The slack sail shifts from side to side,
The boat, untrimm'd, admits the tide,
Borne down, adrift, at random tost,
The oar breaks short, the rudder's lost.
Gay's _Fables._
I have tagged with rhyme and blank verse the subdivisions of this
important narrative, in order to seduce your continued attention by
powers of composition of stronger attraction than my own. The preceding
lines refer to an unfortunate navigator, who daringly unloosed from its
moorings a boat, which he was unable to manage, and thrust it off into
the full tide of a navigable river. No schoolboy, who, betwixt frolic and
defiance, has executed a similar rash attempt, could feel himself, when
adrift in a strong current, in a situation more awkward than mine, when I
found myself driving, without a compass, on the ocean of human life.
There had been such unexpected ease in the manner in which my father
slipt a knot, usually esteemed the strongest which binds society
together, and suffered me to depart as a sort of outcast from his family,
that it strangely lessened the confidence in my own personal
accomplishments, which had hitherto sustained me. Prince Prettyman, now a
prince, and now a fisher's son, had not a more awkward sense of his
degradation. We are so apt, in our engrossing egotism, to consider all
those accessories which are drawn around us by prosperity, as pertaining
and belonging to our own persons, that the discovery of our unimportance,
when left to our own proper resources, becomes inexpressibly mortifying.
As the hum of London died away on my ear, the distant peal of her
steeples more than once sounded to my ears the admonitory “Turn again,”
erst heard by her future Lord Mayor; and when I looked back from Highgate
on her dusky magnificence, I felt as if I were leaving behind me comfort,
opulence, the charms of society, and all the pleasures of cultivated
life.
But the die was cast. It was, indeed, by no means probable that a late
and ungracious compliance with my father's wishes would have reinstated
me in the situation which I had lost. On the contrary, firm and strong of
purpose as he himself was, he might rather have been disgusted than
conciliated by my tardy and compulsory acquiescence in his desire that I
should engage in commerce. My constitutional obstinacy came also to my
aid, and pride whispered how poor a figure I should make, when an airing
of four miles from London had blown away resolutions formed during a
month's serious deliberation. Hope, too, that never forsakes the young
and hardy, lent her lustre to my future prospects. My father could not be
serious in the sentence of foris-familiation, which he had so
unhesitatingly pronounced. It must be but a trial of my disposition,
which, endured with patience and steadiness on my part, would raise me in
his estimation, and lead to an amicable accommodation of the point in
dispute between us. I even settled in my own mind how far I would concede
to him, and on what articles of our supposed treaty I would make a firm
stand; and the result was, according to my computation, that I was to be
reinstated in my full rights of filiation, paying the easy penalty of
some ostensible compliances to atone for my past rebellion.
In the meanwhile, I was lord of my person, and experienced that feeling
of independence which the youthful bosom receives with a thrilling
mixture of pleasure and apprehension. My purse, though by no means amply
replenished, was in a situation to supply all the wants and wishes of a
traveller. I had been accustomed, while at Bourdeaux, to act as my own
valet; my horse was fresh, young, and active, and the buoyancy of my
spirits soon surmounted the melancholy reflections with which my journey
commenced.
I should have been glad to have journeyed upon a line of road better
calculated to afford reasonable objects of curiosity, or a more
interesting country, to the traveller. But the north road was then, and
perhaps still is, singularly deficient in these respects; nor do I
believe you can travel so far through Britain in any other direction
without meeting more of what is worthy to engage the attention. My mental
ruminations, notwithstanding my assumed confidence, were not always of an
unchequered nature. The Muse too,--the very coquette who had led me into
this wilderness,--like others of her sex, deserted me in my utmost need,
and I should have been reduced to rather an uncomfortable state of
dulness, had it not been for the occasional conversation of strangers who
chanced to pass the same way. But the characters whom I met with were of
a uniform and uninteresting description. Country parsons, jogging
homewards after a visitation; farmers, or graziers, returning from a
distant market; clerks of traders, travelling to collect what was due to
their masters, in provincial towns; with now and then an officer going
down into the country upon the recruiting service, were, at this period,
the persons by whom the turnpikes and tapsters were kept in exercise. Our
speech, therefore, was of tithes and creeds, of beeves and grain, of
commodities wet and dry, and the solvency of the retail dealers,
occasionally varied by the description of a siege, or battle, in
Flanders, which, perhaps, the narrator only gave me at second hand.
Robbers, a fertile and alarming theme, filled up every vacancy; and the
names of the Golden Farmer, the Flying Highwayman, Jack Needham, and
other Beggars' Opera heroes, were familiar in our mouths as household
words. At such tales, like children closing their circle round the fire
when the ghost story draws to its climax, the riders drew near to each
other, looked before and behind them, examined the priming of their
pistols, and vowed to stand by each other in case of danger; an
engagement which, like other offensive and defensive alliances, sometimes
glided out of remembrance when there was an appearance of actual peril.
Of all the fellows whom I ever saw haunted by terrors of this nature, one
poor man, with whom I travelled a day and a half, afforded me most
amusement. He had upon his pillion a very small, but apparently a very
weighty portmanteau, about the safety of which he seemed particularly
solicitous; never trusting it out of his own immediate care, and
uniformly repressing the officious zeal of the waiters and ostlers, who
offered their services to carry it into the house. With the same
precaution he laboured to conceal, not only the purpose of his journey,
and his ultimate place of destination, but even the direction of each
day's route. Nothing embarrassed him more than to be asked by any one,
whether he was travelling upwards or downwards, or at what stage he
intended to bait. His place of rest for the night he scrutinised with the
most anxious care, alike avoiding solitude, and what he considered as bad
neighbourhood; and at Grantham, I believe, he sate up all night to avoid
sleeping in the next room to a thick-set squinting fellow, in a black
wig, and a tarnished gold-laced waistcoat. With all these cares on his
mind, my fellow traveller, to judge by his thews and sinews, was a man
who might have set danger at defiance with as much impunity as most men.
He was strong and well built; and, judging from his gold-laced hat and
cockade, seemed to have served in the army, or, at least, to belong to
the military profession in one capacity or other. His conversation also,
though always sufficiently vulgar, was that of a man of sense, when the
terrible bugbears which haunted his imagination for a moment ceased to
occupy his attention. But every accidental association recalled them. An
open heath, a close plantation, were alike subjects of apprehension; and
the whistle of a shepherd lad was instantly converted into the signal of
a depredator. Even the sight of a gibbet, if it assured him that one
robber was safely disposed of by justice, never failed to remind him how
many remained still unhanged.
I should have wearied of this fellow's company, had I not been still more
tired of my own thoughts. Some of the marvellous stories, however, which
he related, had in themselves a cast of interest, and another whimsical
point of his peculiarities afforded me the occasional opportunity of
amusing myself at his expense. Among his tales, several of the
unfortunate travellers who fell among thieves, incurred that calamity
from associating themselves on the road with a well-dressed and
entertaining stranger, in whose company they trusted to find protection
as well as amusement; who cheered their journey with tale and song,
protected them against the evils of over-charges and false reckonings,
until at length, under pretext of showing a near path over a desolate
common, he seduced his unsuspicious victims from the public road into
some dismal glen, where, suddenly blowing his whistle, he assembled his
comrades from their lurking-place, and displayed himself in his true
colours--the captain, namely, of the band of robbers to whom his unwary
fellow-travellers had forfeited their purses, and perhaps their lives.
Towards the conclusion of such a tale, and when my companion had wrought
himself into a fever of apprehension by the progress of his own
narrative, I observed that he usually eyed me with a glance of doubt and
suspicion, as if the possibility occurred to him, that he might, at that
very moment, be in company with a character as dangerous as that which
his tale described. And ever and anon, when such suggestions pressed
themselves on the mind of this ingenious self-tormentor, he drew off from
me to the opposite side of the high-road, looked before, behind, and
around him, examined his arms, and seemed to prepare himself for flight
or defence, as circumstances might require.
The suspicion implied on such occasions seemed to me only momentary, and
too ludicrous to be offensive. There was, in fact, no particular
reflection on my dress or address, although I was thus mistaken for a
robber. A man in those days might have all the external appearance of a
gentleman, and yet turn out to be a highwayman. For the division of
labour in every department not having then taken place so fully as since
that period, the profession of the polite and accomplished adventurer,
who nicked you out of your money at White's, or bowled you out of it at
Marylebone, was often united with that of the professed ruffian, who on
Bagshot Heath, or Finchley Common, commanded his brother beau to stand
and deliver. There was also a touch of coarseness and hardness about the
manners of the times, which has since, in a great degree, been softened
and shaded away. It seems to me, on recollection, as if desperate men had
less reluctance then than now to embrace the most desperate means of
retrieving their fortune. The times were indeed past, when Anthony-a-Wood
mourned over the execution of two men, goodly in person, and of
undisputed courage and honour, who were hanged without mercy at Oxford,
merely because their distress had driven them to raise contributions on
the highway. We were still farther removed from the days of “the mad
Prince and Poins.” And yet, from the number of unenclosed and extensive
heaths in the vicinity of the metropolis, and from the less populous
state of remote districts, both were frequented by that species of
mounted highwaymen, that may possibly become one day unknown, who carried
on their trade with something like courtesy; and, like Gibbet in the
Beaux Stratagem, piqued themselves on being the best behaved men on the
road, and on conducting themselves with all appropriate civility in the
exercise of their vocation. A young man, therefore, in my circumstances
was not entitled to be highly indignant at the mistake which confounded
him with this worshipful class of depredators.
Neither was I offended. On the contrary, I found amusement in alternately
exciting, and lulling to sleep, the suspicions of my timorous companion,
and in purposely so acting as still farther to puzzle a brain which
nature and apprehension had combined to render none of the clearest. When
my free conversation had lulled him into complete security, it required
only a passing inquiry concerning the direction of his journey, or the
nature of the business which occasioned it, to put his suspicions once
more in arms. For example, a conversation on the comparative strength and
activity of our horses, took such a turn as follows:--
“O sir,” said my companion, “for the gallop I grant you; but allow me to
say, your horse (although he is a very handsome gelding--that must be
owned,) has too little bone to be a good roadster. The trot, sir”
(striking his Bucephalus with his spurs),--“the trot is the true pace for
a hackney; and, were we near a town, I should like to try that
daisy-cutter of yours upon a piece of level road (barring canter) for a
quart of claret at the next inn.”
“Content, sir,” replied I; “and here is a stretch of ground very
favourable.”
“Hem, ahem,” answered my friend with hesitation; “I make it a rule of
travelling never to blow my horse between stages; one never knows what
occasion he may have to put him to his mettle: and besides, sir, when I
said I would match you, I meant with even weight; you ride four stone
lighter than I.”
“Very well; but I am content to carry weight. Pray, what may that
portmanteau of yours weigh?”
“My p-p-portmanteau?” replied he, hesitating--“O very little--a
feather--just a few shirts and stockings.”
“I should think it heavier, from its appearance. I'll hold you the quart
of claret it makes the odds betwixt our weight.”
“You're mistaken, sir, I assure you--quite mistaken,” replied my friend,
edging off to the side of the road, as was his wont on these alarming
occasions.
“Well, I am willing to venture the wine; or, I will bet you ten pieces to
five, that I carry your portmanteau on my croupe, and out-trot you into
the bargain.”
This proposal raised my friend's alarm to the uttermost. His nose changed
from the natural copper hue which it had acquired from many a comfortable
cup of claret or sack, into a palish brassy tint, and his teeth chattered
with apprehension at the unveiled audacity of my proposal, which seemed
to place the barefaced plunderer before him in full atrocity. As he
faltered for an answer, I relieved him in some degree by a question
concerning a steeple, which now became visible, and an observation that
we were now so near the village as to run no risk from interruption on
the road. At this his countenance cleared up: but I easily perceived that
it was long ere he forgot a proposal which seemed to him so fraught with
suspicion as that which I had now hazarded. I trouble you with this
detail of the man's disposition, and the manner in which I practised upon
it, because, however trivial in themselves, these particulars were
attended by an important influence on future incidents which will occur
in this narrative. At the time, this person's conduct only inspired me
with contempt, and confirmed me in an opinion which I already
entertained, that of all the propensities which teach mankind to torment
themselves, that of causeless fear is the most irritating, busy, painful,
and pitiable.