Hail, land of the kangaroo!--paradise of the bushranger!--purgatory of
England!--happy scene, where the sheep-stealer is metamorphosed into the
shepherd; the highwayman is the guardian of the road; the dandy is
delicate no more, and earns his daily bread; and the Court of Chancery
is unknown--hail to thee, soil of larceny and love! of pickpockets and
principle! of every fraud under heaven, and primeval virtue! daughter of
jails, and mother of empires!--hail to thee, New South Wales! In all my
years--and I am now no boy--and in all my travels--and I am now at the
antipodes--I have never heard any maxim so often as, that time is short;
yet no maxim that ever dropt from human lips is further from the truth.
I appeal to the experience of mankind--to the three hundred heirs of the
British peerage, whom their gouty fathers keep out of their honours and
estates--to the six hundred and sixty-eight candidates for seats in
parliament, which they must wait for till the present sitters die; or
turn rebellious to their noble patrons, or their borough patrons, or
their Jew patrons; or plunge into joint-stock ruin, and expatriate
themselves, for the astonishment of all other countries, and the benefit
of their own;--to the six thousand five hundred heroes of the half-pay,
longing for tardy war;--to the hundred thousand promissory excisemen
lying on the soul of the chancellor of the ex-chequer, and pining for
the mortality of every gauger from the Lizard to the Orkneys;--and, to
club the whole discomfort into one, to the entire race of the fine and
superfine, who breathe the vital air, from five thousand a year to
twenty times the rental, the unhappy population of the realms of
indolence included in Bond Street, St. James's, and the squares.
For my own part, in all my experience of European deficiencies, I have
never found any deficiency of time. Money went like the wind; champagne
grew scanty; the trust of tailors ran down to the dregs; the smiles of
my fair flirts grew rare as diamonds--every thing became as dry, dull,
and stagnant as the Serpentine in summer; but time never failed me. I
had a perpetual abundance of a commodity which the philosophers told me
was beyond price. I had not merely enough for myself, but enough to give
to others; until I discovered the fact, that it was as little a
favourite with others as myself, and that, whatever the plausible might
say, there was nothing on earth for which they would not be more obliged
to me than a donation of my superfluous time. But now let me give a
sketch of my story. A single fact is worth a hundred reflections. The
first consciousness that I remember, was that of having a superabundance
of time; and my first ingenuity was demanded for getting rid of the
encumbrance. I had always an hour that perplexed my skill to know what
to do with this treasure. A schoolboy turn for long excursions in any
direction but that of my pedagogue, indicative of a future general
officer; a naturalist-taste for bird-nesting, which, in maturer years,
would have made me one of the wonders of the Linnaean Society; a passion
for investigating the inside of every thing, from a Catherine-wheel to a
China-closet, which would yet have entitled me to the honours of an
F.R.S.; and an original vigour in the plunder of orchards, which
undoubtedly might have laid the foundation of a first lord of the
treasury; were nature's helps to get rid of this oppressive bounty. But
though I fought the enemy with perpetual vigour and perpetual variety,
he was not to be put to flight by a stripling; and I went to the
university as far from being a conqueror as ever. At Oxford I found the
superabundance of this great gift acknowledged with an openness worthy
of English candour, and combated with the dexterity of an experience
five hundred years old. Port-drinking, flirtation, lounging, the
invention of new ties to cravats, and new tricks on proctors; billiards,
boxing, and barmaids; seventeen ways of mulling sherry, and as many
dozen ways of raising "the supplies," were adopted with an adroitness
that must have baffled all but the invincible. Yet Time was master at
last; and he always indulged me with a liberality that would have driven
a less resolute spirit to the bottom of the Isis.
At length I gave way; left the university with my blessing and my debts;
and rushed up to London, as the grand _place d'armes_, the central spot
from which the enemy was excluded by the united strength, wit, and
wisdom of a million and a half of men. I might as well have staid
bird-nesting in Berkshire. I found the happiest contrivances against the
universal invader fail. Pigeon-matches; public dinners; coffee-houses;
bluestocking _reunions_; private morning quadrille practice, with public
evening exhibitions of their fruits; dilettanti breakfasts, with a
bronze Hercules standing among the bread and butter, or a reposing cast
of Venus, fresh from Pompeii, as black and nude as a negress disporting
on the banks of the Senegal, but dear and delicate to the eyes of taste;
Sunday mornings at Tattersal's, jockeying till the churches let out
their population, and the time for visits was come; and Sunday evening
routs at _the_ duchess's, with a cotillon by the _vraies danseuses_ of
the opera, followed by a concert, a round game, and a _select_ supper
for the initiated;--the whole failed. I had always an hour too
much--sixty mortal minutes, and every one of them an hour in itself,
that I could never squeeze down.
"Ye gods, annihilate both space and time,
And make two lovers happy,"
may have been called a not over-modest request; but I can vouch for at
least one half of it being the daily prayer of some thousands of the
best-dressed people that the sun ever summoned to a day of twenty-four
hours long. On feeling the symptoms of this horary visitation, I
regularly rushed into the streets, on the principle that some
alleviation of misery is always to be found in fellow-suffering. This
maxim I invariably found false, like every other piece of the boasted
wisdom of mankind. I found the suffering infinitely increased by the
association with my fellow-fashionables. A man might as well have fled
from his chamber to enjoy comfort in the wards of an hospital. In one of
my marches up and down the _pavé_ of St. James's Street, that treadmill
of gentlemen convicted in the penalty of having nothing to do, I lounged
into the little hotel of the Guards, that stands beside the great hotel
of the gamblers, like a babe under its mamma's wing--the likeness
admirable, though the scale diminutive. That "hour too many," cost me
three games of billiards, my bachelor's house, and one thousand pounds.
This price of sixty minutes startled me a little; and, for a week, I
meditated with some seriousness on the superior gaiety of a life spent
in paving the streets, driving a wagon, or answering the knocker of a
door. But the "hour" again overflowed me. I was walking it off in Regent
Street, when an old fellow-victim met me, and prescribed a trot to
Newmarket. The prescription was taken, and the hour was certainly got
rid of. But the remedy was costly; for my betting-book left me minus ten
thousand pounds. I returned to town like a patient from a
watering-place; relieved of every thing but the disease that took me
there. My last shilling remained among the noble blacklegs; but nothing
could rob me of a fragment of my superfluous time, and I brought even a
tenfold allowance of it back. But every disease has a crisis; and when a
lounge through the streets became at once useless and inconvenient--when
the novelty of being cut by all my noble friends, and of being seduously
followed by that generation who, unlike the fickle world, reserve their
tipstaff attentions for the day of adversity, had lost its zest, and I
was thinking whether time was to be better fought off by a plunge to the
bottom of the Thames, or by the muzzle of one of Manton's hair-
triggers--I was saved by a plunge into the King's Bench. There life was
new, friendship was undisguised, my coat was not an object of scorn, my
exploits were fashion, my duns were inadmissible, and my very captors
were turned into my humble servants. There, too, my nature, always
social, had its full indulgence; for there I found, rather to my
surprise, nine-tenths of my most accomplished acquaintance. But the
enemy still made his way; and I had learned to yawn, in spite of
billiards and ball-playing, when _the_ Act let me loose into the great
world again. Good-luck, too, had prepared a surprise for my _debut_. I
had scarcely exhibited myself in the streets, when I discovered that
every man of my _set_ was grown utterly blind whenever I happened to
walk on the same side of the way, and that I might as well have been
buried a century. I was absurd enough to be indignant; for nothing can
be more childish than any delicacy when a man cannot bet on the rubber.
But one morning a knock came to my attic-door which startled me by its
professional vigour. An attorney entered. I had now nothing to fear, for
the man whom no one will trust cannot well be in debt; and for once I
faced an attorney without a palpitation. His intelligence was
flattering. An old uncle of mine, who had worn out all that was human
about him in amassing fifty thousand pounds, and finally died of
starving himself, had expired with the pen in his hand, in the very act
of leaving his thousands to pay the national debt. But fate, propitious
to me, had dried up his ink-bottle; the expense of replenishing it would
have broken his heart of itself; and the attorney's announcement to me
was, that the will, after blinding the solicitor to the treasury and
three of his clerks, was pronounced to be altogether illegible.
The fact that I was the nearest of kin got into the newspapers; and in
my first drive down St. James's, I had the pleasure of discovering that
I had cured a vast number of my friends of their calamitous defect of
vision. But if the "post equitem sedet atra cura" was the maxim in the
days of Augustus, the man who drives the slower cabriolet in the days of
George the Fourth, cannot expect to escape. The "hour too many" overtook
me in the first week. On one memorable evening I saw it coming, just as
I turned the corner of Piccadilly; fair flight was hopeless, and I took
refuge in that snug asylum on the right hand of St. James's Street,
which has since expanded into a palace. I stoutly battled the foe, for I
"took no note of time" during the next day and night; and when at last I
walked forth into the air, I found that I had relieved myself of the
burden of three-fourths of my reversion. A weak mind on such an occasion
would have cursed the cards, and talked of taking care of the fragment
of his property; but mine was of the higher order, and I determined on
revenge. I had my revenge, and saw my winners ruined. They had their
consolation, and at the close of a six months' campaign saw me walk into
the streets a beggar. I grew desperate, and was voted dangerous. I
realized the charge by fastening on a noble lord who had been one of the
most adroit in pigeoning me. His life was "too valuable to his country,"
or himself, to allow him to meet a fellow whose life was of no use to
any living thing; and through patriotism and the fear of being shot, he
kept out of my way. I raged, threatened to post his lordship, and was in
the very act of writing out the form of the placard declaring the noble
heir of the noble house of ---- a cheat and a scoundrel, when by the
twopenny-post I received a notice from the Horse Guards that I was on
that day to appear in the Gazette as an ensign in his majesty's ----
regiment, then serving in the Peninsula, with orders to join without
delay. This was enough from his lordship, and was certainly better for
me than running the chance of damages in the King's Bench, for provoking
his majesty's subjects to a breach of the peace.
I was gazetted, tried on my uniform before the mirror, entirely approved
of my appearance, and wrote my last letter to my last flirt. The
Portsmouth mail was to start at eight. I had an hour to spare, and
sallied into the street. I met an honest-faced old acquaintance as much
at a loss as myself to slay the hour. We were driven by a shower into
shelter. The rattle of dice was heard within a green-baize-covered door.
We could not stay for ever shivering on the outside. Fortune favoured
me; in half an hour I was master of a thousand pounds; it would have
been obvious folly and ingratitude to check the torrent of success for
the paltry prospects of an ensigncy. I played on, and won on. The clock
struck eight. I will own that I trembled as the first sound caught my
ear. But whether nervous or not, from that instant the torrent was
checked. The loss and gain became alternate. Wine was brought in; I
played in furious scorn of consequences. I saw the board covered with
gold. I swept it into my stake; I soon saw my stake reduced to nothing.
My eyes were dazzled, my hand shook, my brain was on fire, I sang,
danced, roared with exultation or despair. How the night closed, I know
not; but I found myself at last in a narrow room, surrounded with
squalidness, its only light from a high-barred window, and its only
furniture the wooden tressel on which I lay, fierce, weary, and
feverish, as if I lay on the rack. From this couch of the desperate, I
was carried into the presence of a magistrate, to hear that in the
_mélée_ of the night before, I had in my rage charged my honest-faced
acquaintance with palpable cheating; and having made good my charge by
shewing the loaded dice in his hand, had knocked him down with a
violence that made his recovery more than doubtful. He had seen my name
in the Gazette, and had watched me for the express purpose of final
plunder. The wretch died. I was brought to trial, found guilty of
manslaughter, and sentenced to seven years' expatriation. Fortunate
sentence! On my arrival in New South Wales, as I was found a perfect
gentleman, and fit for nothing, there was no resource but to make me try
the labour of my hands. Fortunate labour! From six at morning till six
at night, I had the spade or the plough in my hands. I dragged carts, I
delved rocks, I hewed trees; I had not a moment to spare. The appetite
that once grew languid over venison, now felt the exquisite delight of
junk beef. The thirst that scorned champagne was now enraptured with
spring water. The sleep that had left me many a night tossing
within-side the curtains of a hundred-and-fifty-guinea Parisian bed, now
came on the roughest piece of turf, and made the planks of my cabin
softer than down. I can now run as fast as one of my Newmarket stud,
pull down a buffalo, and catch a kangaroo by the tail in fair field.
Health, vigour, appetite, and activity, are my superabundance now. I
have every thing but time. My banishment expires to-morrow; but I shall
never recross the sea. This is my country. Since I set my foot upon its
shore I have never had a moment to yawn. In this land of real and
substantial life, the spectre that haunted my joyless days dares not be
seen--the "hour too many" is no more.
_The Forget-Me-Not_.
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