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 glo
rious
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.
They say that claret is better nowadays, and cookery much
improved since the days of my monarch -- of George IV. Pastry
Cookery is certainly not so good. I have often eaten half-a-
crown's worth (including, I trust, ginger-beer) at our school
pastrycook's, and that is a proof that the pastry must have been
very good, for could I do as much now? I passed by the
pastrycook's shop lately, having occasion to visit my old school.
It looked a very dingy old baker's; misfortunes may have come
over him -- those penny tarts certainly did not look so nice as I
remember them: but he may have grown careless as he has grown
old (I should judge him to be now about ninety-six years of age),
and his hand may have lost its cunning.
Not that we were not great epicures. I remember how we
constantly grumbled at the quantity of the food in our master's
house -- which on my conscience I believe was excellent and
plentiful -- and how we tried once or twice to eat him out of
house and home. At the pastrycook's we may have over-eaten
ourselves (I have admitted half-a-crown's worth for my own part,
but I don't like to mention the real figure for fear of
perverting the present generation of boys by my monstrous
confession) -- we may have eaten too much, I say. We did; but
what then? The school apothecary was sent for: a couple of
small globules at night, a trifling preparation of senna in the
morning, and we had not to go to school, so that the draught was
an actual pleasure.
For our amusements, besides the games in vogue, which were pretty
much in old times as they are now (except cricket par exemple --
and I wish the present youth joy of their bowling, and suppose
Armstrong and Whitworth will bowl at them with light field-pieces
next), there were novels -- ah! I trouble you to find such novels
in the present day! O Scottish Chiefs, didn't we weep over you!
O Mysteries of Udolpho, didn't I and Briggs Minor draw pictures
out of you, as I have said? Efforts, feeble indeed, but still
giving pleasure to us and our friends. "I say, old boy, draw us
Vivaldi tortured in the Inquisition," or, "Draw us Don Quixote
and the windmills, you know," amateurs would say, to boys who had
a love of drawing. "Peregrine Pickle" we liked, our fathers
admiring it, and telling us (the sly old boys) it was capital
fun; but I think I was rather bewildered by it, though "Roderick
Random" was and remains delightful. I don't remember having
Sterne in the school library, no doubt because the works of that
divine were not considered decent for young people. Ah! not
against thy genius, O father of Uncle Toby and Trim, would I say
a word in disrespect. But I am thankful to live in times when
men no longer have the temptation to write so as to call blushes
on women's cheeks, and would shame to whisper wicked allusions to
honest boys. Then, above all, we had Walter Scott, the kindly,
the generous, the pure -- the companion of what countless
delightful hours; the purveyor of how much happiness; the
friend whom we recall as the constant benefactor of our youth!
How well I remember the type and the brownish paper of the old
duodecimo "Tales of My Landlord!" I have never dared to read the
"Pirate," and the "Bride of Lammermoor," or "Kenilworth," from
that day to this, because the finale is unhappy, and people die,
and are murdered at the end. But "Ivanhoe," and "Quentin
Durward"! Oh! for a half-holiday, and a quiet corner, and one of
those books again! Those books, and perhaps those eyes with
which we read them; and, it may be, the brains behind the eyes!
It may be the tart was good; but how fresh the appetite was! If
the gods would give me the desire of my heart, I should be able
to write a story which boys would relish for the next few dozen
of centuries. The boy-critic loves the story: grown up, he
loves the author who wrote the story. Hence the kindly tie is
established between writer and reader, and lasts pretty nearly
for life. I meet people now who don't care of Walter Scott, or
the "Arabian Nights"; I am sorry for them, unless they in their
time have found their romancer -- their charming Scheherazade.
By the way, Walter, when you are writing, tell me who is the
favourite novelist in the fourth form now? Have you got anything
so good and kindly as dear Miss Edgeworth's Frank? It used to
belong to a fellow's sisters generally; but though he pretended
to despise it, and said, "Oh, stuff for girls!" he read it; and
I think there were one or two passages which would try my eyes
now, were I to meet with the little book.
As for Thomas and Jeremiah (it is only my witty way of calling
Tom and Jerry), I went to the British Museum the other day on
purpose to get it; but somehow, if you will press the question
so closely, on reperusal, Tom and Jerry is not so brilliant as I
had supposed it to be. The pictures are just as fine as ever;
and I shook hands with broad-backed Jerry Hawthorn and Corinthian
Tom with delight, after many year's absence. But the style of
the writing, I own, was not pleasing to me; I even thought it a
little vulgar -- well! well! other writers have been considered
vulgar -- and as a description of the sports and amusements of
London in the ancient times, more curious than amusing.
But the pictures! -- oh! the pictures are noble still! First,
there is Jerry arriving from the country, in a green coat and
leather gaiters, and being measured for a fashionable suit at
Corinthian House, by Corinthian Tom's tailor. Then away for the
career of pleasure and fashion. The park! delicious excitement!
The theatre! the saloon!! the green-room!!! Rapturous bliss --
the opera itself! and then perhaps to Temple Bar, to knock down a
Charley there! There are Jerry and Tom, with their tights and
little cocked hats, coming from the opera -- very much as
gentlemen in waiting on royalty are habited now. There they are
at Almack's itself, amidst a crowd of high-bred personages, with
the Duke of Clarence himself looking at them dancing. Now,
strange change, they are in Tom Cribb's parlour, where they don't
seem to be a whit less at home than in fashion's gilded halls;
and now they are at Newgate, seeing the irons knocked off the
malefactors' legs previous to execution. What hardened ferocity
in the countenance of the despera
do in yellow breeches! What
compunction in the face of the gentleman in black (who, I
suppose, has been forging), and who clasps his hands, and listens
to the chaplain! Now we haste away to merrier scenes: to
Tattersall's (ah gracious powers! what a funny fellow that actor
was who performed Dicky Green in that scene in the play!); and
now we are at a private party, at which Corinthian Tom is
waltzing (and very gracefully too, as you must confess) with
Corinthian Kate, whilst Bob Logic, the Oxonian, is playing on the
piano!
"After," the text says, "the Oxonian had played several pieces of
lively music, he requested as a favour that Kate and his friend
Tom would perform a waltz. Kate without any hesitation
immediately stood up. Tom offered his hand to his fascinating
partner, and the dance took place. The plate conveys a correct
representation of the `gay scene' at that precise moment. The
anxiety of the Oxonian to witness the attitudes of the elegant
pair had nearly put a stop to their movements. On turning round
from the pianoforte and presenting his comical mug, Kate could
scarcely suppress a laugh."
And no wonder; just look at it now (as I have copied it to the
best of my humble ability), and compare Master Logic's
countenance and attitude with the splendid elegance of Tom! Now
every London man is weary and blase. There is an enjoyment of
life in these young bucks of 1823 which contrasts strangely with
our feelings of 1860. Here, for instance, is a specimen of their
talk and walk, "`If,' says LOGIC -- `if enjoyment is your motto,
you may make the most of an evening at Vauxhall, more than at any
other place in the metropolis. It is all free and easy. Stay as
long as you like, and depart when you think proper.' -- `Your
description is so flattering,' replied JERRY, `that I do not care
how soon the time arrives for us to start.' LOGIC proposed a
`bit of a stroll' in order to get rid of an hour or two, which
was immediately accepted by Tom and Jerry. A turn or two in Bond
Street, a stroll through Piccadilly, a look in at TATTERSALL's, a
ramble through Pall Mall, and a strut on the Corinthian path,
fully occupied the time of our heroes until the hour for dinner
arrived, when a few glasses of TOM's rich wines soon put them on
the qui vive. VAUXHALL was then the object in view, and the TRIO
started, bent upon enjoying the pleasures which this place so
amply affords."
How nobly those inverted commas, those italics, those capitals,
bring out the writer's wit and relieve the eye! They are as good
as jokes, though you mayn't quite preceive the point. Mark the
varieties of lounge in which the young men indulge -- now a
stroll, then a look in, then a ramble, and presently a strut.
When George, Prince of Wales, was twenty, I have read in an old
Magazine, "the Prince's lounge" was a peculiar manner of walking
which the young bucks imitated. At Windsor George III. had a
cat's path -- a sly early walk which the good old king took in
the grey morning before his household was astir. What was the
Corinthian path here recorded? Does any antiquary know? And
what were the rich wines which our friends took, and which enable
them to enjoy Vauxhall? Vauxhall is gone, but the wines which
could occasion such a delightful perversion of the intellect as
to enable it to enjoy ample pleasures there, what were they?
So the game of life proceeds, until Jerry Hawthorn, the rustic,
is fairly knocked up by all this excitement and is forced to go
home, and the last picture represents him getting into the coach
at the "White Horse Cellar," he being one of six inside; whilst
his friends shake him by the hand; whilst the sailor mounts on
the roof; whilst the Jews hang round with oranges, knives, and
sealing-wax: whilst the guard is closing the door. Where are
they now, those sealing-wax vendors? where are the guards? where
are the jolly teams? where are the coaches? and where the youth
that climbed inside and out of them; that heard the merry horn
which sounds no more; that saw the sun rise over Stonehenge;
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