Chapter IV: Introduction (3)

“See here,” and the stranger moved the lamp immediately between them, when, for the first time, Stephen clearly saw the countenance of his customer. His face was red as brick, and his eyes looked deep as the sea, and glowed with good humour. His mouth was large and frank, and his voice came as from the well of truth. His hair fell in curls behind his ears, and his moustache, black as coal, made a perfect crescent on his lip, the points upwards. Other men may be merely good fellows, the stranger seemed the best. “See here,” he repeated, and produced a drawing on a small piece of paper, “can you cut me this in a seal ring?”

“Humph!” and Stephen put on his spectacles; “the subject is——”

“Bacchus squeezing grape-juice into the cup of Death,” said the stranger.

“An odd conceit,” cried the goldsmith.

“We all have our whims, or woe to the sellers,” said the customer. “Well, can it be done?”

“Surely, sir, surely. On what shall it be cut?”

“An emerald, nothing less. It is the drinker’s stone. In a week, Master Curlew?”

“This day week, sir, if I live in health.”

The day came. Stephen was a tradesman of his word, and the stranger sat in the back-parlour, looking curiously into the ring.

“_Per Bacco!_ Rarely done. Why, Master Curlew, thou hast caught the very chops of glorious Liber, his swimming eyes, and blessed mouth. Ha! ha! thou hast put thy heart into the work, Master Curlew; and how cunningly hast thou all but hid the dart of death behind the thyrsus of the god! How his life-giving hand clutches the pulpy cluster, and with what a gush comes down the purple rain, plashing into rubies in the cup of Mors!”

“It was my wish to satisfy, most noble sir,” said Stephen, meekly, somewhat confounded by the loud praises of the speaker.

“May you never be choked with a grape-stone, Master Curlew, for this goodly work. Ha!” and the speaker looked archly at the withered goldsmith; “it hath cost thee many a headache ere thou couldst do this.”

“If I may say it, I have laboured hard at the craft—have been a thrifty, sober man,” said Stephen.

“Sober! Ha! ha! ha!” shouted the speaker, and his face glowed redder, and his eyes melted; “sober! why, thou wast begot in a wine cask, and suckled by a bottle, or thou hadst never done this. By the thigh of Jupiter! he who touched this,” and the stranger held up the ring to his eye, and laughed again, “he who touched this hath never known water. Tut! man, were I to pink thee with a sword thou’dst bleed wine!”

“I,” cried Stephen, “I bleed,” and he glanced fearfully towards the door, and then at the stranger, who continued to look at the ring.

“The skin of the sorriest goat shall sometimes hold the choicest liquor,” said the stranger, looking into the dry face of the goldsmith. “Come, confess, art thou not a sly roysterer? Or art thou a hermit over thy drops, and dost count flasks alone? Ay! ay! well, to thy cellar, man; and—yes—thine arms are long enough—bring up ten bottles of thy choicest Malaga.”

“I!—my cellar!—Malaga!” stammered Stephen.

“Surely thou hast a cellar?” and the stranger put his hat upon the table with the air of a man set in for a carouse.

“For forty years, but it hath never known wine,” cried the goldsmith. “I—I have never known wine.” The stranger said nothing; but, turning full upon Stephen, and, placing his hands upon his knees, he blew out his flushing cheeks like a bagpipe, and sat with his eyes blazing upon the heretic. “No, never!” gasped Stephen, terrified, for a sense of his wickedness began to possess him.

“And thou dost repent?” asked the stranger, with a touch of mercy towards the sinner.

“I—humph! I’m a poor man,” cried Curlew; “yes, though I’m a goldsmith, and seem rich, I—I’m poor! poor!”

“Well, ’tis lucky I come provided,” and the stranger placed upon the table a couple of flasks. Whether he took them from under his cloak, or evoked them through the floor, Stephen knew not; but he started at them as they stood rebukingly upon his table, as if they had been two sheeted ghosts. “Come, glasses,” cried the giver of the wine.

“Glasses!” echoed Stephen, “in my house!”

“Right, glasses! No—cups, and let them be gold ones!” and the bacchanal, for it was plain he was such, waved his arm with an authority which Stephen attempted not to dispute, but rose and hobbled into the shop, and returned with two cups just as the first cork was drawn. “Come, there’s sunlight in that, eh?” cried the stranger, as he poured the wine into the vessels. “So, thou hast never drunk wine? Well, here’s to the baptism of thy heart!” And the stranger emptied the cup, and his lips smacked like a whip.

And Stephen Curlew tasted the wine, and looked around, below, above; and the oaken wainscot did not split in twain, nor did the floor yawn, nor the ceiling gape. Stephen tasted a second time; thrice did he drink, and he licked his mouth as a cat licks the cream from her whiskers, and, putting his left hand upon his belly, softly sighed.

“Ha! ha! another cup! I know thou wilt,” and Stephen took another, and another; and the two flasks were in brief time emptied. They were, however, speedily followed by two more, placed by the stranger on the table, Stephen opening his eyes and mouth at their mysterious appearance. The contents of these were duly swallowed, and lo! another two stood before the goldsmith, or, as he then thought, four.

“There never was such a Bacchus!” cried Stephen’s customer, eyeing the ring. “Why, a man may see his stomach fairly heave, and his cheek ripen with wine: yet, till this night, thou hadst never tasted the juice! What—what could have taught thee to carve the god so capitally?”

“Instinct—instinct,” called out the goldsmith, his lips turned to clay by too much wine.

“And yet,” said the stranger, “I care not so much for—— How old art thou, Stephen?”

“Sixty-five,” and Stephen hiccupped.

“I care not so much for thy Death, Stephen; instinct should have made thee a better hand at Death.”

“Tis a good Death,” cried the goldsmith, with unusual boldness, “a most sweet Death.”

“Tis too broad—the skeleton of an alderman with the flesh dried upon him. He hath not the true desolation, the ghastly nothingness, of the big bugbear. No matter; I’m content; but this I’ll say, though thou hast shown thyself a professor at Bacchus, thou art yet but a poor apprentice at Death.”

Stephen Curlew answered not with words, but he snored very audibly. How long he slept he could not well discover, but when he awoke he found himself alone; no, not alone, there stood upon the table an unopened flask of wine. In a moment the mystery broke upon him—and he sprang to his feet with a shriek, and rushed into the shop. No—he had not been drugged by thieves—all was as it should be. The stranger, like an honest and courteous man, had taken but his own; and, without disturbing the sleeper, had quitted the house. And Stephen Curlew, the wine glowing in his heart—yea, down to his very nails, stood and smiled at the unopened flask before him.

Stephen continued to eye the flask; and though its donor had shared with him he knew not how many bottles, Stephen was resolved that not one drop of the luscious juice before him should wet an alien throat. But how—where to secure it? For, in the new passion which seized upon the goldsmith, the one flask seemed to him more precious than the costly treasure in his shop—a thing to be guarded with more scrupulous affection—more jealous love. In what nook of his house to hide the glorious wealth—what corner, where it might escape the profane glances and itching fingers of his workmen? The thought fell in a golden flash upon him—the cellar—ay, the cellar! Who of his household ever thought of approaching the cellar? Stephen seized the flask and lamp, and paused. The cellar had no lock! No matter; he had a bag of three-inch nails and a stout hammer.

* * * * *

The next morning neighbours met at the closed door and windows of the goldsmith, and knocked and shouted, shouted and knocked. They were, however, reduced to a crowbar, and, at length, burst into the house. Every place was searched, but there was nowhere visible old Stephen Curlew. Days passed on, and strange stories filled the ears of men. One neighbour vowed that he had had a dream or a vision, he knew not which, wherein he saw the goldsmith whirled down the Strand in a chariot drawn by a lion and a tiger, and driven by a half-naked young man, wearing a panther skin, and on his head vine-leaves and ivy. An old woman swore that she had seen Stephen carried away by a dozen devils (very much in liquor), with red faces and goat legs. However, in less than a month, the goldsmith’s nephew, a scrivener’s clerk, took possession of Curlew’s wealth, and became a new-made butterfly with golden wings. As for Stephen, after various speculations, it was concluded, to the satisfaction of all parties, that he must have been carried away by Satan himself, and the nephew cared not to combat popular opinions. But such, in truth, was not the end of the goldsmith. Hear it.

* * * * *

Stephen, possessed by the thought of the cellar, with the one flask, a lamp, nails, and hammer, proceeded to the sacred crypt. He arrived in the vault, and having kissed the flask, reverently put it down, and straightway addressed himself to the work. Closing the door, he drove the first nail, the second, third; and borrowing new strength from the greatness of his purpose, he struck each nail upon the head with the force and precision of a Cyclops, burying it deep in the oak. With this new-found might he drove eleven nails; the twelfth was between his thumb and finger, when looking round—oh! sad mishap, heavy mischance! awful error!—he had driven the nails from the wrong side! In a word—and we tremble while we write it—he had nailed himself in! There he stood, and there stood the flask. He gasped with horror; his foot stumbled, struck the lamp, it fell over, and the light went out.

Shall we write further on the agony of Stephen Curlew? Shall we describe how he clawed and struck at the door, now in the hope to wrench a nail, and now to alarm the breathing men above? No; we will not dwell upon the horror; it is enough that the fate of the goldsmith was dimly shadowed forth in the following paragraph of last Saturday:—

“Some labourers, digging a foundation near”—no, we will not name the place, for the family of the Curlews is not yet extinct, and there may be descendants in the neighbourhood—“near——, found a skeleton. A hammer was beside it, with several long nails: a small wine flask was also found near the remains, which, it is considered, could not have been in the vault in which they were discovered less than a century and three-quarters!”

Oh, ye heads of families! and oh, ye thrifty, middle-aged bachelors, boarding with families, or growing mouldy by yourselves, never, while ye live, forget the terrible end of Stephen Curlew. And oh, ye heads of families—and oh, ye aforesaid bachelors, albeit ye have only one bottle left, never, NEVER NAIL UP THE WINE CELLAR!

------------------------------------------------------------------------

RECOLLECTIONS OF GUY FAWKES

“When a man has once been very famous for jests and merry adventures, he
is made to adopt all the jests that want a father, and many times
such as are unworthy of him.”—Motteux’s _Life of Rabelais_.

AT midnight, on the fifth of November, in the year of grace one thousand six hundred and five, Guido Fawkes, “gentleman,” was discovered, “booted and spurred,” in the vicinity of St Stephen’s Chapel, having on his person “three matches, a tinder-box, and a dark lantern”; and purposing by means of gunpowder to blow up, says King James, “the whole nobility, the most part of the knights and gentry, besides the whole judges of the land, with _most of the lawyers_ and the whole clerks!” For the one indiscretion Guido Fawkes forfeited his gentility, and became a proverb of wickedness. In boyhood we looked upon Guido Fawkes, gentleman, as one little lower than the devil; he had four horns, and a dozen tails. “Years that bring the philosophic mind” have divested him of these excrescences and appendages, and Guido Fawkes now appears to matured charities merely a person of a singularly eccentric disposition.

Some five and twenty years ago it was the patriotic custom of the authorities of an Isle of Sheppy dockyard to bestow upon their apprentices a few waggon-loads of resinous timber, that a bonfire worthy of the cause it celebrated might be kindled from the public purse—that the effigy of the arch-fiend Guy might be consumed in a fire three times hotter than the fire of a furnace. Such fierce liberality was not lost upon the townspeople; their ardour in the burning business smouldered not; every man subscribed his plank or log; and, from the commissioner in his uniform, to Bobby in his pinafore, the fifth of November glowed, in the calendar of their minds, a pillar of fire. For a month before that day, the coming anniversary busied the thoughts of boyish executioners, resolved to show their patriotism in the appointments of the Guy—in the grotesque iniquity of his face—in the cumbrous state of his huge arm-chair. To beg clothes from door to door was the business of every lover of Church and State. To ask for a coat—a pair of breeches—a shirt (the frill could be made of paper)—hose and hat, was not mendicity, but the fulfilment of a high social duty.

Guy Fawkes would at length be dressed. A philosopher might have found good matter in his eleemosynary suit. In the coat of the bloodthirsty wretch he might have recognised the habit of Scum, the slop-seller, a quiet trader afloat of twenty thousand pounds—in the vest of the villainous ruffian the discarded waistcoat of Smallgrog, the honest landlord of a little house for sailors—in the stockings of the atrocious miscreant the hose of the equitable Weevil, biscuit-contractor to his Majesty’s fleet—whilst for the leather of the fiend-like effigy, Guy Fawkes was to be exhibited, and afterwards burnt in, the broad-toed shoes of that best of men, Trap, the town attorney.

The chair, too, in which Guy Fawkes sat, might it not have some day enshrined a justice of the peace? and the lantern fixed in the hand of the diabolical, lynx-eyed monster, might it not have been the property of the most amiable and most somnolent of all the Blue Town watchmen? A mask was fixed upon the effigy, or the lump of clay kneaded into human features, and horribly or delicately expressed, according to the benevolent art of the makers!—might not the same visor have been worn by a perfect gentleman, with considerable advantage, at a masquerade?—might not the clay nose and mouth of the loathsome traitor have borne an accidental likeness to the very pink of patriots? Let philosophy ponder well on Guy Fawkes.

We will now attempt our childish recollections of the great Guy. We have waked at midnight, perhaps dreaming of the bonfire about to blaze, and thinking we heard the distant chorus sounding to the advent of the Mighty Terror. No, it was the sea booming across the marsh, the wind rising or falling. There was nothing for it but to go to sleep and dream of unextinguishable squibs and crackers. At length four o’clock arrives; the cocks crow—the boys can’t be long now. There—hark!—how the chant comes up the street, like one voice—the voice of a solitary droning witch! We lie breathless, and shape to ourselves Guy Fawkes in the dark! Our hearts beat quicker and quicker as the chant becomes louder; and we sit up in bed, as the boys approach the door, and, oh! how we wish to be with them! There—there they are in full chorus! Hark:—

“The fifth of November, as I can remember,
Is gunpowder treason and plot,
I know no reason, why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.”

We feel an unutterable pang, for loudest among the loud, we hear the shrill voice of Jack Tarleton. “Ha!” we sigh, “_his_ mother lets _him_ out.” The bitterness passes away with the—

“Hallo, boys! Hallo, boys! make a round ring,
Hallo, boys! Hallo, boys! God save the king!”

“Rejoicing in the captivity of a suit of clothes stuffed with hay”
]

And now the procession moves on, and the voices die in the distance, and we feel we are left alone; and, in a few minutes, we hear new revellers, rejoicing in the captivity of a suit of clothes stuffed with hay, and called Guy Fawkes. Guy Fawkes! Guy Fawkes! who—what _is_ Guy Fawkes? We had been told that he had been caught with a lantern, tinder-box and matches, ready to blow up thousands of barrels of gunpowder, and so to destroy the king, bishops, and members of Parliament. It must be shocking—very shocking; still, we could not perfectly envisage the atrocity—we could not make out the full horror. We had the undefined sense of the greatness of a king, though we hardly dared to hope we should ever see one. We had a less remote notion of the nature of a bishop, having been helped somewhat in our speculations by the person of the curate at the garrison church. “Curates may come to be bishops, only bishops are very much greater; and curates have nothing upon their heads, whereas certain bishops might wear mitres.” On learning this we thought that bishops were merely full-grown curates; in the same way that we had seen Poland hens with their topknots of feathers only the spring before bare-headed little chicks. It was thus, in the irreverence of childhood, we disposed of the whole bench of bishops. But now came we to the difficulty—what, what could be a member of Parliament? Was it a living thing? If so, had it a voice? Could it speak? Could it sit? Could it say yes and no? Could it walk? Could it turn? Or was it merely an image? Was it pulled by wires, like sister Jenny’s doll? We had been told that members of Parliament made laws. What _were_ laws? Were they the lions and unicorns on the king’s arms? Were they a better sort of cake, too dear for everybody to buy? Little boys ate parliament-cakes—were law-cakes for men? If so, were they gilt or plain?—with comfits or without?

It is no matter, we thought, being unable to satisfy ourselves: it is no matter. Guy Fawkes—that shadowy, terrible mystery—had once lived and tried to kill the king, the full-grown curates, and those undivined riddles—members of Parliament. We again went to our first question. Who _was_ Guy Fawkes? Did he have a father and mother? Was Guy Fawkes ever a little boy? and did he fly a kite and play at marbles? If so, how could he have ever thought it worth his while to trouble himself with other matters? There was something terrifying in the idea of having played with Guy Fawkes. We fancied him at taw—we saw him _knuckle down_. No—it could not be; the imagination of the child could not dwell upon such an impossibility. Guy Fawkes a boy!—a baby! now shaking a rattle—now murmuring as he fed, his mother smiling down upon him! No, no—it was impossible; Guy Fawkes was never born—he was from the first a man—he never could have been a baby. He seemed to us a part of the things that had always been, and always would be—a piece of grim eternity; a principle of everlasting wickedness.

Is it in childhood alone—is it only in the dim imaginings of infancy—in the wandering guesses of babyhood, that we manifest this ignorance? When the full-grown thief is hanged, do we not sometimes forget that he was the child of misery and vice—born for the gallows—nursed for the halter? Did we legislate a little more for the cradle, might we not be spared some pains for the hulks?

And then we had been told that Guy Fawkes came from Spain. Where was Spain? Was it a million miles away, and what distance was a million miles? Were there little boys in Spain, or were they all like Guy Fawkes? How strange, and yet how delightful to us did it seem to feel that we were a part of the wonderful things about us! To be at all upon this world—to be one at the great _show_ of men and women—to feel that when we grew bigger we should know everything of kings, bishops, members of Parliament, and Guy Fawkes! What a golden glory hung about the undiscovered!

And Guy Fawkes, we had heard, had his head cut off, and his body cut into quarters! Could this be true? Could men do to men what we had seen Fulk the butcher do to sheep? How much, we thought, had little boys to grow out of before they could agree to this! And then, when done, what was the good of it—what _could_ be the good of it? Was Guy Fawkes eaten—if not, _why_ cut him up?

Had Guy Fawkes a wife, and little boys and girls? Did he love his children, and buy them toys and apples—or, like Sawney Bean, did he devour them? Did Guy Fawkes say his prayers?

Had Guy Fawkes a friend? Did he ever laugh—did he ever tell a droll story? Did Guy Fawkes ever sing a song? Like Frampton, the Blue Town Barber, did Guy Fawkes ever get drunk? At length we put to ourselves the question of questions:—

_Was there ever such a man as Guy Fawkes? Did Guy Fawkes ever live?_

This query annoyed us with the doubt that we had been tricked into a hate, a fear, a loathing, a wonder—and a mixture of these passions and emotions, for a fib. We felt disappointed when we felt the reality of Guy Fawkes to be doubtful. We had heard of griffins and unicorns, of dragons that had eaten men like apples, and had then been told that there never had been any such thing. If we were not to believe in a dragon, why should we believe in Guy Fawkes? After all, was the whole story but make-game?

The child passively accepts a story of the future, he can bring his mind up to a thing promised, but wants faith in the past. The cause is obvious; he recollects few things gone, but is full of things to come. Hence Guy Fawkes was with us the ogre of a nursery; we could have readily believed, especially after the Story of Beauty and the Beast, that he married Goody Two Shoes, and was the father of Little Red Riding Hood.

But Guy Fawkes grows with us from boyhood to youth. He gets flesh and blood with every November; he is no longer the stuffed plaything of a schoolboy or the grotesque excuse for begging vagabonds, but the veritable Guy Fawkes, “gentleman.” We see him, “Thomas Percy’s alleged man,” at the door of the vault, “booted and spurred”; we behold that “very tall and desperate fellow,” lurking in the deep of night, with looks of deadly resolution, pounced upon by that vigilant gentleman of the privy-chamber, Sir Thomas Knevit! We go with Guido, “the new Mutius Scævola, born in England,” before the council, where “he often smiles in scornful manner, not only avowing the fact, but repenting only, with the said Scævola, his failing in the execution thereof.” We think of him “answering quickly to every man’s objection, scoffing at any idle questions which were propounded to him, and jesting with such as he thought had no authority to examine him.” And then we think of the thanksgiving of the great James, who gave praise that, had the intent of the wicked prevailed, he should not have “died ingloriously in an ale-house, a stew, or such vile place,” but with “the best and most honourable company.”[7]

Footnote 7:

See “His Majesty’s Speech concerning the Gunpowder Plot,” etc., in the
_Harleian Miscellany_.

Guy Fawkes is, in our baby thoughts, a mysterious vision, one of the shadows of evil advancing on the path of childhood. We grow older, and the substances of evil come close upon us—we see their dark lantern, and snuff the brimstone.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

ELIZABETH AND VICTORIA.

EVERY generation compared to the age it immediately succeeds is but a further lapse from Paradise. Every grandfather is of necessity a wiser, kinder, nobler being that the grandson doomed to follow him—every grandmother chaster, gentler, more self-denying, more devoted to the beauty of goodness, than the giddy, vain, thoughtless creature, who in her time is sentenced to be grandmother to somebody, whose still increased defects will only serve to bring out the little lustre of the gentlewoman who preceded her. Man, undoubtedly, had at the first a fixed amount of goodness bestowed upon him; but this goodness, by being passed from generation to generation, has, like a very handsome piece of coin, with arms and legend in bold relief, become so worn by continual transit, that it demands the greatest activity of faith to believe that which is now current in the world, to be any portion of the identical goodness with which the human race was originally endowed. Hapless creatures are we! Moral paupers of the nineteenth century, turning a shining cheek upon one another, and by the potent force of swagger, passing off our thin, worn, illegible pieces of coin—how often, no thicker, no weightier than a spangle on a player’s robe!—when our glorious ancestors, in the grandeur of their goodness, could ring down musical shekels! Nay, as we go back, we find the coin of excellence so heavy, so abounding, that how any man—Samson perhaps excepted—had strength enough to carry his own virtues about him, puzzles the effeminacy of present thought. Folks then were doubtless made grave, majestic in their movements by the very weight of their excellence. Whilst we, poor anatomies—skipjacks of the nineteenth century—we carry all our ready virtue in either corner of our waistcoat pocket, and from its very lightness, are unhappily enabled to act all sorts of unhallowed capers—to forget the true majesty of man in the antics of the mountebank. Forlorn degradation of the human race!

But the tears of the reader—for if he have a heart of flesh, it is by this time melting in his eyes—are not confidently demanded for only the one generation whereof (seeing he is our reader) he is certainly not the worst unit: but we here require of him to weep for posterity; yes, to subscribe a rivulet of tears for the generations to come. The coinage of the virtues at present in circulation among us is so thin, so defaced, so battered, so clipt, that it appears to us wholly impossible that any portion of the currency can descend a couple of generations lower. What, then, is to become of our grandchildren? Without one particle of golden truth and goodness left to them, for we cannot take into account the two or three pieces hoarded—as old ladies have hoarded silver pennies—what remains, what alternative for our descendants but to become a generation of coiners? Can any man withstand the terror of this picture, wherein all the world are shown as so many passers of pocket-pieces, lacquered over with something that seems like gold and silver, but which, indeed, is only seeming? A picture wherein he who is the ablest hypocrite—passing off the greatest amount of false coin upon his neighbor—shall appear the most virtuous person! Is not this an appalling scene to contemplate? Yet, if there be any truth in a common theory, if there be any veracity in the words written in a thousand pages, uttered at every fireside, dropt in the casual meeting of man and man at door-steps, in by-lanes, highways, and market-places—the picture we have shadowed forth must become an iron present.

“We shall never see such times again!”

“The world isn’t what it used to be.”

“When I was a boy, things hadn’t come to this pass.”

“The world gets wickeder and wickeder.”

Since the builders of Babel were scattered, these thoughts have been voiced in every tongue. From the very discontent and fantasticalness of his nature, man looks backward at the lost Paradise of another age. He affects to snuff the odour of its fruits and flowers, and with a melancholy shaking of the head, sees, or thinks he sees, the flashing of the fiery swords that guard them. And then, in the restlessness of his heart, in the peevishness and discontent of his soul, he says all sorts of bitter things of the generations he has fallen among; and, from the vanished glory of the past, predicts increasing darkness for the future. Happily, the prophesying cannot be true; and happily, too, for the condition of the prophet, he knows it will not. But then there is a sort of comfort in the waywardness of discontent; at times, a soothing music to the restlessness of the soul in the deep bass of hearty grumbling.

The ingratitude of the act is entirely forgotten in the pleasure. “Ha! those were the merry days—the golden times of England they were!” May not this be heard from the tradesman, the mechanic, as he is borne past Tilbury Fort, and the thoughts of Queen Elizabeth, of her “golden days,” ring in his brain; and living only in the nineteenth century, he has some vague, perplexing notion that he has missed an Eden, only by a hundred years or two? He thinks not—why should he?—of the luxury he now purchases for a shilling; a luxury, not compassable in those golden days by all the power and wealth of all the combining sovereigns of the earth, for he is a passenger of a Gravesend steamboat, the fare twelvepence.

We would not forget that wonder of Elizabeth’s navy, the _Great Harry_. No; we would especially remember it, to compare the marvel, with all its terrors, to the agent of our day, which, wrought and directed from a few gallons of water, makes the winged ship but as a log—a dead leviathan upon the deep; which, in the certainty and intensity of its power of destruction must, in the fulness of time, make blood-spilling war bankrupt, preaching peace with all men, even from “the cannon’s mouth.”

We are, however, a degenerate race. In our maudlin sensibility, we have taken under our protection the very brutes of the earth—the fowls of the air—the fish of the sea. We have cast the majesty of the law around the asses of the reign of Victoria—have assured to live geese a property in their own feathers—have, with a touch of tenderness, denounced the wood-plugged claws of the lobsters of Billingsgate. We have a society, whose motto, spiritually, is—

“Never to link our pleasure or our pride
With suffering of the meanest thing that lives.”

Very different, indeed, was the spirit of the English people, when their good and gracious Queen Elizabeth smiled sweetly upon bull dogs, and found national music in the growl, the roar, and the yell of a bear-garden; whereto, in all the courtesy of a nobler and more virtuous age, the sovereign led the French ambassador; that, as chroniclers tell us, Monsieur might arrive at a sort of comparative knowledge of English bravery, judging the courage of the people by the stubborn daring of their dogs.

Then we had no Epsom, with its high moralities—no Ascot, with its splendour and wealth. Great, indeed, was the distance—deep the abyss—between the sovereign and the sovereign people.

And in those merry, golden days of good Queen Bess, rank was something; it had its brave outside, and preached its high prerogative from externals. The nobleman declared his nobility by his cloak, doublet and jerkin; by the plumes in his hat; by the jewels flashing in his shoes. Society, in all its gradations, was inexorably marked by the tailor and goldsmith.

But what is the tailor of the nineteenth century? What doth he for nobility? Alas! next to nothing. The gentleman is no longer the creature of the tailor’s hands—the being of his shop-board. The gentleman must dress himself in ease, in affability, in the gentler and calmer courtesies of life, to make distinguishable the nobility of his nature from the homeliness, the vulgarity of the very man who, it may be, finds nobility in shoe-leather. Thus, gentility of blood, deprived by innovation of its external livery—denied the outward marks of supremacy—is thrown upon its bare self to make good its prerogative. Manner must now do the former duty of fine clothes.

State, too, was in the blessed times of Elizabeth a most majestic matter. The queen’s carriage, unlike Victoria’s, was a vehicle wondrous in the eyes of men as the chariot of King Pharaoh. Now, does every poor man keep his coach—price sixpence! How does the economy of luxury vulgarise the indulgence?

“Rank preached its high prerogative from externals”
]

Travelling was then a grave and serious adventure. The horse-litter was certainly a more dignified means of transit than the fuming, boiling, roaring steam-engine, that rushes forward with a man as though the human anatomy was no more than a woolpack. In the good old times of Queen Bess, a man might take his five long days and more for a hundred miles, putting up, after a week’s jolting, at his hostelry, the Queen’s Head of Islington, for one good night’s rest, ere he should gird up his loins to enter London. Now is man taught to lose all respect for the hoariness of time by the quickness of motion. Now may he pass over two hundred miles in some seven or eight hours if he will, taking his first meal in the heart of Lancashire, and his good-night glass at a Geneva palace in London. Is it wonderful that our present days should abound more in sinful levity than the days of the good Queen Elizabeth, seeing that we may, in the same space of time, crowd so much more iniquity? The truth is, science has thrown so many hours upon our hands, that we are compelled to kill them with all sorts of arrows—which, as moralists declare, have mortal poison at the barb, however gay and brilliant may be the feathers that carry it home. Dreadful will be the time when that subtle fiend, science, shall perform nearly all human drudgery; for then men in their very idleness will have nought else to destroy save their own souls; and the destruction will, of course, be quicker, and, to the father of all mischief, much more satisfactory.

Again, in the good times of Elizabeth, humanity was blessed with a modesty, a deference—in these days of bronze, to be vainly sought for—towards the awfulness of power, the grim majesty of authority. And if, indeed, it happened that some outrageous wretch, forgetful of the purpose of nature in creating him the Queen’s liegeman, and therefore her property—if, for a moment, he should cease to remember the fealty which, by the principle of the divine right of kings, should be vital to him as the blood in his veins—why, was there not provided for him, by the benignity of custom and the law, a salutary remedy? If he advanced a new opinion, had he not ears wherewith, by hangman’s surgery, he might be cured of such disease? If he took a mistaken view of the rights of his fellow-subjects, might he not be taught to consider them from a higher point of elevation, and so be instructed?

Booksellers, in the merry time of Elizabeth, were enabled to vindicate a higher claim to moral and physical daring than is permitted to them in these dull and drivelling days. He who published a book, questioning—though never so gently—the prerogative of her Majesty to do just as the spirit should move her, might have his right hand chopped off, and afterwards—there have been examples of such devotion—wave his bloody stump, with a loyal shout of “God save the Queen!” But these were merry days—golden days—in which the royal prerogative was more majestic, more awful than in the nineteenth century. And wherefore? The reason is plain as the Queen’s arms.

The king of beasts lives on flesh. His carnivorousness is one of the great elements of his Majesty. So was it in the times of Elizabeth, with the Queen’s prerogative. It was for the most part fed upon flesh. It would be a curious and instructive calculation could we arrive at the precise number of noses, and arms, and hands, and human heads, and quarters of human carcases, which—during the merry, golden reign of Elizabeth, of those days we shall never see again—were required by law to keep strong and lusty the prerogative of the Virgin Queen! How, as the human head festered and rotted above the city gates, was the prerogative sweetened by the putrefaction! And then the daily lessons preached by the mute horror of the dead man’s mouth, to the human life daily passing beneath it! What precepts of love and gentleness towards all men fell from the shrivelled lips—what Christianity gleamed from the withered eye-balls! How admirably were the every-day thoughts of men associated with prerogative, its majesty for ever preached by dead men’s tongues—its beauty visible in dead men’s flesh. Those were the golden days—the merry days—we shall never see such times again. Now, a poor and frivolous race, we pass beneath Temple Bar, untaught by the grim moralities that from its height were wont to instruct our forefathers. In the days of Elizabeth we might have lounged at the door of the city shopkeeper, and whilst chaffering for a commodity of this world, have had our thoughts elevated by a consideration of the ghastly skull—grinning a comment upon all earthly vanities—above us. Those days are gone—passed for ever. We have now plate-glass and dainty painting, and precious woods, in the shops of our tradesmen, but nought to take us from the vanity of life—no prerogative of a Virgin Queen, in the useful semblance of a _memento mori_.

“Hangman’s surgery”
]

It is to the want of such stern yet wholesome monitors we are doubtless to attribute the decay of the national character. We are sunk in effeminacy, withered by the fond ministerings of science. The road of life—which, by its ruggedness, was wont to try the sinews of our Elizabethan ancestors—we, their degenerate children, have spread as with a carpet, and hung the walls around us with radiant tapestry. The veriest household drudge of our time is a Sardanapalus compared to the lackey of the Virgin Queen. The tatterdemalion, who lives on highway alms, may look down upon the beggar of Elizabeth; for the mendicant of Victoria may, with his prayed-for pence, purchase luxuries unknown to the Dives of former days.

And what—if we listen to complaining patriotism—what is the evil born of this? A loss of moral energy; a wasting away of national fibre. Believe this melancholy philosophy, and national weakness came in (a moral moth in the commodity) with silk stockings. Ere then was the bearing of man more majestic in the eyes of angels! For then was the sword the type of station, a gentleman no more appearing abroad without his rapier than a wasp without its sting. Human life could not but lose part of its dignity with its cold steel. What a fine comment on the charity, the gentleness, the humanity of his fellow-men, did every gentleman wear at his side! He was, in a manner, his own law-maker, his own executioner. In the judgment of later philosophy, we are prone to believe that the said gentlemen may appear, at the best, ferocious simpletons—creatures swaggering “between heaven and earth,” with their hands upon their hilts, ready and yearning for a thrust at those who took the wall of their gentility. Ha! those, indeed, were the good old days! And then came a whining, curd-complexioned benevolence, and in progress of time, its thin, white, womanly fingers unbuckled the sword-belt of the bully, and organised police. Sword-makers were bankrupt, and human nature lost a grace!

Thus, it appears, the world has been from age to age declining in virtue, and can only escape the very profound of iniquity by a speedy dissolution. Every half dozen years or so, a prophet growls from a cellar, or cries from the altitude of a garret, the advent of the last day. An earthquake, or some other convulsion (the particulars of which are only vouchsafed to the prophet) is to destroy the earth or London at least; whereupon old gentlemen remove to Gravesend, and careful housewives take stock of their plate. Now, every such prophecy, instead of bewildering honest people with all sorts of fears, and all sorts of anxieties for their personal property, ought to make them sing thanksgiving songs for the promised blessing. It being the creed of these people that the world gets worse and worse, they would at least have the comfort to know that they had seen the last of its wickedness. For a moment, reader, we will suppose you one of these. Consider, upon your own faith, what a terrible wretch will necessarily be your great-great-great-great-great-grandson! Well, would it not be satisfaction to you that this dragon (we believe dragons are oviparous) should be crushed in the egg of the future? How would you like your own flesh and blood inevitably changed by the course of time into the anatomy of something very like a demon? You are bad enough as you are; that dismal truth your own humility preaches to you; to say nothing of the plain speaking of your neighbours. No; out of pure love and pity for humanity, you ought to wish all the world to stop with your own pulse. It is hard enough now, even for the best of us, to keep on the respectable side of the statutes; but, with the growing wickedness of the world, we should like to know what sort of metal will the laws be made of. The great social link must inevitably be a fetter.

How often have we stood, with the unseen tears in our eyes, watching the nobility of the land, in nobility’s best bib and tucker, winding in golden line to the drawing-room of Queen Victoria! Alas! degenerate dukes—faded duchesses. Marquises fallen upon evil times—marchionesses very dim indeed! What are you to the nobility of Elizabeth? What to the grandees of those merry days, the golden shadow of which is brightness itself to the cold, grey glimmering of the present? We have yet one thought to comfort us; and that is, a half belief that the court of Elizabeth was held as nothing to all courts preceding; and so back, until Englishmen mourned over the abomination of cloaks and vests, sorrowing for those golden days, those good old times of the painted Britons! Great was the virtue abounding in _woad_; grievous the wilful iniquity woven in broad-cloth.

Queen Elizabeth died—fair, regal bud!—in the sweetness of virginity; and though the sun (by some despairing effort) managed to rise the next morning, it has never been wholly itself since. She died, and was brought to Whitehall, to the great calamity of the fish then swimming in the river; for a poet of the day, quoted by Camden, has eternised the evil that in the hour fell upon Thames flounders:—

“The Queene was brought by water to Whitehall;
At every stroke the oares teares let fall;
More clung about the barge; fish under water
_Wept out their eyes of pearle, and swame blinde after_,
I think the bargemen might with easier thighes
Have rowed her thither in her people’s eyes.
Yet, howsoere, thus much my thoughts have scann’d,
She’d come by water, had she come by land.”

So closed the golden days of Queen Elizabeth; leaving us, in all the virtues and comforts of the world, the bankrupt children of Queen Victoria!

Unworthy is he of the balmy sweetness of this blessed May who can think so! A churlish, foolish, moody traitor to the spirit of goodness and beauty that, as with the bounty of the sun and air, calls up forms of loveliness in his path, and surrounds him with ten thousand household blessings! With active presences, which the poet of Elizabeth, in even _his_ large love for man could scarce have dreamed of; or, dreaming, seen them as a part of fairy fantasy—a cloud-woven pageant!

Let the man who lives by his daily sweat pause in his toil, and, with his foot upon his spade, watch the white smoke that floats in the distance; listen to the lessening thunder of the engine that, instinct with Vulcanic life, has rushed, devouring space, before it. That little curl of smoke hangs in the air a thing of blessed promise—that roar of the engine is the melody of hope to unborn generations. But now, the digger of the soil looks moodily at that vapour, and his heart is festering with the curse upon the devil Steam; that fiend that grinds his bones beneath the wheels of British Juggernaut. Poor creature! The seeming demon is a beneficent presence that, in the ripeness of time, will work regeneration of the hopes of men.

Let the poor man—the mechanic of a town—look around him. Let him in his own house, humble though it be, acknowledge the presence of a thousand comforts which, had he lived two centuries ago, he could not with a baron’s wealth have purchased. Not mere creature enjoyments; but humanizing, refining pleasures, drawing man nearer to man, expanding the human heart, and imparting to humanity the truest greatness in the greatest gentleness.

“What!” it may be asked, “can you have the hardihood, or the ignorance, to vaunt these days above the days of Elizabeth? These days with famine throwing the shuttle—with ignorance, wholly brutish, digging in the pit—with gold, a monster all brain, and so the very worst of monsters—dominating throughout the land, and crushing the pulses of thousands within its hard, relentless grasp? Would you not rather pray for a return of those merry, merry days, when men were whipped, imprisoned, branded, burnt, at little more than the mere will of Majesty, for mere opinion—but who had, nevertheless, bacon and bread and ale sufficient to the day?”

No; we would go no step backward, but many in advance; our faith still increasing in the enlarged sympathies of men; in the reverence which man has learned and is still learning to pay towards the nature of his fellow-men; in the deep belief that whatever change may and _must_ take place in the social fabric—we have that spirit of wisdom and tolerance (certainly _not_ a social creature of the golden days) waxing strong among us,—so strong that the fabric will be altered and repaired brick by brick, and stone by stone. Meanwhile, the scaffolding is fast growing up about it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE LITTLE GREAT AND THE GREAT LITTLE

EXTRAORDINARY is the mind of man! He sails in mid-air; he compasseth the globe; he blunts the lightning; he writeth _Hamlet_, _Paradise Lost_, the _Principia_, and he chaineth a flea by the leg. He maketh the strong elephant to bend his joints, and he subdueth a flea, if not to “hew wood,” at least to draw water. These, the later triumphs of the human essence, are now on exhibition somewhere in that long ark for modern monsters, Regent Street! Yes, the “Industrious Fleas” at once delight and shame fashionable idlers, sending them to their beds to ruminate on the sagacity of the living world about them.

We love a monster as much as ever did _Trinculo_; hence we have been bitten; that is, we have made acquaintance with the “Industrious Fleas.” Let us shortly enumerate their separate capabilities. One flea, a fine muscular fellow, worthy, did fairies die, to be mourning coach horse at the funeral of Queen Titania (how long since the fairies had a coronation!), draws a very splendid carriage, constructed from the pith of elder. He curvets, and bounds, and shows his blood (he must have been fed in some royal stable—he has surely fattened on kings) with the proudest royal coach-horse, on—as they say at public dinners—“the proudest day of its life.” Having seen its legs, we shall think more seriously of the kick of a flea ever after. Then, to talk of a “flea bite,” as a proverb for a wife—a mere nothing; let those who speak thus vainly contemplate the terrible proboscis of the aforesaid chariot flea, and then think of the formidable weapon, plunged through one’s tender skin, and sucking up by quarts (we saw, we looked through a microscope) our hearts’ best blood! To go to bed appears no wonder, but to be able to rise again after what we have beheld, seems to us a daily miracle! To proceed. Another of the “industrious” takes the air with a chain and a weight to his leg, the wonder consisting in its resignation to its destiny. A third flea, also manacled, draws water. A fourth flea has a more awful duty—to bear Napoleon Bonaparte, late of France, but now of St Helena—there he is, the victor of a hundred fights, majestically seated on flea back. An enthusiastic Frenchman may, if he have good eyes, see in the miniature emperor, the sallow, thoughtful face, the “brassy eye” (_vide_ Haydon’s account) of the original despot—could the figure take snuff, the illusion would be perfect. Two other fleas, soldiers, fight a desperate combat, affording in their proper persons a triumphant refutation to the celebrated dogma of the philosopher, that “fleas are not lobsters.” We understood from the _Cicerone_ that their deadly enmity was excited towards each other by a mutual tickling. We were also informed that one of the fleas (“epicurean animal!”) had the honour to sup off the hand of the Princess Augusta. This fact was shamefully hushed up by the magas of the _Court Circular_, else how would it have astonished the world to have read that “last night Her Royal Highness the Princess Augusta gave a supper to the fleas!” Certain it is, the document contains at times news of less interest.[8] This condescension on the part of her Highness, though it speaks much for her affability, has been the cause of grievous heartburnings and bickerings among the society. It is extraordinary the airs that every flea gives himself about “his blood.” However, it is to be hoped that a herald will be appointed to settle the claims of each disputant, and to favour the whole with a genealogical tree. Who knows whether one of these fleas’ ancestors did not bite Sancho Panza, or the Dulcinea del Toboso, or the _Carters_, who were “bitten like a tench”? Speaking on our own responsibility, we are afraid that each of these little creatures, after all its vanity about pure blood, has been somewhat capricious in its appetite; a fault, by the by, which often puzzles the heralds in their labours, for certain other little animals are very angry, when they speak of blood, too.

Footnote 8:

Her Majesty the Queen, and Prince George of Cumberland, stood the
whole of the sermon!!—_Court Circular_, April 8, 1832.

We quitted the exhibition, and walking at a melancholy pace, with our long, lean visage bent towards the earth, we were accosted by a man—an odd-looking person, with a box at his back—who begged we would stop and see his show. We were in a sight-seeing humour, and at once consented. The box was placed on a trestle, our eye was at the glass, and our ears open, when the man commenced his description:—

“The first view presents you with a grand state coach of the Great Mogul; it is drawn by a thousand curious animals; they are, as you will perceive, very finely dressed in rich harness, tall feathers, and flying ribbons; they come and tie themselves to the coach, and feel it an honour to be bridled; they snort, and caper, and kick mud into the eyes of the bystanders.

“The next view shows you one of these animals with a long chain and a heavy log. This chain was fixed upon his leg when he was born; and though he has sometimes tried to file away the links, he has had his knuckles so smartly rapped, and been called so many names—been so preached to that the chain and log were for his own good, and that it would ruin him to take them from him—that ’tis likely he will, for the public benefit, be made to wear them to the end of his days.

“The animal in the next view, that is chained and draws water, is one of the Great Mogul’s million of slaves. Although he draws bucket after bucketful for the Mogul’s house and his household, for his horses and his dogs, and his kitchen, and his flower garden, he is often perishing himself for one half mouthful; his lips are blistered, and his tongue black, with the water drawn by his own hands, running about him.