GET. Slave, quotha? I beg no mercy, I! Mercury forbid! I will speak out,
and be gagged for no man. What now, master of the whip and wheel, do you
dream that you are in the company of your cattle, where lash and blow
are law? I do most cordially hate thee; and I tell thee, moreover, that
if thou comest, braving it and bullying it with loud tongue and long
rapier, I have here a stout flagon of Saguntum, which has made flaws in
heads of stouter manufacture, and----
DAM. Why, thou foul-mouthed blasphemer of greatness!
GET. Thou impotent imitator of buffoons!
DAM. Thou idol of cobblers!
GET. Thou scorn of nobility!
MAR. SYR. CYA. In the name of the gods, Damasippus! Jove! there will be
a goodly tumult!
MESSENGER [_without._] What, Syrinx--Syrinx, I say!
SYR. See now, if the Prætor be not here with a force!
MESS. Syrinx, I say--is Damasippus here to-night?
DAM. Well, fellow, who sends for Damasippus?
MESS. Truly, one that must send and find. The Emperor.
DAM. The Emperor! Hang ye, pestilent curs, give me my sandals.
Quick!--and my cloak. So! am I steady, Syrinx? Thy venomous wine hath
somewhat---- Adieu, Cyane; I will visit ye again ere long. A pest upon
the Emperor!
MY FIRST FLAME.
Alderman Greenfat lives, from three to seven P.M., in joyous
anticipation of the delights that hour will bring upon its wing. He
tastes in fancy the never-cloying richness of the turtle, which if
Jupiter had reigned now would have made Jupiter a candidate for civic
honours; the invigorating flavour of the punch, which at once heightens
the zest of the last and prepares the palate for the following dainty;
the turbot, the venison, the champagne, the Burgundy--all are
present to his imagination. Delicious! But seven o’clock arrives.
What is the consummation? The meat is cold, or the wine is hot;
the servants are awkward, or the next neighbour is a bore;
repletion--indigestion--satiety--gout--the devil!
Lady Bauble waits patiently from March to May for the new Waverley
novel, indulging perhaps in an occasional flirtation with Granby or a
brief and hurried visit to Brambletye House, but turning eagerly from
both to the prospect which the unnamed name of the Great Unknown opens
before her imagination. Her visions are full of strange and appalling
ideas. Some new Meg Merrilies appears to start into terrible existence;
some second Balfour lifts up the sword of the Lord and of Gideon; Amy
Robsart is regenerate, Front de Bœuf blasphemes again. But the three
volumes come out, and present her with a commonplace bully or an
everyday coquette--a lady who chatters at an evening party, a lord who
figures in the _Morning Post_. “This really is too bad,” says Lady
Bauble, yawning; “I must absolutely give up Sir Walter!”
Captain Eustace is ordered to Rangoon. Delightful dreams are his--dreams
of success and of reputation, of promotion and of pay, of armies
discomfited, of stockades stormed, of midnight glimpses of the King of
Ava’s harem, of curry prepared in the King of Ava’s kitchen! A few short
weeks, and the fairy vision fades with a vengeance: he finds an empty
camp, and a crowded hospital; a weary surgeon, and a burning sun; a
rifleman in every bramble-bush, and a rheumatism in every bone.
Ο that our hopes could last for ever! That we and the objects of our
desire could run on, like the fore and hind wheels of a chariot, always
close but never united. That we could be contented to let our enjoyments
go on like the lamp of the Rosicrucians, burning and dazzling eternally;
without advancing towards them the profane step which, by the essence
and law of their nature, must destroy and crush them in a moment!
It is now about ten years since I left the residence of my respectable
uncle and guardian in order to pay a visit of a few weeks to some
friends at a neighbouring watering-place. My guardian, Sir Abraham, was
in his day something of a character--and by-and-by I may sketch his
portrait. For the present I shall only quote, as faithfully as I can,
the old gentleman’s parting admonition, for so constantly and
unremittingly had he laboured at my education, up to the age of sixteen,
that he considered six weeks of absence a long period, and six miles an
infinite distance.
“Hark ye, Frederic!” he began; “all young men are fools--very well! Some
are more fools than others; there are degrees of comparison, but all are
fools--very well! You I hold to be particularly and peculiarly a fool;
no fault of mine--very well! Now you have been for the last two years
pestering me with ravings and reveries about every pretty face that fell
in your way; verses you have written, and they are my abomination--very
well! I have found stanzas to Chloe in my shaving-pot, and sonnets to
Araminta in the blank leaves of the Annual Registers--very well! You are
going to-day to my cousin Sir Andrew’s; nobody to fall in love with
there--too sensible a man; insists on a crooked nose in his laundress,
and prefers a humpback to a ten years’ character in his choice of a
dairymaid--very well! But hark you, sir! you may meet, at some of those
hotbeds of frivolity and fevers, which are called card-parties, routs,
balls, and I know not what beside--I say, sir, you may meet a girl
called Adèle Lepicq--a fantastical name forsooth, but ladies are as fine
now in their appellations as they are in their costume--very well!
What’s in a name? I tell you, Frederic, if ever you mean to play the
fool to any purpose, fall in love with that girl. Why, sir, she is rich
enough to buy up the Bank of England--to keep even a ballad-monger from
starving! Talk of beauty--sentiment--- affection! What are these to a
rent-roll like hers? I tell you, a shape is as well set off by Mechlin
lace as by brown holland; and a white neck is mere moonshine, till it
has a diamond necklace about it. Bah!--very well!”
So spoke my revered relation, and the impression produced on my mind was
that which similar speeches have produced on similar minds ever since
old men were arbitrary and young men wilful. I sell myself for gold! I
barter the first flush of the young heart’s emotion for what in poetry
was always trash! I bend my knees to awkwardness or ugliness! I bow in
adoration to malice and insipidity!
I set off, however, and found the stage which was to be my conveyance
occupied by a fox-hunter and a brace of Militia officers, who were
discussing the case of a poor man, named, for his sins, John Smith. He
had been severely wounded in a duel. I listened with great interest to
the usual interesting details--the chaises ordered at five in the
morning; the vain attempt at a reconciliation; the ground measured; the
surgeon in attendance; the firing, the dropping; the deep regret of the
antagonist; the absconding; the apprehension of danger. All this was
very well; but when, after going through the action, they proceeded to
investigate the cause, what was my astonishment at finding that all
this, which was to engross conversation for a week and fill the
newspapers for a month, was occasioned by the fascinations of Adèle
Lepicq!
“I never would risk my life for deformity,” said I, in a fit of
enthusiasm. “Deformity!” quoth the foe of foxes, opening his eyes very
wide; “why she is a divinity! Venus was a wax doll to her--Diana a
dowdy! One glance of her might charm a statue from its pedestal, or
inspire the Bench of Bishops with wit!” And then all three joined in a
sort of chorus of eulogy, which conveyed to me no definite idea of form
or feature, but expressed simply the conviction of the speakers that
every perfection of both had been collected by the munificence of a
bountiful destiny in the person of Adèle Lepicq.
I arrived at my journey’s end pretty considerably puzzled, and not a
little annoyed. I fortified myself, however, in my preconceived dislike
of my guardian’s angel, by remembering that wealth and want of ideas,
loveliness and imbecility, were perfectly compatible qualities. “Some
silly uneducated heiress--all heiresses are silly and uneducated--who
knows nothing but what she has learnt from her glass, and likes no one
who does not corroborate daily its assertions; who votes literature
_mauvais ton_, and would rather look into a coffin than a quarto.” So
thought I with myself as I lounged into Sir Andrew’s library, in the
pride of my mathematical studies, to take down Laplace from the neglect
in which I flattered myself he had slumbered for years. Laplace was
gone; and the card, which according to the custom of the place accounted
for the vacancy on the shelf, informed me that the appropriator of the
treasure was Adèle Lepicq.
I was petrified. But distrust is slow to depart, when it has once been
admitted. “A Blue, then--who studies Aristotle, I warrant, and
criticizes Plato! who keeps a journal in Hebrew, and scribbles notes in
the arrow-headed writing! She has, I doubt not, an album--full of
doggerel compliments and pen-and-ink drawings, a cabinet of shells and
fossils, a museum of butterflies and beetles! After all, the days were
blest when women attempted nothing beyond embroidery and the making of
puddings!” And with these charitable reflections I sat down to dinner.
There was at table a detestable story-teller; I have met him often
since, and have heard his fifty-nine stories fifty-nine times over; but
on this occasion it was as much as he could do to get through one of
them. It was about an _omelette soufflée_: how he was very partial to an
_omelette soufflée_; how he ate an _omelette soufflée_ seven times a
week in Paris; how he never tasted a good _omelette soufflée_ out of
France except once; how a very romantic incident belonged to that
_omelette soufflée_; how it was composed by a beauty--an heiress of
sixteen; how she had studied the whole theory of an _omelette soufflée_
for her father’s gratification, because the old man could not live
without an _omelette soufflée_. This tale, interrupted of course by the
usual accidents which disturb at a dinner-table the most experienced
narrator, concluded by a rhapsody concerning filial duty, and her who
was the gastronomical example of its excellence--Adèle Lepicq.
I began to be infinitely plagued by this continual recurrence of
Monsieur Tonson in the shape of a reigning toast. But I was haunted for
more than a week by unceasing and unpitying rumours. The shops were full
of Adèle bonnets and Lepicq shawls; the musicians dedicated their
quadrilles to Miss Lepicq; the Poet’s Corner in the newspaper had always
its stanzas to A---- L----. By her the harp I admired at Schneider’s had
been bespoken; the Arabian I noticed at the riding-house was breaking
for her. By degrees my imagination became more and more engrossed by the
thought which was thus eternally forced upon its notice. I began to
delight in forming conjectures about the extraordinary being who did all
things, and all things well. First, I painted her reserved, retiring,
shrinking from her own praises, and winning, in consequence, many more
than she deserved. Then I drew her wild, piquante, with a little dash of
the masculine, and spirits enough to provoke the advances which her
pride checked in a moment. Sometimes she was alone by the side of a
river stream, reading Shakespeare, and weeping unconsciously as she
read; presently afterwards she was galloping along the hard sands of the
sea-shore, her horse starting in vain from the echoing waters, and her
hair floating long and dark upon the ocean breeze. She was my thought by
day, my vision by night. I became like the lunatic who beholds,
whithersoever he turns his eyes, an unvarying attendant figure, distinct
in shape and hue to his own sight, but impalpable and unperceived to the
gaze of others.
But I had never seen her, and I left the place in all the tortures of
unsatisfied curiosity. If I was to meet her at a ball, she had a plaguy
cold, and was confined to her room; if I looked for her on the public
walk, she was the only person between the ages of seven and seventy who
was not there; if I went to the theatre, she patronized the concert; if
I rode on the downs, she rambled in the forest.
It was nearly a twelvemonth afterwards that I was one of three hundred
who crowded, almost to bursting, two small drawing-rooms, not a hundred
miles from Cavendish Square. I had picked up a lost fan, while the hurry
and bustle of departure was going on, and was examining it in a fit of
vacant abstraction, when I heard some charitable old lady annoying her
friends with officious inquiries: “Where is Miss Lepicq’s fan?” “Who has
seen Miss Lepicq’s fan?” “Where can Miss Lepicq’s fan be?” I started
from my trance. The deuce take the fan, and the querist--but where is
Miss Lepicq? She had just left the room--her carriage was stopping the
way. I rushed to the landing-place, cleared the stairs with the celerity
of a kangaroo, overturned a brace of footmen, and broke my shins over
the pole of a sedan, arriving at the house-door just in time to see the
last gleam of a kid slipper glide into the concealment of a carriage, to
hear the “Home!” of the footman, and to make the best of my way to my
hotel, with a head-ache and a sprained ankle.
Inquiries were bootless; she left London, England, the world; for she
shut herself up in a convent, Heaven knows why: and, as her epitaph
might say, is remembered with regret by all who knew her--and by one who
did not.
Perhaps I ought not to lament--perhaps I do not lament--that I saw no
more of Adèle Lepicq. I might have been blind to beauties which all the
world adored; I might have discovered imperfections of which no others
dreamed. It is pleasant, when I find in all I meet some little admixture
of human frailty, to look back to one object which appears still all
divine; it is charming, when I am deserted by the fondest friends,
betrayed by the dearest hopes, to cling to an imaginative pleasure from
which I can expect no treason or desertion. I have flirted with some
score of beauties with sufficiently great perseverance, and sufficiently
poor success; I have been desperately in love more than once; but if all
the rapture of my real passions were set in one scale of a balance, and
the luxury of this ideal one were put into the other, I believe the
madder weight of the two would preponderate. I remember that in the
fervour of my last disappointment I wrote a very fine copy of verses to
the same effect; and thus, or nearly thus, they ran--
Many a beaming brow I’ve known,
And many a dazzling eye,
And I’ve listened to many a melting tone
In magic fleeting by;
And mine was never a heart of stone,
And yet my heart hath given to none
The tribute of a sigh;
For fancy’s wild and witching mirth
Was dearer than aught I found on earth;
And the fairest forms I ever knew
Were far less fair than--L’Inconnue!
Many an eye that once was bright
Is dark to-day in gloom;
Many a voice that once was light
Is silent in the tomb;
Many a flower that once was dight
In beauty’s most entrancing might
Hath faded in its bloom;
But she is still as fair and gay
As if she had sprung to life to-day;
A ceaseless tone and a deathless hue
Wild Fancy hath given to--L’Inconnue!
Many an eye of piercing jet
Hath only gleamed to grieve me
Many a fairy form I’ve met,
But none have wept to leave me;
When all forsake, and all forget,
One pleasant dream shall haunt me yet,
One hope shall not deceive me;
For oh! when all beside is past,
Fancy is found our friend at last,
And the faith is firm, and the love is true,
Which are vowed by the lips of--L’Inconnue!
THE INCONVENIENCE OF HAVING AN ELDER BROTHER.
I do not care for the paternal acres. To say the truth, Halbert Hall
never pleased me. As a child I detested the long dark avenues of stunted
trees; and the heavy melancholy stream of moaning water, and the long
passages, with their doleful echoes, and their countless doors, and the
vast chambers with all their pomp and pageantry of faded furniture and
family portraits. I am happier here in Lincoln’s Inn, though one floor
is my palace and one lackey my establishment; and I leave the Hall,
without a sigh, to my elder brother.
I shall not die for the lack of ten thousand a year. I never longed to
keep hounds, or an opera dancer; to give champagne dinners, or to
represent a county; to win at Doncaster, or to lose at _rouge et noir_.
Your true Epicurean does not need great wealth; I can afford to wear a
tolerable coat, and drive an unexceptionable cabriolet; to be seen
sometimes at the Opera, and keep myself out of reach of the Bench; to
throw away a trifle at picquet, and cook a wild duck for my antagonist.
These things content me; and, except when some unusual temptation has
awakened my appetite or some more than common loss, for a time, ruffled
my philosophy, I would not readily exchange them for the rent-roll and
the three per cents. of my elder brother.
As for the title, it is not to be mentioned seriously as the object of a
reasonable man’s ambition. In old times a belted lord had certain
privileges and pastimes, which might make life pass pleasantly enough.
It was interesting to war upon his equals; it was amusing to trample on
his inferiors; there was some merriment in the demolition of an abbey;
there was some excitement in the settlement of a succession. Nowadays,
it is as well to be called Tom as my Lord, unless you have a mind to
dine at the dullest tables, and make speeches to the drowsiest audience
in the world. So I resign my chance of the peerage without reluctance;
the more that the coronet must pass from the temples of its present
apoplectic possessor over an artillery officer, a rural dean, and an
attaché to an embassy, before it decorates the honoured brows of my
elder brother.
But when I have resigned philosophically all longings after these
distinctions and advantages, which would be mine if I could date my
birth but a twelvemonth earlier--when I have congratulated myself that I
am not bound, by any necessity or interest, to do battle for the
privileges of the order or talk nonsense in support of the Game
Laws--why am I to be crossed at every turning by some hateful memento of
the inferiority to which my unlucky planets have doomed me? Why are
smiles to grow colder, and conversation more constrained, at my
approach? Why are my witticisms listened to with such imperturbable
gravity? And why does Lady Montdragon look zero when I bow, and turn
away to whisper “Viper!” in her daughter’s ear?
Thus it has been from my infancy. My mother, to be sure, had the usual
maternal peculiarities, and was always in our nursery squabbles the
unfailing protectress of the party which was most immediately dependent
upon her protection. But she died, poor lady, almost before I could be
sensible how much I needed her alliance, leaving me to carry on the war
unaided against an adversary whose auxiliaries were many and zealous, in
the butler’s pantry and the servants’ hall, in the tenant’s cottage and
the keeper’s lodge. I was as handsome as Frederic; but his dress was
more carefully tended, and his ringlets more studiously arrayed. I was
as ravenous as Frederic; but his acquaintance with the cellar was more
close and his visits to the store-closet more frequent. I was the bolder
rider, but my pony was as rough as a bear. I was the better shot, but my
gun was as heavy as a blunderbuss. Both learnt the lesson, but the
praise and the shilling were for him; both plundered the orchard, but
the reproof and the correction were for me. And when our father, with an
unwonted exertion of impartiality, sent us to the same school, and
supplied us with the same means of extravagance, though my hexameter was
as smooth and my laugh as hearty, my scholarship as sound and my pluck
as indisputable as my brother’s, he had more patrons and more friends
than I had; and somehow or other, between Halbert major and Halbert
minor there was a plaguy difference, though I scarcely yet suspected
where it lay.
But I was soon able to discover of what materials the talisman was
composed. My father broke his neck in a fox-chase, and my brother was
master of the kennel and the stud; my uncle died of a late division, and
my brother represented the borough. We came into the world, and began to
jostle for places like the rest of its industrious citizens.
I met Lord Fortalice at a dinner-party. What could be more condescending
than his lordship’s manner, or more flattering than his expressions? He
had heard of my renown at college; he was confident of my success in
life; he knew a host of my connections; he had had the sincerest respect
for my father, he could assure me the Duke of Merino entertained the
highest opinion of my talents, and Lady Eleanor had pointed me out last
week as a model to her son. But when at last his lordship hoped that my
principles would allow me to support the Bill which’ was next week to be
before Parliament, and understood from me that the interests of
sixty-seven independent men were in my brother’s hands, not mine, he
gradually withdrew his civilities from me, and devoted himself
thenceforth to the entertainment of a puny divine, who spoke in
monosyllables, and took an appalling quantity of snuff.
I was introduced to Tom Manille at the Opera. He was charmed to make my
acquaintance; he had been told of my good fortune at the Salon, and was
aware what a favourite I had been with the Baronne de Lusignan. Did I
want a servant? A friend of his was going to dismiss one who was worth
all the Indies. Was I looking for a hunter? His cousin had one, which
would suit my weight exactly. He would make my betting-book, he would
superintend my cellar, he would take me to a _soirée chez Mademoiselle_,
he would give me a special recommendation to his tailor. He must make me
known to the Somerses--their cook was Ude’s first pupil. Of course I
should belong to the Club--his influence was omnipotent there. A few
weeks elapsed; and Tom Manille was riding my brother’s horses, and
drinking my brother’s chambertin. He always calls me “My dear fellow!”
and never passes me without a most encouraging nod. But I have never
dined with the Somerses, and last week I was blackballed at the Club.
I wrote a treatise on the state of the nation, and submitted it to an
eminent publisher. He was wonderfully delighted with the work. The views
were so sound, the arguments so convincing, the style so pure, the
illustration so apposite. I began to look forward to an infinity of
popularity and an eternity of fame; I dreamed of laurel wreaths; I
calculated the profits of tenth editions. In imagination I was already
the pilot of popular opinion, the setter-up and the putter-down of
Cabinets. But when I struck out the magical M.P. from the proof-sheet of
my title-page, my fall was immediate and disastrous. My language lost
its elegance, and my subject its importance; and my pamphlet lies
forgotten in the limbo of unpublished embryos, wanting only life, and
willing to win immortality. I should have been the most influential
writer of the day if I had not had an elder brother.