Chapter III: Part 3

On the road of course, one day, the lady dined at Durham, “and I went,” she adds, “to see the cathedral; it is a prodigious bulky building.” The day happening to be Sunday, Mrs. Calderwood was much shocked at the behaviour of little boys, who played at ball in what she termed the piazzas, and supposed that the woman who was showing her the place considered her a heathen,--“in particular she stared when I asked what the things were they kneeled upon, as they appeared to me to be so many Cheshire cheeses.” Mrs. Calderwood had travelled far into England before she met with any sensible inhabitant; and then the first intelligent native is recorded, and proves to have been a chamber-maid.

“At Barnet we stopped; and while we changed horses, I asked some questions at the maid who stood at the door, which she answered and went in. In a little time out comes a squinting, smart-like, black girl, and spoke to me, as I thought, in Irish; upon which I said, ‘Are you a Highlander?’ ‘No,’ said she, ‘I am Welch. Are not you Welch?’ ‘No,’ said I, ‘but I am Scots, and the Scots and Welch are near relations, and much better born than the English.’ She took me by the hand, and looked so kindly, that I suppose she thought me her relation because I was not English; which makes me think the English are a people one may perhaps esteem or admire, but they do not draw the affections of strangers, neither in their country nor out of it.”

The general appearance of the southern country is thus pleasantly

O’erlaid with black, staid wisdom’s hue:

“The villages to north of Trent are but indifferent, and the churches very thin sown; and, indeed, for a long time one would think the country of no religion at all, there being hardly either Christian church or heathen temple to be seen. The fields on both hands were mostly grass; and the greatest variety and plenty of fine cattle, all of various colours. I admired the cattle much more than the people; for they seem to have the least of what we call smartness of any folks I ever saw, and totally void of all sort of curiosity--which, perhaps, some may think a good quality.... As for the inclosing in England, it is of all the different methods, both good and bad, that can be imagined; and that such insufficient inclosures, as some are, keep in the cattle (which is so hard with us in Scotland) is entirely owing to the levelness of the grounds; so that an English cow does not see another spot than where she feeds, and has as little intelligence as the people.” Surely the cows are to be pitied, born incapable of taking comprehensive views of things in this flat and unprofitable land. If ever there arose a chance of wider views for the fair traveller, England rose not in her esteem on that account. “Sometimes,” she owns, “we had an extensive prospect, but not the least variety, so that we could say there was too much of it. No water, no distinction between a gentleman’s seat and his tenant’s house, but that he was a little more smothered up with trees.” The lady, when she reached London, found the same reason for contempt of Hyde Park as a place of resort; it was naught, because it was quite smothered with trees. She also surprised the crowded Londoners that she thought England on the whole less populous than Scotland, and there is a good deal of right observation in the sketch she gives of England extra-metropolitan a hundred years ago.

“In the first place, look from the road on each hand, and you see very few houses; towns there are, but at the distance of eight or ten miles. Then, who is it that lives in them? There are no manufactories carried on in them; they live by the travellers and the country about; that is, there are tradesmen of all kinds, perhaps two or three of each--smiths, wrights, shoemakers, &c.; and here is a squire of a small estate in the country near by; and here are Mrs. This, or That, old maids, and so many widow ladies with a parsonage house, a flourishing house. All the houses, built of brick, and very slight, and even some of timber, and two stories high, make them have a greater appearance than there is reality for; for I shall suppose you took out the squire and set him in his country house, and the old maids and widow ladies and place them with their relations, if they have any, in the country, or in a greater town, and take a stone house with a thatch roof of one storey instead of a brick one of two, and there are few country villages in Scotland where I will not muster out as many inhabitants as are in any of these post towns. Then I observed there were few folks to be met with on the road, and many times we could post an hour, which is seven miles, and not see as many houses and people put together on the road! Then on Sunday, we travelled from eight o’clock till we came to Newcastle, where the church was just going in; so that I may say we travelled fifteen miles to Newcastle; and the few people we met going to church upon the road surprised me much. The same as we went all day long; it had no appearance of the swarms of people we always see in Scotland going about on Sunday, even far from any considerable town. Then,” adds the Scotch lady, “the high price of labour is an evidence of the scarcity of people. I went into what we call a cottage, and there was a young woman with her child, sitting; it was very clean, and laid with coarse flags on the floor, but built with timber stoops, and what we call cat and clay walls. She took me into what she called her parlour, for the magnificent names they give things makes very fine till we see them; this parlour was just like to the other. I asked her what her husband was. She said, a labouring man, and got his shilling a day; that she did nothing but took care of her children, and now and then wrought a little plain work. So I found that, except it was in the manufacturing counties, the women do nothing; and if there were as many men in the country as one might suppose there would be, a man could be got for less wages than a shilling per day. Then the high wages at London shows the country cannot provide it with servants. It drains the country, and none return again who ever goes as chairmen, porters, hackney coachmen, or footmen; if they come to old age, seldom spend it in the country, but often in an almshouse, and often leave no posterity. Then the export they make of their victual is a presumption they have not inhabitants to consume it in the country, for, by the common calculation, there are seven millions and one half in England, and the ground in the kingdom is twenty-eight millions of acres, which is four acres to each person. Take into this the immense quantity of horses which are kept for no real use all over the kingdom, and it will be found, I think, that England could maintain many more people than are in it. Besides, let every nation pick out its own native subjects who are but in the first generation, the Irish, the Scots, the French, &c., and I am afraid the native English would appear much fewer than they imagine. On the other hand, Scotland must appear to be more populous for its extent and produce; first, by its bearing as many evacuations in proportion, both to the plantations, the fleet, and army, besides the numbers who go to England, and, indeed, breeding inhabitants to every country under the sun; and if, instead of following the wrong policy of supplying their deficiency of grain by importing it, they would cultivate their waste lands, it would do more than maintain all its inhabitants in plenty.” The lady presently becomes severe: “I do not think the soil near London is naturally rich, and neither the corns nor grass are extraordinary. I thought their crops of hay all very light, and but of an indifferent quality; they call it meadow hay, but we could call it tending pretty nearly to bog hay.”

Her admiration of things English seems indeed to have been confined pretty closely to its immense number of fine horses. “As for London, the first sight of it did not strike me with anything grand or magnificent.... Many authors and correspondents take up much time and pains to little purpose on descriptions. I never could understand anybody’s descriptions, and I suppose nobody will understand mine; so will only say London is a very large and extensive city. But I had time to see very little of it, and every street is so like another that, seeing part, you may easily suppose the whole.”

Then for the heads of London, your ill-meaning, politician lords, the lady Samson pulls their temple down over their heads. “You will think it very odd that I was a fortnight in London, and saw none of the royal family; but I got no clothes made till the day before I left, though I gave them to the making the day after I came. I cannot say my curiosity was great. I found, as I approached the court and the grandees, they sunk so miserably, and came so far short of the ideas I had conceived, that I was loth to lose the grand ideas I had of kings, princes, ministers of state, senators, &c., which, I suppose, I had gathered from romance in my youth. We used to laugh at the English for being so soon afraid when there was any danger in state affairs; but now I do excuse them. For we, at a distance, think the wisdom of our governors will prevent all those things; but those who know and see our ministers every day, see there is no wisdom in them, and that they are a parcel of old, ignorant, senseless bodies, who mind nothing but eating and drinking, and rolling about in their carriages in Hyde Park, and know no more of the country, or the situation of it, nor of the numbers, strength, and circumstances of it, than they never had been in it. And how should they, when London and twenty miles round it is the extent ever they saw of it?”

There were here some remarks not very inappropriate, considering that they were written when the Duke of Newcastle was fighting on his stumps, and the ferment concerning Admiral Byng was at its height.

There seems to have been some connection between the Calderwoods and Mr. George Stone Scott, sub-preceptor to the Prince of Wales, afterwards George the Third. Mrs. Calderwood says--“I had frequent opportunities of seeing George Scott, and asked him many questions about the Prince of Wales. He says he is a lad of very good principles, good-natured, extremely honest, has no heroic strain, but loves peace, and has no turn for extravagance; modest, and has no tendency to vice, and has as yet very virtuous principles; has the greatest temptations to gallant with the ladies, who lay themselves out in the most shameful manner to draw him in, but to no purpose. He says, if he were not what he is they would not mind him. Prince Edward is of a more amorous complexion; but no court is paid to him, because he has so little chance to be king.” Mrs. C.! Mrs. C.! how sweet a dish of scandal! We will next meet with her setting out in gracious humour, and will not be startled should a ripple come over the current of her thoughts.

“Any of the English folks I got acquainted with I liked very well. They seemed to be good-natured and humane; but still there is a sort of ignorance about them with regard to the rest of the world, and their conversation runs in a very narrow channel. They speak with a great relish of their public places, and say, with a sort of flutter, that they shall go to Vauxhall and Ranelagh, but do not seem to enjoy it when there. As for Vauxhall and Ranelagh, I wrote my opinion of them before. The first I think but a vulgar sort of entertainment, and could not think myself in genteel company whiles I heard a man calling ‘Take care of your watches and pockets!’ I saw the Countess of Coventry at Ranelagh. I think she is a pert, stinking-like hussy, going about with her face up to the sky, that she might see from under her hat, which she had pulled quite over nose, that nobody might see her face. She was in deshabille, and very shabby drest, but was painted over her very jawbones. I saw only three English peers, and I think you could not make a tolerable _one_ out of them.... I saw very few, either men or women, tolerably handsome.”

But her woman’s heart could not resist the men in regimentals; she was determined, too, to have a good look at them, as her journal tells.

“I went one morning to the park, in hopes to see the Duke review a troop of the Horse Guards, but he was not there; but the Guards were very pretty. Sall Blackwood and Miss Buller were with me; they were afraid to push near for the crowd, but I was resolved to get forward, so pushed in. They were very surly, and one of them asked me where I would be,--would I have my toes trod off? ‘Is your toes trode off?’ said I. ‘No,’ said he. ‘Then give me your place, and I’ll take care of my toes.’ ‘But they are going to fire,’ said he. ‘Then it’s time for you to march off,’ said I, ‘for I can stand fire. I wish your troops may do as well.’ On which he sneaked off, and gave me his place.”

A few other sketches we give for the sake of their succinctness. Greenwich Hospital “is a ridiculous fine thing.” The view from the hill, there, “is very pretty, which you see just as well in a raree-show glass. No wonder the English are transported with a place they can see about them in.”

We give also as a curiosity, because we wonder how the lady ventured to present to us,--King George the Second in his bedroom at Kensington.

“There are a small bed with silk curtains, two satin quilts, and no blanket; a hair mattress; a plain wicker basket stands on a table, with a silk night-gown and night-cap in it; a candle with an extinguisher; some billets of wood on each side of the fire. He goes to bed alone, rises, lights his fire, and tends it himself, and nobody knows when he rises, which is very early, and he is up several hours before he calls anybody. He dines in a small room adjoining, in which there is nothing but very common things. He sometimes, they say, sups with his daughters and their company, and is very merry, and sings French songs; but at present he is in low spirits.”

Finally, let us show how Mrs. Calderwood brings her acutely haggis-loving mind to bear upon the English ignorance of what is good for dinner.

“As for their victuals, they make such a work about, I cannot enter into the tastes of them, or rather, I think they have no taste to enter into. The meat is juicy enough, but has so little taste that if you shut your eyes, you will not know, by either taste or smell, what you are eating. The lamb and veal look as if they had been blanched in water. The smell of dinner will never intimate that it is on the table. No such effluvia as beef and cabbage was ever found in London! The fish, I think, have the same fault.”

At the want of a sufficiently high smell to the fish eaten by the English, we are very well content to stop, and stop accordingly.

THE ROVING ENGLISHMAN.

THE SHOW OFFICER.

We go stumbling along the unpaved streets of Galatz by the dim light of a lantern carried before us by a servant. The town, although the chief commercial city of the Danubian Principalities, and numbering its inhabitants by tens of thousands, is of course unlighted. The outward civilisation of these countries showy as it appears, has unhappily gone no further, up to the present time, than jewellery and patent-leather boots. Light, air, and cleanliness are at least two generations a-head of it.

Our hotel, the best in the town, is not better than a Spanish inn on the Moorish frontier. The doors do not shut, the windows do not open. There is a bed, but it is an enemy rather than a friend to repose. The bed-clothes are of a dark smoke-colour, stained in many places with iron-moulds, and burned into little black holes by the ashes of defunct cigars. The bed, bedstead, and bed-clothes are alive with vermin. They crawl down the damp mouldy walls, and swarm on the filthy floor, untouched by the broom of a single housemaid since its planks were laid down. Battalions move in little dark specks over the pillow-case; they creep in and out of the rents and folds of the abominable blanket. On a crazy wooden chair--of which one of the legs is broken--stands a small red pipkin, with a glass of dingy water in the centre. A smoky rag, torn and unhemmed, is laid awry beside it. They are designed for the purposes of ablution.

The walls of the room are very thin; and there is a farewell supper of ladies and gentlemen going on in the next room. I saw the guests mustering as we came in. They were so ringed and chained that they would have excited envy and admiration even at a Jewish wedding. They are all talking together at the top of their voices against the Austrian occupation. The odour of their hot meats and the fine smoke of their cigarettes, come creeping through the many chinks and crannies of the slender partition which divides us. Twice I have heard a scuffling behind my door, and I have felt that an inquisitive eye was applied to a key-hole, from which the lock has long since been wrenched in some midnight freak. Derisive whispering, followed by loud laughter, has also given me the agreeable assurance that my movements are watched with a lively and speculative interest. They appear to add considerably to the entertainment of the company. I am abashed by feeling myself the cause of so much hilarity, and stealthily put out the light. Then I wrap myself up resolutely in a roquelaure, take the bed by assault, and shut my eyes desperately to the consequences; doing drowsy battle with the foe, as I feel them crawling from time to time beneath a moustache or under an eyelid. I am ignominiously routed, however, at last, and rise from that loathsome bed blistered and fevered. The screaming and shouting in the next room has by this time grown demoniacal. My friends are evidently making a night of it: so I begin to wonder whether the talisman of a ducat will not induce a waiter and a lantern to go with me to the steam-boat. I may pace the deck till morning, if I cannot sleep; for the Galatz hotel-keepers have I know protested against passengers being allowed berths on board the vessels when in port.

The silver spell succeeds. A sooty little fellow, like a chimney-sweep, agrees to accompany me, and we go scuffling among rat-holes, open sewers, sleeping vagabonds, and scampering cats down to the quagmire by the water-side; and scrambling over bales of goods, and a confused labyrinth of chains and cordage, gain the deck of the good ship Ferdinand. A cigar, a joke, and a dollar, overcomes the steward’s scruples about a berth, and I wake next morning to the rattling sound of the paddle-wheels.

The boat is very full. It is as difficult to get at the washhand-basins as to fight one’s way to the belle of a ball-room. I pounce on one at last, however, by an adroit flank movement, and prepare for a thoroughly British souse, when a young Wallachian--in full dress, and diamond ear-rings; who has just been putting an amazing quantity of unguents on his hair--comes up and coolly commences cleaning his teeth beside me. He looks round with a bright good-natured smile when he has finished, and is plainly at a loss to understand the melancholy astonishment depicted in my countenance.

The deck is crowded with a strange company. There are the carousing party who broke my rest last night. They glitter from head to foot with baubles and gewgaws; but the gentlemen are unwashed and unshorn, and it is well for the ladies that their rich silk and velvet dresses do not easily show the ravages of time and smoke. They are dressed in the last fashions of Holborn or the Palais Royal, and one of the dames, I learn, is a princess, with more ducats and peasants than she can count. She spends a great part of the day adorning herself in her cabin--the centre of an admiring crowd of tinselled gallants, who assist at her toilette, with compliments and with suggestions of a naïveté quite surprising.

Then there is a fat old Moldavian lady of the old school. She wears a black great-coat lined with a pale fur, and Wellington boots. Her head is swathed and bound up in many bandages. She wears thumb rings, and smokes continually. Our passengers are indeed of the most motley character, for we have quitted the excellent boats of the Danube Company, and are now on board a vessel belonging to the Austrian Lloyd’s, very inferior in size and accommodation, although built for going to sea. The first and second class passengers mingle together indiscriminately, and the whole deck is encumbered with a shouting, screaming, laughing, wrangling mass of parti-coloured humanity. There are Gallician Jew girls, going under the escort of some rascally old speculator to Constantinople, and dressed like our poor mountebank lasses, who go about on stilts at country fairs. They are a bright-eyed kindly race of gipsies and good-natured termagants, with a smile and a saucy word for everybody. Watching them, with great contempt, is a German professor, who has indiscreetly shaved the small hairs from the point of his nose till he has quite a beard on it. There is a long Austrian officer in a short cavalry cloak, who looks not unlike a stork; and there is a small Austrian officer, in a long infantry great-coat, who domineers over him, and is evidently his superior. They are an odd pair, and pace the deck together with a military dignity and precision quite comical. There is a brace of gipsies, hereditary serfs, with dark fiery eyes, rich complexions, and red handkerchiefs tied picturesquely with the striking grace in costume, which distinguished that outcast race in all countries. Then there are Greek and Armenian traders engaged in all sorts of rascally speculations connected with the war and the corn markets--sly, sharp-nosed men who have scraped together large fortunes by inconceivable dodges and scoundrel tricks; who have their correspondents and branch-houses at Marseilles, Trieste, Vienna, Paris, London, and New York; who would overreach a Jew of Petticoat Lane, and snap their fingers at him; who have all the rank vices and keen wit of a race oppressed for centuries, newly-emancipated. All power, wealth, and dominion in the Levant is passing into their hands. Long after I who write these lines shall sketch and scribble no more, the chivalry of the West will have a fearful struggle with them. May Heaven make it victorious! Our party is completed by two bandy beggars, with grey beards and bald heads; a crowd of the common-place men of the Levant, loud, important, patronising, presuming, vile, ignorant, worthless, astounding for their impudence; the captain, a brusque, talkative, self-confident Italian, and his wife, a lady from Ragusa, silent and watchful, with a sweet smile and a meaning eye.

We get under weigh betimes in the morning; for, below Galatz, ships are only allowed to navigate the Danube between daylight and dark, so that in these shortening days they must make the most of it. The noble river is crowded with vessels; and, now and then we meet a valuable raft of timber for ships’ masts floating downwards. This will be stopped by the Russians, to the cruel injury of trade. I learn from an Armenian merchant on board, that a mast such as would sell for fifty pounds at Constantinople may be here bought for five pounds or less; so that there will be some grand speculations in timber whenever peace is declared.

At Tschedal, just below Ismail, we come to anchor; and, after a short delay, a trim little boat shoots smartly out from the Bessarabian shore towards us. It is pulled by six rowers, in the peculiar grey great-coats and black leather cross-belts which distinguish Russian soldiers. At the helm is a seventh soldier decorated with a brass badge and some medal of merit; at the prow stands an eighth; in the seat of honour sits the officer empowered to examine our passports, and to ascertain that our ship carries no military stores or contraband of war. At the bottom of the boat is a pile of muskets, and from the stern flutters the Russian war flag--a blue cross on a white ground.

The trim little boat is soon hooked on to our side, and the officer steps lightly and gracefully on deck. He is a Pole; and, though but twenty-five or twenty-six years old, is already a major of marines. I cannot help thinking also that he is a show-officer. He is dressed within an inch of his life. His uniform would turn half the heads at Almack’s; for it is really charming in its elegant propriety and good taste. It is a dark rifle-green uniform, with plain round gilt buttons, and not made tawdry by embroidery. Two heavy epaulettes of bullion, with glittering silver stars, which announce the rank of the wearer, are its only ornament. His boots might have been drawn through a ring, and look quite like kid gloves on his dainty little feet. His well-shaped helmet is of varnished leather, with the Russian eagle in copper gilt upon it; and this eagle and the bright hilt of his sword flash back the rays of the sun quite dazzlingly. We, poor dingy, travel-stained passengers appear like slaves in the presence of a king before him.

He speaks French perfectly. He is excruciatingly polite, and is evidently a man of the world, conscious of being entrusted with a delicate duty; but rather overdoing it. He would be handsome, but for small cunning, or rather roguish eyes, when roguish is used in an undefined sense, and may mean smartness good or bad; but it is difficult to take his measure. He has evidently seen service. His hair is of the light rusty brown of nature and exposure. His face is shorn, except a sweeping moustache peculiarly well trimmed. There are some lines about his face which tell the old story of suffering and privation.

He is, as I have said, courteous--more than courteous. He does not even examine the Greek and Moldo-Wallachian passports; but he pauses over the French and English to see if the visas are correct. Mine he examined more narrowly, and then returned it with a gay débonnaire bow, a polite smile, and a backward step. A Greek keeps up a conversation with him the whole time he remains on board. I fancy there is more in it than meets the ear. In speaking to this fellow the major takes a short, sharp, abrupt, hasty tone of command, like a man in authority pressed for time. The major does not examine the hold of the vessel, nor interrogate any of the Austrian officers. There is evidently a shyness and ill-will between them.

When we have each filed past him in turn, the Pole draws his elegant figure up to its full slim height, tightens his belt, and marches with a light gallant step from one end of the vessel to the other. Then he halts at the gangway, faces about, casts a hawk’s eye round the ship, and descends the companion-ladder. The trim little bark is hooked closer on; then the grapnels are loosened, and she spreads her light sail to the wind. The rowers shelve their oars, and the next moment she is dashing the spray from her bows, and flying towards the shore with the speed of a sea-gull. At the stern sits the Pole upright as a dart, the sunbeams toying with his helmet--a picture to muse on.

Nothing could have been in better taste than the whole thing. It might have served for a scene of an opera, or a chapter in a delightfully romantic peace novel. I confess I cannot help feeling something like a pitying tenderness for the smart cavalier; who may, a few days hence, be called away to the war, and return to his true love never--be mashed by a cannon shot, or blown into small pieces by a mine--his life’s errand all unaccomplished, his bright life suddenly marred. I think, too, how strange and sad is the destiny which can make such a Pole take part in a cause which, if successful, will rivet the chains of his countrymen for ever; and how he would meet his patriot countrymen who have joined the hostile ranks in hundreds for only one faint hope of freedom.

Below Ismail the Danube was a perfect forest of masts, and we had some difficulty in steering our way through the maze of ships. The river is very narrow in many places. A child could easily throw a stone across it. The Turkish and Russian labourers in the fields on the Bulgarian and Bessarabian shores are within hail of each other. And every breeze blows waifs and strays across the narrow boundary. Turkish and Russian wild-fowl, wiser than men, chat amicably together about their prospects for the winter, and call blithely to each other from shore to shore among the reeds. The character of the country on both sides of the river is very much the same--flat and uninteresting. Now and then, however, a charming little valley opens among woods and waters in the distance, and here and there rises a solitary guard-house, or a few fishermen burrow among rocks and caverns. Thirty hours after our departure from Galatz we steam into the crowded port of Sulina, where one thousand sail are wind-bound.

On Saturday, January 19th, will be Published, Price
Five Shillings and Sixpence, cloth boards,

THE TWELFTH VOLUME
OF
HOUSEHOLD WORDS,

Containing from No. 280 to No. 303 (both inclusive),
and the extra Christmas Number.

_The Right of Translating Articles from_ HOUSEHOLD WORDS _is reserved by the Authors_.

Published at the Office. No. 16, Wellington Street North, Strand. Printed by BRADBURY & EVANS, Whitefriars, London.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] Numbers 264, 268, 274, and 279.

[B] Reported in the Manchester Guardian of March 28, 1855.

[C] Reported in the Manchester Guardian of March 28, 1855.

* * * * *

Transcriber’s note

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

In the original on page 15, the footnote is referenced in two places in the text. In this version a duplicate footnote was added.

Spelling has been retained as originally published except for the corrections below.

Page 1: “a man in Paris have an” “a man in Paris has an”
Page 3: “and disagreable company” “and disagreeable company”
Page 9: “Madame Rosa's bourdoir” “Madame Rosa's boudoir”
Page 9: “lived where Michael Angelo” “lived where Michelangelo”
Page 13: “yielded the pas” “yielded the past”
Page 15: “members of the Asociation” “members of the Association”
Page 22: “mends it himself” “tends it himself”