The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb
Chapter 81 : We know one another at first sight. There is an order of imperfect intellects (under wh

We know one another at first sight. There is an order of imperfect intellects (under which mine must be content to rank) which in its const.i.tution is essentially anti-Caledonian. The owners of the sort of faculties I allude to, have minds rather suggestive than comprehensive. They have no pretences to much clearness or precision in their ideas, or in their manner of expressing them. Their intellectual wardrobe (to confess fairly) has few whole pieces in it.

They are content with fragments and scattered pieces of Truth. She presents no full front to them--a feature or side-face at the most.

Hints and glimpses, germs and crude essays at a system, is the utmost they pretend to. They beat up a little game peradventure--and leave it to knottier heads, more robust const.i.tutions, to run it down.

The light that lights them is not steady and polar, but mutable and s.h.i.+fting: waxing, and again waning. Their conversation is accordingly.

They will throw out a random word in or out of season, and be content to let it pa.s.s for what it is worth. They cannot speak always as if they were upon their oath--but must be understood, speaking or writing, with some abatement. They seldom wait to mature a proposition, but e'en bring it to market in the green ear. They delight to impart their defective discoveries as they arise, without waiting for their full developement. They are no systematizers, and would but err more by attempting it. Their minds, as I said before, are suggestive merely. The brain of a true Caledonian (if I am not mistaken) is const.i.tuted upon quite a different plan. His Minerva is born in panoply. You are never admitted to see his ideas in their growth--if, indeed, they do grow, and are not rather put together upon principles of clock-work. You never catch his mind in an undress. He never hints or suggests any thing, but unlades his stock of ideas in perfect order and completeness. He brings his total wealth into company, and gravely unpacks it. His riches are always about him. He never stoops to catch a glittering something in your presence, to share it with you, before he quite knows whether it be true touch or not. You cannot cry _halves_ to any thing that he finds. He does not find, but bring. You never witness his first apprehension of a thing.

His understanding is always at its meridian--you never see the first dawn, the early streaks.--He has no falterings of self-suspicion.

Surmises, guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, semi-consciousnesses, partial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo conceptions, have no place in his brain, or vocabulary. The twilight of dubiety never falls upon him. Is he orthodox--he has no doubts. Is he an infidel--he has none either. Between the affirmative and the negative there is no border-land with him. You cannot hover with him upon the confines of truth, or wander in the maze of a probable argument. He always keeps the path. You cannot make excursions with him--for he sets you right.

His taste never fluctuates. His morality never abates. He cannot compromise, or understand middle actions. There can be but a right and a wrong. His conversation is as a book. His affirmations have the sanct.i.ty of an oath. You must speak upon the square with him. He stops a metaphor like a suspected person in an enemy's country. "A healthy book!"--said one of his countrymen to me, who had ventured to give that appellation to John Buncle,--"did I catch rightly what you said?

I have heard of a man in health, and of a healthy state of body, but I do not see how that epithet can be properly applied to a book." Above all, you must beware of indirect expressions before a Caledonian.

Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein of it. Remember you are upon your oath. I have a print of a graceful female after Leonardo da Vinci, which I was showing off to Mr. ****. After he had examined it minutely, I ventured to ask him how he liked MY BEAUTY (a foolish name it goes by among my friends)--when he very gravely a.s.sured me, that "he had considerable respect for my character and talents" (so he was pleased to say), "but had not given himself much thought about the degree of my personal pretensions." The misconception staggered me, but did not seem much to disconcert him.--Persons of this nation are particularly fond of affirming a truth--which n.o.body doubts. They do not so properly affirm, as annunciate it. They do indeed appear to have such a love of truth (as if, like virtue, it were valuable for itself) that all truth becomes equally valuable, whether the proposition that contains it be new or old, disputed, or such as is impossible to become a subject of disputation. I was present not long since at a party of North Britons, where a son of Burns was expected; and happened to drop a silly expression (in my South British way), that I wished it were the father instead of the son--when four of them started up at once to inform me, that "that was impossible, because he was dead." An impracticable wish, it seems, was more than they could conceive. Swift has. .h.i.t off this part of their character, namely their love of truth, in his biting way, but with an illiberality that necessarily confines the pa.s.sage to the margin.[2] The tediousness of these people is certainly provoking. I wonder if they ever tire one another!--In my early life I had a pa.s.sionate fondness for the poetry of Burns. I have sometimes foolishly hoped to ingratiate myself with his countrymen by expressing it. But I have always found that a true Scot resents your admiration of his compatriot, even more than he would your contempt of him. The latter he imputes to your "imperfect acquaintance with many of the words which he uses;" and the same objection makes it a presumption in you to suppose that you can admire him.--Thomson they seem to have forgotten. Smollett they have neither forgotten nor forgiven for his delineation of Rory and his companion, upon their first introduction to our metropolis.--peak of Smollett as a great genius, and they will retort upon you Hume's History compared with _his_ Continuation of it.

What if the historian had continued Humphrey Clinker?

I have, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews. They are a piece of stubborn antiquity, compared with which Stonehenge is in its nonage.

They date beyond the pyramids. But I should not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse with any of that nation. I confess that I have not the nerves to enter their synagogues. Old prejudices cling about me. I cannot shake off the story of Hugh of Lincoln. Centuries of injury, contempt, and hate, on the one side,--of cloaked revenge, dissimulation, and hate, on the other, between our and their fathers, must, and ought, to affect the blood of the children. I cannot believe it can run clear and kindly yet; or that a few fine words, such as candour, liberality, the light of a nineteenth century, can close up the breaches of so deadly a disunion. A Hebrew is nowhere congenial to me. He is least distasteful on 'Change--for the mercantile spirit levels all distinctions, as all are beauties in the dark. I boldly confess that I do not relish the approximation of Jew and Christian, which has become so fas.h.i.+onable. The reciprocal endearments have, to me, something hypocritical and unnatural in them. I do not like to see the Church and Synagogue kissing and congeeing in awkward postures of an affected civility. If _they_ are converted, why do they not come over to us altogether? Why keep up a form of separation, when the life of it is fled? If they can sit with us at table, why do they keck at our cookery? I do not understand these half convert.i.tes. Jews christianizing--Christians judaizing--puzzle me. I like fish or flesh.

A moderate Jew is a more confounding piece of anomaly than a wet Quaker. The spirit of the synagogue is essentially _separative_. B---- would have been more in keeping if he had abided by the faith of his forefathers. There is a fine scorn in his face, which nature meant to be of ---- Christians. The Hebrew spirit is strong in him, in spite of his proselytism. He cannot conquer the s.h.i.+bboleth. How it breaks out, when he sings, "The Children of Israel pa.s.sed through the Red Sea!"

The auditors, for the moment, are as Egyptians to him, and he rides over our necks in triumph. There is no mistaking him.--B---- has a strong expression of sense in his countenance, and it is confirmed by his singing. The foundation of his vocal excellence is sense. He sings with understanding, as Kemble delivered dialogue. He would sing the Commandments, and give an appropriate character to each prohibition.

His nation, in general, have not ever-sensible countenances. How should they?--but you seldom see a silly expression among them.

Gain, and the pursuit of gain, sharpen a man's visage. I never heard of an idiot being born among them.--Some admire the Jewish female physiognomy. I admire it--but with trembling. Jael had those full dark inscrutable eyes.

In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces--or rather masks--that have looked out kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets and highways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls--these "images of G.o.d cut in ebony." But I should not like to a.s.sociate with them, to share my meals and my good-nights with them--because they are black.

I love Quaker ways, and Quaker wors.h.i.+p. I venerate the Quaker principles. It does me good for the rest of the day when I meet any of their people in my path. When I am ruffled or disturbed by any occurrence, the sight, or quiet voice of a Quaker, acts upon me as a ventilator, lightening the air, and taking off a load from the bosom.

But I cannot like the Quakers (as Desdemona would say) "to live with them." I am all over sophisticated--with humours, fancies, craving hourly sympathy. I must have books, pictures, theatres, chit-chat, scandal, jokes, ambiguities, and a thousand whim-whams, which their simpler taste can do without. I should starve at their primitive banquet. My appet.i.tes are too high for the salads which (according to Evelyn) Eve dressed for the angel, my gusto too excited

To sit a guest with Daniel at his pulse.

The indirect answers which Quakers are often found to return to a question put to them may be explained, I think, without the vulgar a.s.sumption, that they are more given to evasion and equivocating than other people. They naturally look to their words more carefully, and are more cautious of committing themselves. They have a peculiar character to keep up on this head. They stand in a manner upon their veracity. A Quaker is by law exempted from taking an oath. The custom of resorting to an oath in extreme cases, sanctified as it is by all religious antiquity, is apt (it must be confessed) to introduce into the laxer sort of minds the notion of two kinds of truth--the one applicable to the solemn affairs of justice, and the other to the common proceedings of daily intercourse. As truth bound upon the conscience by an oath can be but truth, so in the common affirmations of the shop and the market-place a lat.i.tude is expected, and conceded upon questions wanting this solemn covenant. Something less than truth satisfies. It is common to hear a person say, "You do not expect me to speak as if I were upon my oath." Hence a great deal of incorrectness and inadvertency, short of falsehood, creeps into ordinary conversation; and a kind of secondary or laic-truth is tolerated, where clergy-truth--oath-truth, by the nature of the circ.u.mstances, is not required. A Quaker knows none of this distinction. His simple affirmation being received, upon the most sacred occasions, without any further test, stamps a value upon the words which he is to use upon the most indifferent topics of life. He looks to them, naturally, with more severity. You can have of him no more than his word. He knows, if he is caught tripping in a casual expression, he forfeits, for himself, at least, his claim to the invidious exemption. He knows that his syllables are weighed--and how far a consciousness of this particular watchfulness, exerted against a person, has a tendency to produce indirect answers, and a diverting of the question by honest means, might be ill.u.s.trated, and the practice justified, by a more sacred example than is proper to be adduced upon this occasion. The admirable presence of mind, which is notorious in Quakers upon all contingencies, might be traced to this imposed self-watchfulness--if it did not seem rather an humble and secular scion of that old stock of religious constancy, which never bent or faltered, in the Primitive Friends, or gave way to the winds of persecution, to the violence of judge or accuser, under trials and racking examinations. "You will never be the wiser, if I sit here answering your questions till midnight," said one of those upright Justicers to Penn, who had been putting law-cases with a puzzling subtlety. "Thereafter as the answers may be," retorted the Quaker. The astonis.h.i.+ng composure of this people is sometimes ludicrously displayed in lighter instances.--I was travelling in a stagecoach with three male Quakers, b.u.t.toned up in the straitest non-conformity of their sect. We stopped to bait at Andover, where a meal, partly tea apparatus, partly supper, was set before us. My friends confined themselves to the tea-table. I in my way took supper. When the landlady brought in the bill, the eldest of my companions discovered that she had charged for both meals. This was resisted. Mine hostess was very clamorous and positive. Some mild arguments were used on the part of the Quakers, for which the heated mind of the good lady seemed by no means a fit recipient. The guard came in with his usual peremptory notice. The Quakers pulled out their money, and formally tendered it.--so much for tea--I, in humble imitation, tendering mine--for the supper which I had taken. She would not relax in her demand. So they all three quietly put up their silver, as did myself, and marched out of the room, the eldest and gravest going first, with myself closing up the rear, who thought I could not do better than follow the example of such grave and warrantable personages. We got in. The steps went up. The coach drove off. The murmurs of mine hostess, not very indistinctly or ambiguously p.r.o.nounced, became after a time inaudible--and now my conscience, which the whimsical scene had for a while suspended, beginning to give some twitches, I waited, in the hope that some justification would be offered by these serious persons for the seeming injustice of their conduct. To my great surprise, not a syllable was dropped on the subject. They sate as mute as at a meeting. At length the eldest of them broke silence, by inquiring of his next neighbour, "Hast thee heard how indigos go at the India House?" and the question operated as a soporific on my moral feeling as far as Exeter.

[Footnote 1: I would be understood as confining myself to the subject of _imperfect sympathies_. To nations or cla.s.ses of men there can be no direct _antipathy_. There may be individuals born and constellated so opposite to another individual nature, that the same sphere cannot hold them. I have met with my moral antipodes, and can believe the story of two persons meeting (who never saw one another before in their lives) and instantly fighting.

--We by proof find there should be Twixt man and man such an antipathy, That though he can show no just reason why For any former wrong or injury, Can neither find a blemish in his fame, Nor aught in face or feature justly blame, Can challenge or accuse him of no evil, Yet notwithstanding hates him as a devil.

The lines are from old Heywood's "Hierarchie of Angels," and he subjoins a curious story in confirmation, of a Spaniard who attempted to a.s.sa.s.sinate a King Ferdinand of Spain, and being put to the rack could give no other reason for the deed but an inveterate antipathy which he had taken to the first sight of the King.

--The cause which to that act compell'd him Was, he ne'er loved him since he first beheld him.]

[Footnote 2: There are some people who think they sufficiently acquit themselves, and entertain their company, with relating facts of no consequence, not at all out of the road of such common incidents as happen every day; and this I have observed more frequently among the Scots than any other nation, who are very careful not to omit the minutest circ.u.mstances of time or place; which kind of discourse, if it were not a little relieved by the uncouth terms and phrases, as well as accent and gesture peculiar to that country, would be hardly tolerable.--_Hints towards an Essay on Conversation_.]

WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT-FEARS

We are too hasty when we set down our ancestors in the gross for fools, for the monstrous inconsistencies (as they seem to us) involved in their creed of witchcraft. In the relations of this visible world we find them to have been as rational, and shrewd to detect an historic anomaly, as ourselves. But when once the invisible world was supposed to be opened, and the lawless agency of bad spirits a.s.sumed, what measures of probability, of decency, of fitness, or proportion--of that which distinguishes the likely from the palpable absurd--could they have to guide them in the rejection or admission of any particular testimony?--That maidens pined away, wasting inwardly as their waxen images consumed before a fire--that corn was lodged, and cattle lamed--that whirlwinds uptore in diabolic revelry the oaks of the forest--or that spits and kettles only danced a fearful-innocent vagary about some rustic's kitchen when no wind was stirring--were all equally probable where no law of agency was understood. That the prince of the powers of darkness, pa.s.sing by the flower and pomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege to the weak fantasy of indigent eld--has neither likelihood nor unlikelihood _a priori_ to us, who have no measure to guess at his policy, or standard to estimate what rate those anile souls may fetch in the devil's market. Nor, when the wicked are expressly symbolized by a goat, was it to be wondered at so much, that _he_ should come sometimes in that body, and a.s.sert his metaphor.--That the intercourse was opened at all between both worlds was perhaps the mistake--but that once a.s.sumed, I see no reason for disbelieving one attested story of this nature more than another on the score of absurdity. There is no law to judge of the lawless, or canon by which a dream may be criticised.

I have sometimes thought that I could not have existed in the days of received witchcraft; that I could not have slept in a village where one of those reputed hags dwelt. Our ancestors were bolder or more obtuse. Amidst the universal belief that these wretches were in league with the author of all evil, holding h.e.l.l tributary to their muttering, no simple Justice of the Peace seems to have scrupled issuing, or silly Headborough serving, a warrant upon them--as if they should subpoena Satan!--Prospero in his boat, with his books and wand about him, suffers himself to be conveyed away at the mercy of his enemies to an unknown island. He might have raised a storm or two, we think, on the pa.s.sage. His acquiescence is in exact a.n.a.logy to the non-resistance of witches to the const.i.tuted powers.--What stops the Fiend in Spenser from tearing Guyon to pieces--or who had made it a condition of his prey, that Guyon must take a.s.say of the glorious bait--we have no guess. We do not know the laws of that country.

From my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about witches and witch-stories. My maid, and more legendary aunt, supplied me with good store. But I shall mention the accident which directed my curiosity originally into this channel. In my father's book-closet, the History of the Bible, by Stackhouse, occupied a distinguished station. The pictures with which it abounds--one of the ark, in particular, and another of Solomon's temple, delineated with all the fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the spot--attracted my childish attention. There was a picture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen. We shall come to that hereafter. Stackhouse is in two huge tomes--and there was a pleasure in removing folios of that magnitude, which, with infinite straining, was as much as I could manage, from the situation which they occupied upon an upper shelf. I have not met with the work from that time to this, but I remember it consisted of Old Testament stories, orderly set down, with the _objection_ appended to each story, and the _solution_ of the objection regularly tacked to that.

The _objection_ was a summary of whatever difficulties had been opposed to the credibility of the history, by the shrewdness of ancient or modern infidelity, drawn up with an almost complimentary excess of candour. The _solution_ was brief, modest, and satisfactory.

The bane and antidote were, both before you. To doubts so put, and so quashed, there seemed to be an end for ever. The dragon lay dead, for the foot of the veriest babe to trample on. But--like as was rather feared than realised from that slain monster in Spenser--from the womb of those crushed errors young dragonets would creep, exceeding the prowess of so tender a Saint George as myself to vanquish. The habit of expecting objections to every pa.s.sage, set me upon starting more objections, for the glory of finding a solution of my own for them. I became staggered and perplexed, a sceptic in long coats. The pretty Bible stories which I had read, or heard read in church, lost their purity and sincerity of impression, and were turned into so many historic or chronologic theses to be defended against whatever impugners. I was not to disbelieve them, but--the next thing to that--I was to be quite sure that some one or other would or had disbelieved them. Next to making a child an infidel, is the letting him know that there are infidels at all. Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength. O, how ugly sound scriptural doubts from the mouth of a babe and a suckling!--I should have lost myself in these mazes, and have pined away, I think, with such unfit sustenance as these husks afforded, but for a fortunate piece of ill-fortune, which about this time befel me. Turning over the picture of the ark with too much haste, I unhappily made a breach in its ingenious fabric--driving my inconsiderate fingers right through the two larger quadrupeds--the elephant, and the camel--that stare (as well they might) out of the two last windows next the steerage in that unique piece of naval architecture. Stackhouse was henceforth locked up, and became an interdicted treasure. With the book, the _objections_ and _solutions_ gradually cleared out of my head, and have seldom returned since in any force to trouble me.--But there was one impression which I had imbibed from Stackhouse, which no lock or bar could shut out, and which was destined to try my childish nerves rather more seriously.--That detestable picture!

I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The night-time solitude, and the dark, were my h.e.l.l. The sufferings I endured in this nature would justify the expression. I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life--so far as memory serves in things so long ago--without an a.s.surance, which realized its own prophecy, of seeing some frightful spectre. Be old Stackhouse then acquitted in part, if I say, that to his picture of the Witch raising up Samuel--(O that old man covered with a mantle!) I owe--not my midnight terrors, the h.e.l.l of my infancy--but the shape and manner of their visitation. It was he who dressed up for me a hag that nightly sate upon my pillow--a sure bed-fellow, when my aunt or my maid was far from me. All day long, while the book was permitted me, I dreamed waking over his delineation, and at night (if I may use so bold an expression) awoke into sleep, and found the vision true. I durst not, even in the day-light, once enter the chamber where I slept, without my face turned to the window, aversely from the bed where my witch-ridden pillow was.--Parents do not know what they do when they leave tender babes alone to go to sleep in the dark. The feeling about for a friendly arm--the hoping for a familiar voice--when they wake screaming--and find none to soothe them--what a terrible shaking it is to their poor nerves! The keeping them up till midnight, through candle-light and the unwholesome hours, as they are called,--would, I am satisfied, in a medical point of view, prove the better caution.--That detestable picture, as I have said, gave the fas.h.i.+on to my dreams--if dreams they were--for the scene of them was invariably the room in which I lay. Had I never met with the picture, the fears would have come self-pictured in some shape or other--

Headless bear, black man, or ape--

but, as it was, my imaginations took that form.--It is not book, or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these terrors in children. They can at most but give them a direction. Dear little T.H. who of all children has been brought up with the most scrupulous exclusion of every taint of superst.i.tion--who was never allowed to hear of goblin or apparition, or scarcely to be told of bad men, or to read or hear of any distressing story--finds all this world of fear, from which he has been so rigidly excluded _ab extra_, in his own "thick-coming fancies;" and from his little midnight pillow, this nurse-child of optimism will start at shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in sweats to which the reveries of the cell-d.a.m.ned murderer are tranquillity.

Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras--dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies--may reproduce themselves in the brain of superst.i.tion--but they were there before. They are transcripts, types--the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that, which we know in a waking sense to be false, come to affect us at all?--or

--Names, whose sense we see not, Fray us with things that be not?

Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury?--O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body--or, without the body, they would have been the same. All the cruel, tormenting, defined devils in Dante--tearing, mangling, choking, stifling, scorching demons--are they one half so fearful to the spirit of a man, as the simple idea of a spirit unembodied following him--

Like one that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turn'd round, walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.[1]

That the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual--that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless upon earth--that it predominates in the period of sinless infancy--are difficulties, the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our antemundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadow-land of pre-existence.

My night-fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. I confess an occasional night-mare; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of them. Fiendish faces, with the extinguished taper, will come and look at me; but I know them for mockeries, even while I cannot elude their presence, and I fight and grapple with them. For the credit of my imagination, I am almost ashamed to say how tame and prosaic my dreams are grown. They are never romantic, seldom even rural. They are of architecture and of buildings--cities abroad, which I have never seen, and hardly have hope to see. I have traversed, for the seeming length of a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon--their churches, palaces, squares, market-places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an inexpressible sense of delight--a map-like distinctness of trace--and a day-light vividness of vision, that was all but being awake.--I have formerly travelled among the Westmoreland fells--my highest Alps,--but they are objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recognition; and I have again and again awoke with ineffectual struggles of the inner eye, to make out a shape in any way whatever, of Helvellyn.

Methought I was in that country, but the mountains were gone. The poverty of my dreams mortifies me. There is Coleridge, at his will can conjure up icy domes, and pleasure-houses for Kubla Khan, and Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abara, and caverns,

Where Alph, the sacred river, runs,

to solace his night solitudes--when I cannot muster a fiddle. Barry Cornwall has his tritons and his nereids gamboling before him in nocturnal visions, and proclaiming sons born to Neptune--when my stretch of imaginative activity can hardly, in the night season, raise up the ghost of a fish-wife. To set my failures in somewhat a mortifying light--it was after reading the n.o.ble Dream of this poet, that my fancy ran strong upon these marine spectra; and the poor plastic power, such as it is, within me set to work, to humour my folly in a sort of dream that very night. Methought I was upon the ocean billows at some sea nuptials, riding and mounted high, with the customary train sounding their conchs before me, (I myself, you may be sure, the _leading G.o.d_,) and jollily we went careering over the main, till just where Ino Leucothea should have greeted me (I think it was Ino) with a white embrace, the billows gradually subsiding, fell from a sea-roughness to a sea-calm, and thence to a river-motion, and that river (as happens in the familiarization of dreams) was no other than the gentle Thames, which landed me, in the wafture of a placid wave or two, alone, safe and inglorious, somewhere at the foot of Lambeth palace.

The degree of the soul's creativeness in sleep might furnish no whimsical criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident in the same soul waking. An old gentleman, a friend of mine, and a humorist, used to carry this notion so far, that when he saw any stripling of his acquaintance ambitious of becoming a poet, his first question would be,--"Young man, what sort of dreams have you?" I have so much faith in my old friend's theory, that when I feel that idle vein returning upon me, I presently subside into my proper element of prose, remembering those eluding nereids, and that inauspicious inland landing.

[Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.]

MY RELATIONS

I am arrived at that point of life, at which a man may account it a blessing, as it is a singularity, if he have either of his parents surviving. I have not that felicity--and sometimes think feelingly of a pa.s.sage in Browne's Christian Morals, where he speaks of a man that hath lived sixty or seventy years in the world. "In such a compa.s.s of time," he says, "a man may have a close apprehension what it is to be forgotten, when he hath lived to find none who could remember his father, or scarcely the friends of his youth, and may sensibly see with what a face in no long time OBLIVION will look upon himself."

I had an aunt, a dear and good one. She was one whom single blessedness had soured to the world. She often used to say, that I was the only thing in it which she loved; and, when she thought I was quitting it, she grieved over me with mother's tears. A partiality quite so exclusive my reason cannot altogether approve. She was from morning till night poring over good books, and devotional exercises.

Her favourite volumes were Thomas a Kempis, in Stanhope's Translation; and a Roman Catholic Prayer Book, with the _matins_ and _complines_ regularly set down,--terms which I was at that time too young to understand. She persisted in reading them, although admonished daily concerning their Papistical tendency; and went to church every Sabbath, as a good Protestant should do. These were the only books she studied; though, I think, at one period of her life, she told me, she had read with great satisfaction the Adventures of an Unfortunate Young n.o.bleman. Finding the door of the chapel in Ess.e.x-street open one day--it was in the infancy of that heresy--she went in, liked the sermon, and the manner of wors.h.i.+p, and frequented it at intervals for some time after. She came not for doctrinal points, and never missed them. With some little asperities in her const.i.tution, which I have above hinted at, she was a steadfast, friendly being, and a fine _old Christian_. She was a woman of strong sense, and a shrewd mind--extraordinary at a _repartee;_ one of the few occasions of her breaking silence--else she did not much value wit. The only secular employment I remember to have seen her engaged in, was, the splitting of French beans, and dropping them into a China basin of fair water.

The odour of those tender vegetables to this day comes back upon my sense, redolent of soothing recollections. Certainly it is the most delicate of culinary operations.

Male aunts, as somebody calls them, I had none--to remember. By the uncle's side I may be said to have been born an orphan. Brother, or sister, I never had any--to know them. A sister, I think, that should have been Elizabeth, died in both our infancies. What a comfort, or what a care, may I not have missed in her!--But I have cousins, sprinkled about in Hertfords.h.i.+re--besides _two_, with whom I have been all my life in habits of the closest intimacy, and whom I may term cousins _par excellence_. These are James and Bridget Elia. They are older than myself by twelve, and ten, years; and neither of them seems disposed, in matters of advice and guidance, to waive any of the prerogatives which primogeniture confers. May they continue still in the same mind; and when they shall be seventy-five, and seventy-three, years old (I cannot spare them sooner), persist in treating me in my grand climacteric precisely as a stripling, or younger brother!

James is an inexplicable cousin. Nature hath her unities, which not every critic can penetrate; or, if we feel, we cannot explain them.

The pen of Yorick, and of none since his, could have drawn J.E.

entire--those fine Shandian lights and shades, which make up his story. I must limp after in my poor ant.i.thetical manner, as the fates have given me grace and talent. J.E. then--to the eye of a common observer at least--seemeth made up of contradictory principles.--The genuine child of impulse, the frigid philosopher of prudence--the phlegm of my cousin's doctrine is invariably at war with his temperament, which is high sanguine. With always some fire-new project in his brain, J.E. is the systematic opponent of innovation, and crier down of every thing that has not stood the test of age and experiment.

With a hundred fine notions chasing one another hourly in his fancy, he is startled at the least approach to the romantic in others; and, determined by his own sense in every thing, commends _you_ to the guidance of common sense on all occasions.--With a touch of the eccentric in all which he does, or says, he is only anxious that _you_ should not commit yourself by doing any thing absurd or singular.

On my once letting slip at table, that I was not fond of a certain popular dish, he begged me at any rate not to _say_ so--for the world would think me mad. He disguises a pa.s.sionate fondness for works of high art (whereof he hath ama.s.sed a choice collection), under the pretext of buying only to sell again--that his enthusiasm may give no encouragement to yours. Yet, if it were so, why does that piece of tender, pastoral Dominichino hang still by his wall?--is the ball of his sight much more dear to him?--or what picture-dealer can talk like him?

Whereas mankind in general are observed to warp their speculative conclusions to the bent of their individual humours, _his_ theories are sure to be in diametrical opposition to his const.i.tution. He is courageous as Charles of Sweden, upon instinct; chary of his person, upon principle, as a travelling Quaker.--He has been preaching up to me, all my life, the doctrine of bowing to the great--the necessity of forms, and manner, to a man's getting on in the world. He himself never aims at either, that I can discover,--and has a spirit, that would stand upright in the presence of the Cham of Tartary. It is pleasant to hear him discourse of patience--extolling it as the truest wisdom--and to see him during the last seven minutes that his dinner is getting ready. Nature never ran up in her haste a more restless piece of workmans.h.i.+p than when she moulded this impetuous cousin--and Art never turned out a more elaborate orator than he can display himself to be, upon his favourite topic of the advantages of quiet, and contentedness in the state, whatever it may be, that we are placed in. He is triumphant on this theme, when he has you safe in one of those short stages that ply for the western road, in a very obstructing manner, at the foot of John Murray's street--where you get in when it is empty, and are expected to wait till the vehicle hath completed her just freight--a trying three quarters of an hour to some people. He wonders at your fidgetiness,--"where could we be better than we are, _thus silting, thus consulting_?"--"prefers, for his part, a state of rest to locomotion,"--with an eye all the while upon the coachman--till at length, waxing out of all patience, at _your want of it_, he breaks out into a pathetic remonstrance at the fellow for detaining us so long over the time which he had professed, and declares peremptorily, that "the gentleman in the coach is determined to get out, if he does not drive on that instant."