1 I , fe GJatttcU Imoetattg ffitbrarg atljata, New Hork FROM THE BENNO LOEWY LIBRARY Cornell University Library PR5299.S15D8 Dutch pictures; with some sitetches in the 3 1924 013 543 297 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013543297 DUTCH PICTURES. DUTCH PICTURES; With fame Sketches in the Flemijh Manner. GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA, Author of " William Hogarth;'"'' the " Seiien Sons of Mammon;" "A Journey Due North ;'" "Twice Round the Clock ;" &c., &c. LONDON : TINSLEY BROTHERS, CATHERINE STREET, STRAND. i86i. V \ BY " S 5 A' (^ I'll ^ W. OSTELL, PRINTER, HART STREET, BLOOMSBURY; CONTENTS. PilEFACE PAGE vii THE SHADOTV Or A DUTCH PAINTER II. THE SHADOW OF DAY AND NIGHT III. OUR DOUBLES .... THE GOLDEN CALP A NEW RAILWAY LINE WANT PLACES MOEE PLACES WAHIED OLD LADIES LITTLE CHILDREN rv. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. 15 33 35 51 90 110 123 vi Contents. PAGE. X. THE CONVERSION OS COLONEL QUAGG - - - 137 XI. DEMETKItJS THE DIVER - - - 160 xir. THE captain's PMSONEK, A STOfiY OP THE '45 - 173 XIII. DOCTOB PANTOLOGOS - - 191 XIV. TilAVELS IN SEARCH OF BEEP - - - 211 XV. I'DOTHEB, TRAVELS IN SEARCH OP BEEP - - - 222 XVI. THE METAMORPHOSED PAGODA - - - 2i3 XVII. THE LAND OP NOD, A KINGDOM OP IlECONCILED IMPOSSI- BILITIES - - 265 XVIII. TWENTY MILES . - . . . gjg XIX. LITTLE SAINT ZIIA — A CULINARY LEGEND - - 291 XX. rii;si FRUITS - . 310 xxr. OLD CLOTHES - . 33! PREFACE. «^^J2-<3»*#a-=S.-^ On the Batavian School of Delineation. I THINK that of would-be epigramaticj alliterative, or simply clap-trap titles to books, we Have bad, of late years, satiety. Am I, in calling my volume "Dutch Pictures," adding but one more " taking " title to the Ust? Can "Dutch Pictures" have any more real meaning or significance than "Sand and Shells," "Patchwork," "Odds and Ends," " OHa Podrida," " Waifs and Strays," " Bubble and Squeak," or " Gam- mon and Spinach?" I hope to prove that I have had a definite object in attaching to these papers their present title, and that it is not, after all, grossly inappropriate. I pat " Dutch Pictures " at the head of my page for these reasons. Pirst, because, unless I am much mistaken, the Batavian painters of the seventeenth century were remarkable for their careful delineation viii Preface. of the minutest objects in nature, animate and inani- mate, bestowing infinite pains on the reproduction of, or the shadows and reflections in, pots and pans, — of the twigs in a birch-broom, of the texture of a carpet or a curtain, of the fat and lean of a loin of pork, of the knitted stockings of a fraw, of the red nose of a boor, of the peelings of carrots and turnips, of the plumage of a bird, of the veins in a cabbage, of the smoke from a tobacco-pipe. Next, because I have endea- voured, perhaps unsuccessfully, but always laboriously, to imitate with the pen what these ingenious artists have done with the pencil, and to bring to the descrip- tion of the men and the manners of the times in which I have lived that minuteness — it may be pettiness of observation — which makes every Dutch Picture, to the meanest, curious, if not excellent. Let me not be mistaken by critics. There are Dutchmen and Dutch- men. There are the Teniers, the Gerard Douws, the Ostades, and the Metzas — the great makers of minutise,. but surpassingly gifted likewise in skilful draughtsman- ship, in harmonious composition, in brilliant colour, in delicate texture, in exquisite finish. Such admirable exemplars answer, perhaps, to our Goldsmiths, our Lambs, our Leigh Hunts, and our Washington Livings. I will name no living writer for fear of being howled at. But there are Dutch painters of the second, the third,. Preface. ix and tlie fourth rank. There are the Wouvermans', the Micris^ the Breughels ; there are, lower still, the Jan Steens and the Schkalkens ; there are the Weenix's, the Van HuysumSj the Vanvoorsts, and' the Steenwycks. There may be mentionedj again, the jolly Jordaens, and the coarse but brilliant Adrian Brouwer. When the pearly tints of a Teniers, the wonderful light and shade of an Isaac Ostade, the matchless manipulation* of a Gerard Douw, are almost beyond price, collectors and curiosity-hunters can yet find a word of praise, and a corner in their cabinets, for the inferior works of the Dutch scTiool — not gems, intaglios, or enamels, cer- tainly, but rather buttons, and quaint carved toys, and tradesmen's tokens of art, which give them, so far as the limited capacity, but untiring industry, of the Dutchman went, his notion of the interior of a school- room, the economy of a kitchen, the joluty of a tavern, or the humours of a Tcermesse. What scenes analogous to those just mentioned I have witnessed at home or abroad, I have attempted to draw with pen and ink,, slowly and carefully, in the Dutch manner; and if I * I use the long word in preference to "handling," because the latter has been degraded and distorted by Art critics, who speak of mere coarse dash and vigour in a picture as " handling,"' whereas by " manipulation," I mean the pains-taking work of the pencil wielded by a highly educated hand. -X Preface. have failed, it has been for lack of power, and not of will, or toil. A favourite device adopted now a-days by those whose business it is to dissect a book, is to ask the author his reasons for writing, for publishing, or for repubhshing it. There is no easier cry than cui bono ? and the response is not so very difficult. There is a story told of Mr. John Cooper the tragedian — who is facetiously supposed to be many hundred years old — stating that he once asked William Shakspeare why he drank so much soda-water and sal-volatUe, to which the bard tranquilly replied, "Because I like it, John." I might retort, were I asked my reasons for putting forth these old pictures, of which the majority originally ap- peared in " Household Words" between the years 1851 and 1856, inclusive, and which are now reprinted by permission of Mr. Charles Dickens, that to do so suits my humour, my vanity, or my interest ; but I have two more reasons, less egotistical and perhaps as valid. I wrote the stories in this book with the purpose of amus- ing my readers, and I hope that those who read them may derive some amusement from them now. I wrote the sketches and essays as studies of the manners I saw around me, and with the idea that they might not be without some interest when those manners had passed away. Both stories and sketches may be disfigured by Preface. XI errors of style, by involved and confused language, by repetitions, by inaccuracies, and by verbal affectations, involuntary, but not the less offensive. "With respect to such blemishes, I have but one plea to offer, and to repeat — that there are Dutchmen and Datchmen, and that to all painters are not given the magic coup-d'oeil of Ostade, the unerring touch of Teniers. I have heard that a politician once declared that had he not been bred up to the Quaker persuasion, he would surely have been a prizefighter. It is probable that, had I not drifted into authorship, I should have been a broker's man. I can even remember in early life once ''taking stock" in a theatrical wardrobe, and once making out the Christmas bills for a fashionable tailor ; and I can recaU the delight with which, in a neat round hand, I expatiated upon " one demon's dress, complete," " six page's tunics and tights," and again upon " one best superfine Saxony broad cloth frock-coat, with silk sleeve and skirt lining, buttons and binding." On that ' same art of inventory-making, and stock-taking, I still take my stand. Whatever success I have to be thank- ful for in a. life of incessant and painful labour — never without censure, seldom relieved by encouragement or praise — pursued in sickness and sorrow, in poverty and obscurity, has been due to the pen and the inkhom of the inventory-maker, to persistence in describing the xii Preface. things I have seen, and to a habit of setting down the common things I have thought about them : exactly as they have been presented to me, and exactly as they have occurred. GEOEGE AUGUSTUS SALA. Upton Coukt, Bucks, September, 1861. DUTCH PICTURES. THE SHADOW OF A DUTCH PAINTER. "T7"ELL0W, thumbed, devastated by flies and time, stained J- with spots of oil and varnish, broken-backed, dog's- eared — a sorry, lazar-house copy, which no bookstall-keeper would look at, and at whicli the meanest of buttermen would turn up his nose — I have a book which I love. It is the Eeverend Mr. Pilkington, his Dictionary of Painters. You know it, oh ye amateurs of the fine arts, seeking to verify the masters and the dates of your favourite canvasses ! You know it, ye industrials of Cawdor Street, for it is your grand book of reference, when your journeyman artist Smith, only recently emancipated from limning " Eed Lions," and making " Bulls " radiant with gold leaf, and then painting a Holy Family and affixing thereto the signature (pious fraud !) of Dominichino or Zurbaran, runs the risk, if to the signature B 2 Dutch Pictures. lie adds a date, of making a slight mistake in chronology, and dating his work fifty years or so before the painter's birth, or after his death. I have seen, ere now, an original Eem- brandt (with a flourish to the E at which the boldest of scep- tics would not dare to cavil), dated 1560. I know my Pil- kington well, and of old, and I love it, for it is full of Shadows. I can keep good shadowy company with it ; now with the cream — the E. A.'s of the old masters: Titian in the Mocenigo Palace receiving his pencil from the hands of Charles the Fifth, with a condescending bow ; Eubens riding, abroad with fifty gentlemen in his train ; Eaffaelle lying in state, with princes and cardinals around, and his glorious Transfiguration at the bed-head; now, with the less promi- nent celebrities : jovial, clever, worthless Adrian Brouwer ; Gian Bellini, so meek, so mild, and so pious; honest Peter Claes, so great in painting pots and pans ; stolid old Dirk Stoop the battle painter. Turn again, Pilkington, and let me summon the shadow of Peter de Laar. We are in Eome, in the year of gi'ace sixteen hundred and twenty-three, and in a house in the Strada Vecchia. Light steals with no garish glitter, but with a chastened mellowed softness, through a solitary window into a grand old room. Not but what there are other windows, and large ones too : but they are all fastened and curtained up, that so much light as is needed, and no more, shall permeate into the painter's studio. Three large easels I see, and a smaller one, far off, in a comer, whereat a fair-haired boy is making a study, in chalk, from a plaster bust on a pedestal. There is a good store of old armour, old famiture, . old tapestry 'The Shadow of a Dutch Painter. 3 scattered about, and, above all, an old painted ceiling, where a considerable contingent from Olympus once disported tbemselves upon clouds, but are well nigh invisible now- through clouds of dust and smoke from this lower earth. In revenge for their forced obscurity above, the gods and goddesses have descended to the shelves, where, in plaster, and wanting some of them a leg or at arm, they are as beautiful, and more useful than above. The Venus of MUo stands amicably side by side with Acteeon and his dogs, while in strange proximity is the horned Moses of Michael Aagelo. There is a great velvet-covered silver-clasped book of " Hom-s " on a lectern of carved oak, and in an ebony cabinet, among strange poignards and quaint pieces of plate, are a few books : a copy of Livy with a passage kept open by an ivory rosary, some dog's-eared sketch-books, and a parchment-covered folio of St. Augustine's works, the mar- gins scrawled over with skeletons and fragments of men with muscles in violent relief. Nor are these last the only mus- cular decorations of the apartment. One shelf is entirely devoted to a range of phials, containing anatomical pre- parations sufficiently hideous to the view ; and there stands, close to a table where a serving lad with an eminently Prench face is grinding colours on a marble slab and humming an air the while, a horrible figure as large as life, from which the skin has been flayed oif, showing the muscles and arteries beneath — a dreadful sight to view. It may be of wax or of plaster, but I would as • soon not meet with it, out of a dissecting-room, or a charnel-house. A skeleton, too — the bones artistically wired together, and supported on a tripod — would show that the occupant of the apartment was not B 2 4 Dutch Pictures. averse froin the study of osteology. This skeleton has no head, the place thereof being supplied by a mask, a card- board " dummy " of a superlatively inane cast of beauty : the blue eyes and symmetrical lips (curved into an unmean- ing and eternal simper), the pink cheeks, and silken dolls' tresses, contrasting strangely with the terribly matter-of-fact bones, and ligaments beneath — the moral to my lady's look- ing-glass. This room might belong to a surgeon who is fond of painting (for there are more bones, and one or two real grinning skulls about), or to a painter who is fond of surgery ; for the anatomical drawings which crowd every vacant place, which are scrawled on the walls and furniture in chalk and charcoal and red cinnabar, bear trace of a masterly eye and of an experienced hand. If the apartment be the habitation of a painter, however, he is no poet, no admirer of music, no gallant devoted to gay clothes, or de- lighting to serenade noble dames; for through the length and breadth of the studio I can catch no glimpse of lute, or plumed hat, or velvet mantle trailing on a chair — of sprucely bound volume of Ariosto or Boccaccio, or, worse, of ribald Aretin, of soiled glove, or crushed rose-bud, or crumpled ribbon. The painter, if he be one, must be a grave, sedate cavalier, and so, of a truth, he is. No one yet accused Messire NICOLAS POUSSIN, to whom this studio belongs, of gallantry, or verse-making, or lute-twanging, or flower- seeking. He is a tall, well-made, personable gentleman, prematurely grey, and of a grave presence. He wears a justaucorps of black velvet, not quite innocent of paint-stains, and a well-worn cap of red silk sits on his crisp and (Juried locks. He carries palette on thumb and pencil in hand, "The Shadow of a Dutch 'Painter. 5 with which last he is busily calling up, on the canvass before him, a jovial, riotous, wine-bibbing, dishevelled crew of fauns satyrs. Bacchanals and Hamadryads, dancing, shouting, and leaping round a most disreputable-looking old Silenus, be- striding a leopard and very far gone in Grecian vintages. Anon, the fair-haired boy quits the 'room, and, returning, announces that there is one below would speak with his mas- ter. The words are scarcely out of his mouth, when the stranger, of whom it is question, enters. With much creak- ing of shoes, and cracking of joints, and rustling of his brave garments, he advances to Poussin, and presents him with a packet of letters, which the painter receives with a grave reverence. This is Peter de Laar : here is his Shadow. Take Sancho Panza's head ; blend in the expression of the countenance the shrewd impudence of Gil Bias, the senten- tious yet saucy wit of Eigaro, and the stolid humour of Mo- liere's Sganarelle, yet leave the close-cropped bullet skull, the swarthy tint, the grinning ivories, the penthouse ears and twinkUng little eyes of the immortal governor of Barataria ; mount this head on a trunk combining the strength and mus- cular development of Buonarotti's torso, with the exuberant rotundity of Falstaff ; plant this trunk on the legs of Edward Longshanks, of the celebrated Mi'. Carus Wilson, or of that member of the Daddy Longlegs family, whose inability or disinclination to perform his orisons led to his being precipi- feted down an indeiinite number of stairs. Add to all this, arms always placed at distressingly eccentric angles to the body ; feet, the toes of which are always turned in the con- trary direction to that which they properly should be ; hands, with joints for ever cracking, with palms for ever smiting each 6 Dutch Pictures. other, with thumbs and fingers and wrists for ever combining themselves into strange gestures, into concentric balls of quaint humour ; a nose which, when blown, resounds like a Chaldean tnimpet in the new moon ; moustaches fierce as those of the Copper Captain, long as those of a Circassian chieftain, twisted upwards like those of Mephistopheles in the outlines of Moritz Eetsch. Cover this strange, joyous, bizarree, humourously awkward, quaint and goguenarde frame with habiliments so strangely cut, so queerly fashioned, of such staring colours, bespattered with such fantastic embroidery, that you know not whether to call them vulgar or picturesque, ridiculous or pleasing. Balance me this notable figure in any position out of his proper centre of gravity ; make him sit on tables, or on easels, or on wainscot ledges, till Master Poussin has courteously signalled an easy chair to him ; and even then let him sit on the back, the legs, the arms thereof, rather than sit as Chiistians are wont to repose. Let him do nothing as other men do ; let him have a voice the faintest vibration of which, before ever he utters a word, shaU make you hold your sides with laughter,; let him have been bom a low comedian, a mountebank, a merry-andrew, a jack- pudding, a live marionette, even as some men are bom scoundrels, and some women queens. Let him have wit, talent, impudence (and monstrous impudence !), good-humour and versatility ; let him be a joyous companion, a firm friend, indifferently moral, questionably sober, and passing honestf; imagine him to be all these, and you have the shadow of Peter de Laar, the Dutch painter, better known in Pilkingtonian and auction room lore by the pseudonym given him by the ItaKans, with reference [to his witty buffoonery, of II Bam. ioccio. The Shadow of a Dutch Fainter. 7 Peter has come straight from dear old Amsterdam ; from the sluggish canals, the square-cut trees, the washing tub-like luggers and galliots, the parti-colom-ed houses, the clean flag- stones, tulip-beds, pictorial tiles, multifarious wind-mills, pagoda hay-stacks, pickled gherkins, linsey-woolsey petticoats, and fat, honest, stupid, kind Dutch faces of the City of the Dykes and the Dams, to Eome. He has come as straight, moreover, as the governor of the Low Countries, as the police of M. de Eichelieu in Erance, as a slender pm-se, and an in- veterate propensity to turn out of the beaten track wherever there were pretty faces, good wine, or good company to be found, would allow him to progress. He is come to study landscape painting in Italy, and has brought letters of intro- duction to Poussin, from persons of consideration both in Holland and Prance. The great Prench painter receives him with cordiality. Wine and meats are brought in. Presently enter two friends of Poussin, both painters : Monsieur San- drart, who has left but an imsubstantial shadow to us, and Monsieur Gelee, whose real appellation has also been forgot- ten, but who wiU live, I trust, as long as painting lives, under the title of Claude Lorraine. Peter de Laar is introduced to these worthies. They talk of things literary, of things picto- rial, of the last scandal in the sacred college, of the last squib on the Corso, the last lampoon passed on Pasquin's statue, of ■the success of the Cavaliere Vandyck in England, of the pro- bable jealousy thereat of the Cavaliere Eubens ; of Gaspar Dughet — Nicolas's brother-in-law and pupil, who adopted his master's patronymic — and of his friendship with Albano. They are grave at &-st, but somehow Peter de Laar makes them all laugh. Then there are more wines and more meats. 8 Dutch Pictures. and considerably more laughter. Suddenly, from no man knows whither, Peter produces a fiddle. He plays once, and twice, and thrice, and again. He plays the good old airs of Holland, such as Teniers' vrows dance to, and Ostade's boors nod lazily to, g-uzzling beer the while ; such as the lady in the satin dress of Honthorst plays so sweetly to the cavalier in buff boots ; such as the hurdygurdy players of Metzu and Jan Steen grind so piteously before cottage doors ; such as bring the tears into the eyes of the good company in the old house in the Strada Vecchia, though Peter de Laar be the only Dutchman present. Peter can paint, and paint well, besides playing on the fiddle. He has a pretty hand, too, for turning verses — the more satirical the better. He is a good classic and inimitable story-teller, and a practical joker unrivalled for invention and audacity. He can smoke like a Dutchman, as he is, and sing in madrigals, and do tricks of legerdemain wonderful to look at. He is come to spend three months among the beautiful Italian scenery, but how long do you think he stops ? Five years. Soon the grave and sedate Nicolas Poussin, soon the saturnine Claude Gelee, yclept Lorraine, began to find that they cannot do without the sprightly Dutchman. He fiddles, or touches the viol di gamba or the harpsichord, before they set to work of a morning ; he sings to them as he and they paint, or, while a tint is drying, or the sky is too overcast for him to paint the sunny landscapes by, he wOl throw his huge grotesque laugh-provoking limbs on a stool, and from one of the tomes in the ebon cabinet read forth in a bold strident voice the sounding prose of Livy that Master Poussin loves so well to listen to ; or he will " lisp in numbers," and clearing The Shadow of a Dutch Painter. 9 away the dust and cobwebs from crabbed Basle or Haerlem Latin characters — call forth joy and merriment from Master Quintus Horatius Maccus, and Master P. Virgilius Maro their repositories. But when work is over (Peter can work well and play well), it is then that his supple joints, his joyous face, his great hearty laugh come into fuU play. It is in the wine- shops, among the merry crowds on the Corso and the Pineian Hill, in moonlight junketings among the ruins of the CoUiseum, in the gloomy Ghetto among the Jews, playing them roguish tricks, that he earns his surname of II Bam- loccio, that he becomes the idol and the glory of the Italian jokers and hoaxers. We have been too much accustomed to look at the Italians as a sentimental and romantic people ; yet, in pure fact, few nations possess so much of the comic vein A glance at the memoirs of Baldinucci, at the glorious reper- tory of hoaxes to be found in the Decameron, at the infinity of pantomimes, farces, and burlesques to which the little Vene- tian theatres gave birth ; or even at the buffooneries of that superlative literary rascal, Peter Aretino, would prove the contrary. Punch came from Italy, so did Toby ; so did har- lequin, columbine, clown, and pantaloon. Pancy the stealing of sausages and the animation of clock-faces to have had their origins in the clime of Dante and Petrarch, oh, ye Delia Cms- cans, and readers of Eosa Matilda novels ! If orchards were to be rifled, old ladies frightened, monks waylaid and enticed to drink strong waters till they went home intoning profane canticles to the great scandal of the monastic orders — who but n Bamioccio ? If tradesmen's signs were to be altered, names erased, obnoxious collectors of the salt-tax, to be tarred 10 Dutch Pictures. and feathered, or any other achievements to be accom- plished — who but II Bamhoccio ? Like many practical jokers as famous, Peter de Laar not only enjoys the fame of what he does, but of a great deal of what he neither does do nor has any hand in doing. All the hoaxes, all the satires, ali the practical jokes, all the caricatures, all the concetti, are credited to his account. Though he strenuously denies it, he is set dow^n for certain as the heir-at-law to the celebrated Pasquin. If ever a pasquinade appears against a Cardinal, an epigram on a Monsignore, a couplet on love, politics, or divinity — who but n Bamboccio is fixed upon as the culprit ? Every evening, after the heat of the day, when the dust is laid and the cool breezes come in refreshingly from the Cam- pagna, the grandees of Eome come forth to walk on the Corso. Priests, gentles, noble ladies, cwoalieri serventi and patiti, ■stately Cardinals in their coaches of scarlet and gold, drawn by eight mules a-piece, walk, ride, flirt, or decorously amble up and down. There are smiles, and jests, and smart witti- cisms, and brilliant skirmishes of gallantry round the ladies. One Priday, in the year 1624, at the very height and fashion- able time of the promenade, a huge elderly ape, a white- headed, vicious, bushy-haired, villainous animal, wjiich would be, perhaps, were he to stand upright, nearly as large as a man, appears at the further extremity of the Corso. Gravely he marches, looking slyly at the ladies under their veils, and grimacing horribly. Some laugh, some shriek, some cry that he has escaped from a menagerie. All at once, with an ap- palling scream and a chattering such as man never heard before, he stops opposite a richly-dressed lady, called La Par- queria, and, in defiance of all laws of politeness and etiquette. The Shadow of a Dutch Painter. ir gives her a round of kisses in amazingly rapid succession ; then, tui-ning on his tail, flies and is seen no more. Now La Parqueria, I grieve to tell it, is rather more beautiful than good. Scandal, busy at Eome as elsewhere, says naughty things of her with reference to a certain Cardi- nal. Next day, on the statue of Pasquin appears a most abusive libel, called il hraccimnento, in which, in reference to the occurrence of the day before, his Eminence the Cardinal is likened to an old ape. The aftair makes a furious noise in Eome ; and our friend Bamboccio is generally believed to know more about it than he cares to aver. He drinks, and fiddles, and paints none the less, but he keeps his own coun- sel, goes home rather earlier of an evening, and never alone, -and is heard to boast a good deal in public touching being cunning of fence. As for the poor Parqueria, so great is the hubbub and ridicule, that she is obliged to leave Eome. At this time of day it would scarcely bring Peter de Laar within the range of the batteries of the Holy Inquisition to say that he is the guilty party, the real monkey, and the author of the libel as well. There is an obstinate old woman in Eome who is of the same opinion, and who avers, that with her proper eyes she saw the monkey assume the shape of Bamboccio, mount a horse, and gallop away at the top of his speed ; but ■she is at last persuaded that it was the devil she saw and not the Dutchman, and performs, in consequence, a Novena at the church of San Pancrazio. Pive years have nearly elapsed since Bamboccio's arrival at Eome, when he is one day agreeably surprised by the appearance of his brother, Eoeland de Laar, who brings with him two more young Dutchmen (and famous ones), John and 12 Dutch Pictures. Andrew Both, who are come to study landscape under Claude Lorraine. Eoeland has journeyed hither with the intention of taking his brother back to his native country ; but, after the manner of the hammer which was sent to fetch the chisel, and which, in turn, required the mallet to be sent after it, Bamboccio easily persuades his brother to stay in Eome, and the four painters agree to live mereily together. They take a roomy old house, and lead for upwards of a year the gayest, most jovial, yet most industrious bachelor life you can ima- gine. Alas, for the clouds that are so soon to overcast this fair sky ! One day, on a sketching excursion, and during Lent, after having fiUed their portfolios with sketches, they sit down by a running stream to eat their afternoon meal. The pie is good, and the wine is good, and the ample and hila- rious enjoyment thereof does them, so they think, good too. Not so, however, thinks a shaven monk with a white, cowled blanket lashed round his waist by a greasy rope, feet very picturesquely sandalled but leaving something to be desii'ed in the way of cleanliness, a thin lip, and an evil eye. He takes the artists roundly to task for eating meat in Lent, and threatens nothing less than to denounce them to the ecclesi- astical authorities ; whereupon Bamboccio abuses him with much humorous virulence. "For a fellow,'' says Peter, "who recommends absti- nence, you keep no Lent in wine. Father Baldpate, to judge by your ruby snout." " Wine, in moderation, is sent by Providence for the use of man," answers the monk, sententiously. " And water wherewith to dilute it," cries Bamboccio, The Shadow of a Dutch Painter. 13 with an ominous glance at the running stream. " Did you ever do penance, old shaveling ? " " When T sin, as you do," responds the monk. " Well," says Bamboccio, " you must have sinned during the last two minutes, and you shall do penance now. What say you, brothers?" he adds, turning to his three com- panions, and glancing at the stream again. A clamorous cry of acquiescence in his proposition greets him. The monk endeavours to beat a retreat ; but Peter, with a great Dutch oath, swears he shall do penance, and, catching him by the cowl and waistband, throws him clean into the water. " When he has washed a few of his sins out," he says, laughing, "we will fish him out." But the cun-ent is rapid and the stream is deep, and the monk never is fished out again. He is drowned. Bamboccio and his accomplishes are in consternation ; some counsel one thing, some another, but aU at length agree to set off immediately on their return to Holland. From that fatal day Peter de Laar becomes another man. The shadow of the monk is always before him. At Amster- dam, at Haerlem, at Dordt, at Utrecht, where his paintings are held in great request and are munificently paid for, he lives extravagantly, and is as boisterous a boon companion as of old; but his laugh loses its heartiness, and his eye grows duU and his cheek haggard. It is the Monk. He avoids the companions and accomplices of his crime, even his favourite brother Eoeland. In the year 1650, Andrew Both drowns himself in a canal at Venice. It is the Monk. 14 Dutch Pictures. In the year 1660, Jolin Both perishes in the water at Utrecht. It is the Monk. In the year 1663, Eoeland de Laar crossing a wooden bridge, the ass on which he is mounted stumbles : he is pre- cipitated into the toiTcnt beneath, and is drowned. It is the Monk. In the year 1675, Peter de Laar having come to be more than sixty years of age, a miserable, infirm, sombre old man, ruined in health by excesses, impoverished in purse, eclipsed in fame by the rising star of Wouvennans, is found drowned in a well at Haerlem. It is the Monk. So they that smite with the sword perish by the sword ; and I abut up Pilkington and the Shadows fade away. II. THE SHADOW Or DAY AND NIGHT. A S most of US have our Doubles, so, in many noticeable- -^^^ lives, there are a Day and Niglit so wonderfully contrasted, so strikingly opposed, so picturesque in tlieir opposition to each other, that there can be few more remark- able subjects for consideration. Let me recall a few such Days and Nights. The weather is sultiy, scorching, though there are banks of heavy clouds in the sky. A hot wind shakes the strangely- shaped leaves of gaunt trees fitfuUy to and fro, or agitates tufts of brushwood and furze, rankly luxuriant, which grow here and there on the grey rocks. There are sudden declivities,. and more rocks beyond, furrowed, scarred, and seamed, by tears of brine. On every side beyond, as far as the strained eye can reach, is the interminable Sea. There are birds over- head with sullen flapping wings, and insects and reptUes of strange shape beneath. In a mean house, with whitewashed walls, and crazy Venetian blinds, with paltry furniture strangely diversified by rich pieces of plate and jeweUers's ware, is a man in a bath, with a Madras handkerchief tied round his head. Anon he is dressed by his servants, with whom he i» 1 6 Dutch Pictures. peevish and fretful. He grumbles with the coflFee at breakfast, abuses his attendants, begins a dozen things and does not accomplish one. Now he is in his garden : you will observe that he is short, stout, sallow, and with a discontented expression of countenance. He wears a lai'ge straw hat, a white jacket and trousers, a checked shirt, and has a black handkerchief knotted round his neck. He takes up a book, and throws it down, a newspaper, and casts it aside. He is idle, and loaths his idleness. Through an open window you may look into his plain study, of which the walls are covered with striped paper. You may see hanging their a portrait of a little child, and a map of the world. Who may this man be ? AMiat was he ? A testy East India captain with a liver complaint, a disappointed Indigo planter, a crusty widower with a lagging Chancery suit ? No. It is Night now, but Day was. Twelve years before, he stood on the steps of a throne in Notre Dame with the Pontiff of the Catholic church behind him, with the dignitaries of that church, the princes of his empire, the marshals of his armies, the sages of his tribunals, the ladies of his court, the flower of his subjects on his right hand and on his left. He was aiTayed in velvet, satin and gold, laurels on his head and a sceptre in his hand. He was Napoleon the Great, Emperor and King ; now he is the outlaw of Europe, the Ogre of his former subjects, the scoff of the Quarterly Eeview, the hated, bankrupt, captive, despot General Bonaparte, a prisoner at St. Helena, at the beck and call of an English orderly officer. The portrait of the little child is that of the King of Eome, whose melancholy Double, the pale young man in a white coat, is to be Metternichised in Vienna yonder, The Shadow of Day and Night. ij and tte map is of the World which was to have been his. inheritauee. Again. We are in the pit of an Italian theatre. Wax tapers, in bell-shaped shades, flare round the dress circle, for we are in the eighteenth century, and as yet gas and fishtail burners are not. Gaudy frescoes decorate the front of the tiers of boxes ; the palisade of the orchestra is surmounted with a spiked railing ; the occupants of the pit, in which there are no seats, wear cocked-hats and wigs ; and, in the dress circle, the beaux sport laced ruffles and sparkling-hOted swords, and the belles powder and patches. In one of the proscenium-boxes is the Grand Duke, sitting, imposing, in embroidery ; behind him are his suite, standing humble in ditto. The con-esponding box on the other side of the proscenium is empty. The fb-st act of the opera is over, and an intermediary ballet is being performed. An impossible shepherd, in blue satin trunks, a cauliflower wig, and carrying a golden crook, makes choregraphic overtures, to live with him and be his love, to an apocryphal shepherdess in a robe Pompadour and hair powder. You would see such a pair nowhere else save in Arcadia, or in Wardour Street, and in Dresden China. More shepherds and shepherdesses execute pastoral gambadoes, and the divertissement is over. Then commences the second act of the opera. About this time, verging on half-past nine in the evening, you hear the door of the vacant private box open. An easy chair is brought down to the front, and a book of the opera, a bottle of essences, and a golden snuflF-box are placed upon the ledge before it. Anon enters unto these an infirm, staggering, broken-looking old man, with a splendid dress hanging in 1 8 Dutch Pictures. slovenly magnificence on his half-palsied limbs. He has a bloated countenance, marbled Tvith purple stains, a heavy eyelid and a blood-shoot eye that once must have been bright blue. Eveiy feature is shattered, weary, drooping, and flaccid. Every nerve is unstrung : the man is a wi-eck, and an un- sightly one. His flabby hands are covered with rings, a crumpled blue ribbon crosses his breast, and round his neck hangs another ribbon, from which dangles something that sparkles, like a diamond star. Finally, he is more than three parts inebriated. It is easy to understand that from his unsteady hand, from the dozing torpor into which he occasionally falls, from the querulous incoherence of his speech, from the anxiety manifested by the thin, pale, old men in uniform, with the cross of a commander of Saint Louis, and the hard featured gentlemen with silver thistles in their cravats, who stand on either side of their master, and seem momentarily to fear that he wUl fall out of his chair. The beaux and beUes in the dress circle do not seem to express much curiosity at the advent of this intoxicated gentleman. They merely whisper " E il Signore Cavaliere : he is very far gone to-night," or words to that effect. The spectacle is no novelty. The opera is that most beautiM one by Gluck, Orfeo. The Orpheus of the evening, in a Grecian tunic, but bewigged and powdered according to orthodoxy, is singing the sublime lament, " CJie faro senza Mcridice." The beautiful wailing melody floats upwards, and for a moment the belles forget to flirt, and the beaux to swagger. Cambric handkerchiefs are used for other purposes than to assure the owner that the rouge on the cheeks holds fast, and is not coming off. What is the slovenly magnifico The Shadow of Day and Night. 19 opposite the Grand Duke doing ? During the prelude he was nodding his head and breathing stentoriously ; but as the song proceeds, he sits erect in his chair ; his blue eye dilates ; a score of years of seams and furrows on his brows and cheeks vanish : he is a Man. But the strain concludes, and his Excellency bursts into a fit of maudlin weeping, and ias recourse to the bottle of essences. His excellency has not spent a pleasant day. He has been bullied by his chaplain, snubbed by his chamberlain, and has had a deadly quarrel with his favourite. Moreover his dinner has disagreed with him, and he ias drunk a great deal more, both before and after it, than was good 'for liim. Are these tears merely the offspring of whimpering drunken- ness ; or has the music touched some responsive chord of the cracked lyre, sent some thoughts of what he was through his poor hazy brain clouded with wine of Alicant and strong waters ? Have the strains he has heard to-night, some mys- terious connection (as only music can have) with his youth, his dead happiness, his hopes crushed for ever ; — with the days when he was Charles Edward Stuart, pretending to the Crown of England; when he rode through the streets of Edinburgh at the head of the clans amid the crooning of the bagpipes, the shouts of his partisans, the waving of silken banners 'broidered by the white hands of noble ladies. " Non sum qualis eram," his chaplain wUl tell him ; but, ah me ! what a sorry evening is this to so bright a morning. To come nearer home : the good Queen Anne reigns in England, and an enthusiastic phalanx of High Church raga- muffins have just been bellowing round the Queen's sedan chaii-, "God save your Majesty and Doctor Sacheverell." c 2 20 Dutch Pictures. Thve are a great many country gentlemen in town, for term is just on, and the cause list is full. A white haired patriarch in extreme old age, who has been subpoenaed on some trial, has strolled from Westminster Hall, and entered the House of Lords, where he stands peering curiously at the carved roof, the dingy tapestry, and scarlet covered woolsack. He is one of those men in whose whole apparel and bearing you seem to read farmer, as in another man's you wiU read thief. His snowy white locks, his ruddy, sunburnt, freckeld coun- tenance carved into a thousand wrinkles, like a Nuremburg nut-craoker, tell of hale, hearty old age. You may read •fanner in his flapped felt hat and long duffel coat ; in his scarlet-flapped waistcoat and boots of untanned leather, his stout ashen staff, with a crutch and leathern strap. His full clear eye, his pleasant smile, his jaunty, though feeble bearing, say clearly farmer— a well to do, Queen-loving, God-fearing old agriculturist. His life has probably passed in peace and comfort ; and when he dies he will sleep in the green church- yard where his fore-elders sleep. Here is a London gentle- man who accosts him — a coffee-house wit, a buck skilled in the nice conduct of a clouded cane. He patronises the old farmer, and undertakes to show him the lions of the place. This is the door leading to my Lord Chancellor's robing room ; from behind that curtain enters Her Majesty ; there is the gallery for the peeresses ; there the bar. Is he not astonished ? Is not the place magnificent ? Being from the country (" Shocking Boeetian," says the buck compassionately to himself) he has probably never been in the house of Lords before. The old man raises his stick, and points it, tremu- lously, towards where, blazing in crimson velvet, embroidery The Shadow of Day and Night. 21 and gold, is the Throne. " Never," he answers, " since I sat in that chair ! " The old farmer's Double was Eichard Cromwell, whilom Lord Protector of England. Here is a placid-looking little old man, trotting briskly down John Street, Tottenham Court Eoad. He is about seventy, apparently, but walks erect. He has a natty little thi-ee-cornered hat, a weU-brushed black suit, rather white at the seams, grey silk stockings, and silver buckles in his shoes. Two powdered ailes de pigeon give relief to his simple good- humoured countenance, and his hair is gathered behind into a neat pigtail, which leaves a meandering line of powder on the back of his coat. His linen is very white, so are his hands, on one of the fingers of which he wears a ring of price. He lodges in a little street in the neighbourhood I have mentioned, pays his rent regulai-ly, has frequent friendly chats with the book-stall keepers, to whom he is an excellent cus- tomer, and with whom he is highly popular ; pats all the children on the head, and smiles affably at the maid servants. The neighbours set him down as a retired schoolmaster, a half- pay navy purser, or, perhaps, a widower with a small inde- pendence. At any rate, he is a pleasant body, and quite the gentleman. This is about the close of his Day. Would you like to know his Night? Eead the Old Bailey Sessions Paper : ask the Bow Street oflcers, who have been tracking him for years, and have captured him at last ; who are carry- ing him handcuffed to Newgate, to stand his trial for Murder. His double was Governor Wall, commandant of Goree, who was hanged for the murder of Serjeant Armstrong, whom he caused to be flogged to death ; very strongly adjuring the negro who inflicted the torture, to cut the victim's liver out. 22 Dutch Pictures.. But I should never end were I to notice a tithe of the Days and Nights that flit across this paper while I write.. A paralytic old octogenarian, drivelling, idiotic, and who, of all the passions of his other self has preserved but one, — the most grovelling avarice, — hobbles across a room, and, glancing at himself in a min-or, mutters, " That was once a man." The man was John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. A moping invalid, imbecile and speechless, dozing in an arm- chair, sees a servant endeavouring to break an obstinate lump of coal in the grate : " It's a stone, you blackguard ! " he cries; and these are the first words he has spoken for years — the first that have passed his lips since the Day shone no more on Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's. Anon a shriveUed little dotard, with a bald head and a yellow face, clad in a nightcap, drawers, and slippers, comes giimacing to my desk,, and tells me that although it is Night now, he, Louis the Fourteenth, had his Day — Ludovicus Magnus: of the Porte St. Denis : Louis le Grand in the Gallery of Versailles : in a towering perruque and high-heeled shoes, giving laws to princes. A mincing gentleman in powder, with an olive or rather seagreen complexion, with a sky-blue coat, a waistcoat lined with rose-colouied satin, and silk stockings, and with aa air something between a dandy and a dancing-master, tells- me that, when alive, he lived over an upholsterer's shop, in the Eue St. Honore ; that he was frugal, just and incorrup- tible; that he was beloved by his landlord and landlady; but that he had a Double of the Convention and of the Com- mittee of Public Safety; a Double who swam in the blood of all that was great and noble in France ; a Double whose name was Maximilian Eobespierre. O Day and Night, but this is wondrous strange ! III. OUR DOUBLES. ~]\ ypy philosophy makes no pretence to be elucidative or -^-*- doctrinal ; it is humbly suggestive. I do not presume to explain or to advise ; I only crave the liberty, timidly and respectfully, to hint. My philosophy, like the attire of a beggar, is ragged. It is disjointed, threadbare, looped and windowed with the holes that have been picked in it ; patched, pinned instead of buttoned; flimsy and unsubstantial, and, consequently, undeserving (as all rags must be) of respect. But it may serve to wile away some ten minutes or so, even as a tattered little wretch was wont, in the days of long stages, to amuse the outside passengers by keeping pace with the " spanking tits," for the contingent reversion of a halfpenny ; and as, in our own times, forlorn little street "Arabs " turn the somersaults known as " cartwheels" in the mud, for the amusement of the occupants of omnibus " knifeboards." I have been philosophising lately, after my poor manner, on the dualities of men and women, of the faculty we aU have, more or less, for casting our skin — ^for being one man abroad and another, at home ; one character for the footlights, and 24 Dutch PiBures. another, for the greenroom ; of the marvellous capacity with which we are all gifted, in greater or smaller proportions, for playing a part, and, not only for playing one radically and fundamentally different from the part we enact in private life, but for playing it simultaneously with the other, and for being (to use a very trite and imperfect Malapropism) two gentlemen at once. Everybody, so it seems to me, can be, and is, some- body else. You know this already, you may say, reader ; but you will not be angry with me for telling you what you knew before. To be told what we know, flatters our self-love, and makes us think, with some self-gratulation, of what sharp fellows we are ; but to be told that which we don't know generally wounds our vanity or excites our scepticism, and inclines us to a suspicion that our informant, although doubt- less a weU-informed person, is playing upon our credulity or making sport of our ignorance. Ton will, perhaps, object that in my theory of corporeal duality (I don't hint at the duality of the mind, for that is a subject above my reach, and above my ken), I am but giving another name to the hypocrisy of mankind. But the duality I mean is not always hypocritical. The double man is frequently unconscious of his duality. He is as sincere in one part as he is in the other, and believes himself just as firmly to be the person he is representing, as an accomplished actress, such as Miss O'Neil, would shed real, scalding tears, and sob out words that came really from the heart ; or as tipsy Manager Ellis- ton, in the height and glory, the tinsel and Dutch metal intoxication of a cardboard coronation, thought himself George the Fourth in reality, and blessed his people with Our Doubles. 25 vinous solemnity and sincerity. If people would place a little more credence in this duality, this Siamese-twin quality of their neighbours and of themselves, they would be more tolerant ; they would not accuse of unblushing disregard of truth the gentleman who, when they had knocked at his door, entered his hall, and felt his oilcloth beneath their very feet, called, himself, over the bannisters, that he was not at home. Mr. Smith, they might thus reason, the working, novel-writing, statistic-hatching, or simply lazy and dun- hating Mr. Smith, may certainly be, and is, on the first floor landing ; but the other Mr. Smith, his double, who has time to spare, and likes morning calls, and can conveniently settle the little bill his visitors may have called about, is not at home. He is a hundred miles away. He has just stepped out. It is uncertain when he wiU return. Duality, properly understood, would, like charity, cover a multitude of sins. Some men are double willingly, knowingly, and with pre- meditation — they can be both wolves and lambs ; and with these duplex persons, most frequently the lamb's face is the mask, and the wolf's the genuine article. Many put on masquerade knowingly but awwillingly, and curse the mask and domino while they wear them. A great many wear double skins unconsciously, and would be surprised if you were to tell them that they once were some oue else than what they are now, and that they have still another skin beneath the masquerading one. Of such is the ploughboy, over whose uncouth limbs has been dragged, slowly and painfully, a tightly fitting garment of discipline and drill. Of such is the schoolmaster who has a cricket-loving, child- petting, laughter-exciting, joke-cracking skin for inmost 26 Dutch Pictures. covering, but is swathed without in parchment bands of authority and stern words — bands scribbled over with declensions and perfects forming in mi, stained with ink, dusty with the powder of slate pencils, stockaded with cJievaux-de-frise of cane and birch. There is the duality donned by the exigency of position. The fat man who knows himself inwardly, and is notoriously at home a ninny, yet, awake to the responsibility of a cocked hat and staff and gold laced coat, frowns himself into the semblance of the most austere of beadles, is a most double-faced individual. Necessity is the mother not only of invention, but of duality in men ; and habit is the great wet nurse. She suckles the twins, and sends them forth into the world. Look at Lord de Eougecoffer, Secretary of the depart- ment of State for no matter what affairs, and see how double a man habit has made him. To look at him, throning on the Treasury bench, you would think that nothing less than the great cauldron of broth political could simmer and bubble beneath his hat, and that the domestic pot-au-feu could find no place there. To hear him pleading with all the majesty of official eloquence the cause of tapeism, irre- mediably crushing into an inert and shapeless mass her Majesty's Opposition on the other side of the house (he has been crushed himself, many a time, when he sat opposite, and is none the worse for the crushing at this hour) ; sono- rously* rapping the tin box of office, zealously coughing down injudicious grievance-mongers, nay, even winking at his sub- ordinates while they imitate the cries of the inferior animals, for the better carrying on of the Government of which he is a member : To watch the wearying and laborious course of his ■ Our Doubles. 27 official life, tlie treadmill industry to which he is daily and nightly doomed, the mattev-of-fact phraseology and action to which he is confined ; to observe all this you might think that he was a mere incarnation of Hansai-d's Debates, Babbage's calcidating machines, and Walkingame's Tutor's Assistant, indefinitely multiplied ; that his bowels were of red tape, his blood of liquified sealing-wax, his brain a pnlp of mashed blue- books. Yet this Lord de Eougecoffer of Downing Street, the Treasury bench, and the division-lobby, this crusher of Opposi- tion and pooh-pooher of deputations, and stifler of grievances, has a Double in Belgrave Square, enthusiastically devoted to the acquisition of Eaphaels, Correggios, Dresden china and Etruscan vases; a Double so thoroughly a magister coquince that he seriously contemplates writing a cookery-book some day, at his leisui-e — but he wiU know no leisure, on this side the grave, until he is made a Peer, or is paralysed — a Double enjoying Punch, and with an acknowledged partiality for Ethiopian serenaders ; a Double at a beautiful park down in Hampshire, who is regarded as an oracle on all matters connected with agriculture by iU-used and ruined gentlemen with top-boots and heavy gold chains; who has a taste ajmost amounting to a foible for the cultivation of exotic flowering plants ; a Double who is the delight of the smaller branches of a large family ; who can do the doll trick to a nicety, make plum-puddings in his hat, cut an orange into a perfect Chinese puzzle of shapes, and make as excellent a " back " at leap frog as any young gentleman from the ages of eight to twelve, inclusive, could desire. The Lord in Downing Street rolls out statistics by the column ; the Lord in Belgrave Square is an indiiferent hand at coimting at 28 'Dutch Pictures. counting at whist, and never could understand a betting- book. The Lord in private life is a nobleman of unimpeach- able veracity, of unquestioned candour and sincerity, and enjoys the possession of an excellent memory ; the Lord in St. Stephen's confidently affirms black, to be white, shuffles, prevaricates, and backs out of obligations in an unseemly Inanner, and has a convenient forgetfulness of what he has said or done, and what he ought and has promised, to say or do, which is really surprising. Habit gives a double cuticle to Mr. John Trett (of the firm of Tare and Trett) of the city of London, ship-broker. One Mr. Trett is a morose despot, with a fierce whisker, a malevolent white neckcloth, and a lowering eye. He is the terror of his clerks, the bane of ship-captains, the bugbear of the Jerusalem coffee-house. His surly talk is of ships that ought not to have come home in baUast, and underwriters on whom he will be " down ;" of confounded owners, of freights not worth twopence, of ships gone to the dogs, and customers not worth working for. He is a hard man, and those who serve him, he says, do not earn their salt. He is a tempe- rate man, and refuses chop-and-sherry invitations with scorn. He is a shabbily dressed man, and groans at the hardness of the times; yet he has a double at Dalston worth fifty thousand pounds, the merriest, most jovial, chirruping, middle-aged gentleman, with the handsomest house, the most attached servants, the largest assortment of comic albums and scrap books, and the prettiest daughters that eyes could wish to behold. He is something more than an amateur on the violoncello, although Giuseppe Pizzicato, from Genoa, was last week brought to GuUdhall, at the complaint of Mr. Our Doubles. 29 Treet's double, charged with outraging; the tranquillity of Copperbottom Court, Threadneedle Street, where the ship- brokers have their offices, by the performance of airs from Don Giovanni on the hurdy-gurdy. East of Temple Bar Trett abhors the juice of the grape ; at Dalston he has an undeniable taste for old Port, and is irresistible in the pro- position of " another bottle." It is quite a sight, when he insists on fetching this same "other bottle" from some peculiar and only-to-himself known bin, to see him emerging from the cellar beaming with smiles, cobwebs, and old Port wine. He is an excellent father, a liberal master, a jewel of a man at Dalston : only beware of him in Copperbottom Court. Temple Bar is the scarifier that performs the flaying operation upon him, and trust me, the under city skin is a rough and a hard one. When you walk into Lincoln's Inn old square, and up the rotten staircase (worn with despairing client's footsteps) of No. 202; when you read on a scowling door au inscription purporting that it is the entrance to Messrs. Harrow and Wrench's offices ; when, opening that door, which creaks on its hinges as though clients were being squeezed behind it, you push open the inner portal of baize, which yields with a softness equal to the velvet of a cat's paw ; when you have waited a sufficient time in the outer office, and shuddered at the pale and sallow-visaged runners, and the ghastly Law Almanack, like Charles the First's death warrant, in a black frame, and listened to the grim music of the busy-writing clerks, scoring the doom of clients on parchment cut from clients' skins, with pens trimmed from clients' feathers, with ink distilled from clients' blood, tempered with the gall of 30 Dutch Pictures. law (as all these matters appear to you) ; when you are at last admitted to the inner sanctum, and to an interview with Mr. Harrow ; when, as a debtor, you have begged for time, for lenity, for mercy, and have been refused; or, as a creditor, listened to Mr. Harrow's bland promises to sell Brown up, to seize Jones's sticks, to take care that Smith does not pass his last examination, to seiTe Tompkins with a ne exeat, and to sue out process of outlawry against Eobinson ; when you have paid a bill of costs, or have been presented with one which you have not the remotest chance of paying ; when you have sustained all the misery and madness of the law's delay, and all the insolence of the office, you will very pro- bably descend the staircase, commending the whole temple of injustice, cruelty, and chicane, to Ahriman and other demo- niacal persons. Mr. Harrow will seem to you an embodied ghoul ; Mr. Wrench, a vampire, with a whole faggot of legal sticks and staves through what ought to be his heart, but is a rule to show cause. The scribbling clerks, the tallow- visaged runners, the greasy process-servers, the villainous bailiff's followers snuffing up the scent of a debtor to be trapped from the instructions of a clerk — all these will appear to you cannibals, blood-suckers, venomous reptiles, hating their fellow-creatures, and a-hungered for their entrails. Yet, all these useful members of society are dualities ; they have all their doubles. Mr. HaiTow leaves his inexorable severity, his savage appetite for prey on his faded green-baize table. In Guildford Street, Eussell Square, he gives delightful evening parties, loses his money at cards with charming complacency, and is never proof against petitions for new bonnets from his daughters, for Our Doubles. 31 autumn' excursions from liis wife, for ten-pound notes from his son at Cambridge. Mr. Wrenck (who more particularly looks after the selling-up and scarifying business) is an active member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and is quite a " Man of Boss '' among the poor crossing-sweepers in the neighbom-hood of his residence. The chief clerk (who has the keenest nose and sharpest talon for a recalcitrant bankrupt of any managing clerk in the square) keeps rabbits, portioned his laundress's daughter when she married, and always weeps when he goes to the play, and the " Eent Day " is performed. The clerks who write the doom of clients, the runners, the process-servers, leave their deadly cunning, and remorseless writs, and life- destroying processes in their desks and blue bags and greasy leathern pouches; they leave their skins behind too; and, after office-hours, are joyous boon, companions, irreproach- able husbands in small suburban cottages, sweethearts leav- ing nothing to be desired, free-hearted roysterers always wiUing to be their twopence to another's twopence, men and brothers feeKng another's woe, hiding the faults they see, showing mercy, inter-aiding and assisting each other. And, believe me, this species of duality is not the most uncom- mon. The butcher is, nine times out of ten, kind-hearted and peaceable at home; Sanson, the executioner, had a passion for the cultivation of flowers, and played prettily on the piano ; General Haynau, I dare say (for the sake of argument, at least), was a " love " of an old gentleman in private life, with sucJi " loves " of grey moustachios, and so full of anecdote ! * Do you think the tiger is always savage * I really met tlie General at a German watering place, and found 32 Dutch Pictures. and brutal in domestic life ; that the hyena does not laugh good-humouredly in the bosom of his family ; that the wolf can't be sociable ? No such thing. I dare say that clouds do sometimes obscure the zoological felicity ; that Mrs. Tiger occasionally complains, should the antelope be tough or the marrow scanty ; that Miss Hyena may lament the hardness of the times and the scarcity of carrion ; and that Mr. Lupus may do worse than he expected during the winter; but I think the wild beasts can't be always howling, and yelling, and craunching, and tearing at home ? We grow so accustomed to see people in one character and costume, that we can scarcely fancy the possibility of that duality they certainly possess. Por us the lion must be always lying in a hole under a rock, waiting for a traveller. We ignore his duality, the lion at home. We have grown so accustomed to a Mr. Phelps in a spangled Eoman toga, or a Mr. Buckstone in a skyblue coat and scanty nankeen trousers, that we can't fancy those admired actors in private life, save in theatrical costumes, asking for beer in blank verse, in the first case ; throwing the spectators in convulsions of laughter by poking the fire, in the second. We so mix up double men, and double dresses, and double avocations, that we fail to recognize even persons with whom we are familiar when they have laid the state dress and state character aside, and walk abroad plain men. We see a quiet-looking gentleman in plain black cheapening asparagus in Covent Garden Market, and we are told that he is the Speaker of the House of him the pet of the table-d'hote, and an immense favourite with the ladies. He once won a very large sum at Hombourg, and on his depar- ture, gave a handsome percentage of his winnings to the poor. Our Doubles. 33 Commons. Where are his bagwig, and his naace, that he should use as a vvalkingstick, or, at least, carry under his arm like an umbrella ? Where is his three-cornered hat, with which he accomplishes those cmious hanky-panky tricks in counting members ? We are shewn a stout gentleman in a white hat and a ci\t away coat close to a handsome quiet-looking man, smoking a cigar, and are told that one designed the Crystal Palace, and that the other raised the Britannia Bridge.* Where are their compasses, their rules, their squares ? Why don't they walk about the streets with their hands thrust in their waistcoats, their hair thrown back, and their eyes in a fine ftenzy rolling ? Without going quite so far as the boy who believed that every judge was born with a wig on his head and ermine on his shoulders, can you, can I, fancy a judge in a jacket and wide-a-wake hat ? or, again, a judge in opera tights and a crush hat exchanging fisticuffs with a dandy in the stalls of Her Majesty's theatres ? Is there not something incongruous and inharmonious in the realization of the picture of an archbishop in a linsey-woolsey nightcap ? We can fancy a burglar cleaning his dark lantern, oiling his centre- bit, loading his pistols ; but can we fancy him tending his sick wife, or playing with his children ? It may be the ruling habit, after all, and not the ruling passion, that is strong in death. The schoolmaster who directed his school to " dismiss ; " the judge who sent tlie jury to consider of their verdict ; the wareior who murmured tete d'armee; the mathematician who gave the square of twelve; the jester who said " drop the curtain; the farce is over ;" all these responded more to some watchword of habit, * K S., ob. 1859. S 34 Dutch PiSiures. than of a predominant passion. Doctor Black, though an excellent schoolmaster, can hardly be said to have had a passion for teaching boys their accidence ; it was, perhaps^ more the habit of the judge to sum up evidence for the jury, than his passion ; although Napoleon certainly had a passion for war, the mathematican (I forget his name) was habituated to arithmetrical exercises, and gave the square of twelve through the force of habit; and as for the jester, as for Prancis Eabelais, he was, for all his strange wild talk, a just and pious man ; and it must have been the form, rather than the spirit, of a jest that he is said to have uttered in his last moments. Among the instances where the ruling passion does really seem to have been strong in death, those of the miser who wished the candle to be extinguished, as "he could die in the dark ; " and the Highland Cateran* who objected to extreme unction as an " unco' waste of ulzie;'' seem to me the most worthy of notice, though I am afraid the foundation on which their authenticity rests is rather dubious. * Rob Eoy -~s.<3Ps:sk55^*a=*'»-*— IV. THE GOLDEN CALF. EEADEK, were you ever in — I have a difficulty in expressing the word. Four little letters would serve my turn; but I dare not — this being above all for Household eyes — write them down. I might say Tophet, Hades, the place that is said to be paved with good intentions, the locality where old maids lead specimens of the simious race, Purgatory, L'Inferno, Tar- tarus; the debateable land where Telemachus (under the guidance of good Archbishop Fenelon, taking the pseudonym of Mentor) went to seek for Ulysses ; all sorts of things ; but, none of them would come up in terseness and comprehen- siveness to the name the place is really called by, and which it is really like. Headers, were you ever in Bartholomew Lane in the city of London. There is the wall of the Bank of England; there the Eotunda with those pleasant swing doors that with their " out " and " in " seem to bear the converse of Dante's immortal inscription ; for who enters there takes Hope along with him — the hope of the residuary legatee, and the ex- ecutor, and the dividend warrant bearer, and the government D 2 36 Dutch Pictures. annuitant. There are the men who sell the dog-collars; the badly painted, well varnished pictures (did ever anybody buy one of those pictures, save perhaps a mad heir, frantic with the vanity of youthful blood to spend the old miser his grandfather's savings, and by misuse to poison good ?) ; the spurious bronze sixpenny popguns ; and the German silver pencil cases. There, above all are sold those marvellous pocket-books, with metallic pages, everlasting pencils, elastic straps, snap-locks, almanacs of the month, tables of the eclipses of the moon, the tides, the price of stamps, com- pound interest, the rate of wages, the birthdays of the Eoyal Family, and the list of London bankers — those pocket-books full of artful pockets — sweetly smelling pouches— for gold, silver, or notes, that suggest inexhaustible riches ; and that a man must buy if he have money, and very often does buy, being without, but hoping to have some. I have such a pocket-book to this day. It is old, greasy, flabby, white at the edges now; but it burst with banknotes once — yea, bui-st ■ — the strap flying one way and the clasp the other ; and on its ass-skin opening pages were memoranda of the variations of the funds. There in the distance is Lothbury, whose very name is redolent of bullion — the dwelling-place of the golden Jones and the Loyds made of money; of auriferous gold- heavers in dusky counting-houses, who shovel out gold and weigh sovereigns until their hands become clogged and clammy with the dirt of dross, and they wash them perforce. There is the great Mammon Club, the Stock Exchange, where buUs and bears in white hats and cutaway coats are now frantic about the chances of the Derby favourite, and the next pigeon match at the Eed House ; now about three The Golden Calf. 37 and a quarter for tlie account and Turkisli scrip ; now about a " little mare," name unknown, that can be backed to do wonderful things, anywhere, for any amount of money; but who allow no one to be frantic within the walls of their club under a subscription of ten guineas per annum ; tarring, feathering, flouring, bonneting, and otherwise demolishing all those who dare to worship Mammon without a proper introduction and a proper burnt-offering. All Bartholomevy Lane smells of money. Orange tawny canvas bags ; escorted Pickford vans with bullion fdr the Bank cellars ; common- looking packing-cases full of ingots that might turn Bethnal Green into Belgravia ; bankers' clerks with huge pocket-books secured by iron chains round their bodies, holding bills and checks for thousands ; stockbrokers, billbrokers, sharebrokers, money-brokers' offices; greasy men selling Birmingham sove- reigns for a penny a piece (and a wager, of course) ; auc- tioneers, at the gTeat roaring mart, knocking down advowsons and cures of souls to the highest bidder : there is gold eveiy- where in pockets, hearts, minds, souls, and strengths — gold, " bright and yellow, hard and cold " — gold for bad and gold for good, — " Molten, graven, hammer'd and roU'd, — Heavy to get, and light to hold, Now stamped with the image of Good Queen Bess, And now of a Bloody Mary." But how about the place I did not care to name ? This. Little reck the white-neckclothed clergymen, so demure, so snug, so unimpeachable in umbrella ; the old ladies in their gray shawls and coal-scuttle bonnets ; the young spend- thrifts flushed with the announcement of so much money 3^ Dutch PiBures. standing in their names in Consols, and eager to find bro- kers to sell out for them ; the anomalous well-dressed, watch-chained, clean-shaven dass, who seem to make it a pretext for having " business in the city " to consume bowls of soup at the Cock in Threadneedle Street, or sand- wiches and sheriy at Garraways ; — little do these harm- less votaries of Mammon know of the existence of a sul- phureous subterranean in the vicinity, where Mammon strips p£f his gold-laced coat and cocked hat; sends Dei Gratia packing ; and puts on his proper livery of horns and hoofs and a tail ; where the innoxious veal pie in Birch the pastry- cook's window in Comhill casts oif its crust — has four legs, horns, and a yellow coat, and stands on a pedestal — ^the Golden Calf — in — the place I won't mention to ears polite. Under Capel Court, where the lame ducks, the disem- bodied spirits of ruined stockbrokers hover, like phantoms, on the banks of the Styx with no halfpenny to pay their ferry-boat over, there is a staircase — -foul, stony, precipitous and dark — ^like one in a station-house or the poor side of a debtors' prison. Such establishments have no monopoly of underground staircases like these that lead from life and liberty to squalor, misery, and captivity. At the bottom of the staircase there is a board which some misanthropic brewer has cast into the pit (hoping to find it eventually), relative to entire porter and sparkling ales. Placards also, telling of wines and spirits, are as distinct as the gloominess of a place rivalling a coal-cellar in obscmity and a bear-pit in savagery, will allow them to be. This place is a public-house and — well, let us compromise the matter, and call it Hades. Ton have very :little opportunity of judging what the T^he Golden Calf. 39 place is like inside. You only know that it is dark and full of smoke and men. WaUs, bar, chairs, tables, drinkuig- vessels must be of little account when the noblest study of mankind — being, as it is well known, man — man, compasses you round about, a smoking, drinking, whiskered, hoarse, squabbling, shrieking crowd. Here a boastful buck, all rings and rags. Here rags in their unadulterated condition, but laced with grease and slashed with prospectuses and share-lists. Here roguery, in luck, with clothes all too new, and that will become old before their time, acting the cheap Amphytrion in beer and pipes. Here carcasses without gibbets and gibbets without carcasses looking hungrily upon those who feed. Here utter broken-down misery : hunger that was once weU-fed — that has lent to many, but is ashamed to borrow ; perfect poverty that has no game up — no little caper — ^that is not ily to anything — that has no irons in the fire — that knows no parties — that can put you up to no first-rate moves — that is not waiting for a chance or to see its way, or something to turn up, but is only too glad to warm itself at an eleemosynary fire, and inhale the fumes of other men's tobacco, and wrap itself as in a gar- ment with the steam of the fried onions of the more pros- perous, and brood quietly in a comer of this Bartholomew Lane Hades, ever remembering that it is a beggar, and that it was once worth a hundred thousand pounds. You that have heard of commercial manias, and that they are periodical, don't believe in their transient natm-e. There is always a Mania. Speculation never luUs. When thou- sands are shy, sixpence halfpenny oflFers. Mammon tempers the wind to the shorn speculator. There is always some- 40 Dutch PiBures. thing up. Thus in this Hades when railways are flat, there is always something to be done in gold mines. Wlten the auriferous veins run short, there are nice little pickings to be got out of amalgamated companies for the exploitation of coal ; strata of which are always found in the very nick of time somewhere where they were never heard or dreamed of before. Should the yield of the black diamond prove unre- munerative, a rich vein of lead is sure to turn up at those famous Pyngwylly-Tuddyllyg mines in Wales, where lead has been promising for so many years, and has swallowed up so many thousand pounds in red gold, and driven so many Welsh squires to madness, or the Bankruptcy Court. Copper (somewhere between Honolulu and Vancouver's Island), or quicksilver (anywhere in the Sou-west-by-eastern latitudes) can scarcely fafl. when lead is scarce. When metals are at a discount. Land Companies ; Emigration Companies ; Extra- Economical Gas Companies, to give consumers gas (in their own pipes) at a penny farthing per thousand feet ; Eco- nomical Funeral Companies — a shroud, a leaden coffin, mutes with silk scarves, gloves, hatbands, cake and wine, and a tombstone surmounted by a beautiful sculptured allegory of the three Graces inciting the trumpet of Eame to sound the praises of the domestic Virtues — all for three pound ten; Economical Hotel Companies — beds free, breakfasts gi-atis, wax candles for nothing, and no charge for waiters — Loan Societies, lending any amount of money on personal security at nominal rates of interest; Freehold Land and Building Societies, by subscribing to which (no fines, no stoppages, no entrance money), parties can become their own landlords — dwelling in houses as big as that once occupied by Count The Golden Calf. 41 Walewski at Albert Gate, and walking fifty miles per diem, if they choose, on their own land — in the short space of three months from day of enrolment; Guarantee Societies for securing merchants and bankers against dishonest clerks, landlords from non-rent paying tenants, sheep from the rot, pigs from the measles, feet from corns, drunkards from red noses, and quiet, country parsonages from crape-masked bur- glars. Such, and hundreds more such companies are always somehow in the market, suspectible of being quoted, ad- vertised, and bruited about in Hades. There are always suf&cient of these evanescent specs afloat for appointments to be made between dingy men ; for pots of beer to be called for on the strength of ; for letters to be written (on the first sheet of the half quire cf sleezy post, purchased with borrowed half- pence from the cheap stationer — he who also sells green- grocery and penny blacking — in Stag's Head Court) ; for the pot-boy to be importuned for wafers ; for a Post-office Direc- tory of the year before last to be in immense request ; for postage-stamps to be desired with a mad unquenchable (oft- times hopeless) longing ; for pipes to be lit, and the unwonted extravagance of another screw indulged in ; for pens to be anxiously bitten, gnawed, and sucked ; for the thick black mud at the bottom of the greasy, battered inkstand to be patiently scraped up, as if there were indeed a Pactolus at the bottom ; for intricate calculations to be made with scraps of chalk, or wet fingers on the dinted table — the old, old, flatter- ingly fallacious calculations that prove with such lying accu- racy that where there are no proceeds the profits must be necessarily very large : that two and two infallibly make five, and that from a capital of nothing, interest of at least seventy 42 Dutch PiBures. per centum per annum must immediately accrue ; for those ■worn, tattered, disreputable old pocket books at wliose exist- ence I have already hinted to be unbuckled and disembowelled ; for the old dog's-eared bundles of foolscap to be dug up from the recesses of the old scarecrow hat with the crape round it — the hat that certainly holds, in addition, the lamentable ninepenny cotton pocket-handkerchief full of holes, and per- haps the one black worsted glove without finger-tops ; and not impossibly the threepen'north of boiled beef for to-night's supper ; for, finally the " party " to be waited for — the party who has money, and believes in the scheme ; the party who is seldom punctual, and sometimes fails altogether in keeping his appointment — but when he does come produces a plea- surable sensation in Hades by the sight of his clean shirt, un- patched boots, nappy hat and watchchain : — who cries out with a loud confident voice, " What are you drinking, gentle- men? Beer? Psha — have something warm;" and orders the something warm; and throws down the broad, brave five shilling piece to pay for it ; and, with his creaking boots, his shining jewellery, and big cjgar-case (to say nothing of that new silk umbrella, which did it belong to the speculator in the blue goggles and check trousers opposite would be in less than half-an-hour safe in the Times office in Printing House Square, in the shape at least, of a five and sixpenny advertise- ment of the " Putative nephews and Cousins-german Tontine and Mutual Assm-ance Company," provisionally registered), infuses unutterable envy of gold into ragged Hunger yonder, who whispers to unquenched Thirst his neighbour, that Tom Lotts has got hold of another good card, and what a lucky fellow he is ! 'The Golden Calf. 43 Moons and stars ! can anything equal the possessed state ■of mind of a man with a scheme ? A man walks about, pnUs his hair, talks folly, writes nonsense, makes a fool of himself about a fair woman. He falls enamoured of a picture, an opera tune, a poem with a new thought in it. A friend's goodness moves him quite to forget his own, till the friend turns out a rascal. A new country, city, house may engross all his admiration, observation, appreciation, till he becomes immensely bored ; but give him a scheme — a project, that he thinks he can make his fortune by. Set up that Golden Calf on the altar of his heart, and you wUl never find him writing- letters to the Times to complain of the length of Mammon's liturgy, as some short-breathed Christians do of that of the Church of England. Twenty full services a day will not be too much for him. As he walks the streets, his scheme pre- cedes him as the pillar of cloud and fire went before the Israelites of old. When he reads the share list in the news- papers, the market prices of his company stand out in highest altitude of relief, and quote themselves in letters of burnished gold. It is a fine day in November when his scheme is at premium ; it freezes in July when it is a discount. There are no names in the Court Guide so aristocratic as those in his committee (with power to add to their number). He envies no one. Nor dukes their gilded chariots, nor bucks in the parks their hundred guinea horses, nor members of clubs their Pall Mall palaces, nor M.P.'s their seats in the House ; nor peers their robes, nor earls theii- yachts, nor mayors their chairs, nor aldermen their turtle, nor squires their broad lands, parks, and deer; nor judges their old port; nor college dons their claret and red muUet ; nor bankers their parlours ; 44 Dutch PiSlures. nor old ladies tteir dividends. All these things and more will belong to him when his scheme pays. The rainbow waistcoats in the shops are ticketed expressly for his eye, to fix themselves on his remembrance till the project succeeds, and he can buy them. Mr. Benson is now manufacturing gold watches, Mr. Hoby boots, Mr. Sangster jewelled walk- ing-sticks ; Mr. Hart is new painting the Trafalgar at Green- wich, redecorating the Collingwood room, and bottling mUk punch by the thousand dozen ; Messrs. Hedges and Butler are laying down Champagne and Johannisberger ; Messrs. Fortnum and Mason are importing truiiles, pdte-de-foie-gras, Narbonne honey, Belgian ortolans, edible birds'-nests, and Eussian caviare ; Messrs. Laurie are building carriages with silver axle-boxes, and emblazoned hammer-cloths ; Messrs. Day and Scott are training two-year-olds at Newmarket ; all expressly for him when his scheme comes into its property, and he has twenty thousand pounds to spare in trifles. For that good time coming, Mr. Cubitt is running up a few nine- storied houses or so down Kensington way ; some half dozen members of parliament — all staunch conservatives, of coui'se, as befits men of property — are thinking seriously of accepting the Chiltern Hundreds ; and two or three peers of the realm are going to the dogs as fast as they can, in order to be sold up, and their estates, country houses, manorial rights disposed of (in good time) to the lucky possessor of the successful scheme. Which is the philosopher's stone. Which is the latch-key to Thomas Tiddler, his ground. Which, even in abeyance, even in the topmost turret of a castle in the air, can yet comfort, solace, soothe the schemer, making him for- get hunger, thirst, cold, sleeplessness, debt, impending death. I'he Golden Calf. 45 Which is Alnaschar's basket of glass, and is kicked down often into the kennel, with a great clatter, and ruin of tum- blers, pepper-casters, and hopes. Yet to have a scheme, and to believe in it, is to be happy. Do you think Solomon de Caux, crazy, ragged, in the Bicetre, did not believe that his scheme would triumph eventually, and he be sent for to Ver- sailles, while the mad-house keeper and aU unbelievers in steam engines were to be conveyed incontinently to the gaUies ? Do you think that that poor worn-out loyal gentleman, the Marquis of Worcester, caa-ed one jot for the hundreds of thousands of pounds he had lost in the king's service, while he yet had schemes and inventions, which miist at last turn out successful, and bring him fame and fortune? Do you think that the alchemists grudged their patrimonies smould- ered away in the crucible ; or that the poor captain, who imagined if he did not perfectly invent the long range, was not comforted even on his death-bed, by the persuasion that the Great Mogul, the Grand Scrag, the King of Oude, the Lama of Thibet, or the Tycoon of Japan, must come before life was extinct, and buy the great invention, though English Boards of Ordnance, and European potentates looked coldly upon it, for millions sterling, down? Do you think that Corney O'Giipper yonder, though ragged and penniless, is not happy while he has some old " schame " to propound, or some new one to perfect ? Corney has a most puissant and luxuriant head of hair — the only thing that is rich about him. It is a popular belief that Corney scratches his various " schames " ready made out of this head of hair as the cock in the fable did the pearl. At all events his long fingers are continually busied in the 46 Dutch PiSiures. tufted recesses of his head-thatch, and as he scratches he pro- pounds. His attire is very bad, but black. In his very worst phase of costume he was never known to wear any waiscoat than a black satin one, any coat but a swallow tail. Both these articles of apparel show much more of the lining than is consonant with our received notions of taste in costume. From one imputation, however, they must be exempt. Numerous as are their crevices and gaps they never disclose the existence of such an article as a shirt. On wet days the soles of his boots whistle like blackbirds, or (occasionally) oysters. He wears a black stock, the original satin fabric of which has gone away mournfully into shreds, and shows a dingy white substance beneath, wavering in appearance be- tween sackcloth and ^buckram. It is rumoured that Corney O'Gripper has been a hedge schoolmaster, a coast- guardsman, an iUicit whisky-distiUer, a guager, a sapper and miner, a pawnbroker, a surgeon on the coast of Africa, a temperance lecturer, a repealer, a fishmonger, a parish clerk, an advertis- ing agent, a servants' registry office-keeper, a supercargo, a collector of rents, a broker's man, an actor, a roulette table- keeper on a race-course, a publican, a betting office-keeper, an itinerant, a lawyer's clerk, a county court bailiff, and a life assurance actuary. He confesses himself to have been a " tacher ;" also to having been in America, where he did something considerable in town-lots, in the bank-notes known as shin plaisters, and where he was blown up in a Mississippi steam-boat ; also to having passed twice through the Insolvent Court. His present profession, and one that he glories in, is that of a " promoter." A promoter of what ? Companies. He knows of a Spanish galleon sunk in the bay of Vera Cruz,, The Golden Calf. 47 in Admiral Hosier's time, with two millions five hundred and seventy thousand pounds sterling in doubloons, pUlar dollars, and golden candlesticks destined for the chapel of our St. Jago of Compostella, on board. A joint stock company is just the thing to fish her up, and secure a bonus of two hundred and forty per cent, to every one of the shareholders. He only wants a few good men to complete the list of directors of the Great Female Moses Company, or Emporium of Ladies' Eeady-made Wearing Apparel Society. Lend him sixpence and he wUl be enabled provisionally to register the Curing Herrings on the North-west Coast of L-eland Company. He is to be managing director of the Persons-condemned-to- Capital-Punishment Life Assurance Society ; he promoted the Joint Stock Housebreakers' Investment Company ; the Naval, Military, European, and General Pickpockets' Savings Bank and Sick Fund ; the Amalgamated Society for binding and illustrating Cheesemongers' and Trunkmakers' Wastepaper ; the Mutual Silver Snuff-box Voting Company ; the Bank- rupts' Guarantee Fund ; and the Insolvents' Provident Insti- tution. But the world has dealt' hardly with him. No sooner has he promoted companies and set them on their legs, than solicitors have flouted, directors repudiated him. He has nothing left now but his inextinguishable brogue, and his inexhaustible invention. He will go on promoting till he goes to utter penury, brokendownedness, and the workhouse ; and let me whisper it to you, among all the wUd, impossible, crazy " scharpes " to which the tufted head of Comey O'Grip- per has given birth, there have been some not quite wanting in feasibility and success. There are at this moment com- panies with lofty-sounding names — ^with earls for chairmen ; 48 Dutch PiSiures. companies that spend thousands a year in advertisements, and have grand offices in Cannon Street and branch offices in Waterloo Place — that were in the origin promoted by this poor ragged creature, who is not too proud to sit on the tap-room bench in the Hades under Capel Court : who is only too happy to borrow ninepence, and who sleeps no one knows where, and feeds on fried fish, baked potatoes, saveloys, penny ham sandwiches and meat pies, when he is lucky enough even to be able to procure those simple viands. Thus wags tbe world in the place I do not care to name. I wonder what should set — humpli — Hades — running in my head this evening, and move me to descant upon it, for it is more than a year agone since I was there. What have the pewter pots, the rank tobacco, the shabby men, the fried beef- steaks and onions, the rummers of spirits and the sawdust of that old English Inferno in common with the pier-glass and arabesque decorated cafe, the marble table and crimson velvet couches where I sit — the opal-like scintiUating glass of absinthe ■ I am imbibing on the great Paris Boulevard, hard by the Cafe de I'Opera ? I have not been to the Bourse to-day, though I know that great screaming, tumbling, temple of Mammon well, and of old : its hot, reeking atmosphere, the snow storm of torn scraps of paper on its pavement ; the great inner and outer rings where the bulls and bears offer, refuse, scream, and gesticulate at each other like madmen; the lofty galleries where crowds of idlers, mostly in blouses, lounge with crossed arms over the balustrades, lazily listening to the prodigious clamour that rises to the vaulted roof — the Kyrie Eleison of the worshippers of Mammon ; the decep- tive frescoes on the cornices that look so like bas-reliefs ; the T!he Golden Calf. 49 ushers in uniform darting about with the course of exchange lists ; the municipal guards and gendarmes ; the nursery maids and children that come here for amusement (where will not nur- sery maids and children come ?), the trebly serried ranks of private carriages, fiacres and cabriolets in the place outside. No, I have not been to the Boui-se. I sit quietly smoking a penny cigar and imbibing eight sous worth of absinthe prepa- ratory to going to my friend Madame Busque's to dinner. Whatever can put Hades into my head this December even- ing I wonder? This. The cafe where I sit (I was all unconscious of it before) is Hades; and in its pier-glassed precincts from five to seven every evening, sometimes later, the adorers of the Golden Calf go through their orisons (oh forgive me if I am free-tongued ! ) like the very deuce. Por know you that, the Bourse being closed, the gaping for gain is by no means closed in the hearts of men. They rush to this cafe, hard by the Passage de I'Opera and get up a little Bourse of their own — an illegitimate Bourse be it understood, and one, when its members are detected in speculating, treated with considerable severity by the government. Be- fore I have been in the place ten minutes Sebastopol has been taken, — ^retaken — the allies defeated — kings and emperors assassinated twenty times over. Bank notes. Napoleons, and five franc pieces are strewn on the table amidst absinthe glasses, dominoes, decanters, and cigar ends. Moustachioed men lean over my shoulder and shake pencils at their opposite neighbours fiercely. Seedy men sit sUent, in corners ; pros- perous speculators pay with shining gold. Shrieks of vingt- cinq, trente, qytatre-mngt-cinq^ are bandied about like insults. 50 Dutch PiBures. It is the old under-Capel-Court Inferno with a few mous- taches, some plate-glass, and a ribbon or two of the Legion of Honour j and as I ^finish my absinthe in the din, I seem to see the Golden Calf on the marble, plate-covered counter, very rampant indeed. A NEW EAILWAY LINE. TP I succeed in the object I have proposed to myself in this -*- paper, Ishall consider that I am entitled to the grati- tude of all poets, present and to come. For I shall hare found them a new subject for verse : a discovery, I submit, as important as that of a new metal, or of a new motive power, a new pleasure, a new pattern for shawls, a new colour,or a new system of philosophy. No member of the tuneful craft ; no gentleman whose eyes are in the habit of rolling in a fine frenzy ; no sentimental young lady with an album wiU. deny that the whole present domain of poetry is exhausted : — ^that it has been sm-veyed, travelled over, explored, ticketed, catalogued, •classified, analysed and used up to the last inch of ground, to the last petal of the last flower, to the last blade of grass. Every poetical subject has been worn as threadbare as Sir John Cutler's stockings. The sea, its blueness, depth, vastness, raininess, freedom, noisiness, calmness, darkness, and brightness ; its weeds and waves and finny denizens . its laughter, wailings, sighings, and deep bellowiugs; the ships that saU, and the boats that dance, and the tempests that howl over it ; the white winged birds that skim above its billows ; the great whales, and sharks, and monsters, to us £ 2 52 Dutch PiBures. yet unknown, that disport themselves in its lowest depths, and swinge the scaly horrors of their folded tails in its salt hiding places ; the mermaids that ply their mirrors, and comb their tresses in its coral caves ; the sirens that sing fathoms farther than plummet ever sounded ; the jewels and gold that lie hidden in its caverns, measureless to man ; the dead that it is to give up : — the Sea, and aU pertaining to it, have been sung dry these thousand years. We heard the roar of its billows in the first line of the IHad, and Mr. Mugg, the comic singer, will sing about it this very night at the North Wool- wich Gardens, in connection with the Gravesend steamer, the steward, certain basins, and a boiled leg of mutton. As for the Sun, he has had as many verses written about hira as he is miles distant from the earth. His heat, bright- ness, roundness, and smiling face; his incorrigible propen- sities for getting up in the east and going to bed in the west; his obliging disposition in tipping the hills with gold, and bathing the evening sky with crimson, have all been sung. Every star in the firmament has had a stanza ; Saturn's rings have all had their posies, and Mars, Venus and Jupiter, have all been chanted. As for the poor illused Moon, she has been ground on every bareel-organ in Par- nassus since poetry existed. Her pallid complexion, chastity or lightness of conduct, treacherous, contemplative, or secre- tive disposition, her silvery or sickly smile, have all been over-celebrated in verse. And everything else belonging to the sky — the clouds, murkj^, purple, or silver lined, the hail, the rain, the snow, the rainbow, the wind in its circuits, the fowls that fly, and the insects that hover — they have all had their poets, and too many of them. A New Raihvay Line. 53 Is there anything new in poetry, I ask, to be said about Love ? Surely that viand has been done to rags. We have it with every variety of dressing. Love and madness ; love and smiles, tears, folly, crime, innocence, and charity. We have had love in a village, a palace, a cottage, a camp, a prison, and a tub. We have had the loves of pirates, highwaymen, lords and ladies, shepherds and shepherdesses ; the Loves of the Angels and the Loves of the New Police. Canning was even good enough to impress the abstruse science of mathematics into the service of Poetry and Love ; and to sing about the loves of ardent axioms, postulates, tangents, oscillation, cissoids, conchoids the square of the hypothenuse, asymptotes, parabolas, and conic sections — in short, all the Loves of the Triangles. Doctor Darwin gave us the Loves of the Plants, and in the economy of vegetation we had the loves of granite rocks, argillaceous strata, noduled flints, blue clay, silica, quartz, and the limestone formation. We have had in connection with love in poetry hearts, darts, speUs, wrath, despair, withenng smiles, burn- ing tears, sighs, roses, posies, pearls and other precious stones ; blighted hopes, beaming eyes, misery, wretchedness, and unutterable woe. It is too much. Everything is worn out. The whole of the flower-garden, from the brazen sun- flower to the timid violet, has been exhausted long ago. All the birds in the world could never sing so loud or so long as the poets have sung about them. The bards have sung right through Lempriere's Classical Dictionary, Buffon's Natural History, Malte-Brun's Geography — for what country, city, mountain, or stream, remains unsung ? — and the Biographic Universelle to boot. Every hero, and almost every scoundrel, 54 Dutch PiSlures. has had his epic. We have had the poetical Pleasures of Hope, Memory, Imagination, and Eriendship ; likewise the Vanity of Human Wishes, the Fallacies of Hope, and the Triumphs of Temper. The heavenly muse has sung of man's first disobedience, and the mortal fruit of the forbidden tree, that brought Death into the world and aU our woes. The honest muse has arisen and sung the Man of Koss. AU the battles that ever were fought — all the arms . and aU the men — have been celebrated "in numbers. Arts, commerce, laws, learn- ing, and our old nobility, have had their poet. Suicide has found a member of the Court of Apollo musical and morbid enough to sing self-murder ; and the Com Laws have been rescued from Blue Books, and enshrined in Ballads. Mr. Pope has called upon my Lord Bolingbroke to awake, and " expatiate free o'er all this scene of man ; " and the pair have, together, passed the whole catalogue of human virtues and vices in review. Drunkenness has been sung; so has painting, so has music. Poems have been written on the Art of Poetry. The Grave has been sung. The earth, and the waters under it, and the fearsome region under that ; its " adamantine chains and penal fires ;" its " ever burning sulphur unconsumed," its " darkness visible," its burning marl and sights of teiTor. We have heard the last lays of all the Last Minstrels, and the Last Man has had his say, or rather his song, under the auspices of Campbell. Money has been sung. We have had "Miss Kielmansegg and her golden leg," likewise " a song of sixpence." The harp that once hung in Tara's halls has not a string left, and nobody ought- to play upon it any more. Take instead, oh ye poets, the wii'es of the Electric Tele- A New Railway Line. 55 graph, and run your tuneful fingers over the chords. Sing the poetry of Eailways. But what can there be of the poetical, or even of the picturesque, element in a Eailway ? Trunk lines, branch-lines, loop-lines, and sidings ; cuttings, embank- ments, gradients, curves, and inclines ; points, shuntings, switches, sleepers, fog-signals, and turn-tables ; locomotives, break-vans, buffers, tenders, and whistles ; platforms, tun- nels, tubes, goods-sheds, return-tickets, axle-grease, cattle- trains, pilot-engines, time-tables, and coal-trucks ; all these are eminently prosaic matter-of-fact things, determined, mea- sured and maintained by line and rule, by the chapter and verse of printed regulations and bye-laws signed by Directors and Secretaries, and allowed by Commissioners of Eailways. Can there be any poetry in the Secretary's office ; in dividends, debentures, scrip, preference-shares, and deferred bonds ? Is there any poetry in Eailway, time — the atrociously matter- of-fact system of calculation that has corrupted the half-past two o'clock of the old watchman into "two-thirty?" Is Bradshaw poetical? Are Messrs. Pickford, or Chaplin and Home poetical ? How the deuce (I put words into my oppo- nent's mouths) are you to get any poetry out of that dreariest combination of parallel lines, a railroad;-^parallel rails, parallel posts, parallel wires, parallel stations, and parallel termini ? As if there could be anything poetical about a Eailroad ! I hear Gusto the great fine art critic and judge of Literature say this with a sneer, turning up his fine Eoman nose mean- while. Poetry on a Eailway ! cries Prosycard, the man of business — nonsense ! There may be some nonsensical verses or so in the books that Messrs. W. H. Smith and Sons seE at their stalls at the different stations ; but Poetry on or in 56 Dutch Fixtures. the Eailway itself^ridiculous ! Poetry on the Eail ! echoes Heavypaee, the commercial traveller — ^fudge ! I travel fifteen thousand miles by railway every year. I know every line, branch, and station in Great Britain. I never saw any poetry on the Eail. And a crowd of passengers, directors, share- holders, engine-drivers, guards, stokers, station-masters, sig- nal-men, and porters, with, I am ashamed to fear, a consider- able proportion of the readers of " Dutch Pictures," seem to the ears of my mind, to take up the cry, to laugh scorn- fully at the preposterous idea of there being possibly any such a thing as poetry connected with so matter-of-fact an institu- tion as a Eailway, and to look upon me in the light of a fantastic visionary. But I have tied myself to the stake ; nailed my colours to the mast ; drawn the sword and thrown away the scab- bard : in fact, I have written the title of this article, and must abide the issue. Take a Tunnel- — ^in all its length, its utter darkness, its dank coldness and tempestuous windiness. To me a Tunnel is all poetry. To be suddenly snatched away from the light of day, from the pleasant companionship of the fleecy clouds, the green fields spangled with flowers, the golden wheat, the fantastically changing embankments, — now geological, now floral, now rocky, now chalky ; the hiUs, the valleys, and the winding streams ; the high mountains in the distance, that know they are emperors of the landscape, and so wear purple robes right imperially ; the silly sheep in the meadows, that graze so contentedly, unwotting that John Hinds the butcher is coming down by the next train to purchase them for the Blaughter-hous&j the little lambs that ai'e not quite up to A New Railway Line. 57 railway-trains, their noise and bustle and smoke, yet, and ttat scamper nervously away, carryiug their simple tails behind them ; the sententious cattle that munch, and lazily watch the steam from the funnel as it breaks into fleecy rags of vapour, and then fall to munching again; — to be hurried from all these into pitchy obscurity, seems to nie poetical and picturesque in the extreme. It is like death in the midst of life, a sudden suspension of vitality — the gloom and terror of the grave pouncing Hke a hawk upon the warmth and cheer- fulness of life. Many an ode, many a ballad could be written on that dark and gloomy tunnel — the whirring roar and scream and jarr of echoes, the clanging of wheels, the strange voices that seem to make themselves heard as the train rushes through the tunnel, — ^now in passionate supplication, now in fierce anger and loud invective, now in an infernal chorus of fiendish mirth and demoniac exultation, now in a loud and long-continued though inarticulate screech — a meaningless howl like the raving of a madman. To understand and appre- ciate a tunnel in its full aspect of poetic and picturesque horror, you should travel in a third-class carriage. To first and some- times to second-class passengers the luxury of lamplight is by the gracious favoui- of the Directors of the company condescend- ingly extended ; and in passing through a tunnel they are enabled dimly to desciy their feUow-travellers ; but for the third-class voyager darkness, both outer and inner, are pro- vided — darkness so complete and so intense, that as we are borne invisibly on our howling way, dreadful thoughts spring up in our minds of blindness ; that we have lost our sight for ever ! Vainly we endeavour to peer through the darkness, to strain onr eyes to descry one ray of light, one outline — 58 Dutch PiSiures. be it ever so dim — of a human figure ; one thin bead of day upon a panel, a ledge, a window-sill, or a door. Is there uot matter for bards in all this ? — in the length of the tunnel, its darkness and clamour ; in the rage and fury of the engine eating its strong heart, burnt up by inward fire like a man consumed by his own passions ; in the seemingly everlasting duration of the deprival from light and day and life; but a deprive! which ends at last. Ah, how glad and welcome that restoration to sunshine is ! We seem to have had a sore and dangerous sickness, and to be suddenly and graciously permitted to rise from a bed of pain and suffering, and enter at once into the enjoyment of the rudest health, with all its com- forts and enjoyments, with aU its cheerftil pleasures and happy forgetfulness of the ills that are gone, and unconsciousness of the ills that are to come, and that must come, and surely. Whenever I pass through a tunnel I meditate upon these things, and wish heartily that I were a poet, that I might tune my heart to sing the poetry of railway tunnels. I don't know whether the same thoughts strike other people. I suppose they do, — I hope they do. It may be that I muse more on tunnels, and shape their length and blackness, and coldness and noise, to subjects fit to be wedded to immortal verse; because I happen to reside on a railway, and that almost every morning and evening throughout the week I have to pass through a tunnel of prodigious length, — ^to say the truth, nearly as long as the Box Tunnel, on the Great Western EaUway. Morning and night we dash from the fair fields of Kent, — from the orchards and the hop-gardens, — from the sight of the noble river in the distance, with it& boats and barges and huge ships, into this Erebus, pitch A New Railway Line. 59 . dark, nearly three miles long, and full of horrid noises. Sometimes I travel in the lamp-lit carriages, and then I find it poetical to watch the flickering gleams of the sickly light upon shrouded figures, muffled closely in railway rugs and mantles and shawls, — the ladies, who cower timidly in cor- ners ; the children, who, half-pleased, half-frightened, don't seem to know whether to laugh or cry, and compromise the matter by sitting with their mouths wide open, and inces- santly asking why it is getting dark, and why there is such a noise. Sometimes, and I am not ashamed to confess, much more frequently, I make my joru'ney in the poor man's carriage — the " parly, " or third-class. In that humble " parly " train, believe me, there is much more railway poetry attainable than in the more aristocratic compartments. Total darkness, more noise (for the windows are generally open, and the reverberation is consequently much greater), more mocking voices, more mystery, and more romance. I have even gone through tunnels in those vile open standing- up cars, called by an irreverant public " pig-boxes," and seemingly provided by railway directors as a cutting reproach on, and stern punishment for, poverty. Yet I have drunk deeply of railway poetry in a " pig-box." There is some- thing grand, there is something noble ; there is something really sublime in the gradual melting away of the darkness - into light ; in the decadence of total eclipse and the glorious restoration of the sun to his golden rights again. Standing up in the coverless car you see strange, dim, fantastic, changing shapes above you. The daylight becomes irriguous, like dew, upon the steam from the funnel, the roofs of the carriages, the brickwork sides of the tunnel itself. But 6o Dutch PiBures. nothing is defined, nothing fixed ; all the shapes are irreso- lute, fleeting, confused ; like the events in the memory of an old man. The Tunnel becomes a phantom tube — a dry Styx — the train seems changed into Charon's boat, and the engine-driver turns into the infernal ferryman. And the end of that awful navigation must sui'ely be Tartarus You think so, you fancy yourself in the boat, as Dante and Virgil were in the Divine Comedy ; ghosts cling to the sides, vainly repenting, uselessly lamenting ; Francesca of Eimini floats despairing by ; far off, mingled with the rattle of wheels, are heard the famine- wrung moans of Ugolino's children. Hark, to that awful shrilly, hideous, prolonged yell — a scream like that they say that Catherine of Eussia gave on her deathbed, and which, years afterwards, was wont to haunt the memories of those that had heard it. Lord be good to us ! there is the scream again ; it is the first scream of a lost spirit's last agony ; the cry of the child of earth waking up into the Ever and Ever of pain ; it is H'acinata screaming in her sepulchre of flames — no, it is simply the railway whistle as the train emerges from the tunnel into sunlight again. The ghosts vanish, there are no more horrible sights and noises, no flying sparks, no red lamps at intervals like demon eyes. I turn back in the " pig-box," and look at the arched entrance to the tunnel we have just quitted. I seemed to fancy there should be an inscription over it bidding all who enter to leave Hope behind ; but instead of that there is simply, hard by, a placard on a post relative to cattle straying on the railway. A railway accident ! Ah, poets ! how much of poetry could you find in that, were you so minded 1 Odes and bal- lads, sapphics, alcaics and dactylics, strophes, chorusses and A New Railway Line. 6i semi-chorusses might be sung — rugged poems, rough as the rocky numbers of Ossian, soothing poems, " soft pity to infuse," running " softly sweet in Lydian measure" upon the woes of railway accidents, the widowhoods and orphanages that have been made by the carelessness of a driver, a faulty engine, an unturned " point," a mistaken signal. Think of the bride of yesterday, the first child of our manhood, the last child of our age, think of the dear friend who has been absent for years, who has been estranged from us by those whispering tongues that poison truth, and is coming swiftly along the ii-on road to be reconcOed to us at last. Think of these all torn from us by a sudden, cruel, unprepared-for death; think of these, falling upon that miserable battle-field, without glory, without foes to fight with, yet with fearfuller, ghastlier hurts, with more carnage and horror in destruction than you could meet with even on those gory Chersonean battle-fields after storms of shot and shell, after the fierce assaults of the bayonet's steel, and the trampling of the horses, and the stroke of the sharp sword. There are bards to wail over the warrior who falls in the fray, for the horse and his rider blasted by the crimson whirlwind. There are tears and songs for the dead that the sea engulfs, to cradle them in its blue depths tiU Time and Death shall be no more. There are elegies and epitaphs and mourning verses for those that sleep in the churchyard, that have laid their heads upon a turf, that eat their salad from the roots, that dwell with worms, and entertain creeping things in the cells and little chambers of their eyes. There is poetry even for the mur- derer on his gibbet ; but who cares to sing the railway victim ? w.ho bids the line restore its dead ? who adjures 62 Dutch PiStures. the engine to bring back the true and brave? They are killed, and are buried ; the inquest meet ; the jurymen give their verdict, and forget all about it two days afterwards. Somebody is tried for manslaughter and acquitted, for, of course, there is nobody to blame ? It is all over, and the excursion train, crammed with jovial excursionists, sweet- hearts, married couples, clubs of gay fellows, laughing chil- dren, baskets of prog, bottles of beer, and surreptitious, yet officially connived at, pipes ; the engine dressed in ribbons, the stoker — Oh, wonder! — in a clean shirt; the excursion train, I say, rattles gaily over the very place where, a month since, the Accident took place ; over the very spot where the earth drank up blood, and the rails were violently wrenched and twisted, and the sleepers were ensanguined, and death and havoc and desolation were strewn all around, and the wild flowers in the embankment were scalded with the steam from the shattered boUer.* Can you form an idea, poets, of an haunted line ? Sup- pose the same excursion train I was speaking of to be on its way home, late at night, say from Cripplegate-super-mare or Buffington WeUs. Everybody has enjoyed himself very much — the children are tired, but happy. The bonnets of the married ladies have made their proper impression upon the population of Cripplegate-super-mare, and they are satis- fied with them, their husbands, and themselves. The mar- ried gentlemen have found out of what the contents of the black bottle consisted — they smoke pipes openly now, quite * lest I should be suspected of having endeavoured to make " capital" out of recent catastrophes I may be allowed to' state that this paper was written nearly seven years ago. A New Railway Line. 63 defiant, if not oblivious, of bye-laws and forty-sbiHing fines. Nobody objects to smoking — not even the asthmatical old gentleman in the respirator and the red comforter — not even the tall lady, with the severe countenance and the green umbrella, who took the mUd fair man in spectacles so sharply to task this morning about the mild cigar which he was timidly smoking up the sleeve of his poncho. Even the guards and officials at the stations do not object to smoking One whiskered individual of the former class, ordinarily the terror of the humble third-class passenger, whom he, with fierce contempt, designates as " you, sir," and hauls out of the carriage on the slightest provocation, condescends to be satirical on the smoke subject ; he puts his head in at the window, and asks the passengers " how they like it — mild or full flavoured ? " This is a joke, and everybody, of course, laughs immensely, and goes on smoking unmolested. Bless me ! how heartily we can laugh at the jokes of people we are afraid of, or want to cringe to for a purpose. Surely a merrier excursion train than this was never due at the Babylon Bridge Station at " eleven-thii-ty." Funny stories are told. A little round man, m a grey coat, and a hat like a sailor's sings a comic song seven miles long, for he begins it at one station and ends it at another seven miles distant. A pretty, timorous widow is heard softly joining in the chorus of " tol de rol lol." A bilious man of melancholy mien, hitherto speechless, volunteers a humourous recitation, and promises feats of conjuring after they have passed the next station. Strangers are invited to drink out of strange bottles, and drink. Everybody is willing to take everybody's chil- dren on his knee. People pencil down addresses by the 64 Dutch PiSiures. lamplight, and exchange them with people opposite, hoping that they shall become better acquainted. The select clubs of jolly fellows are vei-y happy — they even say " vrappy." There is laughing, talking, jesting, courting, and tittering. None are silent but those who are asleep. Hurrah for this jovial excursion train, for the Nor-Nor-West-by-Eastern EaQ- way Company, its cheap fares and admirable management ! Suppose that just at the spot where this allegro train now is, there occurred the great accident of last July. You re- member, the excursion train, through some error, the cause of which was unfortunately never discovered, ran into the lug- gage train ! the driver and stoker of the former were dashed to pieces — thirty-three persons were killed or wounded. Suppose some man of poetical temperament, of fantastic imagination, of moody fancies were in the carriage of this merry train to- night, looking from the window, communing with the yellow moonlight, the light clouds placidly floating along the sea of heaven as if sure of a safe anchorage at last. He knows the line, he knows the place where that grim accident was — he muses on it — -yes ; this was the spot, there lay the bodies. Heavens and earth ! suppose the lines were haunted ! See, from a siding comes slowly, noiselessly along the rails the Phantom Teain ! There is no rattle of wheels, no puffing and blowing of the locomotive, only from time to time the engine whistle is heard in a fitful, murmuring, wailing gust of sound ; the lamps in front bum blue, sickly lambent flames leap from the funnel and the furnace door. The car- riages are lamplit too, but with coi-pse candles. The car- riages themselves are mere skeletons — they are all shattered, dislocated, ruined, yet, by some deadly principle of cohesion, A New Railway Line. 65 they keep together, and through the interstices of their crack- ing libs and framework you see the passengers. Horrible sight to see ! Some have limbs bound up in splinters, some lie on stretchers, but they have all Paces and Eyes : and the eyes and the faces, together with the phantom guard with his lantern, from which long rays of ghastly light proceed ; together with the phantom driver, with his jaw bound up ; the phantom stoker, who stokes with a mattock and spade, and feeds the fire as though he were making a grave ; the phantom commercial travellers wrapped in shrouds for rail- way rugs ; the pair of lovers in the first-class coupe locked in the embrace of death in which they were found after the accident, the stout old gentleman with his head in his lap, the legs of the man, the rest of whose body was never found, but who still has a face and eyes, the skeletons of horses in the horseboxes, the stacks of coffins in the luggage vans (for aU is transparent, and you can see the fatal verge of the em- bankment beyond, through the train). All these sights of horror flit continually past, up and down, backwards and forwards, haunting the line where the accident was. But, ah me ! these are, perhaps, but silly fancies after all. EespectabiLity may be right, and there may be no more poetry in a railway than in my boots. Yet I should like to find poetry in everything, even in boots. I am afraid rail- ways are vgly, dull, prosaic, straight ; yet the line of beauty, Hogarth tells us, is a curve, and curves you may occasionally find on the straightest of railways — and where beauty is, poetry, you may be sure of it, is not far off. I am not quite sure but you may find it in ugliness too, if there be anything beautiful in your own mind. p VI. WANT PLACES. ICAEEPULLY peruse every day the "Want Places" columns of the Times newspaper. As I shall presently shew, I happen to know most of the advertisers, and intend to introduce them to public notice. The ladies first: — AS HOUSEKEEPER to a nobleman or gentleman, a resjjectable middle-aged party, fully conversant with her duties. Unexception- able references. Address — K. G., 3, Preserve Street, Piccallilly Gardens. Mrs. Barbara Blundy is the " party." She is fond of mentioning, casually, that she was born in eighteen hundred and twenty, but she is, at least, fifty ; stiff, starch, demure. Two bands of well-pomatumed brown hair, and two thin pendants of corkscrew ringlets, stand perpetually on duty, on either side of her severe cap, caparisoned with grey ribbons of price; Mrs. Blundy' s keys and keybasket are her inseparable companions. She carries the one, and she jingles the others, with an inflexible rigidity of purpose. Her dress is of iron grey, and in it, with her iron keys, she looks like the gaoler, as she is, of the pickles and preserves ; the Charon of the still-room, the Alecto of the linen-chest, the Megsera of the housemaids, the Tisiphone of domestic economy. From her waist descends Want Places. 67 a silken apron of rich but sober hues, supposed to have been originally a genuine Bandanna handkerchief, one, indeed, of a set presented to her by General Sir Bulteel Bango, K.C.B., formerly colonel of the Old Hundredth regiment (raised by Colonel Sternhold in sixteen hundred and ninety- one, and known in the Low Country campaigns as Hopkins's foot). . Mrs. Blundy wears a spray of ambiguous transparencies, accepted, by a great exertion of faith by those who pay her court, to be Irish diamonds ; but which bear a stronger resemblance to the glass drops of a byegone girandole. After- noon and evening she dons a black, stiff, rustling, silk dress — ^like a board, as I have heard ladies say. None of your fal-de-ral lavender boots, but rigid, unmistakeable shoes of Cordovan leather, with broad sandals, and stout soles. No gewgaws, or vain lappets for Mrs. Blundy, when it pleases her to walk abroad ; but a severe, composed, decorous, comfortable, grey plaid shawl, a real sable muff (how the cook envies it ! ), a drawn silk bonnet, black kid gloves of staunch Lamb's Conduit Street make, and the keys in a reticule, like a silken travelling-bag. On Sunday evening she sweeps round the corner to chapel, and " sits under " the Eeverend Nahum GiEywhack (of Lady Mullington's connection), and afterwards, perchance, condescends to partake of a neat supper of some- thing warm at Mr. Chives's, formerly a butler, but now a greengrocer (and a widower), in Orchard Street. When Mrs. Blundy is " suited " in a nobleman's or gen- tleman's family — as she was at Lady Leviathan's, in Plesio- saurus Square — she becomes a fearful and wonderful spectacle. She moves down the back stairs with the dignity of a duchess who has come that way by mistake. Yet she is profoundly F 2 68 Dutch PiSiures. humble. She hopes (oh, how humbly!) that she knows her place. To see her curtsey to Lady Leviathan you would imagine that she was wont to stand on a descending platform instead of on a square of carpet — so low did she bend. Mrs. Blundy considered Miss Poonah (governess to the Honourables Bovina and Lardina Lambert, her ladyship's eldest daughters) as a very well behaved "yoimg person," highly accomplished, no doubt ; but with a want of "moral fitness;" an ambiguous expression which told immensely with the schoolroom maid, who stated that it exactly tallied with her opinion of Miss Poonah, who was, she shotdd say, a " stuck up thing." jMrs. Blundy left Lady Leviathan's in consequence of a " difficulty" with the lady's maid respecting Mr. Chives. Mrs. Blundy is not " suited " just now, and she is temporarily residing at a serious butcher's, in a narrow court) behind a great church, at the West End, wherein Mr. Cuffe, the beadle, not unfrequently condescends to insert his gold- laced person, and to purchase a plump chump chop, or a succulent lamb's fry. When Mrs. Blundy is "suited " (which will be soon, for her references are unexceptionable), she i\'ill rule the roast as completely as ever. She practises, perhaps unconsciously, Frederic Barbarossa's maxim — "Who can dissimulate can reign." She will bully the stiU-room maid, and the footman, and Heaven only help the housemaids ! The terrible lectures they will have to endure on the sinfulness of ribbons, and the " unloveliness of lovelocks," the perdition of jewellery ! The dismal anecdotes they will have to endure of errant housemaids who, disregarding the advice of their pastors and friends — ^the housekeepers — fell into evil ways,, and weare afterwards seen walking in the Park on Sunday,. Want Places. 69 -with fourteen flounces one above the other, and leaning on the arms of Life-Guardsmen. All this will be, as it has been before, when Mrs. Blundy is " suited." To be housekeeper to a duchess is the culminating point of Mrs. Blundy's ambition. To dine with the groom of the chambers, and my lord duke's steward — to have her own still- room footman behind her own still-room chair — to hear the latest Court news from her grace's lady'smaid, or fromMonsieur Anatole, the hair-dresser, invited in to partake of a glass of "London particular" Madeira. These, with the comfortable perspective of a retiring pension, or of a stately superannuation at his grace's great show-house in Hampshire ; with rich fees for shewing Claudes and Petitots, Sevres porcelain and Gobelin, tapestry, to visitors. Any duchess, therefore, who may want such a person, will know where to apply. AS HOUSEKEEPER to a Single or Invalid Gentleman, a Single Person of experience. Can be liighly recommended. Address, Alpha, at Mr. Mutts, 72, Kingsgate Street, Holborn. Attached relatives and friends of Sir Dian Lunes, Bart. — who, beyond occasional aberrations and delusions respecting his head being a beehive, and himself heir to the throne of Great Britain, is a harmless, helpless, paralytic, bedridden old gentleman enough — may be safely assured that Alpha is the housekeeper for him — Alpha, otherwise represented by Miss Eudd. Mr. Mutts, trunkmaker, of Kingsgate Street, Holbom, knows Miss Kudd. Does he not ? Ugh ! Who but a meek, quiet, little, widowed, trunkmaker, with thi-ee daughters (grown up, and all inclined to redness at the nose), would know that terrible female, half as long as he has done ? She 70 Dutch PiSiures. lodges with him ia the frequent intervals between her situations. " Hang her, she do" say Mutts to himself, as he is busy at work. And, as he says it, he gives a nail, which he fancies has a Euddish appearance, such an exasperated rap, that Grrapp, his apprentice, begins rapping at his nails, in professional emulation, harder than ever ; and the two between them engender such a storm of raps that Mr. Eerret, the surly attorney opposite, sends across with his compliments, and reaUy he shall be obliged to indict Mr. Mutts for a nuisance — indeed he shall. Miss Eudd — she is tall, lanky, and bony ! She has some jet ornaments, in heavy links, about her neck ; but, resembling the fetters over the gate of the Old Bailey, they have not a decorative effect. She wears a faded black merino dress, the reflections from which are red with rust. Her feet are long and narrow, like canoes. Her hands, when she has those hideous black mittens on, always remind me of unboiled lobsters. When Judith Jael Mutts, aged twenty-three years, tells her father that Miss Eudd — having left Mrs. Major Morpuss's family, in consequence of the levity of Miss Corpus, that lady's niece — is, pending her acceptance of another engagement, coming to stayaweek in Kingsgate Street, the poor man breaks out into a cold perspiration — yet his daughter Judith always adds, " Eeally Miss Eudd is such a superior person, and has so strict a sense of her moral mission, that we should all be beneiited (a glance at Mutts over his Sunday newspaper) by her stay." Mutts knows that it is all over with this said newspaper during Miss Eudd's stay, which, though announced as to be only of a week's duration, he knows, from sad Want Places. 71 experience, will, very probably, be indefinitely protracted. Miss Eudd's moral mission ordinarily involves an unusual tartness of temper in Mr. Mutt's three amiable daughters ; it makes — on the general question of theology at meal times, and extra exposure to being "worreted" — Grapp's, the apprentice's, life a temporary burden to him. There is no rest for Mr. Mutts while the single gentleman's housekeeper is good enough to lodge with him. He is in daily perturbation lest Miss Eudd should take his state of widowerhood as a state of sin ; and, willing or not willing, marry him severely. With what alacrity he carries the notification of Miss Eudd's wishes to Printing-House Square ! How devoutly he hopes that the advertisement will be speedily answered 1 Not only to Sir Dian Lunes, but to Thomas Tallboys, Esq. (known, when in the House, from his taciturnity, as " Mum " Tallboys), Miss Eudd would be an eligible retainer. That stiff, steru, melancholy, silent, man would find a treasure in her. Trestles, the footman, who is more than half-brother to a mute, would have a grim and silent respect for her. Her lank canoe-Hke shoes would go noiselessly about the stairs ; into Mr. TaHboys's ghastly dining-room, where there is a Turkey carpet, of which the faded colours seem to have sunk through the floor, like spectres ; into the study, where there are great bookcases of veUum bound volumes, which seem to have turned pale with fright at the loneliness of their habita- tion, a view of the Street of Tombs at Pompeii, and a model of an ancient sarcophagus — the study where every morning she would find Mr. Tallboys in a dressing-gown, like a tartan winding sheet, with a bony paperknife cutting the leaves of the Eegistrar-General's returns, which he will have sent to him 7^ Dutch PiSlures. weekly ; into the silent kitchen, where an imposing and gleaming ia^fewe »roe]y moiv. They are aware of Mrs. Smallgrow, but they do not know her. It is a qnestiou even if they are fiuuihar with her name. She supejrintemds the lowering of the grim Iwrown Holland cloths over the gay decorations after the perfiamances. AVhere she lives is a mysteiy — somewhere underneath the "gravetrap" in the mexsanine floor, or high in the tackled flies, perhaps. >vo man regardeth her ; but, when the last actor is descending from lu s dressing-room at night, when the last c.wpenter has packed tip his tools to go home, the figim^ of the theatrical housekeeper is deseriixl duskily looming in the distance — cov«tiug up the piaiwforte in the green rooni. or conferring with iheflreman amidst ti»e coils of the eng^e hose, or upon the deserte>l stage, which, an hour ago, \vas joyous with light and life ai\d music. When the Theatre Bojal, Hatton Ganlwi, has a \-«cancy for « honsekeepcr it is through some oewik 78 Dutch PiSiures. influence — some application totally independent of the three- and-sixpenny publicity — that Mrs. Smallgrove is inducted into this situation. She niay have been a decayed keeper of a wardrobe, a prompter's wife fallen upon evil days, a decrepit ballet mistress. But what her antecedents have been is doubtful, likewise the amount of her salary. AS NURSE in a Nobleman's or Gentleman's Family, a Person of great experience in the care of Children. Can be highly recommeneled by several families of distinction. Address P., care of Mr. Walkinshaw, Trotman's Buildings, Legg Street Road, S. As nurse ! For what enormous funds we can draw on thp bank of Memory on the mention of that familiar word I With the Nurse are connected our youthful hopes and fears — our earliest joys, our earliest sorrows. She was the autocrat of our nonage. Her empire over us commenced even before memory began. When Frederick the Great tempted the soldier on guard to smoke a pipe, adding that he was the king, what was the reply of the faithful sentinel? "King," he said, "be hanged, what wiU my captain say?" So, when even the parental authority winked at our infantile shortcomings, the dread thought, "WhatwiU nurse say?" shot through our youthful minds ; and the parental wink, although it might be urged in alleviation, could not purchase impunity. Charles Lamb, in one of his delightful Essays, says, that if he were not an independent gentleman he would like to be a beggar. Alexander of Macedon expressed a somewhat analogical wish in reference to Diogenes in his tub. Thus, to come farther down, and nearer home, I may say that next to being the Marchioness of Candyshire, I should like to be the Marchioness of Gandyshire's nurse. I will not enlarge Want Places. 79 on the gorgeous estate of the monthly nurse in an aristo- cratic family, on her unquestioned despotism, her unresisted caprices, her irreversible decrees, her undisputed sway over Baby, her familiarity with the most eminent of the Faculty, and the auriferous oblations offered to her in the shape of guineas in the christening cup, because the lady of Trotman's Buildings is the nurse I propose to sketch, not a lunar but a permanent nurse, one of the arbiters of the child's career, from its emancipation from the cradle to its entrance into the school -room. And surely, when we hear so much of what school- masters and mistresses have done towards forming childi'en's minds ; when old FuUer bids us remember " K. Bond, pf Lancashire," for that he had the " breeding the learned Ascham," and " Hartgrave in Brundly school, because he was the &st did teach worthy Dr. Whitaker," and " Mul- grave for his scholar, that gulf of learning. Bishop Andrews;" when we are told what influence this first schoolmistress had towards making Hannah More a moralist, or that poor dear governess L. E. L. a poetess, should we not call to mind what mighty influences the nurse must have had in kneading the capacities, and after-likings and after-learnings of the most famous men and women ? What heroes and statesmen must have learnt their first lessons of fortitude and prudence on the nurse's knee — what hornbooks of duty and truth and love and piety must have been first conned under that homely instructress? On the other hand, what grievous seeds of craven fear, and dastardly rebellion, and hypocrisy and hate, and stubborn pride must have been sown in the child's first nursery garden by the nurse ? Shakspeare, who never 86 Dutch PiSiures. overlooked anything, was mindful of the nurse's mission : yow may turn up in his works a score of quotations on the nursery head without trouble ; and (most ludicrous descent of analogy) even that American showman had some shrewd knowledge of the chords that are respondent in the human heart, when he foisted an old black woman on his countrymen as Wash- ington's nurse. Mrs. Pettifer, now desirous of an engagement in a family of distinction, must have been originally, I take it, a nursery- maid; but if ever lowliness were her "young ambition's ladder," she now decidedly — " — looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees By which she did ascend." Between her and nursery-maids there is a yawning gulf as impassable as Niagara in a cock-boat. " Bits of girls," " trumpery things," thus she characterises them. She over- flows with the failing by which angels are said to have fallen — pride. There is no humility, real or simulated, about her. She knows her place thoroughly ; but she knows that place is to command, to reprimand, to overawe high and low, from the Marchioness of Candyshire to Prue the smallest maid, who is the slave of her gunpowder tea-pot and a bond ser- vant to her arrowroot skillet. At the Marchioness of Candyshii'e's (where we will sup- pose her, for the nonce, to be installed), at that imposing town house in Great Gruffin. Street, Brobdignag Square, about which Messrs. Gunter's myrmidons are always hanging with green boxes ; where the clustered soot from bye-gone flambeaux in the iron extinguishers on the area railings is Want Places. 8i eloquent of entertainments past ; and wliere the harlequinadecl hatchment of Groliath the last Marquis (a sad man for chicken-hazard) hints what a great family the Candy- shires are. Here, in tliis most noble mansion, from the nursery wicket to the weathercocks over the chimney cowls, Martha Pettifer is Empress and Queen. The lower suites of apartments she condescendingly concedes to the Mai-quis and Marchioness for balls, dinners, and similar trifles ; but hers are the flight of nursery stairs, both back and front ; hers the airy suite of upper rooms ; hers the cribs, cradles, and tender bodies of the hopes and pride of Candyshire. The youthful Earl of Everton, aged foui-. Lord Claude Toffie, aged three, Ladies Dulciana and Juliana Toffie, aged two years and eight months, respectively, are her serfs, vas- sals, and villains. Over them she has all rights of soccage, jambage, free warren, turbary, pit and gallows (or rather corner and cupboard), and all other feudal and manorial rights. Lord Candyshire, a timid marquis with a red head, manifestly afraid of his own footman — ^who was expected to do something great in the House on the Bosjesman Bishop- rics (additional) BiU, but did not — is admitted to the nursery on sufferance ; and gives there his caresses with perturba- tion, and his opinions with deference. Lady Candyshire — a superb member of the female aristocracy (you remember her portrait by Flummery, K.A., as Semii-amis), and whom her cousin and former suitor Lord Tommy Fetlock frequently offers to back in the smoking-room of Ms club as " game " to " shut up " any number of ladies-in-waiting in a snaU's -canter — ^is subdued and complaisant in the nursery. She G 82 Dutch PiStures. has an uneasy consciousness that she is not quite mistress there; and though Mrs. Pettifer is not at all like Semiramis, and no Flummery, E.A., ever dreamt of taking her portrait, the Marchioness defers to her, and bears with her humours, and bends to her wiU. As for the Candyshire carriage, sleek horses, tigerskin hammercloth, coachman's wig, footman's batons, and herald painting, they are quite as much Mrs. Pettifer's as her ladyship's. If the youthful scions of that illustrious house are to take, according to her sovereign will, an airing in the Park, and the Marchioness is desirous of attending a meeting of the ladies' committee of the Penitent-Cannibals Society, she may take the brougham ; Martha Pettifer must have the great body vehicle. If, on the other hand, a visit is to be made to Mr. Manismooth, the dentist's, Martha boldly usurps the close carriage, and, bleak as may be the day, and lowering the clouds, leaves her mistress to shift for herself — even when Lord Candyshire (whose silent services at the House of Lords involve the carrying about of a huge mass of papers) has bespoken the curly-wigged coachman and the horses for the conveyance of himself and blue-books to Westminster. As to poor Mademoiselle Frileuse, the thin Swiss governess, with her charge. Lady Ariadne Toffie, aged eleven, she may take what vehicle she can procure. Martha Pettifer, notwithstanding her high estate of car- riage, and curly-wigged coachman and batoned footman, does not ape the apparel of an aristocrat. There is no mis- taking her for a marchioness ; she is above that. She towers high among the youthful Candyshires, erect and stately, com- fortably clad in woollen and stout silk. At shops and exhi- bitions, at the gate of that favourite resort of the juvenile Want Places. 83 aristocracy, the Zoological Gardens ia the Eegent's Park, you may see the great Candyshire carriage standing ; or you may watch it rolling leisurely through Hyde Park, the Can- dyshire children looking as beautiful and as delicate as only British children can look. Aristocratic mammas pass by in their carriages and remark, with languid complacency, how well the dear children look, and what a treasure Lady Candyr shire must have in her nurse. Which is best, think you, Mademoiselle Prileuse, to be— r after a tedious intellectual training which may fit 'you to become a duchess, inasmuch as you are expected to impart it to a young lady who may be a duchess some day — a governess, with forty pounds a year " salary," or to be Mrs. Pettifer, a nurse, with fifty pounds a year " wages " ? Have you a tithe as much authority over your pupU as she has over her nurslings ? Can you command the footmen, and make the nursemaids tremble ? Does the Marchioness defer to you, and say, " Mademoiselle, I dare say you know best, therefore do as you like." Can you contradict the doctor, the mighty Sir Paracelsus Powgrave, and make poor little Mr. PUdrag, the apothecary, shiver in his cloth boots when he comes to lance the children's gums ? Are all your lingual skfll, your drawing, your painting, your harp and pianoforte cunning, your geography, your use of the globes, and your rudiments of Latin, held as of half so much account as Mrs. Pettifer's experiences in the administration of a foot-bath, in the virtues of lambs' wool socks, in the efficacy of a Dover's powder ? You are to teach the children the learning which is to fortify their minds, the graces which are to adorn their, persons for the tournament of the world ; but yonder illiterate G a 84 Dutch Pi£iures. woman who gives the children their physic, superintends their washing and dressing, and cuts their bread and buttei% thinks and knows herself to be infinitely superior to you : " a bit of a governess, indeed ! " There are nurses in all grades and conditions of life who want places just now, but they all, on a coiTespondingly descending scale, are fashioned after the Pettifer model. Some are temporary and some permanent; some ready to take the child from the month, some preferring the care of children of more advanced growth. Then there is the transi- tion nurse — half nurse, half nursemaid, and not averse to sub- siding into the anomalous position of a " young-ladies' maid." There are nurses of tender hearts apt to conceive an affection for their charges quite as ardent as that which a mother ever had for her own children ; who grieve as passionately when they are separated from them as those good Normandy women do who take the babes from the Foundling Hospital in Paris. Such nurses will, after lapses of long years, and from immense distances, suddenly start up looking as yotmg, or rather as old as ever, and shed tears of delight at the sight and speech of their nurse-children,^own men and women, now, with children of their own to nurse. Woe is me that there should be found, among this apparently simple-minded and affectionate class, persons who make of their once state of nursehood a kind of prescriptive ground for future claims. ■' Nurses ! " says my friend Brown, with a groan, " I've had enough of 'em. My mother had thirteen children, and I have had seven of my own ; and every now and then I am beset with importunate old women curtseying, hang 'em, and saying, ' Please, sir, I nvirsed you,' or, ' Please, sir, I was Want Places. 85 master Tommy's nurse;' and who expect five shillings and a pound of green tea." Then there is Mrs. Crapper, whom I may characterise as the " back streets nurse," who is strictly temporary, and whose connection lies chiefly among small tradesmen and well-to-do mechanics. She dwells somewhere in Drury Court, or Camaby Street, Golden Square, or Denmark Street, Soho, in a many-beUed house, over a chandler's shop, or a bookstall, perhaps. The intuitive prescience of being wanted possessed by this woman is to me astonishing. She never requires to be "fetched" like the doctor — appa- rently so, at least. She seems to come up some domestic trap. There she is at her post, with a wonderful free- masonic understanding with the doctor, and the Eegistrar of Births, and the undertaker, and the sexton, and aU the misty functionaries, whisperingly talked of but seldom seen, connected with our coming in and going out of the world. For Mrs. Crapper is as often an attendant upon the sunset as upon the sunrise of life. There is also the Indian Nurse, the Ayah, a brown female in crumpled white muslin, who comes over, with, her nurse child, or baia, with Mrs. Captain Chutney in the Puttyghaut East Indiaman, or with the widow of Mr. Mofuzzle of the civil service overland. Her performances in England are chiefly confined to sitting upon the stairs, shivering and chat- tering her teeth pitiably, and uttering heart-rending entreaties to be sent back to Bengal. Back to Bengal she is sent in due time, accordingly, to squat in a verandah, and talk to her haiba in an unintelligible gabble of Hindostanee and English, after the manner of Ayahs generally. 86 Dutch PtSiures. There is a lady of the nurse persuasion who does not want a place in the Times, but who is not above wanting nurse children. The custom of putting children out to nurse is decidedly prevalent. The present writer was "raised " in this manner. I have no coherent remembrance of the lady, but I bear yet about me an extensive scar caused by a humorous freak of hers to tear off a blister before the proper time. She also, I understand, was in the habit of beating me into a very prismatic condition, though, to do her justice, she distributed her blows among her nurse children and her own with unflinch- ing impartiality. The termination of my connection with her was caused by her putting me into a bed with two of her young charges who were ill of the measles ; following out a theory she entertained, that it was as well that I shoidd catch that complaint then as in after days ; on whigh occasion I was rescued from her and conveyed home, wrapped up in blankets. I have also an indistinct remembrance of having been, in some stage of my petticoathood, introduced to a young gentleman in a trencher cap and leather breeches, on the ground that he had been my foster-brother. Carrying memory farther back, and remembering sundry cuffs and kicks, and mutual out- tearings of handfuls of hair, I had some faint idea that I reaJly had been acquainted with the young gentleman at some time or other. The person who takes children out to nurse resides at Brentford, or at Lewisham, or Sydenham. Her husband may be a labourer in a market-garden, or a suburban omnibus driver, or a river bargeman. She may be (as she often is) a comely, kindly, motherly woman, delighting to make her little knot of infants a perfect nosegay of health, and beauty. Want Places. 87 and cleanliness ; or she may be (as she very often is, too) an ignorant, brutish, drunken jade ; beating, starving, and neglecting her helpless wards, laying in them the foundation of such mortal maladies, both physical and moral, as years of aftemurture shall not assuage. And yet we take our nurses, or send our babies to nurse, blindfold, although we would not go out partridge shooting with a gun we had bought of Cheap Jack, or adventure our merchandise in a ship of which we knew not the name, the tonnage, or the register. One more nurse closes my list — the hospital nurse. Mrs. Pettifer's high-blown pride may have, from over distension, at length broken, and the many summers she has floated " in a sea of glory," may, and do, find a termination sometimes in the cold, dull, dark pool of an hospital ward. Yet power has not whoUy passed away from her ; for, beyoml the doctors, to whom she must perforce be polite and submissive, and the students, whom she treats with waggish complacency, she is supreme over all with whom she comes in con- tact. Mrs. Pettifer, formerly feared and obeyed by the Candyshire vassalage, is here Nurse Canterbury or Nurse Adelaide, stUl feared, still obeyed in Canterbm-y or Adelaide Ward. Controller of physic, of sweet or bitter sauce for food ; smoother of pillows, speaker of soft or querulous words, dis- penser of gaU or balsam to the sick, she is conciliated by rela- tives, dreaded or loved by patients. I often think, when I walk through the long, clean, silent wards of an hospital (nothing, save the lower decks of a man-of-war, can come up to hospital order, neatness, and cleanliness) watching the patients quietly resigned, yet so expressively suffering, the golden sunlight playing on their wan faces, the slow crawUng 88 Dutch FiBures. steps of the convalescents, the intermittent cases sitting quietly at their beds' foot, waiting patiently till their time of torture shall come ; — hearing the monotonous ticking of the clock, the slow rustling of the bed-clothes, the pattering foot of the nurse as she moves from bed to bed, consulting the paper at the bed-head as to the medicine and diet, and slowly gurgling forth the draught : I often think of what an immense, an awful weight of responsibility hangs in this melancholy abode upon the Nurse. The doctor has his vocation, and per- forms it. He severs tbis diseased limb, and binds up that wound. The physician points out the path to health, and gives us drugs like money to help us on our way. But it is for the nurse to guide the weary wanderer ; to wipe the dust from his bleared eyes and the cold sweat from his brow ; to moisten his parched lips ; to bathe his swollen feet : to soothe and tend and minister to him until the incubus of sickness b& taken off and he struggle into Efe a whole man again. Sometimes the hospital nurse is not an aristocrat in deca- dence, but a plebian promoted. Often the back streets nurse, at the recommendation of the doctor, changes the venue of her ministrations from Carnaby Street to Saint Gengulphus's or Saint Prude's. The hospital nurse is ordinarily hard-work- ing, skilful, placable, and scrupulously cleanly ; but she has, too frequently, two deadly sins. She drinks, and she is accessible to bribery j and, where bribery begins, extortion, partiality, and tyranny, to those who cannot bribe, soon fol- low. I wish I could acquit the hospital nurse of these weak- nesses, but I cannot.* And this is why I hail as excellent * This paper was first published in 1853 ; since that time many bene- ficial changes have been made in the system and practice of hospital nursing. Want Places. 89. and hopeful the recent introduction into some liospitals of superintendent nurses, called Sisters, superior ia intelligence and education to the average class of attendants. As nursei'y-maid ; as nurse-girl ; as wet-nui'se (" witli a good," &c., a lady generally sensitive as to diet, and whose daily pints of porter are with her points of honour) ; as school- room-maid : all these " want places " speak for themselves. They are buds and offshoots and twigs of the nurse-tree pro- per, and as such are highly useful, each in their distinctive sphere, but beyond that they do not call for any detailed notice here. YII. MOEE PLACES WANTED. AS LADY'S-MAID, a young person who has lived in the first families, and can have four years's good character. Fully under- stands dressmaking, hair-dressing, and getting up fine linen. Address Miss T., Bunty's Library, Crest Terrace, Pimlico. Miss Fanny Tarlatan, the young lady in quest of a situa- tion, does not reside at Bunty's library. Mr. Bunty and Mr. Bunty's wife are only friends of hers. Mr. Bunty is tall and stout, with a white neckcloth, and is very like a clergy- man, with a dash of the schoolmaster and a smack of the butler. Mrs. Bunty is an acrid lady in ribbons, with a perpetual smile for lady customers ; which would be a little more agreeable if it did not twist her neck, and screw her mouth up, and twist her body over the counter. At Bunty's library are three-volume novels bound in dashing cloth; and Bunty's library is carpeted; and in the centre thereof is a great round table groaning beneath the weight of ladies' albums, and works of genteel piety, and treatises written with a view to induce a state of contentment among the rural population (hot-pressed and with gilt edges), More Places Wanted. 91 together with neatly stitched pamphlets upon genteelly religious and political subjects, and handsomely elapsed church services, with great red crosses on their backs and sides. No ; Miss Tarlatan does not live at Bunty's ; but she is an old colleague of Mrs. Bunty's (once Miss Thomeytwig, my Lady Crocus's waiting woman), and calls her Matilda, and is by her called "Fanny," and "Dear Girl;" and therefore she gives Bunty's library as an addi-ess ; it being considered more aristocratic than Tidlers' Gardens ; where, in the house of Mi's. Silkey, that respectable milliner and dress- maker. Miss Tai'latan is at present staying. She can dress hair, make dresses, and perfectly under- stands getting up fine linen. The French co\ffeiir is still a great personage ; but his services are now-a-days often sup- plied by the lady's-maid ; and there are many fair and noble ladies who are not too haughty to employ Miss Tarlatan, and go, resplendent from her skill, into the presence of their sovereign, or into the melodious vicinity of the singers of the Italian opera. Also to wear ball and court dresses made, not by the pallid workwomen and " first hands " of the great millinery establishments of the AVest-Eud, but by the nimble fingers of Fanny Tarlatan. Also to confide to her sundry priceless treasures of Mechlin and Brussels, Honiton and old point, or " Beggar's lace," sprigged shawls and veils, and such marvels of fine things, to be by her got up. All of which proceedings are characterised by the great millinery establishments, by the fashionable blanchisseiis de fin, and by M. Anatole, coiffeur, of Eegent Street, as atrocious, mean, stingy, avaricious, and unjustifiable on the part of miladi ; 92 Dutch PiStures. but wliich, if they suit her to order and Miss Tarlatau to undertake, are in my mind, on the broad-gauge of free trade, perfectly reasonable and justifiable. Some ladies make a merit of their Tarlatanism, stating, with pride, that their maids " do everything for them ; " others endeavour uneasily to defend their economy by reference to the hardness of the times, to their large families, to the failure of revenue from my lord's Irish estates, to the extravagance of such and such a son or heir, or to Sir John having lost enormously in rail- ways or by electioneering. One lady I have heard of who palliated all domestic retrenchments on the ground of having to pay so much income-tax. Unhappy woman ! Hairdresser, dressmaker, getter-up of fine linen ; skilled in cosmetics and perfumes ; tasteful arranger of bouquets ; dexterous cleaner of gloves (for my lady must have two pairs of clean gloves a-day and, bountiful as may be her pin-money, you will rarely iind her spending seven-hundred and thirty times four shillings per annum in gloves) ; artful trimmer of bonnets ; clever linguist ; of great conversational powers in her own language ; of untiring industry, cheerfulness, and good temper — aU these is Fanny Tarlatan, aged twenty- eight. I have a great respect for Fanny Tarlatan, and for the lady's-maid, generally, and wish to vindicate her from the slur of being a gossiping, tawdry, intriguing, venal waiting-maid, as which she is generally represented in novels and plays, and similar performances. Fanny is not without personal charms. She has ringlets that her lady might envy, and the comely good-humoured look which eight-and-twenty is often gilded with. She has been resolute enough to steel her heart against the advances- More Places Wanted. 93 «f many a dashing courier, of many an accomplished valet, of many a staid and portly butler. She does not look for matrimony in the World of Service. Mr. Whatnext, at the Great Haberdashery Palace, Froppery House, head man there, indeed (though Mr. Biggs, my lord's gentleman, has sneeringly alluded to him as a " low counter-jumper "), has spoken her fair. Jellytin, the rising pastrycook at Gunter's, has openly avowed his maddening passion, and showed her his savings'-bank book. But that did not dazzle her ; for she too has a "little bit of money of her own." Her reve- nues chiefly lie, not in her wages — ^they are not too ample — but in her perquisites. Lawyers would starve (figuratively, of course, for 'tis impossible for a lawyer to starve under any circumstances) on the bare six and eightpenoes — ^it is the extra costs that fatten. Perquisites are Fanny Tarlatan's costs. To her fall all my lady's cast-off clothes. Their amount and value depend npoii my lady's constitutional liberality or parsimony. A dress may be worn once, a week, a month, or a year before it reverts to the lady's-maid. So with gloves, shoes, ribbons, and all the other weapons in the female armouiy, of which I know no more than St. Anthony did of the sex — or that Levantine monk Mr. Curzon made us acquainted with, who had never seen a woman. Old Lady McAthelyre, with whom Fanny lived before she went to the Countess of Coeurdesart's (Lady McA. was a terrible old lady, not unsuspected of a penchant for shoplifting and •drinking ewa de cologne grog), used to cut up all her old dresses for aprons, and the fingers off her gloves for mittens, and was the sort of old lady altogether who might reasonably be expected to skin a flea for the hide and tallow thereof. 94 Dutch PiSiures. Mrs. Colonel Scraw, Fanny's mistress after Lady Coeurde- sart, made her old clothes her own peculiar perquisites, and sold them herself. But such exceptions are rare, and Panny has had, on the whole, no great reason to complain. Perhaps yon will, therefore, at some future time, meet with her under the name of Whatneit, or JeUytin, or Piggies, or Seakale, in a snug, well-to-do West-End business, grown into a portly matron (with ringlets yetj for they are vital to the lady's- maid through life), with two little girls tripping home from Miss Weazel's dancing academy. I hope so, with all my heart. There is a custom common among the English nobility, and yet peculiar to that privileged class, to get the best of everything. Consequently, whenever they find foreign cooks and foreign musicians more skilful than native talent, it is matter of noble usance to refect upon foreign dishes; to prefer the performances of foreign minstrels and players ; to cover the head, or hands, or feet, with coverings made by foreign artisans; and, even in the ordinary conversation of life, to pepper discourse with foreign words, as you would a sheep's kidney with cayenne. So my lord duke entertains in his great mansion a French cook, a Swiss confectioner, an Italian house steward, a French valet, German and French governesses, a German under-nurse or bonne (that his children may imbibe fragments of foreign language with their pap), besides a host of non-resident foreign artists and professors gathered from almost every nation under the sun. It is, therefore, but reasonable that her grace the duchess should have a foreign attendant — a French, or Swiss, or German lady's-maid. I wUl take Mademoiselle Batiste, warranted from Paris, as a sample. More Places Wanted. 95 When I say warranted from Paris, I mean what the word "warranted" is generally found to mean — not at all like what it professes to be. Mademoiselle Batiste says she is from Paris ; but she does not bear the slightest resemblance to the pert, sprightly, coquettish, tasteful, merry creation in a cunning cap, a dress closed to the neck, a plaited silk apron and shiny shoes, that a Parisian lady's maid generally is. My private impression is that she is a native of some distressingly lugubrious provincial town in the midi of France — Aigues-Mortes, perchance — whence she has been sent, for our sins, to England, to make us mournful. She is a most dolorous Abigail ; a lachrymose, grumbling, doleant, miser- able waiting woman. When she is old (she is in the thirties, now,) she will take snuff and keep a poodle on some fifth floor in the Marais. Whether she has been dis- appointed in love, or her relations were guillotined during the great revolution; whether she was bom on the eve of St. Swithin, or like Apollodorus, nourishes scorpions in her breast, I know not, but she is a very grievous woman — a female knight of the rueful countenance. If you fail to please her she grumbles ; if you remonstrate with her, she cries. What are you to do with a woman, whose clouds always end in rain, unless you have Patience for an umbrella? In person. Mademoiselle Batiste is tall ; in compass wofully lean and attenuated; her face is of the hatchet cast, and she has protruding teeth, long dark eyebrows, stony eyes, and heavy eye-lashes. A sick monkey is not a very enlivening sight ; a black man with chilblains and a fit of the ague is not calculated to provoke cheerfulness, and there are specta- cles more cheerful than a workhouse funeral on a wet day ; ^6 Dutch PiStures. but all these are positively carnivals of joviality compared to Mademoiselle Batiste wailing over her lady's wardrobe, her own wrongs, and her unhappy destiny generally. The climate, the food, the lodging, the raiment, the tyranny of superiors, and the insolence of inferiors ; all these find a place in the category of this gruesome lady's unhappiness. She prophecies the decadence of England with far more fervour than M. Ledru RoUin. She will impress herself to leave this detestable land; without sun, vrithout manners, without knowledge of living. iSomehow she docs not quit this detestable land. She is like (without disrespect) that animal of delusive promise, the conjm-or's donkey, which is always going for to go, but seldom does really go, up the ladder. Mademoiselle Batiste weeps and moans, and grumbles, and changes her situation innumerable times, and packs up her " effects " for the continent once a week or so ; but stays in England after all. When she has saved enough money, she may perhaps revisit the land of the Gaul, and relate to her compatriots the affliction sore which long time she bore among ces barbares. In reality, Mademoiselle Batiste is an excellent servant ; she is not only apt but enidite in all the cunning of her craft. M. Anatole, of E«gent Street, might take lessons in hair- dressing from her. She far surpasses Miss Tarlatan in di-ess- making ; although she disdains to include that accomplish- ment in the CTiniculum of her duties. But her principal skfll lies in putting on a dress, in imparting to her mistress when dressed an air, a grace, a tournure, which any but a French hand must ever despair of accomplishing. Yet she .grumbles meanwhile ; and when she has made a peri of More Places Wanted. 97 a peeress, sighs dolefully and maintains that an English- woman does not know how to wear a robe. This skill it is that makes her fretfulness and melancholial distemper borne with by rank and fashion. She has, besides, a pedigi-ee of former engagements of such magnitude and grandeur, that rank and fashion are fain to bow to her caprices. The beau- teous Duchesse de Faribole in Paris, and the Marquise de Lysbrisee (very poor, very Legitimist, but intensely fashion- able) ; the famous Princess Cabbagioso at Florence, Countess MoskamujikoiF at St. Petersburgh, the Duchess of Cham- pignon, the Marchioness of Truffleton and Lady Frances Frongus in England — all these high-born ladies has she delighted with her skill, awed with her aristocratic antece- dents, and annoyed with her melancholia. Although so highly skilled in dress-making she pays but little regard to cos- tume herself. Her figure is straight aU the way down, on all sides. She wears a long pendent shawl, a dreary bonnet with trailing ribbons; and carries, when abroad, a long, melancholy, attenuated umbrella, like a parasol that had out- grown itself, and was wasting away in despair. These, with the long duU gold drops to her ear-rings ; two flat thin smooth bands of hair flattened upon her forehead ; long list- less fingers, and long feet encased in French boots of lustre- less kid, give her an unspeakably mournful, trailing appear- ance. She seems to have fallen altogether into the " portion of weeds and outgrown faces." Her voice is melancholy and tristfuUy surgant, like an jEoKan harp ; her delivery is remi- niscent of the Dead March in Saul ; — a few wailing, lingering notes, closed with a melancholy boom at the end of the strophe. Adieu, Mademoiselle Batiste. H 9? Dutch PiSlures. There are many more lady's-maids who want places ; and, taking into consideration the increased facilities ofFei-ed by the abolition of the duty on advertisements, I sincerely hope they may all be suited satisfactorily. But I cannot tarry to discuss all their several qualifications. Although I can conscientiously recommend " Wilkins" (Christian name unknown), the lady's-maid of middle age, and domesticated habits, who was with Mrs. Colonel Stodger during the whole of the Sutlej campaign ; who is not too proud to teach the cook how to make curries; is reported to have ridden (with her mistress) in man's saddle iive hundred miles on camel's back in India, and to have done something considerable to- wards shooting a plundering native discovered in Mrs. Stod- ger's tent. Nor would I have you overlook the claims of Martha Stirpenny, who is a "young lady's-maid," and is not above plain needlework ; or of Miss Catchpole, the maid, nurse, companion, amanuensis, everything, for so many years to the late Miss Plough, of Maunday Terrace, Bayswater, who ungratefully left all her vast wealth in Bank and India stock to the " Total Abstinence from Suttee Hindoo Widow's So- ciety,'' offices Great St. Helens, secretary, G. E. L. B. Stoneybattcr, Esq. ; and bequeathed to her faithful Catchpole, after twenty years' service, only a silver teapot and a neatly- bound set of the Eev. Doctor Duffaboxe's sermons. All these domestics want places, and all letters to them must be post-paid. AS COOK (Professed) a Person who fully understands her business. Address L., Pattypan Place, Great Brazier Street. There is something honest, outspoken, fearless, in this brief advertisement. L. does not condescend to hint about More Places Wanted. .99 the length and quality of her character, or the distinguished uatme of the family she wishes to enter. " Here I am," she seems to say ; " a professed cook. K you are the sort of person knowing what a professed cook is, and how to use her, try me. Good cooks are not so plentiful that they need shout for custom. Good wine needs no bush. I stand upon my cooking, and if yuu suit me as I suit you, nothing but a spoilt dinner shall part us two." L., whom we will incarnate for the nonce as 3Irs. Lambswool, widow, is fat and forty, but not fair. The fires of innumerable kitchen ranges have swarthed her ruddy countenance to an almost salamandriue hue. And she is a salamander in tamper too, is Mrs. Lambs- wool, for all her innocent name. Lambswool, deceased (formerly clerk of the kitchen to the Dawdle club), knew it to his cost, poor man ; and for many a kept back dinner and unpraised made dish did he suffer in his time. K Fate could bring together (and how seldom Fate does bring together things and persons suited for one another), Mrs. Lambswool and Sir Chyle Tuwener, how excellently they would agree! Sir Chyle — who dwells in Bangmarry Crescent, Hordover Square, and whose house as you pass it smells all day like a cook-shop — made his handsome compe- tence in the war time by contracts for mess-beef as execrable, and mess-biscmts as weevily, as ever her Majesty's service, by sea or land, spoilt their digestion and their teeth with. ' He is, in these piping times of peace, renowned as the most accompUshed epicure in the dining world. He does not dine often at his club, the Gigot (although that establishment boasts of great gastronomic fame, and entertains a head man cook at a salary of two hundred and fifty pounds a year) ; he H 2 100' Dutch PiStures. accused M. Eelevay, the chef in question, of paying more- attention to the greasing and adornment of his hair, and the composition of his bills of fare in ornamental penmanship, than to the culinary wants of the members ; he wiU not have a man cook himself; " the fellows," he says, "are as con- ceited as peacocks and as extravagant as Cleopatra." Give him a woman cook — a professed cook, who knows her busi- ness, and does it : and the best of wages and the best of places are hers, at 35, Bangmany Crescent. Let ns figure him and Mrs. Lambswool together. Sir Chyle — a little apple-faced old gentleman with a white head, and as fiery in temper as his cook — looks on Mrs. Lambs- wool as, next to the dinners she cooks and the government annuity in which (with a sagacious view towards checking the prodigality of his nephew and expectant heir) he has sunk his savings, the most important element in his existence. He nlaees her in importance and consideration far beyond the elderly female attached to [his hoxisehold in the capacity of wife — used by him chiefly in forming a hand at whist and in helping soup (catch Sir Chyle trusting her with fish !) and by him abused at every convenient opportunity. He abso- lutely forbids any interference on her part with the culinaiy economy and discipline. "Blow up the maids as much, as you like. Ma'am," he considerately says, " but don't meddle with my cook." Mrs. L. crows over her mistress- accordingly, and if she were to tell her that pea soup was best made with bilberries, the poor lady would, I dare say, take the dictum for granted. Sir Chyle Turrener is exceedingly liberal in all matters of his own housekeeping — although he once wrote a letter to the Times virulently denouncing soup- More Places Wanteds lor Tdtchens. When a dinner of a superlative nature has issued from his kitchen, he not unfrequently, in the warmth of his admiration, presents Mrs. Lambswool -with gratuities in money; candidly admitting that he gives them now, because he does not intend to leave his cook a penny wheu he dies, seeing that she can dress no more ditmers for him after his decease. On grand occasions she is summoned to the dining room, at the conclusion of the repast, and he compliments her formally on this or that culinary triumph. He lauds her to his friends Tom Aitchbone, of the Beefsteak club, Com- mon Councillor Podge, Sergeant Buffalo, of the Southdown circuit, and old Sir Thomas Marrowfat, who was a prothono- tary to something, somewhere, some time — no matter when or where — and can nose a dinner in the lobby (the poor old fellow can hardly hold his knife and fork for the palsy, and his napkin tucked imder his wagging old chin looks like a grave-cloth) with as much felicity as Hamlet stated that the remains of King Claudius's chamberlain might have been discovered. It is a strong point in the Turrener and Lams- wool creed and practice to hold aU cookery-books — for any practical pui-poses beyond casual reference — in great indiffer- ence, not to say contempt. Sir Chyle has Glasse and Kit- chener, Austin, and Tide, FrancateUi, and Soyer, besides the Almanack des Gourmands, and the Cuisinier Eoyal in his library, gorgeously bound. He glances at them occasionally as Bentley, the critic, might have glanced at a dictionary or a lexicon ; but he does not tie himself nor does he bind his cook to blind adherence to their rules. True cookery, in his opinion, should rest mainly on tradition, on experience, and pre-eminently, in the inborn genius of a cook. Mrs. Lambs- 102 Dutch Pidlures. wool holds the same opinion, although she may express it in different language. She may never have heard of the axiom, " One becomes a cook, but one is born a roaster; " but she will tell you in her own homely language that "roasting and biling comes nateral, and some is good at it, and some isn't." Her master has told her the story of Vatel and his fish martyrdom, but she holds his suicide to have been rank cowardice. " If there was'nt no fish," she remarks, "and it wasn't his fault, why couldn't he have served up something neat in the made-dish way, with a bit of a speech about being drove up into a corner ?" But she hints darkly as to what she would have done to the fishmonger. Trans- fixure on a spit, would have been too good for him, a wretch. Through long years of choice feeding might this pair roll on, till the great epicure, Death, pounces on Sir Chyle Tur- rener to garnish Ms sideboard. If dainty pasture can im- prove meat, he will be a succulent morsel. He has fed on many things animate and inanimate : Nature wiU return the compliment then. For all here below is vanity, and even good dinners and professed cooks cannot last for ever. The fishes have had their share of LucuUus, and Apicius has helped to grow mustard and cress these thousand years. So migM the knight and the cook roll on, I say ; but a hundred to one if they ever come in contact. The world is very wide ; and, although the heiress with twenty thousand pounds, who has fallen in love with us, lives over the way, we marry the housemaid, and our heads gi-ow grey, and we die, and we never reck of the heiress. Sir Chyle Tun-ener may, at this moment, be groaning in exasperation at an unskilful cook, who puts More Places Wanted. 103 too much pepper in his soup and boils his fish to flakes ; aud Mrs. Lambswool's next place may be with a north country squire with no more palate than a boa constrictor, who delights in nothing half so much as a half-raw beefsteak, or a pie with a crust as thick as the walls of the model prison, and calls made dishes " kickshaws." " As Good Cook in a private family," &c., &c., &c., — the usual formula, with a hint as to irreproachable character, and a published want of objection to the counti-y. The Grood Cook does not pretend to the higher mysteries or the ' professed.' I doubt if she knows what a lain marie pau is, or what Mayonnaises, Salmis, Sautes, Fricandeaux, Gratins, or Souffles are. Her French is not even of the school of " Stratford-atte-Bow,' and she does not understand what a mst can mean. Her stock made dishes are veal cutlets, haricot mut- ton, stewed eels, and Irish stew. She makes all these well ; and very good things they are in their way. She is capital at a hand of pork and pea soup ; at pigeon pies ; at roasting, boiling, frying, stewing, and baking. She is great at pies and puddings, and has a non-transcribed receipt for plum pud- ding, which she would not part with for a year's wages. She can cook as succulent, wholesome, cleanly a dinner as any Christian man need wish to set down to ; but she is not an artist. Her dinners are not in the " first style." She may do for Bloomsbury, but not for Belgravia. HOUSEMAID (where a footman is kept), a respectable yonng woDian, with three years' good character. Address L. B., Gamms Court, Lamb's Conduit Street. Letitia Brownjohn, who wishes to be a housemaid, who has three years' good character (by her pronounced " krakter") 104 Dutch PiSlures. is two-and-tweuty years of age. Her father is a smith, or a pianoforte maker, or a leather di'esser, stifling with a large family in Gamms Com-t. Her mother has been, out at ser- vice in her time, and Letitia is in the transition state now — in the chrysalis formation of domestic drudgery ; which she hopes to exchange some day for the full-blown butterflyhood of a home, a husband, a family, and domestic drudgery of her own. Ah, Letitia, for all that you are worried now by captious mistresses, the time may come when, in some stifling Gamms Court of your own, steaming over a washtub, with a drunken husband and a brood of ragged children, you may sigh for your quiet kitchen, the eat, the ticking clock, the workbox in the area window, and your cousin (in the Guards) softly whispering and whistling outside the area railings. Letitia Brovvnjohn, like most other young ladies of the housemaid calling, has had an university education. Not, I need scarcely tell, at theological Oxford, or logarithmical Cambridge ; nor at the Silent Sister's, who would not suit Letitia by any means ; nor at Durham, famous for its mus- tard and its mines; nor at any one of those naughty colleges in Ireland which the Pope is so angry with ; nor even at any one of the colleges recently instituted in this country " for ladies only," as the railway carriages have it — yet in an university. Letitia, as most of the university-edu- cated do, went in the iirst instance to a public school ; that founded by Lady Honoria Woggs (wife of King William the Third's Archbishop Woggs), where intellectual training was an object of less solicitude by the committee of management than the attainment of a strong nasal style of vocal elocution, as applied to the sacred lyrics of Messrs. Sternhold and Hop- More Places Wanted. 105 kins, and the wearing a peculiarly hideous costume, accurately copied and followed from the painted wooden statuette of one of Lady Wogg's girls, in Lady Wogg's own time, placed in a niche over the porch of the dingy brick building containing Lady Wogg's school, and flanked in another niche by another statuette of a young gentleman in a muffin cap and leathers, representing one of Lady Woggs's boys. From this establishment our Letitia passed, being some nine or ten years of age, to the university ; and there she matriculated, and there slie graduated. Do you know that university to which three-fomths — nay, nineteen-twentieths — of our London-bred children " go up ? " Its halls and colleges are the pavement and the gutter ; its lectm-e-theatre the doorstep and the post at the corner ; its schools of philosophy are the chandler's shop, the cobbler's stall, and the public- house ; of which the landlord is the chancellor ; its proctor and bull-dogs are the police-sergeant and his men ; its public orators, the ballad-singers and last-dying-speech criers ; its lecturers are scolding women. The weekly wages of its occu. pants form its university chest. Commemoration takes place. every Saturday night, with grand musical performances from the harp, guitar, and violin, opposite the "Admiral Keppel," The graduates are mechanics and small tradesmen and their wives. The undergraduates are Letitias and Tommies. The University is the Street. Eight in its centre stands the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. And all day long children come and pluck the fruit and eat it ; and some choose ripe, and wholesome fruit, the pleasant savoui of which shall not depart out of their mouths readily ; but some elect bad and rotten apples. io6 Dutch FiSiures. which they fall upon and devour gluttonously, so that the fruit disagrees with them very much indeed, and causes them to break all out in such eraptions of vicious humours, as their very children's children's blood shall be empoisoned with, years hence. And some, being young and foolish and ignorant, take and eat indiscriminately of the good and of the bad fruit, and are sick and soriy or healthful and glad alternately ; but might fare badly and be lost in the long run did not Wisdom and Love (come from making of rain- bows and quelling of storms, perhaps a million miles awayj to consider of the sparrows and take stock of tlie flies in the back street university) appear betimes among these young un- dergraduates gathered under thebranches,andteach their hearts how to direct their hands to pluck good sustenance from that tree. I never go down a back street and look on the multitude of children (I don't mean ragged. Bedouin children, but decently attired young people, of poor but honest parents, living hard by, who have no better playing-ground for them), and hear them singing their street songs, and see them playing street games, and making street friendships, and caballing on door- steps, qr conspiring by posts, or newsmongering on kerb- stones, or trotting along with jugs and halfpence for the beer, or listening open-mouthed to the street orators and musicians, or watching Punch and the acrobats, or forming a ring at a street fight, or gathered round a drunken man, or running to a fire, or running from a bull, or pressing round about an accident, bonnetless and capless, but evidently native to this place — without these thoughts of the university and the tree coming into my head. You who may have been expensively educated and cared for, and have had a gymna- More Places Wanted. 107 slum for exercise, covered playing courts, class-rooms, cricket- fields, ushers to attend you in the hours of recreations ; who have gone from school and college into the world , well re- commended and with a golden passport, should think more, and considerately too, of what a hazardous, critical, dangerous nature this street culture is. With what small book-learning these poor young undergraduates get, or that their parents can afi^ord to provide them with, is mixed' simultaneously the strangest course of tuition in the ethics of the pawn- broker's shop, the philosophy of the public-house, the rhetoric of drunken men and shrewish women, the logic of bad asso- ciations, and bad examples, and bad language. Our Letitia graduated in due course of girlhood, becoming a mistress of such household arts as a London-bred girl can hope to acquire at the age of fourteen or fifteen. Well, you know what sort of a creature the lodging-house maid-of-all- work is, and what sort of a life she leads. Tou have seen her; her pattens and dishevelled caj), her black stockings and battered tin candlestick. We have all known Letitia Brownjohns^oft-times comely, neat-handed PhiDises enough — oft-times desperately slatternly aud untidy — in almost every case wofuUy over-worked and as wofully undei-paid. Letitia must be up early and late. With the exception of the short intermission of sleep doled forth' to her, her work is ceaseless. She ascends and descends every step of every flight of stau's in the house hundreds of times in the course of the day ; she is the slave of the ringing both of the door bell and the lodgers. She must be little more than an animated appendage to the knocker — a jack in the box, to be produced by a double rap. She is cook, house- ■io8 Dutch PiSlures. maidy lady's-maid, scullery maid, housekeeper, all in one ; and for what ? For some hundred and fifty shillings every year, and some — few and far between — coppers and sixpences, doled out to her in gratuities by the lodgers in consideration of her Briarean handiwork. Her holidays are very, veiy few. Almost her only intercourse with the outer world takes place when she runs to the public-house at the corner for the dinner or supper beer, or to a neighbouring fishmonger for oysters. A rigid supervision is kept over her conduct. She is ex- pected to have neither friends, acquaintances, relations, nor sweethearts. " No followers," is the Median and Persian law continually paraded before her ; a law unchangeable, and broken only under the most ruinous penalties. When you and I grumble at our lot, repine at some petty reverse, fret and fume over the curtailment of some indulgence, the depri- vation of some luxury, we little know what infinite gradations of privation and suffering exist ; and what admirable and exem- plary contentment and cheerfulness are often to be found among those whose standing is on the lowest rounds of the ladder. But Letitia is emancipated from the maid-of-aU-work ihraldrom now, and aspires to be a " Housemaid where a footman is kept," yet not without considerable difficulty, and after years of arduous 'apprenticeship and servitude. With the maid-of-aU-work, as she begins, so 'tis ten to one that as such she ends. I have known grey-headed maids-of-aU- work ; and from these — with a sprinkling of insolvent laun- dresses and widows who have had their mangles seized for rent — is recruited, and indeed, organised, the numerous and influential class of " charwomen " who do household work for eighteenpence a day and a glass of spirits. More Places Wanted. 109-; But Letitia Brownjohn has been more fortunate. Some lady lodger, perchance, m some house in whichs he has been a servitor, has taken a fancy to her ; and such lodger, taking in due course of human eventuality a house for herself, has taken Letitia to be her own private housemaid. And she has lived with City families, and tradesmen's families, and in boarding-schools, and she has grown from the untidy " gal " in the black stockings, and the mob cap, to be a natty young person in a smart cap and ribands, aspiring to a situa- tion where a footman is kept. That she may speedily obtain such an appointment ; that the footman may be worthy of his companion in service ; that they may please each other (in due course of time), even to the extent of the asking of banns and the solemnisation of a certain service, I very cheerfully. and sincerely wish- vm. OLD LADIES. A EE there any old ladies left, now-a-days ? The question -^-^ may at first appear absurd ; for, by the returns of the last census we find that seven per cent, of the whole female population were, four years since, widows ;* and that, at the same period, there were in Great Britain three hundred and fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and sixty-nine " old maids " above the age of forty. Yet I repeat my question, and am prepared to abide by the consequences : Are there any old ladies left, now-a-days ? Statistically, of course, substantially .even, old ladies are as pl'entiful as of yore ; but I seek in vain for the old lady types of my youth ; the feminine antiquities that furnished forth my juvenile British Museum. Every omnibus-conduc- tor has his old lady passenger — pattens, big basket, umbrella. The cabman knows the old lauy well — her accurate measure- ment of mileage, her multitudinous packages, for which she resists extra payment ; her objections to the uncleanliness of the straw and the dampness of the cushion ; her incessant use of the checkstring and frequent employment of a parasol handle, or,, a key, dug into the small of the driver's back as a * 'Written A.D. 1855. Old Ladies. Ill means of attracting his attention ; her elaborate but contra- dictory directions as to where she wishes to be set doi\-n ; and, finally, her awful thi-eats of fine, imprisonment, and treadmill should that much-ill-used Ixion-at-sixpence-a-mile offend her. No railway train starts without an old lady, who screams whenever the whistle is sounded ; groans in the tun- nels; is. sure there is something the matter with the engine ; smuggles surreptitious poodles into the carriage ; calls for tea at stations where there are no reft-eshment-rooms ; summons the guard to the door at odd times during the journey, and tells him he ought to be ashamed of himself, because the train is seven minutes behind time ; insists upon having the window up or down at precisely the wrong periods; scrunches the boots of her opposite neighbour, or makes short lunges into his waistcoat during intempestive naps, and, should he remon- strate, indulges in muttered soliloquies, ending with, " One doesn't know who one is travelling with, now-a-days;" and carries a basket of provisions, from which crumbs disseminate themselves unpleasantly on all sun-ounding laps and knees, and from which the neck of a small black bottle will peep : the cork being always mislaid in the carriage, and causing unspeakable agouies to the other passengers in the efforts for its recovery. There are old ladies at every theatre, who scream hysterically when guns are discharged ; who, when the Blaze of Bliss in the Eealms of Dioramie Delight takes place, seem on the point of crying " Fire ! " and who persist in sit- ting before you in huge bonnets, apparently designed expressly to shut out the dangerous seductions of the ballet. Chm-chcs teem with old ladies — from the old ladies in the pews who knock down the prayer-books during the "I publish the 112 Dutch PiSiures. banns," and turn over the mouldy liassocks, blinding you with a cloud of dust and straw-chips, — to the old ladies, mouldier and dustier than the hassocks, who open the pews, cough for sixpences, and curtsey for shillings ; and the very old ladies who sit in the free seats, have fits during the sermon, and paralysis all through the service. There are old ladies in ships upon the high seas who icill speak to the man at the wheel ; in bad weather, meaningly request to be thrown overboard, and block up the companion-ladder — mere senseless bundles of sea-sick old-ladyism. There is never a crowd without an old lady in it. The old lady is at almost every butcher's shop, at almost every grocer's retail establish- ment, on Saturday nights. Every housemaid knows an old lady who objected to ribands, counted the hearthstones, denounced the " fellows " (comprising the police, the house- hold troops, and the assistants of the butcher and grocer aforesaid), and denied that the cat broke all the crockery at her (the hovisemaid's) last place. Every cook has been wor- retted dreadfully, by the old lady ; every country parson knows her and dreads her, for she interferes with the discipline of the village school, and questions the orthodoxy of his sermons. Every country doctor is awai'e of, and is wroth with her ; for there is either always something the matter with her, or else she persists in dosing, pilling, and plaistering other old ladies who have something the matter with them, to the stultifica- tion of the doctor's prescriptions, and the confusion of science. The missionaries would have Kttle to eat, and nobody to eat them up in the South Seas, were it not for the old ladies. Exeter HaU in May would be a howling wilderness, but for the old ladies in the front seats, their umbrellas, and white Old Ladies. 113 pocket-handkerchiefs. And what Professor Methusaleh and his pills, Professor Swallow with his ointment, Doctor Bumble- puppy with his pitch-plaisters, and Mr. Spools, M.E.C.S., with his galvano-therapeutic blisters, would do without old ladies I'm sure I don't know. Yea, and the poor-boxes of the police-courts for their Christmas five-pound notes, the desti- tute for their coals and blankets, the bed-ridden old women for their flannel petticoats would often be in soriy plight but for the aid of the old ladies, bless them ! At every birth and at every death there is an old lady. I have heard that old ladies are sometimes seen at courts. It is whispered that old ladies have from time to time been found in camps. Nay, irre- verent youth, hot-headed, inconsiderate youngsters, doubtless — ^bits of boys — have sometimes the assurance to hint that old ladies have, within these last thousand years, been known to sit the councils of royalty, and direct the movement of armies, the intricacies of diplomacy, and the operations of commerce. But these are not mi/ old ladies. Search the wide world through, and bring before me legions of old ladies, and I shall still be asking my old question. No. I will be positive and give my self-asked question a negative, once for all. There are no old ladies no^v-a-days• Tou know as well as I do that there are no children now ; no tender rnmp-steaks; no good-fellows; no good books; no chest-tenors ; no clever actors ; no good tragedies, and no old. port wine. The old ladies have followed all these vanished good things. If they exist at all, they exist only to that young generation which is treading on our corns and pushing us from our stools, which laughs in its sleeve at us, and calls us old fogies behind our backs ; to that generation which I 114 Dutch PiSlures. yet believes in the whisperings of fancy, the phantoms of hope, and the performance, by age, of the promises of youth. The old women have even disappeared. Women there are, and old, but no old women. The old woman of Berkeley ; the old woman of Tutbury, who so marvellously supported her- self by suction from her pocket-handkerchief ; the aerostatic old woman who effected an ascent so many times higher than the moon ; the old woman who lived in a shoe, and frugally nurtured her numerous offspring upon broth without bread ; the delightful old woman, and member of the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals — Mother Hubbard — who so tenderly entertained that famous dog, though, poor soul, she was often put to it, to find him a bone in her cupboard ; the eccentric old woman who, is it possible to imagine it, lived upon nothing but victuals and drink, and yet would never be quiet (she vanished from my youthful ken at about the same time as the old man of Tobago — who lived on rice, sugar, and sago) ; the terrible old Preiich woman La Mere Croquemitaine who went about Trance with a birch and a basket, where- with to whip and carry away naughty little gals and boys, and who has now been driven away herself by the principals of genteel seminaries in the Champs Elysfes ; the marvellous, fearsome old women of witchcraft, with brooms, hell-broths, spells, and incantations ; the good and wicked old women of the Arabian Nights and the Child's Own Book ; fairy godmothers ; hiimp-backed old women sitting by well- sides ; cross old women gifted with magic powers, who were inadvertently left out of christening invitations, and wove dreadful spells in consequence ; good women in the wood ; Old Ladies. 115 old women who had grandohildren wearing little Eedriding- hoods and meeting (to their sorrow) wolves ; Mother Goose, Mother Eedcap, even Mother Damnable (I beg your pardon) — aE this goodly band of old women have been swept away. There are no types of feminine age left to me now. All the picturesque types of life besides seem melting away. It is aU coming to a dead level : a single line of rails, with signals, stations, points, and turntables ; and the Cradle Train starts at one fifteen, and the Coffin Train is due at twelve forty-five. — An iron world. Somewhere in the dusty room, of which the door has been locked for years, I have a cupboard. There, among the old letters — how yellow and faded the many scored expressions of affection have grown ! the locks of hair ; the bygone washing- bUls — " one pare sex, one frunt ;" the handsome biU of costs (folio, foolscap, stitched with green ferret) that came up as a rider to that small legacy that was spent so quickly ; the miniature of the lady in the leg of mutton sleeves ; the por- traits of Self and Schoolfrieud — Self in a frilled collar, grin- ning ; SchooKriend in a lay-down collar, also grinning ; the rusted pens ; the squeezed-out-tubes of colour ; the memo- randa to be sure to do goodness knows what for goodness knows whom ; the books begun ; the checkbooks ended ; the torn envelopes ; the wedding cards with true lovers' knots dimmed and tarnished; the addresses of people who are dead ; the keys of watches that are sold ; the old passports, old hotel biUs, dinner tickets, and theatrical checks; the multifarious odds and ends that will accumulate in cupboards, be your periodical buriungs ever so frequent, or your waste paper basket system ever so rigorous ; among all these it may, I 2 ii6 Dutch PiSlures. be that I can find a portfolio — shadowy or substantial matters little — wherein lie nestled, all torn, blotted, faded, mildewed, crumpled, stained, and moth-eaten, some portraits of the old ladies I should like to find now-a-days. Yes ; here is one : The Pretty Old Lady. She must have been very, very beautiful when young ; for, in my childish eyes [she had scarcely any imperfections, and we all know what acute and unmerciful critics children are. Her hair was quite white ; not sUvery nor powdery, but pure glossy white, resembling spun glass. I have never been able to make my mind up whether she wore a cap, a hood, or one of those silken head-coverings of the last centuiy called a calash. Whatever she wore, it became her infinitely. I incline, on second thoughts, more to the calash, and think she wore it in lieu of a bonnet, when she went abroad ; which was but seldom. The portrait I have of the old lady is, indeed, blurred and dimmed by the lapse of many winters, and some tears. Her title of the " pretty old lady " was not given to her lightly. It was bruited many years ago — when ladies of fashion were drunk to, in public, and gentlemen of fashion were drunk too in public — that the pretty old lady had been a " reigning toast." A certain gray silk dress which, as it had always square creases in it, I conjectured to be always new, decorated the person of the pretty old lady. She wore a profusion of black lace, which must have been priceless, for it was continually being 'mended, and its reversion was much coveted by the old lady's female friends. My aunt Jane, who was tremen- dously old, and was a Lady ; but whose faculties decayed somewhat towards the close of her Ufe, was never so cohe- Old Ladies. iij rent (save on the subject of May-day and the sweeps) as when, she speculated as to " who was to have the lace " after the old lady's demise. But my aunt Jane died first, and her doubts were never solved. More than this, I can remember a fat-faced old gold watch which the pretty old lady wore at her waist ;. a plethoric mass of gold, like an oyster grown rich and knowing the time of day. Attached to this she wore some trinkets — not the nonsensical charms that young ladies wear at tKeir girdles now, but sensible, substantial ornaments — a signet-ring of her grandfather's ; a smelling-bottle covered with sUver iilagree ; and a little golden box in the form of a book with clasps, which we waggish youngsters declared to be the old lady's snuff- box, but which, I believe, now, to have been a pouncet-box — the same perhaps, which the lord, who was perfumed .like a milliner, held 'twixt his finger and his thumb upon the battle-field, and which, ever and anon, he gave his nose. I trust I am not treading upon dangerous ground, when I say, that two of the chief prettinesses of the pretty old lady were her feet and their covering. " To ladies' eyes a round, boys ! " Certainly, Mr. Moore, we can't refuse ; but to ladies' feet, a round boys, also, if you please. Now the pretty old lady had the prettiest of feet, with the most deli- cate of gray silk stockings, the understandings of the finest, softest, most lustrous leather that ever came from innocent kid. I will back those feet (to use the parlance of this horse-racing age) and those shoes and stockings against any in the known world, in ancient or modern history or romance -■ against Dorathea's tiny feet dabbling in the stream ; agains Musidora's paddling in the cool brook ; against Sara la ii8 Dutch PiSlures. Baigneuse swinging in her silken hammock; against De Gram- mont's Miss Howard's green stockings ; against Madame de Pompadour's golden clocks and red-heeled mules ; against No- blet, Taglioni, Cerito's ; against Madame Vestris's, as modelled in wax by Signor N. N. There are no such feet as the pretty old lady's now ; or, if any such exist, their possessors don't know how to treat them. The French ladies are rapidly losing the art of putting on shoes and stocking with taste ; and I deliberately declare, in the face of Europe, that I have not seen, within the last three months in Paris — ^from the Boulevard des Italieus to the Ball of the Prefect of the Seine — twenty pairs of irreproachable feet. The systematically arched instep, the geometrical ankle, the gentle cuiTes and undulatiops, the delicate advancement and retrogression of the foot of beauty, are all things falling into oblivion. The American overshoes, the machine-made hosiery, and the trailing xLraperies, are completing the ruin of shoes and stockings. The pretty old lady had never been married. Her father had been a man of fashion — a gay man — a first-rate buck, a sparkling rake ; he had known lords, he had driven cnrricles, he had worn the finest of fine linen, the most resplendent of shoe-buckles ; he had once come into the possession of five thousand pounds sterling, upon which capital — quite casting the grovelling doctrine of interest to the winds — he had de- termined to try the fascinating experiment of living at the rate of five thousand a-year. In this experiment lie succeeded to his heart's content for the exact period of one year and one day, after which he had lived (at the same rate) on credit ; after that on the credit of his credit ; after that on his wits ; Old Ladies. 1 19 after that in the rules of the King's Bench ; after that on the certainty of making so many tricks, nightly at whist; and, filially upon his daughter. Eor the pretty old lady, with admirabfe self-ahnegation, had seen her two ugly sisters married ; had, with some natural tears, refused Captain Cutts, of the line, whom she loved (but who had nothing but his pay) and had contentedly accepted the office of a governess ; whence, after much self-denial, study, striving, pinching, and saving (how many times her little cobwebs of economy were ruthlessly swept away by her gay father's turn for whist and hazard —cobwebs that took years to reconstruct !), she had promoted herself to the dignity of a schoolmistress ; governing in that capacity that fine old red-brick ladies' seminary at Paddington, — pulled down for the railway now — Porchester House. 'Twas there I first saw the pretty old lady : for I had a cousin receiving her " finishing " at Porchester House, and 'twas there — being at the time some eight years of age — that I first fell in love with an astonishingly beautiful crea- ture, with raven hair and gazelle-like eyes, who was about seventeen, and the oldest girl in the school. When I paid my cousin a visit 1 was occasionally admitted — being of a mild and watery disposition, and a very little boy of my age to the honours of the tea table. I used to sit opposite to this black-eyed Juno, and be fed by her with slices of those curious open-work cross-barred jam tarts, which are so fre- quently met with at genteel tea-tables. I loved her fondly, wildly : but she dashed my spirits to the ground one day, by telling me not to make faces. I wonder whether she married a duke 1 120 Dutch FiSiures.. The pretty old lady kept school at Porchester House for many, many years, supporting and comforting that fashionable fellow, her father. She had sacilficed her youth, the firstlings of her beauty, her love, her hopes, everything. The gay feUow had grown a little paralytic at last ; and, becoming veiy old and imbecile and harmless, had been relegated to an upper apartment in Porchester House. Here, for several years, he had vegetated in a sort of semi-fabulous existence as the " old gentlemen ; " very many of the younger ladies being absolutely unaware of him ; till, one evening, a neat coflSn with plated nails and handles, arrived at Porchester House, for somebody aged seventy-three, and the cook re- marked to the grocer's young man that the " old gentleman " had died that morning. The pretty old lady continued the education of genera- tions of black-eyed Junos, in French, geography, the use of the globes, and the usual branches of a polite education, long after her father's death. Habit is habit ; Lieutenant-Colonel Cutts had died of a fever in the Walcheren expedition — so the pretty old lady kept school at Porchester House until she was very, very old. When she retired, she devised all her savings to her ugly sisters' children ; and calmly, cheerfully, placidly prepared to lie herself down in her gi-ave. Hers had been a long journey and a sore servitude ; but, perhaps, something was said to her at the End, about being a good and faithful servant, and that it was well done. Such is the dim outline which the picture in my port- folio presents to me of the pretty old lady. Sharpened as her pretty features were by age, the gentle touch of years of peace — of an equable mind and calm desires, had passed Old Ladies. 12 r lovingly over the acuities of her face, and softened them. "\'\''rinkles she must have had, for the stern usurer Time will have his bond ; but she had smiled her wrinkles away, or had laughed them into dimples. Our just, though severe mother. Nature, had rewarded her for having worn no rouge in her youth, no artificial flowers in her spring ; and gave her blooming roses in her December. Although the sunset of her eyes was come and they could not bui-n you up, or melt you as in the noontide, the sky was yet pure, and the lumi- nary sank to rest in a bright halo : the shadows that it cast were long, but sweet and peaceful, — not murky and terrible. The night was coming ; but it was to be a night starlit \vith faith and hope, and not a season of black storms. It was for this reason, I think, that being old, feeling old, looking old, proud of being old, and yet remaining handsome, the pretty old lady was so beloved by all the pretty girls. They adored her. They called her " a dear old thing." They insisted upon trying their new bonnets, shawls, scarfs, and similar femi- nine fallals, upon her. They made her the fashion, and dressed up to her. They never made her spiteful presents of fleecy hosiery, to guard against a rheumatism with which she was not afflicted ; or entreated her to tie her face up when she had no toothache ; or bawled in her ear on the erroneous assumption that she was deaf, — as girls will do, in pure malice, when age forgets its privileges, and apes the levity and sprightliness of youth. Above all, they trusted her with love-secrets (I must mention, that though a spinster, the pretty old lady was always addi'essed as Mistress). She was great in love matters, — a complete letter-writer, without its verbosity ■ as prudent as Pamela, as tender as Amelia, as lai Dutch PiBures. judicious as Hooker, as dignified as Sir Clinrlos Oraiulisou. She could scent ti Lovelace at au immense distance, hid Tom Jones mend his ways, reward the constnucv of nn Uncle Toliy, and reform a Captain Booth. I warrant the perverse widow and Sir Roger de Coverley would have been brought together, had the pretty old lady known the parties and been considted. She was conscientious and severe, but not into- lerant and implacable. Slie did not consider every man in love a " wivtcli," or every woman in love a " silly thing." She was pitiful to love, for she hod known it. She could tell a taJe of love as moving as any told to her. Its hero died at Waleheren. AVlierc shall I find pretty old ladies now-n-dnysP Where are they gone, — those s;cutle, kindly, vet digniiied, antiiimited dames, married and single ? My young friend Sprigly comes and tells rae that I am wrong, and that there arc nipny good old ladies now as of yore. It may be so ; it may be, that we think those pleasant companionships lost because the years are gone in which we enjoyed tliemj and that we imagine there aiv no more old ladies, because those we loved are dead. IX. LITTLE CHILDEEX. M "VrO man can tell," wrote that good Bishop of Down, -*- ' Connor, and Dromore, whose elevation to the mitre in an nnbeUeving and profligate age makes at least one jewel of pure water in the besmirched diadem of Charles the Second, " No man can tell," wrote Jeremy Taylor, " but he who lores his children, how many delicious accents makes a man's heart dance in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges. Their childishness, their stammering, their little angers, their inno- cence, their imperfections, their necessities, are so many little emanations of joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society." With aU due respect and reverence to my beloved author of the " Golden Grove," the " warbler of poetic prose," I must dissent from his first proposition. A man who loves children can tell, without necessarily having any of his own, how delightful is their society, how delicious are their accents, their persons, their little ways. It may be that I write these lines in a cheerless garret, my only friends my books, the only other thing beside me that has life, my lamp ; yet do you not think that I can sympathise with, without envying, the merry party at the merry house over the way? 124 Dutch PiSlures. — the house with all the windows lighted up, th? broughams and hack cabs at the doov ; the piim, white ueckclothed visi- tors taking off their paletots in the passage ; the smiling,, ringleted, rosy cheeked, rosy ribboned young person who attends to the ladies' bonnets and the tea and coffee ; the jangling of CoUard and CoUard's piano; the tinkling of Erard's harp ; the oscillations in their upstairs passage of the negus glasses , the singing, the dancing, the flirtation, and the supper. Yet, I know nothing about Mrs. Saint-Baffin and her evening party. She never invited me to it -. she does not know, very probably, of my existence ; but I am sure I wish most sincerely that her " at home " may be perfectly satisfactoi-y and successful ; that every body may get as much as he wants to eat and drink at supper; that the supply of lobster salad and iced champagne may not run short ; that Miss Strumminson's " Cossacco della Yolga " may be sung by that young lady amid general applause ; that all General Pogey's stories may tell, and that none of young Miller's jokes may have been heard before ; that the right men may secure their right hats and right wrappers ; that all the young ladies may depart duly shawled and bonnetted, to the defiance and confusion of the demon cold ; that all mammas may be placable ; all true lovers satisfied ivith their innocent flirta- tions ; all stolen camellias, scraps of riband, and odd gloves warmly prized ; that years to come there may be little children laughing and playing round papa and mamma, all unconscious that papa and mamma first thought of love and courtship and matrimony over lobster salad, iced cham- pagne, or the vaUe a deux temps at Mrs. Saint-Baffin's " at home." Little Children. 125 Come ! Though I am not bidden to the banquet — though there be no cover laid for me at the table matrimonial — may I not feast (though in no ogre fashion) upon little children? Some day perhaps Hymen's table may lack guests ; and, messengers being sent out into the highways in quest of the lame, the halt, and the blind, I may have a chance. I might speculate upon little children in a purely negative fashion for some time. For instance : as regards the child being father to the man : of men being but children of a larger growth. These are both very easy things to say ; and we get them by heart pat, and somewhat in the parrot man- ner ; and we go on repeating our pet phrase, over and over, backwards and forwards, time after time, till we firmly believe it to be true ; and, if any one presume to argue or dissent, we grow indignant, and cry " turn him out ;" as the member of the Peace Society did the other day, when an opinionated person happened to dissent from the whole hog proposition that the world was to be pacificated, and universal fraternity established, by the lambs shearing the wool off their backs, and taking it to the wolves in a neat parcel, with a speech about arbitration. Now at the risk of being tm-ned out myself, I must ven- ture to dissent from the axiom that the child is father to the man. I say that he is not. Can you persist in telling me that this fair-haired innocent— this little sportive, prattling, loveable child, with dimpled, dumpling hands that almost fold themselves spontaneously into the attitude of supplication and prayer ; with cherry lip^" some bee has stung it newly " lisping thanksgiving and love ; with arms that long to em- 126 Dutch PiSiures. brace ; with eyes beaming confidence, joy, pity, tenderness : — am I to be told that this infant is father to yon hvdking, sodden, sallow-faced, blue-gilled, crop-haired, leaden-eyed, livid -Kpped, bow -shouldered, shrunken-legged, swollen-handed convict in a hideous grey uniform branded with the broad arrow ; with ribbed worsted hose and fetters at his ancles, sullenly skulking through his drudgery under the rattan of an overseer and the bayonet of a marine in Woolwich dockyard P Is the child whom I love and in whom I hope, father to yon wretch with a neck already half-dislocated with fear, with limbs half-dead, with heart wholly so, who droops on his miserable pallet in Newgate cell, his chin on his breast, his hands between his knees, his legs shambling ; the stony walls around him ; the taciturn gaolers watching him ; a Bible by his side, in whose pages, when he tries to read, the letters slide and fall away from under his eye ? Is this the father to — can this ever become tJiat ? Not only in your world-verbiage must the child be father to the man, but the man is merely a child of a larger growth. I deny it. Some boys are tyrants, bullies, hypocrites, and bars for fear of punishment ; thieves alas, through ijl-example, oftimes. Some girls are tell-tales, jealous, spiteful, slanderous, vain and giddy, I grant. If you were to tell me that bad boys and gills often grow up to be bad men and women, I should agree with you. The evil example of you bad men and women begins to corrupt boys and girls early enough. Heaven knows ; but do not brand the child — you know when infancy begins and childhood terminates — with being but your own wicked- ness seen through the small end of the glass. The man a child of larger gi-owth ? Did you ever know a man of smaller Little Children. 127 growth — a child — to discount bills at forty per cent., and offer you for the balance half cash, and the rest poison (put down in the bill as "wine ") and opera stalls ! Did you ever know a child to pawn his sister's play-things, or rob his playmate of his pocket money to gamble, and to cheat while gambling, and to go hang or drown himself when he had lost his winnings and his stolen capital? Could-you ever discern a hankering in a child to accumulate dollars by trading in the flesh and blood of his fellow-creatures ? Did you ever know a child to hoard halfpence in a rag or a teapot, to store rinds of mouldy cheese in secret, or to grow rich in rotten apple parings ? Did you ever hear a child express an opinion that his friend Tonimy must eternally be burnt, for not holding exactly the same religious opinions as he, Billy, did? Aie children false swearers for hire, liars for gain, parasites fbr profit ? Do they begin to throw mud with their earliest pot- hooks and hangers : do they libel their nurse and vilify the doctor ? Men have their playthings, it is true, and somewhat resemble overgrown children in their puerile eagerness for a blue ribbon, an embroidered garter, a silver cross dangling to a morsel of red silk, or a gilt walking stick. But will the child crawl in the gutter for the blue ribbon, or walk barefoot over broken bottles for the garter, or wallow in the mire for the gilt walking stick ? I think not. Give him a string of red beads, a penny trumpet, or a stick of barley sugar, and he will let the ribbons and garters go hang. Try to persuade, with your larger growth theory, one of your smaller men to walk backwards down a staircase before the King of LiUiput. Persuade Colonel Fitz Tommy, aged four, to stand for five hours on one leg behind the King of LiUiput's chair in his 128 Dutch PiSiures. box at the Mai-ionette Theatre. Try to induce little Lady Totsey, aged three, to accede to the proposal of being maid of Lonoar to her doll. Tommy and Totsey leave such tomfool- ■eries to be monopolised by the larger children. We have another school of axiomatic philosophers ; who, abandoning the theorem that manhood is but the enlarged identity of infancy, maintain that the child is an intellectual negation — nothing at all physically or mentally. The en- lightened M. Fourier has denied children the possession of sex, calling them Neuters; and numbers of philosophers, with their attendant schools of disciples, have pleased them- selves by comparing the child's mind to a blank sheet of paper ; innocent, but capable of receiving moral caligraphy, good or bad. The mind of a child like a blank sheet of Bath post! The sheet is fair, hot-pressed, iradefiled by blot or erasure if you wiU, but not a blank. In legible ineffaceable characters thereupon, yon may read Paith and strong belief. The child believes without mental reservation ; he does not require to be convinced ; and if even, now and then, some little struggling dawn of argumentative scepticism leads him to doubt faintly, and to ask how bogey can always manage to live in the cellar among the coals ; hou' the black dog can be on his shoulder, when he sees no dog there ; why little boys should not ask questions, and why the doctor should have brought baby with him under his cloak — he is easily silenced by the reply that good children always believe what is told them ; and that he must believe ; so he does believe. His faith was but shaken' for a moment. Belief was written too strongly in his little heart to be eradicated by any little logic. Would that when he comes to be a child of larger growth, Little Children. lag forsooth, no subtle powers of reasoning should prompt him to dis- sect and anatomise his body of belief, till nothing but dry bones remain, and it fall into a pit of indifference and scepticism ! That child has a maimed child-mind who does not believe implicitly in all the faiiy tales — in the existence of ogres, fairies, giants, and dwarfs. I dare say thousands wiU read this who have lain a-bed as children, awake, and quaking lest Hurlothrumbo, or the dread Giant Bolivorax, or the wolf that devoured little Eed Hiding Hood should enter unto them and devour them. How many do I address who have cherished one especial beanstalk in the back garden as the very identical beanstalk up which Jack clomb ; and, in the slightness of their childish vision, deemed that the stalk grew up and up till it reached the wondrous land of faery — who, also, have firmly believed that the huge pack the old Jew pedlar carried on his back was full of naughty children ; and that from parsley-beds, by means of silver spades, fruits — of whose species Mr. Darwin is aware — were procui'ed. I remember having when a very little child two strong levers of belief. One was a very bright fire-place with a very bright fender, very bright fire irons, and a very bright coloured rug before it. I can see them now, all polished steel, brass and gay worsted work — and all of which 1 saw strictly forbidden to touch. The other was a certain steel engraving in an album : a landscape with a lake, and swans, and ladies with parasols. I know the fire-place now to have been a mere register stove with proper appurtenances, and the picture an engraving of the Park of St. Cloud after Turner; but I declare that I firmly, heartily, uncompro- misingly believed then, that angels' trumpets were Hke those X30 Dutch PiSiures. fire-irons, and that the gay rug, and the pretty landscape was' an accurate view if not an actual peep into Fairyland itself. A; little dead sister of mine used to draw what we called fairyland on her slate. 'Twas after all, I dare say, but a vile childish scrawl, done over a hall" smeared-out game of oughts and crosses, with a morsel of slate pencil, two sticks a half- penny. Tet I and she and all of us believed in the fairyland she drew. We could pluck the golden fruit on the boughs, and hear the silver-voiced birds, and see the fairy elves with their queen (drawn very possibly with a head like a deformed oyster) dancing beneath the big round moon upon the yellow sands. I am sure my sister believed her doll was alive and peculiarly susceptible to catching cold from draughts. I am certain that I never questioned the animated nature of the eight-day clock on the staircase that ticked so awfully in the hot silent summer nights, and gnashed its teeth so feroci-- ously when his weights were moved. My aunt promised everything when her ship came home ; and I believed in the ship that was always coming and never did come, without one spark of scepticism. I believed in, and shuddered at, all the stories about that famous juvenile (always held up to us as a warning and example, and alluded to as " there was once a little boy who ") who was always doing the things he ought not to have done ; and was, in consequence, so per- petually being whipped, caught in door jambs and suspended in the air by meat-hooks, eaten up alive by wild beasts, burnt to death in consequence of playing " with Tommy at lighting straws," that I have often wondered, so many have been his perils, by flood and field, that there should be any of that little boy left. He is alive though, nevertheless, and stilL Little Children. 131 firmly believed in. I was under the necessity the other day of relating a horrible misadventure of his to a little nephew of mine own, showing how the little boy reached over a dining table to put his fingers into a sugar dish, and came to signal shame by knocking over a tumbler and cutting liis fingers therewith ; and I am happy to state that my anecdote was not only received as genuine, but met with the additional criticism from my small nephew (his own digits stiU sticky with the sugar) that it " served the little boy right." Faith and strong belief ! When children play at King or Queen, or Castles or Schools, they believe that they are in verity the persons they enact. We children of a larger growth yawn through our parts, requiring a great deal of prompting, and waiting, now and again, for the applause ; or, if we be of the audience, applaud listlessly, knowing the play to be a de- ception. Faith and strong belief! How is the child to distinguish between the Witch of Endor and the Witch of Edmonton ; between Goliah that David slew, and the Giant that Jack killed ? Let him believe it all in his happy faithful child- hood, I say. Do not think I wish to propagate or encourage error. But that young flowret is too tender yet to bear the crude blast of uncompromising Eact. And battle with error in the child's mind as you wOl, feed him with diagrams and clothe him with Euclid's Elements before he is breeched as you may, the innate Belief that is in him, even though draped in imaginations and harmless fictions, will beat your logic and philosophy hoUow. On that blank sheet of paper to which you compare a child's mind, I find yet more words written that all may K 3 132 Dutch PiSiures. read. I find Truth. Prone to believe the most extravagant fictions, because his belief is indiscriminating through inno- cence, he is yet essentially and legibly a triithteller and is logically true. If he objects to you or me he teUs us candidly, "I don't like you." If asked to assign a reason for his dislike, he answers, as candidly : " Because you are old — because you are ugly — because you smell of snuff." If he likes his old nurse better than his new nurse he tells her so plainly. Herein is no cogging, no qualifying, no constructive lying. When he demands .a present or bachsheesJi, he employs no bowing or scraping ; no beating about the bush to effect his purpose. He says simply, " Give Doddy a sugar-plum," and holds out his hand. Years to come he will learn to cringe and fawn, and write begging letters, and attribute his want of sugar- plums to the hardness of the times, or to his having to " take up a little bill." So blunt is his truthfulness that it fre- quently 'becomes inconvenient and embarrassing. He makes the most alarming revelations, in all innocence and uncon- sciousness, respecting the malpractices of the servants, and the criticisms passed by bis relatives upon the appearance and manners of their friends and acquaintances. He suffers in the flesh for this, and is a martyr to his truthfulness. Not strong enough in purpose to hate, he is yet afraid and ashamed to He. He blushes and stammers over an untruth, "lis practice makes the liar perfect. The infant knows the truth and its seat, for it is in his heart, and he has no need to go wandering about the earth in search of it, like that mad feUow who, hearing that Truth lay at the bottom of a well, jumped into a well and was drowned ; finding indeed Truth at the bottom — for he found Death. You, foolish, Little Children. 133 cockering mothers, teach your children to lie, when you aid them in denying or concealing their faults from those who would be stern with them. You, unreasoning, impetuous parents, nourish lying scorpions in your bosom, when you beat your children savagely for an involuntary accident, for a broken vase, or a torn frock. You give the child a motive for concealment ; you sow lying seed that will bear black fruit ; you make trutll to mean punishment, and falsehood impunity. In letters as large and bold, as beautiful and clear to view, is written on the sheet of paper you are pleased to call bhink in little children's minds the word Charity. Large- hearted, open-handed, self-denying charity. Unreasoning, indiscreet, indiscriminate, perchance, but still charity of the Christian sort, which, done in secret shall be rewarded openly. I am compelled to admit that little children know nothing about the Mendicity Society and the indefatigable Mr. Hors- ford ; that they have never perused the terrific leaders in the Times against street mendicancy, and the sin of indiscriminate almsgiving ; that they would, if they could read bad writing, become an easy prey to begging letter impostors ; and would never be able to steel their hearts against the appeals to the benevolent in the newspapers. I must own, too, that their charity does not stop at humanity but extends itself to the animal creation. I never saw a child feed a donkey with macaroons ; but I have seen one little girl press pound-cake upon a Shetland pony, and another little girl give half of her bread and butterto a four-footed acquaintance of the Newfound- land breed. I have watched the charitable instincts of children from babyhood to school-hood, when hopes and cankering 134 Hutch PiSiures. fears, desire of praise, solicitude for favour and lust of gain begin, shutting up charity in an iron-bound strong box of small-worldliness. Children love to give. Is it to feed the ducks in the park, or slide warm pennies into the palsied hands of cripples, or drop them into the trays of blind men's dogs, or pop them, smiling, into slits of money-boxes, or administer eleemosynary sustenance to Bunny and Tiny the rabbits, or give the pig a " poon " — to give it is indeed their delight. They vi^ant no tuition in charity : it is in them, God-sent. Yonder little chubby " sheet of blank stationery" who is mumbling a piece of parliament in his nurse's anns, has scarcely consciousness of muscular power sufficient to teach him to hold the sweetmeat fast ; yet, if I ask baby half by word half by gesture to give me a bit, this young short- coated Samaritan — who not long since began to "take notice," and can only just ejaculate da-da, ma-ma — will gravely remove the parliament from his own lips and oiFer it to mine. Were he a very few months older he would clutch it tighter in his tiny hand, and break a piece off, and give it me. Is not this charity ? He does not know, this young neophyte, that the parliament is moist and sticky with much sucking and mumbling ; that I am too big to eat parliament ; and that it is mean and paltry in me, a great, hulking, able- bodied, working man, to beg cates of him, a helpless infant. But he knows in his instinctive sapience that he cannot fill my belly with wise saws, or with precepts of political eco- nomy. He cannot quote Adam Smith, Eicardo, or S. G. O. to me; he administers, in his instinctive charity, corporeal sustenance to my corporeal necessity. The avaricious infant is a monster. Little Children. 135 "What word is that that shines so brightly — whose letters dance and glitter like precious gems on the so-called blank scroll ? Love. Instinct of instincts, inborn of all innate things, little children begin to love as soon as they begin to live. When mere flaccid helpless babes their tiny faces mantle with smiles — ah ! so fuU of love and tenderness — in their sleep. The first use they make of their arms is to clasp them round the neck of those they love. And whom \vill they not love? If the witch Sycorax had nursed Miranda, and Caliban had been her foster-brother, the little monster and the little maiden would have loved each other, and Pros- pero's little child would have kissed and fondled her hideous nurse. The first words children utter are words of love. And these are not necessarily taught them ; for their very inarticulate ejaculations are full of love. They love all things. The parrot, though he bites them ; the cat, though she scratches ; the great bushy blundering house-dog ; the poultry in the yard ; the wooden-legged, one-eyed negro who brings the beer ; the country lout with clouted shoon who smells so terribly of the stable ; the red-faced cook, the grubby little knife-boy, the foolish fat scullion, the cross nurse. They love all these ; together with horses, trees, gardens, and toys, and break their little hearts (easily mended again, thank Heaven), if they are obliged to part from them. And, chiefer, stiU, they love that large man with the gruff voice, the blue rough chin, the large eyes, whose knees comprise such an inex- haustible supply of cock-horses always standing at livery, yet always ready to ride post-haste to Coventry : they love papa. And, chiefest of all, they love her of the soft voice, the smiles, .'the tears, the hopes, the cares, the tenderness — who is all in 136 Dutch PiStures. all, tbe iirst, the last to them, in their tender, fragile, happy childhood. Mamma is the centre of love. Papa was an after ac- quaintance. He improves upon acquaintance, too; but mamma was always with them to love, to soothe, to caress, to care for, to watch over. When a child wakes up hot and feverish from some night dream, it is upon his mother he calls. Each childish pain, each childish grief, each childish difficulty is to be soothed, assuaged, explained by her. The pair have no secrets ; they understand each other. The child clings to her. The little boy in the Greek epigram that was creeping down a precipice was invited to his safety, when nothing else could induce him to return, by the sight of his mother's breast. You who have little children and love them — ^you will have borne patiently with me, I know, through all these trivialities. And you, strong-minded philosophers who " celi- bate, sit like a fly in the heart of an apple," and dwell indeed in perpetual sweetness, but sit alone and are confined and die in singularity, excuse my puerility, my little theme, my smaller argument, my smallest conclusions. Eemember the Master suffered little children to come unto him ; and that, strong-minded philosophers as we are, we were all of us, once, but little helpless innocents. X. THE CONVERSION OF COLONEL QUAGG. Some of our religions in the States are not over well paid. Down Punkington way, now, they have a religion with a chandelier; at least the chapel in which Eeverend Eufus P. PiUsbury officiates has one. That religion has a bell, and a weathercock, and a flight of steps of General Buifum's patent scagliola adamant, and columns with Corinthian fixings outside — bright and handsome. There's another religion in those parts though, that has no better chapel than a loft, formerly used for warehousing dry goods ; and our citizens have to go to worship up a ladder, and through a trap-door. Elder Peabody Eagle proposed that they should have a crane outside the building, as was the case in Baggby Brothers', the former proprietors' time, and so hoist the congregation up like cotton or molasses ; but the proposition, though prac- tical, was thought irreverent, and came to nothing. Eeverend Doctor Nathan Flower, who officiated over the dry goods, was very poorly off. Indeed, people said that he had nothing under his black doctor of divinity's gown but a shirt and pants, and that his whole income did not amount to two hundred doUs. a-year; whereas Eeverend Eufus P. PiUsbury 138 Dutch PiSiures^ had a cleav seven or eight hundred ; besides a store of silk gowns as stiff as boards and that rustled beautifully ; white cambric handkerchiefs by the whole dozen ; a real diamond ring ; starched collars and bands by scores ; and better than all, the run of all his congregation's sympathies and houses, which was worth I don't know how many comcakes and cups of tea every day ; besides comforters, over-shoes, umbrellas, gold watches, silver teapots, self-acting coffee-biggins, and select libraries of theology, given or sent to him in the way of testi- monials in the course of the year, without end. Tolks do say, too, that when Eeverend Eufus was in the ministry down South, before he came to Punkington, he was even still richer in worldly goods, for that he ovraed something mentionable in niggers. But you know how folks will talk. Punkington is in Buffum county, Mass. There are a good many religions there. They don't quite hate each other ; strive, speechify, write and talk against each other, as seems to be indispensable with orthodoxy and heterodoxy in Britain. Each religion gets along pretty well as it can : some grandly, some poorly, from Eeverend Eufus P. Pillsbury with his chan- delier, stiff silk gown and diamond ring, down to Eeverend Lovejoy Snowdrop, who is quite black, and preaches to the coloured people (they can sing, some — coloured people can) down in a little crazy affair sot up with planks and sailcloth close to the wharf, and which is more like a wash-house than a chapel. It may be ten years ago that there was a religion in rather a small way in Punkington, called the Grace- Walking Brethren. They had originally been called the Punkington Seceders; but, coalescing with Eeverend Pygrave Clapp — The Converfion of Colonel S^uagg. 139 who had just sloped from Coonopolis, Ga., where he had had a slight difficulty with the citizens on the Preesoil (whole ticket) question, which ended by his being ridden on a rail out of the state, and a report being spread abroad that the darkness of his complexion came from his having been tarred ; and that under his clothes he was feathered Hke a bird — coalescing with this persecuted Testifier, the amalga- mated ticket was thenceforward known as Grace-Walking. They encountered some little opposition at fii'st. The Baal- Peor congregation (brass band connection) felt it incumbent upon them to denounce and repudiate the Grace- Walkers as Erastians, Ebionites, Arminians, Socinians, nigger-saviom's, shoulder-hitters, money-diggers, and traders in shin-plaisters, Eeverend Lysander Splioon published a card in the Punkiug- ton Sphynx and Commercial Advertiser, in which he accused Reverend Barkley Baggs of the Grace- Walkers of whittling in the pulpit, chewing in the vestry, and having a bust of Tom Paine over his bookcase. Eeverend B. B. retorted by another card in the Punkington Sibyl and North-and-South Buffum Oracle, in which he alluded to the well-known story of Eeve- rend L. Sphoon having been in early life in Sing-Sing peni- tentiary for picking up things on the wharf; adding some little anecdotes concerning what he had done subsequently in the wooden nutmeg trade, the clocks-that-wouldn't-figure trade, the school-teaching trade, the spirit-rapping trade, the tarred-oakum-imitation-India-rubber trade, the temperance lecturing trade, and the whiskey seUing trade. He regretted that his sacerdotal character precluded him from cowhiding Eeverend L. Sphoon the first time he met him in town ; but ofi'ered to match any one of his lay-elders against his oppo- 140 Dutch Pidiures. nent's deacons, and to forfeit fifty dolls, if the former left a strip of skin broader than a finger on the body of the latter after half-an-hour's "licking." This was the only feud of any consequence in which the Grace-Walking Brethren were concerned. They were peaceful, decent, harmless bodies enough, minding their own basiness, not interfering with that of anybody else, and our citizens took to them kindly. Their congregations soon began to multiply in number, and they had chapels at Marathon, Squashborough, Lower Whittle, Thermopylae, Jeffersonville, and East Halleluia. Within a year from their establishment they had five circuits within a fifty mUes circle of Punkington. Now a circuit, you must understand, may comprehend five, ten, fifteen, twenty congregations; and, the religion not being quite rich enough to entertain a minister for each separate congregation, there are so many circuits — religious " beats," in fact — each of which is assigned to a different clergyman, who goes the round thereof in turn. Punkington circuit, including as it did the townships of EggnogvUle, Bunkum, and Beersheba, together with Rapparoarer city and the villages of Snakesby, Fiscopolis, New MarseUles, Globbs, and Ephesus, was a very popular circuit indeed. There were always dreadful handsome girls at preachings and camp meetings, and plenty of comfortable farm-houses where the ministers were entertained with such delicacies in the way of pork fixings, mush, hominy, johnnycakes, canvas-backed ducks, pumpkin pies, squash, whitepot, curds, molasses, turkeys, hams, and apple pasties ; with elder wine, and per- haps a small drop of peach brandy or Monongahela whiskey, that would have brought water into the mouth of a London The Converjion of Colonel ^agg. 141 aldennan all cloyed and sogiry from a tortoise dinner at Guildhall, or a proud British nobleman surfeited with tlie luxuries of a regal banquet at the court of St. James's. The country around Pimkiugton was pretty and picturesonie ; and the brethren walked in grace with meekness and devoutness. There was but one thing wanting to make the whole circuit one real land of milk and honey ; or, rather, there was one tiling that turned it into a land of gall and wormwood — of soreness of flesh and bitterness of spirit ; and that thing was an iudiviilual ; and that individual was Colonel Quaga;. A dreadful man, a skeery man, a man to waken snakes and rile monkies was Colonel Quagg. Goliah Washington Quagg was his name ; and two and a half miles from Pun- kingtou did he locate, on the main road to Rapparoarer city. He was six foot three without his stockings, which would have made him. in jack-boots scn»eching tall to look at. He had a Inifhy beard and whiskers, and the integument that covered his bones was hard and horny as a crab-shell. Tlie hair of his head was like a prinieral forest, for it looked as though it had never been lopped, combed, weeded, or trimmed. His eyes wei-e fearful to look upon when they flashed, and they flashed ahnost always. He ate so much that people said he was hollow all through — logs. arms, and all — and packed his food from the feet upwards. Some people compared liim to a locomotive, for he was always smoking, drinking, roaring, and coming into collision with other folks. He compared himself to a ilississippi steam- boat with the safety-valves tied down with rope-yarn. " Kosin me up, and stand on my boilers," he used to cr\-. " Give me goss and let me rip. Strangers pay your bills, and 142 Dutch PiSlures. liquor up once more before you die, for I must Kck every 'coon of you or bust." He was always licking 'coons. He licked a backwoodsman ; four " Bowery bboys " from New York, one after the other; an Irish hod-carrier (with one hand), and an English prize-fighter. They sot a giant out of a menagerie at him once, and the giant closed with him, and was heard, soon afterwards to crack like a nut. The giant said (after he was cracked), that it was a darned, tarnation, everlasting shame it was ; for he had gone in to whip a man, not a grisly bear. Colonel Quagg was a blacksmith. He was not by any means the sort of blacksmith that Professor Longfellow has described. He had no boys to sit in the church among, no little daughter to hear singing in the choir. He was not the sort of blacksmith / saw once, during my travels in Europe, in a little village in the south of Erance, and who, on a broiling July day, was hammering away at his anvil with might and main, — in his shirt, and with his hair in curl papers ; for it was Sunday, and there was to be a fete in the village in the evening. No. Colonel Quagg was a very diiferent kind of Midciber : not a harmonious blacksmith or a learned blacksmith ; but a roaring, rampagious, coaly, knotty, sooty Vulcan of a man. To hear him shout out hoarsely to 'Zeek, his long, lank, bellows-blower : to see him whirl his tremen- dous hammer above his head as though it had been a feather, and bring it down upon the iron on his anvil with such a monstrous clang that the sparks flew about, and the flames leaped up the chimney and tripped up the heels of the smoke, as if they were frightened out of their wits. This was a sight — grand if you like — but fearful. The Converjion of Colonel ^agg. 143 The colonelcy of Goliali Quagg arose from his command of the Eapparoai-er Tigers. These redoubtable volunteers were (of course) the segis of the Union, and the terror of Buft'uni County. On fourtli of July day they fired off so many rounds of musketry that their eventually blowing them- selves up with gunpowder was thought to be by no means a matter of extreme improbability. The Eapparoarer Screamer newspaper teemed with cards headed " Eapparoarer Tigers, attention ! " and commanding the attendance of the corps at reviews, burials or weddings of members, or political meet- ings. Colonel Quagg, in his Tiger uniform, at the head of his corps, vowing vengeance against the Punkington National Guards, the Lower "Whittle Fire Corps ; the Squashborough Invincibles ; the Bunkum Defenders ; the East Halleluia Hussars (between which last-named volunteers and the Tigers there had occurred a deadly fray at the corners of Seventh Street and Slog Avenue, Punkington : the Hussars being at last obliged to take refuge in a liquor-store in the next block, and two eyes and unnumbered double teeth being left on the field) : Colonel Quagg brandishing his sahre and threatening gouging, cowhiding, and etarnal chawing up to creation in general and rival militia and fire-corps in particu- lar, was a great and glorious sight to see once, perhaps twice, , but not oftener; for the sun at noon- day dazzles, and distance lends enchantment to the voice of a powder maga- zine, or Vesuvius, or a mad dog. Colonel Quagg had neither wife nor relations, chick nor child. He lived behind the smithy, in a grim cabin ; where, for aught anybody knew he slept on the bones of his enemies, or kept bears and wolves,- or burned brimstone and Bengal, 144 Dutch PiSlures. lights in his stove. Where he was raised was not certain. What he did on Sundays (for he never went to church or meetings, and could not, in deference to our citizens, work in his smithy on the Sabbath) was not known. There were hut two things about him on which arguments could be, with tolerable certainty, held. That he liked rum — raw— which he drank in vast quantities without ever winking, or being intoxicated ; and that he hated the Grace- Walking Brethren. What these, or any other brethren had ever done to incur his dislike was not stated ; but it was clear and certain that he hated them fiercely and implacably. He declaimed against them in drinking bars ; he called them opprobrious names in the street; and, which was particularly disagreeable to the brethren themselves, he made a point of giving every minister who passed his smithy — on horse or on foot, on business or pleasure — a sound and particularly humiliating beating. Colonel Qnagg's method was this. 'Zeek, the long, lanky- assistant would, as he blew the bellows, keep a sharp look out through a little round hole in the smithy wall. • When, on the crest of the little hill in the valley beneath which the smithy lay (the bridge over the Danube, leading to Punkington, was in the other direction), there appeared the devoted figure of a Grace- Walking clergyman, 'Zeek would call out, " one o' 'em, Colonel ! " , Whereupon the black- smith would lay down his hammer, and say grimly, 'Zeekj 'ile.'" The "ile," or oil, being brought, the Colonel would therewith anoint a tremendous leather strap, in size and appearance between the trace for a cart-horse and the lathe for a steam-engine. Then, would he sally forth, tug the The Converfion of Colonel ^agg. 145 luckless preacter by one leg off his torse — if he happened to be riding — or grapple him by the collar of his coat if he were a-foot, and thrash him with the strap — not till he howled for mercy; for the victim always did ihaf at the very first stroke of the terrible leather; but till his own brawny arm could no longer hold the mighty weapon. All this was accompanied by a flood of abuse on the part of the Colonel : the minister, his congregation, sect, person, and presumed character, were all animadverted upon ; and, after having been treated with brutality, he was dismissed with scorn, with a sardonic recommendation to send as many more of his brethren that way as he could, to be served in the same way. Then, execution being done, and the miserable victim of his ferocity gone on his bruised way towards Punldngton, the Colonel would stride into Silas B. Powkey's tavern over the hill, hot, perspiring, and fatigued; and, throwing his strap on the bar, and seating himself on a puncheon, would throw his legs aloft, half in weariness half in triumph, even till they reached the altitude of the mantel- piece ; would there rest them ; and, ejecting a mighty stream of tobacco juice, cry : " Squire, strapped another Grace- Walker: Eum." Now this, as in the celebrated Frog and Boy case (vide spelling-book reports), albeit excellent sport to one party concerned, was death to the other. Martyrdom had not exactly been contracted for when the Grace- Walking Brethren entered the ministry ; and without martyrdom there was no riding the Punkington circuit. There was no avoiding the colonel and his awful strap. There was no going round another way. There was no mollifying, persuading, or infus- 146 Dutch PiBures. ing soft pity into the colonel's breast. " I licks ye,'' he was wont to reply when interceded with, "because I kin, and because I like, and because ye'se critters that licks is good for. Skins ye have on and skins I'll have off ; hard or soft, wet or dry, spring or fall. Walk in grace if ye like till pumpkins is peaches; but licked ye must be till your toe- nails drop off and your noses bleed blue ink." And licked they were accordingly. What was to be done with such a man — a man with this dreadful fixed idea of strapping clergymen — a man with an indomitable will, a strong arm, and an abusive tongue. Warrants, summonses, exigents, and actions for battery, the colonel laughed to scorn. "As much law as 'you like," he said, "but not one lick will that save you." The female members of the Grrace- Walking congregation were fain to write anonymous letters to him, exhorting him to repentance. Eeverend Joash M'Tear wrote to Lucretia Z. Tackeboguey of Grrimgribberopelis, Va., the celebrated table-turner and spirit- rapper, and begged her to consult a four-legged mahogany of extraordinary talent and penetration with reference to Colonel Quagg's persecution of the saints. He received in reply a highly-flattering and interesting communication from the spirits of Cleopatra and Johanna Southcote, in which it was confidently predicted that shortly after the passing of the Maine liquor law in Holland, and the adoption of Bloomerism at the British court. Colonel Quagg would be bound in leathern straps for five hundred years : which, aU things taken into consideration, was not a very encouraging look- out for the Grace-Walkers. Then they took to holding public meetings, mass meetings, indignation meetings, against The Converfion of Colonel ^agg. 147 lim ; then to praying for liim ; then to praying to be de- livered from him as from a serpent or fiery dragon. One bright spirit of the sect suggested bribery, either directly, by the enclosure of dollar-notes, or indirectly, by the encouragement of the colonel's trade in having horses shod at his smithy. But both artifices failed. The colonel took the first ten- dollar bill that was offered him, and administered a more unmerciful thrashing than ordinary to the giver — as a receipt, he said. The next victim happened to have a horse that opportunely cast both his fore-shoes in front of the colonel's residence. The enemy of Grace- Walkers shod the beast; but the only benefit that its proprietor derived from giving > Quagg his custom was the privilege of being strapped inside the smithy instead of out of it, and the threat that the next time he presumed to come that way he should be laid on the anvil and beaten as flat as a wheel-tire wjth a red-hot crowbar. This state of things was growing intolerable. The more the brethren went on preaching the more the colonel went on licking. The more they beat the — "Pulpit drum ecclesiastic With fist instead of a stick," the more Colonel Quagg proved his doctrine orthodox — " By apostolic blows and knocks." The Punkington circuit began to lack ministers. Clergy- men were not forthcoming. The pulpits were deserted. The congregations began to cry out. No wonder. Devotion, meekness, self-abnegation are all admirable qualities in their way, but human nature, after all, is not cast iron. It wiU wrestle with wild beasts at Ephesus, but it does not exactly L 2 148 Dutch PiSiures. love to wrestle when the wild beasts are twisting the bars of their cage, and have not had a shin-bone to feed on for three weeks. To put one's head into the lion's mouth is good once in a way ; but it is hardly prudent to do so when the lion's tail begins to wag, and his mane to bristle, and his eyes to' flash fire and fury. There was a meeting held at Punkington to decide upon what ministers should go the ensuing Spring circuit ; just as, in Europe, the Judges meet to arrange among themselves who shall go a-hanging, and where. The question of Colonel Quagg was debated in solemn conclave : for, though aU the other places in the circuit found ready volunteers, not one clergyman could be found to offer to adminster to the spiritual necessities of the Eapparoarer brethren. Brother M'Tear had a bad cold ; brother Brownjohn would rather not ; brother Ejiash had a powerful call down Weepingwail way ; brother Bobberlink would next time — perhaps. Brother SJocum gave a more decided reason than any one of his brother ministers. He said that he would be etamally licked if he'd go, because he'd be sure to be considerably licked if he went. A brother who, up to that time, had said little or nothing — a long, thin, loose-limbered brother, with a face very like a quince more than three parts withered — who sat in the comer of the room during the debate, with his legs curled up very much in the fashion of a dog : — & brother, to say the truth, of whose abilities a somewhat mean opinion was entertained, for he was given to stammering, blushing, hemming, hawing, scraping with his feet, and seemed to possess no peculiar accomplishment save the questionable one of shutting one The Converfion of Colonel ^agg. 149 eye when he expectorated — this brother, by name Zephaniah SockdoUoger, here addressed himself modestly to speech : — "Thorns," he said, "is'nt good eating; stinging-nettles isn't pleasant handling, without gloves ; nor is thistles comfortable, worn next to the skin. Corns is painful. Man's skin was not made to be flayed off him like unto the hide of a wild cat. But vocation is vocation, and dooty, dooty — some. I, Zephaniah SockdoUoger, will go on the Rapparoarer loca- tion, and if Brother Brownjohn will lone me his boss I will confront the man — even Goliah Quagg." After which the devoted brother shut one eye and expectorated. The meeting turned their quids and expectorated too ; but without shutting their eyes. They adopted the long brother's disinterested proposition, ne>?i. con. But Brother Bobberlink whispered to Brother Slocura that he Jiad allers thought Zephaniah SockdoUoger considerable of a fool, and that now he know'd it — that was a fact. The fire roared, the sparks flew up the chimney, and the beUows blew fiercely one April evening ; and Colonel Quagg and his anvil were in fierce dispute about a red hot horseshoe. The Colonel had the advantage of a hammer that Tubal Cain might have wielded when he fashioned the first ploughshare ; but the anvil was used to hard knocks, and stood out against the blacksmith bravely. Indeed, if a certain metaUic vibra- tion was to be taken into account, the anvU had the best of it; for it had the last word. Only the unfortunate horseshoe came to grief ; and, like the man between two stools who came to the ground, was battered into all sorts of shapes between the two disputants. Suddenly, 'Zeek, the belj^ows- blower, ceased for a moment in his occupation, and remarked : ISO Dutch PiSiures.- " One 'o them, colonel, top o' the hill. On a boss.. Legs as long as a coulter." " Twankeydillo ! twankeydiUo ! " * sung out Colonel Quagg in great exultation. "He, 'Zeek, and plenty of it for Jack Strap, the crittur, is getting tarnation rusty." The fatal strap being " iled " rather more liberally than usual, the colonel grasped it in his mighty hand, and passed out of the smithy door. He saw, coming towards him down the hiU, a long-legged, yellow-faced man in black, with a white neckcloth and a broad brimmed hat. He bestrode a solemn-looking, white horse with a long tail. He had but one spur (the rider) but it was a very long and rusty spiu'. In his hand he carried a little dog's-eared book ; but, as he rode, he sung quite softly a little hymn that ran something like unto the following : — " We are marcMng through the gracious ground, We soon shall hear the trumpet sound ; And then we shall in glory reign. And never, never, part again. What, never part again ? . No, never part again. No never, never, never, &c. And then we shall, &c." Colonel Quagg waited till the verse of the hymn was quite finished, and the horseman had got to within a couple of yards of his door, when he called out in a terrible voice, " Hold hard ! " " Brother," said the man on the horse, " good evening and peace." * TwankeydiUo is the burden of an old country blacksmith's song. The Converfton of Colonel ^agg. 151 " For the matter of that,'' responded Cojonel Guagg, " rot ! Hold hard, and git out of that hoss." " Brother ? " the other interrogated, as if not quite under- standing the command. " Git out, I tell you," cried the blacksmith. " Legs and feet. Git out, you long-tailed blackbird. Git out, for Fm riz, and snakes wUl wake ! I want to talk to you." The long man slid rather than got off his horse. It was indeed. Brother Zephaniah SlockdoUoger ; for his face was quincier than ever, and, as he descended from his steed, he shut one eye and expectorated. " Now," said the blacksmith, seating himself on tlie horse block in front of his dwelling, and giving a blow on the ground with his strap that made the pebbles dance. " Where do you hail froin ? " " From Punkington city, brother," answered the reverend Zephaniah. " And whar are you a goin' tu ? " " To Eapparoarer city." " And what may you be goin' for to du in that loca- tion?" " Goin' on circuit." " What ? " " Lord's business, brother." Colonel Quagg shook out the strap to its fuU length, and passed it through his horny hand. " There was a brother of yours," he said sententiously, " that went to Eapparoarer city on Lord's business last fall. He passed this edifice he did. He met this strap close by here. And this strap made him see comets, and dance like a 152 Dutch PiSiures. shaking Quaker, and feel uncommon like a bob-tailed bnU in fly-time." There was something so dreadfully suggestive in the position of a bob-tailed bull in fly-time (the insects fre- quently kill cattle with their stings) that brother SockdoUo- ger wriggled uneasily. "And I du hope," the colonel continued, "that you, brother, aren't of the same religion as this babe of grace was as met the strap as he was riding. That religion was the Grace-Walking religion, and that religion I always lick." " Lick brother 1 " "Lick. With the strap. Dreadful." " Colonel Goliah Quagg," said the minister, " for such, I know, is your name in the flesh, I am a. preacher of the Grace- Walking connection. Humble, but faithful, I hope." " Then," returned Colonel Quagg, making an ironical bow, " this is the strap with which I am going to lick you into sarse." " Brother, brother," the other cried, shaking his head, " cast that cruel strap from out of thine hand. Close thine hand, if thou wilt, upon the hammer of thy trade, the coul- ter of thy plough, upon a pen, the rudder of a ship, the handle of a lantern to light men to peace and love and good- will ; but close it not upon sword of iron, or bludgeon of wood, or strap of leathern hide. For, from the uplifting and downfaUing of those wicked instruments came never good ; but rather boiling tears, and bruises and blood, and misery, and death." " Now look you here," the blacksmith cried, impatiently. " Talk as long as you like ; but talk while I am a-licking of The Converjion of Colonel ^agg. 153 you. For time is precious, and must not be thrown away nohow. Lick you I must, and lick you I will. Hard." " But, brother— but, colonel '' " Eot ! " exclaimed the colonel. " Straps is waiting. Stubs and fences ! I'll knock you into horseshoes and then into horsenails, if you keep me waiting." " Have you no merciful feelings ? " asked Zephaniah, as if sorely troubled. " Not a cent of 'em ' Air you ready ! Will you take it fighting, or will you take it lying down ! Some takes it fighting ; some takes it like lambs, lying down. Only makfe haste." " Goliah Quagg," the minister responded, " I am a man of peace, and not one that goes about raging with sword and buckler, like unto Apollyon, or a corporal of the Boston Tigers ; and I would rather not take it at aU." "You must," the colonel roared, now fairly infuriated. " Pickled alligators ! you must. Hold hard, you coon ! Hold hard ! for I'm a goin' to begin. Now, once more ; is it fighting, or is it quiet, you mean for to take it ? " " Well," said brother Zephaniah, " you aj-e hard upon me. Colonel, and that's true. It's fighting or lying down is'nt it ? " "Aye," returned the colonel, brandishing his strap. " Then I'll take itfigJiting," the man of peace said quietly. Colonel Quagg halted for a moment, as if amazed at the audacity of the Grace- Walker. Then, with a wild halloo, he rushed upon him very much as a bob-tailed bull does rush about under the aggravating influence of flies. His hand was upon the minister's coUar ; the strap that had done so 154 Dutch PiSiures. much execution in its time was swinging high in the air, when — Stay. Can you imagine the rage, astonishment, and des- pair of a schoolmaster caned by his pupU ; of the Emperor of China sentenced to be bambooed by a Hong Kong coolie ; of the beadle of the Burlington Arcade expulsed therefrom by a boy with a basket : of a butler kicked by a footpage ; of a Southern planter cowhided by one of his own niggers ; of a Broadway dandy jostled by a newly landed Irish emi- grant ; of a policeman ordered to move on by an apple- woman ; of the Commander-in-chief of the army desired to stand at ease by a drummer ; of the Pope of Eome blessed with two fingers by a chorister boy ? If you can imagine anything of that sort, — ^but only if you can, — you may be able to form some idea of how Colonel Quagg felt when a storm of blows, hard, well-directed, and incessant, began to fall on his head, on his breast, on his face, on his shoulders, on his arms, on his legs — all over his body, so rapidly that he felt as if he was being hit everywhere at once, — when he found his strap would hit nowhere on the body of his op- ponent, but that he himself was hit everywhere. Sledgehammers ! Sledgehammers were nothing to the fists of the Grace-Walking brother. A bob-tailed buU in fly time was an animal to be envied in comparison to the colonel. He danced with all the vigour of a nigger toeing and healing a hornpipe. He saw more comets than Tycho Brahe or Erra Pater ever dreamed of. He felt that he was all nose, and that a horribly swollen one. Then that he had swallowed aU his teeth. Then that he had five hundred eyes, and thtn none at all. Then that his ribs went in and his blood came 'The Converfion of Colonel ^agg. 155 out. Then his legs failed under him, and he fell down all of a heap ; or perhaps, to speak classically and pugilistlcaUy, he hit out wildly, felt groggy, and went down at the ropes. The tall brother went down atop of him, and continued pounding away at his body — not perhaps as hard as he could, but decidedly much harder than the colonel liked — singing all the while the little hymn beginning " We are marching through the gracious ground." quite softly to himself. " Hold hard ! " gasped the colonel at last, faintly. " Tou don't mean murder, do you ? You won't hit a man when he's down, much more, will you, brother ? " " By no means," answered Zephaniah, bringing down his fist nevertheless with a tremendous " bash" upon the colo- nel's nose, as if there were a fly there, and he wanted to kill it. " But you've took it fighting, colonel, and you may as well now take it like a lamb, lying down." " But I'm broke, I tell you,'" groaned the vanquished blacksmith. " I can't do no more. You air so mighty hard, you are." " Oh ! you give in, then ? " "Aye," murmui-ed Colonel Quagg, " I cave in." " Speak louder, I'm hard of hearing." " Yes ! " repeated the colonel, with a groan. " I du cave in. For I'm beat ; whittled clean away to the smaU end o' nothing — chawed up — cornered." " Y'ou must promise me one little thing. Colonel Goliah Quagg," said the reverend SockdoUoger, without however removing his knees from the colonel's chest. " You must promise before I leave off hammering of your body, never 156 Dutch Fidlures. for to ill-treat by word or deed any of our people — ministers, elders, deacons, or brethnpn." "I'll promise," replied the colonel; "only let me up. You're choking me." " Not to rile, lick, or molest any other peaceable critturs as are coming or going past your way upon Lord's busi- ness." " I promise," muttered the colonel who was now be- coming purple in the face. "Likewise," concluded Zephaniah, playfully knocking away one of his adversary's loose teeth, so as to make his mouth neat and tidy, " you must promise to give up drinking of rum ; which is a delusion arid a snare, and bad for the in- nards, besides being on the trunk-line to perdition. And finally, you must promise to come to our next camp meeting, clean shaved, and with a contrite heart." " No,'' cried the almost-expiring colonel, " I won't, not for all the toebacco in Virginny ! Nor yet for Martin Van Buren, or Dan'el Webster ! Nor yet for to be postmaster ! " " Tou won't, brother ? " asked Zephaniah, persuasively raising his fist. " No, I'm darned if I do." " Then," said the Grace-Walker, meekly, " I must sing you another little hymn." Immediately afterwards Colonel Quagg's tortures recommenced. He struggled, he roared, he entreated, but in vain. All he could see were the long man's arms whirling about like the sails of windmills. All he could feel was the deadly pain of the blows on his already hideously bruised face and body. AH he could hear was the snuflSing voice of his The Converfion of Colonel ^agg. 157 tormentor singing, with an occasional stammer, a verse of a little hymn, commencing "I'm going home to bliss above — Will you go, will you go ? To live in mercy, peace, and love — Will you go, will you go ? My old companions fare you well, A brigbter fate has me befel, I mean up in the skies to dwell. Will you go, will you go ?" He could stand' it no longer. He threw out his arms, and groaned, " Spare my life, and I'll promise anything." "Happy to hear it, colonel," answered brother SockdoUoger, helping his adversary to rise, and then coolly settling his own white neckcloth and broadbrimmed hat. " Perhaps you'll be good enough to look after my hoss a bit. He cast a shoe just after I left Punking-ton." Colonel Quagg, quite humiliated and crestfallen, proceeded to shoe the horse, which had been quietly cropping the stunted herbage while the colonel was being licked. The operation iinished, as well as Quagg's bruised arms would permit, the Grace- Walker gravely handed him a coin, which the black- smith as gravely took ; then mounted his steed, and rode away. As for 'Zeek he had been hiding away somewhere during the combat. But he now appeared ; and, to judge by the energetic manner in which he blew the bellows, and a certain grin overspreading his swarthy countenance, he seemed not altogether displeased at the discomfiture of his master. Colonel Quagg had never read Shakespeare, but he had ^58 Dutch PiBures. unconsciously acted the part of Ancient Pistol. He had been compelled to eat the leek which he had mocked. He had been a woodmonger, and bought nothing of brother Soekdolloger but cudgels. He had taken a groat, too, to heal his pate. Let us hope, with FlueUen, that it was good for his wounded sconce. There is a seat at religious camp meetings in America called the " anxious seat." A camp meeting is not unlike a fair — a very pious one, of course ; and the anxious seat is one on which sit the neophytes, or newly-entered — those who have anything to confess, anything to complain of, anything to disclose, or to tell, or to ask. Upon the anxious seat at the next camp meeting near Eapparoarer city of the Grace-Walking Brethren sat Colonel Goliah Quagg. Amid a breathless silence, he frankly avowed his former evil course of Hfe, narrated the events of his conversion by brother Soekdolloger, and promised amendment for the future. A brother, who had been reposing on a bench, with his limbs curled up after the manner of a dog — a long, yellow-faced, brother, who had a curious habit of shutting one eye when he expectorated — rose to speak when the colonel sat down. He expressed how happy he was to have been the instrument of Colonel Quagg's conversion, and that the means he had employed, though somewhat rough, had been effectual. With much modesty, also, he alluded to his own conversion. It was not such a long time ago, he said, that he himself had been but as one of the wicked. He owned it with shame that he had at one time been one of the abandoned men called prizefighters — a pugilist to be backed and betted on for hire and gain ; and that he had beaten Dan Grummles, surnamed T!he Converjion of Colonel ^agg. ^59 the Brooklyn Pet, in a stand up fight for two hundred dolls: a side. Colonel Quagg has kept his promise. He left off ram and parson licking. He resigned the command of the Tigers, and is now, as Elder Quagg, one of the burning and shining lights among the Grace-Walking Brethren. XI. DEMETRIUS THE DIVER. THERE are no bygones that have greater need to be by- gones than those of wickedness, violence, and cruelty. The blood and dust that besmear some pages of history might glue the leaves together for ever. Tet from time to time necessities will occur that leave us no choice but to open the old grave ; to turn to the old dark register ; to unlock the old dark, grim skeleton closet ; to turn the retro- spective glass towards the bad, bold days that are gone. We are at present the allies* — and worthily so — of the Turks. A brave people, patient, high-minded, slow to anger, terrible yet magnanimous in their wrath. Tet, while we ac- knowledge and respect all the good qualities possessed by this valiant nation, it is impossible to forget that the Turk has not always been the complacent Paehain an European frock-coat and a sealing-wax Cap with a blue tassel, who writes sensible, straightforward state papers, reviews Eui'o- pean troops, does not object to a quiet glass of champagne, and regales English newspaper correspondents with coffee, and pipes. Nor is he always the sententious, phlegmatic, * 1854. Demetrius the Diver. i6r taciturn, apathetic Osmanli, who, shawled and turbaned, sits cross-legged upon the divan of meditation, smoking the pipe of reflection ; who counts his beads and says his prayers five times a-day, and enjoys his kef ; and who, as to wars and rumours of wars, fire, famine, pestilence, and slaughter, says but : "Allah akbar " — God is great. There are men in London whom we may meet and con- verse with in our daily walks, who can remember the horrible massacre of Scio, in the year eighteen hundred and twenty- two. We had just begun then, through the edifying cobweb- spinning of diplomacy, the passionate poetry of Lord Byron and the crude intelligence of the English press, to under- stand that there was something on hand between the Greeks and the Turks in the Morea and the Archipelago, and that the former were not, on the whole, quite rightly used. We were just going to see about forming an opinion on these and other matters when the news of the massacre of Scio burst upon us like a thunder-clap. Gloomily and succinctly the frightful news was told us how the terrible Kara Ali — or the Black — Pacha had appeared with a fieet and an army in the Iiarbour of Scio, then one of the fairest, peacefuUest, most prosperous, most densely-populated islands in the Grseco- Turkish Archipelago, and that all and everything — ^peaceful rayahs, gold and purple harvest, university, commerce, wealth — had in three days disappeared. The story of the massacre of Scio has never been fully told in England ; and only in so far as it effects my story am I called upon to advert to it here. Besides, no tongue could teU, no pen could describe, in household language, a tithe of the atrocities perpetrated in the defenceless island by order of the Black Pacha. Suffice M 1 6.2 Dutch PiSiures. it to say that for three days Scio was drenched in blood ; that the dwellings of the European consuls were no asylums ; that the swords of the infuriated Osmanlis murdered alike the whiteheaded patriarch, the priest of the family, the nursing mother, the bride of yesterday, the bride of that to-morrow which was never to come to her, the tender suckling, and the child that was unborn. Upwards of eighteen thousands per- sons were massacred in cold blood ; and the blackened ruins of Scio became a habitation for bats and dragons, howling dogs, and wheeling birds of prey. Some few miserable souls escaped the vengeance of the Black Pacha. There was a Greek ecclesiastic lately in London, who was hidden by his mother in a cave during the massacre, and brought away unhurt. When the fury of the invaders began, through lassitude, to cool, they selected such boys and voung girls as they could find alive, and sent them to be sold in the slave market at Constantinople. Then; when they had left the wretched island to itself, half-famished wretches began to crawl out of holes and thickets and ditches, where they had hidden themselves. They saw the charred and smouldering remnants of what had once been Scio ; but they abode not by them. In an agony of fear lest the murderers should return, they made the best of their way across the seas to other islands, or to inaccessible haunts on the main- land. Those who had the means took refuge on the French and Italian shores of the Mediterranean. There is a sultry city which, if you were minded to go to it over land, you could have reached in those days by dili- gence, as you can reach it in these, by a commodious railway from Paris ; but, to attain which by sea you must cross the Demetrius the Diver. 163 stormy Bay of Biscay and pass the rocky straits of Gibraltar, and coast along the tideless sea almost in sight of the shores of Africa. To this great mart of southern commerce, with its deep blue sky, its slackbaked houses, its Cannebiere, its orange groves, its black-eyed, brown-skinned children, its Quai de la Joliette, and crowded port, where floats the strangest medley of ships, and on the wharves of which walk the most aston- ishing variety of costumes that ever you saw — to the city of Marseilles in Prance, came many of these refugee Greeks, some firom Scio, some from the Morea, some from Candia, many from the Fanal or Panar of Constantinople — which had also had its massacre — some from the interior of Bulgaria and Eoumelia. There were Greek gentlemen with their families who could never congi-atulate themselves sufficiently on having saved their heads and their piastres ; there were merchants quite stripped and bankrupt, who nevertheless, in the true Grecian manner began afresh, trading and making money with admirable assiduity and perseverance. And above all there were poor rayahs, who had been caikjees, coffee-house waiters, portefaix, at home — who had lost their little all, and had nothing but their manual labour to depend upon, and who were glad to carry burdens, and run messages, and help to load and unload the ships in the port of Mar- seilles. Among these, was one Demetrius or Dmitri Omeros. No- body knew much about him, save that he was a Sciote, and had escaped after the massacre ; that he was quite alone, and very poor. He was fortunate enough to possess a somewhat rare accomplishment, which made his earnings although pre- carious, considerably more remunerative than those of his M 3 r64 Dutch PiSiures. felfovv-countaymen occupying the station to wMch he ap- peared to belong. Demetrius was a most expert swimmer and diver. Had Demetrius Omeros lived in our days he would have been a . Professor to a certainty ; the walls would have been covered with posting bills and woodcuts pourtraying his achievements ; and he would have had a con- venient exhibition-room, and a sliding-scale of prices for his Entertainment. In eighteen twenty-three he contented him- self with the exhibition of his talents in the open port of Marseilles, and was satisfied with the stray francs, half-francs, copper sous, and liards, ilung to him when he emerged from the water, aU soaked and dripping, like a Newfoundland dog. He thus managed to lead a sufficiently easy, lounging, idle life; splashing, swimming, and diving sometimes for sheer amusement ; at others, basking in the genial sun Avith such profound indolence that had you not known him to be a Sciote you would have taken him for a genuine lazzarone of the Quai Santa Lucia. Demetrius was some thirty years old, tall, magnificently proportioned, with a bronzed countenance, wavy black hair, and sparkling black eyes. His attire was exceedingly simple, being ordinarily limited to a shirt, red and white striped trowsers secm-ed round the waist by a silken sash, and a small Greek tarbouch on his head, orna- mented with a tarnished gold tassel. Shoes and stockings he despised as effeminate luxuries. He was perfectly contented with his modest fare of grapes, melons, brown bread, garlic, and sour wine. House rent cost him nothing, as one of the Greek merchants settled at Marseilles allowed him to sleep in hi^ warehouse, as a species of watch-dog. When the weather was fine, he swam and dived and dried himself in Demetrius the Diver. 165 the sun : when it was foul, he coiled himself into a ball and went to sleep. In the year eighteen hundred and twenty-four it occmTed to the Turkish government considerably to strengthen its navy. There was an arsenal and dockyard at Constantinople then, as there is now ; but the Ottomans did not know much about ship-bmlding, and in the absence of any material guarantee for the safety of their heads, European artizans were rather chary of enlisting in the service of the Padishah. So, as the shipwrights wonld'nt go to Sultan Mahmoud, Sultan Mahmoud condescended to go to the shipwrights; that is to say he sent an Efifendi attached to the department of Marine, to Marseilles, with full powers to cause to be constructed four frigates by the shipbuilders of that port. As the French government had not then begun to interest itself openly one way or other in the Eastern question, and as the shipbuilders of Marseilles did not care one copper cent whether the Turks beat the Greeks or the Greeks the Turks, and, more than all this, as the Effendi from Stamboul had carte-blanclie in the monetary department, and paid for each, frigate in advance, the MarseUlais set about building the four fiigate with a hearty good will, and by the spring of eighteen hundred and twenty-five, two of them were ready for launching. It was observed by the Erench workmen that Demetrius the Diver appeared to take very great interest in the process of shipbuilding. Day after day he would come into the slip ■where the frigates were being constructed, and, sitting upon a pile of planks, would remain there for hours. Other Greeks ■would come occasionally, and launch forth into fierce invec- tives against the Tui-ks, and against the French too, for 1 66 Dutch PiStures. lending their hand for the fabrication of ships which were to be employed by infidels against Christians. In these tirades Demetrius the Diver seldom, if ever, joined. He was a man of few words, and he sat upon the planks, and looked at the workmen, their tools, and their work. Nobody took much notice of him, except to throw him a few sous occasionally, or to say what a lazy, skulking fellow he was. At length the day arrived which was fixed, for the launch of the first frigate, the " Sultani Bahri." Half Marseilles was present. The sub-prefect was there — not oifioially, but officiously (whatever that subtle distinction may be). Crowds of beautiful ladies, as beautifully dressed, were on the raised seats fitted round the sides of the slip ; the " Sultana Bahri " was dressed out with flags, and aboard her were the great Effendi himself, with his secretary, his interpreter, his pipe- bearer, and the shipbuilder. The sight of a ship-launch is to the full as exciting as any race. The heart beats time to the clinking of the ham» mers that are knocking, the last impediments away, and when the mighty mass begins to move, the spectator is in a tremoiu: of doubt, and hope, and fear. When the ship rights herself, and indeed walks the waters like a thing of life, the excite- ment is tremendous. He who sees the gallant sight must shout, he must congratulate himself, his next neighbour, — every- body in short, upon the successful completion of the Work. Now, everything had been looked to, thought of, prepared for the triumphant launch of the " Sultani Bahri." The only obstacles between her and the waters were certain pieces of wood technically called in England (I know not what their French name may be) " dogshores," and these were being Demetrius the Diver. 167 knocked away by the master shipwright. This operation, I may remark, was formerly considered so dangerous that in the royal dockyards it was undertaken by convicts, who obtained their liberty if they accomplished the task without accident. Just as the first stroke of the hammer became audible, Deme- trius the Diver, who had hitherto been concealed among the crowd, plunged into the water, and swam right across the track that the frigate would probably take on her release from the slip. A cry of horror burst from the crowd as he swam directly towards the ship's stem : for the vessel had begun to move, and every one expected the rash diver to be crushed or drowned. But, when he was within a few feet of the frigate, Demetrius the Diver threw up his arms, held them aloft for a moment in a menacing manner, then quietly subsided on to his back, and floated away. The " Sultani Bahri" slid down her ways to a considerable extent, she was even partially in the water ; but she walked it by no means like a thing of life, for her stern began to settle down, and, if the truth must be told, the new frigate of his Imperial Highness the Sultan — stuck in, the mud ! They tried to screw her off, to weight her off, to float her off, but in vain. When a ship sticks in launching, there is frequently no resource but to pull her to pieces where she sticks, and this seemed to be the most probable fate in store for the " Sultani Bahri." The Effendi was in a fury. The ship- builder was " desolated ;" but the Frenchman only ascribed the misadventure to the clumsiness of his launching-hands, whereas the Moslem, superstitious like the majority of his co- religionists, vowed that the failure was solely owing to the evil eye of the Giaour diver, Demetrius Omeros. Had the 1 68 Dutch PiSiures. Effandi been in Ms own land, a very short and summary pro- cess would have preserved all future ship-launches from the troublesome presence of Demetrius Omeros and his evil eye ; but at Marseilles, in the department of the Bouches du Ehone, tte decapitation, bowstringing, or drowning, of even arayah, was not to be thought of. So, the Effendi was obliged to be satisfied with giving the strictest orders for Demetrius's ex- clusion from the shipbuilder's yard in future; and after a delay of some months, the second frigate (the first was rotting in the mud) was ready for launching. Anxiety was depicted on the Eflfendi's face as he broke a bottle of sherbet over the bows of the frigate and named her the " Achmedie." Immediately afterwards a cry burst from the crowd of "Demetrius ! Demetrius the Diver ! " and, rushing along the platform which ran round the vessel, the Effendi could descry the accursed diver holding up his aims as before, and doubtless blighting the onward progress of the " Achmedie " with his evil eye. Evil or not, a precisely similar disaster overtook the second frigate, and the launch was a lamentable failure. The ship- builder was in despair. The Effendi went home to his hotel, cursing, and was about administering the bastinado to his whole household as a relief to his feelings, when his inter- preter, a shrewd Greek, one Tanni, ventured to pour the balm of advice into the ear of indignation. " Effendi," he said, " this rayah who dives is doubtless a cunning man, a magician, and by his speUs and incantations has arrested the ships of my lord the Padishah, whom Allah preserve, in their progress ! But he is a rayah and a Greek, and a rogue of course. Let my lord the Effendi bribe him, and he will remove his speUs.'' Demetrius the Diver. 169 "You are all dogs, and sons of dogs," answered the Effendi, graciously, " but out of your mouth devoted to the ' clipper, O Yanni, comes much wisdom. Send for this issue of a mangy pig, this diver with the evil eye." Demetrius was sent for, and in dae time made his appear- ance, not so much as salaaming to the Eflfendi, or even remov- ing his cap. The envoy of the Sultan was sorely tempted to begin the interview by addressing himself through the inter- mediary of a bamboo to the soles of the diver's feet ; but, fear of the sub-prefect and his gendarmes, and, indeed, of the magical powers of the diver himself, prevented him. "Dog and slave! " said he, politely, "dog, that would eat garbage out of the shop of a Jew butcher, wherefore hast thou bewitched the ships of om- lord and CaHph the Sultan Mahmoud ? " "I am not come here to swaRow dirt," answered the diver, coolly, " and if your words are for dogs, open the win- dow and throw them out. If you want anything with a man who, in Frangistan, is as good as a Bey Oglou, state your wishes." '•■ The ships, slave, the ships ! " " The first two stuck in the mud," said the Greek ; " and the third, with the blessing of Heaven and St. George of Cap- padocia, will no more float than a cannon-baU ! " " You lie, you dog, you lie ! " said the Effendi. "'Tis you who lie, Effendi," answered Demetrius the Diver ; " and, moreover, if you give me the lie again — by St. Luke I wiU break your unbelieving jaw." As the Effendi happened to be alone with Demetrius (for he had dismissed his interpreter), and as there was somewhat 1 70 Dutch PiStures. exceedingly menacing in the stalwart frame and clenched teeth of the Greek, his interlocutor judged it expedient to lower his tone. " Can you remove the spells you have laid on the ships ?" he asked. " Those that are launched are past praying for." " Will the next float ? " " If I choose." "And the next?" " If I choose." " Name your own reward, then," said the Effendi, im- mensely relieved. " How many piastres do you require ? Will ten thousand do ? " " I want much more than that," replied Demetrius the Diver, with a grim smUe. " More ! What rogues you Greeks are ! How much more ?" " I want," pursued the Diver, "my wife Katinka back from Stamboul. She was torn away from Scio, and is in the harem of the Capitan-Pacha. I want my three children, my boy Andon, my boy Yorghi, and my girl Eudocia. When I have all these, here at Massalian (Marseilles), and twenty thousand piastres to boot, your frigates shall be launched in safety." " All well and good," said the Effendi ; " I wiU write to Stamboul to-night, and you shall have aU your brood and the piastres as well within two months. But what security have I that you will perform your part of the contract ? The word of a Greek is not worth a para." " You shall have a bond for double the amount which you Demetrius the Diver. iji will hand over to me, from two merchants of Marseilles. You cannot give me all I should Uke," concluded the Diver, with a revengeful frown. " You cannot give me back my ' aged father's life, my sister's, my youngest child's ; you can- not give me the heart's blood of the Albanian wolf who slew them." Within a quarter of a year, Demetrius the Diver was restored to his family. He insisted upon receiving the stipu- lated reward in advance, probably holding as poor an opinion of the word of a Turk as the Effendi did of the word of a Greek. The momentous day arrived when the third frigate was to be launched ; and a larger crowd than ever was col- lected. Everybody was on the tiptoe of expectation. Deme- trius the Diver, who, during the past three months had had free access to the ship-builders' yard, was on board. The dogshores were knocked away, the frigate slid down her ways, and took the water in splendid style. The launch was com- pletely successful. The Effendi was in raptures, and believed more firmly in the power of the evil eye than ever. A few days afterwards the fourth frigate was launched with equal success. " Marvellous man ! " cried the envoy of the Sublime Porte ; "by what potent spells wert thou enabled to bewitch the first two frigates ? " " Simply by these," answered Demetrius the Diver, in presence of a large company assembled at a banquet held in honour of the two successfal launches. " Five years ago, my father was one of the most extensive shipbuilders at Scio, and I was bred to the business from my youth. We were rich, we were prosperous, until we were ruined by the Turkish 172 Dutch PiBures. atrocities at Scio. I arrived in Marseilles, alone, beggared, my father murdered, my wife and children in captivity. How I lived, you all know. While the first two frigates were being built, I watched every stage of their construction. I detected several points of detail which I felt certain would prevent their being successfully launched. When, however, I had entered into my contract with this noble Effendi, I conferred with the shipwrights ; I pointed out to them what was wrong ; I convinced them, by argument and illustration, of what was necessary to be done. They did it. They altered, they im- proved. Behold, the ships are launched, and the evUeye had no more to do with the matter than the amber mouthpiece of his excellency the Effendi's chibouque ! I have spoken." The Eifendi, it is said, looked rather foolish at the con- clusion of this explanation, and waddled away, muttering that all Greeks were thieves. Demetrius, however, kept his piastres, gave up diving as a means of a livelihood, and, commencing business on his account as a boat - builder, prospered exceedingly with Katinka his wife, and Andon, Torghi, and Eudocia, his children. As to the two frigates, they were equipped for sea in good time, and were, I beUeve, knocked to pieces by the allied fleets at the battle of Navarino. XII. THE captain's PRISONEK, A STORY OP THE '45. "VrOT many miles from Kendal, in Westmoreland, there is -^^ a little town whicli I will call Bridgemoor. Bridge- moor has a long, scattered, straggling street of houses built in the "anyhow" style of architecture. The market-place in Bridgemoor has a circular flight of steps in the midst, sur- mounted by a jagged stone stump — the pedestal, in old Catho- lic times, of Bridgemoor market-cross. There is a market- house, within whose cloister is a statue of Sir Gervase Gabion,. Knight, of Gabion Place, hard by ; who barricaded, loopholed, casemated, and held out the market-house, against Colonel Barzillai Thwaites, commanding a troop of horse and two eompanies of the Carlisle Godly train-bands, in the Cavalier and Eoundhead days. The loyal baronet is represented in full Eoman costume, including, of course, the voluminous periwig essential to strict classicality in those days. He stands in a commanding attitude, irremediably crushing with his left sandal a hideous stone griffin, supposed to be an effigy of anarchy, or CromweDism, embodied in the person of Colonel Barzillai Thwaites aforesaid. The baronet's right hand holds an elongated cylinder of stone, which may be assumed to mean 174 Dtttch PiSlures. a baton, a telescope, or a roll of paper, exactly as the spec- tator chooses, and with which he points in the direction of his ancestral mansion. Gabion Place, nearly half of which mansion he had the patriotism to blow up with gunpowder about the ears of the Godly trainbands ; in consideration of which eminent, loyal, and patriotic service, the inhabitants of Bridgemoor caused this statue to be erected to him in the market-house cloister ; and King Charles the Second, on His Majesty's happy restoration, did him the honour of playing basset with him twice in the gallery at Whitehall, being actually, in addition, condescending enough to win two score pieces of him and to make two jokes on the fashion of his periwig ; — which was aU he ever did for him. Bridgemoor has, besides the architectural embellishments I have noticed, the usual complement of decent, or genteel, or stylish houses, being the residences of its clergyman, lawyer, doctor, and other local big-wigs. It has a quiet, humdrum, harmless population ; and manners quite as harm- less, as quiet, and as humdrum; but, amidst its general tranquillity, it possesses so great a warmth of feeling on a certain subject, that if a Certain Personage were to come over from foreign parts and set up, aggressively and defiantly, his Toe to be kissed in Bridgemoor market-place, he would be told something from Bridgemoor folk that would, I war- rant, astonish him. Such is Bridgemoor, and such it was, with few excep- tions, some one hundred and sixteen years ago, about which time the story I have to tell had action. The same street, market-place, market-house, quiet humdrum people, and manners existed then as now; but, in 174.6, the men The Captain's Prifoner. ijs wore coclced hats, and square cut coats; the ladies coifs, pinners, and quilted petticoats. The Bridgemoor ladies now ride in railway carriages from the Bridgemoor station along the railway to Kendal; in 1746 they rode on a pillion be- hind John the servant-man. In 1746 the market-place could boast of two time-honoured monuments or institutions, called stocks and a whipping-post ; at which latter institution very many vagrants, male and female, were salutarily scourged by the parish constable, according to the letter of- the humane statute of Elizabeth in the case of vagrancy made and pro- vided. Both of these institutions, together with a cheer- ful-looking gibbet on an adjacent moor, on which the bones of shackled corpses swung in the northern blast, and which was the chief lounge for the Bridgemoor crows, ravens and starlings, and the terror of vinous farmers returning from fair or market, have long since disappeared. So have some score cottages which tumbled down from time to time through rottenness, and were rebuilt in a more modern style. So has Gabion Place, the ancient mansion of the Gabion family which (house and family both), were de- molished at the time, and in the manner 1 am going to tell you of. In the fatal Forty-five, as all men know, Charles Edward Stuart came from Erance into Scotland, and from thence as far as Derby in England to fight for what he conceived to be his own. There were many widows and orphans made in England and Scotland, many tears of blood shed through his bootless quarrel for the crown with George of Hanover. In the more fatal Eorty-six, after Culloden, there was martial law in the highlands of both countries. Dragoons scoured 176 Dutch PiSiures. as the country side in searcli of fugitive Jacobite officers, of Jesuits, of papal emissaries, and of disaffected persons of every degree. Gentlemen's mansions were broken into, wain- scoting was torn down, flooring wrenched up, pictures were pierced for the discovery of the " priest's hole ; " farmhouses were ransacked, barns searched, hay and straw turned up with swords and bayonets lest Jacobite refugees should be concealed beneath. In every ditch, there was a corpse ; in every rivulet, blood ; in every farm field, a smouldering hay- stack, or a shattered plough ; in every house, fear and horror and trembling cheek by jowl with savage brutality and drunken exultation. On every hearth where the red stream of Civil War had flowed to quench the fire of love and house- hold hope, there were the ashes of desolation. Women and young children slaughtered or outraged; men shot and hanged without trial or shrift or hearing ; goods and chattels wantonly destroyed ; crops burnt, homesteads razed ; — such was martial law in Northern Scotland. In England and at Bridgemoor, its aspect, though less sanguinary, was as gloomy. One hideous uniform system of military terrorism was in force; and though — from the number of persons resident in the northern counties who were attached to the existing Government, and had never taken any part with the adherents of the Pretender — there did not exist the same pretence for the wholesale plunder, spoliation, and blood- shedding with which Scotland was ravaged, stOl an un- ceasing round of domiciliary visits was made, and in almost every house military were quartered. Of the many families directly or indirectly compromised by the political events of the foregoing, none were so The C af tain's Prifoner. 177 seriously implicated as that represented at Bridgemoor by the Lady Earnest Gabion, who resided at Gabion Place, and superintended for her son the management of the vast estates he owned. The lady's husband, Gervase Gabion, Lord of the Manor of Bridgemoor, died in 1725, leaving issue one son, Gervase Earnest, now twenty-two years of age. The family were rigid Catholics, and as rigid partisans of the House of Stuart. The last Squire Gabion had been inti- mately mixed up with the Earl of Mar's rash outbreak in 1715. In the course of a long sojourn in France before he could make his peace with the Government, he married, in. 1720, the Lady Earnest Augusta Mary, sole daughter and orphan of Earnest, Baron Brierscourt, of Brierscourt, in the Kingdom of Ireland, who was attainted for his share in Sir John Fenwick's conspiracy ; but escaped, went abroad, and — ^bidding adieu to the pomps and vanities of the world, political and social — took the cowl, and died in the famous Monastery of La Trappe. The Lady Earnest would pro- bably have imitated his example, and have been received as a nun in the convent where she was already a boarder, had she not been, at the passionate instance of her brother, the titular Lord Brierscourt (who, under the name of the Baron de Bricourt, had taken service in the French king's Grey Musketeers), eventually persuaded to accept the hand of Mr. Gervase Gabion. They lived together very happily, as the story-books say, tUl the demise of the squire, who died in his bed, and in decent odour with Sir Eobert Walpole, leaving an infant, as I have told you, who at two years of age became sole lord of Bridgemoor Manor and of a rent-roll of twenty thousand pounds a year. N 178 Dutch PiSlures. As tte little lad grew lie imbibed, together with a doting affection for his mother, and a bigoted attachment to his Church, an attachment quite as doting, as bigoted, as self- denying, as irrational it may be to the princes and politics of that ill-fated, false, and faithless house, which never brought anything but misery and ruin upon the lands they ruled over. Everything around him conspired to confirm him in his love for the house of Stuart. The mother he idolised valued a golden crucifix which her father had received from James the Second, at Saint Germain's, next to the relics of the saints. His nurse was never tired of telling him of the great and good Earl of Derwentwater ; of how he fought and bled for James the Third ; of how the Whigs slew him on Tower Hill, in London, and of the brave words he spake to the people there ; of how his body was brought home to the Lakes in earl's state and splendour, travelling only by night, and rest- ing in Catholic places of worship during the day ; of how she dressed him in a laced shroud and helped to sew his severed head on when he came home. The peasants in the neigh- boarhood were for ever telling him that, when he was a man, he was to bring the rightful King home ; his tutor, an Irish priest, mixed up Jacobitism and the Delphin Classics for him, and instilled the divine right of kings into his accidence. Is it to be wondered at, therefore, that at eighteen years of age Gervase Gabion was compelled to leave even orthodox and Jacobitical Oxford, for openly expressed and obstinately main- tained anti-Hanoverian principles; that at twenty-one he raised, equipped, and commanded as fierce a troop of West- moreland troopers as you could find now in the Life Guards — that he went in, over head and ears for Charles Edward Stuart ? The Captains Prifoner. 179 When Culloden had been fought, and the Prince was hiding, and the proscription came, a troop of Morrish's regi- ment of dragoons (the yellow horse) oame to Bridgemoor. The name and character of the widow of Squii-e Gabion stood so high, she was so beloved far and near for meekness and goodness, that her house, until the date of the com- mencement of this story, had been left sacred. But a strict watch was kept on her and hers. The Lady Earnest had been, for nearly a score of years, in the habit of receiving, in the great oak parlour of Gabion Place, every night in the week save Sunday, the principal inhabitants of Bridgemoor. They' ate and drank nothing, save on stated occasions, for which special invitations were issued ; but the ladies brought their needlework, and the men played at a very solemn and intricate game called Trictrac. Two circumstances may have induced the Lady Earnest to hold these very frequent reunions. In the first place, there was no family in Bridgemoor of sufficient rank to admit of her visiting them ; in the next, she had been educated abroad, where it is the custom for the principal lady in a provincial town to " receive " six times a week. So, night after night, winter and summer, there assembled in the great oak parlour Doctor Boyfus the iEsculapius of Bridge- moor, (sometimes Mrs. Boyfus,) and Mr. Tappan the solicitor; the three Miss Tappans, his elderly sisters (very assiduous in their attendance), old Captain Limberup, who had been with the Duke at the battle of Hochstedt ; one Mr. Paul, who had formerly dealt in druggets at Leeds, and was, consequently, somewhat looked down upon ; but who was so devout a Catholic, so warm a Jacobite, and so good a man, that he N 2 iSo Dutch PiBures. had been admitted on a sort of good-humoured sufferance for full ten years as an honorary member of the, Gabion coterie. The venerable Mrs. Vanderpant, whose husband, a Dutch sea captain, had been summarily shot, in by-gone days, by William the Third for tampering with the adherents of the Pretender, closed the list of the regular frequenters of the oak parlour. The rector of the parish. Dr. Small, came but seldom; he was a Low Churchman, who had for the greater part of his life been very much occupied with the composition of a folio refutation or Bentley's " Pha- laris." A non-juring archdeacon of the Protestant persuasion (very much put to his shifts, and forced to earn his bread as a traveUing tutor) dropped in occasionally ; but he talked too much abojit Doctor Saeherverell, aU of whose sermons he had by heart, and quarrelled too, with Father Maziere, the Irish Benedictine chaplain and tutor, whom I have not men- tioned hitherto as one of the circle, he being as much an article of household furniture, as the great, long-backed arm- chairs or the trictrac board. Many a summer and winter's day had past and gone since young Squire Gervase had put his foot across his own threshold. In his place there came another visitor, unwelcome, though not unbidden ; dreaded, yet nightly expected ; courted, but hated and feared. Tliis was Captain Seagreest, the commander of the troop of horse stationed at Bridgemoor. He was the Pate of the town, he held the strings of life and death j he could hang all Bridge- moor, so they said, as high as Haman, if he chose, in half an hour. On a certain cold Thursday evening in November, 1746, Lady Gabion had determined to close her doors to her entire 'The Captain's Prifoner. i8i circle of visitors, as she had closed them on the preceding Tuesday and Wednesday. The existence, almost cloistral, led by those who dwell in small towns, creates in them a species of habit of analysing and explaining — to their own satisfaction at least — the minutest actions of ther neighbours. AU Bridgemoor was agog for the two days, and for a con- siderable portion of the two nights, to find a solution for Lady Gabion's seemingly inexplicable conduct. On Thursday morning, after the reception by old Mr. Paul of a missive from the Lady Gabion, intimating her renewed inability to receive that evening, and begging him to communicate her apologies to her visitors in collective, public curiosity reached the boiling point, and well nigh boiled over. With this curiosity began to be mingled alarm, not for the health of Lady Gabion, but for her bfe. At twelve o'clock in the forenoon, old Mr. Paul, walking on the High Street, was smartly tapped on the shoulder by a tall man with a black campaigning wig, a scarlet coat, a grizzled moustache, an evil-minded cocked hat, cruel eyes, a great gash across the left cheek, a trailing sabre, and jack-boots with long brass spurs. Mr. Paul, a venerable man, of fuU seventy years, With flowing white hair and an infirm gait, trembled violently when he felt the hand of captain Seagreest on his shoulder, and when, turning round, he found himself face to face with that horrible trooper. " I know what's going on up yonder," was the greeting of the dragoon. " Know, captain ? " faltered out Paul. " Ay," responded his interlocutor, with an oath, " and so do you, you infernal Jacobitical old rag pedlar. I've watched 1 82 Dutch PiBures. the crew at the Place. I know their game, and I'll spoil it too. The old Cumberland witch, Bridget," he continued, " was in the market almost before daylight this morning, and bought eggs : the Gabion woman never eats eggs. She bought fowls : the Gabion woman never eats poultry. As I passed this morning after parade, 1 found the second window on the first floor of the left wing had been cleaned, and fresh curtained. I know who sleeps there when he is at home ; and you know, too, you whining Popish hunks." He struck the old man, sportively it may be, a blow on the cheek as he spoke, with his soiled gauntlet. Sportively, I hope, but rudely enough to bring a blush to the pale cheek, and a clench to the palsied hand, that, twenty years ago, would have been as good as a knock down blow to the ruffian soldado. Look you here, Master Teazel and Wool," he went on, gripping the retired cloth-merchant by the arm. " You are hand and glove with this Babylon baron's daughter; you mumble but of the same mass-book, and plot against His sacred Majesty together. Now mark ! go you up, and tell my Lady this, — she expects her son to-night. Don't He, old Judas, and say she doesn't. In this pocket," and the captain slapped his thigh, " I have the proclamation for the taking of Gervase Gabion of Gabion, dead or alive, with two hundred pounds reward. I come to Gabion Place to-night. Either I go away the accepted suitor and affianced husband of my Lady Gabion, or I go away, to-morrow morning, with a Serjeant and a squad behind me. I'll ride my horse Turenne, d'ye hear ; but I'll have the bridle of another horse in my hand, and as I go away on that horse shall be her The Captain's Prifoner. 183 dainty master Gervase Gabion, gagged, handcuffed, and witli his legs tied together underneath the horse's belly." " Captain, captain ! " faltered Paul. " Tell her that ! " concluded the captain triumphantly, snapping the fingers of the soiled gauntlet. "Tell her that her pet boy shall swing at Carlisle within a fortnight ; that he shall be hanged, drawn, and quartered according to law, like a traitor as he is. Tell her that, and that I'll marry her afterwards into the bargain, if she isn't civil." And with these words sWaggered away, with much jingling of spurs and clanging of the sabre, Captain Jesse Seagreest of Morrish's regiment of horse. He was as great a bully, ruffian, and gamester, as ever was permitted, in those somewhat free and easy Horse Guard days, to disgrace His Majesty's service. The cloth-merchant hurried away as fast as his tottering limbs would permit him, in the direction of Gabion Place, He was panting and trembling with exhaustion and excite- ment when he reached the quaint iron gale, which gave entrance by a siimous carriage drive to the picturesque old mansion. The old porter was not so deaf and stupid, bui he sufficiently comprehended the importance of the occasion, when Mr. Paul pencilled hastily on one of his tablets a pas- sionate request to the Lady Gabion, to let him have one minute's interview with her. Simon Candy, the lodge- keeper, was as devout a Catholic, and as staunch a vassal ft of the houses of Stuart and Gabion as can well be imagined, and he had no sooner read the words held before his eyes by the cloth-merchant, than vrith a nod of acquies- cence, he admitted him within the gate, and bidding him 184 Dutch PiSiures. wait an instant before the lodge door, hurried away towards the house. He returned almost immediately. " My lady '11 see thee," he said. " Gang thee ways oup yander, lad : thee know'st t' way." The lad of eighty, having indicated to the lad of seventy the route he was to take, retired into his lodge. Slowly and sadly — a contrast to the hurried eagerness with which he had approached the house — the ancient man proceeded upon his mission. Now that he was so near upon its completion, an unaccountable reluctance seemed to take possession of him in unfolding its purpose. He trod lag- gingly through a trim, prim, square-cut garden, arranged in that Helvetico-Italian style of which Lenotre was the in- Tentor and prime professor. By hedges cropped like horsehair cushions, through quaint triumphal arches of herbage, under trees cut into fantastic shapes, by zig-zag flower-pots he went, the gravel rasping discordantly under his feet, the leaves of the evergreens soughing piteously. So, on till he came to a glass grape-house, where was a large gi-ape-vine, near which, in a rustic chair, was a lady of noble presence, with a pale face and great brown eyes, a white hand, a supple yet command- ing form, and fair hair. Some forty years had passed their hands across her featui'es, but they had dealt with her lightly, and had left few scars behind. If her face had not been so deathly pale, and her eyes so sorrowful, she would have been beautiful. The cloth-merchant was a plain man, and told what he had to say as plainly and succinctly as he could. " Dear lady," he said in conclusion, "if what this murthering trooper The Captain's Prifoner. 185 says be true, tell us at least if lie has reason for Ws suspicion. Let us see what we can do to hide the truth, to save our boy. There is not a soul in Bridgemoor, I will be sworn, but would go through fire and water to serve you — the swashbuckler dragoons excepted. Joe Limberup (the captain) is in the commission of the peace. He might help us." For reply she took him by the hand, and pulled him rather than led him into a little shed, outside, in which the gardener kept his tools. She closed the ricketty door, she hung her mantle over the latch, she looked around so scared and bewildered, as if she feared the sparrows on the window-siU would carry her secret ; then, pulling from her bosom a torn, dirty, crumpled piece of paper, she thrust it into the old man's hand, and bade him read it. It was a letter from her son, Gerrase Gabion. It said that he was in prison^ and in peril of his life ; but that he had planned an escape. He indicated three days, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday in this same week, on which he might come disguised to Gabion. If he did not come on the third day he was to be considered dead. There was neither place nor date to the hurried scrawl which was as a life or death warrant to two human beings ; but there was a postscript, in which he bade his mother give a munificent reward to the messenger who had brought the letter. " And this is Thursday," cried the lady. " He will be here to-night, and the red-coats know it, and they wiU carry him off and hang him ! " "Trust in me," responded Ezra Paul. "He shall be saved. I will have scouts posted all round the place all aight, to watch for him ; but, dear lady, you must disarm 1 86 Dutch PiSiures. suspicion, you must receive your usual visitors to- night." " But the dragoon — the dragoon ! Ee will be here." " Hang the dragoon," cried Ezra, in his piping voice, " we will watch him. I'll get drunk, I'll poison him, I'll kill him." Passing down the main street, by the threshold of the town-brewery, which had been converted into a temporary bareack, he was hallooed to by Captain Seagreest, who was smoking a pipe and watching one of his troopers clean his famous horse Tilrenne with a wisp of straw, cursing the man heartily, and kicking him be whiles. " Tou've done your errand I see, old Slyboots," he roared out condescendingly. " See here, what a pretty paper- hanging I mean to cover my barrack -yard with." Paul looked up. There was a proclamation offering the reward for the apprehension of Gervase Gabion, twenty-two years of age, light curly hair, blue eyes, six feet in height, a scar on the left hand. The cloth-merchant shuddered, and, in as civil terms as he could command, notified to the dragoon that a slight indis- position, under which the Lady Gabion had been suffering, having yielded to two days' quiet nursing, she was willing to receive as usual that evening, and begged the favour of his company. To his unspeakable joy and relief the captain informed him, with a sarcastic bow, that duty would call him away the whole of that night from Bridgemoor, " and as for the little bit of business I have with my Lady Gran- deur," he sneered forth, " that may as well be settled to- morrow evening as this." With this, Paul took leave of him. The CaptairCs Prifoner. 187 " And yet," he said to himself musingly, as he bent his steps towards the abode of Captain Limberup, " there are some devil's thoughts under that campaigning wig of his. Is he going to scour the country with his marauding, tapstering butchers ? Yet his plan must evidently be to catch the bird ui its nest. To have it taken elsewhere would spoil his plans. Perhaps he is only off on some drinking bout with the other Philistines at Kendal." The Gabion " Thursday night " was held as usual. The • dreary game of trictrac went on as usual. Prodigal Sons, and Sacrifices of Isaacs were worked in parti-coloured silks for chair covers or screens. Snuff was taken, quiet remarks hazarded, half-crowns decorously won and lost. Lady Gabion sat paler than she had been that morning, with forced con- ventional smiles playing on her wan lips. The ticking of the clock smote on her ear like a hammer on an anvil, the wind outside screamed as in pain, the twisted beU-puUs seemed as hangman's halters, the great oak parlour seemed to her as the Valley of the Shadow of Death. And, though the dreaded Seagreest was not there, his very absence increased instead of allaying her terrors. Towards eleven of the clock of this same Thursday night, a young man riding a grey horse, with a docked military tail — as troop horses were docked then — and splashed, man and horse, up to the eyes, was making his way from Kendal to Bridgemoor. He seemed to know the country, for he avoided the main route, and came by a devious and circuitous path. For all his caution, though, he was chal- lenged once or twice by horsemen, but a few words, and the 1 88 Butch PiSiures. sight of a paper he carried in his breast, were a suificient passport for him. He clattered down the main street of Bridgemoor, as far as the brewery barrack, in front of which stopping boldly and resolutely, he called to the sentry to call the seq'eant of the guard. In a minute or two the officer in question came forth from the guard-house, holding a lantern, and offering, in his unsteady gait, rolling head, and blinking eye, an interesting problem to the philosopher as to whether he were more drunk than sleepy, or more sleepy than drunk. " I am on the King's business," said the man on horse- back. " I am Corporal Harris of Hawley's dragoons, on my way to Lancaster. Here are my pass, papers, and billet. The mayor of Kendal has given me a billet on one Lady Gabion, of Gabion Place here. Which is the way to it ? " The seijeant held up his lantern to examine the papers which the horseman offered for his inspection. " Good ! " cried the Serjeant, lowering his lantern. " Good night, comrade. Jolly good quarters you'U get at the popish woman's. Corporal ]?oss, tell him the way to Gabion Place ! " Upon which the Serjeant nodded, and returned, lantern and all, into the guard-house. Corporal Foss did as he was bidden, and, after watching the retreating figure of the horseman till it disappeared at the curve of the street, returned to the guard-house also. " Seq'eant Scales," he remarked to his superior officer, as the two resumed the consumption of two pipes and two mugs of beer, " wasn't that young fellow very like the chap pro- claimed for, dead or alive, with two hundred shiners reward for nailing him ? " T^he Captain's Prifoner. 189 " Hang you for a fool, Corporal Poss ! " responded the Serjeant. " Didn't I see the Duke of Cumberland's own fist at the bottom of the pass ? We should have more stripes on our bac^s than on our arms if we had stopped that cuU, you whackhead," As the Lady Earnest Gabion sat trembling in the great oak parlour alone, her guests having left' her about half an hour, the ticking of the clock, sharp and distinct as it was, ■was suddenly rendered partially inaudible by the clattering of distant hoofs. The lady stood up in the middle of the cham- ber, so that when she heard the hoofs come nearer, nearer, nearer still ; when she hea,rd the lodge-gate open, a man dis- mount, the door-bell ring, the portal open, and the voice of Bridget the old housekeeper cry out below in joyful recogni- tion, "My master — my young master!" she went down on her knees for joy and thankfulness. "He is here! He is here, dear mistress!" cried the bousekeeper, rushing into the room. "Wbo is here?" asked a harsh voice, as a gaunt figure stepped from behind the tapestry on the landing and laid its knotty hand on Lady Gabion's arm. " Who is here ?" asked Captain Seagreest. "Let me go to my son !" screamed the lady. " Hush, for heaven's sake! hush, my dear mistress," said the housekeeper. " My lady is well-nigh distraught, your tonour. The gentleman is one of King George's soldiers ■quartered here for the night, and here is his paper, sir." So saying, she held forth to the brutal trooper the billet, which the supposed corporal had put into her hand as he entered. igo Dutch PiSlures. "Ball!" the captain replied with sublime contempt. " Go and see your baby, my lady. Make your most of him for five minutes. After that he belongs to me." He loosened his hold of the lady, who sprang from his grasp like a bird. She rushed into the wide entrance hall, and folded in her arms the tall young man standing there. " My own boy ! " she cried, sobbing and kissing him passionately. Till, looking up in his face, she gave one loud and awful scrfeam, saying, " This is not my son I" and fell down senseless. " Goodness forgie us and save us if it is ! " cried Bridget in an agony, " and yet how like ! The very hair, the very blue een, and wavy hair, and all. Holy mother ! the very mark on his hand." "Not her son!" said Captain Seagreest, stepping un- concernedly over the prostrate form of Lady Gabion, and staring the astonished soldier in the face, " Who are you, in the devil's name?" " Corporal Harris, Captain Butt's troop, Hawley's dra- goons," answered the young soldier drawing himself up, and saluting the uniform of his officer. " On my way to Lan- caster with a dispatch to Colonel Tarleton. Here is my pass and papers, there is my billet for the night. God save the King, and confound the Pope, the Devil, and the Pretender." Lady Gabion died that night of spasms in the heart. It was afterwards known that at the very hour and minute of the arrival of the soldier at Gabion Place her son Gervase, who was being brought under strong escort to London, and had been confined for the night in a barn at Highgate, was shot dead by the giiard in an attempt to escape. XIII. DOCTOE PANTOLOGOS. "TVOCTOE PANTOLOGOS taught school at Accidentium -L' for thirty years. I would rather not reveal where Accidentium is. Let it be in Blankshire. We don't want, down at Accidentium, the Government Commissioner, or any other commissioner or commission whatsoever. If we have grievances, we can suffer and be strong, as Mr. Long- fellow says ; or, as our homely synonym has it, we can grin and bear it. Some years ago, indeed, we should have had far greater cause to deprecate the arrival of any strangers among us, or their inquiries into our affairs ; for we had one great, patent, notorious, grievance. The school that Doctor Pantologos taught was woefuUy mismanaged. Not by its master — he was a model of probity, and a monument of learning — but by Somebody, who might as well have been Nobody, for we never saw him or them ; and the Free Grammar School at Accidentium went on from year to year becoming more ruinous without, while it decreased in usefulness within. Somebody, who had no right to Anything, received the major portion of the funds, those who ought to have had much got •^92 Butch PiSlures. little, and those who were entitled to little got less. There were prebendaries concerned in Accidentium Grammar School, and an Earl of Something, likewise an Act of Parliament, Sythersett's Charity, and sundry charters, which, for anything we ever saw of them, might have furnished the old parchment, crabbed handwriting-iilLed covers to the school lexicons and dictionaries ; but, for all these influential connections, nobody repaired the roof of the school-room, or increased the salary of Doctor Pantologos. Both needed it very much. The vicar talked of looking into it, but he was poor, and half blind besides, and died ; and his successor, a vellum complexioned young man, bound in black cloth, white lawn edges, and lettered to a frightful degree of archseological lore, had no leisure for anything out of church time save stone breaking on the road (with a view to geological improvement), and taking rubbings in heelbaU of the monumental brasses of the church chancel. Moreover, he was supposed to have his own views about a new Grammar School, which he was understood to conceive as a building in the Pointed manner ; — the boys to wear cassocks and bands, with crosses on their breasts, like buns ; to attend church at eight o'clock every morning, and four times a day afterwards ; to learn intoning, and the Gregorian chant generally; and, in the curriculum of their humanities, to study Homer and Virgil far less than Augustine and Jerome. So the Vicar and Doctor Pantologos fell out, as well on this question as on the broad question of surplices, copes, candlesticks, flowers, lecterns, and wax- candles ; and the Doctor said he pitied him ; while he (his name was Thurifer) wondered whatever would become of an instructor of youth who smoked a pipe, and played at DoSlor Pantologos. 1^3 cribbage. Borax, the Radical grocer (we had one grocer, and one Radical in Accidentium), threatened to shew the school up ; but he took to drinking shortly afterwards, and ran away with Miss Cowdery, after which he was "buttoned up" (an Accidentium term for financial ruin), and was compelled to ily for shelter to Douglas, Isle of Man. The little river Dune, which, in the adjoining manufacturiBg counties of Cardingshire, RoUershire, and Spindleshire, became a broad, sober, gravely flowing, stream, refreshingly dirty (in a commercial sense) at SlubberviUe, and as black as ink at the great town of Drygoodopolis, was, at Accidentium, a little, sparkling, purling, light-hearted, thread of water; now enlivening the pebbles as a Norman menetriei- does the village maidens, making them dance willy nilly ; now enticing the rushes into liquor ; now condescending to act as a looking- glass for a bridge ; now going out, literally, on the loose, of its own accord, by splitting up into little back waters, rivulets, and streamlets, sparkling through the convolvuK to the delight of the wayfarer, and scampering by cottage doors to the glory of the dueks ; but everywhere through the valley of the Dune a jovial, hospitable, earnest, little river : the golden cestus of Venus, by day thrown heedlessly athwart the verdant valley, at night shining silver bright — " As if Diana in her dreams, Had dropped her silver bow. Upon the meadows low." A free hearted river, crying to hot boys, Come bathe ! and to the thirsty cows. Drink ! and to the maidens of Accidentium, Bring hither your fine linen, and see how white the Dune water will make it ! o 194 Dutch PiSiures. Close to the river bank (the water was visible through the old latticed windows of the schoolroom ; and, suggesting bathing, was a source of grievous disquiet to the boys in summer time) was the Accideutium Grammar School. It was a long, low, old, building, not of bricks, but of stones so old that some said they had once formed part of the ancient abbey of Acoidentium, and others that they were more ancient still, and came from the famous wall that the Eomans buUt, to keep out those troublesome Paul Prys who always would intrude : the Picts and Scots. The latticed windows, twinkling through the ivy ; the low-browed doorway, with its carved, ironclamped portal ; the double-benched porch before it; and sculptured slab overhead, shewing the dim semblance of an esquire's coat-of- arms, and a long, but a'.most wholly effaced, Latin inscription, setting forth the pious injunctions of Christopher Sythersett, Armiger, relative to the charities he founded — injunctions how observed, oh, ye prebendaries and somebodies ! these were the most remarkable features of the exterior of Accidentium Grammar School. There had once been a garden in front, and a pretty garden, too ; but the palings were broken down, and the ilowers had disappeared long since, and the weeds had it all their own way. Moreover, a considerable number of the latticed panes were broken, there were great gaps in the stone-masonry, the river frequently got into the garden and wouldn't get out again, the thatch was rotten and the belfry nearly tumbling down; but what was that to anybody? Borax said it was a shame ; but so is slavery a shame, and war, and poverty, and the streets by night — all of which, we know, nobody is accountable for, or in fault about. DoSior Pantologos. i95 The first thing you heard when you entered the long, low, stone, schoolvoom, with its grand carved oak roof all covered with cobwebs, and falling down piecemeal, through neglect, was a din — a dreadful din. Latin was the chiefest thing learnt in Accidentium School, and a Latin noise is considerably more deafening than an English noise. Every boy learnt his lesson out loud — at least, every boy who chose to learn — the rest contenting themselves with shouting out terminations as loud as they could, and rocking themselves backwards and forwards on their forms, after the manner of studious youths, learning very hard indeed. There was a considerable amount of business transacted in the midst of this din, in rabbits, silkworms, hedgehogs, tops, marbles, hardbake, and other toys and luxuries. Autumnal fruits were freely quoted at easy rates between the moods of the verb Amo, and the declensions of nouns and adjectives. One Jack, a killer of giants ; and seven shameless, swaggering, fireeating, blades, who called themselves Champions, and of Christendom, forsooth; together with a genteel youth in complete mail, young Valentine indeed, with his brother Orson (not yet accustomed to polite society), were often welcome, though surreptitious, guests at the dog's-eared tables, where nothing but the grim Vocito, the stern Vocitas, and the redoubtable Vocitavi ; or, at most, the famous chieftains Mars, Bacchus, and ApoUo, should have feasted. After the din, the next thing that was heard was the voice of Doctor Pantologos. And it was a voice. It rolled like the Vesuvian lava — fierce, impetuous, and fiery, at first ; and then, still like lava, it grew dry ; and then, to say the truth, like lava again, it cracked. Grandiloquent was Doctor Pantologos 3 196 Dutch PiSiures. in diction ; redundant in simile, in metaphor, in allegory,, irony, diaresis, hyperbole, catechresis, periphi-asis, and in all the other figures of rhetoric. Rarely did he deal in comparatives — superlatives were his delight. But, though his voice rolled and thundered — though he predicted the gallows as the ultimate reward of bad scanning, and the hulks as the inevitable termination of a career commenced by inattention to the As inpresenti; though his expletives were horrible to hear (all in Latin, and ending with issimus) ; though he threatened often, he punished seldom. His voice was vox et pr^terea nihil — gentle, and kind, and lamblike, for all his Idud and fierce talk ; and the birchen rod, that lay in the dusty cupboard behind him, might have belonged to Doctor Busby, so long had it been in disuse. Doctor Pantologos was a very learned man. He could not measure lands, nor presage tides and storms, nor did the rumour run that he could gauge ; but he was as full of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, as an egg is popularly said to be full of meat. He was a walking dictionary. A Thesaurus in rusty black. A Lexicon ivith a white neckcloth. Bayle, Erasmus, the Scaligers, Beutley, Salmasius, the Scholiast upon Every- - body, all rolled up together. The trees, clad with leafy garments to meaner mortals, were to him hung only with neat little discs, bearing derivations of words and tenses. The gnarled oak had no roots to him but Greek roots. He despised the multiplication table, and sighed for the Abacus back again. He thought Buffon and Cuvier, Audubon and Professor Owen infinitely inferior, as natural historians, to Pliny. Hehad read one novel — the Golden Ass of Apuleius;. one cookery book, that of Apicius. . Galen, Celsus, .3!sculap,ius/. DoBor Pantologos. 197 and Hippocrates, were the whole of the Faculty to him. Politics were his abomination ; and he deemed but three subjects worthy of argument — the buU of Phalaris, the birth- place of Homer, and the iEolic Digamma. On this last subject he had written a work — a mighty work, still in manuscript, from which he frequently read extracts, which nobody could understand, and which Borax, the Sceptic, declared the Doctor didn't understand himself. Either, said Borax, the Ironical, the Doctor was mad before he began the work, or he would go mad before ihe finished it. It was a wondrous book. Written on innumerable fragments of paper, from sheets of foolscap to envelopes of letters and backs of washing bills. The title page, and some half-dozen sheets besides, were fairly copied out and ready for press. " A Treatise on the Origin and History of the iEolic Digamma (with strictures upon the Scholiast uppn Every- body, of course), by Thoukydides Pantologos, Head Master of the Free Grammar School at Accidentium." Thus classically did he write his name : he was of the Grotiaa creed, and scorned the mean, shuffling, evasive, Thucy- dides. Whenever things went contrarywise with the Doctor, he flew for consolation to the treatise. He inade a feint of not employing himself upon it in school hours ; but, almost every afternoon, and frequently in the morning, he would cry, after many uneasy pinches of snuff; "Boy! go to my domicile and fetch the leathern satchel that lyeth on the parlour table." Straightway would the boy addressed, start on his errant ; for, though the Doctor's cottage was close by, it oft-times happened that the boy managed to find time for the purchase igS Dutch PiBures. of cakes and apples — nay, for the spinning of tops and tossing of leathern balls, and for unlawful " chivying" round the town pump, a highly ancient and venerable structure of Accidentium. Back would the boy come with the famous leathern satchel gorged with papers. Then Doc- tor Pantologos would dip bis bony arm into it and draw forth a handful of the treatise, and would fall to biting his pen, and clenching his hands, and muttering passages concerning the welfare of the zEolic Digamma, and in a trice he would be happy ; forgetting the din and the dust, the ruinous schoolroom, his threadbare coat, the misapplied funds, and his inadequate salary — forgetting, even, the existence of the three great plagues of his life, his sister Volumnia, his sister Volumnia's children, and that boy Quan- doquidem. Volumnia was the widow of a Mr. Corry O'Lanus, an Irishman, and an exciseman who had fallen a victim to his devotion to his official duties, having lost his life in " a diffi- culty," about an illicit still in the county Tipperary, much whiskey being spilt on the occasion, and some blood. To whom should the widowed Volumnia fly for protection and shelter but to her brother Thoukydides Pantologos ? And Thoukydides Pantologos, whose general meekness and lamb- likelihood would have prompted him to receive the Megathe- rium with open arms, and acknowledge the Plesiosaurus as a brother-in-law had he been requested so to do, did not only receive, cherish, aid and abet his sister Volumnia, but like- wise her five orphan children — Elagabalus James, Cora- modus William, Marius Frederick, Dnisilla Jane, and Poppaea Caroline. They had all red hair. They all fought, DoSior Pantologos. 199 bit, scratched, stole and devoured, like fox-cubs. They tore the Doctor's bool£s ; they yelled shrOl choruses to distract him as he studied ; they made savage forays upon the leathern satchel : they fashioned his pens into , pea-shooters, ate his wafers, poured out his ink as libations to the infernal gods. In a word, they played the very dickens with Doctor Pantologos. And Yolumnia, whose hair was redder than that of her offspring, and in whose admirable character all the virtues of her children were combined, watched over this young troop with motherly fondness ; and very Kttle rest did she let her brother have night or day if the bereaved orphans of Mr. O'Lanus wanted new boots, or socks, or frocks. Mrs. O'Lanus had no money, no wit, no beauty, no good qualities to speak of, but she had a Temper. By means of this said temper she kept the learned Doctor Pantologos in continual fear and trembling. She raised storms about his ears, she scolded him from doors and objurgated him from windows, she put " ratsbane in his porridge and halters in his pew" (figuratively of course), she trumpeted his mis- doings all over the village, and was much condoled with for her sufferings (a more harmless and inoffensive man than the doctor did not exist) ; she spent three fourths of his small income upon herself and her red-haired children; yet Thouky- dides Pantologos bore it all with patience, aud was willing to believe that Volumnia was a martyr to his interests; that she sacrificed her children to him, and only stayed with him to save him and his house from utter rack and ruin. Did I ever mention that a great many years before this time, Doctor Pantologos took to himself a wife — a delicate lady who died — called Formosa, and who dying left a little 200 Dutch Pictures. child — a girl, called Pulchrior ? I think not, — yet it was so, and at this time this child had grown to be a brown-haired, rosyi-cheekedi buxom little lass, some fifteen summers old. II pleased Doctor Pantologos to remark that she was not weak, nor delicate, nor ailing, like the poor lady — her mother — who died, and that still she had her mother's eyes; and hair, and cheeiry laugh. She was a very merry good little girl this Pulchrior, and I am sure I do not know what the poor Doc- tor would have done without lier. Voltimma hated her, of course. She called her "rubbage," a "faggot" and other unclassical names, which I am ashamed the widow of an O'Lanus should have so far forgotten herself as to make use of; poor Pulchrior had to do the hardest work, and wash and dress the! five red-headed children, who always fought, bit, scratched, and yelled, during the operation ; she had to run errands for Volumnia, notably, with missives of a tender nature addressed to Mr. O'Bleak, the squinting apothecary at the cor- ner (Volumnia adored Irishmen); she had to bear all Volumnia's abuse, and all the turmoil of the infants with the red heads, but she did not repine. She had a temper, too, had Pulchrior, and that temper happened to be a very good one ; and the more Volumnia scolded, and stormed, and abused her, the more Pulchrior sang and smiled, and (when she could get into a quiet corner by herself) danced. Luckily, indeed, was it for Doctor Pantologos that Vol- umnia did not deem it expedient that her red-headed children the boys at least, should receive their education, as yet, in the Accidentium Grammar School. The fiery-headed scions of the house of O'Lanus passed the hours of study in simple and pastoral recreations, dabbling in the mud in the verdant DoSior Pantologos. 201 ditches, making dirt-pies, squirting the pellucid waters of the Dune through syringes at their youthful companions, or cast- ing the genial brickbat at the passing stranger. Ah happy time ! Ah happy they ! Ah happy, happy Doctor Pantologos ! Happy, at least, in school he might have been, notwith- standing the din, and the boys who could'nt and the boys who would'nt learn — both very numerous classes of boys in Accidentum Grammar School — comparatively happy would the days have passed in the absorption of the treatise upon the ^olic Digamma but for that worst of boys Quandoqui- dem. Quandoqiiidem was a big raw-boned boy of fourteen. He had an impracticable head, incorrigible hands, and irre- trievable feet. He was all knuckles — that is, his wrists, elbows, fingers, knees, toes, shoulders, hips, and feet, all seemed to possess the property of " knuckling down," and bending themselves into strange angles. Quandoquidem was a widow's son, and his mother Venturia, who had some little property, dwelt in a cottage just opposite the dwell- ing of Doctor Pantologos, over against the pump. Quan- doquidem either could or would not learn. He would play at all boyish games with infinite skill and readi- ness, but he could not say his lessons. He could make pasteboard coaches, and windmills, and models of boats, but he could not decline Mma. He was the bane of the doc- tor's school life — the plague, the shame, the scandal of the school. He was the most impudent boy. The rudest boy. The noisiest boy. He made paper pellets and discharged them through popguns at the Doctor as he pored over the treatise, or, as oft-times happened, took a quiet doze. He shod cats with walnut-shells and caused them to perambulate 2o4 Dutch PiSiures. the sclioolroom. Doctor Pantologos, mild man, clenched his fist frequently, and looked at him vengefuUy, muttering something about the proverbs of King Solomon. I am cbming to the catastrophe of Doctor Pantologos. One very hot drowsy summer's afternoon, it so fell out that the boy Quandoquidem, the widow's son, was called upon by Doctor Pantologos to say a certain lesson. Young Quidve- tat, the attorney's son, had just said his as glibly as might be, and he, with Ice iEgiotat, Tom Delectus, and Bill Spondee, with little Charley Dactyl, his fag and bottle-holder, were all gathered around the doctor's desk, anticipating vast amusement from the performances of the widow's son, who was the acknowledged dunce of the school. Of course Quandoquidem didn't know his lesson — he never did; but on this summer's afternoon he began to recite it so glibly, and with so much confidence, that his erudite preceptor was about to bestow a large meed of praise upon him, when, his suspicions being roused by a titter he saw spreading amongst the boys on the forms near him, he was induced to look over the brow of his magisterial rostrum or desk. The incor- rigible Quandoquidem had wafered the page of the book containing his lesson against the doctor's desk, and was coolly reading it. Now, it was extremely unlucky for Quandoquidem that the Doctor had been without the treatise aU day, and that he had as yet sent no boy for it. If that famous work upon the Digamma had been at hand, the perusal of the title-page alone would, no doubt, have softened his resentment ; but, he was treatiseless and remorseless, and Quandoquidem read in his eyes that the storm was about to burst. DoSior Pantdlogos. 203 " Varlet," exclaimed the Doctor, in tte lava voice, " dis- grace to the widow thy mother, and to thy father deceased ! Oh puer nequissime, sceleratissime ; unworthy art thou of the lenient cane, the innocuous ferula. Let Thomas Quando- quidem be hoisted. Were he to cry Oivis Romanum sum, he should be scoiirged ! " Thus classically did the Doctor announce his dread design. The rod that might have been in the cupboard since Doctor Busby's time, was brought forth ; and Thomas Quando- quidem, the widow's son, suffered in the flesh. It was a vei-y hot and drowsy summer's afternoon, and the school was dismissed. The afternoon was so hot and drowsy that Doctor Pantologos, who had been hot and drowsy himself since the execution had been done upon Quandoquidem, began to nod in his arm chair, and at length, not having the treatise to divert his attention, fell fast asleep. He was not aware when he did so, that one boy had remained behind, sitting in a comer : or that that boy was Thomas Quandoquidem ! nor was he aware that the widow's son was gazing at him with a flushed face and an evil eye, and that he, from time to time, shook his knuckly fist at him. When the Doctor was fast asleep, Quandoquidem rose and left the school house as softly as possible. He hastened as fast as he could — ^not to his mother's home, but to the domicile of Doctor Pantologos. Volumnia was upstairs writing a tender epistle to Mi\ O'Bleak. The red-haii'ed children were all in the back gar- den, socially employed in torturing a cat. When Quando- quidem lifted the latch and entered the keeping-room, he found no one there but the little lass Pulchrior, who was 204 Dutch PiSiures. sitting by the window, mending tie Doctor's black cotton stockings. Now, between Thomas Quandoquidem, the widow's son, and PulchrioT Pantologos, the motherless, there had existed for some period of time, a very curious friendship and alliance. Numberless were the pasteboard coaches, models of boats, and silkworm-boxes he had made her. Passing one day while she was laboriously sweeping out the parlour, what did Quandoquidem do but seize the broom from her hand, sweep the parlour, passage, kitchen, and washhouse, with goblin-like rapidity, dust all the furniture (there was not much to dust, truly), give Pulchrior a kiss, and then dart across the road to his mother, the widow's house, shouting triumphantly. ? Thus it came about that the little lass, Pul- chrior, thought a good deal of Quandoquidem in her girlish way, and did trifles of sewing for him, and blushed very prettily whenever she saw him. " Miss Pidchrior, please," said Quandoquidem, in a strange hard voice, as he entered the keeping-room, " the Doctor's not coming home yet awhile, and he's sent me for his leathern satchel." He looked so hot and flushed, his brow was so lowering and ill-boding, that the Doctor's little daughter was fright- ened. She could not help suspecting, though she knew not what to suspect. "And did papa send you?" she began, falteringly. " Miss Pulchrior," interjected Quandoquidem, as if offended, " do you think I would tell you a story?" Pulchrior slowly advanced to the table, and took up the leathern bag containing the magnum opus of her father. DoSlor Pantologos. 205 Pantologos. the erudite. She handed it to Quandoquidem, looking timidly in his face, but the eyes of the widow's son were averted. His hand shook as he received the parcel; but he hurriedly thanked her, and, a moment afterwards, was gone. Had Pulchrior followed him to the door, she would have seen that the widow's son did not take the road towards the grammar school ; but that, like a fox harbouring e\il designs towards a henroost, he slunk furtively round a corner, and, watching his opportunity, crept round the town pump, across the narrow street, and so into his mother's- cottage. Pulchrior was not awai-e of this, because she did not follow the guilty Thomas : and she did not follow him because it occurred to her to sit down on a lonely stool and have a good cr)-. She cried she knew not why ; only Tom (she called him Tom) was so different from his wonted state, and at the bottom of her heart there was a vague suspicion and terror of she knew not what. But, at the termination of the good cry, she recovered her spirits ; and, when the kettle began to sing for tea, she was singing too ; albeit the insulting tongue of Volumnia upou the topic of buttered toast was enough to spoil the temper of Eobin GoodfeUow himself. Doctor Pantologos slept in* the great arm chair so long and so soundly, that the old woman with a broom, who came to give the cobwebs change of air, icoxa. the roof to the floor (she would as soon have thought of burning the schoolroom down, as sweeping them away altogether), had to stir him. up with the handle of her household implement before she could awaken him. Then Doctor Pantologos arose shaking, liimself and yawning^ mightily, and went home to tea. 2o6 Dutch PiStures. That repast was not quite ready when he made his ap- pearance ; for the red-headed children having tortured the cat until it was mad and they were hungry, had made a raid upon the buttered toast, and had eaten it up. Then Volum- nia had to abuse Pulchrior for this, which took some time, and fresh toast had to be made, which took more ; so, the Doctor was informed that he would have to wait a quarter of an hour. " Very well. Sister Volumnia,'' said the meek Doctor. " I hanker not so much after the ileshpots of Egypt, but that I can wait. Ad interim, I will take a pipe of tobacco, and correct my seventy-seventh chapter. Pulchrior, my child, the leathern satchel !" "The satchel, papa!" cried his daughter; "why, you sent Tom — I mean Master Quandoquidem — for it." " 1 sent — Satchel — Quandoquidem ! " gasped the Doctor. " Yes, and I gave it him an hour ago." The Doctor turned with wild eyes to his luckless child. He clasped his forehead with his hands, and staggered towards the door. His hand was on the latch, when a burst of derisive laughter fell upon his ear like red-hot pitch. He looked through the open window of his chamber, through the screen of ivy, and Voodbine, and honeysuckle, he could have looked through the town pump, but he looked instead right across the street of Accidentium, and through the open casement of the widow Venturia's cottage ; and there he saw a red glare as of fire burning, and the boy Quandoquidem standing beside it with a leathern satchel in his hand, and his form reddened by the reflection like an imp of Hades. DoSior Pantologos. 207 Doctor Pantologos tried to move, but he could not. Atlas was tied to one foot, and Olympus to the other : Pelion sat upon Ossa a-top of his burning head. The boy Quandoquidem drew a large sheet of paper from the satchel, and brandished it aloft. Had it been a thousand miles off, the Doctor could have read it. It was the title page of his darling treatise. The horrible boy thrust it into the fire; and then another and another sheet, and finally the satchel itself. " So much for the Digamma, old Pan !" he cried with a ferocious laugh, as he stirred the burning mass with a poker. "Lies Ir