_Newcastle-on-Tyne._
P. S. I cannot write the name of the town where I reside, without
feeling a strong inducement to say one word of him, who has been so
pleasantly immortalized by yourself, and the inimitable being who wrote
so affectingly of “Rosamund Gray,” and the “Old Familiar Faces”--I mean
poor Starkey. I was born, and have lived all my life (not a long one),
in the town where he terminated his humble career, and gave another name
to the neglected and unpitied list of those, who seem chiefly to have
entered the world for the purpose of swelling
“The short and simple annals of the poor,”
and my earliest recollections are haunted by his meagre care-worn
form;--many a time have I shrunk from the shaking of his stick, and the
imperious “_dem your bluds_,” which he bestowed with uncommon celerity
on the defenceless heads of his young and unthinking sources of
annoyance, as they assailed him from the corners which he was accustomed
to pass. But the captain was a humble man, and these “moods of the mind”
were seldom indulged in, save when he was returning, brim-full of brief
and intemperate importance, from the Black Horse, in Pilgrim-street, the
tap-room of which was the scene of many a learned disputation with the
“unwashed artificers” of the evening, and in which the captain was
always proportionably brilliant to the number of _gills_ he had drank.
On these occasions, in his efforts to silence the sons of toil, he did
not scruple to use his Latin--and, in such instances, appeal was
impossible, and victory sure. Among several anecdotes, I am in
possession of two, which you, his most celebrious biographer, may not
think unworthy of recording. On one evening, when he was returning from
a carousal, furnished by the generosity of friends, or his own
indiscretion--for the captain despised to-morrow as much as any man,
and was fully convinced of the propriety of the apophthegm, “sufficient
unto the day is its own evil”--he found the gate of the Freemen’s
Hospital, where he resided, closed, and no one in a better condition for
exclaiming with Dr. Beattie,
“Ah! who can tell how hard it is to climb!”
than himself. What was to be done? To fly over was impossible--and he
was much too deep in the scale of intoxication to dream of scaling the
wall. A party of young bucks, “ripe for fun,” fresh from their
sacrifices at the shrine of “the reeling goddess with the zoneless
waist,” came up the street; to these, hat in hand, did the captain
prefer his petition to be assisted over, and they, with a
thoughtlessness hardly to be excused by their condition, took him up,
and threw him completely on to the grass plot on the other side. The
veteran scrambled to his legs, and, for the wall was not _very_ high on
the inside, returned them thanks in his best manner for their timely
assistance, utterly forgetful that it might have proved most disastrous
both to himself and them. The second, and with which I must conclude a
postscript which has already far outgrown the letter, was less harmless
and equally illustrative of the man. He had gone, with another
eleemosynary worthy, on some gratulatory occasion, to the hall of one of
the members for the town, and the butler who was well aware of the
object of his guests, treated them handsomely in his refectory to cold
beef and good ale. He was accidentally called away, and the two friends
were left alone. Alas! for the temptations which continually beset us!
The “expedition of” the captain’s “violent love outran the pauser,
reason:” he suggested, and both adopted, the expedient of secreting a
slice or two of the member’s beef, to make more substantial the repast
of the evening. Starkey’s share was deposited in his hat. The man in
office returned, pressed his visiters afresh, “and still the circling
cup was drained,” until the home-brewed had made considerable
innovations, and the travellers thought it fitting to depart. The
captain’s habitual politeness was an overmatch for his cunning: whilst
he was yet at the door, casting his “last lingering looks behind,” he
must needs take off his hat to give more effect to the fervour of his
farewell--when--“out upon ’t”--the beef fell as flat on his oration, as
did the hat of corporal Trim on the floor in the scene of his eloquence.
Starkey was dumb-founded, his associate was in agonies, and the butler
was convulsed with the most “side-splitting” laughter. The captain, like
other great men, has not fallen “unsung.” Hearken to Gilchrist, one of
the “bards of the Tyne,” who thus sings in his apotheosis of Benjamin
Starkey:--
“His game is up, his pipe is out, an’ fairly laid his craw,
His fame ’ill blaw about just like coal dust at Shiney-Raw.
He surely was a joker rare--what times there’d been for a’ the
nation,
Had he but lived to be a mayor, the glory o’ wor corporation!
“Whack, &c.”