gain on the other; and imagined that every male heart would be open to a
lady, who made such generous advances to the borders of virility. But
man, ungrateful man, instead of springing forward to meet her, shrunk
back at her approach. She was persecuted by the ladies as a deserter,
and at best received by the men only as a fugitive. I, for my part,
amused myself awhile with her fopperies, but novelty soon gave way to
detestation, for nothing out of the common order of nature can be long
borne. I had no inclination to a wife who had the ruggedness of a man
without his force, and the ignorance of a woman without her softness;
nor could I think my quiet and honour to be entrusted to such audacious
virtue as was hourly courting danger, and soliciting assault.
My next mistress was Nitella, a lady of gentle mien, and soft voice,
always speaking to approve, and ready to receive direction from those
with whom chance had brought her into company. In Nitella I promised
myself an easy friend, with whom I might loiter away the day without
disturbance or altercation. I therefore soon resolved to address her,
but was discouraged from prosecuting my courtship, by observing, that
her apartments were superstitiously regular; and that, unless she had
notice of my visit, she was never to be seen. There is a kind of anxious
cleanliness which I have always noted as the characteristick of a
slattern; it is the superfluous scrupulosity of guilt, dreading
discovery, and shunning suspicion: it is the violence of an effort
against habit, which, being impelled by external motives, cannot stop at
the middle point.
Nitella was always tricked out rather with nicety than elegance; and
seldom could forbear to discover, by her uneasiness and constraint, that
her attention was burdened, and her imagination engrossed: I therefore
concluded, that being only occasionally and ambitiously dressed, she was
not familiarized to her own ornaments. There are so many competitors for
the fame of cleanliness, that it is not hard to gain information of
those that fail, from those that desire to excel: I quickly found that
Nitella passed her time between finery and dirt; and was always in a
wrapper, night-cap, and slippers, when she was not decorated for
immediate show.
I was then led by my evil destiny to Charybdis, who never neglected an
opportunity of seizing a new prey when it came within her reach. I
thought myself quickly made happy by permission to attend her to publick
places; and pleased my own vanity with imagining the envy which I should
raise in a thousand hearts, by appearing as the acknowledged favourite
of Charybdis. She soon after hinted her intention to take a ramble for a
fortnight, into a part of the kingdom which she had never seen. I
solicited the happiness of accompanying her, which, after a short
reluctance, was indulged me. She had no other curiosity on her journey,
than after all possible means of expense; and was every moment taking
occasion to mention some delicacy, which I knew it my duty upon such
notices to procure.
After our return, being now more familiar, she told me, whenever we met,
of some new diversion; at night she had notice of a charming company
that would breakfast in the gardens; and in the morning had been
informed of some new song in the opera, some new dress at the playhouse,
or some performer at a concert whom she longed to hear. Her intelligence
was such, that there never was a show, to which she did not summon me on
the second day; and as she hated a crowd, and could not go alone, I was
obliged to attend at some intermediate hour, and pay the price of a
whole company. When we passed the streets, she was often charmed with
some trinket in the toy-shops; and from moderate desires of seals and
snuff-boxes, rose, by degrees, to gold and diamonds. I now began to find
the smile of Charybdis too costly for a private purse, and added one
more to six and forty lovers, whose fortune and patience her rapacity
had exhausted.
Imperia then took possession of my affections; but kept them only for a
short time. She had newly inherited a large fortune, and having spent
the early part of her life in the perusal of romances, brought with her
into the gay world all the pride of Cleopatra; expected nothing less
than vows, altars, and sacrifices; and thought her charms dishonoured,
and her power infringed, by the softest opposition to her sentiments, or
the smallest transgression of her commands. Time might indeed cure this
species of pride in a mind not naturally undiscerning, and vitiated only
by false representations; but the operations of time are slow; and I
therefore left her to grow wise at leisure, or to continue in errour at
her own expense.
Thus I have hitherto, in spite of myself, passed my life in frozen
celibacy. My friends, indeed, often tell me, that I flatter my
imagination with higher hopes than human nature can gratify; that I
dress up an ideal charmer in all the radiance of perfection, and then
enter the world to look for the same excellence in corporeal beauty. But
surely, Mr. Rambler, it is not madness to hope for some terrestrial lady
unstained by the spots which I have been describing; at least I am
resolved to pursue my search; for I am so far from thinking meanly of
marriage, that I believe it able to afford the highest happiness decreed
to our present state; and if, after all these miscarriages, I find a
woman that fills up my expectation, you shall hear once more from,
Yours, &c.
HYMENAEUS.
[Footnote c: The arguments of the revered Sir Samuel Romilly on Criminal
Law, have almost been anticipated in this luminous paper, which would
have gained praise even for a legislator. On the correction of our
English Criminal Code, see Mr. Buxton's speech in the House of Commons,
1820. It is a fund of practical information, and, apart from its own
merits, will repay perusal by the valuable collection of opinions which
it contains on this momentous and interesting subject. ED.]
No. 116. SATURDAY, APRIL 27, 1751.
_Optat ephippia bos piger: optat arare caballus_.
HOR. Lib. i. Ep. xiv. 43.
Thus the slow ox would gaudy trappings claim;
The sprightly horse would plough.--FRANCIS.
TO THE RAMBLER.
SIR,
I was the second son of a country gentleman by the daughter of a wealthy
citizen of London. My father having by his marriage freed the estate
from a heavy mortgage, and paid his sisters their portions, thought
himself discharged from all obligation to further thought, and entitled
to spend the rest of his life in rural pleasures. He therefore spared
nothing that might contribute to the completion of his felicity; he
procured the best guns and horses that the kingdom could supply, paid
large salaries to his groom and huntsman, and became the envy of the
country for the discipline of his hounds. But, above all his other
attainments, he was eminent for a breed of pointers and setting-dogs,
which by long and vigilant cultivation he had so much improved, that not
a partridge or heathcock could rest in security, and game of whatever
species that dared to light upon his manor, was beaten down by his shot,
or covered with his nets.
My elder brother was very early initiated in the chace, and, at an age
when other boys are _creeping like snails unwillingly to school_, he
could wind the horn, beat the bushes, bound over hedges, and swim
rivers. When the huntsman one day broke his leg, he supplied his place
with equal abilities, and came home with the scut in his hat, amidst the
acclamations of the whole village. I being either delicate or timorous,
less desirous of honour, or less capable of sylvan heroism, was always
the favourite of my mother; because I kept my coat clean, and my
complexion free from freckles, and did not come home, like my brother,
mired and tanned, nor carry corn in my hat to the horse, nor bring dirty
curs into the parlour.
My mother had not been taught to amuse herself with books, and being
much inclined to despise the ignorance and barbarity of the country
ladies, disdained to learn their sentiments or conversation, and had
made no addition to the notions which she had brought from the precincts
of Cornhill. She was, therefore, always recounting the glories of the
city; enumerating the succession of mayors; celebrating the magnificence
of the banquets at Guildhall; and relating the civilities paid her at
the companies' feasts by men of whom some are now made aldermen, some
have fined for sheriffs, and none are worth less than forty thousand
pounds. She frequently displayed her father's greatness; told of the
large bills which he had paid at sight; of the sums for which his word
would pass upon the Exchange; the heaps of gold which he used on
Saturday night to toss about with a shovel; the extent of his warehouse,
and the strength of his doors; and when she relaxed her imagination with
lower subjects, described the furniture of their country-house, or
repeated the wit of the clerks and porters.
By these narratives I was fired with the splendour and dignity of
London, and of trade. I therefore devoted myself to a shop, and warmed
my imagination from year to year with inquiries about the privileges of
a freeman, the power of the common council, the dignity of a wholesale
dealer, and the grandeur of mayoralty, to which my mother assured me
that many had arrived who began the world with less than myself.
I was very impatient to enter into a path, which led to such honour and
felicity; but was forced for a time to endure some repression of my
eagerness, for it was my grandfather's maxim, that a _young man seldom
makes much money, who is out of his time before two-and-twenty_. They
thought it necessary, therefore, to keep me at home till the proper age,
without any other employment than that of learning merchants' accounts,
and the art of regulating books; but at length the tedious days elapsed,
I was transplanted to town, and, with great satisfaction to myself,
bound to a haberdasher.
My master, who had no conception of any virtue, merit, or dignity, but
that of being rich, had all the good qualities which naturally arise
from a close and unwearied attention to the main chance; his desire to
gain wealth was so well tempered by the vanity of shewing it, that
without any other principle of action, he lived in the esteem of the
whole commercial world; and was always treated with respect by the only
men whose good opinion he valued or solicited, those who were
universally allowed to be richer than himself.
By his instructions I learned in a few weeks to handle a yard with great
dexterity, to wind tape neatly upon the ends of my fingers, and to make
up parcels with exact frugality of paper and packthread; and soon caught
from my fellow-apprentices the true grace of a counter-bow, the careless
air with which a small pair of scales is to be held between the fingers,
and the vigour and sprightliness with which the box, after the riband
has been cut, is returned into its place. Having no desire of any higher
employment, and therefore applying all my powers to the knowledge of my
trade, I was quickly master of all that could be known, became a critick
in small wares, contrived new variations of figures, and new mixtures of
colours, and was sometimes consulted by the weavers when they projected
fashions for the ensuing spring.
With all these accomplishments, in the fourth year of my apprenticeship,
I paid a visit to my friends in the country, where I expected to be
received as a new ornament of the family, and consulted by the
neighbouring gentlemen as a master of pecuniary knowledge, and by the
ladies as an oracle of the mode. But, unhappily, at the first publick
table to which I was invited, appeared a student of the Temple, and an
officer of the guards, who looked upon me with a smile of contempt,
which destroyed at once all my hopes of distinction, so that I durst
hardly raise my eyes for fear of encountering their superiority of mien.
Nor was my courage revived by any opportunities of displaying my
knowledge; for the templar entertained the company for part of the day
with historical narratives and political observations; and the colonel
afterwards detailed the adventures of a birth-night, told the claims and
expectations of the courtiers, and gave an account of assemblies,
gardens, and diversions. I, indeed, essayed to fill up a pause in a
parliamentary debate with a faint mention of trade and Spaniards; and
once attempted, with some warmth, to correct a gross mistake about a
silver breast-knot; but neither of my antagonists seemed to think a
reply necessary; they resumed their discourse without emotion, and again
engrossed the attention of the company; nor did one of the ladies appear
desirous to know my opinion of her dress, or to hear how long the
carnation shot with white, that was then new amongst them, had been
antiquated in town.
As I knew that neither of these gentlemen had more money than myself, I
could not discover what had depressed me in their presence; nor why they
were considered by others as more worthy of attention and respect; and
therefore resolved, when we met again, to rouse my spirit, and force
myself into notice. I went very early to the next weekly meeting, and
was entertaining a small circle very successfully with a minute
representation of my lord mayor's show, when the colonel entered
careless and gay, sat down with a kind of unceremonious civility, and
without appearing to intend any interruption, drew my audience away to
the other part of the room, to which I had not the courage to follow
them. Soon after came in the lawyer, not indeed with the same attraction
of mien, but with greater powers of language: and by one or other the
company was so happily amused, that I was neither heard nor seen, nor
was able to give any other proof of my existence than that I put round
the glass, and was in my turn permitted to name the toast.
My mother, indeed, endeavoured to comfort me in my vexation, by telling
me, that perhaps these showy talkers were hardly able to pay every one
his own; that he who has money in his pocket need not care what any man
says of him; that, if I minded my trade, the time will come when lawyers
and soldiers would be glad to borrow out of my purse; and that it is
fine, when a man can set his hands to his sides, and say he is worth
forty thousand pounds every day of the year. These and many more such
consolations and encouragements, I received from my good mother, which,
however, did not much allay my uneasiness; for having by some accident
heard, that the country ladies despised her as a cit, I had therefore no
longer much reverence for her opinions, but considered her as one whose
ignorance and prejudice had hurried me, though without ill intentions,
into a state of meanness and ignominy, from which I could not find any
possibility of rising to the rank which my ancestors had always held.
I returned, however, to my master, and busied myself among thread, and
silks, and laces, but without my former cheerfulness and alacrity. I had
now no longer any felicity in contemplating the exact disposition of my
powdered curls, the equal plaits of my ruffles, or the glossy blackness
of my shoes; nor heard with my former elevation those compliments which
ladies sometimes condescended to pay me upon my readiness in twisting a
paper, or counting out the change. The term of Young Man, with which I
was sometimes honoured, as I carried a parcel to the door of a coach,
tortured my imagination; I grew negligent of my person, and sullen in my
temper; often mistook the demands of the customers, treated their
caprices and objections with contempt, and received and dismissed them
with surly silence.
My master was afraid lest the shop should suffer by this change of my
behaviour; and, therefore, after some expostulations, posted me in the
warehouse, and preserved me from the danger and reproach of desertion,
to which my discontent would certainly have urged me, had I continued
any longer behind the counter.
In the sixth year of my servitude my brother died of drunken joy, for
having run down a fox that had baffled all the packs in the province. I
was now heir, and with the hearty consent of my master commenced
gentleman. The adventures in which my new character engaged me shall be
communicated in another letter, by, Sir,
Yours, &c.
MISOCAPELUS.
No. 117. TUESDAY, APRIL 30, 1751.
[Greek: Hossan ep Oulumpo memasan Themen autar ep Ossae
Paelion einosiphullon, in ouranos ambatos eiae.] HOMER, Od.
[Greek: L] 314.
The gods they challenge, and affect the skies:
Heav'd on Olympus tott'ring Ossa stood;
On Ossa, Pelion nods with all his wood. POPE.
TO THE RAMBLER.
SIR,
Nothing has more retarded the advancement of learning than the
disposition of vulgar minds to ridicule and vilify what they cannot
comprehend. All industry must be excited by hope; and as the student
often proposes no other reward to himself than praise, he is easily
discouraged by contempt and insult. He who brings with him into a
clamorous multitude the timidity of recluse speculation, and has never
hardened his front in publick life, or accustomed his passions to the
vicissitudes and accidents, the triumphs and defeats of mixed
conversation, will blush at the stare of petulant incredulity, and
suffer himself to be driven by a burst of laughter, from the fortresses
of demonstration. The mechanist will be afraid to assert before hardy
contradiction, the possibility of tearing down bulwarks with a
silk-worm's thread; and the astronomer of relating the rapidity of
light, the distance of the fixed stars, and the height of the lunar
mountains.
If I could by any efforts have shaken off this cowardice, I had not
sheltered myself under a borrowed name, nor applied to you for the means
of communicating to the publick the theory of a garret; a subject which,
except some slight and transient strictures, has been hitherto neglected
by those who were best qualified to adorn it, either for want of leisure
to prosecute the various researches in which a nice discussion must
engage them, or because it requires such diversity of knowledge, and
such extent of curiosity, as is scarcely to be found in any single
intellect: or perhaps others foresaw the tumults which would be raised
against them, and confined their knowledge to their own breasts, and
abandoned prejudice and folly to the direction of chance.
That the professors of literature generally reside in the highest
stories, has been immemorially observed. The wisdom of the ancients was
well acquainted with the intellectual advantages of an elevated
situation: why else were the Muses stationed on Olympus or Parnassus, by
those who could with equal right have raised them bowers in the vale of
Tempe, or erected their altars among the flexures of Meander? Why was
Jove himself nursed upon a mountain? or why did the goddesses, when the
prize of beauty was contested, try the cause upon the top of Ida? Such
were the fictions by which the great masters of the earlier ages
endeavoured to inculcate to posterity the importance of a garret, which,
though they had been long obscured by the negligence and ignorance of
succeeding times, were well enforced by the celebrated symbol of
Pythagoras, [Greek: anemon pneonton taen aecho proskunei]; "when the
wind blows, worship its echo." This could not but be understood by his
disciples as an inviolable injunction to live in a garret, which I have
found frequently visited by the echo and the wind. Nor was the tradition
wholly obliterated in the age of Augustus, for Tibullus evidently
congratulates himself upon his garret, not without some allusion to the
Pythagorean precept:
_Quam juvat immites ventos audire cubantem--
Aut, gelidas hibernus aquas quum fuderit Auster,
Securum somnos imbre juvante sequi_! Lib. i. El. i. 45.
How sweet in sleep to pass the careless hours,
Lull'd by the beating winds and dashing show'rs!
And it is impossible not to discover the fondness of Lucretius, an
earlier writer, for a garret, in his description of the lofty towers of
serene learning, and of the pleasure with which a wise man looks down
upon the confused and erratick state of the world moving below him:
_Sed nil dulcius est, bene quam munita tenere
Edita doctrina Sapientum templa serena;
Despicere unde queas alios, passimque videre
Errare, atque viam palanteis quaerere vitae_. Lib. ii. 7.
--'Tis sweet thy lab'ring steps to guide
To virtue's heights, with wisdom well supplied,
And all the magazines of learning fortified:
From thence to look below on human kind,
Bewilder'd in the maze of life, and blind. DRYDEN.
The institution has, indeed, continued to our own time; the garret is
still the usual receptacle of the philosopher and poet; but this, like
many ancient customs, is perpetuated only by an accidental imitation,
without knowledge of the original reason for which it was established.
_Causa latet; res est notissima_.
The cause is secret, but th' effect is known. ADDISON.
Conjectures have, indeed, been advanced concerning these habitations of
literature, but without much satisfaction to the judicious inquirer.
Some have imagined, that the garret is generally chosen by the wits as
most easily rented; and concluded that no man rejoices in his aerial
abode, but on the days of payment. Others suspect, that a garret is
chiefly convenient, as it is remoter than any other part of the house
from the outer door, which is often observed to be infested by
visitants, who talk incessantly of beer, or linen, or a coat, and repeat
the same sounds every morning, and sometimes again in the afternoon,
without any variation, except that they grow daily more importunate and
clamorous, and raise their voices in time from mournful murmurs to
raging vociferations. This eternal monotony is always detestable to a
man whose chief pleasure is to enlarge his knowledge, and vary his
ideas. Others talk of freedom from noise, and abstraction from common
business or amusements; and some, yet more visionary, tell us, that the
faculties are enlarged by open prospects, and that the fancy is at more
liberty, when the eye ranges without confinement.
These conveniences may perhaps all be found in a well-chosen garret; but
surely they cannot be supposed sufficiently important to have operated
unvariably upon different climates, distant ages, and separate nations.
Of an universal practice, there must still be presumed an universal
cause, which, however recondite and abstruse, may be perhaps reserved to
make me illustrious by its discovery, and you by its promulgation.
It is universally known that the faculties of the mind are invigorated
or weakened by the state of the body, and that the body is in a great
measure regulated by the various compressions of the ambient element.
The effects of the air in the production or cure of corporeal maladies
have been acknowledged from the time of Hippocrates; but no man has yet
sufficiently considered how far it may influence the operations of the
genius, though every day affords instances of local understanding, of
wits and reasoners, whose faculties are adapted to some single spot, and
who, when they are removed to any other place, sink at once into silence
and stupidity. I have discovered, by a long series of observations, that
invention and elocution suffer great impediments from dense and impure
vapours, and that the tenuity of a defecated air at a proper distance
from the surface of the earth, accelerates the fancy, and sets at
liberty those intellectual powers which were before shackled by too
strong attraction, and unable to expand themselves under the pressure of
a gross atmosphere. I have found dulness to quicken into sentiment in a
thin ether, as water, though not very hot, boils in a receiver partly
exhausted; and heads, in appearance empty, have teemed with notions upon
rising ground, as the flaccid sides of a football would have swelled out
into stiffness and extension.