|Had we been inclined to superstition, what a supernatural treat had
been the discourse of Mr. Merripall! His tales of “goblins damned” were
terrible enough to have bristled up our hair till it lifted our very
hats off our very heads. His reminiscences of resurrection men * were
extensive and curious; he knew their “whereabouts” for ten miles round
London.
* Two resurrection men stumbling over a fellow dead drunk in
the kennel, bagged, and bore him away to a certain
anatomist. The private bell gave a low tinkle, the side-door
down a dark court opened noiselessly, the sack was emptied
of its contents into the cellar, and the fee paid down. In
an hour or two after, the same ceremony (the subject being
really defunct) was repeated. The bell sounded a third time,
and the anatomical charnel-house received another inmate.
The tippler, having now slept off his liquor, began to grope
about, and finding all dark, and himself he knew not where,
bellowed lustily. This was just as the door was closing on
the resurrection men, who being asked what should be done
with the noisy fellow, answered coolly, “Keep him till you
want him!”
We mean not to insinuate that Mr. Merripall had any share in bringing
his departed customers to light again. He was a virtuoso, and his
cabinet comprised a choice collection of the veritable cords on which
the most notorious criminals had made their transit from this world to
the next. He was rich in mendacious caligraphy. Malefactors of liberal
education obligingly favoured him with autograph confessions, and
affectionate epistles full of penitence and piety; while the less
learned condescendingly affixed their contrite crosses to any document
that autographmania might suggest. The lion of his library was an
illustrated copy of the Newgate Calendar, or New Drop Miscellany, and
round his study its principal heroes hung--in frames! He boasted of
having shaken by the hand--an honour of which Old Bailey amateurs are
proudly emulous--all the successful candidates for the Debtors' Door for
these last twenty years; and when Mr. Bosky declared that he had never
saluted a dying felon with “My dear sir!” coveted his acquaintance, and
craved his autograph, he sighed deeply for the Laureat's want of taste,
grew pensive for about a second, and then, as if suddenly recollecting
himself, exclaimed,
“Gentlemen, we are but a stone's throw from the _Owl and Ivy Bush_,
where a society called 'The Blinkers' hold their nightly revels: it
will well repay your curiosity to step in and take a peep at them. Their
president has one eye permanently shut, and the other partially open;
the vice has two open eyes, blinking 'like winkin' all the members are
more or less somniferous; and though none of them are allowed to fall
fast asleep at the club, it is contrary to etiquette to be wide awake.
Their conversation is confined to monosyllables, their talk, like their
tobacco, being short-cut. Their three cheers are three yawns; they sit
round the table with their eyes shut, and their mouths open, the gape,
or gap, being filled up with their pipes, from which rise clouds of
smoke that make their red noses look like lighted lamps in a fog. To the
Reverend Nehemiah Nosebags, their chaplain, I owe the honour of becoming
a member; for happening to sit under his proboscis and pulpit, my jaws
went through such a gaping exercise at his soporific word of command,
that he proposed me as a highly promising probationer, and my election
was carried amidst an unanimous chorus of yawns.”
“Here” exclaimed Mr. Bosky, “is the Owl and Ivy Bush.”
“No,” rejoined Mr. Merripall, “'tis the Three Jolly Trumpeters. On the
opposite side of the way is the Owl and Ivy Bush.”
Mr. Bosky gazed at the sign, and then, with no small degree of
wonderment, at Mr. Merripall. The Lauréat of Little Britain looked signs
and wonders!
“I'll take my affidavit to the Owl!” raising his eye-glass to the solemn
bird that winked wickedly beneath a newly-varnished cauliflower-wig
of white paint; “and though the Ivy Bush looks much more like a birch
broom, it looks still less like a Jolly Trumpeter.”
“Egad, you're right!” said the comical coffin-maker; “though, to my
vision, it seems as if both houses had changed places since I last saw
them.”
The contents of a brace of black bottles flowing under Mr. Merripall's
satin waistcoat, and their fumes ascending to what lay within the
circumference of his best beaver, might possibly account for this
phenomenon.
“Hollo!”' cried the comical coffin-maker, as an uproarious cheer and the
knocking of knuckles upon the tables proclaimed merry doings at the Owl
and Ivy Bush, “the Blinkers were not wont to be so boisterous. What a
riotsome rattle!--hark!”
And the following chorus resounded through the Owl and Ivy Bush:--
We're jovial, happy, and gay, boys!
We rise with the moon, which is surely full soon,
Sing with the owl, our tutelar fowl,
Laugh and joke at your go-to-bed folk,
Never think--but what we shall drink,
Never care--but on what we shall fare,--
Turning the night into day, boys!
“What think you of that, Mr. Merripall?” said the Lauréat of Little
Britain.
We entered the room, and a company more completely wide awake it was
never our good fortune to behold.
“Surely,” whispered Mr. Bosky, “that vociferous gentleman in the chair
can never be your one-eye-shut-and-the-other-half-open president; nor
he at the bottom of the table, with his organs of vision fixed, like
the wooden Highlander's that stands entry over 'Snuff and Tobacco,' your
blinking vice.”
Mr. Merripall looked _incredulus odi_, and would have made a capital
study for Tam O'Shanter.
“Have the kindness to introduce me to the Rev. Nehemiah Nosebags,” said
Mr. Bosky, again addressing his mute and mystified companion.
“Why not ask me to trot out the Pope?” replied the somewhat crotchety
and comical coffin-maker.
A peal of laughter and huzzas echoed from the twin tavern over the way,
and at the same moment mine host, who was very like a China joss,
puffed up stairs, looking as wild as “a wilderness of monkeys,” with the
astounding news that a trick had been played upon himself and brother
publican by Lord Larkinton, Sir Frederick Fitz-fun, and the Honourable
Colonel Frolick, who had taken the liberty of transposing their
respective signs. Hence a straggling party of the _Peep o' day Boys_,
whose proper location was the Three Jolly Trumpeters, had intruded into
the taciturnity and tobacco of the Owl and Ivy Bush. This unravelled the
cross purposes that at one time seemed to call in question the “_mens
sana in corpore sano_” of Mr. Merripall.
“Many men,” addressing Mr. Bosky, as they jogged out of the Three Jolly
Trumpeters, “like to enjoy a reputation which they do not deserve;
but”--here Mr. Merripall looked serious, and in right earnest--“to be
thought tipsy, my good friend, without having had the gratification of
getting so, is,
'Say what men will, a pill
Bitter to swallow, and hard of digestion.'”
And the Lauréat of Little Britain fully agreed with the axiom so
pertinaciously and poetically laid down by the comical coffin-maker.
The three practical jokers now emerged from their ambush to take a more
active part in the sports. With the Peep of day Boys they would have
stood no chance, for each member carried in his hand an executive fist,
to which the noble tricksters were loth to cotton, for fear of being
worsted. Lord Larkinton led the van up the stairs of the Owl and Ivy
Bush, and dashing among the Blinkers, selected their president for his
partner; Colonel Frolick patronized the vice; and Sir Frederick Fitzfun
made choice of the Rev. Nehemiah Nosebags. The rest of the club were
arranged to dance in pairs,--a very stout member with a very lean one,
and a very short one with a very tall one,--so that there was variety,
without being charming. Each danced with his pipe in his mouth. It was
no pipe no dance.
They led off in full puff, dancing about, upon, and on all-fours under
the tables. The fire-irons were confided to a musical brother, with
instructions to imitate the triangles; and as the company danced round
the room,--the room, returning the compliment, danced round them.
The club having been capered within an inch of their lives, Lord
Larkinton begged Mr. Bo-peep to favour them with Jim Crow, consenting to
waive the _jump obligato_, in consideration of his previous exertions.
But he must sing it in character; and in the absence of lamp-black and
charcoal, the corks were burnt, to enable Sir Frederick Fitzfun and
Colonel Fro lick (my Lord holding his partner's physiognomy between his
palms like a vice--the vice and Mr. Nosebags looking ruefully on) to
transform Mr. Bopeep into a negro chorister. His sable toilet being
completed, the president opened with “_Jim Crow_;” but his memory
failing, he got into “_Sich a gittin' up stairs_.” At fault again,
he introduced the “Last rose of summer,” then “The boaty rows”
“Four-and-twenty fiddlers all of a row” “Old Rose and burn the bellows”
“Blow high, blow low” “Three Tooley Street Tailors” “By the deep nine”
“I know a bank” and “You must not sham Abraham Newland”--all of which
he sang to the same tune, “Jim Crow” being the musical bed of torture
to which he elongated or curtailed them. As an accompaniment to this odd
medley, the decanters and tumblers flew about in all directions,
some escaping out at window, others irradiating the floor with their
glittering particles. Colonel Frolick, brandishing a poker, stood
before the last half inch of a once resplendent mirror contemplating his
handiwork and mustaches, and ready to begin upon the gold frame. Every
square of crown glass having been beaten out, and every hat's crown
beaten in, Lord Larkinton politely asked the Rev. Nehemiah Nosebags to
crown all with a song. The chaplain, looking as melancholy as the last
bumper in a bottle before it's buzzed, snuffled, in a Tabernacle twang,
“The-e bir-ird that si-ings in yo-on-der ca-age.”
“Make your bird sing a little more lively,” shouted my Lord, “or we
shan't get out of the cage to-night!”
Many a true word spoken in jest; for mine host, thinking his Lordship's
next joke might be to unroof, batter down, or set fire to the Owl and
Ivy Bush, rushed into the room marshalling a posse of the police, when
a battle royal ensued, and sconces and truncheons, scraping acquaintance
with each other, made “a ghostly rattle.” Disappointed of Mr. Nosebags'
stave, and having no relish for those of the constables, we stole away,
leaving Colonel Frolick beating a tattoo on some dozen of oil-skin hats;
Lord Larkinton and Sir Frederick Fitzfun pushing forward the affrighted
Bopeep and his brethren to bear the brunt of the fray; an intolerable
din of screaming, shouting servants, ostlers and helpers; and the
barking of a kennel of curs, as if “the dogs of three parishes” had been
congregated and let loose to swell the turmoil.
“The sons of care are always sons of night.” Those to whom the world's
beauteous garden is a cheerless desert hide their sorrows in its
friendly obscurity. If in one quarter the shout of revelry is heard, as
the sensualist reels from his bacchanalian banquet,--in another, the low
moan of destitution and misery startles night's deep silence, as they
retire to some bulk or doorway to seek that repose which seldom lights
but “on lids unsullied with a tear.” We had parted with our merry
companions, and were hastening homeward, when, passing by one of those
unsightly pauper prison-houses that shame and deface our land, we beheld
a solitary light flickering before a high narrow casement, the grated
bars of which told a mournful tale, that the following melody, sang with
heart-searching pathos, too truly confirmed:--
A wand'rer, tho' houseless and friendless I roam,
Ah! stranger, I once knew the sweets of a home;
The world promised fair, and its prospects were bright,
My pillow was peace, and I woke to delight.
Do you know what it is from loved kindred to part?
The sting of the scorpion to feel in your heart?
To hear the deep groan of an agonised sire?
To see, broken-hearted, a mother expire?
To hear bitter mockings an answer to prayer?
Scorn pointing behind, and before you despair!--
To hunger a prey, and to passion a slave,--
No home but the outcast's, no rest but the grave!
To feel your brain wander, as reason's faint beam
Illumines the dark, frenzied, sorrowful dream;
The present and past!--See! the moon she rides higher
In mild tranquil beauty, and shoots sparks of fire!
The music ceased, the pauper-prison door opened, and a gentle voice,
addressing another, was heard to say, “Tend her kindly--my purse shall
be yours, and, what is of far higher import, though less valued here,
God's holiest blessing. Every inmate of these gloomy walls has a claim
upon your sympathy; but this hapless being demands the most watchful
solicitude. She is a bruised reed bowed down by the tempest,--a heart
betrayed and bleeding,--a brow scathed by the lightning of heaven! I
entered upon this irksome duty but to mitigate the cruel hardships that
insolent authority imposes upon the desolate and oppressed. With my
associates in office I wage an unequal warfare; but my humble efforts,
aided by yours, may do much to alleviate sufferings that we cannot
entirely remove. She has lucid intervals, when the dreadful truth
flashes upon her mind. Smooth, then, the pillow for her burning brow,
bind up her broken heart, and the gracious Power that inflicts this
just, but awful retribution will welcome you as an angel of mercy, when
mercy, and mercy only, shall be your passport to his presence! Good
night.”
The door closed, and the speaker--unseeing, but not unseen--hurried
away. It was Uncle Timothy!
Bulky as a walrus, and as brutal, out-frogging the frog in the fable,
an over-fed, stolid, pudding-crammed libel upon humanity, sailing behind
his double chin, and with difficulty preserving his equilibrium, though
propped up by the brawny arm of Catspaw Crushem, Mr. Poor Law Guardian
Pinch--a hiccup anticipating an oath--commanded us to “move on.”
Addressing his relieving officer, he stammered out, _en passant_,
“Hark'e, Catspaw, don't forget to report that crazy wagrant to the Board
tomorrow. We'll try whether cold water, a dark crib, and a straight
jacket won't spoil her caterwauling. The cretur grows quite obstroperous
upon our gruel” (!!!)
O England! merrie England!
Once nurse of thriving men;
I've learn'd to look on many things,
With other eyes since then!