Chapter VI: Mr. Harold Smith’s Lecture (2)

After this little glance behind the scenes of a book-maker’s workshop, you will be wondering, I dare say, as to what was the curious coincidence I spoke of in connection with William Hone’s sojourn in Ship Court, Old Bailey. Simply this. Three years after his Litany escapades, the restless man went tooth and nail into the crapulous controversy between George IV. and his unhappy wife; who, though undoubtedly no better than she should be, was undoubtedly used much worse than she or any other woman, not a Messalina or a Frédégonde, should have been. From Hone’s shop issued those merry, rascally libels against the fat potentate late of Carlton House, and which, under the titles of “The Green Bag,” “Doctor Slop,” the “House that Jack built,” and the like, brought such shame and ridicule upon the vain, gross old man, that all Mr. Theodore Hook’s counter-scurrilities in the high Tory _John Bull_ could not alleviate or wipe away the stains thereof. Ah! it was a nice time--a jocund, Christian time. Reformers calling their king “knave, tyrant, and debauchee;” loyalists screaming “hussey,” and worse names, after their queen. That was in the time of the Consul _Un_manlius I should think. Hone’s clever rascalities sold enormously, especially among the aristocracy of the “Opposition.” But Mr. Hone’s disloyal facetiæ from Ship Court were relieved and atoned for by the illustrations, engraved from drawings executed with quite an astonishing power of graphic delineation and acuteness of humour, by a then very young artist named GEORGE CRUIKSHANK: a gentleman whose earliest toys, I believe, had been a strip of copper and an etching-needle; who has, since those wild days of ’21, achieved hundreds of successes more brilliant, but not more notorious, than those he won by working for restless Mr. Hone; and whom I am proud to speak of here, with Hogarth’s name at the head of my sheet, now that he, our George, is old, and honoured, and famous. Do I attach too much importance to the works of these twin geniuses, I wonder, because I love the style of art in which they have excelled with a secret craving devotion, and because I have vainly striven to excel in it myself? Am I stilted or turgid when I paraphrase that which Johnson said of Homer and Milton _in re_ the _Iliad_ and the _Paradise Lost_, and say of Hogarth and Cruikshank that George is not the greatest pictorial humorist our country has seen only because he is not the first? At any rate, you will grant the coincidence--won’t you?--between the lad George Cruikshank and little boy Hogarth, toddling about Ship Court and perchance scrawling caricatures on the walls, exaggerating in rollicking chalk (I allow him as many brick walls as you like, but no slates) the Slawkenbergian nose of William the Deliverer, or adding abnormal curls to the vast wig of the detested clerical statesman, Burnet.

Little boy Hogarth is yet too young to see these things; but he may be at Gilbert Burnet’s turbulent funeral yet. First, we must get him out of the Old Bailey, where he dwells for a good dozen years at least. Dominie Hogarth has the school upstairs, where he drums _Lilly’s Accidence_, or perhaps his own _Grammatical Disputations_ into his scholars. Of what order may these scholars have been? The gentry had long since left the Bailey; and you may start, perhaps, to be told that British Brahmins had ever inhabited that lowering precinct of the gallows, and parvyse of the press-room. Yet, in the Old Bailey stood Sydney House, a stately mansion built for the Sydneys, Earls of Leicester, and which they abandoned [circa 1660] for the genteeler locality of Leicester Fields. I don’t know what Sydney House could have been like, or by whom it was inhabited when Hogarth was a little boy; but it was to all likelihood in a tumbledown, desolate condition. In Pennant’s time it was a coachmaker’s shop. The keeper of Newgate may have had children, too, for schooling, but his corporation connections would probably have insured his boy’s admission to Christ’s Hospital, or to Paul’s, or Merchant Taylors’ School, for the keeper of Newgate was then a somebody; and it was by times his privilege to entertain the sheriffs with sack and sugar. Dominie Hogarth’s pupils must have been sons of substantial traders in the Bailey itself--where were many noted booksellers’ shops--or from the adjacent Ludgate, whilom Bowyers Hill, and from Fleet Street, or, perchance, Aldersgate Street; which, not then purely commercial or shopkeeping, was the site of many imposing mansions superbly decorated within, formerly the property of the nobility, but then (1697) occupied by stately Turkey and Levant merchants. And to the dominie’s may have come the offspring of the wealthy butchers of Newgate Market, whose rubicund meat-wives are libellously declared to have been in the habit of getting “over-taken by burnt sherry” by eight o’clock in the morning; and while in that jovial but prematurely matutinal condition, rivalling the flat-caps of the Dark House, Billingsgate, and the pease-pottage sellers of Baldwin’s Gardens--to say nothing of the cake and comfit purveyors to the Finsbury archers--in voluble and abusive eloquence. Bonny dames were these butchers’ wives; lusty, rotund, generous to the poor, loud, but cheery with their apprentices and journeymen, great (as now) in making fortunes for their beast-buying-and-killing husbands; radiant in gold-chains, earrings, and laced aprons, and tremendous at trades-feasts and civic junketings.

And I am yet in the year 1697, and in the Old Bailey with a child in my arms. Were this an honest plain-sailing biography, now, what would be easier for me than to skip the first twelve or thirteen years of the boy’s life, assume that he got satisfactorily through his teething, thrush, measles, and chicken-pox perils, and launch him comfortably, a chubby lad, in the midst of the period of which the ruthless Doctor Swift will write a history--the last four years of the reign of Queen Anne--and make up his little bundle for him, ready for his apprenticeship to Mr. Ellis Gamble, silver-plate engraver of Cranbourne Alley, Leicester Fields. He may have been sent out to nurse at Tottenham or Edmonton, or, may be, distant Ware, as children of his degree were wont to be sent out (Mr. John Locke’s _Education_, and Mr. Daniel Defoe’s _Family Instructor, passim_). But, in good sooth, I am loth to turn over my William to the tender mercies of the eighteenth century and the Augustan age. I fear great “Anna” and her era, and for a double reason: first, that people know already so much about the reign of Queen Anne. No kindly book a’ bosom but can follow Sir Roger de Coverley and his tall silent friend the _Spectator_ in their rambles; but has seen Swift walking across the park in mighty fear of the Mohocks; but has taken a dish of coffee at Miss Vanhomrigh’s; but has lounged in the elegant saloon, among the China monsters and the black boys, with Belinda or Sir Plume; but has accompanied Steele from coffee-house to coffee-house, and peeped over his shoulder while he scribbled those charming little billets to his wife; but has seen Queen Anne herself, the “stately lady in black velvet and diamonds,” who touched little Sam Johnson for the evil, and hung round his neck that broad piece of angel gold, which in its more earthly form of a guinea the poor doctor wanted so often and so badly at a subsequent stage of his career. The humorists and essayists of Queen Anne’s days have made them as crystal-clear to us as Grammont and Pepys made those of the Second Charles; and--there! bah! it is mock modesty to blink the truth because my pen happens to be enlisted under such a banner. I could have gone swaggeringly enough into all the minutiæ of Anne’s days, all the glories and meannesses of John Churchill, all the humours, and tyrannies, and quarrels of Pope, and Gay, and Harley, and St. John, if a book called _Esmond_ had never been written. Yet finding myself in this cleft stick, between the historian who wrote of the state of manners at the close of the reign of Charles II., and the novelist, who has made the men and women of Queen Anne’s court and city and army live again, I feel slightly relieved. There is just one little niche left for me. Just three years to dwell upon, while little boy Hogarth is in his swaddling clothes, or is consorting with divers other little brats as diminutive as he, on the doorsteps or the pavement of Ship Court. Three years,--’97, ’98, ’99. _Ah! laissez-moi pleurer ces années mortes._ Let me linger over these three ignored years. They were a transition time. They are lost in the deeper shadow cast by the vicious bonfire that Charles’s _roués_ and beauties lighted up--a shadow shortly to be dispelled by the purer radiance of an Augustan era of literature. Pepys and Evelyn are so minute, so lifelike, that between their word-paintings, and those of the _Spectator_ and _Tatler_, there seems a great black blank.

No seven-league boots are necessary for me to stride back to my subject, and to the time when my little-boy-hero is forming his earliest acquaintance with the Old Bailey stones. I said that I wanted those last three dying years of the seventeenth century. Let me take them, and endeavour to make the best of them, even when I compress some of their characteristics within the compass of a single London day.

The century, then, is on its last legs. The town seems to have quite done with the Stuarts, socially speaking, although politically another Stuart will reign: a dethroned Stuart is actually at St. Germains, maundering with his confessors, and conspiring with his shabby refugee courtiers; thinking half of assassinating the abhorred Dutchman, and making Père la Chaise Archbishop of Canterbury _in partibus_, and half of slinking away to La Trappe, wearing a hair shirt, and doing grave-digging on his own account for good and all. Politically, too, this crooked-wayed, impracticable Stuart’s son and grandson will give the world some trouble till the year 1788, when, a hundred years after the Revolution, a worn-out, _blasé_ sensualist, called the Young Pretender, dies at Rome, leaving a brother, the Cardinal of York, who survived to be a pensioner of George the Third, and bequeathed to him those Stuart papers, which, had their contents been known at the Cockpit, Westminster, half a century before, would have caused the fall of many a head as noble as Derwentwater’s, as chivalrous as Charles Ratcliffe’s, and broken many a heart as loving and true as Flora Macdonald’s or Lady Nithisdale’s. But with the Restoration-Stuart period, London town has quite done. Rochester has died penitent, Buckingham bankrupt and forlorn. Archbishop Tenison has preached Nelly Gwynn’s funeral sermon; Portsmouth, Davies, are no more heard of; Will Chiffinch can procure for kings no more: the rigid Dutchman scorns such painted children of dirt; Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland, has married one Fielding, a swindling caricature of a “beau;” Wycherly is old and broken, and the iron of the Fleet has entered into his soul; and poor noble old John Dryden, twitted as a renegade, neglected, unpensioned, and maligned, is savagely writing the finest “copy” that has issued yet from that grand fertile brain, writing it with a Spartan fortitude and persistence, and ever and anon giving left-legged Jacob Tonson a sound verbal trouncing, when the publisher would palm on the poet clipped moidores for milled Jacobuses. Ah, little boy Hogarth, you will see Johnson fifty years hence, listen to him behind the curtain in the twilight room, as the Jacobite schoolman raves against the cruelty of government in hanging Doctor Cameron; but you will never behold John Dryden in the flesh, little boy, or hear him at Wills’s on golden summer afternoons, the undisputed oracle of wits, and critics, and poets. The horrible Chancellor Jeffries (however could the ruffian have found patience and temper to deliver a decree in Chancery!) is dead, but he has a son alive, a rake-hell, Mohock Lord Jeffries, who, four years hence, will be implicated in a scandalous disturbance at Dryden’s house, in Gerrard Street; the poet’s corpse lying there. There are brave men hard at work for the nineteenth century. Isaac Newton is working; in ’95 he was appointed Master of the Mint. Pope is beginning to feel his poetic feet. Mr. Joseph Addison is at college. Swift has had the run of Temple’s library. Lely has thrown down the pencil; Knelier has taken it up; and James Thornhill is preparing for vast sprawlings on ceilings, after the model of Verrio and Laguerre.

Away with Restoration reminiscences, for the more decent century that is to come. By 8th and 9th William III., Alsatia is ruined, and its privileges of sanctuary wholly taken away. A dreadful outpouring and scattering of ragged rogues and ruffians, crying out in what huff-cap cant and crambo they can command, that _delenda est Carthago_, takes place. Foul reeking taverns disgorge knavish tatterdemalions, soddened with usquebaugh and spiced Hollands, querulous or lachrymose with potations of “mad dog,” “angel’s food,” “dragon’s milk,” and “go-by-the-wall.” Stern catchpoles seize these inebriated and indebted maltbugs, and drag them off to the Compters, or to Ludgate, “where citizens lie in durance, surrounded by copies of their freedom.” Alewives accustomed to mix beer with rosin and salt deplore the loss of their best customers; for their creed was Pistol’s advice to Dame Quickly, “Trust none;” and the debased vagabonds who crowded the drinking-shops--if they drank till they were as red as cocks and little wiser than their combs, if they occasionally cut one another’s throats in front of the bar, or stabbed the drawer for refusing to deliver strong waters without cash--could sometimes borrow, and sometimes beg, and sometimes steal money, and then they drank and paid. No use was there in passing bad money in Alsatia, when every sanctuary man and woman knew how to coin and to clip it. You couldn’t run away from your lodgings in Alsatia, for so soon as you showed your nose at the Whitefriars’ gate, in Fleet Street, the Philistines were upon you. Oh! for the ruffianly soldados, the copper captains, the curl’d-pate braggarts, the poltroons who had lost their ears in the pillory, and swore they had been carried off by the wind of a cannon-shot at Sedgemoor! Oh! for the beauteous slatterns, the Phrynes and Aspasias of this Fleet Street Athens, with their paint and their black visor masques; their organ-pipe head-dresses, their low stomachers, and their high-heeled shoes; the tresses of dead men’s hair they thatched their poor bald crowns withal; the live fools’ rings and necklaces they sported between taking out and pawning in! Beggars, cut-purses, swindlers, tavern-bilks, broken life-guardsmen, foreign counts, native highwaymen, and some poor honest unfortunates, the victims of a Draconic law of debtor and creditor, all found their Patmos turn out to be a mere shifting quicksand. The town does not long remain troubled with these broken spars and timbers of the wrecked ship--once a tall caravel--Humanity. Don’t you remember when the “Holy Land” of St. Giles’s was pulled down to build New Oxford Street, what an outcry arose as to where the dispossessed Gilesians were to find shelter? and don’t you remember how quickly they found congenial holes and corners into which to subside--dirt to dirt, disease to disease, squalor to squalor, rags to rags? So with the Alsatians. A miserable compensation is made to them for their lost sanctuary by the statute which quashes all foregone executions for debts under fifty pounds; but they soon get arrested again--often for sums not much more than fifty pence--and, being laid up in hold, starve and rot miserably. There are debtors in Newgate, there are debtors in Ludgate; in the Clink, the Borough, Poultry, and Wood Street Compters, the Marshalsea, the King’s Bench, and at Westminster Gate houses, besides innumerable spunging houses, or “spider’s webs,” with signs like inns, such as the “Pied Bull” in the Borough, and the “Angel” in Cursitor Street. Little boy Hogarth will have much to observe about prisons and prisoners when he is grown to be a man. Many Alsatians take refuge in the Southwark Mint, likewise, and by the same statute deprived of its sanctuary; but which, in some underhand manner--perhaps from there being only one bridge into Southwark, and that rotten--contrives to evade it till late in the reign of George I. Coining flourishes thenceforth more than ever in the Mint; the science of Water Lane being added to the experience of St. Mary Overy, and both being aided, perhaps, by the ancient numismatic traditions of the place. More of the Alsatians are caught up by alguazils of the criminal law, and, after a brief sojourn at Newgate, “patibulate” at Justice Hall, and eventually make that sad journey up Holborn Hill in a cart, stopping for a refresher at the Bowl House, St. Giles’s Pound--alas! it is not always staying for his liquor that will save the saddler of Bawtree from hanging--and so end at Tyburn. Some, too, go a-begging in Lincoln’s Inn, and manufacture some highly remunerative mutilations and ulcers. And some, a very few, tired of the draff and husks in Alsatia, go back to their fathers, and are forgiven. In this hard world, whose members only see the application of parables that teach us love and mercy on Sundays, it is easier to find prodigals to repent than fathers to forgive. But for our hope and comfort, _that_ parable has another and a higher meaning.

Alsatia was linked hand in glove with the Court of the Restoration. ’Twas often but a chapel of ease to the backstairs of Whitehall, and many a great courtier, ruined at basset with the king and his beauties the night before, found his level on the morrow in this vile slum-playing butt, playing cards on a broken pair of bellows. But now, 1697, Whitehall itself is gone. The major part of the enormous pile went by fire in ’91; now the rest, or all but Holbein’s Gate, and the blood-stained Banqueting-house, has fallen a prey to the “devouring element.”

Whitehall, then, has gone by the board. In vain now to look for Horn Chamber, or Cabinet Room, or the stone gallery that flanked Privy Garden, where the imperious, depraved Louise de la Quérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, lived amid “French tapestry, Japan cabinets, screens, pendule clocks, great vases of wrought plate, table stands, chimney furniture, sconces, branches, braseners, all of massive silver, and out of number.” All these things, worthy Master Evelyn, of Sayes Court, Deptford (who about this time has let his said mansion and ground to Peter Velikè, czar of Muscovy, and thinks him but an evil tenant, with his uncouth, uncleanly Russian fashions, his driving of wheelbarrows through neatly-trimmed hedges, and spitting over polished andirons, and gorging himself with raw turnips sliced in brandy)--worthy, sententious Evelyn shall see these things no more. Nay, nor that “glorious gallery,” quoted from his description innumerable times, where was the dissolute king “sitting toying with his concubines, Portsmouth, Cleveland, and Mazarine, &c.; a French boy singing love-songs, whilst about twenty of the great courtiers and others were at basset round a large table, a bank of at least 2,000_l._ in gold before them. Six days after, all was in the dust.” And worse.

Little boy Hogarth, you shall often pass by the banqueting-house--ay, and admire Hans Holbein’s wondrous gate of red brick, tesselated in quaint and beauteous design; of which the fragments, when the gate was pulled down in 1760, were begged by William, Duke of Cumberland, and the pieces numbered, with the project of having them transferred to Windsor park and there re-erected as a royal ducal lodge. But the project was never carried out, and the duke probably forgot all about it, or found something more worth begging for than a lot of old building materials. So exit Whitehall palace: buttery, bakehouse, wood and coal yards, spicery, charcoal-house, king’s privy cellar, council chamber, hearth-money office, and other fripperies in stone. It must have been a grand place, even as the heterogeneous pile that existed in William Dutchman’s time; but if James or Charles had possessed the funds to rebuild it according to Inigo Jones’s magnificent plan, of which the banqueting-house is but an instalment, the palace of Whitehall would have put to the blush the Baths of Diocletian, the golden house of Nero--yea, and the temple which Erostratus burnt, to prove that all things were vanity, even to incendiarism.

Will it please you to walk into the city, now that we have done with Westminster, any day in these three years of the moribund seventeenth century. London is busy enough, noisy enough, dirty enough; but not so smoky. There is little or no foot pavement; but there are plenty of posts and plenty of kennels--three hundred and eleven, I think, between Newgate and Charing Cross. When the humorous operation, resorted to with ugly frequency about this time, of whipping a man at the cart’s tail, takes place, the hangman gives the poor wretch a lash at every kennel the near wheel of the cart grates against. Newgate to Ludgate, Charing Cross to the “Cockpit” at Westminster, are considered the mildest pilgrimages to be undergone by these poor flagellated knaves; but Charing to Newgate is the real _via dolorosa_ of stripes. That pilgrimage was reserved for the great objects of political hatred and vengeance in James II.’s reign--for Titus Oates and Thomas Dangerfield. The former abominable liar and perjurer, stripped of his ambrosial periwig and rustling silk canonicals, turned out of his lodgings in Whitehall, and reduced to the very last of the last, is tried and sentenced, and is very nearly scourged to death. He is to pay an enormous fine besides, and is to lie in Newgate for the remainder of his life. I wonder that like “flagrant Tutchin,” when shuddering under a sentence almost as frightful, he did not petition to be hanged: yet there seems to be an indomitable bull-headed, bull-backed power of endurance about this man Oates--this sham doctor of divinity, this Judas spy of Douai and St. Omer, this broken chaplain of a man-of-war, this living, breathing, incarnate Lie--that enables him to undergo his punishment, and to get over its effects somehow. He has not lain long in Newgate, getting his seared back healed as best he may, when haply, in “pudding-time,” comes Dutch William the Deliverer. Oates’s scourging was evidently alluded to when provision was made in the Bill of Rights against “cruel and unusual punishments.” The heavy doors of Newgate open wide for Titus, who once more dons his wig and canonicals. Reflective persons do not believe in the perjured scoundrel any more, and he is seldom sworn, I should opine, of the common jury or the crowner’s quest. He has “taken the book in his right hand,” and kissed it once too often. By a section of the serious world, who yet place implicit faith in all Sir Edmondbury Godfrey’s wounds, and take the inscription on the Monument of Fish Street Hill as law and gospel, Titus Oates is regarded as a species of Protestant martyr--of a sorry, slippery kind, may be, but, at all events, as one who has suffered sorely for the good cause. The government repension him; he grows fat and bloated, and if Tom Brown is to be believed (_Miscellanies_, 1697), Doctor Oates, about the time of Hogarth’s birth, marries a rich city widow of Jewin Street.

Different, and not so prosperous, is the end of the assistant villain, Dangerfield. He, too, is whipped nearly out of his skin, and within a tattered inch of his miserable life; but his sentence ends before Newgate is reached, and he is being taken to that prison in a hackney-coach, when the hangman’s assistants stop the vehicle at the Gray’s Inn Coffee-house, to give the poor, tired, mangled wretch a drink. Steps out of the coffee-house one Mr. Francis, a counsel learned in the law of Gray’s Inn aforesaid, and who has probably been taking a flask too much at the coffee-house. He is an ardent anti-plot man, and in a railing tone and Newmarket phrase asks Dangerfield whether he has “run his heat and how he likes it.” The bleeding object in the coach, revived to pristine ruffianism by the liquor his gaolers have given him, answers with a flood of ribald execrations--bad language could surely be tolerated in one so evilly intreated as he had been that morning--whereupon the barrister in a rage makes a lunge at Dangerfield’s face, with a bamboo cane, and strikes one of his eyes out. In the fevered state of the man’s blood, erysipelas sets in, and Dangerfield shortly afterwards gives the world a good riddance (though it were better the hangman had done it outright with a halter) and dies. The most curious thing is, that Francis was tried and executed at Tyburn for the murder of this wretched, scourged, blinded perjurer. He was most likely tried by a strong Protestant jury, who (very justly) found him guilty on the facts, but would very probably have found him guilty against the facts, to show their Protestant feeling and belief in the Popish plot; but I say the thing is curious, seeing that the Crown did not exercise its prerogative of mercy and pardon to Francis, who was a gentleman of good family, and manifestly of the court way of thinking. The conclusion is: either that there was more impartial justice in the reign of James II. than we have given that bad time credit for, or that the court let Francis swing through fear of the mob. You see that the mob in those days did not like to be baulked of a show, and that the mob derived equal pleasure from seeing Francis hanged as from seeing Dangerfield whipped. The moral of this apologue is, that Oates and Dangerfield being very much alike in roguery, especially Oates, one got not quite so much as he deserved, and the other not quite enough; which has been the case in many other instances that have occurred in society, both vulgar and polite, since the days of William III.

There, I land you at Temple Bar, on whose gory spikes are the heads of the last conspirators against William the Dutchman’s life. “_Forsitan et nobis_,” whispered Goldsmith slyly to Johnson as they gazed up at the heads which, late in the reign of George III., yet rotted on those fatal spikes. We will not linger at Temple Bar now. Little boy Hogarth, years hence, will take us backwards and forwards through it hundreds of times. The three last years of century seventeen glide away from me. Plumed hats, ye are henceforth to be cocked. Swords, ye shall be worn diagonally, not horizontally. Puffed sleeves, ye must give place to ruffles. Knickerbocker breeches, with rosettes at the knees, ye must be superseded by smalls and rolled stockings. Shoe-bows, the era of buckles is coming. Justaucorps, flapped waistcoats will drive you from the field. Falling bands, your rivals are to be cravats of Mechlin lace. Carlovingian periwigs, the Ramillies’ wig is imminent. Elkanah Settles, greater city poets are to sing the praise of city custards. Claude du Val and Colonel Jack, greater thieves will swing in the greater reign that is to come. And wake up, little boy Hogarth, for William the Dutchman has broken his collar-bone, and lies sick to death at Kensington. The seventeenth century is gone and passed. In 1703 William dies, and the Princess of Denmark reigns in his stead. Up, little boy Hogarth! grow stout and tall--you have to be bound ’prentice and learn the mystery of the cross-hatch and the double cypher. Up, baby Hogarth, there is glorious work for you to do!

Unspoken Dialogue.

Above the trailing mignonette
That deck’d the window-sill,
A lady sat, with lips firm-set,
And looks of earnest will:
Four decades o’er her life had met,
And left her lovely still.

Not to the radiant firmament,
Not to the garden’s grace,
The courses of her mind were bent,
But where, with sweetest face,
Forth from the other window leant
The daughter of the place.

Thus ran her thoughts: “O wretched day!
When She was born so fair:
Well could I let my charms decay,
If she were not their heir;
I loathe the sunbeams as they play
About her golden hair.

“Yet why? she is too good, too mild,
So madly to aspire;
_He_ is no boy to be beguil’d
By sparks of colour’d fire:
I will not dream a pretty child
Can mar my deep desire.

“Her fatherless and lonely days
Are sere before their time:
In scenes of gaiety and praise
She will regain her prime,
And cease to haunt these wooded ways
With sentimental rhyme.”

“Dear child! he comes.--Nay, blush not so
To have your secret known:”]

On to the conscious maiden pass’d
Those words without the tongue;
Half petulantly back she cast
The glist’ning curls that hung
About her neck, and answer’d fast:
“Yes, I am young--too young:

“Yet am I graver than my wont,
Gravest when he is here;
Beneath the glory of his front
I tremble--not with fear:
But as I read, Bethesda’s font
Felt with the Angel near.

“Must I mate only with my kind,
With something as unwise
As my poor self; and never find
Affection I can prize
At once with an adoring mind,
And with admiring eyes?”

“My mother trusts to drag me down
To some low range of life,
By pleasures of the clam’rous town,
And vanity’s mean strife;
And in such selfish tumult drown
My hope to be _his_ wife.”

Then darker round the lady grew
The meditative cloud,--
And stormy thoughts began to brew
She dar’d not speak aloud;
For then without disguise she knew
That rivalry avow’d.

“What is my being if I lose
My love’s last stake? while she
Has the fair future where to choose
Her woman’s destiny--
Free scope those means and powers to use,
Which time denies to me.

“Was it for this her baby arms
About my neck were flung?
Was it for this I found such charms
In her uncertain tongue?
Was it for this those vain alarms
My mother-soul unstrung?

“Oh, horrible! to wish my child--
My sole one left--unborn,
And, seeing her so meek and mild,
To hold such gifts in scorn;
My nature is grown waste and wild,
My heart with fury torn!”

Speechless--enchanted to the spot--
The girl could scarce divine
The whole disaster of her lot,--
But without sound or sign
She cried, “O Mother! love him not;--
Oh! let his love be mine!

“You have had years of full delight,
Your girlhood’s passion-dream
Was realized to touch and sight
As bright as it could seem;--
And now you interpose, like Night,
Before my life’s first gleam.

“Yet you were once what I am now,--
You wore your maiden prize;
You told me of my Father, how
You lived but in his eyes;--
You spoke of the perpetual vow,
The troth that never dies.

“Dear Mother! dearer, kinder far,
If by my childhood’s bed
Your care had never stood to bar
Misfortune from my head;--
But laid me where my brothers are,
Among the quiet dead.

“Ah! why not die? This cruel strife,
Can thus--thus only--cease?
Dear God! take home this erring life--
This struggling soul release:
From Heaven, perchance, upon _his_ wife
I might look down in peace.”

That prayer--like some electric flame,
Struck with resistless force
The lady’s agitated frame,--
Nor halted in its course,
Till her hard pride was turn’d to shame,
Her passion to remorse.

She spoke--her words were very low,
But resolute in tone--
“Dear child! he comes.--Nay, blush not so
To have your secret known:
’Tis best, ’tis best, that I should go--
And leave you here alone.”

Then, as his steps grew near and fast,
Her hand was on the door,
Her heart by holy grace had cast
The demon from its core,--
And on the threshold calm she pass’d
The man she loved no more.

R. MONCKTON MILNES.

Studies in Animal Life.

“Authentic tidings of invisible things;--
Of ebb and flow, and ever-during power,
And central peace subsisting at the heart
Of endless agitation.”--THE EXCURSION.