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Nuts and Nutcrackers

by Charles Lever · English · Gutenberg #35500 · 377,256 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Nuts and Nutcrackers

Author: Charles Lever

Illustrator: Hablot Knight Browne


        
Release date: March 6, 2011 [eBook #35500]
                Most recently updated: February 28, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35500

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NUTS AND NUTCRACKERS ***




Produced by David Widger





NUTS AND NUTCRACKERS

By Charles James Lever

     “The world's my filbert which with my crackers I will open.”

Shakespear.

     “The priest calls the lawyer a cheat,
     And the lawyer beknaves the divine;
     And the statesman, because he's so great,
     Thinks his trade 's as honest as mine.”

Beggars Opera

     “Hard texts are nuts (I will not call them cheaters,)
     Whose shells do keep their kernels from the eaters;
     Open the shells, and you shall have the meat:
     They are are brought for you to crack and eat.”

John Bunyan.


Illustrated By “Phiz.”

London: Chapman And Hall, 193 Piccadilly.

MDCCCLVII.


[Illustration: 018]




AN OPENING NUT.


“An Opening Nut.”

This is the age of popular delusions! Everybody endeavours to be
somebody else, and everything is made to resemble something it is not.
Every class and section of society seeks to mystify the other, and the
whole world is masquerading it, very much it would seem to the whole
world's delight. There are people who think the Tories consistent--the
Whigs honest--and the Repealers respectable. Nothing too palpable in
absurdity not to have its followers; nor does the ridicule cease with
ourselves; but all who visit us catch the malady--witness the Indian
Chiefs, who called on Ben. D'Israeli, to see the style of life and
habits of the English Aristocracy.

These things after all are but poor delusions--little better than what
the Wizard of the North calls “Parlour Magic,” and might be left to
time, to be laughed at, just like the French war clamour--the O'Connell
denunciation--or the Young England discovery of the “pure 'Cocktailian'
race.” There are, however, other fallacies which from age and habit have
gradually associated themselves with our social existence, and become,
as it were, national. To disabuse the world of some of these, has been
my object in the present little volume. To endeavour not only to show
that we often

     “Compound for sins we are inclined to,
     By damning those we have no mind to;”

but also, that our laws and institutions--our manners and customs--are
based less upon principles of justice, than mere convenience and social
advantage.

That such an undertaking will be graciously received or kindly
acknowledged, I have never been able to persuade myself; no more than I
feel disposed to believe, that hunger can be fed by Acts of Parliament;
or starvation alleviated by Cricket or Jack in the bowl; however, it is
_my_ way of regenerating the land, and why should n't I “roll my tub”
 as well as my neighbours. Why I have given the volume its present
title, would be perhaps more difficult to account for, save, that I
have remarked on so many classes and gradations of people; and that,
“Knocks” at our neighbours are generally “Nuts” to ourselves.

[Illustration: 021]

[Illustration: 022]




A NUT FOR MEN OF GENIUS

If Providence, instead of a vagabond, had made me a justice of the
peace, there is no species of penalty I would not have enforced against
a class of offenders, upon whom it is the perverted taste of the day
to bestow wealth, praise, honour, and reputation; in a word, upon that
portion of the writers for our periodical literature whose pastime it
is by high-flown and exaggerated pictures of society, places, and
amusements, to mislead the too credulous and believing world; who, in
the search for information and instruction, are but reaping a barren
harvest of deceit and illusion.

Every one is loud and energetic in his condemnation of a bubble
speculation; every one is severe upon the dishonest features of
bankruptcy, and the demerits of un-trusty guardianship; but while
the law visits these with its pains and penalties, and while heavy
inflictions follow on those breaches of trust, which affect our pocket,
yet can he “walk scatheless,” with port erect and visage high who, for
mere amusement--for the passing pleasure of the moment--or, baser still,
for certain pounds per sheet, can, present us with the air-drawn daggers
of a dyspeptic imagination for the real woes of life, or paint the most
commonplace and tiresome subjects with colours so vivid and so glowing
as to persuade the unwary reader that a paradise of pleasure and
enjoyment, hitherto unknown, is open before him. The treadmill and the
ducking-stool, “_me judice_” would no longer be tenanted by rambling
gipsies or convivial rioters, but would display to the admiring gaze of
an assembled multitude the aristocratic features of Sir Edward Bulwer
Lytton, the dark whiskers of Disraeli, the long and graceful proportions
of Hamilton Maxwell, or the portly paunch and melodramatic frown of
that right pleasant fellow, Henry Addison himself.

You cannot open a newspaper without meeting some narrative of what, in
the phrase of the day, is denominated an “attempted imposition.” Count
Skryznyzk, with black moustachoes and a beard to match, after being a
lion of Lord Dudley Stuart's parties, and the delight of a certain set
of people in the West-end--who, when they give a tea-party, call it a
_soiree_, and deem it necessary to have either a Hindoo or a Hottentot,
a Pole, or a Piano-player, to interest their guests--was lately brought
up before Sir Peter Laurie, charged by 964 with obtaining money under
false pretences, and sentenced to three months' imprisonment and hard
labour at the treadmill.

The charge looks a grave one, good reader, and perhaps already some
notion is trotting through your head about forgery or embezzlement; you
think of widows rendered desolate, or orphans defrauded; you lament over
the hard-earned pittance of persevering industry lost to its possessor;
and, in your heart, you acknowledge that there may have been some cause
for the partition of Poland, and that the Emperor of the Russias, like
another monarch, may not be half so black as he is painted. But spare
your honest indignation; our unpronounceable friend did none of
these. No; the head and front of his offending was simply exciting the
sympathies of a feeling world for his own deep wrongs; for the fate
of his father, beheaded in the Grand Place at Warsaw; for his four
brothers, doomed never to see the sun in the dark mines of Tobolsk; for
his beautiful sister, reared in the lap of luxury and wealth, wandering
houseless and an outcast around the palaces of St. Petersburg, wearying
heaven itself with cries for mercy on her banished brethren; and last of
all, for himself--he, who at the battle of Pultowa led heaven-knows how
many and how terrific charges cf cavalry,--whose breast was a galaxy
of orders only out-numbered by his wounds--that he should be an exile,
without friends, and without home! In a word, by a beautiful and
highly-wrought narrative, that drew tears from the lady and ten
shillings from the gentleman of the house, he became amenable to our
law as a swindler and an impostor, simply because his narrative was a
fiction.

In the name of all justice, in the name of truth, of honesty, and fair
dealing, I ask you, is this right? or, if the treadmill be the fit
reward for such powers as his, what shall we say, what shall we do, with
all the popular writers of the day? How many of Bulwer's stories are
facts? What truth is there in James? Is that beautiful creation of
Dickens, “Poor Nell,” a real or a fictitious character? And is the
offence, after all, merely in the manner, and not the matter, of the
transgression? Is it that, instead of coming before the world printed,
puffed, and hot-pressed by the gentlemen of the Row, he ventured to
edite himself, and, instead of the trade, make his tongue the medium of
publication? And yet, if speech be the crime, what say you to Macready,
and with what punishment are you prepared to visit him who makes your
heart-strings vibrate to the sorrows of _Virginius_, or thrills
your very blood with the malignant vengeance of _Iago?_ Is what is
permissible in Covent Garden, criminal in the city? or, stranger still,
is there a punishment at the one place, and praise at the other? Or is
it the costume, the foot-lights, the orange-peel, and the sawdust--are
they the terms of the immunity? Alas, and alas! I believe they are.

Burke said, “The age of chivalry is o'er;” and I believe the age of
poetry has gone with it; and if Homer himself were to chant an Iliad
down Fleet Street, I 'd wager a crown that 964 would take him up for a
ballad-singer.

But a late case occurs to me. A countryman of mine, one Bernard
Cavanagh, doubtless, a gentleman of very good connections, announced
some time ago that he had adopted a new system of diet, which was
neither more nor less than going without any food. Now, Mr. Cavanagh was
a stout gentleman, comely and plump to look at, who conversed pleasantly
on the common topics of the day, and seemed, on the whole, to enjoy
life pretty much like other people. He was to be seen for a
shilling--children half-price; and although Englishmen have read of our
starving countrymen for the last century and a-half, yet their curiosity
to see one, to look at him, to prod him with their umbrellas, punch him
with their knuckles, and otherwise test his vitality, was such, that
they seemed just as much alive as though the phenomenon was new to them.
The consequence was, Mr. Cavanagh, whose cook was on board wages, and
whose establishment was of the least expensive character, began to wax
rich. Several large towns and cities, in different parts of the empire,
requested him to visit them; and Joe Hume suggested that the corporation
of London should offer him ten thousand pounds for his secret, merely
for the use of the livery. In fact, Cavanagh was now the cry, and as
Barney appeared to grow fat on fasting, his popularity knew no bounds.
Unfortunately, however, ambition, the bane of so many other great men,
numbered him also among its victims. Had he been content with London as
the sphere of his triumphs and teetotalism, there is no saying how long
he might have gone on starving with satisfaction. Whether it is that
the people are less observant there, or more accustomed to see similar
exhibitions, I cannot tell; but true it is they paid their shillings,
felt his ribs, walked home, and pronounced Barney a most exemplary
Irishman. But not content with the capital, he must make a tour in
the provinces, and accordingly went starring it about through Leeds,
Birmingham, Manchester, and all the other manufacturing towns, as if
in mockery of the poor people who did not know the secret how to live
without food.

Mr. Cavanagh was now living--if life it can be called--in one of the
best hotels, when, actuated by that spirit of inquiry that characterises
the age, a respectable lady,' who kept a boarding-house, paid him a
visit, to ascertain, if possible, how far his system might be made
applicable to her guests, who, whatever their afflictions, laboured
under no such symptoms as his.

She was pleased with Barney,--she patted him with her hand; he was
round, and plump, and fat, much more so, indeed, than many of her
daily dinner-party; and had, withal, that kind of joyous, rollicking,
devil-may-care look, that seems to bespeak good condition;--but this the
poor lady, of course, did not know to be an inherent property in Pat,
however poor his situation.

After an interview of an hour long she took her leave, not exhibiting
the usual satisfaction of other visitors, but with a dubious look and
meditative expression, that betokened a mind not made up, and a heart
not at ease; she was clearly not content, perhaps the abortive effort
to extract a confession from Mr. Cavanagh might be the cause, or perhaps
she felt like many respectable people whose curiosity is only the
advanced guard to their repentance, and who never think that in any
exhibition they get the worth of their money. This might be the case,
for as fasting is a negative process, there is really little to see
in the performer. Had it been the man that eats a sheep; “_à la bonne
heure!_” you have something for your money there: and I can even
sympathize with the French gentleman who follows Van Amburgh to this
day, in the agreeable hope, to use his own words, of “assisting at
the _soirée_, when the lions shall eat Mr. Van Amburgh.” This, if not
laudable is at least intelligible. But to return, the lady went her way,
not indeed on hospitable thoughts intent, but turning over in her mind
various theories about abstinence, and only wishing she had the whole of
the Cavanagh family for boarders at a guinea a-week.

Late in the evening of the same day this estimable lady, whose inquiries
into the properties of gastric juice, if not as scientific, were to
the full as enthusiastic as those of Bostock or Tiedeman himself,
was returning from an early tea, through an unfrequented suburb of
Manchester, when suddenly her eye fell upon Bernard Cavanagh, seated in
a little shop--a dish of sausages and a plate of ham before him, while a
frothing cup of porter ornamented his right hand. It was true, he wore
a patch above his eye, a large beard, and various other disguises, but
they served him not: she knew him at once. The result is soon told:
the police were informed; Mr. Cavanagh was captured; the lady gave her
testimony in a crowded court, and he who lately was rolling on the wheel
of fortune, was now condemned to foot it on a very different wheel, and
all for no other cause than that he could not live without food.

The magistrate, who was eloquent on the occasion, called him an
impostor; designating by this odious epithet, a highly-wrought and
well-conceived work of imagination. Unhappy Defoe, your Robinson Crusoe
might have cost you a voyage across the seas; your man Friday might have
been a black Monday to you had you lived in our days. 964 is a severer
critic than _The Quarterly_, and his judgment more irrevocable.

We have never heard of any one who, discovering the fictitious character
of a novel he had believed as a fact, waited on the publisher with a
modest request that his money might be returned to him, being obtained
under false pretences; much less of his applying to his worship for a
warrant against G. P. R. James, Esq., or Harrison Ainsworth, for certain
imaginary woes and unreal sorrows depicted in their writings: yet the
conduct of the lady towards Mr. Cavanagh was exactly of this nature. How
did his appetite do her any possible disservice? what sins against her
soul were contained in his sausages? and yet she must appeal to the
justice as an injured woman: Cavanagh had imposed upon her--she
was wronged because he was hungry. All his narrative, beautifully
constructed and artfully put together, went for nothing; his look, his
manner, his entertaining anecdotes, his fascinating conversation, his
time--from ten in the morning till eight in the evening--went all for
nothing: this really is too bad. Do we ask of every author to be the
hero he describes? Is Bulwer, Pelham, and Paul Clifford, Eugene Aram,
and the Lady of Lyons? Is James, Mary of Burgundy, Darnley, the
Gipsy, and Corse de Leon? Is Dickens, Sara Weller, Quilp, and Barnaby
Rudge?--to what absurdities will this lead us! and yet Bernard Cavanagh
was no more guilty than any of these gentlemen. He was, if I may so
express it, a pictorial--an ideal representation of a man that fasted:
he narrated all the sensations want of food suggests; its dreamy
debility, its languid stupor, its painful suffering, its stage of
struggle and suspense, ending in a victory, where the mind, the
conqueror over the baser nature, asserts its proud and glorious
supremacy in the triumph of volition; and for this beautiful creation of
his brain he is sent to the treadmill, as though, instead of a poet, he
had been a pickpocket.

If Bulwer be a baronet; if Dickens' bed-room be papered with
bank-debentures; then do I proclaim it loudly before the world, Bernard
Cavanagh is an injured man: you are either absurd in one case, or unjust
in the other; take your choice. Ship off Sir Edward to the colonies;
send James to Swan River; let Lady Blessington card wool, or Mrs. Norton
pound oyster-shells; or else we call upon you, give Mr. Cavanagh freedom
of the guild; call him the author of “The Hungry One;” let him be
courted and _fêted_,--you may ask him to dinner with an easy conscience,
and invite him to tea without remorse. Let a Whig-radical borough
solicit him to represent it; place him at the right hand of Lord John;
let his picture be exhibited in the print-shops, and let the cut of his
coat and the tie of his cravat be so much in vogue, that bang-ups _à la_
Barney shall be the only things seen in Bond-street: one course or the
other you must take. If the mountain will not go to Mahomet, Mahomet
must go to the mountain: or in other words, if Bulwer descend not to
Barney, Barney must mount up to Bulwer. It is absurd, it is worse than
absurd, to pretend that he who so thoroughly sympathises with his hero,
as to embody him in his own thoughts and acts, his look, his dress, and
his demeanour, that he, I say, who so penetrated with the impersonation
of a part, finds the pen too weak, and the press too slow, to picture
forth his vivid creations, should be less an object of praise, of
honour, and distinction, than the indolent denizen of some
drawing-room, who, in slippered ease, dictates his shadowy and imperfect
conceptions--visions of what he never felt, dreamy representations of
unreality.

“The poet,” as the word implies, is the maker or the creator; and
however little of the higher attributes of what the world esteems as
poetry the character would seem to possess, he who invents a personage,
the conformity of whose traits to the rule of life is acknowledged for
its truth, he, I say, is a poet. Thus, there is poetry in Sancho Panza,
Falstaff, Dugald Dalgetty, and a hundred other similar impersonations;
and why not in Bernard Cavanagh?

Look for a moment at the effects of your system. The Caraccis, we are
told, spent their boyish years drawing rude figures with chalk on the
doors and even the walls of the palaces of Rome: here the first germs of
their early talent displayed themselves; and in those bold conceptions
of youthful genius were seen the first dawnings of a power that
gave glory to the age they lived in. Had Sir Peter Laurie been their
cotemporary, had 964 been loose in those days, they would have been
treated with a trip to the mill, and their taste for design cultivated
by the low diet of a penitentiary. You know not what budding genius
you have nipped with this abominable system: you think not of the early
indications of mind and intellect you may be consigning to prison: or is
it after all, that the matter-of-fact spirit of the age has sapped the
very vital? of our law-code, and that in your utilitarian zeal you have
doomed to death all that bears the stamp of imagination? if this be
indeed your object, have a good heart, encourage 964, and you 'll not
leave a novelist in the land.

Good reader, I ask your pardon for all this honest indignation; I know
it is in vain: I cannot reform our jurisprudence; and our laws, like the
Belgian revolution, must be regarded “_comme un fait accompli_;” in other
words, what can't be cured must be endured. Let us leave then our friend
the Pole to perform his penance; let us say adieu to Barney, who is at
this moment occupying a suite of apartments in the Penitentiary, and let
us turn to the reverse of the medal, I mean to those who would wile us
away by false promises and flattering speeches to entertain such views
of life as are not only impossible but inconsistent, thus rendering our
path here devoid of interest and of pleasure, while compared with the
extravagant creations of their own erring fancies. Yes, princes may
be trusted, but put not your faith in periodicals. Let no pictorial
representations of Alpine scenery, under the auspices of Colburn or
Bentley, seduce you from the comforts of your hearth and home: let no
enthusiastic accounts of military greatness, no peninsular pleasures,
no charms of campaigning life, induce you to change your garb of country
gentleman for the livery of the Horse-Guards,--“making the green one
red.”

Be not mystified by Maxwell, nor lured by Lorrequer; let no panegyrics
of pipe-clay and the brevet seduce you from the peaceful path in life;
let not Marryat mar your happiness by the glories of those who dwell
in the deep waters; let not Wilson persuade you that the “Lights and
Shadows of Scottish Life” have any reference to that romantic people,
who betake themselves to their native mountains with a little oatmeal
for food and a little sulphur for friction; do not believe one syllable
about the girls of the west; trust not in the representations of
their blue eyes, nor of their trim ankles peering beneath a jupe of
scarlet--we can vouch it is true, for the red petticoat, but the rest
is apocryphal. Fly, we warn you, from Summers in Germany, Evenings in
Brittany, Weeks on the Rhine; away with tours, guide-books, and all
the John Murrayisms of travels. A plague upon Egypt! travellers have a
proverbial liberty of conscience, and the farther they go, the more does
it seem to stretch; not that near home matters are much better, for
our “Wild Sports” in Achill are as romantic as those in Africa, and the
Complete Angler is a complete humbug.

There is no faith--no principle in any of these men. The grave writer,
the stern moralist, the uncompromising advocate of the inflexible rule
of right, is a dandy with essenced locks, loose trousers, and looser
morals, who breakfasts at four in the afternoon, and spends his evenings
among the side scenes of the opera; the merry writer of whims and
oddities, who shakes his puns about like pepper from a pepper-castor,
is a misanthropic, melancholy gentleman, of mournful look and unhappy
aspect: the advocate of field-sports, of all the joyous excitement of
the hunting-field, and the bold dangers of the chase, is an asthmatic
sexagenarian, with care in his heart and gout in his ankles; and lastly,
he who lives but in the horrors of a charnel-house, whose gloomy mind
finds no pleasure save in the dark and dismal pictures of crime and
suffering, of lingering agony, or cruel death, is a fat, round, portly,
comely gentleman, with a laugh like Falstaff, and a face whose every
lineament and feature seems to exhale the merriment of a jocose
and happy temperament. I speak not of the softer sex, many of whose
productions would seem to have but little sympathy with themselves; but
once for all, I would ask you what reliance, what faith can you place
in any of them? Is it to the denizen of a coal mine you apply for
information about the Nassau balloon? Do you refer a disputed point in
dress to an Englishman, in climate to a Laplander, in politeness to a
Frenchman, or in hospitality to a Belgian? or do you net rather feel
that these are not exactly their attributes, and that you are moving the
equity for a case at common law? exactly in the same way, and for the
same reason, we repeat it, put not your faith in periodicals, nor in the
writers thereof.

How ridiculous would it appear if the surgeon-general were to open
a pleading, or charge a jury in the Queen's Bench, while the
solicitor-general was engaged in taking up the femoral artery! What
would you say if the Archbishop of Canterbury were to preside over
the artillery-practice at Woolwich, while the Commander of the Forces
delivered a charge to the clergy of the diocese? How would you look
if Justice Pennefather were to speak at a repeal meeting, and Daniel
O'Connell to conduct himself like a loyal and discreet citizen? Would
you not at once say the whole world is in masquerade? and would you not
be justified in the remark? And yet this it is which is exactly taking
place before your eyes in the wide world of letters. The illiterate and
unreflecting man of underbred habits and degenerate tastes will write
nothing but a philosophic novel; the denizen of the Fleet, or the
Queen's Bench, publishes an ascent of Mont Blanc, with a glowing
description of the delights of liberty; the nobleman writes slang; the
starving author, with broken boots and patched continuations, will
not indite a name undignified by a title; and after all this, will you
venture to tell me that these men are not indictable by the statute for
obtaining money under false pretences?

I have run myself out of breath; and now, if you will allow me a few
moments, I will tell you what, perhaps, I ought to have done earlier in
this article, namely, its object.

It is a remarkable feature in the complex and difficult machinery of
our society, that while crime and the law code keep steadily on the
increase, moving in parallel lines one beside the other, certain
prejudices, popular fallacies---nuts, as we have called them at the
head of this paper--should still disgrace our social system; and that,
however justice maybe administered in our courts of law, in the private
judicature of our own dwellings we observe an especial system of
jurisprudence, marked by injustice and by wrong. To endeavour to depict
some instances of this, I have set about my present undertaking. To
disabuse the public mind as to the error, that what is punishable in one
can be praiseworthy in another; and what is excellent in the court can
be execrable in the city. Such is my object, such my hope. Under this
title I shall endeavour to touch upon the undue estimation in which we
hold certain people and places--the unfair depreciation of certain sects
and callings. Not confining myself to home, I shall take the habits of
my countrymen on the Continent, whether in their search for climate,
economy, education, or enjoyment; and, as far as my ability lies, hold
the mirror up to nature, while I extend the war-cry of my distinguished
countrymen, not asking “justice for Ireland” alone, but “justice for the
whole human race.” For the gaoler as for the guardsman, for the
steward of the Holyhead as for him of the household; from the Munster
king-at-arms to the monarch of the Cannibal Island--“_nihil à me alienum
puto_;” from the priest to the plenipotentiary; from Mr. Arkins to
Abd-el-Kader: my sympathy extends to all.




A NUT FOR CORONERS.

[Illustration: 036]

I had nearly attained to man's estate before I understood the nature of
a coroner. I remember, when a child, to have seen a coloured print from
a well-known picture of the day, representing the night-mare. It was a
horrible representation of a goblin shape of hideous aspect, that sat
cowering upon the bosom of a sleeping figure, on whose white features
a look of painful suffering was depicted, while the clenched hands and
drawn-up feet seemed to struggle with convulsive agony. Heaven knows
how or when the thought occurred to me, but I clearly recollect my
impression that this goblin was a coroner. Some confused notion about
sitting on a corpse as one of his attributes had, doubtless, suggested
the idea; and certainly nothing contributed to increase the horror
of suicide in my eyes so much as the reflection, that the grim demon
already mentioned had some function to discharge on the occasion.

When, after the lapse of years, I heard that the eloquent and gifted
member for Finsbury was a being of this order, although I knew by that
time the injustice of my original prejudices, yet, I confess I could not
look at him in the house, without a thought of my childish fancies, and
an endeavour to trace in his comely features some faint resemblance to
the figure of the night-mare.

This strange impression of my infancy recurred strongly to my mind a few
days since, on reading a newspaper account of a sudden death.--The case
was simply that of a gentleman who, in the bosom of his family, became
suddenly seized with illness, and after a few hours expired. What was
their surprise! what their horror! to find, that no sooner was the
circumstance known, than the house was surrounded by a mob, policemen
were stationed at the doors, and twelve of the great unwashed, with a
coroner at their head, forced their entry into the house of mourning, to
deliberate on the cause of death. I can perfectly understand the value
of this practice in cases where either suspicion has attached, or where
the circumstances of the decease, as to time and place, would indicate
a violent death; but where a person, surrounded by his children, living
in all the quiet enjoyment of an easy and undisturbed existence, drops
off by some one of the ills that flesh is heir to, only a little more
rapidly than his neighbour at next door, why this should be a case for
a coroner and his gang, I cannot, for the life of me, conceive. In the
instance I allude to, the family offered the fullest information: they
explained that the deceased had been liable for years to an infirmity
likely to terminate in this way. The physician who attended him
corroborated the statement; and, in fact, it was clear the case was
one of those almost every-day occurrences where the thread of life is
snapped, not unravelled. This, however, did not satisfy the coroner, who
had, as he expressed it, a “duty to perform,” and, who, certainly had
five guineas for his fee: he was a “medical coroner,” too, and therefore
he would' examine for himself. Thus, in the midst of the affliction and
bereavement of a desolate family, the frightful detail of an inquest,
with all its attendant train of harrowing and heart-rending inquiries,
is carried on, simply because it is permissible by the law, and the
coroner may enter where the king cannot.

We are taught in the litany to pray against sudden death; but up to this
moment I never knew it was illegal. Dreadful afflictions as apoplexy
and aneurism are, it remained for our present civilisation to make them
punishable by a statute. The march of intellect, not satisfied with
directing us in life, must go a step farther and teach us how to die.
Fashionable diseases the world has been long acquainted with, but an
“illegal inflammation,” and a “criminal hemorrhage” have been reserved
for the enlightened age we live in.

Newspapers will no longer inform us, in the habitual phrase, that Mr.
Simpkins died suddenly at his house at Hampstead; but, under the head
of “Shocking outrage,” we shall read, “that after a long life of great
respectability and the exhibition of many virtues, this unfortunate
gentleman, it is hoped in a moment of mental alienation, 'went off with
a disease of the heart. The affliction of his surviving relatives
at this frightful act may be conceived, but cannot be described. His
effects, according to the statute, have been confiscated to the crown,
and a deodand of fifty shillings awarded on the apothecary who attended
him. It is hoped, that the universal execration which attends cases of
this nature may deter others from the same course; and, we confess,
our observations are directed with a painful, but we trust, a
powerful interest to certain elderly gentlemen in the neighbourhood of
Islington.” _Verb. sat._

Under these sad circumstances it behoves us to look a little about, and
provide against such a contingency. It is then earnestly recommended
to heads of families, that when registering the birth of a child, they
should also include some probable or possible malady of which he may,
could, would, should, or ought to die, in the course of time. This
will show, by incontestable evidence, that the event was at least
anticipated, and being done at the earliest period of life, no reproach
can possibly lie for want of premeditation. The register might run
thus:--

Giles Tims, son of Thomas and Mary Tims, born on the 9th of June, Kent
street, Southwark--dropsy, typhus, or gout in the stomach.

It by no means follows, that he must wait for one or other of these
maladies to carry him off. Not at all; he may range at will through the
whole practice of physic, and adopt his choice. The registry only
goes to show, that he does not mean to sneak out of the world in any
under-bred way, nor bolt out of life with the abrupt precipitation of a
Frenchman after a dinner party. I have merely thrown out this hint here
as a warning to my many friends, and shall now proceed to other and more
pleasing topics.




A NUT FOR “TOURISTS.”

Among the many incongruities of that composite piece of architecture,
called John Bull, there is nothing more striking than the contrast
between his thorough nationality and his unbounded admiration for
foreigners. Now, although we may not entirely sympathize with, we can
understand and appreciate this feature of his character, and see how
he gratifies his very pride itself, in the attentions and civilities
he bestows upon strangers. The feeling is intelligible too, because
Frenchmen, Germans, and even Italians, notwithstanding the many points
of disparity between us, have always certain qualities well worthy of
respect, if not of imitation. France has a great literature, a name
glorious in history, a people abounding in intelligence, skill, and
invention; in fact, all the attributes that make up a great nation.
Germany has many of these, and though she lack the brilliant fancy, the
sparkling wit of her neighbour, has still a compensating fund in
the rich resources of her judgment, and the profound depths of her
scholarship. Indeed, every continental country has its lesson for
our benefit, and we would do well to cultivate the acquaintance of
strangers, not only to disseminate more just views of ourselves and our
institutions, but also for the adoption of such customs as seem worthy
of imitation, and such habits as may suit our condition in life;
while such is the case as regards those countries high in the scale
of civilisation, we would, by no means, extend the rule to others less
happily constituted, less benignly gifted. The Carinthian boor with his
garment of sheep-wool, or the Laplander with his snow shoes and his hood
of deerskin, may be both very natural objects of curiosity, but by no
means subjects of imitation. This point will doubtless be conceded at
once; and now, will any one tell me for what cause, under what pretence,
and with what pretext are we civil to the Yankees?--not for their
politeness, not for their literature, not for any fascination of
their manner, nor any charm of their address, not for any historic
association, not for any halo that the glorious past has thrown around
the commonplace monotony of the present, still less for any romantic
curiosity as to their lives and habits--for in this respect all other
savage nations far surpass them. What then is, or what can be the cause?

Of all the lions that caprice and the whimsical absurdity of a
second-rate set in fashion ever courted and entertained, never had any
one less pretensions to the civility he received than the author of
'Pencillings by the Way'--poor in thought, still poorer in expression,
without a spark of wit, without a gleam of imagination--a fourth-rate
looking man, and a fifth-rate talker, he continued to receive the homage
we were wont to bestow upon a Scott, and even charily extended to
a Dickens. His writings the very slip-slop of “commerage,” the
tittle-tattle of a Sunday paper, dressed up in the cant of Kentucky;
the very titles, the contemptible affectation of unredeemed twaddle,
'Pencillings by the Way!' 'Letters from under a Bridge!' Good lack! how
the latter name is suggestive of eaves-dropping and listening; and how
involuntarily we call to mind those chance expressions of his partners
in the dance, or his companions at the table, faithfully recorded for
the edification of the free-born Americans, who, while they ridicule our
institutions, endeavour to pantomime our manners.

For many years past a number of persons have driven a thriving trade in
a singular branch of commerce, no less than buying up cast court dresses
and second-hand uniforms for exportation to the colonies. The negroes,
it is said, are far prouder of figuring in the tattered and tarnished
fragments of former greatness, than of wearing the less gaudy, but
more useful garb, befitting their condition. So it would seem our
trans-Atlantic friends prefer importing through their agents, for that
purpose, the abandoned finery of courtly gossip, to the more useful but
less pretentious apparel, of commonplace information. Mr. Willis was
invaluable for this purpose; he told his friends every thing that he
heard, and he heard every thing that he could; and, like mercy, he
enjoyed a duplicate of blessings--for while he was delighted in by his
own countrymen, he was dined by ours. He scattered his autographs,
as Feargus O'Connor did franks; he smiled; he ogled; he read his own
poetry, and went the whole lion with all his might; and yet, in the
midst of this, a rival starts up equally desirous of court secrets,
and fifty times as enterprising in their search; he risks his liberty,
perhaps his life, in the pursuit, and what is his reward? I need only
tell you his name, and you are answered--I mean the boy Jones; not under
a bridge, but under a sofa; not in Almacks, obtaining it at second-hand,
but in Buckingham Palace--into the very apartment of the Queen--the
adventurous youth has dared to insinuate himself. No lady however sends
her album to him for some memento of his genius. His temple is not
defrauded of its curls to grace a locket or a medallion; and his reward,
instead of a supper at Lady Blessington's, is a voyage to Swan River.
For my part, I prefer the boy Jones: I like his singleness of purpose: I
admire his steady perseverance; still, however, he had the misfortune to
be born in England--his father lived near Wapping, and he was ineligible
for a lion: To what other reason than his English growth can be
attributed the different treatment he has experienced at the hands of
the world. The similarity between the two characters is most striking.
Willis had a craving appetite for court gossip, and the tittle-tattle of
a palace: so had the boy Jones. Willis established himself as a listener
in society: so did the boy Jones. Willis obtruded himself into places,
and among people where he had no possible pretension to be seen: so did
the boy Jones. Willis wrote letters from under a bridge: the boy Jones
eat mutton chops under a sofa.




A NUT FOR LEGAL FUNCTIONARIES.

The pet profession of England is the bar, and I see many reasons why
this should be the case. Our law of primogeniture necessitates the
existence of certain provisions for younger children independently of
the pittance bestowed on them by their families. The army and the navy,
the church and the bar, form then the only avenues to fortune for the
highly born; and one or other of these four roads must be adopted by him
who would carve out his own career. The barrister, for many reasons,
is the favourite--at least among those who place reliance in their
intellect. Its estimation is high. It is not incompatible but actually
favourable to the pursuits of parliament. Its rewards are manifold and
great; and while there is a sufficiency of private ease and personal
retirement in its practice, there is also enough of publicity for the
most ambitiously-minded seeker of the world's applause and the world's
admiration. Were we only to look back upon our history, we should find
perhaps that the profession of the law would include almost two-thirds
of our very greatest men. Astute thinkers, deep politicians, eloquent
debaters, profound scholars, men of wit, as well as men of wisdom, have
abounded in its ranks, and there is every reason why it should be, as I
have called it, the pet profession.

[Illustration: 044]

Having conceded so much, may I now be permitted to take a nearer view of
those men so highly distinguished: and for this purpose let me turn my
reader's attention to the practice of a criminal trial. The first duty
of a good citizen, it will not be disputed, is, as far as in him lies,
to promote obedience to the law, to repress crime, and bring outrage
to punishment. No walk in life--no professional career--no uniform of
scarlet or of black--no freemasonry of craft or calling can absolve him
from this allegiance to his country. Yet, what do we see? The wretch
stained with crime--polluted with iniquity--for which, perhaps, the
statute-book contains neither name nor indictment--whose trembling
lips are eager to avow that guilt which, by confessing, he hopes may
alleviate the penalty--this man, I say, is checked in his intentions--he
is warned not, by any chance expression, to hazard a conviction of his
crime, and told in the language of the law not to criminate himself. But
the matter stops not here--justice is an inveterate gambler--she is not
satisfied when her antagonist throws his card upon the table confessing
that he has not a trump nor a trick in his hand--no, like the most
accomplished swindler of Baden or Boulogne, she assumes a smile of easy
and courteous benignity, and says, pooh, pooh! nonsense, my dear friend;
you don't know what may turn up; your cards are better than you think;
don't be faint-hearted; don't you see you have the knave of trumps,
_i. e._, the cleverest lawyer for your defender; a thousand things may
happen; I may revoke, that is, the indictment may break down; there are
innumerable chances in your favour, so pluck up your courage and play
the game out.

He takes the advice, and however faint-hearted before, he now assumes a
look of stern courage, or dogged indifference, and resolves to play for
the stake. He remembers, however, that he is no adept in the game, and
he addresses himself in consequence to some astute and subtle gambler,
to whom he commits his cards and his chances. The trepidation or the
indifference that he manifested before, now gradually gives way; and
however hopeless he had deemed his case at first, he now begins to think
that all is not lost. The very way his friend, the lawyer, shuffles and
cuts the cards, imposes on his credulity and suggests a hope. He sees
at once that he is a practised hand, and almost unconsciously he
becomes deeply interested in the changes and vacillations of the game he
believed could have presented but one aspect of fortune.

But the prisoner is not my object: I turn rather to the lawyer. Here
then do we not see the accomplished gentleman--the finished scholar--the
man of refinement and of learning, of character and station--standing
forth the very embodiment of the individual in the dock? possessed of
all his secrets--animated by the same hopes--penetrated by the same
fears--he endeavours by all the subtle ingenuity, with which craft
and habit have gifted him, to confound the testimony--to disparage
the truth--to pervert the inferences of all the witnesses. In fact,
he employs all the stratagems of his calling, all the ingenuity of
his mind, all the subtlety of his wit for the one end--that the man he
believes in his own heart guilty, may, on the oaths of twelve honest
men, be pronounced innocent. From the opening of the trial to its close,
this mental gladiator is an object of wonder and dread. Scarcely a
quality of the human mind is not exhibited by him in the brilliant
panorama of his intellect. At first, the patient perusal of a complex
and wordy indictment occupies him exclusively: he then proceeds
to cross-examine the witnesses--flattering this one--brow-beating
that--suggesting--insinuating--amplifying, or retrenching, as the
evidence would seem to favour or be adverse to his client. He is
alternately confident and doubtful, headlong and hesitating--now hurried
away on the full tide of his eloquence he expatiates in beautiful
generalities on the glorious institution of trial by jury, and
apostrophizes justice; or now, with broken utterance and plaintive
voice, he supplicates the jury to be patient, and be careful in the
decision they may come to. He implores them to remember that when
they leave that court, and return to the happy comforts of their home,
conscience will follow them, and the everlasting question crave for
answer within them--were they sure of this man's guilt? He teaches
them how fallacious are all human tests; he magnifies the slightest
discrepancy of evidence into a broad and sweeping contradiction; and
while, with a prophetic menace, he pictures forth the undying remorse
that pursues him who sheds innocent blood, he dismisses them with
an affecting picture of mental agony so great--of suffering so
heartrending, that, as they retire to the jury-room, there is not a man
of the twelve that has not more or less of a _personal_ interest in the
acquittal of the prisoner.

However bad, however depraved the human mind, it still leans to mercy:
the power to dispose of another man's life is generally sufficient for
the most malignant spirit in its thirst for vengeance. What then are the
feelings of twelve calm, and perhaps, benevolent men at a moment like
this? The last words of the advocate have thrown a new element into the
whole case, for independent of their verdict upon the prisoner comes
now the direct appeal to their own hearts. How will they feel when they
reflect on this hereafter? I do not wish to pursue this further. It
is enough for my present purpose that, by the ingenuity of the lawyer,
criminals have escaped, do escape, and are escaping, the just sentence
on their crimes. What then is the result? the advocate, who up to this
moment has maintained a familiar, even a friendly, intimacy with his
client in the dock, now shrinks from the very contamination of his look.
He cannot bear that the blood-stained fingers should grasp the hem of
his garment, and he turns with a sense of shame from the expressions of
a gratitude that criminate him in his own heart. However, this is but
a passing sensation; he divests himself of his wig and gown, and
overwhelmed with congratulations for his brilliant success, he springs
into his carriage and goes home to dress for dinner--for on that day he
is engaged to the Chancellor, the Bishop of London, or some other great
and revered functionary--the guardian of the church, or the custodian of
conscience.

Now, there is only one thing in all this I would wish to bring
strikingly before the mind of my readers, and that is, that the lawyer,
throughout the entire proceeding, was a free and a willing agent. There
was neither legal nor moral compulsion to urge him on. No; it was no
intrepid defence against the tyranny of a government or the usurpation
of power--it was the assertion of no broad and immutable principle of
truth or justice--it was simply a matter of legal acumen and persuasive
eloquence, to the amount of fifty pounds sterling.

This being admitted, let me now proceed to consider another functionary,
and observe how far the rule of right is consulted in the treatment _he_
meets with--I mean the hangman. You start, good reader, and your gesture
of impatience denotes the very proposition I would come to. I need
scarcely remind you, that in our country this individual has a kind of
prerogative of detestation. All other ranks and conditions of men may
find a sympathy, or at least a pity, somewhere, but for him there is
none. No one is sufficiently debased to be his companion,--no one so low
as to be his associate! Like a being of another sphere, he appears but
at some frightful moments of life, and then only for a few seconds. For
the rest he drags on existence unseen and unheard of, his very name a
thing to tremble at. Yet this man, in the duties of his calling, has
neither will nor choice. The stern agent of the law, he has but one
course to follow; his path, a narrow one, has no turning to the right
or to the left, and, save that his ministry is more proximate, is less
accessory to the death of the criminal than he who signs the warrant for
execution. In fact, he but answers the responses of the law, and in the
loud amen of his calling, he only consummates its recorded assertion.
How then can you reconcile yourself to the fact, that while you
overwhelm the advocate who converts right into wrong and wrong into
right, who shrouds the guilty man, and conceals the murderer, with
honour, and praise, and rank, and riches, and who does this for a brief
marked fifty pounds, yet have nothing but abhorrence and detestation for
the impassive agent whose fee is but one. One can help what he does--the
other cannot. One is an amateur--the other practices in spite of
himself. One employs every energy of his mind and every faculty of his
intellect--the other only devotes the ingenuity of his fingers. One
strains every nerve to let loose a criminal upon the world--the other
but closes the grave over guilt and crime!

The king's counsel is courted. His society sought for. He is held in
high esteem, and while his present career is a brilliant one in the
vista before him, his eyes are fixed upon the ermine. Jack Ketch, on the
other hand, is shunned. His companionship avoided, and the only futurity
he can look to, is a life of ignominy, and after it an unknown grave.
Let him be a man of fascinating manners, highly gifted, and agreeable;
let him be able to recount with the most melting pathos the anecdotes
and incidents of his professional career, throwing light upon the
history of his own period--such as none but himself could throw;--let
him speak of the various characters that have _passed through his
hands_, and so to say, “dropped off before him”--yet the prejudice
of the world is an obstacle not to be overcome; his calling is in
disrepute, and no personal efforts of his own, no individual preeminence
he may arrive at in his walk, will ever redeem it. Other men's
estimation increases as they distinguish themselves in life; each fresh
display of their abilities, each new occasion for the exercise of their
powers, is hailed with renewed favour and increasing flattery; not
so he,--every time he appears on his peculiar stage, the disgust and
detestation is but augmented,--_vires acquirit eundo_,--his countenance,
as it becomes known, is a signal for the yelling execrations of a mob,
and the very dexterity with which he performs his functions, is made
matter of loathing and horror. Were his duties such as might be carried
on in secret, he might do good by stealth and blush to find it fame; but
no, his attributes demand the noon-day and the multitude--the tragedy he
performs in, must be played before tens of thousands, by whom his
every look is scowled at, his every gesture scrutinized. But to
conclude,--this man is a necessity of our social system. We want him--we
require, him, and we can't do without him. Much of the machinery of a
trial might be dispensed with or retrenched. His office, however, has
nothing superfluous. He is part of the machinery of our civilisation,
and on what principle do we hunt him down like a wild beast to his lair?

Men of rank and title are daily to be found in association, and even
intimacy with black legs and bruisers, grooms, jockeys, and swindlers;
yet we never heard that even the Whigs paid any attention to a hangman,
nor is his name to be found even in the list of a Radical viceroy's
levee. However, we do not despair. Many prejudices of this nature have
already given way, and many absurd notions have been knocked on the head
by a wag of great Daniel's tail. And if our friend of Newgate, who is
certainly anti-union in his functions, will only cry out for Repeal, the
justice that is entreated for all Ireland may include him in the general
distribution of its favours. Poor Theodore Hook used to say, that
marriage was like hanging, there being only the difference of an
aspirate between halter and altar.

[Illustration: 053]




A NUT FOR “ENDURING AFFECTION.”

[Illustration: 054]

My dear reader, if it does not insult your understanding by
the self-evidence of the query, will you allow me to ask you a
question--which of the two is more culpable, the man who, finding
himself in a path of dereliction, arrests himself in his downward
career, and, by a wonderful effort of self-restraint, stops dead short,
and will suffer no inducement, no seduction, to lead him one step
further; or he, who, floating down the stream of his own vicious
passions, takes the flood-tide of iniquity, and, indifferent to every
consequence, deaf to all remonstrance, seeks but the indulgence of his
own egotistical pleasure with a stern determination to pursue it to the
last? Of course you will say, that he who repents is better than he who
persists; there is hope for the one, there is none for the other. Yet
would you believe it, our common law asserts directly the reverse,
pronouncing the culpability of the former as meriting heavy punishment,
while the latter is not assailable even by implication.

That I may make myself more clear, I shall give an instance of my
meaning. Scarcely a week passes over without a trial for breach of
promise of marriage. Sometimes the gay Lothario, to use the phrase
of the newspapers, is nineteen, sometimes ninety. In either case his
conduct is a frightful tissue of perjured vows and base deception.
His innumerable letters breathing all the tenderness of affectionate
solicitude, intended but for the eyes of her he loves, are read in
open court; attested copies are shown to the judge, or handed up to
the jury-box. The course of his true love is traced from the bubbling
fountain of first acquaintance to the broad river of his passionate
devotion. Its rapids and its whirlpools, its placid lakes, its frothy
torrents, its windings and its turnings, its ebbs and flows, are
discussed, detailed, and descanted on with all the hacknied precision of
the craft, as though his heart was a bill of exchange, or the current of
his affection a disputed mill-stream. And what, after all, is this man's
crime? knowing that love is the great humanizer of our race, and feeling
probably how much he stands in need of some civilizing process, he
attaches himself to some lovely and attractive girl, who, in the
reciprocity of her affection, is herself benefited in a degree equal
to him. If the soft solicitude of the tender passion, if its ennobling
self-respect, if its purifying influence on the heart, be good for the
man, how much more so is it for the woman. If _he_ be taught to feel how
the refined enjoyments of an attractive girl's mind are superior to the
base and degenerate pursuits of every-day pleasure, how much more will
_she_ learn to prize and cultivate those gifts which form the charm of
her nature, and breathe an incense of fascination around her steps. Here
is a compact where both parties benefit, but that they may do so to the
fullest extent, it is necessary that no self-interest, no mean prospect
of individual advantage, should interfere: all must be pure and
confiding. Love-making should not be like a game of _écarté_ with a
black leg, where you must not rise from the table till you are ruined.
No! it should rather resemble a party at picquet with your pretty
cousin, when the moment either party is tired, you may throw down the
cards and abandon the game.

This, then, is the case of the man; he either discovers that on further
acquaintance the qualities he believed in were not so palpable as
he thought, or, if there, marred in their exercise by opposing and
antagonist forces, of whose existence he knew not, he thinks he detects
discrepancies of temperament, disparities of taste; he foresees that in
the channel where he looked for deep water there are so many rocks, and
shoals, and quicksands, that he fears the bark of conjugal happiness may
be shipwrecked upon them; and like a prudent mariner, he resolves to
lighten the craft by “throwing over the lady.” Had this man married with
all these impending suspicions on his mind, there is little doubt he
would have made a most execrable husband; not to mention the danger that
his wife should not be all amiable as she ought. He stops short--that
is, he explains in one, perhaps in a series of letters, the reasons of
his new course.

[Illustration: 056]

He expects in return the admiration and esteem of her, for whose
happiness he is legislating, as well as for his own; and oh, base
ingratitude! he receives a letter from her attorney. The gentlemen of
the long robe--newspaper again--are in ecstasies. Like devils on
the arrival of a new soul, they brighten up, rub their hands, and
congratulate each other on a glorious case. The damages are laid at five
thousand pounds; and, as the lady is pretty, and can be seen from the
jury-box, being fathers themselves, they award every sixpence of the
money.

I can picture to myself the feeling of the defendant at such a moment
as this. As he stands alone in conscious honesty, ruminating on his
fate--alone, I say, for, like Mahomet's coffin, he has no resting-place;
laughed at by the men, sneered at by the women, mulcted of perhaps half
his fortune, merely because for the last three years of his life he
represented himself in every amiable and attractive trait that can grace
and adorn human nature. Who would wonder, if, like the man in the farce,
he would register a vow never to do a good-natured thing again as long
as he lives; or what respect can he have for a government or a country,
where the church tells him to love his neighbour, and the chief justice
makes him pay five thousand for his obedience.

I now come to the other case, and I shall be very brief in my
observations. I mean that of him, who equally fond of flirting as the
former, has yet a lively fear of an action at law. Love-making with him
is a necessity of his existence--he is an Irishman, perhaps, and it is
as indispensable to his temperament as train-oil to a Russian. He
likes sporting, he likes billiards, he likes his club, and he likes the
ladies; but he has just as much intention of turning a huntsman at the
one, or a marker at the other, as he has of matrimony. He knows life is
a chequered table, and that there could be no game if all the squares
were of one colour. He alternates, therefore, between love and sporting,
between cards and courtship, and as the pursuit is a pleasant one, he
resolves never to give up. He waxes old, therefore, with young habits,
adapting his tastes to his time of life; he does not kneel so often
at forty as he did at twenty, but he ogles the more, and is twice as
good-tempered. Not perhaps as ready to fight for the lady, but ten times
more disposed to flatter her. She may love him, or she may not; she may
receive him as of old, or she may marry another. What matters it to him?
All his care is that _he_ shouldn't change. All his anxiety is, to let
the rupture, if there must be one, proceed from _her_ side. He knows in
his heart the penalty of breach of promise, but he also knows that the
Chancellor can issue no injunction compelling a man to marry, and that
in the courts of love the bills are payable at convenience.

Here, then, are the two cases, which, in conformity with the world's
opinion, I have dignified with every possible term of horror and
reproach. In the one, the measure of iniquity is but half filled; in the
other, the cup is overflowing at the brim. For the lesser offence, the
law awards damages and defamation: for the greater, society pronounces
an eulogy upon the enduring fidelity of the man thus faithful to a first
love.

If a person about to buy a horse should, on trying him for an hour or
two, discover that his temper did not suit him, or that his paces were
not pleasant, and should in consequence restore him to the owner: and
if another, on the same errand, should come day after day for weeks,
or months, or even years, cantering him about over the pavement, and
scouring over the whole country; his answer being, when asked if he
intended to purchase, that he liked the horse exceedingly, but that he
hadn't got a stable, or a saddle, or a curb-chain, or, in fact, some one
or other of the little necessaries of horse gear; but that when he had,
that was exactly the animal to suit him--he never was better carried
in his life. Which of these two, do you esteem the more honest and
more honourable? When you make up your mind, please also to make the
application.

[Illustration: 059]




A NUT FOR THE POLICE AND SIR PETER.

[Illustration: 060]

When the Belgians, by their most insane revolution, separated from the
Dutch, they assumed for their national motto the phrase “_L'union fait
la force_” It is difficult to say whether their rebellion towards
the sovereign, or this happy employment of a bull, it was, that so
completely captivated our illustrious countryman, Dan, and excited so
warmly his sympathies for that beer-drinking population. After all,
why should one quarrel with them? Nations, like individuals, have
their coats-of-arms, their heraldic insignia, their blazons, and their
garters, frequently containing the sharpest sarcasm and most poignant
satire upon those who bear them; and in this respect Belgium is only as
ridiculous as the attorney who assumed for his motto “_Fïat justitia_.”
 Time was when the chivalrous line of our own garter, “_Honi soit qui mal
y pense_,” brought with it, its bright associations of kingly courtesy
and maiden bashfulness: but what sympathy can such a sentiment find in
these degenerate days of rail-roads and rack-rents, canals, collieries,
and chain-bridges? No, were we now to select an inscription, much rather
would we take it from the prevailing passion of the age, and write
beneath the arms of our land the emphatic phrase, “Push along, keep
moving.”

If Englishmen have failed to exhibit in machinery that triumphant El
Dorado called perpetual motion, in revenge for their failure, they
resolved to exemplify it in themselves. The whole nation, from John o'
Groat to Land's End, from Westport to Dover, are playing cross-corners.
Every body and every thing is on the move. A dwelling-house, like an
umbrella, is only a thing used on an emergency; and the inhabitants of
Great Britain pass their lives amid the smoke of steam-boats, or the din
and thunder of the Grand-Junction. From the highest to the lowest, from
the peer to the peasant, from the lord of the treasury to the Irish
haymaker, it is one universal “_chassée croissée_.” Not only is this
fashionable--for we are told by the newspapers how the Queen walks daily
with Prince Albert on “the slopes”--but stranger still, locomotion is a
law of the land, and standing still is a statutable offence. The hackney
coachman, with wearied horses, blown and broken-winded, dares not
breathe his jaded beasts by a momentary pull-up, for the implacable
policeman has his eye upon him, and he must simulate a trot, though his
pace but resemble a stage procession, where the legs are lifted without
progressing, and some fifty Roman soldiers, in Wellington boots, are
seen vainly endeavouring to push forward. The foot-passenger is no
better off--tired perhaps with walking or attracted by the fascinations
of a print-shop, he stops for an instant: alas, that luxury may cost him
dear, and for the momentary pleasure he may yet have to perform a quick
step on the mill. “Move on, sir. Keep moving, if you please,” sayeth
the gentleman in blue; and there is something in his manner that wont be
denied. It is useless to explain that you have nowhere particular to go
to, that you are an idler and a lounger. The confession is a fatal one;
and however respectable your appearance, the idea of shoplifting is at
once associated with your pursuits. Into what inconsistencies do we fall
while multiplying our laws, for while we insist upon progression, we
announce a penalty for vagrancy. The first principle of the British
constitution, however, is “keep moving,” and “I would recommend you to
go with the tide.”

Thank heaven, I have reached to man's estate--although with a heavy
heart I acknowledge it is the only estate I have or ever shall attain
to; for if I were a child I don't think I should close my eyes at night
from the fear of one frightful and terrific image. As it is, I am by no
means over courageous, and it requires all the energy I can summon to
combat my terrors. You ask me, in all likelihood, what this fearful
thing can be? Is it the plague or the cholera? is it the dread of
poverty and the new poor-law? is it that I may be impressed as a seaman,
or mistaken for a Yankee? or is it some unknown and visionary terror,
unseen, unheard of, but foreshadowed by a diseased imagination; No;
nothing of the kind. It is a palpable, sentient, existent thing--neither
more nor less than the worshipful Sir Peter Laurie.

Every newspaper you take up announces that Sir Peter, with a hearty
contempt for the brevity of the fifty folio volumes that contain the
laws of our land, in the plenitude of his power and the fulness of his
imagination, keeps adding to the number; so that if length of years be
only accorded to that amiable individual in proportion to his merits, we
shall find at length that not only will every contingency of our lives
be provided for by the legislature, but that some standard for personal
appearance will also be adopted, to which we must conform as rigidly as
to our oath of allegiance.

A few days ago a miserable creature, a tailor we believe, some decimal
fraction of humanity, was brought up before Sir Peter on a trifling
charge of some kind or other. I forget his offence, but whatever it was,
the penalty annexed to it was but a fine of half-a-crown. The prisoner,
however, who behaved with propriety and decorum, happened to have long
black hair, which he wore somewhat “_en jeune France_” upon his neck
and shoulders; his locks, if not ambrosial, were tastefully curled, and
bespoke the fostering hand of care and attention. The Rhadamanthus of
the police-office, however, liked them not: whether it was that he
wore a Brutus himself, or that his learned cranium had resisted all the
efficacy of Macassar, I cannot say; but certain it is, that the tailor's
ringlets gave him the greatest offence, and he apostrophised the wearer
in the most solemn manner:

[Illustration: 063]

“I have sat,” said he, “for------,” as I quote from memory I sha'n't say
how many, “years upon the bench, and I never yet met an honest man with
long hair. The worst feature in your case is your ringlets. There is
something so disgusting to me in the odious and abominable vice you
have indulged in, that I feel myself warranted in applying to you the
heaviest penalty of the law.”

The miserable man, we are told, fell upon his knees, confessed his
delinquency, and, being shorn of his locks in the presence of a crowded
court, his fine was remitted, and he was liberated.

Now, perhaps, you will suppose that all this is a mere matter of
invention. On the faith of an honest man I assure you it is not. I have
retrenched considerably the pathetic eloquence of the magistrate, and I
have left altogether untouched the poor tailor's struggle between
pride and poverty--whether, on the one hand, to suffer the loss of
his half-crown, or, on the other, to submit to the desecration of
his _entire_ head. We hear a great deal about a law for the rich, and
another for the poor; and certainly in this case I am disposed to think
the complaint might not seem without foundation. Suppose for a moment
that the prisoner in this case had been the Honourable Augustus
Somebody, who appeared before his worship fashionably attired, and
with hair, beard, and moustache far surpassing in extravagance the poor
tailor's; should we then have heard this beautiful apostrophe to “the
croppies,” this thundering denunciation of ringlets? I half fear not.
And yet, under what pretext does a magistrate address to one man, the
insulting language he would not dare apply to another? Or let us suppose
the rule of justice to be inflexible, and look at the result. What havoc
would Sir Peter make among the Guards? ay, even in the household of her
Majesty how many delinquents would he find? what a scene would not the
clubs present, on the police authorities dropping suddenly down amongst
them with rule and line to determine the statute length of their
whiskers, or the legal cut of their eye-brows? Happy King of Hanover,
were you still amongst us, not even the Alliance would insure your
mustachoes. As for Lord Ellenborough, it is now clear enough why he
accepted the government of India, and made such haste to get out of the
country.

Now we will suppose that as Sir Peter Laurie's antipathy is long hair,
Sir Frederick Roe may also have his dislikes. It is but fair, you will
allow, that the privileges of the bench should be equal. Well, for
argument's sake, I will imagine that Sir Frederick Roe has not the
same horror of long hair as his learned brother, but has the most
unconquerable aversion to long noses.

[Illustration: 065]

What are we to do here? Heaven help half our acquaintance if this should
strike him! What is to be done with Lord Allen if he beat a watchman! In
what a position will he stand if he fracture a lamp? One's hair may be
cut to even shaved clean off; but your nose.--And then a few weeks,--a
few months at farthest, and your hair has grown again: but your nose,
like your reputation, can only stand one assault. This is really a
serious view of the subject; and it is a somewhat hard thing that the
face you have shown to your acquaintances for years past, with pleasure
to yourself and satisfaction to them, should be pronounced illegal, or
curtailed in its proportions. They have a practice in banks if a forged
note be presented for payment, to mark it in a peculiar manner before
restoring it to the owner. This is technically called “raddling.”
 Something similar, I suppose, will be adopted at the police-office, and
in case of refusal to conform your features to the rule of Roe, you will
be raddled by an officer appointed for the purpose, and sent forth upon
the world the mere counterfeit of humanity.

What a glorious thing it would be for this great country, if, having
equalized throughout the kingdom the weights, the measures, the miles,
and the currency, we should at length attain to an equalization in
appearance. The “facial angle” will then have its application in
reality, and, instead of the tiresome detail of an Old Bailey trial,
we shall hear a judge sum up on the externals of a prisoner, merely
directing the attention of the jury to the atrocious irregularity of his
teeth, or the assassin-like sharpness of his under-jaw. Honour to you,
Sir Peter, should this great improvement grow out of your innovation;
and proud may the country well be, that acknowledges you among its
lawgivers!

[Illustration: 066]

Let men no longer indulge in that absurd fiction which represents
justice as blind. On the contrary, with an eye like Canova's, and a
glance quick, sharp, and penetrating as Flaxman's, she traces every
lineament and every feature; and Landseer will confess himself
vanquished by Laurie. “The pictorial school of judicial investigation”
 will now become fashionable, and if Sir Peter's practice be but
transmitted, surgeons will not be the only professional men who will
commence their education with the barbers.




A NUT FOR THE BUDGET.

[Illustration: 067]

I remember once coming into Matlock, on the top of the “Peveril of
the Peak,” when the coachman who drove our four spanking thoroughbreds
contrived, in something less than five minutes, to excite his whole team
to the very top of their temper, lifting the wheelers almost off the
ground with his heavy lash, and, thrashing his leaders till they smoked
with passion, he brought them up to the inn door trembling with rage,
and snorting with anger. What the devil is all this for, thought I. He
guessed at once what was passing in my mind, and, with a knowing touch
of his elbow, whispered:--

“There's a new coachman a-going to try 'em, and I 'll leave him a
precious legacy.”

This is precisely what the Whigs did in their surrender of power to
the Tories. They, indeed, left them a precious legacy:--without an ally
abroad, with discontent and starvation at home, distant and expensive
wars, depressed trade, and bankrupt speculation, form some portion of
the valuable heritage they bequeathed to their heirs in power. The most
sanguine saw matter of difficulty, and the greater number of men were
tempted to despair at the prospects of the Conservative party; for,
however happily all other questions may have terminated, they still see,
in the corn-law, a point whose subtle difficulty would seem inaccessible
to legislation. Ah! could the two great parties, that divide the state,
only lay their heads together for a short time, and carry out that
beautiful principle that Scribe announces in one of his vaudevilles:--

     “Que le blé te vend cher, et le pain bon marché.”

And why, after all, should not the collective wisdom of England be able
to equal in ingenuity the conceptions of a farce-writer? Meanwhile, it
is plain that political dissensions, and the rivalries of party, will
prevent that mutual good understanding which might prove so beneficial
to all. Reconciliations are but flimsy things at best; and whether the
attempt be made to conciliate two rival churches, two opposite factions,
or two separate interests of any kind whatever, it is usually a
failure. It, therefore, becomes the duty of every good subject, and, _à
fortiori_, of every good Conservative, to bestir himself at the present
moment, and see what can be done to retrieve the sinking fortune of the
state. Taxation, like flogging in the army, never comes on the right
part of the back. Sometimes too high, sometimes too low. There is no
knowing where to lay it on. Besides that, we have by this time got such
a general raw all over us, there isn't a square inch of sound flesh that
presents itself for a new infliction. Since the first French Revolution,
the ingenuity of man has been tortured on the subject of finance; and
had Dionysius lived in our days, instead of offering a bounty for the
discovery of a new pleasure, he would have proposed a reward to the man
who devised a new tax.

Without entering at any length into this subject, the consideration of
which would lead me into all the details of our every-day habits, I
pass on at once to the question which has induced this inquiry, while I
proclaim to the world loudly, fearlessly, and resolutely, “Eureka!”--I
've found it. Yes, my fellow-countrymen, I have found a remedy to supply
the deficient income of the nation, not only without imposing a new
tax, or inflicting a new burden upon the suffering community, but also
without injuring vested rights, or thwarting the activity of commercial
enterprise. I neither mulct cotton or corn; I meddle not with parson or
publican, nor do I make any portion of the state, by its own privations,
support the well-being of the rest. On the contrary, the only individual
concerned in my plan, will not be alone benefited in a pecuniary point
of view, but the best feelings of the heart will be cultivated and
strengthened, and the love of home, so characteristically English,
fostered in their bosoms. I could almost grow eloquent upon the benefits
of my discovery; but I fear, that were I to give way to this impulse,
I should become so fascinated with myself, I could scarcely turn to
the less seductive path of simple explanation. Therefore, ere it be too
late, let me open my mind and unfold my system:

    “What great effects from little causes spring.”

Any one who ever heard of Sir Isaac Newton and his apple will
acknowledge this, and something of the same kind led me to the very
remarkable fact I am about to speak of.

One of the Bonaparte family--as well as I remember, Jerome--was one
night playing whist at the same table with Talleyrand, and having
dropped a crown piece upon the floor, he interrupted the game, and
deranged the whole party to search for his money. Not a little provoked
by a meanness which he saw excited the ridicule of many persons about,
Talleyrand deliberately folded up a bank-note which lay before him, and,
lighting it at the candle, begged, with much courtesy, that he might be
permitted to assist in the search. This story, which is authentic, would
seem an admirable parody on a portion of our criminal law. A poor man
robs the community, or some member of it (for that comes to the same
thing) to the amount of one penny. He is arrested by a policeman, whose
salary is perhaps half-a-crown a-day, and conveyed to a police-office,
that cost at least five hundred pounds to build it. Here are found three
or four more officials; all salaried--all fed, and clothed by the State.
In due course of time he is brought up before a magistrate, also well
paid, by whom the affair is investigated, and by him he is afterwards
transmitted to the sessions, where a new army of stipendiaries all
await him. But his journey is not ended. Convicted of his offence, he
is sentenced to seven years' transportation to one of the most remote
quarters of the globe. To convey him thither the government have
provided a ship and a crew, a supercargo and a surgeon; and, to sum up
in one word, before he has commenced the expiation of his crime, that
penny has cost the country something about three hundred pounds. Is
not this, I ask you, very like Talleyrand and the Prince?--the only
difference being, that we perform in sober earnest, what he merely
exhibited in sarcasm.

Now, my plan is, and I prefer to develop it in a single word, instead of
weakening its force by circumlocution.

In lieu of letting a poor man be reduced to his theft of one penny--give
him two pence. _He_ will be a gainer by double the amount--not to speak
of the inappreciable value of his honesty--and _you_ the richer by
71,998 pence, under your present system expended upon policemen,
magistrates, judges, gaolers, turnkeys, and transports. Examine for a
moment the benefits of this system. Look at the incalculable advantages
it presents--the enormous revenue, the pecuniary profit, and the
patriotism, all preserved to the State, not to mention the additional
pleasure of disseminating happiness while you transport men's hearts,
not their bodies.

Here is a plan based upon the soundest philanthropy, the most rigid
economy, and the strictest common sense. Instead of training up a race
of men in some distant quarter of the globe, who may yet turn your
bitterest enemies, you will preserve to the country so many true-born
Britons, bound to you by a debt of gratitude. Upon what ground--on
what pretext--can you oppose the system? Do you openly confess that
you prefer vice to poverty, and punishment to prevention? Or is it
your pleasure to manufacture roguery for exportation, as the French do
politeness, and the Irish linen?

I offer the suggestion generously, freely, and spontaneously.

If the heads of the government choose to profit by the hint, I only ask
in return, that when the Chancellor of the Exchequer announces in his
place the immense reduction of expenditure, that he will also give
notice of a motion for a bill to reward me by a government appointment.
I am not particular as to where, or what: I only bargain against being
Secretary for Ireland, or Chief Justice at Cape Coast Castle.




A NUT FOR REPEAL.

When the cholera first broke out in France, a worthy prefect in a
district of the south published an edict to the people, recommending
them by all means to eat well-cooked and nutritious food, and drink
nothing but _vin de Bourdeaux_, Anglice, claret. The advice was
excellent, and I take it upon me to say, would have found very few
opponents in fact, as it certainly did in principle. When the world,
however, began to consider that _filets de bouf à la Marengo_, and
_dindes truffées?_ washed down with _Chateau Lafitte_ or _Larase_,
were not exactly within the reach of every class of the community, they
deemed the prefect's counsel more humane than practicable, and as they
do at every thing in France when the tide of public opinion changes,
they laughed at him heartily, and wrote pasquinades upon his folly. At
the same time the ridicule was unjust, the advice was good, sound, and
based on true principles, the only mistake was, the difficulty of its
practice. Had he recommended as an antiseptic to disease, that the
people should play short whist, wear red nightcaps, or pelt stones at
each other, there might have been good ground for the disfavour he
fell into; such acts, however practicable and easy of execution, having
manifestly no tendency to avert the cholera. Now this is precisely the
state of matters in Ireland at this moment: distress prevails more or
less in every province and in every county. The people want employment,
and they want food. Had you recommended them to eat strawberries and
cream in the morning, to drink lemonade during the day, take a little
chicken salad for dinner, with a light bread pudding and a glass of
negus afterwards, avoiding all stimulant and exciting food--for your
Irishman is a feverish subject--you might be laughed at perhaps for your
dietary, but certes it would bear, and bear strongly too, upon the case
in question. But what do you do in reality? The local papers teem with
cases of distress: families are starving; the poor, unhoused and unfed,
are seen upon the road sides exposed to every vicissitude of the season,
surrounded by children who cry in vain for bread. What, I ask, is the
measure of relief you propose? not a public subscription; no general
outburst of national charity--no public work upon a grand scale to give
employment to the idle, food to the hungry, health to the sick, and
hope to all. None of these. Your panacea is the Repeal of the Union; you
purpose to substitute for those amiable jobbers in College-green, who
call themselves Directors of the Bank of Ireland, another set of
jobbers infinitely more pernicious and really dishonest, who will call
themselves Directors of Ireland itself; you talk of the advantage to the
country, and particularly of the immense benefits that must accrue to
the capital. Let us examine them a little.

Dublin, you say, will be a flourishing city, inhabited by lords and
ladies: wealth, rank, and influence will dwell in its houses and parade
its streets. The glare of lamps, the crash of carriages, all the
pride, pomp, and circumstances of fashion, will flow back upon the
long-deserted land, and Paris and London will find a rival to compete
with them, in this small city of the west. Would that this were so;
would that it could be! This, however, is the extent of what you promise
yourselves: you may ring the changes as you please, but the “refrain”
 of your song is, that Dublin shall “have its own again.” Well, for
argument's sake, I say, be it so. The now silenced squares shall wake
to the echoes of thundering equipages, peers and prelates shall again
inhabit the dwellings long since the residence of hotel-keepers,
or still worse, those little democracies of social life, called
boarding-houses. Your theatre shall be crowded, your shops frequented,
and every advantage of wealth diffused through all the channels of
society, shall be yours. As far as Dublin is concerned, I say--for, mark
me, I keep you to this original point, in the land of your promise you
have strictly limited the diffusion of your blessings by the boundary of
the Circular road; even the people at Ringsend and Ballybough bridge
are not to be included, unless a special bill be brought in for their
benefit. Still the picture is a brilliant one: it would be a fine
thing to see all the pomp and ceremony of proud popery walk the land
at noon-day, with its saints in gold, and its relics in silver; for of
course this is included in the plan. Prosperous Ireland must be Catholic
Ireland, and even Spain and Belgium will hide their diminished heads
when compared with the gorgeous homage rendered to popery at home. The
“gentlemen of Liffey-street chapel,” far better-looking fellows than any
foreign priest you 'll meet with from Trolhatten to Tivoli, will walk
about _in pontificalibus_; and all the exciting enthusiasm that Romanism
so artfully diffuses through every feature of life, will introduce
itself among a people who have all the warm temper and hot blood of the
south, with the stern determination and headlong impulse of the north of
Europe. By all of which I mean to say, that in points of strong popery,
Dublin will beat the world, and that before a year of such prosperity
be past, she will have the finest altars, the fattest priests, and the
longest catalogue of miractes in Europe. Lord Shrewsbury need not then
go to the Tyrol for an “estatica,” he'll find one nearer home worth
twice the money. The shin-bone of St. Januarius, that jumped out of
a wooden box in a hackney coach, because a gentleman swore, will be
nothing to the scenes we'll witness; and if St. Patrick should sport
his tibia at an evening party of Daniel O'Connell's, it would not in the
least surprise me. These are great blessings, and I am fully sensible of
them. Now let me pass on to another, which perhaps I have kept last as
it is the chief of all, or as the late Lord Castlereagh would have said,
the “fundamental feature upon which my argument hinges.”

A very common topic of Irish eloquence is, to lament over the enormous
exportation of cattle, fowl, and fish, that continually goes
forward from Ireland into England. I acknowledge the justness of the
complaint--I see its force, and appreciate its value. It is exactly as
though a grocer should exclaim against his misery, in being compelled
to part with his high-flavoured bohea, his sparkling lump sugar, and his
Smyrna figs, or our publisher his books, for the base lucre of gain.
It is humiliating, I confess; and I can well see how a warm-hearted
and intelligent creature, who feels the hardship of an export trade in
matters of food, must suffer when the principle is extended to a matter
of genius; for, not content with our mutton from Meath, our salmon
from Limerick, and our chickens from Carlow; but the Saxon must even
be gratified with the soul-stirring eloquence of the Great Liberator
himself, with only the trouble of going near St. Stephen's to hear him.
I say near--for among the other tyrannies of the land, he is compelled
to shout loud enough to be heard in all the adjacent streets. Now this
is too bad. Take our prog--take even our poteen, if you will; but leave
us our Penates; this theft, which embodies the antithesis of Shakspeare,
is not only “trash,” but “naught enriches them, and makes us poor
indeed.”

Repeal the union, and you remedy this. You 'll have him at home
with you--not masquerading about in the disguise of a gentleman--not
restricted by the habits of cultivated and civilised life--not tamed
down into the semblance and mockery of good conduct--no longer the
chained-up animal of the menagerie, but the roaring, rampant lion,
roaming at large in his native forest--not performing antics before some
political Van Amburgh--not opening his huge jaws, as though he would
devour the Whigs, and shutting them again at the command of his
keeper--but howling in all the freedom of his passion, and lashing
his brawny sides with his vigorous “tail.” Haydn, the composer, had an
enormous appetite; to gratify which, when dining at a tavern, he ordered
a dinner for three. The waiter delayed in serving, as he said the
company hadn't yet arrived, but Haydn told him to bring it up at once,
remarking, as he patted complacently his paunch, “I am de compagnie
myself.” Such will you have the case in your domestic parliament--Dan
will be the company himself. No longer fighting in the ranks of
opposition, or among the supporters of a government--no more the mere
character of a piece, he will then be the Jack Johnson of the political
world, taking the money at the door--in which he has had some practice
already--he will speak the prologue, lead the orchestra, prompt the
performers, and announce a repetition of the farce every night of the
week for his own benefit. Only think what he is in England with his
“forty thieves” at his back, and imagine what he will be in Ireland
without one honest man to oppose him. He will indeed then be well worth
seeing, and if Ireland had no other attraction, foreigners might visit
us for a look at the Liberator. He is a droll fellow, is Dan, and there
is a strong dash of native humour in his notion of repeal. What strange
scenes, to be sure, it would conjure up. Only think for a moment of the
absentee lord, an exiled peer, coming back to Dublin after an absence
of half his lifetime, vainly endeavouring to seem pleased with his
condition, and appear happy with his home. Like an insolvent debtor
affecting to joke with the jailer, watch him simulating so much as he
can of habits he has long forgotten, while his ignorance of his country
is such, that he cannot direct his coachman to a street in the capital.
What a ludicrous view of life would this open to our view! While all
these men, who have been satisfied hitherto to send their sympathies
from Switzerland, and their best wishes for Ireland by an ambassador's
bag, should now come back to writhe beneath the scourge of a demagogue,
and the tyranny of a man who wields irresponsible power.

All Ireland would present the features of a general election--every one
would be fascinating, courteous, affable, and dishonest. The unpopular
debater in England might have his windows smashed. With us, it would
be his neck would be broken. The excitement of the people will be felt
within the Parliament; and then, fostered by all the rancour of party
hate, will be returned to them with interest. The measure discussed out
of doors by the Liberator, will find no one hardy enough to oppose it
within the House, and the opinions of the Corn Exchange will be
the programme for a committee. A notice of a motion will issue from
Merrion-square, and not from a seat in Parliament; and wherever he moves
through the country, great Daniel, like a snail, will carry “his
house” on his back. “Rob me the Exchequer, Hal!” will be the cry of the
priesthood, and no men are better deserving of their hire; and thus,
wielding every implement of power, if Ireland be not happy, he can only
have himself to blame for it.

[Illustration: 078]




A NUT FOR NATIONAL PRIDE.

National Pride must be a strong feeling, and one of the very few
sentiments which are not exhausted by the drain upon them; and it is
a strange thing, how the very fact upon which one man plumes himself,
another would regard as a terrible reproach. A thorough John Bull, as
he would call himself, thinks he has summed up, in those few emphatic
words, a brief description of all that is excellent in humanity. And as
he throws out his chest, and sticks his hand with energy in his breeches
pocket, seems to say, “I am not one of your frog-eating fellows,
half-monkey, half-tiger, but a true Briton.” The Frenchman, as he
proclaims his nation, saying, “_Je suis F-r-r-r-rançais_” would indicate
that he is a very different order of being, from his blunt untutored
neighbour, “_outre mer_;” and so on to the end of the chapter. Germans,
Italians, and Spaniards, and even Americans, think there is some magic
in the name of their fatherland--some inherent nobility in the soil: and
it was only lately I read in a French paper an eloquent appeal from
a general to his soldiers, which concluded by his telling them,
to remember, that they were “Mexicans.” I devoutly trust that they
understood the meaning of his phrase, and were able, without difficulty,
to call to mind the bright prerogative alluded to; for upon my
conscience, as an honest man, it would puzzle me sorely to say what
constitutes a Mexican.

But the absurdity goes further still: for, not satisfied with the
bounties of Providence in making us what we are, we must indulge a
rancorous disposition towards our neighbours for their less-favoured
destiny. “He behaved like a Turk,” is an every-day phrase to indicate a
full measure of moral baseness and turpidity. A Frenchman's abuse can
go no farther than calling a man a Chinese, and when he says, “_tu es un
Pékin_,” a duel is generally the consequence. I doubt not that the Turks
and the Chinese make use of retributive justice, and treat us no better
than we behave to them.

Civilisation would seem rather to have fostered than opposed this
prejudice. In the feudal ages, the strength of a brawny right arm, the
strong hand that could wield a mace, the firm seat in a saddle, were
the qualities most in request; and were physical strength more estimated
than the gifts of a higher order, the fine distinctions of national
character either did not exist, or were not attended to. Now, however,
the tournament is not held on a cloth of gold, but on a broad sheet
of paper; the arms are not the lance and the dagger, but the
printing-press. No longer a herald in all the splendour of his tabard
proclaims the lists, but a fashionable publisher, through the medium of
the morning papers, whose cry for largess is to the full as loud. The
result is, nations are better known to each other, and, by the unhappy
law of humanity, are consequently less esteemed. What signifies the
dislike our ancestors bore the French at Cressy or Agincourt compared
to the feeling we entertain for them after nigh thirty years of peace?
Then, indeed, it was the strong rivalry between two manly natures: now,
the accumulated hate of ages is sharpened and embittered by a thousand
petty jealousies that have their origin in politics, military glory,
society, or literature; and we detest each other like quarterly
reviewers. The Frenchman visits England as a Whig commissioner would a
Tory institution--only anxious to discover abuses and defects--with an
obliquity of vision that sees everything distorted, or a fecundity of
imagination that can conjure up the ills he seeks for. He finds us
rude, inhospitable, and illiterate; our habits are vulgar, our tastes
depraved; our House of Commons is a riotous mob of under-bred debaters;
our army an aristocratic _lounge_, where merit has no chance against
money; and our literature--God wot!--a plagiarism from the French. The
Englishman is nearly as complimentary. The coarseness of French habits
is to him a theme of eternal reprobation; the insolence of the men, the
indelicacy of the women, the immorality of all, overwhelm him with shame
and disgust: the Chamber of Deputies he despises, as a contemptible
parody on a representative body, and a speech from the tribune a most
absurd substitute for the freedom of unpremeditated eloquence: the
army he discovers to be officered by men, to whom the new police are
accomplished gentlemen; and, in fact, he sums up by thinking that if we
had no other competitors in the race of civilisation than the French,
our supremacy on land, is to the full as safe, as our sovereignty over
the ocean. Here lie two countries, separated by a slip of sea not much
broader than an American river, who have gone on for ages repeating
these and similar puerilities, without the most remote prospect of
mutual explanation and mutual good-will.

“I hate prejudice, I hate the French,” said poor Charles Matthews, in
one of his inimitable representations, and really the expression was
no bad summary of an Englishman's faith. On the other hand, to hate and
detest the English is the _sine qua non_ of French nationality, and to
concede to them any rank in literature, morals, or military greatness,
is to derogate from the claims of his own country. Now the question
is, are the reproaches on either side absolutely just? They are not.
Secondly, if they be unfair, how comes it that two people pre-eminently
gifted with intelligence and information, should not have come to a
better understanding, and that many a long year ago? Simply from this
plain fact, that the opinions of the press have weighed against those
of individuals, and that the published satires on both sides have had a
greater currency and a greater credit than the calm judgment of the
few. The leading journals in Paris and in London have pelted each other
mercilessly for many a year. One might forgive this, were the attacks
suggested by such topics as stimulate and strengthen national feeling;
but no, the controversy extends to every thing, and, worse than all, is
carried on with more bitterness of spirit, than depth of information.
The reviewer “par excellence” of our own country makes a yearly
incursion into French literature, as an Indian would do into his
hunting-ground. Resolved to carry death and carnage on every side, he
arms himself for the chase, and whets his appetite for slaughter by the
last “_bonne bouche_” of the day. We then have some half introductory
pages of eloquent exordium on the evil tendency of French literature,
and the contamination of those unsettled opinions in politics, religion,
and morals, so copiously spread through the pages of every French
writer. The revolution of 1797 is adduced for the hundredth time as the
origin of these evils; and all the crime and bloodshed of that frightful
period is denounced as but the first step of the iniquity which has
reached its pinnacle, in the novels of Paul de Kock. To believe the
reviewer, French literature consists in the productions of this writer,
the works of George Sand, Balzac, Frédéric Soulié, and a few others
of equal note and mark. According to him, intrigue, seduction, and
adultery, are the staple of French romance: the whole interest of every
novel turning on the undiscovered turpitude of domestic life; and the
great rivalry between witters, being, to try which can invent a new
feature of depravity and a new fashion of sin. Were this true, it were
indeed a sad picture of national degradation; was it the fact that such
books, and such there are in abundance, composed the light literature
of the day--were to be found in every drawing-room--to be seen in every
hand--to be read with interest and discussed with eagerness--to have
that wide-spread circulation which must ever carry with it a strong
influence upon the habits of those who read. Were all this so, I say
it would be, indeed, a deplorable evidence of the low standard of
civilisation among the French. What is the fact, however? Simply that
these books have but a limited circulation, and that, only among
an inferior class of readers. The _modiste_ and the _grisette_ are,
doubtless, well read in the mysteries of. Paul de Kock and Madame du
Deffant; but in the cultivated classes of the capital, such books have
no more currency than the scandalous memoirs of our own country have in
the drawing-rooms of Grosvenor-square or St. James's. Balzac has, it is
true, a wide-spread reputation; but many of his books are no less marked
by a powerful interest than a touching appeal to the fine feelings of
our nature. Alfred de Vigny, Eugene Sue, Victor Hugo, Leon Gozlan, Paul
de Muset, Alexandre Dumas, and a host of others, are all popular, and,
with the exception of a few works, unexceptionable on every ground of
morality; but these, after all, are but the skirmishers before the
army. What shall we say of Guizot, Thiers, Augustin Thierry, Toqueville,
Mignet, and many more, whose contributions to history have formed an era
in the literature of the age? The strictures of the reviewers are not
very unlike the opinions of the French prisoner, who maintained that in
England every one eat with his knife, and the ladies drank gin, which
important and veracious facts he himself ascertained, while residing
in that fashionable quarter of the town called St. Martin's lane. This
sweeping mode of argument, _à particular_, is fatal when applied to
nations. Even the Americans have suffered in the hands of Mrs. Trollope
and others; and gin twist, bowie knives, tobacco chewing, and many
similarly amiable habits, are not universal. Once for all, then, be it
known, there is no more fallacious way of forming an opinion regarding
France and Frenchmen, than through the pages of our periodical press,
except by a _short_ residence in Paris--I say short, for if a little
learning be a dangerous thing, a little travelling is more so; and it
requires long experience of the world, and daily habit of observation,
to enable any man to detect in the ordinary routine of life the finer
and more distinctive traits that have escaped his neighbour; besides,
however palpable and self-evident the proposition, it demands both tact
and time to see that no general standard of taste can be erected for all
nations, and, that to judge of others by your own prejudices and habits,
is both unfair and absurd. To give an instance. No English traveller
has commented on the French Chamber of Deputies, without expending much
eloquence and a great deal of honest indignation on the practice of
speaking from a tribune, written orations being in their opinion a
ludicrous travestie on the freedom of debate. Now what is the fact; in
the whole French Chamber there are not ten, there are not five men
who could address the house extempore; not from any deficiency
of ability--not from any want of information, logical force, and
fluency---the names of Thiers, Guizot, Lamartine, Dupin, Arago, &c. &c.
are quite sufficient to demonstrate this--but simply from the intricacy
and difficulty of the French language. A worthy alderman gets up, as the
phrase is, and addresses a speech of some three quarters of an hour to
the collective wisdom of the livery; and although he may be frequently
interrupted by thunders of applause, he is never checked for any
solecisms in his grammar: he may drive a coach and six through
Lindley Murray; he may inflict heaven knows how many fractures on poor
Priscian's head, yet to criticise him on so mean a score as that of mere
diction, would not be thought of for a moment. Not so in France:
the language is one of equivoque and subtlety; the misplacement of a
particle, the change of a gender, the employment of any phrase but the
exact one, might be at any moment fatal to the sense of the speaker, and
would inevitably be so to his success. It was not very long since, that
a worthy deputy interrupted M. Thiers by alleging the non-sequitur
of some assertion, “_Vous n'est pas consequent_,” cried the indignant
member, using a phrase not only a vulgarism in itself, but inapplicable
at the time. A roar of laughter followed his interruption. In all the
journals of the next day, he was styled the deputy _consequent_; and
when he returned to his constituency the ridicule attached to his
blunder still traced his steps, and finally lost him his election.

“Thank God I am a Briton,” said Nelson; a phrase, doubtless, many more
of us will re-echo with equal energy; but while we are expressing our
gratitude let our thankfulness extend to this gratifying fact, that the
liberty of our laws is even surpassed by the licence of our language.
No obscure recess of our tongue is so deep that we cannot by _habeas
corpus_ right bring up a long-forgotten phrase, and provided the speaker
have a meaning and be able to convey it to the minds of his hearers,
we are seldom disposed to be critical on the manner, if the matter be
there. Besides this, there are styles of eloquence so imbued with the
spirit of certain eras in French history, that the discussion of any
subject of ancient or modern days, will always have its own peculiar
character of diction. Thus, there is the rounded period and flowing
sententiousness of Louis XIV., the more polished but less forcible
phraseology of the regency itself, succeeded by the epigrammatic taste
and pointed brevity introduced by Voltaire. The empire left its impress
on the language, and all the literature of the period wore the _esprit
soldatesque_; and so on down to the very days of the barricades, each
changing phase of political life had its appropriate expression. To
assume these with effect, was not of course the gift of every man, and
yet to have erred in their adoption, would have been palpable to all;
here then is one important difference between us, and on this subject
alone I might cite at least twenty more. The excitable Frenchman
scarcely uses any action while speaking, and that, of the most simple
and subdued kind. The phlegmatic Englishman stamps and gesticulates with
all the energy of a madman. We esteem humour; they prefer wit: we
like the long consecutive chain of proof that leads us step by step
to inevitable conviction; they like better some brief but happy
illustration that, dispensing with the tedium of argument, presents a
question at one glance before them. They have that general knowledge
of their country and its changes, that an illustration from the past is
ever an effective weapon of the orator; while with us the force would
be entirely lost from the necessity of recounting the incident to which
reference was made.




A NUT FOR DIPLOMATISTS.

Man is the most imitative of all animals: nothing can surpass the
facility he possesses of simulating his neighbour; and I question much
if the press, in all the plentitude of its power, has done as much for
the spread of good or evil, as the spirit of mimicry so inherent in
mankind. The habits of high life are transmitted through every grade of
society: and the cheesemonger keeps his hunters, and damns his valet,
like my lord; while his wife rolls in her equipage, and affects the
graces of my lady. So long as wealth is present, die assumption of the
tastes and habitudes of a different class, can merely be looked upon as
one of those outbreaks of vanity in which rich but vulgar people have
a right, if they like, to indulge. Why shouldn't they have a villa
at Twickenham--why not a box at the opera--a white bait dinner at
Blackwall--a yacht at Southampton Î They have the money to indulge their
caprice, and it is no one's affair but their own. They make themselves
ridiculous, it is true; but the pleasure they experience counterbalances
the ridicule, and they are the best judges on which side lies the
profit. Wealth is power: and although the one may be squandered, and
the other abused, yet in their very profusion, there is something that
demands a kind of reverence from the world; and we have only to look to
France to see, that when once you abolish an hereditary _noblesse_, your
banker is then your great man.

We may smile, if we please, at the absurd pretension of the wealthy
alderman and his lady, whose pompous mansion and splendid equipage
affect a princely grandeur; yet, after all, the knowledge that he is
worth half a million of money, that his name alone can raise the credit
of a new colony, or call into existence the dormant energy of a new
region of the globe, will always prevent our sarcasm degenerating
into contempt. Not so, however, when poverty unites itself to these
aspirings, you feel in a moment that the poor man has nothing to do with
such vanities; his poverty is a scanty garment, that, dispose it as he
will, he can never make it hang like a toga; and we have no compassion
for him, who; while hunger gnaws his vitals, affects a sway and
dominion his state has denied him. Such a line of conduct will often be
offensive--it will always be absurd--and the only relief presented by
its display, is in the ludicrous exhibition of trick and stratagem by
which it is supported. Jeremy Diddler, after all, is an amusing person;
but the greater part of the pleasure he affords us is derived from the
fact; that, cunning as he is in all his efforts to deceive us, we are
still more so, for we have found him out.

Were I to characterise the leading feature of the age, I should
certainly say it is this pretension. Like the monkeys at Exeter 'Change,
who could never bear to eat out of their own dish, but must stretch
their paws into that if their neighbour, so every man now-a-days wishes
to be in that place most unsuitable to him by all his tastes, habits,
and associations, and where once having attained to, his life is one
of misery and constraint. The hypocrisy of simulating manners he is not
used to, is not more subversive of his self-respect, than his imitation
is poor, vulgar, and unmeaning.

Curran said that a corporation was, a “thing that had neither a body to
be kicked, nor a soul to be damned.” And, verity, I begin to think that
masses of men are even more contemptible than individuals. A nation is a
great household; and if it have not all the _prestige_ of rank, wealth,
and power, it is a poor and miserable thing. England and France, Germany
and Russia, are the great of the earth; and we look up to them in the
political world, as in society we do to those whose rank and station are
the guarantees of their power. Many other countries of Europe have also
their claims upon us, but still smaller in degree. Italy, with all its
association of classical elegance--Spain, whose history shines with the
solemn splendour of an illuminated missal, where gold and purple are
seen blending their hues, scarce dimmed by time; but what shall we
say of those newly-created powers, which springing up like mushroom
families, give themselves all the airs of true nobility, and endeavour
by a strange mockery of institutions and customs of their greater
neighbours, to appear of weight and consequence before the world. Look,
for instance, to Belgium the _bourgeois gentilhomme_ of politics,
which, having retired from its partnership with Holland, sets up for
a gentleman on its private means. What can be more ludicrous than its
attempts at high-life, its senate, its ministry, its diplomacy; for
strange enough the ridicule of the individual can be traced extending to
a nation, and when your city lady launched into the world, displays upon
her mantelpiece the visiting cards of her high neighbours, so the first
act of a new people is, to open a visiting acquaintance with their rich
neighbours, and for this purpose the first thing they do is to establish
a corps of diplomacy.

Now your city knight may have a fat and rosy coachman, he may have a
tall and portly footman, a grave and a respectable butler; but whatever
his wealth, whatever his pretension, there is one functionary of a
great household he can never attain to--he can never have a groom of the
chambers. This, like the “chasseur” abroad, is the appendage of but one
class, by constant association with whom its habits are acquired,
its tastes engendered, and it would be equally absurd to see the tall
Hungarian in all the glitter of his hussar costume, behind the caleche
of a pastrycook, as to hear the low-voiced and courteous minion of
Devonshire House announce the uncouth, un-syllabled names, that come
east of St. Dunstan's.

So, in the same way, your new nations may get up a king and a court,
a senate, an army, and a ministry, but let them not meddle with
diplomacy--the moment they do this they burn their fingers: your
diplomate is like your chasseur, and your groom of the chambers; if he
be not well done, he is a miserable failure. The world has so many
types to refer to on this head, there can be no mistake. Talleyrand,
Nesselrode, Metternich, Lord Whitworth, and several more, have too long
given the tone to this peculiar walk to admit of any error concerning
it; however, your little folk will not be denied the pleasures of their
great acquaintance. They will have their diplomacy, and they will be
laughed at: look at the Yankees. There is not a country in Europe,
there is not a state however small, there is not a Coburgism with three
thousand inhabitants and three companies of soldiers, where _they_
haven't a minister resident with plenipotentiary powers extending to
every relation political and commercial, although all the while the
Yankees would be sorely puzzled to point out on the map the _locale_ of
their illustrious ally, and the Germans no less so to find out a reason
for their embassy. Happily on this score, the very bone and marrow of
diplomacy is consulted, and secrecy is inviolable; for, as your American
knows no other tongue save that spoken on the Alleghanies, he keeps his
own counsel and theirs also.

Have you never in the hall of some large country house, cast your eye,
on leave-taking, at the strange and motley crew of servants awaiting
their masters--some well fed and handsomely clothed, with that look of
reflected importance my lord's gentleman so justly wears; others, in
graver, but not less respectable raiment, have that quiet and observant
demeanour so characteristic of a well-managed household. While a third
class, strikingly unlike the other two, wear their livery with an air of
awkwardness and constraint, blushing at themselves even a deeper
colour than the scarlet of their breeches. They feel themselves in
masquerade--they were at the plough but yesterday, though they are
in powder now. With the innate consciousness of their absurdity, they
become fid-getty and uneasy, and would give the world for “a row” to
conceal the defaults of their breeding. Just so, your petty “diplomate”
 suffers agony in all the quiet intercourse of life. The limited
opportunities of small states have circumscribed his information. He
is not a man of the world, nor is he a political character, for he
represents nothing; nothing, therefore, can save him from oblivion or
contempt, save some political convulsion where any meddler may become
prominent; he has thus a bonus on disturbance: so long as the company
behave discreetly, he must stay in his corner, but the moment they
smash the lamps and shy the decanters, he emerges from his obscurity and
becomes as great as his neighbour. For my part, I am convinced that the
peace and quietness of Europe as much depends on the exclusion of such
persons from the councils of diplomacy, as the happiness of everyday
life does upon the breeding and good manners of our associates.

And what straits, to be sure, are they reduced to, to maintain this
absurd intercourse, screwing the last shilling from the budget to pay a
_Charge d'affaires_, with an embroidered coat, and a decoration in his
button-hole.

The most amusing incidents might be culled from such histories, if one
were but disposed to relate them.

Balzac mentions, in one of his novels, the story of a physician
who obtained great practice, merely by sending throughout Paris a
gaudily-dressed footman, who rang at every door, as it were, in search
of his master; so quick were the fellow's movements, so rapid his
transitions, from one part of the city to the other, nobody believed
that a single individual could ever have sufficed for so many calls; and
thus, the impression was, not only that the doctor was greatly sought
after, but that his household was on a splendid footing. The Emperor of
the Brazils seems to have read the story, and profited by the hint, for
while other nations are wasting their thousands in maintaining a whole
corps of diplomacy, he would appear like the doctor to have only one
footman, whom he keeps moving about Europe without ceasing: thus _The
Globe_ tells us one day that the Chevalier de L------, the Brazilian
ambassador, has arrived in London to resume his diplomatic functions;
_The Handelsbad of the Hague_ mentions his departure from the Dutch
Court; _The Algeimeine Zeitung_ announces the prospect of his arrival
at Vienna, and _The Moniteur Parisien_ has a beautiful article on the
prosperity of their relations with Mexico, under the auspices of the
indefatigable Chevalier: “_non regio terræ_,” exempt from his labours.
Unlike Sir Boyle Roche, he has managed to be not only in two, but twenty
places at once, and I should not be in the least surprised to hear of
his negotiations for sulphur at Naples, at the same moment that he was
pelting snowballs in Norway. Whether he travels in a balloon or on
the back of a pelican, he is a wonderful man, and a treasure to his
government.

The multiplicity of his duties, and the pressing nature of his
functions, may impart an appearance of haste to his manner, but it looks
diplomatic to be peremptory, and he has no time for trifling.

Truly, Chevalier de L------, thou art a great man--the wandering Jew was
but a type of thee.




A NUT FOR FOREIGN TRAVEL.

[Illustration: 094]

Of all the popular delusions that we labour under in England, I scarcely
know of one more widely circulated, and less founded in fact, than
the advantages of foreign travel. Far be it from me to undervalue the
benefits men of education receive by intercourse with strangers, and
the opportunities of correcting by personal observation the impressions
already received by study. No one sets a higher price on this than I
do; no one estimates more fully the advantages of tempering one's
nationality by the candid comparison of our own institutions with those
of other countries; no one values more highly the unbiassed frame of
mind produced by extending the field of our observation, and, instead
of limiting our experience by the details of a book, reading from the
wide-spread page of human nature itself. So conscious, indeed, am I
of the importance of this, that I look upon his education as but very
partial indeed who has not travelled. It is not, therefore, against the
benefits of seeing the world I would inveigh--it is rather against the
general application of the practice to the whole class of our countrymen
and countrywomen who swarm on the continent. Unsuited by their
tastes--unprepared by previous information-deeming a passport and a
letter of credit all-sufficient for their purpose--they set out upon
their travels. From their ignorance of a foreign language, their journey
is one of difficulty and embarrassment at every step. They understand
little of what they see, nothing of what they hear. The discomforts of
foreign life have no palliation, by their being enabled to reason
on, and draw inferences from them. All the sources of information
are hermetically sealed against them, and their tour has nothing to
compensate for its fatigue, and expense, save the absurd detail of
adventure to which their ignorance has exposed them.

It is not my intention to rail in this place against the injury done to
the moral feeling of our nation, by intimate association with the habits
of the Continent. Reserving this for a more fitting time, I shall merely
remark at present, that, so far as the habits of virtue are concerned,
more mischief is done among the middle class of our countrymen, than
those of a more exalted sphere.

Scarcely does the month of May commence, when the whole tide of British
population sets in upon the coast of France and Flanders. To watch the
crowded steamers as they arrive in Antwerp, or Boulogne, you would
say that some great and devastating plague had broken out in London, and
driven the affrighted inhabitants from their homes. Not so, however:
they have come abroad for pleasure. With a credit on Coutts, and the
inestimable John Murray for a guide, they have devoted six weeks to
France, Belgium, and the Rhine, in which ample time they are not only
to learn two languages, but visit three nations, exploring into cookery,
customs, scenery, literature, and the arts, with the same certainty
of success that they would pay a visit to Astley's. Scarcely are they
launched upon their travels when they unite into parties for personal
protection and assistance. The “_morgue Britannique_” so much spoken
of by foreigners, they appear to have left behind them; and sudden
friendships, and intimacies, spring up between persons whose only
feeling in common is that of their own absurd position. Away they
go sight-seeking in clusters. They visit cathedrals, monuments, and
galleries; they record in their journals the vulgar tirades of a hired
_commissionaire_; they eat food they detest, and they lie down to sleep
discontented and unhappy. The courteous civility of foreigners, the
theme of so much eulogy in England, they now find out to be little more
than selfishness, libertinism, and impertinence. They see the country
from the window of a diligence, and society from a place at the _table
d'hôte_, and truly both one and the other are but the vulgar high
roads of life. Their ignorance of the language alone protects them from
feeling insulted at the impertinences directed at themselves and their
country; and the untutored simplicity of their nature saves them the
mortification of knowing that the ostentatious politeness of some
moustached acquaintance is an exhibition got up by him for the
entertainment of his friends.

Poor John Bull, you have made great sacrifices for this tour. You
have cut the city, and the counting-house, that your wife may become
enamoured of dress, and your daughter of a dancing-master--that your son
may learn to play roulette and smoke cigars, and that you yourself may
ramble some thousand miles over paved roads, without an object to amuse,
without an incident to attract you. While this is a gloomy picture
enough, there is another side to the medal still worse. John Bull goes
home generally sick of what he has seen, and much more ignorant of the
Continent than when he set out. His tour, however, has laid in its
stock of foreign affectation, that renders his home uncomfortable; his
daughters pine after the flattering familiarities of their whiskered
acquaintances at Ems, or Wiesbaden; and his sons lose all zest for the
slow pursuit of competence, by reflecting on the more decisive changes
of fortune, that await on _rouge et noir_. Yet even this is not the
worst. What I deplore most of all, is the false and erroneous notions
continental nations procure of our country, and its habits, from such
specimens as these. The Englishman who, seen at home, at the head of
his counting-house, or in the management of his farm, presents a fine
example of those national traits we are so justly proud of--honest,
frank, straightforward in all his dealings, kind and charitable in his
affections; yet see him abroad, the sphere of his occupations exists
no longer--there is no exercise for the manly habits of his nature:
his honesty but exposes him to be duped; his frankness degenerates into
credulity; the unsuspecting openness of his character makes him the butt
of every artful knave he meets with; and he is laughed at from Rotterdam
to Rome for qualities which, exercised in their fitting sphere, have
made England the greatest country of the universe. Hence we have the
tone of disparagement now so universally maintained about England, and
Englishmen, from one end of the Continent to the other. It is not that
our country does not send forth a number of men well qualified to induce
different impressions of their nation; but unfortunately, such persons
move only in that rank of foreign society where these prejudices do not
exist; and it is among a different class, and unhappily a more numerous
one also, that these undervaluing opinions find currency and belief.
There is nothing more offensive than the continual appeal made by
Frenchmen, Germans, and others, to English habits, as seen among this
class of our countrymen. It is in vain that you explain to them that
these people are neither among the more educated nor the better ranks of
our country. They cannot comprehend your distinction. The habits of
the Continent have produced a kind of table-land of good-breeding, upon
which all men are equals. Thus, if you rarely meet a foreigner ignorant
of the every-day _convenances_ of the world, you still more rarely meet
with one unexceptionably well-bred. The _table d'hôte_, like the mess in
our army, has the effect of introducing a certain amount of decorum that
is felt through every relation of life; and, although the count abroad
is immeasurably beneath the gentleman at home, here, I must confess,
that the foreign cobbler is a more civilized person than his type in
England. This is easily understood: foreign breeding is not the outward
exhibition of an inward principle--it is not the manifestation of a
sense of mingled kindness, good taste, and self-respect--it is merely
the rigid observance of a certain code of behaviour that has no
reference whatever to any thing felt within; it is the mere popery of
politeness, with its saint-worship, its penances, and its privations. An
Englishman makes way for you to accommodate your passage; a foreigner--a
Frenchman I should say--does so for an opportunity to flourish his hat
or to exhibit an attitude. The same spirit pervades every act of both;
duty in one case, display in the other, are the ruling principles of
life; and, where persons are so diametrically different, there is little
likelihood of much mutual understanding or mutual esteem. To come back,
however, the great evil of this universal passion for travelling lies in
the opportunity afforded to foreigners, of sneering at our country, and
ridiculing our habits. It is in vain that our institutions are models
of imitation for the world--in vain that our national character stands
pre-eminent for good-faith and fidelity--in vain the boast that the sun
never sets upon a territory that girths the very globe itself, so long
as we send annually our tens of thousands out upon the Continent, with
no other failing than mere unfitness for foreign travel, to bring down
upon us the sneer, and the ridicule, of every ignorant and unlettered
Frenchman, or Belgian, they meet with.




A NUT FOR DOMESTIC HAPPINESS.

[Illustration: 100]

Our law code would, were its injunctions only carried out in private
life, effect most extraordinary reformations in our customs and habits.
The most singular innovations in our tastes and opinions would spring
out of the statutes. It was only a few days ago where a man sought
reparation for the greatest injury one could inflict on another, the
great argument of the defendant's counsel was based on the circumstance
that the plaintiff and his wife had not been proved to have lived
happily together, except on the testimony of their servants. Great
stress was laid upon this fact by the advocate; and such an impression
did it make on the minds of the jury, that the damages awarded were a
mere trifle. Now, only reflect for a moment on the absurdity of such a
plea, and think how many persons there are whose quiet and unobtrusive
lives are unnoticed beyond the precincts of their own door--nay, how
many estimable and excellent people who live less for the world than
for themselves, and although, probably for this very reason, but little
exposed to the casualty in question, would yet deem the injustice great
that placed them beyond the pale of reparation because they had been
homely and domestic.

Civilisation and the march of mind are fine things, and doubtless it is
a great improvement that the criminal is better lodged, and fed, in the
prison, than the hungry labourer in the workhouse. It is an admirable
code that makes the debt of honour, the perhaps swindled losses of the
card-table, an imperative obligation, while the money due to toiling,
working industry, may be evaded or escaped from. Still, it is a bold
step to invade the privacy of domestic life, to subvert the happiness
we deem most national, and to suggest that the world has no respect for,
nor the law no belief in, that peaceful course in life, which, content
with its own blessings, seeks neither the gaze of the crowd, nor the
stare of fashion. Under the present system, a man must appear in society
like a candidate on the hustings--profuse in protestations of his
happiness and redolent of smiles; he must lead forth his wife like a
blooming _débutante_, and, while he presents her to his friends, must
display, by every endeavour in his power, the angelic happiness of their
state. The _coram publico_ endearments, so much sneered at by certain
fastidious people, are now imperative; and, however secluded your
habits, however retiring your tastes, it is absolutely necessary you
should appear a certain number of times every year before the world,
to assure that kind-hearted and considerate thing, how much conjugal
felicity you are possessed of.

It is to no purpose that your man-servant and your maid-servant, and
even the stranger within your gates, have seen you in the apparent
enjoyment of domestic happiness: it is the crowd of a ball-room must
testify in your favour--it is the pit of a theatre--it is the company of
a steam-boat, or the party on a rail-road, you must adduce in evidence.
They are the best--they are the only judges of what you, in the
ignorance of your heart, have believed a secret for your own bosom.

Your conduct within-doors is of little moment, so that your bearing
without satisfy the world. What a delightful picture of universal
happiness will England then present to the foreigner who visits our
salons! With what ecstasy will he contemplate the angelic felicity of
conjugal life! Instead of the indignant coldness of a husband, offended
by some casual levity of his wife, he will now redouble his attentions,
and take an opportunity of calling the company to witness that they live
together like turtle-doves. He knows not how soon, if he mix much in
fashionable life, their testimony may avail him; and the loving smile he
throws his spouse across the supper-table is worth three thousand pounds
before any jury in Middlesex.

Romance writers will now lose one stronghold of sentiment. Love in a
cottage will possess as little respect as it ever did attraction for the
world. The pier at Brighton, a Gravesend steamer, Hyde Park on a Sunday,
will be the appropriate spheres for the interchange of conjugal vows.
No absurd notions of solitude will then hold sway. Alas! how little
prophetic spirit is there in poetry! But a few years ago, and one of our
sirens of song said,

     “When should lovers breathe their vows?
     When should ladies hear them?
     When the dew is on the boughs--
     When none else is near them.”

Not a word of it! The appropriate place is amid the glitter of jewels,
the glare of lamps, the crush of fashion, and the din of conversation.
The private boxes of the opera are even, too secluded, and your
happiness is no more genuine, until recognised by society, than is an
exchequer bill with the mere signature of Lord Monteagle.

The benefits of this system will be great. No longer will men be reduced
to the cultivation of those meeker virtues that grace and adorn life;
no more will they study those accomplishments that make home happy and
their hearth cheerful. A winter at Paris and a box at the Variétés will
be more to the purpose. Scribe's farces will teach them more important
lessons, and they will obtain an instructive example in the last line of
a vaudeville, where an injured husband presents himself at the fall of
the curtain, and, as he bows to the audience, embraces both his wife
and her lover, exclaiming, “_Maintenant je suis heureux--ma femme--mon
meilleur ami!_” He then may snap his fingers at Charles Phillips and
Adolphus: he has not only proved his affection to his wife, but his
confidence in his friend. Let him lay the damages at ten thousand, and,
with a counsel that can cry, he'll get every shilling of the money.

[Illustration: 104]




A NUT FOR LADIES BOUNTIFUL.

Jean Jacques tells us, that when his wife died every farmer in the
neighbourhood offered to console him by one of their daughters; but that
a few weeks afterwards his cow having shared the same fate, no one ever
thought of replacing his loss by the offer of another; thereby proving
the different value people set upon their cows and children--this seems
absurd enough, but is it a bit more so, than what is every day taking
place in professional life? How many parsons are there who would not
lend you five pounds, would willingly lend you their pulpit, and the
commonest courtesy from a hospital surgeon is, to present his visitor
with a knife and entreat him to carve a patient. He has never seen
the individual before, he doesn't know whether he be short-sighted, or
nervous, or ignorant, or rash, all he thinks of, is doing the honours of
the institution; and although like a hostess, who sees the best dish at
her table mangled by an unskilful carver, he suffers in secret, yet is
she far too well-bred to evince her displeasure, but blandly smiles at
her friend, and says “No matter, pray go on.” This, doubtless, is highly
conducive to science; and as medicine is declared to be a science of
experiment, great results occasionally arise from the practice. Now
that I am talking of doctors--what a strange set they are, and what
a singular position do they hold in society; admitted to the fullest
confidence of the world, yet by a strange perversion, while they are the
depositaries of secrets that hold together the whole fabric of
society, their influence is neither fully recognised, nor their power
acknowledged. The doctor is now what the monk once was, with this
additional advantage, that from the nature of his studies and the
research of his art, he reads more deeply in the human heart, and
penetrates into its most inmost recesses. For him, life has little
romance; the grosser agency of the body re-acting ever on the operations
of the mind, destroy many a poetic daydream and many a high-wrought
illusion. To him alone does a man speak “_son dernier mot:_” while to
the lawyer the leanings of self-respect will make him always impart a
favourable view of his case. To the physician he will be candid, and
even more than candid--yes, these are the men who, watching the secret
workings of human passion, can trace the progress of mankind in virtue,
and in vice; while ministering to the body they are exploring the mind,
and yet, scarcely is the hour of danger passed, scarcely the shadow of
fear dissipated, when they fall back to their humble position in life,
bearing with them but little gratitude, and, strange to say, no fear!

The world expects them to be learned, well-bred, kind, considerate,
and attentive, patient to their querulousness, and enduring under
their caprice; and, after all this, the humbug of homoeopathy, the
preposterous absurdity of the water cure, or the more reprehensible
mischief of Mesmerism, will find more favour in their sight than the
highest order of ability accompanied by, great natural advantages.

Every man--and still more, every woman--imagine themselves to be
doctors. The taste for physic, like that for politics, is born with
us, and nothing seems easier than to repair the injuries of the
constitution, whether of the state or the individual. Who has not seen,
over and over again, physicians of the first eminence put aside, that
the nostrum of some ignorant pretender, or the suggestion of some
twaddling old woman, should be, as it is termed, tried? No one is too
stupid, no one too old, no one too ignorant, too obstinate, or too
silly, not to be superior to Brodie and Chambers, Crampton and Marsh;
and where science, with anxious eye and cautious hand, would scarcely
venture to interfere, heroic ignorance would dash boldly forward and cut
the Gordian difficulty by snapping the thread of life. How comes it that
these old ladies, ol either sex, never meddle with the law? Is the game
beneath them, where the stake is only property, and not life? or is
there less difficulty in the knowledge of an art whose principles rest
on so many branches of science, than in a study founded on the basis
of precedent? Would to heaven the “Ladies Bountiful” would take to
the quarter-sessions and the assizes, in lieu of the infirmaries and
dispensaries, and make Blackstone their aid-de-camp--_vice_ Buchan
retired.

[Illustration: 107]




A NUT FOR THE PRIESTS.

[Illustration: 108]

There would be no going through this world if one had not an
India-rubber conscience, and one could no more exist in life without
what watch-makers call accommodation, in the machinery of one's heart,
than a blue-bottle fly could grow fat in the shop of an apothecary.
Every man's conscience has, like Janus, two faces--one looks most
plausibly to the world, with a smile of courteous benevolence, the other
with a droll leer seems to say, I think we are doing them. In fact, not
only would the world be impossible, and its business impracticable, but
society itself would be a bear-garden without hypocrisy.

Now, the professional classes have a kind of licence on this subject;
just as a poet is permitted to invent sunsets, and a painter to
improvise clouds and cataracts, so a lawyer dilates upon the virtues
or attractions of his client, and a physician will weep you good round
substantial tears, at a guinea a drop, for the woes of his patient;
but the church, I certainly thought, was exempt from this practice. A
paragraph in a morning paper, however, disabused my ignorance in the
most remarkable manner. The Roman Catholic hierarchy have unanimously
decided that all persons following the profession of the stage, are to
be considered without the pale of the church, they are neither to he
baptized nor confirmed, married nor buried; they may get a name in the
streets, and a wite there also, but the church will neither bless
the one, nor confirm the other; in fact, the sock and the buskin are
proclaimed in opposition to Christianity, and Madame Lafarge is not a
bit more culpable than Robert Macaire. A few days since, one of the
most fashionable churches in Paris was crowded to suffocation by the
attraction of high mass, celebrated with the assistance of the whole
opera choir, with Duprez at their head. The sum contributed by the
faithful was enormous, and the music of Mozart was heard to great effect
through the vaulted aisles of Notre Dame, yet the very morning after,
not an individual of the choir could receive the benediction of the
church--the _rationale_ of all which is, that the Dean of Notre Dame,
like the Director of the Odeon, likes a good house and a heavy benefit.
He gets the most attractive company he can secure, and although he makes
no scruple to say they are the most disreputable acquaintances, still
they fill the benches, and it will be time enough to damn them when the
performance is over!

Whenever the respectable Whigs are attacked for their alliance with
O'Connell, they make the same reply the priest would probably do in this
circumstance--How can we help it? We want a mob; if he sings, we have
it--we know his character as well as you; so only let us fill our
pockets, and then------I do not blame them in the least, if the popery
of their politics has palled upon the appetite; if they can work no
more miracles of reform and revolution, I do not see how they can help
calling in aid from without.





A NUT FOR LEARNED SOCIETIES.

[Illustration: 110]

We laugh at the middle ages for their trials by ordeal, their jousts,
their tournaments, their fat monasteries, and their meagre people; but
I am strongly disposed to think, that before a century pass over,
posterity will give us as broad a grin for our learned societies. Of all
the features that characterise the age, I know of none so pre-eminently
ridiculous, as nine-tenths of these associations would prove; supported
by great names, aided by large title, with a fine house, a library and
a librarian, they do the honours of science pretty much as the yeomen
of the guard do those of a court on a levee day, and they bear about the
same relation to literature and art, that do the excellent functionaries
I have mentioned, to the proceedings around the throne.

An old gentleman, hipped by celibacy, and too sour for society, has
contracted a habit of looking out of his window every morning, to
observe the weather: he sees a cloud very like a whale, or he fancies
that when the wind blows in a particular direction, and it happens to
rain at the same time, that the drops fall in a peculiarly slanting
manner. He notes down the facts for a month or two, and then establishes
a meteorological society, of which he is the perpetual president, with
a grant from Parliament to extend its utility. Another takes to old
volumes on a book-stall; and becoming, as most men are who have little
knowledge of life, fascinated with his own discoveries, thinks he has
ascertained some curious details of ancient history, and communicating
his results to others as stupid and old as himself, they dub themselves
antiquarians, or archaeologists, and obtain a grant also.

Now, one half of these societies are neither more nor less than most
impertinent sarcasms on the land we live id. The man who sets himself
down deliberately to chronicle the clouds in our atmosphere, and jot
down the rainy days in our calendar, is, to my thinking, performing
about as grateful a task, as though he were to count the carbuncles on
his friend's nose. We have, it is true, a most abominable climate: the
sun rarely shows himself, and, when he does, it is through a tattered
garment of clouds, dim and disagreeable; but why throw it in our teeth?
and, still more, why pay a body of men to publish the slander? Then
again, as to history, all the world knows that since the Flood the Irish
have never done any thing else than make love, illicit whiskey, and beat
each other. What nonsense, then, to talk about the ancient cultivation
of the land, of its high rank in literature, and its excellence in
art. A stone bishop, with a nose like a negro, and a crosier like
a garden-rake, are the only evidences of our ancestors' taste in
sculpture; and some doggrel verses in Irish, explaining how King Phelim
O'Toole cheated a brother monarch out of his smallclothes, are about the
extent of our historic treasures. But, for argument's sake, suppose it
otherwise; imagine for a moment that our ancestors were all that Sir
William Betham and Mr. Petrie would make them--I do not know how other
people may feel, but I myself deem it no pleasant reflection to think of
_their_ times and look at _our own_. What if we were poets and painters,
architects, historians, and musicians! What have we now among us to
represent these great and mighty gifts? I am afraid, except our
Big Beggarman, we have not a single living celebrity; and is this
a comfortable reflection, is this a pleasing thought, that while,
fourteen hundred years ago, some Irish Raphael and some Galway Grisi
were the delight of our illustrious ancestors--that while the splendour
of King Malachi, with his collar of gold, astonished the ladies in the
neighbourhood of Trim--we have nothing to boast of, save Dan for Lord
Mayor, and Burton Bindon's oysters? Once more, I say, if what these
people tell us be facts, they are the most unpalatable facts could be
told to a nation; and I see no manner of propriety or good-breeding in
replying to a gipsy who begs for a penny, by the information, that “his
ancestors built the Pyramids.”

Again, if our days are dark, our nights are worse; and what, in Heaven's
name, have we to do with an observatory and a telescope as long as the
_Great Western?_ The planets are the most expensive vagabonds to the
Budget, and the fixed stars are a fixed imposition. Were I Chancellor
of the Exchequer, I'd pension the Moon, and give the Great Bear a sum of
money as compensation. Do not tell me of the distresses of the people,
arising from cotton, or corn, China, or Chartists--it is our scientific
institutions are eating into the national resources. There is not an
egg-saucepan of antiquity that does not cost the country a plum, and
every wag of a comet's tail may be set down at half-a-million. I warrant
me the people in the Moon take us a deuced deal more easily, and give
themselves very little trouble to make out the size of Ireland's eye or
the height of Croaghpatrick. No, no; let the Chancellor of the Exchequer
come down with a slapping measure of retrenchment, and make a clear
stage of all of them. Every man with money to buy a cotton umbrella
is his own meteorologist; and a pocket telescope, price
eight-and-fourpence, is long enough, in all conscience, for any man in
a climate like ours; or, if such a course seem too peremptory, call
on these people for their bill, and let there be a stated sum for each
item. At Dolly's chop-house, you know to the exact farthing how much
your beefsteak and glass of ale will cost you; and if you wish, in
addition, a slice of Stilton with your XX, you consult your pocket
before you speak. Let not the nation be treated worse than the
individual: let as first look about us, and see if a year of prosperity
and cheap potatoes will permit us the indulgence of obtaining a new
luminary or an old chronicle; then, when we know the cost, we may
calculate with safety. Suppose a fixed star, for instance, be set down
at ten pounds; a planet at five; Saturn has so many belts, I would not
give more than half-a-crown for a new one; and, as for an eclipse of the
sun, I had rather propose a reward for the man who could tell us when we
could see him palpably.

For the present I merely throw out these suggestions in a brief,
incomplete manner, intending, however, to return to the subject on
another occasion.

[Illustration: 114]




A NUT FOR THE LAWYERS.

[Illustration: 115]

Authors have long got the credit of being the most accomplished persons
going--thoroughly conversant not only with the features of every walk
and class in life, but also with their intimate sentiments, habits of
thought, and modes of expression. Now, I have long been of opinion,
that in all these respects, lawyers are infinitely their superiors. The
author chooses his characters as you choose your dish, or your wine at
dinner--he takes what suits, and leaves what is not available to his
purpose. He then fashions them to his hand--finishing off this portrait,
sketching that one--now bringing certain figures into strong light, anon
throwing them into shadow: they are his creatures, who must obey him
while living, and even die at his command. Now, the lawyer is called on
for all the narrative and descriptive powers of his art, at a moment's
notice, without time for reading or preparation; and worse than all, his
business frequently lies among the very arts and callings his taste is
most repugnant to. One day he is to be found creeping, with a tortoise
slowness through all the wearisome intricacy of an equity case--the next
he is borne along in a torrent of indignant eloquence, in defence of
some Orange processionist or some Ribbon associate: now he describes,
with the gravity of a landscape gardener, the tortuous windings of a
mill-stream; now expatiating in Lytton Bulwerisms over the desolate
hearth and broken fortunes of some deserted husband. In one court he
attempts to prove that the elderly gentleman whose life was insured for
a thousand at the Phoenix, was instrumental to his own decease, for not
eating Cayenne with his oysters; in another, he shows, with palpable
clearness, that being stabbed in the body, and having the head
fractured, is a venial offence, and merely the result of “political
excitement” in a high-spirited and warm-hearted people.

These are all clever efforts, and demand consummate powers, at the
hand of him who makes them; but what are they to that deep and critical
research with which he seems, instinctively, to sound the depths of
every scientific walk in life, and every learned profession. Hear him
in a lunacy case--listen to the deep and subtle distinctions he draws
between the symptoms of mere eccentricity and erring intellect--remark
how insignificant the physician appears in the case, who has made these
things the study of a life long--hear how the barrister confounds him
with a hail-storm of technicals--talking of the pineal gland as if it
was an officer of the court, and of atrophy of the cerebral lobes, as
if he was speaking of an attorney's clerk. Listen to him in a trial of
supposed death by poison; what a triumph he has there, particularly if
he be a junior barrister--how he walks undismayed among all the tests
for arsenic--how little he cares for Marsh's apparatus and Scheele's
discoveries--hydro-sulphates, peroxydes, iodurates, and proto-chlorides
are familiar to him as household words. You would swear that he was
nursed at a glass retort, and sipped his first milk through a blow-pipe.
Like a child who thumps the keys of a pianoforte, and imagines himself
a Liszt or Moschelles, so does your barrister revel amid the phraseology
of a difficult science--pelting the witnesses with his insane blunders,
and assuring the jury that their astonishment means ignorance.

[Illustration: 117a]

Nothing in anatomy is too deep--nothing in chemistry too subtle--no
fact in botany too obscure--no point in metaphysics too difficult. Like
Dogberry, these things are to him but the gift of God; and he knows
them at his birth. Truly, the chancellor is a powerful magician; and the
mystic words by which he calls a gentleman to the bar, must have some
potent spell within them.

[Illustration: 117b]

The youth you remember as if it were yesterday, the lounger at evening
parties, or the chaperon of tiding damsels to the Phoenix, comes forth
now a man of deep and consummate acquirement--he whose chemistry went
no further than the composition of a “tumbler of punch,” can now perform
the most difficult experiments of Orfila or Davy, or explain the causes
of failure in a test that has puzzled the scientific world for half
a century. He knows the precise monetary value of a deserted maiden's
affections--he can tell you the exact sum, in bank notes, that a widow
will be knocked down for, when her heart has been subject to but a feint
attack of Cupid.

[Illustration: 118]

With what consummate skill, too, he can show that an indictment is
invalid, when stabbing is inserted for cutting; and when the crown
prosecutor has been deficient in his descriptive anatomy, what a
glorious field for display is opened to him. Then, to be sure, what
droll fellows they are!--how they do quiz the witness as he sits
trembling on the table--what funny allusions to his habits of life--his
age--his station--turning the whole battery of their powers of ridicule
against him--ready, if he venture to retort, to throw themselves on
the protection of the court. And truly, if a little Latin suffice for a
priest, a little wit goes very far in a law court. A joke is a universal
blessing: the judge, who, after all, is only “an old lawyer,” loves
it from habit: the jury, generally speaking, are seldom in such good
company, and they laugh from complaisance; and the bar joins in the
mirth, on that great reciprocity principle, which enables them to bear
each other's dulness, and dine together afterwards. People are insane
enough to talk of absenteeism as one of the evils of Ireland, and regret
that we have no resident aristocracy among us--rather let us rejoice
that we have them not, so long as the lawyers prove their legitimate
successors.

How delightful in a land where civilization has still some little
progress before it, and where the state of crime is not quite
satisfactory--to know that we have those amongst us who know all things,
feel all things, explain all things, and reconcile all things--who can
throw such a Claude Lorraine light over right and wrong, that they are
both mellowed into a sweet and hallowed softness, delightful to gaze
on. How the secret of this universal acquirement is accomplished I know
not--perhaps it is the wig.

What set me first on this train of thought, was a trial I lately read,
where a cross action was sustained for damage at sea--the owners of the
brig Durham against the Aurora, a foreign vessel, and _vice versa_, for
the result of a collision at noon, on the 14th of October. It appeared
that both vessels had taken shelter in the Humber from stress of
weather, nearly at the same time--that the Durham, which preceded
the Prussian vessel, “clewed up her top-sails, and dropped her anchor
_rather_ suddenly; and the Aurora being in the rear, the vessels came
in collision.” The question, therefore, was, whether the Durham came to
anchor too precipitately, and in an unseamanlike manner; or, in other
words, whether, when the “Durham clewed up topsails, and let go her
anchor, the Aurora should not have luffed up, or got stern way on her,”
 &c. Nothing could possibly be more instructive, nor anything scarcely
more amusing, than the lucid arguments employed by the counsel on both
sides. The learned Thebans, that would have been sick in a ferry-boat,
spoke as if they had circumnavigated the globe. Stay-sails, braces,
top-gallants, clews, and capstans they hurled at each other like _bon
bons_ at a carnival; and this naval engagement lasted from daylight to
dark. Once only, when the judge “made it noon,” for a little refection,
did they cease conflict, to renew the strife afterwards with more deadly
daring, till at last so confused were the witnesses--the plaintiff,
defendant, and all, that they half wished, they had gone to the bottom,
before they thought of settling the differences in the Admiralty
Court. This was no common occasion for the display of these powers so
peculiarly the instinctive gift of the bar, and certainly they used it
with all the enthusiasm of a _bonne bouche_.

How I trembled for the Aurora, when an elderly gentleman, with a wart on
his nose, assured the court that the Durham had her top-sail backed ten
minutes before the anchor fell; and then, how I feared again for the
Durham, as a thin man in spectacles worked the Prussian, about in a
double-reefed mainsail, and stood round in stays so beautifully. I
thought myself at sea, so graphic was the whole description--the waves
splashed and foamed around the bulwarks, and broke in spray upon the
deck--the wind rattled amid the rigging--the bulkheads creaked, and the
good ship heaved heavily in the trough of the sea, like a mighty monster
in his agony. But my heart quailed not--I knew that Dr. Lushington was
at the helm, and Dr. Haggard had the look-out a-head--I felt that Dr.
Robinson stood by the lee braces, and Dr. Addison waited, hatchet in
hand, to cut away the mainmast. These were comforting reflections, till
I was once more enabled to believe myself in her Majesty's High Court of
Admiralty.

Alas! ye Coopers--ye Marryats--ye Charniers--ve historians of storm and
sea-fight, how inferior are your triumphs compared with the descriptive
eloquence of a law court. Who can pourtray the broken heart of blighted
affection, like Charles Phillips in a breach of promise? What was
Scott compared to Scarlett?--how inferior is Dickens to Counsellor
O'Driscoll?--here are the men, who, without the trickery of trade,
ungilt, unlettered, and unillustrated, can move the world to laughter
and to tears. They ask no aid from Colburn, nor from Cruikshank--they
need not “Brown” nor Longman. Heaven-born warriors, doctors, chemists,
and anatomists--deep in every art, learned in every science--mankind
is to them an open book, which they read at will, and con over at
leisure--happy country, where we have you in abundance, and where your
talents are so available, that they can be had for asking.

[Illustration: 121]




A NUT FOR THE IRISH.

AN IRISH ENCORE.

[Illustration: 122]

We certainly are a very original people, and contrive to do everything
after a way of our own! Not content with cementing our friendships by
fighting, and making the death of a relative the occasion of a merry
evening, we even convert the habits we borrow from other land into
something essentially different from their original intention, and
infuse into them a spirit quite national. The echo which, when asked
“How d'ye do, Paddy Blake?” replied, “Mighty well, thank you,” could
only have been an Irish echo. Any other country would have sulkily
responded, “Blake--ake--ake--ake,” in _diminuendo_ to the end of the
chapter. But there is a courtesy, an attention, a native politeness on
our side of the channel, it is in vain to seek elsewhere. A very strong
instance in point occurs in a morning paper before me, and one so
delightfully characteristic of our habits and customs, it would be
unpardonable to pass it without commemoration. At an evening concert
at the Rotundo, we are informed that Mr Knight--I believe his name
is--enchanted his audience by the charming manner he sung “Molly
Astore.” Three distinct rounds of applause followed, and an encore that
actually shook the building, and may--though we are not informed of
the circumstance--have produced very remarkable effects in the adjacent
institution; upon which Mr. Knight, with his habitual courtesy, came
forward and sang--what, think ye, good reader? Of course you will
say, “Molly Astore,” the song he was encored for. Alas! for your
ignorance;--that might do very well in Liverpool or Manchester, at Bath,
Bristol, or Birmingham--the poor benighted Saxons there might like to
get what they asked so eagerly for; but we are men of very different
mould, and not accustomed to the jog-trot subserviency of such
common-sense notions; and accordingly, Mr. Knight sang “The Soldier
Tired”--a piece of politeness on his part that actually convulsed the
house with acclamations; and so on to the end of the entertainment, “the
gentleman, when encored, invariably sang a new song”--I quote the paper
_verbatim_--“which testimony of his anxiety to meet the wishes of the
audience afforded universal satisfaction.”

Now, I ask--and I ask it in all the tranquillity of triumph--show me the
country on a map where such a studied piece of courteous civility
could have been practised, or which, if attempted, could have been so
thoroughly, so instantaneously appreciated. And what an insight does
it give us into some of the most difficult features of our national
character. May not this Irish encore explain the success with which Mr.
O'Connell consoles our “poverty” by attacks on the clergy, and relieves
our years of scarcity by creating forty-shilling freeholders. We ask for
bread; and he tells us we are a great people--we beg for work, and
he replies, that we must have repeal of the union--we complain of our
poverty, and his remedy is--subscribe to the rent. Your heavy-headed
Englishman--your clod-hopper from Yorkshire--or your boor from
Northumberland, would never understand this, if you gave him a life-long
to con over it. Norfolk pudding to his gross and sensual nature would
seem better than the new registration bill; and he'd rather hear the
simmering music of the boiled beef for his dinner, than all the rabid
ruffianism of a repeal meeting.

But to come back to ourselves. What bold and ample views of life do our
free-and-easy habits disclose to us, not to speak of the very servant
at table, who will often help you to soup, when you ask for sherry, and
give you preserves, when you beg for pepper. What amiable cross-purposes
are we always playing at--not bigotedly adhering to our own narrow
notions, and following out our own petty views of life, but eagerly
doing what we have no concern in, and meritoriously performing for our
friends, what they had been well pleased, we'd have let alone.

This amiable waywardness--this pleasing uncertainty of
purpose--characterises our very climate; and the day that breaks in
sunshine becomes stormy at noon, calm towards evening, and blows a
hurricane all night. So the Irishman that quits his home brimful of
philanthropy is not unlikely to rob a church before his return. But so
it is, there is nobody like us in any respect. We commemorate the advent
of a sovereign by erecting a testimonial to the last spot he stood on
at his departure; and we are enthusiastic in our gratitude when, having
asked for one favour, we receive something as unlike it as possible.

Our friends at the other side are beginning to legislate for us in
the true spirit of our prejudices; and when we have complained of “a
beggared proprietary and a ruined gentry,” they have bolstered up our
weakness with the new poor law. So much for an Irish encore.

“The sixth of Anne, chap, seventeen, makes it unlawful to keep
gaming-houses in any part of the city except the 'Castle,' and prohibits
any game being played even there except during the residence of the Lord
Lieutenant. This act is still on the statute book.”--_Dublin Paper_.

One might puzzle himself for a very long time for an explanation of
this strange _morceau_ of legislation, without any hope of arriving at a
shadow of a reason for it.

That gaming should be suppressed by a government is in no wise
unnatural; nor should we feel any surprise at our legislature having
been a century in advance of France, in the due restriction of this
demoralizing practice. But that the exercise of a vice should be limited
to the highest offices of the state is, indeed, singular, and demands no
little reflection on our part to investigate the cause.

Had the functions of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland been of that drowsy,
tiresome, uninteresting nature, that it was only deemed fair by the
legislature to afford him some amusing pastime to distract his “_ennui_”
 and dispel his melancholy, there might seem to have been then some
reason for this extraordinary enactment. On the contrary, however, every
one knows that from the remotest times to the present, every viceroy of
Ireland has had quite enough on his hands. Some have been saving money
to pay off old mortgages, others were farming the Phoenix; some took to
the King Cambyses' vein, like poor dear Lord Normanby--raked up all the
old properties and faded finery of the Castle, and with such material as
they could collect, made a kind of Drury-lane representation of a court.
And very lately, and with an originality so truly characteristic of true
genius, Lord Ebrington struck out a line of his own, and slept away
his time with such a persevering intensity of purpose, that “the
least wide-awake” persons of his government became actually ashamed of
themselves. But to go back. What, I would ask, was the intention of
this act? I know you give it up. Well, now, I have made the matter the
subject of long and serious thought, and I think I have discovered it.

Have you ever read, in the laws of the smaller German states, the
singular rules and regulations regarding the gaming-table? If so,
you will have found how the entire property of the “rouge et noi”
 and “roulette” is vested in certain individuals in return for very
considerable sums of money, paid by them to the government, for the
privilege of robbing the public. These honourable and estimable people
farm out iniquity as you would do your demesne, selling the cheatable
features of mankind, like the new corn law, on the principle of “a
general average.” The government of these states, finding--no uncommon
thing in Germany--a deficiency in their exchequer, have hit upon
this ready method of supplying the gap, by a system which has all the
regularity of a tax, with the advantage of a voluntary contribution.
These little kingdoms, therefore, of some half-dozen miles in
circumference, are nothing more than _rouge et noir_ tables, where the
grand duke performs the part of croupier, and gathers in the gold. Now,
I am convinced that something of this kind was intended by our lawgivers
in the act of parliament to which I have alluded, and that its programme
might run thus--that “as the office of Lord Lieutenant in Ireland is one
of great responsibility, high trust, and necessarily demanding profuse
expenditure; and that, as it may so happen that the same should, in
the course of events, be filled by some Whig-Radical viceroy of great
pretension and little property; and that as the ordinary sum for
maintaining his dignity may be deemed insufficient, we hereby give him
the exclusive liberty and privilege of all games of chance, skill,
or address, in the kingdom of Ireland, whether the same may be
chicken-hazard, blind hookey, head and tail, &c.--thimble-rigging was
only known later--to be enjoyed by himself only, or by persons deputed
by him; such privilege in nowise to extend to the lords justices, but
only to exist during the actual residence and presence of the Lord
Lieutenant himself.”--_See the Act_.

I cannot but admire the admirable tact that dictated this portion of
legislation; at the same time, it does seem a little hard that the
chancellor, the archbishop, and the other high functionaries, who
administer the law in the absence of the viceroy, should not have
been permitted the small privilege of a little unlimited loo, or even
beggar-my-neighbour, particularly as the latter game is the popular one
in Ireland.

There would seem, too, something like an appreciation of our national
character in the spirit of this law, which, unhappily for England, and
Ireland, too, has not always dictated her enactments concerning us. It
is well known that we hate and abhor anything in the shape of a legal
debt. Few Irishmen will refuse you the loan of five pounds; still fewer
can persuade themselves to pay five shillings. The kingdom of Galway
has long been celebrated for its enlightened notions on this subject,
showing how much more conducive it is to personal independence and
domestic economy, to spend five hundred pounds in resisting a claim,
than to satisfy it by the payment of twenty. Accordingly, had any
direct taxation of considerable amount been proposed for the support of
viceregal dignity, the chances are--much as we like show and glitter,
ardently as we admire all that gives us the semblance of a state--we
should have buttoned up our pockets, and upon the principle of those
economical little tracts, that teach us to do so much for ourselves,
every man would have resolved to be “his own Lord Lieutenant;” coming,
however, in the shape of an indirect taxation, a voluntary contribution
to be withheld at leasure, the thing was unobjectionable.

You might not like cards, still less the company--a very possible
circumstance, the latter, in some times we wot of not long since--Well,
then, you saved your cash and your character by staying at home; on the
other hand, it was a comfort to know that you could have your rubber
of “shorts” or your game at _écarté_, while at the same time you were
contributing to the maintenance of the crown, and discharging the
_devoirs_ of a loyal subject It is useless, however, to speculate upon
an obsolete institution; the law has fallen into disuse, and the more is
the pity. How one would like to have seen Lord Normanby, with that one
curl of infantine simplicity that played upon his forehead, with that
eternal leer of self-satisfied loveliness that rested on his features,
playing banker at _rouge et noir_, or calling the throws at hazard. I
am not quite so sure that the concern would have been so profitable as
picturesque. The principal frequenters of his court were “York too;”
 Lord Plunket was a “downy cove;” and if Anthony Black took the box,
most assuredly “I'd back the caster.” Now and then, to be sure, a stray,
misguided country gentleman--a kind of “wet Tory”--used to be found at
that court; just as one sees some respectable matronly woman at Ems or
Baden, seated in a happy unconsciousness that all the company about
her are rogues and swindlers, so _he_ might afford some good sport, and
assist to replenish the famished exchequer. Generally speaking, however,
the play would not have kept the tables; and his lordship would have
been _in_ for the wax-lights, without the slightest chance of return.

As for his successor, “patience” would have been his only game; and
indeed it was one he had to practise whilst he remained amongst us.
Better days have now come: let us, therefore, inquire if a slight
modification of the act might not be effected with benefit, and an
amendment, somewhat thus, be introduced into the bill:--“That the words
'Lord Mayor' be substituted for the words 'Lord Lieutenant;' and that
all the privileges, rights, immunities, &c, aforesaid, be enjoyed by
him to his sole use and benefit; and also that, in place of the word
'Castle,' the word 'Mansion-house' stand part of this bill”--thus
reserving to his lordship all monopoly in games of chance and address,
without in anywise interfering with such practices of the like nature
exercised by him elsewhere, and always permitted and conceded by
whatever government in power.

Here, my dear countrymen, is no common suggestion. I am no prophet, like
Sir Harcourt Lees; but still I venture to predict, that this system
once legalised at the Mayoralty, the tribute is totally unnecessary.
The little town of Spa, with scarce 10,000 inhabitants, pays the
Belgian government 200,000 francs per annum for the liberty: what would
Dublin--a city so populous and so idle? only think of the tail!--how
admirably they could employ their little talent as “bonnets,” and
the various other functionaries so essential to the well-being of a
gambling-house; and, lastly, think of great Dan himself, with his burly
look, seated in civic dignity at the green cloth, with a rake instead
of a mace before him, calling out, “Make your game, gentlemen, make your
game”--“Never venture, never win”--“Faint heart,” &c, &c.

How suitable would the eloquence that has now grown tiresome, even at
the Corn Exchange, be at the head of a gaming-table; and how well would
the Liberator conduct a business whose motto is so admirably expressed
by the phrase, “Heads, _I_ win; tails, _you_ lose.” Besides, after
all, nothing could form so efficient a bond of union between the two
contending parties in the country as some little mutual territory of
wickedness, where both might forget their virtues and their grievances
together. Here you 'd soon have the violent party-man of either side,
oblivious of everything but his chance of gain; and what an energy would
it give to the great Daniel to think that, while filling his pockets, he
was also spoiling the Egyptians! Instead, therefore, of making the poor
man contribute his penny, and the ragged man twopence, you'd have
the Rent supplied without the trouble of collection; and all from the
affluent and the easy, or at least the idle, portion of the community.

This is the second time I have thrown out a suggestion--and all for
nothing, remember--on the subject of a finance; and little reflection
will show that both my schemes are undeniable in their benefits. Here
you have one of the most expensive pleasures a poor country has ever
ventured to afford itself--a hired agitator, pensioned, without any
burden on the productive industry of the land; and he himself, so far
from having anything to complain of, will find that his revenue is more
than quadrupled.

Look at the question, besides, in another point of view, and see what
possible advantages may arise from it. Nothing is so admirable an
antidote to all political excitement as gambling: where it flourishes,
men become so inextricably involved in its fascinations and attractions
that they forget everything else. Now, was ever a country so urgently
in want of a little repose as ours? and would it not be well to purchase
it, and pension off our great disturbers, at any price whatever? Cards
are better than carding any day; short whist is an admirable substitute
for insurrection; and the rattle of a dice-box is surely as pleasant
music as the ruffian snout for repeal.




RICH AND POOR-POUR ET CONTRE.

[Illustration: 132]

If I was a king upon a throne this minute, an' I wanted to have a smoke
for myself by the fireside--why, if I was to do my best, what could I
smoke but one pen'orth of tobacco, in the night, after all?--but can't I
have that just as asy?

“If I was to have a bed with down feathers, what could I do but sleep
there?--and sure I can do that in the settle-bed above.”

Such is the very just and philosophical reflection of one of Griffin's
most amusing characters, in his inimitable story of “The Collegians”--a
reflection that naturally sets us a thinking, that if riches and
wealth cannot really increase a man's capacity for enjoyment with the
enjoyments themselves, their pursuit is, after all, but a poor and
barren object of even worldly happiness.

As it is perfectly evident that, so far as mere sensual gratifications
are concerned, the peer and the peasant stand pretty much on a level,
let us inquire for a moment in what the great superiority consists which
exalts and elevates one above the other? Now, without entering upon
that wild field for speculation that power (and what power equals that
conferred by wealth?) confers, and the train of ennobling sentiment
suggested by extended views of philanthropy and benevolence--for, in
this respect, it is perfectly possible the poor man has as amiable a
thrill at his heart in sharing his potato with a wandering beggar, as
the rich one has in contributing his thousand pounds' donation to some
great national charity--let us turn rather to the consideration of those
more tangible differences that leave their impress upon character, and
mould men's minds into a fashion so perfectly and thoroughly distinct.

To our thinking, then, the great superiority wealth confers lies in the
seclusion the rich man lives in From all the grosser agency of every-day
life--its make-shifts, its contrivances, its continued warfare of petty
provision and continual care, its unceasing effort to seem what it is
not, and to appear to the world in a garb, and after a manner, to which
it has no just pretension. The rich man knows nothing of all this: life,
to him, rolls on in measured tread; and the world, albeit the changes
of season and politics may affect him, has nothing to call forth any
unusual effort of his temper or his intellect; his life, like his
drawing-room, is arranged for him; he never sees it otherwise than in
trim order; with an internal consciousness that people must be engaged
in providing for his comforts at seasons when he is in bed or asleep, or
otherwise occupied, he gives himself no farther trouble about them; and,
in the monotony of his pleasures, attains to a tranquillity of mind the
most enviable and most happy.

Hence that perfect composure so conspicuous in the higher ranks, among
whom wealth is so generally diffused--hence that delightful simplicity
of manner, so captivating from its total absence of pretension
and affectation--hence that unbroken serenity that no chances or
disappointments would seem to interfere with; the knowledge that he is
of far too much consequence to be neglected or forgotten, supports
him on every occasion, and teaches that, when anything happens to his
inconvenience or discomfort, that it could not but be unavoidable.

Not so the poor man: his poverty is a shoe that pinches every hour of
the twenty-four; he may bear up from habit, from philosophy, against his
restricted means of enjoyment; he may accustom himself to limited and
narrow bounds of pleasure; he may teach himself that, when wetting his
lips with the cup of happiness, that he is not to drink to his liking of
it: but what he cannot acquire is that total absence of all forethought
for the minor cares of life, its provisions for the future, its changes
and contingencies;--hence he does not possess that easy and tranquil
temperament so captivating to all within its influence; he has none of
the careless _abandon_ of happiness, because even when happy he feels
how short-lived must be his pleasure, and what a price he must pay for
it. The thought of the future poisons the present, just as the dark
cloud that gathers round the mountain-top makes the sunlight upon the
plain seem cold and sickly.

All the poor man's pleasures have taken such time and care in their
preparation that they have lost their freshness ere they are tasted. The
cook has sipped so frequently at the pottage, he will not eat of it
when at table. The poor man sees life “en papillotes” before he sees
it “dressed.” The rich man sees it only in the resplendent blaze of
its beauty, glowing with all the attraction that art can lend it, and
wearing smiles put on for his own enjoyment. But if such be the case,
and if the rich man, from the very circumstance of his position, imbibe
habits and acquire a temperament possessing such charm and fascination,
does he surrender nothing for all this? Alas! and alas! how many of
the charities of life lie buried in the still waters of his apathetic
nature! How many of the warm feelings of his heart are chilled for
ever, for want of ground for their exercise! How can he sympathise who
has never suffered? how can he console who has never grieved! There is
nothing healthy in the placid mirror of that glassy lake; uncurled by
a breeze, unruffled by a breath of passion, it wants the wholesome
agitation of the breaking wave--the health-giving, bracing power of the
conflicting element that stirs the heart within, and nerves it for a
noble effort.

All that he has of good within him is cramped by _convenance_ and
fashion; for he who never feared the chance of fortune, trembles, with
a coward's dread, before the sneer of the world. The poor man, however,
only appeals to this test on a very different score. The “world” may
prescribe to him the fashion of his hat, or the colour of his coat--it
may dictate the locale of his residence, and the style of his household,
and he may, so far as in him lies, comply with a tyranny so absurd; but
with the free sentiments of his nature--his honest pride, his feeling
sympathy--with the open current of his warm affection he suffers no
interference: of this no man shall be the arbiter. If, then, the shoals
and quicksands of the world deprive him of that tranquil guise and
placid look--the enviable gift of richer men--he has, in requital,
the unrestricted use of those greater gifts that God has given him,
untrammelled by man's opinion, uncurbed by the control of “the world.”

Each supports a tyranny after his own kind:--The rich man--above
the dictates of fashion--subjects the thoughts of his mind and the
meditations of his heart to the world's rule.

The poor man--below it--keeps these for his prerogative, and has no
slavery save in form.

Happy the man who, amid all the seductions of wealth, and all the
blandishments of fortune, can keep his heart and mind in the healthy
exercise of its warm affections and its generous impulses. But still
happier he, whose wealth, the native purity of his heart--can limit his
desires to his means, and untrammelled by ambition, undeterred by fear
of failure, treads the lowly but peaceful path in life, neither aspiring
to be great, nor fearing to be humble.




A NUT FOR ST. PATRICK'S NIGHT.

[Illustration: 137]

There is no cant offends me more than the oft-repeated criticisms on
the changed condition of Ireland. How very much worse or how very much
better we have become since this ministry, or that measure--what a
deplorable falling off!--what a gratifying prospect! how poor! how
prosperous! &c. &c. Now, we are exactly what and where we used to be:
not a whit wiser nor better, poorer nor prouder. The union, the relief
bill, the reform and corporation acts, have passed over us, like the
summer breeze upon the calm water of a lake, ruffling the surface for
a moment, but leaving all still and stagnant as before. Making new laws
for the use of a people who would not obey the old ones, is much like
the policy of altering the collar or the cuffs of a coat for a savage,
who insists all the while on going naked. However, it amuses the
gentlemen of St. Stephen's; and, I'm sure I'm not the man to quarrel
with innocent pleasures.

To me, looking back, as my Lord Brougham would say, from the period of
a long life, I cannot perceive even the slightest difference in the
appearance of the land, or the looks of its inhabitants. Dublin is the
same dirty, ill-cared-for, broken-windowed, tumble-down concern it used
to be--the country the same untilled, weed-grown, un-fenced thing I
remember it fifty years ago--the society pretty much the same mixture
of shrewd lawyers, suave doctors, raw subalterns, and fat, old, greasy
country gentlemen, waiting in town for remittances to carry them on to
Cheltenham--that paradise of Paddies, and elysium of Galway _belles_.
Our table-talk the old story, of who was killed last in Tipperary or
Limerick, with the accustomed seasoning of the oft-repeated alibi that
figures at every assizes, and is successful with every jury. These
pleasant topics, tinted with the party colour of the speaker's
politics, form the staple of conversation; and, “barring the wit,” we
are pretty much what our fathers were some half century earlier. Father
Mathew, to be sure, has innovated somewhat on our ancient prejudices;
but I find that what are called “the upper classes” are far too
cultivated and too well-informed to follow a priest. A few weeks ago, I
had a striking illustration of this fact brought before me, which I am
disposed to quote the more willingly as it also serves to display the
admirable constancy with which we adhere to our old and time-honoured
habits. The morning of St. Patrick's day was celebrated in Dublin by an
immense procession of teetotallers, who, with white banners, and whiter
cheeks, paraded the city, evidencing in their cleanly but care-worn
countenances, the benefits of temperance. On the same evening a
gentleman--so speak the morning papers--got immoderately drunk at the
ball in the Castle, and was carried out in a state of insensibility.
Now, it is not for the sake of contrast I have mentioned this fact--my
present speculation has another and very different object, and is simply
this:--How comes it, that since time out of mind the same event has
recurred on the anniversary of St. Patrick at the Irish court? When I
was a boy I remember well “the gentleman who became so awfully drunk,”
 &c. Every administration, from the Duke of Rutland downwards, has had
its drunken gentleman on “St. Patrick's night.” Where do they keep
him all the year long?--what do they do with him?--are questions I
continually am asking myself. Under what name and designation does
he figure in the pension list? for of course I am not silly enough
to suppose that a well-ordered government would depend on chance for
functionaries like these. One might as well suppose they would calculate
on some one improvising Sir William Betliam, or extemporaneously
performing “God save the Queen,” on the state trumpet, in lieu of
that amiable individual who distends his loyal cheeks on our great
anniversaries. No, no. I am well aware he is a member of the household,
or at least in the pay of the government. When the pope converts his
Jew on Holy Thursday, the Catholic church have had ample time for
preparation: the cardinals are on the look-out for weeks before, to
catch one for his holiness--a good respectable hirsute Israelite, with
a strong Judas expression to magnify the miracle. But then the Jew is
passive in the affair, and has only to be converted patiently--whereas
“the gentleman” has an active duty to discharge; he must imbibe sherry,
iced punch, and champagne, at such a rate that he can be able to
shock the company, before the rooms thin, with his intemperate excess.
Besides, to give the devil--the pope, I mean--his Jew, they snare a
fresh one every Easter. Now, I am fully persuaded that, at our Irish
court, the same gentleman has performed the part for upwards of fifty
years.

At the ancient banquets it was always looked upon as a triumph of
Amphitryonism when a guest or two died the day after of indigestion,
from over eating. Now, is it not possible that our classic origin may
have imparted to us the trait I am speaking of, and that “the gentleman”
 is retained as typical of our exceeding hilarity and consummate
conviviality--an evidence to the “great unasked” that the festivities
within doors are conducted on a scale of boundless profusion and
extravagance--that the fountains from which honour flows, run also with
champagne, and that punch and the peerage are to be seen bubbling from
the same source.

It is a sad thing to think that the gifted man, who has served his
country so faithfully in this capacity for so long a period, must now be
stricken in years. Time and rum must be telling upon him; and yet, what
should we do were we to lose him!

In the chapel of Maria Zell, in Styria, there is a portly figure of St.
Somebody, with more consonants than I find it prudent to venture on
from mere memory; the priest is rolling his eyes very benignly on the
frequenters of the chapel, as they pass by the shrine he resides in. The
story goes, that when the saint ceases winking, some great calamity will
occur to the commune and its inhabitants. Now, the last time I saw him,
he was in great vigour, ogled away with his accustomed energy, and even,
I thought--perhaps it was a suspicion on my part--had actually strained
his eyeballs into something like a squint, from actual eagerness to
oblige his votaries--a circumstance happily of the less moment in our
days, as a gifted countryman of ours could have remedied the defect in
no time. But to return; my theory is, that when we lose our tipsy friend
it's all up with us; “Birnam wood will then have come to Dunsinane;”
 and what misfortunes may befal us, Sir Harcourt Lees may foresee, but I
confess myself totally unable to predicate.

Were I the viceroy, I 'd not sleep another night in the island. I
'd pack up the regalia, send for Anthony Blake to take charge of the
country, and start for Liverpool in the mail-packet.

Happily, however, such an event may be still distant; and although
the Austrians have but one Metternich, we may find a successor to our
“Knight of St. Patrick.”




A NUT FOR “GENTLEMAN JOCKS.”

[Illustration: 143]

“The Honourable Fitzroy Shuffleton,” I quote _The Morning Post_, “who
rode Bees-wing, came in a winner amid deafening cheers. Never was a
race better contested; and although, when passing the distance-post, the
Langar colt seemed to have the best of it, yet such was Mr. Shuffleton's
tact and jockeyship, that he shot a-head in advance of his adversary,
and came in first.” I omit the passages descriptive of the peculiar
cleverness displayed by this gifted gentleman. I omit also that glorious
outbreak of newspaper eloquence, in which the delight of his friends is
expressed--the tears of joy from his sisters--the cambric handkerchiefs
that floated in the air--the innumerable and reiterated cries of “Well
done!--he's a trump!--the right sort!” &c. &c, so profusely employed by
the crowd, because I am fully satisfied with what general approbation
such proofs of ability are witnessed.

We are a great nation, and nowhere is our greatness more conspicuous
than in the education of our youth. The young Frenchman seems to fulfil
his destiny, when, having drawn on a pair of the most tight-fitting
kid gloves, of that precise shade of colour so approved of by Madame
Laffarge, he saunters forth on the Boulevard de Gand, or lounges in the
_coulisse_ of the opera.

The German, whose contempt not only extends to glove-leather, but clean
hands, betakes himself early in life to the way he should go, and from
which, to do him justice, he never shows any inclination to depart. A
meerschaum some three feet long, and a tobacco bag like a school-boy's
satchel, supply his wants in life. The dreamy visions of the unreal
woes, and the still more unreal greatness of his country, form the
pabulum for his thoughts; and he has no other ambition, for some half
dozen years of his life, than to boast his utter indifference to kings
and clean water.

Now, we manage matters somewhat better. Our young men, from the very
outset of their career, are admirable jockeys; and if by any fatality,
like the dreadful revolution of France, our nobles should be compelled
to emigrate from their native land, instead of teaching mathematics and
music, the small sword and quadrilles, we shall have the satisfaction of
knowing that we supply stable-boys to the whole of Europe.

Whatever other people may say or think, I put a great value on this
equestrian taste. I speak not here of the manly nature of horse
exercise--of the noble and vigorous pursuits of the hunting field. No;
I direct my observations solely to the heroes of Ascot and Epsom--of
Doncaster and Goodwood. I only speak of those whose pleasure it is
to read no book save the Racing Calendar, and frequent no lounge but
Tattersalls; who esteem the stripes of a racing-jacket more honourable
than the ribbon of the Bath, and look to a well-timed “hustle” or “a
shake” as the climax of human ability. These are fine fellows, and I
prize them. But if it be not only praiseworthy, but pleasant, to ride
for the Duke's cup at Goodwood, or the Corinthian's at the Curragh, why
not extend the sphere of the utility, and become as amiable in private
as they are conspicuous in public life?

We have seen them in silk jackets of various hues, with leathers and
tops of most accurate fitting, turn out amid the pelting of a most
pitiless storm, to ride some three miles of spongy turf, at the hazard
of their necks, and the almost certainty of a rheumatic fever; and
why, donning the same or some similar costume, will they not perform
the office of postillion, when their fathers, or mayhap, some venerated
aunt, is returning by the north road to an antiquated mansion in
Yorkshire? The pace, to be sure, is not so fast--but it compensates in
safety what it loses in speed--the assemblage around is not so numerous,
or the excitement so great; but filial tenderness is a nobler motive
than the acclamations of a mob. In fact, the parallel presents all the
advantages on one side: and the jockey is as inferior to the postillion
as the fitful glare of an _ignis-fatuus_ is to the steady brilliancy of
a gas-lamp.

An Englishman has a natural pride in the navy of his country--our wooden
walls are a glorious boast; but, perhaps, after all, there is nothing
more captivating in the whole detail of the service, than the fact that
even the highest and the noblest in the land has no royal road to its
promotion, but, beginning at the very humblest step, he must work his
way through every grade and every rank, like his comrades around
him. Many there are now living who remember Prince William, as he was
called--late William the Fourth, of glorious memory--sitting in the
stern seats of a gig, his worn jacket and weather-beaten hat attesting
that even the son of a king had no immunity from the hardships of the
sea. This is a proud thought for Englishmen, and well suited to gratify
their inherent loyalty and their sturdy independence. Now, might we not
advantageously extend the influence of such examples, by the suggestion
I have thrown out above? If a foreigner be now struck by hearing, as
he walks through the dockyard at Plymouth, that the little middy who
touches his hat with such obsequious politeness, is the Marquis of
--------, or the Earl of--------, with some fifty thousand per annum,
how much more astonished will he be on learning that he owes the
rapidity with which he traversed the last stage to his having been
driven by Lord Wilton--or that the lengthy proportions, so dexterously
gathered up in the saddle, belong to an ex-ambassador from St.
Petersburgh. How surprised would he feel, too, that instead of the low
habits and coarse tastes he would look for in that condition in life,
he would now see elegant and accomplished gentlemen, sipping a glass
of curaçoa at the end of a stage; or, mayhap, offering a pinch of snuff
from a box worth five hundred guineas. What a fascinating conception
would he form of our country from such examples as this! and how
insensibly would not only the polished taste and the high-bred depravity
of the better classes be disseminated through the country; but, by
an admirable reciprocity, the coarsest vices of the lowest would be
introduced among the highest in the land. The racecourse has done much
for this, but the road would do far more. Slang is now but the language
of the _elite_--it would then become the vulgar tongue; and, in fact,
there is no predicting the amount of national benefit likely to arise
from an amalgamation of all ranks in society, where-the bond of union
is so honourable in its nature. Cultivate, then, ye youth of England--ye
scions of the Tudors and the Plantagenets--with all the blood of all the
Howards in your veins--cultivate the race-course--study the stable--read
the Racing Calendar. What are the precepts of Bacon or the learning of
Boyle compared to the pedigree of Grey Momus, or the reason that Tramp
“is wrong?” “A dark horse” is a far more interesting subject of inquiry
than an eclipse of the moon, and a judge of pace a much more exalted
individual than a judge of assize.




A NUT FOR YOUNGER SONS.

[Illustration: 148]

Douglas Jerrold, in his amusing book, “Cakes and Ale,” quotes an
exquisite essay written to prove the sufficiency of thirty pounds
a-year for all a man's daily wants and comforts--allowing at least five
shillings a quarter for the conversion of the Jews--and in which every
outlay is so nicely calculated, that it must be wilful eccentricity if
the pauper gentleman, at the end of the year, either owes a shilling or
has one. To say the least of it, this is close shaving; and, as I detest
experimental philosophy, I'd rather not try it. At the same time, in
this age of general glut, when all professions are overstocked--when you
might pave the Strand with parsons' skulls, and thatch your barn with
the surplus of the college of physicians; when there are neither waste
lands to till and give us ague and typhus, nor war to thin us--what
are we to do? The subdivision of labour in every walk in life has been
carried to its utmost limits: if it takes nine tailors to make a man,
it takes nine men to make a needle. Even in the learned professions, as
they are called, this system is carried out; and as you have a lawyer
for equity, another for the Common Pleas, a third for the Old Bailey,
&c, so your doctor, now-a-days, has split up his art, and one man takes
charge of your teeth, another has the eye department, another the ear,
a fourth looks after your corns; so that, in fact, the complex machinery
of your structure strikes you as admirably adapted to give employment
to an ingenious and anxious population, who, until our present
civilization, never dreamed of morselling out mankind for their benefit.

As to commerce, our late experiences have chiefly pointed to the
pleasure of trading with nations who will not pay their debts,--like the
Yankees. There is, then, little encouragement in that quarter. What
then remains I scarcely know. The United Services are pleasant, but poor
things by way of a provision for life. Coach-driving, that admirable
refuge for the destitute, has been smashed by the railroads; and there
is a kind of prejudice against a man of family sweeping the
crossings. For my own part, I lean to something dignified and
respectable--something that does not compromise “the cloth,” and
which, without being absolutely a sinecure, never exacts any undue or
extraordinary exertion,--driving a hearse, for instance: even this,
however, is greatly run upon; and the cholera, at its departure, threw
very many out of employment. However, the question is, what can a man of
small means do with his son? Short whist is a very snug thing--if a man
have natural gifts,--that happy conformation of the fingers, that ample
range of vision, that takes in everything around. But I must not suppose
these by any means general--and I legislate for the mass. The turf has
also the same difficulties,--so has toad-eating; indeed these three
walks might be included among the learned professions.

As to railroads, I 'm sick of hearing of them for the last three years.
Every family in the empire has at least one civil engineer within its
precincts; and I 'm confident, if their sides were as hard as their
skulls, you could make sleepers for the whole Grand Junction by merely
decimating the unemployed.

Tax-collecting does, to be sure, offer some little prospect; but that
won't last. Indeed, the very working of the process will limit the
advantages of this opening,--gradually converting all the payers
into paupers. Now I have meditated long and anxiously on the subject,
conversing with others whose opportunities of knowing the world were
considerable, but never could I find that ingenuity opened any new path,
without its being so instantaneously overstocked that competition alone
denied every chance of success.

One man of original genius I did, indeed, come upon, and his career had
been eminently successful. He was a Belgian physician, who, having in
vain attempted all the ordinary modes of obtaining practice, collected
together the little residue of his fortune, and sailed for Barbadoes,
where he struck out for himself the following singularly new and
original plan:--He purchased all the disabled, sick, and ailing negroes
that he could find; every poor fellow whose case seemed past hope, but
yet to his critical eye was still curable, these he bought up; they
were, of course, dead bargains. The masters were delighted to get rid of
them--they were actually “eating their heads off;” but the doctor knew,
that though they looked somewhat “groggy,” still there was a “go” in
them yet.

By care, skill, and good management, they recovered under his hands,
and frequently were re-sold to the original proprietor, who was totally
unconscious that the sleek and shining nigger before him had been the
poor, decrepid, sickly creature of some weeks before.

The humanity of this proceeding is self-evident: a word need not be said
more on that subject. But it was no less profitable than merciful.
The originator of the plan retired from business with a large fortune,
amassed, too, in an inconceivably short space of time. The shrewdest
proprietor of a fast coach never could throw a more critical eye over
a new wheeler or a broken-down leader, than did he on the object of his
professional skill; detecting at a glance the extent of his ailments,
and calculating, with a Babbage-like accuracy, the cost of keep, physic,
and attendance, and setting them off, in his mind, against the probable
price of the sound man. What consummate skill was here! Not merely, like
Brodie or Crampton, anticipating the possible recovery of the patient,
but estimating the extent of the restoration--the time it would
take--ay, the very number of basins of chicken-broth and barley-gruel
that he would devour, _ad interim_. This was the cleverest physician I
ever knew. The present altered condition of West Indian property has,
however, closed this opening to fortune, in which, after all, nothing
short of first-rate ability could have ensured success.

I have just read over the preceding “nut” to my old friend, Mr. Synnet,
of Mulloglass, whose deep knowledge of the world makes him no mean
critic on such a subject. His words are these:--

“There is some truth in what you remark--the world is too full of us.
There is, however, a very nice walk in life much neglected.”

“And what may that be?” said I, eagerly.

“The mortgagee,” replied he, sententiously.

“I don't perfectly comprehend.”

“Well, well! what I mean k this: suppose, now, you have only a couple
of thousand pounds to leave your son--maybe, you have not more than a
single thousand--now, my advice is, not to squander your fortune in any
such absurdity as a learned profession, a commission in the Line, or
any other miserable existence, but just look about you, in the west of
Ireland, for the fellow that has the best house, the best cellar, the
best coo

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