MORE CONCERNING THE AFORESAID TOBACCONIST.
I doubt nothing at all but that you shall like the man every day
better than other; for verily I think he lacketh not of those
qualities which should become any honest man to have, over and besides
the gift of nature wherewith God hath above the common rate endued
him.
ARCHBISHOP CRANMER.
Mr. Allison was as quiet a subject as Peter Hopkins, but he was not
like him a political quietist from indifference, for he had a warm
sense of loyalty, and a well rooted attachment to the constitution of
his country in church and state. His ancestors had suffered in the
Great Rebellion, and much the greater part of their never large
estates had been alienated to raise the fines imposed upon them as
delinquents. The uncle whom he succeeded in Bishopsgate Street, had,
in his early apprenticeship, assisted at burning the Rump, and in
maturer years had joined as heartily in the rejoicings, when the Seven
Bishops were released from the Tower: he subscribed to Walker's
“Account of the Sufferings of the Clergy,” and had heard sermons
preached by the famous Dr. Scott, (which were afterwards incorporated
in his great work upon the Christian Life,) in the church of St. Peter
le Poor (oddly so called, seeing that there are few districts within
the City of London so rich, insomuch that the last historian of the
metropolis believed the parish to have scarcely a poor family in it);
and in All-hallows, Lombard Street, where, during the reign of the
Godly, the puritanical vestry passed a resolution that if any persons
should come to the church “on the day called Christ's birth-day,” they
should be compelled to leave it.
In these principles Mr. Allison had grown up; and without any
profession of extra-religion, or ever wearing a sanctified face, he
had in the evening of his life attained “the end of the commandment,
which is charity, proceeding from a pure heart, and a good conscience,
and a faith unfeigned.” London in his days was a better school for
young men in trade than it ever was before, or has been since. The
civic power had quietly and imperceptibly put an end to that club-law
which once made the apprentices a turbulent and formidable body, at
any moment armed as well as ready for a riot; and masters exercised a
sort of parental controul over the youth entrusted to them, which in
later times it may be feared has not been so conscientiously exerted,
because it is not likely to be so patiently endured. Trade itself had
not then been corrupted by that ruinous spirit of competition, which,
more than any other of the evils now pressing upon us, deserves to be
called the curse of England in the present age. At all times men have
been to be found, who engaged in hazardous speculations,
gamester-like, according to their opportunities, or who mistaking the
means for the end, devoted themselves with miserable fidelity to the
service of Mammon. But “Live and let live,” had not yet become a maxim
of obsolete morality. We had our monarchy, our hierarchy and our
aristocracy,—God be praised for the benefits which have been derived
from all three, and God in his mercy continue them to us! but we had
no plutarchy, no millionaires, no great capitalists to break down the
honest and industrious trader with the weight of their overbearing and
overwhelming wealth. They who had enriched themselves in the course of
regular and honourable commerce, withdrew from business, and left the
field to others. Feudal tyranny had past away, and moneyed tyranny had
not yet arisen in its stead—a tyranny baser in its origin, not more
merciful in its operations, and with less in its appendages to redeem
it.
Trade in Mr. Allison's days was a school of thrift and probity, as
much as of profit and loss; such his shop had been when he succeeded
to it upon his uncle's decease, and such it continued to be when he
transmitted it to his son. Old Mr. Strahan the printer (the founder of
his typarchical dynasty) said to Dr. Johnson, that “there are few ways
in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money;”
and he added, that “the more one thinks of this, the juster it will
appear.” Johnson agreed with him; and though it was a money-maker's
observation, and though the more it is considered now, the more
fallacious it will be found, the general system of trade might have
justified it at that time. The entrance of an Exciseman never
occasioned any alarm or apprehension at No. 113, Bishopsgate
Street-Within, nor any uncomfortable feeling, unless the officer
happened to be one, who, by giving unnecessary trouble, and by
gratuitous incivility in the exercise of authority, made an equitable
law odious in its execution. They never there mixed weeds with their
tobacco, nor adulterated it in any worse way; and their snuff was
never rendered more pungent by stirring into it a certain proportion
of pounded glass. The duties were honestly paid, with a clear
perception that the impost fell lightly upon all whom it affected, and
affected those only who chose to indulge themselves in a pleasure
which was still cheap, and which, without any injurious privation,
they might forego. Nay, when our good man expatiated upon the uses of
tobacco, which Mr. Bacon demurred at, and the Doctor sometimes
playfully disputed, he ventured an opinion that among the final causes
for which so excellent an herb had been created, the facilities
afforded by it toward raising the revenue in a well-governed country
like our own, might be one.
There was a strong family likeness between him and his sister, both in
countenance and disposition. Elizabeth Allison was a person for whom
the best and wisest man might have thanked Providence, if she had been
allotted to him for help-mate. But though she had, in Shakspeare's
language, “withered on the virgin thorn,” hers had not been a life of
single blessedness: she had been a blessing first to her parents; then
to her brother and her brother's family, where she relieved an
amiable, but sickly sister-in-law, from those domestic offices which
require activity and forethought; lastly, after the dispersion of his
sons, the transfer of the business to the eldest, and the breaking up
of his old establishment, to the widower and his daughter, the only
child who cleaved to him,—not like Ruth to Naomi, by a meritorious act
of duty, for in her case it was in the ordinary course of things,
without either sacrifice or choice; but the effect in endearing her to
him was the same.
In advanced stages of society, and no where more than in England at
this time, the tendency of all things is to weaken the relations
between parent and child, and frequently to destroy them, reducing
human nature in this respect nearer to the level of animal life.
Perhaps the greater number of male children who are “born into the
world” in our part of it, are _put out_ at as early an age,
proportionally, as the young bird is driven from its nest, or the
young beast turned off by its dam as being capable of feeding and
protecting itself; and in many instances they are as totally lost to
the parent, though not in like manner forgotten. Mr. Allison never saw
all his children together after his removal from London. The only time
when his three sons met at the Grange, was when they came there to
attend their father's funeral; nor would they then have been
assembled, if the Captain's ship had not happened to have recently
arrived in port.
This is a state of things more favorable to the wealth than to the
happiness of nations. It was a natural and pious custom in patriarchal
times that the dead should be gathered unto their people. “Bury me,”
said Jacob, when he gave his dying charge to his sons,—“bury me with
my fathers, in the cave that is in the field of Machpelah, which is
before Mamre in the land of Canaan, which Abraham bought with the
field of Ephron the Hittite, for a possession of a burying place.
There they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife; there they buried Isaac
and Rebecca his wife; and there I buried Leah.” Had such a passage
occurred in Homer, or in Dante, all critics would have concurred in
admiring the truth and beauty of the sentiment. He had buried his
beloved Rachel by the way where she died; but although he remembered
this at his death, the orders which he gave were that his own remains
should be laid in the sepulchre of his fathers. The same feeling
prevails among many, or most of those savage tribes who are not
utterly degraded. With them the tree is not left to lie where it
falls. The body of one who dies on an expedition is interred on the
spot, if distance or other circumstances render it inconvenient to
transport the corpse; but however long the journey, it is considered
as a sacred duty that the bones should at some time or other be
brought home. In Scotland, where the common rites of sepulture are
performed with less decency than in any other Christian country, the
care with which family burial-grounds in the remoter parts are
preserved, may be referred as much to natural feeling, as to
hereditary pride.
But as indigenous flowers are eradicated by the spade and plough, so
this feeling is destroyed in the stirring and bustling intercourse of
commercial life. No room is left for it: as little of it at this time
remains in wide America as in thickly peopled England. That to which
soldiers and sailors are reconciled by the spirit of their profession
and the chances of war and of the seas, the love of adventure and the
desire of advancement cause others to regard with the same
indifference; and these motives are so prevalent, that the dispersion
of families and the consequent disruption of natural ties, if not
occasioned by necessity, would now in most instances be the effect of
choice. Even those to whom it is an inevitable evil, and who feel it
deeply as such, look upon it as something in the appointed course of
things, as much as infirmity and age and death.
It is well for us that in early life we never think of the
vicissitudes which lie before us; or look to them only with
pleasurable anticipations as they approach.
Youth
Knows nought of changes: Age hath traced them oft,
Expects and can interpret them.[1]
The thought of them, when it comes across us in middle life, brings
with it only a transient sadness, like the shadow of a passing cloud.
We turn our eyes from them while they are in prospect, but when they
are in retrospect many a longing lingering look is cast behind. So
long as Mr. Allison was in business he looked to Thaxted Grange as the
place where he hoped one day to enjoy the blessings of
retirement,—that _otium cum dignitate_, which in a certain sense the
prudent citizen is more likely to attain than the successful
statesman. It was the pleasure of recollection that gave this hope its
zest and its strength. But after the object which during so many years
he had held in view, had been obtained, his day-dreams, if he had
allowed them to take their course, would have recurred more frequently
to Bishopsgate Street than they had ever wandered from thence to the
scenes of his boyhood. They recurred thither oftener than he wished,
although few men have been more masters of themselves; and then the
remembrance of his wife, whom he had lost by a lingering disease in
middle age; and of the children, those who had died during their
childhood, and those who in reality were almost as much lost to him in
the ways of the world, made him alway turn for comfort to the prospect
of that better state of existence in which they should once more all
be gathered together, and where there would be neither change nor
parting. His thoughts often fell into this train, when on summer
evenings he was taking a solitary pipe in his arbour, with the church
in sight, and the church yard wherein at no distant time he was to be
laid in his last abode. Such musings induced a sense of sober
piety,—of thankfulness for former blessings, contentment with the
present, and humble yet sure and certain hope for futurity, which
might vainly have been sought at prayer meetings, or evening lectures,
where indeed little good can ever be obtained without some deleterious
admixture, or alloy of baser feelings.
[Footnote 1: ISAAC COMMENUS.]
The happiness which he had found in retirement was of a different kind
from what he had contemplated: for the shades of evening were
gathering when he reached the place of his long-wished-for rest, and
the picture of it which had imprinted itself on his imagination was a
morning view. But he had been prepared for this by that slow change of
which we are not aware during its progress till we see it reflected in
others, and are thus made conscious of it in ourselves; and he found a
satisfaction in the station which he occupied there, too worthy in its
nature to be called pride, and which had not entered into his
anticipations. It is said to have been a saying of George the Third,
that the happiest condition in which an Englishman could be placed,
was just below that wherein it would have been necessary for him to
act as a Justice of the Peace, and above that which would have
rendered him liable to parochial duties. This was just Mr. Allison's
position: there was nothing which brought him into rivalry or
competition with the surrounding Squirarchy, and the yeomen and
peasantry respected him for his own character, as well as for his
name's-sake. He gave employment to more persons than when he was
engaged in trade, and his indirect influence over them was greater;
that of his sister was still more. The elders of the village
remembered her in her youth, and loved her for what she then had been
as well as for what she now was; the young looked up to her as the
Lady Bountiful, to whom no one that needed advice or assistance ever
applied in vain. She it was who provided those much approved
plum-cakes, not the less savoury for being both homely and wholesome,
the thought of which induced the children to look on to their Lent
examination with hope, and prepare for it with alacrity. Those offices
in a parish which are the province of the Clergyman's wife, when he
has made choice of one who knows her duty and has both will and
ability to discharge it, Miss Allison performed; and she rendered Mr.
Bacon the farther, and to him individually the greater service of
imparting to his daughter those instructions which she had no mother
to impart. Deborah could not have had a better teacher; but as the
present chapter has extended to a sufficient length,
_Diremo il resto in quel che vien dipoi,
Per non venire a noja a me e voi._[2]
[Footnote 2: ORLANDO INNAMORATO.]