66 we are not philosophers enough to explain, but in that wonderful episode of the cave of Mammon, in which the Money God appears first in the lowest form of a miser, is then a worker of metals, and becomes the god of all the treasures of the world; and has a daughter, Ambition, before whom all the world kneels for favours-with the Hesperian fruit, the waters of Tantalus, with Pilate washing his hands vainly, but not impertinently, in the same stream that we should be at one moment in the cave of an old hoarder of treasures, at the next at the forge of the Cyclops, in a palace and yet in hell, all at once, with the shifting mutations of the most rambling dream, and our judgment yet all the time awake, and neither able nor willing to detect the fallacy, is a proof of that hidden sanity which still guides the poet in the wildest seeming aberrations. and that these mental hallucinations were are at home, and upon acquainted ground. discoverable only in the treatment of subjects The one turns life into a dream; the other out of nature, or transcending it, the judg- to the wildest dreams gives the sobrieties of ment might with some plea be pardoned if every-day occurrences. By what subtle art it ran riot, and a little wantonised: but of tracing the mental processes it is effected, even in the describing of real and every-day life, that which is before their eyes, one of these lesser wits shall more deviate from nature show more of that inconsequence, which has a natural alliance with frenzy, than a great genius in his "maddest fits," as Withers somewhere calls them. We appeal to any one that is acquainted with the common run of Lane's novels, as they existed some twenty or thirty years back, those scanty intellectual viands of the whole female reading public, till a happier genius arose, and expelled for ever the innutritious phantoms, whether he has not found his brain more betossed," his memory more puzzled, his sense of when and where more confounded, among the improbable events, the incoherent incidents, the inconsistent characters, or nocharacters, of some third-rate love-intrigue where the persons shall be a Lord Glendamour and a Miss Rivers, and the scene only alternate between Bath and Bond-street-a more bewildering dreaminess induced upon him, than he has felt wandering over all the fairy-grounds of Spenser. In the productions we refer to, nothing but names and places is familiar; the persons are neither of this world nor of any other conceivable one; an endless stream of activities without purpose, of purposes destitute of motive: -we meet phantoms in our known walks; fantasques only christened. In the poet we have names which announce fiction; and we have absolutely no place at all, for the things and persons of the Fairy Queen prate not of their "whereabout." But in their inner nature, and the law of their speech and actions, we --- It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a copy of the mind's conceptions in sleep; it is, in some sort—but what a copy! Let the most romantic of us, that has been entertained all night with the spectacle of some wild and magnificent vision, recombine it in the morning, and try it by his waking judgment. That which appeared so shifting, and yet so coherent, while that faculty was passive, when it comes under cool examination shall appear so reasonless and so unlinked, that we are ashamed to have been so deluded; and to have taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a god. But the transitions in this episode are every whit as violent as in the most extravagant dream, and yet the waking judgment ratifies them. CAPTAIN JACKSON. AMONG the deaths in our obituary for this | suades me, that this could have been no other month, I observe with concern At his cot- in fact than my dear old friend, who some tage on the Bath road, Captain Jackson." five-and-twenty years ago rented a tenement, The name and attribution are common which he was pleased to dignify with the enough; but a feeling like reproach per- appellation here used, about a mile from Westbourn Green. Alack, how good men, leavings: only he would sometimes finish the and the good turns they do us, slide out of remainder crust, to show that he wished no memory, and are recalled but by the surprise savings. of some such sad memento as that which now lies before us! were too. Wine we had none; nor, except on very rare occasions, spirits; but the sensation of He whom I mean was a retired half-pay wine was there. Some thin kind of ale I officer, with a wife and two grown-up daugh-remember-"British beverage," he would ters, whom he maintained with the port and say! "Push about, my boys;"" Drink to notions of gentlewomen upon that slender your sweethearts, girls." At every meagre professional allowance. Comely girls they draught a toast must ensue, or a song. All the forms of good liquor were there, with none of the effects wanting. Shut your eyes, and you would swear a capacious bowl of punch was foaming in the centre, with beams of generous Port or Madeira radiating to it from each of the table corners. You got flustered, without knowing whence; tipsy upon words; and reeled under the potency of his unperforming Bacchanalian encouragements. And was I in danger of forgetting this man? — his cheerful suppers-the noble tone of hospitality, when first you set your foot in the cottage the anxious ministerings about you, where little or nothing (God knows) was to be ministered. Althea's horn in a poor platter-the power of self-enchantment, by which, in his magnificent wishes to entertain you, he multiplied his means to bounties. You saw with your bodily eyes indeed what seemed a bare scrag, cold savings from the foregone meal-remnant hardly sufficient to send a mendicant from the door contented. But in the copious will the revelling imagination of your host the "mind, the mind, Master Shallow," whole beeves were spread before you-hecatombs no end appeared to the profusion. It was the widow's cruse - the loaves and fishes; carving could not lessen, nor helping diminish it—the stamina were left the elemental bone still flourished, divested of its accidents. We had our songs-" Why, Soldiers, why,” and the "British Grenadiers" in which last we were all obliged to bear chorus. Both the daughters sang. Their proficiency was a nightly theme- the masters he had given them-the "no-expense" which he spared to accomplish them in a science " so necessary to young women." But thenthey could not sing "without the instrument." Louisa! Sacred, and, by me, never-to-be-violated, secrets of Poverty! Should I disclose your honest aims at grandeur, your makeshift efforts of magnificence? Sleep, sleep, with all thy broken keys, if one of the bunch be "Let us live while we can," methinks I extant; thrummed by a thousand ancestral hear the open-handed creature exclaim; thumbs; dear, cracked spinnet of dearer "while we have, let us not want," "here is Without mention of mine, be dumb, plenty left;" "want for nothing" with thou thin accompanier of her thinner warble! many more such hospitable sayings, the spurs A veil be spread over the dear delighted face of appetite, and old concomitants of smoking of the well-deluded father, who now haply boards, and feast-oppressed chargers. Then listening to cherubic notes, scarce feels sliding a slender ratio of Single Gloucester sincerer pleasure than when she awakened upon his wife's plate, or the daughters', he thy time-shaken chords responsive to the would convey the remanent rind into his own, twitterings of that slender image of a voice. with a merry quirk of "the nearer the bone," &c., and declaring that he universally preferred the outside. For we had our table distinctions, you are to know, and some of us in a manner sate above the salt. None but his guest or guests dreamed of tasting flesh luxuries at night, the fragments were vere hospitibus sacra. But of one thing or another there was always enough, and We were not without our literary talk either. It did not extend far, but as far as it went, it was good. It was bottomed well; had good grounds to go upon. In the cottage was a room, which tradition authenticated to have been the same in which Glover, in his occasional retirements, had penned the greater part of his Leonidas. This circumstance was nightly quoted, though none of the present vortex of his temperament. His riotous imagination conjured up handsome settlements before their eyes, which kept them up in the eye of the world too, and seem at last to have realized themselves; for they both have married since, I am told, more than respectably. inmates, that I could discover, appeared ever | persuaded, not for any half hour together to have met with the poem in question. But did they ever look their own prospects fairly that was no matter. Glover had written in the face. There was no resisting the there, and the anecdote was pressed into the account of the family importance. It diffused a learned air through the apartment, the little side casement of which (the poet's study window), opening upon a superb view as far as the pretty spire of Harrow, over domains and patrimonial acres, not a rood nor square yard whereof our host could call his own, yet gave occasion to an immoderate expansion of -vanity shall I call it?—in his bosom, as he showed them in a glowing summer evening. It was all his, he took it all in, and communicated rich portions of it to his guests. It was a part of his largess, his hospitality; it was going over his grounds; he was lord for the time of showing them, and you the implicit lookers-up to his magnificence. He was a juggler, who threw mists before your eyes-you had no time to detect his fallacies. He would say, "Hand me the silver sugar tongs;" and before you could discover it was a single spoon, and that plated, he would disturb and captivate your imagination by a misnomer of "the urn" for a teakettle; or by calling a homely bench a sofa. Rich men direct you to their furniture, poor ones divert you from it; he neither did one nor the other, but by simply assuming that everything was handsome about him, you were positively at a demur what you did, or did not see, at the cottage. With nothing to live on, he seemed to live on everything. He had a stock of wealth in his mind; not that which is properly termed Content, for in truth he was not to be contained at all, but overflowed all bounds by the force of a magnificent self-delusion. Enthusiasm is catching; and even his wife, a sober native of North Britain, who generally saw things more as they were, was not proof against the continual collision of his credulity. Her daughters were rational and discreet young women; in the main, perhaps, not insensible to their true circumstances. I have seen them assume a thoughtful air at times. But such was the preponderating opulence of his fancy, that I am It is long since, and my memory waxes dim on some subjects, or I should wish to convey some notion of the manner in which the pleasant creature described the circumstances of his own wedding-day. I faintly remember something of a chaise-and-four, in which he made his entry into Glasgow on that morning to fetch the bride home, or carry her thither, I forget which. It so completely made out the stanza of the old ballad When we came down through Glasgow town, And I myself in cramasie I suppose it was the only occasion upon which his own actual splendour at all corre sponded with the world's notions on that subject. In homely cart, or travelling caravan, by what ever humble vehicle they chanced to be transported in less prosperous days, the ride through Glasgow came back upon his fancy, not as a humiliating contrast, but as a fair occasion for reverting to that one day's state. It seemed an "equipage etern" from which no power of fate or fortune, once mounted, had power thereafter to dislodge him. There is some merit in putting a handsome face upon indigent circumstances. To bully and swagger away the sense of them before strangers, may not be always discommendable. Tibbs, and Bobadil, even when detected, have more of our admiration than contempt. But for a man to put the cheat upon himself; to play the Bobadil at home; and, steeped in poverty up to the lips, to fancy himself all the while chin-deep in riches, is a strain of constitutional philosophy, and a mastery over fortune, which was reserved for my old friend Captain Jackson. 29 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. lost almost the capacity of enjoying a free hour; and livelily expressing the hollowness of a day's pleasuring. The very strollers in the fields on that day look anything but comfortable. Ir peradventure, Reader, it has been thy | tices and little tradesfolks, with here and there lot to waste the golden years of thy life-thy a servant-maid that has got leave to go out, shining youth in the irksome confinement who, slaving all the week, with the habit has of an office; to have thy prison days prolonged through middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of release or respite; to have lived to forget that there are such things as holidays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives of childhood; then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance. It is now six-and-thirty years since I took my seat at the desk in Mincing-lane. Melancholy was the transition at fourteen from the abundant playtime, and the frequently-intervening vacations of school days, to the eight, nine, and sometimes ten hours' a-day attendance at the counting-house. But time partially reconciles us to anything. I gradually became content-doggedly contented, as wild animals in cages. me. But besides Sundays, I had a day at Easter, and a day at Christmas, with a full week in the summer to go and air myself in my native fields of Hertfordshire. This last was a great indulgence; and the prospect of its recurrence, I believe, alone kept me up through the year, and made my durance tolerable. But when the week came round, did the glittering phantom of the distance keep touch with me? or rather was it not series of seven uneasy days, spent in restless pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the most of them?__ Where was the quiet, where the promised rest? Before I had a taste of it, it was vanished. I was at the desk again, counting upon the fifty-one tedious weeks that must intervene before such another snatch would come. Still the prospect of its coming threw something of an illumination upon the darker side of my captivity. Without it, as I have said, I could scarcely have sustained my thraldom. It is true I had my Sundays to myself; but Sundays, admirable as the institution of them is for purposes of worship, are for that very reason the very worst adapted for days of unbending and recreation. In particular, there is a gloom for me attendant upon a city Sunday, a weight in the air. I miss the cheerful cries of London, the music, and the ballad-singers-the buzz and stirring murmur of the streets. Those eternal bells depress The closed shops repel me. Prints, Independently of the rigours of attendance, pictures, all the glittering and endless succes- I have ever been haunted with a sense sion of knacks and gewgaws, and ostenta- (perhaps a mere caprice) of incapacity for tiously displayed wares of tradesmen, which business. This, during my latter years, had make a week-day saunter through the less increased to such a degree, that it was visible busy parts of the metropolis so delightful- in all the lines of my countenance. are shut out. No book-stalls deliciously to health and my good spirits flagged. I had idle over- —no busy faces to recreate the idle perpetually a dread of some crisis, to which man who contemplates them ever passing by I should be found unequal. Besides my - the very face of business a charm by con- daylight servitude, I served over again all trast to his temporary relaxation from it. night in my sleep, and would awake with Nothing to be seen but unhappy countenances terrors of imaginary false entries, errors in -or half-happy at best-of emancipated 'pren-my accounts, and the like. I was fifty years My of age, and no prospect of emancipation that I accepted their proposal, and I was told presented itself. I had grown to my desk, that I was free from that hour to leave their as it were; and the wood had entered into my service. I stammered out a bow, and at just soul. ten minutes after eight, I went home-for ever. This noble benefit- gratitude forbids me to conceal their names-I owe to the kindness of the most munificent firm in the world-the house of Boldero, Merryweather, Bosanquet, and Lacy. Esto perpetua! My fellows in the office would sometimes rally me upon the trouble legible in my countenance; but I did not know that it had raised the suspicions of any of my employers, when on the fifth of last month, a day ever to be remembered by me, L, the junior partner in the firm, calling me on one side, directly taxed me with my bad looks, and frankly For the first day or two I felt stunned, inquired the cause of them. So taxed, I overwhelmed. I could only apprehend my honestly made confession of my infirmity, felicity: I was too confused to taste it sinand added that I was afraid I should even- cerely. I wandered about, thinking I was tually be obliged to resign his service. He happy, and knowing that I was not. I was spoke some words of course to hearten me, in the condition of a prisoner in the old and there the matter rested. A whole week Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty years' I remained labouring under the impression confinement. I could scarce trust myself that I had acted imprudently in my dis- with myself. It was like passing out of closure; that I had foolishly given a handle Time into Eternity - for it is a sort of Eteragainst myself, and had been anticipating nity for a man to have his Time all to himmy own dismissal. A week passed in this self. It seemed to me that I had more manner, the most anxious one, I verily time on my hands than I could ever manage. believe, in my whole life, when on the evening From a poor man, poor in Time, I was of the 12th of April, just as I was about suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue: I quitting my desk to go home (it might be could see no end of my possessions; I wanted about eight o'clock) I received an awful some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage summons to attend the presence of the my estates in Time for me. And here let whole assembled firm in the formidable me caution persons grown old in active busiback parlour. I thought now my time is ness, not lightly, nor without weighing their surely come, I have done for myself, I am own resources, to forego their customary going to be told that they have no longer employment all at once, for there may be occasion for me. L, I could see, smiled danger in it. I feel it by myself, but I know at the terror I was in, which was a little that my resources are sufficient; and now relief to me, when to my utter astonishment that those first giddy raptures have subsided, B, the eldest partner, began a formal I have a quiet home-feeling of the blessedness harangue to me on the length of my services, of my condition. I am in no hurry. Having my very meritorious conduct during the all holidays, I am as though I had none. If whole of the time (the deuce, thought I, how Time hung heavy upon me, I could walk it did he find out that? I protest I never had away: but I do not walk all day long, as I the confidence to think as much.) He went used to do in those old transient holidays, on to descant on the expediency of retiring thirty miles a day, to make the most of them. at a certain time of life (how my heart If Time were troublesome, I could read it panted!), and asking me a few questions as away; but I do not read in that violent to the amount of my own property, of which measure, with which, having no Time my I have a little, ended with a proposal, to own but candlelight Time, I used to weary which his three partners nodded a grave out my head and eyesight in bygone winters. assent, that I should accept from the house, I walk, read, or scribble (as now), just when which I had served so well, a pension for the fit seizes me. I no longer hunt after life to the amount of two-thirds of my pleasure; I let it come to me. I am like the accustomed salary -a magnificent offer! I man do not know what I answered between surprise and gratitude, but it was understood that's born, and has his years come to him, In some green desert. |