Complete Works of Thomas Love Peacock

by Thomas Love Peacock

  Julia, who was fond both of her Lar and her father, made no reply. Proculus went on:

  “And here is this Atilian family, which ought to think itself honoured by having such a daughter-in-law as you would be in yourself, to say nothing of my probable ancestor, who was the only personal friend Quirinus has ever had in this world — at any rate we have better claims than any one else to be descended from him — will not suffer their son’s suit to you because you have no dowry. Now I say your Lar, with his opportunities, ought to have taken care that you should have had a dowry.”

  “I think he will do so yet, father,” said Julia. “He has promised me as much in a dream.”

  “A dream indeed,” said Proculus, “there is no more chance than of the flower buds in that garland which you have suspended to him bursting into full blossom.”

  The father and daughter fixed their eyes on the garland, and the flowers suddenly expanded.

  “There is an omen, father!” said Julia.

  “A strange coincidence,” said Proculus. “But the flowers must have been ready to open when you gathered them.”

  Julia shook her head at her father’s scepticism, but she smiled at the omen, for she certainly thought it a good one.

  II

  Julia had retired, and Proculus was alone. He fell into a reverie, with his eyes fixed on the garland. By degrees the marble behind the altar of the Lar seemed to assume human lineaments, till at length a figure like a draped statue stood before him.

  “You are ungrateful, Proculus,” said the Lar, “and I am come to convince you of your ingratitude.”

  “I shall be much obliged to you,” said Proculus, “if you will begin by informing me whether I am awake: or whether I am dreaming of you, as my daughter did.”

  THE LAR

  I visited your daughter in a dream: but you are wide awake. I promised her a dowry, and I shall keep my word. And you are dissatisfied with your condition in life. I will place you in any other that you may like better.

  Ill Proculus had a rich neighbour, Caius Sulpicius, who gave good suppers. Proculus was one of his favourite guests. Sulpicius had one virtue which did not belong to all the magnates of the time. He treated all his company alike. There was no mortification for a poor client. All had the same wine, the same bread, the same cooled water as the master of the feast. There was nothing to check the expansion of good spirits, and in general, at a supper of Sulpicius, all was joy and jollity. There was also a due intermixture of philosophical discussion, in that pleasant form of successive questions on particular points, which give so great a charm to the several symposia which antiquity has consigned to us.

  Proculus was at one of these suppers on the evening after his interview with the Lar. His scepticism had been so disturbed, and his mind thrown into such a state of perplexity by his adventure of the morning, that he remained absent and absorbed; not taking, as customary, a prominent share in the conversation, till his attention was aroused by a turn in the conversation, which had fallen on supernatural appearances, and a guest in his immediate vicinity was narrating a marvellous tale. This chimed in with the current of his thoughts, and he gave all his attention to the narrator.

  The lovers knelt together before the altar of the Lar. A bright light shone on it for a moment, and a voice whispered in Julia’s ear, “Withdraw from the altar.” She caught her lover’s hand, and retired to the side of the hall.

  Presently they heard from without a cry resembling that of Charon giving rowing-time to Bacchus:—” O — or, or! o — or, or! o — or, or!” and simultaneously with the last “or!” a ponderous stone vase was projected through the window, and lighted with a loud crash on the altar of the Lar: where it broke into a thousand pieces, and scattered

  JULIA PROCULA all round the altar a shower of gold. The same voice whispered to Julia:—” There is your dowry.”

  We must now look back a little in our narrative, to trace the origin and progress of this auriferous projectile.

  * * * * *

  Julius Proculus walked to the Forum, and the first person he met was Caius Atilius, the father of Marcus, who accosted him abruptly.

  CAIUS ATILIUS

  They tell me, Julius Proculus, that you admit my son to visit your daughter.

  JULIUS PROCULUS

  They tell you the truth, Caius Atilius.

  CAIUS ATILIUS

  It is very unbecoming that when a young man’s father has prohibited his addresses to a young woman, the young woman’s father should permit him to visit her.

  JULIUS PROCULUS

  I do not see the unbecomingness. It is for you to enforce your own prohibition. I like him, and my daughter likes him, and shut my door in his face I most assuredly will not.

  CAIUS ATILIUS

  You cannot suppose that I shall allow my son to marry a girl without a dowry.

  JULIUS PROCULUS

  You have said so often enough to ensure its not being forgotten.

  CAIUS ATILIUS

  Then what do you expect?

  JULIUS PROCULUS

  Nothing. It pleases them to meet, and no harm comes of it.

  CAIUS ATILIUS

  That is more than you know.

  JULIUS PROCULUS

  I can trust my daughter. But to guard against evil tongues Psecas never quits them.

  CAIUS ATILIUS

  Psecas! A slave-girl! A piece of furniture!

  JULIUS PROCULUS

  A piece of furniture with a heart and a head which many a Patrician lady would be the better for. No harm comes of it, and that is enough for today. I shall legislate for tomorrow when it arrives.

  CAIUS ATILIUS

  I know my rights. I shall find means to control him.

  JULIUS PROCULUS

  Do so. That is your affair. Only do not pretend to control me. You are only richer than I am; neither better nor nobler. There was no Atilius in Rome when there was a Julius Proculus, the only living man who ever saw Quirinus.

  CAIUS ATILIUS

  That is your old joke.

  JULIUS PROCULUS

  No more a joke than any other old stemma.

  CAIUS ATILIUS

  At any rate his peculiar intimacy with Quirinus has not much benefited his posterity.

  JULIUS PROCULUS

  So I told my daughter this morning, who insists that Quirinus’s friend is our particular Lar. I think he might take better care of us. She says he will yet. But take care you do not make yourself a Heautontimoroumenos. There are still kings in Asia who want soldiers.

  CAIUS ATILIUS

  What do you mean?

  JULIUS PROCULUS

  Only to give you a hint not to push things too far. Nothing will be done without your concurrence. Persuade him to give up Julia, and I will persuade her to give up him. But I will use no compulsion. And as to the dowry, perhaps my ancestor may yet make interest with Quirinus on the subject.

  Proculus walked away, leaving Atilius much perplexed as to how far he was in earnest, and somewhat disturbed by the allusion to Terence’s comedy. He had no objection but that of their curta supellex to either Proculus or his daughter. He had perfect reliance on their honor, and determined for the present to use no means but persuasion: as an ingredient in which he bethought himself of a rich and beautiful damsel who might be a powerful ally in effecting a diversion.

  A Story Opening at Chertsey

  THREE young friends, who were returning on the twenty ninth of September from a walk to which they had devoted all the hours of daylight, with the exception of so much of them as they had assigned to breakfast and dinner at a pleasant country inn on their way out and home, paused on a rustic bridge, to watch the play of the moonlight on the water below. While thus engaged, the bell of the neighbouring church struck eight, and immediately after swung forth the toll of the Curfew.

  The Church was that of Chertsey. The water on which they looked down was that of the Abbey River, an artificial stream drawn off from the Thames some distance above by th
e Monks of Chertsey: to work their corn-mill and feed their numerous fish-ponds: — which, furnished with sluices and inexhaustibly supplied with transparent water, were severally appropriated each to a different species of fish, ensuring comfortable fasts to the abstemious brethren: — giving them the pleasant variety of a bream-pie, an eel baked in beet-leaf, a pike stuffed with a pudding of bread and herbs, a perch in souchy of parsley or a carp or tench stewed in claret: to say nothing of salmon, with which the Thames once abounded, though the march of “improvement” by poisoning the tide-way has now banished them from the stream.

  A few grey stones built into an orchard wall are all that remain of the venerable pile. It was succeeded by an old-fashioned English Mansion, with a large hall, large apartments, vast staircases, long galleries bordered by chambers, extensive lawns, groves, and terraced gardens. That too has disappeared, and every thing that surrounds the seats of these two periods of greatness speaks only of “the sons of little men The three friends leaned over the bridge, listening to the bell in silence, till, having given the due numbers of the Curfew, followed by those of the day of the month, and of the year of the Sovereign’s reign, the bell was no longer heard. They then resumed their walk, and passed on to the inn where they proposed to sup and pass the night.

  An early breakfast, an early dinner, a long walk and a supper imply that these were old-fashioned young gentlemen. And so indeed they were: their habits and their tastes were all antique. One was devoted to Greece and Rome: one to mediaeval art and manners: one to legends of chivalry and romance: not so exclusively that each did not enter pretty largely into the domains of the others: but each had marked out for himself a pursuit in which the respective tastes predominated.

  They had taken up their quarters at the Swan Inn in Chertsey, and in several walks had seen many ancient things. They had walked up Saint George’s Hill and perlustrated Caesar’s Camp: had examined the ruins of Saint Katharine’s Chapel near Guildford: had walked to Parford, enjoyed the view from the rustic churchyard, and descended to the ruins of Newark Abbey: had marked the few grey stones on St. Anne’s hill which are all that remain of the Chapel of St. Anne, to say nothing of the more familiar but much modernised antiquities of Windsor, Eton and Hampton Court.

  Notwithstanding the questionable advantage of being made a railway terminus, the progress of what is called improvement, and often signifies a change for the worse, is scarcely visible in Chertsey. An old endowed school, where a number of children learned a little, has been incorporated with a national school where a greater number learn less: the old dame school in the church-yard, where something was really taught, is gone and has no substitute: the Abbey House already mentioned is gone: St. Anne’s Hill and the house that was Charles Fox’s are pretty much as he left them: the Church and the Presbyterian Chapel are as they were half a century ago: the shops with some few changes carry on the same trades with new names: the poor have lost their commons: the geese have lost their greens: the pedestrian has lost many pleasant foot-paths: the bridge over the Thames has lost its balconies: the Thames itself has lost its salmon: and the last old fisherman who remembered their abundance and who lived, himself a picture of hale old age, in a picturesque cottage by the river-side, pleasant objects both to a lander from a boat, has died at the age of eighty: his cottage is pulled down: and there is nothing on the spot to replace either it or him.

  The Swan Inn in external appearance is exactly what it was half a century ago. Internally it was comfortable then, and no doubt is so still. Associations of childhood in one of the party had led our young friends to choose it for their head-quarters, and he had so timed their return by the foot-path from Laleham Ferry as to be sure that the sound of the Curfew would meet them on the Abbey Bridge. The Abbey field which they crossed in their way from the Ferry was the first field in which he had gathered cowslips: and this pleasantest of all early [sentence unfinished in MS.].

  At supper they were joined by a clerical friend, a Londoner, who during the whole time while they were walking had been angling in the vicinity of Chertsey Bridge. Isaac Walton never had a more indefatigable disciple, and all the days he could spare from his duties, during the open months of the fishery, he was as surely to be found in a punt as in his pulpit on a Sunday. He had brought home, as part of the produce of his day’s sport, a mess of perch and gudgeons to form the first course of their supper. He was a good, kind-hearted and tolerant man, notwithstanding the energy with which he declaimed in his sermons against Puseyism and Popery: but he had a horror of innovation, and thought the Church of England, as represented by his father, the quiet Rector of a country village where differences of doctrine and ceremony had never been heard of, the perfection of religious institution. His own lot was cast in London, from which he was always glad to escape to some quiet piece of water, where, throwing his fly in spring or watching his float in summer and autumn, rejoicing first in the early green of the willows, and as the year grew old, in the deep beds of bulrushes that rose in the still water, the lilies that floated on its [sentence unfinished in MS.].

  If any reader should be curious to know what the partie carrée had for supper, be it known that it consisted simply of river fish and game, with a jug of bitter ale and a bottle of Madeira: the whole wound up by a crowning bowl of punch, suggested by the divine, who had not merely a personal liking but a traditional veneration for the thing: for it had been in favour with his father, his grandfather, and the grandfathers of his grandfathers as far as he could trace their memory.

  A Story of a Mansion among the Chiltern Hills

  MAXIMIN condemned the Royal Martyr Katharine to die by the wheels which bear her name. Angels broke the wheels. He doomed her to die by fire. The angels extinguished the flame. He ordered her to be beheaded by the sword. This was permitted: but in the meantime the day had closed.

  In the Catholic days of England, three sisters, named Katharine, Martha, and Anne, built three chapels to their namesake Saints, on the summits of three hills, which took from these dedications the names which they still bear. From the summit of each of these towers the other two were visible. They were reverenced as memorials of piety and sisterly affection till the days of the Reformation, which demonstrated by the holy text of pike and gun that both the piety and the affection were Pagan and idolatrous. Of the chapels of Saint Katharine and Saint Martha there are still some graceful ruins. Nothing remains of that of Saint Anne but a few grey stones built into an earthen wall which some half-century ago enclosed a plantation. The hill is now better known by the memory of Charles Fox than by that of its ancient Saint.

  The ruins of Saint Katharine’s chapel overlook the river Wey between Guildford and Godaiming. These ruins were, one fine summer morning, visited by a small party, in which were three sisters, one of whom was named Katharine, but the others were neither Martha nor Anne. Katharine had the honors of the locality, and was treated as the representative of the Saint: and as far as youth, beauty, natural gifts and artificial acquirements might qualify a Protestant maid to represent the brightest ideality in the Catholic hierarchy, none could be more worthy.

  The party, leaving the chapel, descended the river in their boats to the larger ruin of a more important establishment, that of Newark Abbey, midway between Guildford and Weybridge. This ruin stands on ground above the highest range of the winter floods, and surrounded on all sides by the waters of the Wey. In quiet lowland scenery there is no more beautiful combination of near and distant hills, woods, dotted trees, and water partly glittering in sunshine, partly rolling under thick foliage, than is presented by the site of this old Abbey.

  The party disembarked, and spreading a pic-nic dinner in the shadow of the ruin devoted themselves for a while to festivity not altogether unworthy of the days when “England” was “merry”, as well as Catholic.

  AMONG THE CHILTERN HILLS

  It was, as Mr. Southey says of a monastic festival in the twelfth century —

  “A day Of that allowable and te
mperate mirth Which leaves a joy for memory.”

  And the memory of the day recurred on the evening of the 25 th of November, when the same party, with some slight differences, was seated round a bright fire in the library of a rural mansion embosomed in old woods among the Chiltern Hills: in the vicinity of one of the few spots in which the old customs of Saint Katharine’s Day are still partially preserved.

  This was Saint Katharine’s day, and the customary observances in the vicinity had recalled more vividly the recollections of the Chapel and Abbey which had been the scenes of the summer-day’s excursion.

  The mansion in which the party was assembled was the seat of the father of the three sisters already mentioned: a country gentleman of an old family, who so far differed from the ways of his ancestors that he cared very little about game-preserving and very much about classical literature. He had considerable liberality of opinion, was tolerant of all differences from his own, and was implacable only in his detestation of tobacco, which he strictly banished to the turnpike-road and would [Here, in the middle of a sentence, the MS. ends.]

  Boozabowt Abbey

  CHAPTER I

  “THESE walls will survive their foundation,” said a stalwart friar, standing by the side of the Mitred Abbot Ernulph, as he leaned down, with a trowel in his hand, to lay the first stone of Boozabowt Abbey. The Abbot did not understand the remark, but thought it not the time and place to notice it.

  The old Abbey was a poor inconvenient structure, partially in decay. The brotherhood had extensive lands, and a full treasury; and had determined on doing honour to the faith, by providing a more spacious and convenient habitation for their own at once ghostly and substantial persons.