course; and it is not necessary to describe her more particularly. Her
mother behaved to me with the greatest kindness; she was a respectable
old lady who wore a magnificent cap, and played casino while her
daughter was waltzing. Caroline liked me, I am sure; for she discarded a
dress because I disliked the colour, and insulted a colonel because I
thought him a fool. I was in the seventh heaven for a fortnight; I rode
with her on the downs, and walked with her on the Chain Pier. I drew
sketches for her scrap-book, and scribbled poetry in her album. I gave
her the loveliest poodle that ever was washed with rose-water, and
called out a corpulent gentleman for talking politics while she played.
Caroline was a fairy of a thousand spells; she danced like a mountain
nymph and sang like a syren; she made beautiful card-racks and knew
Wordsworth by heart; but to me her deepest fascination was her
simplicity of feeling, her independence of every mercenary
consideration, her scorn of Stars and Garters, her _penchant_ for
cottages and waterfalls. I was already meditating what county she would
choose for her retirement, and what furniture she would prefer for her
boudoir, when she asked me, at an ill-omened fancy ball, who was that
clumsy Turk, in the green turban and the saffron slippers. It was my
elder brother. She did not start nor change colour; well-taught beauties
never do; but she danced that night with the clumsy Turk in the green
turban and the saffron slippers; and when I made my next visit she was
just sealing a note of invitation to him, and had lighted her taper with
the prettiest verses I ever wrote in my life.
If your father was an alderman, you may nevertheless be voted _comme il
faut_; if your nose is as long as the spire of Strasburg, you may yet be
considered good-looking; if you have published a sermon, you may still
be reputed a wit; if you have picked a pocket, you may by-and-by be
restored to society. But if you have an elder brother--migrate! Go to
Crim Tartary or to Cochin China--wash the Hottentot--convert the Hindoo!
At home you cannot escape the stigma that pursues you. You may have
honesty, genius, industry--no matter. You are a “detrimental” for all
that.
Last summer I saw Scribe’s amusing scenes, “Avant, Pendant, et Après,”
at the Théàtre de Madame. In the “Avant,” when the Duchess of the old
_régime_, after bestowing upon her eldest son unearned military rank and
the richest _parti_ in all France, was quietly dooming her youngest born
to live poor, unknown, and Chevalier of Malta, a fine little fellow, who
was sitting in the front row before me, looked up at his father, and
cried, “Mais nous avons changé tout cela, nést ce pas, mon papa?”
Much of it is changed. But to change it all, we must wait for a stranger
revolution than that which has regenerated France.
TOUJOURS PERDRIX.
We have all been occupied for a great many years in considering whether
we ought to emancipate the Catholics from their disabilities. Let us at
last begin to think whether it is not high time to emancipate ourselves
from the discussion of them. My respectable and Popish cousin, Arthur
M‘Carmick, inhabits a charming _entresol_ in the Rue St. Honoré, where
he copies Vernet and reads Delavigne, dreams of Pauline Latour, and
spends six hundred a year in the greatest freedom imaginable; yet,
because he is not yet entitled to frank letters and address the
Speaker’s chair, Arthur M‘Carmick wants to be emancipated. I, whom fate
and a profession confine in my native country, am fettered by the
thraldom, and haunted by the grievance, at every turn I take. In vain I
fly from the doors of Parliament, and make a circuit of five miles to
avoid the very echo of the county meeting; my friend in the club and my
mistress in the ball-room, the ballad-singer in the street and the
preacher in the pulpit, all combine to harass my nerves, and weary my
forbearance; even Dr. Somnolent wakes occasionally after dinner, to
indulge in a guttural murmur concerning martyrdom and the Real
Presence; and Sir Roger, when the hounds are at fault, reins up at my
side, and harks back to the Revolution of 1688. Our very servants wear
our prejudices, as constantly as our cast-off clothes, and our tradesmen
offer us their theories more punctually than their bills. Not a week ago
my groom assured me that there was no reason to be alarmed, for the Pope
lived a great way off; and my barber on the same day hinted that he knew
as much as most people, and that all he knew was this, that if ever the
Catholics were uppermost they would play the old bear with the Church. I
could not sleep that night for thinking of Ursa Major and the Beast in
the Revelations. Yet I, because I may put on a silk gown whenever it
shall please His Majesty to adorn me in such radiant attire, and
because, some twenty years hence, I may have hope to be in the great
council of the nation, the mouthpiece of some two or three dozen of
independent individuals--I, forsooth, am to petition for no
emancipation.
There are persons who cannot bear the uninterrupted ticking of a
pendulum in their chamber. The sustained converse of a wife vexes many.
I have heard of a prisoner who was driven mad by the continued plashing
of water against the wall of his cell. Such things are lively
illustrations of the disquiet I endure. It is not that I am thwarted in
an argument or beat on a division; it is not that I have a horror of
innovation, or a hatred of intolerance; you are welcome to trample upon
my opinions, if you will not tread upon my toes. I will waltz with any
fair Whig who has a tolerable ear and a pretty figure; and I will gladly
dine with any septuagenarian Tory who is liberal in his culinary system
and puts no restrictions upon his cellar. The Question kills me: no
matter in what garb or under what banner it come. Brunswick and
Liberator, reasoner and declaimer, song and speech, pamphlet and
sermon--I hate them all.
Look at that handsome young man who is so pleasantly settling himself at
his table at the Travellers’. He spends two hours daily upon his curls,
and the rings on his fingers would make manacles for a burglar; surely
he has no leisure for the affairs of the nation? The waiter has just
disclosed to his view the _anguilles en matelotte_, and the steward is
setting down beside him the pint of Johannisberg. And he only arrived
yesterday from Versailles; it is impossible he can have been infected in
less than four-and-twenty hours. Alas! there is the _Courier_ extended
beside his plate; and the dish grows cold, and the wine grows warm,
while Morrison sympathizes with the feelings of the Home Secretary, or
penetrates the mysteries of the Attorney-General’s philippic.
Watch Lady Lansquenet as she takes up her hand from the whist-table.
With what an ecstasy of delight does she marshal the brocaded warriors
who are the strength of her battle; how indignantly does she thrust into
their appointed station the more ignoble combatants, who are
distinguished, like hackney-coaches, only by their number; how
reverentially does she draw towards her those three last lingering
cards, as if the magic alchemy of delay were of power to transmute a
spade into a club, or exalt a plebeian into a prince. Then, with what an
air of anxiety does she observe the changes and chances of the contest;
now flushed with triumph, now palsied with alarm; and bestowing
alternately upon her adversary and her ally equal shares of her
impartial indignation. Lady Lansquenet is neither pretty nor young, nor
musical nor literary. She does not know a Raphael from a Teniers, nor a
scene by Shakespeare from a melody by Moore. Yet to me she seems the
most conversible person in the room; for at least the Question is
nothing to Lady Lansquenet. One may ask her what her winnings have been
without fear. “I have lost,” says her ladyship, “twenty points. I am
seldom so unfortunate; but what could I expect, you know--with a Popish
partner!”
I will go and see Frederick Marston. He has been in love for six weeks.
In ordinary cases I shrink with unfeigned horror from the conversation
of a lover--barley-broth is not more terrible to an alderman, nor
metaphysics to a blockhead, nor argument to a wit. But now, in mere
self-defence, I will go and see Frederick Marston. He will talk of
wood-pigeons and wildernesses, of eyebrows and ringlets, of sympathies
and quadrilles, of “meet me by moonlight” and the brightest eyes in the
world. I will endure it all; for he will have no thought to waste upon
the wickedness of the Duke of Wellington or the disfranchisement of
Larry O’Shane. So I spoke in the bitterness of my heart; and, after a
brief and painful struggle with a Treasury clerk in the Haymarket, and a
narrow escape in Regent Street from the heavy artillery of a
Somersetshire divine, I flung myself into my old schoolfellow’s
armchair, and awaited his raptures or his apprehensions, as patiently as
the wrecked mariner awaits the lions or the savages, when he has escaped
from the billow and the blast. “My dear fellow,” said my unhappy friend,
and pointed, as he spoke, to a letter which was lying open on the table,
“I am the most miserable of fortune’s playthings. It is but a week since
every obstacle was removed. The dresses were bespoken; the ring was
bought; the Dean had been applied to, and the lawyer was at work. I had
written out ten copies of an advertisement, and sold Hambletonian for
half his value. Λ plague on all uncles! Sir George has discovered ‘an
insuperable objection.’ One may guess his meaning without comment.”
“Upon my life, not I! Have you criticized his Correggio?”
“Never.”
“Have you abused his claret?”
“Never.”
“You have thinned his preserves, then?”
“I never carried a gun there!”
“Or slept while his chaplain was preaching?”
“I never sat in his pew.”
A horrible foreboding came over me. I sat in silent anticipation of the
blow which was to overwhelm me. “Oh, my dear friend,” said Frederick
after a long pause, “why was I born under so fatal a planet? And why did
my second cousin sign that infernal petition?”
My father’s ancient and valued friend, Martin Marston, Esq., of Marston
Hall, has vegetated for forty years in his paternal estate in the West
of England, proud and happy in the enjoyment of everything which makes
the life of a country gentleman enviable. He is an upright magistrate,
a kind master, a merciful landlord, and a hearty friend. If you believe
his neighbours, he has not been guilty of a fault for ten years, but
when he forgave the butler who plundered his plate-closet; nor uttered a
complaint for twenty, except when the gout drove him out of his saddle,
and compelled him to take refuge in the pony-chair. If his son were not
the readiest Grecian at Westminster, he was nearly the best shot in the
county; and if his daughters had little interest in the civil
dissensions of the King’s Theatre, and thought of Almack’s much as a
Metropolitan thinks of Timbuctoo, they had nevertheless as much beauty
as one looks for in a partner, and quite as many accomplishments as one
wants in a wife. Mr. Marston has always been a Liberal politician,
partly because his own studies and connections have that way determined
him. and partly because an ancestor of his bore a command in the
Parliamentary army at the battle of Edgehill. But his principles never
interfered with his comforts. He had always a knife and fork for the
vicar, a furious High Churchman; and suffered his next neighbour, a
violent Tory, to talk him to sleep without resistance or
remonstrance--in consequence of which Dr. Gloss declared he had never
found any man so open to conviction, and Sir Walter vowed that old
Marston was the only Radical that ever listened to reason.
When I visited Marston Hall two months ago, on my road to Penzance,
matters were strangely altered in the establishment. I found the old
gentleman sitting in his library with a huge bundle of printed placards
before him, and a quantity of scribbled paper lying on his table. The
County Meeting was in agitation; and Mr. Marston, to the astonishment of
every one, had determined to take the field against bigotry and
persecution. He was composing a speech. Poachers were neglected, and
turnip-stealers forgotten; his favourite songs echoed unheeded, and the
urn simmered in vain. He hunted authorities, he consulted references, he
hammered periods into shape, he strung metaphors together like beads, he
translated, he transcribed. He was determined that, if the good folk of
the West remained unenlightened, the fault should not rest upon his
shoulders. Every pursuit and amusement were at an end. He had been
planning a new line of road through part of his estate, but the
labourers were now at a standstill; and he had left off reading in the
middle of the third volume of “The Disowned.” I found that Sir Walter
had not dined at his table for five weeks; and when I talked of
accompanying his party to the parish church on Sunday, Emily silenced me
with a look, and whispered that her papa read the prayers at home now,
for that Dr. Gloss was a detestable fanatic, who went about getting up
petitions. Mr. Marston could talk about nothing but the Question, and
the speech he meant to make upon it. “Talk of the dangers of Popery,” he
said, “why old Tom Sarney, who died the other day, was a Papist; I
hunted with him for ten years; never saw a man ride with better
judgment. When I had that horrid tumble at Fen Brook, if Tom Sarney had
not been at my side my Protestant neck would not have been worth a
whistle that day. Danger, forsooth! They are Papists at Eastwood Park,
you know; and, if my son’s word is to be credited, there is one pretty
Catholic there who would save at least one heretic from the bonfire. My
tenant Connel is a Papist; never flinches at Lady-day and Michaelmas.
Lady Dryburgh is a Papist, and Dr. Gloss says she keeps a Jesuit in her
house. By George, sir, she may have a worse faith than I, but she
contrived to give twice as many blankets to the poor last Christmas. And
so I shall tell my friends from the hustings next week.”
When I observed the report of the proceedings at the County Meeting in
the newspaper a fortnight afterwards, I find only that Mr. Marston
“spoke amidst considerable uproar.” But I learn from private channels
that his speech has been by no means thrown away. For it is quoted with
much emphasis by his gamekeeper, and it occupies thirteen closely
written pages in Emily’s album.
THE BEST BAT IN THE SCHOOL.
“It is the best bat in the school. I call it Mercandotti, for its shape.
Look at its face; run your hand over the plane. It is smoother than a
looking-glass. I was a month suiting myself, and I chose it out of a
hundred. I would not part with it for its weight in gold; and that
exquisite knot! lovelier, to me, than a beauty’s dimple. You may fancy
how that drives. I hit a ball yesterday from this very spot to the
wickets in the Upper Shooting Fields; six runs clear, and I scarcely
touched it. Hodgson said it was not the first time that a ball had been
wonderfully struck by Mercandotti! There is not such another piece of
wood in England. Collyer would give his ears for it; and that would be a
long price, as Golightly says. Do take it in your hand, Courtenay; but,
plague on your clumsy knuckles! You know as much of a bat as a Hottentot
of the longitude or a guinea-pig of the German flute!”
So spoke the Honourable Ernest Adolphus Volant, the _decus columenque_
that day of his Dame’s Eleven; proud of the red silk that girded his
loins, and the white hose that decorated his ankles; proud of his
undisputed prowess, and of his anticipated victory; but prouder far of
the possession of this masterpiece of nature’s and Thompson’s workshop,
than which no pearl was ever more precious, no phœnix more unique. As he
spoke, a bail dropped. The Honourable Ernest Adolphus Volant walked
smilingly to the vacant wicket. What elegance in his attitude! What ease
in his motions! Keep that little colleger out of the way, for we shall
have the ball walking this road presently. Three to one on Ragueneau’s!
Now! There was a moment’s pause of anxious suspense. The long fag rubbed
his hands, and drew up his shirt-sleeves; the wicket-keeper stooped
expectantly over the bails; the bowler trotted leisurely up to the
bowling crease, and off went the ball upon its successive errands; from
the hand of the bowler to the exquisite knot in the bat of the
Honourable Ernest Adolphus Volant, from the said exquisite knot to the
unerring fingers of the crouching Long Nips, and from those fingers up
into the blue firmament of heaven with the velocity of a sky-rocket.
What a mistake! How did he manage it? His foot slipped, or the ball was
twisted, or the sun dazzled him. It could not be the fault of the bat;
it is the best bat in the school!
A week afterwards I met my talented and enthusiastic friend crawling to
absence through the playing-fields, as tired as a posthorse, and as hot
as a salamander, with many applauding associates on his right and on his
left, who exhibited to him certain pencilled scrawls, on which he gazed
with flushed and feverish delight. He had kept his wicket up two hours,
and made a score of seventy-three. “I may thank my bat for it,” quoth
he, shouldering it as Hercules might have shouldered his club; “it is
the best bat in the school!” Alas for the instability of human
affections! The exquisite knot had been superseded. Mercandotti had been
sold for half-price, and the Honourable Ernest Adolphus Volant was again
to be eloquent, and again to be envied; he had still the best bat in the
school.
I believe I was a tolerably good-natured boy. I am sure I was always
willing to acquiesce in the estimation my companions set upon their
treasures, because they were generally such that I felt myself a vastly
inadequate judge of their actual value. But the Honourable Ernest
Adolphus Volant was exorbitant in the frequency and variety of his
drafts upon my sympathy. He turned off five hockey-sticks in a
fortnight; and each in its turn was unrivalled. He wore seven waistcoats
in a week, and each for its brief day was as single in its beauty as the
rainbow. In May, Milward’s shoes were unequalled; in June, Ingalton’s
were divine. He lounged in Poet’s Walk over a duodecimo, and it was the
sweetest edition that ever went into a waistcoat-pocket; he pored in his
study over a folio, and there was no other copy extant but Lord
Spencer’s and the mutilated one at Heidelberg. At Easter there were
portraits hanging round his room; Titian never painted their equal. At
Michaelmas, landscapes had occupied their place; Claude would have owned
himself outdone. The colt they were breaking for him in Leicestershire,
the detonator he had bespoken of Charles Moore, the fishing-rod which
had come from Bermuda, the flageolet he had won at the raffle--they were
all, for a short season, perfection; he had always “the best bat in the
school.”
The same whimsical propensity followed him through life. Four years
after we had made our last voyage to Monkey Island in “the best skiff
that ever was built,” I found him exhibiting himself in Hyde Park on
“the best horse that ever was mounted.” A minute was sufficient for the
compliments of our reciprocal recognition, and the Honourable Ernest
Adolphus Volant launched out forthwith into a rhapsody on the merits of
the proud animal he bestrode. “Kremlin, got by Smolensko, out of my
uncle’s old mare. Do you know anything of a horse? Look at his shoulder!
Upon my honour, it is a model for a sculptor. And feel how he is ribbed
up; not a pin loose here; knit together like a ship’s planks; trots
fourteen miles an hour without turning a hair, and carries fifteen stone
up to any hounds in England. I hate your smart dressy creatures, as
slender as a greyhound and as tender as a gazelle, that look as if they
had been stabled in drawing-rooms and taken their turn with the poodle
in my lady’s lap. I like to have plenty of bone under me. If this horse
had been properly ridden, Courtenay, he would have won the Hunters’
Stakes at our place in a canter. He has not a leg that is not worth a
hundred pounds. Seriously, I think there is not such another horse in
the kingdom.”
But before a month had gone by, the Honourable Ernest Adolphus Volant
was ambling down the ride in a pair of stirrups far more nearly
approaching _terra firma_ than those in which his illustrious feet had
been reclining while he held forth on the excellences of Kremlin. “Oh
yes,” he said, when I inquired after “the best horse in England,”
“Kremlin is a magnificent animal; but then, after all, his proper place
is with the hounds. One might as well wear one’s scarlet in a ball-room
as ride Kremlin in the Park. And so I have bought Mrs. Davenant’s
Bijou--and a perfect bijou she is; throws out her little legs like an
opera-dancer, and tosses her head as if she knew that her neck is
irresistible. You will not find such another mane and tail in all
London. Mrs. Davenant’s own maid used to put up both in papers every
night of the week. She is quite a love!” And so the Honourable Ernest
Adolphus Volant trotted off, on a smart dressy creature, as slender as a
greyhound and as tender as a gazelle, that looked as if it had been
stabled in a drawing-room and taken a turn with the poodle in my lady’s
lap.
An analysis of the opinions of my eccentric friend would be an
entertaining thing. “The best situation in town” has been found
successively in nearly every street between the Regent’s Park and St.
James’s Square; “the best carriage for a bachelor” has gone to-day on
two wheels and to-morrow on four; “the best servant in Christendom” has
been turned off, within my own knowledge, for insolence, for
intoxication, for riding his master’s horse, and for riding his master’s
inexplicables; and “the best fellow in the world” has been at various
periods deep in philosophy and deep in debt--a frequenter of the Fives
Court and a dancer of quadrilles--a Tory and a Republican--a prebendary
and a Papist--a drawer of dry pleadings and a singer of sentimental
serenades. If I had acted upon Volant’s advice, I should have been
to-day subscribing to every club and taking in every newspaper; I should
have been imbibing the fluids of nine wine merchants, and covering my
outward man with the broadcloth of thirteen tailors.
It is a pity that Volant has been prevented by indolence, a doting
mother, and four thousand a year, from applying his energies to the
attainment of any professional distinction. In a variety of courses he
might have commanded success. A cause might have come into court stained
and spotted with every conceivable infamy, with effrontery for its
crest, falsehood for its arms, and perjuries for its supporters; but if
Volant had been charged with the advocacy of it, his delighted eye would
have winked at every deficiency, and slumbered at every fault; in his
sight weakness would have sprung up into strength, deformity would have
faded into beauty, impossibility would have been sobered into fact.
Every plaintiff, in his showing, would have been wronged irreparably;
every defendant would have been as unsullied as snow. His would have
been the most irreproachable of declarations, his the most impregnable
of pleas. The reporters might have tittered, the bar might have smiled,
the bench might have shaken its heads; nothing would have persuaded him
that he was beaten. He would have thought the battle won, when his lines
were forced at all points; he would have deemed the house secure, when
the timbers were creaking under his feet. It would have been delicious,
when his strongest objection had been overruled, when his clearest
argument had been stopped, when his stoutest witness had broken down, to
see him adjusting his gown with a self-satisfied air, and concluding
with all the emphasis of anticipated triumph, “That is _my_ case, my
Lord!”
Or if he had coveted senatorial fame, what a space would he have filled
in the political hemisphere! If he had introduced a Turnpike Bill, the
House would have forgotten Emancipation for a time; if he had moved the
committal of a printer, Europe would have gazed as upon the arrest of a
peer of the realm. The Minister he supported would have been the most
virtuous of statesmen when both Houses had voted his impeachment; the
gentlemen he represented would have been the most virtuous of
constituents when they had sold him their voices at five per cent. over
the market price.
Destiny ordered it otherwise. One day, in that sultry season of the year
when fevers and flirtations come to their crisis, and matrimony and
hydrophobia scare you at every corner, I happened to call at his rooms
in Regent Street, at about that time in the afternoon which the
fashionable world calls daybreak. He was sitting with his chocolate
before him, habited only in his _robe de chambre_; but the folds of that
joyous drapery seemed to me composed in a more studied negligence than
was their wont, and the dark curls upon his fine forehead were arranged
in a more scrupulous disorder. I saw at a glance that some revolution
was breaking out in the state of my poor friend’s mind; and when I found
a broken fan on the mantelpiece and a withered rosebud on the sofa,
Walker’s Lexicon open on the writing-table and an unfinished stanza
reposing on the toast-rack, I was no longer in doubt as to its nature;
the Honourable Ernest Adolphus Volant was seriously in love.