamed of analysing their degrees. Kind and true, with no object in her thoughts but mine, our wishes, interests, aud indulgences, were one ; and we had seen year after year glide away with as few matrimonial rubs, at least, as most peers in the land. But daylight brought back our discomfiture. The seal was to be neither laughed nor railed off the bond. The rout must be given, the house must be crowded from parlour to attic with all the grimace, gossip, and gibberish, that could be gathered to feed on us, to stifle us on our own staircases, and thenceforward to make us the stopgap of country conversation, the sneer of country elegance, and the mark of country envy, until some other victims could be turned out for the general diversion. In a grand council held over the breakfast- table, we revolved the several expedients to THE WOES OF WEALTH. 77 escape the calamity. Flight, sudden illness of the principals, a violent contagious fever broken out among the domestics, all were suggested, and all found wanting. It was shown that, where the ladies of the vicinage were determined on a party, they would not be repelled by a bulletin of the plague signed by three king's physi- cians. The only plausible expedients seemed to be my own, and those were, in the first in- stance to declare that my London banker had failed, and carried off my thousands, as usual on those occasions, to America — an intimation which, in London, I had seen strip a man of every acquaintance on earth in the course of a single revolution of the sun. But this was overruled, as, in the country, if friendships were not more firm, routs were rarer ; and we should have the whole dancing population on us as mer- ry as ever, if we were not worth sixpence in the world. My favourite expedient was, to set the house on fire ; the true mode after all. But the council broke up without coming to a combustion. The fact was, that the women had ordered dresses from the supreme artiste of 78 THE squire's tale. Paris, while the sugar-baker's wife had only ran- sacked London. Triumph was certain, and the female votes carried it that the evil must be endured, and could be at worst only one night's suffering. With a heavy heart I pre- pared to be the gayest of the gay. THE WOES OF WEALTH. 79 CHAPTER VI. Time hurries on in spite of all the reluctance of mankind, and the dreaded night came. It was all that I had expected it to be, with the exception that, from one of the serenest days of summer, the weather changed at a moment's warning into a tempest worthy of the north- west passage. Our fete champetre was blown into a thousand fragments. Our lamps, fes- tooned among our elms, were sent flying like chain-shot through our windows ; our " grand emblematic" transparency, the masterpiece of a London Apelles, and which cost I dare not confess how much, was ripped from top to bottom at the first onset, and discharged with the force of a steam-engine down the " grand staircase" on 80 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. the heads of an ascending column of quakers, devils, Jews, and Spanish grandees. The uproar was tremendous ; and from my study, in which I had lingered till the first concourse should be quiet, and I might venture forth with safety to my limbs, I heard the general crash, not unde- lighted with the anticipations of its clearing my house. Mr. Ultramarine's sudden retreat had left all our ornamental exploits half born. The cascade, painted to a fac-simile of Tivoli, was carried away by a burst of the rivulet that we had been nursing for the occasion. The superbe fontaine on the model of the grand tronc of Versailles, after flinging up half a dozen con- vulsive jets which burst into the drawing-room windows and extravagated over the company, refused to play a drop more. The organ, ex- pressly brought down from London to captivate us by unseen harmony from a grotto, for which the wall of my study was broken down, firmly resisted the touch of human finger during the night, or gave signs of life only in a succession of alternate screams and groans. The crowd THE WOES OF WEALTH. 81 was enormous, the heat stifling-, the noise deafening, and the crush hazardous to life and limb. To move, much less to dance, and least of all, to get a glass of wine or a fragment of biscuit without a fair combat, became rapidly out of the question. Fixed, like one of my own candelabra, in the corner to which I had first worked my way, I saw, to my infinite alarm, the crowd increase without measure. The mask had sanctioned every thing and every body ; and I could soon discover, through all its pasteboard, that a multitude had made good their entree who had no invitation but their own. As the throng thickened, its materials seemed palpably to degenerate ; the malice of my vil- lage friends had mustered the rabble for my fete; nameless figures, whose natural garb served them as masquerade habits, and who played the clown with the truth of nature, fought their way through the mass of battling and bruised shepherdesses, Dianas, and sultanas, To resist was soon hopeless, and, in the act of inquiring by what right a tall ruffian with a watchman's coat and rattle had made his appear- 82 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. ance in my house, I at once received a volley of language that made all my belles clap their hands on their ears ; a grasp behind, which left my coat skirtless ; and a push before, which deprived me of an old and favourite repeater, that I would not have given for the fee-simple of the corporation. A new uproar from below announced that a reinforcement was at hand, in the shape of the footmen, coachmen, and grooms, whom the in- creasing storm had driven within the house. Like the invasions of the Goths and Vandals, this new irruption of barbarians drove forward the old; disorder "sat umpire of the night." The temporary orchestra, left unfinished by our Decorator, found itself unable to sustain the weight of well-fed beauty that fled to its benches for refuge, and came down fiddlers and all with a crash of expiring harmony. The " grand" supper-table, after having been fought upon for a considerable time, at length gave way to a grand assaat of the principal cham- pions, and after a heave or two rolled the whole battalia to the ground, and itself on the THE WOES OF WEALTH. 83 top of them. The conflict was doubly revived on the rising of the combatants : decanters, ten guineas a pair, flew like meteors against pier- glasses a hundred guineas a piece. My match- less Hockheim tumblers, ancient as Albert Durer, painted and cut with all indescribable griffins, virgins, and boars' heads, " invaluable to the antiquary and man of taste," and whose sale broke the heart of the Landgrave that had drained them from his cradle to his climacteric ; those my muniments and treasures, that I had reserved for an heir-loom to satisfy my remotest generation of the refinement of their ancestor, and that nothing should or could have won from my safe-keeping but my wife's begging and praying to have something to show on the table which defied Mr. Molasses and all his money to have, and which would consequently bow down to the dust his and his still prouder wife's heart ; those exquisite emblems, that an ancient Roman would have consecrated in the temple of Bacchus, and that I ought to have refused to all human threats and tears, I saw flashing through air, ground between teeth, 84 the squire's tale* trampled under heels, and finally levigated into their original sand. The supreme catastrophe of the rout at length roused me to a sense of my duty. The chandelier, a huge pile, whose galaxy of prisms, drops, and stars, would have raised the envy of the Great Mogul, had given early signs of tottering. Our Decorator, 'tis true, had pledged his neck to us for its security, and I had reposed on the pledge, from presuming it the more valuable to a fellow who had nothing but his neck to lose. He had even given himself an experimental swing from its chain, and as neither its time nor his was yet come, he had been suspended in safety. But the general concussion, in which the very walls danced, at last reached the ceiling ; a flying claret-jug gave the finishing blow, and down thundered the chandelier in a whirlwind of dust, plaster, and or-molu. In real alarm, I extricated myself from the chaos to ascertain the fate of my family, and found my unfortunate wife doubly overwhelmed by the general discomfiture, and the fall of an THE WOES OF WEALTH. 85 immense screen, which one of our village archi- tects had, in the fulness of his ingenuity, con- verted into a partition between the salle de danse, as it was announced in our programme — for we had a programme too— and the supper- room; and which of course the first inunda- tion of belles and beaux had swept away as if it had been gossamer. Rescuing the partner of my joys and sor- rows from the ruin, with the loss of a whole revenue in lace, feathers, and gros de Naples undone for ever; and leaving the ground covered over with a full crop of beads and bugles, I bore her, fainting and frightened out of all hope of glory for the night, up to her chamber, which I found already invaded by a festive crowd, whose chief amusement was the examination of every little recess of those shrines in which beauty keeps her secrets against the ravages of time. Dull as my glance was, even I discovered &ome mysteries of the art of perpetual youth, which the last three months and a French 86 THE squire's tale. lady's maid had communicated to my village queen. But, to the rustic inquirers round us, the investigation was worth ball and supper put together. Our nearest and dearest friends were, as might be concluded, the most active in the inquiry ; and I saw, not without some feeling of gladdened justice, the preparations for a whole winter's campaign of renovated and resistless bloom carried off as trophies. But my wife's patience had passed away with her fright ; and, at the moment when her most confidential neighbour was in the act of deve- loping a French boite of the most precious and profound nature, from its blue morocco, double volumed caisse, lettered pensees sur Vhomme, in which rouge veritable was the least of the misdemeanours, my beloved dashed her way through the laughing rabble with the vigour of a bereaved tigress, rent the boite from the meagre figure that with virgin hypo- crisy was on the very point of appropriating its contents for future use, and by an energy THE WOES OF WEALTH. 87 denied to all but females in despair, absolutely flung the delinquent headlong out of the cham- ber. I then joined my forces to the conqueror ; the defeat became general, and the chamber was cleared, but cleared like a field of battle ; left covered with the wrecks of all that once glittered there to do mischief to mankind. My next inquiry was for my daughters. Emily I found with her rosy cheeks turned to scarlet by wrath at the persecutions of a fellow with a beard down to his middle ; a learned Brahmin, who, after plaguing the unhappy girl with jargon worthy of his kindred baboons, during the evening, had now taken advantage of the crowd to come to direct language, and make the regular offer of dying at her feet. The multitude kept me from this philosopher just long enough to hear him propose an elope- ment. Indignation left me no power of words, but I contrived to do without them. I tore my path through a phalanx of dominoes, Indian blankets, and Queen Elizabeth fardingales, and applied to the learned pundit the same argument which I had found so effective with Mr. Ultra- 88 THE squire's tale. marine. He started from his knee, and assumed the hero. I grasped his beard, brought away his wisdom and his mask together, and saw — the Decorator himself! My measures were not the less energetic. I gave him new ground for half a dozen actions before he reached the head of the stairs. How he contrived to reach the bottom, I believe he as little knew as I inquired. My sole remaining stake in this lottery of love and riot was my stately daughter Caroline. After a long search, I found the beauty of my princess covered with the wrecks of her plu- mage, her cheeks washed with tears, and her white hands mottled with paint from the visages of a troop of fauns and satyrs who had encircled her, and between impudence and revelry, both stimulated by floods of my best champagne, were astounding her ears with incantations worthy of their patron deity, and insulting the harassed girl into manual defence. This, too, I put to the route after some effort ; and in the midst of roars of laughter, carried my unlucky daughter to the chamber where her mother and /' THE WOES OF WEALTH. 89 sister sat in sublime repentance, and, as they ex- amined their piece-meal drapery, vowing irre- concilable resentment against the living world. They were not without a speedy revenge upon at least a part of it. The chandelier, in whose fall I had augured the ruin of my house, was destined to be its preservation. Some of the tapers had continued to burn. The most brilliant and hostile belle of the vicinity was swept in full waltz across the spot where one of those lurking incendiaries lay smouldering unobserved. Her drapery, almost as combustible as herself, touched the taper. The gallant hussar, who, in sabre-tache and moustache unparalleled, was whirling away this fond and breathless enthu- siast with the rapidity of a Catherine wheel, felt too much absorbed in the glowing cheek, that, according to the laws of the dance, lay melting, like an over-sunned peach, on his epauletted shoulder, to think of the world beside. But, in this Mahometan moment, the flame laid fast hold of its prey ; the drapery flamed ; and two whirls of the waltz were enough to 90 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. propagate it through a circle of floating frippery on the limbs of twenty belles more. The dis- covery once made, the happy consequences fol- lowed in an universal scream — a rush to the stairs — an utter disregard of the ties of nature, love, and bienseance — adorers flying from the adored — bosom friends trampling on each other in the most ruthless spirit of self-preservation - the stairs discharging the young, the anti- quated, the grave, and the gay, without respect of persons, by hundreds into the high-road. The sauve qui pent was the grand maxim of every one, as much as if they had been a garde imperiale. From my elevation on the third story I con- templated the havoc with the serenity of Addi- son's angel : and — : Pleased the village manners to reform, Welcomed the whirlwind, and enjoyed the storm.' And the storm was doing its duty vigorously. Sheets of rain, such as serve for conversation to the "oldest inhabitants" of country towns, came THE WOES OF WEALTH. 91 down at the crisis, serving alike at once for punishment and preservation; extinguishing the conflagration of the draperies and dominoes, but visiting their dismantled proprietors with an excess of ablution, which, if water could "wash their stains away," would have left us the purest souled village in Christendom. 92 THE squire's tale. CHAPTER VII. I had now gone regularly through a course of getting rid of my friends ; and this last expe- riment made a worthy consummation of my plan. For this, too, I was to pay. Malice had hitherto only dipped its tongue at intervals in venom ; but now it compounded the draught wholesale, and swallowed it in full luxury. I have observed that, if in cities calumny exists, it is in the country that it flourishes. The flow of life in towns, like the flow of a river, forbids the deposit of the fry. It is in the pond, in the still and tepid stagnation of life, that the scandalous principle has time to grow into shape and fatten for use. Every foolery that could pass through the THE WOES OF WEALTH. 93 vivid fancy of ancient ladies offering up repu- tations over their tea-cups, like the witches of old fumigating people out of heart and brain over their cauldrons; every insolence that could be dreamed over the meagre mess-table of our three half-pay lieutenants, invalided since the siege of Gibraltar, and who acted as our oracles in all matters of decorum and war ; every pretty impertinence that could glow on the pouting lips of all the female hopes of all the village families, envious of the good looks and wealth of my daughters ; the wrath of the whole world for miles round, outrageous at the superior equipments of our rout, wild as it was, and sor- rowing over the common ravage of their tiffa- nies, came conglomerating upon me and mine. Anonymous letters of regret, warning, and advice, all of which I ordered to immediate flame, as being always the most envenomed trick of petty malice ; toasts and tales at village coteries, sure to reach our ears in the progress of a visit of " friendship" from some " unalter- able friend ;" paragraphs in a paralytic news- paper, that after struggling down to the very 94 THE squire's tale. verge of the grave, seemed to start back into existence on the strength of my unpopularity ; and above all, an endless copy of verses, by a muse whose periodic urn, long filled from the lowest ditch of Helicon, had been my habitual horror ; all were lavished on my naked head, and all I bore, and could have still borne with the equanimity of a Socrates under a similar discharge, but the verses, which were doggerel, and not to be borne by gods or columns, or even by country gentlemen. T discovered the author, and found him one of my last retainers, the most faithful diner at my table, the echo of every rambling sentiment that the genius of claret and companionship, such as it was, ever warmed me to utter, and pledged to me and mine, with the faith of ano- ther Pylades, to the final hour in which "gra- titude could beat in the pulses of man." Such had been his literal harangue at the very last dinner that I had suffered the slave to enjoy under my roof. And such was his sincere intention at the time, and for all time, while I should have a THE WOES OF WEALTH. 95 guinea to lend. But when was wisdom the attribute of the muse ? The inspiration of the subject dazzled him ; immortal fame was in his grasp ; and in the determination to eclipse Dry- den, and rise on the ruins of Churchill at a single spring, he made me and mine his theme. I walked to his house with his verses in one hand and a horsewhip in the other. His sur- prise would have been invaluable to a dramatist. He attempted to deny, to explain, and finally to laugh off the affair. I knew where to sting him, and, without reproaching the fellow with ingratitude, which he could not have under- stood, calmly told him that his verses were " utterly contemptible." The sting went to his midriff. I held the paper to his eye, and asked him if any brute with ears, but one, could ever have generated such unequivocal stupidity. I ended by telling him that, as to personal resent- ment, I could feel none against such an as- sailant; but that, as a friend to the English language, as a scholar, and a gentleman, I could not overlook such an insult to the art of poetry. 96 THE squire's tale. Execution promptly followed, and I returned to my household gods, with the cheering con- viction of having cured an erring friend of a delusion that must bring him to be the poet of attics and albums ; and of having, by an appli- cation to the human nose, shown the true way of vindicating the human ear. My expedient made some noise, and relieved me from a crowd of open offences already far advanced in preparation. In three days subse- quent, I received notice of an action of damages from the fractured son of Parnassus. But I had done my country a service worth the money, and I was content to suffer, whether as a pa- triot or a martyr. We now held another family council. My " voice was for war:" my blood was warmed by battle ; hostilities had been fairly commenced ; there was not a man above my own groom from whom I did not meet a frowning brow. I was within sight of my beloved solitude, the trophy that I would have sought through ten times the hostility ; and only wished, like an old Roman, to lay in a stock of provisions, close THE WOES OF WEALTH. 97 my gates, and, like him, in future to think a stranger synonymous with an enemy. But I was overruled again ; the ladies out- voted Sempronius. The discovery of my wife's toilet-mysteries, which were, after all, only the fantasies of her French waiting-woman, whose a-la-mode de Paris soul deemed that to live without those little subsidiaries to loveliness was to die outright, had made the village a scene of civil horror to the companion of my bosom. Never had her round cheek been tipped with cotton or camels' hair, with ribbon dipped in Hungary water, or that still sublimer soupfo?i, the vegetale, that comes and goes with exqui- site and periodic delusion. Never had the polvoramento — but I shrink from the un- hallowed revealing of those rites into which, sacred as the mysteries of Isis, man can never have made his way but in disguise. My own instance, however, was a virtuous exception. The seizure of the boite by her most confidential friend, to whom my wife, in the innocence of her heart, had shown it on its VOL. i. E 98 THE squire's tale. arrival but the day before, was the whole source of my knowledge ; and when the victim with tears in her eyes protested that she was guiltless of any colour but that red and white by nature's nice and cunning hand laid on, I gave her credit for it at sight, on the security of the real roses that glowed with double crimson in her cheeks; and sealed my bond with a conjugal kiss, that put them in a state to confute the nearest and dearest hater she had in the world. My counsel was, to proclaim ourselves in a state of siege, and scorn and exclude human kind, great and little. But my wife and daughters stipulated for a month at Bath, to give them time to prepare, or for the course of things to swallow up the clamour against us. In a month might occur one of those grand events which wipe all memorials else from the brains of a county ; there might be a new parson, or a new stage-coach ; some of the belligerent spinsters might be absorbed by marriage, or death might do his duty, and relieve the world of them ; Mr. Molasses might meet his na- tural fate by apoplexy ; or the Decorator might THE WOES OF WEALTH. 99 be hanged; or the innkeeper's daughter, a pro- digious blue, might concentrate the public talk, and reward her parents for her education at a " superior establishment for young ladies," where " the language of the house was French," by running off with the spruce recruiting corporal, retained to give her lessons on the tambourine. There was reason in all this ; and to reason I always submitted. The family coach was forth- with sent to be put in travelling order ; and, with a lading of live and dead stock not much inferior to Squire Wronghead's, we solemnly left our home, and heavily launched forth on the highways of this wicked world. I will ac- knowledge that I was not charmed with the decision ; but I was a husband — the word is an expressive one; and thanking my stars that the groanings and heavings of the wheels, springs, and axletrees, under the merciless weight that we laid upon them, were more meant in the way of threat than execution, I alighted for my sins at the stateliest hotel in the city of King Bladud. 100 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. Our first night there was a happy specimen of the future. We had arrived in the height of the Bath carnival. The hotel was full, running over with West-Indians, members of the London clubs, come down, on the demise of the London winter, to plunder a little until the period for regular operations returned ; and a double discharge of Irish, a fatal result of lowering the fares of the Bristol packets without due consideration of the consequences. In this state of repletion, to escape sleeping under the canopy of heaven — for to be driven to an inferior hotel was totally out of the ques- tion " with persons of our fortune" — was a piece of infinite good luck ; and when the bowing landlord, with a thousand protestations of the most exemplary sorrow, ushered us up ten pair of stairs along a wild, wo-begone, sky- lighted gallery into a suit of damp, half- furnished, chill, and dungeon-looking chambers, which might have made a capital figure in a romance of the " penitents of the Pyrenees," or the " black banditti," my female authorities felt, instead of indignation, unequivocal gra- THE WOES OF WEALTH. 101 titude towards our preserver from contact with the canaille and comforts of the nameless and unnameable world. Yet, with my best inclination to be thankful, I could not help revolving the scene that once used to meet my eyes at the same hour — the comfort of the fireside, the books, the sim- ple, easy furniture, the supper-table, neatness itself ; the look of cheerfulness, not without elegance, that endeared every thing in my early home. But as I saw that my wife and daughters, while we tried to warm ourselves over a fire which from want of habit would do any thing but burn, were involuntarily re- volving the very same thoughts, I had the merit to hold my tongue; and, somewhat fear- ing that my powers of retention were not to be long depended on, I hurried the whole party to repose. 102 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. CHAPTER VIII. To repose! — they might as well have at- tempted to sleep in a sea-fight. The stately hotel was one of the supreme foci of " rank and fashion." It had a club and a weekly assembly, and on this night a festino, at which " as- sisted" all the amateur fiddlers, foreign artistes, void, figurante nondescripts, that lived par leurs talens in the city of the arts. The entertain- ment was the most select thing in the annals of Bath : the lady patronesses had exerted them- selves with Roman rigour and vigour, and had produced bickerings innumerable in their re- solve to exclude all but the perfection of so- ciety; and what a paradisaical foretaste did it THE WOES OF WEALTH. 103 give me of Bath society, to know that at least a thousand registered in those muster-rolls of excellence, waltzed, drank, and romped within the walls of the chosen hotel ! I had full time to indulge in the contempla- tion ; for I never closed my eyes but once, and then I was startled by a Bacchanalian uproar, that made me in my dizziness think for the moment that I was once more in the centre of my own masquerade ; but the infinite superi- ority of the bouncing and bellowing under me soon brought me to my senses, and I felt that I was in the region of the accomplishments, in the central Elysium of the "elegant extracts" of man and womankind. Morning found me in my meditation ; and I arose to have a glimpse of the world before me. It was extensive enough, but monotonous ; for my view consisted of the tiles and chimney-tops of some myriads of houses. Sky there was none ; but it found a substitute in volumes of vapour, made picturesque and palatable only by volumes of smoke, the whole giving the idea of the steam 104 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. of a gigantic cauldron, in which we were under- going the boiling process. The elevation of our bed-chambers, which were an excrescence on the roof— a kind of airy out-house, or receptacle suspensory for the waifs and strays which the habitable portion of the building rejected — gave me a sensation of alarm that I determined not to undergo longer than I could help. I had no taste for this bird's- eye view of the world ; and descending with what speed I dared, I quitted our Mont Blanc, in the full determination never to take up my abode in the most fashionable hotel on earth again. There have been a hundred definitions of man. Of woman one is enough : — she is a rout- loving animal. From a dairy-maid to a duchess, the sight of people crushing each other, whether within the walls of a barn or a palace, is de- lightful to all her sensibilities. The first card that summoned my share of the female world to be trampled upon was from the house of an inexhaustible old peeress, to THE WOES OP WEALTH. 105 whom the Bath physicians should have erected statues, if men who live by colds and con- sumptions could be grateful to the chief pro- moter of their fortunes. This card effaced every memory of human wrong. My wife and daughters went out all bloom, gay as the flowers on their heads, and with every pulse beating with anticipated triumph. I attended them malgrt ; was forced to work my passage to an obscure corner ; was squeezed into an omelet by a phalanx of brazen-faced brawny women, who drove their way through the tumult like angry elephants ; was famished, stunned, thirsty, and tired; and so left to the chances of war, without more con- sideration from any human being than if I had been one of the family pictures. In my refuge between two candelabra on the flanks, and a fierce, full-dressed duchess of enormous size in front, I thought of Richelieu's advice to the courtiers : " Speak ill of nobody; ask for every thing; and sit down wherever you can." But the whole art of high-life was precluded to me. If all the benevolence that 106 THE SQUIRE'S TALE* ever dropped from human lip was ready to disguise my irritation against the old peeress and her party, I could not play the hypocrite at that hour; for to breathe, much more to speak, seemed beyond hope. To ask for any thing, if I possessed the faculty of speech, was idle ; for beggary was the order of the night, and the few trays were waylaid at the door by a knot of half-naked harpies, who alternately fought, fed, and flirted the " sultry hours away;" and as to sitting down, the original vseizers of the chairs made good prize of them for the full term of the rout, and would have seen a whole generation of their own godfathers and godmothers drop dead at their feet before it would occur to them to move a limb. Morning came at last, after a night that I thought protracted beyond all count of time ; and its discoveries served me as a sort of re- venge. They were tremendous. Ovid should have added them as the choicest chapter to his Meta- morphoses. Youth transformed into age ; skins of ivory suddenly emulating orange ; raven locks unscrewing their dejected ringlets to THE WOES OF WEALTH. 107 show the venerable gifts of nature beneath ; and coral lips washed yellow. Worn out as I was, scorched, squeezed, and half suffocated, this general dismantling o€ borrowed charms gave me a new knowledge of human nature, and, if I had been a younger man, would have served me as an useful moral on the perishable pomps of sublunary skins. I should at least have been Bath-beauty proof for ever. In this kind of life, for the month, we made battle against time, an enemy that yet defies conquest by man. But as the ladies were still in arms, I gave way to necessity, and took vigorously to enjoying all the enjoyments of this citadel of the polite and intellectual. Like all things which have long exercised the undivided study of man, pleasure here had been reduced to a system, equally ingenious, various, and refined. I ran round the whole circle. In the morning I followed its votaries on their early promenade to the Market-place, where, in the midst of groups of the idle and 108 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. invalid, I heard the observations of the pro- found in beef and mutton; saw the poultry, rabbits, and fish examined with a master-hand ; and received critical dissertations on prime cuts from miserables that had not twelve hours of life in their whole configuration. My next indulgence was the Pump-room , where I plunged into a mob of liver-coloured nabobs ; frizzled mulatto-visaged men from the sugar-islands, made, if possible, more alarming by cargoes of wives and daughters whose features and language would have na- turalised them in a forest of ourang-outangs ; London tailors come down to set the fashions and talk of Almacks ; Spanish and Portuguese fugitives, patriots every soul of them, with visages borrowed from their neighbour Africa, and purses borrowed Heaven knows where ; French dancing-masters, with the croix at their button-holes, and flourishing as counts and colonels ; Irish barristers come over to learn English ; aldermen of the town, swelling with provincial dignity, and irresistible on all ques- tions of law and politics within a circle of five THE WOES OF WEALTH. 109 miles ; grim incipient physicians, tyro-minis- ters of the king of terrors, thin men, fed o' the cameleon's dish, darting about their eager eyes for prey, and pouncing through the bilious ranks, like kites over a flock of sick sheep ; asthmatic men of ton, castle-spectres, conde- scending to offer up the incense of their last lungs on the altar of some sallow daughter of city wealth longing to be a countess ; plump country baronets, with their plump dames dragging their young by whole generations to the pump, and forcing physic by the pint on the howling and face-making victims ; gouty militaires whispering consolation, crutch in hand, to widows in their weeds ; and last, and alone to be pitied, unhappy, homely squires, deluded like myself into venturing their souls and bodies into the whirl of this vanity-fair ; — the whole a hubbub of every topic of twaddledom from the battle of Bunker's Hill to the setting of a mouse-trap, and the whole carried on under the eternal scraping, twanging, screaming, drumming, and groaning of the most merciless 110 THE SQUIRE'S TALE* orchestra that ever vilified the name of har- mony. This pleasure being tasted to the full, Milsom- street lay before me, where till dinner I was at liberty to enjoy the same faces, the same coughs, and the same conversation over again, turn after turn, forty times within the hour, until I could wager on the topic that engaged the indi- vidual at the first sight of him five hundred yards off; and could have given a map from memory of every wrinkle on the visage of every lovely man-hunter that ranged the human covert, seeking whom she might devour. There were other delights : — a theatre, into which, as luckily my wife was engaged ten deep every night at card-parties, or superintending her girls at quadrilles, I was not compelled to chaperon any one, and so utterly escaped going. The rumour was enough for me ; and I left the reality to the critics, the coffee-house literati, and the orange- women, the only class of the three that seemed to profit by their attendance on the drama. THE WOES OF WEALTH. Ill There were conversaziones too, where a dozen fearful looking old women, brown as the bonzes that figured on their mantlepiece, and an iti- nerant lecturer, discussed the departed glories of science, in a chamber gloomy as a mauso- leum, over the worst coffee in Christendom. This too I escaped ; for my wife had luckily no taste for pyramids or potsherds, was ignorant as Eve of all chemistry and mathematics, and would have as soon committed the sin of witch- craft as dandled the mummy of the great Psammeticus himself. But a grand event was on the point of coming to my succour. I had given up remonstrance, and waited in faith and patience for the work of Time, that great unfeed doctor, who cures more diseases than the whole College of Phy- sicians put together, and gives saving lessons where all other moralists since Confutzee would have preached in vain. Yet Time, if a sure auxiliary, is a tardy one, and to my great regret I saw this perpetual whirl of song and supper wearing out the spirits of my girls, and nightly rubbing the roses off 112 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. their young" cheeks. All our virtues are said to have their kindred vices. My high-souled Caroline was teaching her black eyes to conquer in all directions, and in a month more I should have had her a supreme coquette ; my delicate Emily was indulging her blue eyes with down- cast triumph, and was on the point of turning out as pretty a prude as ever loved a flirtation. I determined to take my departure forthwith, and try the effect of a country regimen on the family understanding. As to the fading com- plexions, the remedy was so near at hand, that I dared not touch on the topic, for fear of seeing the general expedient adopted without cere- mony. THE WOES OF WEALTH. 113 CHAPTER IX. While I was deliberating on the safest mode of hinting my wishes, I was startled by the arrival of a huge letter, in the old formality of black seal and mourning edges, which had hitherto so often given me a fit of nervousness. Now, however, I soon got over my panic. I had warred, or been warred on by every " friend " I possessed in the world. I now acknowledged the genuine advantage of living a second Esau among mankind ; and, without a lingering fear of being touched in the person of any human being, I boldly broke up the missive of mor- tality. The news within was an example of the proverb, that good or evil seldom comes 114 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. alone. The death of one uncle, whom I had seen but once, had lifted me into opulence ; the death of another uncle, whom I had never seen at all, was now to lift me higher than I could have dreamed. He was an old, bitter Yorkshire baronet, who, after disowning my father for marrying the beauty of his choice, had, to show his supe- rior taste, set his scullion at the head of his table. But as his pride forbade any ceremony on the occasion, and the fracture of his neck on the edge of a double ditch at the age of three- score and ten extinguished the alliance, his manor, money, and title, fell upon the last head that he had contemplated, or that had even de- sired them among mankind. The news, however, had one real good ; for it decided our instant return. In my wife's judg- ment, the idea of remaining to mingle as a baronet's lady in the same circle which had re- ceived her untitled, was preposterous beyond all precedent. The world of the plebeians and ten-thousands a year was a totally different world from that of the " hereditary titles" and THE WOES OF WEALTH. 115 thirty thousands a year. I acquiesced in the conclusion, if the reasoning did not convince me; and when from the first slope of the road I looked back on the hot, vapoury, watery cover- lid of the huge human bed that filled the valley, and thought of the paralytic, nightmarish, and parboiled multitude melting below, I found that, whatever mischiefs there might be in thirty thousand a year, I was, for the hour, almost a happy man. The grand question on our return was, whether we should not abandon our old locale altogether, commence the world in a new re- gion, and start for the mansion in Yorkshire. My voice was for the emigration. I had already felt some of the evils of living rich where I had lived poor ; and I was fully disinclined to add to their number. But once again I was over- ruled. My excellent wife, if she scorned to own that she had injuries to avenge, had, as she observed, " prejudices to rectify." I could have subjoined, that she had triumphs to enjoy. The Molasses faction were to be utterly routed ; 11G THE SQUIRE'S TALE. and as for the virgin plunderer or plunderers of the toilet, they were to be withered into ashes by our exclusive blaze. By a curious and unlucky coincidence, a part of my late acquisition was in a large extent of land adjoining the village. New duties thus came crowding on the " baronet and great landed proprietor," of which the quiet dweller in the squire's cottage would have escaped the whole trouble, and in which I was to go from bad to worse by the course of nature. There were two classes of the hangers-on upon society for whom I had always felt a sort of lazy compassion, the smuggler and the poacher. I am not defending either of them ; but perhaps the reckless intrepidity and rough hazards of both had some influence on me. They were at least not made more criminal in my estimation by the ineradicable insolence of custom-house offi- cers, and the capricious absurdity of rigid game-preservers. In fact, I had never dis- sembled my opinions on the battue generation, who reckon their prowess by slaughtering game THE WOES OF WEALTH. 117 as if they shot them in a coop, and destroy in a day more than all the poachers of a province steal in a year. But I was now the " lord of the manor," the dispenser of law, the " great standard of morals" for the village environs, and I must not wink at the breaches of the statutes made for preserving partridges and the duty on tea and tobacco. For the partridges I had never cared ; and for the care of the revenue, I had thought that the nation paid handsomely enough with- out enlisting the country gentlemen into its ser- vice. But I had now parted with the happy privileges of the obscure ; I v> as now a man " looked up to ;" a personage whose example, as the twaddlers, in a body, pronounced it, was " pregnant with good or evil" to the country. I accordingly seized a whole posse of depre- dators on my game ; saw the poor devils sent to jail ; received the applauses of the bench of ma- gistrates the next day ; received its counter- balance in my own regrets ; spent three hun- dred pounds in their liberation ; and, the bounty 118 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. being of course secret, had the double benefit of being cursed by the peasantry far and near as a purse-proud tyrant, and being sneered at by every man who envied my sudden fortunes, as " an upstart attempting to catch the eye of government by over-zeal, and ignominiously defeated in his awkward enterprise." But I had troubles to which this was a mole- hill. My wife's visit to Bath had touched her with a new sense of the necessity of foreign elegance to English perfection ; and the most accomplished emiyrce that Paris ever polished luckily dropped in her way at the moment when she was in absolute despair of seeing her daughters ever possess the true flow of a lan- guage so essential to their existence as French. The introduction had been managed with diplomatic dexterity by a lady of the first fashion ; who, I had good subsequent reason to believe, received fifty pounds from each party for her share in a negotiation of such exquisite difficulty. We brought our invaluable treasure home with us, and rejoiced in a tutoress, or rather in THE WOES OF WEALTH. 119 " an interesting friend," who would soon smooth us into such shining specimens of society, that our rustic neighbours would not dare to lift their dazzled eyes where we trod. The emigre* was pretty, and she had a pretty story, which she disclosed to the heads of the house under the " most solemn seal of secrecy, " and with some as prettily produced tears as I ever saw glitter on a long silken eyelash. " She was" — and the sigh that sent forth the tale was accompanied with an attesting upthrown glance of the dewy black eye, that none but a Goth or a Hun could dare to disbelieve. " She was the daughter, the only and beloved daughter," of a marquis of immense revei 11 who, alas ! fell a victim to his loyalty in the i stage of the revolution. He died in the army of Conde, after performing prodigies of valour, and bequeathing his infant Cassandre-Stephanie- Ar- mide-St. Ange to the care of his illustrious leader. Attached from her birth to the royal cause, the most magnificent offers from Napo- leon himself could not tempt her to remain uu- der his atrocious dynasty. '* Plutotptrir, plu- 120 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. totperir," exclaimed the pretty ultra, with an attitude worthy of Duchesnois. She had vowed to devote her life to the sublime revenge of im- buing English genius with the accomplishments of France, and thus depriving her ungrateful country of the only laurel whose loss would be irreparable. To resist the conviction of such tears from such eyes was impossible. My two tall girls were instantly sent to drill. Their old acquire- ments were flung aside like old clothes. A new course of canzonets and concertantes, readings from Rousseau, and recitations from Voltaire, were the order of the day. Ariosto reposed upon the toilet, and the Pastor Fido lay the ten- der companion of the pillow ; and when, after a fortnight's absence at my Yorkshire manor, I returned, I could scarcely know my own flesh and blood in the two operatic divinities that shrank from the horrors of an " accueil" so threatening as mine, to their machinery of French flowers, fronts d~la Valiere, and flounces ti-la the deuce knows who. But I had no time to display my wrath on the THE WOES OF WEALTH. 121 subject ; my attention was drawn to another visitor. It was six months since I had sent my son to Oxford, a handsome, healthy, and intelligent youth as any in the land. He had of course shared in the family prosperity, and where my re- mittances cautiously paused, his mother's secret generosity made ample recompense. Between us, we might as well have sent him as many doses of arsenic. In my misbelieving presence stood a sickly- visaged rake, an exhausted emblem of supreme elegance, ringleted and moustached like a German mountebank, with a cigar puffing from his lips into my face, and a cheek sallow with late hours and dissipation. Holding out to me, as I gazed in speechless astonishment, a finger loaded with rings, he, in some jargon, half French, half English, conde- scended to acknowledge me. I broke from him, and from all, and rushed to my chamber to give vent to feelings which I dared not show to my alienated household. I spent the rest of that day alone, and in a bit- terness of heart that might have made the beggar vol. i. F 122 THE squire's tale. at my gate rejoice in his nakedness. My son undone ; my daughters perverted into puppets and dolls ; my wife's honest head turning in the general whirl of fashion and foolery ; — if a wish from the bottom of my soul could have sent my estates flying through the air, and set me down on my quiet com- petence again, I should that night have been the possessor of five hundred pounds a year, and not a shilling more. But freedom is not the privilege of men "of my station." I found on my table a notice that I had been "most graciously appointed by His Majesty to the important and honourable office of high sheriff for the county ;" and the next morning had scarcely dawned when I was instructed that the assizes were about to begin, and that I must attend the triumphal entry of their worships the judges. I loathed this scene of rustic bustle ; but where was my resource I " Public business must be done by public men." I submitted, like one going to the block. A miserable week was spent in a perpetual tumult of preparation ; and while my showy car- riages, horses, javelin-men, and dinners only laid THE WOES OF WEALTH. 123 up a store of bile in the bosoms of every prede- cessor whose finance might less afford the neces- sary display, I could have wished the whole cere- mony at the bottom of the ocean. My early practice in Jurisprudence had not re- conciled me to her shrine ; and what kind of votary was I likely to be now, after a life of seclusion, and, at the present moment, with enough of my own business on my hands ? Perplexed in head, ner- vous in heart, and wearied in frame, I was urged through a period of clamour, feast-giving, mob- marshalling, and, to close the whole with the fitting ceremony, it was my duty to preside at the only execution that had happened for years among us. With the feeling of a felon released from his irons, I saw the judges take their departure. I certainly never before had a proper sense of the sacrifices to which patriotism, or the love of power, or the prospect of knighthood, annually prompts so many worthy gentlemen. 124 THE SQUIRE'S tale. CHAPTER X. But fortune had malice still in reserve. The leading county member, as hand some, florid, and fox- hunting a legislator as any that ever sat mute in the House of Commons, suddenly transported beyond his usual stint of three bottles of claret by the en- thusiasm of having carried off the brush, fell from his seat with the sixth bottle in his hand, and deserted the table, this life, and the representation together. I shuddered instinctively at the sight of the three mud-covered post-chaises that came with the intelligence, galloping over every thing in the streets of the miserable assize-town, where I sat in fierce formality, envying every egg-and-butter- woman that drove her donkey by the court-door. THE WOES OF WEALTH. 125 The prognostic was true. The fatal post-chaises brought a deputation of my " particular friends, and the particular friends of my family," request- ing me, "in the name of public feeling, personal dignity, and the free and independent electors of the true-blue interest — trampled so long by a fac- tion — the prey of a vicious and insolent oligarchy — sold from hand to hand at the caprice of half a dozen great families, and saddled with inveterate boobies, such as their late member, — to stand for the county." I never took less time to make up my mind on any subject under the sun. I gave, on the spot, the plainest negative that man could give. The deputation were supremely astonished ; " the distinction was so honourable, the service rendered to the country so essential, their own feelings so much alive on the occasion, and, finally, the return so unequivocally secure. They would and could take no denial." But I was firm ; and we parted with mutual solemnity. I had a couple of hours more to spend in court. They were not lost by my good friends. Before I could step half a yard into the street, rejoiced to 126 THE squire's tale. be divested of my official toils, and hoping to glide away to my beef-steak in private virtue, I found that publicity was to be the badge of all my tribe. I was surrounded, congratulated, and compli- mented by the whole population on " my accep- tance of the offer." The principal Boniface solicited me, in person, to do him the honour of making his house the head-quarters of the " true-blue." All the post- boys of the town clamoured round me, whip in hand, and only longed to have the honour of bringing up " my honour's friends." The horns of the Bald-faced Stag, on the other side of the way, wore the true-blue in rivalry of the pile of ribands, of equal azure, that decorated the Red Lion. My retreat was cut off by a posse of the prettiest milliners of the town, each showing her superior dexterity in the art of making rosettes. I fell into an ambush of all the elite of our youth and beauty, already contemplating the balls and banquets of an election, and the marriages sprout- ing therefrom ; and while I was brought to a dead stand by the attempt to say something to every body, and the impossibility of saying any thing to THE WOES OF WEALTH. 127 the purpose, I was seized by main force by an irruption from the M grand hotel," consisting of the same gentlemen whose offer I had already rejected, but who, as they avouched, " knowing my own mind better than myself, and accustomed to expect such answers, in the first instance, from men of talent and delicacy, had ordered a din- ner for the purpose of giving me time to re-con- sider the matter coolly with my friends." Human nature, good and bad, is a curious study. It had long been mine ; and, unluckily, the present scene tempted me as a new scrap for my mental portfolio. No evil could follow from my dining along with those good-natured boobies. My anti-parlia- mentary determination had been too firmly fixed to give way; I was, beside, hungry and tired; I loved society ; I loved a good song ; had no dislike to a bottle of such claret as I knew my host of the " grand hotel" could produce on par- ticular occasions ; and thus tempted and fortified, I rashly suffered myself to be escorted to the head of the table. The history of all public dinners is much the same : a succession of prescriptive toasts drunk in 128 THE squire's tale, vile wine, and moved, seconded, and re-seconded, in oratory worthy of the wine. In the metro- polis things are bad enough ; but there the pro- cess has by habit been licked into some form, The established orators talk the established non- sense, and the affair is over. But my jovial constituents were children of nature ; and before our second bottle had fairly gone its round, we were all orators together. The fact that they could utter three consecutive sentences was new to most of them ; and the bourgeois gentil- homme was never more astonished or more de- lighted at the discovery that he could talk prose. We had for hours together the enjoyment of this experimental oratory, with all its alarms at "addressing so distinguished an assemblage;" its "consciousness of utter incompetence;" and its wish that "so elevated a duty as that of proposing the health of Mr. Alderman Topsyturvy, &c. should have fallen on some member more ade- quate" to a task of such overwhelming magnitude. When it came to my turn, I made the sort of harangue that a man generally makes when he is fantastic enough to expect to think of carrying THE WOES OF WEALTH. 129 two contradictory purposes at once. Every sylla- ble that went to thank the general civility of the assemblage was taken for a direct consent, which the firmest negation could not wash away. My occa- sional expressions of that good -will which goes for nothing in the presence of the bottle, were seized and shouted over as admissions and concessions, as the strong facts of the case, which nothing but challenging the whole deputation on the spot could have torn from their souls. The wine whirled faster and faster, and the general brain whirled like the wine. Songs start- ing up from volunteer performers in all quarters, the most desperate experiments of throats to which nature had denied all voice beyond a tally-ho ; more harangues, more pledges and protestations, more roarings, more wine, rapidly exhilarated us into a state fit for talking equally well upon all subjects, legal, religious, and political. What I said in my several speeches after twelve o'clock, I, as a conscientious man, will not be very resolute in asserting. But whatever it was, it was received with an applause that might have done honour to a De- 130 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. mosthenes. I believe I went over the several theories of church and state ; discussed the finan- ces in a style of matchless elucidation ; intrepidly quoted my school Latin ; condemned or panegy- rised the war, I forget which ; laid down a new system of representation, reform, and chimney- sweeping by machines; pledged myself to live and die for the county, whether in or out of parliament, which was received with a thunder of applause; and while I was between the sinking fund and the supply of London with fresh water, dropped down into my seat, from which I unos- tentatiously slipped upon the squire-strewn floor. Morning glared in upon me fevered, headached, and with the remnants of my oratory still rolling through my puzzled brains. But my uncertainty was not to be long-lived. The deputation waited on me while I was lazily trying to remember where I was. They brought a paper loaded with signa- tures, at the head of which was my own. At what hour of the carousal, or in what state of my understanding, this document was procured, I could not tell for my soul. But there I was ; the litera scripta had me fast, pledged to " redeem THE WOES OF WEALTH. 131 the independence of the county too long shackled by an odious oligarchy," and the rest in very legi- timate style. I remonstrated in vain : — there was the indelible witness. I at length grew angry at what I felt to be a deception of some kind or other ; and flatly telling my excellent friends that they must look for their representative somewhere else, ordered my horse, and to their utter surprise, left town, deputation, and the glory of the true-blue, ten miles behind me within the half hour. I pulled up on reaching a hill which overlooked my house, and, as my blood cooled along the ascent, sank into the usual meditations of a repen- tant bacchanal. My meditations had nearly cost me my neck. The burst of a rocket over my horse put the animal to his speed ; and nearly unseated, and not undeserving of the honours of John Gil- pin, I was whirled through our long and crooked street, bursting my way among a screaming and shouting multitude, till my steed stopped at the accustomed door. The shouts followed me still. They were echoed 132 THE squire's tale. from a circle of country fellows come to " drink bis honour's health, and success to his election." My footmen made their appearance half drunk with their early libations to the same glorious cause ; and the wife of my bosom received me in the hall, cerulean from top to toe, and with a pretty, half-jealous speech on my having so dex- terously concealed from her " my noble intention of setting up for the county." I am afraid that I did not behave like a philo- sopher on this speech ; for the style of my reply brought tears into eyes that I never wished to see shaded ; and discord and dismay raised their voices through the household when I ordered my solitary meal to my study. But I might as well have stopped the Thames at full tide, as curb the sudden friendship with which the county honoured me. The emissaries who had conveyed the intelligence of my " canvass" home, had lost no time in spreading the glad tidings far and wide. The seed prospered into a rapid harvest, and for a month to come I had not an hour unmolested by deputations, per- sonal inquiries, men of " county weight" riding THE WOES OF WEALTH. 133 over to point out where the press of battle lay ; and whole caravans of jocund matrons and spinsters crowding in from the remotest corners of the province, to ascertain the probability of their figuring at our convivialities. 134 THE squire's tale. CHAPTER XI. No man knew the history of all this love better than myself. Our paramount duke, a frigid and penurious aristocrat, whose touch, as the London wits said, luckily saved him the expense of ice for his wine, had hitherto settled the representation in his own way. Nothing could be more tranquil, and less satisfactory. The noble duke avowed that this was done " to preserve the peace of the county." The whole in- ferior race of existences declared that, the plain English of the peace-preservation was to make an easy government-bargain for himself, to get places for his haughty progeny, and, blackest of all, to " starve the poor innkeepers." The idea of losing the opportunity of starting THE WOES OF WEALTH. 135 a new man with ready money enough to make the million drunk, and with that undisguised opinion of the ducal proceedings which would make com- promise with His Grace impossible, was not to be given up without horror. I well knew that, to plunder me, and to stimulate the great man, were the genuine objects of this sudden enthusiasm for my talents and virtues. Years had elapsed since the sweets of office had been known in our community. Not a commission in a Jamaica regiment — not an Indian cadetship — not a surgeoncy in a slave-hospital — not a clerkship in Canada, fell among our luckless population; not a bone of ours was among the King of Ashan- tee's drumsticks, nor a drop of our blood was turned into fire under the sky of Sierra Leone. All the favours were reserved for a county a hundred miles off, where His Grace had to struggle with a balanced interest. We were basely secure ; and we scandalously paid the penalty of this sub- mission by being shut out from the delights of pestilence, diseased liver, broiling alive, and winter within a stone's throw of the pole. No wonder that we should have wished to see 136 THE squire's tale. this atrocious system of partiality changed, cost what it might. Yet I was determined to disap- point them all ; and no form of language could be more distinct than my steady refusal to assist our young farmers in getting their lives shortened, out of their own country. I looked with an iron eye on the hardships of men earning health, comfort, and character in our obscure community, when they might have been gloriously perishing of arrack, miasma, and every debauchery and disease under the stars, ten thousand miles off. I had even the hardihood to express my belief that nine-tenths of the voters knew no more, and could know no more, of the qualifications of a member of parliament, and cared no more about them, if they did, than the pigs they drove. But let no man be too sure of his resolution. My daughters returned in tears from a ball given by a patrician in our neighbourhood ; my wife returned in sublime indignation. They had come in con- tact with His Grace and the duchess, now awakened to the necessity of a little looking after their own interests. His Grace let fall his stony eye upon THE WOES OF WEALTH. 137 them, and gazed as if he was gazing on the weed under his own lordly feet. But woman has more direct ways of expressing her opinions. The little etiquettes of dancing were forced to give way to the impetuous duchess ; a belle proud as Lucifer, and arrived at that fated time of life when the beauty can be a beauty no longer, and the delights of supremacy must be looked for in some other mode. Arrogance was the one chosen by Her Grace ; and the contrast between her own sullen and swarthy offspring, and the rosy and animated faces of my untitled girls, envenomed the point of the haughty lady's displeasure. A series of petty insults that none but women can construct or feel, made their evening miser- able. Every puppy in attendance on the ducal groupe was commissioned to level his eye-glass at them ; whispers of fashionable scorn passed from ear to ear in discussing their costumes ; their places were usurped in right of the superior rank of the usurpers ; and one of the dilettanti loungers of the circle occupied his leisure in making a pencil- sketch of their quadrille, which he handed round 138 THE squire's tale. amid the unrestrained applause of the tl select circle." " Human nature," as my wife pouted out the story, " could bear it no longer." The mother flamed in her breast, and she at length gave Her Grace a public opinion of her proceedings, in language so little capable of being misunderstood, that the high-born offender reddened deeper than her rouge, and in furious indignation fled the room. My wife marched over the field in triumph ; and then returned to weep and disburden herself of the insult, in the shape of an absolute demand, that " I should shake this insolent set out of the representation." Every animal has his weak side ; and I was here attacked on mine. Five minutes earlier, I could have sworn myself superior to any form of ratioci- nation that ever melted down the purposes of man. I felt myself dipped in the Styx of impenetrability ; but the shaft found me at last. Contempt in my own person I might have answered by contempt ; but not Cyrus the Great, nor any duke in the land, should dare to hurt a hair of the head I loved. THE WOES OF WEALTH. 139 I now wanted no stimulant. All the curtain- lectures that ever worried the marital ear could not have found me more suddenly obedient to my domestic sovereign. In fact, my family, now alarmed by the complete result of their applica- tion, like children startled at letting off their own fireworks, wasted more eloquence to cool than they had done to inflame me. On this occasion I take no credit to myself; I will acknowledge that I behaved like a fool ; for my first performance was a note to the duke, demanding his promptest explanation of the in- sult, which, upon second thoughts, I had found it by no means a matter of ease to define. However, away went the letter, like a bomb, to fall with what havoc it might. For three days I received no answer. As I never was in the militia, I may be allowed to say, without imputation on my soldiership, that those three days were by no means the most soothing of my career. I had, in a fit of rage, done a thing which might, in the twinkling of an eye, involve every one I cared for in misery. If I went the way of all duellists, what was to 140 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. become of those for whom I had run my head into the noose ? My property was still disarranged ; my expenses had hitherto prevented my making any sufficient provision for the females of my house- hold ; and they must be left to the mercy of a spendthrift and giddy boy, already, I had reason to fear, deeply encumbered, and, by his dissipation, worn out as much in health as in purse; while at his death the property must go to a distant line. The innumerable projects of personal and public good which I had long occupied myself in forming, must all be extinguished. Still higher considera- tions, however I laboured to repel them from my mind, pressed upon me ; and, when I thought of the mischiefs that had been done in my case, and in a million of others, by the unhappy facility of putting the mind on paper, I began to think that the prohibition of pen and ink to prisoners was, instead of an act of severity, an act of provident tenderness. It was taking away the claws that the captive, infuriated by his chain, would have used only to tear his own flesh. My shooting His Grace, though I own I should THE WOES OF WEALTH. 141 have had much less compunction in that turn of the catastrophe, yet might be attended with its discomforts too. What right had I to go through the world making widows and orphans, however the one might be as proud as Lucifer, and the other likely to inherit the insolence and impudence of their parentage on both sides ? The connexion, besides, was large, was round me, and must feel itself arrayed in perpetual wroth. I bitterly re- pented of my defiance. However, it was now too late to retract ; and as no apology had made its appearance by the close of the third day, I concluded that war was resolved on, and began to make the due preparations. I took down my pistols, old idlers, that had hung in primeval rust for twenty years over the mantle- piece of my bed-chamber ; gave a long and per- haps a melancholy inspection to their pans and flints ; and, as T snapped them, moralised on the perverted dexterity of man. The night passed slowly away, and I had a full opportunity of enjoying with a critic's eye the exquisite growth of the dawn, from its streak of purple to its sheet of scarlet, with all its other 142 THE squire's tale. beauties. For my eye never closed ; and I have seldom discovered that any man slept better, as dawned the day when he was to be shot at. " And this," soliloquised I, " is the work of my money ! If I had been left as I was, I could have enjoyed every thing about me with as much zest as if I were worth the rental of England. On my five hundred a year I should have gone on like a philosopher, undisturbed by the world ; I should have been suffered to follow my natural tastes, without any man's caring sixpence what I did. Neither long dinners would have tired out my soul, nor late drinkings disturbed my un- derstanding. I should never have been condemned to hear long speeches, nor worse, to make them. I should not have seen my house turned inside out, nor my family turned outside in ; the minds of my sweet girls stuffed with silver la?ne, crepe a la Reine, and satin-stitch; and my dear wife harassed to death with disputes about precedency, or capable of any other ambition than that of having the earliest cucumbers and cream-cheeses in the county. " I should have been neither sheriff nor poli- THE WOES OF WEALTH. 143 tician. I should, too, at this balmy hour, when every bud is spangled with diamonds, more glitter- iug than the five thousand pounds necklace on the brown neck of the haggard Princess of Faux- passki, have been walking bareheaded in the gentle sun, without fear of gunpowder ; filling my frame with the breath of flowers and fruits, and listening to the warble of my larks and black- birds, instead of counting, like a malefactor, the chimes of that funereal village steeple, whose sound makes me sick, and which, before dinner-time this very day, may be ringing out for my finale. And all this comes of having had two old rich beasts of uncles, and being, as every one declares, the most fortunate man alive." The morning lingered on with that wormy length which gives the idea of never making way ; until, in fierce impatience, I sent my " friend" — such are the services of friendship among the wise of our time — to insist on His Grace's presence in the field. My envoy came back at full gallop ; I saw him miles off with an acuteness of vision that might have been envied by Sister Anne on the top of Bluebeard's tower. I received him in private ; he 144 THE squire's tale. put a note into my hand with a look of great displeasure. It was from His Grace, " lamenting that the necessity of immediate attendance on his parliamentary duty must deprive him for the present of the honour I had intended him." His Grace, Her Grace, caricaturists, and coterie, had gone off the evening before. My second ex- pressed the sort of wrath that a sportsman might, who saw a covey wing off before he could bring the gun to his shoulder. I was, on the contrary, never better pleased in the course of my life. The difference of our feelings is perhaps to be ac- counted for by my being principal, and his being; second. THE WOES OF WEALTH. 145 CHAPTER XII. Continued good luck may harden a man, but an accidental turn of the cards in his favour has rather a tendency to soften him. I no sooner found that I was not to be his frigid Grace's exe- cutioner, nor to die by his hand, than my general hostility to the ducal interests thawed away. I repented me of the wife-extorted promise to stand for the county at all risks, and would have been charmed to back out of the honour of representing the lives and fortunes of so many better and hun- grier men than myself. But as I cooled, the domestic privy council, the paramount authority who fulminated their decrees from my lady's boudoir, grew more ardent ; until the virtuous minority, assailed by a new impulse, vol. i. a 146 THE squire's tale. surrendered to a provocation which inflamed both sides of the house alike. My neighbour the sugar-baker, an honest, pudding-headed fellow, who loved a good dinner better than the three estates of the legislature, had the misfortune of being trampled on by as fierce a virago as ever terrified a husband. Early deficiencies of education, which, as our sex- ton, the wit of the parish, said, " destined him for a man of mark" had made Molasses bow his purse- pride before my superior scholarship, of which his idea was unbounded. He was a dunce of the most solid description, with a business worth fifty thou- sand a year, in right of which he had a dozen peers and peeresses at his London table whenever he took the trouble to ask them. Molasses and I had long been on tolerable terms ; but our paradise was about to be invaded by the old temptation, the love of a step upwards, and through the old medium, a woman. The apple for which Molasses endangered the general peace was a baronetcy, and the original thirster after this dangerous fruit was his wife. He hated commotion of any kind, and long de- THE WOES OF WEALTH. 147 clined the honour. But domestic commotion was closer to his feelings than foreign, and the fear of declaring hostilities against me was extinguished in the greater fear of daring to call his soul his own before the sharer of his pillow. The duke was a potential person at Whitehall ; he nominated six conscientious legislators, whom a twirl of his finger could send from one side of the house to the other ; and influenced six more, who had that true political gratitude, " the sense of favours to come." Frigid as he was, he could be warm in a job. His present performances were expeditious, and the same post brought down the patent announcing the sugar-baker to be Sir Mungo for all future ages, and His Grace's " re- commendation" to all and several his agents, and so forth, to return the new baronet as a good man and true for the shire. A whole army of the ladies of the "true-blue" waited instantly on my wife, to represent this new candidateship as the most intolerable act of base- ness, ingratitude, and malice within the memory of man, or woman, which is perhaps not the worst pickle of such things. Lady Molasses, on the 148 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. other hand, in the joy of her new rank, was not slow in giving reality to the imaginary wrong ; and under the direction of my wife, aided by volunteer wrath and wisdom from all the females of her ac- quaintance, to it we went. The election went on in the way of all elections. Both the candidates, pigeons plucked to the last feather that the voters could lay a linger on ; the " independent electors," to a man, contriving how they could make the most of their opportunities ; canvassers and counsel filling their pockets from both sides ; and the free and enlightened mob de- ciding on the virtues and talents of the parties by the quality of our ale. To do Sir Mungo justice, he had the good sense to see where his strength lay ; and by the confession of every footman even under my own roof, his liquor was of the highest order of public principle. But I had some advantages still. His Grace was as obnoxious as any man must be who was richer than three-fourths of the county ; who gave dinners that made the multitude of the squires' ladies hang down their heads in shame ; and who, besides, gave them but once in six THE WOES OF WEALTH. 149 months. A long train of similar insults, not dead, but sleeping, started up in the public memory on the first occasion of revenge. The ladies tasked their gratitude in vain to discover an instance in which His Grace had led off with any one of them at the assize-ball ; the gentlemen had their wrongs on the score of the rigid preservation of hares and pheasants ; and the mob swore wrath against the man from whom neither joy nor sorrow, neither bell-ringing and bonfires, nor fever and famine, could extract a sixpence. The wrath fell reduplicated on the head of Sir Mungo, as at once a safer subject, and offending the pride of the squiredom by taking a flight above their ancient glories, and throwing their tarnished coach paunels into utter eclipse by the glittering honours of the " bloody hand." I too was not idle. Having once been fool enough to entangle myself in this squabble, I determined at least not to lose the victory by my own indolence. This, I admit, was but adding one absurdity to another. But Homer sleeps now and then, and Solomon himself was not always a sage. I gathered up my old acquirements, and became 150 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. a speech-maker. Twenty years — twenty happy years, had flown on wings of eider-down since I had disturbed the echoes with a longer harangue than to bid my frieze-coated garfon light my study candles, or bring my horse. But the bar, if it teach nothing else, teaches us to have no fear nor feeling of the face of man. If the monk's receipt for eloquence was, to con- sider his congregation but so many heads of cabbage; the barrister finds the secret in the profession which enables him to consider, or to make, the heads of cabbage available for his own provision. I treated my hearers on this principle, and spoke with the alternate unction of an attor- ney-general and an ordinary of Newgate. It is no self-flattery to say that I was popular. Mankind, like the lion, never spring upon the prey that keeps a firm face to them. I treated my hearers with easy carelessness, with contemptuous ridicule, with haughty reprobation, with every thing but respect. They swore that I was Pitt and Fox combined. My unfortunate antagonist had not learnt the art of despising, and they trampled on him: I THE WOES OF WEALTH. 151 carried every thing before me. In the very act of drinking his liquor, human fickleness would prevail ; and Sir Mungo often found his fair side all unguarded, while the very bailiffs and tallyman, whose cheeks were purpling with his beeves and beer, jostled my faithful true-blues to get the first hearing of my performances. In all this, I lay no claim whatever to the honours of oratory. The art has died among us ; and died so thoroughly, that, if it ever rise again, a doubtful point, it must rise in a new generation and in another form. The orations that made the walls of parliament ring thirty years ago, to make Europe echo their noble and soul-stirring power, would probably now be as strange to the ear, as the scorn of dishonest power and base tergiver- sation would be startling to the hunters of place on any terms. But no more of this. Oratory is dead and gone, and we have in its place flippancy, feebleness, and sneering. This is the day of party, without the manly objects that once dignified even party. Public life is a game, a political loo, in which every player is for himself; or if he com- bine with another, it is for the purpose of tricking 152 THE squire's tale. a third. Our oratory is worthy of its subjects. The recriminations of broken preferment-hunters and detected conspirators ought to be expressed in the language of their heads and hearts. The dis- appointed ambition of picking the public purse should bewail itself in the eloquence of the jail. The words of an Iscariot must be impressed with the guilt, shuffling, and meanness of an Iscariot's soul. My election went on swimmingly. Majority mounted on the back of majority ; and my mob-escort homewards was daily larger, louder tongued, and thirstier than ever. No physiologist who has not studied the human configuration by the help of the hustings, can have an idea of its capacity for swal- lowing nonsense and every thing else. The un- feathered ostriches who followed me open- throated, to gorge on what they could get, would have bolted the board of aldermen roasted whole, and washed them down in fluid enough to float a seventy-four. But " independence " was not to be satisfied with showing its zeal for the " true cause" in this single and fleshly mode. THE WOES OF WEALTH. 153 There certainly never was such a succession of individual misfortunes in any shire, unvisited by an earthquake or a French invasion. An universal bankruptcy seemed to prevail from the commence- ment of my canvass. Men who were said to be u safe as the bank" suddenly felt the " pressure of the times," and requested " my assistance" for a month or two. Farmers, whose homesteads offered to an inexperienced eye the very picture of yellow fertility ; vigorous yeomen, who laid in their own port, and hunted three days in the week on hundred guinea horses, were absolutely " unable to get on at all" without a " moderate sum," to be repaid with thanks on demand. The peasantry of course shared in the general affliction. Never was there such a mortality of pigs. Sheep were declared to have vanished from their industrious owners no one could tell how ; the dilapidations of gipseys and foxes were active beyond human count ; and in all this calamity, who was to help them but Providence, and the " most liberal landlord, the kindest-hearted gentleman," and the most plunderable candidate that ever scat* tered away his substance for the votes of knaves ? 154 THE squire's tale. CHAPTER XIII. My day of triumph arrived at last ; fortunately for the shire, as it alone could have saved the community from the extraordinary complication of ruin that was thickening on all sides. Three farm-houses had already been burnt to the ground in my sight, and their owners " reduced from comfort to the cruel necessity " of building them again, unless my " well-known bounty " inter- posed. The old women, who could lose nothing else, were losing their health, each in what way it best pleased her, and the universal remedy was, a dozen of my wine. The whole stud of a capital horse-breeder within a furlong of my house walked away one morning spontaneously, and sold themselves at a fair ten miles off, to the " total THE WOES OF WEALTH. 155 destruction of the industrious owner," whom his misfortune had so completely deprived of his senses, that neither he nor his three brothers could vote for the true-blue without "some hope of recovering his ruin." In short I was the grand resource : I mended more joint-stools than any carpenter on record ; held the " spark of life quivering" in more old hags than the county hospital; and embellished the parlours of more worthy families of indepen- dent principles and many daughters with pianos, than ever made musical the rustic breeze before. The election answered all its purposes ; for it fed every body for a mortal fortnight. I made two speeches a day, sometimes ten. It was in the height of the dog-days. I was worn to a skeleton with vexation, bustling, haranguing, and the eter- nal thaw and dissolution of my outward man under a sun that would have startled a slave-trader. To return to my house for an hour together was impossible. Longing to get back, I knew nothing of what was doing there but by scraps of lamentation from my wife, grieving over the waste, the riot, and still worse, the visitations of her 156 THE squire's tale. neighbours, who, to console her in my absence, kindly came in troops and regiments to make her house their home. Among her grievances, too, was onr interesting emigree, who had begun to be so charming that my son was found carrying on a profound flirtation with her ; while, to return the civility, she had introduced two most stupendous beaux to my family ; one of them her brother, a captain in the Blut-und-gutz hussars, and the other her cousin, a major in the Tausend-Teufel tiralleurs. I was in an agony at this part of the intelligence ; but I dared not stir from my post. The close of my labours could not be far off; and an hour's absence might overthrow every thing. Sir Mungo's hopes were at the final gasp ; and I owed it to " my honour, to my family, and above all, to the cause of independence" — such are the reflections of dupery once fairly hampered — to hold the hust- ings to the last, and crush the life out of my ex- hausted antagonist. I accordingly remained ; broiling, sleepless, speech-making, and in a fever of domestic fear, anxiety, and self-reproach from day to day. THE WOES OF WEALTH. 167 At last the decision came ; His Grace was invete- rate, and he had continued dragging up his languid voters at the rate of one an hour. He was wring- ing out his dregs, the vestry-clerk, the sexton, and the watchman ; when the electors who had hitherto hung prudentially neuter, seeing on which side the victory was to turn, suddenly discovered that I was the most fitting representative ever offered to the true friends of true independence, and came pouring on me by patriotic shoals. Sir Mungo at length gave in, threatening, as usual, a petition, in which " he should show that my success was totally fictitious ; that however the votes might seem to be given to me, they were actually intended for him ; and that when the popular delusion was cleared away before a Com- mittee of the House, the election would not be worth the cockades in their caps." The triumphant candidate, however soured he might be by this prospect of a prolonged war, yet of course laughed at the menace, congratulated the fallen sugar-baker on the opportunity now offered to him of " retiring to the peaceful," or, as the sexton maliciously added, " the re- 158 THE squire's tale. fined pursuits in which his genius might be displayed with most honour to himself and advantage to his country ; " congratulated my drunken rioters on " their uniform propriety, decency, decorum, and respect for the laws ;" congratulated my borrowers on " the high sense of political purity, the unadul- terated principle, and the absence of all meaner motives, which had led them from their homes to espouse the cause of an humble individual known to them only by his zeal to relieve the county from an intolerable yoke;" and finally, congratulated " my- self on having been the fortunate instrument to achieve this pre-eminent purpose with such ex- traordinary facility ; without an effort of mind or body, to have subdued a colossal influence, that withered, and crushed, and devoured, and sat like a vulture gnawing the vitals of the county ; to have triumphed over hereditary corruption without an appeal to avarice or appetite ; to have put down party violence without an appeal to tumult ; and as the cheering and brilliant result of the whole, to have secured for the county an imperishable free- dom, and for the humble individual who had the honour of addressing them, the proud conviction THE WOES OF WEALTH. 159 of a success which would gild his days to their last decline, as it made that day the brightest, the proudest, and the happiest, of his existence." Having said all this, I retired to my inn, sent for a physician, and went to bed ; wishing to ex- change with any of the hob-nailed fellows about me, envying the responsibilities of a galley-slave, and tortured alike with mental exhaustion and bodily disease. The doctor found me hurrying into a brain fever, and ordered me, on pain of being a dead man, or a lunatic, to sleep for the next twenty-four hours. But what have "public men" to do with so many minutes' sleep ? I was roused from a dreary attempt at compo- sure by shouts that might have disturbed a metro- polis of watchmen, and was informed that my chairing was about to take place. Refusal was idle. My presence was " essential to the general interests of the empire." I went forth, and was carried in a gew-gaw machine, a sort of Patagonian band-box, on the heads of a troop of patriots, who went, for no other reason that I can discover, but that of being 160 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. much too drunk to stand, and whose going was in as many curves as ever mathematician feigned, or poet drew on the margin of his epic in chase of some elusive rhyme. In the momentary hazard of my neck, I was hurled, thrust, and heaved along on this moving pillory through multitudes " mad as the vext winds," sages full of ale, gin, and public principle, screaming, fighting, howling, and trampling each other with the vigour of re-asserted freedom. Nor was I without the attentions of the defeated party. I was hissed, hooted, visited with oppro- brious names, insulted by gross caricatures of my person and family, held on poles within an inch of my nose ; was pelted, for which the peculiar good- luck of its being market-day afforded the due reinforcement of missiles ; and after thus peram- bulating every suffocating nook and alley of the old, narrow, and stifling town, was tumbled from my triumphal car, in the midst of a general battle, at the door of the grand hotel. My duties were not yet consummated; for I must take the head of the table; round which were assembled my exulting constituents, to the THE WOES OF WEALTH. 161 number of as many hundreds as could force their self-invited presence into the room, to congratulate me on my victory, and " dine." With disease burning in every vein, and an impatience to throw off my task and escape, that absolutely stung and burned me like a dose of aquafortis ; I was forced to sit through a night of bumpers with three-times- three, fox-hunting oratory, and uproarious songs of every species expressible by rural lungs. Our entertainment promised to have sat from that hour until this, but for a general yell, which penetrated through all our festivity. It was a riot of the most furious kind, whose first-fruits were displayed in a shower of stones, that broke every window in the house, and fell with great slaughter among our decanters. To pull down the hotel, to burn every beam of it, and to make an universal broil of the carousers, were among the gentlest of the denunciations heard from the politicians of the street. In an evil hour, and probably a little under that influence which " puts an enemy into our mouths to steal away our brains," I advanced to the balcony to harangue the multitude into peace. 162 THE squire's tale. I might as well have talked to them of the next budget. The half dozen words I spoke were oil itself, but they were oil upon a fire. The roar ascended fiercer than ever ; and as I was standing waving my arms, and making gestures and grimaces of supplication to be listened to, which were at- tended with as much effect as if I implored a con- vocation of white bears, I received a blow of a stone in the forehead, which disqualified me effec- tually for moving the passions for that night. I fell back insensible ; was next morning pro- nounced under the necessity of an operation for a fracture of the osfrontis, and made my triumphal entry into my own demesne, covered with a blan- ket, and carried on a shutter. THE WOES OF WEALTH. 163 CHAPTER XIV. I recovered, either because a man must do so who has more to suffer on earth, or because it is hard to knock out a country gentleman's brains ; and on recognising my family for the first time in a fortnight, I received the intelligence that Sir Mungo had actually kept his word, and that I must fight the battle over again before a committee of the House of Commons. It would have been wisdom to leave him to fight it alone ; but, u I was pledged to the county ;" that was the phrase. I had spent twenty thousand pounds to fatten electors, and supply their establishments with port and pianos ; it was cruel that all this should be thrown away. So said my weeping wife, horrified at the scenes in 164 THE squire's tale. which we had all been plunged, and innocently thinking that to go on was the easiest way to come hack. As to our constituents, the bare idea of my relinquishing the seat threw them into absolute despair. I was a capital prize in the election lot- tery. They were sure of a contest as long as I could be inflamed into folly ; while the triumph of His Grace would close the wheel for half a century to come. I was sick, feeble, hating the sun and air, and mankind, and, above all, its patriotic por- tion. But Sir Mungo had, in the course of the election, played one or two slippery tricks which disgusted me. His Grace, too, at the safe distance of St. Stephens, had thought proper to bully ; and the double irritation determined me to hoist the flag of defiance against the duke and his man together. I kept my resolution ; jumped out of my sick bed ; hurried up to town ; and, at the expense of a fortnight more of the merest misery on earth — by which all its experimentalists will understand that I mean the misery of attending on an election committee — I was at length declared duly re- THE WOES OF WEALTH. 165 turned ; and had to pay for justice but five thou- sand pounds more. Never did man throw himself on his couch with more relief of heart than I, when I returned to my solitary chamber in the Clarendon. "Now," thought I, "my last labour is achieved, and I may return to the quiet life for which all my habits were fitted. I have shown that I am not to be trifled with by any man, let his rank be what it may. I have, 'tis true, some additional share of public duty to perform, but I shall not suffer it to engross the dearer hours that every human being owes to his own happiness and that of his family. Henceforth for my fruits and flowers ; for my violin and my books ; for the day of literature, and the evening of peace ; the pulses of affectionate hearts, and smiles from lips unsullied by the world." I ordered post-horses to be ready half an hour after dinner, and flung myself down to get rid of the intolerable weariness that the day's lingering about Palace-yard had fixed in every bone. I was roused from sleep by a billet from the Treasury ; stating, with the succinctness of office, that as a debate of the very highest importance was to come 166 THE squire's tale. on that night, " the presence of the county mem- bers would confer a particular obligation on His Ma- jesty's Government," &c. But, whatever might be my opinion of my own prowess, I had not yet learned to believe that I could save nations, and I threw the billet into the fire-place. Within the next five minutes another appeal came from the leader of opposition ; professing, at much greater length, his highest respect for the principles of honour and political conduct which had distin- guished my election. He admitted, indeed, that I had not yet " openly declared my intention of joining the phalanx of those virtuous and enlight- ened patriots, of whom he considered himself in every sense the least important ; by whose vigilance alone the country was to be preserved from the fatal results of being governed by a giddy, incapable, and unprincipled faction, with just vigour enough to rush headlong into perpetual error, and sense enough to dupe a credulous and generous people. He felt confident, therefore, that I would not hesitate a moment in the choice between the be- trayers and the preservers of the constitution ; and that the independence which I, by such a powerful THE WOES OF WEALTH. 167 display of ability, and with such triumphant suc- cess, had vindicated on the hustings, I should, on that night, be prepared to lead to victory over a mere perishing faction, which required nothing but exposure by men of intelligence and intrepidity to be instantly undone." This dilemma was brought upon me by my attempting the exploded practice of keeping my vote free. I returned a similar answer to both notes; and that "sudden and severe indisposition' 1 which so often sends a hesitating statesman to his pillow in the height of health, served me, and not altogether without truth, for my escape from the statesman-like necessity of declaring " my opinion" before I had made up my mind. The post-chaise was at the door. I had cava- lierly left both parties to fight for their country, and for what they could pick up in the contest, and was placing my foot upon the step, when I was surrounded by a posse of my constituents just arrived with a whole packet of turnpike bills, . county presentments, and a demand to be heard by counsel against a bill for a new bridge. I protested against the interruption ; but no 168 THE squire's tale. protester, even among the peerage, ever made his protest to less purpose. Every soul present was ready to swear that his whole earthly existence depended on my appearing in defence of the " rights of gentlemen who must be utterly ruined" by the success of the obnoxious measures. Rea- soning was out of the question with those despe- rate supplicants. I was literally forced back to my apartment, from which, after a three hours' effort to understand grievances as many and various as there were tongues among them, I was finally conveyed, to make all sure, by the deputa- tion to the door of the House ; where my entrance excited equal surprise and suspicion on both sides, and where I was involved in a long squabble with the equally violent partizans of the bridge, &c. I returned me to my bed at exactly four o'clock of the following morning. When it was once found that I could do business, I was not left without business enough to do. One paltry interest or other crowded on me. With each applicant, his own concerns were worthy to stir heaven and earth ; and I at length saw no better resource than taking the evil at its THE WOES OF WEALTH. 169 height, giving myself up wholly and solely to the accumulation of petty trouble, working my way through it at once, and then quietly with- drawing from the bustle of the session to my house, if not giving up the seat altogether. O rus, quando te aspiciam ! was my hourly sigh. Horace, choked by the heat and deafened by the roar of Rome, never longed for the pleasant oblivion, the slumber, and untroubled hours of his Sabine farm, with keener pinings. But chain upon chain bound me to the oar. The drudgery of committees during the morning, followed by a levee of solicitors, barristers, and country complainants, and this again followed by a debate that never closed till sunrise, were among the rewards of my patriotism. Ill news, too, came from home. The interesting emigrte was growing insolent on the strength of her charms ; and my wife was growing miserable at the perpetual hints of the neighbourhood that this showy demoiselle was already privately married to my prodigal. The attentions of the two superbly moustached relatives of this new orna- ment to our line were becoming palpable, and VOL. I. H 170 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. my daughters, who had already learned to waltz with them, were the venomed subject of every tea-table. I sent an instant order for the demoi- selle to be turned out of the house, the two chevaliers to be kicked after her, and my wife and daughters to come up to town without delay. In two days they were upon the road ; amidst the general wonder of the spinsterhood, who of course propagated their opinions with the freedom of a land of liberty, and decided that so sudden a move " augured ruin of some kind or other," an augury which they were content to divide between my estates and the matrimonial prospects of my daughters. In impatience to meet the only beings for whom I could have a care, I rode a few miles out of town on the evening of their coming, and felt a parent's throb of heart, as, standing upon the summit of a hill from which the prospect spread extensively, I saw a travelling carriage, some miles off, twinkling along in the sunshine like a gilded plaything. 1 galloped down to meet it. The meeting soon came. The carriage was mine, and I saw in it — my recreant son side by side with THE WOES OF WEALTH. 171 my recreant governess. They were in high good- humour, and had no eyes for the luckless father, who would have as soon seen a son of his bound to New South Wales for life. But this was my legacy. Had I remained the obscure denizen of a village, what French woman under heaven would have taken the trouble of encumbering herself with a husband who had never smoked a cigar in a Parisian cafe ? They whirled along. I had no heart to stop them. While I was pondering on the ill stars that continually dropped their influence on me, the true travellers of whom I was in search came up, and I felt, folded in their arms, that I yet had happiness in store. But here dropped the influence still. At our lingering supper I heard of nothing but persecutions endured in all shapes from every human being who feared, hated, or envied, which included the whole population of their " bosom friends ;" and, in addition, from the captain and major, who, after soliciting my girls to elope, made formal proposals, and, on rejection, severally declared that they must have an inter- view for the purpose of shooting themselves in 172 THE squire's tale. the presence of their " too lovely, but too cruel," fair ones. The threat of those adorers had the full effect of terrifying my females ; and, in mingled indigna- tion and alarm, they implored me to set, sell, or lay waste, if I liked, every acre belonging to me in this intolerable county, and for life bury my- self and them in the smoky security of London. I gave way to their nervousness ; before a week was out, sold my house for half its value, pur- chased a London mansion for twice as much as it was worth, and, at fifty-five, began the world again. But here a new difficulty arose. I had outrun my income ; and my town establishment gave every prospect of helping me to outrun it still more. My agent's letters were ominous. I owed large sums as it was ; and to live in the circle into which I had been forced would leave me a beggar. I now accomplished the only fortunate feat of my life. I settled my mode of retrenchment on the spot ; sold a third of my estates to clear the remainder ; and, notwithstanding some dejected looks at home, prohibited two routs and a fanc} r -ball in embryo. THE WOES OF WEALTH. 173 From that moment my ill-luck grew weary of ha- rassing me. Like a man dying of plethora, every operation on my superfluity was a step to health. A week had not passed before I received a re- pentant letter from my son, deeply regretting the folly by which he had been beguiled into marriage with a frivolous and heartless woman, who, on hearing of my diminution of property happily exaggerated into my utter ruin, upbraided him with bringing her into poverty, and ran off, carry- ing with her every shilling of which he was master. But the captain and major were still to be dis- posed of; and a note from a correspondent, whose name defied my keenest powers of decyphering, informed me that they had arrived in town, fiercely determined on carrying the heiresses by storm. I took my measures here, too ; for, without going to the formality of complaining to magistrates and feeing bailiffs — means which would have been beneath the dignity of heroes — I treated them in the military way ; I bought a blunderbuss. 174 THE squire's tale. CHAPTER XV. Among my early habits, I bad indulged an idle fondness for the drama, wbicb extended itself to the whole disastrous race that strut and struggle their' hour upon the rustic stage. The strollers that murdered sleep in our village ranged them- selves by instinct under my protection. My barn was at their service when their worships the ma- gistrates, in the pride of office, refused their license for the legitimate and very crazy theatre. My purse sometimes assisted kings and queens against calamities more serious than the fall of thrones ; and moderate as my table was, it had a cover now and then for the more decorous among those sons and daughters of the wheel of fortune. To do them justice, I had never found reason to THE WOES OF WEALTH. 175 regret this trivial hospitality. Their return, if not in kind, was in what I liked better, in good-will. I was amused by their pleasantry ; my wine brought out their anecdote ; and even from the wild whim and strange adventure of their life of chance, I perhaps derived lessons well worth all I ga\e for them. As I was sitting alone a few days after the receipt of the mysterious billet, and in the act of studying it for the twentieth time, my valet an- nounced a stranger who was pressingly anxious to "see me for but one moment." Some "new in- vention of the enemy" was my first thought; which was by no means cleared up by the entrance of a figure dressed in the extreme of faded fashion, with a tinge of rouge still upon a hollow cheek, and an air something between the dash of a rake, and the conscious elegance of a dancing- master. " I presume you must recollect me, Sir," said he, advancing three stage-steps, and then poising himself on a pointed toe. " Not in the least," was my answer. " Very extraordinary ! ' 'raze out the written 176 THE squire's tale. traces of the brain !' Not recollect my name! Al- phonso Mortimer !" " I am as much in the dark as ever, Mr. Mor- timer." "Why, Sir, the thing is possible; for, as the divine Shakspeare says, if a man would be re- membered six months after his death, he must build churches; and as none of my money ever went in that direction, " But in whatever direction his purse might have gone, that of his eye was obvious enough : a bottle of claret was the talisman that fixed it, and stopped the speaker with a short episodical cough and an application of his hand to his throat, the true professional expression of extreme huskiness. Those signs would have told me the stroller, if I had met him in any part of the world's circumfe- rence : my old propensities warmed to him, and I filled Mr. Mortimer a bumper. He swallowed the wine with the air of a con- noisseur, and in return for my civility, proposed that he should have the honour of drinking ray health, which he did in a second bumper. u Now, Mr. Mortimer," said I, " indulge me by mentioning your business with me." THE WOES OP WEALTH. 177 "Business! my dear Sir," said he, with a look of impudent drollery, "over such a glass of wine ; ■ throw physic to the dogs.' This is nectar. The bouquet is enough to perfume a whole thea- tre, through oil, orange-peel, bumpkins, and all. Ton my life, they may talk of champagne, but for the true enjoyment of the thing, the sober cer- tainty of waking bliss, I say a bottle of cool claret against the Prince Regent's cellar. Vive Carbo- nel ! Let me have the honour to propose a toast — a lady — your own excellent lady, one of the finest women that ever graced a benefit night! 'pon my honour." Execution followed the word ; the bumper was filled, and despatched in an instant. " But is it possible, my dear baronet?" said he, drawing his chair nearer the fire, and filling his glass, to be ready for another act of gallantry. " 1 can scarcely bring myself to conceive that you can have forgot my performance. My name, I admit, may go for nothing. In fact, I have had three within our last circuit. It gives an eclat — a brilliant novelty, a je ne scais qnoi, to an actor. Your Augustus Belville, or Charles Caversham 178 THE squire's tale. Castleton, or any of your high-sounding, lady- catching, romantic appendages have a prodigious effect placarded in letters a foot and a half long on a village wail. 1 have known the same actor hissed under the honest but iuinous appellative of Williams or Wilkins, and hissed by an audience of a dozen ploughmen, with the sexton's and schoolmaster's wives for side-box company, who, in the next town, under the sonorous name of Montague Mandeville, " from the Theatre Royal Covent Garden, engaged for three nights only," drew ten-pound houses, and was honoured with three rounds of applause at his first bow. But you don't drink. And I take shame to myself for having omitted a toast incumbent on every man who has had the honour of seeing so much grace, beauty, and accomplishment — T mean the health and happiness of your two lovely daughters." He honoured the toast without delay. I did not altogether relish this familiarity, and he probably saw my opinion in my counte- nance. " If I have taken too great a liberty on this occasion," said the stroller, " I must find my THE WOES OF WEALTH. 179 excuse in the spontaneous and irresistible effusion of a gratitude inwoven in my nature, ' still pay- ing-, still to owe ;' a feeling that in me, once touched, disdains a limit. And it was on account of those two very lonely young ladies that I have now waited on you." I was fully alive on the subject, and expressed my impatience to hear what he had to say, as soon as possible. " The matter is of the most interesting nature, indeed, my dear baronet ; but, the bottle stands with you. Yet I cannot suffer you to drink such a toast out of the bottom ; suffer me to ring for another — a magnum, if you like. As to my name, Shakspeare, with all his supreme know- ledge of every thing, is certainly wrong for once. '■ What's in a name ? a rose by any other name,' and so forth. Now, I say, that there is a prodigious deal in a name. Look through the world. But I beg a thousand pardons — I have not drunk your public health yet. Here's to the representative of our county, a man that ' dares be honest in the worst of times.' 'Pon my life your cellar improves prodi- giously. This bottle puts the other quite out of 180 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. countenance; the coolness more delicious, the flavour more delicate. When I lay in my next stock, I shall make Chambertin the heaviest ar- ticle in my wine-merchant's bill. Long corks and long credit is my maxim." He drank, and became the orator of appel- latives again. " As to name, why every thing in life is done by a name. ■ What is friendship but a name V says your poet. ' What is virtue but a name V says your philosopher. What is my Lord X's rentroll but a name ? What is his gambling grace of Z's honour but a name ? or what is the principle, public or private, of half mankind but a name I Shakspeare, immortal as he was, was unquestion- ably wrong. But can you have forgot my Ham- let ? my Fag in the Rivals, and my Scrub ? I played them all on the same night, in the same barn, and in the same presence that I have now the honour to enjoy. Versatility is the life, the soul and body, the triumph of genius ; and may this claret, that flames and sparkles in its crystal bounds, as Coous says, be the last that, as Anthony says, ' doth tame the fever of my amo- THE WOES OF WEALTH. 181 rous lip ;' but I will acknowledge that, leaving the rant, the vociferation, the struggle in the throat, and the convulsion in the limbs, to the Charlatans of Melpomene, I on that night ex- hibited a variety of talent that ought to have secured an engagement for life, with an increas- ing salary, on the metropolitan boards. But, no matter — hang care, say I. This bottle's the sun of our table; and here I must take the liberty of drinking a sentiment — ' However shorn of its beams the sun of our fortune may be, may the sun of our table never set !' " He drank to the sentiment most cordially. " Or," said he, pouring the last drop of his luminary into his glass, "as the toast is not altogether new, or, as the immortal author, says Sheridan, and I thought of the same thing, only that he thought of it first, I shall give it to you in an improved form. Let us call it the moon of our table ; and here's ' May our moon al- ways be at the full !' But I beg innumerable pardons — I have finished the bottle, and have not left you a drop. Let me amend my error." He rang the bell, and stirred the fire; and with 182 THE SQUIRE'S tale. our third bottle before us, he at length let me into the object of his mission. It was to announce the serious intelligence that my daughters were to be carried off, on their return from the Opera that night, by the captain and major ; who, being nearer the scene of action than the fair emigree, had discovered that I was not yet ruined enough to make my alliance unde- sirable. They were now in a coffee-house in the Haymarket, with their post-chaises in waiting. The prizes were to be accosted and separated from their party in the " crush-room," handed down stairs by the two heroes, and then, bon gre mal gre, hurried to Gretna. The affair was now not for me, but for public justice. I sent for a couple of police officers, and with my village Hamlet went straight to the ren- dezvous. The two adventurers were pointed out to me in an inner room, discussing a flask of champagne. Time had begun to hang as heavy with their impatience as with mine. They looked perpetually at their diamond-set watches ; lounged in their superb mantles ; and arranged their enor- THE WOES OF WEALTH. 183 mous moustaches in the mirror. I would have pounced upon them at the instant ; but my guide insisted on my delaying the caption, or, as he called it, " the catastrophe," until the warrants, for which one of our policemen was dispatched, had arrived. 184 THE squire's tale. CHAPTER XVI. As I paced the coffee-room, casting many a glance through the glass door at my culprits within, I could not help the exclamation, " Was it such baboonery of visage that charmed the tastes of my countrywomen at the present day? Was it in a head piled with a mane worthy of a buffalo, and lips that resembled nothing but a tiger-cat's, to captivate the fancy of any woman above the sensibilities of an Esquimaux ?" Some of my soliloquy, rather louder than I had intended, caught my new friend's ear ; and with his usual ease, he gave me the benefit of his own concep- tions. " You may rely upon it, baronet, that the world are apt to make considerable mistakes in the THE WOES OF WEALTH. 185 character of the lovely sex ; and one of those is their timidity. I pass by the innumerable instances in which they daily exhibit a courage that throws ours into total eclipse. When a woman takes it into her head to defy public opinion, she faces the fight with the boldness of a Bucephalus. But in the matter of the human animal, you may rely on it, that the more frightful the object is, the more it charms the heroism of the sex. Take the mous- taches off those two fellows, and not a woman within the bills of mortality would waste a glance on them. Send them as they are into any fete in London, and they instantly extinguish every man vulgar enough to shave. A wig and a waltz would dance them into the hearts of the whole female peerage. Their strength is, like Samson's, in the hair ; and the standard of perfection is divided between a Jew boxer and an Italian bravo. The blacker the skin, and the thicker the beard, you may rely on it, the more captivating the lover. If to those are added a countenance between Spadaccino and Sbirro, between the assassin and the spy, with corresponding manners, the fortunate possessor may lay his commands upon any heiress, 186 THE squire's tale. from Tweed to Thame, to follow him through the circumnavigation of the globe." I was forced to confess that I was pretty much of his opinion ; but my experience had been limited ; and, except in the instance of an occasional booby who brought back his chin to our county as an evi- dence of a fortnight in Boulogne ; or some St. James's aide-de-camp, who only served to frighten the farmer's teams, I had seldom seen the rabbinical ornament among people calling themselves Chris- tians. " My facts," said he, " are indubitable. I speak from an experience of twenty years, and a hundred and sixty degrees of latitude and longi- tude. Let one instance answer for all, " In a ramble to the continent during the peace, I took up my quarters in Dresden. The Germans are a prettily moustached army ; and some of their cavalry are really well accoutred under the nose. They throve accordingly. The unfortunate civilians were found guilty of using the razor ; and not a woman would look at a civilian while an infantry officer was to be found ; nor at an infantry officer while their superiors on the lip and THE WOES OF WEALTH. l v 7 chin were discoverable among the horse. But this triumph was not long-. A barouche full of Frea aides-de-camp came to visit the wonders of this city of shows, and. I believe, to ma-. reconnoissances which might be convenient in the next invasion. The Frenchman knows the world too well, not to know how much of it depends upon the ladies ; and knows too much of the ladle | . : . . : ; . take the most invincible way to their hear:- aides-de-camp came moustached to the m tivating degree ; and, as Frenchmen a: and improvers for Europe in cookery, complexions, and hair-cutting, they brou_ ministers and grandees, the last candeaux ; won the services of the beaux by a new dve, which turned the German's yellow ar; true gypsey hue; and vanquished i\. masse, by the new chin-tuft a Fimpiriaie. - This triumph had its week, and but its week. At the end of seven days, in rolled half a dozen kibitkas, full of Russians ch la gar J-.. They could not equal the elegance of the Frenchmen. and the;. made no pretension of the kind; but thev wore beards down to the middle, and 188 THE squire's tale. their claims were instantly acknowledged. The Frenchmen walked up and down the ball-rooms partnerless, until the Scythians were served : as to the German milit aires, not a female soul acknow- ledged their existence. But what is human glory, when it depends on the constancy of the fair ? The Russians were whirling away among the elite of the Dresden Venuses, when a pulk of cossacks passed a night or two within the walls on their return to Siberia. They were Bashkirs, and the perfection of barbarism ; the choicest speci- mens of savagery that could be gathered from the Volga to the Yellow Sea. They might have said to the bear, thou art my brother ; and to the hippo- potamus, thou art my sister. What was the result ? I swear it in the presence of the chaste stars, the six officers of the pulk no sooner ap- peared at the ridotto, than they distanced German, French, and Russian altogether; scattered their grim smiles with universal captivation ; and when the barbarians marched through the gates, car- ried off in matrimonial chains the six handsomest and richest dames of the famous and fastidious capital of Saxony. THE WOES OF WEALTH. 189 " The only cause that T could ever discover for this success was, that the ■ bearded pard and Hyrcan tiger' were smooth to them ; and nothing but the nicest inspection could distinguish the front from the back of their heads. It was the general barbarism of brow, beard, and whisker, that overwhelmed the hopes of the rivals and the hearts of the belles." " But having enlightened me on so many sub- jects," said I, " enlighten me on one more. What has induced you to take so much trouble about my affairs?" " One reason at a time may actuate inferior mortals," was the reply; " but I have had three. In the first place, a liking for adventure ; in the next, a desire to punish a pair of rogues ; and in the third, a hope to return an obligation to a be- nefactor. You had a fondness for the drama that did honour to your taste. You resisted the persuasions of silly friends, the insolence of office, and the pride of wealth, that would have bid you abandon us. Besides, though you have forgotten my Hamlet, and even my Scrub, I have not for- gotten that the first and last five pound note that I 190 THE SQUIRE'S TALE. have touched these five years, ' dear as the light that visits these sad eyes/ the highest testimonial of the public feeling that ever honoured my theatric powers, came on that night from your purse for my stage-box. I bound myself by a vow, * solemn and deep as triple-guarded Styx,' to return the favour on the first opportunity. It arrived. I yesterday threw up my engagement with as pretty a company as ever had a blanket for a drop-scene, or divided five shillings a week ; and have, since daylight, walked forty miles to perform in a new part, without a rehearsal, and in which, as I said on my benefit night, The hope that cheers my spirit, while it awes, Is the high favour of your kind applause. But lo ! the officer ! — What news from the Rialto ? Hear it not, Duncan." The policeman produced his credentials, and we entered the room ; where sat the two heroes yawning at the tardiness of time, as widely as if they were marquisses. The eclaircissement was brief ; the astonishment of the parties excessive ; and their broken-English protestations of inno- THE WOES OF WEALTH. 191 cence and insult, were in the highest style of the moustache. I, however, proceeded to action ; and having ordered them to give up their pistols, gave their persons also into the hands of the police, and then demanded, under what pretence they had dared to carry on so atrocious a design. They talked like field -marshals, threatened im- placable vengeance, and demanded my card. I looked round for my guide, my proof, my man of evidence ; but Hamlet was vanished ; and the awkward idea flashed across my mind, that the stroller had been involving me in a scrape, which was of course to end in extracting money for the assault. Even the experienced ministers of cap- tion seemed at fault. The courage of the captives naturally became tremendous. After denuncia- tions of law and damages enough to ruin my trea- sury, they were striding contemptuously to the door. But at the moment when the scales of justice hung trembling between us, a loud laugh announced the stroller. He walked from behind a curtain, and with a low bow to one of the cap- tives, begged that he would honour him and the 192 THE squire's tale. company with a song. He was answered by a burst of indignation. " Prodigiously well played," said the stroller, surveying him with a critical eye. " Attitude good, emphasis correct, countenance eti costume ; voice a little in alt, but the whole much above par. Ah, you rascal, if you had played your Filch to my Macheath in that style on the night of my benefit, you would not have been hissed so mercilessly. But come, be honest for once. Officer, take off my friend's moustaches. I hate hypocrisy. If he is a rogue, at least let him be a barefaced one." Hamlet laughed loudly at the conceit ; the policeman obeyed the mandate; and the Blut-und- gutz hussar stood before me a smooth-lipped knave of an Englishman. " Now," said the stroller, turning to me, " if the stupid managers of the London houses had any sense, would I be left long without an en- gagement ? Here's a subject for farce, opera, and melodrame ; enough to work through a whole season. What can be more absurd than to be import- ing actors and plays by the hundred-weight from THE WOES OF WEALTH. 193 Paris, when native talent, versus native roguery, can produce scenes like this I Here's matter for fifty melodrames. But, to let you behind the scenes, the whole affair, or, as we call it, the programme, is as follows. The captain and the major are my particular acquaintance, both of the same corps, and that corps served under my orders within the last six months. The captain played farce, lit the lamps, and posted the bills ; the major played tragedy, made pantaloons, and dressed perukes. Both were clever in their way. But I was forced to drum them both out of my regi- ment ; the captain, for want of distinguishing between his neighbour's finances and his own ; and the major, for having the impudence to marry against my commands a little French milliner, whom I had imported to play soubrettes, and who, being thereupon discharged, is now, I understand, play- ing the orphaned and interesting emigree in some gentleman's family." My heart leaped at the intelligence. A few words more satisfied me of the identity of the soubrette player with my governess. My son's unfortunate marriage was void. The detected heroes made no vol. I. I 194 THE squire's tale. further pretence to their commissions ; and com- pelling them to sign a full acknowledgment of their plan, to be held up in terrorem to all country ladies enamoured of the moustache, I saw them both turned into the street ; and then driving to the Opera-house, escorted my trembling daughters in triumph home. But London life was still as irksome as ever, and before I laid my head on my pillow, one of my vows was to break loose from it, and even to take a temporary leave of England as soon as pos- sible. Again I was to have the proof that neither good nor ill luck comes alone. I had but just franked my letter to my son informing him that he was a husband iio more, when my eye was caught by the sight of a string of post-chaises rolling away from a hotel opposite, much favoured by members from the sister country. As I walked down to the House, the same symptoms of rapid movement were discoverable in all directions. The world seemed taking wing. Before I was half way down St. James's Street, I was bowed to out of twenty vehicles rattling along at full speed. A THE WOES OF WEALTH. 195 crowd in Pall Mall, round the door of a club- house, were roaring with laughter at a whole bat- talion of bailiffs, who stood in double lines, eyeing* every man that came out, as the fox would eye an escaping pullet. As each forthcomer presented himself ready for travel, and successively drove off, the wrath of the sheriff's officers could be equalled only by the boisterous merriment of the populace. But among the mingled stories of the mob I was still in the dark. My joy was to break on me all at once. I reached St. Stephen's ; the first look at the House let me into the secret. The English members were few ; there was a little group eft Scotch members close at the premier's ear; I missed my gay friends from the sister country. They were flown to a man. In five minutes after the speaker had taken the chair, the premier in- formed the House that, for reasons essential to the public good, by which he certainly meant some- thing different from the fall of his own administra- tion, "it had pleased His Majesty that this par- liament should be then and there dissolved." I was now a free man. No debt-loaded repre- 196 THE squire's tale. sentative within five minutes of the loss of privi- lege ever hurried over the pavement of London with more eagerness than I, to carry back the glad tidings to my household. No disappointed statesman ever made more ardent protestations against the folly of wasting life in being the slave of trifles and triflers ; no ex-member ever abjured late debates, speaker's dinners, levees to hear the speech read, and the eternal troubles of country corre- spondence, with sterner resolution. No more franking ; no more frivolity ; no more midnight squabbling ; no more turnpike wars ; 1 was free. Yet, what is the resolution of man after all ? Within a week I began to miss the occupation of the evening. The waiters at the club applied to me no more for the " favour of my cover," and I involuntarily felt even this. The dinner-cards of the high officials no longer came pouring in ; and though I hated the routine of those tiresome per- formances, yet I was not pleased at thus dropping out of society. I felt a general diminution of homage. I was losing caste. My wife and daughters were reduced to a regimen of three routs a week. A note from the country, stating THE WOES OF WEALTH. 197 that Molasses was secretly canvassing-, roused me to my mettle. I received a long letter from my constituents, summoning me to the patriot duty of again "rescuing the county from a domineering faction, and of securing its independence upon a free, firm, and constitutional basis," &c. &c. I wrote an according answer, corrected, copied, re-read my manifesto, caught an accidental glimpse of my grey hairs in the glass, smiled at the weakness of man, and threw my work into the fire. I was once more a philosopher. With the last spark that quivered along my blackened paper, out went my ambition. But no man is wise in lingering near the scene of temptation. I ordered a general movement; and in one month we were looking down from the Jura on the purple hills and silver waters of Switzerland. THE WALLACHIAN'S TALE. HEBE. THE WALLACHIAN. The storm had extended over the whole range of the St. Bernard, and intelligence rapidly came in of the loss of cattle and peasantry in the innu- merable ravines. Those calamities are of regular recurrence, for nothing will make the peasant in any country aware that what has happened to others may happen to himself; and the Swiss mountaineer habitually answers to all suggestions on the subject, that he has not lost his life yet ; an argument, which allows of no appeal until the evil arrives, and the appeal may be made to the winds. But the Alpine storm actually generates a special and most hazardous exposure, from the circum- stance that the smugglers then pass more un- molested by the guardians of the customs, and that 202 THE WALLACHIAN. their cargoes command an additional value from the perils of the transit. Winter, and summers turned into winter, are thus the strong temptation of the smuggler, and every storm leaves melan- choly examples of the waste of human life for the earlier supply of necklaces and cigars to the sunny idlers of the plains. Some unfortunate beings had been already brought into the convent from the Swiss side ; but the rumour that a troop of pilgrims returning from Italy were surprised in the tempest, roused all our sympathies, and every guest in the convent talked of volunteering to assist the monks, who were much worn out by their incessant exertions. Among the most zealous was a fine-looking foreigner, whom I should have taken for a Greek, from his quick eye and statue-like physiognomy ; but who, on my making a passing observation of the kind, told me smilingly that he had no preten- sions to so classic a descent, and that the further he traced back, the nearer he came to the Hun. He was a Wallachian colonel of cavalry, and was now on a diplomatic mission from his court to France, having come by Greece and Naples ; of THE WALLACHIAN. 203 both which his knowledge was intimate, close, and curious in a high degree. But the tidings of the pilgrims put an end to every topic but that of their rescue ; and at the head of a party of which I made one, the colonel sallied forth to the spot of ruin. Our assistance was well meant, and it had perhaps the effect of encouraging the regular discoverers; but it was too awkward to be of much use. The monks and attendants, however, with their experienced eyes and their long poles did good service ; and the litters and other conveyances were loaded with sufferers luckily so soon rescued from their cold bed, that I believe the whole number, from twenty to thirty, recovered. Evening was lowering fiercely upon our work, and we had all begun to think of the comfortable fire and table of the convent. The word was given to march, and shouldering our poles, we moved through the snow-drifts, in a phalanx of what might have been imagined by the Alpine traveller into a troop of very sufficient levyers of unlicensed contributions. While I was indulging myself in some such 204 THE WALLACHIAN, vision through the sleet that fell in sharp and thick whirls round our troop, I was warned against the unsuitableness of the employment by slipping from the narrow ridge of the mountain road into a gully at its side. I was instantly plunged up to the teeth, and should have probably gone a much more formidable depth, but for my pole's falling across the chasm, and in some degree breaking my descent. All hands were, however, summoned, and I was set on terra firma again. But in the struggle to extricate myself, my feet had touched something that I conceived to be a human body. The guides had no inclination to brave the night, and advised our hastening homeward ; but my gallant Walla- chian thought with me, and he declared his deter- mination to explore the deposit of the snow. A beginning was made by my pole, and my first trophy was a furred shoe. There was now no hesitation on the part of any one, and after an hour's digging, we happily succeeded in bringing from the bottom of the drift a young Italian pea- sant with a child in her arms. She seemed to be totally dead, but the infant was alive, and had been THE WALLACHIAN. 205 so carefully wrapped round, that the mother must have exposed herself for the preservation of her babe. The circumstance naturally interested us all, and perhaps the colonel and myself peculiarly, from our peculiar share in the discovery. We remained in the convent hospital during the night, suggesting new expedients of restoration as the old failed, and at length had the happiness of seeing life rekindle. The peasant's story was as we had conjectured : she was on her way to a chapel on the borders of the lake of Lucerne when the storm came on. After struggling from shelter to shelter in crossing the mountain, she had sat down in despair by the precipice, and conceiv- ing her own death inevitable, unhesitatingly has- tened its chance by stripping herself of the chief part of her clothing to preserve warmth in her child. I observed this to the Wallachian as the strong instinct of maternity. "No," said he, " it is the strong affection of woman's nature. I have known hazards and trials that would have shaken the vigour of many a man, endured and overcome by a 206 THE WALLACHIAN. tender girl of eighteen, timid as a fawn, and used to the enjoyments of a life of elegance." " Yes," said I, " woman will feel nothing too desperate for love." '* No," said he, gravely : " love was out of the question ; the wonder was wrought by gratitude." I ordered supper, trimmed our fire, and he gave me the illustration. THE VALLACHIAX'S TALE. HEBE. CHAPTER I. There is no lovelier portion of Europe than the slope of the Carpathian mountains looking to Wal- lachia. An undulating belt of country thirty miles broad, and reaching from the Pruth to the Danube, is covered with vineyards and orchards in the full luxuriance of a climate, whose summer sun shines with the fire of the East on a soil watered by innumerable streams. As the country rises, the scenery becomes mag- nificent. Immense obelisks and piles of every coloured marble start up among the forests ; per- petual cascades thunder from inaccessible heights ; 208 THE wallachian's tale. glittering pinnacles, wild caverns, and precipices steep as a wall, and sheeted with forest flowers and shrubs of singular fragrance and richness of colour, remind the traveller of Switzerland, but of Switzerland under an almost oriental sky. The Wallachian noble, however, sees but little of this fine country, and in general prefers paying his court to the Hospodar in Bucharest ; where, in the midst of alternate dust and mire, he idles away life between sleep, cards, and the formal visiting and dull assemblies of his brother boyars. But there are, in all countries and classes, a few left to show what the rest might have been, and vindicate the original capacities of the people. Some of the boyars, either taught by foreign travel, disgusted with the submissions required at their court, or impelled by a nobler nature, have fixed themselves among their mountains, and exhibited the purity, manliness, and intelligence of a life unstained by the corruption of the capital. One of those recluses was the boyar Gregorio Cantacuzene, a generous and accomplished noble, who, after long service in the Hungarian cavalry, had turned his lance into a ploughshare, and his HEBE. 209 sabre into a reaping-hook, and come to settle him- self at the foot of a proud peak, from which lay beneath him an horizon like an ocean of verdure. His rank was high, his fortune was large, and his palpable superiority to his order made him im- portant in the eyes of the successive Hospodars, a race of sovereigns, who, as the native proverb says, N are crowned with a curse, and rewarded with its completion." But he had seen the thrones of Eu- rope, and he disdained to connect himself with men purchasing power like slaves, to surrender it like criminals, and perpetually either meditat ; ng feeble rebellion, or bending their necks to the bow- string. He suffered the honours and intrigues of Bu- charest equally to pass by him ; cultivated his grounds, protected his peasantry, and relaxed his hours with literature ; the performance of a fine orchestra, which he had raised among the children of an orphan school founded on his estate ; and even with classic hopes and dreams on that great disturbing event which was vet to take vears before it ripened into the Greek insurrection. 210 THE WALLACHIAN'S TALE. Symptoms of this turn of his thoughts might have been discovered in his whole conduct. Since the day of his retirement from the Austrian ser- vice, a word of German never escaped his lips, and as little of the mingled Latin and Slavonic that makes the common language of his country. The Turkish, though on every side, no menial dared to utter in his presence. He spoke Greek alone, in that dialect which is to be still found among the Wallachians, and whose purity more closely ap- proaches the Hellenic than any other remaining. He wore neither the Osmanlee robes of his bro- ther boyars, nor even the native costume; the caftan and the calpac were alike rejected. He wore the dress of the ancient Greek. Herodotus, the vivid narrative of Xenophon, and the clear and forcible details of Thucydides, were his historic models. His poets were Homer, iEschylus, and Rhiga. The two great fathers of the epic and the drama he placed at the summit of human genius ; he worshipped them throned on the twin peaks of Parnassus ; but his scarcely deeper devotion was kindled by the alternate melancholy HEBE. 211 and power, the fiery indignation, and more than sepulchral sorrow, of the great and unfortunate patriot of his own day. When on service at Vienna, he had accidentally met Rhiga, and was struck with the genius and eloquence of that extraordinary man. The meet- ing gave a sudden turn to his life. The dissipa- tions of the court, all open to the young and animated soldier, lost their interest at once ; he broke up all those pursuits to which his fortune and rank might have tempted him ; he became a student of the nobler arts of life ; and looked with equal disdain upon the brilliant frivolity in which the Viennese nobles trifle away existence, and the heavy and mindless self-indulgence in which the Wallachian dreams down to the grave. The determination to do something for which his name would yet be remembered, or to raise his country from the humiliation in which she lay before the eyes of Europe, and awake her to a knowledge of her own resources of nature and of mind, became the reigning passion of his soul. But to pursue those objects in the giddy routine of the court was impossible. He had lost his 212 THE wallachian's tale. wife a few years before ; his only son had been sent from Vienna to be reared in the mountain air of his estate ; and thus, with the world before him, he dissolved his last remaining tie to Austria by resigning his colonelcy of the guard ; and before the talkers of the capital had ceased to wonder and doubt, Cantacuzene was on his travels through Europe. After three years, a note from Rhiga brought him back. It contained a dispiriting statement of the difficulties which still retarded the progress of Greece ; but concluded by saying, that brighter days might soon dawn, and that he was on the point of going to Servia to assist in the liberation of that unhappy country. His friend saw ruin in the attempt, and flew back to warn the victim. They passed together the last evening that saw Rhiga in Vienna ; and the noble Wallachian often described it as the most memorable evening of his life. He had never seen the vigour of the Greek's genius so strongly marked as in the long details which he then gave of his hopes and determina- tions. Always eloquent, his eloquence on that day glowed with double ardour ; his spirit seemed to HEBE. 213 look into futurity with the combined clearness of the prophet and the rapture of the bard. But it was in vain that his friend pointed out the dubious policy of Austria, the treachery of the agents that served alike the cause of slavery and free- dom, and the notorious bloodthirstiness of the Turk. Rhiga had made up his mind. He was weary of incertitude, and his powerful understanding gave way to his impatience of dealing with the feebleness and craftiness of men whom he had wasted half his days in toiling to rouse to a sense of their own dignity. " What is the life of man but a vapour?" ex- claimed the Greek ; " and, since it must pass away, who would not rather that it rose like incense from the altar of his country's freedom, than that it sank only to add to the pestilence from his grave V Those were the parting words of Rhiga, as this high-hearted being tore himself from the boyar's embrace at the gates of Vienna. He was never seen more. A party of Turkish horse were al- ready on his path : he was seized on the Servian 214 THE wallachian's tale. frontier, and in three days his head was blackening in the sun on the ramparts of Belgrade. The death of this singular and admirable man broke up the associations which his energy had called into existence, and Cantacuzene retired to his estates, to dedicate his life to the surer means of renovating his country, by showing how much might be done by a noble determined on doing his duty. He found his large possessions a desert ; the marauding rabble, that under the various names of gypseys, miners, and shepherds, rove through the Hospodariates, had taken possession of the most fertile spots ; and the wolf and the wild boar were lords of the remainder. He applied himself with manliness and intelli- gence to the remedy ; and he succeeded, as such means will always succeed. In a few years his estate was a garden ; of which the plunderers were either vigorously repelled, or humanely subdued into a peaceable and active peasantry. , His opulence and power excited, as usual, the jealousy of the Porte, and he was offered high rank at the court of the Hospodar. But he was HEBE. 2L5 weary of the scene, and pleaded increasing years. The offer was renewed with the additional lure of an appointment for his son in the Albanian cavalry of the Porte. Cantacuzene, conscious that this was but a new artifice of that habitual jealousy which is determined to have a hold upon every sub- ject, declined the offer, perilous as might be the result of disobeying the will of the Sultan. But the bow-string passed him by for the time, and the offer was only more pressingly renewed. He still resisted ; but the solicitations of his friends, and still more the entreaties of his ambitious and ardent son, in part prevailed ; and with an ominous sigh, the father buckled the scvmetar on his Con- stantine, and sent him to gather honours under the Sultan. But the boyar's paternal feelings were not left altogether without an object. Among the barba- rian kinds of traffic existing in those border coun- tries of Christianity and Mahometanism, the sale of children is not unfrequent. The perpetual conflicts of the various tribes producing hurried flights, the breaking-up of families, and that deepest misery which makes the harassed parents 216 THE wallachian's tale. glad to see their children even in slavery, where they are secure of bread, largely supply this re- pulsive traffic. But in the general scene of de- vastation, the most formidable ruin follows the track of the gangs of declared robbers, who, with- out country or faith, are Servians, Transylvanians, and Turks, as suits them for the hour. To those the merchant and the traveller, the peasant and the peaceable of every kind, are the natural prey ; and against those the force of the Hospodariates was constantly in arms. In an excursion at the head of his peasantry to break up a camp of those marauders on the ridge of the Carpathian, Cantacuzene had succeeded in surrounding a considerable body that defended themselves desperately from cliff to cliff, until they were driven into a defile, where they must either surrender or perish of famine. The boyar, willing to spare human life, offered them conditions on giving up their arms and plunder. The robbers, of whom the chief part were disbanded soldiery, passed across the fron- tier. The peasantry were enriched by a large spoil of the spoilers, and the boyar returned home, glad HEBE. 217 to hang up his sabre, and turn over his volumes once more. A few days after the expedition, he was sur- prised by the return of one of the captains of the broken banditti, who came to offer him a child for sale. The fellow had contrived to conceal it, in the general restitution ; expecting that its extreme beauty would remunerate him for his other losses. Cantacuzene purchased the infant from the rob- ber, who could give no other account of it than that it had been carried off from a cottage in Hungary, where a Greek lady, on her way to France, had given it birth, and died. He adopted the infant, called it by a name ex- pressive of its loveliness, and employed some of the happiest years of his life in training the glow- ing and grateful spirit of his young Hebe. But he was now to be left no longer to the en- joyment of his philosophic solitude. The ambition of the French emperor, in 1804, had disturbed even those torpid regions. The Hospodars, Ipsilanti and Morousi, were too much connected with Russia to suffer their continuance, under the French system, which had begun to govern the VOL. I. K 218 THE wallachian's tale. Porte; and in 1805, Alexander Sutzo, a Greek, but a known enemy of Russian connexion, was appointed Prince of Wallachia. It is the indispensable custom for the nobles to receive the new Hospodar with public honours ; and Cantacuzene took with him a train suitable to his high rank. Hebe, strangely startled at the journey, implored to be left behind ; and no re- quest of hers would have been resisted, but for the boyar's secret purpose to try how far her graces and talents might touch his son. He was anxious to see him married; he had birth and wealth enough to choose for himself; and if Constantine was to be charmed by beauty, he might be the hus- band of the loveliest girl within sight of the Carpathians. HEBE. 219 CHAPTER II. The young Greek had received the announce- ment of the journey with terror; and she gave her- self up to such undissembled distress, that Can- tacuzene, in surprise, retracted his order. But the pale cheek had scarcely turned to red, and the feeble step recovered its buoyancy at the change, when all was worse than ever. Silence or sighs were on the lips of the fair Hebe ; and she wan- dered through the apartments with the heaviness of one that had met with some formidable calamity. Cantacuzene had seen too much of human nature, and known too much of that most resistless por- tion of it, the nature of the fair, to suppose that he could extract a direct answer to his inquiry into this new sorrow. But he ordered supper in his favourite seat, an alcove that looked over a 220 THE wallachian's tale. delicious extent of vineyard and plains, and bade Hebe bring her rebec,* and give him a song. The singer's voice was sweet ; and as he looked upon her form, the brightness of her eye, and the tender rose that the expression of her song brought into her cheek, he regretted that a little caprice should thwart a plan so sure of succeeding. " Impossible," thought he, " that any human being, capable of distinguishing between beauty and deformity, can overlook the singular attractions of this fine and vivid creature." The song had ceased, and Hebe was sitting with the rebec silent on her knee, and her eyes fixed on the distant valley. She was but sixteen ; yet the female form in those countries acquires an early perfection ; and Hebe might have sat to a statuary for the fairest model of a melancholy muse. " Come," said Cantacuzene, " child, you look the very image of an idler. Have I heard all your songs, or will you improvise?" She smiled, shook away a tear from her black eyelashes, and began one of the long rambling airs that the * A species of lute common on the Danube. HEBE. 221 miners chaunt to any words that chance inspires, praises of the hospitality of the boyars, petitions for alms, or fairy adventures that seem as if they could go on for ever. To the astonishment of her hearer, the few first wanderings of thought in which the improvisatore hovers over the subject, like a bird fluttering before it takes flight, were followed by an animated praise of social life. The song contrasted the monotony, the loneliness, and the lifelessness of the country, with the various animation of cities ; and of all cities, first and fondest, the capital of the principality. Cantacuzene listened to this glowing palinode with wonder ; but the reality of her expression told him that she was in earnest, and he congratulated her on the fortunate change of her sentiments. She answered, that since the time when she had been ungracious enough to hesitate at his command, she had deeply regretted her disobedience. The quick beating of her heart, and the burning crim- son that overspread her cheek as she spoke, told that her reason was one beyond the reach of argu- ment. 222 THE wallachian's tale. But the boyar had no desire to waste his vic- tory, and leave room for another change. He pressed her forehead with his lips ; called her his beloved child, his dear daughter ; attributed her starting at the words to the timidity of the sex; ordered his equipages to be ready for the road by day-break ; and left her to follow, when the manifold and mysterious preparations for a lady's journey could be got ready. The famous city of Bucharest ought to have been planted on the eastern side of the Propontis; for it is thoroughly Asiatic. If it have not as many pilgrims as Bagdad, it has as many beggars. If the cry of Allah il Allah does not deafen the ear, that organ does not escape much better from the eternal jargon of the Slavonic, Hungarian, and Lingua Franca, that clamours its "aves" through the streets, There are in both cities almost the same amount of dogs, Jews, devotees, and doers-of-no thing. If the Turkish female is covered with a veil, the Christian face is nearly as invisible from an ab- horrence of ablution. If the streets of Bagdad are dry ditches that admit of only two people HEBE. 223 abreast, the streets of Bucharest are wet ditches, that out of every three passengers threaten to drown at least one. If the former have ruinous houses that promise to fall upon the Arab popula- tion every hour, and not seldom keep their pro- mise ; the other has three hundred and sixty churches exactly in the same condition. But not to extend the similitude till doomsday, it may be said that they both look picturesque and glittering enough to the stranger a few miles off, from being built in the midst of plantations and gardens ; that they both undeceive the stranger rapidly on his entrance ; that they both contain a vast deal of folly, squalidness, and roguery ; that the world would not miss the one more than the other; and that the sooner a man is out of both, the better for his purse, his ears, his olfactories, and the colour of his costume. It would perplex a new BufFon to give a defini- tion of the true Noble of Bucharest, unless it is to be done by negatives. A boyar is an animal with legs, who never walks ; with a tongue, who never speaks ; with an understanding, who never thinks ; with a con- 224 THE wallachian's tale. science, who seldom knows a distinction between right and wrong ; and with, it is supposed, a soul, who leaves the care of it, from five years old to five score, to a French tutor, a Greek priest, or to chance, perhaps the safest of the three. But, be it told for the edification of the proud in all lands, that pride flourishes in its broadest luxuriance among those exalted and useful per- sonages. The boyars soar above the shallow pedigrees of the rest of Europe ; laugh to scorn the sixteen quarterings of the German and Hungarian magni- ficoes; scoff at the Venetian Libro d'Oro; push up their genealogies above the degenerate Romans to the Scythians who fought Cyrus and Darius ; and fairly establish their right to be considered, next to the white bears, the most northerly and ancient savages in the creation. The young and lovely Greek, romantic from the cradle, and trained with the fine eye that enjoys the slightest trace of natural beauty, was delighted with the distant view of the city, as the pompous train of her adopted father's horsemen and equi- pages swept across the level fields at the debouche HEBE. 225 into the plain. She saw nothing in their immea- surable flatness and smoothness but a paradise, where every bird of the air and beast of the field might rove and delight itself without fear of man. But when Bucharest displayed itself with the western sun sheeting its roofs and spires with gold, and the sound of its innumerable bells coming softened to her ear, she clasped her hands, and wept in delight at the fairy vision. Within an hour more she was tossing and thrown from rut to rut, in streets that forbade the light of day; she was surrounded with ragged and hideous beings, howling and fighting ; she- glanced into houses that looked too wretched for dungeons, and saw human beings that looked too wretched for the houses ; and when, completely tired, terrified, and cured of giving way to first impressions, she had pronounced Bucharest a living sepulchre, she was ushered into a marble vestibule, leading into a suite of apartments hung with cloth of gold, blazing with silver lamps, and crowded with attendants covered with embroidery. She passed from room to room in an astonishment that deprived her of the power of asking ques- 226 THE wallachian's tale. tions ; and by the time that she had been cured of trusting to second impressions more than to first, she reached the door of a chamber guarded by chasseurs in magnificent liveries, and saw within, upon a sofa like a throne, the boyar Cantacuzene. " Welcome, my child," said he ; t( you see me surrounded with unwilling honours. It has pleased the Hospodar to take advantage of my coming, and call me into service, when I should infinitely rather be riding over my fields. Our ploughmen and vine-dressers satisfy my eye better than all the very fine personages that encumber us here; but the sovereign's will is law ; and here I sit portar- bashi* of the Hospodariate, until Sutzo arrives, finds me too rustic for a courtier, and sends me re- joicingly to our mountains again. The experiment will not be long delayed, for the prince enters Bucharest to-morrow. But there is one topic, my Hebe, which is nearer to my heart than those idle exhibitions. I have from your infancy loved you as a daughter of our line. Providence bequeathed * A minister for foreign affairs, and chiefly corresponding with the Turkish court. HEBE. 227 you to me; and I trust that from the hour in which I took the charge, I have not been care- less of a duty bound on me alike by honour and affection." Hebe, with the large tears coursing down her cheeks, like dew-drops on the peach, fell on her knees, and kissed his hand in speechless gratitude. He raised her, and, with a glance of paternal ad- miration, seated her by his side, and entreated her attention to the only command that he would ever lay upon her. " My Hebe, you must marry. Life is un- certain under every sky ; but the government of the Sultan puts the existence of his nobles in such hazard, that the only security is, their not being worth his plunder or his suspicion. I must see your happiness, at least, secure." The young Greek looked up at him in mingled terror for herself and her benefactor. " Then you, my father, must be marked by this hideous tyranny. Your rank, but above all your character, must be crimes to the Ottoman. The friend of his country and of human nature must be hated by the oppressor. Let us hasten from this place, from 228 THE wallachian's tale. this country ; let us fly to some of the lovely lands of Europe, the free spots where man is not pro- hibited from every thing but guilt; where he is not forced to feel it in the power of a slave of the se- raglio to destroy at a moment the labours of a life of benevolence ; where the noble aspirations of genius and virtue are not like the struggles of the eagle in a cage, every effort to use the powers that nature gave but dashing him against his bars, and leaving his bosom bare and bleeding." " I have often thought of this, my child; but what is life after all I or what is the great lesson taught us by its shortness, and the infinite perils that make every hour one on which we may be plunged into another state of being, but that we should value it only for its uses ; that we should not for the mere purpose of prolonging it, a pur- pose clearly beyond our powers, throw away the opportunity of expending such years as may be allotted to us, in the service of mankind; and leave our place in that portion of mankind among whom nature or fortune has allotted it ? In this ruined country, among this benighted population, I am fixed ; it is my first duty to try to the uttermost HEBE. 229 what can be done to enlighten its ignorance, and raise it from its ruin. If but few among our nobles think with me, there is the more necessity for the labours of those few. Besides, my Hebe, — for your ingenuous mind is worthy of knowing every thought that can fill the heart with honour and resolution — what are we but the creatures of a power which will do its high pleasure in defiance of man ? The Mahometan meets the chance of death in a sullen belief that so it must be ; we meet the chance in a lofty and hallowed convic- tion that so it ought to be. If that high pleasure be to protect us, not all the ferocity of all the Sultans can touch a hair of our heads. But if the hour be come, how can we meet it with more confidence, dignity, and honour, than in the fear- less and devoted exercise of the talent that Pro- vidence has given V There was silence between them for a while. The noble philosopher sat wrapped in boding thoughts of the future. The young Greek, alter- nately crimson and pale as the lily, was agitated at once by fears for her adopted father, and by emotions more tumultuous, though not deeper. 230 THE WALLACHIAK'S TALE. At last the boyar, starting from his seat, pressed her to his bosom, and laying his hand, as in benediction, on her forehead, said : " Now, my child, go to rest. To-morrow we shall have a busy day; — to-morrow, too, you shall see the noble whom I have chosen for your husband." With these words he left the room. Hebe tot- tered after him. Her ears rang, her eyes were dim: she blindly felt her way towards the door, but it was already closed. She tried to speak ; her tongue refused to utter a word. She sank beside the sofa. The moonlight glowing on her figure at length startled her with her own image in one of the immense mirrors. For a few moments her mind, enfeebled and overwhelmed, almost believed that an apparition lifted those tossing arms, and knelt with such distracted prayer before her. But she soon felt the reality of her anguish, and dreading alike to look round her and to think, she feebly reached her chamber. HEBE. "231 CHAPTER III. The next was a busy day. The whole eighty thousand souls of the city, the greater part with bodies that it might have perplexed Blumenbach to class among any known race above the quadru- ped, poured into the streets at daylight, or were employed in hanging their decorations of curtain, caftan, and carpet, old as the conquest of the province, from the windows. The city looked like an enormous Tartar caravansera ; and the inha- bitants did no injustice, by the comeliness of their countenances or the grace of their drapery, to the sons of the Great Table land of the north. The rejoicings were as anomalous as the people; for every thing capable of producing sound was in full exercise from day-break. The bells of the 232 THE WALLACHIAN'S TALE. three hundred and sixty churches pealed loud enough to deafen the whole population ; cannon roared, trumpets blasted, horns howled, trombones brayed, and incessant musketry rattled close to the ear of the passer-by, lucky if he escaped the ball put into the charge, not to kill him, but to make the report louder, though, if it killed him, no man inquired into an accident so natural to a day of general joy. In the midst of this ragged tumult moved by, from time to time, some Turkish officer, magnificent in fur and shawl, and reining a barb that seemed proud of its caparison, and longing to get loose from the earth ; or the state-coach of a boyar, used, like his hearse, for the first and the last time, a ponderous pile of gilding put together for the day ; or a troop of the body-guard dashing among the rabble, that the whole force of the prin- cipality could not have kept quiet ; the entire co- vered in suffocating clouds of dust, and under a sun that would have scorched an Ethiop ; a mingling of grandeur and mendicancy, discomfort and re- joicing, that could be shown by none but a half oriental, half European city — a border receptacle HEBE. 233 for the oddities, extravagances, and pomps of East and West in one. Cantacuzene was a man of magnificent tastes, which he knew well how to exhibit ; and his habits of foreign life saved him from the extraordinary contrasts of meanness and splendour to be per- petually found among his brother nobles. In saying that the horses to his six carriages were neither blind nor lame, that his harnesses were not ropes, his coachmen half-naked gypseys, nor his guards something between beggars and banditti, enough is said to draw the line between his ap- pearance on that day, and the proudest exhibition made by the majority of the proud lords of the soil of Wallachia. Sorrow sits light upon the young ; and Hebe, when the pompous equipage in which she sat with the boyar emerged from streets hot as an oven, and echoing like a den of wild beasts with yells innumerable, into the open air of the country, then in the first freshness and fragrance of spring, felt as the bird feels, let loose from its cage. The boyar's graver spirit was touched too ; but he thought of his mountains, and of the long and 234 THE WALLACHIATS'S TALE. anxious scenes that he might have to undergo before he was to sit once more among his books, and from his favourite veranda look over his deli- cious landscape. But the sound of cannon announced the ap- proach of the Hospodar. Both felt the sound ominous without knowing why, and Hebe placed her hand in the cold hand of her father as a pledge that, let come what will, she would follow his fortunes to the last. The sovereign procession was soon seen glitter- ing on the hills. Detachments of spahis made way through the multitude. The crowd of Turkish functionaries who came with every new Hospodar to fatten on these unlucky principalities, came caracoling their showy Arabians ; and at the close of a long train moved Prince Sutzo, the monarch, who, if titles could ensure him an easy supremacy, would have few equals in the downiness of his throne. This T^Xotutos, or "Most High;" Serene Highness; Bey; God's Anointed; Hos- podar ; this compound of glories Greek, German, Turkish, Wallachian, and Russ, looked like a man at the point of death, condemned to be HEBE. 235 suffocated by furs, jewelled chains, and purple cloth. But his kukka * had been laid on his weary brow by the Nuzhur aga, and his robe of honour had been thrown over his burning shoulders by no humbler hands than those of the grand vizier. It is true that a month or a week might see them transferred to another, and the Hospodar's shoulders without a head ; but what man ever resisted the temptation of being, even for one week, the most exposed to chance of any living being, the most harassed, the most responsible, and the most unthanked of millions — a king i But the universal shout arose when the Albanian horse-guard of the prince poured over the plain. Their mounting and caparison were superb ; their rapidity of movement was striking even among the dashing cavalry of the Turks ; and their distinction in the field had been acquired by a long course of desperate exploits, alike against European and Asiatic enemies. At the head of those gallant squadrons rode, with the chelenk f * Military crest. t A diamond plume of honour given by the Sultan. 236 THE wallachian's tale. in his turban, in the prime of youth, and glowing with military pride, the son of Cantacuzene. The boyar's eye was filled, as he looked on the showy and martial figure whom he had sent away but a few years since, scarcely beyond boy- hood. A few words of ardent recognition passed, as the cavalry moved on. Hebe, blushing and alarmed, heard her name pronounced by the young soldier with high expressions of his delight at her increased beauty ; and from that moment until the cavalcade entered the city gates, and she found herself alone in her chamber, she scarcely knew whether she was awake or in a dream. But some words of terror floated on her memory above all this confusion of thought, like fragments of wreck above the waters, to show the working of the storm. " There is your husband," sounded in her ears. The rest was scattered among recollections too painful, and still too vague for her to give them shape. She remembered the astonished look of the boyar at her evident alarm, his entreaty that she would not throw away her fairest hope of happi- ness, his displeasure at the caprice of the female HEBE. 237 mind ; but those were all like clouds passing over her memory; and the more she attempted to bring- back that momentous conversation, the more it seemed to baffle all her powers. A long succession of balls and public festivities on the inauguration of the prince occupied some weeks ; and Hebe's loveliness, not less conspicuous from the simplicity of the Greek dress to which she adhered with patriotic pride in the midst of the heavy opulence of the costume worn by the wives of the boyars, was the universal topic. Her cultivated talents added to the attraction ; and, if the Turkish dignitaries were incapable of valuing more than her beauty ; or the native nobles listened to her graceful language, her skill on the lute, or her touching voice, only as they might have listened to a syren of the opera; the accom- plished homage of the European officers and strangers of rank stamped her with fame. Cantacuzene had found no difficulty in per- suading his son to the marriage. The young soldier's ardent temperament had been inflamed from the first glance. Even had she charmed him less, his pride would have been delighted with 238 THE wallachian's tale. carrying off the prize from so many admirers. To triumph was his passion, whether it were in the rich- ness of his dress, or the renown of his squadrons, the beauty of his charger, or the beauty of his wife. He had figured at Paris, Vienna, and Constanti- nople ; and whether at the gaming-table, or in the ball-room, in the sumptuous festivities and bril- liant flirtations of the two great European capitals of the loves and graces, or in the perilous pursuits of the sullen city of the dungeon and the bow - string, he had found no superior. He received his father's proposition with rap- ture ; flew through the long vista of stately halls to the apartment where the young Greek sat gazing with full and fixed eyes towards the moun- tains; declared his passion; and while his ear waited a moment to hear it answered in sounds of supreme gratitude, to his inconceivable astonish- ment, heard it firmly and finally rejected. HEBE. 239 CHAPTER IV. Among the displays of this time of festivity, a company of Italian figurantes and opera-singers had made their way to Bucharest. The Italian proverb says that, " monks and mosquitos are to be found in every part of the world." Where the monks are not, the mosquitos are. But when they are together, woe be to mankind. The Italians are a compound of both. They lay a national claim to be livers on what they can suck from the superfluities of the body-corporate wherever they go. They are to be found in every spot of the earth, perpetually on the wing, with no more local habitation than the mosquito, and with as much mind as the monk, to extract the last de- nier where they happen to settle. They issue 240 THE wallachian's tale. yearly, as soen as the sun warms them out of their Alpine sleep, into the atmosphere of every climate of the world ; with no plan of life but that of preying upon all, and with a general determina- tion never to see the spot from which the swarm issued, but as full as they can hold of the substance of all. They are not fastidious in their prey, and will feed on a peasant as soon as on a prince of the empire. They are never at a loss ; for any rejected trade, pursuit, or pretext will answer their ambition. In Germany, they tell fortunes, and flourish behind carriages. In France, they sweep chimneys, kennels, and shoes. In England, they exhibit monkeys, grind organs, and are the exclusive masters of Punch. In Poland, they perplex the Israelites by superior usury. In Russia, they do all those things together, and are teachers and tutors besides, which may account for the morals of the patrician population. They would be Christian Jews, but for the double doubt whe- ther the majority are Christians at all, and whether they ever desire to set foot in their own country again. HEBE. 241 But the opera species is the most universal, the most restless, and the most plundering — the most Italian of the whole genus. Some of those brilliant insects have been known to fasten on the ple- thoric purse of a mighty noble, and sting him down to his last piastre. Great warriors have stopped in the full career of victory, to watch the fluttering of those gilded and silken minions. Kings and emperors have suffered the wheels of the world to pause, while they listened to their humming. The opera swarm that had just alighted on the bustling capital of the Hospodariate, were not the most dazzling of their kind. But they had the native faculties ; and the boyars were dazzled, fascinated, and in due time very thoroughly purse- stung. The Wallachian matrons gave themselves no concern on the subject, so long as it disencum- bered them of the heavy presence of their lords ; the maidens cared as little, while it left them the German officers to figure with ; and, as the women give the tone in every land but the land of the Moslemin, when they were happy, who dared be discontented I The Italians were as happy as the rest, and vol. L L 242 THE wallachian's tale. with more substantial reason. Their talents were various, and they were all employed. They gave dinners, with hazard after the desert ; they gave select balls, with the liberty of retiring to faro in the next room ; and more select than all, they gave petits soupers, the most exquisite things in the world; for a thousand crowns a head, punctually disbursed after them on a rouge-et-noir table, was the very lowest price. Their public exhibitions were crowded in the most stifling degree, for they were fashionable ; and they were fashionable, be- cause not one hearer in a hundred could under- stand a syllable. This triumph might have gone on for ever ; and the Wallachians might have imagined, like the English and other descendants of the Goths, that they were enchanted. But Italian avarice was on the point of accomplishing its own ruin. At once to make money, and to indulge the theatrical thirst for publicity, the " poet" of the company was put at the head of a little "journal," in which the affairs of Europe occupied a corner, and the merits, injuries, and anecdotes of the opera occupied the rest. HEBE. 243 But too much knowledge is often more fatal than too much ignorance ; as a man will die of waking, though he never dies of sleep. From the luckless period in which the Italian gazetteers unveiled the secrets of the prison-house, and taught the ignoble multitude to talk at their ease of the Sostenente and Sostenuto family; of the rehearsal conflicts of Signor Cantabile and the Signora Contralto, divinest of prima-donnas; and the domestic history of Signor Portomento and his Signora, equally divine ; the spell was broke, mere mortals stood before them ; the royal robes lost their glitter, the opera went down ten thousand fathom deep. Like Beaumarchais' play, when all the world were in the secret, the plot was dissolved, and there was nothing more to be done but to drop the curtain. 244 THE wallachian's tale. CHAPTER V. The Italians were in despair. The diminished treasury haunted them. Like greater personages, they cursed from the bottom of such souls as they had, the treacherous hour when, io the thought- less avidity to produce public partizanship, they had put pen to paper. The men tore the ringlets out of their hair ; the women wept the rouge off their cheeks ; and both devoted the whole race of boyars to purgatory, as asses of the longest-eared species, and the whole inferior generation to the deeper miseries of listening to their grievances. Every garret was a cabal ; and the little meagre cafe, the sole one in which those itinerant Cim- arosas and Paesiellos ever spent a sol, from its favourite resemblance to a dungeon, and its being HEBE. 245 below the pocket of even a Wallachian beggar, was a scene of shrugs, grimaces, and recriminations immitigable, implacable, and ridiculous beyond measure. The green-room was in open insurrection, and the rehearsals regularly broke up in a civil war of scowls under ferocious brows and significant threats of the vengeance that might couch in a basin of vermicelli, or be coiled in a string of ma- caroni. But the wheel of fortune gave a sudden whirl. A signora, stooping from none knew what pro- pitious star, alighted at the door of the theatre, and requested an immediate engagement. She brought no credentials ; she had not a line to any lover of song or beauty among the great. She did not threaten the manager with the undying vengeance of any of those resistless patrons, prince or banker, who insist so furiously upon seeing jus- tice done to the signoras fortunate enough to have the honour of their approbation. Her merits rested on much more uncommon grounds ; she had talent, and she asked no ruinous salary. THE WALLACHIAN'S TALE, The Italians well knew the value of her face, her figure, and her voice ; but the offer to play for next to nothing put all doubt of her excellence out of the question ; and, with many a managerial declaration of the impolicy of overloading a stage " already full of the most popular ability," and many con- fessions of the " generous desire, which they could not restrain," of giving a compafriote an opportunity of showing her powers, they allowed her to — make their fortunes, if she could. Her first appearance decided the point : — she was a wonder. Her song, her acting, and her beauty, were of the highest excellence of her country. Travellers, when, fairly feeling themselves es- caped from the Alps, and rolling along the fat and level lands of Italy, without fear of a wolf start- ing from the mouth of a ravine to carry off their post-horses, or an avalanche thundering from its summit, to be the monument of master, equipage and all, they have leisure to look round upon the population, may well think with horror on the future doom of painters and sculptors, poets and romancers, if their visions of Italian beauty are to be reached by justice. HEBE. 247 Abandoning the Savoyard physiognomy as in- describable, and marked by nature for its designa- tion of being seen only through soot, they see the nymph of the Milanese, a brawny, she- barbarian, with a figure formed on the model of her own churn, and a complexion borrowed from her own cheeses. Rolling onward, they see la bella Toscana, a sul- len, heavy-browed being, with negro features, and a colour scarcely nearer the human. The Roman skin they find wrinkled by the sun to the con- sistence of the oldest parchment; and the Nea- politan covered with a mask of grime, the work of a whole life undisturbed by washing — a sort of native bronze, compounded of dust, heat, tobacco- smoke, and the handling of charcoal. They ask, in surprise, where did the great art- ists discover models for the madonnas and se- raphs ? where found they the weeping loveliness of their Magdalene sorrow, or the placid pomp of their St. Catherine's smile ? Yet such models are to be found, though rare as a new planet; and the singer that came to revive the dead glories of the troop was one of those. 248 THE wallachian's tale. She had the vivid force of countenance, the fal- con eye, the singular wreathing of the lip that shapes, of all smiles, the most witching or the most scornful. Her figure was imperial, and even her most careless attitude conveyed an impression of command. Her theatrical talents were instantly acknowledged. Her voice, magnificent in com- pass and tone, extinguished all competition in the theatre. She trod the stage with the alternate ma- jesty of the tragic heroine and the lightness of the nymph ; and when she retired for the moment, she left the most stirring scene divested of its charm. The arrival of the Italian gave new animation to the court circle, already beginning to be wearied of opera, masquerade, and elaborate attempts at the gallantry of Paris and Vienna. The polished stran- gers were writing bitter epigrams, and drawing caricatures, to kill the hour ; the Russians longed for Moscow, where they might throw off" their embroidered coats, let their beards follow the course of nature, and drink quass when they were tired of brandy, and brandy when they were HEBE. 249 tired of quass. The native Huns honestly yawned in each other's faces, and envied the Laplander his six months' escape from the sight of day. But the tide of pleasure had now begun to flow again. The theatre, that matchless resource of the vacant souls of mankind ; that essential of life to the Far-niente world ; before the scenes, giving topics to the multitude, and behind the scenes to the select — the theatre, that alike by its dulness and its gaiety, its pleasantries and its misfortunes, supplies the ten thousand morning visits with the use of speech, until evening comes again to refresh the withered fallows of the coteries with just dew enough to keep their weeds alive — the theatre was raised once more into the leading- theme, and nothing was wanting to the perfection of its celebrity, but to be burned to the ground by accident, and rebuilt by subscription. Even the su- premacy of the Signora Seraphina's shake, and the Signora Cherubina's sol-fa, was luckily settled ; for there could be no rivalry to the Italian ; and the company still trembled at the very thought of a pen. The new gaiety of the theatre transpired in the 250 THE WALLACHIAN'S TALE. new gaiety of the court, which expanded itself in boatings on the Hellesteo, that Avernian lake, on whose burning borders a thousand carriages of every kind of craziness are to be seen on every gala-day, threatening to discharge the whole no- blesse of Bucharest into its compost of mud and water; a destiny which any man but a boyar would prefer to the roasting, dusting, and deafen- ing, that await those patient philosophers on their corso of scorching sand. But fashion is exclusive in all countries, from the Tartar steppe to the English drawing-room ; and even the Boneza, with all its distance from the ruder pleasures of the crowd, its novelty of a green field and a grove, and the singularity of the habitable boyar-house of Vakaresko, were too much within the popular access for fashion. The grand consummating ball given by the noblesse to their sovereign was fixed at a distance to which not one native carriage in fifty had ever ventured, and from which those who might venture could have but faint hope of ever bringing back their tottering frames to Bucharest. The site of the ball-room was fixed at three HEBE. 251 hours' drive from the city, in one of the beautiful vallies that, in spite of man, still breathe and bloom in a province traversed every ten years by the Russian in pursuit of the Turk, and by the Turk in pursuit of the Russian. The preparations were picturesque, and the entertainment became the engrossing topic for a month beforehand. It almost divided the heart of the great world with the Italian. But the charm was wound, when it was announced that the Italian herself was to be there. The whole mass of the nobility struggled to be at this concentration of all rapture ; but they knew that to gratify them all was impossible. They only struggled the more. When the boyars grew weary of perpetual rejection, their wives besieged the unhappy postelnik-maray. * But as he could not work miracles, he was compelled to escape those fair and fierce petitioners by a sudden complication of disorders, which drove him to his bed. But the petitioners, who would have allowed nothing short of death to keep themselves from a ball * First master of the court ceremonies. 252 THE wallachian's tale. from which they were to see half their intimate acquaintance shut out, could suffer no disease of another to stand between them and their tickets. The minister was a Greek, and, with his national subtlety, when he found the gout, asthma, and his whole chronic list failing him, suddenly discovered that he was deaf and blind ; this, too, failed him : the ladies knew the ways of courts, and demanded, whether he supposed them fools enough not to know that all important business was done by deputy ? The Greek had then but one resource between him and insurrection. He published an official note, fortified by the bulletin of his confessor, that he had made a vow to the Panagia * to do nothing good or evil, directly or indirectly, for a month to come. The name of the Panagia shocked the feelings of a religious people, who have two hundred and ten saints' days to get through in the year ; and while they were still deliberating on sending the Greek another confessor, who should teach his- * The Virgin. HEBE. 253 conscience another lesson, the day of festival arrived. All who had received cards, had spent the hours from morning till night visiting at the houses of those who had not, and declaring that they had been " totally indifferent to the honour." The rejected washed off the discomfiture by declaring that they had not thought it worth their while to make known any wish for trifles, which " anv one might have had for asking ; that the distance was tremendous ; the fete could not but be dull ; and the crowd, from the want of discrimination in the grand Postelnik, must be on the very verge of vulgar." The rank of Cantacuzene, and Hebe's beauty, made their presence essential to the fete. But it had no charms for either of them. The manliness of the noble shrank from this perpetual waste of time, and the young Greek seemed to feel a still deeper reluctance. Solitary thought was preyiug on her. She rarely smiled. She avoided the human presence, and was often heard at night wandering through her suite of apartments till dawn. Her eyes at 254 THE wallachian's tale. morning showed that tears had been there; and her listlessness, silence, and loss of animation, in the midst of scenes that set the whole high-born multitude in a tumult of enjoyment, were to be accounted for, in the superstition of the country, only by her having been smote by an evil eye. On this occasion she implored Cantacuzene, with so much earnestness, to be spared the fatigue of the fete, that he, in alarm at her look of ex- haustion, complied. Evening fell, his carriages were at the gate, and he was coming to take leave of his adopted daughter for the night, when, to his astonishment, he met her magnificently attired, her eye sparkling, her cheek glowing, and her light and lovely figure as if it trod on air. She now implored him again, but it was to be suffered " to change her mind." The boyar, smiling, and saying that he would be the last man to object to the course of nature, led her to the carriage. HEBE. 255 CHAPTER VI. Th e ball was brilliant. Uniforms of every service, costumes of every clime, and characters of every species ; novelty, eccentricity and splendour, filled the eye. The woods echoed with harmony, the air breathed fragrance, and the fountains flowed with wine. Fire-works invaded the sky with showers of new risen stars ; and looking down upon them all, came forth in her majesty the moon, round as a shield, and white as the top of Parnassus, to put the fire- works out of countenance; furnish topics to the sentimentalist ; similes, not the worse for repetition since the flood, to the poetic ; light to the admirer of downcast beauty ; and to lavish over domes and fountains, pavilions and promenades, sheet on sheet of silver untarnished by the world. 256 THE wallachian's tale. But moon, fireworks, and fine speeches were forgotten, when Hebe at length appeared, leaning on the arm of the stately boyar. From the farthest extremity of the saloon she was seen by the eye of the Hospodar himself, who, as she passed into the field of his opera-glass, gave a detail of her charms with the precision of science, and stamped her at once the wonder of the night. A hundred glasses were instantly levelled, whose owners, had she been the twin-sister of Sycorax, would have sworn that she eclipsed all beauty present, past, and to come. Fashion does much, and the belle who had sus- tained the ordeal of her sovereign's glass, was allowed to be handsome even by the circle on circle of haughty dames who surrounded the simplicity of her Greek costume with diamond stomachers and tiaras enough to have justified an invasion of India, and plumes enough to have stript an empire of ostriches bare. But here nature and fashion were for once allied. Hebe's face and form seemed to have ac- quired additional loveliness from her seclusion : HEBE. 257 her eye danced, her cheek glowed, a tide of in- voluntary joy was in her heart, and every step was buoyant with happiness. Her triumph was ac- knowledged, rivalry shrank, and mothers kept their daughters at a cautious distance ; the Hos- podar himself trespassed against etiquette in the distribution of his eyes ; the surrounding cheva- liers were guiltily neglectful of all other attrac- tions. Black eagles and white, blue lions and green, the whole menagerie of the honours moved submissive to her smile ; and she had but to frown to bring a sudden mortality among heroes and statesmen, and extinguish the court calendar. Yet, in the height of triumph, with vows breath- ing round her from a whole army of starred and aiguilleted admirers, and her hand engaged for more mazurkas and allemandes than could have been toiled through by a whole corps de ballet, Hebe was gone. The vision had disappeared with visionary swiftness. The announcement of supper, which has so often made the fairest of the fair but a secondary object, and alienated the most resolute constancy in hazard of losing a place at the table, had for a moment withdrawn 258 the homage of her worshippers. She had abdi- cated her throne without a syllable of complaint; and whether she sank into the earth to renew her fascinations in the wizard cave from which they must have come, or ascended to the clouds that now lay in reposing pomp like a pillow for the moon, none saw, knew, or could conjecture to what part of creation she was gone. When the supper precedency was settled, and the heart had room to come into play once more, the universal question was for the universal en- chantress. What sylph enamoured of her dancing, or pacha in disguise, or whiskered prince of the empire had carried her off, was asked in the same voice of dismay by the men, and with the same not undelighted smile by the women. The majority of the lovers, in despair, betook themselves to the remedy that never fails, from arctic to antarctic. Passion, like thirst, has but one palliative, and to that the boyars fled for refuge by instinct. Hock, chambertin, and tokay are three allies made to defy the three grand evils of life ; and happy the man who has them against debt, love, and curtain-lectures. HEBE. 259 Cantacuzene, engaged in the prince's private party, was among the last to hear the inquiry ; but when he heard it, his alarm was not to be con- trouled. The strange and rapid alterations of Hebe's manner during the day had struck him with anxiety and surprise. But he had too high a reliance on her lofty feelings to doubt that, when the due time was come, he should find her mystery one of a heart full of truth and honour. Hastily apologising to the prince, and without communicating his suspicions, he rushed into the gardens. They were extensive, and he wandered long in vain. Yet, one thought, too painful to be borne, smote him. He had observed the fiery indignation that spoke in every feature of his son at the refusal of Hebe, and murmurs of mingled scorn and revenge had reached his ear, though they were instantly suppressed, and turned off with a smile. He knew the haughty nature of the youth, long pampered by the habits of Constantinople and the arrogance of command, and he trembled at the furious ex- cesses of pride inflamed by passion. The suspicion grew stronger as he thought of 260 THE wallachian's tale. his hurried departure from the court a few days before, almost without a pretext; and his stern and contemptuous look, as he turned on his heel from Hebe's entreaty to be reconciled. Had this boy of burning blood and vexed pride borne away his child 8 Harassed by thoughts to which he dared give no utterance, the boyar was forcing his weary way through the overgrown paths of the wood, when he heard voices near him. They spoke in whispers, but his ear caught the broken words. "I dare advise nothing; I ask and hope for nothing. The Bohemian, wherever she has learnt it, has uniformly told the truth. I am indifferent about life, but while I live I must think of you. The time for decision is come. By this time to-morrow we may both be secure and happy, or may both be undone ; I in my grave, for I will not survive your loss, and you in the hands of a being of uncontrouled violence, and determined to be your lord, if you scorn him as your husband ; a Turk with the name of Christian, a young pacha, who knows no limit of his passions but his power.'* Deep sobs were the only answer. HEBE. 261 " One word for all," pronounced the voice again ; " will you be the wife, the beloved, ho- noured, treasured wife of Justiniani, or the slave, the abject, imprisoned, despised — how can I pro- nounce the word — paramour of Constantine ? for, in revenge for your rejection of him, this he has sworn you shall be." The secret was now disclosed that solved the long mystery of Hebe's joys and sorrows. Theo- dore Justiniani was the son of an Italian officer, who, after serving in Cantacuzene's regiment, had retired with him, and settled on a small estate under his friend. Hebe, accustomed to see him joined in her sports and studies from infancy, had given to Theodore the affections of her young heart ; and if the deepest homage in return could have deserved that most precious possession, the heart of woman in its fondness, purity, and faith, it was deserved by her friend. The young Greek's first sorrow had been when she heard that she was to leave the hills and valleys, every spot of which was consecrated to her glowing fancy by the image of Theodore. But her sorrow was suddenly turned into delight by the news that he was ap- 262 THE wallachian's tale. pointed by the boyar captain of his escort to Bucharest. From that time a strange and mysterious in- fluence guided them. In the country, the boyar's vigorous and active life gave him little leisure for the observation of two beings, whom he looked upon as only two children. At the court, occupied by the perplex- ing labours of a new cabinet, balancing between the rival terrors and temptations of the Muscovite and the Ottoman, he had still less leisure to watch the growth of childish attachment into youthful passion. But the story was now told, and he felt, with a pang, how idle are the plans of philo- sophy against the force of nature. He stayed to hear no more, but indignantly stood in the presence of the lovers. Hebe uttered a cry, and fell at his feet. " As for you, traitor," he exclaimed to Theodore, " I shall find a time and a punishment. Meet me on this spot half an hour hence, if, after having had the baseness to teach disobedience to this weak girl, you have the courage to face a man of honour." . Justiniani, with a smitten heart and burning HEBE. 263 cheek, heard his sentence ; he bowed without a word, and turned away. But he was detained ; the irresistible force of two arms, white and deli- cate as two wreaths of lilies, stopped him ; and Hebe, with a countenance of native nobleness and virtue, commanded that he should explain their story. But his spirit had been roused, and for once he disobeyed. The task then devolved upon herself. M I had no secret from my father and my lord," said she, turning to the boyar. " I was ignorant how any one human being could make me more happy or unhappy than another, until I was taught it by your son. His proposal of marriage opened my eyes to the feelings which I am now proud to avow, for they are bestowed on one worthy of them. This is no time, my lord, for concealment. 1 found that to love Constantine was as impossible — as it was to forget Theodore." The confession was made ; and she wept with agitation and the overflowings of her generous soul. Then more firmly resumed — " But, my lord will believe his child, when she tells him that she had determined to suppress every wish unsanctioned 264 the wallachian's tale. by his authority. Theodore knows that I repelled his friendship, and that I avoided his presence, as by my entreaty he avoided mine. But we were at last urged by something like a superior power ; we were even compelled to hazard my lord's dis- pleasure. Letters, of which I could not conjecture the writer, continually reached me, detailing evil intentions on the part of powerful nobles here. I had reason, from accidental circumstances, to believe that the information was true. But to whom was I to fly in my terrors ? I knew that to communicate those names to my lord would be to involve him in ill-blood with profligate and dangerous men of rank, who, if they dared not openly defy him, would accomplish their revenge by poison and the dagger. There was but one friend to whom I dared to mention those bitter trials ; and I found him what I expected. " Let me do justice to you, Theodore." She with a blush took his hand. " I found new sources of regard in the ready zeal with which you baffled those criminals and conspirators against a woman ; but I was still more grateful for the prudence that accomplished my safety without bringing my lord HEBE. 265 and father into public hostility with beings un- worthy of a thought from one like him." Cantacuzene would have as soon doubted an angel from heaven, as the rosy lips that spoke those words. He caught her to his heart. " Yet," said he, pausing, " did I not hear more than this ? was there not an offer of marriage ? and could my Hebe's sense of duty listen to this with- out her father's knowledge?" " There let me speak," interposed Theodore. " I now stand before you, my lord, for the last time ; for you have pronounced my sentence of banish- ment. Reserve is now idle. I loved Hebe ; I shall love her to the last hour of my obscure life. Yet I would rather have perished in hopeless pas- sion than have urged her to the rash step of fol- lowing my fortunes, and offending her more than father. But I was in alarm, almost in despair. I had received intelligence the most unquestion- able, Uhat on this very night Hebe was to be carried off, and either compelled to a most un- happy marriage, or sunk into the last degradation of woman." vol. I. M 266 the wallachian's tale. The boyar's indignation was roused, and he demanded full knowledge of the insult. " Had she remained in Bucharest," said Theodore, "my lord's palace was to have been surrounded, and Hebe would have been by this time in the hands of worse than banditti. A troop of the Albanian cavalry were actually under orders. I implored her permission to disclose this new danger to you ; but she refused it, not merely as before, through dread of exposing my lord to the malice of licentious slaves and pol- trons, against whom no man can guard ; — she now dreaded the infliction of a pang on a father's heart, an agony to which all peril would have been trivial." The boyar felt the pang through every nerve. He had anticipated the name. Constantine was on his lips ; but he mastered his emotion, and cordially held out his hand to Theodore. " And so, when you found her in danger on the one side, and determined not to apply to the only protection on the other that could have been of use to her, you offered her your own. It was a rash act, young soldier ; but youth will be absurd ; and" — he smiled as he spoke — "woman, until she HEBE. 267 learns to wear a mask for life, will be perplexing the peace of the world. I forgive you." They walked from the arbour in silence, till they were roused by the distant lights and sounds of the fete. The boyar had shaken off his dejec- tion. " And now, Hebe," said he, as he placed her arm within his, to enter the saloon, " are you not shocked at finding that the romance is at an end, that rivals are to pursue you no more, nor fathers to overhear you in forests by moon-light? Or do you not feel yourself pledged from this instant forth to hate, scorn, and abjure the adorer who was fool enough to let you see that you may set your foot on his neck, if such be your sover- eign will and pleasure?" Hebe in smiles and tears of delight kissed his hands. He raised her up, and with a paternal blessing placed her in her lover's arms. There are moments in which the joy of a whole life seems concentrated ; deep, silent secrets, and delights of the inmost soul, when a word would be profanation, and the single lan- guage is that of the beatings of the overcharged 268 THE wallachian's tale. heart. Such were the moments that had now followed the terrors of parting, and the bitterness of hopeless passion. The boyar, scarcely less happy in their happiness, suffered them to enjoy the first sacred communion of hearts that were now to be bound for ever, By one impulse they turned their countenances glowing with love, hope, and gratitude, to the heavens, and in tears and sighs of richer joy than smiles ever told, pledged their faith through good and ill, through sickness and sorrow, through life and the grave. " Now," said the boyar, " to avoid the curiosity of the wise people about us, Hebe and I must re- turn to the table ; and as this business must not be made public without some degree of ceremony, Theodore will ride back to the city, and learn patience till to-morrow, or till his truant decide whether she can actually make up her mind to surrender pachas and princes for a simple sub- altern of cavalry." HEBE. 269 CHAPTER VII. Hebe's return to the ball was received with acclamations. She looked more brilliant than ever. Secure happiness gave richer lustre to her eyes, and more touching melody to her voice. Her promenade was conceived to be the source of this striking change, and many a languid princess lamented that she had not gone to cheer her roses by the breeze. The Hospodar again sinned against etiquette, and honoured her with exclusive ap- proval ; the foreign chevaliers abandoned their ad- dresses to the opulent, and the boyars half aban- doned the bottle. But in the midst of the gene- ral rapture, morning, unwelcome morning, broke in, and the fete was put to flight before the sun- beams, as if a brigade of Turkish horse had been 270 THE wallachian's tale. let loose upon it. The loveliest of the lovely in- stinctively buried their faces in their shawls, and scattered in dismay. The road homewards was instantly covered with harassed horses and indescribable equipages rushing and rolling against each other, to the infinite hazard of their freight of noble lives. And it was not until the loveliest of the lovely had reached their chambers, closed their shutters, and given a consoling look in their mirrors by candle-light again, that they dared go to bed, and trust themselves with a dream. But the young Greek had no thought of her own attractions. Sleep was impossible ; she would not even suffer the stream of delicious thought to be checked by slumber. She fondly cherished every image of the hour that was to her the supreme of life. She revolved every word, every look. She wept with delight, as an expanding flower drops its dew. She wandered into deep and remote thoughts of the future, and saw it to the last smooth and radiant : life like the boundless level of ocean coloured with the rosiest hues of heaven. Slumber at length sealed the happiest eyes of earth, only to repeat the vision in more fantastic beauty. HEBE. 271 A confusion of sounds in the palace roused her late in the day. She instantly felt that unac- countable sensation that so often warns us of misfortune, and hastened to the apartments of Cantacuzene. He was gone; and Hebe could learn no more than that, on some intelligence which he had received about noon, he had rode out, ordering his escort to follow. The arrival of a messenger from the boyar to men- tion that he would not be at home during the day, had produced the confusion among the domestics, among whom rumours of public danger were already spreading. Squadrons of Austrian hulans had been seen gathering on the Transylvanian frontier. A regiment of spahis, on the other hand, were collecting contributions along the left bank of the Danube; and the slightest symptoms of war were sufficient to excite the terror of a coun- try perpetually the victim, whoever might be aggressor. But where was her affianced hu&band? She passed the dreary hours of that day lingering for his step ; she caught the sound of his horse's tramp in every echo. 272 THE wallachian's tale. To what ill-fortune, inconstancy, or calamity, was his singular absence to be attributed ? Her quick fancy augured some great reverse. She saw the night fall ; and, sitting at the same casement from which she had seen the sun rise, asked, in the vehemence of her fevered heart, what she had done to be thus suddenly cast down from the height of happiness. The night was inclement ; yet she sat out the storm. She watched without a fear the long shafts and spikes of lightning as they tore through the masses of cloud, and wildly wished that some flash would lay her perplexities at rest for ever. But at midnight her quick eye observed a blaze rising some miles off along the ridge that overtops the city. She felt a consciousness that her fate was connected with its coming. The light slowly ap- proached, and as it expanded, she could perceive that it was from a number of torches carried by cavalry. Her heart alternately swelled and died away. She felt as powerless as an infant, while she watched the troop making the slow circuit of the fortifications. The light disappeared, flashed HEBE. 273 again, rose, and died, until she saw it entering the gates ; and the sound of many voices in the palace at length told her that the boyar was come. In fear and hope she advanced to meet him ; but she had no strength to ask the one question on which her all but life hung. She could only see that dejection sat on his manly physiognomy. The hall was crowded with attendants and the dismounted troopers of the escort. It was no place for the disclosure which the boyar had to make, and he led the shuddering girl back to her apart- ment ; where, with a voice that betrayed his own want of composure, he explained the purpose of his journey. " The ways of Providence are wise, my child," said the noble philosopher with a sigh, " and it is perhaps their very wisdom that so often makes them strange to us. Our faculties are not made to question those deep and far-reaching views to which, though they provide for us better than we could desire for ourselves, human intelligence is but folly. Last night I had looked upon your happiness, my Hebe, as almost secure beyond this world's changes ; and so it may be still; but the 274 THE wallachian's tale. means must be in higher hands than ours. The alliance with Justiniani must, T fear, be delayed." "But he lives! tell me that he lives!" ex- claimed Hebe, sinking on her knees before him, and with her clasped hands beseeching him to pro- nounce the words of mercy. "In the name of that Heaven which we worship, but tell me that he lives." The boyar could not abide the agony of that face of beauty, every quivering feature of which was distinctly seen by the strong illumination of the burning vase above. He silently attempted to rise ; but she read evil in his silence ; and fixing upon him eyes that, seemed to dart into his soul, with one hand buried in the glossy tresses on her forehead, to check its throbbings, and give her time to breathe, and with the other grasping his robe, she waited for her sentence of misery. "There is hope yet," gravely said the boyar. "Theodore's absence this morning surprised me; but I took it for granted that it was but some of the little piques of the young, and not the less likely to be atoned for, on his arrival, for which I naturally looked every hour. But new intelligence of the HEBE. 275 movement of troops on the frontier alarmed me. I knew the indiscriminate spirit of rapine among the roving squadrons on both sides, allies and enemies alike ; and my impression gradually began to be that Theodore, in the venturous desire to show himself worthy of my connexion, had made some rash reconnoissance, and had fallen into their hands. " I immediately despatched hussars to the frontier, and have given up the day to a search in every direction in which it was probable that he had gone. I have returned, as you see, without success; but, my child, if this cost you some tears, remember that the anguish of to-day may be turned into the gladness of to-morrow ; and more than all, that we are in the hands of a Being whose final object is to make all his creatures happy, if they will not repel his benevolence by unrepentant error, or self-indulgent and mistrust- ful sorrow." The mourner rose. The tears still would gush ; but higher feelings made them calm ; and she thought of hopes before which the reverses of life are mists before the sun. She withdrew to her chamber, and there in solitude sought on her knees 276 THE wallachian's tale. that peace of heart which is nowhere else to be found. The troubles of a wavering cabinet, and a dis- turbed country, day by day still more occupied Cantacuzene's time. But the search for Theodore was unremitted and fruitless. Months passed in alternate hope and disappointment. Hebe shunned society, but her powerful understanding showed her the idleness of intemperate grief. She wept and prayed, and was patient. Theo- dore was in all her thoughts ; but she had given up the hope of ever seeing him again. He was to her as the image of the dead ; a being of memory that excluded all others from her love. Her passion was profound and melancholy, but sacred ; less for one still struggling through the trials of life, than for one of the freed and lofty dwellers in a world where human suffering can intrude no more. Woman may be a fickle thing ; but it is where the captivation is of her fancy, not of her heart Where she has formed the image in the play and wandering of her fine sensibilities, the same spell which called up the vision can lay it at its will ; as the same breeze which shapes the cloud into HEBE. 277 fantastic beauty, can sweep it away into nothing- ness. All that is of gay caprice perishes, and is made to perish. It builds the bower, and rears the altar, and grows weary of both ; the course of nature does the rest — strips the bower of its blossoms, and melts away the altar. But woman is capable of an infinitely more profound, so- lemn, and enduring quality — true passion. Instead of being the birth of the sportive and frivo- lous, it belongs wholly to the more powerful minds. It is no factitious fire, sparkling and play- ing before the eye, to pass away in the glitter of the hour ; but an intense, deep-seated, and inex- tinguishable principle, which, as wisdom or weak- ness guides, may be the source of all that is noble and vigorous in the human character, or the instru- ment of utter ruin ; a moral volcano, whose fire may be the hidden fount of luxuriance and beauty to all upon the surface, or may display its wild strength in consuming and turning it into barren- ness for ever. 278 THE WALLACHIAN'S TALE. CHAPTER VIII. At length some knowledge of the mysterious fate of Theodore seemed likely to transpire. One night, as the boyar was returning late from the Hospodar's council, a billet was flung into his car- riage. The streets of Bucharest are proverbially as dark as dungeons, and it was impossible to see from what hand the billet came. But its contents were calculated to excite curiosity. " If you wish to hear the fate of Theodore Jus- tiniani, come to-morrow night at twelve to the southern gate of the city. If you suspect treach- ery, bring as many attendants as you please. But their presence will restrict the disclosure. If you would know all, you will come alone." The boyar felt no ground for suspicion of any HEBE. 279 private hostility to himself. In a city crowded with troops and population there could be no fo- reign fear ; and he determined to go alone. He could scarcely doubt that Theodore's absence proceeded from some singular misfortune. Long attachment had bound him to the name of Justiniani, and Hebe's deep dejection was worth even serious hazard to remove. He put his pistols in his pocket, and, as the the great clock of the cathedral tolled twelve, he was at the place of rendezvous. The night was one of those changeful periods of autumn when the most perfect serenity is sud- denly turned into the utter rage of the elements. The populace were long since in their beds. The occasional equipages returning from the parties of the nobles flew along to escape the storm ; and soon, except for the passing of some houseless wretch or midnight plunderer, startled by the storm, and flying for shelter, he might have thought himself in a city of the dead. He lingered under the ramparts until his patience was exhausted, and he had begun to conceive that some idle jest had been played upon 280 THE wallachian's tale. his credulity. The cathedral chimes were ringing one ; when, just as he had determined to be trifled with no more, and was wrapping his cloak round him, to go forth and brave the storm of wind and rain, which now rushed down with wilder violence, he heard a step close at his side. The darkness was excessive. He demanded who was there. Receiving no answer, and thinking that he might have been deluded to that lonely spot for the pur- pose of robbery, or private revenge, he drew his sabre, and made a blow in the direction of the sound. A voice, that seemed to come from under his feet, uttered, " Strike your enemies, but the time is not come ; but assist your friends, for the time is come." Total silence followed. No further answer could be obtained to the boyar's repeated demands that the speaker should appear, or dismiss him at once. At length, declaring that he would be sported with no more, he moved from his place of shelter, and had gone forward some steps into the open space that lies between the foot of the rampart and the streets, when his eyes were HEBE. 281 caught by the extraordinary appearance of a large globe of yellow light, floating along the pinnacles of the cathedral. Singular as the phenomenon was, he was at first inclined to resolve it into some of the meteors formed by the highly electric state of the atmo- sphere; but, as he gazed, the globe changed its form, and lengthened out into the human figure. A gigantic spectre stood on the battlements, now pointing to the earth, now to the heaven, and exhibiting a face strongly marked with solemnity and woe. The time, the loneliness, and the business on which Cantacuzene had come, height- ened the natural influence of this strange visitant. Fear he felt none ; but a deep interest and anxiety to know the object of the visitant were excited. No man had laboured more to suppress superstition among his peasantry ; and the tales of vampyres, amulets, and evil eyes, had found in him a resolute castigator. With the usual zeal of a reformer, he had started perhaps beyond the legitimate boundary, and even offered a reward to the man who would produce to him an authentic proof that there was any ground whatever for 282 THE wallachian's tale. these mysteries, stronger than the absurdity worked by wine, fear, or dreams. The memory of this determination not to be- lieve, flashed on his mind with something of the feeling of a crime, as he saw the shape glare on him from its stand on the brow of the great place of graves. Still, though his heart beat with sen- sations that in another hour he would have chidden as weakness, the philosopher in his nature gave him strength ; and, if he dreaded, he longed for the nearer approach of the phantom, from which, if it were any thing more than a vapour of the night, he might at length know the great mystery, and hear tidings of the forbidden world. His wish was soon, though but partially, granted. The phantom descended from the pin- nacle, an enormous height: but what was difficulty or descent to such powers? It walked along the steep edge of the roof, where no living foot could have found a resting-place for a moment. It came still lower down, and stood, making gestures of the most impressive solemnity, on a spot where all looked a sheet of perpendicular and polished marble. Passing down this almost precipice, HEBE. 283 every vein and colouring of which shone in the glimmering radiance of the spectre, it at last touched the ground. But the massive iron-work of the gates was still between. A voice demanded whether the boyar was prepared to follow where it would lead. His answer was firm. More than the gratification of curiosity urged him to investigate the wonder to its depths. He was still unpersuaded; yet what he saw was more than strange enough to stimulate inquiry. Let what would come of the pursuit, he was convinced that the fate of Theo- dore would receive some elucidation. If the whole display were illusive, it was yet evident that it must have been constructed on some know- ledge of a transaction which to him had remained in total obscurity. But if the shape before him were true, and the permission to warn and instruct had been given ; if his philosophy taught him that it was not unsuitable to reason that the Pro- vidence to whom the blood cries out of the ground should take especial means for the discovery of the crime, how should he be justified in shrinking from its full disclosure ? 284 THE wallachian's tale. As if the apparition knew his thoughts, it moved forward. No gates of iron, none of ada- mant, could have retarded its progress. It passed free as air through the massive bars. Once on his side of the portal, it strode loftily along to the fortifications. The solid rampart, which, the mo- ment before, had seemed impervious as a rock, gave way to its tread. The boyar boldly fol- lowed ; passed through the rampart unimpeded, and when he glanced upwards again, saw the stars twinkling over his head, and the huge mass of the battlements and bastions frowning behind him. A single ravelin was still to be passed ; but as he was ascending it, guided by the blue efful- gence that flowed from the robes of the vision, a dismounted cannon, that lay under the embra- sures, struck his foot, and even while he glanced down to discover the nature of the obstacle, the guide had disappeared. He gazed round the horizon in vain. The eye commanded leagues upon leagues ; but not even the glimmer of a cottage light was visible. The heavens were loaded with mountains of cloud that, HEBE. 285 from time to time, like floating iEtnas, threw out broad columns of flame, or opened their huge sides, as if the imprisoned fire had burst them. The storm was returning in its violence ; the sudden gusts of wind compelled the boyar to grasp the gun, lest he should be swept away ; and the fragments of the ruinous outworks flying about him began to render his situation one of great personal hazard. To remain where he was, or to return, was equally difficult. He was now convinced that no personal object could have been designed in lead- ing him to this desolate scene. Exhaustion of body acted on even his powerful understanding ; and while he heard the roar of the whirlwind, the heaving of the forests like a distant ocean, and the awful peals of the thunder, he could scarcely restrain himself from the thought that in this wild visitation there was some reference to the punish- ment of his own incredulity ; that the storm was suffered to shake and overwhelm him, but that the mysterious knowledge, the price for which it was braved, was to be withheld. He had scarcely conceived the thought, before the voice was again at his side. No shape was 286 THE wallachian's tale. visible; but a feeble glimpse of light glanced along tlie path which he was commanded to fol- low. He followed unhesitatingly. The path led over an intricate space of ruins and weeds to a broken portcullis. The bars rose spontaneously before them. A door rolled back, the vision passed on, and the boyar intrepidly entered. The light perished and the door closed at the same moment. He felt his way with his hands. He was evidently in one of the dungeons of the rampart ; and human fears struck him again. But he was strong in the sense of duty, and he gathered his vigour for the result. He was not left to long perplexity. The ground under his feet heaved, and he felt himself sinking. The boyar was now suddenly convinced that his death was intended ; and the natural love of life struggled against the horrible chances of this living grave. He cried out, in the hope that some sen- tinel might catch the sound ; he grasped at the invisible walls, but there was nothing on which he could fix his grasp. Still he went down. He felt the air grow thicker, and more pestilent. A va- HEBE. 287 pour, that smelled of contagion, rose round him. He was now more than ever convinced that some atrocious treachery had been practised upon him, and that he was to be a sacrifice. But the thought, which would have unnerved a feebler mind, re- stored his to its dignity. High principle and vi- gorous intellect were still his. If fate was against him, he must yield ; if personal enemies had cir- cumvented him, he determined that, let the worst come, they should have no triumph — that he would not degrade his honourable career by pusillani- mous concessions in its last hour. While he was awaiting his sentence, with the full consciousness that now neither courage nor sagacity could avail, further than to prolong his torture, the cell began to be seen more distinctly round him. But the light was so pale, that his first impression attributed it to merely the common strengthening of the sight by being accustomed to darkness. The light however increased, and he gradually saw a strange and shadowy figure at the extremity of the vault sitting beside an open grave. Greatly perturbed at all that he had witnessed during this night of peril, Cantacuzene at first 288 THE wallachian's tale. would have retreated from a phenomenon whose half-defined shape struck him with more anxiety than he perhaps would have felt from any dis- tinct form of terror. But by a strong effort he advanced, demanding " for what purpose he had been beguiled into that place of hideousness and horror." The voice that had so long led him on, oracularly answered, as if from the earth above his head, that " for the bold, there was no danger ; for the believing, there was no concealment." The figure then rose to a height which filled the vault, and in a splendour which made the boyar cast his eyes on the ground to escape its intensity. The voice again was heard, demanding whether he was prepared to receive " knowledge at the price of pain." The boyar haughtily exclaimed that " he was to be trifled with no longer; that he came for knowledge, and that he was prepared to pay its price ; that if imposture were intended, he was prepared to detect it ; and that if he had been be- trayed into evil hands, his fate would be terribly avenged." Loud laughter echoed through the cavern as he HEBE. 289 pronounced the threat ; the wall before him gave way ; and, as if he had been let into the open air, he saw by the flashes of a storm a vast extent of the landscape round the city. Liberty was his instant impulse, and he sprang forwards; but a low barrier, which he had not hitherto perceived, stood across the centre of the vault, and the lightning showed him on the other side an impassable trench. He now stood still and gazed. As the light in- creased, the storm passed away, and with it the landscape ; and his heart beat high, when, under the softness of the dawn, he saw his own Carpa- thian domains expanded in their full fertility. He thought of the unprotected state of his adopted child, and wished from his soul that he had never brought her from the solitude which could be left by a being of her beauty and feeling, only to en- counter peril. The thought had not reached his lips ; yet, at the instant, he saw a magnificent chamber, and in it, in the midst of the emblems and employments of her tasteful mind, the form of Hebe. She was evidently in deep sorrow ; her face was upturned to heaven, and the tears that streamed down it, vol. I. N 290 THE wallachian's tale. and the sighs that heaved her bosom, pained him with their reality. He gazed keenly, to discover whether all this was not illusion. But Hebe rose, and after pacing the chamber for a few moments, and pressing the tears from her silken eyelashes, took up a lute, and touched it to a native air, every note of which vibrated to his heart. She sang, and he recognised the unri- valled sweetness of her voice. The words were melancholy, and such as he had often known the effusion of her feelings. They told of love withered in the bud ; of the heart, like a sealed fountain, destined to waste away ; of hopes buried in the sepulchre of him to whom she had pledged her faith once and for ever. He heard his own name mingle fondly with the tribute to the memory of Theodore. Her lamentation was now for the boyar. She recounted his virtues, his dignity of mind, his noble union of the loftiest purposes with the gentlest heart ; until, overpowered by the con- trast of her earlier happiness with the loss of the only two beings who made life dear to her, the young Greek let the lute fall from her hand, and sank upon the grouud. HEBE. 291 CHAPTER IX. Cantacuzene, absolutely overcome by the strong resemblance, would have rushed forward to her help, but the obstacle before his steps recalled him to bitter consciousness and to incredulity. "If," he exclaimed, "there be a human being within hearing, who dreads punishment, or looks to reward, let him come forward, and trust to me. He shall be rewarded to the full extent of his demands. If this be some conspiracy to extort money, money he shall have. But another mo- ment's delay in accepting those terms will be fatal to every man concerned in this tissue of charla- tanry and crime." A burst of clamorous mockery again echoed through the cavern. " Boyar Cantacuzene," said 292 THE wallachian's tale. the mysterious voice, " charge not the keepers of the secret world with the follies of your world of guilt and ignorance. As the infant is to the man, so are the men of your boasted wisdom to the pupils of the true philosophy ; but as the stars are above the earth, so high above all that is born of earth are the spirits of our mysteries. Now look, listen, and if you would not be undone, doubt no more." He looked ; before him was a small chamber of the most simple kind. A stove, a few books and papers scattered on shelves, a few paintings of men in ancient armour, a few plaster busts of Roman patriots and philosophers, and two or three large charts hung upon the walls, made its whole furniture. At a table sat a figure of a man, with his head bent close over a map, which he was traversing with a pair of compasses. On the floor were a small trunk, a cloak, a telescope, and some other common preparations for a journey. The boyar gazed in utter astonishment. It was in a chamber exactly like this, in the Leopoldstat of Vienna, that he had parted with his glorious friend Rhiga. The evening of their fatal parting, HEBE. 293 the last time that he was to meet in this world one of the noblest hearts that ever left it, was indelibly impressed on his mind. Every feature of the apartment had been retraced by him in his solitude, until he had the picture as firmly before his thoughts as if he once more stood within its walls. The chamber present to him now was perfect identity. Yet he paused. He had heard of the celebrated illusions of Schaefer at Leipsic, and knew the power of the imagination to realise its own dreams. The disciples of Weishaupt, a more dexterous charlatan for a more atrocious purpose, had ventured even under the claws of the imperial eagle ; and the proud nobles of the Austrian aristocracy had been duped into worshipping the absurdities of magne- tism and the cabbala. But while the deists and phi- losophers of the very pious and profligate Vienna bowed down their solemn foreheads in the dust in worship of the "new science," Cantacuzene's clear understanding, undarkened by the supersti- tious fears that make vice blind, had scorned to share the common folly. The ingenuity of Weis- hanpfs most striking illusion was broken up by 294 THE wallachian's tale. his penetration ; and the public penalties, by which the whole system of jugglery was pro- hibited, owed their origin in no slight degree to his sagacity in its public exposure. But here was no trace of that imperfect per- formance which had enabled him to detect the Viennese impostures. The delusion, if such, was incomparably exact, minute, and probable. One test more would be all that scepticism could de- mand. " Let him hear the words of his departed friend." As he pronounced the wish, the sitter at the table raised his head, and fixed on him the large dark eye for which the countenance of Rhiga was remarkable even among his countrymen. Cantacuzene uttered an involuntary cry of re- cognition and wonder. Every trait of the patriot lived before him. He saw the handsome and lofty physiognomy, pale as it was with habitual thought, and worn with long labour in the most glorious and unhappy cause that ever stirred the spirit of mankind. He saw the brown hair touched into streaks of early white, and the magnificent forehead that had so strikingly proclaimed the hero HEBE. 295 and the bard. The lips moved at last ; and he heard these memorable words : — " Let what will become of me; — this I would say to kings and people. — " The cause of Greece is not the cause of re- bellion against lawful government, nor of an insane passion to throw off all authority. It is a rising against misery too great to be borne ; an effort of nature against a degree of wretchedness that God never intended to be borne by man. We demand not some extravagant shape of freedom, but the simplest one that will secure us from being ground to the dust, trampled, and murdered at the will of barbarians that know no fear of God or man ; — that will save us from the daily agony of seeing our wives and children dragged away for the hideous purposes of savage passions, and ourselves rewarded for our wretched submission by the whip and the scymetar ; our religion insulted ; our na- tional character a byeword ; our property the prey of insolent and capricious plunder; our country one vast extent of sorrow and shame, licentious as a haram, dark as a dungeon, and bloody as a perpetual scaffold." 296 The speaker drooped his head on his hands, and was silent for a time. Cantacuzene was over- whelmed with astonishment. "No," said the illustrious Greek, starting from his seat, with a gesture such as Pericles might have used when, in the sight of Athens, he ob- tested the shades of the warriors fallen in the cause of their country. " No, those things must have an end. Hu- man nature cries out against those horrors. When the powers of Europe shall have learned to throw aside that feeble, short-sighted, and unholy policy, which dreads to do an act of common justice, through fear that it may be a means of some petty good to a rival ; when statesmen shall have felt that there is a mighty Being above, who loves justice and hates the oppressor, who commands us to do our duty and leave the rest to his wisdom ; then will the robber of the Caucasus, that a thou- sand years could not civilise, then will the human tiger, that will be a tiger to the last, be driven from his prey ; and Greece and the world will re- joice together. There is our emblem." The form pointed to the heavens, which exhibited HEBE. 297 the colours of a brilliant sunset. " Greece has laboured through a day of tempest ; but her hour will come, an hour of splendid tranquillity ; when her past sufferings will but heighten her future peace, and, like those clouds, the very sources of her storm, will brighten and unfold themselves into the sources of her glory." The boyar listened as to the language of more than man. Those were the actual words that had passed on the final night of his meeting with Rhiga. That they could have transpired, was impossible to conceive. They were spoken in the little chamber, where he alone was present. He had even made no memorandum of them, so reluctant was he to offend the jealousy of the court in whose army he served. He had never disclosed them to man ; and yet here they were detailed to him syl- lable for syllable. When he looked up again, the chamber had disappeared. A low underwood, thinly scattered with trees, spread along the bank of a mighty stream. Threading the broken paths of the wood, a horseman was riding slowly along, and making 298 THE wallachian's tale. signals to a small barge that was nearing the bank. The horseman, on the point of embarking, turned round and waved his hand with an air of proud dejection to the land. He was Rhiga. This anticipation of the boyar's thoughts com- pleted the wonder. He had been on the point of demanding to know, how his gallant friend was snatched away from his career of fame and virtue ; but now he watched the developement with breathless and fearful interest. The horseman embarked. But the barge was rapidly pursued and surrounded, by others that had evidently been lying in wait for it under cover of the shore. He saw the heroic Greek defend him- self with desperate gallantry ; he saw him over- powered, carried on shore, flung, chained, into a waggon, and carried to Belgrade. He saw him brought out on the ramparts, the pacha standing at the head of his janizaries, and gazing in wonder at the intrepid being that, with his last look turned on Greece, knelt waiting for the scymetar. He saw the signal given, the flash of the steel, and the death of that man whom reviving Greece HEBE. 299 will yet fix in the temple of immortality between Homer and Miitiades. The boyar uttered an exclamation of agony. " Are you convinced now?" said the voice; " or must the knowledge for which you came be hidden from your unbelief for ever?" "I am convinced ; let me know all, and know it at once," was the answer. Wall and rampart, pacha and victim, dissolved away into air, and in their place rose a misty re- semblance of a grove, with a distant pavilion from which sounds of music and dancing were heard. He saw two figures whom he rapidly recognised as Theodore and Hebe in deep conversation. They parted; Hebe towards the pavilion, and the lover to plunge into the wood, where he remained alone, absorbed in the referie of passion. A stranger wrapt in a military cloak suddenly rushed from his concealment beside him. He taunted Theo- dore with treachery to his honour, his military subordination, and his master's household. The voice was distinctly heard, and its tone struck the boyar as fearfully familiar to him. But the speaker's face was turned away. 300 THE wallachian's tale. Theodore eagerly deprecated the quarrel, cleared himself of the charge of disingenuousness, and offered to leave the whole question to the decision of Hebe, or the boyar himself. The stranger replied only by throwing off his cloak, and drawing his scymetar. Theodore vainly besought his fu- rious antagonist to avoid this rashness, listen to reason, and spare him the misery of offending his family. The entreaty was answered by a blow. They fought long, the stranger ferociously ; but Theodore's coolness baffled every attack, until in the very act of wresting the weapon from his assailant, his foot slipped, and the point entered his bosom. He dropped on the ground with a deep groan. It was echoed by Cantacuzene. The stranger, struck with sudden horror by the catastrophe, threw himself beside the dying man; attempted to staunch the wound ; and, finding it hopeless, was in despair. A sound of voices, and the glittering of lights through the grove alarmed him ; he started up, and fled. As he turned, his countenance was for the first time visible in the moonlight. Every nerve of the boyar s vigorous frame trembled with HEBE. 301 anguish. The shedder of that blood was his son Cons tan tine ! An irresistible conviction of the fact seized him. Some vague conjectures, the impressions rather of a dread lest it should be so, than of any ground for believing that it was, had often beset him. But certainty was now beneath his eye, and he felt the blow driven home to his own heart. Sinking under the fatal display, he adjured the power whatever it might be, gifted to make such dreadful discoveries, to spare his feelings the tor- ture of seeing the consummation of the deed of blood. But the developement went on. The sounds had passed away ; but no foot of the revellers came near the spot; and the body of the unfortunate Theodore lay upon the ground, pouring forth its purple streams at every heave of the dying frame. At length some rude and felon-looking men came lurking under the trees : the rich dress caught their eyes ; they surrounded the insensible young soldier, and, dreading interruption in their plunder, carried him away. Total darkness followed, and theboyar remained 302 THE wallachian's tale. expecting his own assassination to close this night of trial. But the gleaming shape that had so long been his guide, was again seen as if growing out of the solid earth. It stalked onward soundlessly, and without a word. The boyar followed. It tra- versed the caverns, floated along the parapet of the bastion, and finally plunged into the rampart. Still the boyar, wound up to the last pitch of des- perate reliance, followed through height and depth, through the ruins and the rampart. The solid and the lofty were alike easily overcome ; and unchal- lenged by sentinel, and unimpeded by obstacles which might have checked the assault of an army, he followed on, until the huge gates of the cathe- dral once more frowned before him. The appari- tion again flitted through, like the mote in a sun- beam, ascended the wall, surmounted the battle- ment, and then, with a wild gesture and a sepul- chral cry, vanished from his gaze. Overcome by indescribable emotions, the boyar stood with his eyes fixed on the pinnacle. His feet were rooted to the spot : he almost deemed himself bound by an actual spell to the vicinage HEBE. 303 which had been the scene of events more mar- vellous than the wildest fictions of his fabling land. He watched until he saw a light tinging the pinnacle. With his flesh creeping, he imagined in this sign the returning lustre of the potent being that had given him so much unwilling wisdom; and he prepared himself for what adventure more fearful and final might be still his fate. The light increased. From the feeblest struggle with darkness it had already become white ; the white was soon touched with rose ; the rose was soon mingled with gold. It was dawn. The boyar's eye rejoicingly recognised the coming of that sunrise, before which nature and the mind alike throw off their garb of darkness ; and with a heart oppressed with its fatal knowledge, yet in- sensibly cheered by the universal cheering of the face of earth, he hastened to his home. The mixture of revelry and anxious council which occupied the court of the Hospodar, at a juncture when the installation of the new sovereign was likely to be followed by a new war, made the absence of the boyar during the night a matter of 304 the wallachian's tale. such frequency, as to prevent every suspicion in his household ; and he passed to his chamber through ranges of weary domestics, who looked on his re- turn only as a permission for them to fling them- selves down on the floors, and forget balls and boyars in the land of dreams, where the slave is as great as his king. On reaching his chamber, the grateful obscurity prompted him to rest. His limbs were worn with fatigue, but the fatigue was less of his frame than of his mind. He threw himself on the em- broidered couch; and yet there had been times when he could have slept more refreshingly on the bare ground. His eyes were sealed in vain : his mind was restless, and he saw in his uneasy slumber the shapes and hazards of the night. The apparition rose again to appal him ; he felt it approach ; he felt a hot and withering air round him. A sullen voice murmured in his ears; he adjured the phantom to " speak its purpose, and relieve him from an un- certainty worse than death." The form moved away : he saw it throw a long beam of solid fire upon the table, in which he read words of mystery HEBE. 305 and fear. He attempted to grasp the fiery docu- ment; felt himself violently repulsed, and awoke. In his disturbed sleep, he had left the couch, and strayed round the chamber. The distant sounds of the city had probably administered to the alarms of his dream ; and in his ramblings he had struck his hand forcibly on the marble table. But, to his amazement, all was not the working of fantasy. Upon that table gleamed a pale glow- worm radiance, fading as the daylight penetrated through the draperies of the casements. He gazed upon the expiring flame with an indescribable feel- iug. He was habitually above superstition; yet the night had deeply perplexed him, and he looked upon this self-sustained effulgence as an ancient worshipper at Dodona or Delphi might have watched the first oracular whispers of the trees, or the first kindling of inspiration along the features of the pythoness. He came still nearer, saw that the flame shaped itself into the characters of writing, and read these words on the marble : — " Your guilty mistrust of the power that last 306 THE wallachian's tale. night offered you knowledge for nothing, then im- peded your full knowledge, and now compels you to buy it at a price. If you would know the fate of Theodore, if you would rescue the honour of Constantine, and if you would save the life of Hebe> to-morrow will find you on the road to the Danube. Go in secret, or you go in vain. Demand an audience of the pacha of Bulgaria. Return in secret, and be thenceforth high, ho- noured, and happy." The words vanished away as he read. But their import was fixed in his soul. At another crisis, he would have scorned the whole transaction, as a device to involve him in some idle adventure. He knew perfectly the contrivances by which chemistry had of old been made to disturb the less scientific imaginations. But the " coincidence here was too strong for human means." He, how- ever, made no unthinking resolve. The boyar gave every hour of that day to a close investigation of the circumstances. A secure con- clusion was not to be attained. Yet it was obvious that, whether preternatural or human, HEBE. 307 an extraordinary knowledge of events, which now occupied the chief interest of his being, was possessed by those strange visitants. The impression was so powerful, that had he been a private individual, he would have risked all results, and set out for the Danube instantly. But a new perplexity arose. He held a public trust of the highest rank ; his seat in the council involved matters of the first importance ; and the pressure of the times was formidable, from the contending claims of Russia and the Porte, which might be followed at a moment by invasion. His secret journey too might not remain the secret of a day ; while his absence at this critical period, and peculiarly his absence in the actual ter- ritory of the Porte, must lay him under suspicions alike dishonourable to his character, and hazardous to his final purposes. He now rejected the oracle, and to extricate him- self from thinking further on the subject, went to seek Hebe. He found her ; but found her looking such a picture of anguish, that his resolution was shaken at the instant. Her death-like paleness, the sighs that interrupted her few words, and the 308 nervous and overwhelming emotion that transpired in all that she said or did, convinced him how essential to her very life was some elucidation of the fate of her betrothed. It was in vain that he attempted to give her young and bereaved heart the hope, that his philo- sophy could not master for itself. Hebe, too, overcome by the evident sympathy with which he looked upon her bitter struggle for com- posure, at length divulged the cause of those sufferings, that had even within a single night made so rapid and melancholy a change in her returning tranquillity. Scared from her sleep by the storm to which the boyar had been exposed, she had seen a form before her, in whose description he recognised his mysterious guide. It had uttered words which she felt like fire in her brain. It told of "dangers to herself, to the house of her more than father, to all she loved ; and finally, declared that on the boyar's zeal and intrepidity must depend her hope, her love, and her existence." Cantacuzene hesitated no longer to renew his purpose ; yet he reasoned on the idleness of giving HEBE. 309 the reins to imagination ; talked of the propensity of young and strongly agitated minds to fabricate visions into substance ; recommended rest ; and promised, when he next saw her, to bring good news. She thanked him with a sad smile, and in the grateful impulse of the moment, prayed that every blessing and protection of Heaven might be on the head of the noble Cantacuzene. He heard the supplication in silence, but he heard it as the prompting of a superior wisdom to the enterprise which was to restore this creature of beauty and sorrow to happiness. He left her still pouring out the aspirations of eloquent gra- titude, and hastened to his chamber, where he spent the remaining hours in solitary preparation for his journey. At night-fall he set forth alone ; gave an anxious glance to the twinkling lights of his palace; plunged into the wild roads and utter darkness of the champaign ; and, by dawn, was far on his way to the frontier. As the evening sun was throwing its red light over the plains of Thrace, the boyar reached the Da- nube. The brown walls of Rudschuk, still marked 310 THE WALLACHIAN'S TALE. with many a Russian cannon-shot, rose massively before him, topped with minarets slender as lances, standing out among domes and bulging roofs, that looked like a colossal Tartar camp. It was his first view of a city under the dominion of the Turk ; that bold Scythian, who, sprung from slaves in his native Caucasus, had so often con- quered the discipline of the civilised south, yet conquered only to remain more thoroughly a slave. He heard the Imaums raising their sonorous voices on the air, while all the other voices of life were gradually sinking away ; and the sound reminded him, with a painful sensation, that he was now leaving the land of comparative security, to throw himself into the grasp of a despotism whose mercy was at best but caprice, whose cruelty was a principle, and whose only law was that of the stronger. But this was not the time to deliberate. A few hours would decide questions that, to his excited feelings, were worth the sacrifice of a life. He hailed a Turkish boat that lay creeping its way among the yellow waters of the mighty river; sprang on board, and was speedily running through HEBE. 311 the flat islets that turn this queen of waters into a Dutch lake. " Now, friend," said the boyar to his boatman, "you must do me another service on my landing, and show me the way to some place where I may lodge for the night." The request, assisted by a piastre, put the Turk into good-humour ; he instantly dropped his na- tional sternness, and with a look of jocularity, hoped that his passenger was not "in the habit of taking his lodgings in trust of the generation of rascals that plied between Giurgevo and Rudschuk, for in their hands he ran three chances, one of which was a certainty ; he was either pilfered, cast overboard, or tricked into the pacha's hands, who regularly sent such prizes to the slave bazaar in Stamboul." * The boyar, though struck by the oddity of the communication, gravely expressed his belief that he should escape the whole three. '* No doubt," said the boatman ; " this morning the crow flew over my left shoulder, a sign that I * Constantinople. 312 should meet a good fare before night, and that I should treat him like a boatman of honour. There are honest men to be found in all trades. I myself knew two lawyers, and one prime minister, that I should trust with any thing — but my money. And among the navigators of this muddy river, I must own that you have alighted on a splendid excep- tion. Rely upon it, my good friend, that from this bank to the bank of the Bosphorus, you could not have been more lucky in your choice of boat or boatman." "lam satisfied on that point," said the boyar. " Every man best knows himself, and as he cannot be suspected of mistake on the subject — " " Mistake!" interrupted the Turk with a laugh. " The thing is impossible. I never mistook a man's character in my life — the more was my ill luck ; for if I had condescended to be a little more in the dark, the most high and mighty the confidential secretary of the most high and mighty sultan, Selim the Third, would not now be eating horsebeans, drinking water, and rowing your sub- limity across the Danube." The boyar stared at the fallen depository of HEBE. 313 power ; and thought that he perceived in the bold aspect and strong glance of the athletic rower some indications of what might have been the haughty favourite. The sudden alternations of rank and obscurity in the Ottoman government lessened the improbability of both the rise and the fall. " I can tell you more than that," pursued the panting ex-minister, as he lay upon his oar, and suffered the boat to sweep along with the stream. " The pacha Achmet ben Ali, who for two reasons of his own, plunder and fear, and one of mine, revenge, hides his head in yonder castle, is as arrant a caitiff as if he had held an oar since the day he was born. My own history I disdain to give ; it is written on the noses of the Russian cavalry, who lie fattening the soil between the Dnieper and the Danube ; and on the backs of the Austrian grenadiers, who remain paying the same compli- ment to Servia. Achmet's history is written on the soles of men's feet, after beginning on the soles of men's shoes." He laughed loudly at the conceit. " The riddle is this : he began life as a cobbler, and he rose in vol. i. o 314 THE wallachian's tale. life by his expertness in the bastinado. On my ar- rival in the seraglio to assist the wisdom of my imperial and most magnificent master, Selim the Third, of immortal memory, and forgotten the moment that his rogue of a nephew threw him into chains ; I found this Achmet at the summit of his profession, the most expert proficient in the use of the bamboo of any bostangee * since the taking of Stamboul. " If I have ever possessed any talent, it has been that of discerning the value of things that other people overlook. The bostangee became my right- hand man at once. In Christendom, you think yourselves the very essence of humanity and wisdom ; yet you imprison, banish, and hang ten for one that the moslemin ever touches. The sultan is privileged by the blessed and merciful law of our prophet to cut off fourteen heads a day, without any one's questioning him upon the matter. But the blessed and merciful law of lazi- ness says another thing : the work is troublesome. It spoils clothes, scymetars, and the temper. The refurnishing of harams too is expensive; and * Attendant and guard of the seraglio. HEBE. 315 thanks to your virtuous grandees, the market stock of Circassians and Greeks is so much monopolised at home, that they are becoming more expensive every day. Janizaries will not now suffer their heads to be cut off without grumbling, whatever they might do in better times ; and as for the heads of Moreotes and islanders, I believe on my soul that, like the locusts, the more you extinguish of them, the more come in their place. " In Christendom, you banish for a shilling, you imprison for a yard of cotton, you slay for a sheep ; while we never take the life of man but for a cause worthy of justice. The scymetar smites only for rebellion, for wearing a green turban if you are not a hadji, or for twitching a hair out of the sacred camel's tail." " You omit," said the boyar, smiling in turn, " the still more unpardonable crime of doubting that the thirty- third chapter of the Koran was written with a pen of light a hundred miles long by the aDgel Gabriel." The boatman shook him by the hand with gay familiarity. " I see you are a man after my own heart," exclaimed he, throwing himself back in 316 THE wallachian's tale. unrestrained laughter. " I wish for your sake that all your doctors on the left bank of the Danube were but half as rational as our fat old muftis ; you would not then be under the necessity of pilfering each other's purses, and cutting each other's throats, for the honour of a rag of holiness, of which you might have the exact fellow in price and purity from any old clothes' shop in the shadow of your mighty mother of Casan, or your mighty father of St. Peter's. " Now, the mufti asks our assent to a plain story, which every man may believe with a safe conscience, for no man can prove it to be untrue. " As I live by this oar, I swear that I cannot tell whether the angel Gabriel may not have written the whole of the Koran ; or whether, as in my own case, secretary though I was, all the peumanship was by deputy. Those points I leave to the doctors; who, having gained pelisses worth a thousand crowns by them, and wearing turbans a yard and a half above the rest of mankind, of course know more than we, who, having no interest in the matter, have taken no trouble about it. But let the longest-bearded mufti that ever rivalled the ha- HEBE. 317 nours of a Cretan goat, or the proudest ulema* that ever melted under fur in the dog-days, ask me to believe that a piece of ox-bone had ever been a saint ; that a peep at a skull through a glass-case had ever turned wooden legs into flesh and blood ; or that the handiwork of a painter that I would not suffer to daub my boat, could talk, weep, cure the gout, and stop an inundation ; there I own that my tongue would be in danger of giving his holi- ness something not far from a reason for doubting my belief, and making my head bid farewell to the neck which it has so little desire to leave. u But here, pursued he, u lies the quay where I must try to land you in the teeth of those clumsy barges of pulse and papas, f cabbages for the moslemen, and confessors for the Greeks — and the one half of the cargo just as wise as the other." * Lawyer. t Greek priests. 318 THE wallachian's tale. CHAPTER X. He pushed in boldly, and ran on board the commodore of the cabbage-boats. But there his success ended. The confessor ial cargo rose in arms, and poured on him a volley of river elo- quence that completely overwhelmed his volu- bility. Long as the boyar had lived in the highest ranks of mankind, never had he seen more furi- ous irritation about nothing; and his fullest ac- quaintance with camps could not supply him with a hundredth part of the tropes and metaphors of the river tongue. The boatmen, as might be ex- pected from professional principles, stood by, much amused at the defeat of their fellow ; and occa- sionally administering such figures of speech as they presumed might give additional effect to the pungency of the papas. HEBE. 319 " We must abandon our object," observed the boyar, smiling. " We have no chance of being suffered to reach a port here." " To get a place and to keep it," replied the boatman tranquilly, " is the maxim all over the world, as well as among the cabbage-boats of the Danube." " But what do you propose next V " What, if I had done in other times, I should not have been here — ' go with the stream.' " He put this policy into practice, and suffering the boat to glide, continued with his eyes fixed on the bustle of the barges, that were now squab- bling and crowding to the shore. The boyar, anxious to land, pointed to the sinking light, and asked why he continued to look on the quarrel. " For reasons that I learned before I ever ex- pected to see your face. I am trying to find out which is the more foolish and furious of the parties." " To join in the battle, and assist the right side, I suppose," said the boyar with a sceptical glance. " You have seen too much of the World, my good sir, to suppose any such thing," said the 320 THE WALLACHIAN'S TALE. boatman. " I learned the true maxim long ago in the divan. If a minister is turned out of office, his natural hope is in the populace ; and the more thoroughly rabble his friends are, the better is his chance. No scruples about character are likely to be made on either side ; their measures have an energy worth all the lazy virtues of the earth; and the minister who had been kicked out of the seraglio the week before, as even too black for the honour of execution by the state-hatchet, rides back in triumph on the swell of the cobblers and charcoal porters of Stamboul, purer at every step he goes, till the surge lifts him up to the cushions of the council — the vizier sent by Mahomet himself to save his people." But the Danube, freshened by the flow of the mountain torrents after the storm, began to swell and sweep them down with violent rapidity. "What do you think," said the fallen secretary, " of a voyage to Stamboul? This villanous cur- rent perhaps owes me a grudge for the character I have given of its masters, and would take me off again to the walls of the seraglio. Well, it was a glo- rious game after all :" the fire flashed in his dark HEBE. 321 eye, as, strongly gesticulating, he uttered the words. " It was worth the hazard of a life, of a thousand lives, to be the ruler of all that my glance fell upon ; to see the bold, the mighty, the rich, and the rabble, worship me; to send out my armies, to sweep the seas with my fleets, to shake and terrify, to subdue and hold in submission, myriads on myriads of the most daring, desperate, and haughty of man- kind ; to make the Arab, as he started from his sand, look, not to the sun, but to the spot where my stronger beams shone ; to make the Persian, trembling in Teheran, ask his astrologer how long, not the will of fate, but my will, was to suffer him to sit upon his throne ; to fix the fieri e eye of the Muscovite, the frigid heart of the Austrian, the furious subtlety of France, and the slow strength of England on one man, one alone, among the twenty millions of the empire of the faithful — and that one me ! " But here we are under the suburbs of this most ragged of towns, peopled by the most thievish of Turks, and squeezed by the most roguish of governors. And now, before we part, let me ask whether you have any particular business with the magnificent and renowned Achmet Pacha V* 322 " I have," said the boyar, " and business of great importance to me and mine." " Then let me give you, not advice, for you have too much sense to thank me for what every one gives ; and no one gives, but because he knows it to be worth nothing ; — but take with you a sketch of his character, which you could have from no authority so high as my own : — " He is a tyrant, an extortioner, and a lover of blood — in one word, a pacha. But, as nature some- times thwarts the finest qualities for human mis- chief, just as she forces the shark to turn on his back before he can bite ; the serpent to be content with one buffalo at a time ; and the conqueror to stop when the snow falls, if it were only to leave mankind to grow up through the winter for the summer's crop of the scymetar ; so, indolence tem- pers the exquisite faculties of the Turk. Even Achmet will not bastinado you, unless he can get something by the operation. Though, if you have money enough in your sash to stir up his avarice, without enough to bribe it, never will you leave those castle walls within a foot and a half as tall as you entered them. Yet with the renowned pacha I have some influence still." HEBE. 323 The boatman requested the traveller's tablets, and wrote a few lines: — "That you may not be sur- prised," said he, "at so culpable an accomplishment as scribbling in an Ottoman minister, I must let you into the secret that, as such, I was never guilty of touching a pen. The acquirement was forced upon me by the mother of all crimes — money. The traders whom I ferried over cheated me so mercilessly, that unless I chose to be starved, I must learn to keep their names in remembrance in some way or other. To suffer my memory to load itself with the freight of butter and Austrians was a degradation impossible to be borne. In self- defence I learned this vulgar art of the infidel ; and, conscious as I am of my having thus set the seal to my expulsion from the divan for ever, if it were known, I am not sorry if it may yet save your feet from the bastinado, and your neck from the bowstring." To Cantacuzene the Turkish was a dead lan- guage ; but he folded up the billet, and promised to have recourse to it, in case of necessity. " Necessity!" exclaimed the boatman. " Be- fore you have been twelve hours inside those gates, it will depend on this scrawl whether I see you 324 THE wallachian's tale. tumbling without your brains from one of the loopholes to feed the sturgeons, or you are safe and sound at your pipe and pillaff. I make no inquiry about your business ; but men like you," and he fixed his penetrating eyes on the boyar, M do not rove the world for nothing." He now amused himself with European sketches. " Your Englishman travels to spend his money, and curse every spot where he cannot find beef and politics ; your Frenchman to curl his hair and write lampoons ; your German to enrich his own barbarian jargon with the barbarism of every other jargon ; your Russian to rob your Turk, — but you are no trader ; no, I'll be sworn that you never sold a pumpkin or a pistachio in your life. You could better tell whether the Czar shaves looking towards the North Pole or the Santa Sophia ; or the sultan shakes his beard more towards France or Austria." The boyar disclaimed this knowledge of sove- reign toilettes. " So best for you!" replied his doubting com- panion. " But Achmet's story will grow as cold as this evening's breeze. " On my appointment to office, I found every HEBE. 325 thing in confusion ; all the provinces, as usual, either in rebellion or starving ; the rabble of the city burning the houses over their own heads every night by thousands, for the purpose of enlightening the sublime brother of the sun and moon ; the janizaries carrying their kettles through the streets with a fresh aga's head in them every day ; and the ladies of the haram, from the sultana-mother down to the dingiest Nubian that ever wore a nose, scolding, crying, clamouring, and vowing revenge, from morning till night. " The business without the seraglio looked bad enough ; but the business within was unspeakable ; I own that I was perplexed. Ayoub* himself would have gone out of his senses with the din. The kislar agaf came to me every five minutes with tears in his eyes, and instinctively turning his hand round his neck, to feel whether the head was still upon his shoulders. " The furious frolics of the ladies made his hideous black visage more hideous if possible ; his woolly locks stood up like porcupine's quills; and in his most baboonish language, the African * Job, still the great model of oriental endurance, t The chief governor of the haram. 326 THE wallachian's tale. attempted to tell me of the Venetian mirrors dashed into fragments by those pretty tormentors ; of the cashmires worth a thousand dollars a piece, ripped into a thousand fragments before his eyes ; of the piles of French lace, Persian tissues, Saxon porcelain, and a hundred other fine things, torn, burnt, or flung at his head by those doves of Paradise. The plain fact was, the whole haram was in a state of mutiny. " I demanded an audience of the sultan, and found him in his kiosk, # trying to smoke away thought. I told him to lay down his pipe, or be prepared to lay down his sceptre. He was in despair, refused to listen to reason, and comforted himself in the national way, with saying, that if it was written in the book of destiny that his career must be cut short, it must. " I insisted upon it, that if a moslemin takes physic to cure himself of a headache, he may as well take a little trouble to save his head. " To satisfy me of the hopelessness of affairs, his highness led me to the terrace of the upper gardens; and from that most hallowed spot, gave * Pavilion. HEBE. 327 me a full view of the riot within. Riot '.—why, by the beard of my father, the word is tame ; the thing was rebellion, rage, fury. The women had all got loose, and were acting according to the good-will and pleasure of the sex, to the amount of flogging the unfortunate slaves and mutes in every direction ; chasing their old governesses with rods through the grounds; and breaking every thing that came in their way, windows, furniture, the heads of the negroes, and the commandment against swearing. " Since I was born, I never heard such a melee of voices, such screaming, singing, shouting, and laughter ; never was such an uproar from human throats. There were enough of them too ; for the five hundred fair wives of the sultan looked like scattered diamonds among the mob of brown, red, black, and yellow monsters, that came rolling, tumbling, and fighting, out of the courts of the haram into the gardens. A wilderness of monkeys was silence to them ; a wilderness of tigers was tame. And what do you think was the mighty cause f 1 " The most trifling in the world, of course," said the boyar. " But, as any thing would have done it, 328 THE wallachian's tale. from a toothpick to a throne, 1 cannot venture* to guess. The love of having their own way, perhaps." " Right. Though you Christians keep no ha- rams, yet I am satisfied that man, in all parts of the globe, knows tolerably well the nature of the case. The immediate uproar arose from the seizure of a French smuggler in the natural dis- guise of an ape on a Jew-pedlar's back. " The fellow was an agent of the ambassador, and carried with him a cargo of ribands showy enough to set a whole empire of women in insur- rection. The spy was seized, and his cargo was unluckily embezzled by the kislar aga; for the private emolument, as usual, of that grand func- tionary. The matter might still have been hushed up in the happy secrecy that extinguishes so many other Ottoman blunders ; but the black brute's avarice spoiled all. He began to sell the ribands to the sultanas, on his own account : the price was enormous. But what will not a beauty give to be more beautiful ? Necklaces, bracelets, and tiaras heavy with jewels, daily disappeared. The old governesses were in consternation, the negresses were stripped, and the mutes were whipped, with no improvement of their knowledge ; and the sultanas HEBE. 329 wer,e threatened in vain with the sack and a plunge in the Bosphorus. " Nothing would do. In the midst of this uni- versal stripping and whipping, it transpired, for the hazard of all ears, and the sultan's throne, that the precious commodities for which the sultanas were sacrificing their topazes by the pound, ought actually to have been theirs without the expense of a piastre. The news dropped among those heavenly creatures, like a match into a pow- der-magazine. The haram gates flew open at once ; and if, instead of crazy old timber, they had been made of marble or iron, they would have done the same before the torrent that now rushed upon them. " The kislar aga's soul and body were the first demand from their two thousand pairs of lips. But the old rogue knew well enough what he was to expect ; and the very first symptom of the dis- turbance had sent him flying for his life to my footstool. Then went head over heels into baths, tubs, and fountains, every guardian wretch that they could lay hold of, male and female, from the wrinkled superintendent of the Odalisques, herself as proud as a sultana and as bitter as a beauty 330 THE wallachian's tale. past her time, down to the Ethiopian mute that resembled his brother monkey in every thing but a beard and a tail. " The lovely insurgents at length unluckily threw up their eyes, where I — may the prophet forgive me for being such a fool ! — was indulging mine. I had always a passion for wild nature, from the time that I was a camel-driver among the swamps of the Euphrates ; but all that I had ever seen was child's play to the sight let loose before me. " A troop of Georgians rushed up the side of the terrace. I had been noted in the market for giving a large price for the ornaments of my household, but his highness, as the brother of the sun and moon, having the first right to the celestials, his purse sweeps the bazaar. The twenty or thirty half frantic creatures that bounded up the terrace to wreak their vengeance on me, were the very finest specimens ever sold by Christian mothers to Moslemin masters ; they were as handsome and wicked as a herd of panthers. I had nothing to do but to fly for it. His highness dared trust his sublimity among them no more than myself, and I led him down trembling, to hide in the haram. HEBE. 331 " But the doors were shut; the she-rabble would be upon us in an instant ; and ten to one but the empire would have to mourn together the most frightened of sovereigns and the most brilliant of secretaries. " In this extremity, I proposed that he should get upon my shoulders, and climb in at the win- dow. But his attempt was abortive. As there was no time for etiquette, I made him take my place, mounted the shoulders that bear the weight of empire, broke the panes, pulled away the bars, and dragged him up after me into the Chalved Yiertzey, the winter-hall where the sultanas try to amuse themselves with running races, quarrelling, Italian farces, and shuttlecock. We were pursued by the whole multitude. 1 ' But luckily for us, the room was loaded with lum- ber of all kinds, left since the sultanas had gone to the summer apartments ; old cabinets, fragments of tapestry, broken chandeliers, and clothes-presses crammed with the dismantled finery of the slaves that they whipped into actors. Yet all this could not keep out the prying eyes of two thousand women ; for what on earth could ? Even I was in despair ; until, by one of those accidents which 332 THE wallachian's tale. happen only lo men of genius, in pulling away an immense hanging of scarlet cloth, I saw two French mirrors, tall enough to show a full-dressed sultana, feathers and all. " I pushed his astonished highness behind one of them, and plunged myself behind the other. The principle is matchless, though the discovery is old ; for no woman ever thinks of looking at the back of a mirror, when she can see her ow T n charming self in the front. "The crowd were soon on the spot; all the bostangis in the service could not have kept them out ; doors and windows flew into powder before them, and the furious tide poured in. Boxes, presses, hangings, chandeliers — every thing that could be flung about was tossed like chaff in the wind. All was noise, vengeance, and clouds of dust. The secretary must have fallen a "victim, as the adviser of the sultan ; and probably the sultan would have followed, for an example to all Selims to come. As it was, we were almost suffocated. "But my principle was founded in all-powerful nature, and it saved us both. The sight of the mirrors was magical. Not a woman of the two thousand but had a glance ; and not a woman but HEBE. 333 indulged herself with more than one. The ri- valry turned from extinguishing the government to eclipsing each other. By a law, which it is not my business to comprehend, no woman ever thought herself positively not worth looking at; nor ever looked at herself without discovering that there was something in her physiognomy that well repaid her study. " But here the examination was before a tri- bunal of critics that would suffer none of the ten- der misconceptions of judges in their own cause ; none of those little bland partialities that recon- cile the solitary spectator to a visage, where all the world beside see the deficiencies of nature or the touches of time. Youth and loveliness here stood in inevitable supremacy over their unhappy oppo- sites. " The lofty couutenance of the Greek, the Cir- cassian playfulness of feature, and the glow of the Georgian complexion, were grouped in ruinous contrast with the old and olive-skinned, the copper- coloured, and the downright sable, flat-nosed and woolly-haired. Peals of scornful laughter at the display shook the dome. The daughters of Ara- bia, India, and Africa, were soon driven away, to 334 THE wallachian's tale. hate the art of glass-making, and to think of re- venge. " But the display of the beauties themselves, now mistresses of the field, was the very reverse of conciliation. Age, which will penetrate even the latticed bowers of the seraglio, had paid his ominous visit to many a face, till that moment un- conscious of his call. Sultanas, who had sat su- preme, not less in charms than in rank, found themselves for the first time in sudden danger of a fall from their royalty. Even the Georgian rose of a twelvemonth's transplanting into this garden of houris, was not quite so rose-like as the flower of a week brought blooming from the fresh air of its mountains ; and the Greek eye itself flashed less irresistible radiance after a year or two of triumph, than the newly-imported dia- monds from Chios and Rhodes. " In Turkey the men are silent enough, but the women possess the sex's privilege in as blessed abundance as under any sky of the globe. The comparisons defied concealment. There are times when truth is fold even in courts ; and I never, on any occasion in the course of my changing life, heard it told with greater plainness and volubility. HEBE. 335 " From opinions, the debate rose to sneers of the lowly, and commands of the high. The riot was beginning again ; and I was in the most un- questionable fear lest some friend of peace should knock down the mirrors to put an end to the con- troversy. But when I heard the very proposal made, and was preparing to die with honour, luckily the sultana-mother, hopeless of a sentence in her own favour, ordered the whole assemblage to retire. " Some remaining deference for a woman who had ordered innumerable rivals to be turned out of the holy precincts of the seraglio without more than the caftan on their backs, for sale to the ass-drivers of Karaman, and who might do so again, when she pleased, produced a slight hesitation. A ru- mour artfully spread, that the Frenchman had been set at liberty with his stock, and was at that instant waiting the honour of their selection, completed the movement ; and to my great de- light, the last retiring steps of the last of those exquisite tormentors gave me an opportunity of standing upright, after being squeezed double for an hour; and of relieving his sublime majesty from a weight of rags, dust, and worm-eaten 336 THE wallachian's tale. wood, that had nearly obscured the mighty suc- cessor of Abdulhamid from the sight of his loving subjects for ever. " If the sultan was still in despair, his trusty secretary was not much better ; but fortune never deserts the bold. I took my terrified master away, washed his face in the next fountain, and gave him the advice, worth its weight in gold, that he should repose the burden of his sceptre on me for the next four-and- twenty hours. " The advice was taken ; and while he went to supper and his pipe, I went to my cabinet, and sent for Achmet. " The bostangee appeared, after some search ; for every male creature had been put to the rout during the empire of women. ' Bostangee,' said I to the trembling slave, ' have you ever basti- nadoed a sultana V — • Never !' said he, with the uneasy look of one whose answer, right or wrong, may cost him his neck. ' Then/ said I, * you shall have the opportunity without delay.' n END OF VOL. I. LONDON : PRINTED BY A. J, VALl'Y, RED UON COURT, FLEET STREET. n : TmmSi , :x u >*»S£, 30112 057fii a S '?. ■ m m m ■ &» I". '.';■■ J v!