“’Twas ever thus.”
(_Old Play._)
The sultry glare of noon was already giving place to the cool of a
cloudless evening, and the lulled ocean was washing against the Pier
with a low murmur, suggestive to poetical minds of the kindred ideas of
motion and lotion, when two travellers might have been seen, by such
as chose to look that way, approaching the secluded town of Whitby by
one of those headlong paths, dignified by the name of road, which serve
as entrances into the place, and which were originally constructed,
it is supposed, on the somewhat fantastic model of pipes running into
a water-butt. The elder of the two was a sallow and careworn man; his
features were adorned with what had been often at a distance mistaken
for a moustache, and were shaded by a beaver hat, of doubtful age, and
of appearance which, if not respectable, was at least venerable. The
younger, in whom the sagacious reader already recognises the hero of my
tale, possessed a form which, once seen, could scarcely be forgotten:
a slight tendency to obesity proved but a trifling drawback to the
manly grace of its contour, and though the strict laws of beauty
might perhaps have required a somewhat longer pair of legs to make up
the proportion of his figure, and that his eyes should match rather
more exactly than they chanced to do, yet to those critics who are
untrammelled with any laws of taste, and there are many such, to those
who could close their eyes to the faults in his shape, and single out
its beauties, though few were ever found capable of the task, to those
above all who knew and esteemed his personal character, and believed
that the powers of his mind transcended those of the age he lived in,
though alas! none such has as yet turned up--to those he was a very
Apollo.
What though it had not been wholly false to assert that too much grease
had been applied to his hair, and too little soap to his hands? that
his nose turned too much up, and his shirt collars too much down? that
his whiskers had borrowed all the colour from his cheeks, excepting a
little that had run down into his waistcoat? Such trivial criticisms
were unworthy the notice of any who laid claim to the envied title of
the connoisseur.
He had been christened William, and his father’s name was Smith, but
though he had introduced himself to many of the higher circles in
London under the imposing name of “Mr. Smith, of Yorkshire,” he had
unfortunately not attracted so large a share of public notice as he
was confident he merited: some had asked him how far back he traced
his ancestry; others had been mean enough to hint that his position
in society was not entirely unique; while the sarcastic enquiries of
others touching the dormant peerage in his family, to which, it was
suggested, he was about to lay claim, had awakened in the breast of
the noble-spirited youth an ardent longing for that high birth and
connection which an adverse Fortune had denied him.
Hence he had conceived the notion of that fiction, which perhaps in
his case must be considered merely as a poetical licence, whereby he
passed himself off upon the world under the sounding appellation which
heads this tale. This step had already occasioned a large increase in
his popularity, a circumstance which his friends spoke of under the
unpoetical simile of a bad sovereign fresh gilt, but which he himself
more pleasantly described as, “... a violet pale, At length discovered
in its mossy dale, And borne to sit with kings”: a destiny for which,
as it is generally believed, violets are not naturally fitted.
The travellers, each buried in his own thoughts, paced in silence down
the steep, save when an unusually sharp stone, or an unexpected dip in
the road, produced one of those involuntary exclamations of pain, which
so triumphantly demonstrate the connection between Mind and Matter. At
length the young traveller, rousing himself with an effort from his
painful reverie, broke upon the meditations of his companion with the
unexpected question, “Think you she will be much altered in feature? I
trust me not.” “Think who?” testily rejoined the other: then hastily
correcting himself, with an exquisite sense of grammar, he substituted
the expressive phrase, “Who’s the she you’re after?” “Forget you then,”
asked the young man, who was so intensely poetical in soul that he
never spoke in ordinary prose, “forget you the subject we conversed
on but now? Trust me, she hath dwelt in my thoughts ever since.” “But
now!” his friend repeated, in sarcastic tone, “it is an hour good since
you spoke last.” The young man nodded assent; “An hour? true, true.
We were passing Lyth, as I bethink me, and lowly in thine ear was I
murmuring that touching sonnet to the sea I writ of late, beginning,
‘Thou roaring, snoring, heaving, grieving main which----’” “For pity’s
sake!” interrupted the other, and there was real earnestness in that
pleading tone, “don’t let us have it all again! I have heard it with
patience once already.”
“Thou hast, thou hast,” the baffled poet replied: “well then, she
shall again be the topic of my thoughts,” and he frowned and bit his
lip, muttering to himself such words as cooky, hooky, and crooky, as
if he were trying to find a rhyme to something. And now the pair were
passing near a bridge, and shops were on their left and water on their
right; and from beneath uprose a confused hubbub of sailors’ voices,
and, wafted on the landward breeze, came an aroma, dimly suggestive of
salt herring, and all things from the heaving waters in the harbour to
the light smoke that floated gracefully above the housetops, suggested
nought but poetry to the mind of the gifted youth.
[28] See footnote to “The Lady of the Ladle.”