RALPH GROWETH EGREGIOUSLY MODEST, AND BOASTETH IMMODERATELY, UNTIL HE IS
BEATEN BY ONE WITH ONE FOOT IN THE GRAVE; WITH SOMETHING TOUCHING THE
FEATS OF THE MAN WITHOUT FEET.
I find myself in a dilemma. My modesty (?) is at variance with my love
of verity. Oh, the inconvenience of that little pronoun, I! Would that
I had in the first instance imitated the wily conduct of the bald-pated
invader of Britain. How complacently might I not then have vaunted in
the beginning, have caracoled through the middle, and glorified myself
at the conclusion of this my autobiography! What a monstrous piece of
braggadocio would not Caesar's Commentaries have been, had he used the
first instead of the third person singular! How intolerable would have
been the presumption of his Thrasonical, "I thrashed the Helvetians--I
subjugated the Germans--I utterly routed the Gauls--I defeated the
painted Britons!" And, on the contrary--for I like to place heroes side
by side--how decorously and ingeniously might I not have written, "Ralph
Rattlin blackened Master Simpkin's left eye--Ralph Rattlin led on the
attack upon Farmer Russel's orchard, and Ralph Rattlin fought three
rounds, with no considerable disadvantage, with the long-legged pieman."
Alas! I cannot even shelter myself under the mistiness of the
peremptory _we_. I have made a great mistake. But I have this
consolation, in common with other great men, that, for our mistake, the
public will assuredly suffer more than ourselves. Many a choice
adventure, of which I was the hero, must be suppressed. _I_ should
blush myself black in the face to say what _he_ would relate with a very
quiet smile of self-satisfaction. However, as regrets are quite
unavailing, unless, like the undertaker's, they are paid for, I shall
exclaim, with the French soldier, who found his long military queue in
the hands of a pursuing English sailor, "Chivalry of the world,
_toujours en avant_!"
I now began to commit the sin of much verse, and, consequently, acquired
in the neighbouring village much notice. No chastising blow, or even
word of reproof fell upon me. My mind was fed upon praise, and my heart
nourished with caresses. In the school I had no equal, and my vanity
whispered that such was the case without. However, this vanity I did
not show, for I was humble from excessive pride.
There are two animals that are almost certain to be spoiled--a very
handsome young man, and the "cock of the school." Being certainly in
the latter predicament, I was only saved from becoming an utter and
egregious ass by the advent of one, the cleverest, most impudent,
rascally, agreeable scoundrel that ever swindled man or deceived woman,
in the shape of a wooden-legged usher. He succeeded my worthy friend of
the guitar, Mr Sigismund Pontifex. His name was Riprapton, and he only
wanted the slight requisite of common honesty to have made himself the
first man of any society in which fate might happen to cast him--and
fate had been pleased to cast him into a great many. He was a short,
compactly-made, symmetrically-formed man, with a countenance deeply
indented with the small-pox, and in every hole there was visibly
ensconced a little imp of audaciousness. His eyes were such intrepid
and quenchless lights of impudence, that they could look even Irish
_sang froid_ out of countenance. And then that inimitable wooden leg!
It was a perfect grace. As he managed it, it was irresistible. He did
not progress with a miserable, vulgar, dot-and-go-one kind of gait; he
neither hopped, nor halted, nor limped; and though he was wood from the
middle of his right thigh downwards, his walk might almost have been
called the poetry of motion. He never stumped, but he stole along with
a glissade that was the envy and admiration, not exactly of surrounding
nations, but of the dancing-master. It was a beautiful study to see him
walk, and I made myself master of it. The left leg was inimitably
formed; the calf was perhaps a little too round and Hibernian--a fault
gracious in the eyes of the fair sex; his ankle and foot were
exquisitely small and delicately turned; of course he always wore shorts
with immaculate white cotton or silk stockings.
I shall not distinguish the two legs by the terms, the living and the
dead one--it would be as great an injustice to the carved as to the
calfed one--for the former had a graceful life, _sui generis_, of its
own. I shall call them the pulsating and the gyrating leg, and now
proceed to describe how they bare along, in a manner so fascinating, the
living tabernacle of Mr Riprapton. The pulsator, with pointed toe and
gently turned calf, would make a progress in a direct line, but as the
sole touched the ground, the heel would slightly rise and then fall, and
whilst you were admiring the undulating grace of the pulsator,
unobserved and silently you would find the gyrator had stolen a march
upon you, and actually taken the _pas_ of its five-toed brother. One
leg marched and the other swam, in the prettiest semicircle imaginable.
When he stopped, the flourish of the gyrator was ineffable. The
drumstick in the hand of the big black drummer of the first regiment of
foot-guards was nothing to it. Whenever Riprapton bowed--and he was
always bowing--this flourish preluded and concluded the salutary bend.
It was making a leg indeed.
Many a time, both by ladies and gentlemen, he has been offered a cork
leg--but he knew better; had he accepted the treacherous gift he would
have appeared but as a lame man with two legs, now he was a perfect
Adonis with one. I do believe, in my conscience, that Cupid often made
use of this wooden appendage when he wished to befriend him, instead of
one of his own arrows, for he was really a marvellous favourite with the
ladies.
Well, no sooner had my friend with the peg made himself a fixture in the
school, than he took me down, not a peg or two, but a good half-dozen.
He ridiculed my poetry--he undervalued my drawing--he hit me through my
most approved guards at my fencing--he beat me hollow at hopping, though
it must be confessed that I had the advantage with two legs; but he was
again my master at "all-fours." He out-talked me immeasurably, he
out-bragged me most heroically, and out-lied me most inconceivably.
Knowing nothing either of Latin or Greek, they were beneath a
gentleman's notice, fit only for parsons and pedants; and he was too
patriotic to cast a thought away upon French. As he was engaged for the
arithmetical and mathematical departments, it would have been perhaps as
well if he had known a little of algebra and Euclid; but, as from the
first day he honoured me with a strict though patronising friendship, he
made me soon understand that we were to share this department of
knowledge in common. It was quite enough if one of the two knew
anything about the matter; besides, he thought that it improved me so
much to look over the problems and algebraical calculations of my
schoolfellows.
With this man I was continually measuring my strength; and as I
conceived that I found, myself woefully wanting, he proved an excellent
moral sedative to my else too rampant vanity. Few, indeed, were the
persons who could feel themselves at ease under the withering sarcasms
of his intolerable insolence. Much more to their astonishment than to
their instruction, he would very coolly, and the more especially when
ladies were present, correct the divinity of the parson, the pharmacy of
the doctor, and the law of the attorney; and with that placid air of
infallibility that carried conviction to all but his opponents.
Once, at a very large evening party, I heard him arguing strenuously,
and very triumphantly, against a veteran captain of a merchant-ship, who
had circumnavigated the world with Cook, that the degrees of longitude
were equal in length all over the world, be they more or less--for he
never descended to details--and that the further south you sailed the
hotter it grew, though the worthy old seaman pointed to what remained of
his nose, the end of which had been nipped off by cold, and consequent
mortification, in the anti-arctic regions. As Riprapton flourished his
wooden index, in the midst of his brilliant peroration, he told the
honest seaman that he had not a _leg_ to stand upon; and all the ladies,
and some of the gentlemen, too, cried out with one accord, "O fie,
Captain Headman, now don't be so obstinate--surely you are quite
mistaken." And the arch-master of impudence looked round with modest
suavity, and, in an audible whisper, assured the gentleman that sat next
to him, that Captain Headman's argument of the demolished proboscis went
for nothing, for that there were other causes equally efficacious as
cold and frost, for destroying gentlemen's noses.
In the sequel, this very learned tutor had to instruct me in navigation.
Nothing was too high or too low for him. Had any persons wished to
have taken lessons in judicial astrology, Mr Riprapton would not have
refused the pupil. Plausible ignorance will always beat awkward
knowledge, when the ignorant, which is generally the case, make up the
mass of the audience.