"Nought but a blank remains, a dead void space,
A step of life that promised such a race."
--Dryden.
Napoleon has now sent us back from the grave sufficient echoes of his
living renown: the twilight of posthumous fame has lingered long enough
over the spot where the sun of his glory set; and his name must at
length repose in the silence, if not in the darkness of night. In this
busy and evanescent scene, other spirits of the age are rapidly snatched
away, claiming our undivided sympathies and regrets, until in turn they
yield to some newer and more absorbing grief. Another name is now added
to the list of the mighty departed,--a name whose influence upon the
hopes and fears, the fates and fortunes of our countrymen, has rivalled,
and perhaps eclipsed, that of the defunct "child and champion of
Jacobinism," while it is associated with all the sanctions of legitimate
government, all the sacred authorities of social order and our most holy
religion. We speak of one, indeed, under whose warrant heavy and
incessant contributions were imposed upon our fellow-citizens, but who
exacted nothing without the signet and the sign-manual of most devout
Chancellors of the Exchequer. Not to dally longer with the sympathies of
our readers, we think it right to premonish them that we are composing
an epicedium upon no less distinguished a personage than the Lottery,
whose last breath, after many penultimate puffs, has been sobbed forth
by sorrowing contractors, as if the world itself were about to be
converted into a blank. There is a fashion of eulogy, as well as of
vituperation, and, though the Lottery stood for some time in the latter
predicament, we hesitate not to assert that "_multis ille bonis flebilis
occidit_." Never have we joined in the senseless clamor which condemned
the only tax whereto we became voluntary contributors, the only
resource which gave the stimulus without the danger or infatuation of
gambling, the only alembic which in these plodding days sublimized our
imaginations, and filled them with more delicious dreams than ever
flitted athwart the sensorium of Alnaschar.
Never can the writer forget, when, as a child, he was hoisted upon a
servant's shoulder in Guildhall, and looked down upon the installed and
solemn pomp of the then drawing Lottery. The two awful cabinets of iron,
upon whose massy and mysterious portals the royal initials were
gorgeously emblazoned, as if, after having deposited the unfulfilled
prophecies within, the King himself had turned the lock, and still
retained the key in his pocket,--the blue-coat boy, with his naked arm,
first converting the invisible wheel, and then diving into the dark
recess for a ticket,--the grave and reverend faces of the commissioners
eying the announced number,--the scribes below calmly committing it to
their huge books,--the anxious countenances of the surrounding
populace,--while the giant figures of Gog and Magog, like presiding
deities, looked down with a grim silence upon the whole
proceeding,--constituted altogether a scene which, combined with the
sudden wealth supposed to be lavished from those inscrutable wheels, was
well calculated to impress the imagination of a boy with reverence and
amazement. Jupiter, seated between the two fatal urns of good and evil,
the blind goddess with her cornucopia, the Parcæ wielding the distaff,
the thread of life, and the abhorred shears, seemed but dim and shadowy
abstractions of mythology, when I had gazed upon an assemblage
exercising, as I dreamt, a not less eventful power, and all presented to
me in palpable and living operation. Reason and experience, ever at
their old spiteful work of catching and destroying the bubbles which
youth delighted to follow, have indeed dissipated much of this illusion;
but my mind so far retained the influence of that early impression, that
I have ever since continued to deposit my humble offerings at its
shrine, whenever the ministers of the Lottery went forth with type and
trumpet to announce its periodical dispensations; and though nothing has
been doled out to me from its uudiscerning coffers but blanks, or those
more vexatious tantalizers of the spirit denominated small prizes, yet
do I hold myself largely indebted to this most generous diffuser of
universal happiness. Ingrates that we are, are we to be thankful for no
benefits that are not palpable to sense, to recognize no favors that are
not of marketable value, to acknowledge no wealth unless it can be
counted with the five fingers? If we admit the mind to be the sole
depositary of genuine joy, where is the bosom that has not been elevated
into a temporary Elysium by the magic of the Lottery? Which of us has
not converted his ticket, or even his sixteenth share of one, into a
nest-egg of Hope, upon which he has sat brooding in the secret
roosting-places of his heart, and hatched it into a thousand fantastical
apparitions?
What a startling revelation of the passions, if all the aspirations
engendered by the Lottery could be made manifest! Many an impecuniary
epicure has gloated over his locked-up warrant for future wealth, as a
means of realizing the dream of his namesake in the "Alchemist":--
"My meat shall all come in in Indian shells,--
Dishes of agate set in gold, and studded
With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies;
The tongues of carps, dormice, and camels' heels,
Boiled i' the spirit of Sol, and dissolved in pearl
(Apicius' diet 'gainst the epilepsy);
And I will eat these broths with spoons of amber
Headed with diamant and carbuncle.
My footboy shall eat pheasants, calvered salmons,
Knots, goodwits, lampreys. I myself will have
The beards of barbels served; instead of salads,
Oiled mushrooms, and the swelling unctuous paps
Of a fat pregnant sow, newly cut off,
Dressed with an exquisite and poignant sauce,
For which I'll say unto my cook, 'There's gold:
Go forth, and he a knight.'"
Many a doting lover has kissed the scrap of paper whose promissory
shower of gold was to give up to him his otherwise unattainable Danaë;
Nimrods have transformed the same narrow symbol into a saddle by which
they have been enabled to bestride the backs of peerless hunters; while
nymphs have metamorphosed its Protean form into
"Rings, gauds, conceits,
Knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats,"
and all the braveries of dress, to say nothing of the obsequious
husband, the two-footmaned carriage, and the opera-box. By the simple
charm of this numbered and printed rag, gamesters have, for a time at
least, recovered their losses, spendthrifts have cleared off mortgages
from their estates, the imprisoned debtor has leaped over his lofty
boundary of circumscription and restraint and revelled in all the joys
of liberty and fortune, the cottage-walls have swelled out into more
goodly proportion than those of Baucis and Philemon, poverty has tasted
the luxuries of competence, labor has lolled at ease in a perpetual
armchair of idleness, sickness has been bribed into banishment, life has
been invested with new charms, and death deprived of its former terrors.
Nor have the affections been less gratified than the wants, appetites,
and ambitions of mankind. By the conjurations of the same potent spell,
kindred have lavished anticipated benefits upon one another, and charity
upon all. Let it be termed a delusion,--a fool's Paradise is better than
the wise man's Tartarus; be it branded as an _ignis-fatuus_,--it was at
least a benevolent one, which, instead of beguiling its followers into
swamps, caverns, and pitfalls, allured them on with all the
blandishments of enchantment to a garden of Eden, an ever-blooming
Elysium of delight. True, the pleasures it bestowed were evanescent: but
which of our joys are permanent? and who so inexperienced as not to know
that anticipation is always of higher relish than reality, which strikes
a balance both in our sufferings and enjoyments? "The fear of ill
exceeds the ill we fear"; and fruition, in the same proportion,
invariably falls short of hope. "Men are but children of a larger
growth," who may amuse themselves for a long time in gazing at the
reflection of the moon in the water; but, if they jump in to grasp it,
they may grope forever, and only get the farther from their object. He
is the wisest who keeps feeding upon the future, and refrains as long as
possible from undeceiving himself by converting his pleasant
speculations into disagreeable certainties.
The true mental epicure always purchased his ticket early, and postponed
inquiry into its fate to the last possible moment, during the whole of
which intervening period he had an imaginary twenty thousand locked up
in his desk: and was not this well worth all the money? Who would
scruple to give twenty pounds interest for even the ideal enjoyment of
as many thousands during two or three months? "_Crede quod habes, et
habes_"; and the usufruct of such a capital is sorely not dear at such a
price. Some years ago, a gentleman, in passing along Cheapside, saw the
figures 1,069, of which number he was the sole proprietor, flaming on
the window of a lottery-office as a capital prize. Somewhat flurried by
this discovery, not less welcome than unexpected, he resolved to walk
round St. Paul's that he might consider in what way to communicate the
happy tidings to his wife and family; but, upon repassing the shop, he
observed that the number was altered to 10,069, and, upon inquiry, had
the mortification to learn that his ticket was a blank, and had only
been stuck up in the window by a mistake of the clerk. This effectually
calmed his agitation; but he always speaks of himself as having once
possessed twenty thousand pounds, and maintains that his ten-minutes'
walk round St. Paul's was worth ten times the purchase-money of the
ticket. A prize thus obtained has, moreover, this special advantage: it
is beyond the reach of fate; it cannot be squandered; bankruptcy cannot
lay siege to it; friends cannot pull it down, nor enemies blow it up; it
bears a charmed life, and none of woman born can break its integrity,
even by the dissipation of a single fraction. Show me the property in
these perilous times that is equally compact and impregnable. We can no
longer become enriched for a quarter of an hour; we can no longer
succeed in such splendid failures: all our chances of making such a miss
have vanished with the last of the Lotteries.
Life will now become a flat, prosaic routine of matter-of-fact; and
sleep itself, erst so prolific of numerical configurations and
mysterious stimulants to lottery-adventure, will be disfurnished of its
figures and figments. People will cease to harp upon the one lucky
number suggested in a dream, and which forms the exception, while they
are scrupulously silent upon the ten thousand falsified dreams which
constitute the rule. Morpheus will stifle Cocker with a handful of
poppies, and our pillows will be no longer haunted by the book of
numbers.
And who, too, shall maintain the art and mystery of puffing in all its
pristine glory, when the lottery-professors shall have abandoned its
cultivation? They were the first, as they will assuredly be the last,
who fully developed the resources of that ingenious art,--who cajoled
and decoyed the most suspicious and wary reader into a perusal of their
advertisements by devices of endless variety and cunning,--who baited
their lurking schemes with midnight murders, ghost-stories, crim-cons,
bon-mots, balloons, dreadful catastrophes, and every diversity of joy
and sorrow, to catch newspaper-gudgeons. Ought not such talents to be
encouraged? Verily the abolitionists have much to answer for!
And now, having established the felicity of all those who gained
imaginary prizes, let us proceed to show that the equally numerous class
who were presented with real blanks have not less reason to consider
themselves happy. Most of us have cause to be thankful for that which is
bestowed; but we have all, probably, reason to be still more grateful
for that which is withheld, and more especially for our being denied the
sudden possession of riches. In the Litany, indeed, we Call upon the
Lord to deliver us "in all time of our wealth"; but how few of us are
sincere in deprecating such a calamity! Massinger's _Luke_, and Ben
Jonson's _Sir Epicure Mammon_, and Pope's _Sir Balaam_, and our own
daily observation, might convince us that the Devil "now tempts by
making rich, not making poor." We may read in the "Guardian" a
circumstantial account of a man who was utterly ruined by gaining a
capital prize; we may recollect what Dr. Johnson said to Garrick, when
the latter was making a display of his wealth at Hampton Court,--"Ah,
David! David! these are the things that make a death-bed terrible"; we
may recall the Scripture declaration as to the difficulty a rich man
finds in entering into the kingdom of heaven; and, combining all these
denunciations against opulence, let us heartily congratulate one another
upon our lucky escape from the calamity of a twenty or thirty thousand
pound prize! The fox in the fable, who accused the unattainable grapes
of sourness, was more of a philosopher than we are generally willing to
allow. He was an adept in that species of moral alchemy which turns
everything to gold, and converts disappointment itself into a ground of
resignation and content. Such we have shown to be the great lesson
inculcated by the Lottery, when rightly contemplated; and if we might
parody M. de Châteaubriand's jingling expression, "_Le Roi est mort:
vive le Roi_!" we should be tempted to exclaim, "The Lottery is no more:
long live the Lottery!"
* * * * *
The foregoing article, as the reader may possibly remember, was not
Lamb's only contribution to the "New Monthly Magazine." Indeed, it was
in that pleasant and popular periodical,--then at the height of its
popularity, with many of the most admired writers in Great Britain among
its contributors, and edited by the elegant and polished poet who sang
the "Pleasures of Hope,"--it was in this magazine that Elia's admirable
"Popular Fallacies" were first given to the world. (I fear, however,
that the exquisite grace, beauty, and polish of these delightful papers
were hardly appreciated by the readers of the "New Monthly.") And it was
for this publication that he undertook to write a novel. Although Elia
had but little fancy for novels himself, and in the writing of them
would not have done justice, perhaps, to his rare genius, yet,
nevertheless, I suspect that all admirers of "Rosamund Gray," if not all
readers of novels, regret that he did not complete the work of fiction
he began for the "New Monthly Magazine." Judging from the specimen that
was published, it would have been, had the author seen fit to finish it,
quite an original and very characteristic production. Here is the first
chapter of the story. Though advertised to be continued, this is all of
it that ever appeared.
* * * * *