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My Miscellanies, Vol. 1 (of 2)

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Title: My Miscellanies, Vol. 1 (of 2)

Author: Wilkie Collins


        
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Transcriber's Note:

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     MY MISCELLANIES.

     BY WILKIE COLLINS,

     AUTHOR OF 'THE WOMAN IN WHITE,' 'NO NAME,' 'THE DEAD SECRET,'
     &c. &c. &c.


     IN TWO VOLUMES.--VOL. I.


     LONDON:

     SAMPSON LOW, SON, & CO., LUDGATE HILL.

     1863.

     The Author reserves the right of Translation.




     LONDON: PRINTED BY W. CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET,
     AND CHARING CROSS.




     Affectionately Inscribed
     TO
     HENRY BULLAR
     (OF THE WESTERN CIRCUIT).




PREFACE.


The various papers of which the following collection is composed, were
most of them written some years since, and were all originally
published--with many more, which I have not thought it desirable to
reprint--in 'Household Words,' and in the earlier volumes of 'All the
Year Round.' They were fortunate enough to be received with favour by
the reader, at the period of their first appearance, and were thought
worthy in many instances of being largely quoted from in other
journals. After careful selection and revision, they are now collected
in book-form; having been so arranged, in contrast with each other, as
to present specimens of all the shorter compositions which I have
contributed in past years to periodical literature.

My object in writing most of these papers--especially those collected
under the general heads of 'Sketches of Character' and 'Social
Grievances'--was to present what I had observed and what I had
thought, in the lightest and the least pretentious form; to address
the public (if I could) with something of the ease of letter writing,
and something of the familiarity of friendly talk. The literary Pulpit
appeared to me at that time--as it appears to me still--to be rather
overcrowded with the Preachers of Lay Sermons. Views of life and
society to set us thinking penitently in some cases, or doubting
contemptuously in others, were, I thought, quite plentiful enough
already. More freshness and novelty of appeal to the much-lectured and
much-enduring reader, seemed to lie in views which might put us on
easier terms with ourselves and with others; and which might encourage
us to laugh good-humouredly over some of the lighter eccentricities of
character, and some of the more palpable absurdities of
custom--without any unfair perversion of truth, or any needless
descent to the lower regions of vulgarity and caricature. With that
idea, all the lighter contributions to these Miscellanies were
originally written; and with that idea they are now again dismissed
from my desk, to win what approval they may from new readers.

     HARLEY STREET, LONDON.
       September, 1863.




CONTENTS OF VOL. I.


                                                                  PAGE

     Sketches of Character: I.

            Talk-Stoppers                                            1

     Social Grievances: I.

            A Journey in Search of Nothing                          22

     Nooks and Corners of History: I.

            A Queen's Revenge                                       48

     Social Grievances: II.

            A Petition to the Novel-Writers                         72

     Fragments of Personal Experience: I.

            Laid Up in Lodgings                                     90

     Sketches of Character: II.

            A Shockingly Rude Article                              135

     Nooks and Corners of History: II.

            The Great (Forgotten) Invasion                         152

     Curiosities of Literature: I.

            The Unknown Public                                     169

     Social Grievances: III.

            Give us Room!                                          192

     Curiosities of Literature: II.

            Portrait of an Author, Painted by his Publisher        205

     Fragments of Personal Experience: II.

            My Black Mirror                                        250

     Sketches of Character: III.

            Mrs. Badgery                                           274




MY MISCELLANIES.




SKETCHES OF CHARACTER.--I.

TALK-STOPPERS.


We hear a great deal of lamentation now-a-days, proceeding mostly from
elderly people, on the decline of the Art of Conversation among us.
Old ladies and gentlemen with vivid recollections of the charms of
society fifty years ago, are constantly asking each other why the
great talkers of their youthful days have found no successors in this
inferior present time. Where--they inquire mournfully--where are the
illustrious men and women gifted with a capacity for perpetual
outpouring from the tongue, who used to keep enraptured audiences
deluged in a flow of eloquent monologue for hours together? Where are
the solo talkers, in this degenerate age of nothing but choral
conversation?

The solo talkers have vanished. Nothing but the tradition of them
remains, imperfectly preserved in books for the benefit of an
ungrateful posterity, which reviles their surviving contemporaries,
and would perhaps even have reviled the illustrious creatures
themselves as Bores. If they could rise from the dead, and wag their
unresting tongues among us now, would they win their reputations anew,
just as easily as ever? Would they even get listeners? Would they be
actually allowed to talk? I venture to say, decidedly not. They would
surely be interrupted and contradicted; they would have their nearest
neighbours at the dinner-table talking across them; they would find
impatient people opposite, dropping things noisily, and ostentatiously
picking them up; they would hear confidential whispering, and
perpetual fidgeting in distant corners, before they had got through
their first half-dozen of eloquent opening sentences. Nothing appears
to me so wonderful as that none of these interruptions (if we are to
believe report) should ever have occurred in the good old times of the
great talkers. I read long biographies of that large class of
illustrious individuals whose fame is confined to the select circle of
their own acquaintance, and I find that they were to a man, whatever
other differences may have existed between them, all delightful
talkers. I am informed that they held forth entrancingly for hours
together, at all times and seasons, and that I, the gentle, constant,
and patient reader, am one of the most unfortunate and pitiable of
human beings in never having enjoyed the luxury of hearing them: but,
strangely enough, I am never told whether they were occasionally
interrupted or not in the course of their outpourings. I am left to
infer that their friends sat under them just as a congregation sits
under a pulpit; and I ask myself amazedly (remembering what society is
at the present day), whether human nature can have changed altogether
since that time. Either the reports in the biographies are one-sided
and imperfect, or the race of people whom I frequently meet with
now--and whom I venture to call Talk-stoppers, because their business
in life seems to be the obstructing, confusing, and interrupting of
all conversation--must be the peculiar and portentous growth of our
own degenerate era.

Perplexed by this dilemma, when I am reading in long biographies about
great talkers, I do not find myself lamenting, like my seniors, that
they have left no successors in our day, or doubting irreverently,
like my juniors, whether the famous performers of conversational solos
were really as well worth hearing as eulogistic report would fain have
us believe. The one invariable question that I put to myself under
these circumstances runs thus:--Could the great talkers, if they had
lived in my time, have talked at all? And the answer I receive is:--In
the vast majority of cases, certainly not.

Let me not unnecessarily mention names, but let me ask, for example,
if some such famous talker as, say--the Great Glib--could have
discoursed uninterruptedly for five minutes together in the presence
of my friend Colonel Hopkirk?

The colonel goes a great deal into society; he is the kindest and
gentlest of men; but he unconsciously stops, or confuses conversation
everywhere, solely in consequence of his own sociable horror of ever
differing in opinion with anybody. If A. should begin by declaring
black to be black, Colonel Hopkirk would be sure to agree with him,
before he had half done. If B. followed, and declared black to be
white, the colonel would be on his side of the question, before he had
argued it out; and, if C. peaceably endeavoured to calm the dispute
with a truism, and trusted that every one would at least admit that
black and white in combination made grey, my ever-compliant friend
would pat him on the shoulder approvingly, all the while he was
talking; would declare that C.'s conclusion was, after all, the common
sense of the question; and would set A. and B. furiously disputing
which of them he agreed or disagreed with now, and whether on the
great Black, White, and Grey question, Colonel Hopkirk could really be
said to have any opinion at all.

How could the Great Glib hold forth in the company of such a man as
this? Let us suppose that delightful talker, with a few of his
admirers (including, of course, the writer of his biography), and
Colonel Hopkirk, to be all seated at the same table; and let us say
that one of the admirers is anxious to get the mellifluous Glib to
discourse on capital punishment for the benefit of the company. The
admirer begins, of course, on the approved method of stating the
objections to capital punishment, and starts the subject in this
manner.

"I was dining out, the other day, Mr. Glib, where capital punishment
turned up as a topic of conversation----"

"Ah!" says Colonel Hopkirk, "a dreadful necessity--yes, yes, yes, I
see--a dreadful necessity--Eh?"

"And the arguments for its abolition," continues the admirer, without
noticing the interruption, "were really handled with great dexterity
by one of the gentlemen present, who started, of course, with the
assertion that it is unlawful, under any circumstances, to take away
life----"

"Unlawful, of course!" cries the colonel. "Very well put. Yes,
yes--unlawful--to be sure--so it is--unlawful, as you say."

"Unlawful, sir?" begins the Great Glib, severely. "Have I lived to
this time of day, to hear that it is unlawful to protect the lives of
the community, by the only certain means----?"

"No, no--O dear me, no!" says the compliant Hopkirk, with the most
unblushing readiness. "Protect their lives, of course--as you say,
protect their lives by the only certain means--yes, yes, I quite agree
with you."

"Allow me, colonel," says another admirer, anxious to assist in
starting the great talker, "allow me to remind our friend, before he
takes this question in hand, that it is an argument of the
abolitionists that perpetual imprisonment would answer the purpose of
protecting society----"

The colonel is so delighted with this last argument that he bounds on
his chair, and rubs his hands in triumph. "My dear sir!" he cries,
before the last speaker can say another word, "you have hit it--you
have indeed! Perpetual imprisonment--that's the thing--ah, yes, yes,
yes, to be sure--perpetual imprisonment--the very thing, my dear
sir--the very thing!"

"Excuse me," says a third admirer, "but I think Mr. Glib was about to
speak. You were saying, sir----?"

"The whole question of capital punishment," begins the delightful
talker, leaning back luxuriously in his chair, "lies in a nutshell."
("Very true," from the colonel.) "I murder one of you--say Hopkirk
here." ("Ha! ha! ha!" loudly from the colonel, who thinks himself
bound to laugh at a joke when he is only wanted to listen to an
illustration.) "I murder Hopkirk. What is the first object of all the
rest of you, who represent the community at large?" ("To have you
hanged," from the colonel. "Ah, yes, to be sure! to have you hanged.
Quite right! quite right!") "Is it to make me a reformed character, to
teach me a trade, to wash my blood-stains off me delicately, and set
me up again in society, looking as clean as the best of you? No!"
("No!" from the compliant colonel.) "Your object is clearly to prevent
me from murdering any more of you. And how are you to do that most
completely and certainly? Can you accomplish your object by perpetual
imprisonment?" ("Ah! I thought we should all agree about it at last,"
cries the colonel cheerfully. "Yes, yes--nothing else for it but
perpetual imprisonment, as you say.") "By perpetual imprisonment? But
men have broken out of prison." ("So they have," from the colonel.)
"Men have killed their gaolers; and there you have the commission of
that very second murder that you wanted to prevent." ("Quite right,"
from the compliant Talk-Stopper. "A second murder--dreadful!
dreadful!") "Imprisonment is not your certain protective remedy, then,
evidently. What is?"

"Hanging!!!" cries the colonel, with another bound in his chair, and a
voice that can no longer be talked down. "Hanging, to be sure! I quite
agree with you. Just what I said from the first. You have hit it, my
dear sir. Hanging, as you say--hanging, by all manner of means!"

Has anybody ever met Colonel Hopkirk in society? And does anybody
think that the Great Glib could possibly have held forth in the
company of that persistently-compliant gentleman, as he is alleged, by
his admiring biographer, to have held forth in the peculiar society of
his own time? The thing is clearly impossible. Let us leave Glib,
congratulating him on having died when the Hopkirks of these latter
days were as yet hardly weaned; let us leave him, and ascertain how
some other great talker might have got on in the society of some other
modern obstructor of the flow of eloquent conversation.

I have just been reading the Life, Letters, Labours, Opinions, and
Table-Talk of the matchless Mr. Oily; edited--as to the Life, by his
mother-in-law; as to the Letters, by his grand-daughter's husband; and
as to the Labours, Opinions, and Table-Talk, by three of his intimate
friends, who dined with him every other Sunday throughout the whole of
his long and distinguished life. It is a very pretty book in a great
many volumes, with pleasing anecdotes--not only of the eminent man
himself, but of all his family connections as well. His shortest notes
are preserved, and the shortest notes of others to him. "My dear O.,
how is your poor head? Yours, P." "My dear P., hotter than ever.
Yours, O." And so on. Portraits of Oily, in infancy, childhood,
youth, manhood, old age active, and old age infirm, concluding with a
post-mortem mask, abound in the book--so do fac-similes of his
handwriting, showing the curious modifications which it underwent when
he occasionally exchanged a quill for a steel-pen. But it will be more
to my present purpose to announce for the benefit of unfortunate
people who have not yet read the Memoirs, that Oily was, as a matter
of course, a delightful and incessant talker. He poured out words, and
his audience imbibed the same perpetually three times a week from
tea-time to past midnight. Women especially revelled in his
conversation. They hung, so to speak, palpitating on his lips. All
this is told me in the Memoirs at great length, and in several places;
but not a word occurs anywhere tending to show that Oily ever met with
the slightest interruption on any one of the thousand occasions when
he held forth. In relation to him, as in relation to the Great Glib, I
seem bound to infer that he was never staggered by an unexpected
question, never affronted by a black sheep among the flock, in the
shape of an inattentive listener, never silenced by some careless man
capable of unconsciously cutting him short and starting another topic
before he had half done with his own particular subject. I am bound to
believe all this--and yet, when I look about me at society as it is
constituted now, I could fill a room, at a day's notice, with people
who would shut up the mouth of Oily before it had been open five
minutes, quite as a matter of course, and without the remotest
suspicion that they were misbehaving themselves in the slightest
degree. What (I ask myself), to take only one example, and that from
the fair sex--what would have become of Oily's delightful and
incessant talk, if he had known my friend Mrs. Marblemug, and had
taken her down to dinner in his enviable capacity of distinguished
man?

Mrs. Marblemug has one subject of conversation--her own vices. On all
other topics she is sarcastically indifferent and scornfully mute.
General conversation she consequently never indulges in; but the
person who sits next to her is sure to be interrupted as soon as he
attracts her attention by talking to her, by receiving a confession of
her vices--not made repentantly, or confusedly, or jocularly--but
slowly declaimed with an ostentatious cynicism, with a hard eye, a
hard voice, a hard--no, an adamantine--manner. In early youth, Mrs.
Marblemug discovered that her business in life was to be eccentric and
disagreeable, and she is one of the women of England who fulfils her
mission.

I fancy I see the ever-flowing Oily sitting next to this lady at
dinner, and innocently trying to make her hang on his lips like the
rest of his tea-table harem. His conversation is reported by his
affectionate biographers, as having been for the most part of the
sweetly pastoral sort. I find that he drove that much-enduring
subject, Nature, in his conversational car of triumph, longer and
harder than most men. I see him, in my mind's eye, starting in his
insinuating way from some parsley garnish round a dish of
lobsters--confessing, in his rich, full, and yet low voice (vide
Memoirs) that garnish delights him, because his favourite colour is
green--and so getting easily on to the fields, the great subject from
which he always got his largest conversational crop. I imagine his
tongue to be, as it were, cutting its first preliminary capers on the
grass for the benefit of Mrs. Marblemug; and I hear that calmly-brazen
lady throw him flat on his back by the utterance of some such words as
these:

"Mr. Oily, I ought to have told you, perhaps, that I hate the fields:
I think Nature in general something eminently disagreeable--the
country, in short, quite odious. If you ask me why, I can't tell you.
I know I'm wrong; but hating Nature is one of my vices."

Mr. Oily eloquently remonstrates. Mrs. Marblemug only says, "Yes, very
likely--but, you see, it's one of my vices." Mr. Oily tries a
dexterous compliment. Mrs. Marblemug only answers, "Don't!--I see
through that. It's wrong in me to see through compliments, being a
woman, I know. But I can't help seeing through them, and saying I do.
That's another of my vices." Mr. Oily shifts the subject to
Literature, and thence, gently but surely, to his own books--his
second great topic after the fields. Mrs. Marblemug lets him go on,
because she has something to finish on her plate--then lays down her
knife and fork--looks at him with a kind of wondering indifference,
and breaks into his next sentence thus:--

"I'm afraid I don't seem quite so much interested as I know I ought to
be," she says; "but I should have told you, perhaps, when we first sat
down, that I have given up reading."

"Given up reading!" exclaims Mr. Oily, thunderstruck by the monstrous
confession. "You mean only the trash that has come into vogue lately;
the morbid, unhealthy----"

"No, not at all," rejoins Mrs. Marblemug. "If I read anything, it
would be morbid literature. My taste is unhealthy. That's another of
my vices."

"My dear madam, you amaze--you alarm me,--you do indeed!" cries Mr.
Oily, waving his hand in graceful deprecation and polite horror.

"Don't," says Mrs. Marblemug; "you'll knock down some of the
wine-glasses, and hurt yourself. You had better keep your hand
quiet,--you had, indeed. No; I have given up reading, because all
books do me harm--the best--the healthiest. Your books even, I
suppose, I ought to say; but I can't, because I see through
compliments, and despise my own, of course, as much as other people's!
Suppose, we say, I don't read, because books do me harm--and leave it
there. The thing is not worth pursuing. You think it is? Well, then,
books do me harm, because they increase my tendency to be envious (one
of my worst vices). The better the book is, the more I hate the man
for being clever enough to write it--so much cleverer than me, you
know, who couldn't write it at all. I believe you call that Envy.
Whatever it is, it has been one of my vices from a child. No, no
wine--a little water. I think wine nasty, that's another of my
vices--or, no, perhaps, that is only one of my misfortunes. Thank you.
I wish I could talk to you about books; but I really can't read
them--they make me so envious."

Perhaps Oily (who, as I infer from certain passages in his Memoirs,
could be a sufficiently dogged and resolute man on occasions when his
dignity was in danger) still valiantly declines to submit and be
silent, and, shifting his ground, endeavours to draw Mrs. Marblemug
out by asking her questions. The new effort, however, avails him
nothing. Do what he will, he is always met and worsted by the lady in
the same, quiet, easy, indifferent way; and, sooner or later, even his
distinguished mouth is muzzled by Mrs. Marblemug, like the mouths of
all the degenerate talkers of my own time whom I have ever seen in
contact with her. Are Mr. Oily's biographers not to be depended on, or
can it really be the fact that, in the course of all his long
conversational career, that illustrious man never once met with a
check in the shape of a Mrs. Marblemug? I have no tender prepossession
in favour of the lady; but when I reflect on the character of Mr.
Oily, as exhibited in his Memoirs, I am almost inclined to regret that
he and Mrs. Marblemug never met. In relation to some people, I
involuntarily regard her as a dose of strong moral physic; and I
really think she might have done my distinguished countryman some
permanent good.

To take another instance, there is the case of the once-brilliant
social luminary, Mr. Endless--extinguished, unfortunately for the new
generation, about the time when we were most of us only little boys
and girls.

What a talker this sparkling creature must have been, if one may judge
by that racy anonymous publication (racy was, I think, the word
chiefly used in reviewing the book by the critics of the period),
Evenings with Endless, by A Constant Listener! "I could hardly
believe," I remember the Listener writes, "that the world was the same
after Endless had flashed out of this mortal scene. It was morning
while he lived--it was twilight, or worse, when he died. I was very
intimate with him. Often has the hand that writes these trembling
lines smacked that familiar back--often have those thrilling and
matchless accents syllabled the fond diminutive of my Christian name.
It was not so much that his talk was ceaseless (though that is
something), as that it moved incessantly over all topics from heaven
to earth. His variety of subject was the most amazing part of this
amazing man. His fertility of allusion to topics of the past and
present alike, was truly inexhaustible. He hopped, he skipped, he
fluttered, he swooped from theme to theme. The butterfly in the
garden, the bee in the flower-bed, the changes of the kaleidoscope,
the sun and shower of an April morning, are but faint emblems of him."
With much more to the same eloquent purpose; but not a word from the
first page to the last to hint even that Endless was ever brought to a
full stop, on any single occasion, by any one of the hundreds of
enchanted listeners before whom he figured in his wonderful
performances with the tongue from morning to night.

And yet, there must surely have been Talk-Stoppers in the world, in
the time of the brilliant Endless--talk-stoppers, in all probability,
possessing characteristics similar to those now displayed in society
by my exasperating connection by marriage, Mr. Spoke Wheeler.

It is impossible to say what the consequences might have been if my
relative and Mr. Endless had ever come together. Mr. Spoke Wheeler is
one of those men--a large class, as it appears to me--who _will_ talk,
and who have nothing whatever in the way of a subject of their own to
talk about. His constant practice is to lie silently in ambush for
subjects started by other people; to take them forthwith from their
rightful owners; turn them coolly to his own uses; and then cunningly
wait again for the next topic, belonging to somebody else, that passes
within his reach. It is useless to give up, and leave him to take the
lead--he invariably gives up, too, and declines the honour. It is
useless to start once more, seeing him apparently silenced--he becomes
talkative again the moment you offer him the chance of seizing on your
new subject--disposes of it without the slightest fancy, taste, or
novelty of handling, in a moment--then relapses into utter
speechlessness as soon as he has silenced the rest of the company by
taking their topic away from them. Wherever he goes, he commits this
social atrocity with the most perfect innocence and the most provoking
good humour, for he firmly believes in himself as one of the most
entertaining men who ever crossed a drawing-room or caroused at a
dinner-table.

Imagine Mr. Spoke Wheeler getting an invitation to one of those
brilliant suppers which assisted in making the evenings of the
sparkling Endless so attractive to his friends and admirers. See him
sitting modestly at the table with every appearance in his face and
manner of being the most persistent and reliable of listeners. Endless
takes the measure of his man, as he too confidently believes, in one
bright glance--thinks to himself, Here is a new worshipper to
astonish; here is the conveniently dense and taciturn human pedestal
on which I can stand to let off my fireworks--plunges his knife and
fork, gaily hospitable, into the dish before him (let us say a turkey
and truffles, for Endless is a gastronome as well as a wit), and
starts off with one of those "fertile allusions," for which he was so
famous.

"I never carve turkey without thinking of what Madame de Pompadour
said to Louis the Fifteenth," Endless begins in his most off-hand
manner. "I refer to the time when the superb Frenchwoman first came to
court, and the star of the fair Chateauroux waned before her. Who
remembers what the Pompadour said when the king insisted on carving
the turkey?"

Before the company can beg Endless, as usual, to remember for them,
Mr. Spoke Wheeler starts into life and seizes the subject.

"What a vicious state of society it was in the time of Madame de
Pompadour!" he says, with moral severity. "Who can wonder that it led
to the French Revolution?"

Endless feels that his first effort for the evening is nipped in the
bud, and that the new guest is not to be depended on as a listener.
He, however, waits politely, and every one else waits politely to hear
something more about the French Revolution. Mr. Spoke Wheeler has not
another word to say. He has snatched his subject--has exhausted
it--and is now waiting, with an expectant smile on his face, to lay
hands on another. Disastrous silence reigns, until Mr. Endless, as
host and wit, launches a new topic in despair.

"Don't forget the salad, gentlemen," he exclaims. "The emblem, as I
always fancy, of human life. The sharp vinegar corrected by the soft
oil, just as the misfortune of one day is compensated by the luck of
another. Heigho! let moralists lecture as they will, what a true
gambler's existence ours is, by the very nature of it! Love, fame,
wealth, are the stakes we all play for; the world is the table; Death
keeps the house, and Destiny shuffles the cards. According to my
definition, gentlemen, man is a gambling animal, and woman----"
Endless pauses for a moment, and lifts the glass to his lips to give
himself a bacchanalian air before he amazes the company with a torrent
of eloquence on the subject of woman. Unhappy man! in that one moment
Mr. Spoke Wheeler seizes on his host's brilliant gambling metaphor,
and runs away with it as his own property immediately.

"The worst of gambling," he says, with a look of ominous wisdom, "is,
that when once a man takes to it, he can never be got to give it up
again. It always ends in ruin. I know a man whose son is in the Fleet,
and whose daughter is a maid-of-all-work at a lodging-house. The poor
devil himself once had twenty thousand pounds, and he now picks up a
living by writing begging-letters. All through gambling. Degrading
vice, certainly; ruins a man's temper and health, too, as well as his
property. Ah! a very degrading vice--very much so indeed!"

"I am afraid, my dear sir, you have no vices," says Endless, getting
angry and sarcastic as a fresh pause follows this undeniable
commonplace. "The bottle stands with you. Do you abjure even that most
amiable of human failings--the cheerful glass? Ha!" exclaims Endless,
seeing that his guest is going to speak again, and vainly imagining
that he can cut him short this time. "Ha! what a debt we owe to the
first man who discovered the true use of the grape! How drunk he must
have got in making his immortal preliminary experiments! How often his
wife must have begged him to consider his health and his
respectability, and give up all further investigations! How he must
have shocked his family with perpetual hiccups, and puzzled the
medical men of the period with incurable morning headaches! To the
health of that marvellous, that magnificent, that inestimable human
being, the first Toper in the world! The patriarchal Bacchus quaffing
in his antediluvian vineyard! What a picture, gentlemen; what a
subject for our artists! Scumble, my dear friend," continues Endless,
breathlessly, feeling that Mr. Spoke Wheeler has got his topic again,
and anxious to secure assistance in preventing that persistent
gentleman from making any use of the stolen property--"Scumble, your
pencil alone is worthy of the subject. Tell us, my prince of painters,
how would you treat it?"

The prince of painters has his mouth full of turkey, and looks more
puzzled than flattered by this complimentary appeal. He hesitates, and
Mr. Spoke Wheeler darts into the conversation on the subject of
drunkenness, forthwith.

"I'll tell you what," says the Talk-Stopper, "we may all joke about
drunkenness as much as we please--I'm no saint, and I like a joke as
well as anybody--but it's a deuced serious thing for all that.
Seven-tenths of the crime in this country is owing to drunkenness; and
of all the incurable diseases that baffle the doctors, delirium
tremens is (next to hydrophobia) one of the worst. I like a cheerful
glass myself--and this is uncommonly good wine we are drinking
now--but there's more than you think for to be said on the temperance
side of the question; there is, indeed!"

Will even the most indiscriminate of the surviving admirers of
Endless, and of the great talkers generally, venture to assert that
he, or they, could have shown off with the slightest approach to
success in the company of Mr. Spoke Wheeler, or of Mrs. Marblemug, or
of Colonel Hopkirk, or of any of the other dozens on dozens of
notorious talk-stoppers whose characters I refrain from troubling the
reader with? Surely not! Surely I have quoted examples enough to prove
the correctness of my theory, that the days when the eminent professors
of the Art of Conversation could be sure of perpetually-attentive
audiences, have gone by. Instead of mourning over the loss of the
great talkers, we ought to feel relieved (if we have any real regard
for them, which I sometimes doubt) by their timely departure from the
scene. Between the members of the modern generation who would not have
listened to them, the members who could not have listened to them, and
the members who would have confused, interrupted, and cut them short,
what extremities of compulsory silence they must have undergone if
they had lasted until our time! Our case may be lamentable enough in
not having heard them; but how much worse would theirs be if they came
back to the world now, and tried to show us how they won their
reputations!




SOCIAL GRIEVANCES.--I.

A JOURNEY IN SEARCH OF NOTHING.

[Communicated by An Anonymous Traveller.]


NOTE THE FIRST. TRYING FOR QUIET.

"Yes," said the doctor, pressing the tips of his fingers with a
tremulous firmness on my pulse, and looking straight forward into the
pupils of my eyes, "yes, I see: the symptoms all point unmistakably
towards one conclusion--Brain. My dear sir, you have been working too
hard; you have been following the dangerous example of the rest of the
world in this age of business and bustle. Your brain is
over-taxed--that is your complaint. You must let it rest--there is
your remedy."

"You mean," I said, "that I must keep quiet, and do Nothing?"

"Precisely so," replied the doctor. "You must not read or write; you
must abstain from allowing yourself to be excited by society; you must
have no annoyances; you must feel no anxieties; you must not think;
you must be neither elated nor depressed; you must keep early hours
and take an occasional tonic, with moderate exercise, and a nourishing
but not too full a diet--above all, as perfect repose is essential to
your restoration, you must go away into the country, taking any
direction you please, and living just as you like, so long as you are
quiet and so long as you do Nothing."

"I presume he is not to go away into the country without ME?" said my
wife, who was present at the interview.

"Certainly not," rejoined the doctor with an acquiescent bow. "I look
to your influence, my dear madam, to encourage our patient to follow
my directions. It is unnecessary to repeat them, they are so extremely
simple and easy to carry out. I will answer for your husband's
recovery if he will but remember that he has now only two objects in
life--to keep quiet, and to do Nothing."

My wife is a woman of business habits. As soon as the doctor had taken
his leave, she produced her pocket-book, and made a brief abstract of
his directions, for our future guidance. I looked over her shoulder
and observed that the entry ran thus:--

"Rules for dear William's restoration to health. No reading; no
writing; no excitement; no annoyance; no anxiety; no thinking. Tonic.
No elation of spirits. Nice dinners. No depression of spirits. Dear
William to take little walks (with me). To go to bed early. To get up
early. N.B.--Keep him quiet. Mem.: Mind he does Nothing."

Mind I do Nothing? No need to mind about that. I have not had a
holiday since I was a boy. Oh, blessed Idleness, after the years of
merciless industry that have separated us, are you and I to be brought
together again at last? Oh, my weary right hand, are you really to
ache no longer with driving the ceaseless pen? May I, indeed, put you
in my pocket, and let you rest there, indolently, for hours together?
Yes! for I am now at last to begin--doing Nothing. Delightful task
that performs itself! Welcome responsibility that carries its weight
away smoothly on its own shoulders!

These thoughts shine in pleasantly on my mind after the doctor has
taken his departure, and diffuse an easy gaiety over my spirits when
my wife and I set forth, the next day, for the country. We are not
going the round of the noisy watering-places, nor is it our intention
to accept any invitations to join the circles assembled by festive
country friends. My wife, guided solely by the abstract of the
doctor's directions in her pocket-book, has decided that the only way
to keep me absolutely quiet, and to make sure of my doing Nothing, is
to take me to some pretty retired village and to put me up at a
little primitive, unsophisticated country-inn. I offer no objection
to this project--not because I have no will of my own and am not
master of all my movements--but only because I happen to agree with my
wife. Considering what a very independent man I am naturally, it has
sometimes struck me, as a rather remarkable circumstance, that I
always do agree with her.

We find the pretty, retired village. A charming place, full of
thatched cottages with creepers at the doors, like the first easy
lessons in drawing-masters' copy-books. We find the unsophisticated
inn--just the sort of house that the novelists are so fond of writing
about, with the snowy curtains and the sheets perfumed by lavender,
and the matronly landlady and the amusing signpost. This Elysium is
called the Nag's Head. Can the Nag's Head accommodate us? Yes, with a
delightful bedroom and a sweet parlour. My wife takes off her bonnet
and makes herself at home, directly. She nods her head at me with a
look of triumph. Yes, dear, on this occasion also I quite agree with
you. Here we have found perfect quiet; here we may make sure of obeying
the doctor's orders; here we have, at last, discovered--Nothing.

Nothing! Did I say Nothing? We arrive at the Nag's Head late in the
evening, have our tea, go to bed tired with our journey, sleep
delightfully till about three o'clock in the morning, and, at that
hour, begin to discover that there are actually noises even in this
remote country seclusion. They keep fowls at the Nag's Head; and, at
three o'clock, the cock begins to crow and the hens to cluck under our
window. Pastoral, my dear, and suggestive of eggs for breakfast whose
reputation is above suspicion; but I wish these cheerful fowls did not
wake quite so early. Are there, likewise, dogs, love, at the Nag's
Head, and are they trying to bark down the crowing and clucking of the
cheerful fowls? I should wish to guard myself against the possibility
of making a mistake, but I think I hear three dogs. A shrill dog who
barks rapidly; a melancholy dog who howls monotonously; and a hoarse
dog who emits barks at intervals like minute guns. Is this going on
long? Apparently it is. My dear, if you will refer to your
pocket-book, I think you will find that the doctor recommended early
hours. We will not be fretful and complain of having our morning sleep
disturbed; we will be contented, and will only say that it is time to
get up.

Breakfast. Delicious meal, let us linger over it as long as we
can,--let us linger, if possible, till the drowsy midday tranquillity
begins to sink over this secluded village.

Strange! but now I think of it again, do I, or do I not, hear an
incessant hammering over the way? No manufacture is carried on in
this peaceful place, no new houses are being built; and yet there is
such a hammering that, if I shut my eyes, I can almost fancy myself in
the neighbourhood of a dock-yard. Waggons, too. Why does a waggon
which makes so little noise in London, make so much noise here? Is the
dust on the road detonating powder, that goes off with a report at
every turn of the heavy wheels? Does the waggoner crack his whip or
fire a pistol to encourage his horses? Children, next. Only five of
them, and they have not been able to settle for the last half hour
what game they shall play at. On two points alone do they appear to be
unanimous--they are all agreed on making a noise and on stopping to
make it under our window. I think I am in some danger of forgetting
one of the doctor's directions: I rather fancy I am actually allowing
myself to be annoyed.

Let us take a turn in the garden, at the back of the house. Dogs
again. The yard is on one side of the garden. Every time our walk
takes us near it, the shrill dog barks and the hoarse dog growls. The
doctor tells me to have no anxieties. I am suffering devouring
anxieties. These dogs may break loose and fly at us, for anything I
know to the contrary, at a moment's notice. What shall I do? Give
myself a drop of tonic? or escape for a few hours from the perpetual
noises of this retired spot by taking a drive? My wife says, take a
drive. I think I have already mentioned that I invariably agree with
my wife.

The drive is successful in procuring us a little quiet. My directions
to the coachman are to take us where he pleases, so long as he keeps
away from secluded villages. We suffer much jolting in by-lanes, and
encounter a great variety of bad smells. But a bad smell is a
noiseless nuisance, and I am ready to put up with it patiently.
Towards dinner-time we return to our inn. Meat, vegetables, pudding,
all excellent, clean and perfectly cooked. As good a dinner as I wish
ever to eat;--shall I get a little nap after it? The fowls, the dogs,
the hammer, the children, the waggons, are quiet at last. Is there
anything else left to make a noise? Yes: there is the working
population of the place.

It is getting on towards evening, and the sons of labour are
assembling on the benches placed outside the inn to drink. What a
delightful scene they would make of this homely every-day event on the
stage! How the simple creatures would clink their tin mugs, and drink
each other's healths, and laugh joyously in chorus! How the peasant
maidens would come tripping on the scene and lure the men tenderly to
the dance! Where are the pipe and tabour that I have seen in so many
pictures; where the simple songs that I have read about in so many
poems? What do I hear as I listen, prone on the sofa, to the evening
gathering of the rustic throng? Oaths,--nothing, on my word of honour,
but oaths! I look out, and see gangs of cadaverous savages, drinking
gloomily from brown mugs, and swearing at each other every time they
open their lips. Never in any large town, at home or abroad, have I
been exposed to such an incessant fire of unprintable words as now
assail my ears in this primitive village. No man can drink to another
without swearing at him first. No man can ask a question without
adding a mark of interrogation at the end in the shape of an oath.
Whether they quarrel (which they do for the most part), or whether
they agree; whether they talk of their troubles in this place or their
good luck in that; whether they are telling a story, or proposing a
toast, or giving an order, or finding fault with the beer, these men
seem to be positively incapable of speaking without an allowance of at
least five foul words for every one fair word that issues from their
lips. English is reduced in their mouths to a brief vocabulary of all
the vilest expressions in the language. This is an age of
civilization; this is a Christian country; opposite me I see a
building with a spire, which is called, I believe, a church; past my
window, not an hour since, there rattled a neat pony chaise with a
gentleman inside, clad in glossy black broad cloth, and popularly
known by the style and title of clergyman. And yet, under all these
good influences, here sit twenty or thirty men whose ordinary
table-talk is so outrageously beastly and blasphemous, that not one
single sentence of it, though it lasted the whole evening, could be
printed, as a specimen, for public inspection in these pages. When the
intelligent foreigner comes to England, and when I tell him (as I am
sure to do) that we are the most moral people in the universe, I will
take good care that he does not set his foot in a secluded British
village when the rural population is reposing over its mug of
small-beer after the labours of the day.

I am not a squeamish person, neither is my wife, but the social
intercourse of the villagers drives us out of our room, and sends us
to take refuge at the back of the house. Do we gain anything by the
change? Nothing whatever.

The back parlour, to which we have now retreated, looks out on a
bowling-green; and there are more benches, more mugs of beer, more
foul-mouthed villagers on the bowling-green. Immediately under our
window is a bench and table for two, and on it are seated a drunken
old man and a drunken old woman. The aged sot in trousers is offering
marriage to the aged sot in petticoats, with frightful oaths of
endearment. Never before did I imagine that swearing could be twisted
to the purposes of courtship. Never before did I suppose that a man
could make an offer of his hand by bellowing imprecations on his eyes,
or that all the powers of the infernal regions could be appropriately
summoned to bear witness to the beating of a lover's heart under the
influence of the tender passion. I know it now, and I derive so little
satisfaction from gaining the knowledge of it, that I determine on
having the two intolerable old drunkards removed from the window, and
sent to continue their cursing courtship elsewhere. The ostler is
lounging about the bowling-green, scratching his bare brawny arms and
yawning grimly in the mellow evening sunlight. I beckon to him, and
ask him if he does not think those two old people have had beer
enough? Yes, the ostler thinks they have. I inquire next if they can
be removed from the premises, before their language gets worse,
without the risk of making any great disturbance. The ostler says,
Yes, they can, and calls to the potboy. When the potboy comes, he
says, "Now then, Jack!" and snatches the table away from the two
ribald old people without another word. The old man's pipe is on the
table; he rises and staggers forward to possess himself of it; the old
woman rises, too, to hold him by the arm for fear he should fall flat
on his face. The moment they are off the bench, the potboy snatches
their seat away from behind them, and quietly joins the ostler who is
carrying their table into the inn. None of the other drinkers laugh at
this proceeding, or pay any attention to it; and the two intoxicated
old people, left helpless on their legs, stagger away feebly without
attracting the slightest notice. The neat stratagem which the ostler
and the potboy have just performed, is evidently the customary and
only possible mode of letting drinkers know when they have had enough
at the Nag's Head. Where did those savage islanders live whose manners
a certain sea-captain once upon a time described as no manners at all,
and some of whose customs he reprobated as being very nasty? If I did
not know that we are many miles distant from the coast, I should be
almost disposed to suspect that the seafaring traveller whose opinion
I have just quoted had been touching at the Nag's Head.

As it is impossible to snatch away all the tables and all the benches
of all the company drinking and swearing in front of the house and
behind it, I inquire of the ostler, the next time he comes near the
window, at what time the tap closes? He tells me at eleven o'clock. It
is hardly necessary to say that we put off going to bed until that
time, when we retire for the night, drenched from head to foot, if I
may so speak, in floods of bad language.

I cautiously put my head out of window, and see that the lights of the
tap-room are really extinguished at the appointed time. I hear the
drinkers oozing out grossly into the pure freshness of the summer
night. They all growl together; they all go together. All? Sinner and
sufferer that I am, I have been premature in arriving at that happy
conclusion! Six choice spirits, with a social horror in their souls of
going home to bed, prop themselves against the wall of the inn, and
continue the evening's conversazione in the darkness. I hear them
cursing at each other by name. We have Tom, Dick, and Sam, Jem, Bill,
and Bob to enliven us under our window, after we are in bed. They
begin improving each other's minds, as a matter of course, by
quarrelling. Music follows and soothes the strife, in the shape of a
local duet, sung by voices of vast compass, which soar in one note
from howling bass to cracked treble. Yawning follows the duet; long,
loud, weary yawning of all the company in chorus. This amusement over,
Tom asks Dick for "baccer," and Dick denies that he has got any, and
Tom tells him he lies, and Sam strikes in and says, "No, he doan't,"
and Jem tells Sam he lies, and Bill tells him that if he was Sam he
would punch Jem's head, and Bob, apparently snuffing the battle from
afar off and not liking the scent of it, shouts suddenly a pacific
good night in the distance. The farewell salutation seems to quiet the
gathering storm. They all roar responsive to the good-night roar of
Bob. A moment of silence, actually a moment, follows--then a
repetition of the long, loud, weary yawning in chorus--then another
moment of silence--then Jem suddenly shouts to the retiring Bob to
come back--Bob refuses, softened by distance--Jem insists, and his
four friends join him--Bob relents and returns. A shriek of
indignation, far down the village--Bob's wife has her window open, and
has heard him consent to go back to his friends. Hearty laughter from
Bob's five friends; screams from Bob's wife; articulate screams,
informing Bob that she will "cut his liver out," if he does not come
home directly. Answering curses from Bob; he will "mash" his wife, if
she does not hold her tongue. A song in chorus from Bob's five
friends. Outraged by this time past all endurance, I spring out of bed
and seize the water-jug. My wife, having the doctor's directions ever
present to her mind, implores me in heart-rending tones to remember
that I am under strict medical orders not to excite myself. I pay no
heed to her remonstrances, and advance to the window with the jug. I
pause before I empty the water on the heads of the assembly beneath; I
pause, and hear--O! most melodious, most welcome of sounds!--the
sudden fall of rain. The merciful sky has anticipated me; the "clerk
of the weather" has been struck by my idea of dispersing the Nag's
Head Night Club, by water. By the time I have put down the jug and
got back to bed, silence--primeval silence, the first, the foremost of
all earthly influences--falls sweetly over our tavern at last.

That night, before sinking wearily to rest, I have once more the
satisfaction of agreeing with my wife. Dear and admirable woman! she
proposes to leave this secluded village the first thing to-morrow
morning. Never did I share her opinion more cordially than I share it
now. Instead of keeping myself composed, I have been living in a
region of perpetual disturbance; and, as for doing nothing, my mind
has been so agitated and perturbed that I have not even had time to
think about it. We will go, love--as you so sensibly suggest--we will
go the first thing in the morning, to any place you like, so long as
it is large enough to swallow up small sounds. Where, over all the
surface of this noisy earth, the blessing of tranquillity may be
found, I know not; but this I do know: a secluded English village is
the very last place towards which any man should think of turning his
steps, if the main object of his walk through life is to discover
quiet.


NOTE THE SECOND. DISCOVERY OF--NOTHING.

The next morning we continue our journey in the direction of the
coast, and arrive at a large watering-place.

Observing that it is, in every respect, as unlike the secluded
village as possible, we resolve to take up our abode in this populous
and perfectly tranquil town. We get a lodging fronting the sea. There
are noises about us--various and loud noises, as I should have
thought, if I had not just come from a village; but everything is
comparative, and, after the past experience I have gone through, I
find our new place of abode quiet enough to suit the moderate
expectations which I have now learnt to form on the subject of getting
peace in this world. Here I can at least think almost uninterruptedly
of the doctor's orders. Here I may surely begin my new life, and enjoy
the luxury of doing Nothing.

I suppose it _is_ a luxury; and yet so perverse is man, I hardly know
whether I am not beginning to find it something more like a hardship
at the very outset. Perhaps my busy and active life has unfitted me
for a due appreciation of the happiness of being idle. Perhaps I am
naturally of a restless, feverish constitution. However that may be,
it is certain that on the first day when I seriously determine to do
nothing, I fail to find in the execution of my resolution such supreme
comfort as I had anticipated. I try hard to fight against the
conviction (which will steal on me, nevertheless) that I have only
changed one kind of hard work for another that is harder. I try to
persuade myself that time does not hang at all heavily on my hands,
and that I am happier with nothing to do than ever I was with a long
day's work before me. Do I succeed or do I fail in this meritorious
attempt? Let me write down the results of my first day's experience of
the Art of doing Nothing, and let the reader settle the question for
me.

       *       *       *       *       *

Breakfast at nine o'clock, so as not to make too long a day of it.
Among the other things on the table are shrimps. I find myself liking
shrimps for an entirely new reason--they take such a long time to eat.
Well, breakfast is over at last: I have had quite enough, and yet I am
gluttonously sorry when the table is cleared. If I were in health I
should now go to my desk, or take up a book. But I am out of health,
and I must do Nothing. Suppose I look out of window? I hope that is
idle enough to begin with.

The sea--yes, yes, the sea! Very large, very grey, very calm; very
calm, very grey, very large. Anything else about the sea? Nothing else
about the sea.

Yes--ships. One big ship in front, two little ships behind. (What time
shall we have dinner, my dear? At five? Certainly at five!) One big
ship in front, two little ships behind. Nothing more to see? Nothing.

Let me look back into the room, and study the subjects of these
prints on the walls. First print:--Death of the Earl of Chatham in the
House of Lords, after Copley, R.A. Just so. Curious idea this picture
suggests of the uniformity of personal appearance which must have
distinguished the Peers in the last century. Here is a house full of
noble lords, and each one of them is exactly like the other. Every
noble lord is tall, every noble lord is portly, every noble lord has a
long receding forehead, and a majestic Roman nose. Odd; and leading to
reflections on the physical changes that must have passed over the
peerage of the present day, in which I might respectfully indulge, if
the doctor had not ordered me to abstain from thinking.

Circumstanced as I am, I must mournfully dismiss the death of the Earl
of Chatham, and pass from the work of Copley, R.A., to the other
prints on the walls. Dear, dear me! Now I look again, there is nothing
to pass to. There are only two other prints, and they are both
classical landscapes. Deteriorated as the present condition of my
faculties may be, my mind has not sunk yet to the level of Classical
Landscape. I have still sense enough left to disbelieve in Claude and
Poussin as painters of Italian scenery. Let me turn from the classical
counterfeit to the modern reality. Let me look again at the sea.

Just as large, just as grey, just as calm as ever. Any more ships?
No; still the one big ship in front; still the two little ships
behind. They have not altered their relative positions the least in
the world. How long is it to dinner-time? Six hours and a quarter.
What on earth am I to do? Nothing.

Suppose I go and take a little walk? (No, dear, I will not tire
myself; I will come back quite fresh to take you out in the
afternoon.) Well, which way shall I go, now I am on the door-step?
There are two walks in this place. First walk, along the cliff
westward; second walk, along the cliff eastward. Which direction shall
I take? I am naturally one of the most decided men in the world; but
doing nothing seems to have deprived me already of my usual resolute
strength of will. I will toss up for it. Heads, westward; tails,
eastward. Heads! Ought this to be considered conclusive? or shall I
begin again, and try the best of three? I will try the best of three,
because it takes up more time. Heads, tails, heads! Westward still.
Surely this is destiny. Or can it be that doing nothing has made me
superstitious as well as irresolute? Never mind; I will go westward,
and see what happens.

I saunter along the path by the iron railings; then down a little dip,
at the bottom of which there is a seat overlooking a ship-builder's
yard. Close under me is a small coasting-vessel on the slips for
repair. Nobody on board, but one old man at work. At work, did I say?
Oh, happy chance! This aged repairer of ships is the very man, of all
others, whom I had most need of meeting, the very man to help me in my
present emergency. Before I have looked at him two minutes, I feel
that I am in the presence of a great professor of the art of doing
nothing. Towards this sage, to listen to his precepts and profit by
his example, did destiny gently urge me, when I tossed up to decide
between eastward and westward. Let me watch his proceedings; let me
learn how to idle systematically by observing the actions of this
venerable man.

He is sitting on the left side of the vessel when I first look at him.
In one hand he holds a crooked nail; in the other, a hammer. He coughs
slowly, and looks out to sea; he sighs slowly, and looks back towards
the land; he rises slowly, and surveys the deck of the vessel; he
stoops slowly, and picks up a flat bit of iron, and puts it on the
bulwark, and places the crooked nail upon it, and then sits down and
looks at the effect of the arrangement so far. When he has had enough
of the arrangement, he gives the sea a turn again, then the land.
After that, he steps back a little and looks at the hammer, weighs it
gently in his hand, moistens his hand, advances to the crooked nail on
the bit of iron, groans softly to himself and shakes his head as he
looks at it, administers three deliberate taps with the hammer, to
straighten it, finds that he does not succeed to his mind; again
groans softly, again shakes his head, again sits down and rests
himself on the left side of the vessel. Since I first looked at him I
have timed him by my watch: he has killed a quarter of an hour over
that one crooked nail, and he has not straightened it yet! Wonderful
man, can I ever hope to rival him? Will he condescend to talk to me?
Stay! I am not free to try him; the doctor has told me not to excite
myself with society; all communion of mind between me and this
finished and perfect idler is, I fear, prohibited. Better to walk on,
and come back, and look at him again.

I walk on and sit down; walk on a little farther and sit down again;
walk on for the third time, sit down for the third time, and still
there is always the cliff on one side of me, and the one big ship and
the two little ships on the other. I retrace my steps, occupying as
much time as I possibly can in getting back to the seat above the
coasting-vessel. Where is my old friend, my esteemed professor, my
bright and shining example in the difficult art of doing nothing?
Sitting on the right side of the vessel this time, with the bit of
flat iron on the right side also, with the hammer still in his hand,
and, as I live, with the crooked nail not straightened yet! I observe
this, and turn away quickly with despair in my heart. How can I, a
tyro Do-Nothing, expect to imitate that consummate old man? It is vain
to hope for success here--vain to hope for anything but dinner-time.
How many hours more? Four. If I return home now, how shall I go on
doing nothing? Lunch, perhaps, will help me a little. Quite so! Let us
say a glass of old ale and a biscuit. I should like to add shrimps--if
I were not afraid of my wife's disapprobation--merely for the purpose
of trying if I could not treat them, as my old friend of the
coasting-vessel treated the crooked nail.

Three hours and a half to dinner-time. I have had my biscuit and my
glass of old ale. Not being accustomed to malt liquor in the middle of
the day, my lunch has fuddled me. There is a faint singing in my ears,
an intense sleepiness in my eyelids, a genial warmth about my stomach,
and a sensation in my head as if the brains had oozed out of me and
the cavity of my skull was stuffed with cotton-wool steeped in
laudanum. Not an unpleasant feeling altogether. I am not anxious; I
think of nothing. I have a stolid power of staring immovably out of
window at the one big ship and the two little ships, which I had not
hitherto given myself credit for possessing. If my wife would only
push an easy-chair up close behind me, I could sink back in it and go
to sleep; but she will do nothing of the sort. She is putting on her
bonnet: it is the hour of the afternoon at which we are to take each
other out fondly, for our little walk.

The company at the watering-place is taking its little walk also at
this time. But for the genial influence of the strong ale, I should
now be making my observations and flying in the face of the doctor's
orders by allowing my mind to be occupied. As it is, I march along
slowly, lost in a solemn trance of beer.

One circumstance only, during our walk, is prominent enough to attract
my sleepy attention. I just contrive to observe, with as much surprise
and regret as I am capable of feeling at the present moment, that my
wife apparently hates all the women we meet, and that all the women we
meet, seem, judging by their looks, to return the compliment by hating
my wife. We pass an infinite number of girls, all more or less plump,
all more or less healthy, all more or less overshadowed by eccentric
sea-side hats; and my wife will not allow that any one of these young
creatures is even tolerably pretty. The young creatures on their side,
look so disparagingly at my wife's bonnet and gown, that I should feel
uneasy about the propriety of her costume, if I were not under the
comforting influence of the strong ale. What is the meaning of this
unpleasant want of harmony among the members of the fair sex? Does one
woman hate another woman for being a woman--is that it? How shocking
if it is! I have no inclination to disparage other men whom I meet on
my walk. Other men cast no disdainful looks on me. We lords of the
creation are quite content to be handsome and attractive in our
various ways, without snappishly contesting the palm of beauty with
one another. Why cannot the women follow our meritorious example? Will
any one solve this curious problem in social morals? Doctor's orders
forbid me from attempting the intellectual feat. The dire necessity of
doing nothing narrows me to one subject of mental contemplation--the
dinner-hour. How long is it--now we have returned from our walk--to
that time? Two hours and a quarter. I can't look out of window again,
for I know by instinct that the three ships and the calm grey sea are
still lying in wait for me. I can't heave a patriot's sigh once more
over the "Death of the Earl of Chatham." I am too tired to go out and
see how the old man of the coasting-vessel is getting on with the
crooked nail. In short, I am driven to my last refuge. I must take a
nap.

The nap lasts more than an hour. Its results may be all summed up in
one significant and dreadful word--Fidgets. I start from the sofa
convulsively, and sit down bolt upright in a chair. My wife is
opposite to me, calmly engaged over her work. It is an hour and five
minutes to dinner-time. What am I to do? Shall I soothe the fidgets
and soften my rugged nature by looking at my wife, to see how she
gets on with her work?

She has got a strip of calico, or something of that sort, punched all
over with little holes, and she is sewing round each little hole with
her needle and thread. Monotonous, to a masculine mind. Surely the
punching of the holes must be the pleasantest part of this sort of
work? And that is done at the shop, is it, dear? How curious!

Does my wife lace too tight? I have never had leisure before to look
at her so long and so attentively as I am looking now; I have been
uncritically contented hitherto, to take her waist for granted. Now I
have my doubts about it. I think the wife of my bosom is a little too
much like an hour-glass. Does she digest? Good Heavens! In the
existing state of her stays, how do I know whether she digests?

Then, as to her hair: I do not object to the dressing of it, but I
think--strangely enough, for the first time since our marriage--that
she uses too much bear's grease and bandoline. I see a thin rim of
bandoline, shining just outside the line of hair against her temples,
like varnish on a picture. This won't do--oh, dear, no--this won't do
at all. Will her hands do? Certainly not! I discover, for the first
time, that her hands won't do, either. I am mercifully ready to put up
with their not being quite white enough, but what does the woman mean
by having such round tips to her fingers? Why don't they taper? I
always thought they did taper until this moment. I begin to be
dissatisfied with her; I begin to think my wife is not the charming
woman I took her for. What is the matter with me? Am I looking at her
with perceptions made morbid already by excessive idleness? Is this
dreadful necessity of doing nothing, to end by sapping the foundations
of my matrimonial tranquillity, and letting down my whole connubial
edifice into the bottomless abyss of Doctors' Commons? Horrible!

The door of the room opens, and wakes me, as it were, from the hideous
dream in which my wife's individuality has been entirely altered to my
eyes. It is only half an hour to dinner; and the servant has come in
to lay the cloth. In the presence of the great event of the day I feel
myself again. Once more I believe in the natural slimness of my wife's
waist; once more I am contented with the tops of her fingers. Now at
last, I see my way to bed-time. Assuming that we can make the dinner
last two hours; assuming that I can get another nap after it;
assuming----

       *       *       *       *       *

No! I can assume nothing more, for I am really ashamed to complete the
degrading picture of myself which my pen has been painting up to this
time. Enough has been written--more than enough, I fear--to show how
completely I have failed in my first day's attempt at doing Nothing.
The hardest labour I ever had to get through, was not so difficult to
contend with as this enforced idleness. Never again will I murmur
under the wholesome necessities of work. Never again--if I can only
succeed in getting well--will a day of doing nothing be counted as
pleasant holiday-time by me. I have stolen away at the dead of the
night, in flat defiance of the doctor's directions, to relieve my
unspeakable weariness by writing these lines. I cast them on the world
as the brief personal narrative of a most unfortunate man. If I
systematically disregard medical advice, I shall make myself ill. If I
conscientiously obey it, how am I to get through to-morrow? I mustn't
work, and I can't idle. Will anybody kindly tell me what I am to do?




NOOKS AND CORNERS OF HISTORY.

I.

A QUEEN'S REVENGE.


The name of Gustavus Adolphus, the faithful Protestant, the great
general, and the good king of Sweden, has been long since rendered
familiar to English readers of history. We all know how this renowned
warrior and monarch was beloved by his soldiers and subjects, how
successfully he fought through a long and terrible war, and how nobly
he died on the field of battle. With his death, however, the interest
of the English reader in Swedish affairs seems to terminate. Those who
have followed the narrative of his life carefully to the end, may
remember that he left behind him an only child--a daughter named
Christina. But of the character of this child, and of her
extraordinary adventures after she grew to womanhood, the public in
England is, for the most part, entirely ignorant. In the popular
historical and romantic literature of France, Queen Christina is a
notorious character. In the literature of this country, she has,
hitherto, been allowed but little chance of making her way to the
notice of the world at large.

And yet, the life of Christina is in itself a romance. At six years
old she was Queen of Sweden, with the famous Oxenstiern for guardian.
This great and good man governed the kingdom in her name until she had
lived through her minority. Four years after her coronation she, of
her own accord, abdicated her rights in favour of her cousin, Charles
Gustavus. Young and beautiful, the most learned and most accomplished
woman of her time, she resolutely turned her back on the throne of her
inheritance, and set forth to wander through civilised Europe in the
character of an independent traveller who was resolved to see all
varieties of men and manners, to collect all the knowledge which the
widest experience could give her, and to measure her mind boldly
against the greatest minds of the age.

So far, the interest excited by her character and her adventures is of
the most picturesquely-attractive kind. There is something strikingly
new in the spectacle of a young queen who prefers the pursuit of
knowledge to the possession of a throne, and who barters a royal
birthright for the privilege of being free. Unhappily, the portrait of
Christina cannot be painted throughout in bright colours only. It
must be recorded to her disgrace that, when her travels brought her to
Rome, she abandoned the religion for which her father fought and died.
And it must be admitted in the interests of truth, that she freed
herself from other restraints besides the restraint of royalty.
Mentally distinguished by her capacities, she was morally degraded by
her vices and her crimes.

The events in the strange life of Christina--especially those
connected with her actions in the character of a Queen-Errant--present
ample materials for a biography, which might be regarded in England as
a new contribution to our historical literature. One among the many
extraordinary adventures which marked the Queen's wandering career,
may be related in these pages as an episode in the history of her life
which is complete in itself. The events of which the narrative is
composed, throw light, in many ways, on the manners, habits, and
opinions of a past age; and they can, moreover, be presented in the
remarkable words of an eye-witness who beheld them two centuries ago.

       *       *       *       *       *

The scene is the Palace of Fontainebleau, the time is the close of the
year sixteen hundred and fifty-seven, the persons are the wandering
Queen Christina; her grand equerry, the Marquis Monaldeschi; and
Father Le Bel of the Convent of Fontainebleau, the witness whose
testimony we are shortly about to cite.

Monaldeschi, as his name implies, was an Italian by birth. He was a
handsome, accomplished man, refined in his manners, supple in his
disposition, and possessed of the art of making himself eminently
agreeable in the society of women. With these personal recommendations,
he soon won his way to the favour of Queen Christina. Out of the long
list of her lovers, not one of the many whom she encouraged caught so
long and firm a hold of her capricious fancy as Monaldeschi. The
intimacy between them probably took its rise, on her side at least, in
as deep a sincerity of affection as it was in Christina's nature to
feel. On the side of the Italian, the connection was prompted solely
by ambition. As soon as he had reaped all the advantages of the
position of chief favourite in the queen's court, he wearied of his
royal mistress, and addressed his attentions secretly to a young Roman
lady, whose youth and beauty powerfully attracted him, and whose fatal
influence over his actions ultimately led to his ruin and his death.

After endeavouring to ingratiate himself with the Roman lady, in
various ways, Monaldeschi found that the surest means of winning her
favour lay in satisfying her malicious curiosity on the subject of
the secret frailties of Queen Christina. He was not a man to be
troubled by any scrupulous feelings of honour when the interests of
his own intrigues happened to be concerned; and he shamelessly took
advantage of the position that he held towards Christina, to commit
breaches of confidence of the most meanly infamous kind. Not contented
with placing in the possession of the Roman lady the series of the
queen's letters to himself, containing secrets that she had revealed
to him in the fullest confidence of his worthiness to be trusted, he
wrote letters of his own to the new object of his addresses, in which
he ridiculed Christina's fondness for him, and sarcastically described
her smallest personal defects with a heartless effrontery which the
most patient of women would have found it impossible to forgive. While
he was thus privately betraying the confidence that had been reposed
in him, he was publicly affecting the most unalterable attachment and
the most sincere respect for the queen.

For some time this disgraceful deception proceeded successfully. But
the hour of discovery was at hand, and the instrument of effecting it
was a certain cardinal who was desirous of supplanting Monaldeschi in
the queen's favour. The priest contrived to get possession of the
whole correspondence which had been privately confided to the Roman
lady, including, besides Christina's letters, the letters which
Monaldeschi had written in ridicule of his royal mistress. The whole
collection of documents was enclosed by the cardinal in one packet,
and was presented by him, at a private audience, to the queen.

It is at this critical point of the story that the testimony of the
eye-witness whom we propose to quote, begins. Father Le Bel was
present at the terrible execution of the queen's vengeance on
Monaldeschi, and was furnished with copies of the whole correspondence
which had been abstracted from the possession of the Roman lady.
Having been trusted with the secret, he is wisely and honourably
silent throughout his narrative on the subject of Monaldeschi's
offence. Such particulars of the Italian's baseness and ingratitude as
have been presented here, have been gathered from the contradictory
reports which were current at the time, and which have been preserved
by the old French collectors of historical anecdotes. The details of
the extraordinary punishment of Monaldeschi's offence which are now to
follow, may be given in the words of Father Le Bel himself. The reader
will understand that his narrative begins immediately after
Christina's discovery of the perfidy of her favourite.

       *       *       *       *       *

The sixth of November, sixteen hundred and fifty-seven (writes Father
Le Bel), at a quarter past nine in the morning, Queen Christina of
Sweden, being at that time lodged in the Royal Palace of
Fontainebleau, sent one of her men servants to my convent, to obtain
an interview with me. The messenger, on being admitted to my presence,
inquired if I was the superior of the convent, and when I replied in
the affirmative, informed me that I was expected to present myself
immediately before the Queen of Sweden.

Fearful of keeping her Majesty waiting, I followed the man at once to
the palace, without waiting to take any of my brethren from the
convent with me.

After a little delay in the antechamber, I was shown into the Queen's
room. She was alone; and I saw, by the expression of her face, as I
respectfully begged to be favoured with her commands, that something
was wrong. She hesitated for a moment; then told me, rather sharply,
to follow her to a place where she might speak with the certainty of
not being overheard. She led me into the Galerie des Cerfs, and,
turning round on me suddenly, asked if we had ever met before. I
informed her Majesty that I had once had the honour of presenting my
respects to her; that she had received me graciously, and that there
the interview had ended. She nodded her head and looked about her a
little; then said, very abruptly, that I wore a dress (referring to
my convent costume) which encouraged her to put perfect faith in my
honour; and she desired me to promise beforehand that I would keep the
secret with which she was about to entrust me as strictly as if I had
heard it in the confessional. I answered respectfully that it was part
of my sacred profession to be trusted with secrets; that I had never
betrayed the private affairs of any one; and that I could answer for
myself as worthy to be honoured by the confidence of a queen.

Upon this, her Majesty handed me a packet of papers sealed in three
places, but having no superscription of any sort. She ordered me to
keep it under lock and key, and to be prepared to give it her back
again before any person in whose presence she might see fit to ask me
for it. She further charged me to remember the day, the hour, and the
place in which she had given me the packet; and with that last piece
of advice she dismissed me. I left her alone in the gallery, walking
slowly away from me, with her head drooping on her bosom, and her
mind, as well as I could presume to judge, perturbed by anxious
thoughts.[1]

On Saturday, the tenth of November, at one o'clock in the afternoon, I
was sent for to the Palace again. I took the packet out of my private
cabinet, feeling that I might be asked for it; and then followed the
messenger as before. This time he led me at once to the Galerie des
Cerfs. The moment I entered it, he shut the door behind me with such
extraordinary haste and violence, that I felt a little startled. As
soon as I recovered myself, I saw her Majesty standing in the middle
of the gallery, talking to one of the gentlemen of her Court, who was
generally known by the name of The Marquis, and whom I soon
ascertained to be the Marquis Monaldeschi, Grand Equerry of the Queen
of Sweden. I approached her Majesty and made my bow--then stood before
her, waiting until she should think proper to address me.

With a stern look on her face, and with a loud, clear, steady voice,
she asked me, before the Marquis and before three other men who were
also in the gallery, for the packet which she had confided to my care.

As she made that demand, two of the three men moved back a few paces,
while the third, the captain of her guard, advanced rather nearer to
her. I handed her back the packet. She looked at it thoughtfully for a
little while; then opened it, and took out the letters and written
papers which it contained, handed them to the Marquis Monaldeschi, and
insisted on his reading them. When he had obeyed, she asked him, with
the same stern look and the same steady voice, whether he had any
knowledge of the documents which he had just been reading. The Marquis
turned deadly pale, and answered that he had now read the papers
referred to for the first time.

"Do you deny all knowledge of them?" said the Queen. "Answer me
plainly, sir. Yes or no?"

The Marquis turned paler still. "I deny all knowledge of them," he
said, in faint tones, with his eyes on the ground.

"Do you deny all knowledge of these too?" said the Queen, suddenly
producing a second packet of manuscript from under her dress, and
thrusting it in the Marquis's face.

He started, drew back a little, and answered not a word. The packet
which the Queen had given to me contained copies only. The original
papers were those which she had just thrust in the Marquis's face.

"Do you deny your own seal and your own handwriting?" she asked.

He murmured a few words, acknowledging both the seal and the
handwriting to be his own, and added some phrases of excuse, in which
he endeavoured to cast the blame that attached to the writing of the
letters on the shoulders of other persons. While he was speaking, the
three men in attendance on the Queen silently closed round him.

Her Majesty heard him to the end. "You are a traitor," she said, and
turned her back on him.

The three men, as she spoke those words, drew their swords.

The Marquis heard the clash of the blades against the scabbards, and,
looking quickly round, saw the drawn swords behind him. He caught the
Queen by the arm immediately, and drew her away with him, first into
one corner of the gallery, then into another, entreating her in the
most moving terms to listen to him, and to believe in the sincerity of
his repentance. The Queen let him go on talking without showing the
least sign of anger or impatience. Her colour never changed; the stern
look never left her countenance. There was something awful in the
clear, cold, deadly resolution which her eyes expressed while they
rested on the Marquis's face.

At last she shook herself free from his grasp, still without betraying
the slightest irritation. The three men with the drawn swords, who had
followed the Marquis silently as he led the Queen from corner to
corner of the gallery, now closed round him again, as soon as he was
left standing alone. There was perfect silence for a minute or more.
Then the Queen addressed herself to me.

"Father Le Bel," she said, "I charge you to bear witness that I treat
this man with the strictest impartiality." She pointed, while she
spoke, to the Marquis Monaldeschi with a little ebony riding-whip
that she carried in her hand. "I offer that worthless traitor all the
time he requires--more time than he has any right to ask for--to
justify himself if he can."

The Marquis hearing these words, took some letters from a place of
concealment in his dress, and gave them to the Queen, along with a
small bunch of keys. He snatched these last from his pocket so
quickly, that he drew out with them a few small silver coins which
fell to the floor. As he addressed himself to the Queen again, she
made a sign with her ebony riding-whip to the men with the drawn
swords; and they retired towards one of the windows of the gallery. I,
on my side, withdrew out of hearing. The conference which ensued
between the Queen and the Marquis lasted nearly an hour. When it was
over, her Majesty beckoned the men back again with the whip, and then
approached the place where I was standing.

"Father Le Bel," she said, in her clear, ringing, resolute tones,
"there is no need for me to remain here any longer. I leave that man,"
she pointed to the Marquis again, "to your care. Do all that you can
for the good of his soul. He has failed to justify himself, and I doom
him to die."

If I had heard sentence pronounced against myself, I could hardly have
been more terrified than I was when the Queen uttered those last
words. The Marquis heard them where he was standing, and flung himself
at her feet. I dropped on my knees by his side, and entreated her to
pardon him, or at least to visit his offence with some milder
punishment than the punishment of death.

"I have said the words," she answered, addressing herself only to me;
"and no power under Heaven shall make me unsay them. Many a man has
been broken alive on the wheel for offences which were innocence
itself, compared with the offence which this perjured traitor has
committed against me. I have trusted him as I might have trusted a
brother; he has infamously betrayed that trust; and I exercise my
royal rights over the life of a traitor. Say no more to me. I tell you
again, he is doomed to die."

With those words the Queen quitted the gallery, and left me alone with
Monaldeschi and the three executioners who were waiting to kill him.

The unhappy man dropped on his knees at my feet, imploring me to
follow the Queen, and make one more effort to obtain his pardon.
Before I could answer a word, the three men surrounded him, held the
points of their swords to his sides--without, however, actually
touching him--and angrily recommended him to make his confession to
me, without wasting any more time. I entreated them, with the tears
in my eyes, to wait as long as they could, so as to give the Queen
time to reflect, and, perhaps, to falter in her deadly intentions
towards the Marquis. I succeeded in producing such an impression on
the chief of the three men, that he left us, to obtain an interview
with the Queen, and to ascertain if there was any change in her
purpose. After a very short absence he came back, shaking his head.

"There is no hope for you," he said, addressing Monaldeschi. "Make
your peace with Heaven. Prepare yourself to die!"

"Go to the Queen!" cried the Marquis, kneeling before me with clasped
hands. "Go to the Queen yourself; make one more effort to save me! O,
Father Le Bel, run one more risk--venture one last entreaty--before
you leave me to die!"

"Will you wait till I come back?" I said to the three men.

"We will wait," they answered, and lowered their sword-points to the
ground.

I found the Queen alone in her room, without the slightest appearance
of agitation in her face or her manner. Nothing that I could say had
the slightest effect on her. I adjured her by all that religion holds
most sacred, to remember that the noblest privilege of any sovereign
is the privilege of granting mercy; that the first of Christian duties
is the duty of forgiving. She heard me unmoved. Seeing that
entreaties were thrown away, I ventured, at my own proper hazard, on
reminding her that she was not living now in her own kingdom of
Sweden, but that she was the guest of the King of France, and lodged
in one of his own palaces; and I boldly asked her if she had
calculated the possible consequences of authorising the killing of one
of her attendants inside the walls of Fontainebleau, without any
preliminary form of trial, or any official notification of the offence
that he had committed. She answered me coldly, that it was enough that
she knew the unpardonable nature of the offence of which Monaldeschi
had been guilty; that she stood in a perfectly independent position
towards the King of France; that she was absolute mistress of her own
actions, at all times and in all places; and that she was accountable
to nobody under Heaven for her conduct towards her subjects and
servants, over whose lives and liberties she possessed sovereign
rights, which no consideration whatever should induce her to resign.

Fearful as I was of irritating her, I still ventured on reiterating my
remonstrances. She cut them short by hastily signing to me to leave
her.

As she dismissed me, I thought I saw a slight change pass over her
face; and it occurred to me that she might not have been indisposed at
that moment to grant some respite, if she could have done so without
appearing to falter in her resolution, and without running the risk
of letting Monaldeschi escape her. Before I passed the door, I
attempted to take advantage of the disposition to relent which I
fancied I had perceived in her; but she angrily reiterated the gesture
of dismissal before I had spoken half-a-dozen words. With a heavy
heart, I yielded to necessity, and left her.

On returning to the gallery, I found the three men standing round the
Marquis, with their sword-points on the floor, exactly as I had left
them.

"Is he to live or to die?" they asked when I came in.

There was no need for me to reply in words; my face answered the
question. The Marquis groaned heavily, but said nothing. I sat myself
down on a stool, and beckoned to him to come to me, and begged him, as
well as my terror and wretchedness would let me, to think of
repentance, and to prepare for another world. He began his confession
kneeling at my feet, with his head on my knees. After continuing it
for some time, he suddenly started to his feet with a scream of
terror. I contrived to quiet him, and to fix his thoughts again on
heavenly things. He completed his confession, speaking sometimes in
Latin, sometimes in French, sometimes in Italian, according as he
could best explain himself in the agitation which now possessed him.

Just as he had concluded, the Queen's chaplain entered the gallery.
Without waiting to receive absolution, the unhappy Marquis rushed away
from me to the chaplain, and, still clinging desperately to the hope
of life, besought him to intercede with the Queen. The two talked
together in low tones, holding each other by the hand. When their
conference was over, the chaplain left the gallery again, taking with
him the chief of the three executioners who were appointed to carry
out the Queen's deadly purpose. After a short absence, this man
returned without the chaplain. "Get your absolution," he said briefly
to the Marquis, "and make up your mind to die."

Saying these words, he seized Monaldeschi; pressed him back against
the wall at the end of the gallery, just under the picture of Saint
Germain; and, before I could interfere, or even turn aside from the
sight, struck at the Marquis's right side with his sword. Monaldeschi
caught the blade with his hand, cutting three of his fingers in the
act. At the same moment the point touched his side and glanced off.
Upon this, the man who had struck at him exclaimed, "He has armour
under his clothes," and, at the same moment, stabbed Monaldeschi in
the face. As he received the wound, he turned round towards me, and
cried out loudly, "Father Le Bel! Father Le Bel!"

I advanced towards him immediately. As I did so, the man who had
wounded him retired a little, and signed to his two companions to
withdraw also. The Marquis, with one knee on the ground, asked pardon
of God, and said certain last words in my ear. I immediately gave him
absolution, telling him that he must atone for his sins by suffering
death, and that he must pardon those who were about to kill him.
Having heard my words, he flung himself forward on the floor. While he
was falling, one of the three executioners who had not assailed him as
yet, struck at his head, and wounded him on the surface of the skull.

The Marquis sank on his face; then raised himself a little, and signed
to the men to kill him outright, by striking him on the neck. The same
man who had last wounded him, obeyed by cutting two or three times at
his neck, without, however, doing him any great injury. For it was
indeed true that he wore armour under his clothes, which armour
consisted of a shirt of mail weighing nine or ten pounds, and rising
so high round his neck, inside his collar, as to defend it
successfully from any chance blow with a sword.

Seeing this, I came forward to exhort the Marquis to bear his
sufferings with patience, for the remission of his sins. While I was
speaking, the chief of the three executioners advanced, and asked me
if I did not think it was time to give Monaldeschi the finishing
stroke. I pushed the man violently away from me, saying that I had no
advice to offer on the matter, and telling him that if I had any
orders to give, they would be for the sparing of the Marquis's life,
and not for the hastening of his death. Hearing me speak in those
terms, the man asked my pardon, and confessed that he had done wrong
in addressing me on the subject at all.

He had hardly finished making his excuses to me, when the door of the
gallery opened. The unhappy Marquis hearing the sound, raised himself
from the floor, and, seeing that the person who entered was the
Queen's chaplain, dragged himself along the gallery, holding on by the
tapestry that hung from the walls, until he reached the feet of the
holy man. There, he whispered a few words (as if he was confessing) to
the chaplain, who, after first asking my permission, gave him
absolution, and then returned to the Queen.

As the chaplain closed the door, the man who had struck the Marquis on
the neck, stabbed him adroitly with a long narrow sword in the throat,
just above the edge of the shirt of mail. Monaldeschi sank on his
right side, and spoke no more. For a quarter of an hour longer he
still breathed, during which time I prayed by him, and exhorted him as
I best could. When the bleeding from this last wound ceased, his life
ceased with it. It was then a quarter to four o'clock. The death agony
of the miserable man had lasted, from the time of the Queen's first
pronouncing sentence on him, for nearly three hours.

I said the De Profundis over his body. While I was praying, the three
executioners sheathed their swords, and the chief of them rifled the
Marquis's pockets. Finding nothing on him but a prayer-book and a
small knife, the chief beckoned to his companions, and they all three
marched to the door in silence, went out, and left me alone with the
corpse.

A few minutes afterwards I followed them, to go and report what had
happened to the Queen.

I thought her colour changed a little when I told her that Monaldeschi
was dead; but those cold clear eyes of hers never softened, and her
voice was still as steady and firm as when I first heard its tones on
entering the gallery that day. She spoke very little, only saying to
herself, "He is dead, and he deserved to die!" Then, turning to me,
she added, "Father, I leave the care of burying him to you; and, for
my own part, I will charge myself with the expense of having masses
enough said for the repose of his soul." I ordered the body to be
placed in a coffin, which I instructed the bearers to remove to the
churchyard on a tumbril, in consequence of the great weight of the
corpse, of the misty rain that was falling, and of the bad state of
the roads. On Monday, the twelfth of November, at a quarter to six in
the evening, the Marquis was buried in the parish church of Avon,
near the font of holy water. The next day the Queen sent one hundred
livres, by two of her servants, for masses for the repose of his soul.

       *       *       *       *       *

Thus ends the extraordinary narrative of Father Le Bel. It is
satisfactory to record, as some evidence of the progress of humanity,
that this barbarous murder, which would have passed unnoticed in the
feudal times, as an ordinary and legitimate exercise of a sovereign's
authority over a vassal, excited, in the middle of the seventeenth
century, the utmost disgust and horror throughout Paris. The prime
minister at that period, Cardinal Mazarin (by no means an
over-scrupulous man, as all readers of French history know), wrote
officially to Christina, informing her that "a crime so atrocious as
that which had just been committed under her sanction, in the Palace
of Fontainebleau, must be considered as a sufficient cause for
banishing the Queen of Sweden from the court and dominions of his
sovereign, who, in common with every honest man in the kingdom, felt
horrified at the lawless outrage which had just been committed on the
soil of France."

To this letter Queen Christina sent the following answer, which, as a
specimen of spiteful effrontery, has probably never been matched:

"MONSIEUR MAZARIN,--Those who have communicated to you the details of
the death of my equerry, Monaldeschi, knew nothing at all about it. I
think it highly absurd that you should have compromised so many people
for the sake of informing yourself about one simple fact. Such a
proceeding on your part, ridiculous as it is, does not, however, much
astonish me. What I am amazed at, is, that you and the king your
master should have dared to express disapproval of what I have done.

"Understand, all of you--servants and masters, little people and
great--that it was my sovereign pleasure to act as I did. I neither
owe, nor render, an account of my actions to any one,--least of all,
to a bully like you.

       *       *       *       *       *

"It may be well for you to know, and to report to any one whom you can
get to listen to you, that Christina cares little for your court, and
less still for you. When I want to revenge myself, I have no need of
your formidable power to help me. My honour obliged me to act as I
did; my will is my law, and you ought to know how to respect it....
Understand, if you please, that wherever I choose to live, there I am
Queen; and that the men about me, rascals as they may be, are better
than you and the ragamuffins whom you keep in your service.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Take my advice, Mazarin, and behave yourself for the future so as to
merit my favour; you cannot, for your own sake, be too anxious to
deserve it Heaven preserve you from venturing on any more disparaging
remarks about my conduct! I shall hear of them, if I am at the other
end of the world, for I have friends and followers in my service who
are as unscrupulous and as vigilant as any in yours, though it is
probable enough that they are not quite so heavily bribed."

After replying to the prime minister of France in those terms,
Christina was wise enough to leave the kingdom immediately.

For three years more, she pursued her travels. At the expiration of
that time, her cousin, the king of Sweden, in whose favour she had
abdicated, died. She returned at once to her own country, with the
object of possessing herself once more of the royal power. Here, the
punishment of the merciless crime that she had sanctioned overtook her
at last. The brave and honest people of Sweden refused to be governed
by the woman who had ordered the murder of Monaldeschi, and who had
forsaken the national religion for which her father died. Threatened
with the loss of her revenues as well as the loss of her sovereignty,
if she remained in Sweden, the proud and merciless Christina yielded
for the first time in her life. She resigned once more all right and
title to the royal dignity, and left her native country for the last
time. The final place of her retirement was Rome. She died there in
the year sixteen hundred and eighty-nine. Even in the epitaph which
she ordered to be placed on her tomb, the strange and daring character
of the woman breaks out. The whole record of that wild and wicked
existence, was summed up with stern brevity in this one line:

     CHRISTINA LIVED SEVENTY-TWO YEARS.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Although Father Le Bel discreetly abstains from mentioning the
fact, it seems clear from the context that he was permitted to read,
and that he did read, the papers contained in the packet.




SOCIAL GRIEVANCES.--II.

A PETITION TO THE NOVEL-WRITERS.

[Communicated by a Romantic Old Gentleman.]


I hope nobody will be alarmed if I confess that I am about to disclose
the existence of a Disreputable Society, in one of the most
respectable counties in England. I dare not be more particular as to
the locality, and I cannot possibly mention the members by name. But I
have no objection to admit that I am perpetual Secretary, that my wife
is President, that my daughters are Council, and that my nieces form
the Society. Our object is to waste our time, misemploy our
intellects, and ruin our morals--or, in other words, to enjoy the
prohibited luxury of novel-reading.

It is a settled opinion of mine that the dull people in this country,
are the people who, privately as well as publicly, govern the nation.
By dull people, I mean people of all degrees of rank and education,
who never want to be amused. I don't know how long it is since these
dreary members of the population first hit on the cunning idea of
calling themselves Respectable; but I do know that, ever since that
time, this great nation has been afraid of them--afraid in religious,
in political, and in social matters. If my present business were with
the general question, I think I could prove this assertion by simple
reference to those records of our national proceedings which appear in
the daily newspapers. But my object in writing is of the particular
kind. I have a special petition to address to the writers of novels,
on the part of the Disreputable Society to which I belong; and if I am
to give any example here of the supremacy of the dull people, it must
be drawn from one or two plain evidences of their success in opposing
the claims of our fictitious literature to popular recognition.

The dull people decided years and years ago, as every one knows, that
novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that
novel-reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time. They
gave, and still give, reasons for this opinion, which are very
satisfactory to persons born without Fancy or Imagination, and which
are utterly inconclusive to everyone else. But, with reason or without
it, the dull people have succeeded in affixing to our novels the
stigma of being a species of contraband goods. Look, for example, at
the Prospectus of any librarian. The principal part of his trade of
book-lending consists in the distributing of novels; and he is
uniformly ashamed to own that simple fact. Sometimes, he is afraid to
print the word Novel at all in his lists, and smuggles in his
contraband fiction under the head of Miscellaneous Literature.
Sometimes, after freely offering all histories, all biographies, all
voyages, all travels, he owns self-reproachfully to the fact of having
novels too, but deprecatingly adds--Only the best! As if no other
branch of the great tree of literature ever produced tasteless and
worthless fruit! In all cases, he puts novels last on his public list
of the books he distributes, though they stand first on his private
list of the books he gains by. Why is he guilty of all these sins
against candour? Because he is afraid of the dull people.

Look again--and this brings me to the subject of these lines--at our
Book Clubs. How paramount are the dull people there! How they hug to
their rigid bosoms Voyages and Travels! How they turn their intolerant
backs on novels! How resolutely they get together, in a packed body,
on the committee, and impose their joyless laws on the yielding
victims of the club, who secretly want to be amused! Our book club was
an example of the unresisted despotism of their rule. We began with a
law that novels should be occasionally admitted; and the dull people
abrogated it before we had been in existence a twelvemonth. I
smuggled in the last morsel of fiction that our starving stomachs were
allowed to consume, and produced a hurricane of virtuous indignation
at the next meeting of the committee.

All the dull people of both sexes attended that meeting. One dull
gentleman said the author was a pantheist, and quoted some florid
ecstacies on the subject of scenery and flowers in support of the
opinion. Nobody seemed to know exactly what a pantheist was, but
everybody cried "Hear, hear,"--which did just as well for the purpose.
Another dull gentleman said the book was painful because there was a
death-bed scene in it. A third reviled it for morbid revelling in the
subject of crime, because a shot from the pistol of a handsome
highwayman dispatched the villain of the story. But the great effect
of the day was produced by a lady, the mother of a large family which
began with a daughter of eighteen years, and ended with a boy of eight
months. This lady's objection affected the heroine of the novel,--a
respectable married woman, perpetually plunged in virtuous suffering,
but an improper character for young persons to read about, because the
poor thing had two accouchements--only two!--in the course of three
volumes. "How can I suffer my daughters to read such a book as that?"
cried our prolific subscriber indignantly. A tumult of applause
followed. A chorus of speeches succeeded, full of fierce references
to "our national morality," and "the purity of our hearths and homes."
A resolution was passed excluding all novels for the future; and then,
at last, the dull people held their tongues, and sat down with a thump
in their chairs, and glared contentedly on each other in stolid
controversial triumph.

From that time forth (histories and biographies being comparatively
scarce articles), we were fed by the dull people on nothing but
Voyages and Travels. Every man (or woman) who had voyaged and
travelled to no purpose, who had made no striking observations of any
kind, who had nothing whatever to say, and who said it at great length
in large type on thick paper, with accompaniment of frowsy
lithographic illustrations, was introduced weekly to our hearths and
homes as the most valuable guide, philosopher, and friend whom our
rulers could possibly send us. All the subscribers submitted; all
partook the national dread of the dull people, with the exception of
myself and the members of my family enumerated at the beginning of
these pages. We resolutely abandoned the club; got a box-full of
novels for ourselves, once a month, from London; lost caste with our
respectable friends in consequence; and became, for the future,
throughout the length and breadth of our neighbourhood, the
Disreputable Society to which I have already alluded. If the dull
people of our district were told to-morrow that my wife, daughters,
and nieces had all eloped in different directions, leaving just one
point of the compass open as a runaway outlet for me and the cook, I
feel firmly persuaded that not one of them would be inclined to
discredit the report. "This is what comes of novel-reading!" they
would say--and would return, with renewed zest, to their Voyages and
Travels, their accouchements in real life, their canting "national
morality," and their blustering "purity of our hearths and homes."

And now, to come to the main object of this paper,--the humble
petition of myself and family to certain of our novel-writers. We may
say of ourselves that we deserve to be heard, for we have braved
public opinion for the sake of reading novels; and we have read, for
some years past, all (I hold to the assertion, incredible as it may
appear)--all the stories in one, two, and three volumes, that have
issued from the press. What, then, have we got to petition about? A
very slight matter. Marking, first of all, as exceptions, certain
singular instances of originality, I may mention, as a rule, that our
novel-reading enjoyments have hitherto been always derived from the
same sort of characters and the same sort of stories--varied, indeed,
as to names and minor events, but fundamentally always the same,
through hundreds on hundreds of successive volumes, by hundreds on
hundreds of different authors. We, none of us complain of this, so
far; for we like to have as much as possible of any good thing; but we
beg deferentially to inquire whether it might not be practicable to
give us a little variety for the future. We have no unwholesome
craving after absolute novelty--all that we venture to ask for is, the
ringing of a slight change on some of the favourite old tunes which we
have long since learnt by heart.

To begin with our favourite Hero. He is such an old friend that we
have by this time got to love him dearly. We would not lose sight of
him altogether on any consideration whatever. Far be it from us to
hint at the withdrawal of this noble, loving, injured, fascinating
man! We adore his aquiline nose, his tall form, his wavy hair, his
rich voice. Long may we continue to weep on his deep chest and press
respectfully to our lips the folds of his ample cloak! Personally
speaking it is by no means of him that we are getting tired, but of
certain actions which we think he has now performed often enough.

For instance, may we put it respectfully to the ladies and gentlemen
who are so good as to exhibit him, that he had better not "stride" any
more? He has stridden so much, on so many different occasions, across
so many halls, along so many avenues, in and out at so many
drawing-room doors, that he must be knocked up by this time, and his
dear legs ought really to have a little rest. Again, when his dignity
is injured by irreverent looks or words, can he not be made to assert
it for the future without "drawing himself up to his full height?" He
has really been stretched too much by perpetual indulgence in this
exercise for scores and scores of years. Let him sit down--do please
let him sit down next time! It would be quite new, and so impressive.
Then, again, we have so often discovered him standing with folded
arms, so often beheld him pacing with folded arms, so often heard him
soliloquise with folded arms, so often broken in upon him meditating
with folded arms, that we think he had better do something else with
his arms for the future. Could he swing them for a change? or put them
akimbo? or drop them suddenly on either side of him? Or could he give
them a holiday altogether, and fold his legs by way of variety?
Perhaps not. The word Legs--why, I cannot imagine--seems always
suggestive of jocularity. "Fitzherbert stood up and folded his arms,"
is serious. "Fitzherbert sat down and folded his legs," is comic. Why,
I should like to know?

A word--one respectful word of remonstrance to the lady-novelists
especially. We think they have put our Hero on horseback often enough.
For the first five hundred novels or so, it was grand, it was
thrilling, when he threw himself into the saddle after the inevitable
quarrel with his lady-love, and galloped off madly to his bachelor
home. It was inexpressibly soothing to behold him in the milder
passages of his career, moody in the saddle, with the reins thrown
loosely over the arched neck of his steed, as the gallant animal paced
softly with his noble burden, along a winding road, under a blue sky,
on a balmy afternoon in early spring. All this was delightful reading
for a certain number of years; but everything wears out at last, and
trust me, ladies, your hero's favourite steed, your dear, intelligent,
affectionate, glossy, long-tailed horse, has really done his work, and
may now be turned loose, for some time to come, with great advantage
to yourselves, and your readers.

Having spoken a word to the ladies, I am necessarily and tenderly
reminded of their charming representatives--the Heroines. Let me say
something, first, about our favourite two sisters--the tall dark one,
who is serious and unfortunate: the short light one, who is coquettish
and happy.

Being an Englishman, I have, of course, an ardent attachment to
anything like an established rule, simply because it is established. I
know that it is a rule that, when two sisters are presented in a
novel, one must be tall and dark, and the other short and light. I
know that five-feet-eight of female flesh and blood, when accompanied
by an olive complexion, black eyes, and raven hair, is synonymous with
strong passions and an unfortunate destiny. I know that five feet
nothing, golden ringlets, soft blue eyes, and a lily-brow, cannot
possibly be associated by any well-constituted novelist, with anything
but ringing laughter, arch innocence, and final matrimonial happiness.
I have studied these great first principles of the art of fiction too
long not to reverence them as established laws; but I venture
respectfully to suggest that the time has arrived when it is no longer
necessary to insist on them in novel after novel. I am afraid there is
something naturally revolutionary in the heart of man. Although I know
it to be against all precedent, I want to revolutionise our favourite
two sisters. Would any bold innovator run all risks, and make them
both alike in complexion and in stature? Or would any desperate man (I
dare not suggest such a course to the ladies) effect an entire
alteration, by making the two sisters change characters? I tremble
when I see to what lengths the spirit of innovation is leading me.
Would the public accept the tall dark-haired sister, if she exhibited
a jolly disposition and a tendency to be flippant in her talk? Would
readers be fatally startled out of their sense of propriety, if the
short charmer with the golden hair, appeared before them as a serious,
strong-minded, fierce-spoken, miserable, guilty woman? It might be a
dangerous experiment to make this change; but it would be worth
trying--the rather (if I may be allowed to mention anything so utterly
irrelevant to the subject under discussion as real life) because I
think there is some warrant in nature for attempting the proposed
innovation. Judging by my own small experience, I should say that
strong minds and passionate natures reside principally in the breasts
of little, light women, especially if they have angelic blue eyes and
a quantity of fair ringlets. The most facetiously skittish woman, for
her age, with whom I am acquainted, is my own wife, who is three
inches taller than I am. The heartiest laugher I ever heard is my
second daughter, who is bigger even than my wife, and has the blackest
eyebrows and the swarthiest cheeks in the whole neighbourhood. With
such instances as these, producible from the bosom of my own family,
who can wonder if I want, for once in a way, to overthrow the
established order of things, and have a jovial dark sister and a
dismal light one introduced as startling novelties in some few of the
hundred new volumes which we are likely to receive next season from
the Circulating Library?

But, after all, our long-established two sisters seem to be
exceptional beings, and to possess comparatively small importance, the
moment our minds revert to that vastly superior single personage, THE
HEROINE.

Let me mention, to begin with, that we wish no change to be made in
our respectable, recognised, old-fashioned Heroine, who has lived and
loved and wept for centuries. I have taken her to my bosom thousands
of times already, and ask nothing better than to indulge in that
tender luxury thousands of times again. I love her blushing cheek, her
gracefully-rounded form, her chiselled nose, her slender waist, her
luxuriant tresses which always escape from the fillet that binds them.
Any man or woman who attempts, from a diseased craving after novelty,
to cheat me out of one of her moonlight walks, one of her floods of
tears, one of her kneeling entreaties to obdurate relatives, one of
her rapturous sinkings on her lover's bosom, is a novelist whom I
distrust and dislike. He, or she, may be a very remarkable writer; but
their books will not do for my family and myself. The Heroine, the
whole Heroine, and nothing but the Heroine--that is our cry, if you
drive us into a corner and insist on our stating precisely what we
want, in the plainest terms possible.

Being thus faithfully attached to the established Heroine, it will
not, I trust, appear a very unaccountable proceeding, if we now
protest positively, and even indignantly, against her modern
successor--a bouncing, ill-conditioned, impudent young woman, who has
been introduced among us of late years. I venture to call this
wretched and futile substitute for our dear, tender, gentle, loving
old Heroine, the Man-Hater; because, in every book in which she
appears, it is her mission from first to last to behave as badly as
possible to every man with whom she comes in contact. She enters on
the scene with a preconceived prejudice against my sex, for which I,
as a man, abominate her; for which my wife, my daughters, my nieces,
and all other available women whom I have consulted on the subject,
despise her. When her lover makes her an offer of marriage, she
receives it in the light of a personal insult, goes up to her room
immediately afterwards, and flies into a passion with herself, because
she is really in love with the man all the time--comes down again, and
snubs him before company instead of making a decent apology--pouts and
flouts at him, on all after-occasions, until the end of the book is at
hand--then suddenly turns round and marries him! If we feel inclined
to ask why she could not, under the circumstances, receive his
advances with decent civility at first, we are informed that her
"maidenly consciousness" prevented it. This maidenly consciousness
seems to me very like new English for our old-fashioned phrase, bad
manners. And I am the more confirmed in this idea, because, on all
minor occasions, the Man-Hater is persistently rude and disobliging to
the last. Every individual in the novel who wears trousers and gets
within range of her maidenly consciousness, becomes her natural enemy
from that moment. If he makes a remark on the weather, her lip curls;
if he asks leave to give her a potato at dinner-time (meaning, poor
soul, to pick out for her the mealiest in the dish), her neck curves
in scorn; if he offers a compliment, finding she won't have a potato,
her nostril dilates. Whatever she does, even in her least aggressive
moments, she always gets the better of all the men. They are set up
like nine-pins for the Man-Hater to knock down. They are described, on
their introduction, as clever, resolute fellows; but they lose their
wits and their self-possession the instant they come within hail of
the Man-Hater's terrible tongue. No man kisses her, no man dries her
tears, no man sees her blush (except with rage), all through the three
volumes. And this is the opposition Heroine who is set up as successor
to our soft, feminine, loveable, sensitive darling of former days!

Set up, too, by lady-novelists, who ought surely to be authorities
when female characters are concerned. Is the Man-Hater a true
representative of young women, now-a-days? If so, what is to become of
my son--my unlucky son, aged twelve years?

In a short time, this boy will be marriageable, and he will go into
the world to bill and coo, and offer his hand and heart, as his father
did before him. My unhappy offspring, what a prospect awaits you! One
forbidding phalanx of Man-Haters, bristling with woman's dignity, and
armed to the teeth with maidenly consciousness, occupies the wide
matrimonial field, look where you will! Ill-fated youth, yet a few
years, and the female neck will curve, the female nostril dilate, at
the sight of you. You see that stately form, those rustling skirts,
that ample brow, and fall on your knees before it, and make your
proposal with the impassioned imbecility which your father exhibited
before you. My deluded boy, that is not a woman--it is a Man-Hater--a
whited sepulchre full of violent expostulations and injurious
epithets. She will lead you the life of a costermonger's ass, until
she has exhausted her whole stock of maidenly consciousness; and she
will then say (in effect, if not in words):--"Inferior animal, I loved
you from the first--I have asserted my dignity by making a fool of you
in public and private--now you may marry me!" Marry her not, my son!
Go rather to the slave-market at Constantinople--buy a Circassian
wife, who has heard nothing and read nothing about man-haters--bring
her home (with no better dowry than pots of the famous Cream from her
native land to propitiate your mother and sisters)--and trust to your
father to welcome an Asiatic daughter-in-law, who will not despise him
for the unavoidable misfortune of being a Man!

But I am losing my temper over a hypothetical case. I am forgetting
the special purpose of my petition, which is to beg that the Man-Hater
may be removed altogether from her usurped position of heroine. The
new-fashioned heroine is a libel on her sex. As a husband and a
father, I solemnly deny that she is in any single respect a natural
woman. Am I no judge? I have a wife, and I made her an offer. Did she
receive it as the Man-Haters receive offers? Can I ever forget the
mixture of modest confusion and perfect politeness with which that
admirable woman heard me utter the most absolute nonsense that ever
issued from my lips? Perhaps she is not fit for a heroine. Well, I can
give her up in that capacity without a pang. But my daughters and
nieces have claims, I suppose, to be considered as examples of what
young ladies are in the present day. Ever since I read the first novel
with a Man-Hater in it, I have had my eye on their nostrils, and I can
make affidavit that I have never yet seen them dilate under any
circumstances, or in any society. As for curling their lips and
curving their necks, they have attempted both operations at my express
request, and have found them to be physical impossibilities. In men's
society, their manners (like those of all other girls whom I meet
with) are natural and modest; and--in the cases of certain privileged
men--winning, into the bargain. They open their eyes with astonishment
when they read of the proceedings of our new-fashioned heroines, and
throw the book indignantly across the room, when they find a nice man
submitting to be bullied by a nasty woman, because he has paid her the
compliment of falling in love with her. No, no! we positively decline
to receive any more Man-Haters, and there is an end of it!

With this uncompromising expression of opinion, I think it desirable
to bring the present petition to a close. There are one or two other
good things in fiction, of which we have had enough; but I refrain
from mentioning them, from modest apprehension of asking for too much
at a time. If the slight changes in general, and the sweeping reform
in particular, which I have ventured to suggest, can be accomplished,
we are sure, in the future as in the past, to be grateful,
appreciating, and incessant novel-readers. If we cannot claim any
critical weight in the eyes of our esteemed authors, we can at least
arrogate to ourselves the minor merit, not only of reading novels
perpetually, but (and this is a rarer virtue) of publicly and proudly
avowing the fact. We only pretend to be human beings with a natural
desire for as much amusement as our work-a-day destinies will let us
have. We are just respectable enough to be convinced of the usefulness
of occasionally reading for information; but we are also certain (and
we say it boldly, in the teeth of the dull people), that there are few
higher, better, or more profitable enjoyments in this world than
reading a good novel.




FRAGMENTS OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE.--I.

Laid up in lodgings.


MY PARIS LODGING.

It has happened rather whimsically, and not very fortunately for me,
that my first experience of living in furnished lodgings abroad, as
well as in England, has occurred at the very time when illness has
rendered me particularly susceptible to the temporary loss of the
comforts of home. I have been ill, alone, in furnished lodgings in
Paris--ill, alone, on the journey back to England--ill, alone, again,
in furnished lodgings in London. I am a single man; but as I have
already intimated, I never knew what it was to enjoy the desolate
liberty of the bachelor until I became an invalid. Some of my
impressions of things and persons about me, formed under these
anomalous circumstances, may, perhaps, prove not altogether unworthy
of being written down, while they are still fresh in my mind.

How I happen, for a temporary period, to be away from the home in
which I have hitherto lived with my nearest relatives, and to which I
hope soon to return, it is of no importance to the reader to know.
Neither is it at all worth while to occupy time and space with any
particular description of the illness from which I have been and am
still suffering. It will be enough for preliminary purposes, if I
present myself at once in the character of a convalescent visiting
Paris, with the double intention of passing agreeably an interval of
necessary absence from home, and of promoting, by change of air and
scene, my recovery from a distressing and a tedious illness. When I
add to this, that although I lived alone in my French bachelor
apartment, I had the good fortune at Paris, as afterwards in London,
to be in the near neighbourhood of the most kind, attentive, and
affectionate friends, I have said as much as is needful by way of
preface, and may get on at once to my main purpose.

What my impressions of my apartment in Paris might have been, if I had
recovered there according to my anticipations, I cannot venture to
say; for, before I had got fairly settled in my new rooms, I suffered
a sudden relapse. My life, again, became the life of an invalid, and
my ways of thought and observation turned back disastrously to the old
invalid channel. Change of air and scene--which had done nothing for
my body--did nothing either for my mind. At Paris, as before in
London, I looked at the world about me, purely from the sick man's
point of view--or, in other words, the events that passed, the sights
that appeared, and the persons who moved around me, interested or
repelled me only as they referred more or less directly to myself and
my own invalid situation. This curious narrowness of view, of which I
am not yet well enough entirely to rid myself, though as conscious as
another of the mental weakness that it implies, has no connection that
I can discover with excessive selfishness or vanity; it is simply the
result of the inevitable increase of a man's importance to himself
which the very fact of sickness is only too apt to produce.

My own sensations, as a sick man, now fill up the weary blank of my
daily existence when I am alone, and form the main topic of inquiry
and conversation when my doctor and my friends enliven my solitude.
The concerns of my own poor body, which do not, I thank heaven, occupy
my attention for much more than one hour out of the twenty-four, when
I am well, become the main business and responsibility of all my
waking moments, now that I am ill. Pain to suffer, and the swallowing
of drugs and taking of nourishment at regulated periods; daily
restraints that I must undergo, and hourly precautions that I am
forced to practise, all contribute to keep my mind bound down to the
level of my body. A flight of thought beyond myself and the weary
present time--even supposing I were capable of the exertion--would
lead me astray from the small personal rules and regulations on which
I now depend absolutely for the recovery of my health.

Have my temper and disposition changed for the worse, under these
unfavourable circumstances? Not much, I hope. I can honestly say for
myself that I envy no other man's health and happiness. I feel no
jealous pang when I hear laughter about me. I can look at people out
of my window, running easily across the road, while I can hardly crawl
from one end of my chamber to the other, without feeling insulted by
their activity. Still, it is true, at the same time, that I warm to
people now exactly in proportion as I see them sensibly and sincerely
touched by my suffering condition; and that I like, or dislike, my
habitation for the time being, just as it happens to suit, or not to
suit, all the little requirements of my temporary infirmity. If I were
introduced to one of the most eminent men in the country at this
moment, and if he did not look sorry to see me ill, I should never
care to set eyes on the eminent man again. If I had a superb room with
the finest view in the world, but no bed-side conveniences for my
pill-boxes and medicine-bottles, I would leave that superb room and
fine view, and go cheerfully to a garret in an alley, provided it
adapted itself comfortably to the arrangement of my indispensable
invalid's lumber. This is doubtless a humiliating confession; but it
is well that I should make it once for all--for, the various opinions
and impressions which I am about frankly to write down, will be found
to be more or less coloured by what I venture to describe as the
involuntary egotism of a sick man.

Let us see how my new lodging in Paris suits me; and why it is that I
immediately become fond of it.

I live in a little building of my own, called a Pavilion. Outside, it
resembles, as to size, brightness, and apparent insubstantiality, a
private dwelling-house in a Pantomime. I expect as I drive up to it,
for the first time, to see Clown grinning at the door, and Harlequin
jumping through the window. A key is produced, and an odd little white
door, through which no fat man could penetrate even sideways, is
opened; I ascend a steep flight of a dozen steps, and enter my
toy-castle: my own independent, solitary, miniature mansion.

The first room is the drawing-room. It is about the size of a large
packing-case, with a gay looking-glass and clock, with bright red
chairs and sofa, with a cosy round table, with a big window looking
out on another Pavilion opposite, and on a great house set back in a
courtyard. To my indescribable astonishment, it actually possesses
three doors! One I have just entered by. Another leads into a
bed-chamber of the same size as the drawing-room, just as brightly and
neatly furnished, with a window that looks out on the everlasting
gaiety and bustle of the Champs Elysées. The third door leads into a
dressing-room half the size of the drawing-room, and having a fourth
door which opens into a kitchen half the size of the dressing-room,
but of course possessing a fifth door which leads out again to the
head of the staircase. As no two people meeting in the kitchen could
possibly pass each other, or remain in the apartment together without
serious inconvenience, the two doors leading in and out of it may be
pronounced useful as well as ornamental. Into this quaint little
culinary crevice the coal-merchant, the wood-merchant, and the
water-carrier squeeze their way, and find a doll's cellar and cistern
all ready for them. They might be followed, if I were only well enough
to give dinners, by a cook and his scullions--for I possess, besides
the cellar and cistern, an elaborate charcoal stove in the kitchen, at
which any number of courses might be prepared by any culinary artist,
who could cook composedly with a row of small fires under his nose, a
coal-cellar between his legs, a cistern scrubbing his shoulder, and a
lukewarm wall against his back.

But what is the main secret of my fondness for the Pavilion? It does
not, I am afraid, lie in the brightness and elegance of the little
rooms, or even in the delightful independence of inhabiting a lodging,
which is also a house of my own, where I can neither be disturbed nor
overlooked by any other lodgers. The one irresistible appeal which my
Parisian apartment makes to my sympathies, consists in the perfect
manner in which it fits my wants and flatters my weaknesses as an
invalid.

I have quite a little druggist's stock-in-trade of physic-bottles,
glasses, spoons, card-boxes and prescriptions; I have all sorts of
queer vestments and coverings, intended to guarantee me against all
variations of temperature and all degrees of exposure, by night as
well as by day; I have ready remedies that must be kept in my
bed-chamber, and elaborate applications that I must find handy in my
dressing-room. In short, I myself am nothing but the centre of a vast
medical litter, and the closer the said litter revolves round me the
more comfortable I am. In a house of the usual size, and in rooms
arranged on the ordinary plan, I should be driven distracted (being an
untidy man even in my healthiest moments) by mislaying things every
hour in the day, by having to get up to look for them, and by being
compelled to walk up and down stairs, or to make others do so for me,
when I want to establish communications between dressing-room,
bed-room, drawing-room, coal-cellar, and kitchen. In my tiny Parisian
house of one small storey, I can wait on myself with the most perfect
ease; in my wee sitting-room, nine-tenths of the things I want are
within arm's length of me, as I repose in my elbow-chair; if I must
move I can get from my bed-chamber to my kitchen in less time than it
would take me to walk across an English drawing-room; if I lose my
morning draught, mislay my noontide drops, or leave my evening
pill-box under my afternoon dressing-gown, I can take my walking-stick
or my fire-tongs, and poke or fish for missing articles in every
corner of the room, without doing more than turning round in my chair.
If I had been well and had given dinner parties, I might have found my
habitation rather too small for me. As it is, if my Pavilion had been
built on purpose for a solitary lodger to fall ill in with the least
possible amount of personal discomfort, it could not have suited my
sad case better. Sick, I love and honour the skilful architect who
contrived it. Well, I am very much afraid I should never have bestowed
so much as a single thought on him.

Why do I become, in one cordial quarter of an hour, friendly,
familiar, and even affectionate with my portress? Because it is part
of my unhealthy condition of body and mind, that I like nothing so
well as being pitied; and my portress sweetens my daily existence with
so much compassion that she does me more good, I think, than my doctor
or my drugs.

Let me try to describe her. She is a thin, rapid, cheerful little
woman, with a tiny face and bright brown eyes. She has a husband
(Hippolyte-senior) and a son (Hippolyte-junior), and a lodge of one
room to live in with her family. She has not been in bed, for years
past, before two or three in the morning; for my Pavilion and the
second Pavilion opposite and the large house behind, are all shut in
from the roadway by handsome iron gates, which it is the business of
somebody in the porter's lodge to open (by pulling a string
communicating with the latch) at all hours of the night to
homeward-bound lodgers. The large house has so many tenants that some
one is always out at a party or a theatre--so the keeping of late
hours becomes a necessary part of the service in the lodge, and the
poor little portress is the victim who suffers as perpetual
night-watch. Hippolyte-senior absorbs his fair share of work in the
day, and takes the early-rising department cheerfully, but he does not
possess the gift of keeping awake at night. By eleven o'clock (such is
sometimes the weakness even of the most amiable human nature) it is
necessary that Hippolyte-senior should be stretched on his back on the
nuptial bedstead, snoring impervious to all sounds and all in-comers.
Hippolyte-junior, or the son, is too young to be trusted with the
supervision of the gate-string. He sleeps, sound as his father, with a
half-developed snore and a coiled-up body, in a crib at the foot of
the parental bed. On the other side of the room, hard by the lodgers'
keys and candlesticks, with a big stove behind her and a gaslight
before her eyes, sits the faithful little portress, watching out the
weary hours as wakefully as she can. She trusts entirely to strong
coffee and the near flare of the gaslight to combat the natural
sleepiness which follows a hard day's work begun at eight o'clock
every morning. The coffee and the gas deserve, to a certain extent,
the confidence she places in them. They keep her bright brown eyes
wide open, staring with unwinking pertinacity at the light before
them. They keep her back very straight against her chair, and her arms
crossed tightly over her bosom, and her feet set firmly on her
footstool. But though they stop sleep from shutting her eyes or
relaxing her limbs, they cannot prevent some few latent Morphian
influences from stealthily reaching her. Open as her eyes may be, the
little woman nevertheless does start guiltily when the ring at the
bell comes at last; does stare fixedly for a moment before she can get
up; has to fight resolutely with something drowsy and clinging in the
shape of a trance, before she can fly to the latch-string, and hang on
to it wearily, instead of pulling at it with the proper wakeful jerk.
Night after night she has now drunk the strong coffee, and propped
herself up stiffly in her straight chair, and stared hard at the
flaring gaslight, for nearly seven years past. Some people would have
lost their tempers and their spirits under these hard circumstances;
but the cheerful little portress has only lost flesh. In a dark corner
of the room hangs a daguerreotype likeness. It represents a buxom
woman, with round cheeks and a sturdy waist, and dates from the period
when she was the bride of Hippolyte-senior, and was thinking of
following him into the Porter's Lodge. "Ah! my dear sir," she says
when I condole with her, "if we do get a little money sometimes in our
way of life, we don't earn it too easily. Aïe! Aïe! Aïe! I should like
a good sleep: I should like to be as fat as my portrait again!"

The same friendly relations--arising entirely, let it always be
remembered, out of my illness and the portress's compassion for
me--which have let me into the secrets of the strong coffee, the
daguerreotype portrait, and the sleepy constitution of Hippolyte-senior,
also enable me to ascertain, by special invitation, how the
inhabitants of the lodge dispose of some of the hardly-earned profits
of their situation.

I find myself suffering rather painfully, one morning, under some
aggravated symptoms of my illness, and my friend the portress comes
into the Pavilion to talk to me and keep up my spirits. She has had an
hour's extra sleep, for a wonder, and is in a chirping state of
cheerfulness in consequence. She shudders and makes faces at my
physic-bottles; entreats me to throw them away, to let her put me to
bed, and administer A Light Tea to begin with, and A Broth to follow
(un Thé léger et un Bouillon). If I will only stick to these remedies,
she will have them ready, if necessary, every hour in the day, and
will guarantee my immediate restoration to health and strength. While
we are arguing the question of the uselessness of drugs and the
remedial excellence of tea and broth, Hippolyte-senior, with a look of
mysterious triumph, which immediately communicates itself to the face
of his wife, enters the room to tell her that she is wanted below in
the lodge. She goes to his side and takes his arm, as if he was a
strange gentleman waiting to lead her down to dinner, nods to him
confidentially, then glances at me. Her husband follows her example,
and the two stand quite unconfusedly, arm-in-arm, smiling upon me and
my physic-bottles, as if they were a pair of lovers and I was the
venerable parent whose permission and blessing they were waiting to
receive.

"Have you been getting a new doctor for me?" I ask, excessively
puzzled by their evident desire to connect me with some secret in the
lodge.

"No," says the portress, "I believe in no doctors. I believe in
nothing but a light tea and a broth."

("My sentiments also!" adds her husband, parenthetically.)

"But we have something to show you in the lodge," continues the
portress.

(Hippolyte-senior arches his eyebrows, and says "Aha!")

"And when you feel better," proceeds my cheerful little friend, "only
have the politeness to come down to us, and you will see a marvellous
sight!"

Hippolyte-senior depresses his eyebrows, and says "Hush!"

"Enough," replies the portress, understanding him; "let us retire."

And they leave the room immediately, still arm-in-arm--the fondest and
most mysterious married couple that I have ever set eyes on.

That day, I do not feel quite strong enough to encounter great
surprises; so my visit to the lodge is deferred until the next
morning. Rather to my amazement, the portress does not pay me her
usual visit at my waking, on the eventful day. I descend to the lodge,
wondering what this change means, and see three or four strangers
assembled in the room which is bed-chamber, parlour, and porter's
office, all in one. The strangers, I find, are admiring friends: they
surround Hippolyte-senior, and all look one way with an expression of
intense pleasure and surprise. My eyes follow the direction of theirs;
and I see, above the shabby little lodge table, a resplendent new
looking-glass in the brightest of frames. On either side of it, rise
two blush-coloured wax tapers. Below it are three ornamental pots with
blooming rose-trees in them, backed by a fanlike screen of fair white
paper. This is the surprise that was in store for me; and this is also
the security in which the inhabitants of the lodge have invested their
last hard-earned savings. The whole thing has the effect upon my mind
of an amateur High Altar; and I admire the new purchase accordingly
with such serious energy of expression, that Hippolyte-senior, in the
first sweetness of triumph, forgets the modesty proper to his position
as proprietor of the new treasure, and apostrophises his own property
as Magnifique, with a power of voice and an energy of gesticulation
which I have never noticed in him before. When his enthusiasm has
abated, and just as I am on the point of asking where my friend the
portress is, I hear a faint little voice speaking behind the group of
admiring friends:

"Perhaps, Messieurs et Mesdames, you think this an extravagance for
people in our situation," says the voice, in feebly polite tones of
apology; "but, alas! how could we resist it? It is so beautiful--it
brightens the room so--it gives us such a noble appearance. And, then,
it is also a property--something to leave to our children--in short, a
pardonable extravagance. Aïe! I am shaking all over again; I can say
no more!"

While these words are in course of utterance, the group of friends
separate, and I see sitting behind them, close to the big stove, the
little portress, looking sadly changed for the worse. Her tiny face
has become very yellow; her bright brown eyes look disproportionately
large; she has an old shawl twisted round her shoulders and shivers in
it perpetually. I ask what is the matter, imagining that the poor
little woman has got a fit of the ague. The portress contrives to
smile as usual before she answers, though her teeth are chattering
audibly.

"You will not give me drugs, if I tell you?" she says.

"I will do nothing that is not perfectly agreeable to you," I reply
evasively.

"My complaint is a violent indigestion (une forte indigestion),"
continues the portress, indicatively laying one trembling fore-finger
on the region of her malady. "And I am curing myself with a Light
Tea."

Here the fore-finger changes its direction and points to a large white
earthenware teapot, with an empty mug by the side of it. To save the
portress the trouble of replenishing her drinking vessel, I pour out a
dose of the Light Tea. It is a liquid of a faint straw colour, totally
unlike any English tea that ever was made; and it tastes as a quart of
hot water might taste after a wisp of hay had been dipped into it. The
portress swallows three mugsful of her medicine in my presence,
smiling and shivering; looking rapturously at the magnificent new
mirror with its attendant flower-pots and tapers; and rejecting with
grimaces of comic disgust, all overtures of medical help on my part,
even to the modest offering of one small pill. An hour or two later, I
descend to the lodge again to see how she is. She has been persuaded
to go to bed; is receiving, in bed, a levée of friends; is answering,
in the same interesting situation, the questions of all the visitors
of the day, relating to all the lodgers in the house; has begun a
fresh potful of the light tea; is still smiling; still shivering;
still contemptuously sceptical on the subject of drugs.

In the evening I go down again. The teapot is not done with yet, and
the hay-flavoured hot water is still pouring inexhaustibly into the
system of the little portress. She happens now to be issuing
directions relative to the keeping awake of Hippolyte-senior, who, for
this night at least, must watch by the gate-string. He is to have a
pint of strong coffee and a pipe; he is to have the gas turned on very
strong; and he is to be excited by the presence of a brisk and wakeful
friend. The next morning, just as I am thinking of making inquiries at
the lodge, who should enter my room but the dyspeptic patient herself,
cured, and ready to digest anything but a doctor's advice or a small
pill. Hippolyte-senior, I hear, has not fallen asleep over the
gate-string for more than half-an-hour every now and then; and the
portress has had a long night's rest. She does not consider this
unusual occurrence as reckoning in any degree among the agencies which
have accomplished her rapid recovery. It is the light tea alone that
has done it; and, if I still doubt the inestimable virtues of the hot
hay-water cure, then of all the prejudiced gentlemen the portress has
ever heard of, I am the most deplorably obstinate in opening my arms
to error and shutting my eyes to truth.

Such is the little domestic world about me, in some of the more vivid
lights in which it presents itself to my own peculiar view.

As for the great Parisian world outside, my experience of it is
bounded by the prospect I obtain of the Champs Elysées from my
bed-room window. Fashionable Paris spins and prances by me every
afternoon, in all its glory; but what interest have healthy princes
and counts and blood-horses, and blooming ladies, plunged in abysses
of circumambient crinoline, for me, in my sick situation? They all fly
by me in one confused phantasmagoria of gay colours and rushing forms,
which I look at with lazy eyes. The sights I watch with interest are
those only which seem to refer in some degree to my own invalid
position. My sick man's involuntary egotism clings as close to me
when I look outward at the great highway, as when I look inward at my
own little room. Thus, the only objects which I now notice attentively
from my window, are, oddly enough, chiefly those which I should have
missed altogether, or looked at with indifference if I had occupied my
bachelor apartment in the enviable character of a healthy man.

For example, out of the various vehicles which pass me by dozens in
the morning, and by hundreds in the afternoon, only two succeed in
making anything like a lasting impression on my mind. I have only
vague ideas of dust, dashing, and magnificence in connection with the
rapid carriages late in the day--and of bells and hollow yelping of
carters' voices in connection with the deliberate waggons early in the
morning. But I have, on the other hand, a very distinct remembrance of
one sober brown omnibus, belonging to a Sanitary Asylum, and of a
queer little truck which carries baths and hot water to private
houses, from a bathing establishment near me. The omnibus, as it
passes my window at a solemn jog-trot, is full of patients getting
their airing. I can see them dimly, and I fall into curious fancies
about their various cases, and wonder what proportion of the afflicted
passengers are near the time of emancipation from their sanitary
prison on wheels. As for the little truck, with its empty zinc bath
and barrel of warm water, I am probably wrong in sympathetically
associating it as frequently as I do with cases of illness. It is
doubtless often sent for by healthy people, too luxurious in their
habits to walk abroad for a bath. But there must be a proportion of
cases of illness to which the truck ministers; and when I see it going
faster than usual, I assume that it must be wanted by some person in a
fit; grow suddenly agitated by the idea; and watch the empty bath and
the hot-water barrel with breathless interest, until they rumble away
together out of sight.

So, again, with regard to the men and women who pass my window by
thousands every day; my view of them is just as curiously
circumscribed as my view of the vehicles. Out of all the crowd, I now
find, on taxing my memory, that I have noticed particularly just three
people (a woman and two men), who have chanced to appeal to my invalid
curiosity.

The woman is a nursemaid, neither young nor pretty, very clean and
neat in her dress, with an awful bloodless paleness in her face, and a
hopeless consumptive languor in her movements. She has only one child
to take care of--a robust little girl of cruelly active habits. There
is a stone bench opposite my window; and on this the wan and weakly
nursemaid often sits, not bumping down on it with the heavy thump of
honest exhaustion, but sinking on it listlessly, as if in changing
from walking to sitting she were only passing from one form of
weariness to another. The robust child remains mercifully near the
feeble guardian for a few minutes--then becomes, on a sudden,
pitilessly active again, laughs and dances from a distance, when the
nurse makes weary signs to her, and runs away altogether, when she is
faintly entreated to be quiet for a few minutes longer. The nurse
looks after her in despair for a moment, draws her neat black shawl,
with a shiver, over her sharp shoulders, rises resignedly, and
disappears from my eyes in pursuit of the pitiless child. I see this
mournful little drama acted many times over, always in the same way,
and wonder sadly how long the wan nursemaid will hold out. Not being a
family man, and having nervously-acute sympathies for sickness and
suffering just now, it would afford me genuine satisfaction to see the
oppressed nurse beat the tyrannical child; but she seems fond of the
little despot; and, besides, she is so weak that if it came to blows,
I am afraid, grown woman as she is, that she might get the worst of
it.

The men whom I observe, are not such interesting cases; but they
exhibit, in a minor degree, the peculiarities that are sure to attract
my attention. The first of the two is a gentleman--lonely and rich, as
I imagine. He is fat, yellow, and gloomy, and has evidently been
ordered horse-exercise for the benefit of his health. He rides a quiet
English cob; never has any friend with him; never--so far as I can
see--exchanges greetings with any other horseman; is never smiled at
from a carriage, nor bowed to by a foot-passenger. He rides with his
flaccid chin sunk on his fat breast; sits his horse as if his legs
were stuffed and his back boneless; always attracts me because he is
the picture of dyspeptic wretchedness, and always passes me at the
same mournful jog-trot pace. The second man is a police agent. I
cannot sympathise with him in consequence of his profession; but I can
observe, with a certain lukewarm interest, that he is all but worked
to death. He yawns and stretches himself in corners; sometimes drops
furtively on to the stone bench before my window; then starts up from
it suddenly, as if he felt himself falling asleep the moment he sat
down. He has hollow places where other people have cheeks; and,
judging by his walk, must be quite incapable of running after a
prisoner who might take to flight. On the whole, he presents to my
mind the curious spectacle of a languid man trying to adapt himself to
a brisk business, and failing palpably in the effort. As the sick
child of a thriving system he attracts my attention. I devoutly hope
that he will not return the compliment by honouring me with his
notice.

Such are the few short steps that I take in advance to get a
moderately close glance at French humanity. If my view is absurdly
limited to my own dim horizon, this defect has at least one advantage
for the reader: it prevents all danger of my troubling him with my
ideas and observations at any great length. If other people value this
virtue of brevity in writers, orators, and preachers as sincerely as I
do, perhaps I may hope, on account of my short range of observation
and my few words, to get another hearing, if I write the second
chapter of my invalid experiences. I began the first half of them (as
herein related) in France; and I am now completing the second (yet to
be recorded) in England. When the curtain rises on my sick bed again,
the scene will be London.


CHAPTER THE SECOND.--MY LONDON LODGING.

I last had the honour of presenting myself to the reader's notice in
the character of an invalid laid up in lodgings at Paris. Let me now
be permitted to reappear as an invalid laid up, for the time being, in
a London cab. Let it be imagined that I have got through the journey
from Paris, greatly to my own surprise and satisfaction, without
breaking down by the way; that I have slept one night at a London
hotel for the first time in my life; and that I am now helplessly
adrift, looking out for Furnished Apartments as near as may be to my
doctor's place of abode.

The cab is fusty, the driver is sulky, the morning is foggy. A dry
dog-kennel would be a pleasant refuge by comparison with the miserable
vehicle in which I am now jolting my way over the cruel London stones.
On our road to my doctor's neighbourhood we pass through Smeary
Street, a locality well known to the inhabitants of Northern London. I
feel that I can go no further. I remember that some friends of mine
live not far off, and I recklessly emancipate myself from the torment
of the cab, by stopping the driver at the very first house in the
windows of which I see a bill with the announcement that Apartments
are to Let.

The door is opened by a tall muscular woman, with a knobbed face and
knotty arms besprinkled with a layer of grate-dust in a state of
impalpable powder. She shows me up into a second-floor front bed-room.
My first look of scrutiny is naturally directed at the bed. It is of
the negative sort, neither dirty nor clean; but, by its side, I see a
positive advantage in connection with it, in the shape of a long
mahogany shelf, fixed into the wall a few inches above the bed, and
extending down its whole length from head to foot. My sick man's
involuntary egotism is as predominant an impulse within me at London
as at Paris. I think directly of my invalid's knick-knacks: I see
that the mahogany shelf will serve to keep them all within my reach
when I am in bed; I know that it will be wanted for no other purpose
than that to which I design to put it; that it need not be cleared for
dinner every day, like a table, or disturbed when the servant cleans
the room, like a moveable stand. I satisfy myself that it holds out
all these rare advantages to me, in my peculiar situation, and I snap
at them on the instant--or, in other words, I take the room
immediately.

If I had been in health, I think I should have had two cogent reasons
for acting otherwise, and seeking apartments elsewhere. In the first
place, I should have observed that the room was not very clean or very
comfortably furnished. I should have noticed that the stained and torn
drugget on the floor displayed a margin of dirty boards all round the
bed-chamber; and I should no sooner have set eyes on the venerable
arm-chair by the bedside than I should have heard it saying privately
in my ear, in an ominous language of its own, "Stranger, I am let to
the Fleas: take me at your peril." Even if these signs and portents
had not been enough to send me out into the street again, I should
certainly have found the requisite warning to quit the house written
legibly in the face, figure, and manner of the landlady. I should
probably have seen something to distrust and dislike in everything
connected with her, down even to her name, which was Mrs. Glutch; I
should have made my escape into the street again, and should not have
ventured near it any more for the rest of the day. But as it was, my
fatal invalid prepossessions blinded me to everything but the
unexpected blessing of that mahogany shelf by the bedside. I
overlooked the torn drugget, the flea-peopled arm-chair, and the
knotty-faced landlady with the ominous name. The shelf was bait enough
for me, and the moment the trap was open, I collected my train of
medicine bottles and confidently walked in.

It is a general subject of remark among observant travellers, that the
two nations of the civilized world which appear to be most widely
separated as to the external aspects of life respectively presented by
them, are also the two which are most closely brought together by the
neighbourly ties of local situation. Before I had been many days
established in Smeary Street, I found that I myself, in my own
circumscribed sphere, offered a remarkable example of the truth of the
observation just recorded. The strong contrast between my present and
my past life was a small individual proof of the great social
contrasts between England and France.

I have truly presented myself at Paris, as living independently in a
little toy house of my own; as looking out upon a scene of almost
perpetual brightness and gaiety; and as having people to attend on me
whose blessed levity of disposition kept them always cheerful, always
quaintly characteristic, always unexpectedly amusing, even to the
languid eye of a sick man. With equal candour I must now record of my
in-door life in London, that it was passed with many other lodgers, in
a large house without a vestige of toy-shop prettiness in any part of
it. I must acknowledge that I looked out upon drab-coloured walls and
serious faces through a smoke-laden atmosphere; and I must admit that
I was waited on (so far as the actual house-service was concerned) by
people whose cloudy countenances seemed unconscious of a gleam of
inner sunshine for days and days together. Nor did the contrast end
here. In my lodgings at Paris, I have represented myself as having
about me a variety of animate and inanimate objects which I might
notice or not just as I pleased, and as using my freedom of choice in
a curiously partial and restricted manner, in consequence of the
narrowing effect of my illness on my sympathies and powers of
observation. In my London lodging, I enjoyed no such liberty. I could
not get even a temporary freedom of selection, except by fighting for
it resolutely at odds and ends of time. I had but one object which
offered itself to my observation, which perpetually presented itself,
which insisted on being noticed, no matter how mentally unfit and
morally unwilling my illness rendered me to observe it; and that
object was--my landlady, Mrs. Glutch.

Behold me then, now, no longer a free agent; no longer a fanciful
invalid with caprices to confide to the ear of the patient reader. My
health is no better in Smeary Street than it was in the Champs
Elysées; I take as much medicine in London as I took in Paris; but my
character is altered in spite of myself, and the form and colour of my
present fragment of writing will, I fear, but too truly reflect the
change.

I _was_ a sick man with several things to discourse of--I _am_ a sick
man with only one topic to talk about. I may escape from it for a few
sentences at a time, in these pages, as I escaped from it for a few
minutes at a time in Smeary Street; but the burden of my song will be
now, what the burden of my life has been lately--my landlady. I am
going to begin with her--I shall go on with her--I shall try to wander
away from her--I shall get back to her--I shall end with her. She will
mix herself up with everything I have to say; will intrude on my
observations out of window; will get into my victuals and drink, and
drops, and draughts, and pills; will come between me and my studies of
character among maids-of-all-work, in this too faithful narrative,
just as she did in the real scenes which it endeavours to represent.
While I make this acknowledgment as a proper warning to the reader
that I have changed into a monotonous sick man since we met last, let
me add, in justice to myself, that my one subject has at least the
advantage of being a terrible one. Think of a sick fly waited on by a
healthy blue-bottle, and you will have a fair idea of the relative
proportions and positions of myself and Mrs. Glutch.

I have hardly been settled an hour in my second-floor front room
before the conviction is forced on my mind that Mrs. Glutch is
resolved to make a conquest of me--of the maternal, or platonic kind,
let me hasten to add, so as to stop the mouth of scandal before it is
well opened. I find that she presents herself before me in the
character of a woman suffused in a gentle melancholy, proceeding from
perpetual sympathy for my suffering condition. It is part of my
character, as a sick man, that I know by instinct when people really
pity me, just as children and dogs know when people really like them;
and I have, consequently, not been five minutes in Mrs. Glutch's
society, before I know that her sympathy for me is entirely of that
sort of which (in the commercial phrase) a large assortment is always
on hand. I take no pains to conceal from Mrs. Glutch that I have found
her out; but she is too innocent to understand me, and goes on
sympathising in the very face of detection. She becomes, in spite of
her knobbed face, knotty arms, and great stature and strength,
languidly sentimental in manner, the moment she enters my room.
Language runs out of her in a perpetual flow, and politeness encircles
her as with a halo that can never be dimmed. "I have been so anxious
about you!" is her first morning's salutation to me. The words are
preceded by a faint cough, and followed by an expressively weary sigh,
as if she had passed a sleepless night on my account. The next morning
she appears with a bunch of wallflowers in her mighty fist, and with
another faint prefatory cough, "I beg pardon, sir; but I have brought
you a few flowers. I think they relieve the mind." The expressively
weary sigh follows again, as if it would suggest this time that she
has toiled into the country to gather me the flowers at early dawn. I
do not find, strange as it may seem, that they relieve my mind at all;
but of course I say, "Thank you."--"Thank _you_, sir," rejoins Mrs.
Glutch--for it is a part of this woman's system of oppressive
politeness always to thank me for thanking her. She invariably
contrives to have the last word, no matter in what circumstances the
courteous contention which is the main characteristic of our daily
intercourse, may take its rise.

Let us say, for instance, that she comes into my room and gets into my
way (which she always does) at the very time when she ought to be out
of it--her first words are necessarily, "I beg pardon." I growl (not
so brutally as I could wish, being weak), "Never mind!"--"Thank you,
sir," says Mrs. Glutch, and coughs faintly, and sighs, and delays
going out as long as possible. Or, take another example:--"Mrs.
Glutch, this plate's dirty."--"I am much obliged to you, sir, for
telling me of it."--"It isn't the first dirty plate I have
had."--"Really now, sir?"--"You may take away the fork; for that is
dirty too."--"Thank you, sir."--Oh for one hour of my little Parisian
portress! Oh for one day's respite from the politeness of Mrs. Glutch!

Let me try if I cannot get away from the subject for a little while.
What have I to say about the other lodgers in the house? Not much; for
how can I take any interest in people who never make inquiries after
my health, though they must all know, by the frequent visits of the
doctor and the chemist's boy, that I am ill?

The first floor is inhabited by a mysterious old gentleman, and his
valet. He brought three cart-loads of gorgeous furniture with him, to
fit up two rooms--he possesses an organ, on which, greatly to his
credit, he never plays--he receives perfumed notes, goes out
beautifully dressed, is brought back in private carriages, with tall
footmen in attendance to make as much noise as possible with the
door-knocker. Nobody knows where he comes from, or believes that he
passes in the house under his real name. If any aged aristocrat be
missing from the world of fashion, we rather think we have got him in
Smeary Street, and should feel willing to give him up to his rightful
owners on payment of a liberal reward. Next door to me, in the second
floor back, I hear a hollow cough and sometimes a whispering; but I
know nothing for certain--not even whether the hollow cougher is also
the whisperer, or whether they are two, or whether there is or is not
a third silent and Samaritan person who relieves the cough and listens
to the whisper. Above me, in the attics, there is a matutinal stamping
and creaking of boots, which go down-stairs, at an early hour, in a
hurry, which never return all day, but which come up-stairs again in a
hurry late at night. The boots evidently belong to shopmen or clerks.
Below, in the parlours, there seems to be a migratory population,
which comes in one week and goes out the next, and is, in some cases,
not at all to be depended upon in the matter of paying rent. I happen
to discover this latter fact, late one night, in rather an alarming
and unexpected manner. Just before bedtime I descend, candle in hand,
to a small back room, at the end of the passage, on the ground floor
(used all day for the reception of general visitors, and empty, as I
rashly infer, all night), for the purpose of getting a sofa cushion to
eke out my scanty allowance of pillows. I no sooner open the door and
approach the sofa than I behold, to my horror and amazement, Mrs.
Glutch coiled up on it, with all her clothes on, and with a wavy,
coffee-coloured wrapper flung over her shoulders. Before I can turn
round to run away, she is on her legs, wide awake in an instant, and
politer than ever. She makes me a long speech of explanation, which
begins with "I beg pardon," and ends with "Thank you, sir;" and from
the substance of which I gather that the parlour lodgers for the past
week are going away the next morning; that they are the likeliest
people in the world to forget to pay their lawful debts; and that Mrs.
Glutch is going to lie in ambush for them all night, in the
coffee-coloured wrapper, ready the instant the parlour door opens, to
spring out into the passage and call for her rent.

What am I about? I am relapsing insensibly into the inevitable and
abhorrent subject of Mrs. Glutch, exactly in accordance with my
foreboding of a few pages back. Let me make one more attempt to get
away from my landlady. If I try to describe my room, I am sure to get
back to her, because she is always in it. Suppose I get out of the
house altogether, and escape into the street?

All men, I imagine, have an interest of some kind in the locality in
which they live. My interest in Smeary Street is entirely associated
with my daily meals, which are publicly paraded all day long on the
pavement. In explanation of this rather original course of proceeding,
I must mention that I am ordered to eat "little and often," and must
add, that I cannot obey the direction if the food is cooked on the
premises in which I live, because I have had the misfortune to look
down certain underground stairs and to discover that in the lowest
depth of dirt, which I take to be the stairs themselves, there is a
lower deep still, which is the kitchen at the bottom of them. Under
these peculiar circumstances, I am reduced to appeal for nourishment
and cleanliness in combination, to the tender mercies (and kitchen) of
the friends in my neighbourhood, to whom I have alluded at the outset
of this narrative. They commiserate and help me with the readiest
kindness. Devoted messengers, laden with light food, pass and repass
all day long between their house and my bedroom. The dulness of Smeary
Street is enlivened by perpetual snacks carried in public procession.
The eyes of my opposite neighbours, staring out of window, and not
looking as if they cared about my being ill, are regaled from morning
to night by passing dishes and basins, which go westward full and
steaming, and return eastward eloquently empty. My neighbourhood knows
when I dine, and can smell out, if it pleases, what I have for dinner.
The early housemaid kneeling on the doorstep, can stay her scrubbing
hand and turn her pensive head and scan my simple breakfast, before I
know what it will be myself. The mid-day idler, lounging along Smeary
Street, is often sweetly reminded of his own luncheon by meeting mine.
Friends who knock at my door may smell my dinner behind them, and know
how I am keeping up my stamina, before they have had time to inquire
after my health. My supper makes the outer darkness savoury as the
evening closes in; and my empty dishes startle the gathering silence
with convivial clatter as they wend on their homeward way the last
thing at night.

Is there no dark side to this bright picture? Is there never any hitch
in these friendly arrangements for feeding me in the cleanest way, on
the most appetising diet? Yes--there is a hitch. Will you give it a
name? I will. Its name is Mrs. Glutch.

It is, I am well aware, only to be expected that my landlady should
resent the tacit condemnation of her cleanliness and cookery implied
in the dietary arrangements which I have made with my friends. If she
would only express her sense of offence by sulking or flying into a
passion, I should not complain; for in the first case supposed, I
might get the better of her by noticing nothing, and, in the second, I
might hope, in course of time, to smooth her down by soft answers and
polite prevarications. But the means she actually takes of punishing
me for my too acute sense of the dirtiness of her kitchen, are of
such a diabolically ingenious nature, and involve such a continuous
series of small persecutions, that I am rendered, from first to last,
quite powerless to oppose her. Shall I describe her plan of annoyance?
I _must_ describe it--I must return to my one prohibited topic (as I
foreboded I should) in spite of myself.

Mrs. Glutch, then, instead of visiting her wrath on me, or my food, or
my friends, or my friends' messengers, avenges herself entirely on
their tray-cloths and dishes. She does not tear the first nor break
the second--for that would be only a simple and primitive system of
persecution--but she smuggles them, one by one, out of my room, and
merges them inextricably with her own property, in the grimy regions
of the kitchen. She has a power of invisibly secreting the largest
pie-dishes, and the most voluminous cloths, under my very eyes, which
I can compare to nothing but sleight of hand. Every morning I see
table utensils which my friends lend me, ranged ready to go back, in
my own room. Every evening, when they are wanted, I find that some of
them are missing, and that my landlady is even more surprised by that
circumstance than I am myself. If my friends' servant ventures to say,
in her presence, that the cook wants her yesterday's tray-cloth, and
if I refer him to Mrs. Glutch, the immoveable woman only sniffs,
tosses her head, and "wonders how the young man can have demeaned
himself by bringing her such a peremptory message." If I try on my own
sole responsibility to recover the missing property, she lets me see,
by her manner at the outset, that she thinks I suspect her of stealing
it. If I take no notice of this manœuvre, and innocently persist in
asking additional questions about the missing object, the following is
a sample of the kind of dialogue that is sure to pass between us:--

"I think, Mrs. Glutch"----

"Yes, sir!"

"I think one of my friends' large pudding-basins has gone
down-stairs."

"Really, now, sir? A large pudding-basin? No: I think not."

"But I can't find it up here, and it is wanted back."

"Naturally, sir."

"I put it on the drawers, Mrs. Glutch, ready to go back, last night."

"Did you, indeed, sir?"

"Perhaps the servant took it down-stairs to clean it?"

"Not at all likely, sir. If you will please to remember, you told her
last Monday evening--or, no, I beg pardon--last Tuesday morning, that
your friends cleaned up their own dishes, and that their things was
not to be touched."

"Perhaps you took it down-stairs then yourself, Mrs. Glutch, by
mistake?"

"I, sir! I didn't. I couldn't. Why should I? I think you said a large
pudding-basin, sir?"

"Yes, I did say so."

"I have ten large pudding-basins of my own, sir."

"I am very glad to hear it. Will you be so good as to look among them,
and see if my friends' basin has not got mixed up with your crockery?"

Mrs. Glutch turns very red in the face, slowly scratches her muscular
arms, as if she felt a sense of pugilistic irritation in them, looks
at me steadily with a pair of glaring eyes, and leaves the room at the
slowest possible pace. I wait and ring--wait and ring--wait and ring.
After the third waiting and the third ringing, she reappears, redder
of face and slower of march than before, with the missing article of
property held out before her at arm's length.

"I beg pardon, sir," she says, "but is this anything like your
friends' large pudding-basin?"

"That is the basin itself, Mrs. Glutch."

"Really, now, sir? Well, as you seem so positive, it isn't for me to
contradict you. But I hope I shall give no offence if I mention that I
had ten large pudding-basins of my own, and that I miss one of them."

With that last dexterous turn of speech, she gives up the basin with
the air of a high-minded woman, who will resign her own property
rather than expose herself to the injurious doubts of a morbidly
suspicious man. When I add that the little scene just described takes
place between us nearly every day, the reader will admit that,
although Mrs. Glutch cannot prevent me from enjoying on her dirty
premises the contraband luxury of a clean dinner, she can at least go
great lengths towards accomplishing the secondary annoyance of
preventing me from digesting it.

I have hinted at a third personage in the shape of a servant, in my
report of the foregoing dialogue; and I have previously alluded to
myself (in paving the way for the introduction of my landlady), as
extending my studies of human character, in my London lodging, to
those forlorn members of the population called maids-of-all-work. The
maids--I use the plural number advisedly--present themselves to me to
be studied, as apprentices to the hard business of service, under the
matronly superintendence of Mrs. Glutch. The succession of them is
brisk enough to keep all the attention I can withdraw from my landlady
constantly employed in investigating their peculiarities. By the time
I have been three weeks in Smeary Street, I have had three
maids-of-all-work, to study--a new servant for each week! In reviewing
the three individually before the reader, I must be allowed to
distinguish them by numbers instead of names. Mrs. Glutch screams at
them all indiscriminately by the name of Mary, just as she would
scream at a succession of cats by the name of Puss. Now, although I am
always writing about Mrs. Glutch, I have still spirit enough left to
vindicate my own individuality, by abstaining from following her
example. In obedience, therefore, to these last relics of independent
sentiment, permit me the freedom of numbering my maids-of-all-work, as
I introduce them to public notice in these pages.

Number One is amazed by the spectacle of my illness, and always stares
at me. If I fell ill one evening, went to a dispensary, asked for a
bottle of physic, and got well on it the next morning; or, if I
presented myself before her at the last gasp, and died forthwith in
Smeary Street, she would, in either case, be able to understand me.
But an illness on which medicine produces no immediate effect, and
which does not keep the patient always groaning in bed, is beyond her
comprehension. Personally, she is very short and sturdy, and is always
covered from head to foot with powdered black, which seems to lie
especially thick on her in the morning. How does she accumulate it?
Does she wash herself with the ordinary liquid used for ablutions; or
does she take a plunge-bath every morning under the kitchen-grate? I
am afraid to ask this question of her; but I contrive to make her talk
to me about other things. She looks very much surprised, poor
creature, when I first let her see that I have other words to utter in
addressing her, besides the word of command; and seems to think me the
most eccentric of mankind, when she finds that I have a decent anxiety
to spare her all useless trouble in waiting on me. Young as she is,
she has drudged so long over the wickedest ways of this world, without
one leisure moment to look up from the everlasting dirt on the road at
the green landscape around, and the pure sky above, that she has
become hardened to the saddest, surely, of human lots before she is
yet a woman grown. Life means dirty work, small wages, hard words, no
holidays, no social station, no future, according to her experience of
it. No human being ever was created for this. No state of society
which composedly accepts this, in the cases of thousands, as one of
the necessary conditions of its selfish comforts, can pass itself off
as civilised, except under the most audacious of all false pretences.
These thoughts rise in me often, when I ring the bell, and the
maid-of-all-work answers it wearily. I cannot communicate them to her:
I can only encourage her to talk to me now and then on something like
equal terms. Just as I am succeeding in the attainment of this object,
Number One scatters all my plans and purposes to the winds, by telling
me that she is going away.

I ask Why? and am told that she cannot bear being a-railed at and
a-hunted about by Mrs. Glutch any longer. The oppressively polite
woman who cannot address me without begging my pardon, can find no
hard words in the vocabulary hard enough for the maid-of-all-work. "I
am frightened of my life," says Number One, apologizing to me for
leaving the place. "I am so little and she's so big. She heaves things
at my head, she does. Work as hard as you may, you can't work hard
enough for her. I must go, if you please, sir. Whatever do you think
she done this morning? She up, and druv the creases at me." With these
words (which I find mean in genteel English, that Mrs. Glutch has
enforced her last orders to the servant by throwing a bunch of
water-cresses at her head), Number One curtseys and says "Good-bye!"
and goes out resignedly once again into the hard world. I follow her a
little while, in imagination, with no very cheering effect on my
spirits--for what do I see awaiting her at each stage of her career?
Alas, for Number One, it is always a figure in the likeness of Mrs.
Glutch.

Number Two fairly baffles me. I see her grin perpetually at me, and
imagine, at first, that I am regarded by her in the light of a new
kind of impostor, who shams illness as a way of amusing himself. But I
soon discover that she grins at everything--at the fire that she
lights, at the cloth she lays for dinner, at the medicine-bottles she
brings upstairs, at the furibund visage of Mrs. Glutch, ready to
drive whole baskets full of creases at her head every morning. Looking
at her with the eye of an artist, I am obliged to admit that Number
Two is, as the painters say, out of drawing. The longest things about
her are her arms; the thickest thing about her is her waist. It is
impossible to believe that she has any legs, and it is not easy to find
out the substitute which, in the absence of a neck, is used to keep
her big head from rolling off her round shoulders. I try to make her
talk, but only succeed in encouraging her to grin at me. Have ceaseless
foul words, and ceaseless dirty work clouded over all the little light
that has ever been let in on her mind? I suspect that it is so, but I
have no time to acquire any positive information on the subject. At
the end of Number Two's first week of service, Mrs. Glutch discovers,
to her horror and indignation, that the new maid-of-all-work possesses
nothing in the shape of wearing-apparel, except the worn-out garments
actually on her back; and, to make matters worse, a lady-lodger in the
parlour misses one of a pair of lace-cuffs, and feels sure that the
servant has taken it. There is not a particle of evidence to support
this view of the case; but Number Two being destitute, is consequently
condemned without a trial, and dismissed without a character. She too
wanders off forlorn into a world that has no haven of rest or voice
of welcome for her--wanders off, without so much as a dirty bundle in
her hand--wanders off, voiceless, with the unchanging grin on the
smut-covered face. How shocked we should all be, if we opened a book
about a savage country, and saw a portrait of Number Two in the
frontispiece as a specimen of the female population!

Number Three comes to us all the way from Wales; arrives late one
evening, and is found at seven the next morning, crying as if she
would break her heart, on the door-step. It is the first time she has
been away from home. She has not got used yet to being a forlorn
castaway among strangers. She misses the cows of a morning, the
blessed fields with the blush of sunrise on them, the familiar faces,
the familiar sounds, the familiar cleanliness of her country home.
There is not the faintest echo of mother's voice, or of father's
sturdy footfall here. Sweetheart John Jones is hundreds of miles away;
and little brother Joe toddles up door-steps far from these to clamour
for the breakfast which he shall get this morning from other than his
sister's hands. Is there nothing to cry for in this? Absolutely
nothing, as Mrs. Glutch thinks. What does this Welsh barbarian mean by
clinging to my area-railings when she ought to be lighting the fire;
by sobbing in full view of the public of Smeary Street when the
lodgers' bells are ringing angrily for breakfast? Will nothing get
the girl in-doors? Yes, a few kind words from the woman who passes by
her with my breakfast will. She knows that the Welsh girl is hungry as
well as home-sick, questions her, finds out that she has had no supper
after her long journey, and that she has been used to breakfast with
the sunrise at the farm in Wales. A few merciful words lure her away
from the railings, and a little food inaugurates the process of
breaking her in to London service. She has but a few days allowed her,
however, to practise the virtue of dogged resignation in her first
place. Before she has given me many opportunities of studying her
character, before she has done knitting her brows with the desperate
mental effort of trying to comprehend the mystery of my illness,
before the smut has fairly settled on her rosy cheeks, before the
London dirt has dimmed the pattern on her neat print gown, she, too,
is cast adrift into the world. She has not suited Mrs. Glutch (being,
as I imagine, too offensively clean to form an appropriate part of the
kitchen furniture)--a friendly maid-of-all-work, in service near us,
has heard of a place for her--and she is forthwith sent away to be
dirtied and deadened down to her proper social level in another
Lodging-house.

With her, my studies of character among maids-of-all-work come to an
end. I hear vague rumours of the arrival of Number Four. But before
she appears, I have got the doctor's leave to move into the country,
and have terminated my experience of London lodgings, by making my
escape with all convenient speed from the perpetual presence and
persecutions of Mrs. Glutch. I have witnessed some sad sights during
my stay in Smeary Street, which have taught me to feel for my poor and
forlorn fellow-creatures as I do not think I ever felt for them
before, and which have inclined me to doubt for the first time whether
worse calamities might not have overtaken me than the hardship of
falling ill.




SKETCHES OF CHARACTER.--II.

A SHOCKINGLY RUDE ARTICLE.

[Communicated by A Charming Woman.]


Before I begin to write, I know that this will be an unpopular
composition in certain select quarters. I mean to proceed with it,
however, in spite of that conviction, because when I have got
something on my mind, I must positively speak. Is it necessary, after
that, to confess that I am a woman? If it is, I make the
confession--to my sorrow. I would much rather be a man.

I hope nobody will be misled by my beginning in this way, into
thinking that I am an advocate of the rights of women. Ridiculous
creatures! they have too many rights already; and if they don't hold
their chattering tongues, one of these days the poor dear deluded men
will find them out.

The poor dear men! Mentioning them reminds me of what I have got to
say. I have been staying at the seaside, and reading an immense
quantity of novels and periodicals, and all that sort of thing,
lately; and my idea is, that the men-writers (the only writers worth
reading) are in the habit of using each other very unfairly in books
and articles, and so on. Look where I may, I find, for instance, that
the large proportion of the bad characters in their otherwise very
charming stories, are always men. As if women were not a great deal
worse! Then, again, most of the amusing fools in their books are,
strangely and unaccountably, of their own sex, in spite of its being
perfectly apparent that the vast majority of that sort of character is
to be found in ours. On the other hand, while they make out their own
half of humanity (as I have distinctly proved) a great deal too bad,
they go to the contrary extreme the other way, and make out our half a
great deal too good. What in the world do they mean by representing us
as so much better, and so much prettier, than we really are? Upon my
word, when I see what angels the dear nice good men make of their
heroines, and when I think of myself, and of the whole circle of my
female friends besides, I feel quite disgusted,--I do, indeed.

I should very much like to go into the whole of this subject at once,
and speak my sentiments on it at the fullest length. But I will spare
the reader, and try to be satisfied with going into a part of the
subject instead; for, considering that I am a woman, and making
immense allowances for me on that account, I am really not altogether
unreasonable. Give me a page or two, and I will show in one
particular, and, what is more, from real life, how absurdly partial
the men-writers are to our sex, and how scandalously unjust they are
to their own.

Bores.--What I propose is, that we take for our present example
characters of Bores alone. If we were only to read men's novels,
articles, and so forth, I don't hesitate to say we should assume that
all the Bores in the human creation were of the male sex. It is
generally, if not always, a man, in men's books, who tells the
long-winded story, and turns up at the wrong time, and makes himself
altogether odious and intolerable to everybody he comes in contact
with, without being in the least aware of it himself. How very unjust,
and, I must be allowed to add, how extremely untrue! Women are quite
as bad, or worse. Do, good gentlemen, look about you impartially, for
once in a way, and own the truth. Good gracious! is not society full
of Lady-Bores? Why not give them a turn when you write next?

Two instances: I will quote only two instances out of hundreds I could
produce from my own acquaintance. Only two: because, as I said before,
I am reasonable about not taking up room. I can put things into a very
small space when I write, as well as when I travel. I should like the
literary gentleman who kindly prints this (I would not allow a woman
to print it for any sum of money that could be offered me) to see how
very little luggage I travel with. At any rate, he shall see how
little room I can cheerfully put up with in these pages.

My first Lady-Bore--see how quickly I get to the matter in hand,
without wasting so much as a single line in prefatory phrases!--my
first Lady-Bore is Miss Sticker. I don't in the least mind mentioning
her name; because I know, if she got the chance, she would do just the
same by me. It is of no use disguising the fact, so I may as well
confess at once that Miss Sticker is a fright. Far be it from me to
give pain where the thing can by any means be avoided; but if I were
to say that Miss Sticker would ever see forty again, I should be
guilty of an unwarrantable deception on the public. I have the
strongest imaginable objection to mentioning the word petticoats; but
if that is the only possible description of Miss Sticker's figure
which conveys a true notion of its nature and composition, what am I
to do? Perhaps I had better give up describing the poor thing's
personal appearance. I shall get into deeper and deeper difficulties,
if I attempt to go on. The very last time I was in her company, we
were strolling about Regent Street, with my sister's husband for
escort. As we passed a hairdresser's shop, the dear simple man looked
in, and asked me what those long tails of hair were for, that he saw
hanging up in the windows. Miss Sticker, poor soul, was on his arm,
and heard him put the question. I thought I should have dropped.

This is, I believe, what you call a digression. I shall let it stop
in, however, because it will probably explain to the judicious reader
why I carefully avoid the subject--the meagre subject, an ill-natured
person might say--of Miss Sticker's hair. Suppose I pass on to what is
more importantly connected with the object of these pages--suppose I
describe Miss Sticker's character next.

Some extremely sensible man has observed somewhere, that a Bore is a
person with one idea. Exactly so. Miss Sticker is a person with one
idea. Unhappily for society, her notion is, that she is bound by the
laws of politeness to join in every conversation which happens to be
proceeding within the range of her ears. She has no ideas, no
information, no flow of language, no tact, no power of saying the
right word at the right time, even by chance. And yet she _will_
converse, as she calls it. "A gentlewoman, my dear, becomes a mere
cipher in society unless she can converse." That is her way of putting
it; and I deeply regret to add, she is one of the few people who
preach what they practise. Her course of proceeding is, first, to
check the conversation by making a remark which has no kind of
relation to the topic under discussion. She next stops it altogether
by being suddenly at a loss for some particular word which nobody can
suggest. At last the word is given up; another subject is started in
despair; and the company become warmly interested in it. Just at that
moment, Miss Sticker finds the lost word; screams it out triumphantly
in the middle of the talk; and so scatters the second subject to the
winds, exactly as she has already scattered the first.

The last time I called at my aunt's--I merely mention this by way of
example--I found Miss Sticker there, and three delightful men. One was
a clergyman of the dear old purple-faced Port-wine school. The other
two would have looked military, if one of them had not been an
engineer, and the other an editor of a newspaper. We should have had
some delightful conversation if the Lady-Bore had not been present. In
some way, I really forget how, we got to talking about giving credit
and paying debts; and the dear old clergyman, with his twinkling eyes
and his jolly voice, treated us to a professional anecdote on the
subject.

"Talking about that," he began, "I married a man the other day for the
third time. Man in my parish. Capital cricketer when he was young
enough to run. 'What's your fee?' says he. 'Licensed marriage?' says
I; 'guinea of course.'--'I've got to bring you your tithes in three
weeks, sir,' says he; 'give me tick till then.' 'All right,' says I,
and married him. In three weeks he comes and pays his tithes like a
man. 'Now, sir,' says he, 'about this marriage-fee, sir? I do hope
you'll kindly let me off at half-price, for I have married a bitter
bad 'un this time. I've got a half-a-guinea about me, sir, if you'll
only please to take it. She isn't worth a farthing more--on the word
of a man, she isn't, sir!' I looked hard in his face, and saw two
scratches on it, and took the half-guinea, more out of pity than
anything else. Lesson to me, however. Never marry a man on credit
again, as long as I live. Cash on all future occasions--cash down, or
no marriage!"

While he was speaking, I had my eye on Miss Sticker. Thanks to the
luncheon which was on the table, she was physically incapable of
"conversing" while our reverend friend was telling his humorous little
anecdote. Just as he had done, and just as the editor of the newspaper
was taking up the subject, she finished her chicken, and turned round
from the table.

"Cash down, my dear sir, as you say," continued the editor. "You
exactly describe our great principle of action in the Press. Some of
the most extraordinary and amusing things happen with subscribers to
newspapers----"

"Ah, the Press!" burst in Miss Sticker, beginning to converse. "What a
wonderful engine! and how grateful we ought to feel when we get the
paper so regularly every morning at breakfast. The only question
is--at least, many people think so--I mean with regard to the Press,
the only question is whether it ought to be----"

Here Miss Sticker lost the next word, and all the company had to look
for it.

"With regard to the Press, the only question is, whether it ought to
be----O, dear, dear, dear me!" cried Miss Sticker, lifting both her
hands in despair, "what is the word?"

"Cheaper?" suggested our reverend friend. "Hang it, ma'am! it can
hardly be that, when it is down to a penny already."

"O no; not cheaper," said Miss Sticker.

"More independent?" inquired the editor. "If you mean that, I defy
anybody to find more fearless exposures of corruption----"

"No, no!" cried Miss Sticker, in an agony of polite confusion. "I
didn't mean that. More independent wasn't the word."

"Better printed?" suggested the engineer.

"On better paper?" added my aunt.

"It can't be done--if you refer to the cheap press--it can't be done
for the money," interposed the editor, irritably.

"O, but that's not it!" continued Miss Sticker, wringing her bony
fingers, with horrid black mittens on them. "I didn't mean to say
better printed, or better paper. It was one word I meant, not
two.--With regard to the Press," pursued Miss Sticker, repeating her
own ridiculous words carefully, as an aid to memory, "the only
question is, whether it ought to be----Bless my heart, how
extraordinary! Well, well, never mind: I'm quite shocked, and ashamed
of myself. Pray go on talking, and don't notice me."

It was all very well to say, Go on talking; but the editor's amusing
story about subscribers to newspapers, had been, by this time, fatally
interrupted. As usual, Miss Sticker had stopped us in full flow. The
engineer considerately broke the silence by starting another subject.

"Here are some wedding-cards on your table," he said, to my aunt,
"which I am very glad to see there. The bridegroom is an old friend of
mine. His wife is really a beauty. You know how he first became
acquainted with her? No? It was quite an adventure, I assure you. One
evening he was on the Brighton Railway; last down train. A lovely girl
in the carriage; our friend Dilberry immensely struck with her. Got
her to talk after a long time, with great difficulty. Within half an
hour of Brighton, the lovely girl smiles, and says to our friend,
'Shall we be very long now, sir, before we get to Gravesend?' Case of
confusion at that dreadful London Bridge Terminus. Dilberry explained
that she would be at Brighton in half an hour, upon which the lovely
girl instantly and properly burst into tears. 'O, what shall I do! O,
what will my friends think!' Second flood of tears.--'Suppose you
telegraph?' says Dilberry soothingly.--'O, but I don't know how!' says
the lovely girl. Out comes Dilberry's pocket-book. Sly dog! he saw his
way now to finding out who her friends were. 'Pray let me write the
necessary message for you,' says Dilberry. 'Who shall I direct to at
Gravesend?'--'My father and mother are staying there with some
friends,' says the lovely girl. 'I came up with a day-ticket, and I
saw a crowd of people when I came back to the station, all going one
way, and I was hurried and frightened, and nobody told me, and it was
late in the evening, and the bell was ringing, and, O Heavens! what
will become of me!' Third burst of tears.--'We will telegraph to your
father,' says Dilberry. 'Pray don't distress yourself. Only tell me
who your father is.'--'Thank you a thousand times,' says the lovely
girl, 'my father is----'"

"ANONYMOUS!" shouts Miss Sticker, producing her lost word with a
perfect burst of triumph. "How glad I am I remembered it at last!
Bless me," exclaims the Lady-Bore, quite unconscious that she has
brought the engineer's story to an abrupt conclusion, by giving his
distressed damsel an anonymous father; "Bless me! what are you all
laughing at? I only meant to say that the question with regard to the
Press was, whether it ought to be anonymous. What in the world is
there to laugh at in that? I really don't see the joke."

And this woman escapes scot-free, while comparatively innocent men are
held up to ridicule, in novel after novel, by dozens at a time! When
will the deluded male writers see my sex in its true colours, and
describe it accordingly? When will Miss Sticker take her proper place
in the literature of England?

       *       *       *       *       *

My second Lady-Bore is that hateful creature, Mrs. Tincklepaw. Where,
over the whole interesting surface of male humanity (including
Cannibals)--where is the man to be found whom it would not be
scandalous to mention in the same breath with Mrs. Tincklepaw? The
great delight of this shocking woman's life, is to squabble with her
husband (poor man, he has my warmest sympathy and best good wishes),
and then to bring the quarrel away from home with her, and to let it
off again at society in general, in a series of short spiteful hints.
Mrs. Tincklepaw is the exact opposite of Miss Sticker. She is a very
little woman; she is (and more shame for her, considering how she
acts) young enough to be Miss Sticker's daughter; and she has a kind
of snappish tact in worrying innocent people, under every possible
turn of circumstances, which distinguishes her (disgracefully) from
the poor feeble-minded Maid-Bore, to whom the reader has been already
introduced. Here are some examples--all taken, be it observed, from my
own personal observation--of the manner in which Mrs. Tincklepaw
contrives to persecute her harmless fellow-creatures wherever she
happens to meet with them:

Let us say I am out walking, and I happen to meet Mr. and Mrs.
Tincklepaw. (By the bye, she never lets her husband out of her
sight--he is too necessary to the execution of her schemes of petty
torment. And such a noble creature, to be used for so base a purpose!
He stands six feet two, and is additionally distinguished by a
glorious and majestic stoutness, which has no sort of connection with
the comparatively comic element of fat. His nature, considering what a
wife he has got, is inexcusably meek and patient. Instead of answering
her, he strokes his magnificent flaxen whiskers, and looks up
resignedly at the sky. I sometimes fancy that he stands too high to
hear what his dwarf of a wife says. For his sake, poor man, I hope
this view of the matter may be the true one.)

I am afraid I have contrived to lose myself in a long parenthesis.
Where was I? O! out walking and happening to meet with Mr. and Mrs.
Tincklepaw. She has had a quarrel with her husband at home, and this
is how she contrives to let me know it.

"Delightful weather, dear, is it not?" I say, as we shake hands.

"Charming, indeed," says Mrs. Tincklepaw. "Do you know, love, I am so
glad you made that remark to me, and not to Mr. Tincklepaw?"

"Really?" I ask. "Pray tell me why?"

"Because," answers the malicious creature, "if you had said it was a
fine day to Mr. Tincklepaw, I should have been so afraid of his
frowning at you directly, and saying, 'Stuff! talk of something worth
listening to, if you talk at all.' What a love of a bonnet you have
got on! and how Mr. Tincklepaw would have liked to be staying in your
house when you were getting ready to-day to go out. He would have
waited for you so patiently, dear. He would never have stamped in the
passage; and no such words as, 'Deuce take the woman! is she going to
keep me h

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