← catalogue

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 66 No.406, August 1849

by Various · English · Gutenberg #43722 · 543,825 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 66 No.406, August 1849
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 66 No.406, August 1849

Author: Various


        
Release date: September 14, 2013 [eBook #43722]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43722

Credits: Produced by Brendan OConnor, Richard Tonsing, Jonathan
        Ingram and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
        http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
        generously made available by The Internet Library of Early
        Journals.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE, VOL. 66 NO.406, AUGUST 1849 ***

BLACKWOOD'S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

NO. CCCCVI.      AUGUST, 1849.      VOL. LXVI.




CONTENTS.


  CHARLES LAMB,                                             133

  THE CAXTONS.--PART XV.                                    151

  JONATHAN IN AFRICA,                                       172

  THE GREEN HAND.--A "SHORT" YARN.--PART III.               183

  FOR THE LAST PAGE OF "OUR ALBUM,"                         205

  THE INSURRECTION IN BADEN,                                206

  LAMARTINE'S REVOLUTION OF 1848,                           219

  DIES BOREALES. NO. III. CHRISTOPHER UNDER CANVASS,        235


EDINBURGH:

  WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET;
  AND 37, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.

_To whom all communications (post paid) must be addressed._

SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.

BLACKWOOD'S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

NO. CCCCVI.      AUGUST, 1849.      VOL. LXVI.




CHARLES LAMB.[1]


To Charles Lamb shall be allotted--general assent has already assigned
it to him, and we have no wish to dispute his claim--a quiet, quaint
niche, apart to himself, in some odd nook or corner in the great
temple of English literature. It shall be carved from the solid oak,
and decorated with Gothic tracery; but where Madonnas and angels
ordinarily appear, there shall be all manner of laughing cherubs--one
amongst them disguised as a chimney-_sweep_--with abundance of sly and
humorous devices. Some such niches or stalls may occasionally be seen
in old cathedrals, sharing the eternity of the structure, and drawing
the peculiar regard of the curious and loitering visitor. You are
startled to find a merry device, and a wit by no means too reverential,
side by side with the ideal forms of Catholic piety. You approach to
examine the solemn-looking carving, and find, perhaps, a fox clothed in
priestly raiment--teaching, in his own way, divers lessons of morality
to the bears and geese. Such venerable and Gothic drollery suspends for
a moment, but hardly mars, the serious and sedate feelings which the
rest of the structure, and the other sculptured figures of the place,
are designed to excite.

[1] _The Works of Charles Lamb._

_Final Memorials of Charles Lamb._ By THOMAS NOON TALFOURD.

Some such peculiar place amongst our literary worthies seems, as we
have said, to be assigned by general consent to Charles Lamb, nor
are we about to gainsay his right to this position. He has all the
genius that could comport with oddity, and all the oddity that could
amalgamate with genius. With a range of thought most singularly
contracted, considering the times in which he lived, and the men by
whom he was surrounded, he has contrived, by a charming subtlety of
observation, and a most felicitous humour, to make us in love even
with that contractedness itself, which in another would be despised,
as evidencing a sluggishness and obtuseness of mind. Perhaps there are
few writers who could be named, of these later days, on whose peculiar
merits there is so little difference of opinion. As a poet, he was,
at all events, inoffensive, and his mediocrity has been pardoned him
in favour of that genius he displayed as the humorous and critical
essayist. The publication of his letters, too, has materially added
to his reputation, and confirmed him as a favourite with all to whom
his lambent and playful wit had already made him known and esteemed.
We are not aware, therefore, that we have anything to dispute, or
essentially to modify, in the verdict passed by popular opinion on this
writer. Yet something may remain to be said to assist in appreciating
and discriminating his peculiar merits as a humorist--something to
point out where praise is due, and something to draw the limits of that
praise. Moreover, his biography, as presented to us by Mr Talfourd,
claims some notice; disclosing, as it does, one of the saddest
tragedies, and one of the noblest acts of heroism, which ever afflicted
and dignified the life of a man of letters. This biography is also
written by one who is himself distinguished in the literary world, who
was an intimate friend of Lamb, and personally acquainted with those
literary characters by whom Lamb had surrounded himself, and who are
here grouped around him. Upon the whole, therefore, the _Life and
Writings of Elia_, though a subject which no longer wears the gloss of
novelty, still invites and may repay attention.

We hardly know whether to regret it as a disadvantage to us, on the
present occasion, that we never enjoyed the slightest acquaintance with
Charles Lamb, or indeed with any of those literary friends amongst
whom he lived. We never saw this bland humorist; we never heard that
half-provoking, half-pleasing stutter, which awakened anticipation
whilst it delayed enjoyment, and added zest to the witticism which it
threatened to mar, and which it had held back, for a moment, only to
project with the happier impetus. We never had before us, in bodily
presence, that slight, black-coated figure, and those antique and
curiously-gaitered legs, which, we have also been assured, contributed
their part to the irresistible effect of his kindly humour. We never
even knew those who had seen and talked with him. To us he is a purely
historic figure. So, too, of his biographer--which argues ourselves
to be sadly unknown--we have no other knowledge than what runs about
bruited in the world; even his displays of eloquence, forensic or
parliamentary, we have never had an opportunity of hearing; we know him
only by his writings, and by that title we have often heard bestowed
on him, the amiable author of _Ion_;--to which amiability we refer,
because to this we must attribute, we suppose, a large portion of that
too laudatory criticism which, in these volumes, he bestows so lavishly
and diffusely. We cannot, therefore, bring to our subject any of those
vivid reminiscences, anecdotes, or details which personal acquaintance
supplies. But, on the other hand, we have no bias whatever to contend
against, whether of a friendly or hostile description, in respect of
any of the literary characters whom we may have occasion to speak of.
Had they all lived in the reign of good Queen Anne, they could not have
been more remote from our personal sympathies or antipathies.

It is probably known to most of our readers that when, shortly after
the decease of Charles Lamb, his letters were given to the world with
some biographical notices, there were circumstances which imposed
silence on certain passages of his life, and which obliged the editor
to withhold a certain portion of the letters. That sister, in fact, was
still alive whose lamentable history was so intimately blended with the
career of Lamb, and an allusion to her unfortunate tragedy would have
been cruel in any one, and in an intimate friend utterly impossible.
Serjeant Talfourd had no other course than to leave the gap or hiatus
in the biography, and cover it up and conceal it as well as might be,
from the eyes of such readers as were not better informed from other
sources. Upon the decease of that sister, there no longer existed any
motive for this silence; and, indeed, shortly after this event, the
whole narrative was revealed by a writer in the _British Quarterly
Review_, who had himself waited till then before he permitted himself
to disclose it, and by its disclosure do an act of justice to the moral
character of Lamb. Mr Talfourd was, therefore, called upon to complete
his biographical notice, and also the publication of the letters. This
he did in the two volumes entitled _Final Memorials_, &c.

As a separate and subsidiary publication became inevitable, and as
probably the exigencies of _the trade_ required that it should be of a
certain bulk and substance, we suppose we must rather commiserate Mr
Talfourd than cast any blame upon him for the manifest difficulty he
has had to fill these two volumes of _Final Memorials_. One of them
would have been sufficient for all that he had to communicate, or that
it was wise to add. Many of the letters of Lamb here printed are such
as he had very properly laid aside, in the first instance, not because
they trenched upon too delicate ground, but because they were wholly
uninteresting. He had very correctly said, in what, for distinction's
sake, we will call _The Life_--"I have thought it better to omit much
of this verbal criticism, which, not very interesting in itself, is
unintelligible without a contemporary reference to the poems which are
its subject."--(P. 12.) Now we cannot, of course, undertake to say that
the letters given us here are precisely those which he speaks of as
being wisely rejected on the former occasion, but we know that there
was the same good reason for this rejection, for they are occupied
with a verbal criticism utterly uninteresting. Surely, what neither
illustrates a man's life, nor adds a tittle to his literary reputation,
ought not to be allowed to encumber for ever, as with a dead weight,
the collected works of an author. The mischief is, that, if materials
of this kind are once published, every succeeding editor finds it
incumbent on him to reprint them, lest his edition should be thought
less perfect than others, and thus there is no getting rid of the
useless and burdensome increment. It is otherwise with another portion
of these two volumes, the sketches of the contemporaries and friends
of Lamb, which Mr Serjeant Talfourd, or any future editor, can either
retrench, omit, or enlarge, at his option.

In the next edition that is published of the works of Lamb, we hope
the editor may be persuaded altogether to recast his materials. The
biography should be kept apart, and not interspersed piecemeal amongst
the letters. This is an arrangement, the most provoking and irritating
to the reader that could have been devised. Let us have all the
biography at once, and then sit down and enjoy the letters of Lamb. Why
be incessantly bandied from the one to the other? Few of the letters
need any explanation; if they do, the briefest note at the head or at
the foot would be sufficient. Not to add, that, if it is wished to
refer to any event in the biography, one does not know where to look
for it. And, _apropos_ of this matter of reference, it may be just
worth mentioning that the present volume is so divided into _Parts_,
and the parts so paged, that any reference to a passage by the number
of the page is almost useless. The numbers recommence some half-dozen
times in the course of the volume; so that if you are referred to page
50, you may find five of them--you may find page 50 five times over
before you come to the right one. For which reason we shall dispense
ourselves, in respect to this volume, with our usual punctuality of
reference, for the reference must be laboriously minute, and even
then will impose a troublesome search. In the mere and humble task of
editing, the Serjeant has been by no means fortunate.

Lying about in such confusion as the fractions of the biography do at
present, we shall perhaps be rendering a slight service if we bring
together from the two different publications the leading events of the
life of Lamb.

"Charles Lamb," says the first publication, "was born on the 18th
February 1775, in Crown-office Row, in the Inner Temple, where he
spent the first seven years of his life." At the age of seven he was
presented to the school of Christ's Hospital, and there remained till
his fifteenth year. His sweetness of disposition rendered him a general
favourite. From one of his schoolfellows we have the following account
of him:--"Lamb," says Mr Le Grice, "was an amiable, gentle boy, very
sensible, and keenly observing, indulged by his schoolfellows and by
his master, on account of his infirmity of speech. His countenance
was mild; his complexion clear brown, with an expression which might
lead you to think that he was of Jewish descent. His eyes were not
each of the same colour--one was hazel, the other had specks of gray
in the iris, mingled as we see red spots in the bloodstone. His step
was _plantigrade_, (Mr Le Grice must be a zoologist--Lamb would have
smiled to hear himself so scientifically described,) which made his
walk slow and peculiar, adding to the staid appearance of his figure.
I never heard his name mentioned without the addition of Charles,
although, as there was no other boy of the name of Lamb, the addition
was unnecessary; but there was an implied kindness in it, and it was
a proof that his gentle manner excited that kindness." Mr Le Grice
adds that, in the sketch Lamb gave in his _Recollections of Christ's
Hospital_, he drew a faithful portrait of himself. "While others were
all fire and play, he stole along with all the self-concentration of a
young monk." He had, in fact, only passed from cloister to cloister,
and, during the holidays, it was in the Temple that he found his home
and his only place of recreation. This cloistering-in of his mind was
the early and constant peculiarity of his life. He would have made an
excellent monk; in those good old times, be it understood, when it
was thought no great scandal if there was a well-supplied cellarage
underneath the cloister.

After quitting Christ's Hospital, he was employed for some time in the
South Sea House, but on the 5th April 1792 obtained that appointment in
the accountant's office in the East India Company which was his stay
and support, in more senses than one, through life.

A little anecdote is here introduced, which strikes us as very
characteristic. It reveals the humorist, ready to appreciate and
promote a jest even at his own expense, and at the easy sacrifice of
his own dignity or self-respect: but it reveals something more and
sadder; it seems to betray a broken, melancholy spirit, that was no
longer disposed to contend for its claim to respect from others. "In
the first year of his clerkship," says Mr Le Grice, "Lamb spent the
evening of the 5th November with some of his former schoolfellows,
who, being amused with the particularly large and flapping brim of his
round hat, pinned it up on the sides in the form of a cocked hat. Lamb
made no alteration in it, but walked home in his usual sauntering gait
towards the Temple. As he was going down Ludgate Hill, some gay young
men, who seemed not to have passed the London Tavern without resting,
exclaimed, 'The veritable Guy!--no man of straw!' and with this
exclamation they took him up, making a chair with their arms, carried
him, seated him on a post in St Paul's Churchyard, and there left him.
This story Lamb told so seriously, that the truth of it was never
doubted. He wore his three-cornered hat many evenings, and retained the
name of Guy ever after. Like Nym, he quietly sympathised in the fun,
and seemed to say 'that was the humour of it.'" Some one may suggest
that probably Lamb was himself in the same condition, on this 5th
of November, as the young men "who had not passed the London Tavern
without resting," and that therefore all peculiar significance of the
anecdote, as it bears upon his character and disposition, is entirely
lost. But Lamb relates the story himself, and afterwards, and when
there is no question of sobriety, quietly acquiesces and participates
in the absurd joke played upon himself.

At this time his most constant companion was one _Jem_ White, who
wrote some imaginary "Letters of John Falstaff." These letters Lamb
went about all his life praising, and causing others to praise, but
seems never to have found any one to share his admiration. As even Mr
Talfourd has not a good word to throw away upon the literary merits of
Jem White, we may safely conclude that Lamb's friendship had in this
instance quite overruled his critical judgment.

But the associate and friend who really exercised a permanent and
formative influence upon his mind, was a man of a very different
stamp--Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They had been schoolfellows at Christ's
Hospital, and, though no particular intimacy existed at that time,
the circumstance formed a foundation for a future friendship. "While
Coleridge," writes Mr Talfourd, "remained at the university, they met
occasionally on his visits to London; and when he quitted it and came
to town, full of mantling hopes and glorious schemes, Lamb became his
admiring disciple. The scene of these happy meetings was a little
public-house, called the _Salutation and Cat_, in the neighbourhood
of Smithfield, where they used to sup, and remain long after they had
'heard the chimes at midnight.'"

These suppers at the Salutation and Cat, in Smithfield, seem to carry
back the imagination far beyond the period here alluded to; they
seem to transport us to the times of Oliver Goldsmith, or to take us
across the water into Germany, where poetry and philosophy may still
occasionally find refuge in the beer-shop. They were always remembered
by Lamb as the brightest spots of his life. "I think I hear you again,"
he says, writing to Coleridge. "I imagine to myself the little smoky
room at the Salutation and Cat, where we sat together through the
winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with poetry." And in another
place he alludes to "those old suppers at our old inn--when life was
fresh and topics exhaustless--and you first kindled in me, if not
the power, yet the love of poetry, and beauty, and kindliness." It
was in these interviews that the project was started, we believe, of
publishing a volume of poems, the joint production of the two friends.

But this pleasing project, and all the poetry of life, was for a time
to give place, in the history of Lamb, to a domestic tragedy of the
most afflicting nature. It is here that the Final Memorials take up
the thread of the biography. It was on the 22d September 1796, that
the terrible event took place which cast so perpetual a shade, and
reflected also so constant an honour, on the life of Lamb. He was
living at this time with his father, mother, and sister, in lodgings
in Little Queen Street, Holborn. After being engaged in his taskwork
at the India House, he returned in the evening to amuse his father by
playing cribbage. The old man had sunk into dotage and the miserable
selfishness that so often attends on old age. If his son wished to
discontinue for a time the game at cribbage, and turn to some other
avocation, or the writing of a letter, he would pettishly exclaim,--"If
you don't play cribbage, I don't see the use of your coming home at
all." The mother also was an invalid, and Miss Lamb, we are told,
was worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery, by attention to
needlework by day, and to her mother by night, until the insanity
which had been manifested more than once broke out into frenzy. "It
appeared," says the account extracted from the _Times_, (an account of
the inquest, in which the names of the parties are suppressed,) "that
while the family were preparing for dinner, the young lady seized
a case-knife lying on the table, and in a menacing manner pursued
a little girl, her apprentice, round the room. On the calls of her
infirm mother to forbear, she renounced her first object, and with
loud shrieks approached her parent. The child by her cries quickly
brought up the landlord of the house, but too late. The dreadful scene
presented to him the mother lifeless, pierced to the heart, on a chair,
her daughter yet wildly standing over her with the fatal knife, and
the old man, her father, weeping by her side, himself bleeding at the
forehead from the effects of a severe blow he received from one of the
forks she had been madly hurling about the room."

The following is the letter which Lamb wrote to Coleridge shortly after
the event. From this it appears that it was he, and not the landlord,
who took the knife from the hand of the lunatic.

"MY DEAREST FRIEND,--White, or some of my friends, or the public
papers, by _this_ time may have informed you of the terrible calamities
that have fallen on our family. I will only give you the outlines. My
poor, dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death
of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife
out of her grasp. She is at present in a madhouse, from whence I fear
she must be removed to an hospital. God has preserved to me my senses.
I eat, and drink, and sleep, and have my judgment, I believe, very
sound. My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care
of him and my aunt. Mr Norris of the Blue-coat School has been very
kind to us, and we have no other friend; but, thank God, I am very calm
and composed, and able to do the best that remains to do. Write as
religious a letter as possible, but no mention of what is gone and done
with. With me 'the former things are passed away,' and I have something
more to do than to feel.

"God Almighty have us all in his keeping!--C. LAMB.

"Mention nothing of poetry; I have destroyed every vestige of past
vanities of that kind. Do as you please; but if you publish, publish
mine (I give free leave) without name or initial, and never send me a
book, I charge you.

"Your own judgment will convince you not to take any notice of this yet
to your dear wife. You look after your family--I have my reason and
strength left to take care of mine. I charge you, don't think of coming
to see me--write. I will not see you if you come. God Almighty love
you, and all of us."--C. LAMB.

Miss Lamb was of course placed in an asylum, where, however, she was in
a short time restored to reason. And now occurred the act of life-long
heroism on the part of the brother. As soon as she was recovered,
he petitioned the authorities to resign her to his care; he pledged
himself to be her guardian, her provider, her _keeper_, for all her
days to come. He was at that time paying his addresses to a young lady,
with what hopes, or with what degree of ardour, we are not informed.
But marriage with her, or with any other, was now to be entirely
renounced. He devoted his life, and all his love, to his unhappy
sister, and to the last he fulfilled the obligation he had taken upon
himself without a murmur, and without the least diminution of affection
towards the object of it.

We have called it an act of heroism; we applaud it, and rejoice that it
stands upon record a complete and accomplished act. There it stands,
not only to relieve the character of Lamb from such littleness as it
may have contracted from certain habits of intemperance, (of which
perhaps more has been said than was necessary;) but it remains there
as an enduring memorial, prompting, to all time, to the like acts
of self-denying kindness, and unshaken generosity of purpose. But,
admiring the act as we do, we must still be permitted to observe, that
there was a degree of imprudence in it which fully justified other
members of the family in their endeavours to dissuade Lamb from his
resolution, and which would have justified the authorities (whoever
they were--and about this matter there seems a singular obscurity, and
a suspicion is created that even in proceedings of this nature much is
done carelessly, informally, uncertainly) in refusing to accede to his
request. Miss Lamb had several relapses into temporary derangement;
and, although she never committed, as far as we are informed, any acts
of violence, this calmness of behaviour, in her seasons of mental
aberration, could not have been calculated on. We confess we should
have shrunk from the responsibility of advising the generous but
perilous course which was adopted with so fortunate a result.

How sad and fearful a charge Lamb had entailed upon himself, let the
following extract suffice to show. The subject is too painful to be
longer dwelt upon than is necessary. "The constant impendency of
this great sorrow saddened to 'the Lambs' even their holidays, as
the journey which they both regarded as the relief and charm of the
year was frequently followed by a seizure; and, _when they ventured
to take it, a strait-waistcoat, carefully packed up by Miss Lamb
herself, was their constant companion_. Sad experience at last induced
the abandonment of the annual excursion, and Lamb was contented with
walks in and near London during the interval of labour. Miss Lamb
experienced, and full well understood, premonitory symptoms of the
attack, in restlessness, low fever, and the inability to sleep; and,
as gently as possible, prepared her brother for the duty he must soon
perform; and thus, unless he could stave off the terrible separation
till Sunday, obliged him to ask leave of absence from the office as
if for a day's pleasure--a bitter mockery! On one occasion Mr Charles
Lloyd met them slowly pacing together a little footpath in Haxton
Fields, _both weeping bitterly, and found, on joining them, that they
were taking their solemn way to the accustomed asylum_!"[2]

[2] _Final Memorials_, vol. ii., p. 212.

It seems that a tendency to lunacy was hereditary in the family, and
Charles Lamb himself had been for a short period deprived of his
reason.

On this subject Mr Talfourd makes the following excellent remark:--"The
wonder is, that, amidst all the difficulties, the sorrows, and the
excitements of his succeeding forty years, the malady never recurred.
Perhaps the true cause of this remarkable exemption--an exemption the
more remarkable when his afflictions are considered in association with
one single frailty--will be found in the sudden claim made on his moral
and intellectual nature by a terrible exigency, and by his generous
answer to that claim; _so that a life of self-sacrifice was rewarded by
the preservation of unclouded reason_."

We will not weaken so admirable a remark by repeating it in a worse
phraseology of our own. We wish the Serjeant always wrote in the same
clear, forcible, and unaffected manner. With respect to this seizure
which Lamb, in an early part of his life, had experienced, there is a
reference in one of his letters too curious to pass unnoticed. Writing
to Coleridge, he says--"At some future time I will amuse you with an
account, as full as my memory will permit, of the strange turns my
frenzy took. I look back upon it at times with a gloomy kind of envy,
for, while it lasted, I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream
not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy
till you have gone mad! All now seems to me vapid, or comparatively so."

The residue of Lamb's life is uneventful. The publication of a book--a
journey into Cumberland--his final liberation from office, are the
chief incidents. These it is not necessary to arrange in chronological
order: they can be alluded to as occasion requires. But we will pursue
a little further our notice of Mr Talfourd's biographical labours, that
we may clear our way as we proceed.

We have seen that Lamb, in the first agony of his grief, rudely
threw aside his poetry, and his scheme of publishing conjointly with
Coleridge. Poetry and schemes of publication are not, however, so
easily dismissed. As his mind subsided into a calmer state, they were
naturally resumed. The literary partnership was extended, and Lloyd
was admitted to associate his labours in the forthcoming volume. "At
length," says Mr Talfourd, "the small volume containing the poems of
Coleridge, Lloyd, and Lamb, was published by Mr Cottle at Bristol.
It excited little attention." We do not wonder at this, if the
lucubrations of Mr Lloyd had any conspicuous place in the volume. How
the other two poets--how Coleridge especially, could have consented
to this literary partnership, with so singularly inept and absurd a
writer, would be past explaining, if it were not for some hint that we
receive that Charles Lloyd was the son of a wealthy banker, and might,
therefore, be the fittest person to transact that part of the business
which occurs between the author and the publisher. Here we have a
striking instance of Mr Talfourd's misplaced amiability of criticism.
"Lloyd," he says, "wrote _pleasing_ verses, and with great facility--a
facility fatal to excellence; but his mind was chiefly remarkable
for _the fine power of analysis which distinguishes his 'London,'_
and other of his later compositions. In this power of discriminating
and distinguishing--carried to a pitch almost of painfulness--Lloyd
has scarcely been equalled; and his poems, though rugged in point of
versification, will be found, by those who will read them with the calm
attention they require, replete with critical and moral suggestions
of the highest value." Very grateful to Mr Serjeant Talfourd will any
reader feel who shall be induced, by his recommendation, to peruse, or
attempt to peruse, Mr Lloyd's poem of "London!" We were. "Fine power of
analysis!" Why, it is one stream of mud--of theologic mud. "Rugged in
point of versification!" There is no trace of verse, and the style is
an outlandish garb, such as no man has ever seen elsewhere, either in
prose or verse. Poor Lloyd was a lunatic patient!--on him no one would
be severe; but why should an intelligent Serjeant, unless prompted by
a sly malice against all mankind, persuade us to read his execrable
stuff? The following is a fair specimen of the drug, and is, indeed,
taken as the book opened. We add the two last lines of the preceding
stanza, to give all possible help to the elucidation of the one we
quote. The italics are all Mr Lloyd's:--

    "If you affirm _grace irresistible_,
    You must deny all liberty of will.

142.

    "But you reply, grace irresistible
      Our creed admits not. I am sorry for't.
    Enough, or not enough, to bind the free will,
      Grace must be. Not enough? The dose falls short.
    This is of _cause_ the prime condition still
      That it be _operative_. Yet divines exhort
    Us to deem grace _sole source_ of all salvation,
    And if we're damned, blame _but its application_."

But divinity of this kind, it may be said, though well calculated to
display "the power of discriminating and distinguishing, carried to
a pitch almost of painfulness," is not exactly favourable to flowing
verse. Here is a specimen where a lady is the subject, and the verse
should be smooth then, if ever.

    "I well remember her years, five-and-twenty,
      (Ah! now my muse is got into a gallop,)
    Longer perhaps! But time sufficient, plenty
      Of treasured offices of love to call up.
    She was then, as I recollect, quite dainty,
      And delicate, and seemed a fair envelope
    Of virgin sweetness and angelic goodness;
    That fate should treat her with such reckless rudeness!"

The poor man seems to have had not the least appreciation of the
power of language, so as to distinguish between the ludicrous and
the pathetic. He must have read "Hudibras" with tears, _not_ of
laughter, in his eyes, and hence drawn his notion of tenderness of
diction as well as harmony of verse. The most surprising thing about
Lloyd is, that such a man should have chosen for his literary task to
translate--Alfieri! And although he has performed the task very far
from well, he has accomplished it in a manner that could not have been
anticipated from his original compositions.

After this specimen of Mr Talfourd's laudatory criticism, we need not
be astonished at any amount of eulogy he bestows on such names as
Hazlitt and others, which really have a certain claim on the respect
of all men. And yet, even after this, we felt some slight surprise at
hearing Mr Talfourd speak of "the splendid reputation" of Mr Harrison
Ainsworth! Would Mr Talfourd _have_ such a reputation, if it were
offered him? Would he not rather have remained in complete obscurity
than be distinguished by such "splendours" as the authorship of _Jack
Sheppard_ would have invested him with? Why should he throw about
this indiscriminate praise, and make his good word of no possible
value? Splendid reputation! Can trash be anything but trash, because
a multitude of the idle and the ignorant, whom it exactly suits, read
and admire? By-and-by they grow ashamed of their idol, when they find
they have him all to themselves, and that sensible people are smiling
at their enthusiasm; they then discard him for some new, untried, and
_unconvicted_ favourite. Such is the natural history of these splendid
reputations.

The second volume of the "Final Memorials" is in great part occupied
with sketches of the literary friends and companions of Lamb. These Mr
Talfourd introduces by a somewhat bold parallel between the banquets
at the lordly halls of Holland House and the suppers in the dark and
elevated chambers in the Inner Temple, whither Lamb had removed. We are
by no means scandalised at such a comparison. Wit may flow, and wisdom
too, as freely in the garret as in the saloon. To eat off plate, to be
served assiduously by liveried attendants, may not give any more real
zest to colloquial pleasure, to good hearty talking, than to attack
without ceremony "the cold beef flanked with heaps of smoking potatoes,
which Becky has just brought in." Nor do we know that claret in the
flagon of beautifully cut glass, may be a more potent inspiration
of wit than "the foaming pots of porter from the best tap in Fleet
Street." We are not at all astonished that such a parallel should be
drawn; what surprises us is, that, being in the humour to draw such
comparisons, the Sergeant could find only _one_ place in all London
which could be brought into this species of contrast, and of rivalry,
with Holland House. "Two circles of rare social enjoyment, differing as
widely as possible in all external circumstances--_but each superior
in its kind to all others_, were at the same time generously opened to
men of letters." We, who have been admitted to neither, have perhaps
no right to an opinion; but, judging by the bill of fare presented to
us, we shrewdly suspect there were very many circles where we should
have preferred the intellectual repast to that set out in Inner Temple
Lane. We doubt not the Serjeant himself has assembled round his own
table a society that we should greatly more have coveted the pleasure
of joining. We have the name of Godwin, it is true, but Godwin never
opened his mouth;--played whist all the evening. Had he not written
his book? why should he talk? We have Hazlitt,--but by all accounts he
was rarely in a tolerable humour, perpetually raving, with admirable
consistency, in praise of republics and Bonaparte. Coleridge was too
rarely a visitor to be counted in the list; and certain we are that
we should have no delight in hearing Charles Lloyd "reason of fate,
free-will, foreknowledge absolute," to Leigh Hunt. Some actors are
named, of whose conversational powers we know nothing, and presume
nothing very extraordinary. Lamb's "burly jovial brother, the Ajax
Telamon of clerks," and a Captain Burney, of whom we are elsewhere
told that he liked Shakspeare "because he was so much of a gentleman,"
promise little on the score of intellectual conversation; neither
should we be particularly anxious to sit opposite a certain M. B., of
whom Lamb said, "M., if dirt were trumps, what hands you would hold!"

After this singular parallel, we are shown round a gallery of
portraits. First we have George Dyer, who appears to be the counterpart
of our old friend Dominie Sampson. But, indeed, we hold George Dyer
to be a sort of myth, a fabulous person, the creation of Charles
Lamb's imagination, and imposed as a reality on his friends. Such an
absurdity as he is here represented to be could not have been bred,
could not have existed, in these times, and in London. If we are to
credit the stories told of him, his walking in broad day into the canal
at Islington was one of the wisest things he did, or could possibly
have done. Lamb tells him, in the strictest confidence, that the
"Waverley Novels" are the works of Lord Castlereagh, just returned from
the Congress of Sovereigns at Vienna! Off he runs, nor stops till he
reaches Maida Hill, where he deposits his news in the ears of Leigh
Hunt, who, "as a public man," he thinks ought to be possessed of the
great fact. At another time Lamb gravely inquires of him, "Whether it
was true, as was commonly reported, that he was to be made a lord?" "Oh
dear, no! Mr Lamb," he responds with great earnestness, "I could not
think of such a thing: it is not true, I assure you." "I thought not,"
replies the wit, "and I contradict it wherever I go; but the government
will not ask your consent--they may raise you to the peerage without
your even knowing it." "I hope not, Mr Lamb; indeed, indeed, I hope
not; it would not suit me at all," repeats our modern Dominie, and goes
away musing on the possibility of strange honours descending, whether
he will or not, upon his brow. It goes to our heart to disturb a good
story, but such a man as the George Dyer here represented never could
have existed.

We have rather a long account of Godwin, with some remarks not very
satisfactory upon his intellectual character. That Mr Godwin was
taciturn, that he conversed, when he did talk, upon trivial subjects,
and in a small precise manner, and that he was especially fond of
sleeping after dinner--all this we can easily understand. Mr Godwin's
mental activity was absorbed in his authorship, and he was a very
voluminous author. But we cannot so easily understand Mr Talfourd's
explanations, nor why these habits should have any peculiar connexion
with the intellectual qualities of the author of _Caleb Williams_, and
a host of novels, as well as of the _Political Justice_, of the _Life
of Chaucer_, and the _History of the Commonwealth_. Such habits are
rather the result of a man's temperament, and the manner of life which
circumstances have thrown him into, than of his intellectual powers.
Profound metaphysicians have been very vivacious talkers, and light and
humorous writers very taciturn men. Mr Talfourd finds that Godwin had
no imagination, was all abstract reason, and thus accounts for his
having no desire to address his fellowmen but through the press. The
passage is too long to quote, and would be very tedious. We must leave
him in quiet possession of his own theory of the matter.

It was new to us, and may be to our readers, to hear that Godwin
supported himself "by a shop in Skinner Street, where, under the
auspices of 'Mr J. Godwin & Co.,' the prettiest and wisest books
for children issued, which old-fashioned parents presented to their
children, without suspecting that the graceful lessons of piety and
goodness which charmed away the selfishness of infancy, were published,
and sometimes revised, and now and then written, by a philosopher
whom they would scarcely venture to name!" We admire the good sense
which induced him to adhere to so humble an occupation, if he found it
needful for his support. But what follows is not quite so admirable.
He was a great borrower; or, in the phrase of Mr Talfourd, "he met
the exigencies of business with the trusting simplicity which marked
his course; he asked his friends for aid without scruple, considering
that their means were justly the due of one who toiled in thought for
their inward life, and had little time to provide for his own outward
existence, and took their excuses when offered without doubt or
offence." And then the Serjeant proceeds to relate, in a tone of the
most touching simplicity, his own personal experience upon this matter.
"The very next day after I had been honoured and delighted by an
introduction to him at Lamb's chambers, I was made still more proud and
happy by his appearance at my own on such an errand, which my poverty,
not my will, rendered abortive. After some pleasant chat on indifferent
matters, he carelessly observed that he had a little bill for £150
falling due on the morrow, _which he had forgotten till that morning_,
and desired the loan of the necessary amount for a few weeks. At first,
in eager hopes of being able thus to oblige one whom I regarded with
admiration akin to awe, I began to consider whether it was possible
for me to raise such a sum; but, alas! a moment's reflection sufficed
to convince me that the hope was vain, and I was obliged, with much
confusion, to assure my distinguished visitor how glad I should have
been to serve him, but that I was only just starting as a special
pleader, was obliged to write for magazines to help me on, and had not
such a sum in the world. 'Oh dear!' said the philosopher, 'I thought
you were a young gentleman of fortune--don't mention it, don't mention
it--I shall do very well elsewhere!' And then, in the most gracious
manner, reverted to our former topics, and sat in my small room for
half-an-hour, as if to convince me that my want of fortune made no
difference in his esteem." How very gracious! The most shameless
borrower coming to raise money from a young gentleman of fortune, to
meet "a little bill which he had forgotten till that morning," would
hardly, on finding his mistake, have made an abrupt departure. He would
have coolly beat a retreat, as the philosopher did. We never hear, by
the way, that he returned "to my small room" at any other time, for
half-an-hour's chat. But how very interesting it is to see the learned
Serjeant, whose briefs have made him acquainted with every trick and
turn of commercial craft, retaining this sweet and pristine simplicity!

The Serjeant, however, has a style of narrative which, though on the
surface it displays the most good-natured simplicity, slyly insinuates
to the more intelligent reader that he sees quite as far as another,
and is by no means the dupe of his own amiability. Thus, in his
description of Coleridge, (which would be too long a subject to enter
into minutely,) he has the following passage, (perhaps the best in the
description,) which, while it seems to echo to the full the unstinted
applause so common with the admirers of that singular man, gives a
quiet intimation to the reader that he was not altogether so blind as
some of those admirers. "If his entranced hearers often were unable
to perceive the bearings of his argument--too mighty for any grasp
but his own--and sometimes reaching beyond his own--they understood
'a _beauty_ in the words, if not the words;' and a wisdom and a piety
in the illustrations, even when unable to connect them with the idea
which he desired to illustrate." Mr Talfourd reveals here, we suspect,
the true secret of the charm which Coleridge exercised in conversation.
His hearers never seemed to have carried away anything distinct or
serviceable from his long discourses. They understood "a beauty in the
words, if not the words;" they felt a charm like that of listening to
music, and, when the voice ceased, there was perhaps as little distinct
impression left, as if it had really been a beautiful symphony they had
heard.

There is only one more in this gallery of portraits before which we
shall pause, and that only for a moment, to present a last specimen
of the critical manner of Mr Talfourd. We are sorry the last should
not be the best; and yet, as this sketch is a reprint, in an abridged
form, of an essay affixed to the _Literary Remains of Hazlitt_, it
may be considered as having received a more than usual share of the
author's attention. It is thus that he analyses the mental constitution
of one whom he appears to have studied and greatly admired--William
Hazlitt. "He had as unquenchable a desire for truth as others have
for wealth, or power, or fame: he pursued it with sturdy singleness
of purpose, and enunciated it without favour or fear. But besides
that love of truth, that sincerity in pursuing it, and that boldness
in telling it, he had also a fervent aspiration after the beautiful,
a vivid sense of pleasure, and an _intense consciousness of his own
individual being_, which sometimes produced obstacles to the current
of speculation, by which it was broken into dazzling eddies, or urged
into devious windings. Acute, fervid, vigorous as his mind was, it
wanted _the one great central power of imagination, which brings all
the other faculties into harmonious action, multiplies them into each
other, makes truth visible in the forms of beauty, and substitutes
intellectual vision for proof_. Thus in him truth and beauty held
divided empire. In him the spirit was willing but the flesh was
_strong_, and when these contend it is not difficult to anticipate the
result; 'for the power of beauty shall sooner transform honesty from
what it is into a bawd, than the person of honesty shall transform
beauty into its likeness.' This 'sometime paradox' was vividly
exemplified in Hazlitt's personal history, his conversation, and his
writings."[3]

[3] Vol. ii., p. 157.

Are we to gather from this most singular combination of words, that
Hazlitt had a grain too much of sensuality in his composition, which
diverted him from the search after truth? The expression, "the flesh
was strong," and the quotation so curiously introduced from Shakspeare,
seem to point this way. And then, again, are we to understand that
this too much of sensuality was owing to a want of imagination?--that
central power of imagination which is here described in a manner that
no system of metaphysics we have studied enables us in the least to
comprehend. We know something of Schelling's "intellectual intuition"
transcending the ordinary scope of reason. Is this "intellectual
vision, which the imagination substitutes for proof," of the same
family? But indeed it would be idle insincerity to ask such questions.
Sergeant Talfourd knows no more than we do what it means. The simple
truth is, that here, as too frequently elsewhere, he aims at a
certain subtlety of thought, and falls unfortunately upon no thought
whatever--upon mere confusion of thought, which he attempts to hide by
a quantity of somewhat faded phrase and rhetorical diction.

If we refer to the original essay itself, we shall not be aiding
ourselves or Mr Talfourd. The statement is fuller, and the confusion
greater. In one point it relieves us--it relieves us entirely from
the necessity of too deeply pondering the philosophic import of any
phraseology our critic may adopt, for the phrase is changed merely to
please the ear; and what at first has the air of definition proves
to be merely a poetic colouring. He thus commences his essay: "As an
author, Mr Hazlitt may be contemplated principally in three aspects--as
a moral and political reasoner, as an observer of character and
manners, and as a critic in literature and painting. It is in the
first character only that he should be followed with caution." In the
two others he is, of course, to be followed implicitly. Why he was
not equally perfect as a moral and political reasoner, Mr Talfourd
proceeds to explain. Mr Hazlitt had "a passionate desire for truth,"
and also "earnest aspirations for the beautiful." Now, continues our
critic, "the vivid sense of beauty may, indeed, have fit home in the
breast of the searcher after truth, but then he must also be endowed
with the highest of all human faculties--the great mediatory and
interfusing power of imagination, which presides supreme over the
mind, brings all its powers and impulses into harmonious action, and
becomes itself the single organ of all. At its touch, truth becomes
visible in the shape of beauty; the fairest of material things become
the living symbols of airy thought, and the mind apprehends _the finest
affinities of the world of sense and spirit 'in clear dream and solemn
vision.'_" This last expression conveys, we presume, all the meaning,
or no-meaning, of the phrase afterwards adopted--the "intellectual
vision which it substitutes for truth." Both are mere jingle. The rest
of the passage is much the same as it stands in the _Final Memorials_.
Somehow or other Mr Hazlitt is proved to have been defective as a
reasoner, because he wanted imagination!--and imagination was wanted,
not to enlarge his experience of mental phenomena, but to step between
his love of truth and his sense of beauty. Did he ever divulge this
discovery to his friend Hazlitt?--and how did the metaphysician receive
it?

To one so generous towards others, it would be ungracious to use hard
words. Indeed, to leave before an intelligent reader these specimens of
"fine analysis," and "powers of discriminating and distinguishing," is
quite severe enough punishment. We wish we could expunge them, with a
host of similar ones, not only from our record, but from the works of
the author himself.[4]

[4] The author of _Ion_ ought not to be held in remembrance for any of
these prosaic blunders he may have committed.

It is time that we turn from the biography to the writings of
Charles Lamb--to Elia, the gentle humorist. Not that Charles Lamb is
exclusively the humorist: far from it. His verse is, at all events,
sufficient to demonstrate a poetic sensibility, and his prose writings
display a subtlety of analysis and a delicacy of perception which were
not always enlisted in the service of mirth, but which were often
displayed in some refined criticism, or keen observation upon men
and manners. Still it is as a humorist that he has chiefly attracted
the attention of the reading public, and obtained his popularity and
literary _status_. But the coarser lineaments of the humorist are not
to be found in him. His is a gentle, refined, and refining humour,
which never trespasses upon delicacy; which does not excite that common
and almost brutal laughter, so easily raised at what are called the
comic miseries of life--often no comedy to those who have to endure
them. It is a humour which generally attains its end by investing what
is lowly with an unexpected interest, not by degrading what is noble
by allying it with mean and grotesque circumstance, (the miserable art
of parody;) it is a humour, in short, which excites our laughter, not
by stifling all reflection, but by awakening the mind to new trains of
thought, and prompting to odd but kindly sympathies. It is a humour
which a poet might indulge in, which a very nun might smile at, which
a Fenelon would at times prepare himself mildly to admonish, but, on
seeing from how clear a spirit it emanated, would, relaxing his brows
again, let pass unreproved.

There is a great rage at present for the comic; and, to do justice
to our own times, we think it may be said that wit was never more
abundant--and certainly the pencil was never used with more genuine
humour. But we cannot sympathise with, or much admire, that class of
writers who seem to make the comic their exclusive study, who peer into
everything merely to find matter of jest in it. Everything is no more
comic than everything is solemn, in this mingled world of ours. These
men, reversing the puritanical extravagance, would _improve_ every
incident into the occasion of a laugh. At length one extreme becomes
as tedious as the other. We have, if we may trust to advertisements,
for we never saw the production itself, a _Comic History of
England!_ and, amongst other editions of the learned commentator,
_A Comic Blackstone!_ We shall be threatened some day with a _Comic
Encyclopædia_; or we shall have these comic gentry following the track
round the whole world which Mrs Sommerville has lately taken, in her
charming book on Physical Geography. They will go hopping and grinning
after her, peeping down volcanoes, and punning upon coral reefs, and
finding laughter in all things in this circumnavigable globe. Well, let
them go grinning from pole to pole, and all along the tropics. We can
wish them no worse punishment.

This exclusive cultivation of the comic must sadly depress the organ of
veneration, and not at all foster any refined feelings of humanity. To
him who is habitually in the mocking vein, it matters little what the
subject, or who the sufferer, so that he has his jest. It is marvellous
the utter recklessness to human feeling these light laughers attain to.
Their seemingly sportive weapon, the "satiric thong" they so gaily use,
is in harder hands than could be found anywhere else out of Smithfield.
Nor is it quite idle to notice in what a direct barefaced manner these
jesters appeal to the coarse untutored malice of our nature. If we
were to analyse the jest, we should sometimes find that we had been
laughing just as wisely as the little untaught urchin, who cannot hold
his sides for "fun," if some infirm old woman, slipping upon the slide
he has made, falls down upon the pavement. The jest only lasts while
reflection is laid asleep.

In this, as we have already intimated, lies the difference between
the crowd of jesters and Charles Lamb. We quit their uproarious
laughter for his more quiet and pensive humour with somewhat the same
feeling that we leave the noisy, though amusing, highway, for the cool
landscape and the soft greensward. We reflect as we smile; the malice
of our nature is rather laid to rest than called forth; a kindly and
forgiving temper is excited. We rise from his works, if not with any
general truth more vividly impressed, yet prepared, by gentle and
almost imperceptible touches, to be more social in our companionships,
and warmer in our friendships.

Whether from mental indolence, or from that strong partiality he
contracted towards familiar things, he lived, for a man of education
and intelligence, in a singularly limited circle of thought. In the
stirring times of the first French Revolution, we find him abstracting
himself from the great drama before him, to bury himself in the gossip
of _Burnet's History_. He writes to Manning--"I am reading _Burnet's
own Times_. Quite the prattle of age, and outlived importance....
Burnet's good old prattle I can bring present to my mind; I can make
the Revolution present to me--the French Revolution, by a converse
perversity in my nature, I fling as far _from_ me." Science appears
never to have interested him, and such topics as political economy
may well be supposed to have been quite foreign to his nature. But
even as a reader of poetry, his taste, or his partialities in his
range of thought, limited him within a narrow circuit. He could make
nothing of Goethe's _Faust_; Shelley was an unknown region to him,
and the best of his productions never excited his attention. To Byron
he was almost equally indifferent. From these he could turn to study
George Withers! and find matter for applause in lines which needed,
indeed, the recommendation of age to give them the least interest. His
personal friendship for Wordsworth and Coleridge led him here out of
that circle of old writers he delighted to dwell amongst; otherwise, we
verily believe, he would have deserted them for Daniell and Quarles.
But perhaps, to one of his mental constitution, it required a certain
concentration to bring his powers into play; and we may owe to this
exclusiveness of taste the admirable fragments of criticism he has
given us on Shakspeare and the elder dramatists.

In forming our opinion, however, of the tastes and acquirements of
Lamb, we must not forget that we are dealing with a humorist, and that
his testimony against himself cannot be always taken literally. On
some occasions we shall find that he amused himself and his friends
by a merry vein of self-disparagement; he would delight to exaggerate
some deficiency, or perhaps some Cockney taste, in which, perhaps, he
differed from others only in his boldness of avowal. He had not, by all
accounts, what is called an ear for music; but we are not to put faith
in certain witty descriptions he has given of his own obtuseness to
all melodious sounds. We find him, in some of his letters, speaking of
Braham with all the enthusiasm of a young haunter of operas. "I follow
him about," he says, "like a dog." Nothing has given more scandal to
some of the gentle admirers of Lamb, than to find him boldly avowing
his preference of Fleet Street to the mountains of Cumberland. He
claimed no love for the picturesque. Shops, and the throng of men, were
not to be deserted for lakes and waterfalls. It was his to live in
London, and, as a place to _live in_, there was no peculiarity of taste
in preferring it to Cumberland; but when he really paid his visit to
Coleridge at Keswick, he felt the charm fully as much as tourists who
are accustomed to dwell, rather too loudly, upon their raptures. The
letters he wrote, after this visit, from some of which we will quote,
if our space permits us, describe very naturally, unaffectedly, and
vividly, the impressions which are produced on a first acquaintance
with mountainous scenery.

Indeed we may remark, that no man can properly enter into the character
or the writings of a humorist, who is not prepared both to permit and
to understand certain little departures from truth. We mean, that
playing with the subject where our _convictions_ are not intended to
be seriously affected. Those who must see everything as true or false,
and immediately approve or reject accordingly, who know nothing of that
_punctum indifferens_ on which the humorist, for a moment, takes his
stand, had better leave him and his writings entirely alone. "I like a
smuggler," says Charles Lamb, in one of his essays. Do you, thereupon,
gravely object that a smuggler, living in constant violation of the
laws of the land, ought by no means to be an object of partiality
with any respectable order-loving gentleman? Or do you nod assent and
acquiesce in this approbation of the smuggler? You do neither one nor
the other. You smile and read on. You know very well that Lamb has no
design upon your serious convictions, has no wish whatever that _you_
should like a smuggler; he merely gives expression to a partiality of
his own, unreasonable if you will, but arising from certain elements in
the smuggler's character, which just then are uppermost in his mind.
A great deal of the art and tact of the humorist lies in bringing out
little truths, and making them stand in the foreground, where greater
truths usually take up their position. Thus, in one of Lamb's papers,
he would prove that a convalescent was in a less enviable condition
than a man downright ill. This is done by heightening the effect of a
subordinate set of circumstances, and losing sight of facts of greater
importance. No error of judgment can really be introduced by this
sportive ratiocination, this mock logic, while it perhaps may be the
means of disclosing many ingenious and subtle observations, to which,
afterwards, you may, if you will, assign their just relative importance.

It would be a work of supererogation, even if space allowed us, to go
critically over the whole writings of Lamb--his poems, his essays,
and his letters. It is the last alone that we shall venture to pause
upon, or from which we may hope to make any extract not already
familiar to the reader. His poetry, indeed, cannot claim much critical
attention. It is possible, here and there, to find an elegant verse,
or a beautiful expression; there is a gentle, amiable, pleasing tone
throughout it; but, upon the whole, it is without force, has nothing to
recommend it of deep thought or strong passion. His tragedy of _John
Woodville_ is a tame imitation of the manner of the old dramatists--of
their manner when engaged in their subordinate and preparatory scenes.
For there is no attempt at tragic passion. We read the piece asking
ourselves when the play is to begin, and while still asking the
question, find ourselves brought to its conclusion. If the poems are
read by few, the _Essays of Elia_ have been perused by all. Who is not
familiar with what is now a historic fact--the discovery of roast pig
in China? This, and many other touches of humour, it would be useless
here to repeat. His letters, as being latest published, seem alone to
call for any especial observations, and from these we shall cull a few
extracts to enliven our own critical labours.

What first strikes a reader, on the perusal of the letters, is their
remarkable similarity in style to the essays. Some of them, indeed,
were afterwards converted into essays, and that more by adding to
them than altering their structure. That style, which at first seems
extremely artificial, was, in fact, natural in Lamb. He had formed for
himself a manner, chiefly by the study of our classical essayists,
and of still older writers, from which it would have been an effort
in him to depart. With whatever ease, therefore, or rapidity, he may
have written his letters, it was impossible that they should bear
the impress of freedom. His style was essentially a lettered style,
partaking little of the conversational tone of his own day. They could
obtain the case of finished compositions, not of genuine letters. For
this, if for no other reason, they can never be brought into comparison
with those charming spontaneous effusions of humour which flowed from
Cowper, in his letters to his old friend Hill, and his cousin, Lady
Hesketh. They are charming productions, however, and the best of his
letters will take rank, we think, with the best of his essays, in the
public estimation.

We must first quote from a letter to Manning, after his visits to
the lakes, to rescue his character in the eyes of the lovers of the
picturesque from the imputation of being utterly indifferent to the
higher beauties of nature.

     "Coleridge received us with all the hospitality in the world. He
     dwells upon a small hill by the side of Keswick, in a comfortable
     house, quite enveloped on all sides by a net of mountains: great
     floundering bears and monsters they seemed, all couchant and
     asleep. We got in in the evening, travelling in a post-chaise from
     Penrith, in the midst of a gorgeous sunshine, which transmuted all
     the mountains into colours, purple, &c., &c. We thought we had
     got into fairyland. But that went off (and it never came again;
     while we stayed we had no more fine sunsets), and we entered
     Coleridge's comfortable study just in the dusk, when the mountains
     were all dark with clouds on their heads. Such an impression I
     never received from objects of sight before, nor do I suppose that
     I can ever again. Glorious creatures, fine old fellows--Skiddaw,
     &c.--I never shall forget ye, how ye lay about that night like
     an entrenchment--gone to bed, as it seemed for the night, but
     promising that ye were to be seen in the morning.... We have
     clambered up to the top of Skiddaw; and I have waded up the bed
     of Lodore. In fine, I have satisfied myself that there is such a
     thing as tourists call _romantic_, which I very much suspected
     before; they make such a sputtering about it.... Oh! its fine
     black head, and the bleak air atop of it, with the prospects of
     mountains about and about, making you giddy. It was a day that
     will stand out like a mountain, I am sure, in my life."

Of Mr Manning we are told little or nothing, though he seems to have
been one of the very dearest friends of Lamb. His best letters are
written to Manning--the drollest, and some of the most affecting. The
following was written to dissuade him from some scheme of oriental
travel. Manning was, at the time, at Paris:--

  "_Feb. 19, 1803._

     "MY DEAR MANNING,--The general scope of your letter afforded no
     indications of insanity; but some particular points raised a
     scruple. For God's sake, don't think any more of 'Independent
     Tartary.' What are you to do among such Ethiopians? Read Sir John
     Mandeville's travels to cure you, or come over to England. There
     is a Tartar-man now exhibiting at Exeter Change. Come and talk
     with him, and hear what he says first. Indeed, he is no favourable
     specimen of his countrymen! Some say they are cannibals; and then
     conceive a Tartar fellow _eating_ my friend, and adding the _cool
     malignity_ of mustard and vinegar! I am afraid 'tis the reading
     of Chaucer has misled you; his foolish stories about Cambuscan,
     and the ring and the horse of brass. Believe me, there are no such
     things. These are all tales--a horse of brass never flew, and a
     king's daughter never talked with birds. The Tartars really are
     a cold, insipid, smoutchy set. You'll be sadly moped (if you
     are not eaten) amongst them. Pray try and cure yourself. Shave
     yourself oftener. Eat no saffron; for saffron eaters contract a
     terrible Tartar-like yellow. Shave _the upper lip_. Go about like
     a European. Read no books of voyages, (they are nothing but lies;)
     only now and then a romance, to keep the fancy _under_. Above
     all, don't go to any sights of _wild beasts_. _That has been your
     ruin._"

And when Manning really departed on his voyage to China, he writes to
him in the following mingled strains of humour and of feeling. Being
obliged to omit a great deal, it would only be unsightly to mark every
instance where a sentence has been dropt. The italics, we must remark,
are not ours. If Lamb's, they show how naturally, even in writing to
his most intimate friend, he fell into the feelings of the author:--

  "_May 10, 1806._

     "... Be sure, if you see any of those people whose heads do
     grow beneath their shoulders, that you make a draught of them.
     It will be very curious. Oh! Manning, I am serious to sinking
     almost, when I think that all those evenings which you have made
     so pleasant are gone, perhaps for ever. Four years, you talk of,
     may be ten--and you may come back and find such alterations! Some
     circumstance may grow up to you or to me, that may be a bar to the
     return of any such intimacy. I dare say all this is hum! and that
     all will come back; but, indeed, we die many deaths before we die,
     and I am almost sick to think that such a hold I had of you is
     gone."

  "_Dec. 5, 1806._

     "Manning, your letter dated Hottentots, August the--what was it?
     came to hand. I can scarce hope that mine will have the same
     luck. China--Canton--bless us! how it strains the imagination,
     and makes it ache. It will be a point of conscience to send you
     none but bran-new news (the latest edition), which will but grow
     the better, like oranges, for a sea voyage. Oh that you should be
     so many hemispheres off--if I speak incorrectly you can correct
     me--why, the simplest death or marriage that takes place here must
     be important to you as news in the old Bastile."

He then tells him of the acceptance of his farce--_Mr H._; which farce,
by the way, was produced, and failed, Lamb turning against his own
production, and joining the audience in hissing it off the stage. It
certainly deserved its fate.

     "Now, you'd like to know the subject. The title is, 'Mr H.'
     No more; how simple, how taking! A great H sprawling over the
     play-bill, and attracting eyes at every corner. The story is, a
     coxcomb appearing at Bath, vastly rich--all the ladies dying for
     him--all bursting to know who he is; but he goes by no other name
     than Mr H.--a curiosity like that of the dames of Strasburg about
     the man with the great nose. But I won't tell you any more about
     it. Yes, I will; but I can't give you any idea how I have done it.
     I'll just tell you that, after much vehement admiration, when his
     true name comes out, 'Hogsflesh,' all the women shun him, avoid
     him, and not one can be found to change her name for him; that's
     the idea--how flat it is here--but how whimsical in the farce! And
     only think how hard upon me it is, that the ship is despatched
     to-morrow, and my triumph cannot be ascertained till the Wednesday
     after. But all China will ring of it by-and-by. Do you find, in
     all this stuff I have written, anything like those feelings which
     one should send my old adventuring friend that is gone to wander
     among Tartars, and may never come again? I don't; but your going
     away, and all about you, is a threadbare topic. I have worn it
     out with thinking. It has come to me when I have been dull with
     anything, till my sadness has seemed more to have come from it
     than to have introduced it. I want you, you don't know how much;
     but if I had you here, in my European garret, we should but talk
     over such stuff as I have written.

     "Good Heavens! what a bit only I've got left! How shall I squeeze
     all I know into this morsel! Coleridge is come home, and is going
     to turn lecturer on taste at the Royal Institution. How the paper
     grows less and less! In less than two minutes I shall cease to
     talk to you, and you may rave to the great Wall of China.--N.B. Is
     there such a wall? Is it as big as Old London Wall by Bedlam? Have
     you met with a friend of mine, named Ball, at Canton? If you are
     acquainted, remember me kindly to him."

But we should be driven into as hard straits as Lamb, at the close of
his epistle, if we, should attempt, in the small space that remains to
us, to give any fair idea of the various "humours" and interests, of
many kinds, of these letters. We pass at once to those that illustrate
the last important incident of his life, his retirement from office. It
is thus he describes his manumission, and the sort of troubled delight
it brought with it, to Wordsworth:--

  "_6th April, 1825._

     "Here am I then, after thirty-three years' slavery, sitting in my
     own room, at eleven o'clock this finest of all April mornings, a
     freed man, with £441 a-year for the remainder of my life, live I
     as long as John Dennis, who outlived his annuity and starved at
     ninety.

     "I came home FOR EVER on Tuesday of last week. The
     incomprehensibleness of my condition overwhelmed me. It was
     like passing from life into eternity. Every year to be as long
     as three; _i. e._, to have three times as much real time--time
     that is my own in it! I wandered about thinking I was happy, but
     feeling I was not. But that tumultuousness is passing off, and I
     begin to understand the nature of the gift."

And to Bernard Barton he writes:

     "My spirits are so tumultuary with the novelty of my recent
     emancipation, that I have scarce steadiness of hand, much more of
     mind, to compose a letter. I am free, Bernard Barton--free as air!

    'The little bird, that wings the sky,
    Knows no such liberty.'

     I was set free on Tuesday in last week at four o'clock. I came
     home for ever!

     "I have been describing my feelings, as well as I can, to
     Wordsworth, and care not to repeat. Take it briefly, that for a
     few days I was painfully oppressed by so mighty a change, but it
     is becoming daily more natural to me. I went and sat among them
     all, at my old thirty-three years' desk yester morning; and deuce
     take me, if I had not yearnings at leaving all my old pen-and-ink
     fellows, merry sociable lads, at leaving them in the lurch--fag,
     fag, fag! The comparison of my own superior felicity gave me
     anything but pleasure.

     "B. B., I would not serve another seven years for seven hundred
     thousand pounds! I have got £440 net for life, with a provision
     for Mary if she survives me. I will live another fifty years."

But to live without any steady compulsory occupation requires an
apprenticeship as much as any other mode of life. An idle man ought
to be born and bred to the profession. With Lamb, literature could be
nothing but an amusement, and for a mere amusement literature is far
too laborious. It cannot, indeed, serve long as an amusement except
when it is adopted also as a labour. He was destined, therefore, to
make the humiliating discovery, which so many have made before him,
that one may have too much time, as well as too little, at one's own
disposal. Writing to the same Bernard Barton, a year or two afterwards,
he says:--

     "What I can do, and over-do, is to walk; but deadly long are
     the days, these summer all-day days, with but a half-hour's
     candle-light and no fire-light. I do not write, tell your kind
     inquisitive Eliza, and can hardly read. 'Tis cold work authorship,
     without something to puff one into fashion.... I assure you _no
     work_ is worse than _over-work_. The mind preys on itself, the
     most unwholesome food. I bragged, formerly, that I could not have
     too much time. I have a surfeit; with few years to come, the days
     are wearisome. But weariness is not eternal. Something will shine
     out to take the load off that crushes me, which is at present
     intolerable. I have killed an hour or two in this poor scrawl.
     Well; I shall write merrier anon. 'Tis the present copy of my
     countenance I send, and to complain is a little to alleviate."

He had taken a house at Enfield, but the cares of housekeeping were
found to be burdensome to Miss Lamb, and they took up their abode as
boarders in the house of a neighbour. To this circumstance he alludes
in the following extract from a letter to Wordsworth, which is the last
we shall make, and with which we shall bid farewell to our subject.
It will be found to be not the least remarkable amongst the letters
of Lamb, and contains one passage, we think, the boldest piece of
extravagance that ever humorist ventured upon with success. It just
escapes!--and, indeed, it rather takes away our breath at its boldness
than prompts to merriment.

  "_January 2, 1831._

     "And is it a year since we parted from you at the steps of
     Edmonton stage? There are not now the years that there used to
     be. The tale of the dwindled age of men, reported of successional
     mankind, is true of the same man only. We do not live a year
     in a year now. 'Tis a _punctum stans_. The seasons pass with
     indifference. Spring cheers not, nor winter heightens our gloom;
     autumn hath foregone its moralities. Let the sullen nothing
     pass. Suffice it, that after sad spirits, prolonged through many
     of its months, we have cast our skins; have taken a farewell of
     the pompous, troublesome trifle, called housekeeping, and are
     settled down into poor boarders and lodgers at next door, the
     Baucis and Baucida of dull Enfield. Here we have nothing to do
     with our victuals but to eat them; with the garden but to see it
     grow; with the tax-gatherer but to hear him knock; with the maid
     but to hear her scolded. Scot and lot, butcher, baker, are things
     unknown to us, save as spectators of the pageant. We are fed we
     know not how; quieted--confiding ravens. Yet in the self-condemned
     obliviousness, in the stagnation, some molesting yearnings of
     life, not quite killed, rise, prompting me that there was a
     London, and that I was of that old Jerusalem. In dreams I am in
     Fleet Market, but I wake and cry to sleep again. I die hard, a
     stubborn Eloisa in this detestable Paraclete. What have I gained
     by health? Intolerable dulness. What by early hours and moderate
     meals? A total blank. Oh! let no native Londoner imagine that
     health, and rest, and innocent occupation, interchange of converse
     sweet, and recreative study, can make the country anything better
     than altogether odious and detestable. _A garden was the primitive
     prison, till man, with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily
     sinned himself out of it._"

Any further summary than what we have already given, of the literary
character of Lamb, would be only tedious. He is one who will be
generally _liked_, who with a smaller class will be greatly admired,
and who will never excite hostile criticism, unless his injudicious
friends shall elevate him to a higher pedestal than is due to him, or
than he is manifestly fit to occupy. Such is the cold and calm verdict
with which criticism must dismiss him. But those who have thoroughly
enjoyed the essays of Elia and the letters of Lamb, will feel a warmer,
a more partial affection than Criticism knows well how to express:
she becomes somewhat impatient of her own enforced gravity; she would
willingly throw away those scales with which, like Justice, we suppose,
she is symbolically supplied, and, embracing the man as he is, laugh
and be pleased with the rest of the world, without further thought of
the matter.




THE CAXTONS.--PART XV.

CHAPTER LXXXIV.


"Please, sir, be this note for you?" asked the waiter.

"For me--yes; it is my name."

I did not recognise the handwriting, and yet the note was from one
whose writing I had often seen. But formerly the writing was cramped,
stiff, perpendicular, (a feigned hand, though I guessed not it was
feigned;) now it was hasty, irregular, impatient--scarce a letter
formed, scarce a word that seemed finished--and yet strangely legible
withal, as the handwriting of a bold man almost always is. I opened the
note listlessly, and read--

"I have watched for you all the morning. I saw her go. Well!--I did
not throw myself under the hoofs of the horses. I write this in a
public-house, not far. Will you follow the bearer, and see once again
the outcast whom all the rest of the world will shun?"

Though I did not recognise the hand, there could be no doubt who was
the writer.

"The boy wants to know if there's an answer," said the waiter.

I nodded, took up my hat, and left the room. A ragged boy was standing
in the yard, and scarcely six words passed between us, before I was
following him through a narrow lane that faced the inn, and terminated
in a turnstile. Here the boy paused, and, making me a sign to go on,
went back his way whistling. I passed the turnstile, and found myself
in a green field, with a row of stunted willows hanging over a narrow
rill. I looked round, and saw Vivian (as I intend still to call him)
half kneeling, and seemingly intent upon some object in the grass.

My eye followed his mechanically. A young unfledged bird, that had
left the nest too soon, stood, all still and alone, on the bare short
sward--its beak open as for food, its gaze fixed on us with a wistful
stare. Methought there was something in the forlorn bird that softened
me more to the forlorner youth, of whom it seemed a type.

"Now," said Vivian, speaking half to himself, half to me, "did the bird
fall from the nest, or leave the nest at its own wild whim? The parent
does not protect it. Mind, I say not it is the parent's fault--perhaps
the fault is all with the wanderer. But, look you, though the parent is
not here, the foe is!--yonder, see!"

And the young man pointed to a large brindled cat, that, kept back from
its prey by our unwelcome neighbourhood, still remained watchful, a few
paces off, stirring its tail gently backwards and forwards, and with
that stealthy look in its round eyes, dulled by the sun--half fierce,
half frightened--which belongs to its tribe, when man comes between the
devourer and the victim.

"I do see," said I, "but a passing footstep has saved the bird!"

"Stop!" said Vivian, laying my hand on his own, and with his old bitter
smile on his lip--"stop! do you think it mercy to save the bird? What
from? and what for? From a natural enemy--from a short pang and a quick
death? Fie!--is not that better than slow starvation? or, if you take
more heed of it, than the prison-bars of a cage? You cannot restore the
nest, you cannot recall the parent. Be wiser in your mercy: leave the
bird to its gentlest fate!"

I looked hard on Vivian; the lip had lost the bitter smile. He rose and
turned away. I sought to take up the poor bird, but it did not know its
friends, and ran from me, chirping piteously--ran towards the very jaws
of the grim enemy. I was only just in time to scare away the beast,
which sprang up a tree, and glared down through the hanging boughs.
Then I followed the bird, and, as I followed, I heard, not knowing, at
first whence the sound came, a short, quick, tremulous note. Was it
near? was it far?--from the earth? in the sky? Poor parent-bird!--like
parent-love, it seemed now far and now near; now on earth, now in sky!

And at last, quick and sudden, as if born of the space, lo! the little
wings hovered over me!

The young bird halted, and I also. "Come," said I, "ye have found each
other at last--settle it between you!"

I went back to the outcast.


CHAPTER LXXXV.

PISISTRATUS.--How came you to know we had stayed in the town?

VIVIAN.--Do you think I could remain where you left me? I wandered
out--wandered hither. Passing at dawn through yon streets, I saw the
ostlers loitering by the gates of the yard, overheard them talk, and so
knew you were all at the inn--all! (_He sighed heavily._)

PISISTRATUS.--Your poor father is very ill! O cousin, how could you
fling from you so much love!

VIVIAN.--Love!--his!--my father's!

PISISTRATUS.--Do you really not believe, then, that your father loved
you?

VIVIAN.--If I had believed it, I had never left him! All the gold of
the Indies had never bribed me to leave my mother!

PISISTRATUS.--This is indeed a strange misconception of yours. If we
can remove it, all may be well yet. Need there now be any secrets
between us? (_persuasively._) Sit down, and tell me all, cousin.

After some hesitation, Vivian complied; and by the clearing of his
brow, and the very tone of his voice, I felt sure that he was no
longer seeking to disguise the truth. But, as I afterwards learned
the father's tale as well as now the son's, so, instead of repeating
Vivian's words, which--not by design, but by the twist of a mind
habitually wrong--distorted the facts, I will state what appears to me
the real case, as between the parties so unhappily opposed. Reader,
pardon me if the recital be tedious. And if thou thinkest that I bear
not hard enough on the erring hero of the story, remember that he who
recites judges as Austin's son must judge of Roland's.


CHAPTER LXXXVI.

VIVIAN.

AT THE ENTRANCE OF LIFE SITS--THE MOTHER.

It was during the war in Spain that a severe wound, and the fever which
ensued, detained Roland at the house of a Spanish widow. His hostess
had once been rich; but her fortune had been ruined in the general
calamities of the country. She had an only daughter, who assisted to
nurse and tend the wounded Englishman; and when the time approached
for Roland's departure, the frank grief of the young Ramouna betrayed
the impression that the guest had made upon her affections. Much of
gratitude, and something, it might be, of an exquisite sense of honour,
aided, in Roland's breast, the charm naturally produced by the beauty
of his young nurse, and the knightly compassion he felt for her ruined
fortunes and desolate condition.

In one of those hasty impulses common to a generous nature--and which
too often fatally vindicate the rank of Prudence amidst the tutelary
Powers of Life--Roland committed the error of marriage with a girl of
whose connexions he knew nothing, and of whose nature little more than
its warm spontaneous susceptibility. In a few days subsequent to these
rash nuptials, Roland rejoined the march of the army; nor was he able
to return to Spain till after the crowning victory of Waterloo.

Maimed by the loss of a limb, and with the scars of many a noble wound
still fresh, Roland then hastened to a home the dreams of which had
soothed the bed of pain, and now replaced the earlier visions of
renown. During his absence a son had been born to him--a son whom he
might rear to take the place he had left in his country's service; to
renew, in some future fields, a career that had failed the romance
of his own antique and chivalrous ambition. As soon as that news had
reached him, his care had been to provide an English nurse for the
infant--so that, with the first sounds of the mother's endearments, the
child might yet hear a voice from the father's land. A female relation
of Bolt's had settled in Spain, and was induced to undertake this
duty. Natural as this appointment was to a man so devotedly English,
it displeased his wild and passionate Ramouna. She had that mother's
jealousy, strongest in minds uneducated; she had also that peculiar
pride which belongs to her country-people, of every rank and condition;
the jealousy and the pride were both wounded by the sight of the
English nurse at the child's cradle.

That Roland, on regaining his Spanish hearth, should be disappointed
in his expectations of the happiness awaiting him there, was the
inevitable condition of such a marriage; since, not the less for his
military bluntness, Roland had that refinement of feeling, perhaps
over-fastidious, which belongs to all natures essentially poetic; and
as the first illusions of love died away, there could have been little
indeed congenial to his stately temper in one divided from him by an
utter absence of education, and by the strong but nameless distinctions
of national views and manners. The disappointment probably, however,
went deeper than that which usually attends an ill-assorted union;
for, instead of bringing his wife to his old tower, (an expatriation
which she would doubtless have resisted to the utmost,) he accepted,
maimed as he was, not very long after his return to Spain, the offer
of a military post under Ferdinand. The Cavalier doctrines and intense
loyalty of Roland attached him, without reflection, to the service of
a throne which the English arms had contributed to establish; while
the extreme unpopularity of the Constitutional Party in Spain, and
the stigma of irreligion fixed to it by the priests, aided to foster
Roland's belief that he was supporting a beloved king against the
professors of those revolutionary and Jacobinical doctrines, which
to him were the very atheism of politics. The experience of a few
years in the service of a bigot so contemptible as Ferdinand, whose
highest object of patriotism was the restoration of the Inquisition,
added another disappointment to those which had already embittered the
life of a man who had seen in the grand hero of Cervantes no follies
to satirise, but high virtues to imitate. Poor Quixote himself--he
came mournfully back to his La Mancha, with no other reward for his
knight-errantry than a decoration which he disdained to place beside
his simple Waterloo medal, and a grade for which he would have blushed
to resign his more modest, but more honourable English dignity.

But, still weaving hopes, the sanguine man returned to his Penates. His
child now had grown from infancy into boyhood--the child would pass
naturally into his care. Delightful occupation!--At the thought, Home
smiled again.

Now, behold the most pernicious circumstance in this ill-omened
connexion.

The father of Ramouna had been one of that strange and mysterious
race which presents in Spain so many features distinct from the
characteristics of its kindred tribes in more civilised lands.
The Gitáno, or gipsy of Spain, is not the mere vagrant we see on
our commons and roadsides. Retaining, indeed, much of his lawless
principles and predatory inclinations, he lives often in towns,
exercises various callings, and not unfrequently becomes rich. A
wealthy Gitáno had married a Spanish woman;[5] Roland's wife had been
the offspring of this marriage. The Gitáno had died while Ramouna
was yet extremely young, and her childhood had been free from the
influences of her paternal kindred. But, though her mother, retaining
her own religion, had brought up Ramouna in the same faith, pure from
the godless creed of the Gitáno--and, at her husband's death, had
separated herself wholly from his tribe--still she had lost caste with
her own kin and people. And while struggling to regain it, the fortune,
which made her sole chance of success in that attempt, was swept away,
so that she had remained apart and solitary, and could bring no friends
to cheer the solitude of Ramouna during Roland's absence. But, while my
uncle was still in the service of Ferdinand, the widow died; and then
the only relatives who came round Ramouna were her father's kindred.
They had not ventured to claim affinity while her mother lived; and
they did so now, by attentions and caresses to her son. This opened
to them at once Ramouna's heart and doors. Meanwhile, the English
nurse--who, in spite of all that could render her abode odious to her,
had, from strong love to her charge, stoutly maintained her post--died,
a few weeks after Ramouna's mother, and no healthful influence remained
to counteract those baneful ones to which the heir of the honest old
Caxtons was subjected. But Roland returned home in a humour to be
pleased with all things. Joyously he clasped his wife to his breast,
and thought, with self-reproach, that he had forborne too little, and
exacted too much--he would be wiser now. Delightedly he acknowledged
the beauty, the intelligence, and manly bearing of the boy, who played
with his sword-knot, and ran off with his pistols as a prize.

[5] A Spaniard very rarely indeed marries a Gitána or female gipsy. But
occasionally (observes Mr Borrow) a wealthy Gitáno marries a Spanish
female.

The news of the Englishman's arrival at first kept the lawless kinsfolk
from the house; but they were fond of the boy, and the boy of them, and
interviews between him and these wild comrades, if stolen, were not
less frequent. Gradually Roland's eyes became opened. As, in habitual
intercourse, the boy abandoned the reserve which awe and cunning at
first imposed, Roland was inexpressibly shocked at the bold principles
his son affected, and at his utter incapacity even to comprehend that
plain honesty and that frank honour which, to the English soldier,
seemed ideas innate and heaven-planted. Soon afterwards, Roland found
that a system of plunder was carried on in his household, and tracked
it to the connivance of the wife and the agency of the son, for the
benefit of lazy bravos and dissolute vagrants. A more patient man than
Roland might well have been exasperated--a more wary man confounded,
by this discovery. He took the natural step--perhaps insisting on it
too summarily--perhaps not allowing enough for the uncultured mind and
lively passions of his wife: he ordered her instantly to prepare to
accompany him from the place, and to give up all communication with her
kindred.

A vehement refusal ensued; but Roland was not a man to give up such
a point, and at length a false submission, and a feigned repentance
soothed his resentment and obtained his pardon. They moved several
miles from the place; but where they moved, there, some at least, and
those the worst, of the baleful brood, stealthily followed. Whatever
Ramouna's earlier love for Roland had been, it had evidently long
ceased in the thorough want of sympathy between them, and in that
absence which, if it renews a strong affection, destroys an affection
already weakened. But the mother and son adored each other with all
the strength of their strong, wild natures. Even under ordinary
circumstances, the father's influence over a boy yet in childhood is
exerted in vain, if the mother lend herself to baffle it. And in this
miserable position, what chance had the blunt, stern, honest Roland
(separated from his son during the most ductile years of infancy)
against the ascendency of a mother who humoured all the faults, and
gratified all the wishes, of her darling?

In his despair, Roland let fall the threat that, if thus thwarted, it
would become his duty to withdraw his son from the mother. This threat
instantly hardened both hearts against him. The wife represented Roland
to the boy as a tyrant, as an enemy--as one who had destroyed all the
happiness they had before enjoyed in each other--as one whose severity
showed that he hated his own child; and the boy believed her. In his
own house a firm union was formed against Roland, and protected by the
cunning which is the force of the weak against the strong.

In spite of all, Roland could never forget the tenderness with which
the young nurse had watched over the wounded man, nor the love--genuine
for the hour, though not drawn from the feelings which withstand the
wear and tear of life--that lips so beautiful had pledged him in the
bygone days. These thoughts must have come perpetually between his
feelings and his judgment, to embitter still more his position--to
harass still more his heart. And if, by the strength of that sense
of duty which made the force of his character, he could have strung
himself to the fulfilment of the threat, humanity, at all events,
compelled him to delay it--his wife promised to be again a mother.
Blanche was born. How could he take the infant from the mother's
breast, or abandon the daughter to the fatal influences from which
only, by so violent an effort, he could free the son?

No wonder, poor Roland! that those deep furrows contracted thy bold
front, and thy hair grew gray before its time!

Fortunately, perhaps, for all parties, Roland's wife died while Blanche
was still an infant. She was taken ill of a fever--she died delirious,
clasping her boy to her breast, and praying the saints to protect him
from his cruel father. How often that deathbed haunted the son, and
justified his belief that there was no parent's love in the heart
which was now his sole shelter from the world, and the "pelting of its
pitiless rain." Again I say, poor Roland!--for I know that, in that
harsh, unloving disrupture of such solemn ties, thy large generous
heart forgot its wrongs; again didst thou see tender eyes bending over
the wounded stranger--again hear low murmurs breathe the warm weakness
which the women of the south deem it no shame to own. And now did it
all end in those ravings of hate, and in that glazing gaze of terror!


CHAPTER LXXXVII.

THE PRECEPTOR.

Roland removed to France, and fixed his abode in the environs of Paris.
He placed Blanche at a convent in the immediate neighbourhood, going
to see her daily, and gave himself up to the education of his son. The
boy was apt to learn; but to unlearn was here the arduous task--and
for that task it would have needed either the passionless experience,
the exquisite forbearance of a practised teacher, or the love, and
confidence, and yielding heart of a believing pupil. Roland felt that
he was not the man to be the teacher, and that his son's heart remained
obstinately closed to him. He looked round, and found at the other
side of Paris what seemed a suitable preceptor--a young Frenchman of
some distinction in letters, more especially in science, with all
a Frenchman's eloquence of talk, full of high-sounding sentiments,
that pleased the romantic enthusiasm of the Captain; so Roland, with
sanguine hopes, confided his son to this man's care. The boy's natural
quickness mastered readily all that pleased his taste; he learned to
speak and write French with rare felicity and precision. His tenacious
memory, and those flexile organs in which the talent for languages
is placed, served, with the help of an English master, to revive his
earlier knowledge of his father's tongue, and to enable him to speak
it with fluent correctness--though there was always in his accent
something which had struck me as strange; but, not suspecting it to
be foreign, I had thought it a theatrical affectation. He did not go
far into science--little farther, perhaps, than a smattering of French
mathematics; but he acquired a remarkable facility and promptitude in
calculation. He devoured eagerly the light reading thrown in his way,
and picked up thence that kind of knowledge which novels and plays
afford, for good or evil, according as the novel or the play elevates
the understanding and ennobles the passions, or merely corrupts the
fancy, and lowers the standard of human nature. But of all that Roland
desired him to be taught, the son remained as ignorant as before. Among
the other misfortunes of this ominous marriage, Roland's wife had
possessed all the superstitions of a Roman Catholic Spaniard, and with
these the boy had unconsciously intermingled doctrines far more dreary,
imbibed from the dark paganism of the Gitános.

Roland had sought a Protestant for his son's tutor. The preceptor was
nominally a Protestant--a biting derider of all superstitions indeed!
He was such a Protestant as some defender of Voltaire's religion says
the Great Wit would have been had he lived in a Protestant country. The
Frenchman laughed the boy out of his superstitions, to leave behind
them the sneering scepticism of the _Encyclopédie_, without those
redeeming ethics on which all sects of philosophy are agreed, but
which, unhappily, it requires a philosopher to comprehend.

This preceptor was doubtless not aware of the mischief he was doing;
and for the rest, he taught his pupil after his own system--a mild and
plausible one, very much like the system we at home are recommended
to adopt--"Teach the understanding, all else will follow;" "Learn
to read _something_, and it will all come right;" "Follow the bias
of the pupil's mind; thus you develop genius, not thwart it." Mind,
Understanding, Genius--fine things! But, to educate the whole man,
you must educate something more than these. Not for want of mind,
understanding, genius, have Borgias and Neros left their names as
monuments of horror to mankind. Where, in all this teaching, was one
lesson to warm the heart and guide the soul?

O mother mine! that the boy had stood by thy knee, and heard from thy
lips, why life was given us, in what life shall end, and how heaven
stands open to us night and day! O father mine! that thou hadst been
his preceptor, not in book-learning, but the heart's simple wisdom! Oh!
that he had learned from thee, in parables closed with practice, the
happiness of self-sacrifice, and how "good deeds should repair the bad!"

It was the misfortune of this boy, with his daring and his beauty, that
there was in his exterior and his manner that which attracted indulgent
interest, and a sort of compassionate admiration. The Frenchman liked
him--believed his story--thought him ill-treated by that hard-visaged
English soldier. All English people were so disagreeable, particularly
English soldiers; and the Captain once mortally offended the Frenchman,
by calling Vilainton _un grand homme_, and denying, with brutal
indignation, that the English had poisoned Napoleon! So, instead of
teaching the son to love and revere his father, the Frenchman shrugged
his shoulders when the boy broke into some unfilial complaint, and
at most said, "_Mais, cher enfant, ton père est Anglais--c'est tout
dire_." Meanwhile, as the child sprang rapidly into precocious youth,
he was permitted a liberty in his hours of leisure, of which he availed
himself with all the zest of his early habits and adventurous temper.
He formed acquaintances among the loose young haunters of cafés,
and spendthrifts of that capital--the wits! He became an excellent
swordsman and pistol-shot--adroit in all games in which skill helps
fortune. He learned betimes to furnish himself with money, by the cards
and the billiard-balls.

But, delighted with the easy home he had obtained, he took care to
school his features, and smooth his manner, in his father's visits--to
make the most of what he had learned of less ignoble knowledge, and,
with his characteristic imitativeness, to cite the finest sentiments he
had found in his plays and novels. What father is not credulous? Roland
believed, and wept tears of joy. And now he thought the time was come
to take back the boy--to return with a worthy heir to the old Tower.
He thanked and blest the tutor--he took the son. But, under pretence
that he had yet some things to master, whether in book knowledge or
manly accomplishments, the youth begged his father, at all events,
not yet to return to England--to let him attend his tutor daily for
some months. Roland consented, moved from his old quarters, and took
a lodging for both in the same suburb as that in which the teacher
resided. But soon, when they were under one roof, the boy's habitual
tastes, and his repugnance to all paternal authority, were betrayed.
To do my unhappy cousin justice, (such as that justice is,) though
he had the cunning for a short disguise, he had not the hypocrisy to
maintain systematic deceit. He could play a part for a while, from an
exulting joy in his own address; but he could not wear a mask with the
patience of cold-blooded dissimulation. Why enter into painful details,
so easily divined by the intelligent reader? The faults of the son
were precisely those to which Roland would be least indulgent. To the
ordinary scrapes of high-spirited boyhood, no father, I am sure, would
have been more lenient; but to anything that seemed low, petty--that
grated on him as gentleman and soldier--there, not for worlds would
I have braved the darkness of his frown, and the woe that spoke like
scorn in his voice. And when, after all warning and prohibition were
in vain, Roland found his son, in the middle of the night, in a resort
of gamblers and sharpers, carrying all before him with his cue, in the
full flush of triumph, and a great heap of five-franc pieces before
him--you may conceive with what wrath the proud, hasty, passionate man,
drove out, cane in hand, the obscene associates, flinging after them
the son's ill-gotten gains; and with what resentful humiliation the
son was compelled to follow the father home. Then Roland took the boy
to England, but not to the old Tower; that hearth of his ancestors was
still too sacred for the footsteps of the vagrant heir!


CHAPTER LXXXVIII.

THE HEARTH WITHOUT TRUST, AND THE WORLD WITHOUT A GUIDE.

And then, vainly grasping at every argument his blunt sense could
suggest--then talked Roland much and grandly of the duties men
owed--even if they threw off all love to their father--still to their
father's name; and then his pride, always so lively, grew irritable and
harsh, and seemed, no doubt, to the perverted ears of the son, unlovely
and unloving. And that pride, without serving one purpose of good, did
yet more mischief; for the youth caught the disease, but in a wrong
way. And he said to himself,--

"Ho! then my father is a great man, with all these ancestors and big
words! And he has lands and a castle--and yet how miserably we live,
and how he stints me! But if he has cause for pride in all these dead
men, why, so have I. And are these lodgings, these appurtenances, fit
for the 'gentleman' he says I am?"

Even in England, the gipsy blood broke out as before; and the
youth found vagrant associates, heaven knows how or where; and
strange-looking forms, gaudily shabby, and disreputably smart, were
seen lurking in the corner of the street, or peering in at the window,
slinking off if they saw Roland--and Roland could not stoop to be a
spy. And the son's heart grew harder and harder against his father,
and his father's face now never smiled on him. Then bills came in,
and duns knocked at the door. Bills and duns to a man who shrunk from
the thought of a debt, as an ermine from a spot on its hide! And the
son's short answer to remonstrance was,--"Am I not a gentleman?--these
are the things gentlemen require." Then perhaps Roland remembered the
experiment of his French friend, and left his bureau unlocked, and
said, "Ruin me if you will, but no debts. There is money in those
drawers--they are unlocked." That trust would for ever have cured
of extravagance a youth with a high and delicate sense of honour:
the pupil of the Gitános did not understand the trust; he thought it
conveyed a natural though ungracious permission to take out what he
wanted--and he took! To Roland this seemed a theft, and a theft of the
coarsest kind: but when he so said, the son started indignant, and saw
in that which had been so touching an appeal to his honour, but a trap
to decoy him into disgrace. In short, neither could understand the
other. Roland forbade his son to stir from the house; and the young man
the same night let himself out, and stole forth into the wide world, to
enjoy or defy it in his own wild way.

It would be tedious to follow him through his various adventures and
experiments on fortune, (even if I knew them all, which I do not.) And
now, putting altogether aside his right name, which he had voluntarily
abandoned, and not embarrassing the reader with the earlier aliases
assumed, I shall give to my unfortunate kinsman the name by which I
first knew him, and continue to do so, until--heaven grant the time
may come!--having first redeemed, he may reclaim, his own. It was in
joining a set of strolling players that Vivian became acquainted with
Peacock; and that worthy, who had many strings to his bow, soon grew
aware of Vivian's extraordinary skill with the cue, and saw therein
a better mode of making their joint fortunes than the boards of an
itinerant Thespis furnished to either. Vivian listened to him, and
it was while their intimacy was most fresh that I met them on the
highroad. That chance meeting produced (if I may be allowed to believe
his assurance) a strong, and, for the moment, a salutary effect upon
Vivian. The comparative innocence and freshness of a boy's mind were
new to him; the elastic healthful spirits with which those gifts were
accompanied startled him, by the contrast to his own forced gaiety and
secret gloom. And this boy was his own cousin!

Coming afterwards to London, he adventured inquiry at the hotel in
the Strand at which I had given my address; learned where we were;
and, passing one night in the street, saw my uncle at the window--to
recognise and to fly from him. Having then some money at his disposal,
he broke off abruptly from the set into which he had been thrown. He
resolved to return to France--he would try for a more respectable mode
of existence. He had not found happiness in that liberty he had won,
nor room for the ambition that began to gnaw him, in those pursuits
from which his father had vainly warned him. His most reputable friend
was his old tutor; he would go to him. He went; but the tutor was now
married, and was himself a father, and that made a wonderful alteration
in his practical ethics. It was no longer moral to aid the son in
rebellion to his father. Vivian evinced his usual sarcastic haughtiness
at the reception he met, and was requested civilly to leave the house.
Then again he flung himself on his wits at Paris. But there were plenty
of wits there sharper than his own. He got into some quarrel with the
police--not indeed for any dishonest practices of his own, but from an
unwary acquaintance with others less scrupulous, and deemed it prudent
to quit France. Thus had I met him again, forlorn and ragged, in the
streets of London.

Meanwhile Roland, after the first vain search, had yielded to the
indignation and disgust that had long rankled within him. His son had
thrown off his authority, because it preserved him from dishonour. His
ideas of discipline were stern, and patience had been wellnigh crushed
out of his heart. He thought he could bear to resign his son to his
fate--to disown him, and to say, "I have no more a son." It was in this
mood that he had first visited our house. But when, on that memorable
night in which he had narrated to his thrilling listeners the dark
tale of a fellow-sufferer's woe and crime--betraying in the tale, to
my father's quick sympathy, his own sorrow and passion--it did not
need much of his gentler brother's subtle art to learn or guess the
whole, nor much of Austin's mild persuasion to convince Roland that he
had not yet exhausted all efforts to track the wanderer and reclaim
the erring child. Then he had gone to London--then he had sought every
spot which the outcast would probably haunt--then had he saved and
pinched from his own necessities, to have wherewithal to enter theatres
and gaming-houses, and fee the agencies of police; then had he seen
the form for which he had watched and pined, in the street below
his window, and cried in a joyous delusion, "He repents!" One day a
letter reached my uncle, through his banker's, from the French tutor,
(who knew of no other means of tracing Roland but through the house
by which his salary had been paid,) informing him of his son's visit.
Roland started instantly for Paris. Arriving there, he could only learn
of his son through the police, and from them only learn that he had
been seen in the company of accomplished swindlers, who were already
in the hands of justice; but that the youth himself, whom there was
nothing to criminate, had been suffered to quit Paris, and had taken,
it was supposed, the road to England. Then at last the poor Captain's
stout heart gave way. His son the companion of swindlers!--could he be
sure that he was not their accomplice? If not yet, how small the step
between companionship and participation! He took the child left him
still from the convent, returned to England, and arrived there to be
seized with fever and delirium--apparently on the same day (or a day
before that on which) the son had dropped shelterless and penniless on
the stones of London.


CHAPTER LXXXIX.

THE ATTEMPT TO BUILD A TEMPLE TO FORTUNE OUT OF THE RUINS OF HOME.

"But," said Vivian, pursuing his tale, "but when you came to my aid,
not knowing me--when you relieved me--when from your own lips, for
the first time, I heard words that praised me, and for qualities that
implied I might yet be 'worth much.'--Ah! (he added mournfully,) I
remember the very words--a new light broke upon me--struggling and dim,
but light still. The ambition with which I had sought the truckling
Frenchman revived, and took worthier and more definite form. I would
lift myself above the mire, make a name, rise in life!"

Vivian's head drooped, but he raised it quickly, and laughed--his
low mocking laugh. What follows of his tale may be told succinctly.
Retaining his bitter feelings towards his father, he resolved to
continue his incognito--he gave himself a name likely to mislead
conjecture, if I conversed of him to my family, since he knew that
Roland was aware that a Colonel Vivian had been afflicted by a runaway
son--and, indeed, the talk upon that subject had first put the notion
of flight into his own head. He caught at the idea of becoming known to
Trevanion; but he saw reasons to forbid his being indebted to me for
the introduction--to forbid my knowing where he was: sooner or later,
that knowledge could scarcely fail to end in the discovery of his real
name. Fortunately, as he deemed, for the plans he began to meditate,
we were all leaving London--he should have the stage to himself. And
then boldly he resolved upon what he regarded as the master scheme of
life--viz., to obtain a small pecuniary independence, and to emancipate
himself formally and entirely from his father's control. Aware of poor
Roland's chivalrous reverence for his name, firmly persuaded that
Roland had no love for the son, but only the dread that the son might
disgrace him, he determined to avail himself of his father's prejudices
in order to effect his purpose.

He wrote a short letter to Roland, (that letter which had given the
poor man so sanguine a joy--that letter after reading which he had said
to Blanche, "Pray for me,") stating simply, that he wished to see his
father; and naming a tavern in the city for the meeting.

The interview took place. And when Roland, love and forgiveness in
his heart--but (who shall blame him?) dignity on his brow, and rebuke
in his eye--approached, ready at a word to fling himself on the boy's
breast, Vivian, seeing only the outer signs, and interpreting them by
his own sentiments--recoiled; folded his arms on his bosom, and said
coldly, "Spare me reproach, sir--it is unavailing. I seek you only to
propose that you shall save your name, and resign your son."

Then, intent perhaps but to gain his object, the unhappy youth
declared his fixed determination never to live with his father, never
to acquiesce in his authority, resolutely to pursue his own career,
whatever that career might be, explaining none of the circumstances
that appeared most in his disfavour--rather, perhaps, thinking that,
the worse his father judged of him, the more chance he had to achieve
his purpose. "All I ask of you," he said, "is this: Give me the least
you can afford to preserve me from the temptation to rob, or the
necessity to starve; and I, in my turn, promise never to molest you in
life--never to degrade you in my death; whatever my misdeeds, they will
never reflect on yourself, for you shall never recognise the misdoer!
The name you prize so highly shall be spared." Sickened and revolted,
Roland attempted no argument--there was that in the son's cold manner
which shut out hope, and against which his pride rose indignant. A
meeker man might have remonstrated, implored, and wept--that was not in
Roland's nature. He had but the choice of three evils, to say to his
son: "Fool, I command thee to follow me;" or say, "Wretch, since thou
wouldst cast me off as a stranger, as a stranger I say to thee--Go,
starve or rob, as thou wilt!" or lastly, to bow his proud head, stunned
by the blow, and say, "Thou refusest me the obedience of the son, thou
demandest to be as the dead to me. I can control thee not from vice,
I can guide thee not to virtue. Thou wouldst sell me the name I have
inherited stainless, and have as stainless borne. Be it so!--Name thy
price!"

And something like this last was the father's choice.

He listened, and was long silent; and then he said slowly, "Pause
before you decide."

"I have paused long--my decision is made! this is the last time we
meet. I see before me now the way to fortune, fairly, honourably; you
can aid me in it only in the way I have said. Reject me now, and the
option may never come again to either!"

And then Roland said to himself, "I have spared and saved for this son;
what care I for aught else than enough to live without debt, creep
into a corner, and await the grave! And the more I can give, why the
better chance that he will abjure the vile associate and the desperate
course." And so, out of that small income, Roland surrendered to the
rebel child more than the half.

Vivian was not aware of his father's fortune--he did not suppose the
sum of two hundred pounds a-year was an allowance so disproportioned
to Roland's means--yet when it was named, even he was struck by the
generosity of one to whom he himself had given the right to say, "I
take thee at thy word; 'just enough not to starve!'"

But then that hateful cynicism which, caught from bad men and evil
books, he called "knowledge of the world," made him think, "it is not
for me, it is only for his name;" and he said aloud, "I accept these
terms, sir; here is the address of a solicitor with whom yours can
settle them. Farewell for ever."

At those last words Roland started, and stretched out his arms vaguely
like a blind man. But Vivian had already thrown open the window, (the
room was on the ground floor) and sprang upon the sill. "Farewell," he
repeated: "tell the world I am dead."

He leapt into the street, and the father drew in the outstretched arms,
smote his heart, and said--"Well, then, my task in the world of man is
over! I will back to the old ruin--the wreck to the wrecks--and the
sight of tombs I have at least rescued from dishonour shall comfort me
for all!"


CHAPTER XC.

THE RESULTS--PERVERTED AMBITION--SELFISH PASSION--THE INTELLECT
DISTORTED BY THE CROOKEDNESS OF THE HEART.

Vivian's schemes thus prospered. He had an income that permitted him
the outward appearances of a gentleman--an independence modest indeed,
but independence still. We were all gone from London. One letter to
me, with the postmark of the town near which Colonel Vivian lived,
sufficed to confirm my belief in his parentage, and in his return to
his friends. He then presented himself to Trevanion as the young man
whose pen I had employed in the member's service; and knowing that
I had never mentioned his name to Trevanion--for without Vivian's
permission I should not, considering his apparent trust in me, have
deemed myself authorised to do so--he took that of Gower, which he
selected haphazard from an old Court Guide, as having the advantage in
common with most names borne by the higher nobility of England, viz.,
of not being confined, as the ancient names of untitled gentlemen
usually are, to the members of a single family. And when, with his
usual adaptability and suppleness, he had contrived to lay aside, or
smooth over, whatever in his manners would be calculated to displease
Trevanion, and had succeeded in exciting the interest which that
generous statesman always conceived for ability, he owned candidly, one
day, in the presence of Lady Ellinor--for his experience had taught him
the comparative ease with which the sympathy of woman is enlisted in
anything that appeals to the imagination, or seems out of the ordinary
beat of life--that he had reasons for concealing his connexions for
the present--that he had cause to believe I suspected what they were,
and, from mistaken regard for his welfare, might acquaint his relations
with his whereabouts. He therefore begged Trevanion, if the latter had
occasion to write to me, not to mention him. This promise Trevanion
gave, though reluctantly; for the confidence volunteered to him seemed
to exact the promise; but as he detested mystery of all kinds, the
avowal might have been fatal to any farther acquaintance; and under
auspices so doubtful, there would have been no chance of his obtaining
that intimacy in Trevanion's house which he desired to establish, but
for an accident which at once opened that house to him almost as a home.

Vivian had always treasured a lock of his mother's hair, cut off on her
deathbed; and when he was at his French tutor's, his first pocket-money
had been devoted to the purchase of a locket, on which he had caused to
be inscribed his own name and his mother's. Through all his wanderings
he had worn this relic; and in the direst pangs of want, no hunger had
been keen enough to induce him to part with it. Now, one morning the
ribbon that suspended the locket gave way, and his eye resting on the
names inscribed on the gold, he thought, in his own vague sense of
right, imperfect as it was, that his compact with his father obliged
him to have the names erased. He took it to a jeweller in Piccadilly
for that purpose, and gave the requisite order, not taking notice of
a lady in the further part of the shop. The locket was still on the
counter after Vivian had left, when the lady coming forward observed
it, and saw the names on the surface. She had been struck by the
peculiar tone of the voice, which she had heard before; and that very
day Mr Gower received a note from Lady Ellinor Trevanion, requesting
to see him. Much wondering, he went. Presenting him with the locket,
she said smiling, "There is only one gentleman in the world who calls
himself _De_ Caxton, unless it be his son. Ah! I see now why you wished
to conceal yourself from my friend Pisistratus. But how is this? can
you have any difference with your father? Confide in me, or it is my
duty to write to him."

Even Vivian's powers of dissimulation abandoned him, thus taken by
surprise. He saw no alternative but to trust Lady Ellinor with his
secret, and implore her to respect it. And then he spoke bitterly
of his father's dislike to him, and his own resolution to prove the
injustice of that dislike by the position he would himself establish
in the world. At present, his father believed him dead, and perhaps
was not ill-pleased to think so. He would not dispel that belief till
he could redeem any boyish errors, and force his family to be proud to
acknowledge him.

Though Lady Ellinor was slow to believe that Roland could dislike his
son, she could yet readily believe that he was harsh and choleric, with
a soldier's high notions of discipline; the young man's story moved
her, his determination pleased her own high spirit;--always with a
touch of romance in her, and always sympathising with each desire of
ambition--she entered into Vivian's aspirations with an alacrity that
surprised himself. She was charmed with the idea of ministering to the
son's fortunes, and ultimately reconciling him to the father,--through
her own agency;--it would atone for any fault of which Roland could
accuse herself in the old time.

She undertook to impart the secret to Trevanion, for she would have no
secrets from him, and to secure his acquiescence in its concealment
from all others.

And here I must a little digress from the chronological course of my
explanatory narrative, to inform the reader that, when Lady Ellinor
had her interview with Roland, she had been repelled by the sternness
of his manner from divulging Vivian's secret. But on her first
attempt to sound or conciliate him, she had begun with some eulogies
on Trevanion's new friend and assistant, Mr Gower, and had awakened
Roland's suspicions of that person's identity with his son--suspicions
which had given him a terrible interest in our joint deliverance of
Miss Trevanion. But so heroically had the poor soldier sought to resist
his own fears, that on the way he shrank to put to me the questions
that might paralyse the energies which, whatever the answer, were then
so much needed. "For," said he to my father, "I felt the blood surging
to my temples; and if I had said to Pisistratus, 'Describe this man,'
and by his description I had recognised my son, and dreaded lest I
might be too late to arrest him from so treacherous a crime, my brain
would have given way;--and so I did not dare!"

I return to the thread of my story. From the time that Vivian confided
in Lady Ellinor, the way was cleared to his most ambitious hopes; and
though his acquisitions were not sufficiently scholastic and various to
permit Trevanion to select him as a secretary, yet, short of sleeping
at the house, he was little less intimate there than I had been.

Among Vivian's schemes of advancement, that of winning the hand and
heart of the great heiress had not been one of the least sanguine.
This hope was annulled when, not long after his intimacy at her
father's house, she became engaged to young Lord Castleton. But he
could not see Miss Trevanion with impunity--(alas! who, with a heart
yet free, could be insensible to attractions so winning?) He permitted
the love--such love as his wild, half-educated, half-savage nature
acknowledged--to creep into his soul--to master it; but he felt no
hope, cherished no scheme while the young lord lived. With the death
of her betrothed, Fanny was free; _then_ he began to hope--not yet to
scheme. Accidentally he encountered Peacock. Partly from the levity
that accompanied a false good-nature that was constitutional with
him, partly from a vague idea that the man might be useful, Vivian
established his quondam associate in the service of Trevanion. Peacock
soon gained the secret of Vivian's love for Fanny, and, dazzled by the
advantages that a marriage with Miss Trevanion would confer on his
patron, and might reflect on himself, and delighted at an occasion to
exercise his dramatic accomplishments on the stage of real life, he
soon practised the lesson that the theatres had taught him--viz: to
make a sub-intrigue between maid and valet serve the schemes and insure
the success of the lover. If Vivian had some opportunities to imply his
admiration, Miss Trevanion gave him none to plead his cause. But the
softness of her nature, and that graceful kindness which surrounded
her like an atmosphere, emanating unconsciously from a girl's harmless
desire to please, tended to deceive him. His own personal gifts were
so rare, and, in his wandering life, the effect they had produced
had so increased his reliance on them, that he thought he wanted but
the fair opportunity to woo in order to win. In this state of mental
intoxication, Trevanion, having provided for his Scotch secretary, took
him to Lord N----'s. His hostess was one of those middle-aged ladies of
fashion, who like to patronise and bring forward young men, accepting
gratitude for condescension, as a homage to beauty. She was struck by
Vivian's exterior, and that 'picturesque' in look and in manner which
belonged to him. Naturally garrulous and indiscreet, she was unreserved
to a pupil whom she conceived the whim to make '_au fait_ to society.'
Thus she talked to him, among other topics in fashion, of Miss
Trevanion, and expressed her belief that the present Lord Castleton had
always admired her; but it was only on his accession to the marquisate
that he had made up his mind to marry, or, from his knowledge of Lady
Ellinor's ambition, thought that the Marquis of Castleton might achieve
the prize which would have been refused to Sir Sedley Beaudesert. Then,
to corroborate the predictions she hazarded, she repeated, perhaps
with exaggeration, some passages from Lord Castleton's replies to her
own suggestions on the subject. Vivian's alarm became fatally excited;
unregulated passions easily obscured a reason so long perverted, and a
conscience so habitually dulled. There is an instinct in all intense
affection, (whether it be corrupt or pure,) that usually makes its
jealousy prophetic. Thus, from the first, out of all the brilliant
idlers round Fanny Trevanion, my jealousy had pre-eminently fastened on
Sir Sedley Beaudesert, though, to all seeming, without a cause. From
the same instinct, Vivian had conceived the same vague jealousy--a
jealousy, in his instance, coupled with a deep dislike to his supposed
rival, who had wounded his self-love. For the marquis, though to be
haughty or ill-bred was impossible to the blandness of his nature,
had never shown to Vivian the genial courtesies he had lavished upon
me, and kept politely aloof from his acquaintance--while Vivian's
personal vanity had been wounded by that drawing-room effect, which the
proverbial winner of all hearts produced without an effort--an effect
that threw into the shade the youth, and the beauty (more striking, but
infinitely less prepossessing) of the adventurous rival. Thus animosity
to Lord Castleton conspired with Vivian's passion for Fanny, to rouse
all that was worst by nature and by rearing, in this audacious and
turbulent spirit.

His confidant, Peacock, suggested from his stage experience the
outlines of a plot, to which Vivian's astuter intellect instantly gave
tangibility and colouring. Peacock had already found Miss Trevanion's
waiting-woman ripe for any measure that might secure himself as her
husband, and a provision for life as a reward. Two or three letters
between them settled the preliminary engagements. A friend of the
ex-comedian's had lately taken an inn on the North road, and might be
relied upon. At that inn it was settled that Vivian should meet Miss
Trevanion, whom Peacock, by the aid of the abigail, engaged to lure
there. The sole difficulty that then remained would, to most men, have
seemed the greatest--viz., the consent of Miss Trevanion to a Scotch
marriage. But Vivian hoped all things from his own eloquence, art, and
passion; and by an inconsistency, however strange, still not unnatural
in the twists of so crooked an intellect, he thought that, by insisting
on the intention of her parents to sacrifice her youth to the very man
of whose attractions he was most jealous--by the picture of disparity
of years, by the caricature of his rival's foibles and frivolities,
by the commonplaces of "beauty bartered for ambition," &c., he might
enlist her fears of the alternative on the side of the choice urged
upon her. The plan proceeded, the time came: Peacock pretended the
excuse of a sick relation to leave Trevanion; and Vivian, a day before,
on pretence of visiting the picturesque scenes in the neighbourhood,
obtained leave of absence. Thus the plot went on to its catastrophe.

"And I need not ask," said I, trying in vain to conceal my indignation,
"how Miss Trevanion received your monstrous proposition!"

Vivian's pale cheek grew paler, but he made no reply.

"And if we had not arrived, what would you have done? Oh, dare you look
into the gulf of infamy you have escaped!"

"I cannot, and I will not bear this!" exclaimed Vivian, starting
up. "I have laid my heart bare before you, and it is ungenerous and
unmanly thus to press upon its wounds. You can moralise, you can speak
coldly--but I--I loved!"

"And do you think," I burst forth--"do you think that I did not love
too!--love longer than you have done; better than you have done; gone
through sharper struggles, darker days, more sleepless nights than
you,--and yet--"

Vivian caught hold of me.

"Hush!" he cried; "is this indeed true! I thought you might have had
some faint and fleeting fancy for Miss Trevanion, but that you curbed
and conquered it at once. Oh no; it was impossible to have loved
really, and to have surrendered all chance as you did!--have left the
house, have fled from her presence! No--no, that was not love!"

"It _was_ love! and I pray Heaven to grant that, one day, you may
know how little your affection sprang from those feelings which make
true love sublime as honour, and meek as is religion! Oh cousin,
cousin!--with those rare gifts, what you might have been! what, if
you will pass through repentance, and cling to atonement--what, I
dare hope, you may yet be! Talk not now of your love; I talk not of
mine! Love is a thing gone from the lives of both. Go back to earlier
thoughts, to heavier wrongs!--your father--that noble heart which you
have so wantonly lacerated, that much-enduring love which you have so
little comprehended!"

Then with all the warmth of emotion I hurried on--showed him the true
nature of honour and of Roland (for the names were one!)--showed him
the watch, the hope, the manly anguish I had witnessed, and wept--I,
not his son--to see; showed him the poverty and privation to which
the father, even at the last, had condemned himself, so that the son
might have no excuse for the sins that Want whispers to the weak.
This, and much more, and I suppose with the pathos that belongs to
all earnestness, I enforced, sentence after sentence--yielding to no
interruption, over-mastering all dissent; driving in the truth, nail
after nail, as it were, into the obdurate heart, that I constrained and
grappled to. And at last, the dark, bitter, cynical nature gave way,
and the young man fell sobbing at my feet, and cried aloud, "Spare me,
spare me!--I see it all now! Wretch that I have been!"


CHAPTER XCI.

On leaving Vivian, I did not presume to promise him Roland's immediate
pardon. I did not urge him to attempt to see his father. I felt the
time was not come for either pardon or interview. I contented myself
with the victory I had already gained. I judged it right that thought,
solitude, and suffering should imprint more deeply the lesson, and
prepare the way to the steadfast resolution of reform. I left him
seated by the stream, and with the promise to inform him at the small
hostelry, where he took up his lodging, how Roland struggled through
his illness.

On returning to the inn, I was uneasy to see how long a time had
elapsed since I had left my uncle. But on coming into his room, to
my surprise and relief I found him up and dressed, and with a serene
though fatigued expression of countenance. He asked me no questions
where I had been--perhaps from sympathy with my feelings in parting
with Miss Trevanion--perhaps from conjecture that the indulgence of
those feelings had not wholly engrossed my time.

But he said simply, "I think I understood from you that you had sent
for Austin--is it so?"

"Yes, sir; but I named * * * * *, as the nearest point to the Tower,
for the place of meeting."

"Then let us go hence forthwith--nay, I shall be better for the change.
And here, there must be curiosity, conjecture--torture!" said he,
locking his hands tightly together. "Order the horses at once!"

I left the room, accordingly; and while they were getting ready the
horses, I ran to the place where I had left Vivian. He was still there,
in the same attitude, covering his face with his hands, as if to
shut out the sun. I told him hastily of Roland's improvement, of our
approaching departure, and asked him an address in London at which I
could find him. He gave me as his direction the same lodging at which I
had so often visited him. "If there be no vacancy there for me," said
he, "I shall leave word where I am to be found. But I would gladly be
where I was, before--" He did not finish the sentence. I pressed his
hand and left him.


CHAPTER XCII.

Some days have elapsed; we are in London, my father with us; and Roland
has permitted Austin to tell me his tale, and received through Austin
all that Vivian's narrative to me suggested, whether in extenuation
of the past, or in hope of redemption in the future. And Austin has
inexpressibly soothed his brother. And Roland's ordinary roughness has
gone, and his looks are meek, and his voice low. But he talks little,
and smiles never. He asks me no questions; does not to _me_ name his
son, nor recur to the voyage to Australia, nor ask 'why it is put off,'
nor interest himself as before in preparations for it--he has no heart
for anything.

The voyage _is_ put off till the next vessel sails, and I have
seen Vivian twice or thrice, and the result of the interviews has
disappointed and depressed me. It seems to me that much of the previous
effect I had produced is already obliterated. At the very sight of
the great Babel--the evidence of the ease, the luxury, the wealth,
the pomp, the strife, the penury, the famine, and the rags, which the
focus of civilisation, in the disparities of old societies, inevitably
gathers together--the fierce combative disposition seemed to awaken
again; the perverted ambition, the hostility to the world; the wrath,
the scorn; the war with man, and the rebellious murmur against Heaven.
There was still the one redeeming point of repentance for his wrongs to
his father--his heart was still softened there; and, attendant on that
softness, I hailed a principle more like that of honour than I had yet
recognised in Vivian. He cancelled the agreement which had assured him
of a provision at the cost of his father's comforts. "At least, there,"
he said, "I will injure him no more!"

But while, on this point, repentance seemed genuine, it was not so
with regard to his conduct towards Miss Trevanion. His gipsy nurture,
his loose associates, his extravagant French romances, his theatrical
mode of looking upon love intrigues and stage plots, seemed all to rise
between his intelligence and the due sense of the fraud and treachery
he had practised. He seemed to feel more shame at the exposure than at
the guilt; more despair at the failure of success than gratitude at
escape from crime. In a word, the nature of a whole life was not to be
remodelled at once--at least by an artificer so unskilled as I.

After one of these interviews, I stole into the room where Austin sat
with Roland, and, watching a seasonable moment when Roland, shaking off
a reverie, opened his Bible, and sat down to it, with each muscle in
his face set, as I had seen it before, into iron resolution, I beckoned
my father from the room.

PISISTRATUS.--I have again seen my cousin. I cannot make the way I
wish. My dear father, you must see him.

MR CAXTON.--I!--yes, assuredly, if I can be of any service. But will he
listen to me?

PISISTRATUS.--I think so. A young man will often respect in his elder,
what he will resent as a presumption in his contemporary.

MR CAXTON.--It maybe so: (_then, more thoughtfully,_) but you describe
this strange boy's mind as a wreck!--in what part of the mouldering
timbers can I fix the grappling-hook? Here, it seems that most of the
supports on which we can best rely, when we would save another, fail
us. Religion, honour, the associations of childhood, the bonds of
home, filial obedience--even the intelligence of self-interest, in the
philosophical sense of the word. And I, too!--a mere book-man! My dear
son!--I despair!

PISISTRATUS.--No, you do not despair--no, you must succeed; for, if you
do not, what is to become of Uncle Roland? Do you not see his heart is
fast breaking?

MR CAXTON.--Get me my hat; I will go. I will save this Ishmael--I will
not leave him till he is saved!

PISISTRATUS (_some minutes after, as they are walking towards Vivian's
lodgings._)--You ask me what support you are to cling to! A strong and
a good one, sir.

MR CAXTON.--Ay, what is that?

PISISTRATUS.--Affection! There is a nature capable of strong affection
at the core of this wild heart! He could love his mother; tears gush to
his eyes at her name--he would have starved rather than part with the
memorial of that love. It was his belief in his father's indifference
or dislike that hardened and embruted him--it is only when he hears how
that father loved him, that I now melt his pride and curb his passions.
You have affection to deal with!--do you despair now?

My father turned on me those eyes so inexpressibly benign and mild, and
replied softly, "No!"

We reached the house; and my father said, as we knocked at the door,
"If he is at home, leave me. This is a hard study to which you have set
me; I must work at it alone." Vivian was at home, and the door closed
on his visitor. My father stayed some hours.

On returning home, to my great surprise I found Trevanion with my
uncle. He had found us out--no easy matter, I should think. But a good
impulse in Trevanion was not of that feeble kind which turns home at
the sight of a difficulty. He had come to London on purpose to see and
to thank us.

I did not think there had been so much of delicacy--of what I may
call the "beauty of kindness"--in a man whom incessant business had
rendered ordinarily blunt and abrupt. I hardly recognised the impatient
Trevanion in the soothing, tender, subtle respect that rather implied
than spoke gratitude, and sought to insinuate what he owed to the
unhappy father, without touching on his wrongs from the son. But of
this kindness--which showed how Trevanion's high nature of gentleman
raised him aloof from that coarseness of thought which those absorbed
wholly in practical affairs often contract--of this kindness, so noble
and so touching, Roland seemed scarcely aware. He sat by the embers of
the neglected fire, his hands grasping the arms of his elbow-chair,
his head drooping on his bosom; and only by a deep hectic flush on
his dark cheek could you have seen that he distinguished between an
ordinary visitor and the man whose child he had helped to save. This
minister of state--this high member of the elect, at whose gift are
places, peerages, gold sticks, and ribbons--has nothing at his command
for the bruised spirit of the half-pay soldier. Before that poverty,
that grief, and that pride, the King's Counsellor was powerless. Only
when Trevanion rose to depart, something like a sense of the soothing
intention which the visit implied seemed to rouse the repose of the old
man, and to break the ice at its surface; for he followed Trevanion
to the door, took both his hands, pressed them, then turned away, and
resumed his seat. Trevanion beckoned to me, and I followed him down
stairs, and into a little parlour which was unoccupied.

After some remarks upon Roland, full of deep and considerate feeling,
and one quick, hurried reference to the son--to the effect that his
guilty attempt would never be known by the world--Trevanion then
addressed himself to me with a warmth and urgency that took me by
surprise. "After what has passed," he exclaimed, "I cannot suffer
you to leave England thus. Let me not feel with you, as with your
uncle, that there is nothing by which I can repay--no, I will not so
put it. Stay and serve your country at home: it is my prayer--it is
Ellinor's. Out of all at my disposal, it will go hard but what I shall
find something to suit you." And then, hurrying on, Trevanion spoke
flatteringly of my pretensions, in right of birth and capabilities,
to honourable employment, and placed before me a picture of public
life--its prizes and distinctions--which, for the moment at least,
made my heart beat loud and my breath come quick. But still, even
then, I felt (was it an unreasonable pride?) that there was something
that jarred, something that humbled, in the thought of holding all my
fortunes as a dependency on the father of the woman I loved, but might
not aspire to;--something even of personal degradation in the mere
feeling that I was thus to be repaid for a service, and recompensed for
a loss. But these were not reasons I could advance; and, indeed, so for
the time did Trevanion's generosity and eloquence overpower me, that I
could only falter out my thanks, and my promise that I would consider
and let him know.

With that promise he was forced to content himself; he told me to
direct to him at his favourite country-seat, whither he was going that
day, and so left me. I looked round the humble parlour of the mean
lodging-house, and Trevanion's words came again before me like a flash
of golden light. I stole into the open air, and wandered through the
crowded streets, agitated and disturbed.


CHAPTER XCIII.

Several days elapsed--and of each day my father spent a considerable
part at Vivian's lodgings. But he maintained a reserve as to his
success, begged me not to question him, and to refrain also for the
present from visiting my cousin. My uncle guessed or knew his brother's
mission; for I observed that, whenever Austin went noiseless away, his
eye brightened, and the colour rose in a hectic flush to his cheek. At
last my father came to me one morning, his carpet-bag in his hand, and
said, "I am going away for a week or two. Keep Roland company till I
return."

"Going with _him_?"

"With him."

"That is a good sign."

"I hope so; that is all I can say now."

The week had not quite passed when I received from my father the
letter I am about to place before the reader; and you may judge how
earnestly his soul must have been in the task it had volunteered, if
you observe how little, comparatively speaking, the letter contains of
the subtleties and pedantries (may the last word be pardoned, for it is
scarcely a just one) which ordinarily left my father a scholar even in
the midst of his emotions. He seemed here to have abandoned his books,
to have put the human heart before the eyes of his pupil, and said,
"Read, and _un_learn!"


TO PISISTRATUS CAXTON.

     "MY DEAR SON,--It were needless to tell you all the earlier
     difficulties I have had to encounter with my charge, nor to repeat
     all the means which, acting on your suggestion, (a correct one,)
     I have employed to arouse feelings long dormant and confused, and
     allay others, long prematurely active, and terribly distinct. The
     evil was simply this: here was the intelligence of a man in all
     that is evil--and the ignorance of an infant in all that is good.
     In matters merely worldly, what wonderful acumen! in the plain
     principles of right and wrong, what gross and stolid obtuseness!
     At one time, I am straining all my poor wit to grapple in an
     encounter on the knottiest mysteries of social life; at another,
     I am guiding reluctant fingers over the horn-book of the most
     obvious morals. Here hieroglyphics, and there pot-hooks! But as
     long as there is affection in a man, why, there is Nature to begin
     with! To get rid of all the rubbish laid upon her, clear back the
     way to that Nature, and start afresh--that is one's only chance.

     "Well, by degrees I won my way, waiting patiently till the bosom,
     pleased with the relief, disgorged itself of all 'its perilous
     stuff,'--not chiding--not even remonstrating, seeming almost to
     sympathise, till I got him Socratically to disprove himself. When
     I saw that he no longer feared me--that my company had become
     a relief to him--I proposed an excursion, and did not tell him
     whither.

     "Avoiding as much as possible the main north road, (for I did not
     wish, as you may suppose, to set fire to a train of associations
     that might blow us up to the dog-star,) and, where that
     avoidance was not possible, travelling by night, I got him into
     the neighbourhood of the old Tower. I would not admit him under
     its roof. But you know the little inn, three miles off the trout
     stream?--we made our abode there.

     "Well, I have taken him into the village, preserving his
     incognito. I have entered with him into cottages, and turned the
     talk upon Roland. You know how your uncle is adored; you know
     what anecdotes of his bold, warm-hearted youth once, and now of
     his kind and charitable age, would spring up from the garrulous
     lips of gratitude! I made him see with his own eyes, hear with his
     own ears, how all who knew Roland loved and honoured him--except
     his son. Then I took him round the ruins--(still not suffering
     him to enter the house,) for those ruins are the key to Roland's
     character--seeing them, one sees the pathos in his poor foible
     of family pride. There, you distinguish it from the insolent
     boasts of the prosperous, and feel that it is little more than the
     pious reverence to the dead--'the tender culture of the tomb.'
     We sat down on heaps of mouldering stone, and it was there that
     I explained to him what Roland was in youth, and what he had
     dreamed that a son would be to him. I showed him the graves of his
     ancestors, and explained to him why they were sacred in Roland's
     eyes! I had gained a great way, when he longed to enter the home
     that should have been his; and I could make him pause of his own
     accord, and say, 'No, I must first be worthy of it.' Then you
     would have smiled--sly satirist that you are--to have heard me
     impressing upon this acute, sharp-witted youth, all that we plain
     folk understand by the name of HOME--its perfect trust and truth,
     its simple holiness, its exquisite happiness--being to the world
     what conscience is to the human mind. And after that, I brought
     in his sister, whom till then he had scarcely named--for whom he
     scarcely seemed to care--brought her in to aid the father, and
     endear the home. 'And you know,' said I, 'that if Roland were to
     die, it would be a brother's duty to supply his place; to shield
     her innocence--to protect her name! A good name is something,
     then. Your father was not so wrong to prize it. You would like
     yours to be that which your sister would be proud to own!'

     "While we were talking, Blanche suddenly came to the spot, and
     rushed to my arms. She looked on him as a stranger; but I saw his
     knees tremble. And then she was about to put her hand in his--but
     I drew her back. Was I cruel? He thought so. But when I dismissed
     her, I replied to his reproach, 'Your sister is a part of Home.
     If you think yourself worthy of either, go and claim both; I will
     not object.'--'She has my mother's eyes,' said he, and walked
     away. I left him to muse amidst the ruins, while I went in to see
     your poor mother, and relieve her fears about Roland, and make her
     understand why I could not yet return _home_.

     "This brief sight of his sister has sunk deep into him. But I now
     approach what seems to me the great difficulty of the whole. He is
     fully anxious to redeem his name--to regain his home. So far so
     well. But he cannot yet see ambition, except with hard, worldly
     eyes. He still fancies that all he has to do is to get money and
     power, and some of those empty prizes in the Great Lottery, which
     we often win more easily by our sins than our virtues. (Here
     follows a long passage from Seneca, omitted as superfluous.) He
     does not yet even understand me--or, if he does, he fancies me
     a mere bookworm indeed, when I imply that he might be poor, and
     obscure, at the bottom of fortune's wheel, and yet be one we
     should be proud of! He supposes that, to redeem his name, he has
     only got to lacker it. Don't think me merely the fond father, when
     I add my hope that I shall use you to advantage here. I mean to
     talk to him to-morrow, as we return to London, of you, and of your
     ambition: you shall hear the result.

     "At this moment, (it is past midnight,) I hear his step in the
     room above me. The window-sash aloft opens--for the third time;
     would to Heaven he could read the true astrology of the stars!
     There they are--bright, luminous, benignant. And I seeking to
     chain this wandering comet into the harmonies of heaven! Better
     task than that of astrologers, and astronomers to boot! Who among
     them can 'loosen the band of Orion?'--but who amongst us may not
     be permitted by God to have sway over the action and orbit of the
     human soul?

     "Your ever affectionate father,

  A. C."

Two days after the receipt of this letter, came the following; and
though I would fain suppress those references to myself which must be
ascribed to a father's partiality, yet it is so needful to retain them
in connexion with Vivian, that I have no choice but to leave the tender
flatteries to the indulgence of the kind.

     "MY DEAR SON,--I was not too sanguine as to the effect that your
     simple story would produce upon your cousin. Without implying any
     contrast to his own conduct, I described that scene in which you
     threw yourself upon our sympathy, in the struggle between love and
     duty, and asked for our counsel and support; when Roland gave you
     his blunt advice to tell all to Trevanion; and when, amidst such
     sorrow as the heart in youth seems scarcely large enough to hold,
     you caught at truth impulsively, and the truth bore you safe from
     the shipwreck. I recounted your silent and manly struggles--your
     resolution not to suffer the egotism of passion to unfit you for
     the aims and ends of that spiritual probation which we call LIFE.
     I showed you as you were, still thoughtful for us, interested in
     our interests--smiling on us, that we might not guess that you
     wept in secret! Oh, my son--my son! do not think that, in those
     times, I did not feel and pray for you! And while he was melted by
     my own emotion, I turned from your love to your ambition. I made
     him see that you, too, had known the restlessness which belongs to
     young ardent natures; that you, too, had your dreams of fortune,
     and aspirations for success. But I painted that ambition in its
     true colours: it was not the desire of a selfish intellect, to be
     in yourself a somebody--a something--raised a step or two in the
     social ladder, for the pleasure of looking down on those at the
     foot, but the warmer yearning of a generous heart; your ambition
     was to repair your father's losses--minister to your father's very
     foible, in _his_ idle desire of fame--supply to your uncle what he
     had lost in his natural heir--link your success to useful objects,
     your interests to those of your kind, your reward to the proud and
     grateful smiles of those you loved. That was thine ambition, O
     my tender Anachronism! And when, as I closed the sketch, I said,
     'Pardon me: you know not what delight a father feels, when, while
     sending a son away from him into the world, he can speak and think
     thus of him! But this, you see, is not your kind of ambition. Let
     us talk of making money, and driving a coach-and-four through this
     villanous world,'--your cousin sank into a profound reverie, and
     when he woke from it, it was like the waking of the earth after a
     night in spring--the bare trees had put forth buds!

     "And, some time after, he startled me by a prayer that I would
     permit him, with his father's consent, to accompany you to
     Australia. The only answer I have given him as yet, has been in
     the form of a question: 'Ask yourself if I ought? I cannot wish
     Pisistratus to be other than he is; and unless you agree with him
     in all his principles and objects, ought I to incur the risk that
     you should give him your knowledge of the world, and inoculate him
     with your ambition?' He was struck, and had the candour to attempt
     no reply.

     "Now, Pisistratus, the doubt I expressed to him is the doubt
     I feel. For, indeed, it is only by home-truths, not refining
     arguments, that I can deal with this unscholastic Scythian, who,
     fresh from the Steppes, comes to puzzle me in the Portico.

     "On the one hand, what is to become of him in the Old World? At
     his age, and with his energies, it would be impossible to cage him
     with us in the Cumberland ruins; weariness and discontent would
     undo all we could do. He has no resource in books--and I fear
     never will have! But to send him forth into one of the overcrowded
     professions--to place him amidst all those 'disparities of social
     life,' on the rough stones of which he is perpetually grinding
     his heart--turn him adrift amongst all the temptations to which he
     is most prone--this is a trial which, I fear, will be too sharp
     for a conversion so incomplete. In the New World, no doubt, his
     energies would find a safer field; and even the adventurous and
     desultory habits of his childhood might there be put to healthful
     account. Those complaints of the disparities of the civilised
     world, find, I suspect, an easier if a bluffer reply from the
     political economist than the Stoic philosopher. 'You don't like
     them, you find it hard to submit to them,' says the political
     economist; 'but they are the laws of a civilised state, and you
     can't alter them. Wiser men than you have tried to alter them,
     and never succeeded, though they turned the earth topsy-turvy!
     Very well; but the world is wide--go into a state that is not so
     civilised. The disparities of the Old World vanish amidst the
     New! Emigration is the reply of Nature to the rebellious cry
     against Art.' Thus would say the political economist: and, alas,
     even in your case, my son, I found no reply to the reasonings! I
     acknowledge, then, that Australia might open the best safety-valve
     to your cousin's discontent and desires; but I acknowledge also a
     counter-truth, which is this--'It is not permitted to an honest
     man to corrupt himself for the sake of others.' That is almost the
     only maxim of Jean Jacques to which I can cheerfully subscribe! Do
     you feel quite strong enough to resist all the influences which a
     companionship of this kind may subject you to--strong enough to
     bear his burthen as well as your own--strong enough, also--ay, and
     alert and vigilant enough--to prevent those influences harming
     the others, whom you have undertaken to guide, and whose lots are
     confided to you? Pause well, and consider maturely, for this must
     not depend upon a generous impulse. I think that your cousin would
     now pass under your charge, with a sincere desire for reform;
     but between sincere desire and steadfast performance there is a
     long and dreary interval--even to the best of us. Were it not for
     Roland, and had I one grain less confidence in you, I could not
     entertain the thought of laying on your young shoulders so great a
     responsibility. But every new responsibility to an earliest nature
     is a new prop to virtue;--and all I now ask of you is--to remember
     that it _is_ a solemn and serious charge, not to be undertaken
     without the most deliberate gauge and measure of the strength with
     which it is to be borne.

     "In two days we shall be in London.--Yours, my Anachronism,
     anxiously and fondly,

  A. C."

I was in my own room while I read this letter, and I had just finished
it when, as I looked up, I saw Roland standing opposite to me. "It is
from Austin," said he; then he paused a moment, and added in a tone
that seemed quite humble, "May I see it?--and dare I?" I placed the
letter in his hands, and retired a few paces, that he might not think I
watched his countenance while he read it. And I was only aware that he
had come to the end by a heavy, anxious, but not despondent sigh. Then
I turned, and our eyes met, and there was something in Roland's look,
inquiring--and as it were imploring. I interpreted it at once.

"Oh, yes, uncle," I said, smiling; "I have reflected, and I have no
fear of the result. Before my father wrote, what he now suggests had
become my secret wish. As for our other companions, their simple
natures would defy all such sophistries as--but he is already half
cured of those. Let him come with me, and when he returns he shall be
worthy of a place in your heart, beside his sister Blanche. I feel, I
promise it--do not fear for me! Such a change will be a talisman to
myself. I will shun every error that I might otherwise commit, so that
he may have no example to entice him to err."

I know that in youth, and the superstition of first love, we are
credulously inclined to believe that love, and the possession of the
beloved, are the only happiness. But when my uncle folded me in his
arms, and called me the hope of his age, and stay of his house--the
music of my father's praise still ringing on my heart--I do affirm that
I knew a greater and a prouder bliss than if Trevanion had placed
Fanny's hand in mine, and said, "She is yours."

And now the die was cast--the decision made. It was with no regret
that I wrote to Trevanion to decline his offers. Nor was the sacrifice
so great--even putting aside the natural pride which had before
inclined to it--as it may seem to some; for, restless though I was,
I had laboured to constrain myself to other views of life than those
which close the vistas of ambition with images of the terrestrial
deities--Power and Rank. Had I not been behind the scenes, noted all
of joy and of peace that the pursuit of power had cost Trevanion, and
seen how little of happiness rank gave even to one of the polished
habits and graceful attributes of Lord Castleton? Yet each nature
seemed fitted so well--the first for power, the last for rank! It is
marvellous with what liberality Providence atones for the partial
dispensations of Fortune. Independence, or the vigorous pursuit of it;
affection, with its hopes and its rewards; a life only rendered by art
more susceptible to nature--in which the physical enjoyments are pure
and healthful--in which the moral faculties expand harmoniously with
the intellectual--and the heart is at peace with the mind: is this a
mean lot for ambition to desire--and is it so far out of human reach?
"Know thyself," said the old philosophy. "Improve thyself," saith
the new. The great object of the Sojourner in Time is not to waste
all his passions and gifts on the things external that he must leave
behind--that which he cultivates within is all that he can carry into
the Eternal Progress. We are here but as schoolboys, whose life begins
where school ends; and the battles we fought with our rivals, and the
toys that we shared with our playmates, and the names that we carved,
high or low, on the wall, above our desks--will they so much bestead us
hereafter? As new facts crowd upon us, can they more than pass through
the memory with a smile or a sigh? Look back to thy school days, and
answer.


CHAPTER XCIV.

Two weeks, since the date of the preceding chapter, have passed; we
have slept our last, for long years to come, on the English soil. It is
night; and Vivian has been admitted to an interview with his father.
They have been together alone an hour and more, and I and my father
will not disturb them. But the clock strikes--the hour is late--the
ship sails to-night--we should be on board. And as we two stand below,
the door opens in the room above, and a heavy step descends the stairs;
the father is leaning on the son's arm. You should see how timidly the
son guides the halting step. And now, as the light gleams on their
faces, there are tears on Vivian's cheek; but the face of Roland seems
calm and happy. Happy! when about to be separated, perhaps for ever,
from his son? Yes, happy! because he has found a son for the first
time; and is not thinking of years and absence, and the chance of
death--but thankful for the Divine mercy, and cherishing celestial
hope. If ye wonder why Roland is happy in such an hour, how vainly have
I sought to make him breathe, and live, and move before you!

       *       *       *       *       *

We are on board; our luggage all went first. I had had time, with the
help of a carpenter, to knock up cabins for Vivian, Guy Bolding, and
myself in the hold. For, thinking we could not too soon lay aside the
pretensions of Europe--"_de_-fine-gentlemanise" ourselves, as Trevanion
recommended--we had engaged steerage passage, to the great humouring of
our finances. We had, too, the luxury to be by ourselves, and our own
Cumberland folks were round us, as our friends and servants both.

We are on board, and have looked our last on those we are to leave,
and we stand on deck leaning on each other. We are on board, and the
lights, near and far, shine from the vast city; and the stars are on
high, bright and clear, as for the first mariners of old. Strange
noises, rough voices, and crackling cords, and here and there the sobs
of women, mingling with the oaths of men. Now the swing and heave of
the vessel--the dreary sense of exile that comes when the ship fairly
moves over the waters. And still we stood, and looked, and listened;
silent, and leaning on each other.

Night deepened, the city vanished--not a gleam from its myriad lights!
The river widened and widened. How cold comes the wind!--is that a
gale from the sea? The stars grow faint--the moon has sunk. And now,
how desolate look the waters in the comfortless gray of dawn! Then we
shivered and looked at each other, and muttered something that was not
the thought deepest at our hearts, and crept into our berths--feeling
sure it was not for sleep. And sleep came on us soft and kind. The
ocean lulled the exiles as on a mother's breast.




JONATHAN IN AFRICA.[6]


A new school of novelists is evidently springing up on the western
shores of the Atlantic. The pioneers are already in the field--and
the main body, we suppose, will shortly follow. The style of these
innovators seems a compound imitation of _Gulliver_, _Munchausen_,
_The Arabian Nights_, and _Robinson Crusoe_; the ingredients being
mixed in capricious proportions, well stirred, seasoned with Yankee
bulls and scraps of sea-slang, and served hot--sometimes plain, at
others with a _hors d'oeuvre_ of puffs. We know not how such queer
ragouts affect the public palate; but we are inclined to prefer dishes
of an older fashion. Mr Herman Melville, of New York and the Pacific
Ocean, common sailor, first introduced the new-fangled kickshaw. This
young gentleman has most completely disappointed us. Two or three
years ago, he published two small volumes of sea-faring adventure and
island-rambles, of which we thought more highly than of any first
appearance of the kind we for a long time had witnessed. In the pages
of Maga, where praise is never lightly or lavishly bestowed, we said as
much; and were glad to hope that Typee and Omoo were but an earnest of
even better things. And, therefore, sadly were we disgusted on perusal
of a rubbishing rhapsody, entitled _Mardi, and a Voyage Thither_.
We sat down to it with glee and self-gratulation, and through about
half a volume we got on pleasantly enough. The author was afloat; and
although we found little that would bear comparison with the fine vein
of nautical fun and characteristic delineation which we had enjoyed
on board the Little Jule, and afterwards at Tahiti, yet there was
interest--strong interest at times; and a scene on board a deserted
vessel was particularly exciting,--replete with power of a peculiar
and uncommon kind. But this proved a mere flash in the pan--the ascent
of the rocket which was soon to fall as a stick. An outlandish young
female, one Miss Yillah, makes her first appearance: Taji, the hero and
narrator of the yarn, reaches a cluster of fabulous islands, where the
jealous queen Hautia opens a floral correspondence with him: where the
plumed and turbaned Yoomy sings indifferent doggerel; and Philosopher
Babbalanja unceasingly doth prose; and the Begum of Pimminee holds
drawing-rooms, which are attended by the Fanfums, and the Diddledees,
and the Fiddlefies, and a host of other insular magnates, with names
equally elegant, euphonious, and significant. Why, what trash is
all this!--mingled, too, with attempts at a Rabelaisian vein, and
with strainings at smartness--the style of the whole being affected,
pedantic, and wearisome exceedingly. We are reminded, by certain parts
of _Mardi_, of Foote's nonsense about the nameless lady who "went into
the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple-pie;" and at whose
wedding the Joblilies, and the Picninnies, and the Great Panjandrum,
danced till the gunpowder ran out at their boot-heels. Foote wrote his
absurd paragraph, we believe, to try a friend's memory; Mr Melville
has evidently written his unintelligible novel to try the public's
patience. Of three things we are certain, namely, that the Panjandrum
story is quite as easy to understand as _Mardi_; that it is much more
diverting; and, the chief advantage of all, an infinite deal shorter.

[6] _Kaloolah, or Journeyinqs to the Djébel Kumri: an Autobiography of
Jonathan Romer._ Edited by W. S. MAYO, M.D. London: 1849.

_Mardi_, which we dismissed from our mind when we closed it with a yawn
a day or two after its publication, has been recalled to our memory
by another book, also proceeding from America, although published in
London; and which, like Mr Melville's romance, blends the real and
the possible with the ideal and the fantastic. _Kaloolah_ (Heaven
help these Yankee nomenclators) professes to be the autobiography of
Jonathan Romer, a young Nantucket sailor, to whose narrative, during
his absence in the interior of Africa, one of his countrymen, Dr W.
S. Mayo, obligingly acts as editor. Most readers will probably be
of opinion that the American M.D. might claim a nearer interest in
the literary bantling--the first-born, we apprehend, of his own pen
and imagination. But our business is with the book, and not with the
author, whose name, whether Romer or Mayo, is as yet unknown to fame,
but who need not despair of achieving reputation. _Kaloolah_ combines
with certain faults, which may presently be indicated, some very
excellent qualities, and has several chapters, whereof any one contains
more real good stuff, and ingenuity, and amusement, than the whole of
the second and third volumes of _Mardi_, reduced to a concentrated
essence. Besides, it is manifest that the two books must be viewed
and judged differently--one as a first, and by no means unpromising
attempt; the other, as the backsliding performance of a man who has
proved himself capable of far better things.

Before commencing his own story, young Jonathan Romer introduces us to
his ancestors, and asserts his right to a life of adventure. "Descended
on both sides of the house from some of the earliest settlers of
Nantucket, and more or less intimately related to the Coffins, the
Folgers, the Macys, and the Starbucks of that adventurous population,
it would seem that I had a natural right to a roving disposition, and
to a life of peril, privation, and vicissitude. Nearly all the male
members of my family, for several generations, have been followers
of the sea: some of them in the calm and peaceful employment of the
merchant-service; others, and by far the greater number, in the more
dangerous pursuit of the ocean monster." After relating some of the
feats of his family, and glancing at his own childhood, which gave
early indications of the bold and restless spirit that animated him at
a mature period, Jonathan presents himself to his readers at the age of
eighteen--a stalwart stripling and idle student; the best rider, shot,
swimmer, and leaper for many miles around, with little taste for books,
and a very decided one for rambling in the woods with rifle and rod. At
this time the academy, of which he had for four years been an inmate,
is nearly broken up by what is called "a revival of religion;" in other
words, a violent fit of fanatical enthusiasm, provoked and fed by
Baptist and Methodist preachers. Pupils and teachers alike go mad with
fervent zeal, classes are at an end, unceasing prayer is substituted
for study, and Jonathan, who ls one of the few unregenerated, walks
into the forest, and knocks the head off a partridge with a rifle-ball.
The bird is picked up, and the excellence of the aim applauded by an
old trapper and hunter, Joe Downs by name, well known along the shores
of the Rackett and Grass rivers, in the northern and uninhabited part
of the state of New York. Joe is not the wild, semi-Indian trapper of
the south and west, whom Sealsfield and Ruxton have so graphically
sketched; there is as much difference between the two characters as
between a sailor in the coasting trade and a Pacific Ocean beachcomber.
There is nothing of the half-horse, half-alligator style about Joe,
whose manner is so mild, and his coat so decent, that he has been taken
for a country parson. He despises the Redskins, sets no value on their
scalps, and would not shed their blood, except in self-defence. How he
had once been thus compelled to do so, he relates to Jonathan in the
course of their first conversation.

     "It was the way towards Tupper's lake. There had been a light
     fall of snow, and I was scouting round, when I happened to make a
     circumbendibus, and came across my own track, and there I saw the
     marks of an Indian's foot right on my trail. Thinks I, that is
     kind of queer; the fellow must have been following me; howsomever
     I'll try him, and make sure; so I made another large circle, and
     again struck my own track, and there was the tarnal Indian's foot
     again. Says I, this won't do; I must find out what this customer
     wants, and how he'll have it. So I stopped short, and soon got
     sight of him; he knew that I saw him, so he came along up, in the
     most friendly manner you can think. But I didn't like his looks;
     he was altogether too darned glad to see me. He had no gun, but he
     had an almighty long-handled tomahawk, and a lot of skins and real
     traps. Thinks I, may be, old fellow, your gun has burst, or you've
     pawned it for rum, and you can't raise skins enough to redeem it,
     and you want mine, and perhaps you'll get it.

     "At last I grew kind of nervous; I knew the fellow would hatchet
     me if I gave him a chance, and yet I didn't want to shoot him
     right down just on suspicion. But I thought, if I let him cut my
     throat first, it would be too late to shoot him afterwards. So I
     concluded that the best way would be to give him a chance to play
     his hand; and if so be he'd lead the wrong card, why I should
     have a right to take the trick. Just then, at the right time, a
     partridge flew into a clump that stood five or six rods off. So I
     kind of 'noeuvred round a little. I drew out my ramrod, as if to
     feel whether the ball in my rifle was well down; but instead of
     returning it again, I kept it in my hand, and, without letting the
     vagabond see me, I got out a handful of powder. I then sauntered
     off to the bush, shot the partridge, and in an instant passed my
     hand over the muzzle of my rifle, and dropped the powder in. I
     picked up the bird, and then just took and run my ramrod right
     down upon the powder. Now, he thought, was his chance before I
     loaded my gun again. He came towards me with his hatchet in his
     hand. I saw that he was determined to act wicked, and began to
     back off; he still came on. I lowered my rifle, and told him to
     keep away. He raised his tomahawk, gave one yell, and bounded
     right at me. When he was just about three or four feet from the
     muzzle, I fired. You never see a fellow jump so. He kicked his
     heels up in the air, and came down plump on his head, dead as
     Julius Cæsar. He never winked; the ramrod--a good, hard, tough
     piece of hickory--had gone clean through him, and stuck out about
     two feet from his back. Served him right; didn't it?"

The old trapper urges Jonathan to accompany him on an expedition into
the woods, promising, as an inducement, to put him "right alongside
the biggest catamount he has ever seen," and to let him fight it
out, with rifle, hatchet, and knife, without making or meddling in
the contest. He also pledges himself to show him a fishpond, "where
the youngest infants, of a genteel pickerelto family, weigh at least
three pounds." Such inducements are irresistible. Jonathan packs up a
brace of blankets and his shooting and fishing fixings, and goes off
in the canoe with Joe Downs on a pleasant up-stream cruise, enlivened
by a succession of beautiful scenery, and by the varied and original
conversation of his companion. On their way they fell in with a party
of Indians, amongst them one Blacksnake, a brother of the gentleman
whom Joe had spitted on his ramrod. He suspects Joe of having shot his
kinsman, and Joe strongly suspects him of having already attempted to
revenge his death.

     "'I was leaning out of the second story doorway of Jones's shop
     one day,' said Joe, 'looking across the river, when, whizz, a
     rifle bullet came and buried itself in the doorpost. I hain't
     the least doubt that that very identical Blacksnake sent it.
     Thank God, his aim was not as his will! He's a bad chap. Why, I
     really believe it was he who murdered my old friend Dan White
     the trapper. If I only knew it was the fact, I wish I may be
     stuck, forked end uppermost, in a coon hole, if I wouldn't send a
     ball through his painted old braincase, this 'ere very identical
     minute. Darn your skin!' energetically growled Joe, shaking his
     fist at the distant canoe."

It would have saved Mr Downs some trouble and suffering if he had
yielded to the impulse, and expended half-an-ounce of lead upon
Blacksnake, who, about a week later, sneaks up, with two companions,
to the trapper's pine-log fire, and shoots the unfortunate Joe, but
is shot down himself, the very next moment, by Jonathan Romer, whose
double-barrel settles two of the murderers, and then descends with
crushing force upon the cranium of the third. Joe not being dead,
although very badly wounded, his young companion conveys him to a cave,
whose hidden entrance the trapper had revealed to him the previous day,
and there tends him till he is able to bear removal. With his committal
to the hands of a village surgeon, Mr Romer's backwoods adventures
terminate, a source of regret to the reader, since they are more lively
and attractive than some subsequent portions of the book, evidently
deemed by the author more interesting and important, and therefore
dwelt upon at greater length. Indeed it is our opinion that the author
of _Kaloolah_ is mistaken, as young authors constantly are, in the real
scope and nature of his own abilities, and that he would shine much
more in a novel of backwoods life, or nautical adventure, than in the
mixed style he has selected for his first attempt, which is a sort of
mosaic, distinguished rather for variety and vividness of colour than
for harmony and regularity of design.

Jonathan reaches home in time to receive the last adieu of his mother,
a worthy but eccentric old lady, who had fitted out her son, on his
departure for school, with a winding-sheet, amongst other necessaries,
that he might be buried decently should he die far from his friends,
and that he might be reminded of his mortality as often as he emptied
his trunk. It was a curious conceit, but, as Jonathan observes, she
was from Nantucket, and they are all queer people there, and filial
affection induced him long to preserve the shroud. Mrs Romer dead, her
son applies to the study of surgery, gets himself into trouble by a
body-snatching exploit, has to levant to New York, and there, finding
he is still in danger from the friends of the disinterred corpse, who
have set the police upon his track, ships himself on board the fine
fore-topsail schooner, "Lively Anne," bound for the Western Islands,
and commanded by Captain Coffin, an old shipmate of his father's.
In this smart little craft, he sees some country and more water,
until, upon the voyage from the Azores to Malaga, a white squall or a
waterspout--which of the two he could never ascertain--capsizes the
schooner and dashes him senseless down the hatchway, whence he was just
emerging, in alarm at the sudden uproar on deck. On recovering himself,
he finds the vessel dismasted, the deck swept of all its fixtures, and
the captain and crew missing. Doubtless they had been hurled into the
waves by the same terrible force that had shattered the bulwarks and
carried away boats, casks, and galley. The horizon was now clear, not a
sail was in sight, and Jonathan Romer was alone on a helpless wreck in
the middle of the wide ocean. But he was a man of resource and mettle,
whom it was hard to discourage or intimidate; and finding the schooner
made no water, he righted her as well as he could, and resigned himself
to float at the will of the wind until he should meet a rescuing
sail. This did not occur for some weeks, during which he floated
past Teneriffe in the night, within hail of fishermen, who would not
approach him for fear of the quarantine laws. At last, sitting over his
solitary dinner, he perceived a ship heading up for the schooner.

     "As she came on, I had full time to note all her beautiful
     proportions. She was small, apparently not above 300 tons,
     and had a peculiarly trim and clipper-like look. Her bright
     copper, flashing occasionally in the sunlight, showed that she
     was in light sailing trim; whilst from the cut of her sails,
     the symmetrical arrangement of her spars and rigging, and her
     quarter-boats, I concluded she must be a man-of-war. Passing me
     about half a mile astern, she stood on for a little distance,
     then, hoisting the bilious-looking flag of Spain, she tacked
     and ran for me, backing her main-topsail within twenty yards of
     my larboard beam. Her quarter-boat was immediately lowered, and
     half-a-dozen fellows, in red caps and flannel shirts, jumped into
     it, followed by an officer in a blue velvet jacket, with a strip
     of gold lace upon his shoulders, and a broad-brimmed straw hat
     upon his head. I ran below, stuffed all the money that I had in
     gold--about a thousand dollars--into my pockets, and got upon
     deck again just as the boat touched the side."

The precaution was a good one: the saucy Bonito, Pedro Garbez master,
was bound from Cuba to the coast of Africa, with a cut-throat crew
and an empty slave-deck. Owing to an accident, she had sailed without
a surgeon, and Romer was well received and treated so soon as his
profession was known. When he discovered the ship's character, he would
gladly have left her, but means were wanting, for the Bonito loved not
intercourse with passing craft, and touched nowhere until she reached
her destination--Cabenda Bay, on the western coast of Africa. There
being no slaves at Cabenda, it was resolved to run a few miles up the
Congo river.

     "We at length reached Loonbee, and anchored off the town, which is
     the chief market or slave-depot for Embomma. It consists of about
     a hundred huts of palm-leaves, with two or three block-houses,
     where the slaves are confined. About two hundred slaves were
     already collected, and more were on their way down the river, and
     from different towns in the interior. After presents for the King
     of Embomma, and for the Mafooka (a sort of chief of the board of
     slave-trade,) and other officials, had been made, and a deal of
     brandy drunk, we landed, and in company with several Fukas, or
     native merchants, and two or three Portuguese, went to take a
     look at the slaves. Each dealer paraded his gang for inspection,
     and loudly dilated upon their respective qualities. They were all
     entirely naked, and of all ages, sexes, and conditions, and all
     had an air of stolid indifference, varied only in some of them by
     an expression of surprise and fear at sight of the white men."

In one of these unfortunate groups of dingy humanity, Romer was struck
by the appearance of a young girl, whose features widely differed
from the usual African stamp, and whose complexion, amongst a white
population, would not have been deemed too dark for a brunette. Her
gracefully curling hair contrasted with the woolly polls of her
companions; her eyes were large and expressive, and her form elegant,
but then emaciated by fatigue and ill-treatment. This is Kaloolah.
On inquiry of the slave-dealer, a great burly negro, wielding a long
thong of plaited buffalo hide, Romer learned that she is of a far
distant nation, called the Gerboo Blanda, who dwell in stone houses on
an extensive plain. The slave-dealer knows them only by report, and
Kaloolah and her brother, who is near at hand, are the first specimens
he has seen of this remote tribe. He had bought her two months' journey
off, and then she had already come a long distance. And now that he had
got them to the coast, he esteems them of small value compared to the
full-blooded blacks; for Kaloolah has pined herself away to a shadow,
and her brother, Enphadde, is bent upon suicide, and cannot be trusted
with unfettered hands; so that for thirty dollars Romer buys them both.
The Bonito having been driven out to sea by the approach of a British
cruiser, he passes some days on shore with his new purchases; during
which time, with a rapidity bordering on the miraculous, he acquires
sufficient of their language, and they of his, to carry on a sort of
piebald conversation, to learn the history of these pale Africans, and
some particulars of their mysterious country.

     "The Gerboo Blanda, I found, was a name given to their country by
     the Jagas, that its true name was Framazugda, and that the people
     were called Framazugs. That it was situated at a great distance
     in the interior, in a direction west by north, and that it was
     surrounded by negro and savage nations, through whom a trade was
     carried on with people at the north-west and east, none of whom,
     however, were ever seen at Framazugda, as the trade had to pass
     through a number of hands. Enphadde represented the country to
     be of considerable extent, consisting mostly of a lofty plateau
     or elevated plain, and exceedingly populous, containing numerous
     large cities, surrounded by high walls, and filled with houses of
     stone. Several large streams and lakes watered the soil, which,
     according to his account, was closely cultivated, and produced
     in abundance the greatest variety of trees, fruits, flowers,
     and grain. Over this country ruled Selha Shounsé, the father of
     Enphadde and Kaloolah, as king. It was in going from the capital
     to one of the royal gardens that their escort was attacked by
     a party of blacks from the lowlands, the attendants killed or
     dispersed, and the young prince and princess carried off."

Thirty dollars could hardly be deemed a heavy price for the son and
daughter of the great Shounsé, and Jonathan was well pleased with his
bargain, although it was not yet clear how he should realise a profit;
but meanwhile it was something to be the proprietor of their royal
highnesses of Framazugda; something too to gaze into Kaloolah's bright
black eyes, and listen to her dulcet tones, as she warbled one of her
country's ditties about the Fultul, a sweet-scented lily flourishing
beside the rivulets of her native mountains. The verses, by the bye,
are not to be commended in Mr Romer's version; they perhaps sounded
better in the original Framazug, and when issuing from the sweet lips
of Kaloolah.

Instead of a week, the Bonito was month absent, having been caught in
a calm. Captain Pedro Garbez promised the Virgin Mary the value of a
young negro in wax-lights for a capful of wind, but in vain; and he was
fain to tear the hair from his head with impatience. Meanwhile Jonathan
had caught a fever in the swamps of Congo, and Kaloolah had made his
chicken-broth, and tended him tenderly, and restored him to health,
although he was still so altered in appearance that Garbez knew him not
when he mounted the side of the slaver. All speed was now made to buy
and ship a cargo. The account of the latter process is interesting,
and, we have no doubt, perfectly authentic; for although the author of
_Kaloolah_ has chosen to interlard, and perhaps deteriorate his book by
strange stories of imaginary countries, animals, flowers, &c., it is
not difficult to distinguish between his fact and his fiction, and to
recognise the internal evidence of veracity and personal observation.
A short extract may here with propriety be made, for the benefit of
anti-slavery philanthropists.

     "The first slaves that came on board were taken below the
     berth-deck, and arranged upon a temporary slave-deck placed over
     the water-casks, and at a distance of not more than three feet and
     a half from the deck overhead.... The slaves were arranged in four
     ranks. When lying down, the heads of the two outer ranks touched
     the sides of the ship, their feet pointing inboard or athwart the
     vessel. They, of course, occupied a space fore and aft the ship,
     of about six feet on either side, or twelve feet of the whole
     breadth. At the feet of the outside rank came the heads of the
     inner row. They took up a space of six feet more on either side,
     or together twelve feet. There was still left a space running up
     and down the centre of the deck, two or three feet in breadth;
     along this were stretched single slaves, between the feet of the
     two inner rows, so that, when all were lying down, almost every
     square foot of the deck was covered with a mass of human flesh.
     Not the slightest space was allowed between the individuals of
     the ranks, but the whole were packed as closely as they could be,
     each slave having just room enough to stretch himself out flat
     upon his back, and no more. In this way about two hundred and
     fifty were crowded upon the slave-deck, and as many more upon the
     berth-deck. Horrible as this may seem, it was nothing compared
     to the 'packing' generally practised by slavers. Captain Garbez
     boasted that he had tried both systems, tight packing and loose
     packing, thoroughly, and found the latter the best.

     "'If you call this loose packing,' I replied, 'have the goodness
     to explain what you mean by tight packing?'

     "'Why, tight packing consists in making a row sit with their legs
     stretched apart, and then another row is placed between their
     legs, and so on, until the whole deck is filled. In the one case
     each slave has as much room as he can cover lying; in the other
     only as much room as he can occupy sitting. With tight packing
     this craft ought to stow fifteen hundred.'"

The Bonito was not above three hundred tons. Such are the blessings for
which the negroes are indebted to the tender-mercied emancipators who
have ruined our West Indian colonies.

     "'When it comes to closing the hatches,' (in the event of a
     gale) said Captain Pedro, 'it is all up with the voyage. You can
     hardly save enough to pay expenses. They die like leeches in a
     thunderstorm. I was once in a little schooner with three hundred
     on board, and we were compelled to lie-to for three days. It was
     the worst sea I ever saw, and came near swamping us several times.
     We lost two hundred and fifty slaves in that gale. We couldn't
     get at the dead ones to throw them overboard very handily, and so
     those that didn't die from want of air were killed by the rolling
     and tumbling about of the corpses. Of the living ones some had
     their limbs broken, and every one had the flesh of his leg worn to
     the bone, by the shackle irons.'

     "'Good God! and you still pursue the horrible trade?'

     "'Certainly; why not? Despite of accidents the trade is
     profitable, and, for the cruelty of it, no one is to blame except
     the English. Were it not for them, large and roomy vessels would
     be employed, and it would be an object to bring the slaves
     over with every comfort, and in as good condition as possible.
     Now, every consideration must be sacrificed to the one great
     object--escape from capture by the British cruisers.'

     "I had no wish to reply to the captain's argument. One might as
     well reply to a defence of blasphemy or murder. Giddy, faint,
     and sick, I turned with loathing from the fiends in human guise,
     and sought the more genial companionship of the inmates of my
     state-room."

These were Kaloolah and Enphadde. To conceal the beauty of the former,
perilous amidst the lawless crew of the slaver, Jonathan had marked
her face with caustic, producing black spots which had the appearance
of disease. This temporary disfigurement secured her from licentious
outrage, but not from harsh treatment. Monte, second captain of
the Bonito, was an ex-pirate, whose vessel had been destroyed by
Yankee cruisers. To spite Romer, whom he detested as an American, he
threatened to send Kaloolah and her brother amongst the slaves, and
took every opportunity of abusing them. Chapter xxi. passes wholly on
board the slaver, and is excellent of its kind. The Bonito is chased
by a man-of-war, but escapes. At daybreak, whilst lying in his berth,
Romer hears a bustle on deck, followed by shrill cries and plunges in
the water. The following is good:--

     "I jumped from my berth and stepped out upon deck. A dense fog
     brooded upon the surface of the ocean, and closely enveloped the
     ship--standing up on either side, like huge perpendicular walls
     of granite, and leaving a comparatively clear space--the area of
     the deck and the height of the main-topmast crosstrees. Inboard,
     the sight ranged nearly free fore-and-aft the ship, but seaward no
     eye could penetrate, more than a yard or two, the solid-looking
     barrier of vapour. A man standing on the taffrail might have seen
     the catheads the whole length of the deck, whilst at the same
     time, behind him, the end of the spanker boom, projecting over
     the water, was lost in the mist. I looked up at the perpendicular
     walls and the lofty arch overhead with feelings of awe, and, I may
     add, fear. Cursed, indeed, must be our craft, when the genius of
     the mist so carefully avoided the pollution of actual contact. His
     rolling legions were close around us, but vapoury horse and misty
     foot shrank back affrighted from the horrors of our blood-stained
     decks."

The phenomenon was doubtless attributable to the hot air generated in
the crowded 'tween-decks. The cries and plashings that had startled
Jonathan were soon explained. Virulent ophthalmia raged on board, and
Monte was drowning the blind, whose value of course departed with their
eyesight. A blind slave was "an encumbrance, an unsaleable article,
a useless expense. Pitch him overboard! Twenty-five to-day, and a
dozen more to-morrow!" But retribution was at hand, threatened, at
least, by a British brig-of-war, which appeared when the fog cleared,
at about a mile and a half to windward. During the chase, Monte,
casually jostled by Kaloolah, struck her to the deck, and a furious
scuffle ensued between him and Jonathan, who at last, seeing some of
the crew approaching, knife in hand, leaped overboard, dragging his
antagonist with him, and followed by Enphadde and Kaloolah. After a
deep dive, during which Monte's tenacious grasp was at last relaxed,
the intrepid Jonathan regained the surface, where he and his friends
and enemy easily supported themselves till picked up by the brig. The
swift slaver escaped. Monte was put in irons, Romer and his Framazugdan
friends were made much of by Captain Halsey and the officers of her
Majesty's brig Flyaway, and landed in the picturesque but pestilent
shores of Sierra Leone. Then Kaloolah and her brother propose to seek
their way homewards, and Jonathan takes ship for Liverpool. Previously
to his departure, there are some love passages between the Yankee and
the Princess of Framazugda. These are not particularly successful.
Sentiment is not Dr Mayo's _forte_: he is much happier in scenes of
bustle and adventure--when urging his weary dromedary across boundless
tracts of sand, or waging deadly combat with the fierce inmates of
African jungles. His book will delight Mr Van Amburgh. There is a duel
between a lion and a boa that we make no doubt of seeing dramatised
at Astley's, as soon as a serpent can be tamed sufficiently for the
performance. That Dr Mayo's lions are of the very first magnitude, the
following description shows:--"His body was hardly less in size than
that of a dray-horse; his paw as large as the foot of an elephant;
while his head!--what can be said of such a head? Concentrate the
fury, the power, the capacity, and the disposition for evil of a dozen
thunderstorms into a round globe about two feet in diameter, and one
would then be able to get an idea of the terrible expression of that
head and face, enveloped and set off as it was by the dark framework
of bristling mane!" This pleasing quadruped, disturbed in its forest
solitude by the advent of Jonathan and the fair Kaloolah, who have
wandered, lover-like, to some distance from their bivouac, at once
prepares to breakfast upon them. Jonathan had imprudently laid down
his gun to pluck wild honeysuckles for his mistress, when the lion,
stepping in, cuts him off from his weapon. Suddenly "the light figure
of Kaloolah rushed past me: 'Fly, fly, Jon'than!' she wildly exclaimed,
as she dashed forward directly towards the lion. Quick as thought, I
divined her purpose, and sprang after her, grasping her dress, and
pulling her forcibly back, almost from within those formidable jaws.
The astonished animal gave several jumps sideways and backwards,
and stopped, crouching to the ground, and growling and lashing his
sides with renewed fury. It was clearly taken aback by our unexpected
charge upon him, but yet was not to be frightened into abandoning his
prey. His mouth was made up for us, and there could be no doubt, if
his motions _were_ a little slow, that he considered us as good as
gorged." Pulling back Kaloolah, and drawing his knife, Romer awaits,
with desperate determination, the monster's terrible onslaught, when
an unexpected ally arrives to the rescue. "It seemed as if one of the
gigantic creepers I have mentioned had suddenly quitted the canopy
above, and, endowed with life and a huge pair of widely distended
jaws, had darted with the rapidity of lightning upon the crouching
beast. There was a tremendous shaking of the treetops, and a confused
wrestling and jumping and whirling over and about, amid a cloud of
upturned roots and earth and leaves, accompanied with the most terrific
roars and groans. As I looked again, vision grew more distinct.
An immense body, gleaming with purple, green, and gold, appeared
convoluted around the majestic branches overhead, and, stretching down,
was turned two or three times around the struggling lion, whose head
and neck were almost concealed from sight within the cavity of a pair
of jaws still more capacious than his own." A full-grown boa, whose
length is estimated by Mr Romer at about a hundred feet, (much less
than many he subsequently saw, but still "a very respectable-sized
snake,") had dropped a few fathoms of coil from the gigantic tree
around which he was twined, and enveloped the lion, who soon was
crushed to death in the scaly embrace. Jonathan makes no doubt that the
serpent was about to swallow his victim whole, according to the custom
of his kind; and it is certainly to be regretted that the entreaties
of Kaloolah, combined with the "strong sickly odour" diffused by the
boa, prevented his remaining to witness a process of deglutition which,
considering the dimensions of the morsel to be swallowed, could not
have been otherwise than curious.

Wrecked a second time, Romer again reaches the coast of Africa, in
company with an old sailor named Jack Thompson. They fall into the
hands of the Bedouins, and suffer much ill treatment, an account of
which, and of various adventures and escapes, occupy many chapters,
and would have borne a little curtailment. Romer is wandering about
with a tribe, upon whom he has passed himself off as an Arab from a
distant region, when he is compelled to join in an attack on a caravan.
Kaloolah is amongst the prisoners. She has been captured by a party of
slave-hunters, and is on her way to Morocco, where her master hopes
her beauty will fetch a good price from the Emperor Muley Abderrahman.
In the partition of the spoil, she falls to the share of an old Arab,
who is ill satisfied with the acquisition. "He was extremely chagrined
at the turn of fortune which threatened to throw into the wrangling
elements of his domestic felicity a feminine superfluity--or, as he
expressed it, 'another tongue in his tent.'

"'Bismillah!' he exclaimed; 'God is great, but this is a small thing!
She is not a man; she is not a black--she cannot work; but won't she
eat and talk! They all eat and talk. I take a club sometimes, and knock
them down; beat them; break their bones; but they still eat and talk!
God's will be done! but it is too much to put such a thing upon me for
my share! She is good for nothing: I cannot sell her.'"

The grumbling old Bedouin did sell her, however, to Jonathan, for
three or four cotton shirts. Flight now becomes necessary, for Hassan,
son of the chief of the tribe, seeks Jonathan's life, and Mrs Ali,
the chief's wife, persecutes him with her misplaced affection, and is
spiteful to Kaloolah, whom she looks upon as the chief obstacle to its
requital. Upon this head our Yankee is rather good: "Respect for th

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/43722