SECTION I--THE GLORY OF MOTION

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THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH

AND

JOAN OF ARC

By Thomas De Quincey

Edited With Introduction And Notes By Milton Haight Turk, Ph.D.

TO CHARLES DEACON CREE

THIS LITTLE VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED

_Glencairn, Kilmacolm, Scotland June 27, 1905_

PREFACE

Some portions of this Introduction have been taken from the Athenæum

Press _Selections from De Quincey_; many of the notes have also been

transferred from that volume. A number of the new notes I owe to a

review of the _Selections_ by Dr. Lane Cooper, of Cornell University.

I wish also to thank for many favors the Committee and officers of the

Glasgow University Library.

If a word by way of suggestion to teachers be pertinent, I would venture

to remark that the object of the teacher of literature is, of course,

only to fulfill the desire of the author--to make clear his facts and

to bring home his ideas in all their power and beauty. Introductions

and notes are only means to this end. Teachers, I think, sometimes lose

sight of this fact; I know it is fatally easy for students to forget it.

That teacher will have rendered a great service who has kept his pupils

alive to the real aim of their studies,--to know the author, not to know

of him.

M.H.T

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION I. LIFE II. CRITICAL REMARKS III. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

SELECTIONS THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH

JOAN OF ARC

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

I. LIFE

Thomas de Quincey was born in Manchester on the 15th of August, 1785.

His father was a man of high character and great taste for literature as

well as a successful man of business; he died, most unfortunately, when

Thomas was quite young. Very soon after our author's birth the family

removed to The Farm, and later to Greenhay, a larger country place near

Manchester. In 1796 De Quincey's mother, now for some years a widow,

removed to Bath and placed him in the grammar school there.

Thomas, the future opium-eater, was a weak and sickly child. His first

years were spent in solitude, and when his elder brother, William, a

real boy, came home, the young author followed in humility mingled with

terror the diversions of that ingenious and pugnacious "son of eternal

racket." De Quincey's mother was a woman of strong character and

emotions, as well as excellent mind, but she was excessively formal, and

she seems to have inspired more awe than affection in her children,

to whom she was for all that deeply devoted. Her notions of conduct in

general and of child rearing in particular were very strict. She took

Thomas out of Bath School, after three years' excellent work there,

because he was too much praised, and kept him for a year at an inferior

school at Winkfield in Wiltshire.

In 1800, at the age of fifteen, De Quincey was ready for Oxford; he had

not been praised without reason, for his scholarship was far in advance

of that of ordinary pupils of his years. "That boy," his master at Bath

School had said, "that boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than

you or I could address an English one." He was sent to Manchester

Grammar School, however, in order that after three years' stay he

might secure a scholarship at Brasenose College, Oxford. He remained

there--strongly protesting against a situation which deprived him "of

_health_, of _society_, of _amusement_, of _liberty_, of _congeniality

of pursuits_"--for nineteen months, and then ran away.

His first plan had been to reach Wordsworth, whose _Lyrical Ballads_

(1798) had solaced him in fits of melancholy and had awakened in him a

deep reverence for the neglected poet. His timidity preventing this,

he made his way to Chester, where his mother then lived, in the hope of

seeing a sister; was apprehended by the older members of the family;

and through the intercession of his uncle, Colonel Penson, received the

promise of a guinea a week to carry out his later project of a solitary

tramp through Wales. From July to November, 1802, De Quincey then led

a wayfarer's life. [Footnote: For a most interesting account of this

period see the _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_, Athenæum Press

_Selections from De Quincey_, pp. 165-171, and notes.] He soon lost

his guinea, however, by ceasing to keep his family informed of his

whereabouts, and subsisted for a time with great difficulty. Still

apparently fearing pursuit, with a little borrowed money he broke away

entirely from his home by exchanging the solitude of Wales for the

greater wilderness of London. Failing there to raise money on his

expected patrimony, he for some time deliberately clung to a life of

degradation and starvation rather than return to his lawful governors.

Discovered by chance by his friends, De Quincey was brought home and

finally allowed (1803) to go to Worcester College, Oxford, on a reduced

income. Here, we are told, "he came to be looked upon as a strange being

who associated with no one." During this time he learned to take opium.

He left, apparently about 1807, without a degree. In the same year he

made the acquaintance of Coleridge and Wordsworth; Lamb he had sought

out in London several years before.

His acquaintance with Wordsworth led to his settlement in 1809 at

Grasmere, in the beautiful English Lake District; his home for ten years

was Dove Cottage, which Wordsworth had occupied for several years and

which is now held in trust as a memorial of the poet. De Quincey was

married in 1816, and soon after, his patrimony having been exhausted, he

took up literary work in earnest.

In 1821 he went to London to dispose of some translations from German

authors, but was persuaded first to write and publish an account of his

opium experiences, which accordingly appeared in the _London Magazine_

in that year. This new sensation eclipsed Lamb's _Essays of Elia_, which

were appearing in the same periodical. The _Confessions of an English

Opium-Eater_ was forthwith published in book form. De Quincey now made

literary acquaintances. Tom Hood found the shrinking author "at home in

a German ocean of literature, in a storm, flooding all the floor, the

tables, and the chairs--billows of books." Richard Woodhouse speaks of

the "depth and reality of his knowledge. ... His conversation appeared

like the elaboration of a mine of results. ... Taylor led him into

political economy, into the Greek and Latin accents, into antiquities,

Roman roads, old castles, the origin and analogy of languages; upon all

these he was informed to considerable minuteness. The same with regard

to Shakespeare's sonnets, Spenser's minor poems, and the great writers

and characters of Elizabeth's age and those of Cromwell's time."

From this time on De Quincey maintained himself by contributing to

various magazines. He soon exchanged London and the Lakes for Edinburgh

and its suburb, Lasswade, where the remainder of his life was spent.

_Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_ and its rival _Tatt's Magazine_

received a large number of contributions. _The English Mail-Coach_

appeared in 1849 in Blackwood. _Joan of Arc_ had already been published

(1847) in _Tait_. De Quincey continued to drink laudanum throughout his

life,--twice after 1821 in very great excess. During his last years he

nearly completed a collected edition of his works. He died in Edinburgh

on the 8th of December, 1859.

II. CRITICAL REMARKS

The Opium-Eater had been a weak, lonely, and over-studious child, and he

was a solitary and ill-developed man. His character and his work present

strange contradictions. He is most precise in statement, yet often

very careless of fact; he is most courteous in manner, yet inexcusably

inconsiderate in his behavior. Again, he sets up a high standard

of purity of diction, yet uses slang quite unnecessarily and

inappropriately; and though a great master of style, he is guilty, at

times, of digression within digression until all trace of the original

subject is lost.

De Quincey divides his writings into three groups: first, that class

which "proposes primarily to amuse the reader, but which, in doing so,

may or may not happen occasionally to reach a higher station, at which

the amusement passes into an impassioned interest." To this class would

belong the _Autobiographic Sketches_ and the _Literary Reminiscences_.

As a second class he groups "those papers which address themselves

purely to the understanding as an insulated faculty, or do so

primarily." These essays would include, according to Professor Masson's

subdivision, (a) Biographies, such as _Shakespeare_ or _Pope_--_Joan of

Arc_ falls here, yet has some claim to a place in the first class; (b)

Historical essays, like The _Cæsars_; (c) Speculative and Theological

essays; (d) Essays in Political Economy and Politics; (e) Papers of

Literary Theory and Criticism, such as the brilliant discussions of

_Rhetoric, Style_, and _Conversation_, and the famous _On the Knocking

at the Gate in 'Macbeth_.' As a third and "far higher" class the author

ranks the _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_, and also (but more

emphatically) the _Suspiria de Profundis_. "On these," he says, "as

modes of impassioned prose ranging under no precedents that I am aware

of in any literature, it is much more difficult to speak justly, whether

in a hostile or a friendly character."

Of De Quincey's essays in general it may be said that they bear witness

alike to the diversity of his knowledge and the penetrative power of his

intellect. The wide range of his subjects, however, deprives his papers

when taken together of the weight which might attach to a series of

related discussions. And, remarkable as is De Quincey's aptitude for

analysis and speculation, more than once we have to regret the lack of

the "saving common-sense" possessed by many far less gifted men.

His erudition and insight are always a little in advance of his good

judgment.

As to the works of the first class, the _Reminiscences_ are defaced

by the shrewish spirit shown in the accounts of Wordsworth and other

friends; nor can we depend upon them as records of fact. But our author

had had exceptional opportunities to observe these famous men and women,

and he possessed no little insight into literature and personality. As

to the _Autobiographic Sketches_, the handling of events is hopelessly

arbitrary and fragmentary. In truth, De Quincey is drawing an idealized

picture of childhood,--creating a type rather than re-creating a person;

it is a study of a child of talent that we receive from him, and as such

these sketches form one of the most satisfactory products of his pen.

The _Confessions_ as a narrative is related to the Autobiography, while

its poetical passages range it with the _Suspiria_ and the _Mail-Coach_.

De Quincey seems to have believed that he was creating in such writings

a new literary type of prose poetry or prose phantasy; he had, with

his splendid dreams as subject-matter, lifted prose to heights

hitherto scaled only by the poet. In reality his style owed much to the

seventeenth-century writers, such as Milton and Sir Thomas Browne. He

took part with Coleridge, Lamb, and others in the general revival of

interest in earlier modern English prose, which is a feature of the

Romantic Movement. Still none of his contemporaries wrote as he did;

evidently De Quincey has a distinct quality of his own. Ruskin, in our

own day, is like him, but never the same.

Yet De Quincey's prose poetry is a very small portion of his work, and

it is not in this way only that he excels. Mr. Saintsbury has spoken of

the strong appeal that De Quincey makes to boys. [Footnote: "Probably

more boys have in the last forty years been brought to a love

of literature proper by De Quincy than by any other writer

whatever."--_History of Nineteenth-Century Literature_, p.198.] It is

not without significance that he mentions as especially attractive to

the young only writings with a large narrative element. [Footnote: "To

read the _Essay on Murder_, the _English Mail-Coach_, _The Spanish Nun_,

_The Cæsars_, and half a score other things at the age of about fifteen

or sixteen is, or ought to be, to fall in love with them."--_Essays in

English Literature_, 1780-1860, p.307.] Few boys read poetry, whether in

verse or prose, and fewer still criticism or philosophy; to every normal

boy the gate of good literature is the good story. It is the narrative

skill of De Quincey that has secured for him, in preference to other

writers of his class, the favor of youthful readers.

It would be too much to say that the talent that attracts the young to

him must needs be the Opium-Eater's grand talent, though the notion is

defensible, seeing that only salient qualities in good writing appeal to

inexperienced readers. I believe, however, that this skill in narration

is De Quincey's most persistent quality,--the golden thread that unites

all his most distinguished and most enduring work. And it is with him

a part of his genius for style. Creative power of the kind that goes to

the making of plots De Quincey had not; he has proved that forever by

the mediocrity of _Klosterheim_. Give him Bergmann's account of the

Tartar Migration, or the story of the Fighting Nun,--give him the

matter,--and a brilliant narrative will result. Indeed, De Quincey

loved a story for its own sake; he rejoiced to see it extend its winding

course before him; he delighted to follow it, touch it, color it, see it

grow into body and being under his hand. That this enthusiasm should now

and then tend to endanger the integrity of the facts need not surprise

us; as I have said elsewhere, accuracy in these matters is hardly to

be expected of De Quincey. And we can take our pleasure in the skillful

unfolding of the dramatic narrative of the Tartar Flight--we can feel

the author's joy in the scenic possibilities of his theme--even if we

know that here and there an incident appears that is quite in its proper

place--but is unknown to history.

In his _Confessions_ the same constructive power bears its part in

the author's triumph. A peculiar end was to be reached in that

narrative,--an end in which the writer had a deep personal interest.

What is an opium-eater? Says a character in a recent work of fiction,

of a social wreck: "If it isn't whisky with him, it's opium; if it isn't

opium, it's whisky." This speech establishes the popular category in

which De Quincey's habit had placed him. Our attention was to be drawn

from these degrading connections. And this is done not merely by the

correction of some widespread fallacies as to the effects of the

drug; far more it is the result of narrative skill. As we follow with

ever-increasing sympathy the lonely and sensitive child, the wandering

youth, the neuralgic patient, into the terrible grasp of opium, who

realizes, amid the gorgeous delights and the awful horrors of the tale,

that the writer is after all the victim of the worst of bad habits? We

can hardly praise too highly the art which even as we look beneath it

throws its glamour over us still.

Nor is it only in this constructive power, in the selection and

arrangement of details, that De Quincey excels as a narrator; a score

of minor excellences of his style, such as the fine Latin words or the

sweeping periodic sentences, contribute to the effective progress of his

narrative prose. Mr. Lowell has said that "there are no such vistas and

avenues of verse as Milton's." The comparison is somewhat hazardous,

still I should like to venture the parallel claim that there are no such

streams of prose as De Quincey's. The movement of his discourse is that

of the broad river, not in its weight or force perhaps, but in its easy

flowing progress, in its serene, unhurried certainty of its end. To be

sure, only too often the waters overflow their banks and run far afield

in alien channels. Yet, when great power over the instrument of language

is joined to so much constructive skill, the result is narrative art of

high quality,--an achievement that must be in no small measure the solid

basis of De Quincey's fame.

III. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

I. WORKS

1. _The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey_. New and enlarged

edition by David Masson. Edinburgh: A. and C. Black, 1889-1890. [New

York: The Macmillan Co. 14 vols., with footnotes, a preface to each

volume, and index. Reissued in cheaper form. The standard edition.]

2. _The Works of Thomas de Quincey_. Riverside Edition. Boston:

Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1877. [12 vols., with notes and index.]

3. _Selections from De Quincey._ Edited with an Introduction and Notes,

by M. H. Turk. Athenaeum Press Series. Boston, U.S.A., and London: Ginn

and Company, 1902. ["The largest body of selections from De Quincey

recently published.... The selections are _The affliction of Childhood,

Introduction to the World of Strife, A Meeting with Lamb, A Meeting

with Coleridge, Recollections of Wordsworth, Confessions, A Portion of

Suspiria, The English Mail-Coach, Murder as one of the Fine Arts, Second

Paper, Joan of Arc,_ and _On the Knocking at the Gate in 'Macbeth.'_"]

II. BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM

4. D. MASSON. _Thomas De Quincey._ English Men of Letters. London.

[New York: Harper. An excellent brief biography. This book, with a

good volume of selections, should go far toward supplying the ordinary

student's needs.]

5. H. S. SALT. DE QUINCEY. Bell's Miniature Series of Great Writers.

London: George Bell and Sons. [A good short life.] 6. A. H. JAPP.

_Thomas De Quincey: His Life and Writings._ London, 1890. [New York:

Scribner. First edition by "H. A. Page," 1877. The standard life of

De Quincey; it contains valuable communications from De Quincey's

daughters, J. Hogg, Rev. F. Jacox, Professor Masson, and others.]

7. A. H. JAPP. _De Quincey Memorials. Being Letters and Other

Records, here first published. With Communications from Coleridge, the

Wordsworths, Hannah More, Professor Wilson, and others._ 2 vols. London:

W. Heinemann, 1891.

8. J. HOGG. _De Quincey and his Friends, Personal Recollections,

Souvenirs, and Anecdotes_ [including Woodhouse's _Conversations_,

Findlay's _Personal Recollections_, Hodgson's _On the Genius of De

Quincey_, and a mass of personal notes from a host of friends]. London:

Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1895.

9. E. T. MASON. _Personal Traits of British Authors_. New York, 1885. [4

vols. The volume subtitled _Scott, Hogg,_ etc., contains some accounts

of De Quincey not included by Japp or Hogg.]

10. L. STEPHEN. _Hours in a Library_. Vol. I. New York, 1892.

11. W. MINTO. _Manual of English Prose Literature_. Boston, 1889.

[Contains the best general discussion of De Quincey's style.]

12. L. COOPER. _The Prose Poetry of Thomas De Quincey_. Leipzig, 1902.

THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH

SECTION I--THE GLORY OF MOTION

Some twenty or more years before I matriculated at Oxford, Mr. Palmer,

at that time M.P. for Bath, had accomplished two things, very hard to

do on our little planet, the Earth, however cheap they may be held by

eccentric people in comets: he had invented mail-coaches, and he had

married the daughter of a duke. He was, therefore, just twice as great

a man as Galileo, who did certainly invent (or, which is the same thing,

[Footnote: "_The same thing_":--Thus, in the calendar of the Church

Festivals, the discovery of the true cross (by Helen, the mother

of Constantine) is recorded (and, one might think, with the express

consciousness of sarcasm) as the _Invention_ of the Cross.] discover)

the satellites of Jupiter, those very next things extant to mail-coaches

in the two capital pretensions of speed and keeping time, but, on the

other hand, who did _not_ marry the daughter of a duke.

These mail-coaches, as organised by Mr. Palmer, are entitled to a

circumstantial notice from myself, having had so large a share in

developing the anarchies of my subsequent dreams: an agency which they

accomplished, 1st, through velocity at that time unprecedented--for they

first revealed the glory of motion; 2dly, through grand effects for

the eye between lamplight and the darkness upon solitary roads; 3dly,

through animal beauty and power so often displayed in the class of

horses selected for this mail service; 4thly, through the conscious

presence of a central intellect, that, in the midst of vast distances

[Footnote: "Vast distances":--One case was familiar to mail-coach

travellers where two mails in opposite directions, north and south,

starting at the same minute from points six hundred miles apart, met

almost constantly at a particular bridge which bisected the total

distance.]--of storms, of darkness, of danger--overruled all obstacles

into one steady co-operation to a national result. For my own feeling,

this post-office service spoke as by some mighty orchestra, where a

thousand instruments, all disregarding each other, and so far in danger

of discord, yet all obedient as slaves to the supreme _baton_ of some

great leader, terminate in a perfection of harmony like that of heart,

brain, and lungs in a healthy animal organisation. But, finally, that

particular element in this whole combination which most impressed

myself, and through which it is that to this hour Mr. Palmer's

mail-coach system tyrannises over my dreams by terror and terrific

beauty, lay in the awful _political_ mission which at that time it

fulfilled. The mail-coach it was that distributed over the face of the

land, like the opening of apocalyptic vials, the heart-shaking news

of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo. These were the

harvests that, in the grandeur of their reaping, redeemed the tears and

blood in which they had been sown. Neither was the meanest peasant

so much below the grandeur and the sorrow of the times as to confound

battles such as these, which were gradually moulding the destinies of

Christendom, with the vulgar conflicts of ordinary warfare, so often

no more than gladiatorial trials of national prowess. The victories of

England in this stupendous contest rose of themselves as natural _Te

Deums_ to heaven; and it was felt by the thoughtful that such victories,

at such a crisis of general prostration, were not more beneficial to

ourselves than finally to France, our enemy, and to the nations of all

western or central Europe, through whose pusillanimity it was that the

French domination had prospered.

The mail-coach, as the national organ for publishing these mighty

events, thus diffusively influential, became itself a spiritualised and

glorified object to an impassioned heart; and naturally, in the Oxford

of that day, _all_ hearts were impassioned, as being all (or nearly all)

in _early_ manhood. In most universities there is one single college;

in Oxford there were five-and-twenty, all of which were peopled by young

men, the _élite_ of their own generation; not boys, but men: none

under eighteen. In some of these many colleges the custom permitted the

student to keep what are called "short terms"; that is, the four terms

of Michaelmas, Lent, Easter, and Act, were kept by a residence, in the

aggregate, of ninety-one days, or thirteen weeks. Under this interrupted

residence, it was possible that a student might have a reason for going

down to his home four times in the year. This made eight journeys to

and fro. But, as these homes lay dispersed through all the shires of the

island, and most of us disdained all coaches except his Majesty's mail,

no city out of London could pretend to so extensive a connexion with Mr.

Palmer's establishment as Oxford. Three mails, at the least, I remember

as passing every day through Oxford, and benefiting by my personal

patronage--viz., the Worcester, the Gloucester, and the Holyhead mail.

Naturally, therefore, it became a point of some interest with us, whose

journeys revolved every six weeks on an average, to look a little into

the executive details of the system. With some of these Mr. Palmer had

no concern; they rested upon bye-laws enacted by posting-houses for

their own benefit, and upon other bye-laws, equally stern, enacted

by the inside passengers for the illustration of their own haughty

exclusiveness. These last were of a nature to rouse our scorn; from

which the transition was not very long to systematic mutiny. Up to this

time, say 1804, or 1805 (the year of Trafalgar), it had been the fixed

assumption of the four inside people (as an old tradition of all

public carriages derived from the reign of Charles II) that they, the

illustrious quaternion, constituted a porcelain variety of the human

race, whose dignity would have been compromised by exchanging one word

of civility with the three miserable delf-ware outsides. Even to have

kicked an outsider might have been held to attaint the foot concerned

in that operation, so that, perhaps, it would have required an act

of Parliament to restore its purity of blood. What words, then, could

express the horror, and the sense of treason, in that case, which _had_

happened, where all three outsides (the trinity of Pariahs) made a vain

attempt to sit down at the same breakfast-table or dinner-table with

the consecrated four? I myself witnessed such an attempt; and on that

occasion a benevolent old gentleman endeavoured to soothe his three holy

associates, by suggesting that, if the outsides were indicted for this

criminal attempt at the next assizes, the court would regard it as a

case of lunacy or _delirium tremens_ rather than of treason. England

owes much of her grandeur to the depth of the aristocratic element in

her social composition, when pulling against her strong democracy. I

am not the man to laugh at it. But sometimes, undoubtedly, it expressed

itself in comic shapes. The course taken with the infatuated outsiders,

in the particular attempt which I have noticed, was that the waiter,

beckoning them away from the privileged _salle-à-manger_, sang out,

"This way, my good men," and then enticed these good men away to the

kitchen. But that plan had not always answered. Sometimes, though

rarely, cases occurred where the intruders, being stronger than usual,

or more vicious than usual, resolutely refused to budge, and so far

carried their point as to have a separate table arranged for themselves

in a corner of the general room. Yet, if an Indian screen could be found

ample enough to plant them out from the very eyes of the high table, or

_dais_, it then became possible to assume as a fiction of law that the

three delf fellows, after all, were not present. They could be ignored

by the porcelain men, under the maxim that objects not appearing and

objects not existing are governed by the same logical construction.

[Footnote: _De non apparentibus_, etc.]

Such being, at that time, the usage of mail-coaches, what was to be done

by us of young Oxford? We, the most aristocratic of people, who were

addicted to the practice of looking down superciliously even upon the

insides themselves as often very questionable characters--were we,

by voluntarily going outside, to court indignities? If our dress and

bearing sheltered us generally from the suspicion of being "raff"

(the name at that period for "snobs" [Footnote: "_Snobs_," and its

antithesis, "_nobs_," arose among the internal factions of shoemakers

perhaps ten years later. Possibly enough, the terms may have existed

much earlier; but they were then first made known, picturesquely and

effectively, by a trial at some assizes which happened to fix the public

attention.]), we really _were_ such constructively by the place we

assumed. If we did not submit to the deep shadow of eclipse, we entered

at least the skirts of its penumbra. And the analogy of theatres was

valid against us,--where no man can complain of the annoyances incident

to the pit or gallery, having his instant remedy in paying the higher

price of the boxes. But the soundness of this analogy we disputed.

In the case of the theatre, it cannot be pretended that the inferior

situations have any separate attractions, unless the pit may be supposed

to have an advantage for the purposes of the critic or the dramatic

reporter. But the critic or reporter is a rarity. For most people, the

sole benefit is in the price. Now, on the contrary, the outside of the

mail had its own incommunicable advantages. These we could not forego.

The higher price we would willingly have paid, but not the price

connected with the condition of riding inside; which condition we

pronounced insufferable. The air, the freedom of prospect, the proximity

to the horses, the elevation of seat: these were what we required;

but, above all, the certain anticipation of purchasing occasional

opportunities of driving.

Such was the difficulty which pressed us; and under the coercion of this

difficulty we instituted a searching inquiry into the true quality and

valuation of the different apartments about the mail. We conducted

this inquiry on metaphysical principles; and it was ascertained

satisfactorily that the roof of the coach, which by some weak men had

been called the attics, and by some the garrets, was in reality the

drawing-room; in which drawing-room the box was the chief ottoman or

sofa; whilst it appeared that the _inside_ which had been traditionally

regarded as the only room tenantable by gentlemen, was, in fact, the

coal-cellar in disguise.

Great wits jump. The very same idea had not long before struck the

celestial intellect of China. Amongst the presents carried out by our

first embassy to that country was a state-coach. It had been specially

selected as a personal gift by George III; but the exact mode of

using it was an intense mystery to Pekin. The ambassador, indeed (Lord

Macartney), had made some imperfect explanations upon this point; but,

as His Excellency communicated these in a diplomatic whisper at the

very moment of his departure, the celestial intellect was very feebly

illuminated, and it became necessary to call a cabinet council on the

grand state question, "Where was the Emperor to sit?" The hammer-cloth

happened to be unusually gorgeous; and, partly on that consideration,

but partly also because the box offered the most elevated seat, was

nearest to the moon, and undeniably went foremost, it was resolved by

acclamation that the box was the imperial throne, and, for the scoundrel

who drove,--he might sit where he could find a perch. The horses,

therefore, being harnessed, solemnly his imperial majesty ascended his

new English throne under a flourish of trumpets, having the first lord

of the treasury on his right hand, and the chief jester on his left.

Pekin gloried in the spectacle; and in the whole flowery people,

constructively present by representation, there was but one discontented

person, and _that_ was the coachman. This mutinous individual

audaciously shouted, "Where am _I_ to sit?" But the privy council,

incensed by his disloyalty, unanimously opened the door, and kicked him

into the inside. He had all the inside places to himself; but such is

the rapacity of ambition that he was still dissatisfied. "I say," he

cried out in an extempore petition addressed to the Emperor through the

window--"I say, how am I to catch hold of the reins?"--"Anyhow," was the

imperial answer; "don't trouble _me_, man, in my glory. How catch

the reins? Why, through the windows, through the keyholes--_anyhow_."

Finally this contumacious coachman lengthened the check-strings into a

sort of jury-reins communicating with the horses; with these he drove

as steadily as Pekin had any right to expect. The Emperor returned after

the briefest of circuits; he descended in great pomp from his throne,

with the severest resolution never to remount it. A public thanksgiving

was ordered for his majesty's happy escape from the disease of a broken

neck; and the state-coach was dedicated thenceforward as a votive

offering to the god Fo Fo--whom the learned more accurately called Fi

Fi.

A revolution of this same Chinese character did young Oxford of that

era effect in the constitution of mail-coach society. It was a perfect

French Revolution; and we had good reason to say, _ça ira_. In fact,

it soon became _too_ popular. The "public"--a well-known character,

particularly disagreeable, though slightly respectable, and notorious

for affecting the chief seats in synagogues--had at first loudly

opposed this revolution; but, when the opposition showed itself to be

ineffectual, our disagreeable friend went into it with headlong zeal.

At first it was a sort of race between us; and, as the public is usually

from thirty to fifty years old, naturally we of young Oxford, that

averaged about twenty, had the advantage. Then the public took to

bribing, giving fees to horse-keepers, &c., who hired out their persons

as warming-pans on the box seat. _That_, you know, was shocking to all

moral sensibilities. Come to bribery, said we, and there is an end

to all morality,--Aristotle's, Zeno's, Cicero's, or anybody's. And,

besides, of what use was it? For _we_ bribed also. And, as our bribes,

to those of the public, were as five shillings to sixpence, here again

young Oxford had the advantage. But the contest was ruinous to

the principles of the stables connected with the mails. This whole

corporation was constantly bribed, rebribed, and often surrebribed; a

mail-coach yard was like the hustings in a contested election; and a

horse-keeper, ostler, or helper, was held by the philosophical at that

time to be the most corrupt character in the nation.

There was an impression upon the public mind, natural enough from the

continually augmenting velocity of the mail, but quite erroneous, that

an outside seat on this class of carriages was a post of danger. On the

contrary, I maintained that, if a man had become nervous from some

gipsy prediction in his childhood, allocating to a particular moon

now approaching some unknown danger, and he should inquire earnestly,

"Whither can I fly for shelter? Is a prison the safest retreat? or a

lunatic hospital? or the British Museum?" I should have replied, "Oh no;

I'll tell you what to do. Take lodgings for the next forty days on the

box of his Majesty's mail. Nobody can touch you there. If it is by

bills at ninety days after date that you are made unhappy--if noters and

protesters are the sort of wretches whose astrological shadows darken

the house of life--then note you what I vehemently protest: viz., that,

no matter though the sheriff and under-sheriff in every county should be

running after you with his _posse_, touch a hair of your head he cannot

whilst you keep house and have your legal domicile on the box of the

mail. It is felony to stop the mail; even the sheriff cannot do that.

And an _extra_ touch of the whip to the leaders (no great matter if

it grazes the sheriff) at any time guarantees your safety." In fact, a

bedroom in a quiet house seems a safe enough retreat; yet it is liable

to its own notorious nuisances--to robbers by night, to rats, to fire.

But the mail laughs at these terrors. To robbers, the answer is packed

up and ready for delivery in the barrel of the guard's blunderbuss. Rats

again! there _are_ none about mail-coaches any more than snakes in Von

Troil's Iceland; [Footnote: "_Von Troil's Iceland_":--The allusion is

to a well-known chapter in Von Troil's work, entitled, "Concerning

the Snakes of Iceland." The entire chapter consists of these six

words--"_There art no snakes in Iceland_."] except, indeed, now and then

a parliamentary rat, who always hides his shame in what I have shown

to be the "coal-cellar." And, as to fire, I never knew but one in a

mail-coach; which was in the Exeter mail, and caused by an obstinate

sailor bound to Devonport. Jack, making light of the law and the

lawgiver that had set their faces against his offence, insisted on

taking up a forbidden seat [Footnote: "_Forbidden seat_":--The very

sternest code of rules was enforced upon the mails by the Post-office.

Throughout England, only three outsides were allowed, of whom one was

to sit on the box, and the other two immediately behind the box; none,

under any pretext, to come near the guard; an indispensable caution;

since else, under the guise of a passenger, a robber might by any one

of a thousand advantages--which sometimes are created, but always are

favoured, by the animation of frank social intercourse--have disarmed

the guard. Beyond the Scottish border, the regulation was so far relaxed

as to allow of _four_ outsides, but not relaxed at all as to the mode of

placing them. One, as before, was seated on the box, and the other three

on the front of the roof, with a determinate and ample separation from

the little insulated chair of the guard. This relaxation was conceded

by way of compensating to Scotland her disadvantages in point of

population. England, by the superior density of her population, might

always count upon a large fund of profits in the fractional trips of

chance passengers riding for short distances of two or three stages. In

Scotland this chance counted for much less. And therefore, to make good

the deficiency, Scotland was allowed a compensatory profit upon one

_extra_ passenger.] in the rear of the roof, from which he could

exchange his own yarns with those of the guard. No greater offence was

then known to mail-coaches; it was treason, it was _læsa majestas_, it

was by tendency arson; and the ashes of Jack's pipe, falling amongst the

straw of the hinder boot, containing the mail-bags, raised a flame

which (aided by the wind of our motion) threatened a revolution in

the republic of letters. Yet even this left the sanctity of the box

unviolated. In dignified repose, the coachman and myself sat on, resting

with benign composure upon our knowledge that the fire would have

to burn its way through four inside passengers before it could reach

ourselves. I remarked to the coachman, with a quotation from Virgil's

"Æneid" really too hackneyed--

"Jam proximus ardet

Ucalegon."

But, recollecting that the Virgilian part of the coachman's education

might have been neglected, I interpreted so far as to say that perhaps

at that moment the flames were catching hold of our worthy brother and

inside passenger, Ucalegon. The coachman made no answer,--which is my

own way when a stranger addresses me either in Syriac or in Coptic;

but by his faint sceptical smile he seemed to insinuate that he knew

better,--for that Ucalegon, as it happened, was not in the way-bill, and

therefore could not have been booked.

No dignity is perfect which does not at some point ally itself with the

mysterious. The connexion of the mail with the state and the executive

government--a connexion obvious, but yet not strictly defined--gave to

the whole mail establishment an official grandeur which did us service

on the roads, and invested us with seasonable terrors. Not the

less impressive were those terrors because their legal limits were

imperfectly ascertained. Look at those turnpike gates: with what

deferential hurry, with what an obedient start, they fly open at our

approach! Look at that long line of carts and carters ahead, audaciously

usurping the very crest of the road. Ah! traitors, they do not hear us

as yet; but, as soon as the dreadful blast of our horn reaches them with

proclamation of our approach, see with what frenzy of trepidation they

fly to their horses' heads, and deprecate our wrath by the precipitation

of their crane-neck quarterings. Treason they feel to be their crime;

each individual carter feels himself under the ban of confiscation and

attainder; his blood is attainted through six generations; and nothing

is wanting but the headsman and his axe, the block and the sawdust, to

close up the vista of his horrors. What! shall it be within benefit of

clergy to delay the king's message on the high road?--to interrupt the

great respirations, ebb and flood, _systole_ and _diastole_, of the

national intercourse?--to endanger the safety of tidings running day and

night between all nations and languages? Or can it be fancied, amongst

the weakest of men, that the bodies of the criminals will be given up to

their widows for Christian burial? Now, the doubts which were raised

as to our powers did more to wrap them in terror, by wrapping them in

uncertainty, than could have been effected by the sharpest definitions

of the law from the Quarter Sessions. We, on our parts (we, the

collective mail, I mean), did our utmost to exalt the idea of our

privileges by the insolence with which we wielded them. Whether this

insolence rested upon law that gave it a sanction, or upon conscious

power that haughtily dispensed with that sanction, equally it spoke from

a potential station; and the agent, in each particular insolence of the

moment, was viewed reverentially, as one having authority.

Sometimes after breakfast his Majesty's mail would become frisky; and,

in its difficult wheelings amongst the intricacies of early markets,

it would upset an apple-cart, a cart loaded with eggs, &c. Huge was

the affliction and dismay, awful was the smash. I, as far as possible,

endeavoured in such a case to represent the conscience and moral

sensibilities of the mail; and, when wildernesses of eggs were lying

poached under our horses' hoofs, then would I stretch forth my hands

in sorrow, saying (in words too celebrated at that time, from the false

echoes [Footnote: "_False echoes_":--Yes, false! for the words ascribed

to Napoleon, as breathed to the memory of Desaix, never were uttered at

all. They stand in the same category of theatrical fictions as the cry

of the foundering line-of-battle ship _Vengeur_, as the vaunt of General

Cambronne at Waterloo, "La Garde meurt, mais ne se rend pas," or as the

repartees of Talleyrand.] of Marengo), "Ah! wherefore have we not time

to weep over you?"--which was evidently impossible, since, in fact, we

had not time to laugh over them. Tied to post-office allowance in some

cases of fifty minutes for eleven miles, could the royal mail pretend to

undertake the offices of sympathy and condolence? Could it be expected

to provide tears for the accidents of the road? If even it seemed to

trample on humanity, it did so, I felt, in discharge of its own more

peremptory duties.

Upholding the morality of the mail, _a fortiori_ I upheld its rights; as

a matter of duty, I stretched to the uttermost its privilege of imperial

precedency, and astonished weak minds by the feudal powers which I

hinted to be lurking constructively in the charters of this proud

establishment. Once I remember being on the box of the Holyhead mail,

between Shrewsbury and Oswestry, when a tawdry thing from Birmingham,

some "Tallyho" or "Highflyer," all flaunting with green and gold, came

up alongside of us. What a contrast to our royal simplicity of form and

colour in this plebeian wretch! The single ornament on our dark ground

of chocolate colour was the mighty shield of the imperial arms, but

emblazoned in proportions as modest as a signet-ring bears to a seal

of office. Even this was displayed only on a single panel, whispering,

rather than proclaiming, our relations to the mighty state; whilst the

beast from Birmingham, our green-and-gold friend from false, fleeting,

perjured Brummagem, had as much writing and painting on its sprawling

flanks as would have puzzled a decipherer from the tombs of Luxor. For

some time this Birmingham machine ran along by our side--a piece

of familiarity that already of itself seemed to me sufficiently

Jacobinical. But all at once a movement of the horses announced a

desperate intention of leaving us behind. "Do you see _that?_" I said to

the coachman.--"I see," was his short answer. He was wide awake,--yet

he waited longer than seemed prudent; for the horses of our audacious

opponent had a disagreeable air of freshness and power. But his motive

was loyal; his wish was that the Birmingham conceit should be full-blown

before he froze it. When _that_ seemed right, he unloosed, or, to speak

by a stronger word, he _sprang_, his known resources: he slipped our

royal horses like cheetahs, or hunting-leopards, after the affrighted

game. How they could retain such a reserve of fiery power after the work

they had accomplished seemed hard to explain. But on our side, besides

the physical superiority, was a tower of moral strength, namely the

king's name, "which they upon the adverse faction wanted." Passing them

without an effort, as it seemed, we threw them into the rear with so

lengthening an interval between us as proved in itself the bitterest

mockery of their presumption; whilst our guard blew back a shattering

blast of triumph that was really too painfully full of derision.

I mention this little incident for its connexion with what followed. A

Welsh rustic, sitting behind me, asked if I had not felt my heart burn

within me during the progress of the race? I said, with philosophic

calmness, _No_; because we were not racing with a mail, so that no glory

could be gained. In fact, it was sufficiently mortifying that such a

Birmingham thing should dare to challenge us. The Welshman replied

that he didn't see _that_; for that a cat might look at a king, and a

Brummagem coach might lawfully race the Holyhead mail. "_Race_ us, if

you like," I replied, "though even _that_ has an air of sedition; but

not _beat_ us. This would have been treason; and for its own sake I

am glad that the 'Tallyho' was disappointed." So dissatisfied did the

Welshman seem with this opinion that at last I was obliged to tell him

a very fine story from one of our elder dramatists: viz., that once,

in some far Oriental kingdom, when the sultan of all the land, with his

princes, ladies, and chief omrahs, were flying their falcons, a hawk

suddenly flew at a majestic eagle, and, in defiance of the eagle's

natural advantages, in contempt also of the eagle's traditional royalty,

and before the whole assembled field of astonished spectators from Agra

and Lahore, killed the eagle on the spot. Amazement seized the sultan at

the unequal contest, and burning admiration for its unparalleled result.

He commanded that the hawk should be brought before him; he caressed the

bird with enthusiasm; and he ordered that, for the commemoration of his

matchless courage, a diadem of gold and rubies should be solemnly

placed on the hawk's head, but then that, immediately after this solemn

coronation, the bird should be led off to execution, as the most valiant

indeed of traitors, but not the less a traitor, as having dared to rise

rebelliously against his liege lord and anointed sovereign, the eagle.

"Now," said I to the Welshman, "to you and me, as men of refined

sensibilities, how painful it would have been that this poor Brummagem

brute, the 'Tallyho,' in the impossible case of a victory over us,

should have been crowned with Birmingham tinsel, with paste diamonds

and Roman pearls, and then led off to instant execution." The Welshman

doubted if that could be warranted by law. And, when I hinted at the

6th of Edward Longshanks, chap. 18, for regulating the precedency

of coaches, as being probably the statute relied on for the capital

punishment of such offences, he replied drily that, if the attempt to

pass a mail really were treasonable, it was a pity that the "Tallyho"

appeared to have so imperfect an acquaintance with law.

The modern modes of travelling cannot compare with the old mail-coach

system in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity,--not,

however, as a consciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge,

resting upon _alien_ evidence: as, for instance, because somebody

_says_ that we have gone fifty miles in the hour, though we are far from

feeling it as a personal experience; or upon the evidence of a result,

as that actually we find ourselves in York four hours after leaving

London. Apart from such an assertion, or such a result, I myself am

little aware of the pace. But, seated on the old mail-coach, we needed

no evidence out of ourselves to indicate the velocity. On this system

the word was not _magna loquimur_, as upon railways, but _vivimus_. Yes,

"magna _vivimus_"; we do not make verbal ostentation of our grandeurs,

we realise our grandeurs in act, and in the very experience of life. The

vital experience of the glad animal sensibilities made doubts impossible

on the question of our speed; we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it

as a thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind insensate

agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the

fiery eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, in his dilated nostril,

spasmodic muscles, and thunder-beating hoofs. The sensibility of the

horse, uttering itself in the maniac light of his eye, might be the last

vibration of such a movement; the glory of Salamanca might be the

first. But the intervening links that connected them, that spread the

earthquake of battle into the eyeballs of the horse, were the heart of

man and its electric thrillings--kindling in the rapture of the fiery

strife, and then propagating its own tumults by contagious shouts and

gestures to the heart of his servant the horse. But now, on the new

system of travelling, iron tubes and boilers have disconnected man's

heart from the ministers of his locomotion. Nile nor Trafalgar has power

to raise an extra bubble in a steam-kettle. The galvanic cycle is

broken up for ever; man's imperial nature no longer sends itself forward

through the electric sensibility of the horse; the inter-agencies are

gone in the mode of communication between the horse and his master out

of which grew so many aspects of sublimity under accidents of mists that

hid, or sudden blazes that revealed, of mobs that agitated, or midnight

solitudes that awed. Tidings fitted to convulse all nations must

henceforwards travel by culinary process; and the trumpet that once

announced from afar the laurelled mail, heart-shaking when heard

screaming on the wind and proclaiming itself through the darkness to

every village or solitary house on its route, has now given way for

ever to the pot-wallopings of the boiler. Thus have perished multiform

openings for public expressions of interest, scenical yet natural, in

great national tidings,--for revelations of faces and groups that could

not offer themselves amongst the fluctuating mobs of a railway station.

The gatherings of gazers about a laurelled mail had one centre, and

acknowledged one sole interest. But the crowds attending at a railway

station have as little unity as running water, and own as many centres

as there are separate carriages in the train.

How else, for example, than as a constant watcher for the dawn, and for

the London mail that in summer months entered about daybreak amongst the

lawny thickets of Maryborough forest, couldst thou, sweet Fanny of the

Bath road, have become the glorified inmate of my dreams? Yet Fanny, as

the loveliest young woman for face and person that perhaps in my whole

life I have beheld, merited the station which even now, from a distance

of forty years, she holds in my dreams; yes, though by links of natural

association she brings along with her a troop of dreadful creatures,

fabulous and not fabulous, that are more abominable to the heart than

Fanny and the dawn are delightful.

Miss Fanny of the Bath road, strictly speaking, lived at a mile's

distance from that road, but came so continually to meet the mail that

I on my frequent transits rarely missed her, and naturally connected her

image with the great thoroughfare where only I had ever seen her. Why

she came so punctually I do not exactly know; but I believe with some

burden of commissions, to be executed in Bath, which had gathered to

her own residence as a central rendezvous for converging them. The

mail-coachman who drove the Bath mail and wore the royal livery

[Footnote: "Wore the royal livery":--The general impression was that

the royal livery belonged of right to the mail-coachmen as their

professional dress. But that was an error. To the guard it _did_ belong,

I believe, and was obviously essential as an official warrant, and as a

means of instant identification for his person, in the discharge of his

important public duties. But the coachman, and especially if his place

in the series did not connect him immediately with London and the

General Post-Office, obtained the scarlet coat only as an honorary

distinction after long (or, if not long, trying and special) service.]

happened to be Fanny's grandfather. A good man he was, that loved his

beautiful granddaughter, and, loving her wisely, was vigilant over her

deportment in any case where young Oxford might happen to be concerned.

Did my vanity then suggest that I myself, individually, could fall

within the line of his terrors? Certainly not, as regarded any physical

pretensions that I could plead; for Fanny (as a chance passenger from

her own neighbourhood once told me) counted in her train a hundred and

ninety-nine professed admirers, if not open aspirants to her favour; and

probably not one of the whole brigade but excelled myself in personal

advantages. Ulysses even, with the unfair advantage of his accursed bow,

could hardly have undertaken that amount of suitors. So the danger might

have seemed slight--only that woman is universally aristocratic; it is

amongst her nobilities of heart that she _is_ so. Now, the aristocratic

distinctions in my favour might easily with Miss Fanny have compensated

my physical deficiencies. Did I then make love to Fanny? Why, yes; about

as much love as one _could_ make whilst the mail was changing horses--a

process which, ten years later, did not occupy above eighty seconds; but

_then_,--viz., about Waterloo--it occupied five times eighty. Now, four

hundred seconds offer a field quite ample enough for whispering into

a young woman's ear a great deal of truth, and (by way of parenthesis)

some trifle of falsehood. Grandpapa did right, therefore, to watch me.

And yet, as happens too often to the grandpapas of earth in a contest

with the admirers of granddaughters, how vainly would he have watched me

had I meditated any evil whispers to Fanny! She, it is my belief, would

have protected herself against any man's evil suggestions. But he, as

the result showed, could not have intercepted the opportunities for

such suggestions. Yet, why not? Was he not active? Was he not blooming?

Blooming he was as Fanny herself.

"Say, all our praises why should lords----"

Stop, that's not the line.

"Say, all our roses why should girls engross?"

The coachman showed rosy blossoms on his face deeper even than his

granddaughter's--_his_ being drawn from the ale-cask, Fanny's from

the fountains of the dawn. But, in spite of his blooming face, some

infirmities he had; and one particularly in which he too much resembled

a crocodile. This lay in a monstrous inaptitude for turning round. The

crocodile, I presume, owes that inaptitude to the absurd _length_ of his

back; but in our grandpapa it arose rather from the absurd _breadth_ of

his back, combined, possibly, with some growing stiffness in his legs.

Now, upon this crocodile infirmity of his I planted a human advantage

for tendering my homage to Miss Fanny. In defiance of all his honourable

vigilance, no sooner had he presented to us his mighty Jovian back (what

a field for displaying to mankind his royal scarlet!), whilst inspecting

professionally the buckles, the straps, and the silvery turrets

[Footnote: "_Turrets_":--As one who loves and venerates Chaucer for his

unrivalled merits of tenderness, of picturesque characterisation, and of

narrative skill, I noticed with great pleasure that the word _torrettes_

is used by him to designate the little devices through which the reins

are made to pass. This same word, in the same exact sense, I heard

uniformly used by many scores of illustrious mail-coachmen to whose

confidential friendship I had the honour of being admitted in my younger

days.] of his harness, than I raised Miss Fanny's hand to my lips, and,

by the mixed tenderness and respectfulness of my manner, caused her

easily to understand how happy it would make me to rank upon her list

as No. 10 or 12: in which case a few casualties amongst her lovers (and,

observe, they _hanged_ liberally in those days) might have promoted me

speedily to the top of the tree; as, on the other hand, with how

much loyalty of submission I acquiesced by anticipation in her award,

supposing that she should plant me in the very rearward of her favour,

as No. 199 + 1. Most truly I loved this beautiful and ingenuous girl;

and, had it not been for the Bath mail, timing all courtships by

post-office allowance, heaven only knows what might have come of it.

People talk of being over head and ears in love; now, the mail was the

cause that I sank only over ears in love,--which, you know, still left a

trifle of brain to overlook the whole conduct of the affair.

Ah, reader! when I look back upon those days, it seems to me that all

things change--all things perish. "Perish the roses and the palms of

kings": perish even the crowns and trophies of Waterloo: thunder and

lightning are not the thunder and lightning which I remember. Roses

are degenerating. The Fannies of our island--though this I say with

reluctance--are not visibly improving; and the Bath road is notoriously

superannuated. Crocodiles, you will say, are stationary. Mr. Waterton

tells me that the crocodile does _not change_,--that a cayman, in fact,

or an alligator, is just as good for riding upon as he was in the time

of the Pharaohs. _That_ may be; but the reason is that the crocodile

does not live fast--he is a slow coach. I believe it is generally

understood among naturalists that the crocodile is a blockhead. It is

my own impression that the Pharaohs were also blockheads. Now, as

the Pharaohs and the crocodile domineered over Egyptian society, this

accounts for a singular mistake that prevailed through innumerable

generations on the Nile. The crocodile made the ridiculous blunder of

supposing man to be meant chiefly for his own eating. Man, taking a

different view of the subject, naturally met that mistake by another: he

viewed the crocodile as a thing sometimes to worship, but always to

run away from. And this continued till Mr. Waterton [Footnote: "_Mr.

Waterton_":--Had the reader lived through the last generation, he would

not need to be told that, some thirty or thirty-five years back,

Mr. Waterton, a distinguished country gentleman of ancient family in

Northumberland, publicly mounted and rode in top-boots a savage old

crocodile, that was restive and very impertinent, but all to no purpose.

The crocodile jibbed and tried to kick, but vainly. He was no more able

to throw the squire than Sinbad was to throw the old scoundrel who used

his back without paying for it, until he discovered a mode (slightly

immoral, perhaps, though some think not) of murdering the old fraudulent

jockey, and so circuitously of unhorsing him.] changed the relations

between the animals. The mode of escaping from the reptile he showed to

be not by running away, but by leaping on its back booted and spurred.

The two animals had misunderstood each other. The use of the crocodile

has now been cleared up--viz., to be ridden; and the final cause of

man is that he may improve the health of the crocodile by riding him

a-fox-hunting before breakfast. And it is pretty certain that any

crocodile who has been regularly hunted through the season, and is

master of the weight he carries, will take a six-barred gate now as well

as ever he would have done in the infancy of the pyramids.

If, therefore, the crocodile does _not_ change, all things else

undeniably _do_: even the shadow of the pyramids grows less. And often

the restoration in vision of Fanny and the Bath road makes me too

pathetically sensible of that truth. Out of the darkness, if I happen

to call back the image of Fanny, up rises suddenly from a gulf of forty

years a rose in June; or, if I think for an instant of the rose in

June, up rises the heavenly face of Fanny. One after the other, like the

antiphonies in the choral service, rise Fanny and the rose in June, then

back again the rose in June and Fanny. Then come both together, as in

a chorus--roses and Fannies, Fannies and roses, without end, thick

as blossoms in paradise. Then comes a venerable crocodile, in a royal

livery of scarlet and gold, with sixteen capes; and the crocodile is

driving four-in-hand from the box of the Bath mail. And suddenly we upon

the mail are pulled up by a mighty dial, sculptured with the hours, that

mingle with the heavens and the heavenly host. Then all at once we are

arrived at Marlborough forest, amongst the lovely households [Footnote:

"_Households_":--Roe-deer do not congregate in herds like the fallow

or the red deer, but by separate families, parents and children; which

feature of approximation to the sanctity of human hearths, added to

their comparatively miniature and graceful proportions, conciliates

to them an interest of peculiar tenderness, supposing even that this

beautiful creature is less characteristically impressed with the

grandeurs of savage and forest life.] of the roe-deer; the deer and

their fawns retire into the dewy thickets; the thickets are rich with

roses; once again the roses call up the sweet countenance of Fanny; and

she, being the granddaughter of a crocodile, awakens a dreadful host of

semi-legendary animals--griffins, dragons, basilisks, sphinxes--till

at length the whole vision of fighting images crowds into one towering

armorial shield, a vast emblazonry of human charities and human

loveliness that have perished, but quartered heraldically with

unutterable and demoniac natures, whilst over all rises, as a

surmounting crest, one fair female hand, with the forefinger pointing,

in sweet, sorrowful admonition, upwards to heaven, where is sculptured

the eternal writing which proclaims the frailty of earth and her

children.

GOING DOWN WITH VICTORY

But the grandest chapter of our experience within the whole mail-coach

service was on those occasions when we went down from London with the

news of victory. A period of about ten years stretched from Trafalgar

to Waterloo; the second and third years of which period (1806 and

1807) were comparatively sterile; but the other nine (from 1805 to 1815

inclusively) furnished a long succession of victories, the least of

which, in such a contest of Titans, had an inappreciable value of

position: partly for its absolute interference with the plans of our

enemy, but still more from its keeping alive through central Europe the

sense of a deep-seated vulnerability in France. Even to tease the coasts

of our enemy, to mortify them by continual blockades, to insult them

by capturing if it were but a baubling schooner under the eyes of their

arrogant armies, repeated from time to time a sullen proclamation of

power lodged in one quarter to which the hopes of Christendom turned in

secret. How much more loudly must this proclamation have spoken in the

audacity [Footnote: "_Audacity_":--Such the French accounted it; and it

has struck me that Soult would not have been so popular in London, at

the period of her present Majesty's coronation, or in Manchester,

on occasion of his visit to that town, if they had been aware of the

insolence with which he spoke of us in notes written at intervals from

the field of Waterloo. As though it had been mere felony in our army

to look a French one in the face, he said in more notes than one,

dated from two to four P.M. on the field of Waterloo, "Here are the

English--we have them; they are caught _en flagrant délit_" Yet no man

should have known us better; no man had drunk deeper from the cup of

humiliation than Soult had in 1809, when ejected by us with headlong

violence from Oporto, and pursued through a long line of wrecks to the

frontier of Spain; and subsequently at Albuera, in the bloodiest of

recorded battles, to say nothing of Toulouse, he should have learned our

pretensions.] of having bearded the _élite_ of their troops, and having

beaten them in pitched battles! Five years of life it was worth paying

down for the privilege of an outside place on a mail-coach, when

carrying down the first tidings of any such event. And it is to be noted

that, from our insular situation, and the multitude of our frigates

disposable for the rapid transmission of intelligence, rarely did any

unauthorised rumour steal away a prelibation from the first aroma of the

regular despatches. The government news was generally the earliest news.

From eight P.M. to fifteen or twenty minutes later imagine the mails

assembled on parade in Lombard Street; where, at that time, [Footnote:

"_At that time_":--I speak of the era previous to Waterloo.] and not in

St. Martin's-le-Grand, was seated the General Post-Office. In what exact

strength we mustered I do not remember; but, from the length of each

separate _attelage_, we filled the street, though a long one, and

though we were drawn up in double file. On _any_ night the spectacle

was beautiful. The absolute perfection of all the appointments about the

carriages and the harness, their strength, their brilliant cleanliness,

their beautiful simplicity--but, more than all, the royal magnificence

of the horses--were what might first have fixed the attention. Every

carriage on every morning in the year was taken down to an official

inspector for examination: wheels, axles, linchpins, pole, glasses,

lamps, were all critically probed and tested. Every part of every

carriage had been cleaned, every horse had been groomed, with as much

rigour as if they belonged to a private gentleman; and that part of the

spectacle offered itself always. But the night before us is a night

of victory; and, behold! to the ordinary display what a heart-shaking

addition!--horses, men, carriages, all are dressed in laurels and

flowers, oak-leaves and ribbons. The guards, as being officially his

Majesty's servants, and of the coachmen such as are within the privilege

of the post-office, wear the royal liveries of course; and, as it is

summer (for all the _land_ victories were naturally won in summer), they

wear, on this fine evening, these liveries exposed to view, without any

covering of upper coats. Such a costume, and the elaborate arrangement

of the laurels in their hats, dilate their hearts, by giving to them

openly a personal connexion with the great news in which already they

have the general interest of patriotism. That great national sentiment

surmounts and quells all sense of ordinary distinctions. Those

passengers who happen to be gentlemen are now hardly to be distinguished

as such except by dress; for the usual reserve of their manner in

speaking to the attendants has on this night melted away. One heart,

one pride, one glory, connects every man by the transcendent bond of

his national blood. The spectators, who are numerous beyond precedent,

express their sympathy with these fervent feelings by continual hurrahs.

Every moment are shouted aloud by the post-office servants, and summoned

to draw up, the great ancestral names of cities known to history through

a thousand years--Lincoln, Winchester, Portsmouth, Gloucester, Oxford,

Bristol, Manchester, York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth,

Stirling, Aberdeen--expressing the grandeur of the empire by the

antiquity of its towns, and the grandeur of the mail establishment by

the diffusive radiation of its separate missions. Every moment you hear

the thunder of lids locked down upon the mail-bags. That sound to each

individual mail is the signal for drawing off; which process is the

finest part of the entire spectacle. Then come the horses into play.

Horses! can these be horses that bound off with the action and gestures

of leopards? What stir!--what sea-like ferment!--what a thundering of

wheels!--what a trampling of hoofs!--what a sounding of trumpets!--what

farewell cheers--what redoubling peals of brotherly congratulation,

connecting the name of the particular mail--"Liverpool for ever!"--with

the name of the particular victory--"Badajoz for ever!" or "Salamanca

for ever!" The half-slumbering consciousness that all night long, and

all the next day--perhaps for even a longer period--many of these mails,

like fire racing along a train of gunpowder, will be kindling at

every instant new successions of burning joy, has an obscure effect of

multiplying the victory itself, by multiplying to the imagination into

infinity the stages of its progressive diffusion. A fiery arrow seems

to be let loose, which from that moment is destined to travel,

without intermission, westwards for three hundred [Footnote: "_Three

hundred_":--Of necessity, this scale of measurement, to an American, if

he happens to be a thoughtless man, must sound ludicrous. Accordingly,

I remember a case in which an American writer indulges himself in the

luxury of a little fibbing, by ascribing to an Englishman a pompous

account of the Thames, constructed entirely upon American ideas of

grandeur, and concluding in something like these terms:--"And, sir,

arriving at London, this mighty father of rivers attains a breadth of

at least two furlongs, having, in its winding course, traversed the

astonishing distance of one hundred and seventy miles." And this

the candid American thinks it fair to contrast with the scale of the

Mississippi. Now, it is hardly worth while to answer a pure fiction

gravely; else one might say that no Englishman out of Bedlam ever

thought of looking in an island for the rivers of a continent, nor,

consequently, could have thought of looking for the peculiar grandeur of

the Thames in the length of its course, or in the extent of soil which

it drains. Yet, if he _had_ been so absurd, the American might have

recollected that a river, not to be compared with the Thames even as to

volume of water--viz., the Tiber--has contrived to make itself heard of

in this world for twenty-five centuries to an extent not reached as

yet by any river, however corpulent, of his own land. The glory of

the Thames is measured by the destiny of the population to which it

ministers, by the commerce which it supports, by the grandeur of the

empire in which, though far from the largest, it is the most influential

stream. Upon some such scale, and not by a transfer of Columbian

standards, is the course of our English mails to be valued. The American

may fancy the effect of his own valuations to our English ears by

supposing the case of a Siberian glorifying his country in these

terms:--"These wretches, sir, in France and England, cannot march half a

mile in any direction without finding a house where food can be had and

lodging; whereas such is the noble desolation of our magnificent country

that in many a direction for a thousand miles I will engage that a dog

shall not find shelter from a snow-storm, nor a wren find an apology for

breakfast."] miles--northwards for six hundred; and the sympathy of our

Lombard Street friends at parting is exalted a hundredfold by a sort of

visionary sympathy with the yet slumbering sympathies which in so vast a

succession we are going to awake.

Liberated from the embarrassments of the city, and issuing into the

broad uncrowded avenues of the northern suburbs, we soon begin to enter

upon our natural pace of ten miles an hour. In the broad light of the

summer evening, the sun, perhaps, only just at the point of setting, we

are seen from every storey of every house. Heads of every age crowd to

the windows; young and old understand the language of our victorious

symbols; and rolling volleys of sympathising cheers run along us, behind

us, and before us. The beggar, rearing himself against the wall, forgets

his lameness--real or assumed--thinks not of his whining trade, but

stands erect, with bold exulting smiles, as we pass him. The victory has

healed him, and says, Be thou whole! Women and children, from garrets

alike and cellars, through infinite London, look down or look up with

loving eyes upon our gay ribbons and our martial laurels; sometimes

kiss their hands; sometimes hang out, as signals of affection,

pocket-handkerchiefs, aprons, dusters, anything that, by catching the

summer breezes, will express an aerial jubilation. On the London side of

Barnet, to which we draw near within a few minutes after nine, observe

that private carriage which is approaching us. The weather being so

warm, the glasses are all down; and one may read, as on the stage of a

theatre, everything that goes on within. It contains three ladies--one

likely to be "mamma," and two of seventeen or eighteen, who are probably

her daughters. What lovely animation, what beautiful unpremeditated

pantomime, explaining to us every syllable that passes, in these

ingenuous girls! By the sudden start and raising of the hands on first

discovering our laurelled equipage, by the sudden movement and appeal to

the elder lady from both of them, and by the heightened colour on their

animated countenances, we can almost hear them saying, "See, see! Look

at their laurels! Oh, mamma! there has been a great battle in Spain; and

it has been a great victory." In a moment we are on the point of passing

them. We passengers--I on the box, and the two on the roof behind

me--raise our hats to the ladies; the coachman makes his professional

salute with the whip; the guard even, though punctilious on the matter

of his dignity as an officer under the crown, touches his hat. The

ladies move to us, in return, with a winning graciousness of gesture;

all smile on each side in a way that nobody could misunderstand, and

that nothing short of a grand national sympathy could so instantaneously

prompt. Will these ladies say that we are nothing to _them_? Oh no; they

will not say _that_. They cannot deny--they do not deny--that for this

night they are our sisters; gentle or simple, scholar or illiterate

servant, for twelve hours to come, we on the outside have the honour

to be their brothers. Those poor women, again, who stop to gaze upon

us with delight at the entrance of Barnet, and seem, by their air of

weariness, to be returning from labour--do you mean to say that they are

washerwomen and charwomen? Oh, my poor friend, you are quite mistaken. I

assure you they stand in a far higher rank; for this one night they feel

themselves by birthright to be daughters of England, and answer to no

humbler title.

Every joy, however, even rapturous joy--such is the sad law of

earth--may carry with it grief, or fear of grief, to some. Three miles

beyond Barnet, we see approaching us another private carriage, nearly

repeating the circumstances of the former case. Here, also, the glasses

are all down; here, also, is an elderly lady seated; but the two

daughters are missing; for the single young person sitting by the lady's

side seems to be an attendant--so I judge from her dress, and her air

of respectful reserve. The lady is in mourning; and her countenance

expresses sorrow. At first she does not look up; so that I believe she

is not aware of our approach, until she hears the measured beating of

our horses' hoofs. Then she raises her eyes to settle them painfully on

our triumphal equipage. Our decorations explain the case to her at once;

but she beholds them with apparent anxiety, or even with terror. Some

time before this, I, finding it difficult to hit a flying mark when

embarrassed by the coachman's person and reins intervening, had given

to the guard a "Courier" evening paper, containing the gazette, for the

next carriage that might pass. Accordingly he tossed it in, so folded

that the huge capitals expressing some such legend as GLORIOUS VICTORY

might catch the eye at once. To see the paper, however, at all,

interpreted as it was by our ensigns of triumph, explained everything;

and, if the guard were right in thinking the lady to have received it

with a gesture of horror, it could not be doubtful that she had suffered

some deep personal affliction in connexion with this Spanish war.

Here, now, was the case of one who, having formerly suffered, might,

erroneously perhaps, be distressing herself with anticipations of

another similar suffering. That same night, and hardly three hours

later, occurred the reverse case. A poor woman, who too probably

would find herself, in a day or two, to have suffered the heaviest

of afflictions by the battle, blindly allowed herself to express an

exultation so unmeasured in the news and its details as gave to her the

appearance which amongst Celtic Highlanders is called _fey_. This was at

some little town where we changed horses an hour or two after midnight.

Some fair or wake had kept the people up out of their beds, and had

occasioned a partial illumination of the stalls and booths, presenting

an unusual but very impressive effect. We saw many lights moving about

as we drew near; and perhaps the most striking scene on the whole

route was our reception at this place. The flashing of torches and the

beautiful radiance of blue lights (technically, Bengal lights) upon

the heads of our horses; the fine effect of such a showery and ghostly

illumination falling upon our flowers and glittering laurels [Footnote:

"_Glittering laurels_":--I must observe that the colour of _green_

suffers almost a spiritual change and exaltation under the effect of

Bengal lights.]; whilst all around ourselves, that formed a centre of

light, the darkness gathered on the rear and flanks in massy blackness:

these optical splendours, together with the prodigious enthusiasm of the

people, composed a picture at once scenical and affecting, theatrical

and holy. As we staid for three or four minutes, I alighted; and

immediately from a dismantled stall in the street, where no doubt she

had been presiding through the earlier part of the night, advanced

eagerly a middle-aged woman. The sight of my newspaper it was that had

drawn her attention upon myself. The victory which we were carrying

down to the provinces on _this_ occasion was the imperfect one of

Talavera--imperfect for its results, such was the virtual treachery of

the Spanish general, Cuesta, but not imperfect in its ever-memorable

heroism. I told her the main outline of the battle. The agitation of

her enthusiasm had been so conspicuous when listening, and when first

applying for information, that I could not but ask her if she had not

some relative in the Peninsular army. Oh yes; her only son was there.

In what regiment? He was a trooper in the 23d Dragoons. My heart sank

within me as she made that answer. This sublime regiment, which an

Englishman should never mention without raising his hat to their memory,

had made the most memorable and effective charge recorded in military

annals. They leaped their horses--_over_ a trench where they could;

_into_ it, and with the result of death or mutilation, when they could

_not_. What proportion cleared the trench is nowhere stated. Those

who _did_ closed up and went down upon the enemy with such divinity of

fervour (I use the word _divinity_ by design: the inspiration of God

must have prompted this movement for those whom even then He was calling

to His presence) that two results followed. As regarded the enemy, this

23d Dragoons, not, I believe, originally three hundred and fifty strong,

paralysed a French column six thousand strong, then ascended the hill,

and fixed the gaze of the whole French army. As regarded themselves,

the 23d were supposed at first to have been barely not annihilated; but

eventually, I believe, about one in four survived. And this, then, was

the regiment--a regiment already for some hours glorified and hallowed

to the ear of all London, as lying stretched, by a large majority, upon

one bloody aceldama--in which the young trooper served whose mother was

now talking in a spirit of such joyous enthusiasm. Did I tell her the

truth? Had I the heart to break up her dreams? No. To-morrow, said I

to myself--to-morrow, or the next day, will publish the worst. For one

night more wherefore should she not sleep in peace? After to-morrow

the chances are too many that peace will forsake her pillow. This brief

respite, then, let her owe to _my_ gift and _my_ forbearance. But, if I

told her not of the bloody price that had been paid, not therefore was

I silent on the contributions from her son's regiment to that day's

service and glory. I showed her not the funeral banners under which the

noble regiment was sleeping. I lifted not the overshadowing laurels from

the bloody trench in which horse and rider lay mangled together. But I

told her how these dear children of England, officers and privates,

had leaped their horses over all obstacles as gaily as hunters to the

morning's chase. I told her how they rode their horses into the midst of

death,--saying to myself, but not saying to _her_ "and laid down their

young lives for thee, O mother England! as willingly--poured out their

noble blood as cheerfully--as ever, after a long day's sport, when

infants, they had rested their weary heads upon their mother's knees, or

had sunk to sleep in her arms." Strange it is, yet true, that she seemed

to have no fears for her son's safety, even after this knowledge

that the 23d Dragoons had been memorably engaged; but so much was she

enraptured by the knowledge that _his_ regiment, and therefore that

_he_, had rendered conspicuous service in the dreadful conflict--a

service which had actually made them, within the last twelve hours,

the foremost topic of conversation in London--so absolutely was fear

swallowed up in joy--that, in the mere simplicity of her fervent nature,

the poor woman threw her arms round my neck, as she thought of her son,

and gave to _me_ the kiss which secretly was meant for _him_.