Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

fared after his rash quarrel with the official acts of the highest civilian of the Presidency.

In racing and sport the subaltern of the last century took as keen an interest as in the present day. There were pleasant breakfasts on the race-course at Calcutta, when the stewards entertained their friends after the races were over-a clever grouping of tents where to the strains of one of the regimental bands two hundred and fifty persons sat down in one company. The stewards' hospitality did not end here, for after breakfast the company adjourned to another tent, where a wooden floor had been prepared, and there dancing was kept up till two o'clock in the afternoon. On the last day of the races, too, there was a ball to end up with, when the stately minuet and sprightly country dance gave our fair countrywomen an occasion of displaying their grace and charm of dress and manner. At one time it is said-perhaps it was in the hot weather! -that the ladies are not such keen dancers as they used to be, and that no one is found to dance through the night and prepare for the duties of another day by a drive at sunrise round the racecourse. Small wonder, and our countrywomen must have been a sprightly race for so much to have been expected of them. One New Year's Day we hear of an "elegant dinner," followed by a magnificent ball given by the Right Honorable the Governor-General. At the latter the "minuet walkers were few, but the lively country-dance runners were bounding and abounding." The supper tables "presented every req. uisite to gratify the most refined Epicurean.' The ladies soon resumed the pleasures of the dance, and knit the rural braid in emulation of the poet's sister Graces till four in the morning, while some disciples of the jolly god of wine testified their satisfaction in pæans of satisfaction."

[ocr errors]

66

Not in presence of the ladies, we will suppose! Were there any drives round the race-course to end up this more than usually brilliant entertainment? Our chronicle saith not, but we can imagine that there may have been.

Masquerades, theatricals, and lotteries, were all attractions of the season in Calcutta. So entirely was the gam

bling of the latter in accordance with the spirit of the age, that it was thought proper to devote the proceeds of a lottery to the erection of a church. In this, perhaps, our fancy fairs" and "sales" for the same objects are not on altogether different lines.

66

The subaltern had a variety to choose from in his social pleasures, and we fear he must have become spoiled for roughing life if his lot were cast there many seasons in succession. It was not all dance and music, though, in those good old times.

There was a reverse to the picture, and there were dangers of field and flood to be encountered, and experiences of war with the wily native that make us even now shudder. The ghastly sufferings of those who fell into the hands of Tippoo Sultan were almost beyond belief, and death claimed many before they were released. One of the survivors, who was a prisoner with Colonel Braithwaite in Bangalore, tried to beguile his sufferings with verse.

Along the veranda we stalk,

And think of past pleasure with pain; With arms unfolded we walk,

And sigh for those pleasures again.
We feel with regret our decay,

So meagre, so lank, and so pale ;
Like ghosts we are ranged in array
When mustered in Bangalore jail.

Thus while the best days of our prime
Walk slowly and wretchedly on,
We pass the dull hours of our time

With marbles, cards, dice, and a song.
While others sit mending their clothes,
Which long since began for to fail;
Amusements which lighten the woes

Of the captives in Bangalore jail. It needed the light spirit of an Irishman, as the rhymes tell us the author must have been, thus to celebrate his

woes.

There were difficulties encountered by the officers in command of native regiments, when as yet the former had not grasped the subtle windings of the invincible barriers of caste, and the newly enlisted Asiatics knew little of the stern and unbending discipline of English military law. In the autumn of 1795 the Commander-in-Chief laid before the Governor-General in Council a statement of the mutinous conduct of the 15th Battalion of Native Infantry. It was resolved that the said battalion should be "broken with infamy," and

its colors burned. The minutes go on to state that in order to prevent misrepresentation of the reasons of this severe punishment, a full explanation of the same shall be published in General Orders. The men of the 15th Battalion were Hindus, and therefore had the strongest prejudice against undertaking a voyage by sea. Troops were to be sent to Malacca, and it was officially reported that the battalion had volunteered for the service. However this may have been, when the time came for embarkation the men refused to obey orders. The 29th Battalion was called out to suppress this "outrageous mutiny," but when summoned to lay down their arms the mutineers fired on the 29th. The Commander-in-Chief acknowledges the services rendered by the 29th Battalion, and compliments the officers on the efficient state of their men. Orders are issued for the formation of a new battalion, and stringent regulations made to prevent the re-enlistment of any of the mutineers of the 15th Battalion. There was evidently something to be learned on both sides before European officers and native soldiers could pull together. Dacoits were bold, and seem to have dared the law with impunity. Many were the murders and robberies committed by them within the precincts of Calcutta itself, while in the mofussil (outlying districts) they were the terror of honest men. A series of more than usually daring robberies at last led the inhabitants of Calcutta to petition the government to take steps to suppress the nuisance, and to put the police on a better footing.

The old torch-lighting days, or rather nights, were over for the garrison of Fort William before the end of the century, and the Governor-General orders that links or torches be totally prohibited along the streets or on the ramparts, and the sentries at the sorties are ordered not to suffer them to pass into garrison. The march of civilization had reached the point of "lanthorns with candles lighted in them," and though less picturesque than the blazing torches in the dark streets, they doubtless lessened the number of con

flagrations which so often roused the slumbering inhabitants at the dead of night.

As we scan the advertisements of this same old-world" Gazette" from which we have been culling, we find some that would be unique in any country. What a curious society it must have been in which the following appeared!

"Whereas I, John Ghent, being on the Race Ground on Monday, the 30th of January, 1786, did, without provocation, strike Mr. Robert Hay, I in this public manner beg pardon of the said Mr. Hay for committing the aforesaid offence.

"(Signed) JOHN GHENT." Here is a confession of anticipated connubial bliss made naïvely to the world at large:

"Marriage. On Wednesday last, John Palling, Esq., to Miss Grieveley, a young lady possessing every qualification to render the marriage state happy." It does not mention the qualifications of the bridegroom for the marriage state." Let us hope they were on a level with those of the fair bride.

[ocr errors]

Sometimes, too, military men were confounded with their civilian brethren, and, though kindly disposed toward all, such a slight was not to be borne. Who will not sympathize with the following?

"Whereas there are several persons of the name of Price whose Christian name begins with a large J.-J. Price, Esq., doth therefore apply to so many that mistakes have frequently happened. I beg leave to decline the appellation of Esq., and request of those who do know me and of those who do not know me, but may in future have occasion to send notes, letters, or parcels, which they may pretend shall come direct to me, that they direct to

"Captain Joseph Price,

"Clive Street, "Calcutta." Such a comprehensive guarding against danger should have been successful. Those who know us, and those who do not know us, embrace pretty well all sorts and conditions of our fellow-men. -Cornhill Magazine.

[ocr errors]

GEORGE FOX.

"ENGLAND," wrote Voltaire, in 1731, "is properly the country of sectarists. An Englishman, as one to whom liberty is natural, may go to heaven his own way. The epigram is a curious commentary upon the futility of attempting to enforce uniformity in religion. Barely fifty years before the great Frenchman took up his residence at Wandsworth, Jeffreys had sent Baxter to prison and set Muggleton in the pillory; and already if a man were willing to forego the material advantages of State employment, he was at liberty to riot in what the Church termed schism. In no circumstances is it likely that Nonconformity could ever have been rendered nugatory; but had the Church shown more wisdom it might have been reduced to a minimum. Men are so constructed intellectually that so long as they continue to think they will continue to differ; and the expression of their differences will not assume its least colorable aspect under the influence of a violent spiritual upheaval. It is then that sincerity tends to bigotry and formality stiffens itself by a nicer regard for ceremony, that the sceptic grows bitterly contemptuous, while for the hysterical nothing is too outrageous provided it is only sufficiently incomprehensible. To separate at such a moment the permanent from the evanescent, in other words to be wise before the event, is always a task of supreme difficulty; and probably, in the whole range of religious controversy in this country, there never was a time when prescience was less easy than during the period known as that of the Puritan revival. Just as to the satirist Lucian watching in Pagan Rome the growth of the manifold illusions fostered by Grecian scepticism and Arabian philosophy, Christianity appeared remarkable merely on account of the simplicity of its delusions; just as to the banqueters in Mahomet's house at Mecca the suggestion of an elderly merchant and a boy of sixteen girding up their loins for the conversion of the world was provocative of nothing except laughter; just as Pope Leo, surrounded by all the art and culture of the Renascence, could

dismiss the theses on the church door at Wittenberg as the drunken frolic of a German friar, so no doubt to the sober Englishmen of the Protectorate, the rant of the Independent, the rhodomontade of the "prophet who damned," and the rhapsodies of the "man in leather breeches," represented nothing but folly varying in degree. Yet, after the lapse of several centuries, while the Ranters have vanished into space, while Muggletonianism, after dragging out a sordid and obscure career, is probably extinct, the Quakers, having enriched humanity by many capable and some eminent citizens, remain a respected if a diminishing body.

The fact of Fox's success is sufficiently plain; the reason of it is by no means equally superficial. There was nothing in his conception which seemed to entail what the devout would have described as an especial blessing; there was, on the contrary, a multitude of tiresome and perplexing detail. Its fundamental principles were as ancient as Christianity itself; its peculiar bulwarks an outrage on human intelligence. If it contained nothing so comically extravagant as the Muggletonian revelation of a transparent deity, it contained much that was sufficiently wild and incoherent to supply Macaulay with an excuse for a famous and characteristic antithesis. England has now grown so familiar with the decorous life and gentle courtesy of the modern member of the Society of Friends, as to have forgotten that Quakerism in its militant epoch was by no means always either gentle or decorous. The fanaticism which sent George Fox trudging over hill and moor in the belief that he was at once a prophet and a miracle worker, which urged him to disturb public worship, and drove him barefooted through Lichfield crying aloud, "Woe to this bloody city !" found its inevitable corollary in the madman who rode into Bristol surrounded by disciples shouting, "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Israel," and the still madder lady who thrust herself stark naked into church before the Protector, being moved, she declared, to appear as a sign to the peo

ple. In all this there was not much calculated to secure the support of any but the most excitable of religious buffoons. It is necessary to look for the secret of the man's influence, and it is to be discovered probably in two simple causes the magnetism of his personality and his almost superhuman truthfulness. Fox was undoubtedly one of those persons exercising a strange fascination over all who came in contact with them. That, with his neck in the pillory, he should have succeeded in taming the mobs which came to hurl brickbats at him, is not particularly surprising. Mobs are the most uncertain of all unknown quantities, capable one moment of the most brutal ferocity, and the next of mere maudlin sentimentality. That he should have gained and held the respect of such men as Penn and Barclay among his own following, and should have wrung an unwilling compliment from the great Protector himself, is sufficient proof, if any were needed, that he was no mere mountebank. His more questionable antics were probably nothing but the valve through which a strangely impressionable nature found relief in a highly charged atmosphere; and were really insignificant in comparison with the strenuous fight which, in the face of ruffianism and bigotry, he made for liberty of conscience. Out of the multitude of preachers, some supremely honest, some simply charlatans, whom the religious cyclone had cast up to the surface, he alone, despite all his vaporings and grimaces, seems to have fashioned his pulpit out of the adamantine rock of eternal truthfulness. The very extravagance of his attack upon the pleasant courtesies of life, and the pedantry of his objection to such every-day words and phrases as the shallowness of his learning enabled him to select for incorporation in his index expurgatorius, are but proof of how an overwrought brain may reduce even consistency to an absurdity.

But the real work of Fox, the work for which numberless generations have had reason to honor him, was his effort to remove the bonds which men, not content with wrapping them about their own souls, persisted in endeavoring to twist about those of their neighbors.

The sad-visaged men, with yokes of names, who prowled from village to hamlet denouncing everything that tended to brighten the struggle for existence, who loathed the Christmas-tree equally with the Maypole, and raged against bear-baiting, not, in Macaulay's famous phrase, because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators, were as violent as Laud himself in subordinating the cause of truth to their own particular shiboleths. For the moment the Puritan had mastered the Episcopalian, and was intent upon proving that it was possible to be as intolerant in a steeple hat as in a shovel one. Like all religious fanatics, Fox was impressed with the fact that he had secured a monopoly of truth; but he held it no part of his revelation to indulge in the punishment of error. He was a proselytizer of course, but it was of the stamp of St. Paul rather than of Saul of Tarsus. No doubt in accordance with the theological bias of the age, he was convinced that those who rejected his gospel were imperilling their prospects of salvation; but he owned that truth could not be instilled into the weaker brethren either by the physical torture of the boot or by the social coaxing of the Test Act. Whether, if they had ever become the dominant factor in the State, Fox's successors would have lived up to his theories it is impossible to say. jorities have an ugly habit of ignoring the professions of their minority. The whole history of the world is one long panorama of persecuted turned persecutors. In Rome the primitive Christians were thrown by the Pagans to the lions; when the throne of the Cæsars gave place to the Chair of St. Peter, the Christians chained the heretic to. the stake. Protestantism in England, having freed its neck from the yoke of the Papacy, hastened to submit itself to the yoke of Puritanism. Puritanism, in its turn, fleeing to New England from the pillory and the cart tail, devoted its surplus energy to the branding of Quakers and the hanging of witches. Even the Quakers, who had promised "love" to the Indians under the great elm tree at Shakamaxon, ended by investing their capital in negroes and cowhides.

Ma

Such being the inveterate tendency of human endeavor, it is easily conceivable that the noblest aspirations of Quakerism were best served by the very eccentricities of its conception, which, by militating against its progression, kept its converts in the van of the struggle for religious freedom, instead of by a complete victory putting them in a position to dictate terms to their opponents. How important its accomplishments were, how auspiciously timed its birth, may best be studied in the career of its founder.

ers.

6

George Fox was born in July, 1624, at Drayton-in-the-Clay, Leicestershire. His father, Christopher Fox, was by trade a weaver, one of the old fraternity of workmen who bent over the weft in their own cottages, in the days before the flying-shuttle and the power-loom had begun to rear the factory chimneys along the village street. His mother, Mary Lago, was, he is careful to inform us, an upright woman, of the stock of the martyrs." Of education, in the modern sense of the word, the boy had none. In an age when a great noble could often with difficulty write a letter and the country gentleman still regarded literature with disdain, the son of a village weaver was scarcely likely to receive any such teaching at all. Books, indeed, were still even rarer than readIn the whole hamlet, with the exception of the Bible, there was probably not a single volume, unless some ancient folio which in bygone days had been chained to the pillars of the parish church. Something, however, he did learn, in that Leicestershire village, of more importance than all the culture of the Universities, a love of absolute veracity or, as he put it in his Quaker English, "to keep to yea and nay in all things." So that, in days to come, when his quaint "verily" was heard amid the crowd about his goods at the fairs, the purchasers ceased to haggle, for, said they, "if George Fox says 'verily,' there is no altering him." He grew up a sober, dreamy youth, taking little or no part, one would imagine, in the boisterous frolics on the village green, and exhibiting a rather unnatural contempt for frivolity in his seniors. Such a spirit seemed to mark him out for the priesthood; and a

priest his parents had determined upon making him, when other influences were brought to bear, and he was apprenticed instead to a cobbler. What line Fox would have taken if, at the very threshold of his career, he had found himself a representative of the great State Church, is a rather curious speculation. Would he, like many an ardent reformer before him, have bowed to the prejudices of his position and settled down, like the vast majority of the rural clergy, to marry on a miserable pittance the cook of some fox-hunting Tory squire, and preach in a tattered cassock to a handful of yokels and dairymaids? Or would he, like a Luther or a Wesley, have risen up, and rent the mighty corporation in which he found himself embedded to the roots? The question can never be answered, and is futile enough.

Besides being a maker of shoes Fox's new master was a wool merchant and a grazier. In each capacity Fox served him well and faithfully. Indeed on the very first page of his book there occurs a specimen of that habit of selfappreciation from which the worthy Quaker is never entirely free: "While I was with him," he writes, "he was blest, but after I left him he broke and came to nothing." came to nothing." His period of service cannot, however, have been a very long one. In his nineteenth year one of those trifling occurrences which so frequently dominate a man's whole future caused him to turn his back forever upon the shoe-lasts and the woolbales, and to go forth clothed in his garb of leather to preach in the wilderness of unrighteousness.

The immediate cause of his decision was completely unheroic. Chancing at a fair, where he was present upon business, on a couple of acquaintances, he adjourned with them to a neighboring tavern to share a jug of ale. As soon as his thirst was satisfied Fox proposed to leave; but his friends, calling for more drink, startled him by the suggestion that he who first succumbed should pay the score. To a youth in Fox's state of mental agitation such a proposition sounded little less than demoniacal. Starting up, and throwing a groat upon the board, he shook the dust of the place from off his feet. He

« ZurückWeiter »