ONE WHO WAS NOT SO WISE AS HIS FRIENDS COULD HAVE WISHED, AND YET
QUITE AS HAPPY AS IF HE HAD BEEN WISER. NEPOTISM NOT CONFINED TO
POPES.
There are of madmen as there are of tame,
All humoured not alike.———Some
Apish and fantastic;
And though 'twould grieve a soul to see God's image
So blemished and defaced, yet do they act
Such antic and such pretty lunacies,
That spite of sorrow, they will make you smile.
DEKKER.
William Dove was Daniel's only surviving brother, seven years his
junior. He was born with one of those heads in which the thin
partition that divides great wits from folly is wanting. Had he come
into the world a century sooner, he would have been taken _nolens
volens_ into some Baron's household, to wear motley, make sport for
the guests and domestics, and live in fear of the rod. But it was his
better fortune to live in an age when this calamity rendered him
liable to no such oppression, and to be precisely in that station
which secured for him all the enjoyments of which he was capable, and
all the care he needed. In higher life, he would probably have been
consigned to the keeping of strangers who would have taken charge of
him for pay; in a humbler degree he must have depended upon the parish
for support; or have been made an inmate of one of those moral
lazar-houses in which age and infancy, the harlot and the idiot, the
profligate and the unfortunate are herded together.
William Dove escaped these aggravations of calamity. He escaped also
that persecution to which he would have been exposed in populous
places where boys run loose in packs, and harden one another in
impudence, mischief and cruelty. Natural feeling, when natural feeling
is not corrupted, leads men to regard persons in his condition with a
compassion not unmixed with awe. It is common with the country people
when they speak of such persons to point significantly at the head and
say _'tis not all there_;—words denoting a sense of the mysteriousness
of our nature which perhaps they feel more deeply on this than on any
other occasion. No outward and visible deformity can make them so
truly apprehend how fearfully and wonderfully we are made.
William Dove's was not a case of fatuity. Though _all_ was not there,
there was a great deal. He was what is called _half-saved_. Some of
his faculties were more than ordinarily acute, but the power of self
conduct was entirely wanting in him. Fortunately it was supplied by a
sense of entire dependence which produced entire docility. A dog does
not obey his master more dutifully than William obeyed his brother;
and in this obedience there was nothing of fear; with all the strength
and simplicity of a child's love, it had also the character and merit
of a moral attachment.
The professed and privileged Fool was generally characterized by a
spice of knavery, and not unfrequently of maliciousness: the unnatural
situation in which he was placed, tended to excite such propensities
and even to produce them. William had shrewdness enough for the
character, but nothing of this appeared in his disposition; ill-usage
might perhaps have awakened it, and to a fearful degree, if he had
proved as sensible to injury as he was to kindness. But he had never
felt an injury. He could not have been treated with more tenderness in
Turkey (where a degree of holiness is imputed to persons in his
condition) than was uniformly shewn him within the little sphere of
his perambulations. It was surprizing how much he had picked up within
that little sphere. Whatever event occurred, whatever tale was
current, whatever traditions were preserved, whatever superstitions
were believed, William knew them all; and all that his insatiable ear
took in, his memory hoarded. Half the proverbial sayings in Ray's
volume were in his head, and as many more with which Ray was
unacquainted. He knew many of the stories which our children are now
receiving as novelties in the selections from Grimm's _Kinder- und
Haus-Marchen_, and as many of those which are collected in the Danish
Folk-Sagn. And if some zealous lover of legendary lore, (like poor
John Leyden, or Sir Walter Scott) had fallen in with him, the
Shakesperian commentators might perhaps have had the whole story of
St. Withold; the Wolf of the World's End might have been identified
with Fenris and found to be a relic of the Scalds: and Rauf Collyer
and John the Reeve might still have been as well known as Adam Bell,
and Clym of the Clough and William of Cloudeslie.
William had a great fondness for his nephew. Let not Protestants
suppose that Nepotism is an affection confined to the dignitaries of
the Roman Catholic Church. In its excess indeed it is peculiarly a
Papal vice,—which is a degree higher than a Cardinal one; but like
many other sins it grows out of the corruption of a good feeling. It
may be questioned whether fond uncles are not as numerous as unkind
ones, notwithstanding our recollections of King Richard and the
Children in the Wood. We may use the epithet nepotious for those who
carry this fondness to the extent of doting, and as expressing that
degree of fondness it may be applied to William Dove: he was a
nepotious uncle. The father regarded young Daniel with a deeper and
more thoughtful, but not with a fonder affection, not with such a
doting attachment. Dinah herself, though a fond as well as careful
mother did not more thoroughly
———delight to hear
Her early child mis-speak half-uttered words;[1]
and perhaps the boy so long as he was incapable of distinguishing
between their moral qualities, and their relative claims to his
respect and love and duty, loved his uncle most of the three. The
father had no idle hours; in the intervals when he was not otherwise
employed, one of his dear books usually lay open before him, and if he
was not feeding upon the page, he was ruminating the food it had
afforded him. But William Dove from the time that his nephew became
capable of noticing and returning caresses seemed to have concentered
upon him all his affections. With children affection seldom fails of
finding its due return; and if he had not thus won the boy's heart in
infancy, he would have secured it in childhood by winning his ear with
these marvellous stories. But he possessed another talent which would
alone have made him a favourite with children,—the power of imitating
animal sounds with singular perfection. A London manager would have
paid him well for performing the cock in Hamlet. He could bray in
octaves to a nicety, set the geese gabbling by addressing them in
their own tongue, and make the turkey-cock spread his fan, brush his
wing against the ground, and angrily gob-gobble in answer to a gobble
of defiance. But he prided himself more upon his success with the
owls, as an accomplishment of more difficult attainment. In this Mr.
Wordsworth's boy of Winander was not more perfect. Both hands were
used as an instrument in producing the notes; and if Pope could have
heard the responses which came from barn and doddered oak and ivied
crag, he would rather, (satirist as he was,) have left Ralph
unsatirized, than have vilified one of the wildest and sweetest of
nocturnal sounds.
[Footnote 1: DONNE.]
He was not less expert to a human ear in hitting off the wood-pigeon's
note, though he could not in this instance provoke a reply. This sound
he used to say ought to be natural to him, and it was wrong in the
bird not to acknowledge his relation. Once when he had made too free
with a lasses lips, he disarmed his brother of a reprehensive look, by
pleading that as his name was William Dove it behoved him both to
_bill_ and to _coo_.