What is gone with the cages, with the climbing squirrel and bells to
them, which were formerly the indispensable appendage to the outside of
a tinman's shop, and were, in fact, the only live signs? One, we
believe, still hangs out on Holborn; but they are fast vanishing with
the good old modes of our ancestors. They seem to have been superseded
by that still more ingenious refinement of modern humanity, the
tread-mill, in which _human_ squirrels still perform a similar round of
ceaseless, improgressive clambering, which must be nuts to them.
We almost doubt the fact of the teeth of this creature being so purely
orange-colored as Mr. Urban's correspondent gives out. One of our old
poets--and they were pretty sharp observers of Nature--describes them as
brown. But perhaps the naturalist referred to meant "of the color of a
Maltese orange,"[D] which is rather more obfuscated than your fruit of
Seville or St. Michael's, and may help to reconcile the difference. We
cannot speak from observation; but we remember at school getting our
fingers into the orangery of one of these little gentry, (not having a
due caution of the traps set there,) and the result proved sourer than
lemons. The author of the "Task" somewhere speaks of their anger as
being "insignificantly fierce"; but we found the demonstration of it on
this occasion quite as significant as we desired, and have not been
disposed since to look any of these "gift horses" in the mouth. Maiden
aunts keep these "small deer," as they do parrots, to bite people's
fingers, on purpose to give them good advice "not to venture so near the
cage another time." As for their "six quavers divided into three quavers
and a dotted crotchet," I suppose they may go into Jeremy Bentham's next
budget of Fallacies, along with the "melodious and proportionable kinde
of musicke," recorded in your last number, of another highly gifted
animal.
* * * * *
Although Lamb took little, if any, interest in public affairs, and,
indeed, knew about as much of the events and occurrences of the day as
the sublime, abstracted dancing-master immortalized in one of the
letters to Manning, he appears to have been profoundly and painfully
impressed by the fate of Fauntleroy, the forger. He thought and talked
of Fauntleroy by day, and dreamed of Fauntleroy at night. And on the day
after the execution of that unfortunate man, Lamb, thus solemnly, yet
humorously withal, writes to his good friend Bernard Barton, poet and
bank-officer:--
"And now, my dear Sir, trifling apart, the gloomy catastrophe of
yesterday morning prompts a sadder vein. The fate of the unfortunate
Fauntleroy makes me, whether I will or no, to cast reflecting eyes
around on such of my friends as, by a parity of situation, are exposed
to a similarity of temptation. My very style seems to myself to become
more impressive than usual with the charge of them. Who that standeth
knoweth but he may yet fall? Your hands as yet, I am most willing to
believe, have never deviated into others' property. You think it
impossible that you could ever commit so heinous an offence; but so
thought Fauntleroy once; so have thought many besides him, who at last
have expiated as he hath done. You are as yet upright; but you are a
banker, or, at least, the next thing to it. I feel the delicacy of the
subject; but cash must pass through your hands, sometimes to a great
amount. If, in an unguarded hour----But I will hope better. Consider the
scandal it will bring upon those of your persuasion. Thousands would go
to see a Quaker hanged that would be indifferent to the fate of a
Presbyterian or an Anabaptist. Think of the effect it would have on the
sale of your poems alone, not to mention higher considerations! I
tremble, I am sure, at myself, when I think that so many poor victims of
the law, at one time of their life, made as sure of never being hanged
as I, in my own presumption, am ready, too ready, to do myself. What are
we better than they? Do we come into the world with different necks? Is
there any distinctive mark under our left ears? Are we unstrangulable, I
ask you? Think on these things. I am shocked sometimes at the shape of
my own fingers,--not for their resemblance to the ape tribe, (which is
something,) but for the exquisite adaptation of them to the purposes of
picking, fingering, etc."
And a few months after writing the above letter, Lamb contributed to
"The London Magazine,"--then in its decadence, but among whose "creaking
rafters" Elia fondly lingered, "like the last rat,"--to this (his
favorite periodical) he contributed a brief, but beautiful paper,
suggested by Fauntleroy's sad story. The article is entitled "The Last
Peach," and purports to be written by a bank-officer (possibly the
author had Barton in his mind while writing it) who fears he may become
a second Fauntleroy. The piece contains one or two delightful passages,
and is, in fact, full of happy touches and felicitous bits of
description. Very charming (to me, at least) is the account of the
plucking of the last peach, and very touching is the allusion to the
babe Fauntleroy. But good wine (or a good peach) needs no bush; and
therefore, without further comment or commendation, I present "The Last
Peach" to the appreciative reader. He will find it to be, unless I am a
very poor judge of the article, a peach of excellent quality and of a
peculiarly fine flavor.
The garden in which grew the tree on which "lingered the one last peach"
belonged to "Blakesmoor," the fine old family-mansion of the Plummers of
Hertfordshire, in whose family Lamb's maternal grandmother--"the
grandame" of his poem of that name, and the "great-grandmother Field" of
Elia's "Dream-Children"--was housekeeper for many years.