We could mention a thousand cures for "colds, et cetera," more

efficacious than a broth diet, a warm room, a tea-spoonful of Epsom

salts, or early roosting. What say you, our dear Dean, to half-a-dozen

tumblers of hot toddy? Your share of a brown jug to the same amount? Or

an equal quantity, in its gradual decrease revealing deeper and deeper

still the romantic Welsh scenery of the Devil's Punch-Bowl? _Adde tot_

small-bearded oysters, all redolent of the salt-sea foam, and worthy, as

they stud the Ambrosial brodd, to be licked off all at once by the

lambent tongue of Neptune. That antiquated calumny against the

character of toasted cheese--that, forsooth, it is indigestible--has

been trampled under the march of mind; and therefore, you may tuck in a

pound of double Gloucester. Other patients, labouring under catarrh,

may, very possibly, prefer the roasted how-towdy--or the green goose

from his first stubble-field--or why not, by way of a little variety, a

roasted maukin, midway between hare and leveret, tempting as maiden

between woman and girl, or, as the Eastern poet says, between a frock

and a gown? Go to bed--no need of warming-pans--about a quarter before

one;--you will not hear that small hour strike--you will sleep sound

till sunrise, sound as the Black Stone at Scone, on which the Kings of

Scotland were crowned of old. And if you contrive to carry a cold about

you next day, you deserve to be sent to Coventry by all sensible

people--and may, if you choose, begin taking, with Tims, a tea-spoonful

of Epsom salts in a half-pint of warm water every half-hour, till it

moves your bowels twice or thrice; but if you do, be your sex, politics,

or religion what they may, never shall ye be suffered to contribute even

a bit of Balaam to the Magazine.

The Doctor then treats of the best Season for travelling, and very

judiciously observes that it is during these months when there is no

occasion for a fire--that is, just before and after the extreme heat. In

winter, Dr Kitchiner, who was a man of extraordinary powers of

observation, observed, "that the ways are generally bad, and often

dangerous, especially in hilly countries, by reason of the snow and ice.

The days are short--a traveller comes late to his lodging, and is often

forced to rise before the sun in the morning--besides, the country looks

dismal--nature is, as it were, half dead. The summer corrects all these

inconveniences." Paradoxical as this doctrine may at first sight

appear--yet we have verified it by experience--having for many years

found, without meeting with one single exception, that the fine, long,

warm days of summer are an agreeable and infallible corrective of the

inconveniences attending the foul, short, cold days of winter--a season

which is surly without being sincere, blustering rather than bold--an

intolerable bore--always pretending to be taking his leave, yet

domiciliating himself in another man's house for weeks together--and, to

be plain, a season so regardless of truth, that nobody believes him till

frost has hung an ice-padlock on his mouth, and his many-river'd voice

is dumb under the wreathed snows.

"Cleanliness when travelling," observes the Doctor, "is doubly

necessary; to sponge the body every morning with tepid water, and then

rub it dry with a rough towel, will greatly contribute to preserve

health. To put the feet into warm water for a couple of minutes just

before going to bed, is very refreshing, and inviting to sleep; for

promoting tranquillity, both mental and corporeal, a clean skin may be

regarded as next in efficacy to a clear conscience."

Far be it from us to seek to impugn such doctrine. A dirty dog is a

nuisance not to be borne. But here the question arises--who--what--is a

dirty dog? Now there are men (no women) naturally--necessarily--dirty.

They are not dirty by chance--or accident--say twice or thrice per diem;

but they are always dirty--at all times and in all places--and never and

nowhere more disgustingly so than when figged out for going to church.

It is in the skin, in the blood--in the flesh, and in the bone--that

with such the disease of dirt more especially lies. We beg pardon--no

less in the hair. Now, such persons do not know that they are

dirty--that they are unclean beasts. On the contrary, they often think

themselves pinks of purity--incarnations of carnations--impersonations

of moss-roses--the spiritual essences of lilies, "imparadised in form of

that sweet flesh." Now, were such persons to change their linen every

half-hour, night and day, that is, were they to put on forty-eight clean

shirts in the twenty-four hours--and it might not be reasonable,

perhaps, to demand more of them under a government somewhat too

Whiggish--yet though we cheerfully grant that one and all of the shirts

would be dirty, we as sulkily deny that at any given moment from sunrise

to sunset, and over again, the wearer would be clean. He would be just

every whit and bit as dirty as if he had known but one single shirt all

his life--and firmly believed his to be the only shirt in the universe.

Men again, on the other hand, there are--and, thank God, in great

numbers--who are naturally so clean, that we defy you to make them _bonâ

fide_ dirty. You may as well drive down a duck into a dirty puddle, and

expect lasting stains on its pretty plumage. Pope says the same thing of

swans--that is, Poets--when speaking of Aaron Hill diving into the

ditch,--

"He bears no tokens of the sabler streams,

But soars far off among the swans of Thames."

Pleasant people of this kind of constitution you see going about of a

morning rather in dishabille--hair uncombed haply--face and hands even

unwashed--and shirt with a somewhat day-before-yesterdayish hue. Yet are

they, so far from being dirty, at once felt, seen, and smelt, to be

among the very cleanest of her Majesty's subjects. The moment you shake

hands with them, you feel in the firm flesh of palm and finger that

their heart's-blood circulates purely and freely from the point of the

highest hair on the apex of the pericranium, to the edge of the nail on

the large toe of the right foot. Their eyes are as clear as unclouded

skies--the apples on their cheeks are like those on the tree--what need,

in either case, of rubbing off dust or dew with a towel? What though,

from sleeping without a nightcap, their hair may be a little toozy? It

is not dim--dull--oily--like half-withered sea-weeds! It will soon comb

itself with the fingers of the west wind--that tent-like tree its

toilette--its mirror that pool of the clear-flowing Tweed.

Some streams, just like some men, are always dirty--you cannot possibly

tell why--unproducible to good pic-nic society either in dry or wet

weather. In dry, the oozy wretches are weeping among the slippery weeds,

infested with eels and powheads. In wet, they are like so many

common-sewers, strewn with dead cats and broken crockery, and

threatening with their fierce fulzie to pollute the sea. The sweet,

soft, pure rains, soon as they touch the flood are changed into filth.

The sun sees his face in one of the pools, and is terrified out of his

senses. He shines no more that day. The clouds have no notion of being

caricatured, and the trees keep cautiously away from the brink of such

streams--save, perchance, now and then, here and there, a weak

well-meaning willow--a thing of shreds and patches--its leafless wands

covered with bits of old worsted stockings, crowns of hats, a bauchle

(see Dr Jamieson), and the remains of a pair of corduroy breeches, long

hereditary in the family of the Blood-Royal of the Yetholm Gypsies.

Some streams, just like some men, are always clean--you cannot well tell

why--producible to good pic-nic society either in dry or wet weather. In

dry, the pearly waters are singing among the freshened flowers--so that

the trout, if he chooses, may breakfast upon bees. In wet, they grow, it

is true, dark and drumly--and at midnight, when heaven's candles are put

out, loud and oft the angry spirit of the water shrieks. But Aurora

beholds her face in the clarified pools and shallows--far and wide

glittering with silver or with gold. All the banks and braes reappear

green as emerald from the subsiding current--into which look with the

eye of an angler, and you behold a Fish--a twenty-pounder--steadying

himself--like an uncertain shadow; and oh! for George Scougal's leister

to strike him through the spine! Yes, these are the images of trees far

down, as if in another world; and, whether you look up or look down,

alike in all its blue, braided, and unbounded beauty, is the morning

sky!

Irishmen are generally men of the kind thus illustrated--generally

sweet--at least in their own green Isle; and that was the best argument

in favour of Catholic Emancipation.--So are Scotsmen. Whereas,

blindfolded, take a London, Edinburgh, or Glasgow Cockney's hand,

immediately after it has been washed and scented, and put it to your

nose--and you will begin to be apprehensive that some practical wit has

substituted in lieu of the sonnet-scribbling bunch of little fetid

fives, the body of some chicken-butcher of a weasel, that died of the

plague. We have seen as much of what is most ignorantly and malignantly

denominated dirt--one week's earth--washed off the feet of a pretty

young girl on a Saturday night, at a single sitting in the little

rivulet that runs almost round about her father's hut, as would have

served him to raise his mignonette in, or his crop of cresses. How

beautifully glowed the crimson-snow of the singing creature's new-washed

feet! First, as they shone almost motionless beneath the lucid

waters--and then, fearless of the hard bent and rough roots of the

heather, bore the almost alarming Fairy dancing away from the eyes of

the stranger; till the courteous spirit that reigns over all the

Highland wilds arrested her steps knee-deep in bloom, and bade her bow

her auburn head, as, blushing, she faltered forth, in her sweet Gaelic

accents, a welcome that thrilled like a blessing through the heart of

the Sassenach, nearly benighted, and wearied sore with the fifty

glorious mountain-miles that intermit at times their frowning forests

from the corries of Cruachan to the cliffs of Cairngorm.

It will be seen from these hurried remarks, that there is more truth

than perhaps Dr Kitchiner was aware of in his apothegm--"that a clean

skin may be regarded as next in efficacy to a clear conscience." But the

Doctor had but a very imperfect notion of the meaning of the words

"clean skin"--his observation being not even skin-deep. A wash-hand

basin, a bit of soap, and a coarse towel, he thought would give a

Cockney on Ludgate-hill a clean skin--just as many good people think

that a Bible, a prayer-book, and a long sermon, can give a clear

conscience to a criminal in Newgate. The cause of the evil, in both

cases, lies too deep for tears. Millions of men and women pass through

nature to eternity clean-skinned and pious--with slight expense either

in soap or sermons; while millions more, with much week-day bodily

scrubbing, and much Sabbath spiritual sanctification, are held in bad

odour here, while they live, by those who happen to sit near them, and

finally go out like the stink of a candle.

Never stir, quoth the Doctor, "without paper, pen, and ink, and a

note-book in your pocket. Notes made by pencils are easily obliterated

by the motion of travelling. Commit to paper whatever you see, hear, or

read, that is remarkable, with your sensations on observing it--do this

upon the spot, if possible, at the moment it first strikes you--at all

events do not delay it beyond the first convenient opportunity."

Suppose all people behaved in this way--and what an absurd world we

should have of it--every man, woman, and child who could write, jotting

away at their note-books! This committing to paper of whatever you see,

hear, or read, has, among many other bad effects, this one

especially--in a few years it reduces you to a state of idiocy. The

memory of all men who commit to paper becomes regularly extinct, we have

observed, about the age of thirty. Now, although the Memory does not

bear a very brilliant reputation among the faculties, a man finds

himself very much at a stand who is unprovided with one; for the

Imagination, the Judgment, and the Reason walk off in search of the

Memory--each in opposite directions; and the Mind, left at home by

itself, is in a very awkward predicament--gets comatose--snores loudly,

and expires. For our own part, we would much rather lose our Imagination

and our Judgment--nay, our very Reason itself--than our Memory--provided

we were suffered to retain a little Feeling and a little Fancy.

Committers to paper forget that the Memory is a tablet, or they

carelessly fling that mysterious tablet away, soft as wax to receive

impressions, and harder than adamant to retain, and put their trust in a

bit of calf-skin, or a bundle of old rags.

The observer who instantly jots down every object he sees, never,

properly speaking, saw an object in his life. There has always been in

the creature's mind a feeling alien to that which the object would, of

its pure self, have excited. The very preservation of a sort of style in

the creature's remarks, costs him an effort which disables him from

understanding what is before him, by dividing the small attention of

which he might have been capable, between the jotting, the jotter, and

the thing jotted. Then your committer to paper of whatever he sees,

hears, or reads, forgets or has never known that all real knowledge,

either of men or things, must be gathered up by operations which are in

their very being spontaneous and free--the mind being even unconscious

of them as they are going on--while the edifice has all the time been

silently rising up under the unintermitting labours of those silent

workers--Thoughts; and is finally seen, not without wonder, by the Mind

or Soul itself, which, gentle reader, was all along Architect and

Foreman--had not only originally planned, but had even daily

superintended the building of the Temple.

Were Dr Kitchiner not dead, we should just put to him this simple

question--Could you, Doctor, not recollect all the dishes of the most

various dinner at which you ever assisted, down to the obscurest kidney,

without committing every item to your note-book? Yes, Doctor, you could.

Well, then, all the universe is but one great dinner. Heaven and earth,

what a show of dishes! From a sun to a salad--a moon to a mutton chop--a

comet to a curry--a planet to a pâté! What gross ingratitude to the

Giver of the feast, not to be able, with the memory he has given us, to

remember his bounties! It is true, what the Doctor says, that notes made

with pencils are easily obliterated by the motion of travelling; but

then, Doctor, notes made by the Mind herself, with the Ruby Pen Nature

gives all her children who have also discourse of Reason, are with the

slightest touch, easilier far than glass by the diamond, traced on the

tablets that disease alone seems to deface, death alone to break, but

which, ineffaceable, and not to be broken, shall with all their

miscellaneous inscriptions endure for ever--yea, even to the great Day

of Judgment.

If men will but look and listen, and feel and think--they will never

forget anything worth being remembered. Do we forget "our children, that

to our eyes are dearer than the sun?" Do we forget our

wives--unreasonable and almost downright disagreeable as they sometimes

will be? Do we forget our triumphs--our defeats--our ecstasies, our

agonies--the face of a dear friend, or "dearest foe"--the ghost-like

voice of conscience at midnight arraigning us of crimes--or her seraph

hymn, at which the gates of heaven seem to expand for us that we may

enter in among the white-robed spirits, and

"Summer high in bliss upon the hills of God?"

What are all the jottings that ever were jotted down on his jot-book, by

the most inveterate jotter that ever reached a raven age, in comparison

with the Library of Useful Knowledge, that _every_ man--who is a

man--carries within the Ratcliffe--the Bodleian of his own breast?

What are you grinning at in the corner there, you little ugly Beelzebub

of a Printer's Devil? and have you dropped through a seam in the

ceiling? More copy do you want? There, you imp--vanished like a

thought!

DR KITCHINER.

SECOND COURSE.

Above all things, continues Dr Kitchiner, "avoid travelling through the

night, which, by interrupting sleep, and exposing the body to the night

air, is always prejudicial, even in the mildest weather, and to the

strongest constitutions." Pray, Doctor, what ails you at the night air?

If the night air be, even in the mildest weather, prejudicial to the

strongest constitutions, what do you think becomes of the cattle on a

thousand hills? Why don't all the bulls in Bashan die of the asthma--or

look interesting by moonlight in a galloping consumption? Nay, if the

night air be so very fatal, how do you account for the longevity of

owls? Have you never read of the Chaldean shepherds watching the courses

of the stars? Or, to come nearer our own times, do you not know that

every blessed night throughout the year, thousands of young lads and

lasses meet, either beneath the milk-white thorn--or on the lea-rig,

although the night be ne'er sae wet, and they be ne'er sae weary--or

under a rock on the hill--or--no uncommon case--beneath a frozen

stack--not of chimneys, but of corn-sheaves--or on a couch of snow--and

that they are all as warm as so many pies; while, instead of feeling

what you call "the lack of vigour attendant on the loss of sleep, which

is as enfeebling and as distressing as the languor that attends the want

of food," they are, to use a homely Scotch expression, "neither to haud

nor bind;" the eyes of the young lads being all as brisk, bold, and

bright as the stars in Charles's Wain, while those of the young lasses

shine with a soft, faint, obscure, but beautiful lustre, like the dewy

Pleiades, over which nature has insensibly been breathing a mist almost

waving and wavering into a veil of clouds?

Have you, our dear Doctor, no compassion for those unfortunate blades,

who, _nolentes-volentes_, must remain out perennially all night--we mean

the blades of grass, and also the flowers? Their constitutions seem

often far from strong; and shut your eyes on a frosty night, and you

will hear them--we have done so many million times--shivering, ay,

absolutely shivering under their coat of hoar-frost! If the night air be

indeed what Dr Kitchiner has declared it to be--Lord have mercy on the

vegetable world! What agonies in that field of turnips! Alas, poor

Swedes! The imagination recoils from the condition of that club of

winter cabbages--and of what materials, pray, must the heart of that man

be made, who could think but for a moment on the case of those carrots,

without bursting into a flood of tears!

The Doctor avers that the firm health and fine spirits of persons who

live in the country, are not more from breathing a purer air, than from

enjoying plenty of sound sleep; and the most distressing misery of "this

Elysium of bricks and mortar," is the rareness with which we enjoy "the

sweets of a slumber unbroke."

Doctor--in the first place, it is somewhat doubtful whether or not

persons who live in the country have firmer health and finer spirits

than persons who live in towns--even in London. What kind of persons do

you mean? You must not be allowed to select some dozen or two of the

hairiest among the curates--a few chosen rectors whose faces have been

but lately elevated to the purple--a team of prebends issuing sleek from

their golden stalls--a picked bishop--a sacred band the élite of the

squirearchy--with a corresponding sprinkling of superior noblemen from

lords to dukes--and then to compare them, cheek by jowl, with an equal

number of external objects taken from the common run of Cockneys. This,

Doctor, is manifestly what you are ettling at--but you must clap your

hand, Doctor, without discrimination, on the great body of the rural

population of England, male and female, and take whatever comes

first--be it a poor, wrinkled, toothless, blear-eyed, palsied hag,

tottering horizontally on a staff, under the load of a premature old age

(for she is not yet fifty), brought on by annual rheumatism and

perennial poverty;--Be it a young, ugly, unmarried woman, far advanced

in pregnancy, and sullenly trooping to the alehouse, to meet the

overseer of the parish poor, who, enraged with the unborn bastard, is

about to force the parish bully to marry the parish prostitute;--Be it a

landlord of a rural inn, with pig eyes peering over his ruby cheeks, the

whole machinery of his mouth so deranged by tippling that he

simultaneously snorts, stutters, slavers and

snores--pot-bellied--shanked like a spindle-strae--and bidding fair to

be buried on or before Saturday week;--Be it a half-drunk horse-cowper,

swinging to and fro in a wraprascal on a bit of broken-down blood that

once won a fifty, every sentence, however short, having but two

intelligible words, an oath and a lie--his heart rotten with falsehood,

and his bowels burned up with brandy, so that sudden death may pull him

from his saddle before he put spurs to his sporting filly that she may

bilk the turnpike man, and carry him more speedily home to beat or

murder his poor, pale, industrious char-woman of a wife;--Be it--not a

beggar, for beggars are prohibited from this parish--but a pauper in the

sulks, dying on her pittance from the poor-rates, which altogether

amount in merry England but to about the paltry sum of, more or less,

six millions a-year--her son, all the while, being in a thriving way as

a general merchant in the capital of the parish, and with clear profits

from his business of £300 per annum, yet suffering the mother that bore

him, and suckled him, and washed his childish hands, and combed the

bumpkin's hair, and gave him Epsoms in a cup when her dear Johnny-raw

had the belly-ache, to go down, step by step, as surely and as obviously

as one is seen going down a stair with a feeble hold of the banisters,

and stumbling every foot-fall down that other flight of steps that

consist of flags that are mortal damp and mortal cold, and lead to

nothing but a parcel of rotten planks, and overhead a vault dripping

with perpetual moisture, green and slobbery, such as toads delight in

crawling heavily through with now and then a bloated leap, and hideous

things more worm-like, that go wriggling briskly in and out among the

refuse of the coffins, and are heard, by imagination at least, to emit

faint angry sounds, because the light of day has hurt their eyes, and

the air from the upper world weakened the rank savoury smell of

corruption, clothing, as with a pall, all the inside walls of the

tombs;--Be it a man yet in the prime of life as to years, six feet and

an inch high, and measuring round the chest forty-eight inches (which is

more, reader, than thou dost by six, we bet a sovereign, member

although thou even be'st of the Edinburgh Six Feet Club), to whom

Washington Irving's Jack Tibbuts was but a Tims--but then ever so many

gamekeepers met him all alone in my lord's pheasant preserve, and though

two of them died within the month, two within the year, and two are now

in the workhouse--one a mere idiot, and the other a madman--both

shadows--so terribly were their bodies mauled, and so sorely were their

skulls fractured;--yet the poacher was taken, tried, hulked; and there

he sits now, sunning himself on a bank by the edge of the wood whose

haunts he must thread no more--for the keepers were grim bone-breakers

enough in their way--and when they had gotten him on his back, one

gouged him like a Yankee, and the other bit off his nose like a Bolton

Trotter--and one smashed his _os frontis_ with the nailed heel of a

two-pound wooden clog, a Preston Purrer;--so that Master Allonby is now

far from being a beauty, with a face of that description attached to a

head wagging from side to side under a powerful palsy, while the

Mandarin drinks damnation to the Lord of the Manor in a horn of

eleemosynary ale, handed to him by the village blacksmith, in days of

old not the worst of the gang, and who, but for a stupid jury, a

merciful judge, and something like prevarication in the circumstantial

evidence, would have been hanged for a murderer--as he was--dissected,

and hung in chains;--Be it a red-haired woman, with a pug nose, small

fiery eyes, high cheekbones, bulging lips, and teeth like

swine-tusks,--bearded--flat-breasted as a man--tall, scambling in her

gait, but swift, and full of wild motions in her weather-withered arms,

all starting with sinews like whipcord--the Pedestrian Post to and fro

the market town twelve miles off--and so powerful a pugilist that she

hit Grace Maddox senseless in seven minutes--tried before she was

eighteen for child-murder, but not hanged, although the man-child, of

which the drab was self-delivered in a ditch, was found with blue

finger-marks on its windpipe, bloody mouth, and eyes forced out of their

sockets, buried in the dunghill behind her father's hut--not hanged,

because a surgeon, originally bred a sow-gelder, swore that he believed

the mother had unconsciously destroyed her offspring in the throes of

travail, if indeed it had ever breathed, for the lungs would not swim,

he swore, in a basin of water--so the incestuous murderess was let

loose; her brother got hanged in due time after the mutiny at the

Nore--and her father, the fishmonger--why, he went red raving mad as if

a dog had bitten him--and died, as the same surgeon and sow-gelder

averred, of the hydrophobia, foaming at the mouth, gnashing his teeth,

and some said cursing, but that was a calumny, for something seemed to

be the matter with his tongue, and he could not speak, only

splutter--nobody venturing, except his amiable daughter--and in that

particular act of filial affection she was amiable--to hold in the

article of death the old man's head;--Be it that moping idiot that would

sit, were she suffered, on, on, on--night and day for ever, on the

self-same spot, whatever that spot might be on which she happened to

squat at morning, mound, wall, or stone--motionless, dumb, and, as a

stranger would think, also blind, for the eyelids are still shut--never

opened in sun or storm;--yet that figure--that which is now, and has for

years been, an utter and hopeless idiot, was once a gay, laughing,

dancing, singing girl, whose blue eyes seemed full of light, whether

they looked on earth or heaven, the flowers or the stars--her

sweetheart--a rational young man, it would appear--having leapt out upon

her suddenly, as she was passing through the churchyard at night, from

behind a tombstone, in a sack which she, having little time for

consideration, and being naturally superstitious, supposed to be a

shroud, and the wearer thereof, who was an active stripling of sound

flesh and blood, to be a ghost or skeleton, all one horrid rattle of

bones; so that the trick succeeded far beyond the most sanguine

expectation of the Tailor who played the principal part--and sense,

feeling, memory, imagination, and reason, were all felled by one blow of

fear--as butcher felleth ox--while by one of those mysteries, which

neither we, nor you, nor anybody else, can understand, life remained not

only unimpaired, but even invigorated; and there she sits, like a clock

wound up to go a certain time, the machinery of which being good, has

not been altogether deranged by the shock that sorely cracked the case,

and will work till the chain is run down, and then it will tick no

more;--Be it that tall, fair, lovely girl, so thin and attenuated that

all wonder she can walk by herself--that she is not blown away even by

the gentle summer breeze that wooes the hectic of her cheek--dying all

see--and none better than her poor old mother--and yet herself

thoughtless of the coming doom, and cheerful as a nest-building

bird--while her lover, too deep in despair to be betrayed into tears, as

he carries her to her couch, each successive day feels the dear and

dreadful burden lighter and lighter in his arms. Small strength will it

need to support her bier! The coffin, as if empty, will be lowered

unfelt by the hands that hold those rueful cords!

In mercy to our readers and ourselves, we shall endeavour to prevent

ourselves from pursuing this argument any further--and perhaps quite

enough has been said to show that Dr Kitchiner's assertion, that persons

who live in the country have firmer health and finer spirits than the

inhabitants of towns--is exceedingly problematical. But even admitting

the fact to be as the Doctor has stated it, we do not think he has

attributed the phenomenon to the right cause. He attributes it to "their

enjoying plenty of sound sleep." The worthy Doctor is entirely out in

his conjecture. The working classes in the country enjoy, we don't doubt

it, sound sleep--but not plenty of it. They have but a short allowance

of sleep--and whether it be sound or not, depends chiefly on themselves;

while as to the noises in towns and cities, they are nothing to what one

hears in the country--unless, indeed, you perversely prefer private

lodgings at a pewterer's. Did we wish to be personal, we could name a

single waterfall who, even in dry weather, keeps all the visitors from

town awake within a circle of four miles diameter; and in wet weather,

not only keeps them all awake, but impresses them with a constantly

recurring conviction during the hours of night, that there is something

seriously amiss about the foundation of the river, and that the whole

parish is about to be overflowed, up to the battlements of the old

castle that over-looks the linn. Then, on another point, we are

certain--namely, that rural thunder is many hundred times more powerful

than villatic. London porter is above admiration--but London thunder

below contempt. An ordinary hackney-coach beats it hollow. But, my

faith! a thunderstorm in the country--especially if it be mountainous,

with a few fine Woods and Forests, makes you inevitably think of that

land from whose bourne no traveller returns; and even our town readers

will acknowledge that country thunder much more frequently proves mortal

than the thunder you meet with in cities. In the country, few

thunderstorms are contented to pass over without killing at least one

horse, some milch-kine, half-a-dozen sucking pigs or turkeys, an old

woman or two, perhaps the Minister of the parish, a man about forty,

name unknown, and a nursing mother at the ingle, the child escaping with

singed eyebrows, and a singular black mark on one of its great toes. We

say nothing of the numbers stupified, who awake the day after, as from a

dream, with strange pains in their heads, and not altogether sure about

the names or countenances of the somewhat unaccountable people whom they

see variously employed about the premises, and making themselves pretty

much at home. In towns, not one thunderstorm in fifty that performs an

exploit more magnanimous than knocking down an old wife from a

chimney-top--singeing a pair of worsted stockings that, knit in an

ill-starred hour, when the sun had entered Aries, had been hung out to

dry on a line in the backyard, or garden as it is called--or cutting a

few inches off the tail of an old Whig weathercock that for years had

been pecking the eyes out of all the airts the wind can blaw, greedy of

some still higher preferment.

Our dear deceased author proceeds to tell his Traveller how to eat and

drink; and remarks, "that people are apt to imagine that they may

indulge a little more in high living when on a journey. Travelling

itself, however, acts as a stimulus; therefore less nourishment is

required than in a state of rest. What you might not consider

intemperate at home, may occasion violent irritation, fatal

inflammations, &c., in situations where you are least able to obtain

medical assistance."

All this is very loosely stated, and must be set to rights. If you shut

yourself up for some fifty hours or so in a mail-coach, that keeps

wheeling along at the rate of ten miles an hour, and changes horses in

half a minute, certainly for obvious reasons the less you eat and drink

the better; and perhaps an hourly hundred drops of laudanum, or

equivalent grain of opium, would be advisable, so that the transit from

London to Edinburgh might be performed in a phantasma. But the free

agent ought to live well on his travels--some degrees better, without

doubt, than when at home. People seldom live very well at home. There is

always something requiring to be eaten up, that it may not be lost,

which destroys the soothing and satisfactory symmetry of an

unexceptionable dinner. We have detected the same duck through many

unprincipled disguises, playing a different part in the farce of

domestic economy, with a versatility hardly to have been expected in one

of the most generally despised of the web-footed tribe. When travelling

at one's own sweet will, one feeds at a different inn every meal; and,

except when the coincidence of circumstances is against you, there is an

agreeable variety both in the natural and artificial disposition of the

dishes. True that travelling may act as a stimulus--but false that

therefore less nourishment is required. Would Dr Kitchiner, if now

alive, presume to say that it was right for him, who had sat all day

with his feet on the fender, to gobble up, at six o'clock of the

afternoon, as enormous a dinner as we who had walked since sunrise forty

or fifty miles? Because our stimulus had been greater, was our

nourishment to be less? We don't care a curse about stimulus. What we

want, in such a case, is lots of fresh food; and we hold that, under

such circumstances, a man with a sound Tory Church-and-King stomach and

constitution cannot over-eat himself--no, not for his immortal soul.

We had almost forgot to take the deceased Doctor to task for one of the

most free-and-easy suggestions ever made to the ill-disposed, how to

disturb and destroy the domestic happiness of eminent literary

characters. "An introduction to eminent authors may be obtained," quoth

he slyly, "from the booksellers who publish their works."

The booksellers who publish the works of eminent authors have rather

more common sense and feeling, it is to be hoped, than this comes

to--and know better what is the province of their profession. Any one

man may, if he chooses, give any other man an introduction to any third

man in this world. Thus the tailor of any eminent author--or his

bookseller--or his parish minister--or his butcher--or his baker--or his

"man of business"--or his house-builder--may, one and all, give such

travellers as Dr Kitchiner and others, letters of introduction to the

said eminent author in prose or verse. This, we have heard, is sometimes

done--but fortunately we cannot speak from experience, not being

ourselves an eminent author. The more general the intercourse between

men of taste, feeling, cultivation, learning, genius, the better; but

that intercourse should be brought about freely and of its own accord,

as fortunate circumstances permit, and there should be no impertinent

interference of selfish or benevolent go-betweens. It would seem that Dr

Kitchiner thought the commonest traveller, one who was almost, as it

were, bordering on a Bagman, had nothing to do but call on the publisher

of any great writer, and get a free admission into his house. Had the

Doctor not been dead, we should have given him a severe rowing and

blowing-up for this vulgar folly; but as he is dead, we have only to

hope that the readers of the Oracle who intend to travel will not

degrade themselves, and disgust "authors of eminence," by thrusting

their ugly or comely faces--both are equally odious--into the privacy of

gentlemen who have done nothing to exclude themselves from the

protection of the laws of civilised society--or subject their fire-sides

to be infested by one-half of the curious men of the country, two-thirds

of the clever, and all the blockheads.

DR KITCHINER.

THIRD COURSE.

Having thus briefly instructed travellers how to get a look at Lions,

the Doctor suddenly exclaims--"IMPRIMIS, BEWARE OF DOGS!" "There have,"

he says, "been many arguments, _pro_ and _con_, on the dreadful disease

their bite produces--it is enough to prove that multitudes of men,

women, and children have died in consequence of having been bitten by

dogs. What does it matter whether they were the victims of bodily

disease or mental irritation? The life of the most humble human being is

of more value than all the dogs in the world--dare the most brutal cynic

say otherwise?"

Dr Kitchiner always travelled, it appears, in chaises; and a chaise of

one kind or other he recommends to all his brethren of mankind. Why,

then, this intense fear of the canine species? Who ever saw a mad dog

leap into the mail-coach, or even a gig? The creature, when so

afflicted, hangs his head, and goes snapping right and left at

pedestrians. Poor people like us, who must walk, may well fear

hydrophobia--though, thank Heaven, we have never, during the course of a

tolerably long and well-spent life, been so much as once bitten by "the

rabid animal!" But what have rich authors, who loll in carriages, to

dread from dogs, who always go on foot? We cannot credit the very

sweeping assertion, that multitudes of men, women, and children have

died in consequence of being bitten by dogs. Even the newspapers do not

run up the amount above a dozen per annum, from which you may safely

deduct two-thirds. Now, four men, women, and children, are not "a

multitude." Of those four, we may set down two as problematical--having

died, it is true, _in_, but not _of_ hydrophobia--states of mind and

body wide as the poles asunder. He who drinks two bottles of pure

spirit every day he buttons and unbuttons his breeches, generally dies

_in_ a state of hydrophobia--for he abhorred water, and knew

instinctively the jug containing that insipid element. But he never dies

at all _of_ hydrophobia, there being evidence to prove that for twenty

years he had drank nothing but brandy. Suppose we are driven to confess

the other two--why, one of them was an old woman of eighty, who was

dying as fast as she could hobble, at the very time she thought herself

bitten--and the other a nine-year-old brat, in hooping-cough and

measles, who, had there not been such a quadruped as a dog created,

would have worried itself to death before evening, so lamentably had its

education been neglected, and so dangerous an accomplishment is an

impish temper. The twelve cases for the year of that most horrible

disease, hydrophobia, have, we flatter ourselves, been satisfactorily

disposed of--eight of the alleged deceased being at this moment engaged

at various handicrafts, on low wages indeed, but still such as enable

the industrious to live--two having died of drinking--one of extreme old

age, and one of a complication of complaints incident to childhood,

their violence having, in this particular instance, been aggravated by

neglect and devilish temper. Where now the "multitude" of men, women,

and children, who have died in consequence of being bitten by mad dogs?

Gentle reader--a mad dog is a bugbear; we have walked many hundred times

the diameter and the circumference of this our habitable globe--along

all roads, public and private--with stiles or turnpikes--metropolitan

streets and suburban paths--and at all seasons of the revolving year and

day; but never, as we padded the hoof along, met we nor were over-taken

by greyhound, mastiff, or cur, in a state of hydrophobia. We have many

million times seen them with their tongues lolling out about a

yard--their sides panting--flag struck--and the whole dog showing

symptoms of severe distress. That such travellers were not mad we do not

assert--they may have been mad--but they certainly were fatigued; and

the difference, we hope, is often considerable between weariness and

insanity. Dr Kitchiner, had he seen such dogs as we have seen, would

have fainted on the spot. He would have raised the country against the

harmless jog-trotter. Pitchforks would have gleamed in the setting sun,

and the flower of the agricultural youth of a midland county, forming a

levy _en masse_, would have offered battle to a turnspit. The Doctor,

sitting in his coach--like Napoleon at Waterloo--would have cried "_Tout

est perdu--sauve, qui peut!_"--and re-galloping to a provincial town,

would have found refuge under the gateway of the Hen and Chickens.

"The life of the most humble human being," quoth the Doctor, "is of more

value than all the dogs in the world--dare the most brutal cynic say

otherwise?"

This question is not put to us; for so far from being the most brutal

Cynic, we do not belong to the Cynic school at all--being an Eclectic,

and our philosophy composed chiefly of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and

Peripateticism--with a fine, pure, clear, bold dash of Platonicism. The

most brutal Cynic, if now alive and snarling, must therefore answer for

himself--while we tell the Doctor, that so far from holding, with him,

that the life of the most humble human being is of more value than all

the dogs in the world, we, on the contrary, verily believe that there is

many a humble dog whose life far transcends in value the lives of many

men, women, and children. Whether or not dogs have souls, is a question

in philosophy never yet solved; although we have ourselves no doubt on

the subject, and firmly believe that they have souls. But the question,

as put by the Doctor, is not about souls, but about lives; and as the

human soul does not die when the human body does, the death of an old

woman, middle-aged man, or young child, is no such very great calamity,

either to themselves or to the world. Better, perhaps, that all the dogs

now alive should be massacred, to prevent hydrophobia, than that a human

soul should be lost;--but not a single human soul is going to be lost,

although the whole canine species should become insane to-morrow. Now,

would the Doctor have laid one hand on his heart and the other on his

Bible, and taken a solemn oath that rather than that one old woman of a

century and a quarter should suddenly be cut off by the bite of a mad

dog, he would have signed the warrant of execution of all the packs of

harriers and fox-hounds, all the pointers, spaniels, setters, and

cockers, all the stag-hounds, greyhounds, and lurchers, all the

Newfoundlanders, shepherd-dogs, mastiffs, bull-dogs, and terriers, the

infinite generation of mongrels and crosses included, in Great Britain

and Ireland--to say nothing of the sledge-drawers in Kamtschatka, and in

the realms slow-moving near the Pole? To clench the argument at

once--What are all the old women in Europe, one-half of the men, and

one-third of the children, when compared, in value, with any one of

Christopher North's Newfoundland dogs--Fro--Bronte--or O'Bronte?

Finally, does he include in his sweeping condemnation the whole brute

creation, lions, tigers, panthers, ounces, elephants, rhinoceroses,

hippopotami, camelopardales, zebras, quaggas, cattle, horses, asses,

mules, cats, the ichneumon, cranes, storks, cocks-of-the-wood, geese,

and how-towdies?

"Semi-drowning in the sea"--he continues--"and all the pretended

specifics, are mere delusions--there is no real remedy but cutting the

part out immediately. If the bite be near a blood-vessel, that cannot

always be done, nor when done, however well done, will it always prevent

the miserable victim from dying the most dreadful of deaths. Well might

St Paul tell us to '_beware of dogs_.' First Epistle to Philippians,

chap. iii., v. 2."

Semi-drowning in the sea is, we grant, a bad specific, and difficult to

be administered. It is not possible to tell, _a priori_, how much

drowning any particular patient can bear. What is mere semi-drowning to

James, is total drowning to John;--Tom is easy of resuscitation--Bob

will not stir a muscle for all the Humane Societies in the United

Kingdoms. To cut a pound of flesh from the rump of a fat dowager, who

turns sixteen stone, is within the practical skill of the veriest

bungler in the anatomy of the human frame--to scarify the fleshless

spindle-shank of an antiquated spinstress, who lives on a small annuity,

might be beyond the scalpel of an Abernethy or a Liston. A large

blood-vessel, as the Doctor well remarks, is an awkward neighbour to the

wound made by the bite of a mad dog, "when a new excision has to be

attempted"--but will any Doctor living inform us how, in a thousand

other cases besides hydrophobia, "the miserable victim may always be

prevented from dying?" There are, probably, more dogs in Britain than

horses; yet a hundred men, women, and children are killed by kicks of

sane horses, for one by bites of insane dogs. Is the British army,

therefore, to be deprived of its left arm, the cavalry? Is there to be

no flying artillery? What is to become of the horse-marines?

Still the Doctor, though too dogmatical, and rather puppyish above, is,

at times, sensible on dogs.

"Therefore," quoth he, "never travel without a good tough Black Thorn in

your Fist, not less than three feet in length, on which may be marked

the Inches, and so it may serve for a measure.

"Pampered Dogs, that are permitted to prance about as they please, when

they hear a knock, scamper to the door, and not seldom snap at unwary

visitors. Whenever _Counsellor Cautious_ went to a house, &c., where he

was not quite certain that there was no Dog, after he had rapped at the

door, he retired three or four yards from it, and prepared against the

Enemy: when the door was opened, he desired, if there was any Dog, that

it might be shut up till he was gone, and would not enter the House till

it was.

"_Sword_ and _Tuck Sticks_, as commonly made, are hardly so good a

weapon as a stout Stick--the Blades are often inserted into the Handles

in such a slight manner, that one smart blow will break them out;--if

you wish for a _Sword-Cane_, you must have one made with a good

Regulation Blade, which alone will cost more than is usually charged for

the entire Stick.--I have seen a Cane made by Mr PRICE, _of the Stick

and Umbrella Warehouse, 221, in the Strand_, near Temple Bar, which was

excellently put together.

"A powerful weapon, and a very smart and light-looking thing, is _an

Iron Stick_ of about four-tenths of an inch in diameter, with a Hook

next the Hand, and terminating at the other end in a Spike about five

inches in length, which is covered by a Ferrule, the whole painted the

colour of a common walking-stick; it has a light natty appearance, while

it is in fact a most formidable Instrument."

We cannot charge our memory with this instrument, yet had we seen one

once, we hardly think we could have forgot it. But Colonel de Berenger

in his _Helps and Hints_ prefers the umbrella. Umbrellas are usually

carried, we believe, in wet weather, and dogs run mad, if ever, in dry.

So the safe plan is to carry one all the year through, like the Duke.

"I found it a valuable weapon, although by mere chance; for, walking

alone in the rain, a large mad dog, pursued by men, suddenly turned upon

me, out of a street which I had just approached; by instinct more than

judgment, I gave point at him severely, opened as the umbrella was,

which, screening me at the same time, _was an article from which he did

not expect thrusts_; but which, although made at guess, for I could not

see him, turned him over and over, and before he could recover himself,

his pursuers had come up immediately to despatch him; the whole being

the work of even few seconds; but for the umbrella the horrors of

hydrophobia might have fallen to my lot."

There is another mode, which, with the omission or alteration of a word

or two, looks feasible, supposing we had to deal not with a bull-dog,

but a young lady of our own species. "If," says the Colonel, "you can

seize a dog's front paw neatly, and immediately squeeze it sharply, he

cannot bite you till you cease to squeeze it; therefore, by keeping him

thus well pinched, you may lead him wherever you like; or you may, with

the other hand, seize him by the skin of the neck, to hold him thus

without danger, provided your strength is equal to his efforts at

extrication." But here comes the Colonel's infallible _vade-mecum_.

"Look at them with your face from between your opened legs, holding the

skirts away, and running at them thus backwards, of course head below,

stern exposed, and above all growling angrily; most dogs, seeing so

strange an animal, the head at the heels, the eyes below the mouth, &c.,

are so dismayed, that, with their tails between their legs, they are

glad to scamper away, some even howling with affright. I have never

tried it with a thorough-bred bull-dog, nor do I advise it with them;

though I have practised it, and successfully, with most of the other

kinds; it might fail with these, still I cannot say it will."

Thus armed against the canine species, the Traveller, according to our

Oracle, must also provide himself with a portable case of instruments

for drawing--a sketch and note-book--paper--ink--and PINS--NEEDLES--AND

THREAD! A ruby or Rhodium pen, made by Doughty, No. 10, Great Ormond

Street--pencils from Langdon's of Great Russell Street--a folding

one-foot rule, divided into eighths, tenths, and twelfths of inches--a

hunting-watch with seconds, with a detached lever or Dupleix escapement,

in good strong silver cases--a Dollond's achromatic opera-glass--a

night-lamp--a tinder-box--two pair of spectacles, with strong silver

frames--an eye-glass in a silver ring slung round the neck--a

traveller's knife, containing a large and a small blade, a saw, hook for

taking a stone out of a horse's shoe, turnscrew, gun-picker, tweezers,

and long corkscrew--galoches or paraloses--your own knife and fork, and

spoon--a Welsh wig--a spare hat--umbrella--two great-coats, one for cool

and fair weather (_i.e._ between 45° and 55° of Fahrenheit), and another

for cold and foul weather, of broad cloth, lined with fur, and

denominated a "dreadnought."

Such are a few of the articles with which every sensible traveller will

provide himself before leaving _Dulce Domum_ to brave the perils of a

Tour through the Hop-districts.

"If circumstances compel you," continues the Doctor, "to ride on the

outside of a coach, put on two shirts and two pair of stockings, turn up

the collar of your great-coat, and tie a handkerchief round it, and have

plenty of dry straw to set your feet on."

In our younger days we used to ride a pretty considerable deal on the

outside of coaches, and much hardship did we endure before we hit on the

discovery above promulgated. We once rode outside from Edinburgh to

London, in winter, without a great-coat, in nankeen trousers _sans_

drawers, and all other articles of our dress thin and light in

proportion. That we are alive at this day, is no less singular than

true--no more true than singular. We have known ourselves so firmly

frozen to the leathern ceiling of the mail-coach, that it required the

united strength of coachman, guard, and the other three outsides, to

separate us from the vehicle, to which we adhered as part and parcel.

All at once the device of the double shirt flashed upon us--and it

underwent signal improvements before we reduced the theory to practice.

For, first, we endued ourselves with a leather shirt--then with a

flannel one--and then, in regular succession, with three linen shirts.

This concluded the Series of Shirts. Then commenced the waistcoats. A

plain woollen waistcoat without buttons--with hooks and eyes--took the

lead, and kept it; it was closely pressed by what is, in common palaver,

called an under-waistcoat--the body being flannel, the breast-edges

bearing a pretty pattern of stripes or bars--then came a natty red

waistcoat, of which we were particularly proud, and of which the effect

on landlady, bar-maid, and chamber-maid, we remember was

irresistible--and, fourthly and finally, to complete that department of

our investiture, shone with soft yet sprightly lustre--the

double-breasted bright-buttoned Buff. Five and four are nine--so that

between our carcass and our coat, it might have been classically said of

our dress--"Novies interfusa coercet." At this juncture of affairs began

the coats, which--as it is a great mistake to wear too many coats--never

exceeded six. The first used generally to be a pretty old coat that had

lived to moralise over the mutability of human

affairs--thread-bare--napless--and what ignorant people might have

called shabby-genteel. It was followed by a plain, sensible, honest,

unpretending, commonplace, everyday sort of a coat--and not, perhaps, of

the very best merino. Over it was drawn, with some little difficulty,

what had, in its prime of life, attracted universal admiration in

Princes Street, as a blue surtout. Then came your regular olive-coloured

great-coat--not braided and embroidered _à la militaire_--for we scorned

to sham travelling-captain--but _simplex munditiis_, plain in its

neatness; not wanting then was your shag-hued wraprascal, betokening

that its wearer was up to snuff--and to close this strange eventful

history, the seven-caped Dreadnought, that loved to dally with the

sleets and snows--held in calm contempt Boreas, Notus, Auster, Eurus,

and "the rest"--and drove baffled Winter howling behind the Pole.

The same principle of accumulation was made applicable to the neck. No

stock. Neckcloth above neckcloth--beginning with singles--and then

getting into the full uncut squares--the amount of the whole being

somewhere about a dozen: The concluding neckcloth worn cravat-fashion,

and flowing down the breast in a cascade, like that of an

attorney-general. Round our cheek and ear, leaving the lips at liberty

to breathe and imbibe, was wreathed, in undying remembrance of the

bravest of the brave, a Jem Belcher Fogle--and beneath the

cravat-cascade a comforter netted by the fair hands of her who had

kissed us at our departure, and was sighing for our return. One hat we

always found sufficient--and that a black beaver--for a lily castor

suits not the knowledge-box of a friend to "a limited constitutional and

hereditary monarchy."

As to our lower extremities--One pair only of roomy shoes--one pair of

stockings of the finest lamb's-wool--another of common close worsted,

knit by the hand of a Lancashire witch--thirdly, Shetland hose. All

three pair reaching well up towards the fork--each about an

inch-and-a-half longer than its predecessor. Flannel drawers--one pair

only--within the lamb's-wool, and touching the instep--then one pair of

elderly casimeres, of yore worn at balls--one pair of Manchester white

cords--ditto of strong black quilt trousers, "capacious and serene"--and

at or beneath the freezing-point, overalls of the same stuff as

"Johnny's grey breeks"--neat but not gaudy--mud-repellers--themselves a

host--never in all their lives "thoroughly wet

through"--frost-proof--and often mistaken by the shepherd on the wold,

as the Telegraph hung for a moment on the misty upland, for the philibeg

of Phoebus in his dawn-dress, hastily slipt on as he bade farewell to

some star-paramour, and, like a giant about to run a race, devoured the

cerulean course of day, as if impatient to reach the goal set in the

Western Sea.

DR KITCHINER.

FOURTH COURSE.

Pray, reader, do you know what line of conduct you ought to pursue if

you are to sleep on the road? "The earlier you arrive," says the Doctor,

"and the earlier after your arrival you apply, the better the chance of

getting a good bed--this done, order your luggage to your room. A

travelling-bag, or a 'sac de nuit,' in addition to your trunk, is very

necessary; it should be large enough to contain one or two changes of

linen--a night-shirt--shaving apparatus--comb, clothes, tooth and hair

brushes, &c. Take care, too, to see your sheets well aired, and that you

can fasten your room at night. Carry firearms also, and take the first

unostentatious opportunity of showing your pistols to the landlord.

However well-made your pistols, however carefully you have chosen your

flint, and however dry your powder, look to the priming and touch-hole

every night. Let your pistols be double-barrelled, and with spring

bayonets."

Now, really, it appears to us, that in lieu of double-barrelled pistols

with spring bayonets, it would be advisable to substitute a brace of

black-puddings for daylight, and a brace of Oxford or Bologna sausages

for the dark hours. They will be equally formidable to the robber, and

far safer to yourself. Indeed we should like to see duelling

black-puddings, or sausages, introduced at Chalk-Farm;--and, that

etiquette might not be violated, each party might take his antagonist's

weapon, and the seconds, as usual, see them loaded. Surgeons will have

to attend as usual. Far more blood, indeed, would be thus spilt, than

according to the present fashion.

The Doctor, as might be expected, makes a mighty rout--a prodigious

fuss--all through the Oracle, about damp sheets; he must immediately see

the chambermaid, and overlook the airing with his own hands and eyes.

He is also an advocate of the warming-pan--and for the adoption, indeed,

of every imaginable scheme for excluding death from his chamber. He goes

on the basis of everything being as it should not be in inns--and often

reminds us of our old friend Death-in-the-Pot. Nay, as Travellers never

can be sure that those who have slept in the beds before them were not

afflicted with some contagious disease, whenever they can they should

carry their own sheets with them--namely, a "light eider-down quilt, and

two dressed hart-skins, to be put on the mattresses, to hinder the

disagreeable contact. These are to be covered with the traveller's own

sheets--and if an eider-down quilt be not sufficient to keep him warm,

his coat put upon it will increase the heat sufficiently. If the

traveller is not provided with these accommodations, it will sometimes

be prudent not to undress entirely; however, the neckcloth, gaiters,

shirt, and everything which checks the circulation, must be loosened."

Clean sheets, the Doctor thinks, are rare in inns; and he believes that

it is the practice to "take them from the bed, sprinkle them with water,

fold them down, and put them into a press. When they are wanted again,

they are, literally speaking, shown to the fire, and, in a reeking

state, laid on the bed. The traveller is tired and sleepy, dreams of

that pleasure or business which brought him from home, and the remotest

thing from his mind is, that from the very repose which he fancies has

refreshed him, he has received the rheumatism. The receipt, therefore,

to sleep comfortably at inns, is to take your own sheets, to have plenty

of flannel gowns, and to promise, and take care to pay, a handsome

consideration for the liberty of choosing your bed."

Now, Doctor, suppose all travellers behaved at inns on such principles,

what a perpetual commotion there would be in the house! The kitchens,

back-kitchens, laundries, drying-rooms, would at all times be crammed

choke-full of a miscellaneous rabble of Editors, Authors, Lords,

Baronets, Squires, Doctors of Divinity, Fellows of Colleges, Half-pay

Officers, and Bagmen, oppressing the chambermaids to death, and in the

headlong gratification of their passion for well-aired sheets, setting

fire so incessantly to public premises as to raise the rate of insurance

to a ruinous height, and thus bring bankruptcy on all the principal

establishments in Great Britain. But shutting our eyes, for a moment,

to such general conflagration and bankruptcy, and indulging ourselves in

the violent supposition that some inns might still continue to exist,

think, O think, worthy Doctor, to what other fatal results this system,

if universally acted upon, would, in a very few years of the transitory

life of man, inevitably lead! In the first place, in a country where all

travellers carried with them their own sheets, none would be kept in

inns except for the use of the establishment's own members. This would

be inflicting a vital blow, indeed, on the inns of a country. For mark,

in the second place, that the blankets would not be long of following

the sheets. The blankets would soon fly after the sheets on the wings of

love and despair. Thirdly, are you so ignorant, Doctor, of this world

and its ways, as not to see that the bed-steads would, in the twinkling

of an eye, follow the blankets? What a wild, desolate, wintry appearance

would a bedroom then exhibit!

The foresight of such consequences as these may well make a man shudder.

We have no objections, however, to suffer the Doctor himself, and a few

other occasional damp-dreading old quizzes, "to see the bed-clothes put

to the fire in their presence," merely at the expense of subjugating

themselves to the derision of all the chambermaids, cooks, scullions,

boots, ostlers, and painters. (The painter is the artist who is employed

in inns, to paint the buttered toast. He always works in oils. As the

Director-General would say--he deals in buttery touches.) Their feverish

and restless anxiety about sheets, and their agitated discourse on damps

and deaths, hold them up to vulgar eyes in the light of lunatics. They

become the groundwork of practical jokes--perhaps are bitten to death by

fleas; for a chambermaid, of a disposition naturally witty and cruel,

has a dangerous power put into her hands, in the charge of blankets. The

Doctor's whole soul and body are wrapt up in well-aired sheets; but the

insidious Abigail, tormented by his flustering, becomes in turn the

tormentor--and selecting the yellowest, dingiest, and dirtiest pair of

blankets to be found throughout the whole gallery of garrets (those for

years past used by long-bearded old-clothesmen Jews), with a wicked leer

that would lull all suspicion asleep in a man of a far less inflammable

temperament, she literally envelopes him in vermin, and after a night of

one of the plagues of Egypt, the Doctor rises in the morning, from top

to bottom absolutely tattooed!

The Doctor, of course, is one of those travellers who believe that

unless they use the most ingenious precautions, they will be uniformly

robbed and murdered in inns. The villains steal upon you during the

midnight hour, when all the world is asleep. They leave their shoes down

stairs, and leopard-like, ascend with velvet, or--what is almost as

noiseless--worsted steps, the wooden stairs. True, that your breeches

are beneath your bolster--but that trick of travellers has long been "as

notorious as the sun at noonday;" and although you are aware of your

breeches, with all the ready money perhaps that you are worth in this

world, eloping from beneath your parental eye, you in vain try to cry

out--for a long, broad, iron hand, with ever so many iron fingers, is on

your mouth; another, with still more numerous digits, compresses your

windpipe, while a low hoarse voice, in a whisper to which Sarah

Siddons's was empty air, on pain of instant death enforces silence from

a man unable for his life to utter a single word; and after pulling off

all the bed-clothes, and then clothing you with curses, the ruffians,

whose accent betrays them to be Irishmen, inflict upon you divers wanton

wounds with a blunt instrument, probably a crow-bar--swearing by Satan

and all his saints, that if you stir an inch of your body before

daybreak, they will instantly return, cut your throat, knock out your

brains, sack you, and carry you off for sale to a surgeon: Therefore you

must use pocket door-bolts, which are applicable to almost all sorts of

doors, and on many occasions save the property and life of the

traveller. The corkscrew door-fastening the Doctor recommends as the

simplest. This is screwed in between the door and the door-post, and

unites them so firmly, that great power is required to force a door so

fastened. They are as portable as common cork-screws, and their weight

does not exceed an ounce and a half. The safety of your bedroom should

always be carefully examined; and in case of bolts not being at hand, it

will be useful to hinder entrance into the room by putting a table and

chair upon it against the door. Take a peep below the bed, and into the

closets, and every place where concealment is possible--of course,

although the Doctor forgets to suggest it, into the chimney. A friend of

the Doctor's used to place a bureau against the door, and "thereon he

set a basin and ewer in such a position as easily to rattle, so that, on

being shook, they instantly became _molto agitato_." Upon one alarming

occasion this device frightened away one of the chambermaids, or some

other Paulina Pry, who attempted to steal on the virgin sleep of the

travelling Joseph, who all the time was hiding his head beneath the

bolster. Joseph, however, believed that it was a horrible midnight

assassin, with mustaches and a dagger. "The chattering of the crockery

gave the alarm, and the attempt, after many attempts, was abandoned."

With all these fearful apprehensions--in his mind, Dr Kitchiner must

have been a man of great natural personal courage and intrepidity, to

have slept even once in his whole lifetime from home. What dangers must

we have passed, who used to plump in, without a thought of damp in the

bed, or scamp below it--closet and chimney uninspected, door unbolted

and unscrewed, exposed to rape, robbery, and murder! It is mortifying to

think that we should be alive at this day. Nobody, male or female,

thought it worth their while to rob, ravish, or murder us! There we lay,

forgotten by the whole world--till the crowing of cocks, or the ringing

of bells, or blundering Boots insisting on it that we were a Manchester

Bagman, who had taken an inside in the Heavy at five, broke our repose,

and Sol laughing in at the unshuttered and uncurtained window showed us

the floor of our dormitory, not streaming with a gore of blood. We

really know not whether to be most proud of having been the favourite

child of Fortune, or the neglected brat of Fate. One only precaution did

we ever use to take against assassination, and all the other ills that

flesh is heir to, sleep where one may, and that was to say inwardly a

short fervent prayer, humbly thanking our Maker for all the

happiness--let us trust it was innocent--of the day; and humbly

imploring his blessing on all the hopes of to-morrow. For, at the time

we speak of, we were young--and every morning, whatever the atmosphere

might be, rose bright and beautiful with hopes that, far as the eyes of

the soul could reach, glittered on earth's, and heaven's, and life's

horizon!

But suppose that after all this trouble to get himself bolted and

screwed into a paradisaical tabernacle of a dormitory, there had

suddenly rung through the house the cry of FIRE--FIRE--FIRE! how was Dr

Kitchiner to get out? Tables, bureaus, benches, chairs, blocked up the

only door--all laden with wash-hand basins and other utensils, the whole

crockery shepherdesses of the chimney-piece, double-barrelled pistols

with spring bayonets ready to shoot and stab, without distinction of

persons, as their proprietor was madly seeking to escape the roaring

flames! Both windows are iron-bound, with all their shutters, and over

and above tightly fastened with "the cork-screw fastening, the simplest

that we have seen." The wind-board is in like manner, and by the same

unhappy contrivance, firmly jammed into the jaws of the chimney, so

egress to the Doctor up the vent is wholly denied--no fire-engine in the

town--but one under repair. There has not been a drop of rain for a

month, and the river is not only distant but dry. The element is

growling along the galleries like a lion, and the room is filling with

something more deadly than back-smoke. A shrill voice is heard

crying--"Number 5 will be burned alive! Number 5 will be burned alive!

Is there no possibility of saving the life of Number 5?" The Doctor

falls down before the barricado, and is stretched all his hapless length

fainting on the floor. At last the door is burst open, and landlord,

landlady, chambermaid, and boots--each in a different key--from manly

bass to childish treble, demand of Number 5 if he be a murderer or a

madman--for, gentle reader, it has been a--Dream.

We must hurry to a close, and shall perform the short remainder of our

journey on foot. The first volume of the Oracle concludes with

"Observations on Pedestrians." Here we are at home--and could, we

imagine, have given the Doctor a mile in the hour in a year-match. The

strength of man, we are given distinctly to understand by the Doctor, is

"in the ratio of the performance of the restorative process, which is as

the quantity and quality of what he puts into his stomach, the energy of

that organ, and the quantity of exercise he takes." This statement of

the strength of man may be unexceptionably true, and most philosophical

to those who are up to it--but to us it resembles a definition we have

heard of thunder, "the conjection of the sulphur congeals the matter."

It appears to us that a strong stomach is not the sole constituent of a

strong man--but that it is not much amiss to be provided with a strong

back, a strong breast, strong thighs, strong legs, and strong feet. With

a strong stomach alone--yea, even the stomach of a horse--a man will

make but a sorry Pedestrian. The Doctor, however, speedily redeems

himself by saying admirably well, "that nutrition does not depend more

on the state of the stomach, or of what we put into it, than it does on

the stimulus given to the system by exercise, which alone can produce

that perfect circulation of the blood which is required to throw off

superfluous secretions, and give the absorbents an appetite to suck up

fresh materials. This requires the action of every petty artery, and of

the minutest ramifications of every nerve and fibre in our body." Thus,

he remarks, a little further on, by way of illustration, "that a man,

suffering under a fit of the vapours, after half an hour's brisk

ambulation, will often find that he has walked it off, and that the

action of the body has exonerated the mind."

The Doctor warms as he walks--and is very near leaping over the fence of

Political Economy. "Providence, he remarks, furnishes materials, but

expects that we should work them up for ourselves. The earth must be

laboured before it gives its increase, and when it is forced to produce

its several products, how many hands must they pass through before they

are fit for use! Manufactures, trade, and agriculture, naturally employ

more than nineteen persons out of twenty; and as for those who are, by

the condition in which they are born, exempted from work, they are more

miserable than the rest of mankind, unless they daily and duly employ

themselves in that VOLUNTARY LABOUR WHICH GOES BY THE NAME OF EXERCISE."

Inflexible justice, however, forces us to say, that although the Doctor

throws a fine philosophical light over the most general principles of

walking, as they are involved in "that voluntary labour which goes by

the name of exercise," yet he falls into frequent and fatal error when

he descends into the particulars of the practice of pedestrianism. Thus,

he says, that no person should sit down to a hearty meal immediately

after any great exertion, either of mind or body--that is, one might

say, after a few miles of Plinlimmon, or a few pages of the Principia.

Let the man, quoth he, "who comes home fatigued by bodily exertion,

especially if he feel heated by it, throw his legs upon a chair, and

remain quite tranquil and composed, that the energy which has been

dispersed to the extremities may have time to return to the stomach,

when it is required." To all this we say--Fudge! The sooner you get hold

of a leg of roasted mutton the better; but meanwhile, off rapidly with

a pot of porter--then leisurely on with a clean shirt--wash your face

and hands in gelid--none of your tepid water. There is no harm done if

you should shave--then keep walking up and down the parlour rather

impatiently, for such conduct is natural, and in all things act

agreeably to nature--stir up the waiter with some original jest by way

of stimulant, and to give the knave's face a well-pleased stare--and

never doubting "that the energy which has been dispersed to the

extremities" has had ample time to return to the stomach, in God's name

fall to! and take care that the second course shall not appear till

there is no vestige left of the first--a second course being looked on

by the judicious moralist and pedestrian very much in the light in which

the poet has made a celebrated character consider it,--

"Nor fame I slight--nor for her favours call--

She comes unlook'd for--if she comes at all."

To prove how astonishingly our strength may be diminished by indolence,

the Doctor tells us, that meeting a gentleman who had lately returned

from India, to his inquiry after his health he replied, "Why,

better--better, thank ye--I think I begin to feel some symptoms of the

return of a little English energy. Do you know that the day before

yesterday I was in such high spirits, and felt so strong, I actually put

on one of my stockings myself?"

The Doctor then asserts, that it "has been repeatedly proved that a man

can travel further for a week or a month than a horse." On reading this

sentence to Will Whipcord--"Yes, sir," replied that renowned Professor

of the Newmarket Philosophy, "that's all right, sir--a man can beat a

horse!"

Now, Will Whipcord may be right in his opinion, and a man may beat a

horse. But it never has been tried: There is no match of pedestrianism

on record between a first-rate man and a first-rate horse; and as soon

as there is, we shall lay our money on the horse--only mind, the horse

carries no weight, and he must be allowed to do his work on turf. We

know that Arab horses will carry their rider, provision and provender,

arms and accoutrements (no light weight) across the desert, eighty miles

a-day, for many days--and that for four days they have gone a hundred

miles a-day. That would have puzzled Captain Barclay in his prime, the

Prince of Pedestrians. However, be that as it may, the comparative

pedestrian powers of man and horse have never yet been ascertained by

any accredited match in England.

The Doctor then quotes an extract from a Pedestrian Tour in Wales by a

Mr Shepherd, who, we are afraid, is no great headpiece, though we shall

be happy to find ourselves in error. Mr Shepherd, speaking of the

inconveniencies and difficulties attending a pedestrian excursion, says,

"that at one time the roads are rendered so muddy by the rain, that it

is almost impossible to proceed;"--"at other times you are exposed to

the inclemency of the weather, and by wasting time under a tree or a

hedge are benighted in your journey, and again reduced to an

uncomfortable dilemma." "Another disadvantage is, that your track is

necessarily more confined--a deviation of ten or twelve miles makes an

important difference, which, if you were on horseback, would be

considered as trivial." "Under all these circumstances," he says, "it

may appear rather remarkable that we should have chosen a pedestrian

excursion--_in answer to which, it may be observed, that we were not

apprised of these things till we had experienced them_." What! Mr

Shepherd, were you, who we presume have reached the age of puberty, not

apprised, before you penetrated as a pedestrian into the Principality,

that "roads are rendered muddy by the rain?" Had you never met, either

in your experience of life, or in the course of your reading, proof

positive that pedestrians "are exposed to the inclemency of the

weather?" That, if a man will linger too long under a tree or a hedge

when the sun is going down, "he will be benighted?" Under what serene

atmosphere, in what happy clime, have you pursued your preparatory

studies _sub dio_? But, our dear Mr Shepherd, why waste time under the

shelter of a tree or a hedge? Waste time nowhere, our young and unknown

friend. What the worse would you have been of being soaked to the skin?

Besides, consider the danger you ran of being killed by lightning, had

there been a few flashes, under a tree? Further, what will become of

you, if you addict yourself on every small emergency to trees and

hedges, when the country you walk through happens to be as bare as the

palm of your hand? Button your jacket, good sir--scorn an

umbrella--emerge boldly from the sylvan shade, snap your fingers at the

pitiful pelting of the pitiless storm--poor spite indeed in Densissimus

Imber--and we will insure your life for a presentation copy of your Tour

against all the diseases that leapt out of Pandora's box, not only till

you have reached the Inn at Capel-Cerig, but your own home in England

(we forget the county)--ay, till your marriage, and the baptism of your

first-born.

Dr Kitchiner seems to have been much frightened by Mr Shepherd's picture

of a storm in a puddle, and proposes a plan of alleviation of one great

inconvenience of pedestrianising. "Persons," quoth he, "who take a

pedestrian excursion, and intend to subject themselves to the

uncertainties of accommodation, by going across the country and visiting

unfrequented paths, will act wisely to carry with them a _piece of

oil-skin_ to sit upon while taking refreshments out of doors, which they

will often find needful during such excursions." To save trouble, the

breech of the pedestrian's breeches should be a patch of oil-skin. Here

a question of great difficulty and importance arises--Breeches or

trousers? Dr Kitchiner is decidedly for breeches. "The garter," says he,

"should be below the knee, and breeches are much better than trousers.

The general adoption of those which, till our late wars, were

exclusively used by 'the Lords of the Ocean,' has often excited my

astonishment. However convenient trousers may be to the sailor who has

to cling to slippery shrouds, for the landsman nothing can be more

inconvenient. They are heating in summer, and in winter they are

collectors of mud. Moreover, they occasion a necessity for wearing

garters. Breeches are, in all respects, much more convenient. These

should have the knee-band three quarters of an inch wide, lined on the

upper side with a piece of plush, and fastened with a buckle, which is

much easier than even double strings, and, by observing the strap, you

always know the exact degree of tightness that is required to keep up

the stocking; any pressure beyond that is prejudicial, especially to

those who walk long distances."

We are strongly inclined to agree with the Doctor in his panegyric on

breeches. True, that in the forenoons, especially if of a dark colour,

such as black, and worn with white, or even grey or bluish, stockings,

they are apt, in the present state of public taste, to stamp you a

schoolmaster, or a small grocer in full dress, or an exciseman going to

a ball. We could dispense too with the knee-buckles and plush

lining--though we allow the one might be ornamental and the other

useful. But what think you, gentle reader, of walking with a Pedometer?

A Pedometer is an instrument cunningly devised to tell you how far and

how fast you walk, and is, quoth the Doctor, a "perambulator in

miniature." The box containing the wheels is made of the size of a

watch-case, and goes into the breeches pocket, and by means of a string

and hook, fastened at the waistband or at the knee, the number of steps

a man takes, in his regular paces, are registered from the action of the

spring upon the internal wheel-work at every step, to the amount of

30,000. It is necessary, to ascertain the distance walked, that the

average length of one pace be precisely known, and that multiplied by

the number of steps registered on the dial-plate.

All this is very ingenious; and we know one tolerable pedestrian who is

also a Pedometrist. But no Pedometrician will ever make a fortune in a

mountainous island, like Great Britain, where pedestrianism is

indigenous to the soil. A good walker is as regular in his going as

clock-work. He has his different paces--three, three and a half--four,

four and a half--five, five and a half--six miles an hour--toe and heel.

A common watch, therefore, is to him, in the absence of milestones, as

good as a Pedometer, with this great and indisputable advantage, that a

common watch continues to go even after you have yourself stopped,

whereas, the moment you sit down on your oil-skin patch, why, your

Pedometer (which, indeed, from its name and construction, is not

unreasonable) immediately stands still. Neither, we believe, can you

accurately note the pulse of a friend in a fever by a Pedometer.

What pleasure on this earth transcends a breakfast after a twelve-mile

walk? Or is there in this sublunary scene a delight superior to the

gradual, dying-away, dreamy drowsiness that, at the close of a long

summer day's journey up hill and down dale, seals up the glimmering eyes

with honey-dew, and stretches out, under the loving hands of nourrice

Nature, the whole elongated animal economy, steeped in rest divine from

the organ of veneration to the point of the great toe, be it on a bed

of down, chaff, straw, or heather, in palace, hall, hotel, or hut? If in

an inn, nobody interferes with you in meddling officiousness; neither

landlord, bagman, waiter, chambermaid, boots;--you are left to yourself

without being neglected. Your bell may not be emulously answered by all

the menials on the establishment, but a smug or shock-headed drawer

appears in good time; and if mine host may not always dignify your

dinner by the deposition of the first dish, yet, influenced by the

rumour that soon spreads through the premises, he bows farewell at your

departure, with a shrewd suspicion that you are a nobleman in disguise.

SOLILOQUY ON THE SEASONS.

FIRST RHAPSODY.

No weather more pleasant than that of a mild WINTER day. So gracious the

season, that Hyems is like Ver--Januarius like Christopher North. Art

thou the Sun of whom Milton said,--

"Looks through the horizontal misty air,

Shorn of his beams,"

an image of disconsolate obscuration? Bright art thou as at meridian on

a June Sabbath; but effusing a more temperate lustre, not unfelt by the

sleeping though not insensate earth. She stirs in her sleep, and

murmurs--the mighty mother; and quiet as herself, though broad awake,

her old ally the ship-bearing sea. What though the woods be

leafless--they look as alive as when laden, with umbrage; and who can

tell what is going on now within the heart of that calm oak grove? The

fields laugh not now--but here and there they smile. If we see no

flowers we think of them--and less of the perished than of the unborn;

for regret is vain, and hope is blest; in peace there is the promise of

joy--and therefore in the silent pastures a perfect beauty how

restorative to man's troubled heart!

The Shortest Day in all the year--yet is it lovelier than the Longest.

Can that be the voice of birds? With the laverock's lyric our fancy

filled the sky--with the throstle's roundelay it awoke the wood. In the

air life is audible--circling unseen. Such serenity must be inhabited by

happiness. Ha! there thou art, our Familiar--the self-same Robin

Redbreast that pecked at our nursery window, and used to warble from the

gable of the school-house his sweet winter song!

In company we are silent--in solitude we soliloquise. So dearly do we

love our own voice that we cannot bear to hear it mixed with that of

others--perhaps drowned; and then our bashfulness tongue-ties us in the

hush expectant of our "golden opinions," when all eyes are turned to the

speechless "old man eloquent," and you might hear a tangle dishevelling

itself in Neæra's hair. But all alone by ourselves, in the country,

among trees standing still among untrodden leaves--as now--how we do

speak! All thoughts--all feelings--desire utterance; left to themselves

they are not happy till they have evolved into words--winged words that

sometimes settle on the ground, like moths on flowers--sometimes seek

the sky, like eagles above the clouds.

No such soliloquies in written poetry as these of ours--the act of

composition is fatal as frost to their flow; yet composition there is at

such solitary times going on among the moods of the mind, as among the

clouds on a still but not airless sky, perpetual but imperceptible

transformations of the beautiful, obedient to the bidding of the spirit

of beauty.

Who but Him who made it knoweth aught of the Laws of Spirit? All of us

may know much of what is "wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best," in

obedience to them; but leaving the open day, we enter at once into

thickest night. Why at this moment do we see a spot once only visited by

us--unremembered for ever so many flights of black or bright winged

years--see it in fancy as it then was in nature, with the same dewdrops

on that wondrous myrtle beheld but on that morning--such a myrtle as no

other eyes beheld ever on this earth but ours, and the eyes of one now

in heaven?

Another year is about to die--and how wags the world? "What great events

are on the gale?" Go ask our statesmen. But their rule--their guidance

is but over the outer world, and almost powerless their folly or their

wisdom over the inner region in which we mortals live, and move, and

have our being, where the fall of a throne makes no more noise than that

of a leaf!

Thank Heaven! Summer and Autumn are both dead and buried at last, and

white lie the snow on their graves! Youth is the season of all sorts of

insolence, and therefore we can forgive and forget almost anything in

SPRING. He has always been a privileged personage; and we have no doubt

that he played his pranks even in Paradise. To-day, he meets you

unexpectedly on the hill-side; and was there ever a face in this world

so celestialised by smiles! All the features are framed of light. Gaze

into his eyes, and you feel that in the untroubled lustre there is

something more sublime than in the heights of the cloudless heavens, or

in the depths of the waveless seas. More sublime, because essentially

spiritual. There stands the young Angel, entranced in the conscious

mystery of his own beautiful and blessed being; and the earth becomes

all at once fit region for the sojourn of the Son of the Morning. So

might some great painter image the First-born of the Year, till nations

adored the picture.--To-morrow you repair, with hermit steps, to the

Mount of the Vision, and,

"Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,"

Spring clutches you by the hair with the fingers of frost; blashes a

storm of sleet in your face, and finishes, perhaps, by folding you in a

winding-sheet of snow, in which you would infallibly perish but for a

pocket-pistol of Glenlivet.--The day after to-morrow, you behold

him--Spring--walking along the firmament, sad, but not sullen--mournful,

but not miserable--disturbed, but not despairing--now coming out towards

you in a burst of light--and now fading away from you in a gathering of

gloom--even as one might figure in his imagination a fallen Angel. On

Thursday, confound you if you know what the deuce to make of his

Springship. There he is, stripped to the buff--playing at hide-and-seek,

hare-and-hound, with a queer crazy crony of his in a fur cap, swan-down

waistcoat, and hairy breeches, Lodbrog or Winter. You turn up the whites

of your eyes, and the browns of your hands in amazement, till the Two,

by way of change of pastime, cease their mutual vagaries, and, like a

couple of hawks diverting themselves with an owl, in conclusion buffet

you off the premises. You insert the occurrence, with suitable

reflections, in your Meteorological Diary, under the head--Spring.--On

Friday, nothing is seen of you but the blue tip of your nose, for you

are confined to bed by rheumatism, and nobody admitted to your sleepless

sanctum but your condoling Mawsey. 'Tis a pity. For never since the

flood-greened earth on her first resurrection morn laughed around

Ararat, spanned was she by such a Rainbow! By all that is various and

vanishing, the arch seems many miles broad, and many miles high, and all

creation to be gladly and gloriously gathered together without being

crowded--plains, woods, villages, towns, hills, and clouds, beneath the

pathway of Spring, once more an Angel--an unfallen Angel! While the

tinge that trembles into transcendent hues fading and

fluctuating--deepening and dying--now gone, as if for ever--and now back

again in an instant, as if breathing and alive--is felt, during all that

wavering visitation, to be of all sights the most evanescent, and yet

inspirative of a beauty-born belief, bright as the sun that flung the

image on the cloud--profound as the gloom it illumines--that it shone

and is shining there at the bidding of Him who inhabiteth eternity.--The

grim noon of Saturday, after a moaning morning, and one silent

intermediate lour of grave-like stillness, begins to gleam fitfully with

lightning like a maniac's eye; and is not that

"The sound

Of thunder heard remote?"

On earth wind there is none--not so much as a breath. But there is a

strong wind in heaven--for see how that huge cloud-city, a night within

a day, comes moving on along the hidden mountain-tops, and hangs over

the loch all at once black as pitch, except that here and there a sort

of sullen purple heaves upon the long slow swell, and here and there

along the shores--how caused we know not--are seen, but heard not, the

white melancholy breakers! Is no one smitten blind? No! Thank God! But

ere the thanksgiving has been worded, an airquake has split asunder the

cloud-city, the night within the day, and all its towers and temples are

disordered along the firmament, to a sound that might waken the dead.

Where are ye, ye echo-hunters, that grudge not to purchase gunpowder

explosions on Lowood bowling-green at four shillings the blast? See!

there are our artillerymen stalking from battery to battery--all hung up

aloft facing the west--or "each standing by his gun" with lighted match,

moving or motionless, Shadow-figures, and all clothed in black-blue

uniform, with blood-red facings portentously glancing in the sun, as he

strives to struggle into heaven. The Generalissimo of all the forces,

who is he but--Spring?--Hand in hand with Spring, Sabbath descends from

heaven unto earth; and are not their feet beautiful on the mountains?

Small as is the voice of that tinkling bell from that humble spire,

overtopped by its coeval trees, yet is it heard in the heart of

infinitude. So is the bleating of these silly sheep on the braes--and

so is that voice of psalms, all at once rising so spirit-like, as if the

very kirk were animated, and singing a joyous song in the wilderness to

the ear of the Most High. For all things are under his care--those that,

as we dream, have no life--the flowers, and the herbs, and the

trees--those that some dim scripture seems to say, when they die,

utterly perish--and those that all bright scripture, whether written in

the book of God, or the book of Nature, declares will live for ever!

If such be the character and conduct of Spring during one week, wilt

thou not forget and forgive--with us--much occasional conduct on his

part that appears not only inexplicable, but incomprehensible? But we

cannot extend the same indulgence to Summer and to Autumn. SUMMER is a

season come to the years of discretion, and ought to conduct himself

like a staid, sober, sensible, middle-aged man, not past, but passing,

his prime. Now, Summer, we are sorry to say it, often behaves in a way

to make his best friends ashamed of him--in a way absolutely disgraceful

to a person of his time of life. Having picked a quarrel with the

Sun--his benefactor, nay, his father--what else could he expect but that

that enlightened Christian would altogether withhold his countenance

from so undutiful and ungrateful a child, and leave him to travel along

the mire and beneath the clouds? For some weeks Summer was sulky--and

sullenly scorned to shed a tear. His eyes were like ice. By-and-by, like

a great school-boy, he began to whine and whimper--and when he found

that would not do, he blubbered like the booby of the lowest form. Still

the Sun would not look on him--or if he did, 'twas with a sudden and

short half-smile half-scowl that froze the ingrate's blood. At last the

Summer grew contrite, and the Sun forgiving, the one burst out into a

flood of tears, the other into a flood of light. In simple words, the

Summer wept and the Sun smiled--and for one broken month there was a

perpetual alternation of rain and radiance! How beautiful is penitence!

How beautiful forgiveness! For one week the Summer was restored to his

pristine peace and old luxuriance, and the desert blossomed like the

rose.

Therefore ask we the Summer's pardon for thanking Heaven that he was

dead. Would that he were alive again, and buried not for ever beneath

the yellow forest leaves! O thou first, faint, fair, finest tinge of

dawning Light that streaks the still-sleeping yet just-waking face of

the morn, Light and no-Light, a shadowy Something, that as we gaze is

felt to be growing into an emotion that must be either Innocence or

Beauty, or both blending together into devotion before Deity, once more

duly visible in the divine colouring that forebodes another day to

mortal life--before Thee what holy bliss to kneel upon the greensward in

some forest glade, while every leaf is a-tremble with dewdrops, and the

happy little birds are beginning to twitter, yet motionless among the

boughs--before Thee to kneel as at a shrine, and breathe deeper and

deeper--as the lustre waxeth purer and purer, brighter and more bright,

till range after range arise of crimson clouds in altitude sublime, and

breast above breast expands of yellow woods softly glittering in their

far-spread magnificence--then what holy bliss to breathe deeper and

deeper unto Him who holds in the hollow of his hand the heavens and the

earth, our high but most humble orisons! But now it is Day, and broad

awake seems the whole joyful world. The clouds--lustrous no more--are

all anchored on the sky, white as fleets waiting for the wind. Time is

not felt--and one might dream that the Day was to endure for ever. Yet

the great river rolls on in the light--and why will he leave those

lovely inland woods for the naked shores? Why--responds some

voice--hurry we on our own lives--impetuous and passionate far more than

he with all his cataracts--as if anxious to forsake the regions of the

upper day for the dim place from which we yet recoil in fear--the dim

place which imagination sometimes seems to see even through the

sunshine, beyond the bourne of this our unintelligible being, stretching

sea-like into a still more mysterious night! Long as a Midsummer Day is,

it has gone by like a Heron's flight. The sun is setting!--and let him

set without being scribbled upon by Christopher North. We took a

pen-and-ink sketch of him in a "Day on Windermere." Poor nature is much

to be pitied among painters and poets. They are perpetually falling into

"Such perusal of her face

As they would draw it."

And often must she be sick of the Curious Impertinents. But a Curious

Impertinent are not we--if ever there was one beneath the skies, a

devout worshipper of Nature; and though we often seem to heed not her

shrine--it stands in our imagination, like a temple in a perpetual

Sabbath.

It was poetically and piously said by the Ettrick Shepherd, at a Noctes,

that there is no such thing in nature as bad weather. Take Summer, which

early in our soliloquy we abused in good set terms. Its weather was

broken, but not bad; and much various beauty and sublimity is involved

in the epithet "broken," when applied to the "season of the year."

Commonplace people, especially town-dwellers, who _flit_ into the

country for a few months, have a silly and absurd idea of Summer, which

all the atmospherical phenomena fail to drive out of their foolish

fancies. They insist on its remaining with us for half a year at least,

and on its being dressed in its Sunday's best every day in the week as

long as they continue in country quarters. The Sun must rise, like a

labourer, at the very earliest hour, shine all day, and go to bed late,

else they treat him contumeliously, and declare that he is not worth his

meat. Should he retire occasionally behind a cloud, which it seems most

natural and reasonable for one to do who lives so much in the public

eye, why, a whole watering-place, uplifting a face of dissatisfied

expostulation to heaven, exclaims, "Where is the Sun? Are we never to

have any Sun?" They also insist that there shall be no rain of more than

an hour's duration in the daytime, but that it shall all fall by night.

Yet when the Sun does exert himself, as if at their bidding, and is

shining, as he supposes, to their heart's content, up go a hundred green

parasols in his face, enough to startle the celestial steeds in his

chariot. A _broken_ summer for us. Now and then a few continuous

days--perhaps a whole week--but, if that be denied, now and then,

"Like angels' visits, few and far between,"

one single Day--blue-spread over heaven, green-spread over earth--no

cloud above, no shade below, save that dove-coloured marble lying

motionless like the mansions of peace, and that pensive gloom that falls

from some old castle or venerable wood--the stillness of a sleeping joy,

to our heart profounder than that of death, in the air, in the sky, and

resting on our mighty mother's undisturbed breast--no lowing on the

hills, no bleating on the braes--the rivers almost silent as lochs, and

the lochs, just visible in their aerial purity, floating dream-like

between earth and sky, imbued with the beauty of both, and seeming to

belong to either, as the heart melts to human tenderness, or beyond all

mortal loves the imagination soars! Such days seem now to us--as memory

and imagination half restore and half create the past into such weather

as may have shone over the bridal morn of our first parents in

Paradise--to have been frequent--nay, to have lasted all the Summer

long--when our boyhood was bright from the hands of God. Each of those

days was in itself a life! Yet all those sunny lives melted into one

Summer--and all those Summers formed one continuous bliss. Storms and

snows vanished out of our ideal year; and then morning, noon, and night,

wherever we breathed, we _felt_, what now we but _know_, the inmost

meaning of that profound verse of Virgil the Divine--

"Devenere locos lætos, et amoena vireta

Fortunatorum nemorum, sedesque beatas.

Largior hîc campos æther et lumine vestit

Purpureo: solemque suum, sua sidera norunt."

Few--no such days as those seem now ever to be born. Sometimes we indeed

gaze through the face into the heart of the sky, and for a moment feel

that the ancient glory of the heavens has returned on our dream of life.

But to the perfect beatitude of the skies there comes from the soul

within us a mournful response, that betokens some wide and deep--some

everlasting change. Joy is not now what joy was of yore; like a fine

diamond with a flaw is now Imagination's eye; other motes than those

that float through ether cross between its orb and the sun; the "fine

gold has become dim," with which morning and evening of old embossed the

skies; the dewdrops are not now the pearls once they were, left on

"Flowers, and weeds as beautiful as flowers,"

by angels' and by fairies' wings; knowledge, custom, experience, fate,

fortune, error, vice, and sin, have dulled, and darkened, and deadened

all things; and the soul, unable to bring over the Present the ineffable

bliss and beauty of the Past, almost swoons to think what a ghastly

thunder-gloom may by Providence be reserved for the Future!

Nay--nay--things are not altogether so bad with us as this

strain--sincere though it be as a stream from the sacred

mountains--might seem to declare. We can yet enjoy a _broken_ Summer. It

would do your heart good to see us hobbling with our crutch along the

Highland hills, _sans_ great-coat or umbrella, in a summer-shower,

aiblins cap in hand that our hair may grow, up to the knees in the bonny

blooming heather, or clambering, like an old goat, among the cliffs.

Nothing so good for gout or rheumatism as to get wet through, while the

thermometer keeps ranging between 60° and 70°, three times a-day. What

refreshment in the very sound--Soaking! Old bones wax dry--nerves

numb--sinews stiff--flesh frail--and there is a sad drawback on the

Whole Duty of Man. But a sweet, soft, sou'-wester blows "caller" on our

craziness, and all our pores instinctively open their mouths at the

approach of rain. Look but at those dozen downward showers, all denizens

of heaven; how black, and blue, and bright they in their glee are

streaming, and gleaming athwart the sunny mountain-gloom, while ever as

they descend on earth, lift up the streams along the wilderness louder

and louder a choral song. Look now at the heather--and smile whenever

henceforth you hear people talk of _purple_. You have been wont to call

a gold guinea or a sovereign _yellow_--but if you have got one in your

pocket, place it on your palm, and in the light of that broom is it not

a _dirty brown_? You have an emerald ring on your finger--but how grey

it looks beside the _green_ of those brackens, that pasture, that wood!

Purple, yellow, and green, you have now seen, sir, for the first time in

your life. Widening and widening over your head, all the while you have

been gazing on the heather, the broom, the bracken, the pastures, and

the woods, have the eternal heavens been preparing for you a vision of

the sacred _Blue_. Is not that an Indigo Divine? Or, if you scorn that

mercantile and manufacturing image, steal that blue from the sky, and

let the lady of your love tinge but her eyelids with one touch, and a

saintlier beauty will be in her upward looks as she beseeches Heaven to

bless thee in her prayers! Set slowly--slowly--slowly--O Sun of Suns! as

may be allowed by the laws of Nature. For not long after Thou hast sunk

behind those mountains into the sea, will that celestial ROSY-RED be

tabernacled in the heavens!

Meanwhile, three of the dozen showers have so soaked and steeped our old

crazy carcass in refreshment, and restoration, and renewal of youth,

that we should not be surprised were we to outlive that raven croaking

in pure _gaieté du coeur_ on the cliff. Threescore and ten years!

Poo--'tis a pitiful span! At a hundred we shall cut capers--for twenty

years more keep to the Highland fling--and at the close of other twenty,

jig it into the grave to that matchless strathspey, the Reel of

Tullochgorum!

Having thus made our peace with last Summer, can we allow the Sun to go

down on our wrath towards the AUTUMN, whose back we yet see on the

horizon, before he turn about to bow adieu to our hemisphere? Hollo! I

meet us half-way in yonder immense field of potatoes, our worthy Season,

and among these peacemakers, the Mealies and the Waxies, shall we two

smoke together the calumet or cigar of reconciliation. The floods fell,

and the folk feared famine. The people whined over the smut in wheat,

and pored pale on the Monthly Agricultural Report. Grain grew greener

and greener--reapers stood at the crosses of villages, towns, and

cities, passing from one to another comfortless quaichs of sma' yill,

with their straw-bound sickles hanging idle across their shoulders, and

with unhired-looking faces, as ragged a company as if you were to dream

of a Symposium of Scarecrows. Alarmed imagination beheld harvest

treading on the heels of Christmas,

"And Britain sadden'd at the long delay!"

when, whew! to dash the dismal predictions of foolish and false

prophets, came rustling from all the airts, far, far and wide over the

rain-drenched kingdom, the great armament of the Autumnal Winds! Groaned

the grain, as in sudden resurrection it lifted up its head, and knew

that again the Sun was in Heaven. Death became life; and the hearts of

the husbandmen sang aloud for joy. Like Turks, the reapers brandished

their sickles in the breezy light, and every field glittered with

Christian crescents. Auld wives and bits o' weans mingled on the

rig--kilted to the knees, like the comely cummers, and the handsome

hizzies, and the lo'esome lassies wi' their silken snoods--among the

heather-legged Highlandmen, and the bandy Irishers, brawny all, and with

hook, scythe, or flail, inferior to none of the children of men. The

scene lies in Scotland--but now, too, is England "Merry England"

indeed, and outside passengers on a thousand coaches see stooks rising

like stacks, and far and wide, over the tree-speckled champaign, rejoice

in the sun-given promise of a glorious harvest-home. Intervenes the rest

of two sunny Sabbaths sent to dry the brows of labour, and give the last

ripeness to the overladen stalks that, top-heavy with aliment, fall over

in their yellowy whiteness into the fast reaper's hands. Few fields

now--but here and there one thin and greenish, of cold, unclean, or

stony soil--are waving in the shadowy winds; for all are cleared, but

some stooked stubbles from which the stooks are fast disappearing, as

the huge wains seem to halt for a moment, impeded by the gates they

hide, and then, crested perhaps with laughing boys and girls,

"Down the rough slope the ponderous waggon rings,"

no--not rings--for Beattie, in that admirable line, lets us hear a cart

going out empty in the morning--but with a _cheerful dull_ sound,

ploughing along the black soil, _the clean dirt_ almost up to the

axletree, and then, as the wheels, rimmed you might always think with

silver, reach the road, macadamised till it acts like a railway, how

glides along downhill the moving mountain! And see now, the growing

Stack glittering with a charge of pitchforks! The trams fly up from

Dobbin's back, and a shoal of sheaves overflows the mire. Up they go,

tossed from sinewy arms like feathers, and the Stack grows before your

eyes, fairly proportioned as a beehive, without line or measure, but

shaped by the look and the feel, true almost as the spring instinct of

the nest-building bird. And are we not heartily ashamed of ourselves,

amidst this general din of working mirthfulness, for having, but an hour

ago, abused the jovial and generous Autumn, and thanked Heaven that he

was dead? Let us retire into the barn with Shoosy, and hide our blushes.

Comparisons are odoriferous, and therefore for one paragraph let us

compare AUTUMN with SPRING. Suppose ourselves sitting beneath THE

SYCAMORE of Windermere! Poets call Spring Green-Mantle--and true it is

that the groundwork of his garb is green--even like that of the proud

peacock's changeful neck, when the creature treads in the circle of his

own splendour, and the scholar who may have forgotten his classics, has

yet a dream of Juno and of her watchful Argus with his hundred, his

thousand eyes. But the coat of Spring, like that of Joseph, is a coat of

many colours. Call it patch-work if you choose,

"And be yourself the great sublime you draw."

Some people look on nature with a milliner's or a mantua-maker's

eye--arraying her in furbelows and flounces. But use your own eyes and

ours, and from beneath THE SYCAMORE let us two, sitting together in

amity, look lovingly on the SPRING. Felt ever your heart before, with

such an emotion of harmonious beauty, the exquisitely delicate

distinctions of character among the lovely tribes of trees! That is

BELLE ISLE. Earliest to salute the vernal rainbow, with a glow of green

gentle as its own, is the lake-loving ALDER, whose home, too, is by the

flowings of all the streams. Just one degree fainter in its hue--or

shall we rather say brighter--for we feel the difference without knowing

in what it lies--stands, by the Alder's rounded softness, the spiral

LARCH, all hung over its limber sprays, were you near enough to admire

them, with cones of the Tyrian dye. That stem, white as silver, and

smooth as silk, seen so straight in the green sylvan light, and there

airily overarching the coppice with lambent tresses, such as fancy might

picture for the mermaid's hair, pleasant as is her life on that

Fortunate Isle, is yet said by us, who vainly attribute our own sadness

to unsorrowing things--to belong to a Tree that _weeps_,--though a

weight of joy it is, and of exceeding gladness, that thus depresses the

BIRCH'S pendent beauty, till it droops--as we think--like that of a

being overcome with grief! Seen standing all along by themselves, with

something of a foreign air, and an exotic expression, yet not unwelcome

or obtrusive among our indigenous fair forest-trees, twinkling to the

touch of every wandering wind, and restless even amidst what seemeth now

to be everlasting rest, we cannot choose but admire that somewhat darker

grove of columnar Lombardy POPLARS. How comes it that some SYCAMORES so

much sooner than others salute the Spring? Yonder are some but budding,

as if yet the frost lay on the honey-dew that protects the beamy germs.

There are others warming into expansion, half-budded and half-leaved,

with a various light of colour visible in that sun-glint distinctly from

afar. And in that nook of the still sunnier south, trending eastward, a

few are almost in their full summer foliage, and soon will the bees be

swarming among their flowers. A HORSE CHESTNUT has a grand oriental air,

and like a satrap uplifts his green banner yellowing in the light--that

shows he belongs to the line of the Prophet. ELMS are then most

magnificent--witness Christ-Church walk--when they hang over head in

heaven like the chancel of a cathedral. Yet here, too, are the

august--and methinks "a dim religious light" is in that vault of

branches just vivifying to the Spring, and though almost bare, tinged

with a coming hue that ere long will be majestic brightness. Those old

OAKS seem sullen in the sunshine, and slow to put forth their power,

like the Spirit of the Land they emblem. But they, too, are relaxing

from their wonted sternness--soon will that faint green be a glorious

yellow; and while the gold-laden boughs stoop boldly to the storms with

which they love to dally, bounds not the heart of every Briton to the

music of his national anthem,

"Rule, Britannia,

Britannia rules the waves!"

The ASH is a manly tree, but "dreigh and dour" in the leafing; and

yonder stands an Ash-grove like a forest of ships with bare poles in the

docks of Liverpool. Yet like the town of Kilkenny

"It shines well where it stands;"

and the bare grey-blue of the branches, apart but not repulsive, like

some cunning discord in music, deepens the harmony of the Isle of

Groves. Contrast is one of the finest of all the laws of association, as

every philosopher, poet, and peasant kens. At this moment, it brings, by

the bonds of beauty, though many glades intervene, close beside that

pale grey-blue leafless Ash-Clump, that bright black-green PINE Clan,

whose "leaf fadeth never," a glorious Scottish tartan triumphing in the

English woods. Though many glades intervene, we said; for thou seest

that BELLE ISLE is not all one various flush of wood, but bedropt all

over--bedropt and besprinkled with grass-gems, some cloud-shadowed, some

tree-shaded, some mist-bedimmed, and some luminous as small soil-suns,

on which as the eye alights, it feels soothed and strengthened, and

gifted with a profounder power to see into the mystery of the beauty of

nature. But what are those living Hills of snow, or of some substance

purer in its brightness even than any snow that fades in one night on

the mountain-top! Trees are they--fruit-trees--The WILD CHERRY, that

grows stately and widespreading even as the monarch of the wood--and can

that be a load of blossoms! Fairer never grew before poet's eye of old

in the fabled Hesperides. See how what we call snow brightens into

pink--yet still the whole glory is white, and fadeth not away the purity

of the balmy snow-blush. Ay, balmy as the bliss breathing from virgin

lips, when, moving in the beauty left by her morning prayers, a glad

fond daughter steals towards him on the feet of light, and as his arms

open to receive and return the blessing, lays her innocence with smiles

that are almost tears, within her father's bosom.

"As when to those who sail

Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past

Mozambic, off at sea north-east winds blow

Sabæan odours from the spicy shore

Of Araby the Blest; with such delay

Well pleased they slack their course, and many a league,

Cheer'd with the grateful smell, old Ocean smiles."