Chapter III: In which I play the Spy. (With an Illustration.) (2)

But this premium, this indenture money, this ’prentice fee for young William: _unde derivatur_? In the beginning, as you should know, this same ’prentice fee was but a sort of “sweetener,” peace-offering, or _pot de vin_ to the tradesman’s wife. The ’prentice’s mother slipped a few pieces into madam’s hand when the boy put his finger on the blue seal. The money was given that mistresses should be kind to the little lads; that they should see that the trenchers they scraped were not quite bare, nor the blackjacks they licked quite empty; that they should give an eye to the due combing and soaping of those young heads, and now and then extend a matronly ægis, lest Tommy or Billy should have somewhat more cuffing and cudgelling than was quite good for them. By degree this gift money grew to be demanded as a right; and by-and-by comes thrifty Master Tradesman, and pops the broad pieces into his till, calling them premium. Poor little shopkeepers in this “silver age” will take a ’prentice from the parish for five pounds, or from an acquaintance that is broken, for nothing perhaps, and will teach him the great arts and mysteries of sweeping out the shop, sleeping under the counter, fetching his master from the tavern or the mughouse when a customer comes in, or waiting at table; but a rich silversmith or mercer will have as much as a thousand pounds with an apprentice. There is value received on either side. The master is, and generally feels, bound to teach his apprentice _everything_ he knows, else, as worthy Master Defoe puts it, it is “somewhat like Laban’s usage to Jacob, viz. keeping back the beloved Rachel, whom he served seven years for, and putting him off with a blear-eyed Leah in her stead;” and again, it is “sending him into the world like a man out of a ship set ashore among savages, who, instead of feeding him, are indeed more ready to eat him up and devour him.” You have little idea of the state, pomp, and circumstance of a rich tradesman, when the eighteenth century was young. Now-a-days, when he becomes affluent, he sells his stock and good-will, emigrates from the shop-world, takes a palace in Tyburnia or a villa at Florence, and denies that he has ever been in trade at all. Retired tailors become country squires, living at “Places” and “Priories.” Enriched ironmongers and their families saunter about Pau, and Hombourg, and Nice, passing for British Brahmins, from whose foreheads the yellow streak has never been absent since the earth first stood on the elephant, and the elephant on the tortoise, and the tortoise on nothing that I am aware of, save the primeval mud from which you and I, and the Great Mogul, and the legless beggar trundling himself along in a gocart, and all humanity, sprang. But then, Anna D. G., it was different. The tradesman was nothing away from his shop. In it he was a hundred times more ostentatious. He may have had his country box at Hampstead, Highgate, Edmonton, Edgeware; but his home was in the city. Behind the hovel stuffed with rich merchandise, sheltered by a huge timber bulk, and heralded to passers by an enormous sheet of iron and painters’ work—his Sign—he built often a stately mansion, with painted ceilings, with carved wainscoting or rich tapestry and gilt leather-work, with cupboards full of rich plate, with wide staircases, and furniture of velvet and brocade. To the entrance of the noisome _cul-de-sac_, leading to the carved and panelled door (with its tall flight of steps) of the rich tradesman’s mansion, came his coach—yes, madam, his coach, with the Flanders mares, to take his wife and daughters for an airing. In that same mansion, behind the hovel of merchandise, uncompromising Daniel Defoe accuses the tradesman of keeping servants in blue liveries richly laced, like unto the nobility’s. In that same mansion the tradesman holds his Christmas and Shrovetide feasts, the anniversaries of his birthday and his wedding-day, all with much merrymaking and junketing, and an enormous amount of eating and drinking. In that same mansion, in the fulness of time and trade, he dies; and in that same mansion, upon my word, _he lies in state_,—yes, in state: on a _lit de parade_, under a plumed tester, with flambeaux and sconces, with blacks and weepers, with the walls hung with sable cloth, et cætera, et cætera, et cætera.[6] ’Tis not only “Vulture Hopkins” whom a “thousand lights attend” to the tomb, but very many wealthy tradesmen are so buried, and with such pomp and ceremony. Not till the mid-reign of George the Third did this custom expire.

[I should properly in a footnote, but prefer in brackets, to qualify the expression “hovel,” as applied to London tradesmen’s shops at this time, 1712-20. The majority, indeed, merit no better appellation: the windows oft-times are not glazed, albeit the sign may be an elaborate and even artistic performance, framed in curious scroll-work, and costing not unfrequently a hundred pounds. The exceptions to the structural poverty of the shops themselves are to be found in the toymen’s—mostly in Fleet Street,—and the pastrycooks’—mainly in Leadenhall. There is a mania for toys; and the toyshop people realize fortunes. Horace Walpole bought his toy-villa at Strawberry Hill—which he afterwards improved into a Gothic doll’s-house—of a retired _Marchand de Joujoux_. The toy-merchants dealt in other wares besides playthings. They dealt in cogged dice. They dealt in assignations and _billet-doux_. They dealt in masks and dominos. Counsellor Silvertongue may have called at the toyshop coming from the Temple, and have there learnt what hour the countess would be at Heidegger’s masquerade. Woe to the wicked city! Thank Heaven we can go and purchase Noah’s arks and flexible acrobats for our children now, without rubbing shoulders with Counsellor Silvertongue or Lord Fanny Sporus, on their bad errands. Frequented as they were by rank and fashion, the toyshops threw themselves into outward decoration. Many of these shops were kept by Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, and it has ever been the custom of that fantastic nation to gild the outside of pills, be the inside ever so nauseous. Next in splendour to the toyshops were the pastrycooks. Such a bill as can be seen of the charges for fresh furnishing one of these establishments about Twelfth Night time! “Sash windows, all of looking-glass plates; the walls of the shop lined up with galley-tiles in panels, finely painted in forest-work and figures; two large branches of candlesticks; three great glass lanterns; twenty-five sconces against the wall; fine large silver salvers to serve sweetmeats; large high stands of rings for jellies; painting the ceiling, and gilding the lanterns, the sashes, and the carved work!” Think of this, Master Brook! What be your _Cafés des Mille Colonnes_, your Véfours, your Vérys, your _Maisons-dorées_, after this magnificence? And at what sum, think you, does the stern censor, crying out against it meanwhile as wicked luxury and extravagance, estimate this Arabian Nights’ pastrycookery? At three hundred pounds sterling! Grant that the sum represents six hundred of our money. The Lorenzos the Magnificent, of Cornhill and Regent Street, would think little of as many thousands for the building and ornamentation of their palaces of trade. Not for selling tarts or toys though. The tide has taken a turn; yet some comfortable reminiscences of the old celebrity of the city toy and tart shops linger between Temple Bar and Leadenhall. Farley, you yet delight the young. Holt, Birch, Button, Purssell, at your sober warehouses the most urbane and beautiful young ladies—how pale the pasty exhalations make them!—yet dispense the most delightful of indigestions.]

So he must have scraped this apprenticeship money together, Dominie Hogarth: laid it by, by cheeseparing from his meagre school fees, borrowed it from some rich scholar who pitied his learning and his poverty, or perhaps become acquainted with Ellis Gamble, who may have frequented the club held at the “Eagle and Child,” in the little Old Bailey. “A wonderful turn for limning has my son,” I think I hear Dominie Hogarth cry, holding up some precocious cartoon of William’s. “I doubt not, sir, that were he to study the humanities of the Italian bustos, and the just rules of Jesuit’s perspective, and the anatomies of the learned Albinus, that he would paint as well as Signor Verrio, who hath lately done that noble piece in the new hall Sir Christopher hath built for the blue-coat children in Newgate Street.” “Plague on the Jesuits,” answers honest (and supposititious) Mr. Ellis Gamble. “Plague on all foreigners and papists, goodman Hogarth. If you will have your lad draw bustos and paint ceilings, forsooth, you must get one of the great court lords to be his patron, and send him to Italy, where he shall learn not only the cunningness of limning, but to dance, and to dice, and to break all the commandments, and to play on the viol-di-gamby. But if you want to make an honest man and a fair tradesman of him, Master Hogarth, and one who will be a loyal subject to the Queen, and hate the French, you shall e’en bind him ’prentice to me; and I will be answerable for all his concernments, and send him to church and catechize, and all at small charges to you.” Might not such a conversation have taken place? I think so. Is it not very probable that the lad Hogarth being then some fourteen years old, was forthwith combed his straightest, and brushed his neatest, and his bundle or his box of needments being made up by the hands of his loving mother and sisters, despatched westward, and with all due solemnity of parchment and blue seal, bound ’prentice to Mr. Ellis Gamble? I am sure, by the way in which he talks of the poor old Dominie and the dictionary, that he was a loving son. I know he was a tender brother. Good Ellis Gamble—the lad being industrious, quick, and dexterous of hand—must have allowed him to earn some journeyman’s wages during his ’prentice-time; for that probation being out, he set not only himself, but his two sisters, Mary and Ann, up in business. They were in some small hosiery line, and William engraved a shop-card for them, which did not, I am afraid, prosper with these unsubstantial spinsters any more than did the celebrated lollipop emporium established in _The House with the Seven Gables_. One sister survived him, and to her, by his will, he left an annuity of eighty pounds.

Already have I spoken of the Leicester Square gold and silver smith’s style and titles. It is meet that you should peruse them in full:—

So to Cranbourn Street, Leicester Fields, is William Hogarth bound for seven long years. Very curious is it to mark how old trades and old types of inhabitants linger about localities. They were obliged to pull old Cranbourn Street and Cranbourn Alley quite down before they could get rid of the silversmiths, and even now I see them sprouting forth again round about the familiar haunt; the latest ensample thereof being in the shop of a pawnbroker—of immense wealth, I presume, who, gorged and fevered by multitudes of unredeemed pledges, has suddenly astonished New Cranbourn Street with plate-glass windows, overflowing with plate, jewellery, and trinkets; buhl cabinets, gilt consoles, suits of armour, antique china, Pompadour clocks, bronze monsters, and other articles of _virtù_. But don’t you remember Hamlet’s in the dear old Dædalean, bonnet-building Cranbourn Alley days?—that long low shop whose windows seemed to have no end, and not to have been dusted for centuries; those dim vistas of dish-covers, coffee biggins and centre-pieces. You must think of Crœsus when you speak of the reputed wealth of Hamlet. His stock was said to be worth millions. Seven watchmen kept guard over it every night. Half the aristocracy were in his debt. Royalty itself had gone credit for plate and jewellery at Hamlet’s. Rest his bones, poor old gentleman, if he be departed. He took to building and came to grief. His shop is no more, and his name is but a noise.

In our time, Cranbourn Street and Cranbourn Alley were dingy labyrinths of dish-covers, bonnets, boots, coffee-shops, and cutlers; but what must the place have been like in Hogarth’s time? We can have no realizable conception; for late in George the Third’s reign, or early in George the Fourth’s, the whole _pâté_ of lanes and courts between Leicester Square and St. Martin’s Lane had become so shamefully rotten and decayed, that they half tumbled, and were half pulled down. The labyrinth was rebuilt; but, to the shame of the surveyors and architects of the noble landlord, on the same labyrinthine principle of mean and shabby tenements. You see, rents are rents, little fishes eat sweet, and many a little makes a mickle. Since that period, however, better ideas of architectural economy have prevailed; and, although part of the labyrinth remains, there has still been erected a really handsome thoroughfare from Leicester Square to Long Acre. As a sad and natural consequence, the shops don’t let, while the little tenements in the alleys that remain are crowded; but let us hope that the example of the feverish pawnbroker who has burst out in an eruption of jewellery and art fabrics, may be speedily followed by other professors of _bricabrac_.

Gay’s _Trivia_, in miniature, must have been manifest every hour in the day in Hogarth’s Cranbourn Alley. Fights for the wall must have taken place between fops. Sweeps and small coalmen must have interfered with the “nice conduct of a clouded cane.” The beggars must have swarmed here: the blind beggar, and the lame beggar, the stump-in-the-bowl, and the woman bent double: the beggar who blew a trumpet—the impudent varlet!—to announce his destitution;—the beggar with a beard like unto Belisarius, the beggar who couldn’t eat cold meat, the beggar who had been to Ireland and the Seven United Provinces—was this “Philip in the tub” that W. H. afterwards drew?—the beggar in the blue apron, the leathern cap, and the wen on his forehead, who was supposed to be so like the late Monsieur de St. Evremonde, Governor of Duck Island; not forgetting the beggar in the ragged red coat and the black patch over his eye, who by his own showing had been one of the army that swore so terribly in Flanders, and howled Tom D’Urfey’s song, “The Queene’s old souldiers, and the ould souldiers of the Queene.” Then there was the day watchman, who cried the hour when nobody wanted to hear it, and to whose “half-past one,” the muddy goose that waddled after him, cried “quack.” And then there must have been the silent mendicant, of whom Mr. _Spectator_ says (1712), “He has nothing to sell, but very gravely receives the bounty of the people for no other merit than the homage due to his manner of signifying to them that he wants a subsidy.”[7] Said I not truly that the old types _will_ linger in the old localities? What is this silent mendicant but the “serious poor young man” we have all seen standing mute on the edge of the kerb, his head downcast, his hands meekly folded before him, himself attired in speckless but shabby black, and a spotless though frayed white neckerchief?

Mixed up among the beggars, among the costermongers and hucksters who lounge or brawl on the pavement, undeterred by fear of barrow-impounding policemen; among the varlets who have “young lambs to sell”—they have sold those sweet cakes since Elizabeth’s time;—among the descendants and progenitors of hundreds of “Tiddy Dolls,” and “Colly Molly Puffs;” among bailiffs prowling for their prey, and ruffian cheats and gamesters from the back-waters of Covent Garden; among the fellows with hares-and-tabors, the matchsellers, the masksellers—for in this inconceivable period ladies and gentlemen wanted vizors at twelve o’clock at noon—be it admitted, nevertheless, that the real “quality” ceased to wear them about the end of William’s reign—among the tradesmen, wigs awry, and apron-girt, darting out from their shops to swallow their matutinal pint of wine, or dram of strong waters; among all this _tohu-bohu_, this Galimatias of small industries and small vices, chairmen come swaggering and jolting along with the gilded sedans between poles; and lo! the periwigged, Mechlin-laced, gold-embroidered beau hands out Belinda, radiant, charming, powdered, patched, fanned, perfumed, who is come to Cranbourn Alley to choose new diamonds. And more beaux’ shins are wounded by more whalebone petticoats, and Sir Fopling Flutter treads on Aramanta’s brocaded _queue_; and the heavens above are almost shut out by the great projecting, clattering signs. Conspicuous among them is the “Golden Angel,” kept by Ellis Gamble.

Mark, too, that Leicester Fields were then as now the favourite resort of foreigners. Green Street, Bear Street, Castle Street, Panton Street, formed a district called, as was a purlieu in Westminster too, by the Sanctuary, “Petty France.” Theodore Gardelle, the murderer, lived about Leicester Fields. Legions of high-dried Mounseers, not so criminal as he, but peaceable, honest, industrious folk enough, peered out of the garret windows of Petty France with their blue, bristly gills, red nightcaps, and filthy indoor gear. They were always cooking hideous messes, and made the already unwholesome atmosphere intolerable with garlic. They wrought at water-gilding, clock-making, sign-painting, engraving for book illustrations—although in this department the Germans and Dutch were dangerous rivals. A very few offshoots from the great Huguenot colony in Spitalfields were silk-weavers. There were then as now many savoury, tasting and unsavoury-smelling French ordinaries; and again, then as now, some French washerwomen and clearstarchers. But the dwellers in Leicester Fields slums and in Soho were mainly Catholics frequenting the Sardinian ambassador’s chapel in Duke Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. French hairdressers and perfumers lived mostly under Covent Garden Piazza, in Bow Street and in Long Acre. Very few contrived to pass Temple Bar. The citizens appeared to have as great a horror of them as of the players, and so far as they could, by law, banished them their bounds, rigorously. French dancing, fencing, and posture masters, and quack doctors, lived at the court end of the town, and kept, many of them, their coaches. Not a few of the grinning, fantastic French community were spies of the magnificent King Louis. Sunday was the Frenchmen’s great day, and the Mall in St. James’s park their favourite resort and fashionable promenade. It answered for them all the purposes which the old colonnade of the Quadrant was wont to serve, and which the flags of Regent Street serve now. On Sunday the blue, bristly gills were clean shaven, the red nightcaps replaced by full-bottomed wigs, superlatively curled and powdered. The filthy indoor gear gave way to embroidered coats of gay colours, with prodigious cuffs, and the skirts stiffened with buckram. Lacquer-hilted swords stuck out behind them. Paste buckles glittered in their shoon. Glass rings bedecked their lean paws. They held their _tricornes_ beneath their arms, flourished their canes and inhaled their snuff with the best beaux on town. We are apt to laugh at the popular old caricatures of the French Mounseer, and think those engravings unkind, unnatural, and overdrawn; but just shave me this bearded, moustached, braided and be-ringed Jules, Gustave, or Adolphe who comes swaggering to-day from the back of Sherrard Street or Marylebone Street, round by the County Fire Office into Regent Street; shave me the modern Mounseer quite clean, clap a periwig on his head, a _chapeau bras_ beneath his arm, a sword by his side; clothe his shrunken limbs in eighteenth century costume; or better, see the French comedian in some old comedy at the _Français_ or the _Odéon_, and you will cry out at once: “There is the Mounseer whom Hogarth, Gilray, Bunbury, and Rowlandson drew.” And yet I owe an apology, here, to the Mounseers; for it was very likely some courteous, albeit grimacing denizen of Petty France who supplied our Hogarth with the necessary French translation of the gold and silver smith’s style and titles to engrave on his shop-card.

I am to be pardoned, I hope, for lingering long in Leicester Fields. I shall have to return to the place often, for William Hogarth much affected it. In Leicester Fields he lived years afterwards when he was celebrated and prosperous. Where Pagliano’s Hotel is now, had he his house, the sign, the “Golden Head,” and not the “Painter’s Head,” as I have elsewhere put it. There he died. There his widow lived for many—many years afterwards, always loving and lamenting the great artist and good man, her husband. It was about Leicester Fields too—nay, unless I mistake, in Cranbourn Alley itself, that old nutcracker-faced Nollekens the sculptor pointed out William to Northcote the painter. “There,” he cried, “see, there’s Hogarth.” He pointed to where stood a little stout-faced sturdy man in a sky-blue coat, who was attentively watching a quarrel between two street boys. It was Mr. Mulready’s “Wolf and the Lamb” story a little before its time. The bigger boy oppressed the smaller; whereupon Hogarth patted the diminutive victim on the head, and gave him a coin, and said with something like a naughty word that he wouldn’t stand it, if he was the small boy: no, not he.

Seven years at cross-hatch and double cypher. Seven years turning and re-turning salvers and tankards on the leathern pad, and every month and every year wielding the graver and burnisher with greater strength and dexterity. What legions of alphabets, in double cypher, he must have “drawn with great correctness;” what dictionary loads of Latin and Norman-French mottoes he must have flourished beneath the coats of arms! Oh, the scutcheons he must have blazoned in the symbolism of lines! Blank for argent, dots for or, horizontal for azure, vertical for gules, close-chequer for sable. The griffins, the lions, the dragons, rampant, couchant, regardant, langued, gorged, he must have drawn! The chevrons, the fesses, the sinoples of the first! He himself confesses that his just notions of natural history were for a time vitiated by the constant contemplation and delineation of these fabulous monsters, and that when he was out of his time he was compelled to unlearn all his heraldic zoology. To the end his dogs were very much in the “supporter” style, and the horses in the illustrations in Hudibras strongly resemble hippogriffs.

He must have been studying, and studying hard, too, at drawing, from the round and plane during his ’prentice years. Sir Godfrey Kneller had a kind of academy at his own house in 1711; but Sir James Thornhill did not establish his till long after Hogarth had left the service of Ellis Gamble. Hogarth tells us that as a boy he had access to the studio of a neighbouring painter. Who may this have been? Francis Hoffmann; Hubertz; Hulzberg, the warden of the Lutheran Church in the Savoy; Samuel Moore of the Custom House? Perhaps his earliest instructor was some High Dutch etcher of illustrations living eastwards to be near the booksellers in Paternoster Row; or perhaps the “neighbouring painter” was an artist in tavern and shop signs. Men of no mean proficiency wrought in that humble but lucrative line of emblematic art in Anna’s “silver age.”

That Hogarth possessed considerable graphic powers when he engraved Ellis Gamble’s shop-card, you have only to glance at the angel holding the palm above the commercial announcement, to be at once convinced. This figure, however admirably posed and draped, _may_ have been copied from some foreign frontispiece. The engraving, however, as an example of pure line, is excellent. We are left to wonder whether it was by accident or by design of quaint conceit that the right hand of the angel has a finger too many.

Of Hogarth’s adventures during his apprenticeship, with the single exception of his holiday excursion to Highgate, when there was a battle-royal in a suburban public-house, and when he drew a capital portrait of one of the enraged combatants, the Muse is dumb. He led, very probably, the life of nineteen-twentieths of the London ’prentices of that period: only he must have worked harder and more zealously than the majority of his fellows. Concerning the next epoch of his life the Muse deigns to be far more explicit, and, I trust, will prove more eloquent on your worships’ behalf. I have done with the mists and fogs that envelop the early part of my hero’s career, and shall be able to trace it now year by year until his death.

FOOTNOTES

[1] According to Tertullian, Asclepiades, the comic cynic, advocated riding on cow-back as the most healthful, and especially the most independent means of locomotion in the world; for, said he, she goes so slowly that she can never get tired. Wherever there is a field, there is her banquet; _and you may live on her milk all the way_. But I think that the most economical and the merriest traveller on record was the Giant Hurtali (though the Rabbins will have that it was Og, King of Basan), who sat astride the roof of Noah’s ark _à la_ cockhorse, steering that great galleon with his gigantic legs, getting his washing for nothing, and having his victuals handed up to him through the chimney.—See _Menage_ and _Le Pelletier_; _l’Arche de Noé_, c. 25.

[2] This “Prusia” occurred in the dedication of the “March to Finchley” to Frederick the Great. His friends quizzed him a good deal about the error, and he undertook to correct it by hand in every proof of the plate sold. But he soon grew tired of making the mark ~ with a pen over the single s, and at last had the offensive “Prusia” burnished out of the copper, and the orthodox “Prussia” substituted. But even then the quizzers were not tired, and showed him a Prussian thaler bearing Frederick’s effigy, and the legend of which spoke of him as _Borussiæ Rex_. ’Twas the story of the old man and his donkey over again.

[3] Till the legislature deprives the people of their “eleven days,” I am using the old-style calendar.

[4] I have seen it somewhere stated that Gamble was a “silversmith of eminence,” residing on or near Snow Hill. “_Cela n’empêche pas_,” as the Hanoverian Queen on her death-bed said to her repentant husband. I see no reason why Gamble should not have been originally of Snow Hill, and have emigrated before 1720 to the Court end of the town.

[5] “The Complete English Tradesman,” i. 234.

[6] “Let it be interred after the manner of the country, and the laws of the place, and the _dignity of the person_. And Ælian tells us that excellent persons were buried in purple, and men of an ordinary fortune had their graves only trimmed with branches of olive and mourning flowers.” So Bishop Taylor in _Holy Dying_. The tide of feeling in this age of ours sets strongly against mortuary pomp; yet should we remember that with the old pomps and obsequies of our forefathers much real charity was mingled. All the money was not spent in wax-tapers and grim feastings. At the death of a wealthy citizen, hundreds of poor men and women had complete suits of mourning given to them, and the fragments of the “funeral baked meats” furnished forth scores of pauper tables before evensong. Lazarus had his portion when Dives passed away. Now, who profits by a funeral beyond half a dozen lacqueys, and Messrs. Tressel and Hatchment, the undertakers?

[7] I can’t resist the opportunity here to tell a story of a Beggar, the more so, that it made me laugh, and was told me by an Austrian officer; and Austrian officers are not the most laughter-compelling people in the world. My informant happened to alight one day at some post town in Italy, and was at once surrounded by the usual swarm of beggars, who, of course, fought for the honour (and profit) of carrying his baggage. Equally, of course, each beggar took a separate portion of the _impedimenta_—one a hat-box, one an umbrella, and so on—so that each would claim a separate reward. At the expenditure of much patience, and some small change, the traveller had at last paid each extortionate impostor that which was not due to him; when there approached a reverend, but ragged-looking man, with a long white beard, and who, with an indescribable look of dirty dignity, held out his hand like the rest. The traveller had remarked that this patriarch had stood aloof during the squabble for the luggage, and had moved neither hand nor foot in pretending to carry it. Naturally, before the traveller disbursed more coin, he briefly desired the man with the white beard to define his claim. The reply was, I think, incomparable for cool and dignified impudence. The patriarch drew himself up to his full height, placed his right hand on his breast, and in slow and solemn accents made answer:—“_Ed anche io sono stato presente._” “I, too, was present!” Sublime beggar!

Mabel.

I.

In the sunlight:—
Little Mab, the keeper’s daughter, singing by the brooklet’s side,
With her playmates singing carols of the gracious Easter-tide;
And the violet and the primrose make sweet incense for the quire,
In the springlight, when the rosebuds hide the thorns upon the briar.

II.

In the lamplight:—
With a proud defiant beauty, Mab, the fallen, flaunts along,
Speaking sin’s words, wildly laughing, she who sang that Paschal song,
And a mother lies a-dying in the cottage far away,
And a father cries to Heaven, “THOU hast said, ‘_I will repay_.’”

III.

In the moonlight:—
By the gravestone in the churchyard, Mabel, where her mother sleeps,
Like the tearful saint of Magdala, an Easter vigil keeps:—
There, trailing cruel thorns, storm-drenched, plaining with piteous
bleat,
The lost lamb (so her mother prayed) and the Good Shepherd meet.

S. R. H.

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.