conditions of society it has been variously regarded as the consummation of
an earthly career most fervently to be desired, and, on the other hand,
as that consummation which is most of all to be deprecated. Cæsar the
Dictator, at his last dinner party, (_coena_,) and the very evening before
his assassination, being questioned as to the mode of death which, in _his_
opinion, might seem the most eligible, replied--"That which should be most
sudden." On the other hand, the divine Litany of our English Church, when
breathing forth supplications, as if in some representative character for
the whole human race prostrate before God, places such a death in the very
van of horrors. "From lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence, and
famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death,--_Good Lord, deliver
us_." Sudden death is here made to crown the climax in a grand ascent of
calamities; it is the last of curses; and yet, by the noblest of Romans,
it was treated as the first of blessings. In that difference, most readers
will see little more than the difference between Christianity and Paganism.
But there I hesitate. The Christian church may be right in its estimate of
sudden death; and it is a natural feeling, though after all it may also
be an infirm one, to wish for a quiet dismissal from life--as that which
_seems_ most reconcilable with meditation, with penitential retrospects,
and with the humilities of farewell prayer. There does not, however, occur
to me any direct scriptural warrant for this earnest petition of the
English Litany. It seems rather a petition indulged to human infirmity,
than exacted from human piety. And, however _that_ may be, two remarks
suggest themselves as prudent restraints upon a doctrine, which else _may_
wander, and _has_ wandered, into an uncharitable superstition. The first
is this: that many people are likely to exaggerate the horror of a sudden
death, (I mean the _objective_ horror to him who contemplates such a
death, not the _subjective_ horror to him who suffers it,) from the false
disposition to lay a stress upon words or acts, simply because by an
accident they have become words or acts. If a man dies, for instance,
by some sudden death when he happens to be intoxicated, such a death is
falsely regarded with peculiar horror; as though the intoxication were
suddenly exalted into a blasphemy. But _that_ is unphilosophic. The man
was, or he was not, _habitually_ a drunkard. If not, if his intoxication
were a solitary accident, there can be no reason at all for allowing
special emphasis to this act, simply because through misfortune it became
his final act. Nor, on the other hand, if it were no accident, but one of
his _habitual_ transgressions, will it be the more habitual or the more a
transgression, because some sudden calamity, surprising him, has caused
this habitual transgression to be also a final one? Could the man have had
any reason even dimly to foresee his own sudden death, there would have
been a new feature in his act of intemperance--a feature of presumption and
irreverence, as in one that by possibility felt himself drawing near to the
presence of God. But this is no part of the case supposed. And the only new
element in the man's act is not any element of extra immorality, but simply
of extra misfortune.
The other remark has reference to the meaning of the word _sudden_. And it
is a strong illustration of the duty which for ever calls us to the stern
valuation of words--that very possibly Cæesar and the Christian church do
not differ in the way supposed; that is, do not differ by any difference
of doctrine as between Pagan and Christian views of the moral temper
appropriate to death, but that they are contemplating different cases.
Both contemplate a violent death; a [Greek: biathanatos]--death that
is [Greek: biaios]: but the difference is--that the Roman by the word
"sudden" means an _unlingering_ death: whereas the Christian Litany
by "sudden" means a death _without warning_, consequently without any
available summons to religious preparation. The poor mutineer, who kneels
down to gather into his heart the bullets from twelve firelocks of his
pitying comrades, dies by a most sudden death in Cæsar's sense: one shock,
one mighty spasm, one (possibly _not_ one) groan, and all is over. But,
in the sense of the Litany, his death is far from sudden; his offence,
originally, his imprisonment, his trial, the interval between his sentence
and its execution, having all furnished him with separate warnings of his
fate--having all summoned him to meet it with solemn preparation.
Meantime, whatever may be thought of a sudden death as a mere variety in
the modes of dying, where death in some shape is inevitable--a question
which, equally in the Roman and the Christian sense, will be variously
answered according to each man's variety of temperament--certainly, upon
one aspect of sudden death there can be no opening for doubt, that of all
agonies incident to man it is the most frightful, that of all martyrdoms it
is the most freezing to human sensibilities--namely, where it surprises a
man under circumstances which offer (or which seem to offer) some hurried
and inappreciable chance of evading it. Any effort, by which such an
evasion can be accomplished, must be as sudden as the danger which it
affronts. Even _that_, even the sickening necessity for hurrying in
extremity where all hurry seems destined to be vain, self-baffled, and
where the dreadful knell of _too_ late is already sounding in the ears by
anticipation--even that anguish is liable to a hideous exasperation in one
particular case, namely, where the agonising appeal is made not exclusively
to the instinct of self-preservation, but to the conscience, on behalf of
another life besides your own, accidentally cast upon _your_ protection. To
fail, to collapse in a service merely your own, might seem comparatively
venial; though, in fact, it is far from venial. But to fail in a case where
Providence has suddenly thrown into your hands the final interests of
another--of a fellow-creature shuddering between the gates of life and
death; this, to a man of apprehensive conscience, would mingle the misery
of an atrocious criminality with the misery of a bloody calamity. The man
is called upon, too probably, to die; but to die at the very moment when,
by any momentary collapse, he is self-denounced as a murderer. He had but
the twinkling of an eye for his effort, and that effort might, at the best,
have been unavailing; but from this shadow of a chance, small or great, how
if he has recoiled by a treasonable _lâcheté_? The effort _might_ have been
without hope; but to have risen to the level of that effort, would have
rescued him, though not from dying, yet from dying as a traitor to his
duties.
The situation here contemplated exposes a dreadful ulcer, lurking far down
in the depths of human nature. It is not that men generally are summoned
to face such awful trials. But potentially, and in shadowy outline, such
a trial is moving subterraneously in perhaps all men's natures--muttering
under ground in one world, to be realized perhaps in some other. Upon the
secret mirror of our dreams such a trial is darkly projected at intervals,
perhaps, to every one of us. That dream, so familiar to childhood, of
meeting a lion, and, from languishing prostration in hope and vital energy,
that constant sequel of lying down before him, publishes the secret
frailty of human nature--reveals its deep-seated Pariah falsehood to
itself--records its abysmal treachery. Perhaps not one of us escapes that
dream; perhaps, as by some sorrowful doom of man, that dream repeats for
every one of us, through every generation, the original temptation in Eden.
Every one of us, in this dream, has a bait offered to the infirm places of
his own individual will; once again a snare is made ready for leading him
into captivity to a luxury of ruin; again, as in aboriginal Paradise, the
man falls from innocence; once again, by infinite iteration, the ancient
Earth groans to God, through her secret caves, over the weakness of her
child; "Nature, from her seat, sighing through all her works," again "gives
signs of woe that all is lost;" and again the counter sigh is repeated to
the sorrowing heavens of the endless rebellion against God. Many people
think that one man, the patriarch of our race, could not in his single
person execute this rebellion for all his race. Perhaps they are wrong.
But, even if not, perhaps in the world of dreams every one of us ratifies
for himself the original act. Our English rite of "Confirmation," by which,
in years of awakened reason, we take upon us the engagements contracted
for us in our slumbering infancy,--how sublime a rite is that! The little
postern gate, through which the baby in its cradle had been silently placed
for a time within the glory of God's countenance, suddenly rises to the
clouds as a triumphal arch, through which, with banners displayed and
martial pomps, we make our second entry as crusading soldiers militant
for God, by personal choice and by sacramental oath. Each man says in
effect--"Lo! I rebaptise myself; and that which once was sworn on my
behalf, now I swear for myself." Even so in dreams, perhaps, under some
secret conflict of the midnight sleeper, lighted up to the consciousness
at the time, but darkened to the memory as soon as all is finished, each
several child of our mysterious race completes for himself the aboriginal
fall.
As I drew near to the Manchester post office, I found that it was
considerably past midnight; but to my great relief, as it was important for
me to be in Westmorland by the morning, I saw by the huge saucer eyes of
the mail, blazing through the gloom of overhanging houses, that my chance
was not yet lost. Past the time it was; but by some luck, very unusual in
my experience, the mail was not even yet ready to start. I ascended to
my seat on the box, where my cloak was still lying as it had lain at
the Bridgewater Arms. I had left it there in imitation of a nautical
discoverer, who leaves a bit of bunting on the shore of his discovery, by
way of warning off the ground the whole human race, and signalising to the
Christian and the heathen worlds, with his best compliments, that he has
planted his throne for ever upon that virgin soil: henceforward claiming
the _jus dominii_ to the top of the atmosphere above it, and also the right
of driving shafts to the centre of the earth below it; so that all people
found after this warning, either aloft in the atmosphere, or in the
shafts, or squatting on the soil, will be treated as trespassers--that is,
decapitated by their very faithful and obedient servant, the owner of the
said bunting. Possibly my cloak might not have been respected, and the _jus
gentium_ might have been cruelly violated in my person--for, in the dark,
people commit deeds of darkness, gas being a great ally of morality--but it
so happened that, on this night, there was no other outside passenger;
and the crime, which else was but too probable, missed fire for want of
a criminal. By the way, I may as well mention at this point, since a
circumstantial accuracy is essential to the effect of my narrative, that
there was no other person of any description whatever about the mail--the
guard, the coachman, and myself being allowed for--except only one--a
horrid creature of the class known to the world as insiders, but whom young
Oxford called sometimes "Trojans," in opposition to our Grecian selves, and
sometimes "vermin." A Turkish Effendi, who piques himself on good breeding,
will never mention by name a pig. Yet it is but too often that he has
reason to mention this animal; since constantly, in the streets of
Stamboul, he has his trousers deranged or polluted by this vile creature
running between his legs. But under any excess of hurry he is always
careful, out of respect to the company he is dining with, to suppress the
odious name, and to call the wretch "that other creature," as though all
animal life beside formed one group, and this odious beast (to whom, as
Chrysippus observed, salt serves as an apology for a soul) formed another
and alien group on the outside of creation. Now I, who am an English
Effendi, that think myself to understand good-breeding as well as any son
of Othman, beg my reader's pardon for having mentioned an insider by his
gross natural name. I shall do so no more; and, if I should have occasion
to glance at so painful a subject, I shall always call him "that other
creature." Let us hope, however, that no such distressing occasion will
arise. But, by the way, an occasion arises at this moment; for the reader
will be sure to ask, when we come to the story, "Was this other creature
present?" He was _not_; or more correctly, perhaps, _it_ was not. We
dropped the creature--or the creature, by natural imbecility, dropped
itself--within the first ten miles from Manchester. In the latter case, I
wish to make a philosophic remark of a moral tendency. When I die, or when
the reader dies, and by repute suppose of fever, it will never be known
whether we died in reality of the fever or of the doctor. But this other
creature, in the case of dropping out of the coach, will enjoy a coroner's
inquest; consequently he will enjoy an epitaph. For I insist upon it, that
the verdict of a coroner's jury makes the best of epitaphs. It is brief, so
that the public all find time to read; it is pithy, so that the surviving
friends (if any _can_ survive such a loss) remember it without fatigue; it
is upon oath, so that rascals and Dr. Johnsons cannot pick holes in it.
"Died through the visitation of intense stupidity, by impinging on a
moonlight night against the off hind wheel of the Glasgow mail! Deodand
upon the said wheel--two-pence." What a simple lapidary inscription! Nobody
much in the wrong but an off-wheel; and with few acquaintances; and if it
were but rendered into choice Latin, though there would be a little bother
in finding a Ciceronian word for "off-wheel," Marcellus himself, that great
master of sepulchral eloquence, could not show a better. Why I call this
little remark _moral_, is, from the compensation it points out. Here, by
the supposition, is that other creature on the one side, the beast of the
world; and he (or it) gets an epitaph. You and I, on the contrary, the
pride of our friends, get none.
But why linger on the subject of vermin? Having mounted the box, I took a
small quantity of laudanum, having already travelled two hundred and fifty
miles--viz., from a point seventy miles beyond London, upon a simple
breakfast. In the taking of laudanum there was nothing extraordinary. But
by accident it drew upon me the special attention of my assessor on the
box, the coachman. And in _that_ there was nothing extraordinary. But by
accident, and with great delight, it drew my attention to the fact that
this coachman was a monster in point of size, and that he had but one eye.
In fact he had been foretold by Virgil as--
"Monstrum. horrendum, informe, ingens cui lumen adempium."
He answered in every point--a monster he was--dreadful, shapeless, huge,
who had lost an eye. But why should _that_ delight me? Had he been one of
the Calendars in the Arabian Nights, and had paid down his eye as the price
of his criminal curiosity, what right had I to exult in his misfortune? I
did _not_ exult: I delighted in no man's punishment, though it were even
merited. But these personal distinctions identified in an instant an old
friend of mine, whom I had known in the south for some years as the most
masterly of mail-coachmen. He was the man in all Europe that could best
have undertaken to drive six-in-hand full gallop over _Al Sirat_--that
famous bridge of Mahomet across the bottomless gulf, backing himself
against the Prophet and twenty such fellows. I used to call him _Cyclops
mastigophorus_, Cyclops the whip-bearer, until I observed that his skill
made whips useless, except to fetch off an impertinent fly from a leader's
head; upon which I changed his Grecian name to Cyclops _diphrélates_
(Cyclops the charioteer.) I, and others known to me, studied under him the
diphrelatic art. Excuse, reader, a word too elegant to be pedantic. And
also take this remark from me, as a _gage d'amitié_--that no word ever
was or _can_ be pedantic which, by supporting a distinction, supports the
accuracy of logic; or which fills up a chasm for the understanding. As a
pupil, though I paid extra fees, I cannot say that I stood high in
his esteem. It showed his dogged honesty, (though, observe, not his
discernment,) that he could not see my merits. Perhaps we ought to excuse
his absurdity in this particular by remembering his want of an eye. _That_
made him blind to my merits. Irritating as this blindness was, (surely
it could not be envy?) he always courted my conversation, in which art I
certainly had the whip-hand of him. On this occasion, great joy was at our
meeting. But what was Cyclops doing here? Had the medical men recommended
northern air, or how? I collected, from such explanations as he
volunteered, that he had an interest at stake in a suit-at-law pending at
Lancaster; so that probably he had got himself transferred to this station,
for the purpose of connecting with his professional pursuits an instant
readiness for the calls of his lawsuit.
Meantime, what are we stopping for? Surely, we've been waiting long enough.
Oh, this procrastinating mail, and oh this procrastinating post-office!
Can't they take a lesson upon that subject from _me_? Some people have
called _me_ procrastinating. Now you are witness, reader, that I was in
time for _them_. But can _they_ lay their hands on their hearts, and say
that they were in time for me? I, during my life, have often had to wait
for the post-office; the post-office never waited a minute for me. What are
they about? The guard tells me that there is a large extra accumulation of
foreign mails this night, owing to irregularities caused by war and by the
packet service, when as yet nothing is done by steam. For an _extra_ hour,
it seems, the post-office has been engaged in threshing out the pure
wheaten correspondence of Glasgow, and winnowing it from the chaff of all
baser intermediate towns. We can hear the flails going at this moment. But
at last all is finished. Sound your horn, guard. Manchester, good bye;
we've lost an hour by your criminal conduct at the post-office; which,
however, though I do not mean to part with a serviceable ground of
complaint, and one which really is such for the horses, to me secretly is
an advantage, since it compels us to recover this last hour amongst the
next eight or nine. Off we are at last, and at eleven miles an hour; and at
first I detect no changes in the energy or in the skill of Cyclops.
From Manchester to Kendal, which virtually (though not in law) is the
capital of Westmoreland, were at this time seven stages of eleven miles
each. The first five of these, dated from Manchester, terminated in
Lancaster, which was therefore fifty-five miles north of Manchester, and
the same distance exactly from Liverpool. The first three terminated in
Preston, (called, by way of distinction from other towns of that name,
_proud_ Preston,) at which place it was that the separate roads from
Liverpool and from Manchester to the north became confluent. Within these
first three stages lay the foundation, the progress, and termination of our
night's adventure. During the first stage, I found out that Cyclops was
mortal: he was liable to the shocking affection of sleep--a thing which I
had never previously suspected. If a man is addicted to the vicious habit
of sleeping, all the skill in aurigation of Apollo himself, with the horses
of Aurora to execute the motions of his will, avail him nothing. "Oh,
Cyclops!" I exclaimed more than once, "Cyclops, my friend; thou art mortal.
Thou snorest." Through this first eleven miles, however, he betrayed
his infirmity--which I grieve to say he shared with the whole Pagan
Pantheon--only by short stretches. On waking up, he made an apology for
himself, which, instead of mending the matter, laid an ominous foundation
for coming disasters. The summer assizes were now proceeding at Lancaster:
in consequence of which, for three nights and three days, he had not lain
down in a bed. During the day, he was waiting for his uncertain summons as
a witness on the trial in which he was interested; or he was drinking with
the other witnesses, under the vigilant surveillance of the attorneys.
During the night, or that part of it when the least temptations existed to
conviviality, he was driving. Throughout the second stage he grew more and
more drowsy. In the second mile of the third stage, he surrendered himself
finally and without a struggle to his perilous temptation. All his past
resistance had but deepened the weight of this final oppression. Seven
atmospheres of sleep seemed resting upon him; and, to consummate the case,
our worthy guard, after singing "Love amongst the Roses," for the fiftieth
or sixtieth time, without any invitation from Cyclops or myself, and
without applause for his poor labors, had moodily resigned himself to
slumber--not so deep doubtless as the coachman's, but deep enough for
mischief; and having, probably, no similar excuse. And thus at last, about
ten miles from Preston, I found myself left in charge of his Majesty's
London and Glasgow mail, then running about eleven miles an hour.
What made this negligence less criminal than else it must have been
thought, was the condition of the roads at night during the assizes. At
that time all the law business of populous Liverpool, and of populous
Manchester, with its vast cincture of populous rural districts, was called
up by ancient usage to the tribunal of Lilliputian Lancaster. To break up
this old traditional usage required a conflict with powerful established
interests, a large system of new arrangements, and a new parliamentary
statute. As things were at present, twice in the year so vast a body of
business rolled northwards, from the southern quarter of the county, that
a fortnight at least occupied the severe exertions of two judges for its
dispatch. The consequence of this was--that every horse available for such
a service, along the whole line of road, was exhausted in carrying down the
multitudes of people who were parties to the different suits. By sunset,
therefore, it usually happened that, through utter exhaustion amongst
men and horses, the roads were all silent. Except exhaustion in the vast
adjacent county of York from a contested election, nothing like it was
ordinarily witnessed in England.
On this occasion, the usual silence and solitude prevailed along the road.
Not a hoof nor a wheel was to be heard. And to strengthen this false
luxurious confidence in the noiseless roads, it happened also that the
night was one of peculiar solemnity and peace. I myself, though slightly
alive to the possibilities of peril, had so far yielded to the influence of
the mighty calm as to sink into a profound reverie. The month was August,
in which lay my own birth-day; a festival to every thoughtful man
suggesting solemn and often sigh-born thoughts.[1] The county was my own
native county--upon which, in its southern section, more than upon any
equal area known to man past or present, had descended the original curse
of labour in its heaviest form, not mastering the bodies of men only as of
slaves, or criminals in mines, but working through the fiery will. Upon no
equal space of earth, was, or ever had been, the same energy of human
power put forth daily. At this particular season also of the assizes, that
dreadful hurricane of flight and pursuit, as it might have seemed to a
stranger, that swept to and from Lancaster all day long, hunting the
county up and down, and regularly subsiding about sunset, united with the
permanent distinction of Lancashire as the very metropolis and citadel of
labour, to point the thoughts pathetically upon that counter vision of
rest, of saintly repose from strife and sorrow, towards which, as to their
secret haven, the profounder aspirations of man's heart are continually
travelling. Obliquely we were nearing the sea upon our left, which also
must, under the present circumstances, be repeating the general state of
halcyon repose. The sea, the atmosphere, the light, bore an orchestral part
in this universal lull. Moonlight, in the first timid tremblings of the
dawn, were now blending: and the blendings were brought into a still more
exquisite state of unity, by a slight silvery mist, motionless and dreamy,
that covered the woods and fields, but with a veil of equable transparency.
Except the feet of our own horses, which, running on a sandy margin of the
road, made little disturbance, there was no sound abroad. In the clouds,
and on the earth, prevailed the same majestic peace; and in spite of all
that the villain of a schoolmaster has done for the ruin of our sublimer
thoughts, which are the thoughts of our infancy, we still believe in no
such nonsense as a limited atmosphere. Whatever we may swear with our false
feigning lips, in our faithful hearts we still believe, and must for ever
believe, in fields of air traversing the total gulf between earth and the
central heavens. Still, in the confidence of children that tread without
fear _every_ chamber in their father's house, and to whom no door is
closed, we, in that Sabbatic vision which sometimes is revealed for an hour
upon nights like this, ascend with easy steps from the sorrow-stricken
fields of earth, upwards to the sandals of God.
[Footnote 1: "Sigh-born:" I owe the suggestion of this word to an obscure
remembrance of a beautiful phrase in Giraldus Gambrensis, viz., _suspiriosæ
cogilationes_.]