Charles Dickens once wrote to a friend: ‘I have distinguished myself in
two respects lately. I took a young lady unknown down to dinner, and
talked to her about the Bishop of Durham’s nepotism in the matter of
Mr Cheese. I found she was Mrs Cheese. And I expatiated to the member
for Marylebone, Lord Fermoy—generally conceiving him to be an Irish
member—on the contemptible character of the Marylebone constituency
and Marylebone representatives.’ Two such mishaps in one evening were
enough to reduce the most brilliant talker to the condition of the
three ‘insides’ of the London-bound coach, who beguiled the tedium of
the journey from Southampton by discussing the demerits of William
Cobbett, until one of the party went so far as to assert that the
object of their denunciations was a domestic tyrant, given to beating
his wife; when, much to his dismay, the solitary lady passenger, who
had hitherto sat a silent listener, remarked: ‘Pardon me, sir; a kinder
husband and father never breathed; and I ought to know, for I am
William Cobbett’s wife!’
Mr Giles of Virginia and Judge Duval of Maryland, members of Congress
during Washington’s administration, boarded at the house of a Mrs
Gibbon, whose daughters were well on in years, and remarkable for
talkativeness. When Jefferson became President, Duval was Comptroller
of the Treasury, and Giles a senator. Meeting one day in Washington,
they fell to chatting over old times, and the senator asked the
Comptroller if he knew what had become of ‘that cackling old maid,
Jenny Gibbon.’ ‘She is Mrs Duval, sir,’ was the unexpected reply.
Giles did not attempt to mend matters, as a certain Mr Tuberville
unwisely did. This unhappy blunderer resembled the Irish gentleman who
complained that he could not open his mouth without putting his foot
in it. Happening to observe to a fellow-guest at Dunraven Castle, that
the lady who had sat at his right hand at dinner was the ugliest woman
he had ever beheld; the person addressed expressed his regret that he
should think his wife so ill-looking. ‘I have made a mistake,’ said the
horrified Tuberville; ‘I meant the lady who sat on my left.’ ‘Well,
sir, she is my sister,’ was the response to the well-intentioned fib;
bringing from the desperate connoisseur of beauty the frank avowal: ‘It
can’t be helped, sir, then; for if what you say be true, I confess I
never saw such an ugly family in the course of my life!’
An honest expression of opinion perhaps not so easily forgiven by the
individual concerned, as that wrung from Mark Twain, who, standing
right before a young lady in a Parisian public garden, cried out to
his friend: ‘Dan, just look at this girl; how beautiful she is!’ to
be rebuked by ‘this girl’ saying in excellent English: ‘I thank you
more for the evident sincerity of the compliment, sir, than for the
extraordinary publicity you have given it!’ Mark took a walk, but did
not feel just comfortable for some time afterward.
One of the humorist’s countrymen made a much more serious blunder.
He was a married man. Going into the kitchen one day, a pair of soft
hands were thrown over his eyes, a kiss was imprinted on his cheek.
He returned the salute with interest, and as he gently disengaged
the hands of his fair assailant, asked: ‘Mary, darling, where is the
mistress?’ and found his answer in an indignant wife’s face. ‘Mary
darling’ had gone out for the day, and the lady of the house intended
by her affectionate greeting to give her lord a pleasant surprise.
He got his surprise; whether he thought it a pleasant one he never
divulged, but that kitchen knew Mary no more.
A stout hearty-looking gentleman one day made his way from the
dock-side at Plymouth to the deck of a man-of-war newly arrived from
abroad, and desired to be shewn over the ship. Most of the officers
were on shore, and the duty of playing cicerone devolved upon a young
midshipman. He made the most of his opportunity, and to have a lark
at the expense of the elderly gentleman as he shewed him round, he
told him how the capstan was used to grind the ship’s coffee, the
eighteen-ton guns for cooling the officers’ champagne, the main-yards
for drying the Admiral’s Sunday shirts, and many other things not
generally known. When the gentleman had seen all he wanted to see, he
handed a card to his kind instructor, saying: ‘Young gentleman, you
are a very smart youth indeed, and full of very curious information;
and I trust that you will see there is no mistake in this card of mine
finding its way to your captain.’ The middy glanced at the bit of
pasteboard and read thereon the name ‘Ward Hunt;’ but before he could
thoroughly realise the situation, the First Lord of the Admiralty, with
a parting nod and pleasant smile, had gone.
Another story, illustrating the awkward results that come of letting
the tongue wag freely under a misapprehension regarding other folk’s
identity, is told of a London tailor. An aristocratic customer noted
for dressing in anything but aristocratic fashion, called to pay his
bill. The tailor’s new manager, after receipting the account, handed
it back with a sovereign, saying: ‘There’s a sovereign for yourself,
and it’s your own fault it isn’t two. You don’t wear out your master’s
clothes half quick enough. He ought to have had double the amount in
the time; it would be worth your while to use a harder brush.’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ said his lordship, smiling; ‘I think my brush is
a pretty hard one too; his lordship complains of it anyhow.’
‘Pooh! Hard! Not a bit of it! Now I’ll put you up to a dodge that’ll
put many a pound in your pocket. You see this piece of wood—now that’s
roughened on purpose. You take that, and give your master’s coat a good
scrubbing with it about the elbows and shoulders every day; and give
the trousers a touch about the knees, and it will be a good five pounds
a year in your pocket. We shan’t forget you.’
‘You are very kind,’ quoth the enlightened gentleman. ‘I will impart
your instructions to my valet, though I fear while he remains in my
service he will not be able to profit by them, as I shall not trouble
you with my custom. I wish you good-day.’
We read in Lord Eldon’s Journal: ‘The most awkward thing that ever
occurred to me was this. Immediately after I was married I was
appointed Deputy Professor of Law at Oxford, and the Law Professor sent
me the first lecture, which I had to read immediately to the students,
and which I began without knowing a single word that was in it. It was
upon the statute applying to young men running away with maidens. Fancy
me reading with about one hundred and fifty boys and young men all
giggling at the Professor! Such a tittering audience no one ever had.’
The comical coincidence may have been an accidental one; but as the Law
Professor must, like the students, have known that his deputy ran away
with his Bessie, the chances are against it. The great lawyer was fated
to be reminded of the romantic episode of his life. A client whose
daughter had been stolen from him, insisted upon the jury being told
that a man who could run away with another man’s daughter was a rascal
and a villain, and deserved to be hanged. ‘I cannot say that,’ said
Scott. ‘And why not, Lawyer Scott—why not?’ inquired the irate father.
‘Because I did it myself!’ was the unanswerable reply.
After doing his office for a young couple, a clergyman was inveigled
into proposing the health of bride and bridegroom at the wedding
breakfast. He wound up a neat little speech by expressing the hope
that the result of the union of the happy pair might prove strictly
analogous to that of the bride’s honoured parents. The groom looked
angry, the bride went into hysterics, the bridesmaids blushed and
became interested in the pattern of the carpet, the master of the
house blew his nose with extraordinary violence, and the speaker sat
down wondering at the effect he had created; till his better-informed
neighbour whispered that the lady was not the daughter of the host and
hostess, but a niece who came to live with them when her mother and
father were divorced.
During Mr Gladstone’s Premiership, Sir George Pollock called one
morning in Downing Street to thank the Prime-minister for making him
governor of the Tower. A cabinet council had just assembled; but
rather than keep the veteran waiting, Mr Gladstone invited him into
the council-chamber and introduced him to his colleagues. Sir George
entertained his new acquaintances with a tedious story about a nobleman
who had been detected cheating at cards, ending his narration with:
‘They turned him out of all the clubs he belonged to; even the Reform
would have nothing more to say to him!’ A way of proving the enormity
of the card-player’s offence that must have pleased his hearers
amazingly, since all or nearly all of them were members of that famous
Liberal club.
The old governor sincerely meant what his words implied. Such is not
always the case with utterers of malapropos things. When a note was
handed to Dr Fletcher in his pulpit intimating that the presence of a
medical gentleman, supposed to be in the church, was urgently required
elsewhere, the preacher read the letter out, and as the doctor was
making for the door, fervently ejaculated: ‘May the Lord have mercy
on his patient!’ A Scotch minister exchanging pulpits with a friend
one Sunday, was accosted after service by an old woman anxious to know
what had become of her ‘ain minister.’ ‘Oh,’ said he, ‘he is with my
people to-day.’ ‘Indeed, indeed,’ said the dame; ‘they’ll be getting
a treat the day!’ As flattering a remark as that of the wife of a
popular lecturer, who on her lord telling her he was going to lecture
at Sheffield, exclaimed: ‘I’m so glad; I always hated those Sheffield
people.’
Epitaph writers sometimes display a talent for this kind of
_double-entendre_. A couple of specimens will suffice. The first
from Arbroath, running: ‘Here lie the bodies of John, William,
Robert, and David Matthews, who all died in the hope of a glorious
resurrection—excepting David.’ The other from an American
burying-ground:
Here lies the mother of children five;
Two are dead and three are alive;
The two that are dead preferring rather
To die with their mother than live with their father.
Although a high authority insists that the lunatic and the lover are of
imagination all compact, it would not enter an ordinary lover’s head
to tell his mistress that loving her was synonymous with madness, as
Steele did when he wrote to his dear lovely Prue: ‘It is the hardest
thing in the world to be in love and yet attend business. As for me,
all who speak to me found me out, and I must lock myself up, or other
people will do it for me;’ but fair Mistress Scurlock doubtless took
the dubious flattery in as good part as the great animal painter took
the king of Portugal’s odd greeting: ‘Ah, Sir Edwin, I am glad to see
you; I’m so fond of beasts.’ An unpleasant way of putting the thing was
innocently adopted by the New York car-driver, who, blissfully ignorant
that his interlocutor was Mr Beecher, replied to that gentleman’s query
whether he did not think it possible to dispense with running the cars
all day on Sunday: ‘Yes, sir, I do; but there’s no hope for it so long
as they keep that Beecher theatre open in Brooklyn; the cars have to
run to accommodate that.’
An American newspaper says: ‘The enthusiastic choir-master who adopted
_Hold the Fort_ as a processional hymn, has been dismissed by the
minister, who considered it personal when the choir burst forth:
See the mighty host advancing,
Satan leading on!
A similar objection might have been raised to the Maine county
commissioners quoting Watts’s lines:
Ye sinners round, come view the ground
Where you will shortly lie,
when inviting certain lawyers to inspect the new court-house; although
they had less reason to complain than Lord Kenyon and Justice Rooke,
who while on circuit, came one Sunday to a little village just as the
good folks were going to church; an example the two judges followed.
Anxious to shew his appreciation of the unexpected honour, the parish
clerk searched for a suitable psalm to sing before the service; and
at the proper time gave out the first two verses of the fifty-eighth
psalm, and the congregation sang:
Speak, O ye judges of the earth,
If just your sentence be;
Or must not innocence appeal
To heaven from your decree.
Your wicked hearts and judgments are
Alike by malice swayed;
Your griping hands, by mighty bribes,
To violence betrayed.
Here the congregation awoke to the meaning of what they were singing,
and left the clerk and the children to offend the ears of the legal
dignitaries with:
To virtue, strangers from the womb,
Their infant steps went wrong;
They prattled slander, and in lies
Employed their lisping tongue.
No serpent of parched Afric’s breed
Does ranker poison bear;
The drowsy adder will as soon
Unlock his sullen ear.
The performance unlocked the tongues of the astonished judges at any
rate; and the churchwardens had some difficulty in convincing them that
the apparent insult arose out of the stupidity of the well-meaning
clerk.