Aged thirty, from St. Mary’s Cray, Kent. This poor fellow was a
journeyman paper-maker near the village he came from, with a family of
a wife and three children. But jealousy, whether founded or not, seems
to have originated his malady: for according to his own incoherent
story, his faithless rib deserted and left him, without the cheering
comforts of a partner in his conjugal cares. His misfortunes having
driven him from manufacturing paper, he has commenced a new trade
since he came in here, of which his imagination is both the source
and the market. In fact, he has established, in his own notion, a
very thriving trade in hops and corn, and deals very largely in those
commodities. He is always as busy in the airing ground here, in looking
out for customers, as if he were in the Southwark hop-market, or in the
Corn Exchange, Mark-lane. “Come,” he will say to a fellow-maniac, “I
can let you have ten tons of hops to-day very reasonable; or I can put
you in a few hundred quarters of wheat well worth your money--come, I
will not be hard with you, if you will make me any reasonable offer.”
When he followed the paper trade he could earn, in his own notion, more
money in an hour than two other men in a day, and was always “singly
equal to eight men in a week.” He is not of that irritable cast, like
others, in whom the ardour of the mind emaciates the body; for he is
as fat and unwieldy as if he still moved amongst all the plenty and
strong ale of his native country, and had no other occupation than
the amusements of food and drink. He has no activity, and takes but
little exercise, except now and then when he takes a dancing fit,
in which his motions fall not much short of the grace and vivacity
of an accomplished bear. He is incorrigibly addicted to dirt and
slovenliness, and generally has his bosom and his hat crammed with
samples--not of hops or wheat, but of straw, bones, pebble-stones,
flannel, linen rags, wooden spoons, bread, old handkerchiefs, and filth
of every sort that he can pick up: and these are the commodities he
exhibits for sale to his customers as hops and wheat, in the gallery
and airing ground. But he is perfectly quiet and harmless: and if it be
true that “happiness exists only in the mind,” and that “content is a
kingdom,” this poor Savage is quite a monarch in his way.