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Yet another novel from the same pen, which has twice before claimed the patience of the public in this form. The unequivocal indulgence which has been extended to my two former attempts, renders me doubly solicitous not to forfeit the kindness I have experienced.
One caution I have particularly sought to exercise: "not to repeat myself." Caleb Williams was a story of very surprising and uncommon events, but which were supposed to be entirely within the laws and established course of nature, as she operates in the planet we inhabit. The story of St. Leon is of the miraculous class; and its design, to "mix human feelings and passions with incredible situations, and thus render them impressive and interesting."
Some of those fastidious readers —they may be classed among the best friends an author has, if their admonitions are judiciously considered —who are willing to discover those faults which do not offer themselves to every eye, have remarked, that both these tales are in a vicious style of writing; that Horace has long ago decided , that the story we cannot believe, we are by all the laws of criticism called upon to hate; and that even the adventures of the honest secretary, who was first heard of ten years ago, are so much out of the usual road, that not one reader in a million can ever fear they will happen to himself.
Gentlemen critics, I thank you. In the present volumes I have served you with a dish agreeable to your own receipt, though I cannot say with any sanguine hope of obtaining your approbation.
The following story consists of such adventures, as for the most part have occurred to at least one half of the Englishmen now existing, who are of the same rank of life as my hero. Most of them have been at college, and shared in college excesses; most of them have afterward run a certain gauntlet of dissipation; most have married; and, I am afraid, there are few of the married tribe, who have not at some time or other had certain small misunderstandings with their wives :—to be sure, they have not all of them felt and acted under these trite adventures as my hero does. In this little work the reader will scarcely find any thing to "elevate and surprise;" and, if it has any merit, it must consist in the liveliness with which it brings things home to the imagination, and the reality it gives to the scenes it pourtrays.
Yet, even in the present narrative, I have aimed at a certain kind
of novelty; a novelty, which may be aptly expressed by a parody on a
well known line of Pope; it relates
Things often done, but never yet describ'd.
In selecting among common and ordinary adventures, I have
endeavoured to avoid such as a thousand novels before mine have
undertaken to develop. Multitudes of readers have themselves passed
through the very incidents I relate; but, for the most part, no work
has hitherto recorded them. If I have told them truly, I have added
somewhat to the stock of books which should enable a recluse shut up
in his closet, to form an idea of what is passing in the world. It is
inconceivable meanwhile, how much by this choice of a subject, I
increased the arduousness of my task. It is so easy to do, a little
better, or a little worse, what twenty authors have done before! If I
had foreseen from the first all the difficulty of my project, my
courage would have failed me to undertake the execution of it.
Certain persons, who condescend to make my supposed inconsistencies the favourite object of their research, will perhaps remark with exultation on the respect expressed in this work for marriage; and exclaim, It was not always thus! referring to the pages in which this subject is treated in the Enquiry concerning Political Justice for the proof of their assertion. The answer to this remark is exceedingly simple. The production referred to in it, the first foundation of its author's claim to public distinction and favour, was a treatise, aiming to ascertain what new institutions in political society might be found more conducive to general happiness than those which at present prevail. In the course of this disquisition it was enquired, whether marriage, as it stands described and supported in the laws of England, might not with advantage admit of certain modifications? Can any thing be more distinct, than such a proposition on the one hand, and a recommendation on the other that each man for himself should supersede and trample upon the institutions of the country in which he lives? A thousand things might be found excellent and salutary, if brought into general practice, which would in some cases appear ridiculous, and in others be attended with tragical consequences, if prematurely acted upon by a solitary individual. The author of Political Justice, as appears again and again in the pages of that work, is the last man in the world to recommend a pitiful attempt, by scattered examples to renovate the face of society, instead of endeavouring by discussion and reasoning, to effect a grand and comprehensive improvement in the sentiments of its members.
I was the only son of my father. I was very young at the period of the death of my mother, and have retained scarcely any recollection of her. My father was so much affected by the loss of the amiable and affectionate partner of his days, that he resolved to withdraw for ever from those scenes, where every object he saw was associated with the ideas of her kindness, her accomplishments, and her virtues: and, being habitually a lover of the sublime and romantic features of nature, he fixed upon a spot in Merionethshire, near the foot of Cader Idris, for the habitation of his declining life.
Here I was educated. And the settled melancholy of my father's mind, and the wild and magnificent scenery by which I was surrounded, had an eminent share in deciding upon the fortunes of my future life. My father loved me extremely; his actions toward me were tender and indulgent; he recognised in me all that remained of the individual he had loved more than all the other persons in the world. But he was also enamoured of solitude; he spent whole days and nights in study and contemplation. Even when he went into company, or received visitors in his own house, he judged too truly of the temper and propensities of boyish years, to put much restraint upon me, or to require that I should either render myself subservient to the habits of my elders, or, by a ridiculous exhibition of artificial talents, endeavour to extract from their politeness nourishment for his paternal vanity or pride.
I had few companions. The very situation which gave us a full enjoyment of the beauties of nature, inevitably narrowed both the extent and variety of our intercourse with our own species. My earliest years were spent among mountains and precipices, amidst the roaring of the ocean and the dashing of waterfalls. A constant familiarity with these objects gave a wildness to my ideas, and an uncommon seriousness to my temper. My curiosity was ardent, and my disposition persevering. Often have I climbed the misty mountain's top, to hail the first beams of the orb of day, or to watch his refulgent glories as he sunk beneath the western ocean. There was no neighbouring summit that I did not ascend, anxious to see what mountains, vallies, rivers and cities were placed beyond. I gazed upon the populous haunts of men as objects that pleasingly diversified my landscape; but without the desire to behold them in nearer view. I had a presentiment that the crowded streets and the noisy mart contained larger materials for constituting my pain than pleasure. The jarring passions of men, their loud contentions, their gross pursuits, their crafty delusions, their boisterous mirth, were objects which, even in idea, my mind shrunk from with horror. I was a spoiled child. I had been little used to contradiction, and felt like a tender flower of the garden, which the blast of the cast wind nips, and impresses with the tokens of a sure decay.
With such a tone of mind the great features of nature are particularly in accord. In her chosen retreats every thing is busy and alive; nothing is in full repose. All is diversity and change. The mysterious power of vegetation continually proceeds; the trees unfold their verdure, and the fields are clothed with grass and flowers. Life is every where around the solitary wanderer; all is health and bloom; the sap circulates, and the leaves expand. The stalk of the flower, the trunk of the tree, and the limbs of animals dilate, and assume larger dimensions. The cattle breathe, and the vegetable kingdom consumes the vital air; the herds resort to the flowing stream, and the grass drinks the moisture of the earth and the dew of heaven. Even the clouds, the winds and the streams present us with the image of life, and talk to us of that venerable power, which is operating every where, and never sleeps. But their speech is dumb; their eloquence is unobtrusive; if they tear us from ourselves, it is with a gentle and a kindly violence, which, while we submit to, we bless.
Here begins the contrast and disparity between youth and age. My father was a lover of nature; but he was not the companion of my studies in the scenes of nature. He viewed her from his window, or from the terrace of earth he had raised at the extremity of his garden; he mounted his horse for a tranquil excursion, and kept along the road which was sedulously formed for the use of travellers. His limbs were stiffened with age; and he was held in awe by the periodical intrusions of an unwelcome visitor, the gout. My limbs on the contrary were full of the springiness which characterises the morning of life. I bounded along the plains, and climbed the highest eminences; I descended the most frightful declivities, and often penetrated into recesses which had perhaps never before felt the presence of a human creature. I rivalled the goat, the native of the mountains, in agility and daring. My only companion was a dog, who by familiarity had acquired habits similar to mine. In our solitary rambles we seemed to have a certain sympathy with each other; and, when I rested occasionally from the weariness of my exertions, he came and lay down at my feet, and I often found relief in dalliance with this humble companion amidst the uninhabited wilds which received me. Sometimes, when I foresaw an excursion of more than usual daring, I confined him at home; but then he would generally break loose in my absence, seek me among the mountains, and frequently meet me in my return. Sometimes I would tie him to a tree or a shrub, and leave him for hours: in these cases he seemed to become a party in the implied compact between us, and waited in mute resignation till he saw me again.
Every thing however was not exertion in the rambles I describe. I loitered by the side of the river, and drank in at leisure sure the beauties that surrounded me. I sat for hours on the edge of a precipice, and considered in quiet the grand and savage objects around me, which seemed never to have changed their character from the foundation of the world. I listened in delightful idleness to the sound of the stones, which I gently let fall in the cavities of the rocks, or followed them with my eye as they bounded from protuberance to protuberance, till by distance they became invisible. I stretched myself at my length along the jutting precipice, while my head hung over the vast billows of the ocean, which seemed to gape and prepare themselves to receive me into their remorseless bosom for ever. Often I reposed by the side of a cataract, and was insensibly lulled into slumber by the monotony of its dashings.
While thus amused, I acquired a habit of being absent in mind from the scene which was before my senses. I devoured at first with greedy appetite the objects which presented themselves; but by perseverance they faded on my eye and my ear, and I sunk into a sweet insensibility to the impressions of external nature. The state thus produced, was sometimes that which we perhaps most exactly understand by the term reverie, when the mind has neither action nor distinct ideas, but is swallowed up in a living death, which, at the same time that it is indolent and inert, is not destitute of a certain voluptuousness. At other seasons the abstraction of my mind was of a more busy and definite sort. I was engaged in imaginary scenes, constructed visionary plans, and found all nature subservient to my command. I had a wife or children, was the occupier of palaces, or the ruler of nations.—There is this difference between the visions of the night, and the dreams, the waking dreams I mean, of the day: the former are often painful, the latter are perhaps always grateful and soothing. With the visions of the night, there is ordinarily mixed a depressing sense of impotence; things without us are too strong for us: in those of the day we are all-powerful; obstacles no sooner present themselves than they are conquered; or, if it is otherwise, we wilfully protract the struggle, that we may prolong our pleasure, and enhance our triumph. In the dream of the night our powers are blunted, and we are but half ourselves: the day-dream on the contrary is the triumph of man; our invention is full, our complacency is pure; and, if there is any mixture of imbecility or folly in the fable, it is a mixture to which the dreamer at the moment scarcely adverts. The tendency therefore of this species of dreaming, when frequently indulged, is to inspire a certain propensity to despotism, and to render him who admits it, impatient of opposition, and prepared to feel every cross accident, as a usurpation upon his rights, and a blot upon his greatness. This effect of my early habits I fully experienced, and it determined the colour of my riper years.
My youth however was not wholly spent in the idle and frivolous task of constructing castles in the air. The regard and affection my father felt for me, rendered him anxious that my education should not be neglected. He hired me a private tutor. I was perhaps sufficiently fortunate in the character of the person who was thus established in our house. He was not a clergyman. He did not shackle my mind with complex and unintelligible creeds, nor did he exhibit that monastic coldness and squareness of character which is too frequently the result of clerical celibacy. He was however a man of morals and of religion. But religion was distinguished in his mind more by sentiments than opinions. Whatever related to his conduct toward God or man was regulated principally by a desire to satisfy his own conscience and obtain his own approbation, not to maintain a certain character and name in the world. He had been designed by his parents, who were poor, for the profession of the law; but he ultimately declined this pursuit, from an aversion, as he said, to disputes, and sophistry, and the deriving a subsistence from the misfortunes of others. He was one of those characters, so frequently found in civilised Europe, who imagine in themselves a vocation to the muses, and an interest in the temple of literary immortality, which all their efforts are unable to realise. He certainly was not a man of genius; and, though he had acquired a considerable facility in the art of rhyming, he was totally a stranger to those more essential qualities which constitute the soul of poetry. But he was that which is better than a mere poet; he was an honest man. His heart was guileless; his manners were simple; and, though he could never be cured of a lying estimation of his own greatness, this did not prevent him from feeling and discharging what was due to others. He also possessed those accomplishments, the reputation of which had principally recommended him to my father's choice; he had a very decent portion of learning, and understood the elements of Latin, Greek, French and Italian, as well as possessed a smattering of astronomy, natural philosophy, mathematics and history. But his favourite study was mythology; his select reading was in Plato, at least in his translators and commentators, which he incessantly perused, I am afraid without exactly understanding them. He had made great progress in what I may name a concordance of all religions. This was the second basis upon which, together with his poetical effusions, he proposed to erect the edifice of his fame. He allegorised whatever is fabulous or historical in the sacred books of all nations, and explained them all to signify a certain sublime metaphysics, the detail of which is to be found for the most part in the writings of Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas.
This was exactly the sort of tutor adapted to my dispositions. I read with him occasionally the classics, and the elementary books of science, because I was unwilling to thwart or give any one pain, more especially my father, and because I was strongly impressed with a certain love for literature and science. But I studied for the most part, when I pleased. My father was contented to discern in me a certain inclination to learning, and did not think of putting on me a task greater than I was willing to endure.
In the mean time there was this peculiarity in my tuition. Though I learned from my preceptor almost every thing valuable that he was able to teach, I never looked up to him. His foibles were obvious, and did not escape my observation. The understanding of my father was incomparably greater than that of this inmate of our family; nor did my father always refrain from ridiculing in his absence, and even sometimes alluding by a passing sarcasm in his presence, to my tutor's weaknesses. I secretly despised the good gentleman's sonnets and odes, and listened with an unattending ear to his mythological mysteries. I never dreamed for a moment that it could be less than sacrilege to measure his understanding with my own. This systematical persuasion of superiority occasionally broke out into little petulancies, which did not fail grievously to wound my kind friend's self-esteem. I was positive, assuming and conceited. But the difference of our ages prevented these disputes from having any serious consequences. If I entertained little deference for my tutor's talents, I was not insensible to that degree of consideration which is due to superior age, particularly when united with virtue; and my father, in his general demeanour, set me too excellent an example in this respect, for it to be possible for me not to profit by it. I might perhaps in my own nature have been sufficiently inclined to the impetuous and turbulent; if I had been one only of a class of pupils, it is probable enough that I should have joined in the conduct of unlucky tricks to be put upon my instructor: but I was alone; and therefore however quick-sighted I might be to his weaknesses, they did not so expressly present themselves to my apprehension in the shape of ridicule.
The proper topic of the narrative I am writing is the record of my errors. To write it, is the act of my penitence and humiliation. I can expect however few persons to interest themselves respecting my errors, unless they are first informed what manner of man I am, what were my spontaneous and native dispositions, and whether I am such a one as that my errors are worthy of commiseration and pity. This must be my apology for the topic I am here to introduce, a topic on which all ingenuous minds are disposed to be silent, and which shall in this place be passed over as slightly as possible, my beneficence and charities.
I was fond of penetrating into the cottages of the poor. I should be greatly unjust to myself, if I suffered the reader to suppose that the wild elevation and intellectual luxuries I indulged, had the effect to render me insensible to the miseries of man. Nothing was squalid, loathsome and disgusting in my eyes, where it was possible for me to be useful. I shrunk from the society of man in general, and foresaw in the intercourse of my species, something for ever prepared to thwart my sensibility, and to jar against the unreal world in which I lived. But I never shrunk from the presence of calamity. From the liberal allowance with which my father supplied me I relieved its wants, I sheltered it from the menaces of a prison, and I even prevailed on myself to resort willingly to such towns as our vicinity afforded, to plead its cause, and parley with its oppressor.
No doubt my pride did not come away ungratified from these enterprises. Far be it from me to assert, with certain morose and cold-blooded moralists, that our best actions are only more subtle methods by which self-love seeks its gratification. My own heart, in every act of benevolence I ever performed, gave the lie to this execrable doctrine. I felt that it was the love of another and not of myself that prompted my deed; I experienced a disinterested joy in human relief and human happiness, independently of the question whether I had been concerned in producing it; and, when the season of retrospect arrived, I exulted in my own benevolence, from the divine consciousness that, while I had been most busily engaged in the task, my own gratification was forgotten.
There is however, as I have intimated, a very subtle and complicated association in human feelings. The generous sympathy which animated my charitable deeds was pure; it flowed from a celestial source, and maintained its crystal current, as unmingled with the vulgar stream of personal passions, as the oil extracted from the most aromatic fruits, flows separate and unconfounded with the mire of the kennel on which it may have fallen. There is no doubt however that the honourable character I exhibited on these occasions, prompted me the more joyfully to seek their repetition. Humanity and self-complacency were distinct causes of my beneficence; but the latter was not less powerful than the former in nourishing it into a habit. In other scenes of human intercourse I played an equal and a doubtful part; the superior eloquence or information of my competitor might overwhelm me; he might have more passion to pursue his purpose, or more want of feeling to harden him against the obstacles that opposed: but in the cottage to which my benevolence led me, I appeared like a superior nature; I had here no opposition to contend with, no insult to awaken my irritability, and no superciliousness to check the operations of my sentiment. It was also fortunate for me, that the cases of distress which came before me in this remote part of the island, were not numerous enough to distract my choice, or to render me callous by the too great frequency of their impressions.
One adventure of this sort interested me so much by the liveliness of its incidents that I cannot refuse briefly to describe it in this place. The season had for many days been uncommonly wet. The waters were swelled with continual rains, and the low-lands were almost inundated. It was July. After a series of heavy showers, one afternoon the sky brightened, the sun burst forth with redoubled splendour, and all nature smiled. This is a moment particularly dear to the lover of rural scenery. Dry weather tarnishes the face of nature, fades the lovely colours of hill and valley, and profanes and destroys those sweet odours which, more than any thing else, give the last finish to the charms of nature. I hastened to enjoy the golden opportunity. By long practice I knew how to find the paths where mire and swamps would not occur to interrupt my pleasure. My way led me by a steep acclivity of the mountain, which overhangs the bason that forms the source of the Desunny. I gained the eastern extremity of the ridge, that I might the more amply enjoy the beams of the setting sun as he sunk beneath the waves of the Irish sea. It was the finest evening my eyes ever beheld. The resplendent colours of the clouds, the rich purple and burnished gold in various streaks fantastically formed and repeated, were beyond any imagination to conceive. The woods were vocal. The scents that surrounded me, the steaming earth, the fresh and invigorating air, the hay and the flowers, constituted, so to express myself, an olfactory concert, infinitely more ravishing than all the concords of harmonious sound that human art ever produced. This lovely moment combined in one impression the freshness of the finest morning, with all the rich and gorgeous effects peculiar to the close of a summer's day.
I stood, as I have said, on the edge of the precipice. I gazed for a long time upon the various charms, that what we ordinarily, but improperly, call inanimate nature unfolded. I saw the rustic, as he retired from endeavouring to repair the injury his hay had sustained, and the flocks, as they passed slowly along to their evening's repose. Presently an individual object engrossed my attention. A young lamb had wandered by some accident to the middle of the precipice, and a peasant was pursuing it, and endeavouring to call it to his arms. I shuddered at the sight. The precipice was in some parts almost perpendicular. The rains had rendered the surface exceedingly slippery. The peasant caught at the shrubs and tufts of grass as he descended; and, with a skill peculiar to the inhabitants of the mountains, seemed to proceed securely in the most desperate places. The lamb, whether from heedlessness or wantonness, advanced further along the mountain-side, as the shepherd pursued.
While I was engaged in observing this little manoeuvre, I suddenly heard a scream. It came from a spot exceedingly near to me. Two boys sat in a nook where I had not perceived them, and cried out, My brother! my brother! A venerable grey-headed man was with them. He exclaimed, My son! my William! and prepared to plunge down the precipice. The scream I had heard was the effect of what at that moment happened before my eyes; yet such is the curious structure of the human senses, that what I heard seemed to be prior in time to what I saw. The peasant had almost overtaken his lamb. The lamb was on the point of escaping by a sudden leap; the peasant sprung upon him, and both were at the bottom of the precipice, and plunged in the bason, now swelled into a lake, with the rapidity of lightning. I flew to the groupe I have described; I laid hold of the old man at the moment of his purposed descent; I cried out, "Stay, poor man! what can you do? I will save your son!" I knew a path, more secure, yet scarcely more circuitous than that which the peasant had followed. I had the advantage over him, that I was not diverted from my course by any object whose deviations I pursued. For some time I went on safely; I saw the peasant rise to the surface of the water, and sink again; my impatience was too great to combine any longer with wariness; I lost my footing, and in an instant I also was in the lake.
My fall had been from a less terrible height than his, and I recovered myself. I swam toward the place where he had last sunk; he rose; I threw my arm round his neck, and supported him. The difficulty however which remained appeared insuperable; the shores on almost every side were shelving, and impossible to be scaled with the peasant in my arms, who was in a state of insensibility. As I was endeavouring to find the means of escaping from this difficulty, I saw a boat advancing toward us; it was rowed by a young woman; it approached; she was William's mistress, and the owner of the lamb for which he had ventured his life; we got him into the boat; he was more stunned with the fall, than injured by the water; he appeared to be gradually recovering; even the lamb was saved.
By the time we had reached the shore, the father and the two brothers were come round to our landing-place. All their attention was at first turned upon William; I was nothing to them; I retired to a little distance, and observed the groupe. The eldest boy supported William, as he sat; the blooming maid rubbed his temples; the father sat before him, and clasped his son's hands between his. It was an interesting spectacle; a painter might have sketched them as they sat. The eyes of the boy glistened with eagerness; the girl hung over her lover, while her colour alternately changed from its natural ruddiness to a languid paleness; the hairs of the old man were as white as snow. Presently William uttered a profound sigh; it was a welcome sound to the whole assembly. The least boy was at first wrapped in silent attention; but presently began to play with Molly, the pet lamb, that frisked about him. In a short time the old man exclaimed, Where is our deliverer? It was now my turn; I was at a short distance; they were all tumultuous in their expressions of gratitude. The peasant-girl and myself supported William to his cottage; I offered my other arm to the father; the biggest boy led their favourite lamb by a string which hung from his neck; the youngest bore in triumph his father's stick, who, as he leaned on my arm, no longer needed its support.
Such was the commencement of my acquaintance with an honest family. The habitation of the girl was at a small distance from theirs; she was one of a numerous assemblage of sisters who lived with their mother. I found that the young persons had been lovers for more than a year, but had deferred their marriage for prudential reasons. The industry of William was the support of his own house; his father was past his labour; they had resolved not to marry till the next brother should be able to take the place now filled by the eldest. The accident that had just occurred, in which the cottage-maid preserved the life of her lover, increased their affection, and doubled their impatience; an impatience however which they were resolute to subject to the most honourable considerations. I saw them often; I loved them much. William was ingenuous and active; the maid added to a masculine intrepidity most of the more lovely graces of her own sex. The father often lamented, even with tears, that he was no longer capable of those exertions which might enable William freely to obey the dictates of his heart. The attachment which I felt to them was that of a patron and a preserver; when I observed the degree of content which prevailed among them, when I witnessed the effusions of their honest esteem and affection, my heart whispered me, This would not have existed, but for me! I prevailed on my father to bestow a farm upon the lovers; I engaged, out of my own little stock, to hire a labourer for the old man; they married, and I had the satisfaction to convert one virtuous establishment into two.
Such were the principal occupations of my juvenile years. I loved the country, without feeling any partiality to what are called the sports of the country. My temper, as I have already said, was somewhat unsocial, and so far as related to the intercourse of my species, except when some strong stimulus of humanity called me into action, unenterprising. I was therefore no hunter. I was inaccessible to the pitiful ambition of showing, before a gang of rural squires, that I had a fine horse, and could manage him gracefully. I had not the motive, which ordinarily influences the inhabitants of the country to the cultivation of these sports, the want of occupation. I was young: the world was new to me: I abounded with occupation. In the scenery of Merionethshire I found a source of inexhaustible amusement. Science, history, poetry, engaged me by turns, and into each of them by turns my soul plunged itself with an ardour difficult to describe. In the train of these came my visions, my beloved and variegated inventions, the records, which to me appeared voluminous and momentous, of my past life, the plans of my future, the republics I formed, the seminaries of education for which I constructed laws, the figure I proposed hereafter to exhibit in the eyes of a wondering world. I had a still further and more direct reason for my rejection of the sports of the field. I could not with patience regard torture, anguish and death, as the sources of my amusement. My natural temper, or my reflective and undebauched habits as a solitaire, prevented me from overlooking the brutality and cruelty of such pursuits. In very early youth I had been seduced, first by a footman of my father, and afterward by my tutor, who was a great lover of the art, to join in an excursion of angling. But, after a short trial, I abjured the amusement for ever; and it was one among the causes of the small respect I entertained for my tutor, that he was devoted to so idle and unfeeling an avocation.
At the usual age I entered myself of the university of Oxford. I felt no strong propensity to this change; but I submitted to it, as to a thing in the regular order of proceeding, and to which it would be useless to object. I was so much accustomed to self-conversation as to have little inclination to mix in the world, and was to such a degree satisfied with my abilities, and progress, and capacity of directing my own studies and conduct, as not to look with any eager craving for the advice and assistance of professors and doctors.
In setting out for the university I was to part with my father and my preceptor. The first of these was a bitter pang to me; I had scarcely from the earliest of my remembrance ever been a week removed from the sight of the author of my being. He was the wisest and the best man I knew. He had all those advantages from nature, and from the external endowments of fortune, which were calculated to maintain my reverence. We had gradually become more qualified for each other's society and confidence. Our characters had many points of resemblance: we were both serious, both contemplative, both averse to the commerce of the world. My temper, as I have said, was to an uncommon degree impatient of contradiction; and a certain degree of heart-burning had not failed occasionally to invade my breast on this score, even toward this excellent parent. But my resentment and indignation in these instances had been short-lived. As the only representative of his person in existence, my father was ardently attached to me, and the occasions he administred to my impatience and displeasure were exceedingly few. On the other hand, whatever faults of character might justly be imputed to me, I had yet betrayed no tokens of an unmanageable boisterousness; my propensities were innocent; and my pursuits, most of them, such as seemed to conduce to the improvement of my understanding and my heart. In a word, my father and I, allowing for those failings which in some form or other are inseparable from the human character, were excellent friends; and it was not without many tears shed on both sides, that we parted when I mounted the chaise in which I set out for Oxford.
The separation between me and my tutor, which took place at the same time, was productive of a mixed sensation. I had long nourished in my mind a supercilious disregard of his mental discernment, and felt as if it were a degradation to me to listen to his instructions. The lessons he gave me appeared as a sort of shackles, the symbols of infantine imbecility. I was confident of my virtue and my perseverance, and longed to shake off these tokens of my nonage. But, beside these intellectual sources of weariness and impatience, there was an animal sensation, which made me regard the day of my separation from my tutor as the epoch of my liberty. His voice was sickly and unpleasing to my ear. He had cultivated the art of being amiable; and his cadences were formed by habit to a kind of tune of candour and gentleness and humanity. His gentleness was unfortunately twin-brother to the softness of his understanding, and expressed nothing so plainly as his ignorance of all the avenues of persuasion, and all the secret springs of hope, and fear, and passion, and will. In addition to this, the good gentleman loved to hear himself talk; and his explanations and exhortations were as long as the homilies of archbishop Cranmer. At my age, the age of restlessness and activity and enterprise, these discourses unhappily did not generate a propensity to sleep, and therefore produced in me an insupportable listlessness and ennui.
Yet I did not finally part with my old friend without pain. It was impossible a more innocent creature should live. If I did not highly respect him, I could not help approving and loving him. Had it been otherwise, there is something in the nature of habit, which will for ever prevent us from parting with that to which we have been long accustomed, with indifference. I had been used to see my preceptor every morning. He was part of the furniture of our eating-room. As we had very unfrequent opportunities of various society, I often found relief in entering into conversation with him. If he could tell me nothing that appeared to me highly worthy of attention, in the way of fancy or deduction, he was at least well qualified to inform me of what he had read in books, relatively either to chronology, geography or science. I am persuaded that, if, when my tutor left me, I had remained among the same scenes, the crisis would have been a severe one. As it was, my understanding approved of the separation; I recollected that it was an event for which I had often and anxiously sighed; yet to part with a good man, a man to whose cares and patience I owed much, who had bestowed on me a thousand benefits, and between whom and myself there had, from familiarity, grown up a considerable affection, was no desirable task. I kissed his hand; I thanked him a hundred times for his constant exertions; with bitter self-reproach I intreated him to forgive every act of rudeness, impetuousness and disrespect, I had been guilty of toward him: at this moment these things struck upon my conscience like crimes.
My father was anxious that a decent provision should be made for his declining years. There was an ecclesiastical living of considerable value vacant in my father's gift, and he intreated my tutor to enter into holy orders, and accept of it. But this my old friend strenuously declined. His creed did not exactly accord with the principles of orthodoxy contained in the code of the church of England; and he disdained to compromise with his conscience. Besides, regarding himself, as he undoubtedly did, as the first luminary of his age, he could not think with perfect temper of devoting the last maturity of his mind to the society of fox-hunting squires, and the reading prayers and sermons to rustics and old women. He retired, upon a small annuity which my father settled upon him, to a narrow lodging in an obscure street of the metropolis, and published from time to time pocket volumes of poetry, and sketches of a synopsis of his mythological discoveries, which some persons bought out of respect to the good qualities of their author, but which no person read.
A third separation which took place on this occasion, and which I hope the reader will not think it beneath the dignity of history to record, was between me and my dog. He was my old and affectionate friend, and the hours I had spent tête à tête in his society were scarcely less numerous than those I had spent with my tutor. He had often been the confident of my sorrows; and I had not found it less natural to complain to him, than the heroines of fable or romance to the woods and the wilds, the rocks and the occean, of the cruelties they experienced, or the calamities that weighed them down to the earth. One instance in particular I remember in very early youth, when my father had spoken to me with unusual sharpness, about some fault that in my eyes by no means merited great severity of censure. I retired to the terrace in the garden which has already been mentioned, threw myself at my length upon the turf, and indulged a short fit of mutiny and misanthropy. As I lay, poor Chilo (that was the dog's name) discovered me, and leaped toward me with his usual demonstrations of joy. I was in too ill a humour to notice him; and he, who seemed to have at least as much skill as my tutor in discerning what passed in my mind, crept along the turf toward the spot which supported my head, with pleading and most diffident advances. At length I suffered my eye to fall on him. This brought him close to me in a moment. He licked my hands and my face, with every token of gratitude, affection and delight. I threw my arms round him. Fond fool! said I, every one else treats me with unkindness and injustice; but you will love me still!
It was judged proper that this animal, who had passed the meridian of his life, should not accompany me in my entrance into the world, but should remain at home. I accordingly left him in Merionethshire. What was my surprise then, one day as I came down the steps of the chapel from morning prayers, after having been a week at Oxford, at meeting my dog! He fawned upon me, played a thousand extravagant antics, and was transported out of himself at the joy of finding me. I afterward learned that he had been at my rooms, had been repulsed there, and finally found his way to the chapel. By what sort of instinct an animal is thus enabled, for a distance of one hundred and seventy miles, to discover the trace of his master, I am unable to say. The thing itself I am told is not uncommon. But every ingenuous mind to whom such an incident has occurred, feels, no doubt, as I did, a most powerful impulse of affection toward the brute who has shown so distinguished an attachment.
What is the nature of this attachment? A dog, I believe, is not less attached to a fool than to a wise man, to a peasant than to a lord, to a beggar inhabiting the poorest hut, than to a prince swaying the sceptre of nations and dwelling in a palace. Ill usage scarcely makes a difference. At least the most sparingly dealt kindness of the surliest groom affords a sufficient basis of attachment. The case is considerably parallel to that of a nobleman I have somewhere read of, who insisted that his mistress should not love him for his wealth nor his rank, the graces of his person nor the accomplishments of his mind, but for himself. I am inclined to blame the man who should thus subtly refine, and wantonly endeavour at a separation between him and all that is most truly his: but, where the course of nature produces this separation, there is a principle in the human mind which compels us to find gratification in this unmerited and metaphysical love.
At Oxford the whole tone of my mind became speedily changed. The situation was altogether new, and the effects produced were strikingly opposed to those which I had hitherto sustained. In Merionethshire I had been a solitary savage. I had no companions, and I desired none. The commerce of my books and of my thoughts was enough for me. I lived in an ideal world of my own creation. The actual world beneath me I intuitively shunned. I felt that every man I should meet would be either too ignorant, too coarse, or too supercilious, to afford me pleasure. The strings of my mind, so to express it, were tuned to too delicate and sensitive a pitch: it was an Eolian harp, upon which the winds of heaven might "discourse excellent music;" but the touch of a human hand could draw from it nothing but discord and dissonance.
At the university all that I experienced for some weeks was pain. Nature spoils us for relishing the beauties of nature. Formed as my mind had been, almost from infancy, to delight itself with the grand, the romantic, the pregnant, the surprising, and the stupendous, as they display themselves in North Wales, it is inconceivable with what contempt, what sensations of loathing, I looked upon the face of nature as it shows itself in Oxfordshire. All here was flat and tame and tedious. Wales was nature in the vigour and animation of youth: she sported in a thousand wild and admirable freaks; she displayed a master-hand; every stroke of her majestic pencil was clear, and bold, and free. But, in the country to which I had now removed, nature to my eyes seemed to be in her dotage; if she attempted any thing, it was the attempt of a driveller; she appeared like a toothless and palsied beldame, who calls upon her visitors to attend, who mumbles slowly a set of inarticulate and unintelligible sounds, and to whom it exceeds the force of human resolution to keep up the forms of civility. Why does the world we live in, thus teach us to despise the world?
My father's house had been built in a style of antique magnificence. The apartments were spacious, the galleries long and wide, and the hall in which I was accustomed to walk in unfavourable weather, was of ample dimensions. The rooms appropriated to my use at Oxford appeared comparatively narrow, squalid and unwholsome. My very soul was cabined in them. There were spacious buildings in Oxford; there were open and cheerful walks: but how contrasted with those to which I had been accustomed! There I expatiated free; I possessed them alone; Nature was my friend, and my soul familiarly discoursed with her, unbroken in upon by the intrusion of the vulgar and the profane. Here I had no green and heaven-formed retreat in which I could hide myself; my path was crossed by boys; I was elbowed by gownmen; their vulgar gabble and light laughter perpetually beset my ears, and waked up curses in my soul. I could pursue no train of thought; the cherished visions of my former years were broken and scattered in a thousand fragments. I know that there are men who could pursue an undivided occupation of thought amidst all the confusion of Babel; but my habits had not fitted me for this. I had had no difficulties to struggle with; and I was prepared to surmount none.
The morning of life is pliable and docile. I speedily adapted myself to my situation. As I could not escape from the coxcombs of the university, I surrendered myself with the best grace I could into their hands. It is the first step only that costs a struggle. At the commencement the savage of Merionethshire made but an uncouth and ludicrous figure among the pert youngsters of Oxford. Their speech and gestures were new to me. I had hitherto spent more words, the repetition of lessons only excepted, in soliloquy than in conversation. My phrases were those of enthusiasm and the heart. They had the full and pregnant form which was given them by a mind crowded with ideas and impelled to unload itself, not the sharp, short, pointed turn of a speaker whose habitual object is a jest. My muscles were not formed to a smile; or, if at any time they had assumed that expression, it was the smile of elevated sentiment, not that of supercilious contempt, of petty triumph, or convivial jollity.
As soon however as I had chosen my part in the dilemma before me, I became instinct with a principle, from which the mind of ingenuous youth is never totally free, the principle of curiosity. I was prompted to observe these animals, so different from any that had been before presented to my view, to study their motives, their propensities and their tempers, the passions of their souls, and the occupations of their intellect. To do this effectually, it was necessary that I should become familiar with many, and intimate with a few. I entered myself an associate of their midnight orgies, and selected one young person for a friend, who kindly undertook my introduction into the world.
It happened in this, as in all cases of a similar nature, that familiarity annihilated wonder. As the hero is no hero to his valet-de-chambre, so the monster is no monster to his friend. Through all the varieties of the human race, however unlike in their prominent features, there are sufficient chords of sympathy, and evidences of a common nature, to enable us to understand each other, and find out the clue to every seeming irregularity. I soon felt that my new associates were of the same species as myself, and that the passions which stimulated them, had seeds of a responsive class, however hitherto unadverted to and undeveloped, in my own bosom.
It is surprising how soon I became like to the persons I had so lately wondered at and despised. Nothing could be more opposite, in various leading respects, than the Fleetwood of Merionethshire and the Fleetwood of the university. The former had been silent and apparently sheepish, not perhaps more from awkwardness than pride. He was contemplative, absent, enthusiastical, a worshipper of nature. His thoughts were full of rapture, elevation and poetry. His eyes now held commerce with the phenomena of the heavens, and now were bent to earth in silent contemplation and musing. There was nothing in them of the level and horizontal. His bosom beat with the flattering consciousness, that he was of a class superior to the ordinary race of man. It was impossible to be of a purer nature, or to have a soul more free from every thing gross, sordid and groveling. The Fleetwood of the university had lost much of this, and had exchanged the generous and unsullied pride of the wanderer, for a pride of a humbler cast. Once I feared not the eye of man, except as I was reluctant to give him pain; now I was afraid of ridicule. This very fear made me impudent. I hid the qualms and apprehensiveness of my nature, under "a swashing and a martial outside." My jest was always ready. I willingly engaged in every scheme of a gay and an unlucky nature. I learned to swallow my glass freely, and to despise the character of a flincher. I carefully stored my memory with convivial and licentious songs, and learned to sing them in a manner that caused the walls of our supper-room to echo with thunders of applause. Here, as in Wales, I advanced toward the summit of the class of character to which I devoted my ambition, and was acknowledged by all my riotous companions for an accomplished pickle. In the contrast of the two personages I have described, I confess my memory has no hesitation on which side to determine her preference. Oh, Cader Idris! oh, genius of the mountains! oh, divinity, that presidest over the constellations, the meteors, and the ocean! how was your pupil fallen! how the awestruck and ardent worshipper of the God who shrowds himself in darkness, changed into the drinker and the debauchee, the manufacturer of "a fool-born jest," and the shameless roarer of a licentious catch!
I did not however entirely depart from the dispositions which had characterised me in Wales. My poetical and contemplative character was gone; all that refinement which distinguished me from the grosser sons of earth. My understanding was brutified; I no longer gave free scope to the workings of my own mind, but became an artificial personage, formed after a wretched and contemptible model. But my benevolence and humanity were still the same. Among the various feats of a college-buck I attempted, there was none in which I came off with so little brilliancy, as that of "quizzing a fresh-man," and making a fellow-creature miserable by a sportive and intemperate brutality. What scenes of this sort I have witnessed! There is no feature of man, by which our common nature is placed in so odious and despicable a light, as the propensity we feel to laugh at and accumulate the distresses of our fellow-creatures, when those distresses display themselves with tokens of the ungainly and uncouth. I engaged in a project of this sort once or twice, and then abjured the ambition for ever. Thenceforward it was my practice to interfere in behalf of the sufferers by such hostilities; and my manner carried with it that air of decision, that, though the interference was unwelcome, it was successful; and the dogs of the caustic hunt let go their hold of the bleeding game. Another motive actuated me in this plan of proceeding. Though I had assumed an impudent and licentious character, I despised it; and I made conscience of debauching new converts into the inglorious school, which was usually the object and end of these brutal jests. I was contented to associate with those whose characters I judged to be finished already, and whom I persuaded myself my encouragement would not make worse; and thus with wretched sophistry I worked my mind into the belief that, while I yielded to a vicious course, I was doing no harm. In the midst of all this, my heart entered with prompt liberality into the difficulties and distresses of others; and, as in Wales I was assiduous to relieve the wants of the industrious and the poor, so in Oxford the embarrassments of those young men, whose funds, derived from their families, did not keep pace with the demands of their situation, excited in me particular sympathy, and received frequent and sometimes secret relief from the resources with which my father's bounty supplied me.
In this place I feel inclined to relate one of those stories of ingenious intellectual victory, as they considered them, of dull and unfeeling brutality, as they really were, in which too many of my college-contemporaries prided themselves. A young man, during my residence at the university, entered himself of our college, who was judged by the gayer Oxonians singularly well-formed to be the butt of their ridicule. The dress in which he made his appearance among us was ungainly and ludicrous: the flaps of his waistcoat extended to his knees, and those of his coat almost to his heels: his black, coarse, shining hair, parted on the forehead, was every where of equal length, and entirely buried his ears beneath its impervious canopy. He had hitherto been brought up in solitude under the sole direction of his father, a country clergyman; but he was an excellent classic scholar and a mathematician, and his manners were the most innocent and unsuspecting that it is possible to imagine. In addition to these qualities, he had an exalted opinion of his own intellectual accomplishments; and he had brought with him among his other treasures, the offspring of his stripling meditations, a tragedy, founded on the story of the Fifth Labour of Hercules.
In this performance the contents of the Augean stable were set out in great pomp of description; the ordure which had accumulated in thirty years from the digestion and dejection of three thousand oxen, was amplified and spread out to the fancy; and Withers (this was the name of the poet) might be said, like Virgil, to "fling about his dung with an air of majesty." The tragedy opened with a pathetic lamentation between the groom and the herdsman of the king, respecting the melancholy condition of the stable, and the difficulty of keeping the cattle which were so unroyally lodged in any creditable appearance. A herald then entered with a proclamation, declaring that three hundred of the king's oxen should be the prize of him who should restore the stable to a wholsome and becoming state. The chorus next sang an ode, in which they exposed the miseries of procrastination, and declared that none but a demigod could accomplish the task which had so long been postponed. In the second act Hercules appeared, and offered to undertake the arduous operation. He has an audience of the king, who dwells upon the greatness of the effort, and exposes in a loftier style, what had already been described by his servants in familiar verse, the filth the hero would have to encounter. Hercules answers modestly, and enters into the history of the four labours he had already accomplished. The bargain is struck; and the chorus admire the form and port of the hero, and pray for his success. The third act begins with expressing the general terror and astonishment. Hercules removes the oxen from their stalls; and then a mighty rushing sound is heard of the river leaving its ancient bounds, and pouring its tide through the noisome and infectious walls. The rest of the play consisted of the arguments on the part of the king and of the hero, as to whether Hercules had fulfilled his engagement; and the punishment of the tyrant. Here many hints were borrowed from the contention of Ajax and Ulysses in Ovid, respecting the preference of wisdom and ingenuity over brute force: king Augeas insisting that the nuisance should have been displaced with shovel and wheel-barrow; while Hercules with great eloquence maintained that to remove the whole evil at once, by changing the course of a river, was a more wonderful and meritorious achievement.
This tragedy soon became a source of inexhaustible amusement to the wits and satirists of our college. One of the drollest and demurest of the set had first wormed himself into the confidence of Withers, and extorted from him his secret, and then, under the most solemn engagements not to name the matter to a living creature, obtained the loan of this choice morsel of scenic poetry. He had no sooner gained possession of it, than he gave notice to four or five of his associates; and they assembled the same evening to enjoy over a bottle the treasure they had purloined. It must be owned that the subject of the drama was particularly calculated to expose the effusions of its author to their ridicule. The solemn phrases and the lofty ornaments with which every thing was expressed, afforded a striking contrast to the filth and slime which constituted the foundation of the piece. A topic of this sort, however slightly mentioned, must appear low and absurd; but, when the dung, accumulated in thirty years by three thousand oxen, together with the solemn engagement between a demigod and a king for its removal, is set out in all the pomp of verse, the man must be more sad than Heraclitus, and more severe than Cato, who could resist the propensity to laughter at the hearing such a tale. In the present case, where every joyous companion was predetermined to find materials for merriment, the peals of laughter were obstreperous and innumerable; many passages were encored by the unanimous voice of the company; and in conclusion the scoffer who had obtained for them their present amusement, was deputed to procure them the higher and more exquisite gratification of hearing the piece gravely declaimed to them by its author.
Accordingly in a few days he waited on Withers with a grave and melancholy face, manuscript in hand, and confessed that by a very culpable neglect he had fallen into a breach of the engagement he had made to the author on receiving it. He then named a young man of ingenuity and fancy in the same college, who had obtained considerable notoriety, by several pieces of fugitive poetry, which were much admired at Oxford. Withers had heard of him, and felt that respect which might naturally be expected for a brother of his own vocation. Morrison, the jester, added, that this votary of the muses and himself were upon so intimate terms, that each had a key to the other's chamber; that he, not recollecting this at the moment, had left the manuscript, being called away by a particular occasion, open upon his desk, had locked the door, and departed; and that the poet, arriving soon after, had discovered, and seized with avidity the Fifth Labour of Hercules.
Withers was greatly distressed at this tale. He had those feelings of modesty, which, under certain modifications, are most incident to such persons as are pervaded with an anticipation of their future eminence. He did not pretend however to blame his friend for a fault, into which he seemed so innocently to have fallen, and which he so ingenuously confessed. On the other hand Morrison soothed the dramatist by describing to him the transports of admiration with which the poet had been impressed in the perusal of this virgin tragedy.
While they were yet in conversation, the poet knocked at the chamber-door. The verses of this young man, Frewen by name, were not deficient in merit, or even in delicacy; but his features were harsh, and his manners coarse. He began with saying, that he could by no means deny himself the pleasure of soliciting the acquaintance and friendship of a youth, to whose mind he had the vanity to believe his own was in so many respects congenial. He then launched out in rapturous praise of the Fifth Labour of Hercules. Seeing the manuscript on the table, he requested permission to open it, and point out to the author one or two places which had struck him as particularly excellent. He then read part of a speech from king Augeas's groom, and that with such emphasis of delivery, and seeming enthusiasm of intonation, as might have persuaded the most sceptical bystander that he was really smitten with approbation of the verses he pronounced. The eyes of Withers glistened with joy. His self-love had never experienced so rich a treat. Frewen then proceeded to descant with great ingenuity upon certain metaphors and ornaments of style interspersed through the composition, showing how happily they were chosen, how skilfully adapted, how vigorously expressed, and how original they were in the conception: and, though some of the clauses he fixed upon were to such a degree absurd, that the poet himself, when he heard them thus insulated from their connection, began to suspect that all was not right, yet the remarks of his panegyrist were so subtle, and above all were delivered with an air of such perfect sincerity, that he finished with being completely the dupe his false friends had purposed to make him. In conclusion, Mr. Frewen observed that he had a select party of friends, whom he was accustomed to make judges of his own productions, and he earnestly intreated Withers, that he would no longer conceal his talent, but would condescend to recite the tragedy he had written, to the same circle.
Withers unaffectedly shrunk back, with the diffidence of a young man, who had never yet in so striking a manner burst the bounds of modesty; but, urged alternately by the solicitations and the encomiums of his tempters, he suffered them to "wring from him his slow consent." A day was then to be fixed. He refused to make it the same evening: he confessed to his visitors that it would be an unprecedented exertion to him, and that he must string up his mind to the task: it was ultimately fixed for the day following.
In the interval Withers had many qualms.
Between the acting of a dreadful thing,
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream.
He felt the sort of arrogance which was implied, in the seating
himself in the chair of honour, fixing the eyes of different persons,
strangers, upon him, and calling their attention to the effusions of
his brain, as to something worthy of their astonishment. He
recollected the faults of his poem, the places where he had himself
doubted whether he had not embraced a Sycorax instead of an angel. He
recollected his youth and inexperience, and the temerity of which he
had in reality been guilty, in undertaking in his first essay to
celebrate perhaps the most prodigious of the labours of the immortal
Hercules. He remembered what he had somewhere heard of the satirical
and malicious turn of the elder Oxonians, and feared to become their
butt. On the other hand, he called to mind the beauties of his poem,
and was encouraged. Above all, he considered his character and
fortitude as at stake in the engagement he had contracted, and was
determined at every hazard to complete it.
The evening arrived; the company assembled; the unhappy poet, the victim of their ridicule, was introduced. Mr. Frewen, at his entrance, took him by the hand, led him into the middle of the room, made a short oration in his praise, and in the name of the company thanked him for his condescension in admitting them to such a pleasure as they were about to receive. After a variety of grimaces on the part of the persons present, the manuscript was laid on the table. The poet took it up to read; but, in the first line, his voice failed him, he turned pale, and was obliged to desist. Morrison, his original seducer, and another, had so placed their chairs that their countenances and action could not be perceived by the reader, they being partly behind him: they winked the eye, and pointed the finger, to each other, and by various gestures endeavoured to heighten the entertainment of the party. The table was covered with bottles and glasses. Frewen, when he saw the unaffected marks of Withers's distress, began to feel an impulse of compunction; but he know that such an impulse would render him for ever contemptible to the present society, and he suppressed it. He filled Withers a bumper, which he obliged him to take off; he snatched the play from his hand, and read with much gravity and articulation the opening speech from the stable-keeper to the herdsman, in which the former bewails the miserable state of the stalls, and, not knowing what to quarrel with, shows himself ready to quarrel with his fellow-officer, laments that there are such animals as oxen, or that oxen cannot live but by food and digestion. This speech was received with bursts of applause, and Frewen particularly commended the "long majestic march and energy divine" of the concluding verse. The poet was encouraged; he had had time to reason with himself, and recover his fortitude; Frewen restored to him his manuscript, filled him another bumper, and the scene commenced.
That my readers may more exactly understand the spirit of the transaction, I will insert here a part of the chorus at the end of the third act, with which the auditors pretended to be especially struck.
One apology may be made for the contrivers of this scene, that they by no means foresaw in the outset, how far they should be drawn in to go, and the serious evils of which they might become authors. The purpose of the auditors was, under extravagant and tumultuous expressions of applause, to smother the indications of their ridicule and contempt. In this however they could not uniformly succeed. A phrase of a ludicrous nature in the piece, an abrupt fall from what was elevated to something meanly familiar or absurd, would sometimes unexpectedly occur, and produce a laughter that could not be restrained. Nor would the feelings allied to laughter always occur in the right place. Persons eager in search of the ludicrous, will often find it in an image, or a mode of expression, which by others, not debauched with this prepossession, would be found fraught with pleasing illustration and natural sentiment. The circle too, assembled on this occasion, acted by sympathy upon each other, and pointed many a joke, and gave vigour to many a burlesque idea, which perhaps to any one of the associates in his retirement would have appeared unworthy to move a risible muscle.
For a short time the jesters who had made Withers their prey, observed a certain degree of decorum. They bit their lips, affectedly raised their eyes, applied the finger to the mouth, the nose, or the forehead, and thus pacified and appeased their propensities to ridicule. One and another incessantly showed themselves lavish in commendation of the beauties of the poem; and with every compliment the glass of Withers was filled, and he was excited to drink. Presently the laugh, imperfectly suppressed, broke out in one solitary convulsion, and was then disguised in a cough, or an effort to sneeze. The dumb gestures of the auditors were unperceived by the reader, who for the most part kept his eyes on the paper, and but rarely ventured, when he came to some bolder flight, to look round him for applause. Then the countenances of the hearers suddenly fell, and their limbs were at once composed into serenity. This transition produced an effect singularly humorous, but which was wholly lost upon Withers, who had the misfortune to be purblind.
By and by an outrageous laugh burst forth at once from one of the audience. The poor novice, their victim, started, as if he had trod on a serpent. Frewen, making a motion to him to be tranquil, addressed the offender with much apparent gravity, and begged to know what he could find ludicrous in the passage which had just been read, at the same time repeating the two last lines with a full and lofty voice. The culprit, as soon as he could resume his seriousness, humbly sued for pardon, and declared that he laughed at nothing in the poem, of which no one could be a sincerer admirer, but that his fancy had been tickled at the sight of a cork-screw (picking it up), which had just dropped from Jack Jones's pocket. This apology was admitted. In a few minutes the same person broke out into an equally loud and clamorous fit of merriment, in which he was now joined by two or three others. Greater anger, as the tumult subsided, was expressed toward him; a more bungling and imperfect apology was tendered; and Frewen offered, if Mr. Withers required it, to turn the culprit out of the room. In one or two instances the poet was requested to read again some passage which the requester affected particularly to admire; and these repetitions were over attended with additional merriment, sometimes suppressed, and sometimes ungovernable. In one or two of the choruses several of the auditors repeated the concluding verses after the reader, sometimes as nearly as possible keeping pace with him, and at other times pursuing one another after the manner of a fuge in music; and, when the author expressed his surprise at this phenomenon, they defended it, first from the enthusiastic admiration they felt, and next from the nature of a chorus, which was designed to be sung, or chanted, and not spoken, and from their desire to enhance their pleasure, by bringing the tragedy they were hearing to as near a resemblance as they could, in this respect, to the state of actual exhibition.
By this time the mind of Withers was in a pitiable situation. That noviceship and total inexperience on his part, which made his torture, constituted the great pleasure of his remorseless tormentors. He was unaccustomed to wine; and they had made him extremely inebriated. He was unaccustomed to high commendations and vociferous applause; and they had raised his mind and purer feelings into a state of intoxication, little inferior to that of the more ponderous and corporeal particles of his nerves and brain. All was confusion and tempest within him. Upon this state of the man were superinduced the demonstrations of ridicule and laughter which by degrees broke out in the audience. His brain was clouded; his understanding was in a maze; he apprehended nothing distinctly. Grave apologies were made to him; and he accepted them seriously; though, presently after, he was compelled to doubt whether they did not wholly originate in the grossest hypocrisy. Had he possessed the smallest portion of knowledge of the world, he could not have harboured a moment's uncertainty; but he was in all these respects a child. They nursed him, so to speak, in mistake, and rocked him in the cradle of delusion. By degrees they persuaded him to mount upon the table, that he might recite some of the most brilliant passages with greater effect. They crowned him with wreaths of parsley, which happened to be the vegetable at hand; they anointed him with libations of wine; and by this time his apprehension was so completely subverted, that he was unable to distinguish whether these things were done in mockery or honour, and willingly resigned himself to the more agreeable construction. At length the reading was finished; and the rioters (for all was now in a state of riot) burst open the door, placed the poet, crowned with parsley, and trickling with wine, in a chair, and carried him triumphantly through the streets to his apartment, with shouts, and vociferation, and uproar, enough to awake the dead.
The deluded rioters, for they laboured under a state of delusion not less complete than their victim, persuaded themselves to look back with complacency upon the diversion of the evening, and even agreed that they had not yet extracted amusement enough from so rich a subject as the unhappy Withers. The ringleaders, in their insatiate thirst after this species of gratification, planned a further scene to be grafted on what had passed in the evening of the reading.
Morrison accordingly waited on Withers the next morning, and found him a prey to a miserable head-ache. The poet was also, now that the fumes of wine were dissipated, full of melancholy reflections on the incidents of the day, and extremely apprehensive that in all that had passed he had been an object of mockery to the assembly. Morrison put the best gloss upon the whole, assured his dupe that all was done in sober sadness, apologised for the most extravagant particulars by observing that the whole party was nearly drunk, and declared on his honour that the manifestations, however uncouth, were those of genuine admiration, adding that, for the sake of their sincerity and good meaning, the poet ought certainly to excuse the rudeness and ungraciousness of the form they had assumed. During the harangue of this buffoon, the eyes of Withers once or twice flashed fire; they were turned upon the speaker with a searching penetration as if they would look him through; and the poet swore a great oath, that he believed he was deceived, and that, if it were so, he would die sooner than endure it.
This subject having been discussed, Morrison informed Withers that he had a piece of bad news to communicate to him. The master of the college, he said, had got information of the riot of the preceding night, and the disorder they had committed in the streets, and had hinted that he was determined to make an example. While they were upon this painful topic, Frewen entered, and added to Morrison's intelligence, that by some unaccountable accident the master had got hold of the name of Withers, and that, as he had been carried in the chair, it was to be feared that he would be selected as the object of punishment. Withers was a young man of great intrinsic modesty and sensibility, and he felt the utmost distress at this information. While his hollow-hearted companions were pretending to console him, a young man, a stranger to Withers, entered, in the character of a messenger from the master, and summoned the poet to make his appearance before his academical superior, the same evening, soon after sunset.
Machinery, such as the malicious and riotous genius of the young men concerned in the plot suggested to their thoughts, was prepared for the occasion. In a chair near the wall, at the upper end of a spacious room the use of which they procured, was seated a puppet, dressed up in a gown and wig similar to those of the master, which it was proposed to pass on the unfortunate Withers for the identical person of the superior whose reproof he dreaded. This image, by the ingenuity of some of the parties to the plot, was so contrived, as to have its head and hands capable of being moved by one of the confederates, who unseen held the springs for that purpose. Morrison, so much admired by his fellow-collegians for wit and humour, had among other accomplishments the art, commonly called ventriloquism, of uttering articulate sounds without any visible motion of the lips, and of causing his voice to appear to come from whatever quarter he pleased; added to which, he was an excellent mimic, and could copy the peculiarities of speech in almost any one he pleased, to a supreme degree. The fame of these qualities would no doubt in a short time have reached the ears of Withers; but he was newly come to the university, and had as yet no suspicion that Morrison was even considered as a wit.
In the evening, just after the shut of the day, Withers was introduced into the apartment which had previously been prepared. He was accompanied by Morrison, Frewen and the other offenders; some having thrust themselves unauthorised into the list of offenders, that they might have an opportunity to be witnesses of he expected sport. The figure which stood for the master of the college, then appeared to call over the names of the culprits; and a young person below him, who seemed to officiate as his secretary, answered to each of the names that the person called upon was present. The master began his harangue. He addressed himself first to Frewen, and after to Morrison; and each of these attempted a sort of excuse for the outrage, and professed great contrition. The address to Morrison was particularly diverting to the spectators, every one of whom, except Withers, well knew that it was Morrison in person who thus pronounced a severe and apparently angry censure upon himself.
The speech of the principal was then directed toward Withers, whom he declared he felt himself obliged to treat as the ringleader, as he had been the person elevated in the chair; he added that certain privileges were by long practice conceded to the senior students in the university, but that it was intolerable for a young man, not many weeks entered in this seat of learning, to be seen drunk in the streets, and to be complained of for a riot.
Withers defended himself with more spirit than was expected. He protested that he was no drunkard, and was exceedingly chagrined that an unfortunate accident had exhibited him under that character. He added that, so far from being the ringleader in the riot, he was made an unwilling tool in the hands of others.
Name them! replied the master, in a strong and imperious voice.
Name them! rejoined Withers: no, I will not be an informer: consider me as the ringleader!
He then proceeded to question the propriety of the rule just delivered, of punishing strictly in the juniors, what was winded at, or slightly animadverted on, in those of longer standing.
Sir, interrupted the master, you were not sent for to criticise our rules, and to teach me how to conduct myself; and you have just shown yourself refractory to the first principles of academical discipline by refusing to become what you call an informer. What now remains is, that I should vindicate the decorum of the college, by punishing you for the riot you have committed; and I accordingly order you to strip off your gown in my presence, and direct that you be excluded from all academical privileges for one month; at the end of which term, upon your expressing a proper degree of sorrow and humiliation, you may possibly be restored.
Withers felt indignant at this censure, and was going to remonstrate; but was prevailed on by those who stood near him to submit. He however threw his gown to the floor with some resentment, and could not refrain expressing in three or four words some contempt for such trappings, and the privileges annexed to them. At this moment, to his utter astonishment and confusion the figure lifted up its hand, as if in the intention of striking him. This indignity put Withers beyond all patience, and worked him into a momentary insanity: he flew at the master, and positively began to cuff the image with violence the machine was unable to resist this species of rudeness, and actually fell in pieces about the ears of its assailant. The candles were extinguished, and the room left in utter darkness; and at the same moment a long, obstreperous and deafening peal of laughter burst out from every person in the assembly.
Thus ended the scene plotted and conducted by these ingenious gentlemen; but not thus ended the consequences which resulted from it. The impression it made upon the mind of Withers was indelible. He had given himself up passively from the beginning to the ideas which his deluders wished to excite in him; the last incident therefore of their comedy had taken him at once, like a thunderbolt. He slunk away in confusion and silence. His mind had been violently acted upon by the events before him, while the whole appeared to him as serious. He had been a stranger to any greater applause than that of having construed well an ode in Horace; and he now found himself treated in one of our famous seats of learning as the foremost among the votaries of the muses. He had been a stranger to pointed rebuke under the indulgent discipline of his father; and he now found himself called before the dignified master of a college, and treated with injustice and contumely. He had been acting, as he imagined, a high and conspicuous part before his fellow-collegians, acquiring laurels in the temple of Apollo, and asserting the cause of justice against insolent and tyrannic authority. On a sudden all this was reversed; instead of honour he encountered disgrace; he found he had been made a laughing-stock to all around him. The concluding moment of the business explained to him the whole; he saw that the applauses he had received were all ironical, that he had been invited to the reading his play, only for contempt, that he had been treated as the weakest, the absurdest, and the most despicable of mankind. The scene of the master, the affected reprimand he had received, the stripping of his gown, the attempted blow, constituted a still deeper insult. It must be acknowledged that this was no flattering induction of an innocent and artless rustic into a great university. Withers lifted up his head no more. He could not bear to face any of his fellow-students; those, who had not been actors in the plot against him, were, he nothing doubted, well acquainted with all that had passed; he shut himself up, as much as possible, in his own apartment. After a brief interval, it was sufficiently visible that his intellects were impaired; a keeper was planted over him. He raved against poets and poetry; he seized with avidity every scrap of written paper he could meet with, that he might commit it to the flames. These excesses however were rare; the greater part of his time was spent in dejection and silence. One morning he escaped from the man who was appointed to watch him, and was soon after found drowned in the Isis. The cause of his unhappy catastrophe became public; the particulars were enquired into; and Frewen and Morrison were expelled from the university with a disgrace which pursued them for the rest of their lives.
This may serve as one specimen of the sort of grave-faced trick and delusion which the choice spirits among us delighted to put upon the more innocent and unsuspecting members of the university. The example here given was perhaps the most memorable, and attended with the most fatal effects, of any that occurred in my time. But all the tricks which were played were of the same class; all turned upon considering the simplicity displayed, and the anguish endured, by the sufferer, as a source of merriment. For myself, as I have said, I had no relish for this amusement. Once or twice, inconsiderately and precipitately, I yielded to the importunity of my companions, and became entangled in such adventures; but I presently abjured every thing of the sort; and, having set my face against pleasures so criminal in their temper, was repeatedly successful in delivering the bleeding prey from the jaws of its devourers.
The adventure which I have here recorded may seem foreign to my object, of painting my own story: I know not where however I could have found a more apt illustration, to set before my reader the character of the persons by whom I was now seduced, and with whom I at present associated. They were such youths as Frewen, Morrison and the rest, whose applauses I sought, whose ridicule awed me, and whose judgment I looked to for the standard of my actions.
It is not my purpose to convert these honest pages into a record of dissipations; far less, of the rude and unseemly dissipations of an overgrown boy. There are few characters more repulsive than that in which we find conjoined the fresh and ingenuous lineaments of a young man, in whom the down has scarcely yet shaded his prosperous cheek, with the impudence of a practised libertine. I look back upon it with horror. Youth, if once it has broken through the restraints of decorum, is the minister of cruelty. Even in me, whose disposition was naturally kind and humane, there was too much of this. It is suffering only, that can inspire us with true sympathy, that can render us alive to those trifles which constitute so large a portion of earthly misery or happiness, that can give us a feeling of that anguish, which, sometimes in human beings, as most evidently in the brute creation, works inwardly, consuming the very principle of life, but has no tongue, not the smallest sound, to signify its excess, and demand our pity. Over this, of which the soberest and most disciplined mind is scarcely prepared to make a true estimate, youth, when flushed with convivial gaiety and high spirits, tramples without remorse, and unhesitatingly assures itself that "All is well." Among the manifold objects which shock our imperfect reason, and make us wish that the constitution of things was in certain respects other than it is, I confess there is none which has at all times been more impressive with me than this, the vast variety of speechless misery which is every where to be found.
I passed through the usual period of education at the university, and then, by the liberality of my father, was sent to make a tour of other countries for my improvement. My father had particularly an old and much valued friend in Switzerland, whose kindness he wished me to cultivate, and whose affectionate and benevolent wisdom he thought would contribute much to the perfecting my character. To him I was furnished with a most exemplary letter of parental introduction, as well as with letters of the usual description to several distinguished and honourable individuals in the courts and principal cities of Europe.
The day on which I quitted the university was an important era in my life, and might have been expected to redeem me from the vices which I had there contracted. The necessities (such I was disposed to regard them) which had rendered me dissolute, were now removed. I had become vicious by the operation of a populous and crowded residence (from a contact with the members of which I found it impossible to escape) upon a young man, unwarned by experience against the rocks that awaited him, and stimulated to confidence and enterprise by the feeling that he was born to a considerable estate. When I quitted Oxford, I had once more the globe of earth to move in. I had elbow-room, and could expatiate as I pleased. I was no longer cooped and cabined in a sort of menagerie, in which I continually saw the same faces, knew the names and the little history of those I saw, and was conscious that I in my turn became the subject of their comment, of their contempt or their approbation. I now saw once again the fairest and most glorious of all visages, the face of nature. If I passed to the continent, I should have the opportunity of viewing her in new aspects; and, if I hastened, as my father wished me to do, to Switzerland, I should be led to the contemplation of a more admirable scenery than my eyes had ever yet beheld. If I sojourned for a short time in cities, my situation there would be very different from what it had been at Oxford. There would be no particular set of men appearing under such circumstances as in a manner extorted my confidence, but I might associate indifferently with any, or with what persons I pleased.
Another cause was favourable to the melioration of my character. The great disadvantage to which young men in a populous place of education are exposed, is the freedom they enjoy from the established restraints of decorum and shame. They constitute a little empire of their own, and are governed by the laws of a morality of their own devising. They are sufficient to keep each other in countenance; and, if any one of them can preserve the good opinion and esteem of the rest of the body, it is all of which he feels that he stands in need. The principles by which he is regulated are voted by an assembly, that is prompted by turbulence, high spirits, convivial good-humour, and a factitious sense of generosity and honour; and, provided these principles are obeyed, he looks down with contempt on the sense of mankind in general. Even the soberer laws which are promulgated by his academical superiors, are canvassed in a mutinous temper, and regarded as the decrees of froward age; obedience to them is sometimes contemplated as a dire necessity, and sometimes as a yoke which it is gallant and liberal to disdain.
But, when the same person goes out into the world, he becomes the member of a larger republic. He respects himself proportionably more, as he feels that he is acting his part upon a wider theatre. He grows a graver character, and is conscious that tumult and frolic are not the business of human life. He demands, not a boisterous approbation, but a sober deference and respect, from those with whom he has intercourse.
I grieve to say, that my character did not gain so much by this transplantation, as a person anxious for my reputation and welfare might have been willing to hope. It was at sixteen that I had repaired to the university, and I had resided there four years. These four years are the period of the development of the passions. When I looked back from the close of this period, the years I had spent in Merionethshire appeared to me as a delightful dream, but only as a dream. It was a season of nonage, the infancy of man. It was visionary, and idle, and unsubstantial. I had now risen (thus I understood it) to the reality of life. The scenes I had passed through in Oxford were sensible, were palpable; those of my earlier and better years were the illusions as of a magic lanthorn. I clung, at least on the threshold, and during the novelty of life, to the realities, and could not bear to exchange them for shadows. I felt as if I could not so exchange them, if I would. I had leaped the gulph; I had passed the bourne, from which, as it seemed to me, (in a different sense from that of Shakespear) "no traveller returns." Having once plunged into the billows, and among the tumult of the passions, I must go on. It was thus I reasoned, when the temptations, which presented themselves in the different stages of my travels, solicited my acceptance.
I would not however be understood for worse than I was. My life at Oxford was a life of dissipation; but it was not all dissipation. That curiosity, which had been one of my first seducers into vice, often assumed an ingenuous form. The various sciences which invited my attention at the university, did not always solicit in vain. My nature was not yet so brutified, as to render me indifferent to the venerable achievements of human intellect in successive ages and in different countries. My mode of passing my days had too much in it of the life of a gamesome and inebriated savage; but all my days were not so passed. The same vanity that led me among the licentious to aspire to a licentious character, gave me the ambition to show that I could be something more. I aspired to resemble the true Epicurean of ancient times, the more illustrious philosophers who had adorned that sect in Greece, or Horace, the graceful and accomplished ornament of the court of Augustus. I had therefore my fits of study and severe application, as well as my seasons which were exclusively devoted to pleasure. And, when I once secluded myself from my riotous companions, I may without vanity affirm that I effected more, and made a more full and pregnant improvement of knowledge in a week, than many of the mere bookworms of the university, and some too of no mean estimation among their fellows, did in months.
At Paris I met with sir Charles Gleed, a young man who had been at Oxford at the same time that I was, and who had occasionally made one in the riotous and dissolute parties that I frequented. Sir Charles had appeared with no great brilliancy in Oxford. His mind was slow and indocile. He had a tutor, who took great pains with him, and who had occasionally persuaded sir Charles to take pains too. But, though the labour, and still more the apparatus and report had been great, the produce had been little. There was a bluntness and hebetude in poor sir Charles's parts, that seemed to prove him adapted to an office like that of the horse in a mill, rather than of the race-horse or the hunter. When this operose and hard-working student descended from his closet, and gained a sort of tacit leave from his tutor to join in the circle of us gay and high-spirited fellows, the part he played was no more advantageous to him, than his former exhibition had been among the learned. He wished for the character of a wit, and had thought that the ample estate attached to his birth would be a sufficient indorsement to the repartees which he uttered. But in this he was deceived. We were too thoughtless and frolic, perhaps I might say, too liberal and independent of soul, to decide on the talent of our companions from the length of their purses. Sir Charles soon found that he was better qualified to be "the cause of wit in others," than to be a wit himself; and the asperity and indignation with which he bore this, and the awkward attempts by which he endeavoured to shake it off, fluctuating between resentment and a suspicion that what he suffered was not a fitting ground of resentment, only made the general effect upon bystanders the more irresistibly ludicrous.
I observed with surprise that sir Charles was received upon a very different footing at Paris, from what he had been at Oxford. Here he performed the part of an elegant, and was generally admitted as a man of breeding, amusement and fashion. No one laughed at, and almost every one courted him.
It has frequently occurred to me to see this metamorphosis, and to remark persons, who in their boyish years had been thought dull and poor fellows, afterward making a grave and no dishonoured figure upon the theatre of life. At school certainly the number of dunces is much beyond its due proportion (particularly if we have regard to the higher classes of society) to those who are ordinarily put down for such in maturer life. Perhaps scarcely more than one boy in an hundred is clever; but, when these boys grow up to be men, the dullard will frequently play his part to the great satisfaction of the spectators; and not only outstrip his more ingenious competitor in the road of fortune, but even be more highly esteemed, and more respectfully spoken of, by the majority of those who know him. I have often been desirous to ascertain in what manner we are to account for so curious a phenomenon; and I have found that there are two ways in which it may happen.
First, the man who plays his part upon the theatre of life, almost always maintains what may be called an artificial character. Gravity has been styled by the satirist, "a mysterious carriage of the body to conceal the defects of the mind;" and young men educated together are scarcely ever grave. They appear in simple and unvarnished colours; theirs is not the age of disguise; and, if they were to attempt it, the attempt, so far as related to their colleagues, would be fruitless. The mind of a young man at college is tried in as many ways, and turned and essayed in as various attitudes, as the body of an unfortunate captive in the slave-market of Algiers. The captive might, with as much probability of success endeavour to conceal his crooked back or misshapen leg, as the Oxonian or Cantab to hide his dulness, his ill-temper or his cowardice. But, when the same persons are brought out into the world, there are certain decorums, and restrictions from good manners, which operate most wonderfully to level the varying statures of mind: and (to pursue the idea suggested by the slave-market) the courtier, the professional man, or the fine lady, do not more abound in advantages for concealing their bodily deformities, than for keeping out of sight those mental imbecilities, which the lynx-eyed sagacity and frolic malice of school-boy against school-boy are sure to discover and expose.
Beside which, secondly, the part which a man has to play upon the theatre of life, is usually of much easier performance, than that of a stripling among his fellows. The stripling is treated with a want of ceremony, which deters him from properly displaying many of his powers. It has been remarked that the severity of criticism in ages of refinement suppresses those happier and more daring fruits of genius, which the dawn of science and observation warmed into life; and in these respects the entrance of the young man into the world operates in a way something similar to the transportation of the poet to a period of primeval simplicity. He is no longer rudely stared out of countenance. To change the similitude, a college-life may be compared with a polar climate; fruits of a hardy vegetation only prosper in it, while those of a more delicate organisation wither and die. The young man, having attained the age of manhood, no longer suffers the liberties to which he was formerly subjected, and assumes confidence in himself. This confidence is in many ways favourable to his reputation and success. It grows into a habit; and every day the probationer is better enabled to act with propriety, to explain his meaning effectually, and to display that promptitude and firmness which may command approbation. I should prefer however, I must confess, the school-boy hero to the plausible and well-seeming man of the world. Mistakes may occur indeed respecting the former as well as the latter. A false taste may lead his fellow-pupils to give the palm to a wild, adventurous and boastful youth over his more tranquil competitor, though the latter should be endowed with the most perspicacious intellect, the finest imagination, or the most generous temper. There is too a ready faculty, of little depth, a rapid, mimetic, superficial memory, which will sometimes pass on inexperienced observers, for a consummate genius. The judgment however which is formed on the phenomena of early youth, has two advantages; first, as this period of human life is free from deception and false colours; and secondly, as qualities then discovered may be supposed more rooted and essential in the character, than such as discover themselves only in a season of maturity.
To return to sir Charles Gleed.—I found him, as I have said, established on an unequivocal and honourable footing at Paris. He was received with distinction by a minister of state, who invited him to his most select parties. He was a favoured guest in the coteries of ladies of fashion, and often spent his mornings in the ruelle of a duchess. Sir Charles was certainly a man of displeasing physiognomy. It was a picture so rudely sketched, that the spectator could scarcely guess what was designed to be represented by it. The eyes were small and pinking; the nose colossal and gigantic, but ill-defined. The muscular parts were fleshy, substantial and protuberant. His stature however was considerably above the middle size; and his form, at least to an ignorant observer, seemed expressive of animal force.
Sir Charles was perhaps sensible how little he was indebted to the bounty of nature; and he was careful to compensate his personal defects, by the most minute vigilance in conduct and demeanour. By some accident he had acquired, since he left the university, the happiest of all foundations for success in the world, a tranquil confidence in himself. His speech, his motions, were all slow; but, as no part was lost in false efforts, in something done that was afterward to be done again, his slowness had to a certain degree the air and effect of haste. He continually approached to the brink of enterprise, and was never enterprising. He perpetually advanced to the verge of wit and observation, and never said any thing that was absolutely the one or the other. The man however must, I believe, be admitted to have had some portion of judgment and good sense, who could so speciously imitate qualities, to the reality of which he was a stranger. If he committed a blunder, the bystander might look in his face, and would discern there such an unsuspecting composure, as might lead him almost to doubt his opinion, and believe that there was no blunder. With the ladies he was attentive, officious and useful, but never bustling or ridiculous; by which means his services never lost their just value. Nothing of a nature more weighty ever thrust the details of a gallant demeanour out of his thoughts; and the sex was flattered to see a man so ample in his dimensions, and therefore, according to their reckoning, so manly, devoted to their pleasure. For the rest, whatever they observed, which would have been less acceptable in a Frenchman, was attributed to, and forgiven in consideration of, his being a stranger to their language, and having a disposition and bent of mind, appropriate, as they supposed, to the nation from which he came.
Such was the man who generously performed for me the part of gentleman-usher, and introduced me to the society of the courtiers and belles of France. Our characters were strikingly contrasted. He was set, disciplined and regular; I was quick, sensitive and variable. He had speciousness; I sensibility. He never did a foolish thing; I was incessantly active, and therefore, though frequently brilliant and earning applause, yet not seldom falling into measures the most injurious to the purposes I had in view. Naturally I was too tremblingly alive, to be well adapted to the commerce of the world; I had worn off a part of this at Oxford; I had gained a certain degree of self-possession and assurance; yet was my sensibility too great, not frequently to lead me into false steps, though I had afterward the fortitude and presence of mind to repair them.
Sir Charles and I, having every reason to be satisfied with our reception in this celebrated metropolis, engaged amicably in similar pursuits, and succeeded with persons of different predilections and tastes, without in the smallest degree interfering with each other. The court of Louis the Fifteenth, the then reigning sovereign, was licentious and profligate, without decency, decorum and character, and the manners which prevailed within the walls of the palace, were greedily imitated by every one who laid claim to, or who aped, rank, refinement or fashion. It were superfluous for me here to describe, what the reader may find in so many volumes amply and ambitiously detailed, the contempt for the marriage-bond, and the universal toleration then extended to adultery and debauchery, with the condition only that they should be covered with a thin and almost transparent veil, and not march entirely naked.
Prepared, as I had been, by my adventures at Oxford, I fell but too easily into the maxims and manners then in vogue in the court of France. Could I have been abruptly introduced to a scene like this, immediately after my departure from Merionethshire, I should have contemplated it with inexpressible horror. But my experience at the university had killed the purity and delicacy of my moral discrimination. In Wales the end I proposed to myself in my actions, was my own approbation; at Oxford I had regulated my conduct by the sentiments of others, not those of my own heart. I had been a noisy and jovial companion; I had associated freely and cordially with characters of either sex, that my judgment did not approve. Friendships like these had indeed been of short duration; but they were of sufficient power to contaminate the mind, and distort the rectitude of feeling and habit. From intimacies built on so slight and inadequate a basis, from a practical disregard of continence and modesty, the transition was easy to the toleration and abetting of the most shameless adultery.
At the university I had been driven from a sort of necessity to live upon the applauses of others; and, the habit being once formed, I carried it along with me in my excursion to the continent. In the societies to which I was introduced, no man was considered as any thing, unless he were, what they styled, un homme à bonnes fortunes, that is, an individual devoted to the formation of intrigues, and a favourite with those ladies of honourable seeming, who held their virtue at a cheap rate. The men who were regarded in Paris as models of politeness, stimulated me to pursuits of this sort by the tenour of their conversation, while the women from time to time, who boasted of rank, beauty and elegant manners, invited me by their insinuations and carriage, and taught me to believe that I should not be unsuccessful in my enterprises. I was young and unguarded; I had no Mentor to set my follies before me in their true light; I had passed the Rubicon of vice, and therefore was deficient in the salutary checks of reflection. My vanity was flattered by the overtures of the fair; my ambition was awakened by the example of the prosperous and the gay; I soon made my choice, and determined that I also would be un homme à bonnes fortunes.
The first woman who in this career fixed my regard was a finished coquette, by which epithet I understand a woman whose ruling passion is her vanity, and whose invention is hourly on the rack for means of gratifying it. She was a lady of high rank, and married to a person of great figure at court. I first obtained her attention under favour of the epithet, by which the Parisian belles thought proper to distinguish me, of the handsome Englishman. Sir Charles, my introducer, was certainly of more established vogue than myself, and in this respect might have seemed a conquest still more flattering to a person of her character. But the marchioness easily discerned that he would have afforded her less occupation and amusement. Sir Charles would perhaps have equalled me in constancy and perseverance; but he had a calmness of temper in affairs of this sort, which to her tastes would have been intolerable. Obedient, obsequious, patient of injuries, he would undoubtedly have shown himself; he was of a character unalterably obliging toward the fair; to violence he would have opposed no violence in return, but would have waited till the storm was dissipated, and then have sought to improve the lucky moment, when the bird of peace brooded over the subsiding billows, and the tumult of the bosom was ended.
My character was of an opposite sort. Sir Charles appeared to the animated and restless spirit of the marchioness more like a convenient instrument, or a respectable piece of furniture, than a living being whose passions were to mix, and shock, and contend, and combine with her own. She would have preferred a lap-dog who, when she pinched or slapped him, would ruffle his hairs, and snarl and bark in return, to such a lover. To vex the temper and alarm the fears of her admirer was her delight. She would not have thought him worth her care, if she did not ten times in the day make him curse himself, his mistress and all the world. She desired no sympathy and love, that were not ushered in by a prelude of something like hate. In a word, she aspired to the character ascribed by Martial to one of his friends: "There was no living with him, nor without him."
The singularities of this woman's temper particularly displayed themselves, in the gradations she introduced into the favours by which my attachment was ultimately crowned. I might describe the transport of my soul, when I first became assured that there was no mark of her good will which she was inclined to withhold from me. I might delineate the ravishing sweetness of the weather on the day which first gave me possession of her person, the delightful excursion we made on the water, the elegantly furnished cottage that received us, the very room, with all its furniture, which witnessed the consummation of my joys. All these things live in my memory, and constitute a picture, which will never be obliterated while this heart continues to beat. But I suppress these circumstances, at the risk of rendering my narrative flat and repulsive by its generalities. I write no book, that shall tend to nourish the pruriency of the debauched, or that shall excite one painful emotion, one instant of debate, in the bosom of the virtuous and the chaste.
The marchioness tormented me with her flights and uncertainty, both
before and after the completing my wishes. In the first of these
periods I thought myself ten times at the summit of my desires, when
again I was, in the most unexpected manner, baffled and thrown back
by her caprices and frolics. Even after, as I have said, the first
ceremonies were adjusted, and the treaty of offence was not only
signed, but sealed,
Me of my yielded pleasure she beguil'd,
And taught me oft forbearance;
though I cannot say, in the sense in which Shakespear has imputed
it to his heroine, that she did it, with
A pudency so rosy, the sweet look on't
Might well have warm'd old Saturn; that I thought her
As chaste as unsunn'd snow.
It was in my nature to attach myself strongly, where I attached myself at all, and by parity of reason to be anxious concerning propriety of conduct, and the minutenesses of behaviour, in the person I loved. This was exceedingly unfortunate for me in my affair with the marchioness. It was almost impossible to make her serious. At moments when all other human beings are grave, and even in allowing those freedoms which ought to be pledges of the soul, she could not put off an air of badinage and raillery. Her mind greatly resembled in its constitution the sleek and slippery form of the eel; it was never at rest, and, when I thought I possessed it most securely, it escaped me with the rapidity of lightning. No strength could detain it; no stratagem could hold it; no sobriety and seriousness of expostulation could fix it to any consistency of system.
Had this been the only characteristic of her mind, a person of my temper would soon have been worn out with the inexhaustibleness of her freaks and follies. But she had an ingenuousness of carriage by which I was for a long time deceived. She seemed, when I could gain her ear for a moment, to confess her faults and absurdities with a simplicity and unreserve that was inexpressibly charming: and she had in herself an equability of soul that nothing could destroy. Where other women would have been exasperated, she laughed; and, when by her flightiness she had driven her lover to the extremity of human bearing, she mollified him in a moment by a gentleness and defencelessness of concession that there was no resisting. Yet it often happened, that she had no sooner by this expedient won my forgiveness, than she flew off again with her customary wildness, and urged me almost to madness.
One passion which eminently distinguished the marchioness, was the perpetual desire of doing something that should excite notice and astonishment. If in the privacy of the tête à tête she was not seldom in a singular degree provoking, in public and in society she was, if possible, still worse. The human being, who is perpetually stimulated with the wish to do what is extraordinary, will almost infallibly be often led into what is absurd, indelicate and unbecoming. It is incredible what excesses of this sort the marchioness committed. Her passion seemed particularly to prompt her to the bold, the intrepid and the masculine. An impudent and Amazonian stare, a smack of the whip, a slap on the back, a loud and unexpected accost that made the hearer start again, were expedients frequently employed by her to excite the admiration of those with whom she associated. In the theatre she would talk louder than the performers; in a dance, by some ridiculous caprice she would put out those with whom she was engaged; she was never satisfied unless the observation of all eyes were turned on her.
It might seem at first sight that a demeanour of this sort would excite general disapprobation, and make every one her enemy. On the contrary the marchioness was an universal favourite, at least with the male sex. Her countenance was exquisitely beautiful; in her eye was combined a feminine softness with vivacity and fire; her figure, which a little exceeded the middle size, seemed moulded by the Graces, and every thing she did was done with an ease and elegance that dazzled the beholders. What would have been absurd and indecorous in most women, became pleasing and ornamental in her. Though the substance of the action was wrong, the manner seemed to change its nature, and render it brilliant and beautiful. She did impudent things without assumption and arrogance; and what in another would have been beyond endurance, seemed in her an emanation of the purest artlessness and innocence. Besides, that such was the rapidity and quickness of her nature, she did not allow to ordinary observers the time to disapprove. She never dwelt upon any thing; nothing was done with slowness and deliberation; and she passed so incessantly from one object of attention and mode of action to another, that every thing seemed obliterated as soon as seen, and nothing was left in the common mind but a general impression of wonder and delight.
This however was not the effect upon me. I often took upon myself to censure the improprieties of the marchioness. My murmurs, as I have said, never put her out of temper. Sometimes she would rally me upon my severity, and vow that, instead of a young and agreeable lover, she had by some chance fallen upon a morose philosopher, who wanted nothing but a long gown and a beard, to make him the worthy successor of Diogenes. Sometimes she would play off her usual arts, and, by some agreeable tale, or amusing sally of wit, force my attention to another subject. At other times she would put the woman upon me, display her charms, assume the attitudes, the gestures, and expression of features, allied to voluptuousness, and make it impossible for a young and susceptible admirer as I was, to give breath to another word of harsh and ungentle signification. On a few occasions, she would personate a seriousness, responsive to my seriousness, promise to be very good, and to conduct herself hereafter in a manner that should command my approbation. Her most ordinary method however was to ridicule my advices, and exasperate me by pertinacious and incorrigible folly; and it was never till she had exercised my patience to the utmost, that she condescended to soothe me with blandishments and promises of amendment.
Inconsistency was the very element in which she moved; and accordingly, whatever was the penitence she displayed, and the amendment she promised, this one feature constantly attended her, that these little expiations never produced any effect on her conduct, and that the fault she professed most solemnly to abjure, was sure to be the fault she would be the earliest to commit.
The torment which this species of character in a mistress inflicted on me is undescribable. The pain I suffered from the excesses she fell into was vehement: when she frankly confessed how much she had been to blame, I became almost angry with myself for the gravity of my censure: and when again I saw her repeat the same unbecoming folly without reflection or hesitation, I was confounded at so unexpected an event, and cursed my own infatuation; at the same time that, in spite of myself, I