_For the Table Book._
I called upon you this morning, and found that you were gone to visit a
dying friend. I had been upon a like errand. Poor N. R. has lain dying
now for almost a week; such is the penalty we pay for having enjoyed
through life a strong constitution. Whether he knew me or not, I know
not, or whether he saw me through his poor glazed eyes; but the group I
saw about him I shall not forget. Upon the bed, or about it, were
assembled his Wife, their two Daughters, and poor deaf Robert, looking
doubly stupified. There they were, and seemed to have been sitting all
the week. I could only reach out a hand to Mrs. R. Speaking was
impossible in that mute chamber. By this time it must be all over with
him. In him I have a loss the world cannot make up. He was my friend,
and my father’s friend, for all the life that I can remember. I seem to
have made foolish friendships since. Those are the friendships, which
outlast a second generation. Old as I am getting, in his eyes I was
still the child he knew me. To the last he called me Jemmy. I have none
to call me Jemmy now. He was the last link that bound me to B----. You
are but of yesterday. In him I seem to have lost the old plainness of
manners and singleness of heart. Lettered he was not; his reading
scarcely exceeding the Obituary of the old Gentleman’s Magazine, to
which he has never failed of having recourse for these last fifty years.
Yet there was the pride of literature about him from that slender
perusal; and moreover from his office of archive keeper to your ancient
city, in which he must needs pick up some equivocal Latin; which, among
his less literary friends assumed the airs of a very pleasant pedantry.
Can I forget the erudite look with which having tried to puzzle out the
text of a Black lettered Chaucer in your Corporation Library, to which
he was a sort of Librarian, he gave it up with this consolatory
reflection--“Jemmy,” said he, “I do not know what you find in these very
old books, but I observe, there is a deal of very indifferent spelling
in them.” His jokes (for he had some) are ended; but they were old
Perennials, staple, and always as good as new. He had one Song, that
spake of the “flat bottoms of our foes coming over in darkness,” and
alluded to a threatened Invasion, many years since blown over; this he
reserved to be sung on Christmas Night, which we always passed with him,
and he sang it with the freshness of an impending event. How his eyes
would sparkle when he came to the passage:
We’ll still make ’em run, and we’ll still make ’em sweat,
In spite of the devil and Brussels’ Gazette!
What is the Brussels’ Gazette now? I cry, while I endite these trifles.
His poor girls who are, I believe, compact of solid goodness, will have
to receive their afflicted mother at an unsuccessful home in a petty
village in ----shire, where for years they have been struggling to raise
a Girls’ School with no effect. Poor deaf Robert (and the less hopeful
for being so) is thrown upon a deaf world, without the comfort to his
father on his death-bed of knowing him provided for. They are left
almost provisionless. Some life assurance there is; but, I fear, not
exceeding ----. Their hopes must be from your Corporation, which their
father has served for fifty years. Who or what are your Leading Members
now, I know not. Is there any, to whom without impertinence you can
represent the true circumstances of the family? You cannot say good
enough of poor R., and his poor Wife. Oblige me, and the dead, if you
can.
_London, 10 Feb. 1827._