Chapter VI (2)

To be candid, no portrait, perhaps, ever stood more in need of such an accompaniment. The figure opposite has certainly the look of one of those practical jokes whereof the original is oftener suspected than really culpable. It might pass for the sign of “The Grave Maurice.” The author of Elia has declared that he once sat as substitute for a whole series of British Admirals,[2] and a physiognomist might reasonably suspect that in wantonness or weariness, instead of giving my head I had procured myself to be painted by proxy. For who, that calls himself stranger, could ever suppose that such a pale, pensive, peaking, sentimental, sonneteering countenance--with a wry mouth as if it always laughed on its wrong side--belonged bonâ fide to the Editor of the Comic--a Professor of the Pantagruelian Philosophy, hinted at in the preface to the present work? What unknown who reckons himself decidedly serious, would recognise the head and front of my “offending,” in a visage not at all too hilarious for a frontispiece to the Evangelical Magazine! In point of fact the owner has been taken sundry times, ere now, for a Methodist Minister, and a pious turn has been attributed to his hair--lucus a non lucendo--from its having no turn in it at all.[3] In like manner my literary contemporaries who have cared to remark on my personals, have agreed in ascribing to me a melancholy bias; thus an authority in the New Monthly Magazine has described me as “a grave anti-pun-like-looking person,” whilst another--in the Book of Gems--declares that “my countenance is more grave than merry,” and insists, therefore, that I am of a pensive habit, and “have never laughed heartily in company or in rhyme.” Against such an inference, however, I solemnly protest, and if it be the fault of my features, I do not mind telling my face to its face that it insinuates a false Hood, and grossly misrepresents a person notorious amongst friends for laughing at strange times and odd places, and in particular when he has the worst of the rubber. For it is no comfort for the loss of points, by his theory, to be upon thorns. And truly what can be more unphilosophical, than to sit ruefully as well as whistfully, with your face inconsistently playing at longs and your hand at shorts,--getting hypped as well as pipped,--“talking of Hoyle,” as the City lady said, “but looking like winegar,” and betraying as keen a sense of the profit and loss, as if the _pack_ had turned you into a _pedlar_.

But I am digressing; and turning my back, as Lord Castlereagh would have said, on my face. The portrait, then, is genuine--“an ill-favoured thing, Sir,” as Touchstone says, “but mine own.” For its quarrel with the rules of Lavater there is precedent. I remember seeing on Sir Thomas Lawrence’s easel, an unfinished head of Mr. Wilberforce, so very merry, so rosy, so good-fellowish, that nothing less than the Life and Correspondence recently published could have persuaded me that he was really a serious character. A memoir, therefore, would be the likeliest thing to convince the world that the physiognomy prefixed to this number is actually Hood’s Own:--indeed a few of the earlier chapters would suffice to clear up the mystery, by proving that my face is only answering in the affirmative, the friendly enquiry of the Poet of all circles--“Has sorrow thy young days shaded?”--and telling the honest truth of one of those rickety constitutions which, according to Hudibras, seem

“---- as if intended
For nothing else but to be mended.”

To confess the truth, my vanity pricked up its ears a little at the proposition of my Publisher. There is something vastly flattering in the idea of appropriating the half or quarter of a century, mixing it up with your personal experience, and then serving it out as your own Life and Times. On casting a retrospective glance, however, across Memory’s waste, it appeared so literally a waste that vanity herself shrank from the enclosure act, as an unpromising speculation. Had I foreseen, indeed, some five-and-thirty years ago, that such a demand would be made upon me, I might have laid myself out on purpose, as Dr. Watts recommends, so as “to give of every day some good account at last.” I would have lived like a Frenchman, for effect, and made my life a long dress rehearsal of the future biography. I would have cultivated incidents “pour servir,” laid traps for adventures, and illustrated my memory like Rogers’s, by a brilliant series of Tableaux. The earlier of My Seven Stages should have been more Wonder Phenomenon Comet and Balloon-like, and have been timed to a more Quicksilver pace than they have travelled; in short, my Life, according to the tradesman’s promise, should have been “fully equal to bespoke.” But alas! in the absence of such a Scottish second-sight, my whole course of existence up to the present moment would hardly furnish materials for one of those “bald biographies” that content the old gentlemanly pages of Sylvanus Urban. Lamb, on being applied to for a Memoir of himself, made answer that it would go into an epigram; and I really believe that I could compress my own into that baker’s dozen of lines called a sonnet. Montgomery, indeed, has forestalled the greater part of it, in his striking poem on the “Common Lot,” but in prose, nobody could ever make anything of it, except Mr. George Robins. The lives of literary men are proverbially barren of interest, and mine, instead of forming an exception to the general rule, would bear the application of the following words of Sir Walter Scott, much better than the career of their illustrious author. “There is no man known at all in literature, who may not have more to tell of his private life than I have. I have surmounted no difficulties either of birth or education, nor have I been favoured by any particular advantages, and my life has been as void of incidents of importance as that of the weary knife-grinder--‘Story! God bless you, I have none to tell, Sir.’”

Thus my birth was neither so humble that, like John Jones, I have been obliged amongst my lays to lay the cloth, and to court the cook and the muses at the same time; nor yet so lofty, that, with a certain lady of title, I could not write without letting myself down. Then, for education, though on the one hand I have not taken my degree, with Blucher; yet on the other, I have not been rusticated, at the Open Air School, like the poet of Helpstone. As for incidents of importance, I remember none, except being drawn for a soldier, which was a hoax, and having the opportunity of giving a casting vote on a great parochial question, only I didn’t attend. I have never been even third in a duel, or crossed in love. The stream of time has flowed on with me very like that of the New River, which everybody knows has so little romance about it, that its head has never troubled us with a Tale. My own story then, to possess any interest, must be a fib.

Truly given, with its egotism and its barrenness, it would look too like the chalked advertisements on a dead wall. Moreover, Pope has read a lesson to self-importance in the Memoirs of P.P., the Parish Clerk, who was only notable after all amongst his neighbours as a swallower of loaches. Even in such practical whims and oddities I am deficient,--for instance, eschewing razors, or bolting clasp-knives, riding on painted ponies, sleeping for weeks, fasting for months, devouring raw tripe, and similar eccentricities, which have entitled sundry knaves, quacks, boobies, and brutes, to a brief biography in the Wonderful Magazine. And, in the absence of these distinctions, I am equally deficient in any spiritual pretensions. I have had none of those experiences which render the lives of saintlings, not yet in their teens, worth their own weight in paper and print, and consequently my personal history, as a Tract, would read as flat as the Pilgrim’s Progress without the Giants, the Lions, and the grand single combat with the Devil.

To conclude my life,--“upon my life,”--is not worth giving or taking. The principal just suffices for me to live upon; and of course, would afford little interest to anyone else. Besides, I have a bad memory; and a personal history would assuredly be but a middling one, of which I have forgotten the beginning and cannot foresee the end. I must, therefore, respectfully decline giving my life to the world--at least till I have done with it--but to soften the refusal, I am willing, instead of a written character of myself, to set down all that I can recall of other authors, and, accordingly, the next number will contain the first instalment of

MY LITERARY REMINISCENCES.

[2] He perhaps took the hint from Dibdin, who lays down the rule in
his Sea Songs, that a Naval Hero ought to be a Lion in battle,
but afterwards a Lamb.

[3] On a march to Berlin, with the 19th Prussian Infantry, I could
never succeed in passing myself off as anything but the
Regimental Chaplain.

THE COMPASS, WITH VARIATIONS.

“The Needles have sometimes been fatal to Mariners.”

PICTURE OF ISLE OF WIGHT.

One close of day--’twas in the Bay
Of Naples, bay of glory!
While light was hanging crowns of gold
On mountains high and hoary,
A gallant bark got under weigh,
And with her sails my story.

For Leghorn she was bound direct,
With wine and oil for cargo,
Her crew of men some nine or ten,
The Captain’s name was Iago;
A good and gallant bark she was,
La Donna (call’d) del Lago.

Bronzed mariners were hers to view,
With brown cheeks clear or muddy,
Dark, shining eyes, and coal-black hair,
Meet heads for painter’s study;
But ’midst their tan their stood one man,
Whose cheek was fair and ruddy.

His brow was high, a loftier brow
Ne’er shone in song or sonnet,
His hair a little scant, and when
He doff’d his cap or bonnet,
One saw that Grey had gone beyond
A premiership upon it.

His eye--a passenger was he,
The cabin he had hired it,--
His eye was gray, and when he look’d
Around, the prospect fired it--
A fine poetic light, as if
The Appe-Nine inspired it.

His frame was stout, in height about
Six feet--well made and portly;
Of dress and manner just to give
A sketch, but very shortly,
His order seem’d a composite
Of rustic with the courtly.

He ate and quaff’d, and joked and laugh’d,
And chatted with the seamen,
And often task’d their skill and ask’d
“What weather is’t to be, man?”
No demonstration there appear’d
That he was any demon.

No sort of sign there was that he
Could raise a stormy rumpus,
Like Prospero, make breezes blow,
And rocks and billows thump us,--
But little we supposed what he
Could with the needle compass!

Soon came a storm--the sea at first
Seemed lying almost fallow--
When lo! full crash, with billowy dash,
From clouds of black and yellow,
Came such a gale, as blows but once
A cent’ry, like the aloe!

Our stomachs we had just prepared
To vest a small amount in;
When, gush! a flood of brine came down
The skylight--quite a fountain,
And right on end the table rear’d,
Just like the Table Mountain.

Down rush’d the soup, down gush’d the wine,
Each roll, its rôle repeating,
Roll’d down--the round of beef declar’d
For parting--not for meating!
Off flew the fowls, and all the game
Was “too far gone for eating!”

Down knife and fork--down went the pork,
The lamb too broke its tether;
Down mustard went--each condiment--
Salt--pepper--all together!
Down everything, like craft that seek
The Downs in stormy weather.

Down plunged the Lady of the Lake,
Her timbers seemed to sever;
Down, down, a dreary derry down,
Such lurch she had gone never;
She almost seem’d about to take
A bed of down for ever!

Down dropt the captain’s nether jaw,
Thus robb’d of all its uses,
He thought he saw the Evil One
Beside Vesuvian sluices,
Playing at dice for soul and ship
And throwing _Sink_ and _Deuces_.

Down fell the steward on his face,
To all the Saints commending;
And candles to the Virgin vow’d,
As save-alls ’gainst his ending.
Down fell the mate, he thought his fate,
Check-mate, was close impending!

Down fell the cook--the cabin boy,
Their beads with fervour telling,
While alps of serge with snowy verge,
Above the yards came yelling.
Down fell the crew, and on their knees
Shuddered at each white swelling!

Down sunk the sun of bloody hue,
His crimson light a cleaver
To each red rover of a wave:
To eye of fancy-weaver,
Neptune, the God, seemed tossing in
A raging scarlet fever!

Sore, sore afraid, each Papist pray’d
To Saint and Virgin Mary;
But one there was that stood composed
Amid the waves’ vagary;
As staunch as rock, a true game cock
’Mid chicks of Mother Cary!

His ruddy cheek retain’d its streak,
No danger seemed to shrink him;
His step still bold,--of mortal mould
The crew could hardly think him:
The Lady of the Lake, he seem’d
To know, could never sink him.

Relax’d at last the furious gale,
Quite out of breath with racing;
The boiling flood in milder mood,
With gentler billows chasing;
From stem to stern, with frequent turn,
The Stranger took to pacing.

And as he walk’d to self he talked,
Some ancient ditty thrumming,
In under tone, as not alone--
Now whistling, and now humming--
“You’re welcome, Charlie,” “Cowdenknowes,”
“Kenmure,” or “Campbells’ Coming.”

Down went the wind, down went the wave,
Fear quitted the most finical;
The Saints, I wot, were soon forgot,
And Hope was at the pinnacle:
When rose on high, a frightful cry--
“The Devil’s in the binnacle!”

“The Saints be near,” the helmsman cried,
His voice with quite a falter--
“Steady’s my helm, but every look
The needle seems to alter;
God only knows where China lies,
Jamaica, or Gibraltar!”

The captain stared aghast at mate,
The pilot at th’ apprentice;
No fancy of the German Sea
Of Fiction the event is:
But when they at the compass look’d,
It seem’d non compass mentis.

Now north, now south, now east, now west,
The wavering point was shaken,
’Twas past the whole philosophy
Of Newton, or of Bacon;
Never by compass, till that hour
Such latitudes were taken!

With fearful speech, each after each
Took turns in the inspection;
They found no gun--no iron--none
To vary its direction;
It stem’d a new magnetic case
Of Poles in Insurrection!

Farewell to wives, farewell their lives,
And all their household riches;
Oh! while they thought of girl or boy,
And dear domestic niches,
All down the side which holds the heart,
That needle crave them stitches.

With deep amaze, the Stranger gaz’d
To see them so white-liver’d:
And walk’d abaft the binnacle,
To know at what they shiver’d;
But when he stood beside the card,
St. Josef! how it quiver’d!

No fancy-motion, brain-begot,
In eye of timid dreamer--
The nervous finger of a sot
Ne’er show’d a plainer tremor;
To every brain it seem’d too plain,
There stood th’ Infernal Schemer!

Mix’d brown and blue each visage grew,
Just like a pullet’s gizzard;
Meanwhile the captain’s wandering wit,
From tacking like an izzard,
Bore down in this plain course at last,
“It’s Michael Scott--the Wizard!”

A smile past o’er the ruddy face;
“To see the poles so falter,
I’m puzzled, friends, as much as you,
For with no fiends I palter;
Michael I’m not--although a Scott--
My Christian name is Walter.”

Like oil it fell, that name, a spell
On all the fearful faction;
The Captain’s head (for he had read)
Confess’d the Needle’s action,
And bow’d to Him in whom the North
Has lodged its main attraction!

SUMMER--A WINTER ECLOGUE.

A Back Parlour at Camberwell. Sylvanus is seated at the
breakfast-table, and greeteth his friend Civis.

SYL.--A good morrow to you, friend Civis, and a hearty welcome!--How hath sleep dealt with you through the night?

CIV.--Purely indeed, and with rare pastoral dreams. I have done nothing but walk through pleasant groves, or sit me down under shady boughs, the whole livelong night. A foretaste, my friend, of the rural delights yet to come, in strolling with you amongst the dainty shades of this your verdant retreat. How have I yearned all through the month of June, to be a Jack-i’-the-Green again amidst your leaves here! You know my prospect in town.

SYL.--Aye, truly; I did once spend, or rather misspend a whole week there in the dog-days. You looked out opposite on a scorching brick front of six stories, with a south aspect--studded with I know not how many badges of Assurance from fire, and not without need--for the shop windows below seemed all a-blaze with geranium-coloured silks, at that time the mode, and flamme d’enfer. The left-hand shop, next door, was all red, likewise, with regiments of lobsters, in their new uniforms; beyond that, a terrible flaring Red Lion, newly done up with paint. At the next door, a vender of red morocco pocket-books--my eyes were in a scarlet fever, the whole time of my sojourning.

CIV.--A true picture, I confess. We are, indeed, a little strong in the warm tints; but they give the more zest to your suburban verdure. All the way down overnight, I thought only of the two tall elm trees beside your gate, and which have always been to my city optics as refreshing as a pair of green spectacles. Surely of all spots I have seen, Camberwell is the greenest, as the poet says, that ever laid hold of Memory’s waist.

SYL.--It hath been greener aforetime. But I pray you sit down and fall to.--Shall I help you to some of this relishing salted fish?

CIV.--By your good leave, Sylvanus, I will first draw up these blinds. My bed-room, you know, looks out only to the road, and I am longing to help my eyes, to a little of what, as a citizen, I may truly call the green fat of nature.

SYL.--Nay, Civis--I pray you let the blinds alone. The rolls are getting cold. This ham is excellently well cured, and the eggs are new-laid. Come, take a seat.

CIV.--I beseech your patience for one moment. There the blind is up. What a brave flood of sunshine--and what a glorious blue sky!--What a rare dainty day to roam abroad in, dallying with the Dryads!--But what do I behold! Oh, my Sylvanus, the Dryads are stripped of their green kirtles--stark naked! The trees are all bare, God help me! as bare as the “otamies in Surgeons’ Hall!”

SYL.--You would take no forewarning--I bade you not pull up the blind. It was my intent to have broken the truth to you, after you had made a full meal; but now you must to breakfast with what appetite you may!

CIV.--As I hope to see Paradise--there is not a green bough between this and Peckham!

SYL.--No, truly, not a twig! I would not advise any forlorn Babes to die in our woods, for Cock Robin would be painfully perplext to provide them with a pall. Alas! were a Butterfly to be born in our bowers, there is not a leaf to swaddle it in.

CIV.--Miserable man that I am, to have come down so late, or rather that winter should have arrived thus early! Ungenial climate! untimely Boreas!

SYL.--Blame not Boreas, nor winter neither. Boiling heat had more part than freezing point in this havoc. To think that even summer nowadays should go by steam!

CIV.--You speak in Sphynxian riddles! Oh, my Sylvanus, tell me in plain English prose what has become of the green emeralds of the forest?

SYL.--Destroyed in one day by a swarm of locusts. Not the locusts of Scripture, such as were eaten by St. John in the wilderness, but a new species. I caught one in the fact, on the very elm tree you wot of, and which it had stripped to the bone, saving one bough.

CIV.--I am glad, with all my heart, that you have him secure, for I delight to gaze on the wonders of nature, even of the destructive kinds. You shall show me your new locust. Of course you thrusted a pin through the body, and fixed it down to a cork after the manner of the entomologists.

SYL.--No, truly; for it knocked me down after the manner of the pugilists, and so made its escape.

CIV.--How! be they so huge, then? To my fancy, they seem more like flying dragons than locusts.

SYL.--It is true, notwithstanding. Some of them which I have seen, measured nearly six feet in length; others, that were younger, from three to five. One of these last, the Minimi, or small fry, I likewise took captive, though not without some shrewd kicking and biting, and striking with its fore-paws.

CIV.--The smallest of animals will do so to escape from bondage. I take for granted you knocked him on the head, for the sake of peace.

SYL.--No, indeed. I had not the heart; the visage was so strangely human, ape or monkey could not look more like a man in the face; and then it cried and whined for all the world like a mere boy.

CIV.--It would have been a kind of petty murder to slay him. I do not think I could commit Monkeycide myself. They look, as Lady Macbeth says, so like our Fathers. To kill an ape would plant the whole stings of an apiary in my conscience. I pray you go on with the description.

SYL.--Willingly, and according to the system of the great Linnæus. Antennæ or horns he had none, thus differing from the common locust, but in lieu thereof, sundry bunches and tufts of coarse red hair; eyes brown, and tending inwards towards the proboscis or snout. Two fore-legs or arms terminating in ten palpi or feelers, and the same number of toes or claws on the hinder feet. On grasping truncus, or the trunk, it was cased in a loose skin resembling corduroy, the same being most curiously furnished with sundry bags or pouches, into which, like the provident pelican, it stuffed the forage it had collected from the trees.

CIV.--With submission, Sylvanus, to your better judgment, I should have taken this same Locust, from your description, to have been actually a mere human boy.

SYL.--Between ourselves, he was--though of what nation or parentage I know not. To use his own heathenish jargon, he was doing “a morning fake on the picking lay for a cove wot add a tea-crib in the monkery.”

CIV.--A strange gibberish, but I do remember that Peter the Wild Boy was wont to discourse in the same uncouth fashion. Poor savage of the woods! I do feel for his pitiful estate; but what could move him to pluck off all-the green emeralds of the Forest?

SYL.--To make sham Hyson and mock Souchong. Even in June you would have deemed it was November, there were so many ragged Guys collecting gunpowder. Oh, Civis, thou hast no notion of the tea-trade that hath been carried on in these parts. Many times I have believed myself to be dwelling in Canton, and that my name was Hum. Thrice I have caught myself marvelling at the huge feet of Mrs. S., and have groped behind my nape for the national pigtail.

CIV.--Sylvanus, spare me. I have but one green week in the year, and here it is all blotted out of the calendar. I pray you do not jest with me. What hath become of the leaves of yon sycamore?

SYL.--Plucked by a Blackamoor, who preferred it to the climbing of chimneys.

CIV.--And yonder Ashes, which I could mourn for in appropriate sackcloth?

SYL.--Stripped by the select young gentleman of Seneca-house, who left the politer branches of education for the purpose. Scholars, you know, will play truant gratis, and these had the opportunity of performing it at twopence the hour. One Saturday they did turn their half-holiday into a whole one, and were found by the geographical master picking Chinese Pekoe and Padre on the sloe bushes and willows of Peckham Rye.

CIV.--Oh, my Sylvanus, such then is the cause of the desolation I survey. To think that I may have myself helped to swallow the verdure that I should now be sitting under. That the green Druidical leaves, instead of clothing the Dryads, should be assisting in the sweeping of my own Kidderminster carpets!

SYL.--Verily so it is. The great god Pan is dead, and Pot will reign in his stead.

CIV.--Such a misfortune was never before read in a tea-cup! Oh, my Sylvanus, what is to become of patriotism or love of the country, when the best part of the country is turned to grouts?

SYL.--I have heard by way of rumour, that Mistress Shakerly of our village, attributes her palsy to a dash of aspen in her British Congo; indeed there be shrewd doubts abroad whether the great Projector hath been at all reforming by turning over a new leaf. Mr. Fairday, the notable chemist, hath sworn solemnly on his affidavit, that the tea is strongly emetical, having always acted upon his stomach as tea and turn out.

CIV.--Of a verity it ought to be tested by the doctors.

SYL.--They have tested it, and tasted it to boot. Dr. Budd, the Pennyroyal Professor of Botany, hath ranked it with the rankest of poisons, after experimenting its destructive virtues on select tea parties of his relations and friends.

CIV.--And I doubt not Dr. Rudd, of the same Royal College, hath added a confirmation to this christening.

SYL.--You know the proverb. Doctors’ opinions do not keep step, or match together, better than their horses. Dr. Rudd hath given this beverage with cream of tartar and sugar of lead to consumptives, and hath satisfied himself morally and physically that phthisic does not begin with tea.

CIV.--Dr. Rudd is an ass! Oh, my Sylvanus, I am sick at heart! Only two days since I did purchase a delectable book of poems, called “Foliage,” purposely to read under your trees, but how can I enjoy it, when the very foliage of nature is, as the booksellers say, out of print! “Bare ruined quires where late the sweet birds sung.”

SYL.--My friend, take comfort. This tea-tray will not be brought up another year, for the counterfeit herb hath all been seized, and condemned to be burnt in the yard of the Excise.

CIV.--I am glad on’t, for it will be, as the French say, “a feu-de-joie;” and verily all the little singing birds ought to collect on the chimney-pots to chaunt a Tea Deum. In the mean time I must borrow Job’s patience under my boils, though they be of the size of kettles, and have boiled away my summer at a gallop. Possibly you may have fewer locusts another season; but by way of precaution, the next time I come down by the stage I shall attend to an old stage direction in Macbeth, namely, “Enter the army with their green boughs in their hands.”

PAIR’D _NOT_ MATCH’D.

Of wedded bliss
Bards sing amiss,
I cannot make a song of it;
For I am small,
My wife is tall,
And that’s the short and long of it.

When we debate
It is my fate
To always have the wrong of it;
For I am small,
And she is tall,
And that’s the short and long of it!

And when I speak
My voice is weak,
But hers--she makes a gong of it!
For I am small,
And she is tall,
And that’s the short and long of it!

She has, in brief,
Command in Chief,
And I’m but Aide-de-camp of it;
For I am small,
And she is tall,
And that’s the short and long of it!

She gives to me
The weakest tea,
And takes the whole Souchong of it;
For I am small,
And she is tall,
And that’s the short and long of it!

She’ll sometimes grip
My buggy whip,
And make me feel the thong of it!
For I am small,
And she is tall,
And that’s the short and long of it!

Against my life
She’ll take a knife,
Or fork, and dart the prong of it;
For I am small,
And she is tall,
And that’s the short and long of it!

I sometimes think
I’ll take to drink,
And hector when I’m strong of it;
For I am small,
And she is tall,
And that’s the short and long of it!

O, if the bell
Would ring her knell,
I’d make a gay ding-dong of it;
For I am small,
And she is tall,
And that’s the short and long of it!

“Man wants but little here below,
Nor wants that little long.”
]

THE DUEL.

A SERIOUS BALLAD.

“Like the two Kings of Brentford smelling at one nosegay.”

In Brentford town of old renown,
There lived a Mister Bray,
Who fell in love with Lucy Bell,
And so did Mr. Clay.

To see her ride from Hammersmith,
By all it was allow’d,
Such fair outsides are seldom seen,
Such Angels on a Cloud.

Said Mr. Bray to Mr. Clay,
You choose to rival me,
And court Miss Bell, but there your court
No thoroughfare shall be.

Unless you now give up your suit,
You may repent your love;
I who have shot a pigeon match,
Can shoot a turtle dove.

So pray before you woo her more,
Consider what you do;
If you pop aught to Lucy Bell,--
I’ll pop it into you.

Said Mr. Clay to Mr. Bray,
Your threats I quite explode;
One who has been a volunteer,
Knows how to prime and load.

And so I say to you unless
Your passion quiet keeps,
I who have shot and hit bulls’ eyes,
May chance to hit a sheep’s.

Now gold is oft for silver changed,
And that for copper red;
But these two went away to give
Each other change for lead.

But first they sought a friend a-piece,
This pleasant thought to give--
When they were dead, they thus should have
Two seconds still to live.

To measure out the ground not long
The seconds then forbore,
And having taken one rash step
They took a dozen more.

They next prepared each pistol-pan
Against the deadly strife,
By putting in the prime of death
Against the prime of life.

Now all was ready for the foes,
But when they took their stands,
Fear made them tremble so they found
They both were shaking hands.

Said Mr. C. to Mr. B.,
Here one of us may fall,
And like St. Paul’s Cathedral now,
Be doom’d to have a ball.

I do confess I did attach
Misconduct to your name;
If I withdraw the charge, will then
Your ramrod do the same?

Said Mr. B., I do agree--
But think of Honour’s Courts!
If we go off without a shot,
There will be strange reports.

But look, the morning now is bright,
Though cloudy it begun;
Why can’t we aim above, as if
We had call’d out the sun?

So up into the harmless air,
Their bullets they did send;
And may all other duels have
That upshot in the end!

THE ROPE DANCER.

AN EXTRAVAGANZA,--AFTER RABELAIS.

I am going, my masters, to tell you a strange romantic, aye, necromantic, sort of story--and yet every monosyllable of it is as true as the Legend of Dumpsius. If you should think otherwise, I cannot help it. All I can say is, you are not experte credo, or expert at believing.

You must know, then, that on a certain day, of a certain year, certain officers went on certain information, to a certain house, in a certain court, in a certain city, to take up a certain Italian for a certain crime. What gross fools are they who say there is nothing certain in this world! However, in they went, with a crash and a dash, and a grip and a grapple, and if they did not take him by the scruff of the neck, like a dog, there is no truth in St. Winifred’s Well. He made no resistance, not so much as a left-hander, though he was by trade a smasher. As for any verbal defence, he never so much as attempted to lay a lie, much less to hatch one. There he was, caught in the very thing, act and fact, as poor a devil as need be to be making money. He was as dead as any die he had about him: as sure of a gallows and a rope, as if he had paid for them down on the nail of before-hand. Oh, ye City Crœsuses, what think ye of a man having his quantum suffocate of twisted hemp for making money! For my own part, if I was to swing for saying so, I’d cry out like a Stentor, that one of God’s images ought not to be made worm’s meat of for only washing the King’s face. ’Twould be a very hard-boiled case, and yet, ’fore Gog and Magog, so it was. For gilding a brass farthing he was to change twelve stone of good human flesh to a clod of clay; to change a jolly, laughing, smiling, grinning, crying, wondering, staring, face-making face for a mere caput mortuum; to change prime tripe, delicate cow-heel, succulent trotters, for a mouthful of dust; to change a garret for a grave; to change a neckcloth for a halter. Zounds! what a deal of change for a bad half sovereign! Well, there he was, caught like a rat, and going for a tit-bit to the furr’d Law-Cats, and without so much as giving a squeak for his life. The counterfeits were on him, so he had nothing to utter. I verily believe, if you had found him in twice as many melting pots, and crucibles, and dies, and white or brown gravy to boot, he could not have coined an excuse. As I said before, he was found _with the mould upon him_, and that, as the sexton of St. Sepulchre will tell you, is as good as a burial to you any day of your life. He was legally dead, and could not look, like other men, upon the sun as his sun-in-law, so he wisely shook hands with himself, and bade good-bye to himself, and did not attempt with his tongue to lick the cub of guilt into a child of grace. All he asked, was to be allowed to take with him a little reptile, or insect of some sort that he had brought over from Italy, belike to be a solace to his captivity; for Baron Trenck, you know, made a bon-camarade of a prison rat, and Monsieur F., in the Bastile, as you know equally, made a long-standing friend of a daddy-longlegs. We live in a world of whims. We eat them, and drink them, and court them, and marry them, take them to bed and board with us, and why not to prison? So Tonio begged for his whim to keep him company, and as it was a small gentle-looking whim, neither so fierce as a lion, nor so huge as an elephant, and moreover as it was a whim no ways dangerous to Church or State, he was allowed to take it with him in a little box, which he carried in his bosom.

Now, if curiosity should itch to know what his whim was like, let it be known, once for all, that it was like neither a toad, nor a spider, nor a viper, nor a snail, nor a black beetle, nor a newt, but something between the size of a crocodile and a cricket. And as for the manner of its going, it either flew, or swam, or hopped, or crawled, or lay still like an oyster, for the Newgate Calendar does not say which. Why it was not a monkey, or a tortoise, or a marmot, Tonio being an Italian, you must ask of the Foreign Secretary at the Court of the King of the Beggars.

May I transmigrate--when Brahma passes my soul into the parish of St. Brute--may I transmigrate, I say, into a butcher’s daughter’s pet-lamb, if it was not a piteous sight to see Tonio going off between the two law terriers to have an hour’s wearing of that last cravat, which never goes to a laundress, but always hangs upon a line of its own. It must be owned, that he had his whim, but for all the whims that ever were whimmed I wouldn’t have had his crick i’ the neck. Let me, I say, stand on terra firma; I’m content with the look-out I have of life without coveting a bird’s-eye view. Old Haman, when he was forty cubits high, had not a better prospect of this world than I have from the ground floor. Poor Tonio! It was a sorry sight; and if I didn’t pity him, from my soul, may I be an hour behind time for seeing the next hanging bout, and all through getting, by mistake, into a blunderbus. A blunderbus, my masters, is the wrong omnibus.

Well, law took its course as usual, that is to say, like a greyhound after a hare. Tony was put up, so-ho’d, run after, run over, run before, turned, tumbled and mumbled, scud and scut, and gripped by the jugulars. But that’s a scurvy simile to another I have, lapped up in pancakes, so give the calendar a shove backwards, and suppose it Shrovetide, and poor Tony stuck up in dock by way of a shy-cock for the law limbs to shy at. You never saw such pelting in your life; no, not even when St. Swithin took it into her watery head to rain cats and dogs! First, the Foreman of the Grand Jury jerked a true bill at him, that took effect on his head. Thereupon the Clerk of Arraigns pitched a heavy indictment in his very teeth, so that it shivered into thirteen separate counts. Then the Council for the Crown heaved a brief of forty folios into the pit of his stomach; anon opening a masked battery, he threw in sworn witnesses in a volley like bombshells, and when they exploded there flew out from them two melting pots, four moulds, nine bulls, and seven-and-twenty hogs, and every hog of them weighed in evidence upwards of ninety stone. Finally, the Chief Pitcher himself pitched at him his great wig, and his fur gown, and his gold chain, and his mace, and his great inkstand, and the King’s crown, and the lion and the unicorn, everything in short he could catch up, and then, taking both hands, he heaved at him the Statutes at Large; not content with which he took next to pelt him with pairs of missiles at once. For instance, a horse and a hurdle, a gallows and a halter, a shovel-hat and a condemned sermon, a last dying speech and an elm coffin, and, last of all, may I die of the pip the next time I eat oranges, if he didn’t cast at him the whole steeple of St. Sepulchre, death-bell and all, as if it had been only a snow-ball.

Never was St. Stephen so pelted. No wonder in the world, that under such a huge heap of rubbish, he became utterly dumbfounded, bamboozled, obfuscated, mizmazed, spifflicated, flummockst, and flabbergasted; seeing which the Chief Pitcher, as usual, enquired whether he had the infinitesimal of a word to say against being strangled into a blackamoor, with the very eyes of his head giving notice to quit. What matter that Tony had a bramble in his mind, that bore reasons like blackberries, and ripe ones too; as for example, that a tight rope round the gullet is very bad for the health, and particularly when one’s health requires to take pills, or even boluses, three times a day? I say, he might have given a thousand such reasonable reasons against hanging, but the very momentous minute of opening his mouth, the Chief Pitcher pitched into it a prodigious great bung, as dab and apt and cleverly as if he had played at nothing else but chuck-farthing and pitch-in-the-hole ever since he was fourteen. So the mummy of silence being preserved, the Merlinising began, and hey presto! before you could say Herman Boaz, the big wig was turned into a black cap! After that you may tell the world that our Judges are no conjurors. Thus the trial ended, and Tony’s sentence, as taken in the hieroglyphical short-hand, ran thus: namely, “that he was to be sent on a Black Monday to the Deaf and Dumb School that is kept in a coffin.”

All this time, mark you, he had the whim with him in the dock, and to look at it now and then seemed his only comfort in life,--how it whisked and frisked, and looked about it, and fed heartily, as if there had been no such thing as law or law-cats in the blessed world; and when Tony went back, like a volume of felony, to be bound in stone, the whim still went with him to his cell, and from his cell to the press-room, and from the press-room to the debtor’s door, and from the debtor’s door to death’s door itself, which opens on the scaffold, as you turn off to the right hand or the left, in your way to nobody knows where. To take such a whim of a reptile with one to the gallows, seems whimsical enough; but the Emperor Adrian, if you read the classics, had such a vagabondish, blandish, little animal, his animula vagula blandula, to be with him on his death-bed.

Well, Friday came, and Saturday, and Sunday, and Sunday’s night; he was posting to eternity with four bolters. I will bet the whole national debt he would have given eighteen-pence a mile, and half-a-crown to the boy, to have been posting on any other road. All the favour the law allowed him was to have an Ordinary at eight instead of an ordinary at one, a very ordinary favour to a man who was about to leave off dining. But the devil ought to have his due, and so should the Lord Mayor and the Sheriffs. As they had neglected Tony a little, by not being with the other gossips at his christening, to usher him into this world, they attended very ceremoniously to show him out of it, each in his gilt coach; and, with regard to the coachmen, the footmen, and even the very horses themselves, they were all Malthusians. Of course the Recorder brought the hanging-warrant, and if you would know what the hanging-warrant was like, it was like a map of _Cheshire_ with the _Mersey_ left out.

I forgot to tell you, that before it came to this pass, the Ordinary came oftentimes to the cell where Tony was, to pray, besides whom there was an Extraordinary, who examined him on his points of faith. And the points of faith were these; namely, whether he believed the moon to be of green cheese, and as to the size of the mites thereon. Secondly, if he believed the puppet-play of Punch and Judy to be a type of the fall of Nineveh; and, thirdly, concerning the lions in Pilgrim’s Progress, whether they were bred at Mr. Wombwell’s or Mr. Cross’s, or at the Tower of London. To all of which Tony giving decidedly serious answers, he was pronounced fit to die, and quite prepared to have his neck stretched, as long as the throttle of a claret-bottle when the wine is ropy.

Accordingly, on the morning of Monday, Time laid his long hand upon Tony’s collar, and gave him eight distinct hints that his hour was come for being ornithologised by sentence of the great Law Bird, genus Black-cap, into jail bird, genus Wryneck. Never was there such mobbing to see a hanging. Half the Londoners that morning went without their breakfasts to be in time for the Old Bailey. Trot, trot, trot, canter and full gallop; away through Piccadilly; push on there, in the Strand, hey down Holborn Hill, with a yoicks in Cheapside, and a hark forward in Newgate Street, and a tally ho! in West Smithfield. They all meant to be in at the death. Never was there such a race, to see a man whose race was run losing it by a neck. And the order of the running was thus:--The Royal Humane Society got in first at the Drop, and had an excellent front row. The Society for Preventing Cruelty to Animals was a good second; and may I die, if the Law Life Assurance hadn’t the assurance to come third. Next came the Philanthropic Society, with the Society of Good Samaritans barely a length behind; and then the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, neck and neck with the London Benevolent Society; all racing till they panted again, to see Tony put out of breath. You never saw such a chevy! Luckily there was no Anniversary at St. Paul’s, so the Sons of the Clergy cantered in with all the children of all the parishes that had any charity, to see an execution put in for the debt of Nature. Also the Medical Society came to see one die by the New Dropsy; and all the Knights of the Garter, with their orders, _it being a collar-day_, wherefore they wore their garters according to the fashion of Miss Bailey; and all the Foreign Ambassadors. Seeing which, Tony put on a good face, and walked stoutly up the ladder, saying softly to himself, “the eyes of Europe are upon you.” All being ready, with the Ordinary on the right hand, and the Extraordinary on the left, and the Great Constrictor a little behind, Tony (who had his whim with him) was asked how he felt himself, and how his father and mother did, and all his little brothers and sisters; to which he answered thankfully, that they were all very well, and that for his own part, he felt very comfortable, and died in the faith of St. Vitus. Now the faith of St. Vitus is not exactly the faith of the Church of England, nor, in faith, do I well know what faith it is; but the Ordinary took no objection to it, for he was a man in favour of universal toleration, remembering the saying of the heathen Priest of Apollo to the Bishop of Magnum Bonum, “You have _your_ thology, and let me have _my_thology.” So the Ordinary held his peace, but the Extraordinary would fain have argued the point regularly and methodically, according to the dogmatical manner of Cerberus, namely, in a discourse with three heads; and if he had once begun to spin the triple yarn of controversy, prosyversy, and viceversy into a cable, there is no saying on oath whether the other rope might have been used to this day. Seeing, therefore, how matters stood, Master Strangulator pushed in, with an elbowing manner, and began begging pardon of Tony for the part he was about to perform, who forgave him very readily, requesting him moreover to shake hands, and by Gog and Magog, such a shake was never shaked since the Shakers became a sect!

At the first grapple of their fingers, the Strangulator pulled away his hand with a jerk, as if a bear’s palm had been palmed upon him instead of a human paw. Then, after making a frightful face, he gave a mighty great spring or vault upwards, a deal higher than the gallows, when, on coming down, he alighted with his legs a-straddle upon the beam, where he kept posturing for some five minutes; now rowing with his arms and legs, like a fish, now hanging with his head downwards, first by one leg and then by the other, then by one hand, and then again by his chin; you never saw a rope-dancer or tumbler of them all, at Bartlemy’s or Astley’s, more nimble. Then coming down to the stage with a bound, he threw three summersets forward, and then three backwards, as quick as thought. Anon, after standing for a minute in the first position, he fell a-dancing with all his might and main, and as fast as he could lift his feet, like a bear upon a hotted floor. Never was such a spring danced round about the gallows-tree; Gilderoy was a fool to him. You may guess how the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs, and the Ordinary and Extraordinary, stared at such a caper, till their eyes grew as big as owls’; and still more when they saw Tony, after making a round O of his mouth, fall to bouncing and bounding like another Oscar Byrne! Shade of Holbein, what a Dance of Death! Only think of Jack Ketch and the condemned dancing face to face on the drop, now poussetting, now setting to each other, now allemanding, now waltzing, and then, Father of Vestris, what a tableau! Tony figuring, opera-fashion, on one leg, with Cheshire poising on tip-toe on the calf of the other! As for his whim, it was jerked out of the box at the first frisk, and had enough to do, you may be sure, to scuttle out of the way of the skipping and hopping; as it was, the poor reptile got more kicks than ha’pence.

In the meantime the Humanes, and the Samaritans, and the Benevolents, and the rest of the mob, did not stand and look on quite as mum as if it had been an overbrimming Quaker’s meeting, with a collection afterwards at the door for the Deaf and Dumb. They chuckled, and crowed, and laughed till they brayed again; and roared, and bellowed, and shouted, and shrieked like hyænas in hysterics. “Huzza! huzzaw! Go it, Jack! That’s your sort encore--ancore--anker--ancoore,--bravo--brawvo--bravoo--brawvoo! Well done Tony--Tony for ever--Tony for my money!--keep it up! It’s better than dancing upon nothing.” If Laporte had been there, who knows what offer he might have made them; for Taglioni herself never danced so--that is to say, gratis, and without music. On they jigged, however, without let or stint, and may I hang my hat up for ever, if the same whim did not suddenly take the marshal, janitor, or head gaoler, however unfit for dancing, seeing that one of his legs was made of the same flesh as my oak table. Timber or not, he balanced on it for a whole minute, while the other foot’s great toe, far above his hip, pointed exactly at the clock of St. Sepulchre, and then swinging his arms like a horizontal windmill, he spun off into a whirlwind of pirouettes that made one giddy to look at. That done, he struck in between the other two with a real step, and they immediately began to work out a dancing sum in the rule of three, which requires only one figure, namely, a figure of eight. Scuffle, shuffle, in and out, the three Kirk Alloway witches could not have footed it better. In fact, there was no resisting it. The whim took the very Ordinary himself, though less boisterously at first, by reason of the gravity of his calling, wherefore, taking a graceful grip with either hand of his cassock, he only glided off, to begin with, into the minuet de la cour. However, as the dancing grew more fast and furious, he gradually danced, in spite of himself, having been classically bred, into the College Hornpipe, and I defy anyone to say they ever saw it better danced, or more briskly, by the very Doctors of Oxford and Cambridge. Mother of Almack’s, what a quadrille! What a ball! The three Fates, though winders of thread, and spinsters in ordinary, had never seen such a Cotton ball! It was the strangest capriccio, the rarest mad morrice that ever was danced; one minute a mazurka, then a polonaise, then a gallopade, then a fandango, then a bolero, then a saraband, then a guaracha, then a Highland fling! Sometimes the Strangulator, by help of the halter which he waved this way and that, seemed executing the shawl dance; anon, he doubled shuffled like Dusty Bob. One minute Tony appeared as measuring his steps with a duchess dowager of the time of Louis the Fourteenth; the next he was snapping his fingers with Maggie Lauder to the tune of Tullochgorum. You fancied one minute, that the Ordinary was dancing a pas seul, to the music of Haydn’s slow movement, and before you could say Jack Robinson (now Earl of Ripon) he started off into as grotesque a burlesque as ever was flung, and floundered, and flounced, and bounced, and shuffled, and scuffled, and draggled, and wiggle-waggled, shambled, gambolled, scrambled, and skimble-skambled by Grimaldi, in Mother Goose. Blessed were they who were born to behold it, though but from the mother’s arms. It was worth going five miles to see, the first mile trundling a coach-wheel, the second picking up eggs, the third hopping on one leg, the fourth backwards, and the fifth jumped in a sack. If any man think otherwise, may he dance, that is to say, in a ten-acre meadow, with a mohawking bully of a bull for a partner.