THE
CORNHILL MAGAZINE.

APRIL, 1860.

LONDON:
SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, CORNHILL.

LEIPZIG: D. TAUCHNITZ. NEW YORK: WILLMER AND ROGERS.
MELBOURNE: G. ROBERTSON.

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BESSY’S REFLECTIONS.

THE
CORNHILL MAGAZINE.

APRIL, 1860.

CHAPTER IV.
A Black Sheep.

The being for whom my friend Dick Bedford seemed to have a special contempt and aversion, was Mr. Bulkeley, the tall footman in attendance upon Lovel’s dear mother-in-law. One of the causes of Bedford’s wrath, the worthy fellow explained to me. In the servants’ hall, Bulkeley was in the habit of speaking in disrespectful and satirical terms of his mistress, enlarging upon her many foibles, and describing her pecuniary difficulties to the many habitués of that second social circle at Shrublands. The hold which Mr. Bulkeley had over his lady lay in a long unsettled account of[386] wages, which her ladyship was quite disinclined to discharge. And, in spite of this insolvency, the footman must have found his profit in the place, for he continued to hold it from year to year, and to fatten on his earnings such as they were. My lady’s dignity did not allow her to travel without this huge personage in her train; and a great comfort it must have been to her, to reflect that in all the country houses which she visited (and she would go wherever she could force an invitation), her attendant freely explained himself regarding her peculiarities, and made his brother servants aware of his mistress’s embarrassed condition. And yet the woman, whom I suppose no soul alive respected (unless, haply, she herself had a hankering delusion that she was a respectable woman), thought that her position in life forbade her to move abroad without a maid, and this hulking incumbrance in plush; and never was seen anywhere in watering-place, country-house, hotel, unless she was so attended.

Between Bedford and Bulkeley, then, there was feud and mutual hatred. Bedford chafed the big man by constant sneers and sarcasms, which penetrated the other’s dull hide, and caused him frequently to assert that he would punch Dick’s ugly head off. The housekeeper had frequently to interpose, and fling her matronly arms between these men of war; and perhaps Bedford was forced to be still at times, for Bulkeley was nine inches taller than himself, and was perpetually bragging of his skill and feats as a bruiser. This sultan may also have wished to fling his pocket-handkerchief to Miss Mary Pinhorn, who, though she loved Bedford’s wit and cleverness, might also be not insensible to the magnificent chest, calves, whiskers, of Mr. Bulkeley. On this delicate subject, however, I can’t speak. The men hated each other. You have, no doubt, remarked in your experience of life, that when men do hate each other, about a woman, or some other cause, the real reason is never assigned. You say, “The conduct of such and such a man to his grandmother—his behaviour in selling that horse to Benson—his manner of brushing his hair down the middle”—or what you will, “makes him so offensive to me that I can’t endure him.” His verses, therefore, are mediocre; his speeches in parliament are utter failures; his practice at the bar is dwindling every year; his powers (always small) are utterly leaving him, and he is repeating his confounded jokes until they quite nauseate. Why, only about myself, and within these three days, I read a nice little article—written in sorrow, you know, not in anger—by our eminent confrère Wiggins,[1] deploring the decay of, &c. &c. And Wiggins’s little article which was not found suitable for a certain Magazine?—Allons donc! The drunkard says the pickled salmon gave him the headache; the man who hates us gives a reason, but not the reason. Bedford was angry with Bulkeley for abusing his mistress at the servants’ table? Yes. But for what else besides? I don’t care—nor possibly does your worship, the exalted reader, for these low vulgar kitchen quarrels.

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Out of that ground-floor room, then, I would not move in spite of the utmost efforts of my Lady Baker’s broad shoulder to push me out; and with many grins that evening, Bedford complimented me on my gallantry in routing the enemy at luncheon. I think he may possibly have told his master, for Lovel looked very much alarmed and uneasy when we greeted each other on his return from the city, but became more composed when Lady Baker appeared at the second dinner-bell, without a trace on her fine countenance of that storm which had caused all her waves to heave with such commotion at noon. How finely some people, by the way, can hang up quarrels—or pop them into a drawer, as they do their work, when dinner is announced, and take them out again at a convenient season! Baker was mild, gentle, a thought sad and sentimental—tenderly interested about her dear son and daughter, in Ireland, whom she must go and see—quite easy in hand, in a word, and to the immense relief of all of us. She kissed Lovel on retiring, and prayed blessings on her Frederick. She pointed to the picture: nothing could be more melancholy or more gracious.

“She go!” says Mr. Bedford to me at night—“not she. She knows when she’s well off; was obliged to turn out of Bakerstown before she came here: that brute Bulkeley told me so. She’s always quarrelling with her son and his wife. Angels don’t grow everywhere as they do at Putney, Mr. B.! You gave it her well to-day at lunch, you did though!” During my stay at Shrublands, Mr. Bedford paid me a regular evening visit in my room, set the carte du pays before me, and in his curt way acquainted me with the characters of the inmates of the house, and the incidents occurring therein.

Captain Clarence Baker did not come to Shrublands on the day when his anxious mother wished to clear out my nest (and expel the amiable bird in it) for her son’s benefit. I believe an important fight, which was to come off in the Essex Marshes, and which was postponed in consequence of the interposition of the county magistrates, was the occasion, or at any rate, the pretext of the captain’s delay. “He likes seeing fights better than going to ’em, the captain does,” my major-domo remarked. “His regiment was ordered to India, and he sold out: climate don’t agree with his precious health. The captain ain’t been here ever so long, not since poor Mrs. L.’s time, before Miss P. came here: Captain Clarence and his sister had a tremendous quarrel together. He was up to all sorts of pranks, the captain was. Not a good lot, by any means, I should say, Mr. Batchelor.” And here Bedford begins to laugh. “Did you ever read, sir, a farce called Raising the Wind? There’s plenty of Jeremy Diddlers now, Captain Jeremy Diddlers and Lady Jeremy Diddlers too. Have you such a thing as half-a-crown about you? If you have, don’t invest it in some folks’ pockets—that’s all. Beg your pardon, sir, if I am bothering you with talking!”

As long as I was at Shrublands, and ready to partake of breakfast with my kind host and his children and their governess, Lady Baker had her[388] own breakfast taken to her room. But when there were no visitors in the house, she would come groaning out of her bedroom to be present at the morning meal; and not uncommonly would give the little company anecdotes of the departed saint, under whose invocation, as it were, we were assembled, and whose simpering effigy looked down upon us, over her harp, and from the wall. The eyes of the portrait followed you about, as portraits’ eyes so painted will; and those glances, as it seemed to me, still domineered over Lovel, and made him quail as they had done in life. Yonder, in the corner, was Cecilia’s harp, with its leathern cover. I likened the skin to that drum which the dying Zisca ordered should be made out of his hide, to be beaten before the hosts of his people and inspire terror. Vous conçevez, I did not say to Lovel at breakfast, as I sat before the ghostly musical instrument, “My dear fellow, that skin of Cordovan leather belonging to your defunct Cecilia’s harp, is like the hide which,” &c.; but I confess, at first, I used to have a sort of crawly sensation, as of a sickly genteel ghost flitting about the place, in an exceedingly peevish humour, trying to scold and command, and finding her defunct voice couldn’t be heard—trying to re-illume her extinguished leers and faded smiles and ogles, and finding no one admired or took note. In the gray of the gloaming, in the twilight corner where stands the shrouded companion of song—what is that white figure flickering round the silent harp? Once, as we were assembled in the room at afternoon tea, a bird, entering at the open window, perched on the instrument. Popham dashed at it. Lovel was deep in conversation upon the wine duties with a member of parliament he had brought down to dinner. Lady Baker, who was, if I may use the expression, “jawing,” as usual, and telling one of her tremendous stories about the Lord Lieutenant to Mr. Bonnington, took no note of the incident. Elizabeth did not seem to remark it: what was a bird on a harp to her, but a sparrow perched on a bit of leather-casing! All the ghosts in Putney churchyard might rattle all their bones, and would not frighten that stout spirit!

I was amused at a precaution which Bedford took, and somewhat alarmed at the distrust towards Lady Baker which he exhibited, when, one day on my return from town—whither I had made an excursion of four or five hours—I found my bedroom door locked, and Dick arrived with the key. “He’s wrote to say he’s coming this evening, and if he had come when you was away, Lady B. was capable of turning your things out, and putting his in, and taking her oath she believed you was going to leave. The long-bows Lady B. do pull are perfectly awful, Mr. B.! So it was long-bow to long-bow, Mr. Batchelor; and I said you had took the key in your pocket, not wishing to have your papers disturbed. She tried the lawn window, but I had bolted that, and the captain will have the pink room, after all, and must smoke up the chimney. I should have liked to see him, or you, or any one do it in poor Mrs. L.’s time—I just should!”

During my visit to London, I had chanced to meet my friend Captain[389] Fitzb—dle, who belongs to a dozen clubs, and knows something of every man in London. “Know anything of Clarence Baker?” “Of course, I do,” says Fitz; “and if you want any renseignement, my dear fellow, I have the honour to inform you that a blacker little sheep does not trot the London pavé. Wherever that ingenious officer’s name is spoken—at Tattersall’s, at his clubs, in his late regiments, in men’s society, in ladies’ society, in that expanding and most agreeable circle which you may call no society at all—a chorus of maledictions rises up at the mention of Baker. Know anything of Clarence Baker! My dear fellow, enough to make your hair turn white, unless (as I sometimes fondly imagine) nature has already performed that process, when of course I can’t pretend to act upon more hair-dye.” (The whiskers of the individual who addressed me, innocent, stared me in the face as he spoke, and were dyed of the most unblushing purple.) “Clarence Baker, sir, is a young man who would have been invaluable in Sparta as a warning against drunkenness and an exemplar of it. He has helped the regimental surgeon to some most interesting experiments in delirium tremens. He is known, and not in the least trusted, in every billiard-room in Brighton, Canterbury, York, Sheffield,—on every pavement which has rung with the clink of dragoon boot-heels. By a wise system of revoking at whist he has lost games which have caused not only his partners, but his opponents and the whole club to admire him and to distrust him: long before and since he was of age, he has written his eminent name to bills which have been dishonoured, and has nobly pleaded his minority as a reason for declining to pay. From the garrison towns where he has been quartered, he has carried away not only the hearts of the milliners, but their gloves, haberdashery, and perfumery. He has had controversies with Cornet Green, regarding horse transactions; disputed turf-accounts with Lieutenant Brown; and betting and backgammon differences with Captain Black. From all I have heard he is the worthy son of his admirable mother. And I bet you even on the four events, if you stay three days in a country house with him, which appears to be your present happy idea,—that he will quarrel with you, insult you, and apologize; that he will intoxicate himself more than once; that he will offer to play cards with you, and not pay on losing (if he wins, I perhaps need not state what his conduct will be); and that he will try to borrow money from you, and most likely from your servant, before he goes away.” So saying, the sententious Fitz strutted up the steps of one of his many club-haunts in Pall Mall, and left me forewarned, and I trust forearmed against Captain Clarence and all his works.

The adversary, when at length I came in sight of him, did not seem very formidable. I beheld a weakly little man with Chinese eyes, and pretty little feet and hands, whose pallid countenance told of Finishes and Casinos. His little chest and fingers were decorated with many jewels. A perfume of tobacco hung round him. His little moustache was twisted with an elaborate gummy curl. I perceived that the little hand which[390] twirled the moustache shook woefully: and from the little chest there came a cough surprisingly loud and dismal.

He was lying on a sofa as I entered, and the children of the house were playing round him. “If you are our uncle, why didn’t you come to see us oftener?” asks Popham.

“How should I know that you were such uncommonly nice children?” asks the captain.

“We’re not nice to you,” says Popham. “Why do you cough so? Mamma used to cough. And why does your hand shake so?”

“My hand shakes because I am ill: and I cough because I’m ill. Your mother died of it, and I daresay I shall too.”

“I hope you’ll be good, and repent before you die, uncle, and I will lend you some nice books,” says Cecilia.

“Oh, bother books!” cries Pop.

“And I hope you’ll be good, Popham,” and “You hold your tongue, Miss,” and “I shall,” and “I shan’t,” and “You’re another,” and “I’ll tell Miss Prior,”—“Go and tell, telltale,”—“Boo”—“Boo”—“Boo”—“Boo”—and I don’t know what more exclamations came tumultuously and rapidly from these dear children, as their uncle lay before them, a handkerchief to his mouth, his little feet high raised on the sofa cushions.

Captain Baker turned a little eye towards me, as I entered the room, but did not change his easy and elegant posture. When I came near to the sofa where he reposed, he was good enough to call out:

“Glass of sherry!”

“It’s Mr. Batchelor; it isn’t Bedford, uncle,” says Cissy.

“Mr. Batchelor ain’t got any sherry in his pocket:—have you, Mr. Batchelor? You ain’t like old Mrs. Prior, always pocketing things, are you?” cries Pop, and falls a-laughing at the ludicrous idea of my being mistaken for Bedford.

“Beg your pardon. How should I know, you know?” drawls the invalid on the sofa. “Everybody’s the same now, you see.”

“Sir!” says I, and “sir” was all I could say. The fact is, I could have replied with something remarkably neat and cutting, which would have transfixed the languid little jackanapes who dared to mistake me for a footman; but, you see, I only thought of my repartee some eight hours afterwards when I was lying in bed, and I am sorry to own that a great number of my best bon mots have been made in that way. So, as I had not the pungent remark ready when wanted, I can’t say I said it to Captain Baker, but I daresay I turned very red, and said “Sir!” and—and in fact that was all.

“You were goin’ to say somethin’?” asked the captain, affably.

“You know my friend, Mr. Fitzboodle, I believe?” said I; the fact is, I really did not know what to say.

“Some mistake—think not.”

“He is a member of the Flag Club,” I remarked, looking my young fellow hard in the face.

[391]

“I ain’t. There’s a set of cads in that club that will say anything.”

“You may not know him, sir, but he seemed to know you very well. Are we to have any tea, children?” I say, flinging myself down on an easy chair, taking up a magazine and adopting an easy attitude, though I daresay my face was as red as a turkey-cock’s, and I was boiling over with rage.

As we had a very good breakfast and a profuse luncheon at Shrublands, of course we could not support nature till dinner-time without a five-o’clock tea; and this was the meal for which I pretended to ask. Bedford, with his silver kettle, and his buttony satellite, presently brought in this refection, and of course the children bawled out to him—

“Bedford—Bedford! uncle mistook Mr. Batchelor for you.”

“I could not be mistaken for a more honest man, Pop,” said I. And the bearer of the tea-urn gave me a look of gratitude and kindness which, I own, went far to restore my ruffled equanimity.

“Since you are the butler, will you get me a glass of sherry and a biscuit?” says the captain. And Bedford retiring, returned presently with the wine.

The young gentleman’s hand shook so, that, in order to drink his wine, he had to surprise it, as it were, and seize it with his mouth, when a shake brought the glass near his lips. He drained the wine, and held out his hand for another glass. The hand was steadier now.

“You the man who was here before?” asks the captain.

“Six years ago, when you were here, sir,” says the butler.

“What! I ain’t changed, I suppose?”

“Yes, you are, sir.”

“Then, how the dooce do you remember me?”

“You forgot to pay me some money you borrowed of me, one pound five, sir,” says Bedford, whose eyes slyly turned in my direction.

And here, according to her wont at this meal, the dark-robed Miss Prior entered the room. She was coming forward with her ordinarily erect attitude and firm step, but paused in her walk an instant, and when she came to us, I thought, looked remarkably pale. She made a slight curtsey, and it must be confessed that Captain Baker rose up from his sofa for a moment when she appeared. She then sate down, with her back towards him, turning towards herself the table and its tea apparatus.

At this board my Lady Baker found us assembled when she returned from her afternoon drive. She flew to her darling reprobate of a son. She took his hand, she smoothed back his hair from his damp forehead. “My darling child,” cries this fond mother, “what a pulse you have got!”

“I suppose, because I’ve been drinking,” says the prodigal.

“Why didn’t you come out driving with me? The afternoon was lovely!”

“To pay visits at Richmond? Not as I knows on, ma’am,” says the invalid. “Conversation with elderly ladies about poodles, bible-societies, that kind of thing? It must be a doocid lovely afternoon that would make[392] me like that sort of game.” And here comes a fit of coughing, over which mamma ejaculates her sympathy.

“Kick—kick—killin’ myself!” gasps out the captain, “know I am. No man can lead my life, and stand it. Dyin’ by inches! Dyin’ by whole yards, by Jo—ho—hove, I am!” Indeed, he was as bad in health as in morals, this graceless captain.

“That man of Lovel’s seems a d—— insolent beggar,” he presently and ingenuously remarks.

“O uncle, you mustn’t say those words!” cries niece Cissy.

“He’s a man, and may say what he likes, and so will I, when I’m a man. Yes, and I’ll say it now, too, if I like,” cries Master Popham.

“Not to give me pain, Popham? Will you?” asks the governess.

On which the boy says,—“Well, who wants to hurt you, Miss Prior?”

And our colloquy ends by the arrival of the man of the house from the city.

What I have admired in some dear women is their capacity for quarrelling and for reconciliation. As I saw Lady Baker hanging round her son’s neck, and fondling his scanty ringlets, I remembered the awful stories with which in former days she used to entertain us regarding this reprobate. Her heart was pincushioned with his filial crimes. Under her chesnut front her ladyship’s real head of hair was grey, in consequence of his iniquities. His precocious appetite had devoured the greater part of her jointure. He had treated her many dangerous illnesses with indifference: had been the worst son, the worst brother, the most ill-conducted school-boy, the most immoral young man—the terror of households, the Lovelace of garrison towns, the perverter of young officers; in fact, Lady Baker did not know how she supported existence at all under the agony occasioned by his crimes, and it was only from the possession of a more than ordinarily strong sense of religion that she was enabled to bear her burden.

The captain himself explained these alternating maternal caresses and quarrels in his easy way.

“Saw how the old lady kissed and fondled me?” says he to his brother-in-law. “Quite refreshin’, ain’t it? Hang me, I thought she was goin’ to send me a bit of sweetbread off her own plate. Came up to my room last night, wanted to tuck me up in bed, and abused my brother to me for an hour. You see, when I’m in favour, she always abuses Baker; when he’s in favour she abuses me to him. And my sister-in-law, didn’t she give it my sister-in-law! Oh! I’ll trouble you! And poor Cecilia—why hang me, Mr. Batchelor, she used to go on—this bottle’s corked, I’m hanged if it isn’t—to go on about Cecilia, and call her.... Hullo!”

Here he was interrupted by our host, who said sternly—

“Will you please to forget those quarrels, or not mention them here? Will you have more wine, Batchelor?”

And Lovel rises, and haughtily stalks out of the room. To do Lovel justice, he had a great contempt and dislike for his young brother-in-law, which, with his best magnanimity, he could not at all times conceal.

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So our host stalks towards the drawing-room, leaving Captain Clarence sipping wine.

“Don’t go, too,” says the captain. “He’s a confounded rum fellow, my brother-in-law is. He’s a confounded ill-conditioned fellow, too. They always are, you know, these tradesmen fellows, these half-bred ’uns. I used to tell my sister so; but she would have him, because he had such lots of money, you know. And she threw over a fellar she was very fond of; and I told her she’d regret it. I told Lady B. she’d regret it. It was all Lady B.’s doing. She made Cissy throw the fellar over. He was a bad match, certainly, Tom Mountain was; and not a clever fellow, you know, or that sort of thing; but at any rate, he was a gentleman, and better than a confounded sugar-baking beggar out Ratcliff Highway.”

“You seem to find that claret very good!” I remark, speaking, I may say, Socratically, to my young friend, who had been swallowing bumper after bumper.

“Claret good! Yes, doosid good!”

“Well, you see our confounded sugar-baker gives you his best.”

“And why shouldn’t he, hang him? Why, the fellow chokes with money. What does it matter to him how much he spends? You’re a poor man, I dare say. You don’t look as if you were over-flush of money. Well, if you stood a good dinner, it would be all right—I mean it would show—you understand me, you know. But a sugar-baker with ten thousand a year, what does it matter to him, bottle of claret more—less?”

“Let us go into the ladies,” I say.

“Go into mother! I don’t want to go into my mother,” cried out the artless youth. “And I don’t want to go into the sugar-baker, hang him! and I don’t want to go into the children; and I’d rather have a glass of brandy-and-water with you, old boy. Here, you! What’s your name? Bedford! I owe you five-and-twenty shillings, do I, old Bedford? Give us a good glass of Schnaps, and I’ll pay you! Look here, Batchelor. I hate that sugar-baker. Two years ago I drew a bill on him, and he wouldn’t pay it—perhaps he would have paid it, but my sister wouldn’t let him. And, I say, shall we go and have a cigar in your room? My mother’s been abusing you to me like fun this morning. She abuses everybody. She used to abuse Cissy. Cissy used to abuse her—used to fight like two cats....”

And if I narrate this conversation, dear Spartan youth! if I show thee this Helot maundering in his cups, it is that from his odious example thou mayest learn to be moderate in the use of thine own. Has the enemy who has entered thy mouth ever stolen away thy brains? Has wine ever caused thee to blab secrets; to utter egotisms and follies? Beware of it. Has it ever been thy friend at the end of the hard day’s work, the cheery companion of thy companions, the promoter of harmony, kindness, harmless social pleasure? be thankful for it. Two years since, when the comet was blazing in the autumnal sky, I stood on the château-steps of a great claret proprietor. “Boirai-je de ton vin, O comète?” I said, addressing the[394] luminary with the flaming tail. Shall those generous bunches which you ripen yield their juices for me morituro? It was a solemn thought. Ah! my dear brethren! who knows the Order of the Fates? When shall we pass the Gloomy Gates? Which of us goes, which of us waits to drink those famous Fifty-eights? A sermon, upon my word! And pray why not a little homily on an autumn eve over a purple cluster?... If that rickety boy had only drunk claret, I warrant you his tongue would not have blabbed, his hand would not have shaken, his wretched little brain and body would not have reeled with fever.

“’Gad,” said he next day to me, “cut again last night. Have an idea that I abused Lovel. When I have a little wine on board, always speak my mind, don’t you know. Last time I was here in my poor sister’s time, said somethin’ to her, don’t quite know what it was, somethin’ confoundedly true and unpleasant I daresay. I think it was about a fellow she used to go on with before she married the sugar-baker. And I got orders to quit, by Jove, sir—neck and crop, sir, and no mistake! And we gave it one another over the stairs. O my! we did pitch in!—And that was the last time I ever saw Cecilia—give you my word. A doosid unforgiving woman, my poor sister was, and between you and me, Batchelor, as great a flirt as ever threw a fellar over. You should have heard her and my Lady B. go on, that’s all!—Well, mamma, are you going out for a drive in the coachy-poachy?—Not as I knows on, thank you, as I before had the honour to observe. Mr. Batchelor and me are going to play a little game at billiards.” We did, and I won; and, from that day to this, have never been paid my little winnings.

On the day after the doughty captain’s arrival, Miss Prior, in whose face I had remarked a great expression of gloom and care, neither made her appearance at breakfast nor at the children’s dinner. “Miss Prior was a little unwell,” Lady Baker said, with an air of most perfect satisfaction. “Mr. Drencher will come to see her this afternoon, and prescribe for her, I daresay,” adds her ladyship, nodding and winking a roguish eye at me. I was at a loss to understand what was the point of humour which amused Lady B., until she herself explained it.

“My good sir,” she said, “I think Miss Prior is not at all averse to being ill.” And the nods recommenced.

“As how?” I ask.

“To being ill, or at least to calling in the medical man.”

“Attachment between governess and Sawbones I make bold for to presume?” says the captain.

“Precisely, Clarence—a very fitting match. I saw the affair, even before Miss Prior owned it—that is to say, she has not denied it. She says she can’t afford to marry, that she has children enough at home in her brothers and sisters. She is a well-principled young woman, and does credit, Mr. Batchelor, to your recommendation, and the education she has received from her uncle, the Master of St. Boniface.”

“Cissy to school; Pop to Eton; and Miss Whatdyoucall to grind the[395] pestle in Sawbones’ back-shop: I see!” says Captain Clarence. “He seems a low, vulgar blackguard, that Sawbones.”

“Of course, my love; what can you expect from that sort of person?” asks mamma, whose own father was a small attorney, in a small Irish town.

“I wish I had his confounded good health,” cries Clarence, coughing.

“My poor darling!” says mamma.

I said nothing. And so Elizabeth was engaged to that great, broad-shouldered, red-whiskered, young surgeon with the huge appetite and the dubious h’s! Well, why not? What was it to me? Why shouldn’t she marry him? Was he not an honest man, and a fitting match for her? Yes. Very good. Only if I do love a bird or flower to glad me with its dark blue eye, it is the first to fade away. If I have a partiality for a young gazelle it is the first to——paha! What have I to do with this namby-pamby? Can the heart that has truly loved ever forget, and doesn’t it as truly love on to the—stuff! I am past the age of such follies. I might have made a woman happy: I think I should. But the fugacious years have lapsed, my Posthumus! My waist is now a good bit wider than my chest, and it is decreed that I shall be alone!

My tone, then, when next I saw Elizabeth, was sorrowful—not angry. Drencher, the young doctor, came punctually enough, you may be sure, to look after his patient. Little Pinhorn, the children’s maid, led the young practitioner smiling towards the schoolroom regions. His creaking highlows sprang swiftly up the stairs. I happened to be in the hall, and surveyed him with a grim pleasure. “Now he is in the schoolroom,” I thought. “Now he is taking her hand—it is very white—and feeling her pulse. And so on, and so on. Surely, surely Pinhorn remains in the room?” I am sitting on a hall-table as I muse plaintively on these things, and gaze up the stairs by which the Hakeem (great, carroty-whiskered cad!) has passed into the sacred precincts of the harem. As I gaze up the stair, another door opens into the hall; a scowling face peeps through that door, and looks up the stair, too. ’Tis Bedford, who has slid out of his pantry, and watches the doctor. And thou, too, my poor Bedford! Oh! the whole world throbs with vain heart-pangs, and tosses and heaves with longing, unfulfilled desires! All night, and all over the world, bitter tears are dropping as regular as the dew, and cruel memories are haunting the pillow. Close my hot eyes, kind Sleep! Do not visit it, dear delusive images out of the Past! Often your figure shimmers through my dreams, Glorvina. Not as you are now, the stout mother of many children—you always had an alarming likeness to your own mother, Glorvina—but as you were—slim, black-haired, blue-eyed—when your carnation lips warbled the Vale of Avoca, or the Angels’ Whisper. “What!” I say then, looking up the stair, “am I absolutely growing jealous of yon apothecary?—O fool!” And at this juncture, out peers Bedford’s face from the pantry, and I see he is jealous too. I tie my shoe as I sit on the table; I don’t affect to notice Bedford in the least (who, in fact, pops his own head back again as soon as he sees mine). I take my[396] wide-awake from the peg, set it on one side my head, and strut whistling out of the hall door. I stretch over Putney Heath, and my spirit resumes its tranquillity.

I sometimes keep a little journal of my proceedings, and on referring to its pages, the scene rises before me pretty clearly to which the brief notes allude. On this day I find noted: “Friday, July, 14.—B. came down to-day. Seems to require a great deal of attendance from Dr.—Row between dowagers after dinner.” “B.,” I need not remark, is Bessy. “Dr.,” of course, you know. “Row between dowagers,” means a battle royal between Mrs. Bonnington and Lady Baker, such as not unfrequently raged under the kindly Lovel’s roof.

Lady Baker’s gigantic menial Bulkeley condescended to wait at the family dinner at Shrublands, when perforce he had to put himself under Mr. Bedford’s orders. Bedford would gladly have dispensed with the London footman, over whose calves, he said, he and his boy were always tumbling; but Lady Baker’s dignity would not allow her to part from her own man; and her good-natured son-in-law allowed her, and indeed almost all other persons, to have their own way. I have reason to fear Mr. Bulkeley’s morals were loose. Mrs. Bonnington had a special horror of him; his behaviour in the village public-houses where his powder and plush were for ever visible—his freedom of behaviour and conversation before the good lady’s nurse and parlour-maids—provoked her anger and suspicion. More than once, she whispered to me her loathing of this flour-besprinkled monster; and, as much as such a gentle creature could, she showed her dislike to him by her behaviour. The flunkey’s solemn equanimity was not to be disturbed by any such feeble indications of displeasure. From his powdered height, he looked down upon Mrs. Bonnington, and her esteem or her dislike was beneath him.

Now on this Friday night the 14th, Captain Clarence had gone to pass the day in town, and our Bessy made her appearance again, the doctor’s prescriptions having, I suppose, agreed with her. Mr. Bulkeley, who was handing coffee to the ladies, chose to offer none to Miss Prior, and I was amused when I saw Bedford’s heel scrunch down on the flunkey’s right foot, as he pointed towards the governess. The oaths which Bulkeley had to devour in silence must have been frightful. To do the gallant fellow justice, I think he would have died rather than speak before company in a drawing-room. He limped up and offered the refreshment to the young lady, who bowed and declined it.

“Frederick,” Mrs. Bonnington begins, when the coffee-ceremony is over, “now the servants are gone, I must scold you about the waste at your table, my dear. What was the need of opening that great bottle of champagne? Lady Baker only takes two glasses. Mr. Batchelor doesn’t touch it.” (No, thank you, my dear Mrs. Bonnington: too old a stager.) “Why not have a little bottle instead of that great, large, immense one? Bedford is a teetotaler. I suppose it is that London footman who likes it.”

“My dear mother, I haven’t really ascertained his tastes,” says Lovel.

[397]

“Then why not tell Bedford to open a pint, dear?” pursues mamma.

“Oh, Bedford—Bedford, we must not mention him, Mrs. Bonnington!” cries Lady Baker. “Bedford is faultless. Bedford has the keys of everything. Bedford is not to be controlled in anything. Bedford is to be at liberty to be rude to my servant.”

“Bedford was admirably kind in his attendance on your daughter, Lady Baker,” says Lovel, his brow darkening: “and as for your man, I should think he was big enough to protect himself from any rudeness of poor Dick!” The good fellow had been angry for one moment, at the next he was all for peace and conciliation.

Lady Baker puts on her superfine air. With that air she had often awe-stricken good, simple Mrs. Bonnington; and she loved to use it whenever city folks or humble people were present. You see she thought herself your superior and mine: as de par le monde there are many artless Lady Bakers who do. “My dear Frederick!” says Lady B. then, putting on her best Mayfair manner, “excuse me for saying, but you don’t know the—the class of servant to which Bulkeley belongs. I had him as a great favour from Lord Toddleby’s. That—that class of servant is not generally accustomed to go out single.”

“Unless they are two behind a carriage-perch they pine away, I suppose,” remarks Mr. Lovel, “as one love-bird does without his mate.”

“No doubt—no doubt,” says Lady B., who does not in the least understand him; “I only say you are not accustomed here—in this kind of establishment, you understand—to that class of——”

But here Mrs. Bonnington could contain her wrath no more. “Lady Baker!” cries that injured mother, “is my son’s establishment not good enough for any powdered wretch in England? Is the house of a British merchant——”

“My dear creature—my dear creature!” interposes her ladyship, “it is the house of a British merchant, and a most comfortable house too.”

“Yes, as you find it,” remarks mamma.

“Yes, as I find it, when I come to take care of that departed angel’s children, Mrs. Bonnington!” (Lady B. here indicates the Cecilian effigy)—“of that dear seraph’s orphans, Mrs. Bonnington! You cannot. You have other duties—other children—a husband, whom you have left at home in delicate health, and who——”

“Lady Baker!” exclaims Mrs. Bonnington, “no one shall say I don’t take care of my dear husband!”

“My dear Lady Baker!—my dear—dear mother!” cries Lovel, éploré, and whimpers aside to me, “They spar in this way every night, when we’re alone. It’s too bad, ain’t it, Batch?”

“I say you do take care of Mr. Bonnington,” Baker blandly resumes (she has hit Mrs. Bonnington on the raw place, and smilingly proceeds to thong again): “I say you do take care of your husband, my dear creature, and that is why you can’t attend to Frederick! And as he is of a very easy temper,—except sometimes with his poor Cecilia’s mother,—he allows[398] all his tradesmen to cheat him; all his servants to cheat him; Bedford to be rude to everybody; and if to me, why not to my servant Bulkeley, with whom Lord Toddleby’s groom of the chambers gave me the very highest character?”

Mrs. Bonnington in a great flurry broke in by saying she was surprised to hear that noblemen had grooms in their chambers: and she thought they were much better in the stables: and when they dined with Captain Huff, you know, Frederick, his man always brought such a dreadful smell of the stable in with him, that——Here she paused. Baker’s eye was on her; and that dowager was grinning a cruel triumph.

“He!—he! You mistake, my good Mrs. Bonnington!” says her ladyship. “Your poor mother mistakes, my dear Frederick. You have lived in a quiet and most respectable sphere, but not, you understand, not——”

“Not what, pray, Lady Baker? We have lived in this neighbourhood twenty years: in my late husband’s time, when we saw a great deal of company, and this dear Frederick was a boy at Westminster School. And we have paid for everything we have had for twenty years; and we have not owed a penny to any tradesman. And we may not have had powdered footmen, six feet high, impertinent beasts, who were rude to all the maids in the place. Don’t—I will speak, Frederick! But servants who loved us, and who were paid their wages, and who—o—ho—ho—ho!”

Wipe your eyes, dear friends! out with all your pocket-handkerchiefs. I protest I cannot bear to see a woman in distress. Of course Fred Lovel runs to console his dear old mother, and vows Lady Baker meant no harm.

“Meant harm! My dear Frederick, what harm can I mean? I only said your poor mother did not seem to know what a groom of the chambers was! How should she?”

“Come—come,” says Frederick, “enough of this! Miss Prior, will you be so kind as to give us a little music?”

Miss Prior was playing Beethoven at the piano, very solemnly and finely, when our Black Sheep returned to this quiet fold, and, I am sorry to say, in a very riotous condition. The brilliancy of his eye, the purple flush on his nose, the unsteady gait, and uncertain tone of voice, told tales of Captain Clarence, who stumbled over more than one chair before he found a seat near me.

“Quite right, old boy,” says he, winking at me. “Cut again—dooshid good fellosh. Better than being along with you shtoopid-old-fogish.” And he began to warble wild “Fol-de-rol-lolls” in an insane accompaniment to the music.

“By heavens, this is too bad!” growls Lovel. “Lady Baker, let your big man carry your son to bed. Thank you, Miss Prior!”

At a final yell, which the unlucky young scapegrace gave, Elizabeth stopped, and rose from the piano, looking very pale. She made her curtsey, and was departing when the wretched young captain sprang up, looked at her, and sank back on the sofa with another wild laugh. Bessy fled away scared, and white as a sheet.

[399]

“Take the brute to bed!” roars the master of the house, in great wrath. And scapegrace was conducted to his apartment, whither he went laughing wildly, and calling out, “Come on, old sh-sh-shugarbaker!”

The morning after this fine exhibition, Captain Clarence Baker’s mamma announced to us that her poor dear suffering boy was too ill to come to breakfast, and I believe he prescribed for himself devilled drum-stick and soda-water, of which he partook in his bedroom. Lovel, seldom angry, was violently wrath with his brother-in-law; and, almost always polite, was at breakfast scarcely civil to Lady Baker. I am bound to say that female abused her position. She appealed to Cecilia’s picture a great deal too much during the course of breakfast. She hinted, she sighed, she waggled her head at me, and spoke about “that angel” in the most tragic manner. Angel is all very well: but your angel brought in à tout propos; your departed blessing called out of her grave ever so many times a day; when grandmamma wants to carry a point of her own; when the children are naughty, or noisy; when papa betrays a flickering inclination to dine at his club, or to bring home a bachelor friend or two to Shrublands;—I say your angel always dragged in by the wings into the conversation loses her effect. No man’s heart put on wider crape than Lovel’s at Cecilia’s loss. Considering the circumstances, his grief was most creditable to him: but at breakfast, at lunch, about Bulkeley the footman, about the barouche or the phaeton, or any trumpery domestic perplexity, to have a Deus intersit was too much. And I observed, with some inward satisfaction, that when Baker uttered her pompous funereal phrases, rolled her eyes up to the ceiling, and appealed to that quarter, the children ate their jam and quarrelled and kicked their little shins under the table, Lovel read his paper and looked at his watch to see if it was omnibus time; and Bessy made the tea, quite undisturbed by the old lady’s tragical prattle.

When Baker described her son’s fearful cough and dreadfully feverish state, I said, “Surely, Lady Baker, Mr. Drencher had better be sent for;” and I suppose I uttered the disgusting dissyllable Drencher with a fine sarcastic accent; for once, just once, Bessy’s grey eyes rose through the spectacles and met mine with a glance of unutterable sadness, then calmly settled down on to the slop-basin again, or the urn in which her pale features, of course, were odiously distorted.

“You will not bring anybody home to dinner, Frederick, in my poor boy’s state?” asks Lady B.

“He may stay in his bedroom, I suppose?” replies Lovel.

“He is Cecilia’s brother, Frederick!” cries the lady.

“Conf——” Lovel was beginning. What was he about to say?

“If you are going to confound your angel in heaven, I have nothing to say, sir!” cries the mother of Clarence.

“Parbleu, madame!” cried Lovel, in French; “if he were not my wife’s brother, do you think I would let him stay here?”

“Parly Français? Oui, oui, oui!” cries Pop. “I know what Pa means!”

[400]

“And so do I know. And I shall lend uncle Clarence some books which Mr. Bonnington gave me, and——”

“Hold your tongue all!” shouts Lovel, with a stamp of his foot.

“You will, perhaps, have the great kindness to allow me the use of your carriage—or, at least, to wait here until my poor suffering boy can be moved, Mr. Lovel?” says Lady B., with the airs of a martyr.

Lovel rang the bell. “The carriage for Lady Baker—at her ladyship’s hour, Bedford: and the cart for her luggage. Her ladyship and Captain Baker are going away.”

“I have lost one child, Mr. Lovel, whom some people seem to forget. I am not going to murder another! I will not leave this house, sir, unless you drive me from it by force, until the medical man has seen my boy!” And here she and sorrow sat down again. She was always giving warning. She was always fitting the halter and traversing the cart, was Lady B., but she for ever declined to drop the handkerchief and have the business over. I saw by a little shrug in Bessy’s shoulders, what the governess’s views were of the matter: and, in a word, Lady B. no more went away on this day, than she had done on forty previous days when she announced her intention of going. She would accept benefits, you see, but then she insulted her benefactors, and so squared accounts.

That great healthy, florid, scarlet-whiskered, medical wretch came at about twelve, saw Mr. Baker and prescribed for him: and of course he must have a few words with Miss Prior, and inquire into the state of her health. Just as on the previous occasion, I happened to be in the hall when Drencher went upstairs; Bedford happened to be looking out of his pantry-door: I burst into a yell of laughter when I saw Dick’s livid face—the sight somehow suited my savage soul.

No sooner was Medicus gone, when Bessy, grave and pale, in bonnet and spectacles, came sliding downstairs. I do not mean down the banister, which was Pop’s favourite method of descent, but slim, tall, noiseless, in a nunlike calm, she swept down the steps. Of course, I followed her. And there was Master Bedford’s nose peeping through the pantry-door at us, as we went out with the children. Pray, what business of his was it to be always watching anybody who walked with Miss Prior?

“So, Bessy,” I said, “what report does Mr.—hem!—Mr. Drencher—give of the interesting invalid?”

“Oh, the most horrid! He says that Captain Baker has several times had a dreadful disease brought on by drinking, and that he is mad when he has it. He has delusions, sees demons, when he is in this state—wants to be watched.”

“Drencher tells you everything.”

She says meekly: “He attends us when we are ill.”

I remark, with fine irony: “He attends the whole family: he is always coming to Shrublands!”

“He comes very often,” Miss Prior says, gravely.

“And do you mean to say, Bessy,” I cry, madly cutting off two or[401] three heads of yellow broom with my stick—“do you mean to say a fellow like that, who drops his h’s about the room, is a welcome visitor?”

“I should be very ungrateful if he were not welcome, Mr. Batchelor,” says Miss Prior. “And call me by my surname, please—and he has taken care of all my family—and——”

“And of course, of course, of course, Miss Prior!” say I, brutally; “and this is the way the world wags; and this is the way we are ill, and are cured; and we are grateful to the doctor that cures us!”

She nods her grave head. “You used to be kinder to me once, Mr. Batchelor, in old days—in your—in my time of trouble! Yes, my dear, that is a beautiful bit of broom! Oh, what a fine butterfly!” (Cecilia scours the plain after the butterfly.) “You used to be kinder to me once—when we were both unhappy.”

“I was unhappy,” I say, “but I survived. I was ill, but I am now pretty well, thank you. I was jilted by a false, heartless woman. Do you suppose there are no other heartless women in the world?” And I am confident, if Bessy’s breast had not been steel, the daggers which darted out from my eyes would have bored frightful stabs in it.

But she shook her head, and looked at me so sadly that my eye-daggers tumbled down to the ground at once; for you see, though I am a jealous Turk, I am a very easily appeased jealous Turk; and if I had been Bluebeard, and my wife, just as I was going to decapitate her, had lifted up her head from the block and cried a little, I should have dropped my scimitar, and said, “Come, come, Fatima, never mind for the present about that key and closet business, and I’ll chop your head off some other morning.” I say, Bessy disarmed me. Pooh! I say. Women will make a fool of me to the end. Ah! ye gracious Fates! Cut my thread of life ere it grow too long. Suppose I were to live till seventy, and some little wretch of a woman were to set her cap at me? She would catch me—I know she would. All the males of our family have been spoony and soft, to a degree perfectly ludicrous and despicable to contemplate——Well, Bessy Prior, putting a hand out, looked at me, and said,—

“You are the oldest and best friend I have ever had, Mr. Batchelor—the only friend.”

“Am I, Elizabeth?” I gasp, with a beating heart.

“Cissy is running back with a butterfly.” (Our hands unlock.) “Don’t you see the difficulties of my position? Don’t you know that ladies are often jealous of governesses; and that unless—unless they imagined I was—I was favourable to Mr. Drencher, who is very good and kind—the ladies at Shrublands might not like my remaining alone in the house with—with—you understand?” A moment the eyes look over the spectacles: at the next, the meek bonnet bows down towards the ground.

I wonder did she hear the bump—bumping of my heart? O heart!—O wounded heart! did I ever think thou wouldst bump—bump again? “Egl—Egl—izabeth,” I say, choking with emotion, “do, do, do you—te—tell me—you don’t—don’t—don’t—lo—love that apothecary?”

[402]

She shrugs her shoulder—her charming shoulder.

“And if,” I hotly continue, “if a gentleman—if a man of mature age certainly, but who has a kind heart and four hundred a-year of his own—were to say to you, ‘Elizabeth! will you bid the flowers of a blighted life to bloom again?—Elizabeth! will you soothe a wounded heart?’”——

“Oh, Mr. Batchelor!” she sighed, and then added quickly, “Please, don’t take my hand. Here’s Pop.”

And that dear child (bless him!) came up at the moment, saying, “Oh, Miss Prior! look here! I’ve got such a jolly big toadstool!” And next came Cissy, with a confounded butterfly. O Richard the Third! Haven’t you been maligned because you smothered two little nuisances in a Tower? What is to prove to me that you did not serve the little brutes right, and that you weren’t a most humane man? Darling Cissy coming up, then, in her dear, charming way, says, “You shan’t take Mr. Batchelor’s hand, you shall take my hand!” And she tosses up her little head, and walks with the instructress of her youth.

“Ces enfans ne comprennent guère le Français,” says Miss Prior, speaking very rapidly.

“Après lonche?” I whisper. The fact is, I was so agitated, I hardly knew what the French for lunch was. And then our conversation dropped: and the beating of my own heart was all the sound I heard.

Lunch came. I couldn’t eat a bit: I should have choked. Bessy ate plenty, and drank a glass of beer. It was her dinner, to be sure. Young Blacksheep did not appear. We did not miss him. When Lady Baker began to tell her story of George IV. at Slane Castle, I went into my own room. I took a book. Books? Paha! I went into the garden. I took out a cigar. But no, I would not smoke it. Perhaps she——many people don’t like smoking.

I went into the garden. “Come into the garden, Maud.” I sate by a large lilac bush. I waited. Perhaps, she would come. The morning-room windows were wide open on to the lawn. Will she never come? Ah! what is that tall form advancing? gliding—gliding into the chamber like a beauteous ghost? Who most does like an angel show, you may be sure ’tis she. She comes up to the glass. She lays her spectacles down on the mantel-piece. She puts a slim white hand over her auburn hair and looks into the mirror. Elizabeth, Elizabeth! I come!

As I came up, I saw a horrid little grinning, debauched face surge over the back of a great arm-chair and look towards Elizabeth. It was Captain Blacksheep, of course. He laid his elbows over the chair. He looked keenly and with a diabolical smile at the unconscious girl; and just as I reached the window, he cried out, “Betsy Bellenden, by Jove!”

Elizabeth turned round, gave a little cry, and——but what happened I shall tell in the ensuing chapter.

If there is one infirmity or defect of those five senses with which we are most of us blest, which more than any other attracts sympathy and claims compassionate consideration, it is blindness—an inability to know what is beautiful in form or in colour, to appreciate light, or to recognize and comprehend the varying features of our fellow-men—a perpetual darkness in the midst of a world of light—a total exclusion from the readiest, pleasantest, and most available means of acquiring ideas.

And yet who would suppose that there exists, and is tolerably common, a partial blindness, which has hardly been described as a defect for more than half a century, and of which it may be said even now that most of those who suffer from it are not only themselves ignorant of the fact, but that those about them can hardly be induced to believe it. The unhappy victims of this partial blindness (which is real and physical, not moral) are at great pains in learning what to them are minute distinctions of tint, although to the rest of the world they are differences of colour of the most marked kind, and, after all, they only obtain the credit of unusual stupidity or careless inattention in reward for their exertions and in sympathy for their visual defect. We allude to a peculiarity of vision which first attracted notice in the case of the celebrated propounder of the atomic theory in chemistry, the late Dr. Dalton, of Manchester, who on endeavouring to find some object to compare in colour with his scarlet robe of doctor of laws, when at Cambridge, could hit on nothing which better agreed with it than the foliage of the adjacent trees, and who to match his drab coat—for our learned doctor was of the Society of Friends—might possibly have selected crimson continuations as the quietest and nearest match the pattern-book of his tailor exhibited.

An explanation of this curious defect will be worth listening to, the more so as one of our most eminent philosophers, Sir John Herschel, has recently made a few remarks on the subject, directing attention at the same time to other little known but not unimportant phenomena of colour, which bear upon and help to explain it.

It is known that white light consists of the admixture of coloured rays in certain proportions, and that the beautiful prismatic colours seen in the rainbow are produced by the different degree in which the various rays of colour are bent when passing from one transparent substance into another of different density. Thus, when a small group of colour-rays, forming a single pencil or beam of white sunlight, passes into and through the atmosphere during a partial shower, and falls on a drop of rain, it is first bent aside on entering the drop, then reflected from the inside surface at the back of the drop, and ultimately emerges in an opposite direction to its original one. During these changes, however, although all the colour-rays forming the white pencil have been bent, each has been bent at a different angle—the red most, and the blue least. When therefore they[404] come out of the drop, the red rays are quite separated from the blue, and when the beam reaches its destination, the various colours enter the eye separately, forming a line of variously coloured light, the upper part red and the lower part blue, instead of a mere point of white light, as the ray would have appeared if seen before it entered the drop. The eye naturally refers each part of the ray to the place from whence it appears to come, and thus, with a number of drops falling and the sun not obscured, a rainbow is seen, which represents part of a number of concentric circular lines of colour, the outermost of which is red, the innermost violet, and the intermediate ones we respectively name orange, yellow, green, blue, and indigo.

It has also been found by careful experiment, that these are not all pure colours, most of them being mixtures of some few that are really primitive and pure, and necessarily belong to solar light. It is these mixed in due proportion which make up ordinary white light, which is the only kind seen when the sun’s rays have not undergone this sort of decomposition or separation into elements. The actual primitive colours are generally supposed to be red, yellow, and blue, and much theoretical as well as practical discussion has arisen as to how these require to be mixed, what proportion they bear to each other in their power of impressing the human eye, and many other matters for which we must refer to Mr. Field, Mr. Owen Jones, and others, who have studied the subject and applied it.

In a general way it is found convenient to remember, or rather to assume, that three parts of red, five parts of yellow, and eight parts of blue form together white, and, therefore, that the pencil of white light contains three rays of red, five of yellow, and eight of blue. To produce the other prismatic colours, we must mix red with a little yellow to form orange; yellow with some blue to form green; much blue with a little red to form indigo, and a little blue with some red to form violet. In performing experiments on colour it is convenient, instead of a drop of water, to substitute a prism of glass in decomposing the rays of light. We may thus produce at will a convenient image, called a prismatic spectrum, which, when thrown on a wall, is a broad band of coloured lights, having all the tints of the rainbow in the same order. Looking at this image, the red is at the top and the violet at the bottom, and it may be asked, How does the red get amongst the blue to form violet, if the red rays are bent up to the top of the spectrum? The answer is, that a quantity of white light not decomposed, and a part of all the colour rays, reach all parts of the spectrum, however carefully it is sheltered, but that so many more red rays get to the top, so many more of the yellow to the middle, and so many more blue to where that colour appears most brilliant, that these are seen nearly pure, whilst where the red and yellow or yellow and blue mix they produce distinct kinds of colour, and where the blue at the bottom is faint, and some of those red rays fall that do not reach the red part of the spectrum, the violet is produced. In point of fact, therefore, all the colours of the spectrum, as seen, are mixtures of pure colour with white light, while all but red are mixtures of other pure colours with some red and some yellow[405] as well as white. Primitive and pure colours, therefore, are not obtained in the spectrum, and a question has arisen as to which really deserve to be called pure, Dr. Young upholding green against yellow, and even regarding violet as primitive, and blue a mixed colour. A consideration of the results of this theory would lead us farther than is necessary for the purpose we have now in view.

We also find philosophers now-a-days calmly discussing a question which most people considered settled very long ago, namely, whether blue and yellow together really make green.

It is of no use for the artist to lift up his eyes with astonishment at any one being so insane as to question so generally admitted a statement. In vain does he point to his pictures, in which his greens have been actually so produced. The strict photologist at once puts him down, by informing him that he knows little or nothing of the real state of the case: his (the artist’s) colours are negative, or hues of more or less complete darkness; whereas in nature, the colour question is to be decided by positive colours, or hues in which all the light used is of one kind. The meaning of this will be best understood by an example: When a ray of white light falls on a green leaf, part of the ray is absorbed and part reflected, and the object is therefore only seen with the part that is reflected. That which is absorbed consists of some of each of the colour rays, and the resulting reflected light is nothing more than a mixture of what remains after this partial absorption. The green we see consists of the original white light deprived of a portion of its rays. It is not a pure and absolute green, but only a residual group of coloured rays, and thus in so far the green colour is negative, or consists of rays not absorbed. It is therefore partial darkness, and not absolute light. If, however, on the other hand, a ray of white light is passed through a transparent medium (e. g. some chemical salt) which has the property of entirely absorbing all but one or more of the colour rays, and no part of the remainder, then all the light that passes through this medium is of the one colour, or a mixture of the several colours that pass: and if such light is thrown on a white ground, the reflected colour will be positive, and not negative, and is far purer as well as brighter than the colour obtained in the other way. It has been found by actual experiment, that when positive blue, thus obtained, is thrown on positive yellow, the resulting reflected colour bears no resemblance to green. Sir John Herschel considers, that whether green is a primitive colour—in other words, whether we really have three or four primitive colours—remains yet an open question.

It was necessary to explain these matters about colour before directly referring to the subject of this paper, namely, blindness to certain colour rays. It should also be clearly understood that the persons subject to this peculiar condition of vision have not necessarily any mechanical or optical defect in the eye as an optical instrument, which may be strong or weak, long-sighted or short-sighted, quite independently of it. Colour blindness does not in any way interfere with the ordinary requirements of vision,[406] nor is there the smallest reason to imagine that it can get worse by neglect, or admit of any improvement by education or treatment.

Assuming that persons of ordinary vision see three simple colours, red, yellow, and blue, and that all the rest of the colours are mixtures of these with each other and with white light, let us try to picture to ourselves what must be the visual condition of a person who is unable to recognize certain rays; and as it appears that there is but one kind of colour-blindness known, we will assume that the person is unable to recognize those rays of white light which consist of pure red and nothing else. In other words, let us investigate the sensations of a person blind so far only as pure red is concerned.

All visible objects either reflect the same kind of light as that which falls on them, absorbing part and reflecting the rest, or else they absorb more of some colour rays than others, and reflect only a negative tint, made up of a mixture of all the colour-rays not absorbed. To a colour-blind person, the mixed light, as it proceeds from the sun, is probably white, as seen by those having perfect vision; for, as we have explained already, positive blue and yellow (the colour rays when red is excluded) do not make green, and the absence of the red ray is likely to produce only a slight darkening effect. So far, then, there is no difference. But how must it be with regard to colour.

Bearing in mind what has been said above, it is evident that in withdrawing the red rays from the spectrum, we affect all the colours. The orange is no longer red and yellow, but darkened yellow; the yellow is purer, the green is quite distinct, the blue purer, and the indigo and violet no longer red and blue, but blue mingled with more or less of darkness, the violet being the darkest, as containing least blue in proportion to red, while the red part itself, though not seen as a colour, is not absolutely black, inasmuch as its part of the spectrum is faintly coloured with the few mixed rays of blue and yellow and white that escape from their proper place. The red then ought to be seen as a gray neutral tint, the orange a dingy yellow, the indigo a dirty indigo, and the violet a sickly, disagreeable tint of pale blue, darkened considerably with black and gray.

Next let us take the case of an intelligent person affected with colour blindness, but who is not yet aware of the fact. He has been taught from childhood that certain shades, some darker and some brighter, but all of neutral tint, and not really presenting to him colour at all, are to be called by various names—scarlet, crimson, pale red, dark red, bright red, dark green, dark purple, brown, and others. With all these he can only associate an idea of gray; nor can he possibly know that any one else sees more than he does. Having been taught the names they are called by, he remembers the names, with more or less accuracy, and thus passes muster. There is a real difference of tint, because each of these colours consists of more or less blue, yellow, and white, mixed with the red; and our friend is enabled to recognize and name them, more or less correctly, according to his acuteness of perception and accuracy of memory.

[407]

If we desire to experiment on such a person, we must ask no names whatever, but simply place before him a number of similar objects differently coloured. Taking, for example, skeins of coloured wools, let us select a complete series of shades of tint, from red, through yellow, green, and blue, to violet, and request him to arrange them as well as he is able, placing the darkest shades first, and putting those tints together that are most like each other. It is curious then to watch the progress of the arrangement. In a case lately tried by the writer of this article, the colour-blind person first threw aside at once a particular shade of pale green as undoubted white, and then several dark blues, dark reds, dark greens, and browns, were put together as black. The yellows and pure blues were placed correctly, as far as name was concerned, by arranging several shades in order of brightness—but the order was very different from that which another person would have selected. The greens were grouped, some with yellows, and some with blues.

The colours in this experiment were all negative and impure, but we may also obtain something like the same result with positive colour, transmitted by the aid of polarized light through plates of mica. In a case of this kind described by Sir J. Herschel, the only colours seen were blue and yellow, while pale pinks and greens were regarded as cloudy white, fine pink as very pale blue, and crimson as blue; white red, ruddy pink, and brick red were all yellows, and fine pink blue, with much yellow. Dark shades of red, blue, or brown, were considered as merely dark, no colour being recognized.

The account of Dr. Dalton’s own peculiarity of vision by himself, offers considerable interest. He says, speaking of flowers: “With respect to colours that were white, yellow, or green, I readily assented to the appropriate term; blue, purple, pink, and crimson appeared rather less distinguishable, being, according to my idea, all referable to blue. I have often seriously asked a person whether a flower was blue or pink, but was generally considered to be in jest.” He goes on further to say, as the result of his experience: “1st. In the solar spectrum three colours appear, yellow, blue, and purple. The two former make a contrast; the two latter seem to differ more in degree than in kind. 2nd. Pink appears by daylight to be sky-blue a little faded; by candlelight it assumes an orange or yellowish appearance, which forms a strong contrast to blue. 3rd. Crimson appears muddy blue by day, and crimson woollen yarn is much the same as dark blue. 4th. Red and scarlet have a more vivid and flaming appearance by candlelight than by daylight” (owing probably to the quantity of yellow light thrown upon them).

As anecdotes concerning this curious defect of colour vision, we may quote also the following: “All crimsons appeared to me (Dr. Dalton) to be chiefly of dark blue, but many of them have a strong tinge of dark brown. I have seen specimens of crimson claret and mud which were very nearly alike. Crimson has a grave appearance, being the reverse of every showy or splendid colour.” Again: “The colour of a florid complexion[408] appears to me that of a dull, opaque, blackish blue upon a white ground. Dilute black ink upon white paper gives a colour much resembling that of a florid complexion. It has no resemblance to the colour of blood.” We have a detailed account of the case of a young Swiss, who did not perceive any great difference between the colour of the leaf and that of the ripe fruit of the cherry, and who confounded the colour of a sea-green paper with the scarlet of a riband placed close to it. The flower of the rose seemed to him greenish blue, and the ash gray colour of quick-lime light green. On a very careful comparison of polarized light by the same individual, the blue, white, and yellow were seen correctly, but the purple, lilac, and brown were confounded with red and blue. There was in this case a remarkable difference noticed according to the nature and quantity of light employed; and as the lad seemed a remarkably favourable example of the defect, the following curious experiment was tried. A human head was painted, and shown to the colour-blind person, the hair and eyebrows being white, the flesh brownish, the lips and cheeks green. When asked what he thought of this head? the reply was, that it appeared natural, but that the hair was covered with a nearly white cap, and the carnation of the cheeks was that of a person heated by a long walk.

There is an interesting account in the Philosophical Transactions for 1859 (p. 325), which well illustrates the ideas entertained by persons in this condition with regard to their own state. The author, Mr. W. Pole, a well-known civil engineer, thus describes his case:—“I was about eight years old when the mistaking of a piece of red cloth for a green leaf betrayed the existence of some peculiarity in my ideas of colour; and as I grew older, continued errors of a similar kind led my friends to suspect that my eyesight was defective; but I myself could not comprehend this, insisting that I saw colours clearly enough, and only mistook their names.

“I was articled to a civil engineer, and had to go through many years’ practice in making drawings of the kind connected with this profession. These are frequently coloured, and I recollect often being obliged to ask in copying a drawing what colours I ought to use; but these difficulties left no permanent impression, and up to a mature age I had no suspicion that my vision was different from that of other people. I frequently made mistakes, and noticed many circumstances in regard to colours, which temporarily perplexed me. I recollect, in particular, having wondered why the beautiful rose light of sunset on the Alps, which threw my friends into raptures, seemed all a delusion to me. I still, however, adhered to my first opinion, that I was only at fault in regard to the names of colours, and not as to the ideas of them; and this opinion was strengthened by observing that the persons who were attempting to point out my mistakes, often disputed among themselves as to what certain hues of colour ought to be called.” Mr. Pole adds that he was nearly thirty years of age when a glaring blunder obliged him to investigate his case closely, and led to the conclusion that he was really colour-blind.

All colour-blind persons do not seem to make exactly the same mistakes,[409] or see colours in the same way; and there are, no doubt, many minor defects in appreciating, remembering, or comparing colours which are sufficiently common, and which may be superadded to the true defect—that of the optic nerve being insensible to the stimulus of pure red light. It has been asserted by Dr. Wilson, the author of an elaborate work on the subject, that as large a proportion as one person in every eighteen is colour-blind in some marked degree, and that one in every fifty-five confounds red with green. Certainly the number is large, for every inquiry brings out several cases; but, as Sir John Herschel remarks, were the average anything like this, it seems inconceivable that the existence of the defect should not be one of vulgar notoriety, or that it should strike almost all uneducated persons, when told of it, as something approaching to absurdity. He also remarks, that if one soldier out of every fifty-five was unable to distinguish a scarlet coat from green grass, the result would involve grave inconveniences that must have attracted notice. Perhaps the fact that a difference of tint is recognized, although the eye of the colour-blind person does not appreciate any difference of colour, when red, green, and other colours are compared together, and that every one is educated to call certain things by certain names, whether he understands the true meaning of the name or not, may help to explain both the slowness of the defective sight to discover its own peculiarity, and the unwillingness of the person of ordinary vision to admit that his neighbour really does not see as red what he agrees to call red.

There is, however, another consideration that this curious subject leads to. It is known that out of every 10,000 rays issuing from the sun, and penetrating space at the calculated rate of 200,000 miles in each second of time, about one-fifth part is altogether lost and absorbed in passing through the atmosphere, and never reaches the outer envelope of the human eye. It is also known that of the rays that proceed from the sun, some produce light, some heat, and some a peculiar kind of chemical action to which the marvels of photography are due. Of these only the light rays are appreciated specially by the eye, although the others are certainly quite as important in preserving life and carrying on the business of the world. Who can tell whether, in addition to the rays of coloured light that together form a beam of white light, four-fifths of which only pass through the atmosphere, there may not have emanated from the sun other rays altogether absorbed and lost? or whether in entering the human eye, or being received on the retina at the back of the eye, or made sensitive by the optic nerve, there may not have been losses and absorptions sufficient to shut out from us, who enjoy what we call perfect vision, some other sources of information. How, in a word, do we who see clearly only three or four colours, and their various combinations, together with their combined white light—how do we know that to beings otherwise organized, the heat, or chemical rays, or others we are not aware of, may not give distinct optical impressions? We may meet one person whose sense of hearing is sufficiently acute to enable him to hear plainly the shrill night-cry of the bat, often totally inaudible, while his friend and daily companion cannot perhaps distinguish the noise[410] of the grasshopper, or the croaking of frogs, and yet neither of these differs sufficiently from the generality of mankind to attract attention, and both may pass through life without finding out their differences in organization, or knowing that the sense of hearing of either is peculiar. So undoubtedly it is with light. There may be some endowed with visual powers extraordinarily acute, seeing clearly what is generally altogether invisible; and this may have reference to light generally, or to any of the various parts of which a complete sunbeam is composed. Such persons may habitually see what few others ever see, and yet be altogether unaware of their powers, as the rest of the world would be of their own deficiency.

The case of the colour-blind person is the converse. He sees, it is true, no green in the fields, or on the trees, no shade of pink mantling in the countenance, no brilliant scarlet in the geranium flower, but still he talks of these things as if he saw them, and he believes he does see them, until by a long process of investigation he finds out that the idea he receives from them is very different from that received by his fellows. He often, however, lives on for years, and many have certainly lived out their lives without guessing at their deficiency.

These results of physical defects of certain kinds remaining totally unknown, either to the subject of them or his friends, even when all are educated and intelligent, are certainly very curious; but it will readily be seen that they are inevitable in the present development of our faculties. In almost everything, whether moral or intellectual, we measure our fellows by our own standard. He whose faculties are powerful, and whose intellect is clear, looks over the cloud that hovers over lower natures, and wonders why they, too, will not see truth and right as he sees them. Those, on the other hand, who dwell below among the mists of error and the trammels of prejudice, will not believe that their neighbour, intellectually loftier, sees clearly over the fog and malaria of their daily atmosphere.

In taking leave of the question of colour blindness, it should be mentioned that hitherto no case has been recorded in which this defect extends to any other ray than the red.

There seems no reason for this, and possibly, if they were looked for, cases might be found in which the insensibility of the optic nerve had reference to the blue instead of the red ray—the least instead of the most refrangible part of the beam of light. It would also be well worth the trial if those who have any reason to suppose that they enjoy a superiority of vision would determine by actual experiment the extent of their unusual powers, and learn whether they refer to an optical appreciation of the chemical or heat rays, or show any modification of the solar spectrum by enlargement or otherwise.

Lastly, it would be well, when children show an unusual difficulty in describing colours, to try by some such experiments as those here related whether any defect of colour blindness exists or not. It would clearly be undesirable that such children as have this defect should waste time in learning accomplishments or professions which they must always be unable[411] to practise. They, their parents and teachers, may thus be saved some of that disappointment which is always experienced when presumed tastes and talents are cultivated or forced contrary to the natural powers of the individual. It must clearly be hopeless to endeavour to obtain good taste in colours, when most of the colours themselves are not seen at all, or are so recognized as to present appearances altogether different from those seen by the rest of the world.

The mere notion that I was in possession of a room inside Canton—with freedom to wander through every quarter of that hitherto mysterious city, of which former travellers had only conveyed a notion from glances taken from the White Cloud Mountain, revealing nothing but an expanse of tiles and trees, with a pagoda-top or two, and a few mandarin flag-poles—was sufficient to banish anything like sleep. And apart from this constant wondering at perpetually finding myself where I was—the sharp “tung” of the mosquitoes before settling down for their gory banquet, the calls of the French and English bugles answering each other from the five-storied pagoda to the joss-house barracks, the terribly breathless atmosphere, and the grim, gigantic Chinese gods, who sat in the moonlight like pantomime ogres round my chamber, were quite enough to have kept one awake, and would have done so even if a genius had descended to read a paper on Art, which they might have discussed with him afterwards.

At last the quickly-rising tropical sun fired a ray like a shell into my eyes through a broken pane in the mother-of-pearl window of my joss-haunted room. This drove me out of bed, or, rather, off my matting, as quickly as though a real shrapnell had hissed its intention of immediately exploding beneath me. For this fearful sun of a Canton summer falls in red-hot death upon the European whose brain it can reach. Our soldiers were struck down before it in the White Cloud expedition as though a crane had dropped a woolsack on their heads.

We have all of us, at some time or another, said, “I never felt so hot in my life!” This has been less with relation to actual caloric than to a sudden flush of awkwardness attendant upon having asked people after their dead relations, or uncomfortable family affairs; or in expectation of some accidental and unintentional revelation of a circumstance in our own lives, of which we were not remarkably proud. Or, more especially, on being introduced by a gushing man to an enemy you had long since cut, with the assurance that you ought both to know each other. But I find this morning that I feel hotter still. The wind blows against me as from the door of a glasshouse; and the sun comes straight down like a red-hot nail, even through my double umbrella (which I am careful to put up before I venture out on the terrace), and my light but thick pith hat. At such times your claret is self-mulled, and butter becomes thick oil. You cannot find a cool place on your hard-stuffed pillow. The sun apparently twists its rays—sends them round corners, and through venetians, and under porticos; the light being so vivid that its mere reflection banishes shade. The swinging punkah—which A-wa, whose picture you have seen on cheap grocers’ tea-papers, pulls night and day, awake and asleep, as though he were a slightly vitalized lever-escapement—this[413] flounced and flirting terror of all bilious people gets up a delusive breeze, and when it stops the heat comes rushing back with double force. Everything you wear clings to you; or, if flannel, fetches out the “prickly heat” until you are beside yourself. In every draught, one side is chilled whilst the other is burned, as happens at the fireplace of an old country house, where one side is roasted, whilst on the other you are nearly blown up the chimney. And when you are actually out and about, you appear to live and move in the focus of one large burning-glass. It is a dead thick heat, that you fancy might be cut into blocks, and stored in Arctic ships for gradual distribution.

The kindness of General Straubenzee had consigned me to a Buddhist temple for my residence. It was the last costly work of Yeh, on Magazine Hill, and was barely finished when we took the city. An elaborate bell, yet unhung, stood sentinel at my door. I afterwards watched its departure to be taken to England, by Captain Maguire, in the Sanspareil, and it may now be seen in the Crystal Palace. Magazine Hill is to Canton what Montmartre is to Paris, and is covered with joss-houses, now all used as barracks for our men. It is to the extreme north of the city, which it commands, as well as the country outside, and is the only high ground within the walls, which here come close to it. Gazing from this on the open country, one is reminded of the view from the walls of our own Chester, near the jail, looking over the Roodee towards the Welsh mountains. To continue the comparison with places which may be familiar to my readers, the look-out towards the south, comprising the entire city, is marvellously like the eye-stretch over Lyons from the Fourvières, when the air is too hazy to see the Alps. There is, however, one localized object—a tall pagoda, rising high above the expanse of red roofs. One involuntary thought of Kew Gardens brings one back, for the moment, to home; and as this pagoda is not considered safe to ascend—on the authority of Major Luard, who gallantly tried it—and as it promises at some future time, if not taken down, to form a gigantic accident (as all columns and pagodas must do one of these days) the likeness is more perfect.

I found a sturdy little unshod pony waiting for me at the foot of the hill, with a tidy little pigtailed boy to guide him. The pony was for sale for seven dollars—it sounded cheap, but the expense of keep was the great question. My little friend made a speech:—“Chin-chin! my talkee A No. 1 Inglis, all a plopper (proper).” But I found his vocabulary of even the scanty “Canton English” very limited. I made out, however, that he was going to London to learn “all sort pigeon;” and he was very much delighted at pointing out to me some signboards over a few little shops, edging a pond, and reading:—“Best Wash from Hong Kong,” “A No. 1, Washsoap,” &c. And when we passed two culprits, tied together by their pigtails, and lying full-length upon the ground, guarded by an Irishman in front of a baraque, inscribed “Paddy-goose” (a favourite sobriquet at the dram-shops), he roared with laughter, and said:—“Soger hab catchee two piecey pilat, too muchee drunkee—wanchee[414] chokee-pigeon: no loast duck.” This interpreted expressing, with the Chinese substitution of the l for the r, that two pirates had been captured by the police in an extreme state of intoxication, and that they would go to prison, where roast duck would be a novelty.

After passing over a desert of brick rubbish—the remains of houses destroyed because they formed ambuscades from which the lurking braves captured or shot at stragglers on the walls, I was fairly inside Canton. Here the streets are all so exactly alike, that in endeavouring to give a notion of one, I may describe all. The majority appeared to vary from seven to ten feet in breadth—the crowded Cranbourn Passage, which runs from St. Martin’s Lane to Castle Street could be soon transformed into one, by a handful of theatrical mechanics. The houses are two or three stories high, and their signboards, in gaudy paint or gilding, either hang in front of them, or are set up in stone sockets, and all at right angles to the houses, so that, as the China character is written perpendicularly, they can be read going up or down the street. The manner in which they intrude on the thoroughfare braves all notices of Commissioners and Boards. The streets are all paved with granite in large flags, and this has acquired a peculiarly polished appearance from the absence of all wheel and quadrupedal traffic, and the constant shuffling along of the soft soles or naked feet of the natives. For the Cantonese do not appear to understand the use of wheels, or beasts of burden; everything is carried on bamboo poles by the intensely hard-working coolie population. Where they can do it, the streets are shaded with matting.

And now it was that all my childish associations connected with China were on the point of realization. For in the “pigeon” of Lord Elgin and Sir Michael Seymour—who must shake hands, and understand how much and how honestly both are respected by all of us—in the China Mail information that Patna opium is at 770 dollars, Malwa dull, and for Turkey no demand; and that Bank bills are 4s. 9d.; Sycee silver, 5½ per cent. premium, and Shanghai green-tea quotations are unchanged—in a whirl of treaties, and Peiho forts, and conferences totally misunderstood on either side, from the dismal ignorance of the practical Chinese language amongst our professed Chinese students (who could translate the great metaphysical work of Fo, but would be sadly bothered to decide a simple police “row”);—in all this, there is nothing in common with our old China. But here these associations crowded on us. Men ran along with slung tea-packages, as they did on the gaily-varnished canisters of the “Canton T Company,” in the High Street of my boyhood. Women with their bismuthed faces peered from windows, as they did on the fans and plates from which I formed my earliest notions of what was then called “the Celestial Empire.” And then came another memory, clinging to that delightful time when a belief in the reality of everything was our principal mental characteristic, extending even to “Bogey” in the cellar, and the dustman who threw sand in the eyes of sleepy little boys on the staircase, and the black dog in the passage; nay, even to that celebrated silver[415] spade with which the doctor dug up our little baby brother or sister from out of the parsley-bed—when story-books had that astonishing hold on me that, out of our town, I perfectly established the field along which Christian ran with his fingers in his ears when his neighbours tried to call him back. (And if ever there was a case for the parochial authorities of a man deserting his wife and children, Christian’s was one.) In this happy time I had associations with China, and they now come back from one of the most charming of the attractive stories in the Arabian Nights Entertainments. I was now looking—practically, with my own eyes—on a Chinese town, and a group of idle boys playing. A grave stranger of a foreign and travelled aspect was watching them. I should not have been at all surprised if he had recognized, in one of the urchins, the son of his dead brother—had clothed him at a ready-made tailor’s, and then introduced him, by lifting up a stone with a ring in it, to those wonderful nursery grounds of Hunt and Roskill, and Phillips, and Garrard, where the dew was all diamonds, and the wall-fruit all stones. And was it not likely that, in this very street, the stranger might have subsequently passed when anxious to exchange his new moderator lamps for any old argands, or solars, or camphines that might be dust-collecting about the house? Here again was an open space of ground, on which that palace might have stood, which went away one night in such a hurry. And strange to say, there was a palace here, and it did disappear one early January morning. It belonged to that old miscreant Yeh, and its sudden absence was owing rather to the sponging of practical guns than the rubbing of wonderful lamps. And although I heard nothing, both here and at Hong Kong, but of Hall of the Calcutta, and Mr. Oliphant; Telesio’s pale ale “chop” (or boat store); John Dent’s French cook’s chow-chow; the arrival of the Fei-man steamer; Colonel Stevenson’s bamboo balcony on the hill: the 59th; Sir John Bowring and Mr. Chisholm Anstey: and innumerable “shaves:” yet my thoughts ran upon Confucius and pagodas, nodding mandarins, chop-sticks, and the feast of lanterns, and above all, on Aladdin.

I was to join Mr. Parkes at the yamun of the Allied Commissioners, and go with him to pay a visit to Peh-kwei, the Governor of Canton. This yamun had been the palace of the Tartar general, but was now filled with English and French officials, soldiers, marines, compradors, coolies, and Chinese rabble, attending the police cases. We here formed a small procession, and our revolvers came into show; for Mr. Parkes was the most unpopular man in the city with the Cantonese. They called him “the red-bristled barbarian,” and had let fly various jingals at him, at different times, in the streets. But he had the courage of the——anybody you please; and the more they annoyed him, the more he would ride them down, and bang them back into their ambuscades. We were all on ponies or in chairs, with the exception of our guards; and we rode so fast along the narrow streets, and through the bustling crowds of passengers, and almost over the wares displayed out of doors, that a fire-engine going through the Lowther Arcade in a hurry could not have[416] created greater confusion. On entering the first court of Peh-kwei’s yamun, we were saluted with guns, and standards were hoisted on the mandarin poles. These courts are large paved areas, with a very broad flag-path up the middle, and fine trees at the sides; they are divided from each other by vast wooden buildings, like barns, with Chinese roofs, and stone lions guarding them. The patient ingenuity of the makers is shown in these animals; they have a large ball in their mouths, which you can turn round behind the teeth, but cannot take out; it has evidently been cut from the solid. We rode through the centre of these barns, up the stairs, to a higher court beyond, but our attendants filed off round the sides; and then we dismounted, and were introduced to Peh-kwei. I had often seen him wagging his head, and tongue, and hands, in old china-shops; but now he stood upright, in a long, white silk peignoir: and then he and Mr. Parkes began bowing to one another in such continuity, that they looked wound up, and minutes elapsed before either of them would take a seat. Then tea was brought in, and for a little time the talk was exactly like the twaddle that passes at a morning call in England between people who don’t care a straw about each other, never have, and are never likely to. But Mr. Parkes began to pull some Chinese documents from his pocket; and as I had been introduced as “a mandarin on his travels,” Peh-kwei made a very lucky suggestion that I should see his grounds.

This was just what I wanted—liberty to invade what would have been deemed a privacy even by the Cantonese; but the acres of unkept, overgrown wilderness, with its rotting pavilions, tumble-down temples, dried-up lakes, crumbling rockwork, and broken seats and tables, formed the spring of all the impressions I afterwards received in and about Canton. Nothing so dreary—not even Vauxhall on a wet Christmas Day—ever could be imagined. It was not the breakdown of acute organic lesion, but the decay of long, long-continued atrophy: and I formed a theory at the moment, which the appearance of every other yamun, or temple, strengthened, that the Chinese had for ages so jealously shut up their vaunted city, not from any terror of the barbarians becoming acquainted with their secrets of trade, government, or manufacture, but from a positive idea of shame that any one should see the mouldering neglected “lions” of their southern capital. True to the estimated value of their curios, everything was in a state of “crackle.” Combine all you can call to mind of dreary places—Miss Linwood’s old room in Leicester Square, and the present aspect of the Square itself; the gaunt, cheerless show-rooms of palaces generally: the “Moated Grange” and “Haunted House;” the old pavilion on Monkey Island, and indeed “pavilions” generally, from that in Hans Place to any damp ceiling-stained summer-house, dedicated to friendship or nature, that you know of—mix them together, and extract their essence, and then you will not have the least idea of the general rot and ruin that is spreading, like an ulcer, throughout Canton.

When a cathedral chapter have received their congé d’élire—so runs the popular and perfectly erroneous tradition—and have made choice of a Bishop, the pastor elect simpers, blushes, and says that really he is much obliged, but that he would rather not accept the proffered dignity. “Nolo episcopari,” he urges in graceful deprecation. Nobody in or out of the chapter believes in his reluctance, and nobody now-a-days believes in the harmless legend. Thus, too, when the Commons elect a Speaker, a tradition with little more foundation assumes that the right honourable gentleman approaches the foot of the Throne, hints in the most delicate manner that he, the chosen of the Commons, is a blockhead and an impostor, declares that he shall make but an indifferent Speaker, and seeks to be relieved from his onerous charge. At that same moment, perhaps, Messrs. Adams and Ede are embroidering Mr. Speaker’s gold robe; and experienced tonsors near Lincoln’s Inn are finishing the last row of curls on the ambrosial horse-hair which to-morrow will be a wig. When you ask a young lady to take a little more Mayonnaise de homard, or entreat her to oblige the company with “Entends tu les gondoles?”—that charming Venetian barcarole—does she not ordinarily, and up to a certain degree of pressure, refuse—say that she would rather not, or that she has a cold? Whose health is proposed and drunk amid repeated cheers, but he rises, and assures the assembled guests that he is about the last person in the world who should have been toasted; that he never felt so embarrassed in his life—he leads at the common law bar, and on breaches of promise is immense—and that he wants words to, &c. &c.? At the bar mess he is known as “Talking Smith,” and at school his comrades used to call him “Captain Jaw.” My friends, we do not place any faith in these denials; and forthwith clap the mitre on the Prelate’s head, bow to the Speaker, help the young lady to arrange the music stool, and intone nine times nine with one cheer more.

It is strange—it is vexatious; but I cannot persuade the ladies and gentlemen who peruse these papers to believe that I am not writing the Life of William Hogarth, and that these are merely discursive Essays on the Man, the Work, and the Time. People persist in thinking that it is with him who is now writing a case of nolo episcopari. Indeed it is no such thing. I should dearly wish to write myself Biographer. “Fain would I climb, but that I fear to fall.” I told you in the outset that this Endeavour was no Life. I disclaimed any possession of exclusive information. I claimed a liberal benefit-of-clergy as to names and dates. I have[418] had no access to muniment rooms. I have explored the contents of no charter chests. I have disentombed no dusty records, and rescued no parish registers from the degrading fate of serving to singe a goose. I am timorous, and seek not to be heard as one speaking with authority. I am anonymous, and risk no fame. But the north country won’t believe me, and the south and the midland shake their heads incredulously when I say this is not Hogarth’s Life, but only so much gossip about him and his pictures and times. I say so again; and if the public won’t be enlightened—si vult decipi—all I can add is, Decipiatur.

Now as to the exact date of the expiration of Hogarth’s apprenticeship—when was it? I have but an impression. I cannot speak from any certain knowledge, and assume, therefore, that the expiry was circa 1720. Ireland opines that it was in 1718, William having then attained his twenty-first year. The registers of the Goldsmiths’ Company might be more explicit, or, better still, Mr. Scott, the chamberlain of London, might enlighten us all, to a month, and to a day. For of old the chamberlain was the official Nemesis to the ofttimes unruly ’prentices of London. The idle, or rebellious, or truant novice, was arraigned before this dread functionary. He had power to relegate the offender to the carcere duro of Bridewell, there to suffer the penance of stripes and a bread-and-water diet. For aught I know, the ministrations of the chamberlain may to this day be occasionally invoked; but it is in his capacity of a recording official, and as having formerly drawn some fees from the attestation and registration of indentures, that his assistance would be useful to me. William Hogarth’s art-and-mystery-parchment may be in the city archives. What other strange and curiously quaint things those archives contain we had an inkling the other day, when the Liber Albus was published. But I have not the pleasure of Mr. Scott’s acquaintance, and he might say me nay.

Hogarth, I presume, was released from silver servitude in 1718-20. April 29th, 1720, is, as I have elsewhere noted, the date affixed to the shop-card he executed for himself, setting up in business, I hope in friendly rivalry to Ellis Gamble in Little Cranbourn Alley, hard by the “Golden Angel.” I stood and mused in Little Cranbourn Alley lately, and tried to conjure up Hogarthian recollections from that well-nigh blind passage. But no ghosts rose from a coffee-shop and a French barber’s, and a murky little den full of tobacco-pipes and penny valentines; so, taking nothing by my motion, I sped my slowest to the Sablonière in Leicester Square. Here even my senses became troubled with the odours of French soups, and I could make nothing Hogarthian out of the hostelry, a wing of which was once Hogarth’s house.

It is my wish to tell as succinctly as is feasible the story of seven years in Hogarth’s progress; seven years during which he was slowly, painfully, but always steadily and courageously, climbing that precipitous ladder which we have all in some sort or another striven to climb. At the top sits Fame kicking her heels, carrying her trumpet mincingly, making sometimes a feint to put it to her lips and sound it, more frequently looking[419] down superciliously with eyes half closed, and pretending to be unaware of the panting wretch toiling up the weary rungs beneath. Some swarm up this ladder as boys up a pole, hand over hand, a good grip with the knees, a confident, saucy, upward look. Others stop in medio, look round, sigh, or are satisfied, and gravely descend to refresh themselves with bread and cheese for life. Some stagger up, wildly, and tumbling off, are borne, mutilated, to the hospital accident-ward to die. Others there are who indeed obtain the ladder’s summit, but are doomed to crawl perpetually up and down the degrees. These are the unfortunates who carry hods to those master bricklayers who have bounded up the ladder with airy strides, or better still, have been born at the top of the ladder. Poor hodmen! they make dictionaries, draw acts of parliament, cram the boy-senator for his maiden speech, form Phidias’ rough clay-sketch into a shapely, polished marble bust, shade with Indian ink Archimedes’ rough draught for the new pump or the tubular bridge, and fill in Sir Joshua’s backgrounds. Some there are who go to sleep at the ladder’s foot, and some, the few, the felicitous, who reach the summit, breathless but triumphant, boldly bidding Fame blow her loudest blast. Forthwith the venal quean makes the clarion to sound, and all the world is amazed. Lowliness, our Shakspeare says, is “young ambition’s ladder:”

But so did not William Hogarth. He was self-confident and self-conscious enough,[2] when, after many years of toilsome struggling he turned up the trump-card, and his name was bruited about with loud fanfares to the[420] crowd. He attained the desired end: this Fame, this renown; and to vulgarize the allegory, he managed to snatch that comfortable shoulder of mutton which surmounts the greasy pole, and which, although we feign to covet it not, we must have. But he never attempted to conceal the smallness of his beginnings, to assert that his ancestors came over with the Conqueror, or to deny that his father came up to London by the waggon. He sets down in his own black and white, how he fought the battle for bread, how he engraved plates, and painted portraits and conversations and assemblies, in order to obtain the necessary bite and sup; how, with no money, he has often “gone moping into the city,” but there receiving “ten guineas for a plate,” has come home, jubilant, “put on his sword,” and swaggered, I doubt it not, with the most dashing bucks in the coffee-house or on the Mall. I think they are happy traits in the character of this good fellow and honest man, that he should have had the courage to accomplish ten guineas’ worth of graver’s work, without drawing money on account, and that he should have had a sword at home for the red-letter days and sunshiny hours. You, brave young student and fellow-labourer! draw on your corduroys, shoulder your pick and shovel, be off to the diggings; do your work, get paid; and then come home, put on your sword and be a gentleman. One sees Mr. Beverly or Mr. Telbin slashing away with a large whitewasher’s brush in a scene-painting room, fagging away in canvas jackets and over-alls, covered with parti-coloured splashes. Then, the work done, they wash their hands and come forth spruce and radiant, in peg-tops and kid-gloves. When our Prime Minister is at Broadlands, I hear that he stands up writing at a high desk, not seated like a clerk, working away bravely at the affairs of the chose publique, as for a wage of five-and-twenty shillings a week, and afterwards enjoys the relaxation of pruning his trees, or riding over his estate. Keep then your swords at home, and don’t wear them in working hours; but, the labour done, come out into the open and claim your rank.

I daresay that for a long time twenty-five shillings a week would have been a very handsome income to William the engraver. He covered many silver salvers and tankards with heraldic devices, but I don’t think he had any “argenterie, bagues et bijouxs,” or other precious stock of his own on sale. Most probable is it, that his old master gave him work to do after he had left his service. I wonder if Mr. Gamble, in after days, when his apprentice had become a great man, would ever hold forth to tavern coteries on the share he had had in guiding the early efforts of that facile hand! I hope and think so; and seem to hear him saying over his tankard: “Yes, sir, I taught the lad. He was bound to me, sir, by his worthy father, who was as full of book learning as the Cockpit is of Hanover rats. He could not draw a stroke when he came to me, sir. He was good at his graving work, but too quick, too quick, and somewhat rough. Never could manage the delicate tintos or the proper reticulations of scroll-foliage. But he was always drawing. He drew the dog. He drew the cat. He drew Dick, his fellow ’prentice, and Molly the maid,[421] and Robin Barelegs the shoeblack at the corner of Cranbourn Street. He drew a pretty configurement of Mistress Gamble, my wife deceased, in her Oudenarde tire, and lapels of Mechlin point, and Sunday sack. But there was ever a leaning towards the caricatura in him, sir. Sure never mortal since Jacques Callot the Frenchman (whose ‘Habits and Beggars’ he was much given to study) ever drew such hideous, leering satyrs. And he had a way too, of making the griffins laugh and the lions dance gambadoes, so to speak, on their hind legs in the escocheons he graved, which would never have passed the College of Arms. Sir, the tankard out: what! drawer, there.”

Thus Ellis Gamble mythically seen and heard. But to the realities. In 1720 or ’21, Hogarth’s father, the poor old dominie, was removed to a land where no grammar disputations are heard, and where one dictionary is as good as another. Hogarth’s sisters had previously kept a “frock shop” in the city; they removed westward after the old man’s death, and probably occupied their brother’s place of business in Little Cranbourn Alley, when, giving up a perhaps momentary essay in the vocation of a working tradesman, he elected to be, instead, a working artist. For Mary and Ann Hogarth he engraved a shop-card, representing the interior of a somewhat spacious warehouse with sellers and customers, and surmounted by the king’s arms. The sisters could not have possessed much capital; and there have not been wanting malevolent spirits—chiefly of the Wilkite way of thinking—to hint that the Misses Hogarths’ “old frock-shop” was indeed but a very old slop-, not to say rag-shop, and that the proper insignia for their warehouse would have been not the royal arms, but a certain image, sable, pendent, clad in a brief white garment: a black doll of the genuine Aunt Sally proportions.

William Hogarth out of his apprenticeship is, I take it, a sturdy, ruddy-complexioned, clear-eyed, rather round-shouldered young fellow, who as yet wears his own hair, but has that sword at home—a silver-hilted or a prince’s metal one—and is not averse to giving his hat a smart cock, ay, and bordering it with a narrow rim of orrice when Fortune smiles on him. Not yet was the ἨΘΟΣ developed in him. It was there, yet latent. But, instead, that quality with which he was also so abundantly gifted, and which combined so well with his sterner faculties—I mean the quality of humorous observation—must have begun to assert itself. “Engraving on copper was at twenty years of age my utmost ambition,” he writes himself. Yes, William, and naturally so. The monsters and chimeras of heraldry and Mr. Gamble’s back-shop had by that time probably thoroughly palled on him. Fortunate if a landscape, or building, or portrait had sometimes to be engraved on a silver snuff-box or a golden fan-mount. The rest was a wilderness of apocryphal natural history, a bewildering phantasmagoria of strange devices from St. Benet’s Hill, expressed in crambo, in jargon, and in heraldic romany: compony, gobony, and chequy; lions erased and tigers couped; bucks trippant and bucks vulnèd; eagles segreiant, and dogs sciant; bezants, plates, torteaux, pomeis, golps,[422] sanguiny-guzes, tawny and saltire.[3] The revulsion was but to be expected—was indeed inevitable, from the disgust caused by the seven years’ transcription of these catalogues of lying wonders, to the contemplation of the real life that surged about Cranbourn Alley, and its infinite variety of humours, comic and tragic. “Engraving on copper” at twenty might be the utmost ambition to a young man mortally sick of silver salvers; but how was it at twenty-one and twenty-two?

“As a child,” writes William, “shows of all kind gave me pleasure.” To a lad of his keen eye and swift perception, all London must have been full of shows. Not only was there Bartlemy, opened by solemn procession and proclamation of Lord Mayor—Bartlemy with its black-puddings, pantomimes, motions of puppets, rope-dancers emulating the achievements of Jacob Hall, sword-swallowing women, fire-eating salamanders, high Dutch conjurors, Alsatian and Savoyard-Dulcamara quacks selling eye-waters, worm-powders, love-philters, specifics against chincough, tympany, tissick, chrisoms, head-mould-shot, horse-shoe-head, and other strange ailments, of which the Registrar-general makes no mention in his Returns, now-a-days;[4] not only did Southwark, Tottenham and Mayfair flourish, but likewise Hornfair by Charlton, in Kent, easy of access by Gravesend tilt-boat, which brought to at Deptford Yard, and Hospital Stairs at Greenwich. There were two patent playhouses, Lincoln’s Inn and Drury Lane; and there were Mr. Powell’s puppets at the old Tennis-court, in James Street, Haymarket—mysterious edifice, it lingers yet! looking older than ever, inexplicable, obsolete, elbowed by casinos, poses plastiques, cafés, and American bowling-alleys, yet refusing to budge an inch before the encroachments of Time, who destroys all things, even tennis-courts. It was “old,” we hear, in 1720; I have been told that tennis is still played there. Gramercy! by whom? Surely at night, when the wicked neighbourhood is snatching a short feverish sleep, the “old tennis-courts” must be haunted by sallow, periwigged phantoms of Charles’s time, cadaverous beaux in laced bands, puffed sleeves, and flapped, plumed hats. Bats of spectral wire strike the cobweb-balls; the moonlight can make them cast no shadows on the old brick-wall. And in the gallery sits the harsh-visaged, cynic king, Portsmouth at his side, his little spaniels mumbling the rosettes in his royal shoes.

[423]

In a kind of copartnership with Mr. Powell’s puppets—formerly of the Piazza, Covent Garden, was the famous Faux, the legerdemain, or sleight-of-hand conjuror—the Wiljalba Frikell of his day, and whom Hogarth mentions in one of his earliest pictorial satires. But Faux did that which the Russian magician, to his credit, does not do: he puffed himself perpetually, and was at immense pains to assure the public through the newspapers that he was not robbed returning from the Duchess of Buckingham’s at Chelsea. From Faux’s show at the “Long-room,” Hogarth might have stepped to Heidegger’s—hideous Heidegger’s masquerades at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, where also were held “ridotti,” and “veglioni”—junketings of an ultra Italian character, and all presented in 1722 by the Middlesex grand jury as intolerable nuisances. Many times, also, did the stern Sir John Gonson (the Harlot’s Progress Gonson), justice of peace, much feared by the Phrynes of the hundreds of Drury, inveigh in his sessions-charges against the sinful ridotti and the disorderly veglioni. Other performances took place at the King’s Theatre. There was struggling for its first grasp on the English taste and the English pocket—a grasp which it has never since lost—that anomalous, inconsistent, delightful entertainment, the Italian Opera. Hogarth, as a true-born Briton, hated the harmonious exotic; and from his earliest plates to the grand series of the Rake’s Progress, indulges in frequent flings at Handel (in his Ptolomeo, and before his immortal Oratorio stage), Farinelli, Cuzzoni, Senesino, Faustina, Barrenstadt, and other “soft simpering whiblins.” Yet the sturdiest hater of this “new taste of the town” could not refrain from admiring and applauding to the echo that which was called the “miraculously dignified exit of Senesino.” This celebrated sortita must have resembled in the almost electrical effect it produced, the elder Kean’s “Villain, be sure thou prove,” &c. in Othello; John Kemble’s “Mother of the world—” in Coriolanus; Madame Pasta’s “Io,” in Medea; and Ristori’s world-known “Tu,” in the Italian version of the same dread trilogy. One of the pleasantest accusations brought against the Italian Opera was preferred some years before 1720, in the Spectator, when it was pointed out that the principal man or woman singer sang in Italian, while the responses were given, and the choruses chanted by Britons. Judices, in these latter days, I have “assisted” at the performance of the Barber of Seville at one of our large theatres, when Figaro warbled in Italian with a strong Spanish accent, when Susanna was a Frenchwoman, Doctor Bartolo an Irishman, and the chorus sang in English, and without any H’s.

More shows remain for Hogarth to take delight in. The quacks, out of Bartlemy time, set up their standings in Moorfields by the madhouse (illustrated by Hogarth in the Rake’s Progress), and in Covent Garden Market (W. H. in the plate of Morning), by Inigo Jones’s rustic church, which he built for the Earl of Bedford: “Build me a barn,” quoth the earl. “You shall have the bravest barn in England,” returned Inigo, and his lordship had it. There were quacks too, though the loud-voiced[424] beggars interfered with them, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and on Tower Hill, where the sailors and river-side Bohemians were wont to indulge in their favourite diversion of “whipping the snake.” There were grand shows when a commoner was raised to the peerage or promoted in grade therein—a common occurrence in the midst of all the corruption entailed by the Scottish union and Walpole’s wholesale bribery. On these occasions, deputations of the heralds came from their dusty old college in Doctors’ Commons, and in full costume, to congratulate the new peer, the viscount made an earl, or the marquis elevated to a dukedom, and to claim by the way a snug amount of fees from the newly-blown dignitary. Strange figures they must have cut, those old kings-at-arms, heralds, and pursuivants! Everybody remembers the anecdote, since twisted into an allusion to Lord Thurlow’s grotesque appearance, of a servant on such an occasion as I have alluded to, saying to his master, “Please, my lord, there’s a gentleman in a coach at the door would speak with your lordship; and, saving your presence, I think he’s the knave of spades.” I burst out in unseemly cachinnation the other day at the opening of Parliament, when I saw Rougecroix trotting along the royal gallery of the peers, with those table-napkins stiff with gold embroidery pendent back and front of him like heraldic advertisements. The astonishing equipment was terminated by the black dress pantaloons and patent-leather boots of ordinary life. Je crevais de rire: the Lord Chamberlain walking backwards was nothing to it; yet I daresay Rougecroix looked not a whit more absurd than did Bluemantle and Portcullis in 1720 with red heels and paste buckles to their Cordovan shoon, and curly periwigs flowing from beneath their cocked hats.

Shows, more shows, and William Hogarth walking London streets to take stock of them all, to lay them up in his memory’s ample store-house. He will turn all he has seen to good account some day. There is a show at the museum of the Royal Society, then sitting at Gresham College. The queer, almost silly things, exhibited there! queer and silly, at least to us, with our magnificent museums in Great Russell Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Brompton. I am turning over the Royal Society catalogue as I write: the rarities all set down with a ponderous, simple-minded solemnity. “Dr. Grews” is the conscientious editor. Here shall you find the “sceptre of an Indian king, a dog without a mouth; a Pegue hat and organ; a bird of paradise; a Jewish phylactery; a model of the Temple of Jerusalem; a burning-glass contrived by that excellent philosopher and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton” (hats off); “three landskips and a catcoptrick paint given by Bishop Wilkins; a gun which discharges seven times one after the other presently” (was this a revolver?); “a perspective instrument by the ingenious Sir Christopher Wren” (hats off again); “a pair of Iceland gloves, a pot of Macassar poison” (oh! Rowland); “the tail of an Indian cow worshipped on the banks of the river Ganges; a tuft of coralline; the cramp fish which by some humour or vapour benumbs the fisherman’s arms,” and so[425] forth. Hogarth will make use of all these “curios” in the fourth scene of the Marriage à la Mede, and presently, for the studio of Sidrophel in his illustrations to Hudibras.

And there are shows of a sterner and crueler order. Now a pick-pocket yelling under a pump; now a half-naked wretch coming along Whitehall at the tail of a slow-plodding cart, howling under the hangman’s lash (that functionary has ceased to be called “Gregory,” from the great executioner G. Brandon, and is now, but I have not been able to discover for what reason, “Jack Ketch”).[5] Now it is a libeller or a perjurer in the pillory at Charing in Eastcheap or at the Royal Exchange. According to his political opinions do the mob—the mob are chiefly of the Jacobite persuasion—pelt the sufferer with eggs and ordure, or cheer him, and fill the hat which lies at his foot on the scaffold with halfpence and even silver. And the sheriffs’ men, if duly fee’d, do not object to a mug of purl or mum, or even punch, being held by kind hands to the sufferer’s lips. So, in Hugo’s deathless romance does Esmeralda give Quasimodo on the carcan to drink from her flask. Mercy is as old as the hills, and will never die. Sometimes in front of “England’s Burse,” or in Old Palace Yard, an odd, futile, much-laughed-at ceremony takes place: and after solemn proclamation, the common hangman makes a bonfire of such proscribed books as Pretenders no Pretence, A sober Reply to Mr. Higgs’s Tri-theistical Doctrine. Well would it be if the vindictiveness of the government stopped here; but alas! king’s messengers are in hot pursuit of the unhappy authors, trace them to the tripe-shop in Hanging Sword Alley, or the cock-loft in Honey Lane Market, where they lie three in a bed; and the poor scribbling wretches are cast into jail, and delivered over to the tormentors, losing sometimes their unlucky ears. There is the great sport and show every market morning, known as “bull banking,” a sweet succursal to his Majesty’s bear-garden and Hockley in the hole. The game is of the simplest; take your bull in a narrow thoroughfare, say, Cock Hill, by Smithfield; have a crowd of hommes de bonne volonté; overturn a couple of hackney coaches at one end of the street, a brewer’s dray at the other: then harry your bull up and down, goad him, pelt him, twist his tail, till he roar and is rabid. This is “bull-banking,” and oh! for the sports of merry England! William Hogarth looks on sternly and wrathfully. He will remember the brutal amusements of the populace when he comes to engrave the Four Stages of Cruelty. But I lead him away now to other scenes and shows. There are the wooden horses before Sadler’s Hall; and westward there stands an uncomfortable “wooden horse” for the punishment of soldiers who are picketed thereon for one and two hours. This wooden horse is on St. James’s Mall, over against the gun-house. The torture is one of Dutch William’s legacies to the subjects, and has been retained and improved on[426] by the slothfully cruel Hanoverian kings. Years afterwards (1745-6), when Hogarth shall send his picture of the March to Finchley to St. James’s for the inspection of his sacred Majesty King George the Second, that potentate will fly into a guard-room rage at the truthful humour of the scene, and will express an opinion that the audacious painter who has caricatured his Foot Guards, should properly suffer the punishment of the picket on the “wooden horse” of the Mall.

Further afield. There are literally thousands of shop-signs to be read or stared at. There are prize-fights—predecessors of Fig and Broughton contests—gladiatorial exhibitions, in which decayed Life-guardsmen and Irish captains trade-fallen, hack and hew one another with broadsword and backsword on public platforms. Then the “French prophets,” whom John Wesley knew, are working sham miracles in Soho, emulating—the impostors!—the marvels done at the tomb of the Abbé, Diacre or Chanoine, Paris, and positively holding exhibitions in which fanatics suffer themselves to be trampled, jumped upon, and beaten with clubs, for the greater glory of Molinism;[6] even holding academies, where the youth of both sexes are instructed in the arts of foaming at the mouth, falling into convulsions, discoursing in unknown tongues, revealing stigmata produced by the aid of lunar caustic, and other moon-struck madnesses and cheats. Such is revivalism in 1720. William Hogarth is there, observant. He will not forget the French prophets when he executes almost the last and noblest of his plates—albeit, it is directed against English revivalists, Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism. He leaves Soho, and wanders eastward and westward. He reads Madam Godfrey’s six hundred challenges to the female sex in the newspapers; sitting, perhaps, at the “Rose,” without Temple Bar; at the “Diapente,” whither the beaux, feeble as Lord Fanny, who could not “eat beef, or horse, or any of those things,” come to recruit their exhausted digestions with jelly-broth. He may look in at mug-houses, where stum, ’quest ales, Protestant masch-beer, and Derby stingo are sold. He may drop in at Owen Swan’s, at the “Black Swan” Tavern in St. Martin’s Lane, and listen to the hack-writers girding at Mr. Pope, and at the enormous amount of eating and drinking in Harry Higden’s comedies. He may see the virtuosi at Childs’s, and dozens of other auctions (Edward Mellington was the George Robins of the preceding age; the famous Cobb was his successor in auction-room eloquence and pomposity), buying china monsters. He may refect himself with hot furmity at the “Rainbow” or at “Nando’s,” mingle (keeping his surtout well buttoned) with the pickpockets in Paul’s, avoid the Scotch walk on ’Change, watch the garish damsels alight from their coaches at the chocolate-houses, mark the gamesters rushing in, at as early an hour as eleven in the morning, to shake their elbows at the “Young Man’s;” gaze at the barristers as they bargain for wherries at the Temple Stairs to take water[427] for Westminster—a pair of sculls being much cheaper than a hackney coach—meet the half-pay officers at Whitehall, garrulously discussing the King of Spain’s last treaty, as the shoeblacks polish their footgear with oil and soot—Day and Martin are yet in embryo: stand by, on Holborn Hill, about half-past eleven, as Jack Hall, the chimney sweep, winds his sad way in Newgate cart, his coffin before him, and the ordinary with his book and nosegay by his side, towards St. Giles’s Pound, and the ultimate bourne, Tyburn. Jack Hall has a nosegay, too, and wears a white ribbon in his hat to announce his innocence. The fellow has committed a hundred robberies. And Jack Hall is very far gone in burnt brandy. Hogarth marks—does not forget him. Jack Hall—who seems to have been a kind of mediocre Jack Sheppard, although his escape from Newgate was well-nigh as dexterous, and quite as bold as the prison-breaking feat of the arch rascal, Blueskin’s friend—will soon reappear in one of the first of the Hogarthian squibs; and the dismal procession to Tyburn will form the dénoûment to the lamentable career of Tom Idle.

Hogarth must have become poco a poco saturated with such impressions of street life. From 1730 the tide of reproduction sets in without cessation; but I strive to catch and to retain the fleeting image of this dead London, and it baulks and mocks me:—the sham bail, “duffers” and “mounters,” skulking with straws in their shoes about Westminster Hall; the law offices in Chancery Lane and the “devil’s gap” between Great Queen Street and Lincoln’s Inn Fields; the Templars, the moot-men, and those who are keeping their terms in Lincoln’s and Gray’s Inn, dining in their halls at noon, eating off wooden trenchers, drinking from green earthenware jugs, and summoned to commons by horn-blow;—the furious stockjobbers at Jonathan’s and Garraway’s, at the sign of the “Fifteen Shillings,” and in Threadneedle Row; the fine ladies buying perfumery at the “Civet Cat,” in Shire Lane, by Temple Bar—perfumery, now-a-days, is much wanted in that unsavoury locale; the Jacobite ballad-singers growling sedition in Seven Dials; the Hanoverian troubadours crooning, on their side, worn-out scandal touching “Italian Molly” (James the Second’s Mary of Modena) and “St. James’s warming-pan” in the most frequented streets; riots and tumults, spy-hunting, foreigner mobbing, of not unfrequent occurrence, all over the town;—gangs of riotous soldiers crowding about Marlborough House, and casting shirts into the great duke’s garden, that his grace may see of what rascally stuff—filthy dowlas instead of good calico—the contractors have made them. Alas! a wheezing, drivelling, almost idiotic dotard is all that remains of the great duke, all that is left of John Churchill. He had just strength enough at the Bath the season before to crawl home in the dark night, in order to avoid the expense of a chair. There are fights in the streets, and skirmishes on the river, where revenue cutters, custom-house jerkers, and the “Tartar pink,” make retributive raids on the fresh-water pirates: light and heavy horsemen, cope-men, scuffle-hunters, lumpers, and game-watermen. There are salt-water as well as fresh-water thieves; and a[428] notable show of the period is the execution of a pirate, and his hanging in chains at Execution dock. All which notwithstanding, it is a consolation to learn that “Captain Hunt, of the Delight,” is tried at Justice Hall for piracy, and “honourably acquitted.” I know not why, but I rejoice at the captain’s escape. He seems a bold, dashing spirit; and, when captured, was “drinking orvietan with a horse-officer.” But when I come to reperuse the evidence adduced on the trial, I confess that the weight of testimony bears strongly against Captain Hunt, and that in reality it would seem that he did scuttle the “Protestant Betsey,” cause the boatswain and “one Skeggs, a chaplain, transporting himself to the plantations”—at the request of a judge and jury, I wonder?—to walk the plank, and did also carbonado the captain with lighted matches and Burgundy pitch, prior to blowing his (the captain’s) brains out. Hunt goes free, but pirates are cast, and sometimes swing. Hogarth notes, comments on, remembers them. The gibbeted corsairs by the river’s side shall find a place in the third chapter of the history of Thomas Idle.

So wags the world in 1720. Hogarth practising on copper in the intervals of arms and crest engraving, and hearing of Thornhill and Laguerre’s staircase-and-ceiling-painting renown, inwardly longing to be a Painter. Sir George Thorold is lord mayor. Comet Halley is astronomer royal, vice Flamsteed, deceased the preceding year. Clement XI. is dying, and the Jews of Ferrara deny that they have sacrificed a child at Easter, à la Hugh of Lincoln. The great King Louis is dead, and a child reigns in his stead. The Regent and the Abbé Dubois are making history one long scandal in Paris. Bernard Lens is miniature painter to the king, in lieu of Benjamin Acland, dead. Mr. Colley Cibber’s works are printed on royal paper. Sheffield, Duke of Bucks, erects a plain tablet to the memory of John Dryden in Westminster Abbey: his own name in very large letters, Dryden’s in more moderately-sized capitals. Madam Crisp sets a lieutenant to kill a black man, who has stolen her lapdog. Captain Dawson bullies half the world, and half the world bullies Captain Dawson: and bullies or is so bullied still to this day.

In disjointed language, but with a very earnest purpose, I have endeavoured to trace our painter’s Prelude,—the growth of his artistic mind, the ripening of his perceptive faculties under the influence of the life he saw. Now, for the operation of observation, distilled in the retort of his quaint humour. I record the work he did; and first, in 1720, mention “four drawings in Indian ink” of the characters at Button’s coffee-house.[7][429] In these were sketches of Arbuthnot, Addison, Pope (as it is conjectured), and a certain Count Viviani, identified years afterwards by Horace Walpole, when the drawings came under his notice. They subsequently came into Ireland’s possession. Next Hogarth executed an etching, whose subject was of more national importance. In 1720-21, as all men know, England went mad, and was drawn, jumping for joy, into the Maëlstrom of the South Sea bubble. France had been already desperately insane, in 1719, and Philip, the Regent, with John Law of Lauriston, the Edinburgh silversmith’s son, who had been rake, bully, and soldier, and had stood his trial for killing Beau Wilson in a duel, had between them gotten up a remarkable mammon-saturnalia in the Palais Royal and the Rue Quincampoix. Law lived en prince in the Place Vendôme. They show the window now whence he used to look down upon his dupes. He died, a few years after the bursting of his bubble, a miserable bankrupt adventurer at Venice. And yet there really was something tangible in his schemes, wild as they were. The credit of the Royal Bank averted a national bankruptcy in France, and some substantial advantage might have been derived from the Mississippi trade. At all events, there actually was such a place as Louisiana. In this country, the geographical actualities were very little consulted. The English South Sea scheme was a swindle, pur et simple. Almost everybody in the country caught this cholera-morbus of avarice. Pope dabbled in S. S. S. (South Sea Stock): Lady Mary Wortley Montague was accused of cheating Ruremonde, the French wit, out of 500l. worth of stock. Ladies laid aside ombre and basset to haunt ’Change Alley. Gay “stood to win” enormous sums—at one time imagined himself, as did Pope also, to be the “lord of thousands,” but characteristically refused to follow a friend’s advice to realize at least sufficient to secure himself a “clean shirt and a shoulder of mutton every day for life.” He persisted in holding, and lost all. Mr. Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was deeply implicated in S. S. S. transactions, as were also many peers and members of parliament. The amiable and accomplished Craggs, the postmaster-general, the friend of all the wits, and for whose tomb Pope wrote so touching an epitaph, tarnished his reputation indelibly by unscrupulous jobbery. He died of the small-pox, just in time to avoid disgrace and ruin; but his poor old father was sold up, and was borne to the grave shortly afterward, broken-hearted. Lord Stanhope ruptured a blood-vessel in replying to a furious speech of the Duke of Wharton (who lived a profligate and died a monk) against S. S., and did not long survive. Samuel Chandler, the eminent Nonconformist divine, was ruined, and had to keep a book-stall for bread. Hudson, known as “Tom of Ten Thousand,” went stark mad, and moved about ’Change just as the “Woman in Black” and the “Woman in White” (the son of the one, and the brother of the other were hanged for forgery), used to haunt the avenues of the Bank of England. The South Sea Company bribed the Government, bribed the two Houses, and bribed the Court ladies, both of fair and of light fame. Erengard Melusina[430] Schuylenberg, Princess von Eberstein, Duchess of Munster (1715), and Duchess of Kendal (1729)—Hogarth engraved the High Dutch hussey’s arms—the Countess of Platen, and her two nieces, and Lady Sunderland, with Craggs and Aislabie, got the major part of the fictitious stock of 574,000l. created by the company. The stock rose to thirteen hundred and fifty pounds premium! Beggars on horseback tore through the streets. There were S. S. coaches with Auri sacra fames painted on the panels. Hundreds of companies were projected, and “took the town” immensely. Steele’s (Sir Richard’s) Fishpool Company, for bringing the finny denizens of the deep by sea to London—Puckle’s Defence Gun—the Bottomree, the Coral-fishery, the Wreck-fishing companies, were highly spoken of. Stogden’s remittances created great excitement in the market. There were companies for insurance against bad servants, against thefts and robberies, against fire and shipwreck. There were companies for importing jack-asses from Spain (coals to Newcastle!); for trading in human hair (started by a clergyman); for fattening pigs; for making pantiles, Joppa and Castile soap; for manufacturing lutestring; “for the wheel of a perpetual motion;” and for extracting stearine from sunflower-seed. There were Dutch bubbles, and oil bubbles, and water bubbles—bubbles of timber, and bubbles of glass. There were the “sail cloth,” or “Globe permits”—mere cards with the seal of the “Globe” tavern impressed on them, and “permitting” the fortunate holders to acquire shares at some indefinite period in some misty sailcloth factory. These sold for sixty guineas a piece. There was Jezreel Jones’s trade to Barbary, too, for which the permits could not be sold fast enough. Welsh copper and York Buildings’ shares rose to cent. per cent. premium. Sir John Blunt, the scrivener, rose from a mean estate to prodigious wealth, prospered, and “whale directors ate up all.” There was an S. S. literature—an S. S. anthology.

Pshaw! have we not Mr. Ward’s capital picture in the Vernon collection, and hundreds of pamphlets on S. S. in the British Museum? The end came, and was, of course, irrevocable and immortal smash. Ithuriel’s spear, in the shape of a scire facias in the London Gazette, pierced this foully iridescent bubble through and through, producing precisely the same effect as the publication of Mr. Sparkman’s inexorable railway statistics in a supplement to The Times newspaper, A.D. 1845. The city woke up one morning and found itself ruined. The Sword-blade company went bankrupt. Knight, the S.S. cashier, fled, but was captured at Tirlemont in Flanders, at the instance of the British resident in Brussels, and thrown into the citadel of Antwerp, from which he presently managed to escape. In an age when almost every one had committed more or less heinous acts of roguery, great sympathy was evinced for rogues. At home, however, there were some thoughts of vengeance. Honest men[431] began, for the first time these many months, to show their heads, and talked of Nemesis and Newgate. Aislabie resigned. The end of the Craggses you have heard. Parliament-men were impeached and expelled the House. Patriots inveighed against the injuries which corrupt ministers may inflict on the sovereigns they serve, and quoted the history of Claudian and Sejanus. The directors—such as had not vanished—were examined by secret committees, and what effects of theirs could be laid hold of were confiscated for the benefit of the thousands of innocent sufferers. I have waded through many hundred pages of the parliamentary reports of the period, and have remarked, with a grim chuckle, the similarities of swindling between this fraud and later ones. Cooked accounts, torn-out leaves, erasures, and a small green ledger with a brass lock—these are among the flowers of evidence strewn on the heads of the secret committees. Knight took the key away with him, forgetting the ledger, I presume. The lock was forced, and there came floating out a bubble of fictitious stock. The old story, gentles and simples. “Comme Charles Dix, comme Charles Dix,” muttered wretched, wigless, Smithified old Louis Philippe, as he fled in a fiacre from the Tuileries in ’48; and this S.S. swindle of 1720 was only “Comme Charles Dix,”—the elder brother of 1825 and 1845 manias, of Milk Companies, Washing Companies, Poyais Loans, Ball’s Pond Railways, Great Diddlesex Junctions, Borough, British, and Eastern Banks, and other thieveries which this age has seen.

Did William Hogarth hold any stock? Did he ever bid for a “Globe permit?” Did he hanker after human hair? Did he cast covetous eyes towards the gigantic jack-asses of Iberia? Ignoramus: but we know at least that he made a dash at the bubble with his sharp pencil. In 1721 appeared an etching of The South Sea, an Allegory. It was sold at the price of one shilling by Mrs. Chilcot, in Westminster Hall, and B. Caldwell, in Newgate Street. The allegory is laboured, but there is a humorous element diffused throughout the work. The comparatively mechanical nature of the pursuits from which Hogarth was but just emancipated shows itself in the careful drawing of the architecture and the comparative insignificance of the figures. The Enemy of mankind is cutting Fortune into collops before a craving audience of rich and poor speculators. There is a huge “roundabout,” with “who’ll ride?” as a legend, and a throng of people of all degrees revolving on their wooden hobbies. In the foreground a wretch is being broken on the wheel—perhaps a reminiscence of the terrible fate of Count Horn, in Paris. L. H., a ruffian, is scourging a poor fellow who is turning his great toes up in agony. These are to represent Honour and Honesty punished by Interest and Villany. In the background widows and spinsters are crowding up a staircase to a “raffle for husbands,” and in the right-hand corner a Jewish high-priest, a Catholic priest, and a Dissenting minister, are gambling with frenzied avidity. Near them a poor, miserable starveling lies a-dying, and to the left there looms a huge pillar, with this inscription on the base—“This monument was erected in memory of the destruction of the city by South[432] Sea, 1720.” It is to be observed that the figure of the demon hacking at Fortune, and the lame swash buckler, half baboon, half imp, that keeps guard over the flagellated man, are copied, pretty literally, from Callot.

You know that I incline towards coincidences. It is surely a not unremarkable one that Callot, a Hogarthian man in many aspects, but more inclined towards the grotesque-terrible than to the humorous-observant, should have been also in his youth a martyr to heraldry. His father was a grave, dusty old king-at-arms, in the service of the Duke of Lorraine, at Nancy. He believed heraldry, next to alchemy, to be the most glorious science in the world, and would fain have had his son devote himself to tabard and escocheon work; but the boy, after many unavailing efforts to wrestle with these Ephesian wild beasts, with their impossible attitudes and preposterous proportions, fairly ran away and turned gipsy, stroller, beggar, picaroon—all kinds of wild Bohemian things. Had Hogarth been a French boy, he, too, might have run away from Ellis Gamble’s griffins and gargoyles. He must have been a great admirer of Callot, and have studied his works attentively, as one can see, not only from this South Sea plate, but from many of the earlier Hogarthian performances, in which, not quite trusting himself yet to run alone, he has had recourse to the Lorrain’s strong arm. Many other sympathetic traits are to be found in the worthy pair. In both a little too much swagger and proneness to denounce things that might have had some little sincerity in them. The one a thorough foreigner, the other as thorough a foreigner. The herald’s son of Nancy was always “the noble Jacques Callot;” the heraldic engraver’s apprentice of Cranbourn Alley was, I wince to learn, sometimes called “Bill Hogarth.”

One of Hogarth’s earliest employers was a Mr. Bowles, at the “Black Horse in Cornhill,” who is stated to have bought his etched works by weight—at the munificent rate of half-a-crown a pound. This is the same Mr. Bowles who, when Major the engraver was going to France to study, and wished to dispose of some landscapes he had engraved that he might raise something in aid of his travelling expenses, offered him a bright, new, burnished, untouched copper-plate for every engraved one he had by him. This Black Horse Bowles, if the story be true, must have been ancestor to the theatrical manager who asked the author how much he would give him if he produced his five-act tragedy; but I am inclined to think the anecdote a bit of gossip tant soit peu spiteful of the eldest Nicholls. Moreover, the offer is stated to have been made “over a bottle.” ’Twas under the same incentive to liberality that an early patron of the present writer once pressed him to write “a good poem, in the Byron style—you know,” and offered him a guinea for it, down. Copper, fit for engraving purposes, was at least two shillings a pound in Bowles’s time. The half-crown legend, then, may be apocryphal; although we have some odd records of the mode of payment for art and letters in those days, and in the preceding time:—Thornhill painting Greenwich Hall for forty shillings the Flemish ell; Dryden contracting[433] with Left-legged Jacob to write so many thousand lines for so many unclipped pieces of money; and Milton selling the manuscript of Paradise Lost to Samuel Simmons for five pounds.

Mr. Philip Overton at the Golden Buck, over against St. Dunstan’s Church, in Fleet Street, also published Hogarth’s early plates. He was the purchaser, too, but not yet, of the eighteen illustrations to Hudibras. Ere these appeared, W. H. etched the Taste of the Town, the Small Masquerade Ticket; the Lottery—a very confused and obscure allegory, perhaps a sly parody on one of Laguerre or Thornhill’s floundering pictorial parables. Fortune and Wantonness are drawing lucky numbers, Fraud tempts Despair, Sloth hides his head behind a curtain; all very interesting probably at the time, from the number of contemporary portraits the plate may have contained, but almost inexplicable and thoroughly uninteresting to us now. The Taste of the Town, which is otherwise the first Burlington Gate satire (not the Pope and Chandos one) created a sensation, and its author paid the first per-centage on notoriety, by seeing his work pirated by the varlets who did for art that which Edmund Curll, bookseller and scoundrel, did for literature.

Burlington Gate, No. 1, was published in 1723. Hogarth seems to have admired Lord Burlington’s love for art, though he might have paid him a better compliment than to have placarded the gate of his palace with an orthographical blunder. There is in the engraving “accademy” for academy. The execution is far superior to that of the South Sea, and the figures are drawn with much verve and decision. In the centre stand three little figures, said to represent Lord Burlington, Campbell, the[434] architect, and his lordship’s “postilion.” This is evidently a blunder on the part of the first commentator. The figure is in cocked hat, wide cuffs, and buckled shoes, and is no more like a postilion than I to Hercules. Is it the earl’s “poet,” and not his “postilion,” that is meant? To the right (using showman’s language), sentinels in the peaked shakoes of the time, and with oh! such clumsy, big-stocked brown-besses in their hands, guard the entrance to the fane where the pantomime of Doctor Faustus is being performed. From the balcony above Harlequin looks out. Faustus was first brought out at the theatre, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, in ’23. It had so prodigious a run, and came into such vogue, that after much grumbling about the “legitimate” and invocations of “Ben Jonson’s ghost” (Hogarth calls him Ben Johnson), the rival Covent Garden managers were compelled to follow suit, and in ’25 came out with their Doctor Faustus—a kind of saraband of infernal persons contrived by Thurmond the dancing-master. He, too, was the deviser of “Harleykin Sheppard” (or Shepherd), in which the dauntless thief who escaped from the Middle Stone-room at Newgate in so remarkable a manner received a pantomimic apotheosis. Quick-witted Hogarth satirized this felony-mania in the caricature of Wilks, Booth, and Cibber, conjuring up “Scaramouch Jack Hall.” To return to Burlington Gate. In the centre, Shakspeare and Jonson’s works are being carted away for waste paper. To the left you see a huge projecting sign or show-cloth, containing portraits of his sacred Majesty George the Second in the act of presenting the management of the Italian Opera with one thousand pounds; also of the famous Mordaunt Earl of Peterborough and sometime general of the armies in Spain. He kneels, and in the handsomest manner, to Signora Cuzzoni the singer, saying (in a long apothecary’s label), “Please accept eight thousand pounds!” but the Cuzzoni spurns at him. Beneath is the entrance to the Opera. Infernal persons with very long tails are entering thereto with joyful countenances. The infernal persons are unmistakeable reminiscences of Callot’s demons in the Tentation de St. Antoine. There is likewise a placard relating to “Faux’s Long-room,” and his “dexterity of hand.”

In 1724, Hogarth produced another allegory called the Inhabitants of the Moon, in which there are some covert and not very complimentary allusions to the “dummy” character of royalty, and a whimsical fancy of inanimate objects, songs, hammers, pieces of money, and the like, being built up into imitation of human beings, all very ingeniously worked out. By this time, Hogarth, too, had begun to work, not only for the ephemeral pictorial squib-vendors of Westminster Hall—those squibs came in with him, culminated in Gillray, and went out with H. B.; or were rather absorbed and amalgamated into the admirable Punch cartoons of Mr. Leech—but also for the regular booksellers. For Aubry de la Mottraye’s Travels (a dull, pretentious book) he executed some engravings, among which I note A woman of Smyrna in the habit of the country—the woman’s face very graceful, and the Dance, the Pyrrhic dance of the Greek islands, and the oddest fandango that ever was seen. One commentator says that[435] the term “as merry as a grig” came from the fondness of the inhabitants of those isles of eternal summer for dancing, and that it should be properly “as merry as a Greek.” Quien sabe? I know that lately in the Sessions papers I stumbled over the examination of one Levi Solomon, alias Cockleput, who stated that he lived in Sweet Apple Court, and that he “went a-grigging for his living.” I have no Lexicon Balatronicum at hand; but from early researches into the vocabulary of the “High Mung” I have an indistinct impression that “griggers” were agile vagabonds who danced, and went through elementary feats of posture-mastery in taverns.

In ’24, Hogarth illustrated a translation of the Golden Ass of Apuleius. The plates are coarse and clumsy; show no humour; were mere pot-boilers, gagne-pains, thrusts with the burin at the wolf looking in at the Hogarthian door, I imagine. Then came five frontispieces for a translation of Cassandra. These I have not seen. Then fifteen head-pieces for Beaver’s Military Punishments of the Ancients, narrow little slips full of figures in chiaroscuro, many drawn from Callot’s curious martyrology, Les Saincts et Sainctes de l’Année, about three hundred graphic illustrations of human torture! There was also a frontispiece to the Happy Ascetic, and one to the Oxford squib of Terræ Filius, in 1724, but of the joyous recluse in question I have no cognizance.

In 1722 (you see I am wandering up and down the years as well as the streets), London saw a show—and Hogarth doubtless was there to see—which merits some lines of mention. The drivelling, avaricious dotard, who, crossing a room and looking at himself in a mirror, sighed and mumbled, “That was once a man:”—this poor wreck of mortality died, and became in an instant, and once more, John the great Duke of Marlborough. On the 9th of August, 1722, he was buried with extraordinary pomp in Westminster Abbey. The saloons of Marlborough House, where the corpse lay in state, were hung with fine black cloth, and garnished with bays and cypress. In the death-chamber was a chair of state surmounted by a “majesty scutcheon.” The coffin was on a bed of state, covered with a “fine holland sheet,” over that a complete suit of armour, gilt, but empty. Twenty years before, there would have been a waxen image in the dead man’s likeness within the armour, but this hideous fantasy of Tussaud-tombstone effigies had in 1722 fallen into desuetude.[8] The garter was buckled round the steel leg of this suit of war-harness; one listless gauntlet held a general’s truncheon; above the vacuous helmet with its unstirred plumes was the cap of a Prince of the Empire. The procession, lengthy and splendid, passed from Marlborough House through St. James’s Park to Hyde Park Corner, then through Piccadilly, down St. James’s Street, along Pall Mall, and by King Street, Westminster, to the Abbey. Fifteen pieces of cannon rambled in this show. Chelsea pensioners, to the number of the years of the age of the deceased, preceded[436] the car. The colours were wreathed in crape and cypress. Guidon was there, and the great standard, and many bannerols and achievements of arms. “The mourning horse with trophies and plumades” was gorgeous. There was a horse of state and a mourning horse, sadly led by the dead duke’s equerries. And pray note: the minutest details of the procession were copied from the programme of the Duke of Albemarle’s funeral (Monk); which, again, was a copy of Oliver Cromwell’s—which, again, was a reproduction, on a more splendid scale, of the obsequies of Sir Philip Sidney, killed at Zutphen. Who among us saw not the great scarlet and black show of 1852, the funeral of the Duke of Wellington? Don’t you remember the eighty-four tottering old Pensioners, corresponding in number with the years of our heroic brother departed? When gentle Philip Sidney was borne to the tomb, thirty-one poor men followed the hearse. The brave soldier, the gallant gentleman, the ripe scholar, the accomplished writer was so young. Arthur and Philip! And so century shakes hand with century, and the new is ever old, and the last novelty is the earliest fashion, and old Egypt leers from a glass-case, or a four thousand year old fresco, and whispers to Sir Plume, “I, too, wore a curled periwig, and used tweezers to remove superfluous hairs.”

In 1726, Hogarth executed a series of plates for Blackwell’s Military Figures, representing the drill and manœuvres of the Honourable Artillery Company. The pike and half-pike exercise are very carefully and curiously illustrated; the figures evidently drawn from life; the attitudes very easy. The young man was improving in his drawing; for in 1724, Thornhill had started an academy for studying from the round and from life at his own house, in Covent Garden Piazza; and Hogarth—who himself tells us that his head was filled with the paintings at Greenwich and St. Paul’s, and to whose utmost ambition of scratching copper, there was now probably added the secret longing to be a historico-allegorico-scriptural painter I have hinted at, and who hoped some day to make Angels sprawl on coved ceilings, and Fames blast their trumpets on grand staircases—was one of the earliest students at the academy of the king’s sergeant painter, and member of parliament for Weymouth. Already William had ventured an opinion, bien tranchée, on high art. In those days there flourished—yes, flourished is the word—a now forgotten celebrity, Kent the architect, gardener, painter, decorator, upholsterer, friend of the great, and a hundred things besides. This artistic jack-of-all-trades became so outrageously popular, and gained such a reputation for taste—if a man have strong lungs, and persists in crying out that he is a genius, the public are sure to believe him at last—that he was consulted on almost every tasteful topic, and was teased to furnish designs for the most incongruous objects. He was consulted for picture-frames, drinking-glasses, barges, dining-room tables, garden-chairs, cradles, and birth-day gowns. One lady he dressed in a petticoat ornamented with columns of the five orders; to another he prescribed a copper-coloured skirt, with gold ornaments. The man was at best but a wretched sciolist; but he for a long period directed the[437] “taste of the town.” He had at last the presumption to paint an altar-piece for the church of St. Clement Danes. The worthy parishioners, men of no taste at all, burst into a yell of derision and horror at this astounding croûte. Forthwith, irreverent young Mr. Hogarth lunged full butt with his graver at the daub. He produced an engraving of Kent’s Masterpiece, which was generally considered to be an unmerciful caricature; but which he himself declared to be an accurate representation of the picture. ’Twas the first declaration of his guerra al cuchillo against the connoisseurs. The caricature, or copy, whichever it was, made a noise; the tasteless parishioners grew more vehement, and, at last, Gibson, Bishop of London (whose brother, by the way, had paid his first visit to London in the company of Dominie Hogarth), interfered, and ordered the removal of the obnoxious canvas. “Kent’s masterpiece” subsided into an ornament for a tavern-room. For many years it was to be seen (together with the landlord’s portrait, I presume) at the “Crown and Anchor,” in the Strand. Then it disappeared, and faded away from the visible things extant.

With another bookseller’s commission, I arrive at another halting-place in the career of William Hogarth. In 1726-7 appeared his eighteen illustrations to Butler’s Hudibras. They are of considerable size, broadly and vigorously executed, and display a liberal instalment of the vis comica, of which William was subsequently to be so lavish. Ralpho is smug and sanctified to a nicety. Hudibras is a marvellously droll-looking figure, but he is not human, is generally execrably drawn, and has a head preternaturally small, and so pressed down between the clavicles, that you might imagine him to be of the family of the anthropophagi, whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders. There is a rare constable, the perfection of Dogberryism-cum-Bumbledom, in the tableau of Hudibras in the stocks. The widow is graceful and beautiful to look at. Unlike Wilkie, Hogarth could draw pretty women;[9] the rogue who chucks the widow’s attendant under the chin is incomparable, and Trulla is a most truculent brimstone. The “committee” is a character full study of sour faces. The procession of the “Skimmington” is full of life and animation; and the concluding tableau, “Burning rumps at Temple Bar,” is a wondrous street-scene, worthy of the ripe Hogarthian epoch of The Progresses, The Election, Beer Street and Gin Lane. This edition of Butler’s immortal satire had a great run; and the artist often regretted that he had parted absolutely, and at once, with his property in the plates.

So now then, William Hogarth, we part once more, but soon to meet again. Next shall the moderns know thee—student at Thornhill’s Academy—as a painter as well as an engraver. A philosopher—quoique tu n’en doutais guère—thou hast been all along.

CHAPTER IV.

An extinct animal recognized by its tooth: how came this to be possible?—The task of classification.—Artificial and natural methods.—Linnæus, and his baptism of the animal kingdom: his scheme of classification.—What is there underlying all true classification?—The chief groups.—What is a species?—Re-statement of the question respecting the fixity or variability of species.—The two hypotheses.—Illustration drawn from the Romance languages.—Caution to disputants.

I was one day talking with Professor Owen in the Hunterian Museum, when a gentleman approached with a request to be informed respecting the nature of a curious fossil, which had been dug up by one of his workmen. As he drew the fossil from a small bag, and was about to hand it for examination, Owen quietly remarked:—“That is the third molar of the under-jaw of an extinct species of rhinoceros.” The astonishment of the gentleman at this precise and confident description of the fossil, before even it had quitted his hands, was doubtless very great. I know that mine was; until the reflection occurred that if some one, little acquainted with editions, had drawn a volume from his pocket, declaring he had found it in an old chest, any bibliophile would have been able to say at a glance: “That is an Elzevir;” or, “That is one of the Tauchnitz classics, stereotyped at Leipzig.” Owen is as familiar with the aspect of the teeth of animals, living and extinct, as a student is with the aspect of editions. Yet before that knowledge could have been acquired, before he could say thus confidently that the tooth belonged to an extinct species of rhinoceros, the united labours of thousands of diligent inquirers must have been directed to the classification of animals. How could he know that the rhinoceros was of that particular species rather than another? and what is meant by species? To trace the history of this confidence would be to tell the long story of zoological investigation: a story too long for narration here, though we may pause awhile to consider its difficulties.

To make a classified catalogue of the books in the British Museum would be a gigantic task; but imagine what that task would be if all the title-pages and other external indications were destroyed! The first attempts would necessarily be of a rough approximative kind, merely endeavouring to make a sort of provisional order amid the chaos, after which succeeding labours might introduce better and better arrangements. The books might first be grouped according to size; but having got them together, it would soon be discovered that size was no indication of their contents: quarto poems and duodecimo histories, octavo grammars and folio dictionaries, would immediately give warning that some other[439] arrangement was needed. Nor would it be better to separate the books according to the languages in which they were written. The presence or absence of “illustrations” would furnish no better guide; while the bindings would soon be found to follow no rule. Indeed, one by one all the external characters would prove unsatisfactory, and the labourers would finally have to decide upon some internal characters. Having read enough of each book to ascertain whether it was poetry or prose: and if poetry, whether dramatic, epic, lyric, or satiric; and if prose, whether history, philosophy, theology, philology, science, fiction, or essay: a rough classification could be made; but even then there would be many difficulties, such as where to place a work on the philosophy of history—or the history of science,—or theology under the guise of science—or essays on very different subjects; while some works would defy classification.

Gigantic as this labour would be, it would be trifling compared with the labour of classifying all the animals now living (not to mention extinct species), so that the place of any one might be securely and rapidly determined; yet the persistent zeal and sagacity of zoologists have done for the animal kingdom what has not yet been done for the library of the Museum, although the titles of the books are not absent. It has been done by patient reading of the contents—by anatomical investigation of the internal structure of animals. Except on a basis of comparative anatomy, there could have been no better a classification of animals than a classification of books according to size, language, binding, &c. An unscientific Pliny might group animals according to their habitat; but when it was known that whales, though living in the water and swimming like fishes, were in reality constructed like air-breathing quadrupeds—when it was known that animals differing so widely as bees, birds, bats, and flying squirrels, or as otters, seals, and cuttle-fish, lived together in the same element, it became obvious that such a principle of arrangement could lead to no practical result. Nor would it suffice to class animals according to their modes of feeding; since in all classes there are samples of each mode. Equally unsatisfactory would be external form—the seal and the whale resembling fishes, the worm resembling the eel, and the eel the serpent.

Two things were necessary: first, that the structure of various animals should be minutely studied, and described—which is equivalent to reading the books to be classified;—and secondly, that some artificial method should be devised of so arranging the immense mass of details as to enable them to be remembered, and also to enable fresh discoveries readily to find a place in the system. We may be perfectly familiar with the contents of a book, yet wholly at a loss where to place it. If we have to catalogue Hegel’s Philosophy of History, for example, it becomes a difficult question whether to place it under the rubric of philosophy, or under that of history. To decide this point, we must have some system of classification.

In the attempts to construct a system, naturalists are commonly said to have followed two methods: the artificial and the natural. The artificial method seizes some one prominent characteristic, and groups all the[440] individuals together which agree in this one respect. In Botany the artificial method classes plants according to the organs of reproduction; but this has been found so very imperfect that it has been abandoned, and the natural method has been substituted, according to which the whole structure of the plant determines its place. If flying were taken as the artificial basis for the grouping of some animals, we should find insects and birds, bats and flying squirrels, grouped together; but the natural method, taking into consideration not one character, but all the essential characters, finds that insects, birds, and bats differ profoundly in their organization: the insect has wings, but its wings are not formed like those of the bird, nor are those of the bird formed like those of the bat. The insect does not breathe by lungs, like the bird and the bat; it has no internal skeleton, like the bird and the bat; and the bird, although it has many points in common with the bat, does not, like it, suckle its young; and thus we may run over the characters of each organization, and find that the three animals belong to widely different groups.

It is to Linnæus that we are indebted for the most ingenious and comprehensive of the many schemes invented for the cataloguing of animal forms; and modern attempts at classification are only improvements on the plan he laid down. First we may notice his admirable invention of the double names. It had been the custom to designate plants and animals according to some name common to a large group, to which was added a description more or less characteristic. An idea may be formed of the necessity of a reform, by conceiving what a laborious and uncertain process it would be if our friends spoke to us of having seen a dog in the garden, and on our asking what kind of dog, instead of their saying “a terrier, a bull-terrier, or a skye-terrier,” they were to attempt a description of the dog. Something of this kind was the labour of understanding the nature of an animal from the vague description of it given by naturalists. Linnæus rebaptized the whole animal kingdom upon one intelligible principle. He continued to employ the name common to each group, such as that of Felis for the cats, which became the generic name; and in lieu of the description which was given of each different kind, to indicate that it was a lion, a tiger, a leopard, or a domestic cat, he affixed a specific name: thus the animal bearing the description of a lion became Felis leo; the tiger, Felis tigris; the leopard, Felis leopardus; and our domestic friend, Felis catus. These double names, as Vogt remarks, are like the Christian- and sur-names by which we distinguish the various members of one family; and instead of speaking of Tomkinson with the flabby face, and Tomkinson with the square forehead, we simply say John and William Tomkinson.

Linnæus did more than this. He not only fixed definite conceptions of Species and Genera, but introduced those of Orders and Classes. Cuvier added Families to Genera, and Sub-kingdoms (embranchements) to Classes. Thus a scheme was elaborated by which the whole animal kingdom was arranged in subordinate groups: the sub-kingdoms were divided into classes,[441] the classes into orders, the orders into families, the families into genera, the genera into species, and the species into varieties. The guiding principle of anatomical resemblance determined each of these divisions. Those largest groups, which resemble each other only in having what is called the typical character in common, are brought together under the first head. Thus all the groups which agree in possessing a backbone and internal skeleton, although they differ widely in form, structure, and habitat, do nevertheless resemble each other more than they resemble the groups which have no backbone. This great division having been formed, it is seen to arrange itself in very obvious minor divisions, or Classes—the mammalia, birds, reptiles, and fishes. All mammals resemble each other more than they resemble birds; all reptiles resemble each other more than they resemble fishes (in spite of the superficial resemblance between serpents and eels or lampreys). Each Class again falls into the minor groups of Orders; and on the same principles: the monkeys being obviously distinguished from rodents, and the carnivora from the ruminating animals; and so of the rest. In each Order there are generally Families, and the Families fall into Genera, which differ from each other only in fewer and less important characters. The Genera include groups which have still fewer differences, and are called Species; and these again include groups which have only minute and unimportant differences of colour, size, and the like, and are called Sub-species, or Varieties.

Whoever looks at the immensity of the animal kingdom, and observes how intelligibly and systematically it is arranged in these various divisions, will admit that, however imperfect, the scheme is a magnificent product of human ingenuity and labour. It is not an arbitrary arrangement, like the grouping of the stars in constellations; it expresses, though obscurely, the real order of Nature. All true Classification should be to forms what laws are to phenomena: the one reducing varieties to systematic order, as the other reduces phenomena to their relation of sequence. Now if it be true that the classification expresses the real order of nature, and not simply the order which we may find convenient, there will be something more than mere resemblance indicated in the various groups; or, rather let me say, this resemblance itself is the consequence of some community in the things compared, and will therefore be the mark of some deeper cause. What is this cause? Mr. Darwin holds that “propinquity of descent—the only known cause of the similarity of organic beings—is the bond, hidden as it is by various degrees of modification, which is partially revealed to us by our classifications”[10]—“that the characters which naturalists consider as showing true affinity between any two or more species are those which have been inherited from a common parent, and in so far all true classification is genealogical; that community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking, and not some unknown plan of creation, or the enunciation of general propositions,[442] and the mere putting together and separating objects more or less alike.”[11]

Before proceeding to open the philosophical discussion which inevitably arises on the mention of Mr. Darwin’s book, I will here set down the chief groups, according to Cuvier’s classification, for the benefit of the tyro in natural history, who will easily remember them, and will find the knowledge constantly invoked.

There are four Sub-kingdoms, or Branches:—1. Vertebrata. 2. Mollusca. 3. Articulata. 4. Radiata.

The Vertebrata consist of four classes:—Mammalia, Birds, Reptiles, and Fishes.

The Mollusca consist of six classes:—Cephalopoda (cuttlefish), Pteropoda, Gasteropoda (snails, &c.), Acephala (oysters, &c.), Brachiopoda, and Cirrhopoda (barnacles).—N.B. This last class is now removed from the Molluscs and placed among the Crustaceans.

The Articulata are composed of four classes:—Annelids (worms), Crustacea (lobsters, crabs, &c.), Arachnida (spiders), and Insecta.

The Radiata embrace all the remaining forms; but this group has been so altered since Cuvier’s time, that I will not burden your memory just now with an enumeration of the details.

The reader is now in a condition to appreciate the general line of argument adopted in the discussion of Mr. Darwin’s book, which is at present exciting very great attention, and which will, at any rate, aid in general culture by opening to many minds new tracts of thought. The benefit in this direction is, however, considerably lessened by the extreme vagueness which is commonly attached to the word “species,” as well as by the great want of philosophic culture which impoverishes the majority of our naturalists. I have heard, or read, few arguments on this subject which have not impressed me with the sense that the disputants really attached no distinct ideas to many of the phrases they were uttering. Yet it is obvious that we must first settle what are the facts grouped together and indicated by the word “species,” before we can carry on any discussion as to the origin of species. To be battling about the fixity or variability of species, without having rigorously settled what species is, can lead to no edifying result.

It is notorious that if you ask even a zoologist, What is a species? you will almost always find that he has only a very vague answer to give; and if his answer be precise, it will be the precision of error, and will vanish into contradictions directly it is examined. The consequence of this is, that even the ablest zoologists are constantly at variance as to specific characters, and often cannot agree whether an animal shall be considered of a new species, or only a variety. There could be no such disagreements if specific characters were definite: if we knew what species meant, once and for all. Ask a chemist, What is a salt? What an acid?[443] and his reply will be definite, and uniformly the same: what he says, all chemists will repeat. Not so the zoologist. Sometimes he will class two animals as of different species, when they only differ in colour, in size, or in the numbers of tentacles, &c.; at other times he will class animals as belonging to the same species, although they differ in size, colour, shape, instincts, habits, &c. The dog, for example, is said to be one species with many varieties, or races. But contrast the pug-dog with the greyhound, the spaniel with the mastiff, the bulldog with the Newfoundland, the setter with the terrier, the sheepdog with the pointer: note the striking differences in their structure and their instincts: and you will find that they differ as widely as some genera, and as most species. If these varieties inhabited different countries—if the pug were peculiar to Australia, and the mastiff to Spain—there is not a naturalist but would class them as of different species. The same remark applies to pigeons and ducks, oxen and sheep.

The reason of this uncertainty is that the thing Species does not exist: the term expresses an abstraction, like Virtue, or Whiteness; not a definite concrete reality, which can be separated from other things, and always be found the same. Nature produces individuals; these individuals resemble each other in varying degrees; according to their resemblances we group them together as classes, orders, genera, and species; but these terms only express the relations of resemblance, they do not indicate the existence of such things as classes, orders, genera, or species.[12] There is a reality indicated by each term—that is to say, a real relation; but there is no objective existence of which we could say, This is variable, This is immutable. Precisely as there is a real relation indicated by the term Goodness, but there is no Goodness apart from the virtuous actions and feelings which we group together under this term. It is true that metaphysicians in past ages angrily debated respecting the Immutability of Virtue, and had no more suspicion of their absurdity, than moderns have who debate respecting the Fixity of Species. Yet no sooner do we understand that Species means a relation of resemblance between animals, than the question of the Fixity, or Variability, of Species resolves itself into this: Can there be any variation in the resemblances of closely allied animals? A question which would never be asked.

No one has thought of raising the question of the fixity of varieties, yet it is as legitimate as that of the fixity of species; and we might also argue for the fixity of genera, orders, classes; the fixity of all these being implied in the very terms; since no sooner does any departure from the type present itself, than by that it is excluded from the category; no sooner does a white object become gray, or yellow, than it is excluded from the class of white objects. Here, therefore, is a sense in which the phrase “fixity of species” is indisputable; but in this sense the phrase has never been disputed. When zoologists have maintained that species[444] are variable, they have meant that animal forms are variable; and these variations, gradually accumulating, result at last in such differences as are called specific. Although some zoologists, and speculators who were not zoologists, have believed that the possibility of variation is so great that one species may actually be transmuted into another, i.e., that an ass may be developed into a horse,—yet most thinkers are now agreed that such violent changes are impossible; and that every new form becomes established only through the long and gradual accumulation of minute differences in divergent directions.

It is clear, from what has just been said, that the many angry discussions respecting the fixity of species, which, since the days of Lamarck, have disturbed the amity of zoologists and speculative philosophers, would have been considerably abbreviated, had men distinctly appreciated the equivoque which rendered their arguments hazy. I am far from implying that the battle was purely a verbal one. I believe there was a real and important distinction in the doctrines of the two camps; but it seems to me that had a clear understanding of the fact that Species was an abstract term, been uniformly present to their minds, they would have sooner come to an agreement. Instead of the confusing disputes as to whether one Species could ever become another Species, the question would have been, Are animal forms changeable? Can the descendants of animals become so unlike their ancestors, in certain peculiarities of structure or instinct, as to be classed by naturalists as a different species?

No sooner is the question thus disengaged from equivoque, than its discussion becomes narrowed within well-marked limits. That animal forms are variable, is disputed by no zoologist. The only question which remains is this: To what extent are animal forms variable? The answers given have been two: one school declaring that the extent of variability is limited to those trifling characteristics which mark the different Varieties of each Species; the other school declaring that the variability is indefinite, and that all animal forms may have arisen from successive modifications of a very few types, or even of one type.

Now, I would call your attention to one point in this discussion, which ought to be remembered when antagonists are growing angry and bitter over the subject: it is, that both these opinions are necessarily hypothetical—there can be nothing like positive proof adduced on either side. The utmost that either hypothesis can claim is, that it is more consistent with general analogies, and better serves to bring our knowledge of various points into harmony. Neither of them can claim to be a truth which warrants dogmatic decision.

Of these two hypotheses, the first has the weight and majority of authoritative adherents. It declares that all the different kinds of Cats, for example, were distinct and independent creations, each species being originally what we see it to be now, and what it will continue to be as long as it exists: lions, panthers, pumas, leopards, tigers, jaguars, ocelots, and domestic cats, being so many original stocks, and not so many divergent forms of one original[445] stock. The second hypothesis declares that all these kinds of cats represent divergencies of the original stock, precisely as the Varieties of each kind represent the divergencies of each Species. It is true that each species, when once formed, only admits of limited variations; any cause which should push the variation beyond certain limits would destroy the species,—because by species is meant the group of animals contained within those limits. Let us suppose the original stock from which all these kinds of cats have sprung, to have become modified into lions, leopards, and tigers—in other words, that the gradual accumulation of divergencies has resulted in the whole family of cats existing under these three forms. The lions will form a distinct species; this species varies, and in the course of long variation a new species, the puma, rises by the side of it. The leopards also vary, and let us suppose their variation at length assumes so marked a form,—in the ocelot,—that we class it as a new species. There is nothing in this hypothesis but what is strictly consonant with analogies; it is only extending to Species what we know to be the fact with respect to Varieties; and these Varieties which we know to have been produced from one and the same Species are often more widely separated from each other than the lion is from the puma, or the leopard from the ocelot. Mr. Darwin remarks that “at least a score of pigeons might be chosen, which, if shown to an ornithologist, and he were told that they were wild birds, would certainly, I think, be ranked by him as well-defined species. Moreover, I do not believe that any ornithologist would place the English carrier, the short-faced tumbler, the runt, the barb, the pouter and fantail in the same genus! more especially as in each of these breeds several truly-inherited sub-breeds or species, as he might have called them, could be shown him.”

The development of numerous specific forms, widely distinguished from each other, out of one common stock, is not a whit more improbable than the development of numerous distinct languages out of a common parent language, which modern philologists have proved to be indubitably the case. Indeed, there is a very remarkable analogy between philology and zoology in this respect: just as the comparative anatomist traces the existence of similar organs, and similar connections of these organs, throughout the various animals classed under one type, so does the comparative philologist detect the family likeness in the various languages scattered from China to the Basque provinces, and from Cape Comorin across the Caucasus to Lapland—a likeness which assures him that the Teutonic, Celtic, Windic, Italic, Hellenic, Iranic, and Indic languages are of common origin, and separated from the Arabian, Aramean, and Hebrew languages, which have another origin. Let us bring together a Frenchman, a Spaniard, an Italian, a Portuguese, a Wallachian, and a Rhætian, and we shall hear six very different languages spoken, the speakers severally unintelligible to each other, their languages differing so widely that one cannot be regarded as the modification of the other; yet we know most positively that all these languages are offshoots from the Latin, which was once a living language, but which is now, so to speak, a fossil.[446] The various species of cats do not differ more than these six languages differ: and yet the resemblances point in each case to a common origin. Max Müller, in his brilliant essay on Comparative Mythology,[13] has said:—

“If we knew nothing of the existence of Latin—if all historical documents previous to the fifteenth century had been lost—if tradition, even, was silent as to the former existence of a Roman empire, a mere comparison of the six Roman dialects would enable us to say, that at some time there must have been a language from which all these modern dialects derived their origin in common; for without this supposition it would be impossible to account for the facts exhibited by these dialects. Let us look at the auxiliary verb. We find:—

It is clear, even from a short consideration of these forms, first, that all are but varieties of one common type; secondly, that it is impossible to consider any one of these six paradigms as the original from which the others had been borrowed. To this we may add, thirdly, that in none of the languages to which these verbal forms belong, do we find the elements of which they could have been composed. If we find such forms as j’ai aimé, we can explain them by a mere reference to the radical means which French has still at its command, and the same may be said even of compounds like j’aimerai, i.e. je-aimer-ai, I have to love, I shall love. But a change from je suis to tu es is inexplicable by the light of French grammar. These forms could not have grown, so to speak, on French soil, but must have been handed down as relics from a former period—must have existed in some language antecedent to any of the Roman dialects. Now, fortunately, in this case, we are not left to a mere inference, but as we possess the Latin verb, we can prove how, by phonetic corruption, and by mistaken analogies, every one of the six paradigms is but a national metamorphosis of the Latin original.

“Let us now look at another set of paradigms:—

[447]

“From a careful consideration of these forms, we ought to draw exactly the same conclusions; firstly, that all are but varieties of one common type; secondly, that it is impossible to consider any of them as the original from which the others have been borrowed; and thirdly, that here again, none of the languages in which these verbal forms occur possess the elements of which they are composed.”

All these languages resemble each other so closely that they point to some more ancient language which was to them what Latin was to the six Romance languages; and in the same way we are justified in supposing that all the classes of the vertebrate animals point to the existence of some elder type, now extinct, from which they were all developed.

I have thus stated what are the two hypotheses on this question. There is only one more preliminary which it is needful to notice here, and that is, to caution the reader against the tendency, unhappily too common, of supposing that an adversary holds opinions which are transparently absurd. When we hear an hypothesis which is either novel, or unacceptable to us, we are apt to draw some very ridiculous conclusion from it, and to assume that this conclusion is seriously held by its upholders. Thus the zoologists who maintain the variability of species are sometimes asked if they believe a goose was developed out of an oyster, or a rhinoceros from a mouse? the questioner apparently having no misgiving as to the candour of his ridicule. There are three modes of combating a doctrine. The first is to point out its strongest positions, and then show them to be erroneous or incomplete; but this plan is generally difficult, and sometimes impossible; it is not, therefore, much in vogue. The second is to render the doctrine ridiculous, by pretending that it includes certain extravagant propositions, of which it is entirely innocent. The third is to render the doctrine odious, by forcing on it certain conclusions, which it would repudiate, but which are declared to be “the inevitable consequences” of such a doctrine. Now it is undoubtedly true that men frequently maintain very absurd opinions; but it is neither candid, nor wise, to assume that men who otherwise are certainly not fools, hold opinions the absurdity of which is transparent.

Let us not, therefore, tax the followers of Lamarck, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, or Mr. Darwin with absurdities they have not advocated; but rather endeavour to see what solid argument they have for the basis of their hypothesis.

CHAPTER X.
Lucy Robarts.

LORD LUFTON AND LUCY ROBARTS.

And now how was he to tell his wife? That was the consideration heavy on Mark Robarts’ mind when last we left him; and he turned the matter often in his thoughts before he could bring himself to a resolution. At last he did do so, and one may say that it was not altogether a bad one, if only he could carry it out.

He would ascertain in what bank that bill of his had been discounted. He would ask Sowerby, and if he could not learn from him, he would go to the three banks in Barchester. That it had been taken to one of them he felt tolerably certain. He would explain to the manager his conviction that he would have to make good the amount, his inability to do so at the end of the three months, and the whole state of his income; and then the banker would explain to him how the matter might be arranged. He thought that he could pay 50l. every three months with interest. As soon as this should have been concerted with the banker, he would let his wife know all about it. Were he to tell her at the present moment, while the matter was all unsettled, the intelligence would frighten her into illness.

But on the next morning there came to him tidings by the hands of Robin postman, which for a long while upset all his plans. The letter was from Exeter. His father had been taken ill, and had very quickly been pronounced to be in danger. That evening—the evening on which his sister wrote—the old man was much worse, and it was desirable that Mark should go off to Exeter as quickly as possible. Of course he went to Exeter—again leaving the Framley souls at the mercy of the Welsh low Churchman. Framley is only four miles from Silverbridge, and at Silverbridge he was on the direct road to the west. He was therefore at Exeter before nightfall on that day.

But nevertheless he arrived there too late to see his father again alive. The old man’s illness had been sudden and rapid, and he expired without again seeing his eldest son. Mark arrived at the house of mourning just as they were learning to realize the full change in their position.

The doctor’s career had been on the whole successful, but nevertheless he did not leave behind him as much money as the world had given him credit for possessing. Who ever does? Dr. Robarts had educated a large family, had always lived with every comfort, and had never possessed a shilling but what he had earned himself. A physician’s fees come in, no doubt, with comfortable rapidity as soon as rich old gentlemen and middle-aged ladies begin to put their faith in him; but[450] fees run out almost with equal rapidity when a wife and seven children are treated to everything that the world considers most desirable. Mark, we have seen, had been educated at Harrow and Oxford, and it may be said, therefore, that he had received his patrimony early in life. For Gerald Robarts, the second brother, a commission had been bought in a crack regiment. He also had been lucky, having lived and become a captain in the Crimea; and the purchase-money was lodged for his majority. And John Robarts, the youngest, was a clerk in the Petty Bag Office, and was already assistant private secretary to the Lord Petty Bag himself—a place of considerable trust, if not hitherto of large emolument; and on his education money had been spent freely, for in these days a young man cannot get into the Petty Bag Office without knowing at least three modern languages; and he must be well up in trigonometry too, in bible theology, or in one dead language—at his option.

And the doctor had four daughters. The two elder were married, including that Blanche with whom Lord Lufton was to have fallen in love at the vicar’s wedding. A Devonshire squire had done this in the lord’s place; but on marrying her it was necessary that he should have a few thousand pounds, two or three perhaps, and the old doctor had managed that they should be forthcoming. The elder also had not been sent away from the paternal mansion quite empty-handed. There were therefore at the time of the doctor’s death two children left at home, of whom one only, Lucy, the younger, will come much across us in the course of our story.

Mark stayed for ten days at Exeter, he and the Devonshire squire having been named as executors in the will. In this document it was explained that the doctor trusted that provision had been made for most of his children. As for his dear son Mark, he said, he was aware that he need be under no uneasiness. On hearing this read Mark smiled sweetly, and looked very gracious; but, nevertheless, his heart did sink somewhat within him, for there had been a hope that a small windfall, coming now so opportunely, might enable him to rid himself at once of that dreadful Sowerby incubus. And then the will went on to declare that Mary, and Gerald, and Blanche, had also, by God’s providence, been placed beyond want. And here, looking into the squire’s face, one might have thought that his heart fell a little also; for he had not so full a command of his feelings as his brother-in-law, who had been so much more before the world. To John, the assistant private secretary, was left a legacy of a thousand pounds; and to Jane and Lucy certain sums in certain four per cents., which were quite sufficient to add an efficient value to the hands of those young ladies in the eyes of most prudent young would-be Benedicts. Over and beyond this there was nothing but the furniture, which he desired might be sold, and the proceeds divided among them all. It might come to sixty or seventy pounds a piece, and pay the expenses incidental on his death.

[451]

And then all men and women there and thereabouts said that old Dr. Robarts had done well. His life had been good and prosperous, and his will was just. And Mark, among others, so declared,—and was so convinced in spite of his own little disappointment. And on the third morning after the reading of the will Squire Crowdy, of Creamclotted Hall, altogether got over his grief, and said that it was all right. And then it was decided that Jane should go home with him,—for there was a brother squire who, it was thought, might have an eye to Jane;—and Lucy, the younger, should be taken to Framley Parsonage. In a fortnight from the receipt of that letter Mark arrived at his own house with his sister Lucy under his wing.

All this interfered greatly with Mark’s wise resolution as to the Sowerby-bill incubus. In the first place he could not get to Barchester as soon as he had intended, and then an idea came across him that possibly it might be well that he should borrow the money of his brother John, explaining the circumstances of course, and paying him due interest. But he had not liked to broach the subject when they were there in Exeter, standing, as it were, over their father’s grave, and so the matter was postponed. There was still ample time for arrangement before the bill would come due, and he would not tell Fanny till he had made up his mind what that arrangement would be. It would kill her, he said to himself over and over again, were he to tell her of it without being able to tell her also that the means of liquidating the debt were to be forthcoming.

And now I must say a word about Lucy Robarts. If one might only go on without those descriptions, how pleasant it would all be! But Lucy Robarts has to play a forward part in this little drama, and those who care for such matters must be made to understand something of her form and likeness. When last we mentioned her as appearing, though not in any prominent position, at her brother’s wedding—she was only sixteen; but now, at the time of her father’s death, somewhat over two years having since elapsed, she was nearly nineteen. Laying aside for the sake of clearness that indefinite term of girl—for girls are girls from the age of three up to forty-three, if not previously married—dropping that generic word, we may say that then, at that wedding of her brother, she was a child; and now, at the death of her father, she was a woman.

Nothing, perhaps, adds so much to womanhood, turns the child so quickly into a woman, as such death-bed scenes as these. Hitherto but little had fallen to Lucy to do in the way of woman’s duties. Of money transactions she had known nothing, beyond a jocose attempt to make her annual allowance of twenty-five pounds cover all her personal wants—an attempt which was made jocose by the loving bounty of her father. Her sister, who was three years her elder—for John came in between them—had managed the house; that is, she had made the tea and talked to the housekeeper about the dinners. But Lucy had sat at her father’s elbow, had read to him of evenings when he went to sleep, had brought him his[452] slippers and looked after the comforts of his easy-chair. All this she had done as a child; but when she stood at the coffin head, and knelt at the coffin side, then she was a woman.

She was smaller in stature than either of her three sisters, to all of whom had been acceded the praise of being fine women—a eulogy which the people of Exeter, looking back at the elder sisters, and the general remembrance of them which pervaded the city, were not willing to extend to Lucy. “Dear—dear!” had been said of her; “poor Lucy is not like a Robarts at all; is she, now, Mrs. Pole?”—for as the daughters had become fine women, so had the sons grown into stalwart men. And then Mrs. Pole had answered: “Not a bit; is she, now? Only think what Blanche was at her age. But she has fine eyes, for all that; and they do say she is the cleverest of them all.”

And that, too, is so true a description of her, that I do not know that I can add much to it. She was not like Blanche; for Blanche had a bright complexion, and a fine neck, and a noble bust, et vera incessu patuit Dea—a true goddess, that is, as far as the eye went. She had a grand idea, moreover, of an apple-pie, and had not reigned eighteen months at Creamclotted Hall before she knew all the mysteries of pigs and milk, and most of those appertaining to cider and green geese. Lucy had no neck at all worth speaking of,—no neck, I mean, that ever produced eloquence; she was brown, too, and had addicted herself in nowise, as she undoubtedly should have done, to larder utility. In regard to the neck and colour, poor girl, she could not help herself; but in that other respect she must be held as having wasted her opportunities.

But then what eyes she had! Mrs. Pole was right there. They flashed upon you—not always softly; indeed not often softly, if you were a stranger to her; but whether softly or savagely, with a brilliancy that dazzled you as you looked at them. And who shall say of what colour they were? Green probably, for most eyes are green—green or grey, if green be thought uncomely for an eye-colour. But it was not their colour, but their fire, which struck one with such surprise.

Lucy Robarts was thoroughly a brunette. Sometimes the dark tint of her cheek was exquisitely rich and lovely, and the fringes of her eyes were long and soft, and her small teeth, which one so seldom saw, were white as pearls, and her hair, though short, was beautifully soft—by no means black, but yet of so dark a shade of brown. Blanche, too, was noted for fine teeth. They were white and regular and lofty as a new row of houses in a French city. But then when she laughed she was all teeth; as she was all neck when she sat at the piano. But Lucy’s teeth!—it was only now and again, when in some sudden burst of wonder she would sit for a moment with her lips apart, that the fine finished lines and dainty pearl-white colour of that perfect set of ivory could be seen. Mrs. Pole would have said a word of her teeth also but that to her they had never been made visible.

“But they do say that she is the cleverest of them all,” Mrs. Pole[453] had added, very properly. The people of Exeter had expressed such an opinion, and had been quite just in doing so. I do not know how it happens, but it always does happen, that everybody in every small town knows which is the brightest-witted in every family. In this respect Mrs. Pole had only expressed public opinion, and public opinion was right. Lucy Robarts was blessed with an intelligence keener than that of her brothers or sisters.

“To tell the truth, Mark, I admire Lucy more than I do Blanche.” This had been said by Mrs. Robarts within a few hours of her having assumed that name. “She’s not a beauty I know, but yet I do.”

“My dearest Fanny!” Mark had answered in a tone of surprise.

“I do then; of course people won’t think so; but I never seem to care about regular beauties. Perhaps I envy them too much.”

What Mark said next need not be repeated, but everybody may be sure that it contained some gross flattery for his young bride. He remembered this, however, and had always called Lucy his wife’s pet. Neither of the sisters had since that been at Framley; and though Fanny had spent a week at Exeter on the occasion of Blanche’s marriage, it could hardly be said that she was very intimate with them. Nevertheless, when it became expedient that one of them should go to Framley, the remembrance of what his wife had said immediately induced Mark to make the offer to Lucy; and Jane, who was of a kindred soul with Blanche, was delighted to go to Creamclotted Hall. The acres of Heavybed House, down in that fat Totnes country, adjoined those of Creamclotted Hall, and Heavybed House still wanted a mistress.

Fanny was delighted when the news reached her. It would of course be proper that one of his sisters should live with Mark under their present circumstances, and she was happy to think that that quiet little bright-eyed creature was to come and nestle with her under the same roof. The children should so love her—only not quite so much as they loved mamma; and the snug little room that looks out over the porch, in which the chimney never smokes, should be made ready for her; and she should be allowed her share of driving the pony—which was a great sacrifice of self on the part of Mrs. Robarts, and Lady Lufton’s best good-will should be bespoken. In fact Lucy was not unfortunate in the destination that was laid out for her.

Lady Lufton had of course heard of the doctor’s death, and had sent all manner of kind messages to Mark, advising him not to hurry home by any means until everything was settled at Exeter. And then she was told of the new-comer that was expected in the parish. When she heard that it was Lucy, the younger, she also was satisfied; for Blanche’s charms, though indisputable, had not been altogether to her taste. If a second Blanche were to arrive there what danger might there not be for young Lord Lufton!

“Quite right,” said her ladyship, “just what he ought to do. I[454] think I remember the young lady; rather small, is she not, and very retiring?”

“Rather small and very retiring. What a description!” said Lord Lufton.

“Never mind, Ludovic; some young ladies must be small, and some at least ought to be retiring. We shall be delighted to make her acquaintance.”

“I remember your other sister-in-law very well,” said Lord Lufton. “She was a beautiful woman.”

“I don’t think you will consider Lucy a beauty,” said Mrs. Robarts.

“Small, retiring, and—” so far Lord Lufton had gone, when Mrs. Robarts finished by the word, “plain.” She had liked Lucy’s face, but she had thought that others probably did not do so.

“Upon my word,” said Lady Lufton, “you don’t deserve to have a sister-in-law. I remember her very well, and can say that she is not plain. I was very much taken with her manner at your wedding, my dear; and thought more of her than I did of the beauty, I can tell you.”

“I must confess I do not remember her at all,” said his lordship. And so the conversation ended.

And then at the end of the fortnight Mark arrived with his sister. They did not reach Framley till long after dark—somewhere between six and seven, and by this time it was December. There was snow on the ground, and frost in the air, and no moon, and cautious men when they went on the roads had their horses’ shoes cocked. Such being the state of the weather Mark’s gig had been nearly filled with cloaks and shawls when it was sent over to Silverbridge. And a cart was sent for Lucy’s luggage, and all manner of preparations had been made. Three times had Fanny gone herself to see that the fire burned brightly in the little room over the porch, and at the moment that the sound of the wheels was heard she was engaged in opening her son’s mind as to the nature of an aunt. Hitherto papa and mamma and Lady Lufton were all that he had known, excepting, of course, the satellites of the nursery.

And then in three minutes Lucy was standing by the fire. Those three minutes had been taken up in embraces between the husband and the wife. Let who would be brought as a visitor to the house, after a fortnight’s absence, she would kiss him before she welcomed any one else. But then she turned to Lucy, and began to assist her with her cloaks.

“Oh, thank you,” said Lucy; “I’m not cold,—not very at least. Don’t trouble yourself: I can do it.” But here she had made a false boast, for her fingers had been so numbed that she could do nor undo anything.

They were all in black, of course; but the sombreness of Lucy’s clothes struck Fanny much more than her own. They seemed to have swallowed her up in their blackness, and to have made her almost an emblem of[455] death. She did not look up, but kept her face turned towards the fire, and seemed almost afraid of her position.

“She may say what she likes, Fanny,” said Mark, “but she is very cold. And so am I,—cold enough. You had better go up with her to her room. We won’t do much in the dressing way to-night; eh, Lucy?”

In the bedroom Lucy thawed a little, and Fanny, as she kissed her, said to herself that she had been wrong as to that word “plain.” Lucy, at any rate, was not plain.

“You will be used to us soon,” said Fanny, “and then I hope we shall make you comfortable.” And she took her sister-in-law’s hand and pressed it.

Lucy looked up at her, and her eyes then were tender enough. “I am sure I shall be happy here,” she said, “with you. But—but—dear papa!” And then they got into each other’s arms, and had a great bout of kissing and crying. “Plain,” said Fanny to herself, as at last she got her guest’s hair smoothed and the tears washed from her eyes—“plain! She has the loveliest countenance that I ever looked at in my life!”

“Your sister is quite beautiful,” she said to Mark, as they talked her over alone before they went to sleep that night.

“No, she’s not beautiful; but she’s a very good girl, and clever enough too, in her sort of way.”

“I think her perfectly lovely. I never saw such eyes in my life before.”

“I’ll leave her in your hands then; you shall get her a husband.”

“That mayn’t be so easy. I don’t think she’d marry anybody.”

“Well, I hope not. But she seems to me to be exactly cut out for an old maid;—to be aunt Lucy for ever and ever to your bairns.”

“And so she shall, with all my heart. But I don’t think she will, very long. I have no doubt she will be hard to please; but if I were a man I should fall in love with her at once. Did you ever observe her teeth, Mark?”

“I don’t think I ever did.”

“You wouldn’t know whether any one had a tooth in their head, I believe.”

“No one, except you, my dear; and I know all yours by heart.”

“You are a goose.”

“And a very sleepy one; so, if you please, I’ll go to roost.” And thus there was nothing more said about Lucy’s beauty on that occasion.

For the first two days Mrs. Robarts did not make much of her sister-in-law. Lucy, indeed, was not demonstrative; and she was, moreover, one of those few persons—for they are very few—who are contented to go on with their existence without making themselves the centre of any special outward circle. To the ordinary run of minds it is impossible not to do this. A man’s own dinner is to himself so important that he cannot[456] bring himself to believe that it is a matter utterly indifferent to every one else. A lady’s collection of baby-clothes, in early years, and of house linen and curtain-fringes in later life, is so very interesting to her own eyes, that she cannot believe but what other people will rejoice to behold it. I would not, however, be held as regarding this tendency as evil. It leads to conversation of some sort among people, and perhaps to a kind of sympathy. Mrs. Jones will look at Mrs. White’s linen-chest, hoping that Mrs. White may be induced to look at hers. One can only pour out of a jug that which is in it. For the most of us, if we do not talk of ourselves, or at any rate of the individual circles of which we are the centres, we can talk of nothing. I cannot hold with those who wish to put down the insignificant chatter of the world. As for myself, I am always happy to look at Mrs. Jones’s linen, and never omit an opportunity of giving her the details of my own dinners.

But Lucy Robarts had not this gift. She had come there as a stranger into her sister-in-law’s house, and at first seemed as though she would be contented in simply having her corner in the drawing-room and her place at the parlour table. She did not seem to need the comforts of condolence and open-hearted talking. I do not mean to say that she was moody, that she did not answer when she was spoken to, or that she took no notice of the children; but she did not at once throw herself and all her hopes and sorrows into Fanny’s heart, as Fanny would have had her do.

Mrs. Robarts herself was what we call demonstrative. When she was angry with Lady Lufton she showed it. And as since that time her love and admiration for Lady Lufton had increased, she showed that also. When she was in any way displeased with her husband, she could not hide it, even though she tried to do so, and fancied herself successful;—no more than she could hide her warm, constant, overflowing woman’s love. She could not walk through a room hanging on her husband’s arm without seeming to proclaim to every one there that she thought him the best man in it. She was demonstrative, and therefore she was the more disappointed in that Lucy did not rush at once with all her cares into her open heart.

“She is so quiet,” Fanny said to her husband.

“That’s her nature,” said Mark. “She always was quiet as a child. While we were smashing everything, she would never crack a teacup.”

“I wish she would break something now,” said Fanny, “and then perhaps we should get to talk about it.” But she did not on this account give over loving her sister-in-law. She probably valued her the more, unconsciously, for not having those aptitudes with which she herself was endowed.

And then after two days Lady Lufton called; of course it may be supposed that Fanny had said a good deal to her new inmate about Lady Lufton. A neighbour of that kind in the country exercises so large an influence upon the whole tenor of one’s life, that to abstain from such talk[457] is out of the question. Mrs. Robarts had been brought up almost under the dowager’s wing, and of course she regarded her as being worthy of much talking. Do not let persons on this account suppose that Mrs. Robarts was a tuft-hunter, or a toadeater. If they do not see the difference they have yet got to study the earliest principles of human nature.

Lady Lufton called, and Lucy was struck dumb. Fanny was particularly anxious that her ladyship’s first impression should be favourable, and to effect this, she especially endeavoured to throw the two together during that visit. But in this she was unwise. Lady Lufton, however, had woman-craft enough not to be led into any egregious error by Lucy’s silence.

“And what day will you come and dine with us?” said Lady Lufton, turning expressly to her old friend Fanny.

“Oh, do you name the day. We never have many engagements, you know.”

“Will Thursday do, Miss Robarts? You will meet nobody you know, only my son; so you need not regard it as going out. Fanny here will tell you that stepping over to Framley Court is no more going out, than when you go from one room to another in the parsonage. Is it, Fanny?”

Fanny laughed and said that that stepping over to Framley Court certainly was done so often that perhaps they did not think so much about it as they ought to do.

“We consider ourselves a sort of happy family here, Miss Robarts, and are delighted to have the opportunity of including you in the ménage.”

Lucy gave her ladyship one of her sweetest smiles, but what she said at that moment was inaudible. It was plain, however, that she could not bring herself even to go as far as Framley Court for her dinner just at present. “It was very kind of Lady Lufton,” she said to Fanny; “but it was so very soon, and—and—and if they would only go without her, she would be so happy.” But as the object was to go with her—expressly to take her there—the dinner was adjourned for a short time—sine die.

CHAPTER XI.
Griselda Grantly.

It was nearly a month after this that Lucy was first introduced to Lord Lufton, and then it was brought about only by accident. During that time Lady Lufton had been often at the parsonage, and had in a certain degree learned to know Lucy; but the stranger in the parish had never yet plucked up courage to accept one of the numerous invitations that had reached her. Mr. Robarts and his wife had frequently been at Framley Court, but the dreaded day of Lucy’s initiation had not yet arrived.

She had seen Lord Lufton in church, but hardly so as to know him,[458] and beyond that she had not seen him at all. One day, however—or rather, one evening, for it was already dusk—he overtook her and Mrs. Robarts on the road walking towards the vicarage. He had his gun on his shoulder, three pointers were at his heels, and a gamekeeper followed a little in the rear.

“How are you, Mrs. Robarts?” he said, almost before he had overtaken them. “I have been chasing you along the road for the last half mile. I never knew ladies walk so fast.”

“We should be frozen if we were to dawdle about as you gentlemen do,” and then she stopped and shook hands with him. She forgot at the moment that Lucy and he had not met, and therefore she did not introduce them.

“Won’t you make me known to your sister-in-law?” said he, taking off his hat, and bowing to Lucy. “I have never yet had the pleasure of meeting her, though we have been neighbours for a month and more.”

Fanny made her excuses and introduced them, and then they went on till they came to Framley Gate, Lord Lufton talking to them both, and Fanny answering for the two, and there they stopped for a moment.

“I am surprised to see you alone,” Mrs. Robarts had just said; “I thought that Captain Culpepper was with you.”

“The captain has left me for this one day. If you’ll whisper I’ll tell you where he has gone. I dare not speak it out loud, even to the woods.”

“To what terrible place can he have taken himself? I’ll have no whisperings about such horrors.”

“He has gone to—to—but you’ll promise not to tell my mother?”

“Not tell your mother! Well now you have excited my curiosity! where can he be?”

“Do you promise, then?”

“Oh, yes! I will promise, because I’m sure Lady Lufton won’t ask me as to Captain Culpepper’s whereabouts. We won’t tell; will we, Lucy?”

“He has gone to Gatherum Castle for a day’s pheasant-shooting. Now, mind you must not betray us. Her ladyship supposes that he is shut up in his room with a toothache. We did not dare to mention the name to her.”

And then it appeared that Mrs. Robarts had some engagement which made it necessary that she should go up and see Lady Lufton, whereas Lucy was intending to walk on to the parsonage alone.

“And I have promised to go to your husband,” said Lord Lufton; “or rather to your husband’s dog, Ponto. And I will do two other good things, I will carry a brace of pheasants with me, and protect Miss Robarts from the evil spirits of the Framley roads.” And so Mrs. Robarts turned in at the gate, and Lucy and his lordship walked off together.

Lord Lufton, though he had never before spoken to Miss Robarts, had[459] already found out that she was by no means plain. Though he had hardly seen her except at church, he had already made himself certain that the owner of that face must be worth knowing, and was not sorry to have the present opportunity of speaking to her. “So you have an unknown damsel shut up in your castle,” he had once said to Mrs. Robarts. “If she be kept a prisoner much longer, I shall find it my duty to come and release her by force of arms.” He had been there twice with the object of seeing her, but on both occasions Lucy had managed to escape. Now we may say she was fairly caught, and Lord Lufton, taking a pair of pheasants from the gamekeeper, and swinging them over his shoulder, walked off with his prey.

“You have been here a long time,” he said, “without our having had the pleasure of seeing you.”

“Yes, my lord,” said Lucy. Lords had not been frequent among her acquaintance hitherto.

“I tell Mrs. Robarts that she has been confining you illegally, and that we shall release you by force or stratagem.”

“I—I—I have had a great sorrow lately.”

“Yes, Miss Robarts; I know you have; and I am only joking, you know. But I do hope that now you will be able to come amongst us. My mother is so anxious that you should do so.”

“I am sure she is very kind, and you also—my lord.”

“I never knew my own father,” said Lord Lufton, speaking gravely. “But I can well understand what a loss you have had.” And then, after pausing a moment, he continued, “I remember Dr. Robarts well.”

“Do you, indeed?” said Lucy, turning sharply towards him, and speaking now with some animation in her voice. Nobody had yet spoken to her about her father since she had been at Framley. It had been as though the subject were a forbidden one. And how frequently is this the case! When those we love are dead, our friends dread to mention them, though to us who are bereaved no subject would be so pleasant as their names. But we rarely understand how to treat our own sorrow or those of others.

There was once a people in some land—and they may be still there for what I know—who thought it sacrilegious to stay the course of a raging fire. If a house were being burned, burn it must, even though there were facilities for saving it. For who would dare to interfere with the course of the god? Our idea of sorrow is much the same. We think it wicked, or at any rate heartless, to put it out. If a man’s wife be dead, he should go about lugubrious, with long face, for at least two years, or perhaps with full length for eighteen months, decreasing gradually during the other six. If he be a man who can quench his sorrow—put out his fire as it were—in less time than that, let him at any rate not show his power!

“Yes: I remember him,” continued Lord Lufton. “He came twice[460] to Framley while I was a boy, consulting with my mother about Mark and myself,—whether the Eton floggings were not more efficacious than those at Harrow. He was very kind to me, foreboding all manner of good things on my behalf.”

“He was very kind to every one,” said Lucy.

“I should think he would have been—a kind, good, genial man—just the man to be adored by his own family.”

“Exactly; and so he was. I do not remember that I ever heard an unkind word from him. There was not a harsh tone in his voice. And he was generous as the day.” Lucy, we have said, was not generally demonstrative, but now, on this subject, and with this absolute stranger, she became almost eloquent.

“I do not wonder that you should feel his loss, Miss Robarts.”

“Oh, I do feel it. Mark is the best of brothers, and, as for Fanny, she is too kind and too good to me. But I had always been specially my father’s friend. For the last year or two we had lived so much together!”

“He was an old man when he died, was he not?”

“Just seventy, my lord.”

“Ah, then he was old. My mother is only fifty, and we sometimes call her the old woman. Do you think she looks older than that? We all say that she makes herself out to be so much more ancient than she need do.”

“Lady Lufton does not dress young.”

“That is it. She never has, in my memory. She always used to wear black when I first recollect her. She has given that up now; but she is still very sombre; is she not?”

“I do not like ladies to dress very young, that is, ladies of—of——”

“Ladies of fifty, we will say?”

“Very well; ladies of fifty, if you like it.”

“Then I am sure you will like my mother.”

They had now turned up through the parsonage wicket, a little gate that opened into the garden at a point on the road nearer than the chief entrance.

“I suppose I shall find Mark up at the house?” said he.

“I daresay you will, my lord.”

“Well, I’ll go round this way, for my business is partly in the stable. You see I am quite at home here, though you never have seen me before. But, Miss Robarts, now that the ice is broken, I hope that we may be friends.” He then put out his hand, and when she gave him hers he pressed it almost as an old friend might have done.

And, indeed, Lucy had talked to him almost as though he were an old friend. For a minute or two she had forgotten that he was a lord and a stranger—had forgotten also to be stiff and guarded as was her wont. Lord Lufton had spoken to her as though he had really cared to know her; and she, unconsciously, had been taken by the compliment. Lord Lufton, indeed, had not thought much about it—excepting as thus, that[461] he liked the glance of a pair of bright eyes, as most other young men do like it. But, on this occasion, the evening had been so dark, that he had hardly seen Lucy’s eyes at all.

“Well, Lucy, I hope you liked your companion,” Mrs. Robarts said, as the three of them clustered round the drawing-room fire before dinner.

“Oh, yes; pretty well,” said Lucy.

“That is not at all complimentary to his lordship.”

“I did not mean to be complimentary, Fanny.”

“Lucy is a great deal too matter-of-fact for compliments,” said Mark.

“What I meant was, that I had no great opportunity for judging, seeing that I was only with Lord Lufton for about ten minutes.”

“Ah! but there are girls here who would give their eyes for ten minutes of Lord Lufton to themselves. You do not know how he’s valued. He has the character of being always able to make himself agreeable to ladies at half a minute’s warning.”

“Perhaps he had not the half minute’s warning in this case,” said Lucy,—hypocrite that she was.

“Poor Lucy,” said her brother; “he was coming up to see Ponto’s shoulder, and I am afraid he was thinking more about the dog than you.”

“Very likely,” said Lucy; and then they went into dinner.

Lucy had been a hypocrite, for she had confessed to herself, while dressing, that Lord Lufton had been very pleasant; but then it is allowed to young ladies to be hypocrites when the subject under discussion is the character of a young gentleman.

Soon after that, Lucy did dine at Framley Court. Captain Culpepper, in spite of his enormity with reference to Gatherum Castle, was still staying there, as was also a clergyman from the neighbourhood of Barchester with his wife and daughter. This was Archdeacon Grantly, a gentleman whom we have mentioned before, and who was as well known in the diocese as the bishop himself,—and more thought about by many clergymen than even that illustrious prelate.

Miss Grantly was a young lady not much older than Lucy Robarts, and she also was quiet, and not given to much talking in open company. She was decidedly a beauty, but somewhat statuesque in her loveliness. Her forehead was high and white, but perhaps too like marble to gratify the taste of those who are fond of flesh and blood. Her eyes were large and exquisitely formed, but they seldom showed much emotion. She, indeed, was impassive herself, and betrayed but little of her feelings. Her nose was nearly Grecian, not coming absolutely in a straight line from her forehead, but doing so nearly enough to entitle it to be considered as classical. Her mouth, too, was very fine—artists, at least, said so, and connoisseurs in beauty; but to me she always seemed as though she wanted fulness of lip. But the exquisite symmetry of her cheek and chin and lower face no man could deny. Her hair was light, and being always dressed with considerable care, did not detract from her appearance;[462] but it lacked that richness which gives such luxuriance to feminine loveliness. She was tall and slight, and very graceful in her movements; but there were those who thought that she wanted the ease and abandon of youth. They said that she was too composed and stiff for her age, and that she gave but little to society beyond the beauty of her form and face.

There can be no doubt, however, that she was considered by most men and women to be the beauty of Barsetshire, and that gentlemen from neighbouring counties would come many miles through dirty roads on the mere hope of being able to dance with her. Whatever attractions she may have lacked, she had at any rate created for herself a great reputation. She had spent two months of the last spring in London, and even there she had made a sensation; and people had said that Lord Dumbello, Lady Hartletop’s eldest son, had been peculiarly struck with her.

It may be imagined that the archdeacon was proud of her, and so indeed was Mrs. Grantly—more proud, perhaps, of her daughter’s beauty, than so excellent a woman should have allowed herself to be of such an attribute. Griselda—that was her name—was now an only daughter. One sister she had had, but that sister had died. There were two brothers also left, one in the church and the other in the army. That was the extent of the archdeacon’s family, and as the archdeacon was a very rich man—he was the only child of his father, who had been Bishop of Barchester for a great many years; and in those years it had been worth a man’s while to be Bishop of Barchester—it was supposed that Miss Grantly would have a large fortune. Mrs. Grantly, however, had been heard to say, that she was in no hurry to see her daughter established in the world;—ordinary young ladies are merely married, but those of real importance are established:—and this, if anything, added to the value of the prize. Mothers sometimes depreciate their wares by an undue solicitude to dispose of them.

But to tell the truth openly and at once—a virtue for which a novelist does not receive very much commendation—Griselda Grantly was, to a certain extent, already given away. Not that she, Griselda, knew anything about it, or that the thrice happy gentleman had been made aware of his good fortune; nor even had the archdeacon been told. But Mrs. Grantly and Lady Lufton had been closeted together more than once, and terms had been signed and sealed between them. Not signed on parchment, and sealed with wax, as is the case with treaties made by kings and diplomats,—to be broken by the same; but signed with little words, and sealed with certain pressings of the hand,—a treaty which between two such contracting parties would be binding enough. And by the terms of this treaty Griselda Grantly was to become Lady Lufton.

Lady Lufton had hitherto been fortunate in her matrimonial speculations. She had selected Sir George for her daughter, and Sir George, with the utmost good nature, had fallen in with her views. She had selected Fanny Monsell for Mr. Robarts, and Fanny Monsell had not rebelled[463] against her for a moment. There was a prestige of success about her doings, and she felt almost confident that her dear son Ludovic must fall in love with Griselda.

As to the lady herself, nothing, Lady Lufton thought, could be much better than such a match for her son. Lady Lufton, I have said, was a good churchwoman, and the archdeacon was the very type of that branch of the church which she venerated. The Grantlys, too, were of a good family,—not noble indeed; but in such matters Lady Lufton did not want everything. She was one of those persons who, in placing their hopes at a moderate pitch, may fairly trust to see them realized. She would fain that her son’s wife should be handsome; this she wished for his sake, that he might be proud of his wife, and because men love to look on beauty. But she was afraid of vivacious beauty, of those soft, sparkling feminine charms which are spread out as lures for all the world, soft dimples, laughing eyes, luscious lips, conscious smiles, and easy whispers. What if her son should bring her home a rattling, rapid-spoken, painted piece of Eve’s flesh such as this? Would not the glory and joy of her life be over, even though such child of their first mother should have come forth to the present day ennobled by the blood of two dozen successive British peers?

And then, too, Griselda’s money would not be useless. Lady Lufton, with all her high-flown ideas, was not an imprudent woman. She knew that her son had been extravagant, though she did not believe that he had been reckless; and she was well content to think that some balsam from the old bishop’s coffers should be made to cure the slight wounds which his early imprudence might have inflicted on the carcase of the family property. And thus, in this way, and for these reasons, Griselda Grantly had been chosen out from all the world to be the future Lady Lufton.

Lord Lufton had met Griselda more than once already; had met her before these high contracting parties had come to any terms whatsoever, and had evidently admired her. Lord Dumbello had remained silent one whole evening in London with ineffable disgust, because Lord Lufton had been rather particular in his attentions; but then Lord Dumbello’s muteness was his most eloquent mode of expression. Both Lady Hartletop and Mrs. Grantly, when they saw him, knew very well what he meant. But that match would not exactly have suited Mrs. Grantly’s views. The Hartletop people were not in her line. They belonged altogether to another set, being connected, as we have heard before, with the Omnium interest—“those horrid Gatherum people,” as Lady Lufton would say to her, raising her hands and eyebrows, and shaking her head. Lady Lufton probably thought that they ate babies in pies during their midnight orgies at Gatherum Castle; and that widows were kept in cells, and occasionally put on racks for the amusement of the duke’s guests.

When the Robarts’s party entered the drawing-room the Grantlys were already there, and the archdeacon’s voice sounded loud and imposing in Lucy’s ears, as she heard him speaking while she was yet on the threshold of the door.

[464]

“My dear Lady Lufton, I would believe anything on earth about her—anything. There is nothing too outrageous for her. Had she insisted on going there with the bishop’s apron on, I should not have been surprised.” And then they all knew that the archdeacon was talking about Mrs. Proudie, for Mrs. Proudie was his bugbear.

Lady Lufton after receiving her guests introduced Lucy to Griselda Grantly. Miss Grantly smiled graciously, bowed slightly, and then remarked in the lowest voice possible that it was exceedingly cold. A low voice, we know, is an excellent thing in woman.

Lucy, who thought that she was bound to speak, said that it was cold, but that she did not mind it when she was walking. And then Griselda smiled again, somewhat less graciously than before, and so the conversation ended. Miss Grantly was the elder of the two, and having seen most of the world, should have been the best able to talk, but perhaps she was not very anxious for a conversation with Miss Robarts.

“So, Robarts, I hear that you have been preaching at Chaldicotes,” said the archdeacon, still rather loudly. “I saw Sowerby the other day, and he told me that you gave them the fag end of Mrs. Proudie’s lecture.”

“It was ill-natured of Sowerby to say the fag end,” said Robarts. “We divided the matter into thirds. Harold Smith took the first part, I the last——”

“And the lady the intervening portion. You have electrified the county between you; but I am told that she had the best of it.”

“I was so sorry that Mr. Robarts went there,” said Lady Lufton, as she walked into the dining-room leaning on the archdeacon’s arm.

“I am inclined to think he could not very well have helped himself,” said the archdeacon, who was never willing to lean heavily on a brother parson, unless on one who had utterly and irrevocably gone away from his side of the church.

“Do you think not, archdeacon?”

“Why, no: Sowerby is a friend of Lufton’s——”

“Not particularly,” said poor Lady Lufton, in a deprecating tone.

“Well, they have been intimate; and Robarts, when he was asked to preach at Chaldicotes, could not well refuse.”

“But then he went afterwards to Gatherum Castle. Not that I am vexed with him at all now, you understand. But it is such a dangerous house, you know.”

“So it is.—But the very fact of the duke’s wishing to have a clergyman there, should always be taken as a sign of grace, Lady Lufton. The air was impure, no doubt; but it was less impure with Robarts there than it would have been without him. But, gracious heavens! what blasphemy have I been saying about impure air? Why, the bishop was there!”

“Yes, the bishop was there,” said Lady Lufton, and they both understood each other thoroughly.

Lord Lufton took out Mrs. Grantly to dinner, and matters were so managed that Miss Grantly sat on his other side. There was no management[465] apparent in this to anybody; but there she was, while Lucy was placed between her brother and Captain Culpepper. Captain Culpepper was a man with an enormous moustache, and a great aptitude for slaughtering game; but as he had no other strong characteristics, it was not probable that he would make himself very agreeable to poor Lucy.

She had seen Lord Lufton once, for two minutes, since the day of that walk, and then he had addressed her quite like an old friend. It had been in the parsonage drawing-room, and Fanny had been there. Fanny now was so well accustomed to his lordship, that she thought but little of this, but to Lucy it had been very pleasant. He was not forward or familiar, but kind, and gentle, and pleasant; and Lucy did feel that she liked him.

Now, on this evening, he had hitherto hardly spoken to her; but then she knew that there were other people in the company to whom he was bound to speak. She was not exactly humble-minded in the usual sense of the word; but she did recognize the fact that her position was less important than that of other people there, and that therefore it was probable that to a certain extent she would be overlooked. But not the less would she have liked to occupy the seat to which Miss Grantly had found her way. She did not want to flirt with Lord Lufton; she was not such a fool as that; but she would have liked to have heard the sound of his voice close to her ear, instead of that of Captain Culpepper’s knife and fork.

This was the first occasion on which she had endeavoured to dress herself with care since her father had died; and now sombre though she was in her deep mourning, she did look very well.

“There is an expression about her forehead that is full of poetry,” Fanny had said to her husband.

“Don’t you turn her head, Fanny, and make her believe that she is a beauty,” Mark had answered.

“I doubt it is not so easy to turn her head, Mark. There is more in Lucy than you imagine, and so you will find out before long.” It was thus that Mrs. Robarts prophesied about her sister-in-law. Had she been asked she might perhaps have said that Lucy’s presence would be dangerous to the Grantly interest at Framley Court.

Lord Lufton’s voice was audible enough as he went on talking to Miss Grantly—his voice but not his words. He talked in such a way that there was no appearance of whispering, and yet the person to whom he spoke, and she only, could hear what he said. Mrs. Grantly the while conversed constantly with Lucy’s brother, who sat at Lucy’s left hand. She never lacked for subjects on which to speak to a country clergyman of the right sort, and thus Griselda was left quite uninterrupted.

But Lucy could not but observe that Griselda herself seemed to have very little to say,—or at any rate to say very little. Every now and then she did open her mouth, and some word or brace of words would fall from it. But for the most part she seemed to be content in the fact[466] that Lord Lufton was paying her attention. She showed no animation, but sat there still and graceful, composed and classical, as she always was. Lucy, who could not keep her ears from listening or her eyes from looking, thought that had she been there she would have endeavoured to take a more prominent part in the conversation. But then Griselda Grantly probably knew much better than Lucy did how to comport herself in such a situation. Perhaps it might be that young men, such as Lord Lufton, liked to hear the sound of their own voices.

“Immense deal of game about here,” Captain Culpepper said to her towards the end of the dinner. It was the second attempt he had made; on the former he had asked her whether site knew any of the fellows of the 9th.

“Is there?” said Lucy. “Oh! I saw Lord Lufton the other day with a great armful of pheasants.”

“An armful! Why we had seven cartloads the other day at Gatherum.”

“Seven carts full of pheasants!” said Lucy, amazed.

“That’s not so much. We had eight guns, you know. Eight guns will do a deal of work when the game has been well got together. They manage all that capitally at Gatherum. Been at the duke’s, eh?”

Lucy had heard the Framley report as to Gatherum Castle, and said with a sort of shudder that she had never been at that place. After this, Captain Culpepper troubled her no further.

When the ladies had taken themselves to the drawing-room Lucy found herself hardly better off than she had been at the dinner table. Lady Lufton and Mrs. Grantly got themselves on to a sofa together, and there chatted confidentially into each other’s ears. Her ladyship had introduced Lucy and Miss Grantly, and then she naturally thought that the young people might do very well together. Mrs. Robarts did attempt to bring about a joint conversation, which should include the three, and for ten minutes or so she worked hard at it. But it did not thrive. Miss Grantly was monosyllabic, smiling however at every monosyllable; and Lucy found that nothing would occur to her at that moment worthy of being spoken. There she sat still and motionless, afraid to take up a book, and thinking in her heart how much happier she would have been at home at the parsonage. She was not made for society; she felt sure of that; and another time site would let Mark and Fanny come to Framley Court by themselves.

And then the gentlemen came in, and there was another stir in the room. Lady Lufton got up and bustled about; she poked the fire and shifted the candles, spoke a few words to Dr. Grantly, whispered something to her son, patted Lucy on the cheek, told Fanny, who was a musician, that they would have a little music; and ended by putting her two hands on Griselda’s shoulders and telling her that the fit of her frock was perfect. For Lady Lufton, though she did dress old herself, as Lucy had[467] said, delighted to see those around her neat and pretty, jaunty and graceful.

“Dear Lady Lufton!” said Griselda, putting up her hand so as to press the end of her ladyship’s fingers. It was the first piece of animation she had shown, and Lucy Robarts watched it all.

And then there was music. Lucy neither played nor sang; Fanny did both, and for an amateur did both well. Griselda did not sing, but she played; and did so in a manner that showed that neither her own labour nor her father’s money had been spared in her instruction. Lord Lufton sang also, a little, and Captain Culpepper a very little; so that they got up a concert among them. In the meantime the doctor and Mark stood talking together on the rug before the fire; the two mothers sat contented, watching the billings and the cooings of their offspring—and Lucy sat alone, turning over the leaves of a book of pictures. She made up her mind fully, then and there, that she was quite unfitted by disposition for such work as this. She cared for no one, and no one cared for her. Well, she must go through with it now; but another time she would know better. With her own book and a fireside she never felt herself to be miserable as she was now.

She had turned her back to the music, for she was sick of seeing Lord Lufton watch the artistic motion of Miss Grantly’s fingers, and was sitting at a small table as far away from the piano as a long room would permit, when she was suddenly roused from a reverie of self-reproach by a voice close behind her: “Miss Robarts,” said the voice, “why have you cut us all?” and Lucy felt that though she heard the words plainly, nobody else did. Lord Lufton was now speaking to her as he had before spoken to Miss Grantly.

“I don’t play, my lord,” said Lucy, “nor yet sing.”

“That would have made your company so much more valuable to us, for we are terribly badly off for listeners. Perhaps you don’t like music?”

“I do like it,—sometimes very much.”

“And when are the sometimes? But we shall find it all out in time. We shall have unravelled all your mysteries, and read all your riddles, by—when shall I say?—by the end of the winter. Shall we not?”

“I do not know that I have got any mysteries.”

“Oh, but you have! It is very mysterious in you to come and sit here, with your back to us all——”

“Oh, Lord Lufton; if I have done wrong——!” and poor Lucy almost started from her chair, and a deep flush came across her dark cheek.

“No—no; you have done no wrong. I was only joking. It is we who have done wrong in leaving you to yourself—you who are the greatest stranger among us.”

“I have been very well, thank you. I don’t care about being left alone. I have always been used to it.”

[468]

“Ah! but we must break you of the habit. We won’t allow you to make a hermit of yourself. But the truth is, Miss Robarts, you don’t know us yet, and therefore you are not quite happy among us.”

“Oh! yes, I am; you are all very good to me.”

“You must let us be good to you. At any rate, you must let me be so. You know, don’t you, that Mark and I have been dear friends since we were seven years old. His wife has been my sister’s dearest friend almost as long; and now that you are with them, you must be a dear friend too. You won’t refuse the offer; will you?”

“Oh, no,” she said, quite in a whisper; and, indeed, she could hardly raise her voice above a whisper, fearing that tears would fall from her tell-tale eyes.

“Dr. and Mrs. Grantly will have gone in a couple of days, and then we must get you down here. Miss Grantly is to remain for Christmas, and you two must become bosom friends.”

Lucy smiled, and tried to look pleased, but she felt that she and Griselda Grantly could never be bosom friends—could never have anything in common between them. She felt sure that Griselda despised her, little, brown, plain, and unimportant as she was. She herself could not despise Griselda in turn; indeed she could not but admire Miss Grantly’s great beauty and dignity of demeanour; but she knew that she could never love her. It is hardly possible that the proud-hearted should love those who despise them; and Lucy Robarts was very proud-hearted.

“Don’t you think she is very handsome?” said Lord Lufton.

“Oh, very,” said Lucy. “Nobody can doubt that.”

“Ludovic,” said Lady Lufton—not quite approving of her son’s remaining so long at the back of Lucy’s chair—“won’t you give us another song—Mrs. Robarts and Miss Grantly are still at the piano?”

“I have sung away all that I knew, mother. There’s Culpepper has not had a chance yet. He has got to give us his dream—how he ‘dreamt that he dwelt in marble halls!’”

“I sang that an hour ago,” said the captain, not over pleased.

“But you certainly have not told us how ‘your little lovers came!’”

The captain, however, would not sing any more. And then the party was broken up, and the Robarts’s went home to their parsonage.

CHAPTER XII.
The Little Bill.

Lucy, during those last fifteen minutes of her sojourn in the Framley Court drawing-room, somewhat modified the very strong opinion she had before formed as to her unfitness for such society. It was very pleasant[469] sitting there in that easy chair, while Lord Lufton stood at the back of it saying nice, soft, good-natured words to her. She was sure that in a little time she could feel a true friendship for him, and that she could do so without any risk of falling in love with him. But then she had a glimmering of an idea that such a friendship would be open to all manner of remarks, and would hardly be compatible with the world’s ordinary ways. At any rate it would be pleasant to be at Framley Court, if he would come and occasionally notice her. But she did not admit to herself that such a visit would be intolerable if his whole time were devoted to Griselda Grantly. She neither admitted it, nor thought it; but nevertheless, in a strange unconscious way, such a feeling did find entrance in her bosom.

And then the Christmas holidays passed away. How much of this enjoyment fell to her share, and how much of this suffering she endured, we will not attempt accurately to describe. Miss Grantly remained at Framley Court up to Twelfth Night, and the Robarts’s also spent most of the season at the house. Lady Lufton, no doubt, had hoped that everything might have been arranged on this occasion in accordance with her wishes, but such had not been the case. Lord Lufton had evidently admired Miss Grantly very much; indeed, he had said so to his mother half-a-dozen times; but it may almost be questioned whether the pleasure Lady Lufton derived from this was not more than neutralized by an opinion he once put forward that Griselda Grantly wanted some of the fire of Lucy Robarts.

“Surely, Ludovic, you would never compare the two girls,” said Lady Lufton.

“Of course not. They are the very antipodes to each other. Miss Grantly would probably be more to my taste; but then I am wise enough to know that it is so because my taste is a bad taste.”

“I know no man with a more accurate or refined taste in such matters,” said Lady Lufton. Beyond this she did not dare to go. She knew very well that her strategy would be vain should her son once learn that she had a strategy. To tell the truth, Lady Lufton was becoming somewhat indifferent to Lucy Robarts. She had been very kind to the little girl; but the little girl seemed hardly to appreciate the kindness as she should do—and then Lord Lufton would talk to Lucy, “which was so unnecessary, you know;” and Lucy had got into a way of talking quite freely with Lord Lufton, having completely dropped that short, spasmodic, ugly exclamation of “my lord.”

And so the Christmas festivities were at an end, and January wore itself away. During the greater part of this month Lord Lufton did not remain at Framley, but was nevertheless in the county, hunting with the hounds of both divisions, and staying at various houses. Two or three nights he spent at Chaldicotes; and one—let it only be told in an under voice—at Gatherum Castle! Of this he said nothing to Lady Lufton. “Why make her unhappy?” as he said to Mark. But Lady Lufton knew[470] it, though she said not a word to him—knew it, and was unhappy. “If he would only marry Griselda, there would be an end of that danger,” she said to herself.

But now we must go back for a while to the vicar and his little bill. It will be remembered, that his first idea with reference to that trouble, after the reading of his father’s will, was to borrow the money from his brother John. John was down at Exeter at the time, and was to stay one night at the parsonage on his way to London. Mark would broach the matter to him on the journey, painful though it would be to him to tell the story of his own folly to a brother so much younger than himself, and who had always looked up to him, clergyman and full-blown vicar as he was, with a deference greater than that which such difference in age required.

The story was told, however; but was told all in vain, as Mark found out before he reached Framley. His brother John immediately declared that he would lend him the money, of course—eight hundred, if his brother wanted it. He, John, confessed that, as regarded the remaining two, he should like to feel the pleasure of immediate possession. As for interest, he would not take any—take interest from a brother! of course not. Well, if Mark made such a fuss about it, he supposed he must take it; but would rather not. Mark should have his own way, and do just what he liked.

This was all very well, and Mark had fully made up his mind that his brother should not be kept long out of his money. But then arose the question, how was that money to be reached? He, Mark, was executor, or one of the executors under his father’s will, and, therefore, no doubt, could put his hand upon it; but his brother wanted five months of being of age, and could not therefore as yet be put legally in possession of the legacy.

“That’s a bore,” said the assistant private secretary to the Lord Petty Bag, thinking, perhaps, as much of his own immediate wish for ready cash as he did of his brother’s necessities. Mark felt that it was a bore, but there was nothing more to be done in that direction. He must now find out how far the bankers could assist him.

Some week or two after his return to Framley he went over to Barchester, and called there on a certain Mr. Forrest, the manager of one of the banks, with whom he was acquainted; and with many injunctions as to secrecy told this manager the whole of his story. At first, he concealed the name of his friend Sowerby, but it soon appeared that no such concealment was of any avail. “That’s Sowerby, of course,” said Mr. Forrest. “I know you are intimate with him; and all his friends go through that, sooner or later.”

It seemed to Mark as though Mr. Forrest made very light of the whole transaction.

“I cannot possibly pay the bill when it falls due,” said Mark.

“Oh, no, of course not,” said Mr. Forrest. “It’s never very convenient[471] to hand out four hundred pounds at a blow. Nobody will expect you to pay it!”

“But I suppose I shall have to do it sooner or later?”

“Well, that’s as may be. It will depend partly on how you manage with Sowerby, and partly on the hands it gets into. As the bill has your name on it, they’ll have patience as long as the interest is paid, and the commissions on renewal. But no doubt it will have to be met some day by somebody.”

Mr. Forrest said that he was sure that the bill was not in Barchester; Mr. Sowerby would not, he thought, have brought it to a Barchester bank. The bill was probably in London, but, doubtless, would be sent to Barchester for collection. “If it comes in my way,” said Mr. Forrest, “I will give you plenty of time, so that you may manage about the renewal with Sowerby. I suppose he’ll pay the expense of doing that.”

Mark’s heart was somewhat lighter as he left the bank. Mr. Forrest had made so little of the whole transaction that he felt himself justified in making little of it also. “It may be as well,” said he to himself, as he drove home, “not to tell Fanny anything about it till the three months have run round. I must make some arrangement then.” And in this way his mind was easier during the last of those three months than it had been during the two former. That feeling of over-due bills, of bills coming due, of accounts overdrawn, of tradesmen unpaid, of general money cares, is very dreadful at first; but it is astonishing how soon men get used to it. A load which would crush a man at first becomes, by habit, not only endurable, but easy and comfortable to the bearer. The habitual debtor goes along jaunty and with elastic step, almost enjoying the excitement of his embarrassments. There was Mr. Sowerby himself; who ever saw a cloud on his brow? It made one almost in love with ruin to be in his company. And even now, already, Mark Robarts was thinking to himself quite comfortably about this bill;—how very pleasantly those bankers managed these things. Pay it! No; no one will be so unreasonable as to expect you to do that! And then Mr. Sowerby certainly was a pleasant fellow, and gave a man something in return for his money. It was still a question with Mark whether Lord Lufton had not been too hard on Sowerby. Had that gentleman fallen across his clerical friend at the present moment, he might no doubt have gotten from him an acceptance for another four hundred pounds.

One is almost inclined to believe that there is something pleasurable in the excitement of such embarrassments, as there is also in the excitement of drink. But then, at last, the time does come when the excitement is over, and when nothing but the misery is left. If there be an existence of wretchedness on earth it must be that of the elderly, worn-out roué, who has run this race of debt and bills of accommodation and acceptances,—of what, if we were not in these days somewhat afraid of good broad English, we might call lying and swindling, falsehood and fraud—and[472] who, having ruined all whom he should have loved, having burnt up every one who would trust him much, and scorched all who would trust him a little, is at last left to finish his life with such bread and water as these men get, without one honest thought to strengthen his sinking heart, or one honest friend to hold his shivering hand! If a man could only think of that, as he puts his name to the first little bill, as to which he is so good-naturedly assured that it can easily be renewed!

When the three months had nearly run out, it so happened that Robarts met his friend Sowerby. Mark had once or twice ridden with Lord Lufton as far as the meet of the hounds, and may, perhaps, have gone a field or two farther on some occasions. The reader must not think that he had taken to hunting, as some parsons do; and it is singular enough that whenever they do so they always show a special aptitude for the pursuit, as though hunting were an employment peculiarly congenial with a cure of souls in the country. Such a thought would do our vicar injustice. But when Lord Lufton would ask him what on earth could be the harm of riding along the roads to look at the hounds, he hardly knew what sensible answer to give his lordship. It would be absurd to say that his time would be better employed at home in clerical matters, for it was notorious that he had not clerical pursuits for the employment of half his time. In this way, therefore, he had got into a habit of looking at the hounds, and keeping up his acquaintance in the county, meeting Lord Dumbello, Mr. Green Walker, Harold Smith, and other such like sinners; and on one such occasion, as the three months were nearly closing, he did meet Mr. Sowerby.

“Look here, Sowerby; I want to speak to you for half a moment. What are you doing about that bill?”

“Bill—bill! what bill?—which bill? The whole bill, and nothing but the bill. That seems to be the conversation now-a-days of all men, morning, noon, and night.”

“Don’t you know the bill I signed for you for four hundred pounds?”

“Did you, though? Was not that rather green of you?”

This did seem strange to Mark. Could it really be the fact that Mr. Sowerby had so many bills flying about that he had absolutely forgotten that occurrence in the Gatherum Castle bedroom. And then to be called green by the very man whom he had obliged!

“Perhaps I was,” said Mark, in a tone that showed that he was somewhat piqued. “But all the same I should be glad to know how it will be taken up.”

“Oh, Mark, what a ruffian you are to spoil my day’s sport in this way. Any man but a parson would be too good a Christian for such intense cruelty. But let me see—four hundred pounds? Oh, yes—Tozer has it.”

“And what will Tozer do with it?”

“Make money of it; whatever way he may go to work he will do that.”

[473]

“But will Tozer bring it to me on the 20th?”

“Oh, Lord, no! Upon my word, Mark, you are deliciously green. A cat would as soon think of killing a mouse directly she got it into her claws. But, joking apart, you need not trouble yourself. Maybe you will hear no more about it; or, perhaps, which no doubt is more probable, I may have to send it to you to be renewed. But you need do nothing till you hear from me or somebody else.”

“Only do not let any one come down upon me for the money.”

“There is not the slightest fear of that. Tally-ho, old fellow! He’s away. Tally-ho! right over by Gossetts’ barn. Come along, and never mind Tozer—‘Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.’” And away they both went together, parson and member of parliament.

And then again on that occasion Mark went home with a sort of feeling that the bill did not matter. Tozer would manage it somehow; and it was quite clear that it would not do to tell his wife of it just at present.

On the 21st of that month of February, however, he did receive a reminder that the bill and all concerning it had not merely been a farce. This was a letter from Mr. Sowerby, dated from Chaldicotes, though not bearing the Barchester post-mark, in which that gentleman suggested a renewal—not exactly of the old bill, but of a new one. It seemed to Mark that the letter had been posted in London. If I give it entire, I shall, perhaps, most quickly explain its purport:

[474]

When Mark had read it through he looked down on his table to see whether the old bill had fallen from the letter; but no, there was no enclosure, and had been no enclosure but the new bill. And then he read the letter through again, and found that there was no word about the old bill,—not a syllable, at least, as to its whereabouts. Sowerby did not even say that it would remain in his own hands.

Mark did not in truth know much about such things. It might be that the very fact of his signing this second document would render that first document null and void; and from Sowerby’s silence on the subject, it might be argued that this was so well known to be the case, that he had not thought of explaining it. But yet Mark could not see how this should be so.

But what was he to do? That threat of cost and lawyers, and specially of the newspapers, did have its effect upon him—as no doubt it was intended to do. And then he was utterly dumfounded by Sowerby’s impudence in drawing on him for 500l. instead of 400l., “covering,” as Sowerby so good-humouredly said, “sundry little outstanding trifles.”

But at last he did sign the bill, and sent it off, as Sowerby had directed. What else was he to do?

Fool that he was. A man always can do right, even though he has done wrong before. But that previous wrong adds so much difficulty to the path—a difficulty which increases in tremendous ratio, till a man at last is choked in his struggling, and is drowned beneath the waters.

And then he put away Sowerby’s letter carefully, locking it up from his wife’s sight. It was a letter that no parish clergyman should have received. So much he acknowledged to himself. But nevertheless it was necessary that he should keep it. And now again for a few hours this affair made him very miserable.

Wandering one morning into the Lowther Arcade, I found myself behind an old man and a little girl. The man was very feeble and tottering in his steps, and the child was very young. It was near the Christmas season, and many children, richly dressed, in the care of mothers, sisters, and nursery governesses, were loading themselves with all kinds of amusing and expensive toys. The vaulted roof re-echoed with the sounds of young voices, shrill whistles, wiry tinklings of musical gocarts, the rustling of paper, and the notes of cornopeans or pianos. It was the Exhibition of 1851 repeated, in miniature; the toys of manhood being exchanged for the toys of youth.

My old man and my little girl were not amongst the happy buyers, or the richly dressed, for they were evidently very poor. They had wandered into the bazaar to feast upon its sights, and it was difficult to say which was the more entranced of the two. The old man gazed about him, with a vacant, gratified smile upon his face, and the child was too young to know that any barrier existed to prevent her plucking the tempting fruit which she saw hanging in clusters on every side. This barrier—the old, thick, black, impassable barrier of poverty—though invisible to the child, was not invisible to me; and I blamed the old man for turning her steps into such a glittering enchanted cavern, whose walls were really lined, to her, with bitterness and despair.

“Why don’t we live here, gran’da?” asked the child. The old man gave no other answer than a weak laugh.

“Why don’t I have a house like that?” continued the child, pointing to a bright doll’s-house displayed upon a stall, and trying to drag her guardian towards it.

The old man still only laughed feebly, as he shuffled past the attraction, and before the thought had struck me that I might have purchased a cheap pleasure by giving this house to the child, they were both lost in the pushing, laughing crowd.

This incident naturally set me thinking about toys, and their effect in increasing the amount of human happiness. I asked myself if I, ——, a respectable, middle-aged man of moderate means, was free from the influence of these powerful trifles. I was compelled, in all the cheap honesty of self-examination, to answer “No.” I felt, upon reflection, that I was even weaker than the poor child I had just seen. The chief toy that I was seeking for was an ideal house that I had never been able to find. I was led away by a vague sentiment about the poetry of neighbourhoods—a secret consuming passion for red-brick—a something that could hardly be weighed or spanned; the echo of an old song; the mists of a picture; the shadow of a dream. She was led away by no such unsubstantial phantoms. Her eyes had suddenly rested, for a few[476] moments, upon her childish paradise, and a few shillings would have made her happy. I, on the contrary, had exhausted years in searching for my paradise, but without a prospect of success.

The fact is, I have got an unfortunate habit of looking back. I am fond of the past, though only in a dreamy, unsystematic way. My history is a little out of order, and I am no authority upon dates; but I like to hover about places. I cannot tell the day, the hour, or even the year in which the battle of Sedgemoor occurred; but I have gloated over the old roadside mill from which the Duke of Monmouth watched his losing contest, and the old houses at Bridgewater, whose roofs were then probably crowded with women and children. I have even been through the straggling village of Weston Zoyland, and into the sanded tavern where the late Lord Macaulay resided for weeks while he wrote this portion of his history. I have heard the landlord’s proud account of his distinguished guest, and how “he worrited about the neighbourhood.” This interesting fact, so I am informed, is duly recorded, upon my authority, in the latest edition of Men of the Time. My only objection to the late Lord Macaulay is, that he was one of these men of the time—of my own time. If Gibbon had been the careful historian of Sedgemoor, the village pothouse would have had a finer old crusted flavour, to my taste. The sentiment that governs me scarcely blooms under a hundred years, neither more nor less. I cannot learn to love the Elizabethan times—they are too remote. I have no more real sympathy with fifteen hundred and fifty, than with eighteen hundred and fifty. I can tolerate the seventeenth century; but the eighteenth always “stirs my heart, like a trumpet.”

Notwithstanding all this, I am not an obstructive man; I am not a “fogey.” I take the good the gods provide me. I have no prejudices against gas; though I wish it could be supplied without so much parochial quarrelling. It may generate poison, as certain chemists assert; but it certainly generates too many pamphlets and public meetings. I use the electric telegraph; I travel by the railway; and I am thankful to their inventors and originators. The moment, however, I leave the railway, I plunge rapidly into the past. I never linger, for a moment, at the bright, new, damp, lofty railway hotel (I hate the name of hotel, although I know it springs from hostelry); nor amongst the mushroom houses that rally round the station. My course is always through the distant trees, beyond the dwarfish, crumbling church, whose broad low windows seem to have taken root amongst the flat, uneven tombstones, into the old town or village, into its very heart—its market-place—and up to the brown old door of its oldest inn. I know everything that can be said against such places. They are very yellow; they have too strong a flavour of stale tobacco-smoke; their roofs are low, and their floors have a leaning either to one side or the other. Their passages are dark, and often built on various levels; so that you may tumble down into your bed-chamber, or tumble up into your sitting-room, shaking every tooth in your head, or possibly biting your tongue. These may be serious drawbacks to some[477] people, but they are not so serious to me, and I am able to find many compensating advantages. The last vestige of the real old able-bodied port lingers only in such nooks and corners, and is served out by matronly servants, like housekeepers in ancient families. I know one inn of the kind where the very “boots” looks positively venerable. He wears a velvet skull-cap that Cardinal Wolsey might have been proud of; he has saved ten thousand pounds in his humble servitude, and is a large landed proprietor in the county. Prosperity has not made him inattentive. No one will give your shoes such an enduring polish, or call you up for an early train with such unerring punctuality.

With these sentiments, fancies, and prejudices in favour of the past, joined to a fastidious, quaintly luxurious taste, and limited funds, it is hardly to be wondered at that I have searched long and vainly for my ideal dwelling. I might, perhaps, have found it readily enough in the country, but my habits only allowed me to seek it in town. I am a London man—London born and London bred—a genuine cockney, I hope, of the school of Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb. I cannot tear myself away from old taverns, old courts and alleys, old suburbs (now standing in the very centre of the town), old print-shops, old mansions, old archways, and old churches. I must hear the London chimes at midnight, or life would not be worth a jot. I hear them, as they were heard a century and more ago, for they are the last things to change; but forty or fifty years have played sad havoc with land, and brick, and stone. Fire has done something; metropolitan improvements have done more. Not only do I mourn over what is lost, but what is gained. The town grows newer every day that it grows older. I know it must be so; I know it ought to be so; I know it is a sign of increased prosperity and strength. I see this with one half of my mind, while I abhor it with the other. I cannot love New Oxford Street, while St. Giles’s Church and old Holborn still remain. I have no affection for Bayswater and Notting-hill, but a tender remembrance of Tyburn Gate. I feel no sensation of delight when I hear the name of St. John’s Wood or the Regent’s Park; and Camden Town is a thing of yesterday that I treat with utter contempt. If I allow my footsteps to wander along Piccadilly and through Knightsbridge, they turn down, on one side, into Chelsea, or up, on the other side, into Kensington, leaving Brompton unvisited in the middle. I am never tired of sitting under the trees in Cheyne Walk; of walking round the red bricks and trim gravel pathways of Chelsea Hospital; of peeping through the railings at Gough House, or watching the old Physic Garden from a boat on the river. I am never weary of roaming hand-in-hand with an amiable, gossiping companion, like Leigh Hunt, listening to stories at every doorstep in the old town, and repeopling faded, half-deserted streets with the great and little celebrities of the past. I never consider a day ill spent that has ended in plucking daisies upon Kew Green, or in wasting an hour or two in the cathedral stillness of Charter-House Square. I am fond of tracing resemblances, perhaps imaginary, between Mark Lane and Old[478] Highgate, and of visiting old merchants’ decayed mansions far away in tarry Poplar. I could add a chapter to Leigh Hunt’s pleasant essay upon City trees,[14] and tell of many fountains and flower-gardens that stand under the windows of dusky counting-houses.

Humanizing as such harmless wandering ought to be, it seems only to make me break a commandment. I am sorely afraid that I covet my neighbour’s house. When I find the nearest approach to my ideal—my day-dream—my toy dwelling—it is always in the occupation of steady, unshifting people. Such habitations, in or near London, seem to descend as heirlooms from generation to generation. They are never to be let; they are seldom offered for sale; and the house agent—the showman of “eligible villas”—is not familiar with them. I will describe the rarity.

It must be built of red brick, not earlier than 1650, not later than 1750, picked out at the edges with slabs of yellow stone. It must not be too lofty, and must be equally balanced on each side of its doorway. It must stand detached, walled in on about an acre of ground, well surrounded by large old trees. Its roof must be sloping, and if crowned with a bell-turret, so much the better. Its outer entrance must be a lofty gate of flowered ironwork, supported on each side by purple-red brick columns, each one surmounted by a globe of stone. Looking through the tracery of this iron gate, you must see a few broad white steps leading up to the entrance-hall. The doorway of this hall must be dark and massive, the lower half wood and the upper half window-framed glass. Over the top must be a projecting hood-porch filled with nests of wood-carving, representing fruit, flowers, and figures, brown with age. Looking through the glass of the hall-door, you must see more carving like this along the lofty walls; and a broad staircase with banisters, dark as ebony, leading up to a long narrow window, shaded by the rich wings of a spreading cedar-tree. The rooms of this mansion will necessarily be in keeping with its external features, presenting many unexpected, irregular closets and corners, with, perhaps, a mysterious double staircase leading down to the cellars, to which a romantic, unauthenticated story is attached. Such houses are none the worse for being filled with legends; for having one apartment, at least, with a reputed murder-stain upon its floor; and for being generally alluded to as Queen Elizabeth’s palaces, although probably not built for nearly a century after that strong-minded monarch’s death. The window-shutters are none the worse for being studded with alarm-bells, as thick as grapes upon a fruitful vine; as an additional comfort is derived from the security of the present, when we are made to reflect upon the dangers of the past. A few rooks will give an additional charm to the place; and it will be pleasant, when a few crumbs are thrown upon the gravel, to see a fluttering cloud of sparrows dropping down from the sheltering eaves.

With regard to the neighbourhood in which such a house should stand,[479] it must be essentially ripe. Better that it should be a little faded; a little deserted; a little unpopular, and very unfashionable; than so dreadfully raw and new. It should have a flavour of old literature, old politics, and old art. If it is just a little obstructive and High Tory—inclined to stand upon the ancient ways—no sensible man of progress should blame it, but smile blandly and pass on. It will, at least, possess the merit, in his eyes, of being self-supporting; asking for, or obtaining no government aid. While Boards of Works are freely supplied with funds to construct the new, there is no board but unorganized sentiment to maintain the old.

This house and this neighbourhood should not be far from London—from the old centre of the old town. They should stand in Soho, or in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, or in Westminster, like Queen’s Square, near St. James’s Park; or even in Lambeth, like the Archbishop’s Palace. Better still if in the Strand, like Northumberland House; or in Fleet Street, like the Temple Gardens. What luxury would there be, almost equal to anything we read of in the Arabian Nights, in turning on one side from the busy crowd, unlocking a dingy door that promised to lead to nothing but a miserable court, and passing, at once, into a secret, secluded garden! What pleasures would be equal to those of hearing the splash of cool fountains; the sighing of the wind through lofty elms and broad beeches; of standing amongst the scent and colours of a hundred growing flowers; of sitting in an oaken room with a tiled fireplace, surrounded by old china in cabinets, old folios upon carved tables, old portraits of men and women in the costume of a bygone time, and looking out over a lawn of grass into a winding vista of trees, so contrived as to shut out all signs of city life, while the mellow hum of traffic came in at the open window, or through the walls, and you felt that you were within a stone’s throw of Temple Bar!

In such a house, on such a spot, a man might live, and his life be something more than a weary round of food and sleep. His nature would become subdued to what it rested in: the clay would happily take the shape of the mould. I believe more in the influence of dwellings upon human character, than in the influence of authority on matters of opinion. The man may seek the house; or the house may form the man; but in either case the result is the same. A few yards of earth, even on this side of the grave, will make all the difference between life and death. If our dear old friend Charles Lamb was now alive (and we all must wish he was, if only that he might see how every day is bringing him nearer the crown that belongs only to the Prince of British Essayists), there would be something singularly jarring to the human nerves in finding him at Dalston; but not so jarring in finding him a little farther off, at Hackney. He would still have drawn nourishment in the Temple and in Covent Garden; but he must surely have perished if transplanted to New Tyburnia. I cannot imagine him living at Pentonville (I cannot, in my uninquiring ignorance, imagine who[480] Penton was that he should name a ville!), but I can see a certain appropriate oddity in his cottage at Colebrook Row, Islington. In the first place, we may agree that this London suburb is very old, without going into the vexed question of whether it was really very “merry.” In the second place, this same Colebrook Row was built a few years before our dear old friend was born—I believe, in seventeen hundred and seventy. In the third place, it was called a “Row,” though “Lane” or “Walk” would have been as old and as good; but “Terrace” or “Crescent” would have rendered it unbearable. The New River flowed calmly past, the cottage walls—as poor George Dyer found to his cost—bringing with it fair memories of Izaak Walton and the last two centuries. The house itself had also certain peculiarities to recommend it. The door was so constructed that it opened into the chief sitting-room; and this, though promising much annoyance, was really a source of fun and enjoyment to our dear old friend. He was never so delighted as when he stood on the hearthrug receiving many congenial visitors, as they came to him on the muddiest-boot, and the wettest-of-umbrella days. His immediate neighbourhood was also peculiar. It was there that weary wanderers came to seek the waters of oblivion. Suicide could pitch upon no spot so favourable for its sacrifices as the gateway leading into the river enclosure before Charles Lamb’s cottage. Waterloo Bridge had not long been built, and was not then a fashionable theatre for self-destruction. The drags were always kept ready in Colebrook Row, and are still so kept at a small tavern a few doors from the cottage. The landlord’s ear, according to his own account, had become so sensitive by repeated practice, that when aroused at night by a heavy splash in the water, he could tell by the sound whether it was an accident, or a wilful plunge. He never believed that poor George Dyer tumbled in from carelessness, though it was no business of his to express an opinion on the matter. After the eighth suicide, within a short period, Charles Lamb began to grow restless.

“Mary,” he said to his sister, “I think it’s high time we left this place;” and so they went to Edmonton. Those who are painfully familiar with the unfortunate mental infirmity under which they both laboured, will see a sorrowful meaning in words like these. Those who, like me, can see an odd harmony between our dear old friend and Colebrook Row, will lament, the sad necessity which compelled them to part company.

Without wishing for a moment to erect my eccentric taste in houses as an unerring guide for my fellow-creatures (especially as the ancient London dwellings are growing fewer every day, and I am still seeking my ideal toy), I must still be allowed to wonder at that condition of mind which can settle down, with seeming delight, in the new raw buildings that I see springing up on every side. I am not speaking of those who are compelled to practise economy (I am compelled to practise it myself), nor of those whose business arrangements require them to keep within a particular circle; but of those who have the power, to a certain extent, of[481] choosing their ground, and choose it upon some principle that I am unable to understand.

I have a sensitive horror of regularity, of uniformity, of straight lines, of obtrusive geometrical forms. I prefer a winding alley to a direct street. I detest a modern, well-advertised building estate. The water-colour sketch of such a place is meant to be very fascinating and attractive as it hangs in the great house-agent’s office or window, but it has no charms for me. My theory is that a man must be perpetually struggling if he wishes to preserve his individuality in such a settlement. The water may be pure; the soil may be gravelly; the neighbourhood may be well supplied with all kinds of churches and chapels; the “red book” may not pass it by as being out of the fashionable circle; blue books may refer to it approvingly as a model of perfect drainage; it may be warmed up by thorough occupation; perambulators may be seen in its bare new squares; broughams may stand by the side of its bright level kerbstones; but the demon of sameness, in my eyes, would always be brooding over it. I should feel that when I retired to rest, perhaps eight hundred masters of households were slumbering in eight hundred bedchambers exactly the same size and the same shape as my own. When I took a bath, or lingered over the breakfast-table, I should be haunted by the knowledge that eight hundred people might probably be taking similar baths and similar breakfasts in precisely similar apartments. My library, my dining-room, and my drawing-room would correspond in shape and size with eight hundred other receptacles devoted to study, refreshment, and recreation. If I gazed from a window, or stood at a doorway, I should see hundreds of other windows, and hundreds of other doorways, that matched mine in relative position and design. I should look down upon the same infant shrubs, and the same even, level walls, or up at the same long, level parapets, without break, the same regular army of chimney-pots, without variety,—until I should feel as if I had settled in a fashionable penitentiary, to feed upon monotony for the rest of my days. My dreams at night would probably be a mixture of the past and the present, of my old tastes and my new sufferings. The builder, whose trowel seemed ever ringing in my ears, would dance over me in hoops and patches; and the whitewasher, whose brush seemed always flopping above my head, would be mixing his composition in my favourite punch-bowl. My old books, my old prints, my old china, my old furniture, my old servants, would pine away in such a habitation; and I should have to surround myself with fresh faces and fresh voices, according to the latest model. Finally, I should die of a surfeit of stucco, and be the first lodger entered in the records of the adjoining bleak, unfinished cemetery.

If I have little sympathy with those people who dwell in such tents as these,—who neither belong to the town nor the country,—who hang upon the skirts of London in mushroom suburbs that blend as inharmoniously with the great old city as a Wandsworth villa would blend with Rochester Castle,—I am totally unable to understand the character of those other[482] people whose love for the modern carries them even farther than this, and who take a pride in planting damp and comfortless homes in the very centre of wild, unfinished neighbourhoods. Who are they? Have they human form and shape, with minds and hearts; or are they, as I have often suspected, merely window-blinds? If they are not policemen and laundresses in charge of bare walls and echoing passages; if they are not hired housekeepers put in to bait the trap, and catch unwary tenants; if they are not restless spirits, who, for an abatement of rent, are always willing to lead the advanced posts in suburban colonization,—whence springs that singular ambition which is always anxious to be literally first in the field, and the oldest inhabitant in a settlement of yesterday? Surely, there can be little pleasure in living, for months, amongst heaps of brick-dust, shavings, mortar and wet clay; in staring at hollow shops that are boarded up for years until they are wanted, and at undecided mansions which may turn out to be public-houses; or in being stared at, in a tenfold degree, by rows of spectral carcases and yawning cellars? There can be little pleasure in contemplating cold stucco porticos of a mongrel Greek type, that crack and fall to pieces in rain and frost; or gaping gravel-pits; or stagnant ponds; or lines of oven-like foundations waiting for more capital and more enterprise to cover them with houses. There can be just as little pleasure in seeing your scanty pavement breaking suddenly off before your door, and your muddy, hilly road tapering away in a few rotten planks that lead into a marshy, grassless field, where you may stand and easily fancy yourself the last man at the end of a melancholy, unsuccessful, deserted world, looking into space, with no one person or thing behind you.

The old places that I shall always cling to are unhappily often visited by decay; but it is the decay of ripe old age, which is always venerable. My ideal toy-house—the nearest approach to it that I can find—may become uninhabitable in the fulness of years, but it will still be picturesque; and those who may despise it as a dwelling will admire it upon canvas. In this form it is often brought within my humble reach, and I secure the shadow if I cannot obtain the substance. I still, however, look longingly at the reality, as my little girl looked at her toy-house in her morning’s walk; and, like her, I shall doubtless be swept past it, still looking back, until I am sucked into that countless crowd from which there is no returning.

Not many days since I went to visit a house where in former years I had received many a friendly welcome. We went in to the owner’s—an artist’s—studio. Prints, pictures, and sketches hung on the walls as I had last seen and remembered them. The implements of the painter’s art were there. The light which had shone upon so many, many hours of patient and cheerful toil, poured through the northern window upon print and bust, lay figure and sketch, and upon the easel before which the good, the gentle, the beloved Leslie laboured. In this room the busy brain had devised, and the skilful hand executed, I know not how many of the noble works which have delighted the world with their beauty and charming humour. Here the poet called up into pictorial presence, and informed with life, grace, beauty, infinite friendly mirth and wondrous naturalness of expression, the people of whom his dear books told him the stories,—his Shakspeare, his Cervantes, his Molière, his Le Sage. There was his last work on the easel—a beautiful fresh smiling shape of Titania, such as his sweet guileless fancy imagined the Midsummer Night’s queen to be. Gracious, and pure, and bright, the sweet smiling image glimmers on the canvas. Fairy elves, no doubt, were to have been grouped around their mistress in laughing clusters. Honest Bottom’s grotesque head and form are indicated as reposing by the side of the consummate beauty. The darkling forest would have grown around them, with the stars glittering from the midsummer sky: the flowers at the queen’s feet, and the boughs and foliage about her, would have been peopled with gambolling sprites and fays. They were dwelling in the artist’s mind no doubt, and would have been developed by that patient, faithful, admirable genius: but the busy brain stopped working, the skilful hand fell lifeless, the loving, honest heart ceased to beat. What was she to have been—that fair Titania—when perfected by the patient skill of the poet, who in imagination saw the sweet innocent figure, and with tender courtesy and caresses, as it were, posed and shaped and traced the fair form? Is there record kept anywhere of fancies conceived, beautiful, unborn? Some day will they assume form in some yet undeveloped light? If our bad unspoken thoughts are registered against us, and are written in the awful account, will not the good thoughts unspoken, the love and tenderness, the pity, beauty, charity, which pass through the breast, and cause the heart to throb with silent good, find a remembrance, too? A few weeks more, and this lovely offspring of the poet’s conception would have been complete—to charm the world with its beautiful mirth. May there not be some sphere unknown to us where it may have an existence? They say our words, once out of our lips, go travelling in omne ærum, reverberating for ever and ever. If our words, why not our thoughts? If the Has Been, why not the Might Have Been?

[486]

Some day our spirits may be permitted to walk in galleries of fancies more wondrous and beautiful than any achieved works which at present we see, and our minds to behold and delight in masterpieces which poets’ and artists’ minds have fathered and conceived only.

With a feeling much akin to that with which I looked upon the friend’s—the admirable artist’s—unfinished work, I can fancy many readers turning to these—the last pages which were traced by Charlotte Brontë’s hand. Of the multitude that has read her books, who has not known and deplored the tragedy of her family, her own most sad and untimely fate? Which of her readers has not become her friend? Who that has known her books has not admired the artist’s noble English, the burning love of truth, the bravery, the simplicity, the indignation at wrong, the eager sympathy, the pious love and reverence, the passionate honour, so to speak, of the woman! What a story is that of that family of poets in their solitude yonder on the gloomy northern moors! At nine o’clock at night, Mrs. Gaskell tells, after evening prayers, when their guardian and relative had gone to bed, the three poetesses—the three maidens, Charlotte, and Emily, and Anne—Charlotte being the “motherly friend and guardian to the other two”—“began, like restless wild animals, to pace up and down their parlour, “making out” their wonderful stories, talking over plans and projects, and thoughts of what was to be their future life.”

One evening, at the close of 1854, as Charlotte Nicholls sat with her husband by the fire, listening to the howling of the wind about the house, she suddenly said to her husband, “If you had not been with me, I must have been writing now.” She then ran upstairs, and brought down, and read aloud, the beginning of a new tale. When she had finished, her husband remarked, “The critics will accuse you of repetition.” She replied, “Oh! I shall alter that. I always begin two or three times before I can please myself.” But it was not to be. The trembling little hand was to write no more. The heart, newly awakened to love and happiness, and throbbing with maternal hope, was soon to cease to beat; that intrepid outspeaker and champion of truth, that eager, impetuous redresser of wrong, was to be called out of the world’s fight and struggle, to lay down the shining arms, and to be removed to a sphere where even a noble indignation cor ulterius nequit lacerare, and where truth complete, and right triumphant, no longer need to wage war.

I can only say of this lady, vidi tantum. I saw her first just as I rose out of an illness from which I had never thought to recover. I remember the trembling little frame, the little hand, the great honest eyes. An impetuous honesty seemed to me to characterize the woman. Twice I recollect she took me to task for what she held to be errors in doctrine. Once about Fielding we had a disputation. She spoke her mind out. She jumped too rapidly to conclusions. (I have smiled at one or two passages in the Biography, in which my own disposition or behaviour forms the subject of talk.) She formed conclusions that might be wrong, and built[487] up whole theories of character upon them. New to the London world, she entered it with an independent, indomitable spirit of her own; and judged of contemporaries, and especially spied out arrogance or affectation, with extraordinary keenness of vision. She was angry with her favourites if their conduct or conversation fell below her ideal. Often she seemed to me to be judging the London folk prematurely: but perhaps the city is rather angry at being judged. I fancied an austere little Joan of Arc marching in upon us, and rebuking our easy lives, our easy morals. She gave me the impression of being a very pure, and lofty, and high-minded person. A great and holy reverence of right and truth seemed to be with her always. Such, in our brief interview, she appeared to me. As one thinks of that life so noble, so lonely—of that passion for truth—of those nights and nights of eager study, swarming fancies, invention, depression, elation, prayer; as one reads the necessarily incomplete, though most touching and admirable history of the heart that throbbed in this one little frame—of this one amongst the myriads of souls that have lived and died on this great earth—this great earth?—this little speck in the infinite universe of God,—with what wonder do we think of to-day, with what awe await to-morrow, when that which is now but darkly seen shall be clear! As I read this little fragmentary sketch, I think of the rest. Is it? And where is it? Will not the leaf be turned some day, and the story be told? Shall the deviser of the tale somewhere perfect the history of little Emma’s griefs and troubles? Shall Titania come forth complete with her sportive court, with the flowers at her feet, the forest around her, and all the stars of summer glittering overhead?

How well I remember the delight, and wonder, and pleasure with which I read Jane Eyre, sent to me by an author whose name and sex were then alike unknown to me; the strange fascinations of the book; and how with my own work pressing upon me, I could not, having taken the volumes up, lay them down until they were read through! Hundreds of those who, like myself, recognized and admired that master-work of a great genius, will look with a mournful interest and regard and curiosity upon this, the last fragmentary sketch from the noble hand which wrote Jane Eyre.

W. M. T.

Emma.
(A FRAGMENT OF A STORY BY THE LATE CHARLOTTE BRONTË.)

CHAPTER I.

We all seek an ideal in life. A pleasant fancy began to visit me in a certain year, that perhaps the number of human beings is few who do not find their quest at some era of life for some space more or less brief. I had certainly not found mine in youth, though the strong belief I held of its existence sufficed through all my brightest and freshest time to keep me hopeful. I had not found it in maturity. I was become resigned[488] never to find it. I had lived certain dim years entirely tranquil and unexpectant. And now I was not sure but something was hovering round my hearth which pleased me wonderfully.

Look at it, reader. Come into my parlour and judge for yourself whether I do right to care for this thing. First, you may scan me, if you please. We shall go on better together after a satisfactory introduction and due apprehension of identity. My name is Mrs. Chalfont. I am a widow. My house is good, and my income such as need not check the impulse either of charity or a moderate hospitality. I am not young, nor yet old. There is no silver yet in my hair, but its yellow lustre is gone. In my face wrinkles are yet to come, but I have almost forgotten the days when it wore any bloom. I married when I was very young. I lived for fifteen years a life which, whatever its trials, could not be called stagnant. Then for five years I was alone, and, having no children, desolate. Lately Fortune, by a somewhat curious turn of her wheel, placed in my way an interest and a companion.

The neighbourhood where I live is pleasant enough, its scenery agreeable, and its society civilized, though not numerous. About a mile from my house there is a ladies’ school, established but lately—not more than three years since. The conductresses of this school were of my acquaintances; and though I cannot say that they occupied the very highest place in my opinion—for they had brought back from some months’ residence abroad, for finishing purposes, a good deal that was fantastic, affected, and pretentious—yet I awarded them some portion of that respect which seems the fair due of all women who face life bravely, and try to make their own way by their own efforts.

About a year after the Misses Wilcox opened their school, when the number of their pupils was as yet exceedingly limited, and when, no doubt, they were looking out anxiously enough for augmentation, the entrance-gate to their little drive was one day thrown back to admit a carriage—“a very handsome, fashionable carriage,” Miss Mabel Wilcox said, in narrating the circumstance afterwards—and drawn by a pair of really splendid horses. The sweep up the drive, the loud ring at the door-bell, the bustling entrance into the house, the ceremonious admission to the bright drawing-room, roused excitement enough in Fuchsia Lodge. Miss Wilcox repaired to the reception-room in a pair of new gloves, and carrying in her hand a handkerchief of French cambric.

She found a gentleman seated on the sofa, who, as he rose up, appeared a tall, fine-looking personage; at least she thought him so, as he stood with his back to the light. He introduced himself as Mr. Fitzgibbon, inquired if Miss Wilcox had a vacancy, and intimated that he wished to intrust to her care a new pupil in the shape of his daughter. This was welcome news, for there was many a vacancy in Miss Wilcox’s schoolroom; indeed, her establishment was as yet limited to the select number of three, and she and her sisters were looking forward with anything but confidence to the balancing of accounts at the close of their first half-year. Few objects could have been more agreeable to her then, than that to which,[489] by a wave of the hand, Mr. Fitzgibbon now directed her attention—the figure of a child standing near the drawing-room window.

Had Miss Wilcox’s establishment boasted fuller ranks—had she indeed entered well on that course of prosperity which in after years an undeviating attention to externals enabled her so triumphantly to realize—an early thought with her would have been to judge whether the acquisition now offered was likely to answer well as a show-pupil. She would have instantly marked her look, dress, &c., and inferred her value from these indicia. In those anxious commencing times, however, Miss Wilcox could scarce afford herself the luxury of such appreciation: a new pupil represented 40l. a year, independently of masters’ terms—and 40l. a year was a sum Miss Wilcox needed and was glad to secure; besides, the fine carriage, the fine gentleman, and the fine name gave gratifying assurance, enough and to spare, of eligibility in the proffered connection. It was admitted, then, that there were vacancies in Fuchsia Lodge; that Miss Fitzgibbon could be received at once; that she was to learn all that the school prospectus proposed to teach; to be liable to every extra; in short, to be as expensive, and consequently as profitable a pupil, as any directress’s heart could wish. All this was arranged as upon velvet, smoothly and liberally. Mr. Fitzgibbon showed in the transaction none of the hardness of the bargain-making man of business, and as little of the penurious anxiety of the straitened professional man. Miss Wilcox felt him to be “quite the gentleman.” Everything disposed her to be partially inclined towards the little girl whom he, on taking leave, formally committed to her guardianship; and as if no circumstance should be wanting to complete her happy impression, the address left written on a card served to fill up the measure of Miss Wilcox’s satisfaction—Conway Fitzgibbon, Esq., May Park, Midland County. That very day three decrees were passed in the new-comer’s favour:—

1st. That she was to be Miss Wilcox’s bed-fellow.

2nd. To sit next her at table.

3rd. To walk out with her.

In a few days it became evident that a fourth secret clause had been added to these, viz. that Miss Fitzgibbon was to be favoured, petted, and screened on all possible occasions.

An ill-conditioned pupil, who before coming to Fuchsia Lodge had passed a year under the care of certain old-fashioned Misses Sterling, of Hartwood, and from them had picked up unpractical notions of justice, took it upon her to utter an opinion on this system of favouritism.

“The Misses Sterling,” she injudiciously said, “never distinguished any girl because she was richer or better dressed than the rest. They would have scorned to do so. They always rewarded girls according as they behaved well to their school-fellows and minded their lessons, not according to the number of their silk dresses, and fine laces and feathers.”

For it must not be forgotten that Miss Fitzgibbon’s trunks, when opened, disclosed a splendid wardrobe; so fine were the various articles of apparel,[490] indeed, that instead of assigning for their accommodation the painted deal drawers of the school bedroom, Miss Wilcox had them arranged in a mahogany bureau in her own room. With her own hands, too, she would on Sundays array the little favourite in her quilted silk pelisse, her hat and feathers, her ermine boa, and little French boots and gloves. And very self-complacent she felt when she led the young heiress (a letter from Mr. Fitzgibbon, received since his first visit, had communicated the additional particulars that his daughter was his only child, and would be the inheritress of his estates, including May Park, Midland County)—when she led her, I say, into the church, and seated her stately by her side at the top of the gallery-pew. Unbiassed observers might, indeed, have wondered what there was to be proud of, and puzzled their heads to detect the special merits of this little woman in silk—for, to speak truth, Miss Fitzgibbon was far from being the beauty of the school: there were two or three blooming little faces amongst her companions lovelier than hers. Had she been a poor child, Miss Wilcox herself would not have liked her physiognomy at all: rather, indeed, would it have repelled than attracted her; and, moreover—though Miss Wilcox hardly confessed the circumstance to herself, but, on the contrary, strove hard not to be conscious of it—there were moments when she became sensible of a certain strange weariness in continuing her system of partiality. It hardly came natural to her to show this special distinction in this particular instance. An undefined wonder would smite her sometimes that she did not take more real satisfaction in flattering and caressing this embryo heiress—that she did not like better to have her always at her side, under her special charge. On principle Miss Wilcox continued the plan she had begun. On principle, for she argued with herself: This is the most aristocratic and richest of my pupils; she brings me the most credit and the most profit: therefore, I ought in justice to show her a special indulgence; which she did—but with a gradually increasing peculiarity of feeling.

Certainly, the undue favours showered on little Miss Fitzgibbon brought their object no real benefit. Unfitted for the character of playfellow by her position of favourite, her fellow-pupils rejected her company as decidedly as they dared. Active rejection was not long necessary; it was soon seen that passive avoidance would suffice; the pet was not social. No: even Miss Wilcox never thought her social. When she sent for her to show her fine clothes in the drawing-room when there was company, and especially when she had her into her parlour of an evening to be her own companion, Miss Wilcox used to feel curiously perplexed. She would try to talk affably to the young heiress, to draw her out, to amuse her. To herself the governess could render no reason why her efforts soon flagged; but this was invariably the case. However, Miss Wilcox was a woman of courage; and be the protégée what she might, the patroness did not fail to continue on principle her system of preference.

A favourite has no friends; and the observation of a gentleman, who about this time called at the Lodge and chanced to see Miss Fitzgibbon,[491] was, “That child looks consummately unhappy:” he was watching Miss Fitzgibbon, as she walked, by herself, fine and solitary, while her school-fellows were merrily playing.

“Who is the miserable little wight?” he asked.

He was told her name and dignity.

“Wretched little soul!” he repeated; and he watched her pace down the walk and back again; marching upright, her hands in her ermine muff, her fine pelisse showing a gay sheen to the winter’s sun, her large Leghorn hat shading such a face as fortunately had not its parallel on the premises.

“Wretched little soul!” reiterated this gentleman. He opened the drawing-room window, watched the bearer of the muff till he caught her eye, and then summoned her with his finger. She came; he stooped his head down to her; she lifted her face up to him.

“Don’t you play, little girl?”

“No, sir.”

“No! why not? Do you think yourself better than other children?”

No answer.

“Is it because people tell you you are rich, you won’t play?”

The young lady was gone. He stretched his hand to arrest her, but she wheeled beyond his reach, and ran quickly out of sight.

“An only child,” pleaded Miss Wilcox; “possibly spoiled by her papa, you know; we must excuse a little pettishness.”

“Humph! I am afraid there is not a little to excuse.”

CHAPTER II.

Mr. Ellin—the gentleman mentioned in the last chapter—was a man who went where he liked, and being a gossiping, leisurely person, he liked to go almost anywhere. He could not be rich, he lived so quietly; and yet he must have had some money, for, without apparent profession, he continued to keep a house and a servant. He always spoke of himself as having once been a worker; but if so, that could not have been very long since, for he still looked far from old. Sometimes of an evening, under a little social conversational excitement, he would look quite young; but he was changeable in mood, and complexion, and expression, and had chamelion eyes, sometimes blue and merry, sometimes grey and dark, and anon green and gleaming. On the whole he might be called a fair man, of average height, rather thin and rather wiry. He had not resided more than two years in the present neighbourhood; his antecedents were unknown there; but as the Rector, a man of good family and standing, and of undoubted scrupulousness in the choice of acquaintance, had introduced him, he found everywhere a prompt reception, of which nothing in his conduct had yet seemed to prove him unworthy. Some people, indeed, dubbed him “a character,” and fancied him “eccentric;” but others could not see the appropriateness of the epithets. He always seemed to them very harmless and quiet, not always perhaps so perfectly[492] unreserved and comprehensible as might be wished. He had a discomposing expression in his eye; and sometimes in conversation an ambiguous diction; but still they believed he meant no harm.

Mr. Ellin often called on the Misses Wilcox; he sometimes took tea with them; he appeared to like tea and muffins, and not to dislike the kind of conversation which usually accompanies that refreshment; he was said to be a good shot, a good angler.—He proved himself an excellent gossip—he liked gossip well. On the whole he liked women’s society, and did not seem to be particular in requiring difficult accomplishments or rare endowments in his female acquaintance. The Misses Wilcox, for instance, were not much less shallow than the china saucer which held their teacups; yet Mr. Ellin got on perfectly well with them, and had apparently great pleasure in hearing them discuss all the details of their school. He knew the names of all their young ladies too, and would shake hands with them if he met them walking out; he knew their examination days and gala days, and more than once accompanied Mr. Cecil, the curate, when he went to examine in ecclesiastical history.

This ceremony took place weekly, on Wednesday afternoons, after which Mr. Cecil sometimes stayed to tea, and usually found two or three lady parishioners invited to meet him. Mr. Ellin was also pretty sure to be there. Rumour gave one of the Misses Wilcox in anticipated wedlock to the curate, and furnished his friend with a second in the same tender relation; so that it is to be conjectured they made a social, pleasant party under such interesting circumstances. Their evenings rarely passed without Miss Fitzgibbon being introduced—all worked muslin and streaming sash and elaborated ringlets; others of the pupils would also be called in, perhaps to sing, to show off a little at the piano, or sometimes to repeat poetry. Miss Wilcox conscientiously cultivated display in her young ladies, thinking she thus fulfilled a duty to herself and to them, at once spreading her own fame and giving the children self-possessed manners.

It was curious to note how, on these occasions, good, genuine natural qualities still vindicated their superiority to counterfeit, artificial advantages. While “dear Miss Fitzgibbon,” dressed up and flattered as she was, could only sidle round the circle with the crestfallen air which seemed natural to her, just giving her hand to the guests, then almost snatching it away, and sneaking in unmannerly haste to the place allotted to her at Miss Wilcox’s side, which place she filled like a piece of furniture, neither smiling nor speaking the evening through—while such was her deportment, certain of her companions, as Mary Franks, Jessy Newton, &c., handsome, open-countenanced little damsels—fearless because harmless—would enter with a smile of salutation and a blush of pleasure, make their pretty reverence at the drawing-room door, stretch a friendly little hand to such visitors as they knew, and sit down to the piano to play their well-practised duet with an innocent, obliging readiness which won all hearts.

There was a girl called Diana—the girl alluded to before as having once[493] been Miss Sterling’s pupil—a daring, brave girl, much loved and a little feared by her comrades. She had good faculties, both physical and mental—was clever, honest, and dauntless. In the schoolroom she set her young brow like a rock against Miss Fitzgibbon’s pretensions; she found also heart and spirit to withstand them in the drawing-room. One evening, when the curate had been summoned away by some piece of duty directly after tea, and there was no stranger present but Mr. Ellin, Diana had been called in to play a long, difficult piece of music which she could execute like a master. She was still in the midst of her performance, when—Mr. Ellin having for the first time, perhaps, recognized the existence of the heiress by asking if she was cold—Miss Wilcox took the opportunity of launching into a strain of commendation on Miss Fitzgibbon’s inanimate behaviour, terming it lady-like, modest, and exemplary. Whether Miss Wilcox’s constrained tone betrayed how far she was from really feeling the approbation she expressed, how entirely she spoke from a sense of duty, and not because she felt it possible to be in any degree charmed by the personage she praised—or whether Diana, who was by nature hasty, had a sudden fit of irritability—is not quite certain, but she turned on her music-stool:—

“Ma’am,” said she to Miss Wilcox, “that girl does not deserve so much praise. Her behaviour is not at all exemplary. In the schoolroom she is insolently distant. For my part I denounce her airs; there is not one of us but is as good or better than she, though we may not be as rich.”

And Diana shut up the piano, took her music-book under her arm, curtsied, and vanished.

Strange to relate, Miss Wilcox said not a word at the time; nor was Diana subsequently reprimanded for this outbreak. Miss Fitzgibbon had now been three months in the school, and probably the governess had had leisure to wear out her early raptures of partiality.

Indeed, as time advanced, this evil often seemed likely to right itself; again and again it seemed that Miss Fitzgibbon was about to fall to her proper level, but then, somewhat provokingly to the lovers of reason and justice, some little incident would occur to invest her insignificance with artificial interest. Once it was the arrival of a great basket of hothouse fruit—melons, grapes, and pines—as a present to Miss Wilcox in Miss Fitzgibbon’s name. Whether it was that a share of these luscious productions was imparted too freely to the nominal donor, or whether she had had a surfeit of cake on Miss Mabel Wilcox’s birthday, it so befel, that in some disturbed state of the digestive organs Miss Fitzgibbon took to sleep-walking. She one night terrified the school into a panic by passing through the bedrooms, all white in her night-dress, moaning and holding out her hands as she went.

Dr. Percy was then sent for; his medicines, probably, did not suit the case; for within a fortnight after the somnambulistic feat, Miss Wilcox going upstairs in the dark, trod on something which she thought was the[494] cat, and on calling for a light, found her darling Matilda Fitzgibbon curled round on the landing, blue, cold, and stiff, without any light in her half-open eyes, or any colour in her lips, or movement in her limbs. She was not soon roused from this fit; her senses seemed half scattered; and Miss Wilcox had now an undeniable excuse for keeping her all day on the drawing-room sofa, and making more of her than ever.

There comes a day of reckoning both for petted heiresses and partial governesses.

One clear winter morning, as Mr. Ellin was seated at breakfast, enjoying his bachelor’s easy chair and damp, fresh London newspaper, a note was brought to him marked “private,” and “in haste.” The last injunction was vain, for William Ellin did nothing in haste—he had no haste in him; he wondered anybody should be so foolish as to hurry; life was short enough without it. He looked at the little note—three-cornered, scented, and feminine. He knew the handwriting; it came from the very lady Rumour had so often assigned him as his own. The bachelor took out a morocco case, selected from a variety of little instruments a pair of tiny scissors, cut round the seal, and read:—“Miss Wilcox’s compliments to Mr. Ellin, and she should be truly glad to see him for a few minutes, if at leisure. Miss W. requires a little advice. She will reserve explanations till she sees Mr. E.”

Mr. Ellin very quietly finished his breakfast; then, as it was a very fine December day—hoar and crisp, but serene, and not bitter—he carefully prepared himself for the cold, took his cane, and set out. He liked the walk; the air was still; the sun not wholly ineffectual; the path firm, and but lightly powdered with snow. He made his journey as long as he could by going round through many fields, and through winding, unfrequented lanes. When there was a tree in the way conveniently placed for support, he would sometimes stop, lean his back against the trunk, fold his arms, and muse. If Rumour could have seen him, she would have affirmed that he was thinking about Miss Wilcox; perhaps when he arrives at the Lodge his demeanour will inform us whether such an idea be warranted.

At last he stands at the door and rings the bell; he is admitted, and shown into the parlour—a smaller and a more private room than the drawing-room. Miss Wilcox occupies it; she is seated at her writing-table; she rises—not without air and grace—to receive her visitor. This air and grace she learnt in France; for she was in a Parisian school for six months, and learnt there a little French, and a stock of gestures and courtesies. No: it is certainly not impossible that Mr. Ellin may admire Miss Wilcox. She is not without prettiness, any more than are her sisters; and she and they are one and all smart and showy. Bright stone-blue is a colour they like in dress; a crimson bow rarely fails to be pinned on somewhere to give contrast; positive colours generally—grass-greens, red violets, deep yellows—are in favour with them; all harmonies are at a discount. Many people would think Miss Wilcox, standing there[495] in her blue merino dress and pomegranate ribbon, a very agreeable woman. She has regular features; the nose is a little sharp, the lips a little thin, good complexion, light red hair. She is very business-like, very practical; she never in her life knew a refinement of feeling or of thought; she is entirely limited, respectable, and self-satisfied. She has a cool, prominent eye; sharp and shallow pupil, unshrinking and inexpansive; pale irid; light eyelashes, light brow. Miss Wilcox is a very proper and decorous person; but she could not be delicate or modest, because she is naturally destitute of sensitiveness. Her voice, when she speaks, has no vibration; her face no expression; her manner no emotion. Blush or tremor she never knew.

“What can I do for you, Miss Wilcox?” says Mr. Ellin, approaching the writing-table, and taking a chair beside it.

“Perhaps you can advise me,” was the answer; “or perhaps you can give me some information. I feel so thoroughly puzzled, and really fear all is not right.”

“Where? and how?”

“I will have redress if it be possible,” pursued the lady; “but how to set about obtaining it! Draw to the fire, Mr. Ellin; it is a cold day.”

They both drew to the fire. She continued:—

“You know the Christmas holidays are near?”

He nodded.

“Well, about a fortnight since, I wrote, as is customary, to the friends of my pupils, notifying the day when we break up, and requesting that, if it was desired that any girl should stay the vacation, intimation should be sent accordingly. Satisfactory and prompt answers came to all the notes except one—that addressed to Conway Fitzgibbon, Esquire, May Park, Midland County—Matilda Fitzgibbon’s father, you know.”

“What? won’t he let her go home?”

“Let her go home, my dear sir! you shall hear. Two weeks elapsed, during which I daily expected an answer; none came. I felt annoyed at the delay, as I had particularly requested a speedy reply. This very morning I had made up my mind to write again, when—what do you think the post brought me?”

“I should like to know.”

“My own letter—actually my own—returned from the post-office, with an intimation—such an intimation!—but read for yourself.”

She handed to Mr. Ellin an envelope; he took from it the returned note and a paper—the paper bore a hastily-scrawled line or two. It said, in brief terms, that there was no such place in Midland County as May Park, and that no such person had ever been heard of there as Conway Fitzgibbon, Esquire.

On reading this, Mr. Ellin slightly opened his eyes.

“I hardly thought it was so bad as this,” said he.

“What? you did think it was bad then? You suspected that something was wrong?”

[496]

“Really! I scarcely knew what I thought or suspected. How very odd, no such place as May Park! The grand mansion, the grounds, the oaks, the deer, vanished clean away. And then Fitzgibbon himself! But you saw Fitzgibbon—he came in his carriage?”

“In his carriage!” echoed Miss Wilcox; “a most stylish equipage, and himself a most distinguished person. Do you think, after all, there is some mistake?”

“Certainly, a mistake; but when it is rectified I don’t think Fitzgibbon or May Park will be forthcoming. Shall I run down to Midland County and look after these two precious objects?”

“Oh! would you be so good, Mr. Ellin? I knew you would be so kind; personal inquiry, you know—there’s nothing like it.”

“Nothing at all. Meantime, what shall you do with the child—the pseudo-heiress, if pseudo she be? Shall you correct her—let her know her place?”

“I think,” responded Miss Wilcox, reflectively—“I think not exactly as yet; my plan is to do nothing in a hurry; we will inquire first. If after all she should turn out to be connected as was at first supposed, one had better not do anything which one might afterwards regret. No; I shall make no difference with her till I hear from you again.”

“Very good. As you please,” said Mr. Ellin, with that coolness which made him so convenient a counsellor in Miss Wilcox’s opinion. In his dry laconism she found the response suited to her outer worldliness. She thought he said enough if he did not oppose her. The comment he stinted so avariciously she did not want.

Mr. Ellin “ran down,” as he said, to Midland County. It was an errand that seemed to suit him; for he had curious predilections as well as peculiar methods of his own. Any secret quest was to his taste; perhaps there was something of the amateur detective in him. He could conduct an inquiry and draw no attention. His quiet face never looked inquisitive, nor did his sleepless eye betray vigilance.

He was away about a week. The day after his return, he appeared in Miss Wilcox’s presence as cool as if he had seen her but yesterday. Confronting her with that fathomless face he liked to show her, he first told her he had done nothing.

Let Mr. Ellin be as enigmatical as he would, he never puzzled Miss Wilcox. She never saw enigma in the man. Some people feared, because they did not understand, him; to her it had not yet occurred to begin to spell his nature or analyze his character. If she had an impression about him, it was, that he was an idle but obliging man, not aggressive, of few words, but often convenient. Whether he were clever and deep, or deficient and shallow, close or open, odd or ordinary, she saw no practical end to be answered by inquiry, and therefore did not inquire.

“Why had he done nothing?” she now asked.

“Chiefly because there was nothing to do.”

“Then he could give her no information?”

[497]

“Not much: only this, indeed—Conway Fitzgibbon was a man of straw; May Park a house of cards. There was no vestige of such man or mansion in Midland County, or in any other shire in England. Tradition herself had nothing to say about either the name or the place. The Oracle of old deeds and registers, when consulted, had not responded.

“Who can he be, then, that came here, and who is this child?”

“That’s just what I can’t tell you:—an incapacity which makes me say I have done nothing.”

“And how am I to get paid?”

“Can’t tell you that either.”

“A quarter’s board and education owing, and masters’ terms besides,” pursued Miss Wilcox. “How infamous! I can’t afford the loss.”

“And if we were only in the good old times,” said Mr. Ellin, “where we ought to be, you might just send Miss Matilda out to the plantations in Virginia, sell her for what she is worth, and pay yourself.”

“Matilda, indeed, and Fitzgibbon! A little impostor! I wonder what her real name is?”

“Betty Hodge? Poll Smith? Hannah Jones?” suggested Mr. Ellin.

“Now,” cried Miss Wilcox, “give me credit for sagacity! It’s very odd, but try as I would—and I made every effort—I never could really like that child. She has had every indulgence in this house; and I am sure I made great sacrifice of feeling to principle in showing her much attention; for I could not make any one believe the degree of antipathy I have all along felt towards her.”

“Yes. I can believe it. I saw it.”

“Did you? Well—it proves that my discernment is rarely at fault. Her game is up now, however; and time it was. I have said nothing to her yet; but now—”

“Have her in whilst I am here,” said Mr. Ellin. “Has she known of this business? Is she in the secret? Is she herself an accomplice, or a mere tool? Have her in.”

Miss Wilcox rang the bell, demanded Matilda Fitzgibbon, and the false heiress soon appeared. She came in her ringlets, her sash, and her furbelowed dress adornments—alas! no longer acceptable.

“Stand there!” said Miss Wilcox, sternly, checking her as she approached the hearth. “Stand there on the farther side of the table. I have a few questions to put to you, and your business will be to answer them. And mind—let us have the truth. We will not endure lies.”

Ever since Miss Fitzgibbon had been found in the fit, her face had retained a peculiar paleness and her eyes a dark orbit. When thus addressed, she began to shake and blanch like conscious guilt personified.

“Who are you?” demanded Miss Wilcox. “What do you know about yourself?”

A sort of half-interjection escaped the girl’s lips; it was a sound expressing partly fear, and partly the shock the nerves feel when an evil, very long expected, at last and suddenly arrives.

[498]

“Keep yourself still, and reply, if you please,” said Miss Wilcox, whom nobody should blame for lacking pity, because nature had not made her compassionate. “What is your name? We know you have no right to that of Matilda Fitzgibbon.”

She gave no answer.

“I do insist upon a reply. Speak you shall, sooner or later. So you had better do it at once.”

This inquisition had evidently a very strong effect upon the subject of it. She stood as if palsied, trying to speak, but apparently not competent to articulate.

Miss Wilcox did not fly into a passion, but she grew very stern and urgent; spoke a little loud; and there was a dry clamour in her raised voice which seemed to beat upon the ear and bewilder the brain. Her interest had been injured—her pocket wounded—she was vindicating her rights—and she had no eye to see, and no nerve to feel, but for the point in hand. Mr. Ellin appeared to consider himself strictly a looker-on; he stood on the hearth very quiet.

At last the culprit spoke. A low voice escaped her lips. “Oh, my head!” she cried, lifting her hands to her forehead. She staggered, but caught the door and did not fall. Some accusers might have been startled by such a cry—even silenced; not so Miss Wilcox. She was neither cruel nor violent; but she was coarse, because insensible. Having just drawn breath, she went on, harsh as ever.

Mr. Ellin, leaving the hearth, deliberately paced up the room as if he were tired of standing still, and would walk a little for a change. In returning and passing near the door and the criminal, a faint breath seemed to seek his ear, whispering his name—

“Oh, Mr. Ellin!”

The child dropped as she spoke. A curious voice—not like Mr. Ellin’s, though it came from his lips—asked Miss Wilcox to cease speaking, and say no more. He gathered from the floor what had fallen on it. She seemed overcome, but not unconscious. Resting beside Mr. Ellin, in a few minutes she again drew breath. She raised her eyes to him.

“Come, my little one; have no fear,” said he.

Reposing her head against him, she gradually became reassured. It did not cost him another word to bring her round; even that strong trembling was calmed by the mere effects of his protection. He told Miss Wilcox, with remarkable tranquillity, but still with a certain decision, that the little girl must be put to bed. He carried her upstairs, and saw her laid there himself. Returning to Miss Wilcox, he said:

“Say no more to her. Beware, or you will do more mischief than you think or wish. That kind of nature is very different from yours. It is not possible that you should like it; but let it alone. We will talk more on the subject to-morrow. Let me question her.”

Most people take an interest in any authentic account of the mode in which important surgical operations are performed, whenever opportunity is offered of gratifying their very natural curiosity. Such opportunities are however somewhat rare. The columns of the newspaper press not unfrequently supply brief, and sometimes curiously incorrect, particulars of the injuries resulting from “an appalling accident” of the night previous, to some unfortunate workman who has fallen from a scaffold, or been mutilated by a railway train. Scraps of hearsay are eagerly gathered up by the penny-a-liner, who, like the fireman’s dog of notorious ubiquity, is always first on the spot after the occurrence of a catastrophe; and a remarkable combination of technical phrases culled from the brief remarks of the surgeon in attendance, and from the slender stock which has accumulated in the reporter’s brain from previous experiences, makes its appearance in to-morrow’s daily journals, and is certain to be reproduced in all the weeklies of Saturday next. Then it is the great public learns with profound horror that some poor victim’s shoulder-joint has been dislocated in three places, that the carotid artery was pronounced (surgeons are invariably said to “pronounce”) to be fractured, or that there was great contusion and ecchymosis (always a trying word for the compositor) about the spine, and that amputation would probably be necessary.

But sometimes it happens that an over-prying public, with a curiosity not much in this instance to be commended, peeps within the pages of the medical press, hoping to unravel some of the mysteries of professional craft. Ten to one that it gets nothing but error for its pains. The technicalities which medical men must necessarily employ when writing for each other, are instructive only to the initiated, and are pregnant with blunders for the simple reader. And few people make more mistakes than our medical amateur who, on the strength of a weekly perusal of The Lancet at his club, sets up as an authority in the social circle on questions of physiology and physic.

Occasionally, moreover, after dinner, when the ladies have left the table, and the men alone remain to empty decanters and derange a dessert, one has the gratification of meeting some very young gentleman, who, the week before last, presented his proud father with the diploma of “the college,” elegantly framed and glazed, in return for an education which has cost five years and a thousand pounds, and who astonishes his elderly associates with a highly-tinted sketch of some operative achievement, in which perchance he assisted at the hospital. As he surveys the auditory, silent and absorbed by his heart-stirring description, and complacently witnesses the admiration which such evidence of his own familiarity with harrowing scenes, and of his apparent absence of emotion, elicits, it is to be feared that its influence, associated with that of the port, a beverage appreciated[500] by our young friend, if one may judge by the quantity he imbibes, tends to render the information obtained, as one may say almost at first hand, not so absolutely trustworthy as a man of fact is accustomed to desire.

After a due survey then of the varied sources from which most people obtain information respecting the topics in question, and after some observation of the character and quality of the knowledge so acquired, we have formed the deliberate conclusion that they possess very erroneous, and very inadequate notions about the nature of a surgical operation. No doubt all admire the sang-froid and skill, possession of which is necessary to make a good surgical operator—qualities, by the way, which are perhaps more frequently developed by training, than found already existing as a natural inheritance. But it is germane to our purpose to remember that everybody has a direct practical concern in the existence of an available supply of the necessary talent to meet a certain demand on the part of the body politic, for no one knows how soon his own personal necessities may not be such as to give him the strongest possible interest in its exercise: a demand that is absolutely inevitable;—for be assured that, without any wish to alarm you, gentle reader, Mr Neison will, if requested to make the calculation, inform us at once what the numerical chances are that your own well-proportioned nether limb will, or will not, fall before the surgeon’s knife, or that that undoubtedly hard and well-developed cranium may not yet be scientifically explored by “trepan” or “trephine.” He will estimate with unerring certainty the probability (to nine places of decimals, if you demand it) that your own fair person may become the subject of some unpleasing excrescence; and also what the chances are that you must seek the surgeon’s aid to remove it. While Mr. Buckle will stoutly maintain, and you will find it hard to gainsay him, that, given the present conditions of existence, a certain ascertainable number of tumours, broken legs, and natural-born deformities will regularly make their appearance every year among the human family. And he will probably add, that it is perfectly within the province of possibility to calculate, if we had all the required data, the exact number of individuals who have the requisite courage to submit to operation; as of those who will not have heart to do so, and who will inevitably die without benefit of surgery; together with the exact per-centage to the population of those who will, and who will not, put faith in the blessed boon of chloroform.

It is a blessed boon; and in olden times the possessor of such a secret would have been the most potent wizard of which the earth has yet heard tell. What miracles might not have been performed by it! What dogmas might not have been made divine and true by its influence! Happy was it that those great powers, the magic of chemical and electrical discovery, have been brought to light in a time when they can be used mainly to enlighten and bless, and not to darken and oppress mankind!

But that word chloroform is happily significant that it is to no scene of suffering that we would introduce our readers. There is no need to shrink,[501] or to question the taste which exhibits the details of a surgical operation to the vulgar eye. It is not designed, even in this stirring time, after the fashion of ancient Rome, to deaden our sensibilities, or to accustom our youth to witness deeds of blood and violence without shrinking. No trace of suffering will be visible in the picture which shall pass before us. So great is the triumph which modern surgical art displays, so great the boon which it has conferred upon humanity! It is this which we propose to illustrate, by describing the single and simple process involved in cutting off a leg.

Permit us first, however, to cast a passing glance, by way of contrast, to the established and orthodox fashion of performing that operation some centuries ago. Bear with us but a moment, and in imagination hope that then, when painless surgery was unknown, no patient lacked support in his hour of trial (long hours then, in truth!) from that great and never-failing source which flows, unmeasured and unfathomable, for all humanity, alike in every age.

Until the last three or four hundred years, amputation of a limb was very rarely performed, except when, from injury or disease, its extremity had begun to mortify; and then, few surgeons ventured to make incisions in the sound portion, but limited themselves to an operation through the tissues which had already lost their vitality. This timidity was due to the fact that they were unacquainted with any effectual means of stopping the bleeding from the larger arteries divided by the knife. Certain and easy as is the control of such bleeding now, by the simple process of tying a piece of thread or silk round the extremity of the bleeding vessel (as we shall hereafter see), it was unknown, at all events as applicable to amputation, to any surgical writer from Hippocrates, 400 B.C., or from Celsus, who flourished in the first Christian century, to the fifteenth. Consequently, the numerous instances of injury and disease, in which life is now saved by a timely resort to amputation, were then always fatal. Hence, also, arose the various expedients which the more adventurous operators of the time resorted to, in order to stop fatal bleeding, with the effect only of increasing the patient’s torture, and with the attainment of no good result. Thus the incisions were performed with a red-hot knife, that the divided vessels, seared and charred by the horrible contact, might contract, or become plugged, and so be prevented from bleeding (Albucasis, 11th century). Effective for the instant, the force of the circulation quickly overpowered the slender obstruction, and fatal hæmorrhage, sooner or later, took place. Yet this plan continued more or less in vogue down to the discovery of the ligature in the 16th century, and was practised even later in Germany by the celebrated Hildanus (1641); although he subsequently adopted the new method. According to another fashion, the surgeon, after making a tedious division of the flesh down to the bone, with studied endeavour not to divide the arteries until the last moment, relied on applications of red-hot irons, or of some styptic fluid, usually a powerful acid or astringent, to arrest the bleeding. If these were not successful, a vessel of boiling[502] pitch was at hand, ready prepared, into which the bleeding stump was plunged. Between Scylla and Charybdis, the patient rarely escaped with life; either he died from loss of blood in a few hours, or less; or if the dreadful remedies succeeded, he survived a day or two, to die of fever or exhaustion. After an earlier method, that of Guido di Caulico (1363), a bandage of plaster was made to encircle the member so tightly that mortification attacked all the parts below, which then, after the lapse of months, dropped off, a horribly loathsome and offensive mass. Another surgeon, Botalli (1560), invented a machine to sever the limb in an instant by a single stroke; and it was not uncommon at this period to effect the same purpose by the hatchet, or by a powerful mallet and chisel.

It is to Ambrose Paré, the great French surgeon, who flourished in the 16th century, that we owe the application of the ligature (used long before in ordinary wounds) to the bleeding arteries in amputation. He discarded the use of the red-hot cautery, and of all the frightful adjuncts already described; and accomplished his purpose by carrying the thread round the vessel by means of a needle passed through the soft parts adjacent—a method of adjustment which, although still in use, is now employed only in exceptional instances. Richard Wiseman, sometimes styled the father of English surgery, who practised about the middle of the 17th century, is believed to have been the first to employ the ligature in our own country, and to relinquish the application of heated irons. At this era also, the circulation of the blood was discovered by the renowned Harvey, and the distinction between arteries and veins being thenceforth clearly understood, the value of the ligature was rendered more than ever obvious.

But enough of this: let us soothe our ruffled nerves by seeing how the thing is done to-day. We will take a quiet post of observation in the area of the operating theatre at one of our metropolitan hospitals, in this year of our Lord 1860. Notice is posted that amputation of the thigh will be performed at 2 o’clock P.M., and we occupy our seat ten minutes before the hour.

The area itself is small, of a horse-shoe form, and surrounded by seats rising on a steep incline one above another, to the number of eight or nine tiers. From 100 to 150 students occupy these, and pack pretty closely, especially on the lower rows, whence the best view is obtained. For an assemblage of youths between eighteen and twenty-five years, who have nothing to do but to wait, they are tolerably well-behaved and quiet. Three or four practical jokers, however, it is evident, are distributed among them, and so the time passes all the quicker for the rest. The clock has not long struck two, when the folding-doors open, and in walk two or three of the leading surgeons of the hospital, followed by a staff of dressers, and a few professional lookers-on; the latter being confined to seats reserved for them on the lowest and innermost tier. A small table, covered with instruments, occupies a place on one side of the area; water, sponges, towels, and lint, are placed on the opposite. The surgeon who is about to[503] operate, rapidly glances over the table, and sees that his instruments are all there, and in readiness. He requests a colleague to take charge of the tourniquet, and with a word deputes one assistant to “take the flaps,” another to hold the limb, a third to hand the instruments, and the last to take charge of the sponges. This done, and while the patient is inhaling chloroform in an adjoining apartment, under the care of a gentleman who makes that his special duty, the operator gives to the now hushed and listening auditory, a brief history of the circumstances which led to an incurable disease of the left knee-joint, and the reasons why he decides on the operation about to be performed. He has scarcely closed, when the unconscious patient is brought in by a couple of sturdy porters, and laid upon the operating table, a small, but strong and steady erection, four feet long by two feet wide, which stands in the centre of the area. The left being the doomed leg, the right is fastened by a bandage to one of the supports of the table, so as to be out of harm’s way; while the dresser, who has special charge of the case, is seated on a low stool at the foot of the table, and supports the left. The surgeon who assists, encircles the upper part of the thigh with the tourniquet, placing its pad over the femoral artery, the chief vessel which supplies the limb with blood, and prepares to screw up the instrument, thus to make sure that no considerable amount of the vital fluid can be lost. The operator, standing on the left side of the corresponding leg, and holding in his right hand a narrow, straight knife, of which the blade is at least ten inches long, and looks marvellously bright and sharp, directs his eye to him who gives the chloroform, and awaits the signal that the patient has become perfectly insensible. All is silence profound: every assistant stands in his place, which is carefully arranged so as not to intercept the view of those around.

The words “quite ready” are no sooner whispered, than the operator, grasping firmly with his left hand the flesh which forms the front part of the patient’s thigh, thrusts quietly and deliberately the sharp blade horizontally through the limb, from its outer to its inner side, so that the thigh is transfixed a little above its central axis, and in front of the bone. He next cuts directly downwards, in the plane of the limb, for about four inches, and then obliquely outwards, so as to form a flap, which is seized and turned upwards out of the way by the appointed assistant. A similar transfixion is again made, commencing at the same spot, but the knife is this time carried behind the bone; a similar incision follows, and another flap is formed and held away as before. Lastly, with a rapid circular sweep round the bone he divides all left uncut; and handing the knife to an assistant, who takes it, and gives a saw in return, the operator divides the bone with a few workmanlike strokes, and the limb is severed from the body. A rustling sound of general movement and deeper breathing is heard among the lookers-on, who have followed with straining and critical eyes every act which has contributed to the accomplishment of the task; and some one of the younger students is heard to whisper to his neighbour, “Five and thirty seconds: not bad, by Jove!”

[504]

The operator now seats himself on the stool just vacated by the dresser, who has carried away the leg, and seeks in the cut surfaces before him the end of the main artery on which to place a ligature. There is no flow of blood, only a little oozing, for the tourniquet holds life’s current hard and fast. Only five minutes’ uncontrolled flow of the current from that great artery now so perfectly compressed, and our patient’s career in this world would be closed for ever. How is it permanently held in check? and what have we to substitute now for the hissing, sparkling, and sputtering iron, and the boiling pitch? The operator takes hold of the cut end of the artery with a slender, delicately made pair of forceps, and draws it out a little, while an assistant passes round the end so drawn out a ligature of exceedingly fine whipcord, fine but strong, and carefully ties it there with double knot, and so effectually closes the vessel. A similar process is applied to perhaps six or seven other but smaller vessels, the tourniquet is removed, and no bleeding ensues. Altogether the patient has lost little more than half-a-pint of blood! The flaps are placed in apposition, the bone is well covered by them, a few stitches are put through their edges, some cool wet lint is applied all around the stump, and the patient, slumbering peacefully, is carried off to a comfortable bed ready prepared in some adjacent ward. Half an hour hence that patient will regain consciousness, and probably the first observation he makes will be, “I am quite ready for the operation, when is it going to begin?” And it takes no little repetition of the assurance that all is over to make him realize the happy truth.

So it is that he who loses the limb knows less about the process than any one concerned; infinitely less, my gentle reader, than you who have shared with us the quiet corner, and have seen all without losing consciousness, or fainting. It was an early day in the medical session, and many new men were there; one at least was observed to become very—very pale, and then slowly disappear: no one knows how or where, for neither we in the area nor those elsewhere had leisure or care to inquire.

What might have happened to somebody else had he been witness before these blessed days of chloroform, can, in the nature of things, be only a matter for speculation. It may even be surmised by some theorist, and without hazarding a very improbable guess, that a similar catastrophe might, perhaps, under such aggravating circumstances, and at a greener age, have rendered utterly futile, on his part, any attempt to describe what modern skill and science now accomplish in cutting off the leg of a patient Under Chloroform.

On a windy, unpleasant day in 1746, a great mathematician and philosopher was exhibiting to a select company in the gardens of the Charterhouse his skill in shooting round a corner with a bent gun-barrel. If he had requested the editor of the Cornhill Magazine of the day to publish his experiments, it is probable that he would have been refused. Now, when every morning paper informs us at breakfast, in its best type, of how far off we may be killed, and the evening papers analyze the same with the commencement of a hot debate on the French Treaty, to give us a pleasing subject for our dreams, we think that perhaps our unprofessional readers may like to know the how and the why of these far-reaching organs of peace on earth and good-will among faithful allies.

Supposing, then, reader—for it is to such that this article is addressed—that you are wholly ignorant of the science of gunnery, and of its principal establisher, Benjamin Robins, and have, therefore, been laughing at him, the poor silly philosopher,—if you will read the following extract from his work on Gunnery, you will see that if he did a foolish thing, he certainly sometimes wrote a wise one:—“I shall, therefore, close this paper with predicting that whatever State shall thoroughly comprehend the nature and advantages of rifled-barrel pieces, and, having facilitated and completed their construction, shall introduce into their armies their general use, with a dexterity in the management of them, they will by this means acquire a superiority which will almost equal anything that has been done at any time by the particular excellence of any one kind of arms; and will, perhaps, fall but little short of the wonderful effects which histories relate to have been formerly produced by the first inventors of fire-arms.”

Now to our distinguished countryman, Mr. Benjamin Robins, is due the credit of having first pointed out the reasons why smooth bores—and smooth bore is now almost as great a term of reproach with us rifle volunteers as dog is with a Turk—were constantly, in fact, universally, in the habit of shooting round corners, and the experiment mentioned was only a means of bringing the fact more strikingly before the obtuse faculties of the Royal Society, whom we may imagine to have been intense admirers of brown-bess—also now a term of reproach in constant use. Mr. Robins did more; he pointed out the advantage of elongated rifle bullets; showed us how to determine—and partially, as far as his limited means permitted, himself determined—the enormous resistance of the atmosphere to the motion of projectiles; in fact, smoothed the way for all our present discoveries; and, treason though it be to say so, left the science of gunnery much as we have it now. Though principally from increased mechanical powers of construction, better material and improved machinery, we have advanced considerably in the Art or practice of destruction.

[506]

Let us endeavour, first, to understand something of the movement of gun-shots in their simplest form. A gun-barrel, consisting of a bar of metal thicker at one end (where it has to withstand the first shock of the gunpowder) than at the other, is bored out throughout its length into a smooth hollow cylinder; this cylinder is closed at one end by the breech, which has a small opening in it, through which the charge is ignited. A charge of powder is placed in the closed end, and on the top of this the ball, say, a spherical one, such as our ancestors in their simplicity considered the best. The powder being ignited, rapidly, though not instantaneously, becomes converted into gas, and the permanent gases generated will, at the temperature estimated to be produced by the combustion (3,000° Fahr.), occupy a volume under the pressure of the atmosphere alone of over 2,000 times that of the bulk of the powder. This point, as well as the elasticity of the gases, both of the permanent ones and of the vapour of water or steam from the moisture in the powder, has never been accurately determined,[15] and various estimates have been formed; but if we take Dr. Hutton’s—a rather low one, viz.—that the first force of fired gunpowder was equal to 2,000 atmospheres (30,000 lbs. on the square inch), and that, as Mr. Robins computed, the velocity of expansion was about 7,000 feet per second, we shall have some idea of the enormous force which is exerted in the direction of the bullet to move it, of the breech of the gun to make it kick, and of the sides of the barrel to burst it. Notwithstanding Mr. Robins’ advice, we certainly never, till very lately, made the most of the power of committing homicide supplied by this powerful agent; but we used it in the most wasteful and vicious manner. All improvements—and many were suggested at different times to remedy defects, which he principally pointed out, like the inventions of printing and of gunpowder itself—lay fallow for long before they were taken up. They were premature. If our fathers had killed men clumsily, why should we not do the same? No one cared much, except the professionals, whether it required 100 or 1,000 bullets, on an average, to kill a man at 100 yards’ distance. Now we take more interest in such amusements; every one’s attention is turned to the best means of thinning his fellow-creatures; and we are not at all content with the glorious uncertainty which formerly prevailed when every bullet found its own billet: we like to kill our particular man, not his next neighbour, or one thirty yards off.

In order to see why we are so much more certain with our Whitworth, or Enfield, or Armstrong, of hitting the man we aim at, let us first examine how a bullet flies; and then by understanding how (badly) our fathers applied the force we have described to make it fly, we shall be able to appreciate how well we do it ourselves.

In consequence of the sudden generation of this enormous quantity of gas, then, in the confined space of the barrel, the bullet is projected into[507] the air, and if it were not acted on by any other force, would proceed for ever in the line in which it started; gravity, however, at once asserts its sway, and keeps pulling it down towards the earth. These two forces together would make it describe a curve, known as the parabola. There is, however, another retarding influence, the air; and though Galileo, and Newton in particular, pointed out the great effect it would have, several philosophers, in fact the majority, still believed that a parabola was the curve described by the path of a shot. It remained for Mr. Robins to establish this point and to prove the great resistance the air offered: to this we shall have to recur again presently. Let us first see how a shot is projected. If the bullet fitted the bore of the gun perfectly, the whole force in that direction would be exerted on it; but in order that the gun might be more easily loaded—and this was more especially the case with cannon—the bullet was made somewhat smaller than the bore or interior cylinder; a space was therefore left between the two, termed windage, and through this windage a great deal of gas rushed out, and was wasted; but the bad effect did not stop there: rushing over the top of the bullet, as it rested on the bottom of the bore, it pressed it down hard—hard enough in guns of soft metal, as brass, after a few rounds to make a very perceptible dint—and forcing it along at the same time made it rebound first against one side and then the other of the bore, and hence the direction in which it left the bore was not the axis or central line of the cylinder, but varied according to the side it struck last. This was one cause of inaccuracy, and could, of course, be obviated to a great extent, though at the cost of difficulty in loading, by making the bullet fit tight; but another and more important cause of deflection was the various rotatory or spinning motions the bullet received from friction against the sides of the bore, and also from its often not being a homogeneous sphere; that is, the density of the metal not being the same throughout, the centre of gravity did not coincide with the centre of the sphere as it should have done.

No. 1.

Looking down upon the spinning bullet.

Let us try to understand the effect of this rotation. A bullet in moving rapidly through the air, separates it; and if its velocity is at all greater than the velocity with which the air can refill the space from which it has been cleared behind it, it must create a more or less complete vacuum. Now when the barometer stands at thirty inches, air will rush into a vacuum at the rate of 1,344 feet per second; and if the bullet is moving at a greater velocity than this, there will be a total vacuum behind it. But it can be easily understood that even when moving with a less velocity, there will be a greater density of air before than behind. If the bullet be rotating on a vertical axis—that is, spinning like a top, point downwards, as in the diagram No. 1, from left to right, in the direction indicated by the crooked arrow, at the same time that[508] it is moving forward (sideways it would be in the top) as indicated by the straight arrow,—it is evident that the left half rotates with the general motion of translation of the bullet, and the right half backwards against this motion, and therefore that on the left side it is moving quicker relatively to the air through which it is passing than on the right side. And its rough surface preventing the air escaping round it on that side, while it, as it were, assists it on the other side, the air becomes denser where shown by the dark lines, and tends to deflect the bullet in the other direction, that is, in the direction in which the anterior or front surface is moving.[16]

No. 2.

Looking at the bullet sideways.

If the bullet rotate on a horizontal axis at right angles to the direction of its motion of translation (that is, like a top thrown spinning with its point sideways, when it would strike the object thrown at with its side), shown in the diagram No. 2; if the anterior portion be moving, as shown by the arrow, from above downwards, it is evident, for the same reasons, that the air will become denser, as shown, and assist the action of gravity in bringing the ball to the ground—that is, decrease the range. A spherical bullet resting on the bottom of the bore of a gun would always have a greater tendency to rotate in this manner than in a contrary direction; for the friction against the bore would be augmented by the weight of the ball in striking against the bottom, and diminished by it when striking against the top.

Shot were constructed in 1851 to try the effect of rotation in the above-mentioned and in the opposite directions. They were made excentric, that is, lop-sided, by taking out a portion of the metal on one side, and replacing it either with a heavier or lighter body. The manner in which they would rotate was, therefore, known; for, not to use too scientific language, the light side moved first, and according to the relative positions of the heavy and light side when placed against the charge so the rotation took place. Thus, when the light side was resting against the bore of the gun, the rotation was exactly contrary to the direction shown in diagram No. 2; and a range of 5,566 yards was obtained from a 10-inch gun, being 916 yards farther than with a concentric shot from the same gun. The deflections to the right and left were proportionately large, according as the light side was placed to the left or right.

We need not specify further; this will be sufficient to show the reason why the smooth bore with a spherical bullet never made a straight long[509] shot, for it was not only that the bullet did not go in the direction in which it was aimed, but it did not even follow the direction in which it started. This was well shown by Mr. Robins in the experiment we commenced with. He bent the end of a gun barrel to the left, and aimed by the straight part. As would be naturally expected, the shot passed through the first tissue-paper screen 1½ inches to the left of the track of a bullet, which had been previously fired from a straight barrel in the same line with which the crooked barrel had been aimed, and 3 inches to the left on the second screen; but as he had predicted, and as the company could hardly have expected, on the wall which was behind, the bullet struck 14 inches to the right of the track, showing that though it had gone at first as directed by the bent portion of the barrel, yet as the bullet in being turned had rolled against the right-hand side of this portion of the barrel, it had a rotatory motion impressed upon it, by which the anterior portion moved from left to right, and the bullet, after moving away from, turned back and crossed the track of the other bullet again, or was incurvated to the right.

We now see why spherical bullets from a smooth bore, though they may fly almost perfectly accurately a short distance, cannot be depended on in the least for a long distance, as the bullet which might strike within 1 inch at 100 yards would not strike within 2 inches at 200 yards, and still less within 3 inches at 300 yards of the mark at which it was fired.

The cause of these deflections we have seen is almost wholly rotation or spin. The object of the rifle is to place this rotation under our control, and if the bullet must spin, to make it spin always in the same direction, and in the way which will suit our purpose best. With this object the interior of the cylindrical bore which we have been considering as smooth, is scored or indented with spiral grooves or furrows. As we are merely concerned with the principles, and not with the constructive details, we need only mention that the number of these grooves varies in different rifles from two to forty; that their shape and size, though dependent on certain conditions, is, we might almost say, a matter of fashion; and that Mr. Whitworth, in his almost perfect rifle, uses a hexagonal bore, and Mr. Lancaster makes a smooth oval-bored rifle; but that in all, the deviations from the circle of the interior cylinder do not pass straight from end to end of the barrel, but spirally, and constitute, in fact, a female screw. The bullet, fitting tight and entering the grooves, is constrained to rotate while being forced out of the barrel by the gunpowder, in the same manner that a screw is necessarily twisted while being drawn out of a hole or nut; and this rotation or spin being impressed upon it by the same force which projects it from the barrel, continues during the flight. This spin is different in direction from those we have been considering previously; it is like the spin of a top thrown point foremost, the axis of rotation coincident with the line of flight. While it remains in this position (coinciding with the line of flight) none of the deflecting effects[510] of the air we have mentioned can come into operation, as the resistance is equal on all sides; and not only that, but if there are any irregularities on the surface of the ball, as they are brought rapidly first on one side and then on the other of the point or pole of rotation, they can have no effect in deflecting it to one side more than to the other. Hence the accuracy, or straight shooting, of our modern gun, the rifle.

We have before mentioned that Robins pointed out the enormous effect of the resistance of the atmosphere to the passage of a shot; and “because,” as he says, “I am fully satisfied that the resistance of the air is almost the only source of the numerous difficulties which have hitherto embarrassed that science,” viz. gunnery, he considered it above all things necessary to determine its amount; for which purpose he invented the Ballistic Pendulum and Whirling Machine. His experiments were made principally with small bullets; but a more extended series of experiments was made by Dr. Hutton with the same machines, and on the Continent and in America by Major Mordecai, with a ballistic pendulum of improved construction. It appears from these that when a ball of two inches diameter is moving with a great velocity, it meets with a resistance of which the following examples will give an idea: at a velocity of 1,800 feet per second the resistance is 85½ lbs., and at a velocity of 2,000 feet, 102 lbs. If we wish to increase the range, then, we must overcome this resistance in some way. As the resistance is nearly proportionate to the surface, that is, twice as great on a surface of two square inches as on a surface of one square inch, we must do so by increasing the weight of the shot. For it is evident that if two shot of different weights start with the same velocity, and meet with the same resistance, the heavier one, having the greater momentum, will maintain its velocity the longest. Throw a cork and a stone of the same size with the same force—the cork will only go a few yards, while the stone will go perhaps ten times as far. In the smooth-bored cannon this could only be effected partially by increasing the size of the shot, when the surface exposed to the resistance of the air increased only as the square of the diameter, while the weight increased in a greater ratio, as the cube of the diameter. Hence the longer range and greater penetration of heavy guns. As, however, with a rotating body the tendency is always for the axis of rotation to remain parallel to its original direction—thus a top while spinning may move about the floor, but remains upright on its point, and does not fall till the spin is exhausted—we have with rifles a means by which we can keep a bullet always in the same direction. In order to comply with the condition, then, of exposing a small surface to the resistance of the air while the bullet’s weight is increased, we reject the spherical form, and make it a long cylinder; and to make it the more easily cut through the air, we terminate it with a conical point.

Thus compare Mr. Whitworth’s 3-pounder with the ordinary or old 3-pounder; the shot weigh the same, but the diameter of Mr. Whitworth’s 3-pounder shot is 1·5 or 1½ inches, while the diameter of the old[511] 3-pounder shot is 2·91 inches, or nearly three inches; and the surfaces they expose to the resistance of the air are 2·25, or 2¼ square inches, and 8·47 nearly, or nearly 8½ square inches; that is, Mr. Whitworth’s bullet, with the same weight to overcome it, meets with a resistance of a little more than a quarter that which the old bullet met with, and has the advantage of a sharp point to boot. Hence the enormous range attained,—9,688 yards.

The very same causes which make the fire of a rifle accurate, tend also to make it inaccurate, paradoxical as it may seem; but this inaccuracy being to a certain extent regular and known beforehand, is not of so much consequence, though it is a decided disadvantage. It may—not to be too mathematical—be explained thus:—The axis of rotation having, as we said, a tendency always to remain parallel to its original direction, when a rifle bullet or picket (the long projectile we have described) is fired at a high angle of elevation—that is, slanting upwards into the air, in order that before it fells it may reach a distant object,—it is evident from the diagram, that if the direction of the axis of rotation remains, as shown by the lines p p p, which represent the shot at different portions of the range parallel to the original direction in the gun, the bullet or picket will not always remain with its point only presented in the direction in which it is moving, but one side of the bullet will be partially opposed to the resistance of the air. The air on that side (in front) will be denser than behind, and the disturbing or deflecting influences before described will come into operation, the two opposite tendencies described in the text and the note to a certain extent counteracting one another. While at the same time the resistance of the air has a tendency to turn the bullet from the sideways position in which it is moving with respect to the line of flight (and the effect of this is the greater the less spin the bullet has to constrain it to keep its original direction), the result of which force, conspiring with the force described in the note, is to give it a slight angular rotation round another axis, and deflect the bullet by constantly changing its general direction (this second axis of rotation) to the side to which the rifling turns. This was exemplified in the late practice with Mr. Whitworth’s gun. When firing at the very long range of 9,000 yards the 3-pounder threw constantly to the right from 32 to 89 yards.

No. 3.

The rotation of the earth about its axis tends to throw the projectile always to the right of the object aimed at. Space will not permit of[512] our entering on this subject; but the principle is the same as that which in M. Foucault's experiment with the vibrating pendulum caused its plane of vibration apparently to constantly deviate to the right.

The time of flight of the shot from Mr. Whitworth’s 3-pounder gun is unknown to us; we are unable, therefore, to calculate the deflection due on this account, but as an illustration we may give this deflection, calculated for the long range attained with the 10-inch gun (5,600 yards), from Captain Boxer’s, R.A., Treatise on Artillery. He finds it to be very nearly 11 yards.

Windage, one of the faults of the spherical bullet, permitting a great escape of the gas, and therefore wasting the force of the powder, has been overcome in various ways in the cylindro-conical picket. The Minié principle consists in hollowing out the base of the ball conically, placing in this hollow an iron cup or piece of wood, which being driven forward by the explosion of the charge further into the conical hollow, enlarges or expands the ball, and makes it fit tight and take the impression of the grooves, though the bullet, when put into the gun, is small enough to be easily rammed down. It is now found that the conical hollow alone, without the cup or plug, is almost equally effective in expanding the ball. We have termed this the Minié principle; Captain Norton, however, undoubtedly has a prior claim (which has been allowed by the British Government, we believe) to this invention. He was before his time. There was no cause for, and therefore the shooting mania was not strong upon us.

With breech-loaders, doing away with windage and making the bullet take the rifling, is an easy matter. The breech into which the bullet is put at once, without being passed through the muzzle, is made slightly larger than the rest of the bore; the bullet on being pushed forward by the force of the powder is squeezed into the narrower portion, and effectually prevents all escape of gas. It is thus with the Armstrong gun. Robins said of the breech-loaders of his day, “And, perhaps, somewhat of this kind, though not in the manner now practised, would be, of all others, the most perfect method for the construction of these barrels.” Mr. Whitworth, on the other hand, uses—well, we have avoided details thus far, and every newspaper has described them so fully, that our readers must be thoroughly acquainted with them. Let us conclude, as we began, with Robins, and hope that his prediction that “they,” the armies of the enlightened nations which perfect rifles, “will by this means acquire a superiority which will almost equal anything that has been done at any time.”