THE REVELLERS. RING, joyous chords !-yet again, again! They are here!-the fair face and the careless heart, In a sudden turn of the flying dance; In a pause of the thrilling melody; And it is not well that Woe should breathe On the bright spring-flowers of the festal wreath; Leave, leave the Hall of Song! Ring, joyous chords !-but who art Thou In the misty depths of thy soft dark eyes? -Thou hast loved, fair girl! thou hast loved too well! Thou hast pour'd thy heart's rich treasures forth, -Mourn on! yet come thou not here the while, There is not a tone in our songs for thee, Ring, joyous chords !-yet again, again! Thou art but more lone midst the sounds of mirth : Ring, joyous chords!-yet again, again! A swifter still, and a wilder strain ! -But thou, though a reckless mien be thine, And thy cup be crown'd with the foaming wine, By the fitful bursts of thy laughter loud, By thine eye's quick flash through its troubled cloud, Of a haunted bosom, that brings thee here! I know thee!-thou fearest the lonely Night, With her piercing stars, and her deep wind's might! There's a tone in her voice which thou fain wouldst shun, For it asks what the secret soul hath done! And thou-there's a dark weight on thine-Away! Ring, joyous chords!-yet again, again! And bring new wreaths!-We will banish all Where are the brows with the fresh rose crown'd? That still should be where the mirthful meet? -They are gone-they are fled-they are parte d'all— GRIMM'S GHOST. LETTER XX. Joshua Pinchbeck. F. H. You tell me, my dear Mr. Pinchbeck, that you have never yet explored the country beyond Stratford-le-Bow on the East, Hammersmith on the West, Holloway Turnpike on the North, and the Windmill upon Clapham Common on the South: you add, that you can now well afford to look a little about you, and you call upon the devil to fetch you if you will take it as you have done: you conclude with intimating an intention of spending a fortnight "somewhere or another" a hundred miles from town, and with doing me the honour of asking my advice as to the spot to be fixed upon for your rural sojourn. Feeling as I do in my own mind a laudable impartiality upon that subject, all parts of the country being to me pretty much upon a par, let me advise you to pack your portmanteau, and mounting a hackneycoach, to desire the driver to convey you either to the Elephant and Castle in Saint George's Fields, or to the White Horse Cellar in Piccadilly, whichsoever the said driver pleaseth. As the distance from your residence in Guildford-street to the former of these houses of call is greater than to the latter, and consequently the coach-fare higher, I assume it as an admitted proposition that you will have been conveyed to the Elephant and Castle. A variety of importunate messengers, commonly called cads, will here have surrounded you, and will have been' very urgent in their inquiries as to the coach by which you are going to quit London. If you possess the equitable feeling upon that subject which appertains to the writer of this letter, you will have told one of them to pitch your portmanteau into the first on the stand: "Whereever fate shall lead me," as John Kemble used to say in the Stranger. The old man in green spectacles and pepper and salt whole gaiters, who faces you on the coach, will have informed you that the present wet weather, if it continues, will thin the watering-places; and the youngwoman with the little hand-basket on your left, will have been eyed by the young man her brother on the roof, at every change of horses, to ascertain that she has not, like Harlequin Lun, leaped through the coach-window. I omit dwelling, at any length, upon the sage in a grey stubble beard, who proffered you pears to sell at the end of the second stage, or upon the cleanly middle-aged woman in a mob cap, who asked you, at the close of the third, if you wanted any nice ducks, protruding, while speaking, a basket containing half a dozen defunct waddlers. A stage passenger, however hungry, cannot well make a luncheon upon a raw duck, and therefore the thing may appear strange, but I will make affidavit of its having occurred to you once, if not oftener, before the close of your journey. You have now, my dear Joshua Pinchbeck, alighted at the Roe buck, a decent-looking inn with a rough-cast coating, the gilt horns and hoofs of the animal which forms the sign, being softened down and relieved by a pictured punchbowl in its rear. I make no account of your landlord; gifted with a red waistcoat, and a nose of the same colour, his duty seems to be confined to smoking and gazing vacantly at the horses heels: the real man of business is the wife. The room into which you are shown has a faded and heel-worn Turkey-carpet in its centre: its extremities consist of plain deal boards. Over the sideboard is a sampler worked by the landlady's mother, subscribed "Fear the Lord. Jane Mills: 4 July, 1764." Your dinner being ordered, viz. mutton-chops, potatoes, and French beans, you make a tour of the room to survey the portraits that adorn its walls. These consist of the Marquess of Granby in cracked glass; a man in a scarlet hunting frock, flying over a five-barred gate with seventeen hounds, and a fox sweeping up the back-ground; Sky-scraper, belonging to his Grace of Queensbury, held by the bridle by a groom in a jockey-cap; His late Majesty, in the third position, engraved from a full-length portrait by Gainsborough; Queen Charlotte with a high toupee, from ditto; and Harry Bunbury's Country Club. There is also a map of the county, printed in the year 1779, suspended over the fire-place, rather yellow from age, and not hanging particularly straight. After satisfying yourself with these curiosities, you look at your watch; and, finding that it wants an hour and a half to dinner-time, you determine to take a survey of the town. Standing on the threshold of the Roebuck, you cast your eyes to the left, and behold one of the projecting parts of the Town Hall, in Saint Peter's-street. You then look toward the right, and you see the dwarf wall of the churchyard in Saint Faith's-street. In the meantime, crockeryware, intermixed with hay, adorns the pavement of the market-place in front: a grunting hog, with a rope tied to his left leg, is driven with difficulty past your footpath; and the barber in his white apron, and the butcher in his blue one, stand at their respective doors. At this period, my dear Joshua, you are seized with a fit of moralizing. You say to yourself" Alas! among all these busy crowds what individual here cares a button for me! Is there a man, woman, or child, among them, who would give a sixpenny piece to prevent my tumbling down in an apoplectic fit?" In answer to this inquiry, I have only to say, in the words of Doctor Johnson to James Boswell," My dear Sir, clear your mind of cant." Only reflect, upon a moderate calculation, what a number of respectable hardware-men like yourself, my dear Joshua, quit London every September in quest of the coy goddess Hygeia. If every man, woman, and child, in every country town, were to care for every such civic emigrant, at the rate of sixpence a head, pray consider what a sum it would amount to at the year's end. My dear Sir, they could not afford it: their means are too circumscribed. Besides, Joshua, have the goodness to reflect how many sixpennypieces you care for them. Plain-dealing is a jewel. Do not expect the reciprocity to be all on one side. Passing the hatter's shop, where all the articles are ticketed with their respective prices, you now passed over a pretty smart new bridge, and had your coat well dusted by steering under the wake of a corn-mill. The blacksmith's forge shone bright on the opposite side of the way, and the proprietor had the hind leg of a cart-horse in his leathercoated lap. The smart white house, with a polished door-plate, could only appertain to George Moss, attorney-at-law. The next range of old brick tenements consisted of St. Leonard's Alms-houses, founded in 1628, by Gregory Robinson, citizen and usurer; his snub-nosed bust adorning the centre. This holy foundation being passed, I see you enter the churchyard. The south door of the church is, as a matter of course, adorned on either side by a stone cherub, hunching up the small remnant of his shoulders, with a face expressive rather of pleasure than of pain; and no wonder, Joshua, pressed as he is with peine fort et dure, arising from a stone tablet on his chest, and the weight of the whole building on his back. You preferred not giving the sexton a shilling for looking at the interior of the edifice, and, therefore, strolled among the tombstones in the churchyard. The first monumental inscription which you here encountered, was " Affliction sore long time I. bore;" the second was "Weep not for me, my parents dear," upon a wooden tombstone, (why not as well as a glass inkhorn?) much overgrown with nettles; the third was not legible, being appurtenant to a defunct mayor, enriched by smuggling, and consequently hemmed in by iron palisades from vulgar inspection. You now sat you down, Joshua, upon the aforesaid dwarf wall, which girded the cemetery, and you forthwith opened an additional vein of moralizing. You pondered, in good set sentiments, upon the frail tenure under which life is held; and you asked yourself of what use is the ceaseless toil which men undergo in the acquisition of wealth, when, sooner or later, death must level all in the dust. It grieves me much, Joshua, to check such fine feelings by mere computation: but do it I must. Your mathematician is a sore enemy to your moralizer: he is to him what the housemaid's broom is to the web of Arachne. If death were not common to all men; or, in other words, if all men who were ever born were permitted to continue to live, I have ascertained, Mr. Pinchbeck, by an arithmetical calculation, that long before the close of the year 1824, this whole globe would be peopled by natives as thickly stowed as the mob at the ensuing Brentford Election. How such a mass of population is to be fed, clothed, and lodged, I leave it to Jeremy Bentham to ascertain. Until that philosopher has surmounted that difficulty, I am perfectly well satisfied to leave things as they are, and to let the dead make way for the living. Not that you and I, Joshua, mean to take our departure quite so early as the rest of mankind: no, there are two exceptions in our favour: I will allow you to reach the age of old Parr, 152: for myself, I mean to be considerably above par; my precedent is Henry Jenkins, who attained 169,--that's my span. I heartily wish, Joshua, that the modern world produced one hundredth part of the number of kind fathers, indulgent husbands, virtuous wives, and dutiful children, that one meets with in a churchyard. One's virtues have a strange knack of lying perdue till the sexton calls them forth. We are absolutely like so many potatoes, the best part of us is underground. After pondering for half an hour upon these monuments of departed excellence, I will now take you back toward the Roebuck with gilt hoofs and horns, in quest of your mutton chop and French beans. Upon casting, however, a "lingering look behind," at the church clock (over which, by the way, you found the pole of the weathercock bent by time into the attitude of the Tower at Pisa,) you ascertained that it wanted half an hour to dinner-time. You, therefore, on re-arriving at the mill-dam, took a letter from your coat pocket, and tore it into divers little boats, which you set afloat on the east side of the bridge, and then stept across to see them make their re-appearance on the west. Some few of them arrived safe under the mill, but the majority were engulphed in the black, bubbling, and remorseless eddy, This pastime is much in vogue among regimental lieutenants in country quarters. Whilst at dinner, Joshua, you asked the names of the two families who represented the borough, and found that one of them was in the Tory or blue interest, and the other in the Whig or yellow. The blues and the yellows you found were much at loggerheads about three years ago, when the town stood a contested election; but for this twelvemonth past, you ascertained that both those colours dwelt in contiguous harmony, as they are wont to do on the fly-leaf of the Edinburgh Review. The landlord had small beer, but could not venture to recommend it his mild ale was alleged to be remarkably good. Dinner despatched, your pint of port swallowed, and the devil's tattoo duly drummed by your left foot under the table, you began to cast your eyes about you in quest of amusement. Again you perused the sampler of Jane Mills, (the landlady's mother who feared the Lord on the 4th July 1764,) the Marquess of Granby in cracked glass, the tally-ho man in scarlet flying over a five-barred gate, His Grace of Queensbury's Sky-scraper, His late Majesty in the third position, Her late Majesty in a high toupee, and Harry Bunbury's Country Club. You now alighted upon an old European Magazine, for the year 1786, crammed into a corner cupboard wherein you found that, unmoved at the interference of the King of Prussia, and the complaints of the Stadtholder, the States of Holland and West Friezeland had declared that they did not find either in the letters from Berlin, or in the Prince of Orange's Manifesto, any argument that could in the least incline them to rescind the resolution complained of: which resolution they alleged themselves determined to put in force. This intelligence might have. been highly palatable at the time, but politics may be kept too long in bottle. You accordingly skipped the article, and alighted upon an Ode to Spring, commencing "Come, Fancy, Nature's pleasing child." This was tost aside to make way for "Leaves collected from the Pioz. zian wreath," and the leaves shortly withered to usher in a critique upon the "Comedy of the Heiress." Flattening your nose against the window-pane, upon which you had previously decyphered "George Frost dined here to his cost, 4th April, 1819."--"What's that to us, you booby?" and "How I love Arabella Clark!"--your eyes next encountered a huge play-bill skewered upon the back of a dead sheep pendant at the opposite butcher's shop, with red ink capitals, denoting the performance on that very evening of "Macbeth, or the Scottish Murderer," with "The Farmer, or Jemmy Jumps in Jeopardy." You leaped, mast high, at the intelligence, and found the usual complement of six people in the boxes, and twenty-six in the pit. Mr. Truncheon, who performed Macbeth, and Mr. Gag, who personated the staymaker, appeared to you to be so very superior to Kemble and Edwin, in these parts, that you determined to write to Elliston to engage the one and to Charles Kemble to snap up the other; it being your equitable intenon to scatter your stars impartially over the two hemispheres. If your letters be not already despatched, I entreat you, Mr. Joshua Pinch |