Chapter IV: Foreword (3)

Nothing in shy neighbourhoods perplexes my mind more than the bad company birds keep. Foreign birds often get into good society, but British birds are inseparable from low associates. There is a whole street of them in St. Giles's; and I always find them in poor and immoral neighbourhoods, convenient to the public-house and the pawnbroker's. They seem to lead people into drinking, and even the man who makes their cages usually gets into a chronic state of black eye. Why is this? Also, they will do things for people in short-skirted velveteen coats with bone buttons, or in sleeved waistcoats and fur caps, which they cannot be persuaded by the respectable orders of society to undertake. In a dirty court in Spitalfields, once, I found a goldfinch drawing his own water, and drawing as much of it as if he were in a consuming fever. That goldfinch lived at a bird-shop, and offered, in writing, to barter himself against old clothes, empty bottles, or even kitchen stuff. Surely a low thing and a depraved taste in any finch! I bought that goldfinch for money. He was sent home, and hung upon a nail over against my table. He lived outside a counterfeit dwelling-house, supposed (as I argued) to be a dyer's; otherwise it would have been impossible to account for his perch sticking out of the garret window. From the time of his appearance in my room, either he left off being thirsty--which was not in the bond--or he could not make up his mind to hear his little bucket drop back into his well when he let it go; a shock which in the best of times had made him tremble. He drew no water but by stealth and under the cloak of night. After an interval of futile and at length hopeless expectation, the merchant who had educated him was appealed to. The merchant was a bow-legged character, with a flat and cushiony nose, like the last new strawberry. He wore a fur cap and shorts, and was of the velveteen race, velveteeny. He sent word that he would "look round." He looked round, appeared in the doorway of the room, and slightly cocked up his evil eye at the goldfinch. Instantly a raging thirst beset that bird; when it was appeased, he still drew several unnecessary buckets of water; and finally, leaped about his perch and sharpened his bill as if he had been to the nearest wine-vaults and got drunk.

Donkeys, again. I know shy neighbourhoods where the donkey goes in at the street-door, and appears to live upstairs, for I have examined the back-yard from over the palings, and have been unable to make him out. Gentility, nobility, royalty, would appeal to that donkey in vain to do what he does for a costermonger. Feed him with oats at the highest price, put an infant prince and princess in a pair of panniers on his back, adjust his delicate trappings to a nicety, take him to the softest slopes at Windsor, and try what pace you can get out of him. Then starve him, harness him anyhow to a truck with a flat tray on it, and see him bowl from Whitechapel to Bayswater. There appears to be no particular private understanding between birds and donkeys, in a state of nature; but in the shy neighbourhood state you shall see them always in the same hands and always developing their very best energies for the very worst company. I have known a donkey--by sight; we were not on speaking terms--who lived over on the Surrey side of London Bridge, among the fastnesses of Jacob's Island and Dockhead. It was the habit of that animal, when his services were not in immediate requisition, to go out alone idling. I have met him a mile from his place of residence, loitering about the streets; and the expression of his countenance at such times was most degraded. He was attached to the establishment of an elderly lady who sold periwinkles, and he used to stand on Saturday nights with a cartful of those delicacies outside a gin-shop, pricking up his ears when a customer came to the cart, and too evidently deriving satisfaction from the knowledge that they got bad measure. His mistress was sometimes overtaken by inebriety. The last time I ever saw him (about five years ago) he was in circumstances of difficulty, caused by this failing. Having been left alone with the cart of periwinkles, and forgotten, he went off idling. He prowled among his usual low haunts for some time, gratifying his depraved tastes, until, not taking the cart into his calculations, he endeavoured to turn up a narrow alley, and became greatly involved. He was taken into custody by the police, and, the Green Yard of the district being near at hand, was backed into that place of durance. At that crisis I encountered him; the stubborn sense he evinced of being--not to compromise the expression--a blackguard, I never saw exceeded in the human subject. A flaring candle in a paper shade, stuck in among his periwinkles, showed him, with his ragged harness broken and his cart extensively shattered, twitching his mouth and shaking his hanging head, a picture of disgrace and obduracy. I have seen boys being taken to station-houses, who were as like him as his own brother.

The dogs of shy neighbourhoods I observe to avoid play, and to be conscious of poverty. They avoid work, too, if they can, of course; that is in the nature of all animals. I have the pleasure to know a dog in a back street in the neighbourhood of Walworth who has greatly distinguished himself in the minor drama, and who takes his portrait with him when he makes an engagement, for the illustration of the playbill. His portrait (which is not at all like him) represents him in the act of dragging to the earth a recreant Indian, who is supposed to have tomahawked, or essayed to tomahawk, a British officer. The design is pure poetry, for there is no such Indian in the piece, and no such incident. He is a dog of the Newfoundland breed, for whose honesty I would be bail to any amount; but whose intellectual qualities in association with dramatic fiction I cannot rate high. Indeed, he is too honest for the profession he has entered. Being at a town in Yorkshire last summer, and seeing him posted in the bill of the night, I attended the performance. His first scene was eminently successful; but, as it occupied a second in its representation (and five lines in the bill), it scarcely afforded ground for a cool and deliberate judgment of his powers. He had merely to bark, run on, and jump through an inn window, after a comic fugitive. The next scene of importance to the fable was a little marred in its interest by his over-anxiety; forasmuch as while his master (a belated soldier in a den of robbers on a tempestuous night) was feelingly lamenting the absence of his faithful dog, and laying great stress on the fact that he was thirty leagues away, the faithful dog was barking furiously in the prompter's box, and clearly choking himself against his collar. But it was in his greatest scene of all that his honesty got the better of him. He had to enter a dense and trackless forest, on the trail of the murderer, and there to fly at the murderer when he found him resting at the foot of a tree, with his victim bound ready for slaughter. It was a hot night, and he came into the forest from an altogether unexpected direction, in the sweetest temper, at a very deliberate trot, not in the least excited; trotted to the foot-lights with his tongue out; and there sat down, panting, and amiably surveying the audience, with his tail beating the boards, like a Dutch clock. Meanwhile the murderer, impatient to receive his doom, was audibly calling to him "Co-o-ome here!" while the victim, struggling with his bonds, assailed him with the most injurious expressions. It happened, through these means, that when he was in course of time persuaded to trot up and rend the murderer limb from limb, he made it (for dramatic purposes) a little too obvious that he worked out that awful retribution by licking butter off his blood-stained hands.

In a shy street behind Long Acre, two honest dogs live who perform in Punch's shows. I may venture to say that I am on terms of intimacy with both, and that I never saw either guilty of the falsehood of failing to look down at the man inside the show, during the whole performance. The difficulty other dogs have in satisfying their minds about these dogs appears to be never overcome by time. The same dogs must encounter them over and over again, as they trudge along in their off-minutes behind the legs of the show and beside the drum; but all dogs seem to suspect their frills and jackets, and to sniff at them as if they thought those articles of personal adornment an eruption--a something in the nature of mange, perhaps. From this Covent-garden window of mine I noticed a country dog only the other day, who had come up to Covent Garden Market under a cart, and had broken his cord, an end of which he still trailed along with him. He loitered about the corners of the four streets commanded by my window; and bad London dogs came up and told him lies that he didn't believe; and worse London dogs came up and made proposals to him to go end steal in the market, which his principles rejected; and the ways of the town confused him, and he crept aside and lay down in a doorway. He had scarcely got a wink of sleep, when up comes Punch with Toby. He was darting to Toby for consolation and advice, when he saw the frill, and stopped, in the middle of the street, appalled. The show was pitched, Toby retired behind the drapery, the audience formed, the drum and pipes struck up. My country dog remained immovable, intently staring at these strange appearances, until Toby opened the drama by appearing on his ledge, and to him entered Punch, who put a tobacco-pipe into Toby's mouth. At this spectacle the country dog threw up his head, gave one terrible howl, and fled due west.

We talk of men keeping dogs, but we might often talk more expressively of dogs keeping men. I know a bull-dog in a shy corner of Hammersmith who keeps a man. He keeps him up a yard, and makes him go to the public-houses and lay wagers on him, and obliges him to lean against posts and look at him, and forces him to neglect work for him, and keeps him under rigid coercion. I once knew a fancy terrier who kept a gentleman--a gentleman who had been brought up at Oxford, too. The dog kept the gentleman entirely for his glorification, and the gentleman never talked about anything but the terrier. This, however, was not in a shy neighbourhood, and is a digression consequently.

There are a great many dogs in shy neighbourhoods who keep boys. I have my eye on a mongrel in Somerstown who keeps three boys. He feigns that he can bring down sparrows and unburrow rats (he can do neither), and he takes the boys out on sporting pretences into all sorts of suburban fields. He has likewise made them believe that he possesses some mysterious knowledge of the art of fishing, and they consider themselves incompletely equipped for the Hampstead ponds, with a pickle-jar and wide-mouthed bottle, unless he is with them and barking tremendously. There is a dog residing in the Borough of Southwark who keeps a blind man. He may be seen most days, in Oxford Street, haling the blind man away on expeditions wholly uncontemplated by, and unintelligible to, the man; wholly of the dog's conception and execution. Contrariwise, when the man has projects, the dog will sit down in a crowded thoroughfare and meditate. I saw him yesterday, wearing the money-tray like an easy collar, instead of offering it to the public, taking the man against his will, on the invitation of a disreputable cur, apparently to visit a dog at Harrow--he was so intent on that direction. The north wall of Burlington House Gardens, between the Arcade and the Albany, offers a shy spot for appointments among blind men at about two or three o'clock in the afternoon. They sit (very uncomfortably) on a sloping stone there, and compare notes. Their dogs may always be observed, at the same time, openly disparaging the men they keep, to one another, and settling where they shall respectively take their men when they begin to move again. At a small butcher's in a shy neighbourhood (there is no reason for suppressing the name; it is by Notting Hill, and gives upon the district called the Potteries), I know a shaggy black-and-white dog who keeps a drover. He is a dog of an easy disposition, and too frequently allows this drover to get drunk. On these occasions it is the dog's custom to sit outside the public-house, keeping his eye on a few sheep, plainly casting up in his mind how many he began with when he left the market, and at what places he has left the rest. I have seen him perplexed by not being able to account to himself for certain particular sheep. A light has gradually broken on him, he has remembered at what butcher's he left them, and in a burst of grave satisfaction has caught a fly off his nose, and shown himself much relieved. If I could at any time have doubted the fact that it was he who kept the drover, and not the drover who kept him, it would have been abundantly proved by his way of taking undivided charge of the six sheep, when the drover came out besmeared with red ochre and beer, and gave him wrong directions, which he calmly disregarded. He has taken the sheep entirely into his own hands, has merely remarked with respectful firmness, "That instruction would place them under an omnibus; you had better confine your attention to yourself--you will want it all"; and has driven his charge away, with an intelligence of ears and tail, and a knowledge of business, that has left his lout of a man very, very far behind.

As the dogs of shy neighbourhoods usually betray a slinking consciousness of being in poor circumstances--for the most part manifested in an aspect of anxiety, an awkwardness in their play, and a misgiving that somebody is going to harness them to something, to pick up a living--so the cats of shy neighbourhoods exhibit a strong tendency to relapse into barbarism. Not only are they made selfishly ferocious by ruminating on the surplus population around them, and on the densely crowded state of all the avenues to cats'-meat; not only is there a moral and politico-economical haggardness in them, traceable to these reflections; but they evince a physical deterioration. Their linen is not clean, and is wretchedly got up; their black turns rusty, like old mourning; they wear very indifferent fur; and take to the shabbiest cotton velvet, instead of silk velvet. I am on terms of recognition with several small streets of cats, about the Obelisk in Saint George's Fields, and also in the vicinity of Clerkenwell Green, and also in the back settlements of Drury Lane. In appearance, they are very like the women among whom they live. They seem to turn out of their unwholesome beds into the street, without any preparation. They leave their young families to stagger about the gutters, unassisted, while they frouzily quarrel and swear and scratch and spit at street corners. In particular, I remark that when they are about to increase their families (an event of frequent recurrence) the resemblance is strongly expressed in a certain dusty dowdiness down-at-heel self-neglect, and general giving up of things. I cannot honestly report that I have ever seen a feline matron of this class washing her face when in an interesting condition.

Not to prolong these notes of uncommercial travel among the lower animals of shy neighbourhoods by dwelling at length upon the exasperated moodiness of the tom-cats and their resemblance in many respects to a man and a brother, I will come to a close with a word on the fowls of the same localities.

That anything born of an egg and invested with wings should have got to the pass that it hops contentedly down a ladder into a cellar, and calls _that_ going home, is a circumstance so amazing as to leave one nothing more in this connexion to wonder at. Otherwise I might wonder at the completeness with which these fowls have become separated from all the birds of the air--have taken to grovelling in bricks and mortar and mud--have forgotten all about live trees and make roosting-places of shop-boards, barrows, oyster-tubs, bulk-heads, and door-scrapers. I wonder at nothing concerning them, and take them as they are. I accept as products of nature and things of course a reduced Bantam family of my acquaintance in the Hackney Road, who are incessantly at the pawnbroker's. I cannot say that they enjoy themselves, for they are of a melancholy temperament; but what enjoyment they are capable of they derive from crowding together in the pawnbroker's side-entry. Here, they are always to be found in a feeble flutter, as if they were newly come down in the world, and were afraid of being identified. I know a low fellow, originally of a good family from Dorking, who takes his whole establishment of wives, in single file, in at the door of the jug department of a disorderly tavern near the Haymarket, manoeuvres them among the company's legs, emerges with them at the Bottle Entrance, and so passes his life. Over Waterloo Bridge there is a shabby old speckled couple (they belong to the wooden French-bedstead, washingstand, and towel-horse-making trade) who are always trying to get in at the door of a chapel. Whether the old lady, under a delusion reminding one of Mrs. Southcott, has an idea of entrusting an egg to that particular denomination, or merely understands that she has no business in the building and is consequently frantic to enter it, I cannot determine; but she is constantly endeavouring to undermine the principal door; while her partner, who is infirm upon his legs, walks up and down, encouraging her and defying the Universe. But the family I have been best acquainted with, since the removal from this trying sphere of a Chinese circle at Brentford, reside in the densest part of Bethnal Green. Their abstraction from the objects among which they live, or rather their conviction that those objects have all come into existence in express subservience to fowls, has so enchanted me that I have made them the subject of many journeys at divers hours. After careful observation of the two lords and the ten ladies of whom this family consists, I have come to the conclusion that their opinions are represented by the leading lord and leading lady: the latter, as I judge, an aged personage, afflicted with a paucity of feathers and visibility of quill, that gives her the appearance of a bundle of office-pens. When a railway goods van that would crush an elephant comes round the corner, tearing over these fowls, they emerge unharmed from under the horses, perfectly satisfied that the whole rush was a passing property in the air, which may have left something to eat behind it. They look upon old shoes, wrecks of kettles and saucepans, and fragments of bonnets, as a kind of meteoric discharge, for fowls to peck at. Peg-tops and hoops they account, I think, as a sort of hail; shuttlecocks, as rain, or dew. Gaslight comes quite as natural to them as any other light; and I have more than a suspicion that, in the minds of the two lords, the early public-house at the corner has superseded the sun.

DRINKING SONG [Sidenote: _J.K. Stephen_]

There are people, I know, to be found,
Who say and apparently think
That sorrow and care may be drowned
By a timely consumption of drink.

Does not man, these enthusiasts ask,
Most nearly approach the divine
When engaged in the soul-stirring task
Of filling his body with wine?

Have not beggars been frequently known,
When satisfied, soaked and replete,
To imagine their bench was a throne
And the civilised world at their feet?

Lord Byron has finely described
The remarkably soothing effect
Of liquor, profusely imbibed,
On a soul that is shattered and wrecked.

In short, if your body or mind
Or your soul or your purse come to grief,
You need only get drunk, and you'll find,
Complete and immediate relief.

For myself, I have managed to do
Without having recourse to this plan,
So I can't write a poem for you,
And you'd better get some one who can.

LETTERS OF T.E. BROWN [Sidenote: _T.E. Brown_]

Thank you very much for the satire. Satire is an undoubted branch of poetry; but I do not affect it much. There is a strong, healthy, noble satire, the _sæva indignatio_of the Latin classics. But, short of that, satire seems only an element of discontent and unhappiness.

I know the "pip," the "black pigs" too, know them well; but they are quite beneath contempt; and nothing on earth would induce me to cross the bright blue of my serenity. I have a great notion of being the master of my own happiness, and not suffering it to be contingent on the manners and conduct of other people.

If a man slights me, he does me no harm; but if his conduct is detrimental to the general good, if he is unjust, a villain in high place, a seducer, a poison, a snare to the innocent, then have at him! though, _constitutionally_ I had rather leave him alone.

The sum of happiness in the world is not too large. I would like, if possible, to increase it by the modest contribution of my own store. If so, I must guard it from all disturbance; and poetry enables me to do this, gives me a thousand springs of joy, in none of which there is one drop of bitterness--and thank God for that!

We are here in the I. of Wight, busy comparing it with the I. of Man, of course. It is really a beautiful island, not merely as regards richness of vegetation, an ornament that just now is not available, but also for its configuration. The "lay of the land," the attitude, and gesture of the lines are admirable. The coast is dismally inferior to ours; glens are not to be seen, and streams are puny, but very clean. On the whole we give the preference to Mona, and that upon purely æsthetic, not patriotic, grounds.

I hope you are all well and thriving. Accept my best wishes for the New Year. Your satire discloses perhaps a slight biliary secretion--all satire, I fear, is bile. I hope I may impute it to Christmas festivities rather than to any permanent disorder!

P.S.--I return the verses, as I think you would like to keep them....

* * * * *

I did very well in the Isle of Man; had two good solitary walks, drank deep draughts of--don't know how to describe it--that social brewage which I get nowhere else. Very likely other people get it in their own habitats. But it really does seem to me as if the whole island was quivering and trembling all over with _stories_--they are like leaves on a tree. The people are always telling them to one another, and any morning or evening you hear, whether you like it or not, innumerable anecdotes, sayings, tragedies, comedies--I wonder whether they lie fearfully. They are a marvellously _narrational_ community. And you've not been there a day before all this closes round you with a quiet familiarity of "use and custom" which is most fascinating. Nothing else in the universe seems of any consequence.

And warly cares, and warly men,
May a' gae tapsalteerie, O!

A week more and I should have become reabsorbed into this medium past recovery and past recognition....

I have been musing a good deal over my "Dooiney-molla"[1]: he is now taking shape, and looms rather large. I believe you will like him, and his fiery little groom. These good souls do well to visit my dreams: they are such a comfort; and, do you know, they positively do "go on" in my dreams. Here are two lines which came tripping at the window of my slumbers last night:

1. "When the sun was jus' puttin' on his shoes" (morning),

for which I instantly seemed to discover a parallel--to wit:

"Sthreelin' oft his golden stockings" (the sun again, evening).

2. "Jus' rags tore off the Divil's ould shirt" (=witches' charms, or
spells).

There will be a very good witch in this poem, I promise you: look out! ----[2] are sounding me about "The Doctor";... They would try to make it a popular book. The others tried to make it a drawing-room book, with the result that the few purchasers thereof hid it somewhere behind their book-shelves, and even there trembled for the morals of the housemaids....

* * * * *

We went into the church, and sat at a long service. The curate preached on Judas Iscariot; the vicar conducted a service in the churchyard. "Judas did this, Judas thought that"; then from the churchyard, in stentorian chorus, "Crown Him! crown Him! crown Him! crown Him Lord of all." Thus, you see, there was an element of the comic; but how, how sad it was to me, how incomprehensible! Verily, I am left behind; I can't, after all these years, adjust myself to the dimensions of such a change. The people behaved better than they used to do in our time; but the numbers! the systematisation! the total absence of the native population! the show atmosphere! the "Walk up, gentlemen" style of thing! Over all this Vanity Fair the dear old bells rang out precisely as of old....

* * * * *

Yesterday, at the Kerroo-Kiel, I met a delightfully bright and witty man. He soon got to know who I was, and we had the most glorious talk. The mischief of it is that these worthies are only too glad to get into a _coosh_ with you, and they would talk all day, leaving a spade, or forsaking plough and horses to lean over a hedge, leaning on something at any rate, and talking away. Their talk is bright, aimless, rambling, not without dives into the depths, and pokes into your personality, above all, _engouement_ the most absolute, and desire of intercommunication the most insatiable. And you are up on the mountain-side at the farther limit of plough-range, and the wind whistles just the right sort of accompaniment to such talk.

I think I must have a sail here. But, do you know? the Manx seamen and fishermen tend to become self-conscious: the "strangers" are spoiling them. Not so the farmer; of course no one can make him understand that the visitors do him any good by raising the prices of his produce, so he cares very little about them, and in no way guides himself according to them or their fashions. So far as the outer world comes to him, it is by the channel of the newspapers. He has all the boundless curiosity, the thirst for knowledge miscellaneous, pulpy, and piquant, which characterise those that dwell remote. When he gets hold of you he flies at you, hugs you, gets every blessed thing he can out of you. "Favourable specimen," you will say. That is true; but, as regards the independence and primitive state of mind, what I say applies to almost all. You see, you must get down beneath the gentleman or would-be gentleman-farmer, down to the man who never conceived the idea of ruffling it with gentlefolk. Also, you must not go down to the mere labourer. But they are desperate gossips--gossips not so much in matters local and insular, as in matters universal. The gossiping tone does proceed into the universal, does it not? The hilarity with which they will range the far horizons of thought is so childlike (you know how children are about that); a chatter that sparkles on the surface like their own _divers_, and then, with an "Aw bless me sowl," or "Aye, man, aye," down into the deepest soundings of the spirit....

* * * * *

A charming Hibernian called on me the other day. Portentous! alarming! He had been sent from Douglas by some evil-disposed friends of mine there, to consult me as the supreme authority on matters Manx. Now of this language I am, if not wholly, yet at least grammatically ignorant. He was a tall, stalwart fellow; black-bearded, not handsome, but with a tremendously Irish face, eyes of fire, nose of peremptory interrogation. Flourishing a wretched grammar in one hand, he proceeded rapidly to demonstrate its ineptness, and sternly to demand my explanation. As my weak-kneedness grew more painfully evident--

So scented the grim feature, and upturned
His nostril wide into the murky air,
Sagacious of his quarry--

he almost shouted with exultation. All the Manx scholars had completely failed--here was another. "Glory be to God! I'll smite him hip and thigh." He was a splendid Irishman, and, of course, kind and generous. He didn't spare me, _destructed_ me utterly; but speedily constructed me upon new lines, and told me a lot about Celtic difficulties and how to overcome them. He spoke Irish like a bird, and, after about three-quarters of an hour, he rushed forth to catch the train, hairy, immense, with some wild wirrasthru of farewell. Imagine a very learned and linguistic Mulligan of Ballymulligan!...

* * * * *

O Wallaston, the delight of this leisure! I read, I write, I play. Good gracious! I shouldn't wonder if my music came to something yet. I have actually gone back to singing, a vice of my youth. Don't mention it at Clifton! I always think the sea the great challenger and promoter of song. Even the mountain is not the same thing. There may always be some d----d fool or another behind a rock. But the sea is open, and you can tell when you are alone, and the dear old chap is so confidential: I will trust him with my secret.

How about Devon! was it good? Did you all bathe and "rux" yourselves well about in the brine? I have not done much in that way: the storms have been so furious--unkind of them, eh? Well, I fancy it is like the boisterous welcome of some great dog--at least I take it in that sense. And the old boy is so strong, and he doesn't know, he thinks I am what I used to be. But I'm not: and every now and then he remembers that, and creeps to my feet so fawningly....

[Sidenote: _T.E. Brown_]

At a great prayer-meeting requests were being made that divers souls, supposed to be in evil case, should be interceded for. One arose and asked the prayers of the meeting for a little town on the east coast of Scotland, which was "wholly given to idolatry." Such was the expression. A little city, with many schools, also the seat of a University. Having thus mysteriously indicated the place, the excellent individual plainly felt that no mortal could possibly guess what place he meant; and, putting his hand over his mouth, he said to his friends on the platform, in a hoarse whisper distinctly heard over the entire hall, "St. Andrews!" Isn't that consummate? Isn't it Scotland?...

[Sidenote: _T.E. Brown_]

Walters did an extremely kind thing the other day. Two old things going about with an _entertainment_ (!) of Recitations (really old, for I heard them "at it" thirty-five years ago), took a letter with them from me to Walters. It was the merest chance, I thought, but I suggested that just possibly Walters might give them an evening at the College. By Jove! sir, he did give them an evening, and gave them a substantial fee, and filled their poor trembling cup of Auld lang syne with joy and thanksgiving, and dismissed them with honour, almost reeling with the intoxication of so unwonted a success, the boys giving them a mighty three-times-three which shook the welkin, and stirred amazingly the pulsation of two hearts that have long desisted from the exercise of hope....

[Sidenote: _T.E. Brown_]

I heard one or two good stories at Braddan when I preached there (last Sunday). One was of a child at the Sunday-school. "What ought you to do on Sunday?" "Go to church." "What ought you to do next?" "Go to chapel." Was it not precisely the story for a vicar to tell? You feel the atmosphere--what?...

[Sidenote: _T.E. Brown_]

We sat down in some cottages. Some of the people were magnificent, throwing themselves upon you with such vigour of accent, such warmth and fun, and endless receptivity, bright, well pulled together, sonorous, that I nearly staggered under it--not chaff--good heavens! no--but would have been chaff, only it wasn't, for they can't chaff.

Kitty Kermode, _alias_ Kinvig, was the best. She said a very sweet and profound thing (but I can't phrase it as I ought) about the value of friendship, as compared with that of love. A little happy creature of some seventeen giggled in a dark corner, but I let her giggle; the old woman pierced me through and through. Oh _fortunati_--Oh indeed! And these dear things seemed to know that their lot was a happy one. _Quod faustum!_ Unutterably precious to me is the woman, the native of the hills, almost my own age, or a little younger, whose spirit is set upon the finest springs, and her sympathies have an almost masculine depth, and a length of reflection that wins your confidence and stays your sinking heart.

The lady can't do it. This class, of what I suppose you would call peasant women (I won't have the word), seems made for the purpose of rectifying everything, and redressing the balance, inspiring us with that awe which the immediate presence of absolute womanhood creates in us. The plain, practical woman, with the outspoken throat and the eternal eyes. Oh, mince me, madam, mince me your pretty mincings! Deliberate your dainty reticences! Balbutient loveliness, avaunt! Here is a woman that talks like a bugle, and, in everything, sees God.

[Sidenote: _T.E. Brown_]

... The wreck of the _Drummond Castle_ is much in my mind. What lovely creatures those French are! The women and children, carrying their poor drowned sisters! that little baby in its coffin decked with roses! Don't you yearn towards those dear souls? What are Agincourt and Waterloo in the presence of such sweetness? Well, I love them anyway, and shall brood over them and pray for them while I live....

[Sidenote: _T.E. Brown_]

I am generally rather a happy "sort" of man, but your letter makes me very happy. How kind you are! Up in the morning betimes to catch people still in their beds warm with a generous enthusiasm, to surprise their sympathies before they had "faded into the light of common day," and to collect all their "loving" words for me. That was a good and faithful act; and I am deeply grateful.

Yes, the man was right. I do love the poor wastrels, and you are right, I have it from my father. He had a way of taking for granted, not only the innate virtue of these outcasts, but their unquestioned respectability. He, at least, never questioned it. The effect was twofold.

Some of the "weak brethren" felt uncomfortable at being met on those terms of equality. My father might have been practising on them the most dreadful irony; and they were "that shy" and confused. But it was not irony, not a bit of it; just a sense of respect, fine consideration for the poor "sowls," well--respect, that's it, respect for all human beings; _his_ respect made _them_ respectable. Wasn't it grand? To others my father was a perfect Port-y-shee.[3] To be in the same room with him was enough. To be conscious that he was there, that he didn't fight strange of them, that he never dreamt of "scowlin'" them, that they were treated as gentlemen. Oh the comfort, the gerjugh,[4] the interval of repose! Extraordinary, though, was it not? To think of a _Pazon_ respecting men's vices even; not as vices, God forbid! but as parts of _them_, very likely all but inseparable from them; at any rate, _theirs_. Pitying with an eternal pity, but not exposing, not rebuking. My father would have considered he was "taking a liberty" if he had confronted the sinner with his sin. Doubtless he carried this too far. But don't suppose for a moment that the "weak brethren" thought he was conniving at their weakness. Not they--they saw the delicacy of his conduct. You don't think, do you, that these poor souls are incapable of appreciating _delicacy_? God only knows how far down into their depths of misery and degradation the sweetness of that delicacy descends. It haunts the drunkard's dreams, and breathes a breath of purity into the bosom of the abandoned. That is the power of a noble innocence, a _respect_ for our fellow creatures--glib phrases, but how little understood and acted on! With my father it was quite natural.... He was a hot hater, though, I can tell you. He hated hypocrisy, he hated lying, and he hated presumption and pretentiousness. He loved sincerity, truth, and modesty. It seemed as if he felt sure that, with these virtues, the others could not fail to be present. Was he far wrong? Yet how many people would have thought him stern!

One dear old cousin of his comes to my mind. We called him U.T., that is Uncle Tom. He was not our uncle--we never had one--but the uncle of our predecessors at Kirk Braddan. And almost every Sunday evening he spent at the Vicarage--poor old thing! He was quite silent. One thing, though, he would say, as "regglar as clockwork." My mother occasionally apologised for the evening being so exclusively musical (we were great singers). Whenever she did so, the reply was prompt from U.T.: "I'm passionately fond of music." This, to us children, was highly ludicrous. Indeed, my mother was amused--she had no Manx blood in her--but my father accepted U.T.'s assurance with the utmost confidence. His chivalrous nature, more deeply tinged than hers with Celtic tenderness, or the very finest kind of Celtic make-believe (_Anglicè_--humbug; oh those English!), had no difficulty in accepting U.T.'s "passionately." _Passion_ in U.T.! Well, to us it was a splendid joke. I sometimes wonder whether the vicar, too, at times, had lucid intervals of the bare, naked reality. He had a fine sense of humour, and he would have considered it a baseness to laugh at the poor thing, with its pretence of passion, trying to screen its forlornness. What U.T. felt was not the passion for music, but just the soothing, comforting sense of being at home with us, of being accepted as one of ourselves, of not being "scoulded," of indisputable respectability, of being thought capable of "passion," even so ethereal a passion as that of music. How blessed those hours must have been to U.T.! He sometimes missed them. But it never was my father's fault. Was it U.T.'s? Well, we children had no idea that he drank. But now, of course, I know that when U.T. did not appear on a Sunday, he must have been "hard at it" on Saturday; and into the kingdom of heaven he must have taken the Sundays, not the Saturdays.

Forgive all this. But I have been so much touched with your taking up my reference to the dear old Vicar of Braddan that I could not help extending the portrait a little.

And for the backsliders, the "weak brethren, the outcasts--aw! let's feel for the lek, and 'keep a houl' o' their ban.'"

Do write again. You will do me so much good.

VISIONS [Sidenote: _Calverley_]

In lone Glenartney's thickets lies crouched the lordly stag,
The dreaming terrier's tail forgets its customary wag;
And plodding ploughman's weary steps insensibly grow quicker,
As broadening casements light them on toward home, or home-brewed liquor.

It is, in brief, the evening--that pure and pleasant time
When stars break into splendour, and poets into rhyme;
When in the glass of Memory the forms of loved ones shine--
And when, of course, Miss Goodchild's is prominent in mine.

Miss Goodchild!--Julia Goodchild!--how graciously you smiled
Upon my childish passion once, yourself a fair-haired child:
When I was (no doubt) profiting by Dr. Crabb's instruction,
And sent those streaky lollipops home for your fairy suction!

"She wore" her natural "roses, the night when first we met"--
Her golden hair was gleaming 'neath the coercive net:
"Her brow was like the snawdrift," her step was like Queen Mab's,
And gone was instantly the heart of every boy at Crabb's.

The parlour boarder _chasséed_ tow'rds her on graceful limb;
The onyx deck'd his bosom--but her smiles were not for him:
With _me_ she danced--till drowsily her eyes "began to blink,"
And _I_ brought raisin wine, and said, "Drink, pretty creature,
drink!"

And evermore, when winter comes in his garb of snows,
And the returning schoolboy is told how fast he grows;
Shall I--with that soft hand in mine--enact ideal Lancers,
And dream I hear demure remarks, and make impassioned answers:--

I know that never, never may her love for me return--
At night I muse upon the fact with undisguised concern--
But ever shall I bless that day: I don't bless as a rule,
The days I spent at "Dr. Crabb's Preparatory School."

And yet we two _may_ meet again--(be still, my throbbing heart!)--
Now rolling years have weaned us from jam and raspberry-tart.
One night I saw a vision--'twas when musk-roses bloom,
I stood--_we_ stood--upon a rug, in a sumptuous dining-room:

One hand clasped hers--one easily reposed upon my hip--
And "Bless ye!" burst abruptly from Mr. Goodchild's lip:
I raised my brimming eye, and saw in hers an answering gleam--
My heart beat wildly--and I woke, and lo! it was a dream.

"BOSWELL AND JOHNSON" [Sidenote: _Macaulay_]

The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worth while to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.

We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a phenomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. He was, if we are to give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. Johnson described him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality by not having been alive when "The Dunciad" was written. Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the laughing-stock of the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part of its fame. He was always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, and begging to be spit upon and trampled upon. He was always earning some ridiculous nickname, and then "binding it as a crown unto him," not merely in metaphor, but literally. He exhibited himself at the Shakespeare Jubilee, to all the crowd which filled Stratford-on-Avon, with a placard round his hat bearing the inscription of "Corsican Boswell." In his Tour, he proclaimed to all the world that at Edinburgh he was known by the appellation of Paoli Boswell. Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London; so curious to know everybody who was talked about that, Tory and High Churchman as he was, he manoeuvred, we have been told, for an introduction to Tom Paine; so vain of the most childish distinctions that, when he had been to Court, he drove to the office where his book was printing without changing his clothes, and summoned all the printer's devils to admire his new ruffles and sword,--such was this man, and such he was content and proud to be. Everything which another man would have hidden, everything the publication of which would have made another man hang himself, was matter of gay and clamorous exultation to his weak and diseased mind. What silly things he said, what bitter retorts he provoked, how at one place he was troubled with evil presentiments which came to nothing, how at another place, on waking from a drunken doze, he read the prayer-book and took a hair of the dog that had bitten him, how he went to see men hanged and came away maudlin, how he added five hundred pounds to the fortune of one of his babies because she was not scared at Johnson's ugly face, how he was frightened out of his wits at sea, and how the sailors quieted him as they would have quieted a child, how tipsy he was at Lady Cork's one evening and how much his merriment annoyed the ladies, how impertinent he was to the Duchess of Argyle and with what stately contempt she put down his impertinence, how Colonel Macleod sneered to his face at his impudent obtrusiveness, how his father and the very wife of his bosom laughed and fretted at his fooleries--all these things he proclaimed to all the world, as if they had been subjects for pride and ostentatious rejoicings. All the caprices of his temper, all the illusions of his vanity, all his hypochondriac whimsies, all his castles in the air, he displayed with a cool self-complacency, a perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself, to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the whole history of mankind. He has used many people ill; but assuredly he has used nobody so ill as himself.

That such a man should have written one of the best books in the world is strange enough. But this is not all. Many persons who have conducted themselves foolishly in active life, and whose conversation has indicated no superior powers of mind, have left us valuable works. Goldsmith was very justly described by one of his contemporaries as an inspired idiot, and by another as a being

"Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll."

La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton. His blunders would not come in amiss among the stories of Hierocles. But these men attained literary eminence in spite of their weaknesses. Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses. If he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer. Without all the qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof, he never could have produced so excellent a book. He was a slave, proud of his servitude, a Paul Pry, convinced that his own curiosity and garrulity were virtues, an unsafe companion who never scrupled to repay the most liberal hospitality by the basest violation of confidence, a man without delicacy, without shame, without sense enough to know when he was hurting the feelings of others, or when he was exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he has, in an important department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol Johnson.

Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his books a single remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society which is not either commonplace or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples. To say that these passages are sophistical would be to pay them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable observations made by himself in the course of conversation. Of those observations we do not remember one which is above the intellectual capacity of a boy of fifteen. He has printed many of his own letters, and in these letters he is always ranting or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation and a retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but, because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made him immortal.

Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fulness of his fame and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other man in history. Everything about him, his coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked his approbation of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish-sauce and veal-pie with plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the posts as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up scraps of orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputations, his contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings, his vigorous, acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his vehemence, his insolence, his fits of tempestuous rage, his queer inmates, old Mr. Levett and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat Hodge and the negro Frank, all are as familiar to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded from childhood....