A rich and parsimonious person, remarkable for having by his will
preferred public charities to his relations, was fond of going to the
theatre, and taking his great coat with him. But where should he leave
this useful appendage during the performance? The box-keepers would
expect at least sixpence; and, should he leave it at a coffee-house, he
must spend threepence to obtain house-room for it. His invention
supplied him with a method cheaper and equally secure. He pledged his
garment every evening that he attended the play, at a pawnbrokers, near
the door, for a shilling. This sum he carried back at the close of the
play, added _one penny_ to it for interest, and received his great coat
again safe and sound, as it had literally been laid up in lavender.
* * * * *
[Illustration: ~Mrs. Gilpin riding to Edmonton.~]
Then Mrs. Gilpin sweetly said
Unto her children three,
“I’ll clamber o’er this style so high,
And you climb after me.”
But having climb’d unto the top,
She could no further go,
But sate, to every passer by
A spectacle and show:
Who said “Your spouse and you this day
Both show your horsemanship,
And if you stay till he comes back,
Your horse will need no whip.”
The sketch, here engraved, (probably from the poet’s friend Romney,) was
found with the above three stanzas in the handwriting of Cowper, among
the papers of the late Mrs. Unwin. It is to be regretted that no more
was found of this little _Episode_, as it evidently was intended to be,
to the “Diverting History of Johnny Gilpin.” It is to be supposed that
Mrs. Gilpin, in the interval between dinner and tea, finding the time to
hang upon her hands, during her husband’s involuntary excursion, rambled
out with the children into the fields at the back of the Bell, (as what
could be more natural?) and at one of those high aukward styles, for
which Edmonton is so proverbially famed, the embarrassment represented,
so mortifying to a substantial City Madam, might have happened; a
predicament, which leaves her in a state, which is the very Antipodes to
that of her too loco-motive husband; in fact she rides a restive
horse.--Now I talk of Edmonton styles, I must speak a little about those
of Enfield, its next neighbour, which are so ingeniously
contrived--every rising bar to the top becoming more protuberant than
the one under it--that it is impossible for any Christian climber to get
over, without bruising his (or her) shins as many times as there are
bars. These inhospitable invitations to a flayed skin, are planted so
thickly too, and are so troublesomely importunate at every little
paddock here, that this, with more propriety than Thebes of old, might
be entitled Hecatompolis: the Town of the Hundred Gates, or _styles_.