be known, once for all, that it was like neither a toad, nor a spider,
nor a viper, nor a snail, nor a black beetle, nor a newt, but something
between the size of a crocodile and a cricket. And as for the manner of
its going, it either flew, or swam, or hopped, or crawled, or lay still
like an oyster, for the Newgate Calendar does not say which. Why it
was not a monkey, or a tortoise, or a marmot, Tonio being an Italian,
you must ask of the Foreign Secretary at the Court of the King of the
Beggars.
May I transmigrate--when Brahma passes my soul into the parish of St.
Brute--may I transmigrate, I say, into a butcher’s daughter’s pet-lamb,
if it was not a piteous sight to see Tonio going off between the two
law terriers to have an hour’s wearing of that last cravat, which never
goes to a laundress, but always hangs upon a line of its own. It must
be owned, that he had his whim, but for all the whims that ever were
whimmed I wouldn’t have had his crick i’ the neck. Let me, I say, stand
on terra firma; I’m content with the look-out I have of life without
coveting a bird’s-eye view. Old Haman, when he was forty cubits high,
had not a better prospect of this world than I have from the ground
floor. Poor Tonio! It was a sorry sight; and if I didn’t pity him, from
my soul, may I be an hour behind time for seeing the next hanging bout,
and all through getting, by mistake, into a blunderbus. A blunderbus,
my masters, is the wrong omnibus.
[Illustration: A LEGAL CONVEYANCE.]
Well, law took its course as usual, that is to say, like a greyhound
after a hare. Tony was put up, so-ho’d, run after, run over, run
before, turned, tumbled and mumbled, scud and scut, and gripped by
the jugulars. But that’s a scurvy simile to another I have, lapped up
in pancakes, so give the calendar a shove backwards, and suppose it
Shrovetide, and poor Tony stuck up in dock by way of a shy-cock for the
law limbs to shy at. You never saw such pelting in your life; no, not
even when St. Swithin took it into her watery head to rain cats and
dogs! First, the Foreman of the Grand Jury jerked a true bill at him,
that took effect on his head. Thereupon the Clerk of Arraigns pitched a
heavy indictment in his very teeth, so that it shivered into thirteen
separate counts. Then the Council for the Crown heaved a brief of forty
folios into the pit of his stomach; anon opening a masked battery, he
threw in sworn witnesses in a volley like bombshells, and when they
exploded there flew out from them two melting pots, four moulds, nine
bulls, and seven-and-twenty hogs, and every hog of them weighed in
evidence upwards of ninety stone. Finally, the Chief Pitcher himself
pitched at him his great wig, and his fur gown, and his gold chain,
and his mace, and his great inkstand, and the King’s crown, and the
lion and the unicorn, everything in short he could catch up, and then,
taking both hands, he heaved at him the Statutes at Large; not content
with which he took next to pelt him with pairs of missiles at once. For
instance, a horse and a hurdle, a gallows and a halter, a shovel-hat
and a condemned sermon, a last dying speech and an elm coffin, and,
last of all, may I die of the pip the next time I eat oranges, if he
didn’t cast at him the whole steeple of St. Sepulchre, death-bell and
all, as if it had been only a snow-ball.
[Illustration: THROWING THE LASSO.]
Never was St. Stephen so pelted. No wonder in the world, that under
such a huge heap of rubbish, he became utterly dumbfounded, bamboozled,
obfuscated, mizmazed, spifflicated, flummockst, and flabbergasted;
seeing which the Chief Pitcher, as usual, enquired whether he had
the infinitesimal of a word to say against being strangled into a
blackamoor, with the very eyes of his head giving notice to quit.
What matter that Tony had a bramble in his mind, that bore reasons
like blackberries, and ripe ones too; as for example, that a tight
rope round the gullet is very bad for the health, and particularly
when one’s health requires to take pills, or even boluses, three
times a day? I say, he might have given a thousand such reasonable
reasons against hanging, but the very momentous minute of opening his
mouth, the Chief Pitcher pitched into it a prodigious great bung,
as dab and apt and cleverly as if he had played at nothing else but
chuck-farthing and pitch-in-the-hole ever since he was fourteen. So
the mummy of silence being preserved, the Merlinising began, and hey
presto! before you could say Herman Boaz, the big wig was turned into
a black cap! After that you may tell the world that our Judges are no
conjurors. Thus the trial ended, and Tony’s sentence, as taken in the
hieroglyphical short-hand, ran thus: namely, “that he was to be sent on
a Black Monday to the Deaf and Dumb School that is kept in a coffin.”
All this time, mark you, he had the whim with him in the dock, and
to look at it now and then seemed his only comfort in life,--how it
whisked and frisked, and looked about it, and fed heartily, as if there
had been no such thing as law or law-cats in the blessed world; and
when Tony went back, like a volume of felony, to be bound in stone,
the whim still went with him to his cell, and from his cell to the
press-room, and from the press-room to the debtor’s door, and from the
debtor’s door to death’s door itself, which opens on the scaffold, as
you turn off to the right hand or the left, in your way to nobody knows
where. To take such a whim of a reptile with one to the gallows, seems
whimsical enough; but the Emperor Adrian, if you read the classics,
had such a vagabondish, blandish, little animal, his animula vagula
blandula, to be with him on his death-bed.
Well, Friday came, and Saturday, and Sunday, and Sunday’s night; he was
posting to eternity with four bolters. I will bet the whole national
debt he would have given eighteen-pence a mile, and half-a-crown to the
boy, to have been posting on any other road. All the favour the law
allowed him was to have an Ordinary at eight instead of an ordinary at
one, a very ordinary favour to a man who was about to leave off dining.
But the devil ought to have his due, and so should the Lord Mayor and
the Sheriffs. As they had neglected Tony a little, by not being with
the other gossips at his christening, to usher him into this world,
they attended very ceremoniously to show him out of it, each in his
gilt coach; and, with regard to the coachmen, the footmen, and even
the very horses themselves, they were all Malthusians. Of course the
Recorder brought the hanging-warrant, and if you would know what the
hanging-warrant was like, it was like a map of _Cheshire_ with the
_Mersey_ left out.
I forgot to tell you, that before it came to this pass, the Ordinary
came oftentimes to the cell where Tony was, to pray, besides whom there
was an Extraordinary, who examined him on his points of faith. And the
points of faith were these; namely, whether he believed the moon to be
of green cheese, and as to the size of the mites thereon. Secondly, if
he believed the puppet-play of Punch and Judy to be a type of the fall
of Nineveh; and, thirdly, concerning the lions in Pilgrim’s Progress,
whether they were bred at Mr. Wombwell’s or Mr. Cross’s, or at the
Tower of London. To all of which Tony giving decidedly serious answers,
he was pronounced fit to die, and quite prepared to have his neck
stretched, as long as the throttle of a claret-bottle when the wine is
ropy.
Accordingly, on the morning of Monday, Time laid his long hand upon
Tony’s collar, and gave him eight distinct hints that his hour was
come for being ornithologised by sentence of the great Law Bird, genus
Black-cap, into jail bird, genus Wryneck. Never was there such mobbing
to see a hanging. Half the Londoners that morning went without their
breakfasts to be in time for the Old Bailey. Trot, trot, trot, canter
and full gallop; away through Piccadilly; push on there, in the Strand,
hey down Holborn Hill, with a yoicks in Cheapside, and a hark forward
in Newgate Street, and a tally ho! in West Smithfield. They all meant
to be in at the death. Never was there such a race, to see a man whose
race was run losing it by a neck. And the order of the running was
thus:--The Royal Humane Society got in first at the Drop, and had an
excellent front row. The Society for Preventing Cruelty to Animals
was a good second; and may I die, if the Law Life Assurance hadn’t
the assurance to come third. Next came the Philanthropic Society,
with the Society of Good Samaritans barely a length behind; and then
the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, neck and neck with the
London Benevolent Society; all racing till they panted again, to see
Tony put out of breath. You never saw such a chevy! Luckily there was
no Anniversary at St. Paul’s, so the Sons of the Clergy cantered in
with all the children of all the parishes that had any charity, to see
an execution put in for the debt of Nature. Also the Medical Society
came to see one die by the New Dropsy; and all the Knights of the
Garter, with their orders, _it being a collar-day_, wherefore they wore
their garters according to the fashion of Miss Bailey; and all the
Foreign Ambassadors. Seeing which, Tony put on a good face, and walked
stoutly up the ladder, saying softly to himself, “the eyes of Europe
are upon you.” All being ready, with the Ordinary on the right hand,
and the Extraordinary on the left, and the Great Constrictor a little
behind, Tony (who had his whim with him) was asked how he felt himself,
and how his father and mother did, and all his little brothers and
sisters; to which he answered thankfully, that they were all very well,
and that for his own part, he felt very comfortable, and died in the
faith of St. Vitus. Now the faith of St. Vitus is not exactly the faith
of the Church of England, nor, in faith, do I well know what faith
it is; but the Ordinary took no objection to it, for he was a man in
favour of universal toleration, remembering the saying of the heathen
Priest of Apollo to the Bishop of Magnum Bonum, “You have _your_
thology, and let me have _my_thology.” So the Ordinary held his peace,
but the Extraordinary would fain have argued the point regularly and
methodically, according to the dogmatical manner of Cerberus, namely,
in a discourse with three heads; and if he had once begun to spin the
triple yarn of controversy, prosyversy, and viceversy into a cable,
there is no saying on oath whether the other rope might have been used
to this day. Seeing, therefore, how matters stood, Master Strangulator
pushed in, with an elbowing manner, and began begging pardon of Tony
for the part he was about to perform, who forgave him very readily,
requesting him moreover to shake hands, and by Gog and Magog, such a
shake was never shaked since the Shakers became a sect!
At the first grapple of their fingers, the Strangulator pulled away his
hand with a jerk, as if a bear’s palm had been palmed upon him instead
of a human paw. Then, after making a frightful face, he gave a mighty
great spring or vault upwards, a deal higher than the gallows, when,
on coming down, he alighted with his legs a-straddle upon the beam,
where he kept posturing for some five minutes; now rowing with his
arms and legs, like a fish, now hanging with his head downwards, first
by one leg and then by the other, then by one hand, and then again
by his chin; you never saw a rope-dancer or tumbler of them all, at
Bartlemy’s or Astley’s, more nimble. Then coming down to the stage with
a bound, he threw three summersets forward, and then three backwards,
as quick as thought. Anon, after standing for a minute in the first
position, he fell a-dancing with all his might and main, and as fast
as he could lift his feet, like a bear upon a hotted floor. Never was
such a spring danced round about the gallows-tree; Gilderoy was a fool
to him. You may guess how the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs, and the Ordinary
and Extraordinary, stared at such a caper, till their eyes grew as big
as owls’; and still more when they saw Tony, after making a round O
of his mouth, fall to bouncing and bounding like another Oscar Byrne!
Shade of Holbein, what a Dance of Death! Only think of Jack Ketch and
the condemned dancing face to face on the drop, now poussetting, now
setting to each other, now allemanding, now waltzing, and then, Father
of Vestris, what a tableau! Tony figuring, opera-fashion, on one leg,
with Cheshire poising on tip-toe on the calf of the other! As for his
whim, it was jerked out of the box at the first frisk, and had enough
to do, you may be sure, to scuttle out of the way of the skipping and
hopping; as it was, the poor reptile got more kicks than ha’pence.
In the meantime the Humanes, and the Samaritans, and the
Benevolents, and the rest of the mob, did not stand and look on
quite as mum as if it had been an overbrimming Quaker’s meeting,
with a collection afterwards at the door for the Deaf and Dumb.
They chuckled, and crowed, and laughed till they brayed again;
and roared, and bellowed, and shouted, and shrieked like hyænas
in hysterics. “Huzza! huzzaw! Go it, Jack! That’s your sort
encore--ancore--anker--ancoore,--bravo--brawvo--bravoo--brawvoo!
Well done Tony--Tony for ever--Tony for my money!--keep it up! It’s
better than dancing upon nothing.” If Laporte had been there, who
knows what offer he might have made them; for Taglioni herself never
danced so--that is to say, gratis, and without music. On they jigged,
however, without let or stint, and may I hang my hat up for ever, if
the same whim did not suddenly take the marshal, janitor, or head
gaoler, however unfit for dancing, seeing that one of his legs was
made of the same flesh as my oak table. Timber or not, he balanced on
it for a whole minute, while the other foot’s great toe, far above his
hip, pointed exactly at the clock of St. Sepulchre, and then swinging
his arms like a horizontal windmill, he spun off into a whirlwind of
pirouettes that made one giddy to look at. That done, he struck in
between the other two with a real step, and they immediately began to
work out a dancing sum in the rule of three, which requires only one
figure, namely, a figure of eight. Scuffle, shuffle, in and out, the
three Kirk Alloway witches could not have footed it better. In fact,
there was no resisting it. The whim took the very Ordinary himself,
though less boisterously at first, by reason of the gravity of his
calling, wherefore, taking a graceful grip with either hand of his
cassock, he only glided off, to begin with, into the minuet de la
cour. However, as the dancing grew more fast and furious, he gradually
danced, in spite of himself, having been classically bred, into the
College Hornpipe, and I defy anyone to say they ever saw it better
danced, or more briskly, by the very Doctors of Oxford and Cambridge.
Mother of Almack’s, what a quadrille! What a ball! The three Fates,
though winders of thread, and spinsters in ordinary, had never seen
such a Cotton ball! It was the strangest capriccio, the rarest mad
morrice that ever was danced; one minute a mazurka, then a polonaise,
then a gallopade, then a fandango, then a bolero, then a saraband,
then a guaracha, then a Highland fling! Sometimes the Strangulator, by
help of the halter which he waved this way and that, seemed executing
the shawl dance; anon, he doubled shuffled like Dusty Bob. One minute
Tony appeared as measuring his steps with a duchess dowager of the time
of Louis the Fourteenth; the next he was snapping his fingers with
Maggie Lauder to the tune of Tullochgorum. You fancied one minute, that
the Ordinary was dancing a pas seul, to the music of Haydn’s slow
movement, and before you could say Jack Robinson (now Earl of Ripon)
he started off into as grotesque a burlesque as ever was flung, and
floundered, and flounced, and bounced, and shuffled, and scuffled,
and draggled, and wiggle-waggled, shambled, gambolled, scrambled, and
skimble-skambled by Grimaldi, in Mother Goose. Blessed were they who
were born to behold it, though but from the mother’s arms. It was
worth going five miles to see, the first mile trundling a coach-wheel,
the second picking up eggs, the third hopping on one leg, the fourth
backwards, and the fifth jumped in a sack. If any man think otherwise,
may he dance, that is to say, in a ten-acre meadow, with a mohawking
bully of a bull for a partner.
[Illustration: A HIGHLAND FLING.]
The whim next seized the Extraordinary, and he danced like a dancing
Fakir. He jumped, and thumped, and twirled, and whirled, and so did
the rest, till the great drops rolled down their foreheads, for it
was in the very middle of the dog-days, and verily if Sirius did not
become a dancing dog it was not for want of masters. The clock struck
nine, and still they were at it, cross hands, down the middle, and back
again--’twas a mercy the bolt held. Chassez-croisez, dos-a-dos!--it was
getting on for ten, and yet they never called a fresh set! high time,
my masters, for authority to interfere; but the Head of the Corporation
had no sooner set the foot of the corporation on the scaffold, than the
whole of the corporation gave way to the whim, and was carried off with
a swagger into the medley, as if it had been the great ball at Easter.
There, I say, was the Mayor of London, scarlet cloak, and fur, and gold
chain and all, capering like a climbing boy, on the first of May. If
you had seen that morris danced, ’tis long odds, Londoners, you would
not have known your own May’r from a Hobbyhorse.
The Sheriffs came next, and they gave in to the same whim and danced,
and so did three Phrenologists who were in waiting to take a cast of
the skull, and another old woman who had got upon the scaffold to
be stroked on the neck for a wen. Though her dancing day was over,
she hobbled her best, and so did a Jew who came up to haggle for the
criminal’s clothes, and likewise an amateur in hangings, who meant to
bid high for a piece of the rope. These all danced, and God knows how
many more might have joined the corps de ballet, but for a certain
leap that was leaped by the Lord Mayor, and which knocked the whim on
the head. Now the Lord Mayor’s weight in the City, in mere flesh, was
a matter of sixteen stone (on the 10th of November a little more) and
his gold chain was seventy-five pounds, as good Troy weight as if Priam
had weighed it himself. He had besides in his pocket, two hundred and
fifty thousand pounds in gold, ninety-five thousand pounds in silver,
and five thousand seven hundred pounds in copper; moreover in his fob
was an old family watch, formerly the clock of St. Dunstan, equal to
ninety-five pounds and a half. Lastly, he carried on his person a
huge bunch of keys, house keys, warehouse keys, shop keys, cellar
keys, and particularly wine cellar keys, cupboard keys, and especially
pantry keys, and above all the Master Key of the City, which at any old
iron shop, would have been reckoned at a hundred pounds. Only think,
my masters, when such a corporate body jumped, only think, I say,
with what a confounding, astounding, crashing, smashing, flattening,
pancake-making sole of a foot it would come down on any reptile short
of a crocodile. No wonder, then, that Tony’s whim was completely
atomised, obliterated, and annihilated, which it was so utterly, that
if you were to search on the gallows to-morrow, with a solar microscope
to help you, I don’t believe, on my soul, that you would find the least
article or particle of the cuticle of
[Illustration: A TARANTULA.]
SONNET TO VAUXHALL.
“The English Garden.”--MASON.
The cold transparent ham is on my fork--
It hardly rains--and hark the bell!--ding-dingle--
Away! Three thousand feet at gravel work,
Mocking a Vauxhall shower!--Married and Single
Crush--rush;--Soak’d Silks with wet white Satin mingle.
Hengler! Madame! round whom all bright sparks lurk,
Calls audibly on Mr. and Mrs. Pringle
To study the Sublime, &c.--(vide Burke)
All Noses are upturned!--Whish--ish!--On high
The rocket rushes--trails--just steals in sight--
Then droops and melts in bubbles of blue light--
And Darkness reigns--Then balls flare up and die--
Wheels whiz--smack crackers--serpents twist--and then
Back to the cold transparent ham again!
[Illustration: “A CHILD’S _call_ TO BE DISPOSED OF.”]
ODE TO MR. MALTHUS.
My dear, do pull the bell,
And pull it well,
And send those noisy children all up stairs,
Now playing here like bears--
You George, and William, go into the grounds,
Charles, James, and Bob are there,--and take your string,
Drive horses, or fly kites, or anything,
You’re quite enough to play at hare and hounds,--
You little May, and Caroline, and Poll,
Take each your doll,
And go, my dears, into the two-back pair,
Your sister Margaret’s there--
Harriet and Grace, thank God, are both at school,
At far off Ponty Pool--
I want to read, but really can’t get on--
Let the four twins, Mark, Matthew, Luke and John,
Go--to their nursery--go--I never can
Enjoy my Malthus among such a clan!
[Illustration: LAYING THE FIRST STONE OF AN HOSPITAL.]
Oh Mr. Malthus, I agree
In everything I read with thee!
The world’s too full, there is no doubt,
And want’s a deal of thinning out,--
It’s plain--as plain as Harrow’s Steeple--
And I agree with some thus far,
Who say the Queen’s too popular,
That is,--she has too many people.
There are too many of all trades,
Too many bakers,
Too many every-thing-makers,
But not too many undertakers,--
Too many boys,--
Too many hobby-de-hoys,--
Too many girls, men, widows, wives and maids,--
There is a dreadful surplus to demolish,
And yet some Wrongheads,
With thick not long heads,
Poor Metaphysicians!
Sign petitions
Capital punishment to abolish;
And in the face of censuses such vast ones
New hospitals contrive,
For keeping life alive,
Laying first stones, the dolts! instead of last ones!--
Others, again, in the same contrariety,
Deem that of all Humane Society
They really deserve thanks,
Because the two banks of the Serpentine,
By their design,
Are Saving Banks.
Oh! were it given but to me to weed
The human breed,
And root out here and there some cumbering elf.
I think I could go through it,
And really do it
With profit to the world and to myself,--
For instance, the unkind among the Editors,
My debtors, those I mean to say
Who cannot or who will not pay,
And all my creditors.
These, for my own sake, I’d destroy;
But for the world’s, and every one’s,
I’d hoe up Mrs. G--’s two sons,
And Mrs. B--’s big little boy,
Call’d only by herself an “only joy.”
As Mr. Irving’s chapel’s not too full,
Himself alone I’d pull--
But for the peace of years that have to run,
I’d make the Lord Mayor’s a perpetual station,
And put a period to rotation,
By rooting up all Aldermen but one,--
These are but hints what good might thus be done!
But ah! I fear the public good
Is little by the public understood,--
For instance--if with flint, and steel, and tinder,
Great Swing, for once a philanthropic man
Proposed to throw a light upon thy plan,
No doubt some busy fool would hinder
His burning all the Foundling to a cinder.
Or, if the Lord Mayor, on an Easter Monday,
That wine and bun-day,
Proposed to poison all the little Blue-coats
Before they died by bit or sup,
Some meddling Marplot would blow up,
Just at the moment critical,
The economy political
Of Saving their fresh yellow plush and new coats.
Equally ’twould be undone,
Suppose the Bishop of London,
On that great day
In June or May,
When all the large small family of charity,
Brown, black, or carroty,
Walk in their dusty parish shoes,
In too, too many two-and-twos,
To sing together till they scare the walls
Of old St. Paul’s,
Sitting in red, grey, green, blue, drab, and white,
Some say a gratifying sight,
Tho’ I think sad--but that’s a schism--
To witness so much pauperism--
Suppose, I say, the Bishop then, to make
In this poor overcrowded world more room,
Proposed to shake
Down that immense extinguisher, the dome--
Some humane Martin in the charity _Gal_-way
I fear would come and interfere,
Save beadle, brat, and overseer,
To walk back in their parish shoes,
In too, too many two-and-twos,
Islington--Wapping--or Pall Mall way!