Chapter IV: Part 4

A _victim_ may become so from many causes. Some men are wrong placed in the world by their friends, and ruin themselves. Some are ill married, and lose heart. Others have tastes unsuited to the dull course of a man of business, as for music, social pleasures, the company of men _out of their own order_, and so forth. Other men have natural imperfections of character, and sink down, from pure inability to compete with rivals of more athletic constitution. But the grand cause of declension in life is inability to accommodate circumstances and conduct.

Suppose a man to have broken credit with the world, and made that treaty of perpetual hostility with it, which, _quasi lucus a non lucendo_, is called a _cessio bonorum_—what is he to do next? One thing is dead clear: he no more appears on Prince’s Street or the bridges. They are to him as a native and once familiar land, from which he is exiled for ever. His migrations from one side of the town to the other are now accomplished by by-channels, which, however well known to our ancestors, are in the present day dreamt of by nobody, except, perhaps, the author of the Traditions of Edinburgh. I once came full upon a _victim_ in Croftangry, a wretched alley near the Palace of Holyrood House; he looked the very Genius of the place! But the ways of _victims_ are in general very occult. Sometimes I have altogether lost sight of one for several years, and given him up for dead. But at length he would re-appear amidst the crowd at a midnight fire, as salmon come from the deepest pools towards the lighted sheaf of the fisherman, or as some old revolutionary names that had disappeared from French history for a quarter of a century, came again above board on the occasion of the late revolution at Paris. At one particular conflagration, which happened some years ago, I observed several _victims_, who had long vanished from the open daylight streets, come out to glare with their bleared eyes upon the awful scene—perhaps unroosted from their dens by the progress of the “devouring element.” But—what is a _victim_ like?

The progress of a _victim’s_ gradual deterioration depends very much upon the question, whether he has, according to the old joke, failed with a waistcoat or a full suit. Suppose the latter contingency: he keeps up a decent appearance for some months after the fatal event, perhaps even making several attempts to keep up a few of his old acquaintance. It won’t do, however; the clothes get worn—threadbare—slit—torn—patched—darned; let ink, thread, and judicious arrangement of person, do their best. The hat, the shoes, and the gloves, fail first; he then begins to wear a suspicious deal of whitey-brown linen in the way of cravat. Collars fail. Frills retire. The vest is buttoned to the uppermost button, or even, perhaps, with a supplementary pin (a pin is the most squalid object in nature or art) at top. Still at this period he tries to carry a jaunty, genteel air; he has not yet all forgot himself to rags. But, see, the buttons begin to show something like new moons at one side; these moons become _full_; they _change_; and then the button is only a little wisp of thread and rags, deprived of all power of retention over the button-hole. His watch has long been gone to supply the current wants of the day. The vest by and bye retires from business, and the coat is buttoned up to the chin. About this period, he perhaps appears in a pair of nankeen trousers, which, notwithstanding the coldness of the weather, he tries to sport in an easy, genteel fashion, as if it were his taste. If you meet him at this time, and inquire how he is getting on in the world, he speaks very confidently of some excellent situation he has a prospect of, which will make him better than ever; it is perhaps to superintend a large new blacking manufactory which is to be set up at Portobello, and for which two acres of stone bottles, ten feet deep, have already been collected from all the lumber-cellars in the country; quite a nice easy business; nothing to do but collect the orders and see them executed; good salary, free house, coal, candle, and _blacking_; save a pound a-year on the article of blacking alone. Or it is some other _concern_ equally absurd, but which the disordered mind of the poor unfortunate is evidently rioting over with as much enjoyment as if it were to make him once more what he had been in his better days. At length—but not perhaps till two or three years have elapsed—he becomes that lamentable picture of wretchedness which is his ultimate destiny; a mere pile of clothes without pile—a deplorable—a _victim_.

As a picture of an individual _victim_, take the following:—My earliest recollections of Mr Kier refer to his keeping a seed-shop in the New Town of Edinburgh. He was a remarkably smart active man, and could tie up little parcels of seeds with an almost magical degree of dispatch. When engaged in that duty, your eye lost sight of his fingers altogether, as you cease to individualise the spokes of a wheel when it is turned with great rapidity. He was the inventor of a curious tall engine, with a peculiar pair of scissors at top, for cutting fruit off trees. This he sent through Prince’s Street every day with one of his boys, who was instructed every now and then to draw the string, so as to make the scissors close as sharply as possible. The boy would watch his men—broad-skirted men with top-boots—and, gliding in before them, would make the thing play _clip_. “Boy, boy,” the country gentleman would cry, “what’s that?” The boy would explain; the gentleman would be delighted with the idea of cutting down any particular apple he chose out of a thickly laden and unapproachable tree; and, after that, nothing more was required than to give him the card of the shop. Mr Kier, however, was not a man of correct or temperate conduct. He used to indulge even in forenoon potations. Opposite to his shop there was a tavern, to which he was in the habit of sending a boy every day for a tumbler of spirits and water, which the wretch was carefully enjoined to carry under his apron. One day the boy forgot the precaution, and carried the infamous crystal quite exposed in his hand across the open and crowded street. Mr Kier was surveying his progress both in going and returning; and when he observed him coming towards the shop, with so damnatory a proof of his malpractices holden forth to the gaze of the world, he leaped and danced within his shop window like a supplejack in a glass case. The poor boy came in quite innocently, little woting of the crime he had committed, or the reception he was to meet with, when, just as he had deposited the glass upon the counter, a blow from the hand of his master stretched him insensibly in a remote corner of the shop, among a parcel of seed-bags. As no qualities will succeed in business unless perfectly good conduct be among the number, and, above all things, an absence from tippling, Kier soon became a _victim_. After he first took to the _bent_, to use Rob Roy’s phrase, I lost sight of him for two or three years. At length I one day met him on a road a little way out of town. He wore a coat buttoned to the chin, and which, being also very long in the breast, according to a fashion which obtained about the year 1813, seemed to enclose his whole trunk from neck to groin. With the usual cataract of cravat, he wore a hat the most woe-begone, the most dejected, the most melancholy I had ever seen. His face was inflamed and agitated, and as he walked, he swung out his arms with a strange emphatic expression, as if he were saying, “I am an ill-used man, but I’ll tell it to the world.” Misery had evidently given him a slight craze, as it almost always does when it overtakes a man accustomed in early life to better things. Some time afterwards I saw him a little revivified through the influence of a _new second-hand coat_, and he seemed, from a small leathern parcel which he bore under his arm, to be engaged in some small agency. But this was a mere flash before utter expiration. He relapsed to the Cowgate—to rags—to wretchedness—to madness—immediately after. When I next saw him, it was in that street, the time midnight. He lay in the bottom of a stair, more like a heap of mud than a man. A maniac curse, uttered as I stumbled over him, was the means of my recognising it to be Kier.

The system of life pursued by _victims_ in general, is worthy of being inquired into. _Victims_ hang much about taverns in the outskirts of the town. Perhaps a decent man from Pennycuik, with the honest rustic name of Walter Brown, or James Gowans, migrates to the Candlemaker Row, or the Grassmarket, and sets up a small public house. You may know the man by his corduroy spatterdashes, and the latchets of his shoes drawn through them by two pye-holes. He is an honest man, believing every body to be as honest as himself. Perhaps he has some antiquated and prescribed right to the stance of a hay-stack at Pennycuik, and is not without his wishes to try his fortune in the Parliament House. Well, the _victims_ soon scent out his house by the glare of his new sign—the _novitas regni_—and upon him they fall tooth and nail. Partly through simplicity, partly by having his feelings excited regarding the stance of the hay-stack, he gives these gentlemen some credit. For a while you may observe a flocking of _victims_ toward his doorway, like the gathering of clean and unclean things to Noah’s ark. But it is not altogether a case of deception. _Victims_, somehow or other, occasionally _have_ money. True, it is seldom in greater sums than sixpence. But then, consider the importance of sixpence to a flock of _victims_. Such a sum, judiciously managed, may get the whole set meat and drink for a day. At length, when Walter begins to find his barrels run dry, with little return of money wherewithal to replenish them, and when the joint influence of occasional apparitions of sixpence, and the stance of the hay-stack at Pennycuik, has no longer any effect upon him, why, what is to be done but fly to some other individual, equally able and willing to bleed?

One thing is always very remarkable in _victims_, namely, their extraordinary frankness and politeness. A _victim_ might have been an absolute bear in his better days; but hunger, it is said, will tame a lion, and it seems to have the same effect in subduing the asperities of a _victim_. Meet a _victim_ where you will—that is, before he has become altogether deplorable—and you are amazed at the bland, confidential air which he has assumed; so different, perhaps, from what he sported in better days. His manner, in fact, is most insinuating—into your pocket; and if you do not get alarmed at the symptoms, and break off in time, you are brought down for half a crown as sure as you live. _Victims_ keep up a kind of constant _civil_ war with shops. They mark those which have been recently opened, and where they see only young men behind the counter. They try to establish a kind of credit of face, by now and then dropping in and asking, in a genteel manner, for a sight of a Directory, or for a bit of twine, or for “the _least_ slip of paper,” occasionally even spending a halfpenny or a penny in a candid, honourable way, with all the air of a person wishing to befriend the shop. In the course of these “transactions,” they endeavour to excite a little conversation, beginning with the weather, gradually expanding to a remark upon the state of business; and, perhaps, ending with a sympathising inquiry as to the prospects which the worthy shopkeeper himself may have of succeeding in his present situation. At length, having laid down what painters call a _priming_, they come in some day, in a hurried fiddle-faddle kind of way, and hastily and confidentially ask across the counter, “Mr——[victims are always particular in saying _Master_], have you got such a thing as fourpence in ha’pence? I just want to pay a porter, and happen to have no change.” The specification of “fourpence in ha’pence,” though in reality nonsense, carries the day; it gives a plausibility and credit-worthiness to the demand that could not otherwise be obtained. The unfortunate shopkeeper, carried away by the contagious bustle of the _victim_, plunges his hand, quick as thought, into the till, and before he knows where he is, he is minus a groat, and the _victim_ has vanished from before him—and the whole transaction, reflected upon three minutes afterwards, seems as if it had been a dream.

The existence of a _victim_ is the most precarious thing, perhaps, in the world. He is a man with no continuing dinner-place. He dines, as the poor old Earl of Findlater used to say, at the sign of the Mouth. It is a very strange thing, and what no one could suppose _a priori_, that the necessitous are greatly indebted to the necessitous. People of this sort form a kind of community by themselves, and are more kind to each other mutually than is any other particular branch of the public to them as a class. Thus, the little that any one has, is apt to be shared by a great many companions, and all have a mouthful. The necessitous are also very much the dupes of the necessitous: they are all, as it were, creatures of prey, the stronger constantly eating up the weaker. Thus, a _victim_ in the last stage preys upon men who are entering the set; and all prey more or less upon poor tradesmen, such as the above Walter Brown or James Gowans, who are only liable to such a spoliation because they are poor, and anxious for business. We have known a _victim_, for instance, who had long passed the condition of being _jail-worthy_, live in a great measure upon a man who had just begun a career of victimization by being thrown into jail. This creature was content to be a kind of voluntary prisoner for the sake of sharing the victuals and bed of his patron. It would astonish any man, accustomed, day after day, to go home to a spread table at a regular hour, to know the strange shifts which victims have to make in order to satisfy hunger—how much is done by raising small hard-wrung subsidies from former acquaintance—how much by duping—how much by what the Scotch people very expressively call _skeching_—how much by subdivision of mites among the wretches themselves. Your _victim_ is often witty, can sing one good comic song, has a turn for mimicry, or at least an amusing smack of worldly knowledge; and he is sometimes so lucky as to fall in with patrons little above himself in fortune, but still having something to give, who afford him their protection on account of such qualifications.

By way of illustrating these points, take the following instances of what may be called the _fag-victim_.

Nisbet of ——, in Lanarkshire, originally a landed gentleman and an advocate at the Scottish bar, was a blood of the first water in the dissolute decade 1780-90, when, if we are to believe Provost Creech, it was a gentleman’s highest ambition, in his street dress and manner of walking, to give an exact personation of the character of Filch in the Beggars’ Opera. Nisbet at that period dressed a good deal above Filch, however he might resemble him in gait. He had a coat edged all round with gold lace, wore a gold watch on each side (an extravagant fashion then prevalent), and with his cane, bag-wig, and gold-buckled shoes, was really a fine figure of the pre-revolutionary era. His house was in the Canongate—a good flat in Chessels’s Court—garrisoned only by a female servant called Nanny. Nisbet at length squandered away the whole of his estate, and became a _victim_. All the world fell away from him; but Nanny still remained. From the entailed family flat in Chessels’s Court, he had to remove to a den somewhere about the Netherbow: Nanny went with him. Then came the period of wretchedness: Nanny, however, still stuck fast. The unfortunate gentleman could not himself appear in his woe-begone attire upon those streets where he had formerly shone a resplendent sun; neither could he bring his well-born face to solicit his former friends for subsidies. Nanny did all that was necessary. Foul day and fair day, she was to be seen gliding about the streets, either petitioning tradesmen for goods to her master on credit, or collecting food and money from the houses of his acquaintance. If a liquid alms was offered, she had a white tankard, streaked with smoky-looking cracks, for its reception; if the proffered article was a mass of flesh, she had a plate or a towel. There never was such a forager. Nisbet himself used to call her “true and trusty,” by way of a compliment to her collective powers; and he finally found so much reason to appreciate her disinterested attachment, that, on reaching the usual fatal period of fifty, he made her his wife! What was the catastrophe of their story, I never heard.

The second, and only other instance of the _fag-victim_ which can be given here, is of a still more touching character than the above, and seems to make it necessary for the writer of this trifling essay to protest, beforehand, against being thought a scoffer at the misery of his fellow creatures. He begs it to be understood, that, however light be the language in which he speaks, he hopes that he can look with no other than respectful feelings upon human nature, in a suffering, and, more especially, a self-denying form.

Some years ago, there flourished, in one of the principal thoroughfares of Edinburgh, a fashionable perfumer, the inheritor of an old business, and a man of respectable connections, who, falling into dissolute habits, became of course very much embarrassed, and, finally, “unfortunate.” In his shop,

“From youth to age a reverend ’_prentice_ grew;”

a man, at the time of his master’s failure, advanced to nearly middle life, but who, having never been any where else since he was ten or twelve years of age, than behind Finlay’s counter—Sundays and meal-hours alone excepted—was still looked upon by his master as “the boy of the shop,” and so styled accordingly. This worthy creature had, in the course of time, become as a mere piece of furniture in the shop; his soul had _fraternized_ (to use a modern French phrase) with his situation. The drawers and shottles, the combs, brushes, and bottles, had entered into and become part of his own existence; he took them all under the wide-spreading boughs of his affections; they were to him, as the infant to the mother, part of himself. He was on the best terms with every thing about the shop; the handles of all things were fitted to his hand; every thing came to him, to use a proverbial expression of Scotland, like the bowl of a pint-stoup. In fact, like a piece of wood placed in a petrifying spring, this man might be said to have been transfigured out of his original flesh and blood altogether, and changed into a creature participating in the existence and qualities of certain essences, perfumes, wigs, pomades, drawers, wig-blocks, glass cases, and counters forming the _materiel_ of Mr Finlay’s establishment. Such a being was, as may be supposed, a useful servant. He knew all the customers; he knew his master’s whole form of practice, all his habits, and every peculiarity of his temper. And then the fidelity of the creature; but that was chiefly shown in the latter evil days of the shop, and during the victimhood of his master. As misfortune came on, the friendship of master and man became more intensely familiar and intimate than it had ever been before. As the proudest man, met by a lion in the desert, makes no scruple to coalesce with his servant in resisting it, so was Finlay induced, by the devouring monster Poverty, to descend to the level, and make a companion, of his faithful “boy.” They would at last go to the same tavern together, take the same Sunday walks—were, in reality, boon companions. In all Finlay’s distresses, the “boy” partook; if any thing “occurred about a bill,” as Crabbe says, it was the “boy” who had the chief dolour of its accommodation; he would scour the North and South Bridges, with his hat off, borrowing small silver a _l’improviste_, as if to make up change to a customer, till he had the necessary sum amassed. The “boy” at length became very much demoralised: he grew vicious towards the world, to be the more splendidly virtuous to his master: one grand redeeming quality, after the manner of Moses’ serpent, had eaten up all the rest. It were needless to pursue the history of the shop through all its stages of declension. Through them all the “boy” survived, unshaken in his attachment. The shop might fade, grow dim, and die, but the “boy” never. The goods might be diminished, the Duke of Wellington might be sold for whisky, and his lady companions pawn their wigs for mutton pies; but the “boy” was a fixture. There was no pledging away his devoted, inextinguishable friendship. The master at last _went to_ the Canongate jail—I say _went to_, in order to inform the sentimental part of mankind that imprisonment is seldom done in the active voice, people generally incarcerating themselves with the most philosophical deliberation, and not the least air of compulsion in the matter. The shop was still kept open, and the “boy” attended it. But every evening did he repair to the dreary mansion, to solace his master with the news of the day, see after his comforts, and yield up the prey which, jackall-like, he had collected during the preceding four-and-twenty hours. This prey, be it remarked, was not raised from the sale of any thing in the shop. Every saleable article had by this time been sold. The only furniture was now a pair of scissors and a comb, together with the announcement, “Hair-cutting rooms,” in the window. By means of these three things, however, the “boy” contrived generally to _fleece_ the public of a few sixpences in the day; and all these sixpences, with the exception of a small commission for his own meagre subsistence, went to his master at the Canongate jail. Often, in the hour between eight and nine in the evening, have they sat in that small dingy back-room behind the large hall, enjoying a bottle of strong ale, drunk out of stoneware tumblers—talking over all their embarrassments, and speculating how to get clear of them. Other prisoners had their wives or their brothers to see after them; but we question if any one had, even in these relations of kindred, a friend so attached as the “boy.” At length, after a certain period, this unfortunate tradesman was one evening permitted to walk away, arm in arm, with his faithful “young man,” and the world was all before them where to choose.

For a considerable period all trace of the attached pair is lost. No doubt their course was through many scenes of poignant misery; for at the only part of their career upon which I have happened to obtain any light, the “boy” was wandering through the streets of Carlisle, in the dress and appearance of a very old beggar, and singing the songs wherewith he had formerly delighted the citizens of Edinburgh in Mrs Manson’s or Johnnie Dowie’s, for the subsistence of his master, who, as ascertained by my informant, was deposited in a state of sickness and wretchedness transcending all description, in a low lodging-house in a back street. Such is the fag-victim, following his master

“To the last gasp, with truth and loyalty;”

and such, I may add, are the virtues which sometimes adorn the most vicious and degraded walks of life, where, to the eyes of ordinary observers, there appears no redeeming feature whatsoever.

FALLACIES OF THE YOUNG.

“ACQUAINTANCES.”

One of the most important concerns of young people is, the management of themselves in respect of what are called “acquaintances.” To have many friends is desirable, in a world where men are generally thrown so much upon their own resources. But there is a distinction between the friendship of a certain number of respectable persons, who are only ready to exert themselves for us when called upon, and the acquaintance of a circle of contemporaries, who are perpetually forcing themselves upon our company for the mere purpose of mutual amusement. Taking the words in their usual signification, a young man ought to wish for many friends, but few acquaintances. There is something in the countenance of a companion that cheers and supports the frailty of human nature. One can speak and act more boldly with a friend by his side, than when alone. But it is the good fortune of men of strong character, and it ought to be the object of every one, to act well and boldly by himself. One thing young people may be assured of, almost all the great services which enlightened men have done for their race, were performed alone. There was but one man, not two, at the discovery of the Compass, of the Copernican System, of the Logarithms, and of the principle of Vaccination. To descend to lesser things, ask any man who has risen in worldly fortune, from small beginnings to great wealth and honour, how he contrived to do so, and you will find that he carved it all out for himself with his own hand. He will in all probability inform you that he has reached the honourable station in society which he now maintains, chiefly by narrowing the circle of his “private acquaintances,” and extending that of his “public relations,” most likely adding, that had he on all occasions “consulted” the persons with whom he happened to be acquainted, as to his designs, he would, by every calculation, have been still in the same obscure insignificant situation he once was. The truth is, it is only when alone that we have the ability to concentrate our minds upon any object; and it is only when things are done with the full force of _one mind_ qualified for the purpose, that they are done well.

It is the misfortune of young people, before they become fully engaged in the relations of life and business, that they look too much to “acquaintances” for encouragement, and make the amusement which “acquaintances” can furnish too indispensable. The tender mind of youth is reluctant, or unable, to stand alone; it needs to be one of a class. Hence, the hours which ought to be spent in the acquisition of that general knowledge which is so useful in after life, and which can only be acquired in the vacant days of youth, are thrown away in the most inglorious pursuits; for “acquaintances” are seldom the companions of study, or the auxiliaries of business, but most generally the associates of a debauch, the fellow-flutterers upon the Mall, the companion-hounds in the chase of empty pleasure. It is amazing how much a youth can endure of the company of his principal “acquaintance.” Virgil’s expression, “_tecum consumerer ævo_,” is realised in his case; for he veritably appears as if he could _spend his whole life_ in the society of the treasured individual. At the approach of that person, every other matter is cast aside; the most important business seems nothing in contrast with the interchange of a smile or a jest with this duplicate of himself. The injunctions of the most valued relations—even of father and mother—are scattered to the winds, if they are at variance with the counsels or conduct of this precious person, whom, after all, he perhaps met only last week at a club. The power of an “acquaintance” of this kind, for good or evil, over the mind of his friend, is so very great, that it may well give some concern to those who are really interested in the prospects of youth. But every effort to redeem a victim from the fascination, will be in vain, unless his natural or habitual goodness be shocked by the further exposure of the “acquaintance’s” character. The only safeguard, therefore, against this mighty evil, is, _previously_ to accustom youth to depend much upon themselves, and to endeavour to infuse into them a sufficient degree of moral excellence, to be a protection to them against the worst vices which “acquaintances” may attempt to impart to them.

There is a possibility, however, that the “acquaintance” may be no worse than his fellow, and yet the two will do that together which they could not do singly. Virtue is, upon the whole, a thing of solitude: vice is a thing of the crowd. The individual will not dare to be wicked, for the responsibility which he knows must be concentrated upon himself; while the company, feeling that a divided responsibility is hardly any responsibility at all, is under no such constraint. There is much edification to the heart of the thoughtless and wicked in the participation of companions; and even in large associations of honourable men for honourable purposes, there is often wanting that fine tone of feeling which governs the conduct of perhaps each individual in the fraternity. Thus, an excessive indulgence in the company of “acquaintances” is to be avoided, even where these “acquaintances” are not inferior in moral worth to ourselves. There is an easy kind of morality much in vogue among a great body of people, that “what others do we may do,” as if higher standards had not been handed down by God himself from heaven, or constructed in the course of time by the wise and pure among men. This morality comes strongly into play among youth in their intercourse with contemporaries; and as it is always on rather a declining than an advancing scale, it soon leads them a great way down the paths of vice.

It will be found, in general, that a considerable degree of abstinence from this indulgence is required, even to secure the most ordinary degree of success in life. But if great things be aimed at, if we wish to surpass our fellows by many degrees, and to render ourselves honourably conspicuous among men, we must abjure “acquaintances” almost entirely. We must, for that purpose, withdraw ourselves from all temptation to idle and futile amusement—we must, in the words of a great poet, “shun delights, and live laborious days.”

SUBJECTS OF CONVERSATION.

Subjects of conversation are sometimes exceedingly difficult to be had. I have known many a company of well-dressed men and women feel themselves most awkwardly situated for want of something to talk about. The weather, which is said to be a never-failing subject, cannot hold out above a few minutes at a time. It will stand a round or two rounds, but not more. It is then knocked up for the evening, and cannot with decency be again brought forward. Being thus disposed of, the subject of “news” is introduced; but, as a matter of course, there being no “news stirring,” “not a word,” “nothing in the papers,” that subject is soon also dispatched. If there happen to be any very remarkable occurrence worth talking of, what a blessing it is on such occasions! It is food for the company a whole night, and may be again and again brought above board for their amusement. But it much more frequently happens that there is no exciting event to talk about, and then the condition of the company is truly miserable. There being ladies present, or there being two factions in the room, politics are proscribed. Every attempt at getting up a topic failing, the company look into the fire, or in each other’s faces, or begin to examine with much interest the pattern of the carpet; and the silence which ensues is truly terrific. A slight whisper is the only sound in the apartment, and is caught at or watched by the company, for it may chance to be the commencement of a conversation in which they may join, without exciting particular attention. But it, too, dies away. It was only a passing under-current of remark between the two married ladies in the blue and white turbans, on the dearth of coals, the difficulty of getting good servants, or the utility of keeping children muffled in flannel nightgowns from October till March. At length some good soul makes an effort to brush away his diffidence. He projects a remark across the room towards the little man with the smirking countenance, about Mr This or Miss That, or Signor Such-a-thing, who are at present enlivening the town with their exhibitions. The remark is in itself a very ordinary remark, but it has its use: it quickens the intellects of those who hear it, and the tongues of a number of individuals are set a-going upon the subject of theatrical amusements, singing in the Assembly Rooms, Pasta, Paganini, and private parties, so that the original remark is lost sight of, and the company go on pretty well with what it has produced for perhaps half an hour. All these topics being exhausted, another horrible silence ensues. The company again look into the fire, or in one another’s faces, and once more examine the carpet. What _is_ to be said next? All think upon saying something, yet nobody speaks. The national _mauvaise honte_ is now displayed to the height of its perfection. The agony of the company, however, approaches its crisis. The awful stillness is broken, and in a most natural and unexpected manner. The young man in the starched cravat sitting in a corner of the room, near the end of the piano, who has been thinking what he should say or do for the last half hour, takes heart of grace; he rises and snuffs the candles, going through the self-imposed duty in as neat and elegant a style as he can possibly affect. The snuffing of the candles is an operation which every member of the company has seen performed ten thousand times; but it affords interest for even the ten thousandth and first time. It may not intrinsically be worth heeding, yet, in a case of this nature, it is of very great importance. It suggests a new theme, and that is exactly what was wanted, for one subject invariably leads to the discussion of half a dozen others. The operation of snuffing the candles, therefore, induces some one to remark, how beautiful gas-light is. Then this brings on a disquisition on the danger of introducing it into private houses; its cost in comparison with oil is next touched upon; then follows an observation about the last illumination; which leads to reminiscences of similar displays on the occasions of the great naval victories—the victories lead to Nelson—Nelson to his biographer, Southey—Southey to poetry—poetry to Byron—and Byron to Greece. This whirl of conversation, however, also runs out; an accident jars it, and it is all over. Suddenly the speakers pause, as if they had received a galvanic shock; one small voice is alone left prominent above the silence; but finding itself unsupported, it is immediately lowered to a whisper, and the whisper subsides to a dead silence.

I have often pitied the host or hostess on occasions of this nature, but I could not help blaming them for not providing against such dismal pauses in the conversation of their parties. To guard against these occurrences, I would recommend them to bring forward what I have remarked to be never-failing sources of conversational entertainment, namely, a tolerably good-looking cat, a lapdog, or a child. The last is the best. It ought to be about two years of age, and be able to walk. If adroitly played off, or permitted to play, it will amuse the party for an hour at least. It must be placed on the hearth-rug, so as to attract all eyes; and while in the room, no other subject will be thought of. Any endeavour to draw off attention, by the relation of some entertaining anecdote, will be deemed sedition against the majesty of the household. If a cat, a dog, or an interesting child, cannot be conveniently had, I would advise the invitation of some one who has a loud voice, and the happy effrontery of speaking incessantly, however ridiculously, on all subjects,—a person who can speak nonsense to any extent, and has the reputation of being a most agreeable companion. This man is of vast use in introducing subjects; for he has no diffidence or modesty, and has a knack of turning every observation to account. His voice also serves as a cover to much by conversation; there being hundreds who would speak fluently enough, provided a bagpipe were kept playing beside them, or who could have their voices drowned by some other species of noise. The loud and voluble talker is therefore an excellent shelter for those of weaker nerves, and will be found a useful ingredient in all mixed companies.

The difficulty of starting subjects of conversation, as well as the difficulty of sustaining them, is often as observable when two acquaintances meet on the street, as when a roomful of company is collected. The unhappy pair exhaust all that they can remember they ought to say to each other in the space of a minute and a half, and another minute may be consumed in going through the process of taking a pinch of snuff; the next half minute is spent in mutual agony. Neither knows how to separate. As the only chance of release, one of the parties at last brings in a joke, or what is meant to be such, to his aid. The other, of course, feels bound to laugh, and both seizing the opportunity, escape in different directions under cover of the witticism.

SECURE ONES.

“I MAK SICKER.”—_Motto of the Family of Kirkpatrick._

“Oh, he’s a sicker ane!” is a phrase used in Scotland in reference to that class of people who make excessively sure about every thing, and are in no manner of means to be imposed upon. I style such persons Secure Ones, in order to be intelligible to southern as well as northern readers. Every body must know a certain class of secure ones by the timid cautiousness and exactness of their behaviour; by the trim, unostentatious propriety of their external aspect. There is a lambs’-woollery comfort and a broad-cloth completeness about this sort of secure one, that nobody can mistake; he even seems to have made the number of buttons in his vest, and the height to which that garment is buttoned up, a matter of accurate calculation. He could not go abroad under less than a certain press of flannel and great-coat for the world; and you might almost as soon expect to meet him without his left arm as minus the silk umbrella under it. (He carries the latter part of himself, or fifth limb, at an angle of about sixty degrees to the horizon, the handle down behind, and the point forked up in front.) When he observes any part of the pavement railed off, in order to save the passengers all danger from an occasional pelleting of stones and bits of plaster which the slaters or chimney-doctors are producing from above, he deploys into the street a good way before coming up to the actual rail or rope, and, in passing, takes care to sweep several good yards beyond the utmost range of shot. “Don’t like these things coming peppering down that way; might almost dislocate one’s shoulder if they were to fall upon it; perhaps we had better go over to the other side of the street altogether. No need, you know, for running into unnecessary danger.” When a secure one ascends a stair, he goes step after step monotonously on, performing every move of his feet with a sound, conscientious deliberation, and seems determined upon doing full justice to every landing-place. He holds firmly, however unnecessarily, by the baluster, since the baluster is there, and he has an obvious satisfaction in the slight pant which he thinks himself entitled to get up on the occasion. The secure one always shuts a door carefully behind him. He takes off his hat softly, with a regard at once to the smooth economy of his hair, and the pile of his chapeau. He has a maxim that the hat should be first raised and loosened from behind, where it slides up along the glossy hair, not from the front, where it encounters a comparative obstruction from the fleshy brow. He lays down his gloves neatly on the top of each other, and hangs up his hat with an air of carefulness truly exemplary. The secure one is a bit of an epicure. When out in the forenoon, he would not for any consideration take lunch or wine. “Madam, would you have me spoil my appetite for dinner?” This appetite he nurses and cherishes in the course of his saunterings between two and five, as carefully as a miser doting over his heap. He holds a telegraphic communion with his inner man that passeth show; he coquets and dallies with his stomach; every indescribable symptom is taken into account, and forms the subject of unexpressed congratulation. “Dear tender flowers of appetite, it would be sacrilege, or worse, to nip ye in the bud, by powdering over you the baneful dew of a glass of Bucellas, or the still more odious blight of a basin of mulligatawny. No, I will coax you, and protect you, and _travel_ for you, in faithful love and kindness, even until ye shall be fully fattened up for slaughter at five o’clock.” When the secure one sits down to table, he painsfully and not unostentatiously (to himself) relieves the one lowest button of his vest from the thrall of button-hole, and with equally deliberate care arranges a napkin over the front of his person. Dinner is a sacred ceremony, and requires its canonicals. Being fully acquainted with the whole planisphere of the table, he takes an exactly proportioned quantity of each article, so as ultimately to have enjoyed each in its exact proportion of merit, and to have precisely enough out of the whole. A secure one is frequently an old respectable unmarried gentleman, residing with a single servant—Jenny—in a “self-contained” house about Stockbridge or Newington. Knowing the distance at which he lives from the mercantile parts of the town, he takes care never to want what he calls a pound of change, as well as a small stock of copper—at least the value of a shilling—observing also that the change is not unmixed with sixpences, so that when any shopkeeper’s boy calls for payment of an account, or to take back the purchase-money of any article he has bought that day in town, he may not have to trouble [_i. e._ trust] the messenger with the duty of obtaining change for a bank note, which would tend to occasion a more than necessary answering of the bells at the door, besides keeping him in an agony of fiddle-faddle till the little affair was settled. Jenny, who has been so long in his service as to have become almost as secure as himself, never opens the door o’ nights without putting on the chain; and she has a standing order against all parleying with beggars, or poor women who sell tapes and such things out of baskets. The secure one regards few creatures in this world with a more jealous or malignant eye than these personages. “Why, Sir, they want nothing but to make an opportunity of stripping the lobby or the kitchen!” And such a story he can tell of a missing hat-brush! “A woman seen that morning going about—sold a pair of garters to the maid-servant three doors off at ten—front door had been left open for a minute, not more, while Jenny ran after me with something I had forgot—and in that time—it could have been at no other—the deed was done. A hat-brush I had just got with my last hat at Grieve and Scott’s; had a thing that screwed in at the one end, so that it was a stretcher also; cost four and sixpence, even taking the hat along with it.” And the secure one, without any premeditated hard-heartedness, thinks nothing of making such an incident apologize to himself for an habitual shutting of his door and his heart against the poor for the next twelvemonth. There is never any imperfection in the _externe_ of the secure one. He bears about him a certain integrality of look that fills and satisfies the eye. From his good well-brushed waterproof beaver, all along down by his roomy blue coat, drab well-fledged, amply-trousered limbs, and so down to his _double_ shoes, not omitting such points as his voluminous white neckcloth without collar, his large Cairngorm brooch, which looks as if a dish of jelly had been inverted into his bosom, and his heavy, pursy bunch of seals dangling, clearly defined and well relieved, from the precipice of belly—every thing betokens the secure one. Clothes are not so much clothes with him as they are a kind of defensive armour! The truth is, the secure one lives in a state of constant warfare with the skiey influences. The chief campaign is in winter. Instead of entering the field, like Captain Bobadil, about the tenth of March, he opens the trenches towards the twenty-fourth of October. He then invests himself with a cuirass of wool almost thick enough to obstruct the passage of a cannon-ball. For months after, he remains in arms, prepared to stand out against the most violent attacks of the enemy, and, in reality, there is hardly any advantage to be got of the secure one by fair open storms or frosts. He bears a charmed life against all such candid modes of warfare. He cannot be overthrown in a pitched battle. It is only ambuscade draughts through open windows, and other kinds of bush-fighting, that ever are of any effect against him. Like Hector in the armour of Patroclus, he is invulnerable over almost all his whole person; but an arrowy rheumatism, like the spear of Achilles, will sometimes reach him through a very small chink. Like the mighty Achilles himself, he is literally proof, perhaps, against every thing but what assails him through the very lowest part of his person—he can stand every thing but wet feet. There is an instance on record of his having once been laid by the heels for three months, in consequence of sitting one night in the pit of the Theatre with a slightly damp umbrella between his knees. He was just about to get entirely better of this disorder, when all at once he was thrown back for six weeks more, by reason, as he himself related, of his having changed the wear (in his sick-chamber) of a silk watch-riband for a chain! “All from the imprudence of that rash girl Jenny, who thought the riband a little shabby, and put on the chain instead. Why, Sir! a thick double riband, more than an inch broad; only conceive what a material addition it must have been to my ordinary clothing!” The chain, he might have added, was apt to be worse than nothing, for it was of irregular application, tattooing his person, as it were, with a minutely decussated exposure, so that the cold was likely to have struck him as with the teeth of a comb! The secure one has an anxiety peculiar to himself on the subject of easy-chairs, nightgowns, and slippers. The easy-chair must be exact in angle to a single minute of a degree; the nightgown must be properly seen to in respect of fur and flannel; the slippers must every night be placed for him at the proper place; and if Jenny has been so inattentive as to place the left one on the right of the other, he feels himself not a little discomposed. The secure one is most pestilently and piquantly accurate about all things. He loves to arrange, and arrange, and arrange, and over again arrange and settle all the preliminaries and pertinents of any little matter which cannot reasonably be done but one way. If he wishes, for instance, to confer with an upholsterer respecting some alteration in the above easy-chair, he first calls one forenoon, and inflicts an hour’s explanation upon the unhappy man of wood—who is not all a man of wood, otherwise he would, in such a case, be happy. It does not in the least matter at what hour the tradesman should come to see this chair, for the secure one is to be at home the whole day. Yet the very liberty at which he stands produces a difficulty. It would be charity in Providence, by any interference, “to give him not to choose.” “Say eleven; I shall then be quite disengaged—will that hour suit you? Or make it any other hour—say twelve—or say half-past eleven—half-past would do very well.” [He recollects that he seldom gets the whole fiddle-faddle of feeding the canaries over by _half-past_.] “Suppose it were a quarter to twelve; that would answer me better still. I may, perhaps, take a walk out at mid-day; would a quarter to twelve do? Or I might hurry the canaries, and then the half-past might do. I dare say half-past will do best after all; mind half-past eleven,” &c. &c. The man comes, and the business of the chair is entered into. The whole affair is most amply canvassed. The secure one sits down in it, and gives a lecture in a very _ex-cathedra_ style upon all its properties and defects. He complains of the back reclining a little too much back, or the bottom showing too little bottom, or some other fault equally inappreciable; and the upholsterer sees at once that the secure one only complains of this, as he is apt to do of other things, for the very uneasiness arising from its over-easiness.

“Lulled on the rack of a too-easy chair.”

The fact is, the secure one has brought every appliance of life to such an absolute exactitude and perfection, that, having no longer any thing to give him pain, he becomes quite wretched. Secureness, it is evident, may go too far. We may become actually frightened in this world at our own caution. We may be shocked by the very unimpeachability of our own virtue. We may become miserable through the extremity of our happiness. In the same manner the secure one, when he has “got all things right,” as he would say, finds himself, to his great disappointment, just at the threshold of woe and evil. He has exactly got time to set his house in order, before the proper consequence of such an event befalls him; and he expires at the very moment when he has just completed his preparations to live.

There is another order of secure ones, whose carefulness refers rather to their wealth than their health. There is an awful inviolability of pocket about such men—a provoking guardedness against all the possible appeals of friendship, and all the impulses of benevolence. Such men look as if they were all stanchioned over. _La Pucelle_ itself was not more perfectly fortified than their breeches. A poorer man is apt to feel in their presence as if he were under an indictment for an intention either to beg or borrow, or, perhaps, to steal from them. He sees something criminative against himself in every impregnable-looking button. Secure ones of this class, perhaps, are bachelors under forty—careful, circumspect men, that have passed through the ordeal of a thousand evening parties without ever being in the least danger. They abstain from marrying, from very fear lest any advantage should be got of them. They cannot enter into the slightest intercourse with a young lady, without letting it appear that they are perfectly on their guard. The most undesigning girl, like the above poor man, feels in their presence as if she were liable to be construed into an absolute “drapery miss.” He is always quite civil, but that is from his very _secureness_: he knows he is in no danger. An experienced woman gives up a man of this kind at first sight. She sees he is cook’s meat, _i. e._ that he is to marry a middle-aged kitchen woman at fifty, upon the ground of her proficiency in preparing a beef-steak. The general feeling of the sex regarding this sort of secure one is, “Confound the fellow! does he think that any one cares for him, or would take him though he were willing?”

“Nobody wants you, Sir, she said.”