Autobiographic Sketches Part 2

[3] It is true that in those days _paregoric elixir_ was occasionally given to children in colds; and in this medicine there is a small proportion of laudanum. But no medicine was ever administered to any member of our nursery except under medical sanction; and this, a.s.suredly, would not have been obtained to the exhibition of laudanum in a case such as mine. For I was then not more that twenty-one months old: at which age the action of opium is capricious, and therefore perilous.

[4] "_Aureola_."--The _aureola_ is the name given in the "Legends of the Christian Saints" to that golden diadem or circlet of supernatural light (that _glory_, as it is commonly called in English) which, amongst the great masters of painting in Italy, surrounded the heads of Christ and of distinguished saints.

[5] "_The astonishment of science_."--Her medical attendants were Dr.

Percival, a well-known literary physician, who had been a correspondent of Condorcet, D'Alembert, &c., and Mr. Charles White, the most distinguished surgeon at that time in the north of England. It was he who p.r.o.nounced her head to be the finest in its development of any that he had ever seen--an a.s.sertion which, to my own knowledge, he repeated in after years, and with enthusiasm. That he had some acquaintance with the subject may be presumed from this, that, at so early a stage of such inquiries, he had published a work on human craniology, supported by measurement of heads selected from all varieties of the human species.

Meantime, as it would grieve me that any trait of what might seem vanity should creep into this record, I will admit that my sister died of hydrocephalus; and it has been often supposed that the premature expansion of the intellect in cases of that cla.s.s is altogether morbid-- forced on, in fact, by the mere stimulation of the disease. I would, however, suggest, as a possibility, the very opposite order of relation between the disease and the intellectual manifestations. Not the disease may always have caused the preternatural growth of the intellect; but, inversely, this growth of the intellect coming on spontaneously, and outrunning the capacities of the physical structure, may have caused the disease.

[6]

"I stood in unimaginable trance And agony which cannot be remembered."

_Speech of Alhadra, in Coleridge's Remorse_

[7] "_The guard_."--I know not whether the word is a local one in this sense. What I mean is a sort of fender, four or five feet high, which locks up the fire from too near an approach on the part of children.

[8] "_Memnonian_."--For the sake of many readers, whose hearts may go along earnestly with a record of infant sorrow, but whose course of life has not allowed them much leisure for study, I pause to explain--that the head of Memnon, in the British Museum, that sublime head which wears upon its lips a smile coextensive with all time and all s.p.a.ce, an Aeonian smile of gracious love and Pan-like mystery, the most diffusive and pathetically divine that the hand of man has created, is represented, on the authority of ancient traditions, to have uttered at sunrise, or soon after as the sun's rays had acc.u.mulated heat enough to rarefy the air within certain cavities in the bust, a solemn and dirge-like series of intonations; the simple explanation being, in its general outline, this-- that sonorous currents of air were produced by causing chambers of cold and heavy air to press upon other collections of air, warmed, and therefore rarefied, and therefore yielding readily to the pressure of heavier air. Currents being thus established by artificial arrangements of tubes, a certain succession of notes could be concerted and sustained.

Near the Red Sea lies a chain of sand hills, which, by a natural system of grooves inosculating with each other, become vocal under changing circ.u.mstances in the position of the sun, &c. I knew a boy who, upon observing steadily, and reflecting upon a phenomenon that met him in his daily experience, viz., that tubes, through which a stream of water was pa.s.sing, gave out a very different sound according to the varying slenderness or fulness of the current, devised an instrument that yielded a rude hydraulic gamut of sounds; and, indeed, upon this simple phenomenon is founded the use and power of the stethoscope. For exactly as a thin thread of water, trickling through a leaden tube, yields a stridulous and plaintive sound compared with the full volume of sound corresponding to the full volume of water, on parity of principles, n.o.body will doubt that the current of blood pouring through the tubes of the human frame will utter to the learned ear, when armed with the stethoscope, an elaborate gamut or compa.s.s of music recording the ravages of disease, or the glorious plenitudes of health, as faithfully as the cavities within this ancient Memnonian bust reported this mighty event of sunrise to the rejoicing world of light and life; or, again, under the sad pa.s.sion of the dying day, uttered the sweet requiem that belonged to its departure.

[9] "_Everlasting Jew_."--_Der ewige Jude_--which is the common German expression for "The Wandering Jew," and sublimer even than our own.

[10] First Epistle to Corinthians, chap. xv., beginning at ver. 20.

[11] This beautiful expression, I am pretty certain, must belong to Mrs.

Trollope; I read it, probably, in a tale of hers connected with the backwoods of America, where the absence of such a farewell must unspeakably aggravate the gloom at any rate belonging to a household separation of that eternal character occurring amongst the shadows of those mighty forests.

[12] "_Galleries_."--These, though condemned on some grounds by the restorers of authentic church architecture, have, nevertheless, this one advantage--that, when the _height_ of a church is that dimension which most of all expresses its sacred character, galleries expound and interpret that height.

[13] Euripides.

[14] "_Spectre of the Brocken_."--This very striking phenomenon has been continually described by writers, both German and English, for the last fifty years. Many readers, however, will not have met with these descriptions; and on _their_ account I add a few words in explanation, referring them for the best scientific comment on the case to Sir David Brewster's "Natural Magic." The spectre takes the shape of a human figure, or, if the visitors are more than one, then the spectres multiply; they arrange themselves on the blue ground of the sky, or the dark ground of any clouds that may be in the right quarter, or perhaps they are strongly relieved against a curtain of rock, at a distance of some miles, and always exhibiting gigantic proportions. At first, from the distance and the colossal size, every spectator supposes the appearances to be quite independent of himself. But very soon he is surprised to observe his own motions and gestures mimicked, and wakens to the conviction that the phantom is but a dilated reflection of himself.

This t.i.tan amongst the apparitions of earth is exceedingly capricious, vanis.h.i.+ng abruptly for reasons best known to himself, and more coy in coming forward than the Lady Echo of Ovid. One reason why he is seen so seldom must be ascribed to the concurrence of conditions under which only the phenomenon can be manifested; the sun must be near to the horizon, (which, of itself, implies a time of day inconvenient to a person starting from a station as distant as Elbingerode;) the spectator must have his back to the sun; and the air must contain some vapor, but _partially_ distributed. Coleridge ascended the Brocken on the Whitsunday of 1799, with a party of English students from Goettingen, but failed to see the phantom; afterwards in England (and under the three same conditions) he saw a much rarer phenomenon, which he described in the following lines:--

"Such thou art as when The woodman winding westward up the glen At wintry dawn, when o'er the sheep-track's maze The viewless snow mist weaves a glistening haze, Sees full before him, gliding without tread, An image with a glory round its head; This shade he wors.h.i.+ps for its golden hues, And _makes_ (not knowing) that which he pursues."

[15] "_On Whitsunday_."--It is singular, and perhaps owing to the temperature and weather likely to prevail in that early part of summer, that more appearances of the spectre have been witnessed on Whitsunday than on any other day.

[16] "_The sorcerer's flower_," and "_The sorcerer's altar_."--These are names still clinging to the anemone of the Brocken, and to an altar- shaped fragment of granite near one of the summits; and there is no doubt that they both connect themselves, through links of ancient tradition, with the gloomy realities of paganism, when the whole Hartz and the Brocken formed for a very long time the last asylum to a ferocious but peris.h.i.+ng idolatry.

[17] On the Roman coins.

CHAPTER II.

INTRODUCTION TO THE WORLD OF STRIFE.

So, then, one chapter in my life had finished. Already, before the completion of my sixth year, this first chapter had run its circle, had rendered up its music to the final chord--might seem even, like ripe fruit from a tree, to have detached itself forever from all the rest of the arras that was shaping itself within my loom of life. No Eden of lakes and forest lawns, such as the _mirage_ suddenly evokes in Arabian sands,--no pageant of air-built battlements and towers, that ever burned in dream-like silence amongst the vapors of summer sunsets, mocking and repeating with celestial pencil "the fuming vanities of earth,"--could leave behind it the mixed impression of so much truth combined with so much absolute delusion. Truest of all things it seemed by the excess of that happiness which it had sustained: most fraudulent it seemed of all things, when looked back upon as some mysterious parenthesis in the current of life, "self-withdrawn into a wonderous depth," hurrying as if with headlong malice to extinction, and alienated by _every_ feature from the new aspects of life that seemed to await me. Were it not in the bitter corrosion of heart that I was called upon to face, I should have carried over to the present no connecting link whatever from the past. Mere reality in this fretting it was, and the undeniableness of its too potent remembrances, that forbade me to regard this burned-out inaugural chapter of my life as no chapter at all, but a pure exhalation of dreams. Misery is a guaranty of truth too substantial to be refused; else, by its determinate evanescence, the total experience would have worn the character of a fantastic illusion.

Well it was for me at this period, if well it were for me to live at all, that from any continued contemplation of my misery I was forced to wean myself, and suddenly to a.s.sume the harness of life. Else under the morbid languis.h.i.+ng of grief, and of what the Romans called _desiderium_, (the yearning too obstinate after one irrecoverable face,) too probably I should have pined away into an early grave. Harsh was my awaking; but the rough febrifuge which this awaking administered broke the strength of my sickly reveries through a period of more than two years; by which time, under the natural expansion of my bodily strength, the danger had pa.s.sed over.

In the first chapter I have rendered solemn thanks for having been trained amongst the gentlest of sisters, and not under "horrid pugilistic brothers." Meantime, one such brother I had, senior by much to myself, and the stormiest of his cla.s.s: him I will immediately present to the reader; for up to this point of my narrative he may be described as a stranger even to myself. Odd as it sounds, I had at this time both a brother and a father, neither of whom would have been able to challenge me as a relative, nor I _him_, had we happened to meet on the public roads.

In my father's case, this arose from the accident of his having lived abroad for a s.p.a.ce that, measured against _my_ life, was a very long one. First, he lived for months in Portugal, at Lisbon, and at Cintra; next in Madeira; then in the West Indies; sometimes in Jamaica, sometimes in St. Kitt's; courting the supposed benefit of hot climates in his complaint of pulmonary consumption. He had, indeed, repeatedly returned to England, and met my mother at watering-places on the south coast of Devons.h.i.+re, &c. But I, as a younger child, had not been one of the party selected for such excursions from home. And now, at last, when all had proved unavailing, he was coming home to die amongst his family, in his thirty-ninth year. My mother had gone to await his arrival at the port (whatever port) to which the West India packet should bring him; and amongst the deepest recollections which I connect with that period, is one derived from the night of his arrival at Greenhay.

It was a summer evening of unusual solemnity. The servants, and four of us children, were gathered for hours, on the lawn before the house, listening for the sound of wheels. Sunset came--nine, ten, eleven o'clock, and nearly another hour had pa.s.sed--without a warning sound; for Greenhay, being so solitary a house, formed a _terminus ad quem_, beyond which was nothing but a cl.u.s.ter of cottages, composing the little hamlet of Greenhill; so that any sound of wheels coming from the winding lane which then connected us with the Rusholme Road, carried with it, of necessity, a warning summons to prepare for visitors at Greenhay. No such summons had yet reached us; it was nearly midnight; and, for the last time, it was determined that we should move in a body out of the grounds, on the chance of meeting the travelling party, if, at so late an hour, it could yet be expected to arrive. In fact, to our general surprise, we met it almost immediately, but coming at so slow a pace, that the fall of the horses' feet was not audible until we were close upon them. I mention the case for the sake of the undying impressions which connected themselves with the circ.u.mstances. The first notice of the approach was the sudden emerging of horses' heads from the deep gloom of the shady lane; the next was the ma.s.s of white pillows against which the dying patient was reclining. The hea.r.s.e-like pace at which the carriage moved recalled the overwhelming spectacle of that funeral which had so lately formed part in the most memorable event of my life. But these elements of awe, that might at any rate have struck forcibly upon the mind of a child, were for me, in my condition of morbid nervousness, raised into abiding grandeur by the antecedent experiences of that particular summer night. The listening for hours to the sounds from horses' hoofs upon distant roads, rising and falling, caught and lost, upon the gentle undulation of such fitful airs as might be stirring--the peculiar solemnity of the hours succeeding to sunset--the glory of the dying day--the gorgeousness which, by description, so well I knew of sunset in those West Indian islands from which my father was returning--the knowledge that he returned only to die--the almighty pomp in which this great idea of Death apparelled itself to my young sorrowing heart--the corresponding pomp in which the antagonistic idea, not less mysterious, of life, rose, as if on wings, amidst tropic glories and floral pageantries that seemed even _more_ solemn and pathetic than the vapory plumes and trophies of mortality,--all this chorus of restless images, or of suggestive thoughts, gave to my father's return, which else had been fitted only to interpose one transitory red-letter day in the calendar of a child, the shadowy power of an ineffaceable agency among my dreams.

This, indeed, was the one sole memorial which restores my father's image to me as a personal reality; otherwise he would have been for me a bare _nominis umbra_. He languished, indeed, for weeks upon a sofa; and, during that interval, it happened naturally, from my repose of manners, that I was a privileged visitor to him throughout his waking hours. I was also present at his bedside in the closing hour of his life, which exhaled quietly, amidst s.n.a.t.c.hes of delirious conversation with some imaginary visitors.

My brother was a stranger from causes quite as little to be foreseen, but seeming quite as natural after they had really occurred. In an early stage of his career, he had been found wholly unmanageable. His genius for mischief amounted to inspiration; it was a divine _afflatus_ which drove him in that direction; and such was his capacity for riding in whirlwinds and directing storms, that he made it his trade to create them, as a _nephelaegereta Zeus_, a cloud-compelling Jove, in order that he _might_ direct them. For this, and other reasons, he had been sent to the Grammar School of Louth, in Lincolns.h.i.+re--one of those many old cla.s.sic inst.i.tutions which form the peculiar [1] glory of England. To box, and to box under the severest restraint of honorable laws, was in those days a mere necessity of schoolboy life at _public_ schools; and hence the superior manliness, generosity, and self-control of those generally who had benefited by such discipline--so systematically hostile to all meanness, pusillanimity, or indirectness. Cowper, in his "Tyrocinium," is far from doing justice to our great public schools.

Himself disqualified, by a delicacy of temperament, for reaping the benefits from such a warfare, and having suffered too much in his own Westminster experience, he could not judge them from an impartial station; but I, though ill enough adapted to an atmosphere so stormy, yet having tried both cla.s.ses of schools, public and private, am compelled in mere conscience to give my vote (and, if I had a thousand votes, to give _all_ my votes) for the former.

Fresh from such a training as this, and at a time when his additional five or six years availed nearly to make _his_ age the double of mine, my brother very naturally despised me; and, from his exceeding frankness, he took no pains to conceal that he did. Why should he? Who was it that could have a right to feel aggrieved by this contempt?

Who, if not myself? But it happened, on the contrary, that I had a perfect craze for being despised. I doted on it, and considered contempt a sort of luxury that I was in continual fear of losing. Why not?

Wherefore should any rational person shrink from contempt, if it happen to form the tenure by which he holds his repose in life? The cases which are cited from comedy of such a yearning after contempt, stand upon a footing altogether different: _there_ the contempt is wooed as a serviceable ally and tool of religious hypocrisy. But to me, at that era of life, it formed the main guaranty of an unmolested repose; and security there was not, on any lower terms, for the _latentis semita vitae_. The slightest approach to any favorable construction of my intellectual pretensions alarmed me beyond measure; because it pledged me in a manner with the hearer to support this first attempt by a second, by a third, by a fourth--O Heavens! there is no saying how far the horrid man might go in his unreasonable demands upon me. I groaned under the weight of his expectations; and, if I laid but the first round of such a staircase, why, then, I saw in vision a vast Jacob's ladder towering upwards to the clouds, mile after mile, league after league; and myself running up and down this ladder, like any fatigue party of Irish hodmen, to the top of any Babel which my wretched admirer might choose to build. But I nipped the abominable system of extortion in the very bud, by refusing to take the first step. The man could have no pretence, you know, for expecting me to climb the third or fourth round, when I had seemed quite unequal to the first. Professing the most absolute bankruptcy from the very beginning, giving the man no sort of hope that I would pay even one farthing in the pound, I never could be made miserable by unknown responsibilities.

Still, with all this pa.s.sion for being despised, which was so essential to my peace of mind, I found at times an alt.i.tude--a starry alt.i.tude--in the station of contempt for me a.s.sumed by my brother that nettled me. Sometimes, indeed, the mere necessities of dispute carried me, before I was aware of my own imprudence, so far up the staircase of Babel, that my brother was shaken for a moment in the infinity of his contempt; and before long, when my superiority in some bookish accomplishments displayed itself, by results that could not be entirely dissembled, mere foolish human nature forced me into some trifle of exultation at these retributory triumphs. But more often I was disposed to grieve over them. They tended to shake that solid foundation of utter despicableness upon which I relied so much for my freedom from anxiety; and therefore, upon the whole, it was satisfactory to my mind that my brother's opinion of me, after any little transient oscillation, gravitated determinately back towards that settled contempt which had been the result of his original inquest. The pillars of Hercules, upon which rested the vast edifice of his scorn, were these two--1st, my physics; he denounced me for effeminacy; 2d, he a.s.sumed, and even postulated as a _datum_, which I myself could never have the face to refuse, my general idiocy. Physically, therefore, and intellectually, he looked upon me as below notice; but, _morally_, he a.s.sured me that he would give me a written character of the very best description, whenever I chose to apply for it. "You're honest," he said; "you're willing, though lazy; you _would_ pull, if you had the strength of a flea; and, though a monstrous coward, you don't run away." My own demurs to these harsh judgments were not so many as they might have been. The idiocy I confessed; because, though positive that I was not uniformly an idiot, I felt inclined to think that, in a majority of cases, I really _was_; and there were more reasons for thinking so than the reader is yet aware of. But, as to the effeminacy, I denied it _in toto_; and with good reason, as will be seen. Neither did my brother pretend to have any experimental proofs of it. The ground he went upon was a mere _a priori_ one, viz., that I had always been tied to the ap.r.o.n string of women or girls; which amounted at most to this--that, by training and the natural tendency of circ.u.mstances, I _ought_ to be effeminate; that is, there was reason to expect beforehand that I _should_ be so; but, then, the more merit in me, if, in spite of such reasonable presumptions, I really were _not_. In fact, my brother soon learned, by a daily experience, how entirely he might depend upon me for carrying out the most audacious of his own warlike plans--such plans, it is true, that I abominated; but _that_ made no difference in the fidelity with which I tried to fulfil them.

This eldest brother of mine was in all respects a remarkable boy. Haughty he was, aspiring, immeasurably active; fertile in resources as Robinson Crusoe; but also full of quarrel as it is possible to imagine; and, in default of any other opponent, he would have fastened a quarrel upon his own shadow for presuming to run before him when going westwards in the morning, whereas, in all reason, a shadow, like a dutiful child, ought to keep deferentially in the rear of that majestic substance which is the author of its existence. Books he detested, one and all, excepting only such as he happened to write himself. And these were not a few. On all subjects known to man, from the Thirty-nine Articles of our English church down to pyrotechnics, legerdemain, magic, both black and white, thaumaturgy, and necromancy, he favored the world (which world was the nursery where I lived amongst my sisters) with his select opinions. On this last subject especially--of necromancy--he was very great: witness his profound work, though but a fragment, and, unfortunately, long since departed to the bosom of Cinderella, ent.i.tled "How to raise a Ghost; and when you've got him down, how to keep him down." To which work he a.s.sured us that some most learned and enormous man, whose name was a foot and a half long, had promised him an appendix, which appendix treated of the Red Sea and Solomon's signet ring, with forms of _mittimus_ for ghosts that might be refractory, and probably a riot act, for any _emeute_ amongst ghosts inclined to raise barricades; since he often thrilled our young hearts by supposing the case, (not at all unlikely, he affirmed,) that a federation, a solemn league and conspiracy, might take place amongst the infinite generations of ghosts against the single generation of men at any one time composing the garrison of earth. The Roman phrase for expressing that a man had died, viz., "_Abiit ad plures_" (He has gone over to the majority,) my brother explained to us; and we easily comprehended that any one generation of the living human race, even if combined, and acting in concert, must be in a frightful minority, by comparison with all the incalculable generations that had trot this earth before us. The Parliament of living men, Lords and Commons united, what a miserable array against the Upper and Lower House composing the Parliament of ghosts! Perhaps the Pre-Adamites would const.i.tute one wing in such a ghostly army. My brother, dying in his sixteenth year, was far enough from seeing or foreseeing Waterloo; else he might have ill.u.s.trated this dreadful duel of the living human race with its ghostly predecessors, by the awful apparition which at three o'clock in the afternoon, on the 18th of June, 1815, the mighty contest at Waterloo must have a.s.sumed to eyes that watched over the trembling interests of man.

The English army, about that time in the great agony of its strife, was thrown into squares; and under that arrangement, which condensed and contracted its apparent numbers within a few black geometrical diagrams, how frightfully narrow, how spectral, did its slender quadrangels appear at a distance, to any philosophic spectators that knew about the amount of human interests confided to that army, and the hopes for Christendom that even then were trembling in the balance! Such a disproportion, it seems, might exist, in the case of a ghostly war, between the harvest of possible results and the slender band of reapers that were to gather it.

And there was even a worse peril than any a.n.a.logous one that has been _proved_ to exist at Waterloo. A British surgeon, indeed, in a work of two octavo volumes, has endeavored to show that a conspiracy was traced at Waterloo, between two or three foreign regiments, for kindling a panic in the heat of battle, by flight, and by a sustained blowing up of tumbrils, under the miserable purpose of shaking the British steadiness.

But the evidences are not clear; whereas my brother insisted that the presence of sham men, distributed extensively amongst the human race, and meditating treason against us all, had been demonstrated to the satisfaction of all true philosophers. Who were these shams and make- believe men? They were, in fact, people that had been dead for centuries, but that, for reasons best known to themselves, had returned to this upper earth, walked about amongst us, and were undistinguishable, except by the most learned of necromancers, from authentic men of flesh and blood. I mention this for the sake of ill.u.s.trating the fact, of which the reader will find a singular instance in the foot note attached, that the same crazes are everlastingly revolving upon men. [2]

This hypothesis, however, like a thousand others, when it happened that they engaged no durable sympathy from his nursery audience, he did not pursue. For some time he turned his thoughts to philosophy, and read lectures to us every night upon some branch or other of physics. This undertaking arose upon some one of us envying or admiring flies for their power of walking upon the ceiling. "Poh!" he said, "they are impostors; they pretend to do it, but they can't do it as it ought to be done. Ah! you should see _me_ standing upright on the ceiling, with my head downwards, for half an hour together, and meditating profoundly." My sister Mary remarked, that we should all be very glad to see him in that position. "If that's the case," he replied, "it's very well that all is ready, except as to a strap or two." Being an excellent skater, he had first imagined that, if held up until he had started, he might then, by taking a bold sweep ahead, keep himself in position through the continued impetus of skating. But this he found not to answer; because, as he observed, "the friction was too r.e.t.a.r.ding from the plaster of Paris, but the case would be very different if the ceiling were coated with ice." As it was _not_, he changed his plan. The true secret, he now discovered, was this: he would consider himself in the light of a humming top; he would make an apparatus (and he made it) for having himself launched, like a top, upon the ceiling, and regularly spun. Then the vertiginous motion of the human top would overpower the force of gravitation. He should, of course, spin upon his own axis, and sleep upon his own axis--perhaps he might even dream upon it; and he laughed at "those scoundrels, the flies," that never improved in their pretended art, nor made any thing of it. The principle was now discovered; "and, of course," he said, if a man can keep it up for five minutes, what's to hinder him from doing so for five months?" "Certainly, nothing that I can think of,"

was the reply of my sister, whose scepticism, in fact, had not settled upon the five months, but altogether upon the five minutes. The apparatus for spinning him, however, perhaps from its complexity, would not work--a fact evidently owing to the stupidity of the gardener. On reconsidering the subject, he announced, to the disappointment of some amongst us, that, although the physical discovery was now complete, he saw a moral difficulty. It was not a _humming_ top that was required, but a peg top. Now, this, in order to keep up the _vertigo_ at full stretch, without which, to a certainty, gravitation would prove too much for him, needed to be whipped incessantly. But that was precisely what a gentleman ought not to tolerate: to be scourged unintermittingly on the legs by any grub of a gardener, unless it were father Adam himself, was a thing that he could not bring his mind to face. However, as some compensation, he proposed to improve the art of flying, which was, as every body must acknowledge, in a condition disgraceful to civilized society. As he had made many a fire balloon, and had succeeded in some attempts at bringing down cats by _parachutes_, it was not very difficult to fly downwards from moderate elevations. But, as he was reproached by my sister for never flying back again,--which, however, was a far different thing, and not even attempted by the philosopher in "Ra.s.selas,"--(for

"Revocare gradum, et _superas_ evadere ad auras Hic labor, hoc opus est,")

he refused, under such poor encouragement, to try his winged parachutes any more, either "aloft or alow," till he had thoroughly studied Bishop Wilkins [3] on the art of translating right reverend gentlemen to the moon; and, in the mean time, he resumed his general lectures on physics.

From these, however, he was speedily driven, or one might say sh.e.l.led out, by a concerted a.s.sault of my sister Mary's. He had been in the habit of lowering the pitch of his lectures with ostentatious condescension to the presumed level of our poor understandings. This superciliousness annoyed my sister; and accordingly, with the help of two young female visitors, and my next younger brother,--in subsequent times a little middy on board many a s.h.i.+p of H. M., and the most predestined rebel upon earth against all a.s.sumptions, small or great, of superiority,--she arranged a mutiny, that had the unexpected effect of suddenly extinguis.h.i.+ng the lectures forever. He had happened to say, what was no unusual thing with him, that he flattered himself he had made the point under discussion tolerably clear; "clear," he added, bowing round the half circle of us, the audience, "to the meanest of capacities;" and then he repeated, sonorously, "clear to the most excruciatingly mean of capacities." Upon which, a voice, a female voice,--but whose voice, in the tumult that followed, I did not distinguish,--retorted, "No, you haven't; it's as dark as sin; "and then, without a moment's interval, a second voice exclaimed, "Dark as night;" then came my young brother's insurrectionary yell, "Dark as midnight;" then another female voice chimed in melodiously, "Dark as pitch;" and so the peal continued to come round like a catch, the whole being so well concerted, and the rolling fire so well sustained, that it was impossible to make head against it; whilst the abruptness of the interruption gave to it the protecting character of an oral "round robin," it being impossible to challenge any one in particular as the ringleader. Burke's phrase of "the swinish mult.i.tude," applied to mobs, was then in every body's mouth; and, accordingly, after my brother had recovered from his first astonishment at this audacious mutiny, he made us several sweeping bows that looked very much like tentative rehearsals of a sweeping _fusillade_, and then addressed us in a very brief speech, of which we could distinguish the words _pearls_ and _swinish mult.i.tude_, but uttered in a very low key, perhaps out of some lurking consideration for the two young strangers. We all laughed in chorus at this parting salute; my brother himself condescended at last to join us; but there ended the course of lectures on natural philosophy.

As it was impossible, however, that he should remain quiet, he announced to us, that for the rest of his life he meant to dedicate himself to the intense cultivation of the tragic drama. He got to work instantly; and very soon he had composed the first act of his "Sultan Selim;"

but, in defiance of the metre, he soon changed the t.i.tle to "Sultan Amurath," considering _that_ a much fiercer name, more bewhiskered and beturbaned. It was no part of his intention that we should sit lolling on chairs like ladies and gentleman that had paid opera prices for private boxes. He expected every one of us, he said, to pull an oar.

We were to _act_ the tragedy. But, in fact, we had many oars to pull.

There were so many characters, that each of us took four at the least, and the future middy had six. He, this wicked little middy, [4] caused the greatest affliction to Sultan Amurath, forcing him to order the amputation of his head six several times (that is, once in every one of his six parts) during the first act. In reality, the sultan, though otherwise a decent man, was too b.l.o.o.d.y. What by the bowstring, and what by the cimeter, he had so thinned the population with which he commenced business, that scarcely any of the characters remained alive at the end of act the first. Sultan Amurath found himself in an awkward situation. Large arrears of work remained, and hardly any body to do it but the sultan himself. In composing act the second, the author had to proceed like Deucalion and Pyrrha, and to create an entirely new generation. Apparently this young generation, that ought to have been so good, took no warning by what had happened to their ancestors in act the first: one must conclude that they were quite as wicked, since the poor sultan had found himself reduced to order them all for execution in the course of this act the second. To the brazen age had succeeded an iron age; and the prospects were becoming sadder and sadder as the tragedy advanced. But here the author began to hesitate.

He felt it hard to resist the instinct of carnage. And was it right to do so? Which of the felons whom he had cut of prematurely could pretend that a court of appeal would have reversed his sentence? But the consequences were distressing. A new set of characters in every act brought with it the necessity of a new plot; for people could not succeed to the arrears of old actions, or inherit ancient motives, like a landed estate. Five crops, in fact, must be taken off the ground in each separate tragedy, amounting, in short, to five tragedies involved in one.

Such, according to the rapid sketch which at this moment my memory furnishes, was the brother who now first laid open to me the gates of war. The occasion was this. He had resented, with a shower of stones, an affront offered to us by an individual boy, belonging to a cotton factory: for more than two years afterwards this became the _teterrima causa_ of a skirmish or a battle as often as we pa.s.sed the factory; and, unfortunately, _that_ was twice a day on every day except Sunday. Our situation in respect to the enemy was as follows: Greenhay, a country house newly built by my father, at that time was a clear mile from the outskirts of Manchester; but in after years Manchester, throwing out the _tentacula_ of its vast expansions, absolutely enveloped Greenhay; and, for any thing I know, the grounds and gardens which then insulated the house may have long disappeared. Being a modest mansion, which (including hot walls, offices, and gardener's house) had cost only six thousand pounds, I do not know how it should have risen to the distinction of giving name to a region of that great town; however, it _has_ done so; [5] and at this time, therefore, after changes so great, it will be difficult for the _habitue_ of that region to understand how my brother and myself could have a solitary road to traverse between Greenhay and Princess Street, then the termination, on that side, of Manchester. But so it was. Oxford _Street_, like its namesake in London, was then called the Oxford _Road_; and during the currency of our acquaintance with it, arose the first three houses in its neighborhood; of which the third was built for the Rev. S. H., one of our guardians, for whom his friends had also built the Church of St. Peter's--not a bowshot from the house. At present, however, he resided in Salford, nearly two miles from Greenhay; and to him we went over daily, for the benefit of his cla.s.sical instructions. One sole cotton factory had then risen along the line of Oxford Street; and this was close to a bridge, which also was a new creation; for previously all pa.s.sengers to Manchester went round by Garrat. This factory became to us the _officina gentium_, from which swarmed forth those Goths and Vandals that continually threatened our steps; and this bridge became the eternal arena of combat, we taking good care to be on the right side of the bridge for retreat, _i.e._, on the town side, or the country side, accordingly as we were going out in the morning, or returning in the afternoon. Stones were the implements of warfare; and by continual practice both parties became expert in throwing them.

The origin of the feud it is scarcely requisite to rehea.r.s.e, since the particular accident which began it was not the true efficient cause of our long warfare, but simply the casual occasion. The cause lay in our aristocratic dress. As children of an opulent family, where all provisions were liberal, and all appointments elegant, we were uniformly well dressed; and, in particular, we wore troussers, (at that time unheard of, except among sailors,) and we also wore Hessian boots--a crime that could not be forgiven in the Lancas.h.i.+re of that day, because it expressed the double offence of being aristocratic and being outlandish. We were aristocrats, and it was vain to deny it; could we deny our boots? whilst our antagonists, if not absolutely _sans culottes_, were slovenly and forlorn in their dress, often unwashed, with hair totally neglected, and always covered with flakes of cotton.

Jacobins they were not, as regarded any sympathy with the Jacobinism that then desolated France; for, on the contrary, they detested every thing French, and answered with brotherly signals to the cry of "Church and king," or "King and const.i.tution." But, for all that, as they were perfectly independent, getting very high wages, and these wages in a mode of industry that was then taking vast strides ahead, they contrived to reconcile this patriotic anti-Jacobinism with a personal Jacobinism of that sort which is native to the heart of man, who is by natural impulse (and not without a root of n.o.bility, though also of base envy) impatient of inequality, and submits to it only through a sense of its necessity, or under a long experience of its benefits.

It was on an early day of our new _tyrocinium_, or perhaps on the very first, that, as we pa.s.sed the bridge, a boy happening to issue from the factory [6] sang out to us derisively, "Hollo, bucks!" In this the reader may fail to perceive any atrocious insult commensurate to the long war which followed. But the reader is wrong. The word "_dandies_" [7]

which was what the villain meant, had not then been born, so that he could not have called us by that name, unless through the spirit of prophecy. _Buck_ was the nearest word at hand in his Manchester vocabulary: he gave all he could, and let us dream the rest. But in the next moment he discovered our boots, and he consummated his crime by saluting us as "Boots! boots!" My brother made a dead stop, surveyed him with intense disdain, and bade him draw near, that he might "give his flesh to the fowls of the air." The boy declined to accept this liberal invitation, and conveyed his answer by a most contemptuous and plebian gesture, [8] upon which my brother drove him in with a shower of stones.

During this inaugural flourish of hostilities, I, for my part, remained inactive, and therefore apparently neutral. But this was the last time that I did so: for the moment, indeed, I was taken by surprise. To be called a _buck_ by one that had it in his choice to have called me a coward, a thief, or a murderer, struck me as a most pardonable offence; and as to _boots_, that rested upon a flagrant fact that could not be denied; so that at first I was green enough to regard the boy as very considerate and indulgent. But my brother soon rectified my views; or, if any doubts remained, he impressed me, at least, with a sense of my paramount duty to himself, which was threefold. First, it seems that I owed military allegiant to _him_, as my commander-in-chief, whenever we "took the field;" secondly, by the law of nations, I, being a cadet of my house, owed suit and service to him who was its head; and he a.s.sured me, that twice in a year, on _my_ birthday and on _his_, he had a right, strictly speaking, to make me lie down, and to set his foot upon my neck; lastly, by a law not so rigorous, but valid amongst gentlemen,--viz., "by the _comity_ of nations,"--it seems I owed eternal deference to one so much older than myself, so much wiser, stronger, braver, more beautiful, and more swift of foot. Something like all this in tendency I had already believed, though I had not so minutely investigated the modes and grounds of my duty. By temperament, and through natural dedication to despondency, I felt resting upon me always too deep and gloomy a sense of obscure duties attached to life, that I never _should_ be able to fulfil; a burden which I could not carry, and which yet I did not know how to throw off. Glad, therefore, I was to find the whole tremendous weight of obligations--the law and the prophets--all crowded into this one pocket command, "Thou shalt obey thy brother as G.o.d's vicar upon earth." For now, if, by any future stone levelled at him who had called me a "buck," I should chance to draw blood, perhaps I might not have committed so serious a trespa.s.s on any rights which he could plead; but if I _had_, (for on this subject my convictions were still cloudy,) at any rate, the duty I might have violated in regard to this general brother, in right of Adam, was cancelled when it came into collision with my paramount duty to this liege brother of my own individual house.

From this day, therefore, I obeyed all my brother's military commands with the utmost docility; and happy it made me that every sort of doubt, or question, or opening for demur was swallowed up in the unity of this one papal principle, discovered by my brother, viz., that all rights and duties of casuistry were transferred from me to himself.

_His_ was the judgment--_his_ was the responsibility; and to me belonged only the sublime obligation of unconditional faith in _him_. That faith I realized. It is true that he taxed me at times, in his reports of particular fights, with "horrible cowardice," and even with "a cowardice that seemed inexplicable, except on the supposition of treachery." But this was only a _facon de parler_ with him: the idea of secret perfidy, that was constantly moving under ground, gave an interest to the progress of the war, which else tended to the monotonous. It was a dramatic artifice for sustaining the interest, where the incidents might happen to be too slightly diversified. But that he did not believe his own charges was clear, because he never repeated them in his "General History of the Campaigns," which was a _resume_, or recapitulating digest, of his daily reports.

We fought every day, and, generally speaking, _twice_ every day; and the result was pretty uniform, viz., that my brother and I terminated the battle by insisting upon our undoubted right to run away. _Magna Charta_, I should fancy, secures that great right to every man; else, surely, it is sadly defective. But out of this catastrophe to most of our skirmishes, and to all our pitched battles except one, grew a standing schism between my brother and myself. My unlimited obedience had respect to action, but not to opinion. Loyalty to my brother did not rest upon hypocrisy: because I was faithful, it did not follow that I must be false in relation to his capricious opinions. And these opinions sometimes took the shape of acts. Twice, at the least, in every week, but sometimes every night, my brother insisted on singing "Te Deum" for supposed victories which he had won; and he insisted also on my bearing a part in these "Te Deums." Now, as I knew of no such victories, but resolutely a.s.serted the truth,--viz., that we ran away,--a slight jar was thus given to the else triumphal effect of these musical ovations. Once having uttered my protest, however, willingly I gave my aid to the chanting; for I loved unspeakably the grand and varied system of chanting in the Romish and English churches.