TICKET-OF-LEAVE. A LETTER TO IRENEUS. MY DEAR IRENEUS,- A merry Yule-tide, and may the young year use you as well as the old ones, and so you will do very well! So you did not ask me to eat my Christmas dinner with you; yours is strictly a family party. The Rector, and the Rose and rose-buds of Devon, and a spinster cousin of yours, a kind of benignant Banshee of your house, who comes to light not when any one is going to die, but whenever all the members of your family are going to live-particularly well: kissed under the mistletoe like the rest, and blushing like the evening when the Reverend Celsus unbends so far as to acknowledge that relic of heathendom, the wicked parasitical plant with which the fair god Balder was slain. Well, Irenæus, an old bachelor at Christmas is not much unlike the mistletoe; he cannot live by himself; has no roots of his own, and must find some family oak to fix himself upon. He cannot dine drearily in his rooms, or sulk at his club on Christmas day he must turn parasite for the nonce; and then it is his duty like the mistletoe to promote the fun as much as possible. Irenæus, if no eyes but thine were destined to look at this page, I might tell thee where I ate my Christmas dinner, but my letter is peculiarly circumstanced. There is a grave old lady called Maga looking over my shoulder while I write, and I am obliged to be circumspect in consequence. But if I could have eaten two Christmas dinners, as young ladies in town go to two or even more balls of a night, I certainly should like to have eaten my second with you; or had I the power to divide myself, my wraith or double should have sat down with you, uninvited as Banquo's ghost, but rather more cheerfully; that is, if a wraith or double possesses digestive organs, and organs capable of digesting a Christmas dinner. Howbeit I can picture in imagination the cheerfulness of your fireside; the delighted scream of the children at the : Christmas Eve, 1856. blazing pudding, puzzled to know how they were to eat fire, especially with a grandpapa whose name implies that he is not a fire-eater himself, although I suspect him of being so in spite of his name ;-the blind man's buff and hunt-the-slipper with Irenæus obliged to pay forfeit and remove a taper from a basin of water with his mouth; the Christmas tree, that prettiest of all modern importations from Germany, like many other pretty things a little dangerous, liable to set people a-fire-hung round with the gifts which the little ones believe came from the Babe of Bethlehem ; and when the little ones are gone to bed, the quiet rubber in the corner, which Irenæus has on principle, because the Puritans think cards wicked at all times, and especially on Christmas day; not that he cares much about it himself, for he only plays for postage stamps. I know that Christmas is a good time with you, Irenæus, not coming, but come; like that Christmas of the heathen Romans When round the lonely cottage And the largest lamp is lit; Around the fire-brands close; And the lads are shaping bows. Might not Macaulay have said that the girls were also shaping beaux in their imaginations? Forgive me-but on such a subject and at such a time, the saturnalia of our year-even a pun is pardonable, however despicable in itself. How strange is the power of suggestion! I meant not when I sat down to write, to wish you more than the compliments of the season, but I see now that I am in for a long letter, and so are you. I do not mean to cross it, and thus you will have no excuse for not reading it through. "The good logs of Algidus" have suggested to me your wood-fire, the very poetry of fires, and your wood-fire has suggested your wood-cutter, and your woodcutter has suggested a ticket-of-leave man; and as I have been thinking somewhat lately on this subject of tickets-of-leave, I by these presents take you by the button, and compel you to listen to the matter of my ruminations, even as that eternal gossip detained Horace, when he was walking in the sacred road "according to his wont." I still think your experiment with regard to that man a dangerous one. Had you been a preserver of game, you would have done better to have made him a gamekeeper, on the principle of "set a thief to catch a thief," as he got into trouble by poaching with aggravations. The most sensible proposition I have seen yet, with regard to ticket-of-leave men, was that of some speaker at a country public dinner, who proposed that they should be made policemen. No other scheme has appeared to me to hold water in the slightest degree. You get a parcel of jail-birds together, till their cage or "jug," as it is affectionately called by the fraternity, is inconveniently full. In order to relieve its superabundance, you select the mildest specimens, or those who appear so to the chaplain, clip a feather of their wings and let them fly again about society at large, forgetting that a clipt feather will soon grow again. You give them a ticket-of-leave-to be at large, and they naturally give a large interpretation to the term, so that a ticket-of-leave has become like an indulgence in the worst times of Popery, the principal difference being that those who granted indulgences were wise enough to get paid for them before-hand, while those who grant tickets-of-leave are fools enough to do it for nothing, and earn into the bargain the maledictions of all timid old gentlemen, and the anathemas of all elderly ladies, if elderly ladies be ever sufficiently unguarded to utter anathemas, as the Council of Trent did. The other day poor Mrs Seacole, of Crimean memory, for her ticket-of-leave, adding that she did not mean to garotte any one in consequence; it being generally understood that a ticket-of-leave would be interpreted by the public to be a license to garotte with impunity, giving a sacred or sacrosanct character to the bearer, like that of a Briton with a Foreign Office passport, an ancient Roman tribune or a modern Swiss idiot, the latter two classes of people licensed to make themselves disagreeable to others to any extent within or without reasonable bounds. We have all heard of Le spectre rouge, and how it has frightened the French people from their impropriety, bending their necks to the stern yoke of absolutism. The same honourable position appears to be occupied now in England by the spectre denominated Ticket-of-leave. Oh, for the brush of a limner that I might portray him, as he is portrayed to the imagination of Materfamilias Tomkins, whose husband is a worthy clerk in the City, and has to walk every evening to a white-washed cottage at Bow, running the gauntlet of all the white-washed blackguards of Whitechapel on the road to it! I claim no originality in wishing for a limner's brush to eke out the weakness of my words, the conceit is as old as Anacreon. I naturally turn as a model to that ode in which the poet apostrophises his mistress "Αγε Σωγράφων ἄριστε with questionable compliment, calling upon the best animal painter, the Landseer of Samos, to paint her according to description in her absence. But I find as I read on, that the glorifications of feminine loveliness can scarcely be paraphrased so as to do for Bill Sykes. Here is one that will serve my purpose better, addressed to some graceless youth of the poet's acquaintance, I mean the Ode to Bathyllus. I suppose a confederate speaking to the painter or photographer, though a case not likely to happen, in fact, unless he wished in the court of bankruptcy, and asked to turn Queen's evidence. "Spake a bitter jest" Εις Βάθυλλον. Γράφε μοι Βάθυλλον οὕτω Τὸν ἑταῖρον ὡς διδάσκω Λιπαρὰς κόμας ποιησον Τὰ μὲν ἔνδοθεν μελάινας, Τὰ δες ἄκρον ἡλιωσας “Ελικας δ' ἐλαυθέρους μοι Πλοκάμων, άτακτα συνθεὶς, *Αφες, ὡς θέλωσι, κεῖσθαι Απαλὸν δὲ καὶ δροσώδες Στεφέτω μέτωπον, ὀφοὺς Κυανωτέρη δρακόντων. Μέλας ὄμμα γοργὸν ἔστω, Κεκερασμένον γαλήνη Τὸ μὲν ἐξ ̓Αρηος ἔλκον Το δε τῆς καλῆς Κυθήρης Ἵνα τις τὸ μὲν φοβῆται Τὸ δ' ἀπ' ἐλπίδος κρεμᾶται. Ροδίνην δ', όποια μῆλον Χνοΐην πάει παρειήν Ερυθημά δ ̓ ὡς ἂν Αἰδοῦς (Λύνασαι) πάλιν ποίησον. Τὸ δὲ χεῖλος, οὐκ ἔτ ̓ διδα Τίνι μοι τρόπῳ ποιήσεις ̓Απαλὸν, γέμοντε πειθοῦς Τὸ δὲ πᾶν, ὁ κηρὸς αὐτὸς Ἐχέτω λαλῶν σιωπή. Μετὰ δὲ πρόσωπον ἔστω Τὸν ̓Αδώνιδος παρελθών, Ελεφάντινος τράχηλος. Μεταμάζιον δε ποίει Διδυμάς τε χεῖρας Ἑρμοῦ ; Πολυδευκες δε μηρούς Διονυσίην δὲ νηδύν. Φθονερηὺ ἔχεις δὲ τέχνην, *Οτι μὴ τὰ νῶτα δεῖξαι, Δύνασαι· τὰ δ ̓ ἦν ἀμείνω. Τί πόδας με δεῖ δί δάσκειν ; Λάβε μισθὸν, ὅσσον εἴπης. Τὸν Εκηβόλον δὲ τοῦτον Καθελών, ποιει Βάθυλλον. Οτε δ ̓ ἐς Σαμου ποτ' ἐλθης Γράφε Φοίβον ἐκ Βαθύλλον. ON BILL SYKES. (After Anacreon.) Paint me, Cruikshank, Doyle, or Leech, Sheared as round a beechen bowl As found drowned in Thames' bed. Paint a chest, the dread of Peelers, Pity that you cannot turn, Paint at once both stem and stern; When you've finished my commission, Surely their Hanging Committee Must on William Sykes take pity, 176 its causes. Ticket-of-Leave. But, in sober earnest, I think the portrait of Ticket-of-leave, if it appeared on the walls of the Royal Academy, might produce unpleasant consequences to ladies in an interesting condition, as happened when Eschylus brusquely exhibited his Eumenides at Athens, so great a horror has been engendered in the public mind by the creature's late misdoings. The word "ticket" was not in very good odour before, between pawnbrokers' tickets and lottery tickets. But it was only disreputable; now it has become formidable. People will ask tremblingly for tickets of leave for admission to lectures, concerts, and the opera. They will fancy that every person travelling by railroad in possession of his ticket, bears also a ticket-ofleave; and should the omnibus companies adopt them, as in Paris, they will certainly prove fatal to their traffic. Joking apart, I am not sorry, for some reasons, for this panic and with other things that have occurred It serves to explode, of late, the bubbles of progress and human perfectibility. The other day we were almost argued into a belief in universal peace, and we have been disenchanted by a war as barbaric as any that has been waged before in pomp and circumstance. Now people are beginning to grow sick of the humanity-hobby, and to allow that after all there are some worse remedies for moral disease than honest hanging. Calcraft is likely to have his declining years consoled by an increasing reverence for his profession, and even to be looked upon in the end as a most indispensable member of society. The London Scoundrel," if his language was as unobjectionable as his real meaning, has a chance of finding an echo in the popular heart, for the sovereign people has as much objecon as any other monarch to have its egatives invaded by having its ile compressed, or its ten-pound house burglariously entered. Domi fell when he began to be an object of terror to the cobblers, and so, it is be hoped, will that modern Domithe ticket of leave man. He al length succeeded in moving esses, and the masses will come own on his head and crush him. [Feb. Things were, indeed, come to a pretty albeit in official estimation a saintly valetudinarian.* In the days of our fathers the ends of justice were defeated by making the punishments for crime not so much too heavy as too indiscriminating. Now they are defeated not so much by being too light as also by being too indiscriminating. Yet given the proper amount of discrimination, and they would still carry a little extra weight with advantage. The great mistake is in regarding the offence and not the offender. The adage that one man may steal an ox, while another is hanged for looking over the hedge, is an illustration of our criminal code as applied in past and present times. During the Great Exhibition, a gentleman of good family got into a passion with a policeman who at tempted to stop his horses, most probably adding some of the insolence of office, and cut him over the face with his whip. His offence was grave, but without malice prepense. The magistrate sent him to prison, and treated him like a common felon; and the newspapers eulogised the bright example of equal justice to rich and poor, and adjudged the administrator of the law a place in history beside Judge Gascoyne, who committed the king's son. But in their intercourse with the professional ruffian, the skins of "unboiled lobsters" are not rated at so high a figure. Then they do not appear in the light of inviolable tribunes of the people. Some time ago I recollect reading of a wretch called Cannon, who infested Southwark, and was the bugbear of the street in which he lived by a habit he had of butting the passersby with his head like a bull, establishing, by the terror of his name, a Cannon Street of his own on the Surrey side of the water. This Minotaur, often convicted, nearly killed a policeman in the execution of his duty, and evidently intended to do it outright. He was neither hanged nor transported, and so trivial was his sentence that it is the only circumstance of the case which has faded from my memory. There was a yet more flagrant case the other day. It is so choice a morceau to illustrate my position, that I have copied it circumstantially, if not verbatim, from the Times. MIDDLESEX SESSIONS. Before the Assistant-Judge at the Guildhall, Westminster. Mary Horrigan, 17, and John Regan, 24 (lady first, gentleman afterwards), were indicted for unlawfully (!) assaulting and beating William Thorne, a constable of the Metropolitan force, whilst in the execution of his duty; and the prisoner Regan was further indicted for unlawfully assaulting and wounding George Anderson. The circumstances were these. Regan went to light his dudheen (he is an EmeraldIslander from his name) at the shop of Mr Bills, fishmonger, 27 Great Wild Street, Lincoln's-Inn-Fields; Anderson (probably a Northerner), the fishmonger's assistant, being engaged very properly in sweeping the shop. He went outside with the sawdust, and the Hibernian hit him on the mouth. Next day Regan, still unsatisfied, came again and brought a shillelah; Anderson dodged the shillelah; and then Regan hit him on the mouth again with his fist. Thorne, the policeman, who was on duty near, was called in; Regan came in without being called, and Anderson, being at home, naturally followed, Regan observing to him in strong language, "I'll have your life before 12 o'clock to-night; you had better get the police to watch, for your life is in my hands." Upon this Thorne, who knew the antecedents of the Regan, went to the station-house for more power, and returned to Wild Street with P. C. Williams, 133 F. They saw the Regan in Lincoln Street flourishing his sapling in one hand and a big knife in the other, apparently prepared for all emergencles. He was heard to exclaim that he would have the something's life, and that he should like to see the policeman who would dare to take him. Thorne said that he would venture to attempt it, and caught hold of his shillelah-arm, when Regan made a pass at him with the knife, saying, There, take a bit of cold steel.' The knife passed through his great * Fact. |