Some Roundabout Papers
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This etext was prepared from the 1908 T.N. Foulis edition by Stephen
Rice, email srice01@ibm.net
Some Roundabout Papers
ON SOME CARP AT SANS SOUCI
We have lately made the acquaintance of an old lady of ninety,
who has passed the last twenty-five years of her old life in a
great metropolitan establishment, the workhouse, namely, of the
parish of Saint Lazarus. Stay -- twenty-three or four years ago,
she came out once, and thought to earn a little money by hop-
picking; but being overworked, and having to lie out at night,
she got a palsy which has incapacitated her from all further
labour, and has caused her poor old limbs to shake ever since.
An illustration of that dismal proverb which tells us how poverty
makes us acquainted with strange bed-fellows, this poor old
shaking body has to lay herself down every night in her workhouse
bed by the side of some other old woman with whom she may or may
not agree. She herself can't be a very pleasant bed-fellow, poor
thing! with her shaking old limbs and cold feet. She lies awake
a deal of the night, to be sure, not thinking of happy old times,
for hers never were happy; but sleepless with aches, and agues,
and rheumatism of old age. "The gentleman gave me brandy-and-
water," she said, her old voice shaking with rapture at the
thought. I never had a great love for Queen Charlotte, but I
like her better now from what this old lady told me. The Queen,
who loved snuff herself, has left a legacy of snuff to certain
poorhouses; and, in her watchful nights, this old woman takes a
pinch of Queen Charlotte's snuff, "and it do comfort me, sir,
that it do!" Pulveris exigui munus. Here is a forlorn aged
creature, shaking with palsy, with no soul among the great
struggling multitude of mankind to care for her, not quite
trampled out of life, but past and forgotten in the rush, made a
little happy, and soothed in her hours of unrest by this penny
legacy. Let me think as I write. (The next month's sermon,
thank goodness! is safe to press.) This discourse will appear at
the season when I have read that wassail-bowls make their
appearance; at the season of pantomime, turkey and sausages,
plum-puddings, jollifications for schoolboys; Christmas bills,
and reminiscences more or less sad and sweet for elders. If we
oldsters are not merry, we shall be having a semblance of
merriment. We shall see the young folks laughing round the
holly-bush. We shall pass the bottle round cosily as we sit by
the fire. That old thing will have a sort of festival too.
Beef, beer, and pudding will be served to her for that day also.
Christmas falls on a Thursday. Friday is the workhouse day for
coming out. Mary, remember that old Goody Twoshoes has her
invitation for Friday, 26th December! Ninety is she, poor old
soul? Ah! what a bonny face to catch under a mistletoe! "Yes,
ninety, sir," she says, "and my mother was a hundred, and my
grandmother was a hundred and two."
Herself ninety, her mother a hundred, her grandmother a hundred
and two? What a queer calculation!
Ninety! Very good, granny: you were born, then, in 1772.
Your mother, we will say, was twenty-seven when you were born,
and was born therefore in 1745.
Your grandmother was thirty-five when her daughter was born, and
was born therefore in 1710.
We will begin with the present granny first. My good old
creature, you can't of course remember, but that little gentleman
for whom you mother was laundress in the Temple was the ingenious
Mr Goldsmith, author of a "History of England," the "Vicar of
Wakefield," and many diverting pieces. You were brought almost
an infant to his chambers in Brick Court, and he gave you some
sugar-candy, for the doctor was always good to children. That
gentleman who well-nigh smothered you by sitting down on you as
you lay in a chair asleep was the learned Mr S. Johnson, whose
history of "Rasselas" you have never read, my pour soul; and
whose tragedy of "Irene" I don't believe any man in these
kingdoms ever perused. That tipsy Scotch gentleman who used to
come to the chambers sometimes, and at whom everybody laughed,
wrote a more amusing book than any of the scholars, your Mr Burke
and your Mr Johnson, and your Dr Goldsmith. Your father often
took him home in a chair to his lodgings; and has done as much
for Parson Sterne in Bond Street, the famous wit. Of course, my
good creature, you remember the Gordon Riots, and crying No
Popery before Mr Langdale's house, the Popish distiller's, and
that bonny fire of my Lord Mansfield's books in Bloomsbury
Square? Bless us, what a heap of illuminations you have seen!
For the glorious victory over the Americans at Breed's Hill; for
the peace in 1814, and the beautiful Chinese bridge in St James's
Park; for the coronation of his Majesty, whom you recollect as
Prince of Wales, Goody, don't you? Yes; and you went in a
procession of laundresses to pay your respects to his good lady,
the injured Queen of England, at Brandenburg House; and you
remember your mother told you how she was taken to see the Scotch
lords executed at the Tower. And as for your grandmother, she
was born five months after the battle of Malplaquet, she was;
where her poor father was killed, fighting like a bold Briton for
the Queen. With the help of a "Wade's Chronology," I can make
out ever so queer a history for you, my poor old body, and a
pedigree as authentic as many in the peerage-books.
Peerage-books and pedigrees? What does she know about them?
Battles and victories, treasons, kings, and beheadings, literary
gentlemen, and the like, what have they ever been to her?
Granny, did you ever hear of General Wolfe? Your mother may have
seen him embark, and your father may have carried a musket under
him. Your grandmother may have cried huzza for Marlborough; but
what is the Prince Duke to you, and did you ever so much as hear
tell of his name? How many hundred or thousand of years had that
toad lived who was in the coal at the defunct exhibition? -- and
yet he was not a bit better informed than toads seven or eight
hundred years younger.
"Don't talk to me your nonsense about Exhibitions, and Prince
Dukes, and toads in coals, or coals in toads, or what is it?"
says granny. "I know there was a good Queen Charlotte, for she
left me snuff; and it comforts me of a night when I lie awake."
To me there is something very touching in the notion of that
little pinch of comfort doled out to granny, and gratefully
inhaled by her in the darkness. Don't you remember what
traditions there used to be of chests of plate, bulses of
diamonds, laces of inestimable value, sent out of the country
privately by the old Queen, to enrich certain relatives in M-ckl-
nb-rg Str-l-tz? Not all the treasure went. Non omnis moritur.
A poor old palsied thing at midnight is made happy sometimes as
she lifts her shaking old hand to her nose. Gliding noiselessly
among the beds where lie the poor creatures huddled in their
cheerless dormitory, I fancy an old ghost with a snuff-box that
does not creak. "There, Goody, take of my rappee. You will not
sneeze, and I shall not say 'God bless you.' But you will think
kindly of old Queen Charlotte, won't you? Ah! I had a many
troubles, a many troubles. I was a prisoner almost so much as
you are. I had to eat boiled mutton every day: entre nous, I
abominated it. But I never complained. I swallowed it. I made
the best of a hard life. We have all our burdens to bear. But
hark! I hear the cock-crow, and snuff the morning air." And
with this the royal ghost vanishes up the chimney -- if there be
a chimney in that dismal harem, where poor old Twoshoes and her
companions pass their nights -- their dreary nights, their
restless nights, their cold long nights, shared in what glum
companionship, illumined by what a feeble taper!
"Did I understand you, my good Twoshoes, to say that your mother
was seven-and-twenty years old when you were born, and that she
married your esteemed father when she herself was twenty-five?
1745, then, was the date of your dear mother's birth. I daresay
her father was absent in the Low Countries, with his Royal
Highness the Duke of Cumberland, under whom he had the honour of
carrying a halberd at the famous engagement of Fontenoy -- or if
not there, he may have been at Preston Pans, under General Sir
John Cope, when the wild Highlanders broke through all the laws
of discipline and the English lines; and, being on the spot, did
he see the famous ghost which didn't appear to Colonel Gardner of
the Dragoons? My good creature, is it possible you don't
remember that Doctor Swift, Sir Robert Walpole (my Lord Orford,
as you justly say), old Sarah Marlborough, and little Mr Pope, of
Twitnam, died in the year of your birth? What a wretched memory
you have! What? haven't they a library, and the commonest books
of reference at the old convent of Saint Lazarus, where you
dwell?"
"Convent of Saint Lazarus, Prince William, Dr Swift, Atossa, and
Mr Pope, of Twitnam! What is the gentleman talking about?" says
old goody, with a "Ho! ho!" and a laugh like a old parrot -- you
know they live to be as old as Methuselah, parrots do, and a
parrot of a hundred is comparatively young (ho! ho! ho!). Yes,
and likewise carps live to an immense old age. Some which
Frederick the Great fed at Sans Souci are there now, with great
humps of blue mould on their old backs; and they could tell all
sorts of queer stories, if they chose to speak -- but they are
very silent, carps are -- of their nature peu communicatives.
Oh! what has been thy long life, old goody, but a dole of bread
and water and a perch on a cage; a dreary swim round and round a
Lethe of a pond? What are Rossbach or Jena to those mouldy ones,
and do they know it is a grandchild of England who brings bread
to feed them?
No! Those Sans Souci carps may live to be a thousand years old
and have nothing to tell but that one day is like another; and
the history of friend Goody Twoshoes has not much more variety
than theirs. Hard labour, hard fare, hard bed, numbing cold all
night, and gnawing hunger most days. That is her lot. Is it
lawful in my prayers to say, "Thank heaven, I am not as one of
these"? If I were eighty, would I like to feel the hunger always
gnawing, gnawing? to have to get up and make a bow when Mr Bumble
the beadle entered the common room? to have to listen to Miss
Prim, who came to give me her ideas of the next world? If I were
eighty, I own I should not like to have to sleep with another
gentleman of my own age, gouty, a bad sleeper, kicking in his old
dreams, and snoring; to march down my vale of years at word of
command, accommodating my tottering old steps to those of the
other prisoners in my dingy, hopeless old gang; to hold out a
trembling hand for a sickly pittance of gruel, and say, "Thank
you, ma'am," to Miss Prim, when she has done reading her sermon.
John! when Goody Twoshoes comes next Friday, I desire she may not
be disturbed by theological controversies. You have a fair
voice, and I heard you and the maids singing a hymn very sweetly
the other night, and was thankful that our humble household
should be in such harmony. Poor old Twoshoes is so old and
toothless and quaky, that she can't sing a bit; but don't be
giving yourself airs over her, because she can't sing and you
can. Make her comfortable at our kitchen hearth. Set that old
kettle to sing by our hob. Warm her old stomach with nut-brown
ale and a toast laid in the fire. Be kind to the poor old
school-girl of ninety, who has had leave to come out for a day of
Christmas holiday. Shall there be many more Christmases for
thee? Think of the ninety she has seen already; the fourscore
and ten cold, cheerless, nipping New Years!
If you were in her place, would you like to have a remembrance of
better early days, when you were young and happy, and loving,
perhaps; or would you prefer to have no past on which your mind
could rest? About the year 1788, Goody, were your cheeks rosy,
and your eyes bright, and did some young fellow in powder and a
pigtail look in them? We may grow old, but to us some stories
never are old. On a sudden they rise up, not dead, but living --
not forgotten, but freshly remembered. The eyes gleam on us as
they used to do. The dear voice thrills in our hearts. The
rapture of the meeting, the terrible, terrible parting, again and
again the tragedy is acted over. Yesterday, in the street, I saw
a pair of eyes so like two which used to brighten at my coming
once, that the whole past came back as I walked lonely, in the
rush of the Strand, and I was young again in the midst of joys
and sorrows, alike sweet and sad, alike sacred and fondly
remembered.
If I tell a tale out of school, will any harm come to my old
school-girl? Once, a lady gave her a half-sovereign, which was a
source of great pain and anxiety to Goody Twoshoes. She sewed it
away in her old stays somewhere, thinking here at least was a
safe investment -- (vestis -- a vest -- an investment, -- pardon
me, thou poor old thing, but I cannot help the pleasantry). And
what do you think? Another pensionnaire of the establishment cut
the coin out of Goody's stays -- an old woman who went upon two
crutches! Faugh, the old witch! What? Violence amongst these
toothless, tottering, trembling, feeble ones? Robbery amongst
the penniless? Dogs coming and snatching Lazarus's crumbs out of
his lap? Ah, how indignant Goody was as she told the story! To
that pond at Potsdam where the carps live for hundreds of
hundreds of years, with hunches of blue mould on their back, I
daresay the little Prince and Princess of Preussen-Britannien
come sometimes with crumbs and cakes to feed the mouldy ones.
Those eyes may have goggled from beneath the weeds at Napoleon's
jack-boots: they have seen Frederick's lean shanks reflected in
their pool; and perhaps Monsieur de Voltaire has fed them, and
now for a crumb of biscuit they will fight, push, hustle, rob,
squabble, gobble, relapsing into their tranquillity when the
ignoble struggle is over. Sans souci, indeed! It is mighty well
writing "Sans souci" over the gate; but where is the gate
through which Care has not slipped? She perches on the shoulders
of the sentry in the sentry-box: she whispers the porter
sleeping in his arm-chair: she glides up the staircase, and lies
down between the king and queen in their bed-royal: this very
night I daresay she will perch upon poor old Goody Twoshoes'
meagre bolster, and whisper, "Will the gentleman and those ladies
ask me again! No, no; they will forget poor old Twoshoes."
Goody! For shame of yourself! Do not be cynical. Do not
mistrust your fellow-creatures. What? Has the Christmas morning
dawned upon thee ninety times? For four-score and ten years has
it been thy lot to totter on this earth, hungry and obscure?
Peace and goodwill to thee, let us say at this Christmas season.
Come, drink, eat, rest awhile at our hearth, thou poor old
pilgrim! And of the bread which God's bounty gives us, I pray,
brother reader, we may not forget to set aside a part for those
noble and silent poor, from whose innocent hands war has torn the
means of labour. Enough! As I hope for beef at Christmas, I vow
a note shall be sent to Saint Lazarus Union House, in which Mr
Roundabout requests the honour of Mrs Twoshoes' company on
Friday, 26th December.
DE JUVENTUTE
We who lived before railways, and survive out of the ancient
world, are like Father Noah and his family out of the Ark. The
children will gather round and say to us patriarchs, "Tell us,
grandpapa, about the old world." And we shall mumble our old
stories; and we shall drop off one by one; and there will be
fewer and fewer of us, and these very old and feeble. There will
be but ten prae-railroadites left: then three -- then two --
then one -- then 0! If the hippopotamus had the least
sensibility (of which I cannot trace any signs either in his hide
or his face), I think he would go down to the bottom of his tank,
and never come up again. Does he not see that he belongs to
bygone ages, and that his great hulking barrel of a body is out
of place in these times? What has he in common with the brisk
young life surrounding him? In the watches of the night, when
the keepers are asleep, when the birds are on one leg, when even
the little armadillo is quiet, and the monkeys have ceased their
chatter, he -- I mean the hippopotamus -- and the elephant, and
the long-necked giraffe, perhaps may lay their heads together and
have a colloquy about the great silent antediluvian world which
they remember, where mighty monsters floundered through the ooze,
crocodiles basked on the banks, and dragons darted out of the
caves and waters before men were made to slay them. We who lived
before railways are antediluvians -- we must pass away. We are
growing scarcer every day; and old -- old -- very old relicts of
the times when George was still fighting the Dragon.
Not long since, a company of horseriders paid a visit to our
watering-place. We went to see them, and I bethought me that
young Walter Juvenis, who was in the place, might like also to
witness the performance. A pantomime is not always amusing to
persons who have attained a certain age; but a boy at a
pantomime is always amused and amusing, and to see his pleasure
is good for most hypochondriacs.
We sent to Walter's mother, requesting that he might join us, and
the kind lady replied that the boy had already been at the
morning performance of the equestrians, but was most eager to go
in the evening likewise. And go he did; and laughed at all Mr
Merryman's remarks, though he remembered them with remarkable
accuracy, and insisted upon waiting to the very end of the fun,
and was only induced to retire just before its conclusion by
representations that the ladies of the party would be incommoded
if they were to wait and undergo the rush and trample of the
crowd round about. When this fact was pointed out to him, he
yielded at once, though with a heavy heart, his eyes looking
longingly towards the ring as we retreated out of the booth. We
were scarcely clear of the place, when we heard "God save the
Queen," played by the equestrian band, the signal that all was
over. Our companion entertained us with scraps of the dialogue
on our way home -- precious crumbs of wit which he had brought
away from that feast. He laughed over them again as he walked
under the stars. He has them now, and takes them out of the
pocket of his memory, and crunches a bit, and relishes it with a
sentimental tenderness, too, for he is, no doubt, back at school
by this time; the holidays are over; and Doctor Birch's young
friends have reassembled.
Queer jokes, which caused a thousand simple mouths to grin! As
the jaded Merryman uttered them to the old gentleman with the
whip, some of the old folks in the audience, I daresay, indulged
in reflections of their own. There was one joke -- I utterly
forget it -- but it began with Merryman saying what he had for
dinner. He had mutton for dinner, at one o'clock, after which
"he had to come to business." And then came the point. Walter
Juvenis, Esq., Rev. Doctor Birch's, Market Rodborough, if you
read this, will you please send me a line, and let me know what
was the joke Mr Merryman made about having his dinner? You
remember well enough. But do I want to know? Suppose a boy
takes a favourite, long-cherished lump of cake out of his pocket,
and offers you a bit? Merci! The fact is, I don't care much
about knowing that joke of Mr Merryman's.
But whilst he was talking about his dinner, and his mutton, and
his landlord, and his business, I felt a great interest about Mr
M. in private life -- about his wife, lodgings, earnings, and
general history, and I daresay was forming a picture of those in
my mind: -- wife cooking the mutton; children waiting for it;
Merryman in his plain clothes, and so forth; during which
contemplation the joke was uttered and laughed at, and Mr M.,
resuming his professional duties, was tumbling over head and
heels. Do not suppose I am going, sicut est mos, to indulge in
moralities about buffoons, paint, motley, and mountebanking.
Nay, Prime Ministers rehearse their jokes; Opposition leaders
prepare and polish them: Tabernacle preachers must arrange them
in their minds before they utter them. All I mean is, that I
would like to know any one of these performers thoroughly, and
out of his uniform: that preacher, and why in his travels this
and that point struck him; wherein lies his power of pathos,
humour, eloquence; -- that Minister of State, and what moves
him, and how his private heart is working; -- I would only say
that, at a certain time of life certain things cease to interest:
but about some things when we cease to care, what will be the use
of life, sight, hearing? Poems are written, and we cease to
admire. Lady Jones invites us, and we yawn; she ceases to
invite us, and we are resigned. The last time I saw a ballet at
the opera -- oh! it is many years ago -- I fell asleep in the
stalls, wagging my head in insane dreams, and I hope affording
amusement to the company, while the feet of five hundred nymphs
were cutting flicflacs on the stage at a few paces distant. Ah,
I remember a different state of things! Credite posteri. To see
these nymphs -- gracious powers, how beautiful they were! That
leering, painted, shrivelled, thin-armed, thick-ankled old thing,
cutting dreary capers, coming thumping down on her board out of
time -- that an opera-dancer? Pooh! My dear Walter, the great
difference between my time and yours, who will enter life some
two or three years hence, is that, now, the dancing women and
singing women are ludicrously old, out of time, and out of tune;
the paint is so visible, and the dinge and wrinkles of their
wretched old cotton stockings, that I am surprised how anybody
can like to look at them. And as for laughing at me for falling
asleep, I can't understand a man of sense doing otherwise. In my
time, a la bonne heure. In the reign of George IV., I give you
my honour, all the dancers at the opera were as beautiful as
Houris. Even in William IV.'s time, when I think of Duvernay
prancing in as the Bayadere, -- I say it was a vision of
loveliness such as mortal eyes can't see nowadays. How well I
remember the tune to which she used to appear! Kaled used to say
to the Sultan, "My lord, a troop of those dancing and singing
gurls called Bayaderes approaches," and, to the clash of cymbals,
and the thumping of my heart, in she used to dance! There has
never been anything like it -- never. There never will be -- I
laugh to scorn old people who tell me about your Noblet, your
Montessu, your Vistris, your Parisot -- pshaw, the senile
twaddlers! And the impudence of the young men, with their music
and their dancers of to-day! I tell you the women are dreary old
creatures. I tell you one air in an opera is just like another,
and they send all rational creatures to sleep. Ah, Ronzi de
Begnis, thou lovely one! Ah, Caradori, thou smiling angel! Ah,
Malibran! Nay, I will come to modern times, and acknowledge that
Lablache was a very good singer thirty years ago (though Porto
was the boy for me): and they we had Ambrogetti, and Curioni,
and Donzelli, a rising young singer.
But what is most certain and lamentable is the decay of stage
beauty since the days of George IV. Think of Sontag! I remember
her in Otello and the Donna del Lago in `28. I remember being
behind the scenes at the opera (where numbers of us young fellows
of fashion used to go), and seeing Sontag let her hair fall down
over her shoulders previous to her murder by Donzelli. Young
fellows have never seen beauty like that, heard such a voice,
seen such hair, such eyes. Don't tell me! A man who has been
about town since the reign of George IV., ought he not to know
better than you young lads who have seen nothing? The
deterioration of women is lamentable; and the conceit of the
young fellows more lamentable still, that they won't see this
fact, but persist in thinking their time as good as ours.
Bless me! when I was a lad, the stage was covered with angels,
who sang, acted, and danced. When I remember the Adelphi, and
the actresses there: when I think of Miss Chester, and Miss
Love, and Mrs Serle at Sadler's Wells, and her forty glorious
pupils -- of the Opera and Noblet, and the exquisite young
Taglioni, and Pauline Leroux, and a host more! One much-admired
being of those days I confess I never cared for, and that was the
chief male dancer -- a very important personage then, with a bare
neck, bare arms, a tunic, and a hat and feathers, who used to
divide the applause with the ladies, and who has now sunk down a
trap-door for ever. And this frank admission ought to show that
I am not your mere twaddling laudator temporis acti -- your old
fogey who can see no good except in his own time.