Imagens da página
PDF
ePub

whether or no I should print it, as a warning to the young Nolans and Vallandighams and Tatnalls of to-day of what it is to throw away a country, I have received from Danforth, who is on board the Levant, a letter which gives an account of Nolan's last hours. It removes all my doubts about telling this story. Here is the letter:

"Levant, 2° 2' S., 131° W.

"DEAR FRED,-I try to find heart and life to tell you that it is all over with dear old Nolan. I have been with him on this voyage more than I ever was, and I can understand wholly now the way in which you used to speak of the dear old fellow. I could see that he was not strong, but I had no idea the end was so near. The doctor had been watching him very carefully, and yesterday morning came to me and told me that Nolan was not so well, and had not left his state-room, a thing I never remember before. He had let the doctor come and see him as he lay therethe first time the doctor had been in the state-roomand he said he should like to see me. Oh dear! do

you remember the mysteries we boys used to invent about his room, in the old Intrepid days? Well, I went in, and there, to be sure, the poor fellow lay in his berth, smiling pleasantly as he gave me his hand, but looking very frail. I could not help a glance round, which showed me what a little shrine he had made of the box he was lying in. The stars and stripes were triced up above and around a picture of Washington, and he had painted a majestic eagle, with lightnings blazing from his beak, and his foot just clasping the whole globe, which his wings overshadowed. The dear old boy saw my glance, and said, with a sad smile, Here, you see, I have a country!' And then he pointed to the foot of his bed, where I had not seen before a great map of the United States, as he had drawn it from memory, and which he had there to look upon as he lay. Quaint, queer old names were on it, in large letters: Indiana Territory,' Mississippi Territory,' and 'Louisiana Territory,' as I suppose our fathers learned such things; but the old fellow had patched in Texas too; he had carried his western boundary all the way to the Pacific, but on that shore he had defined nothing.

[ocr errors]

"Oh, Danforth,' he said, 'I know I am dying. I cannot get home. Surely you will tell me something new? Stop, stop! Do not speak till I say what am sure you know-that there is not in this ship,

that there is not in America (God bless her!), a more loyal man than I. There cannot be a man who loves the old flag as I do, or prays for it as I do, or hopes for it as I do. There are thirty-four stars in it now,

know by

face! and he pressed my hand and said, 'God bless you!' 'Tell me their names,' he said, and pointed to the stars on the flag. The last I know is Ohio. My father lived in Kentucky. But I have guessed Michigan and Indiana and Mississippi; that was where Fort Adam is; they make twenty. But where are your other fourteen ? You have not cut up any of the old ones, I hope?' "How I wished it had been somebody who knew something! But I did as well as I could. I told him of the English war. I told him about Fulton Scott, and Jackson; told him all I could think about and the steamboat beginning. I told him about old the Mississippi, and New Orleans, and Texas, and his own old Kentucky.

"I tell you, Ingham, it was a hard thing to condense the history of half a century into that talk with a sick man. And I do not now know what I told him of emigration, and the means of it-of steamboats and railroads and telegraphs-of inventions and books and literature-of the colleges and West Point and the Naval School-but with the queerest interruptions that ever you heard. You see it was Robinson Crusoe asking all the accumulated questions of fifty-six years. "And he drank it in, and enjoyed it as I cannot tell you. He grew more and more silent, yet I never thought he was tired or faint. I gave him a glass of water, but he just wet his lips, and told me not to go away; Then he asked me to bring the Presbyterian Book of Public Prayer,' which lay there, and said, with a smile, that it would open at the right place; the page; and I knelt down and read, and he repeated with me: For ourselves and our country, O gracious God, we thank Thee that, notwithstanding our manifold trangressions of Thy holy laws, Thou hast continued to us Thy marvellous kindness;' and so to the end of that thanksgiving. Then he turned to the end of the same book, and I read the words more familiar favour to behold and bless Thy servant, the President to me: Most heartily we beseech Thee with Thy of the United States, and all others in authority,' and the rest of the Episcopal collect. Danforth,' said he, 'I have repeated those prayers night and morning, it is now fifty-five years.' And then he said he would go to sleep. He bent me down over him and kissed me; and he said, 'Look in my Bible, Danforth, when I am gone.' And I went away.

and so it did. There was his double red mark down

he was tired and would sleep. I knew he was happy, and I wanted him to be alone.

"But I had no thought it was the end. I thought

he found Nolan had breathed his life away with a "But in an hour, when the doctor went in gently, smile. He had something pressed close to his lips;

it was his father's badge of the Order of Cincinnati. "We looked in his Bible, and there was a slip of paper, at the place where he had marked the text: They desire a country, even a heavenly wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.'

[ocr errors]

"On this slip of paper he had written :

[ocr errors]

:

Danforth. I thank God for that, though I do not know what their names are. There has never been one taken away: I thank God for that. that that there has never been any successful Burr. Oh, Danforth, Danforth,' he sighed out, how like a wretched night's dream a boy's idea of personal fame or of separate sovereignty seems, when one looks back on it after such as a life as mine! But tell me, tell me something, tell me everything, Danforth, before I die!' "Ingham, I swear to you that I felt like a monster that I had not told him everything before. Danger or no danger, delicacy or no delicacy, who was I, that I should have been acting the tyrant all this time over this dear, sainted old man, who had years ago expiated, in his whole manhood's life, the madness of a boy's treason? 'Mr. Nolan,' said I, 'I will tell you 'Lieutenant in the Army of the United States. Everything you ask about. Only, where shall I begin?' "He loved his country as no other man has loved "Oh, the blessed smile that crept over his whiteher; but no man deserved less at her hands.'"

Bury me in the sea; it has been my home, and I love it. But will not some one set up a stone for my memory at Fort Adam or at Orleans, that my disgrace may not be more than I ought to bear. Say

on it :

"In Memory of "PHILIP NOLAN,

RAMBLES AND REVERIES OF A MODERN MORALIST,

No. II. IN A PICTURE-GALLERY,

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

I have been a rambler ever since I could run alone. Without bearing more than my share of the sentence passed on fallen humanity I have yet been a kind of vagabond all my life; a vagrant, yet of a kind fortunately not within the meaning of the Act "in that case made and provided." I do not mean to affirm that I am possessed with the attributes belonging to that especially unpleasant person the Wandering Jew," but still I am a rambler, a wanderer, one who, like the old woman in the Nursery Rhyme, can never be quiet." My rambling, however, is not all physical by any means, perhaps my locomotive excursions are rather limited in area, but my mind wanders over a vast amount of time and space, much farther than I could travel in the flesh, even were I possessed of the "seven-leagued boots" and the " flying carpet" of "The Arabian Nights." I trust I have no mental aberration, in the common and Colney Hatch acceptation of the term, but my meaning is, that a slight thing, a coincidence, a picture, will send my thoughts wandering through I know not what pleasant vistas of dream-land, conjuring up a phantasmagoria far too bright and pleasant to be anything else than fancy portraits and imaginary situations. It is what Byron has thus expressed

"It may be a sound

A tone of music-summer's breath or spring'sA flower-a leaf-the ocean which may wound,

moralize in the Royal Academy, or the Kensington Museum, though I have seen worse places for a revery. This ramble is one of the sedentary kind, where "I take mine ease in mine inn," and bid my thoughts "go packing;" I cannot help their vagrancy, I have not even the excuse of honest Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who says "I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit."

66

As I sit now with the red fire-light making weird shadows on the wall, and listen to the eternal sobbing of the waves I can look along a shadowy gallery well hung with pictures, and of each I can say, thereby hangs a tale." Yet I wot full well that there are not enough pictures on my wall to provide me, were they sold, with "a suit of sables" wherewith to attend the funeral of my last buried hope. But what matters it? If the Marchioness found orange-peel and water equal to wine by "making believe very much," why should not I be as happy in a gallery of pictures painted by that notable artist Fancy, as though I possessed the treasures of the Louvre, or were Sir Edwin Landseer himself? soft! Let me inspect my pictures. Ay, there is that grim old ancestor of mine, who they say was killed at Naseby, fighting, I regret to say, on the side of the Parliament. I saw the actual portrait once, and it is quite fresh in my memory. A respectable man enough in his way, I have no doubt, that ancestor of mine, still I could wish that his face were a little less like the

But

Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly gnarled trunk of a tree, and that his hat and

bound."

I know not how far I am justified in inflicting my wandering thoughts and impressions of men and things on my readers; perchance there will be some who knowing that "there is no new thing under the sun," will not look for originality here, but will be content to find a few simple thoughts and descriptions which may recall some pleasant visions of their own, some oasis in the great Sahara of life, some joys known only to those who are given to day-dreams, and are not ashamed of it.

66

I have said that all my rambles are not in the body; sometimes indeed "I take my walks abroad," not as the old ballad says, some pastime for to see," but to pick up waifs and strays of thought and reflection with the aid of no better Asmodeus than Fancy, who unroofs a house for me in a trice, and shows me the penetralia of many quiet homes.

My present ramble, kind reader, is through a picture-gallery. Start not! I am not going to torture you with readings from a guide-book, or

collar were a thought more becoming. On the whole I am rather glad that I did not know my ancestor personally; though it was hard upon Mr. Prynne to cut off his ears for writing on "The unloveliness of love-locks," yet, certes, I should have worn love-locks myself in those days sooner than the cropped pole of my worthy ancestor yonder. There is another portrait coming into view, much pleasanter to look on than my Puritan "fore-bear." It belongs to one of the gallery of "lost loves" which most of us keep somewhere in our minds. I, a crusty old bachelor, may maunder a little about what used to be, and what might have been, without being called vain or egotistical. Yes, sure enough, those are Alice's blue eyes, and that is Alice's blue sash-the tie of the bow is done to perfection by my artist.

Let me think. I was a man of the world on the wrong side of eight when I first met Alice at a juvenile party, and felt that my future course of life depended upon her. She was two years my senior, and thought little enough of I remember. But we met again-"we met, 'twas

me,

in a crowd"-at another party; I had come home from school a young scapegrace of thirteen, and my devotion for Alice returned with ten-fold vigour, my allegiance had been unshaken by the delights of alley-taws and the seductions of the cake-woman. Did I not on that memorable night dance with her incessantly to the mortal offence of Brown, who wore a coat and collar, and wrote himself "Esquire?" Did not the same Brown ask me in a hollow and sepulchral whisper "whether I meant it?" and did I not reply, "to be sure I do?" Ay, and I did mean it, as far as a youth of thirteen summers may.

where my love-dream came to an end is as clearly before me as though no weary years had passed, no silver-threads come into my venerable hair. The long stretch of river, golden in the sun lies again in my view, again the white and yellow lilies bask in the shadows; again the tall reeds and the wan willows whisper on the bank, as they whispered that day when Kate and I floated idly in our cushioned boat, and thought that we were made for each other, and yet we parted that day upon the banks by the willows, and were strangers henceforth and for ever.

[ocr errors]

"So light a cause may move

Dissention between hearts that love,
Hearts that the world in vain had tried,
And sorrow but more closely tied,

That stood the storm when waves were rough,
Yet in a sunny hour fall off."

Ah, Alice! Little thought we then, when you kissed me in the hall, under the friendly shadow of the clock-case, and let me cut off one of your yellow curls with a pair of feloniously abstracted scissors little thought we then that I should be sitting to-day a lonely old bachelor, and that you would be sleeping by your soldier-husband I can look back now upon that day when my under the palm-trees in a foreign land! Alice's life's romance ended so roughly almost without memory though, and the yellow curl (I saw it a sigh. I can say Kismet, with the easy-going only yesterday, faded and wan in an old desk), oriental fatalist, and be content to take things were my greatest comforts during my next as they come. And how fares Kate, I wonder? "half" at school. What cared I for Brown, "the prettiest Kate in Christendom" once in the exquisite (we did not talk about "swells" my eyes, how fares she? I think I can give a then), the head of the sixth form, the copper- shrewd guess; she joined her fortunes to those plate writer of the school, whose flourishes and of a rich trader, a man of weight and size, ay, elegant up-strokes obtained "the silver-pen" and of much coarseness too, without an "h" in among a host of admiring parents and guar- his vocabulary, or the faintest idea of the word dians?" True, Brown was my deadly foe, and taste except in relation to eating and drinkthreatened daily to "punch my ugly little head" ing. Poor Kate, I doubt not, is the dowdy (the malice of his heart dictated the phrase), but he mother of dowdy marriageable daughters by this never did, and Alice was mine, at least I thought time, and soothes the domestic hours of her so, but then I was but thirteen! Well, well, lord in some Norwood villa, where the great "shoot Folly as she flies" is the right maxim I man, now perchance an alderman, enjoys his suppose, and I must have been struck pretty otium sine dignitate, and laughs at his neighAnd I am a often by the blind god's weapon, judging from bours whom he could "buy up." the long gallery of pictures still unnoticed. I lonely bachelor sitting by my fire and seeing suppose I must say with Prospero, these pictures in my "mind's eye"; shall I bemoan my lot? No, my buttons are not all off my shirts, my tea and sugar is not quite all stolen, though I be condemned to pass my life like the rose which

"Poor worm! Thou art infected!
This visitation shows it."

Yet after all I expect, in many cases, it was not the sterling coin of love, but only what our French friends style a caprice.

There is a scene in my picture-gallery very familiar to me, it rises out of the mist of past years as distinctly as a thing of yesterday; a particular bank in a certain garden all overhung by the sweet lilac in the spring-time, where I used to lie and dream, and wonder what the world was like; and long to get out into it like others. Ah, me! we are all of us in such a hurry to thrust ourselves into that great hurlyburly world, and when we are fairly there, how often have we wished for the ease and quiet of some such shady bank as that on which I dreamed in childhood! It was on that bank where I lay and composed love-songs to Kate, whom I was to have married, and whom I loved (God save the mark! I was but a young fool), with all the devotion of a Romeo. Poor fickle Kate, she soon tired of me, of my devotion and earnestness to please her. That day on the river

[ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

Line, my appetite never failed me, and I slept the procure a supply of water for my bed-room, a sleep of the just, as usual. As for Flora, she very imperious and yet withal jolly bed-room, old was too fond of talking about "my uncle Sir "number eight!" I call my school dear now, Reginald," and as I was a red-hot Radical in but I did not so call it then, believe me. It those days, we joined issue about the game-laws, was always a hard struggle to tear myself away and parted in high dudgeon not to meet again. from the bright faces of the household gods, Well, I must hasten on; I don't think upon for I was ever "a home-keeping youth;" hence reflection that I cared much for Fanny Jeffson; perhaps I may trace the "homely wits" which she was a good girl in her way, but had red dictate these lines. Every nook and corner of hair, I remember, and red hair had not come into the old school comes up before me now in fashion then. There are some pictures turned living colours-the great elm tree where we with their faces to the wall, and I am as reluc- laid our jackets before cricket, or where we tant to look upon them as was Cromwell to lounged in the hot afternoons in such delightful gaze on the portrait of his murdered king. A company as that of "Robinson Crusoe," or the picture yonder, a faded blue ribbon, and a few Ugly Duckling," or "Sindbad the Sailor." yellow letters here in my desk tell their own On the trunk of that old tree many a name is story; I may be pardoned for being sad at the cut by hands now busy in cutting a way through remembrance. Even that roughest and least the world, fighting the battle of life in every loving of men, Jonathan Swift, once felt some corner of the globe, or resting cold and still respect for "6 only a woman's hair." What a after the battle has been fought in that place different story the lives of most of us would where are "the small and the great." I wonder present, in what different places our lots would what has become of all my old school-mates? be cast if the promises made in such old yellow I do not desire to parody the questions asked letters, if the bonds typified by such wan blue in two of the Christy Minstrels' songs, "Where ribbons were all kept, all brought to pass, how are the friends of my youth?" and "Where many of us would utter Scott's beautiful lines- are my schoolmates gone?" yet I can't help speculating on their several fates. One would suppose that I should have a perfect assembly of old friends about me, judging by the vows of eternal friendship pledged at school, and the indifferently written letters after school was left. But I always noticed the letters grew "small by degrees and beautifully less" as time went on, and now not ten men out of all my old schoolfellows would recognize me or remember my name. have met one or two of them in my journey onwards: there was Douglas, who was my "other half" at school, and who preserved his friendship for me longest-he quarreled with me because I could not lend him twenty pounds to buy shares in a bubble company. Stanfield, who fought with me in the well-known corner "behind the shed," the spot consecrated to the god of battles from time immemorial, him I met in a stifling criminal court, pleading for the life of a felon, and moving the hearts and foggy brains of an "intelligent jury." Little Ashton, whom we used to bolster in our bed-room, and who used to tell us stories to escape the dread infliction, was last seen by me at the bed-side of a sick child, a pauper's child too, in a country town. And as the quiet, tender surgeon soothed the feverish agony of the little one, and tried to calm the weeping mother, I thanked God that I had been the friend of so good a man. Blandly, whom we thought a home-sick baby and a coward (cruel little tyrants that we were), fell covered with wounds fighting like a hero at Inkermann.

"Yes, God and man might now approve me, If thou had'st lived, and lived to love me.' But enough of this. I can see a well-known picture yonder, my old school. O times gone by, O days of boyhood, how do we look back upon you, and think over you, and perchance weep over you, when " our way of life is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf!" It may not be true that our boyish days are the happiest in our lives-I do not quite believe it myself; but we had pleasures then which we could not enjoy now, try how we may. What a high privilege to find delight in a broken-bladed knife, and a ball of string! What a boon to enjoy a sour apple, long kept in a warm pocket as a luxury! What a rare blessing to be able to rank the capture of a bird's-nest with the capture of a kingdom! I could not now for the life of me eat sour apples, especially if they were warm from constant friction in a trouser pocket. I cannot at present regard starlings' eggs with any feeling of enthusiasm. And yet which state is the more enviable, that of the boy whose ambition is bounded by such acquisitions as these, and who usually acquires what he longs for, or that of the man who yearns after higher things, and is mostly doomed to disappointment? Many a man will be ready, I think, to echo the words of the Eton poet Praed, and wish he

were

"A boy again, a happy boy at Drury's." Dear old school! How well I remember your red-bricked front, and the tall firs which used to moan at night when I was making my surreptitious visits, thinly clad, to "the pump," to

I

There are other pictures too in my gallery, but there hangs a curtain before them: we must not tell all we know of ourselves or of our friends. My rambling thread is ravelled out, and Time, like the shears of the three "Fatal Sisters," cuts it off for the present at this point,

OLD LONDON AND ITS

ITS NOTABILITIES.

dinal Wolsey. To Arnold, indeed, we owe in this curious compound the preservation of the beautiful old ballad of the "Nut-brown Maid;" and, for the sake of this last poem alone, Arnold's volume should be prized by the antiquarian and cherished.

After Fabian and Arnold, came Leland, Norden, Camden, and others; but the antiquarian par excellence is of course the renowned John Stowe. His work, indeed, has supplied every other that has since appeared professing to be a

The London of our fathers and grandfathers | is fast disappearing. In the course probably of another century all the familiar streets trodden by our feet in childhood, youth, and middleage, will have vanished, and an improved city, as little dreamt of in our present philosophy as was the London of eighteen hundred and sixtyfive by the old monks of St. Bartholomew's, will have arisen; the old nuisances swept away, the old sites preserved only in historical records, or unnoted save in municipal and local bluebooks. It may not, therefore, be amiss to pre-history of London. Stowe was born in 1525, in sent our readers with a view of a few of some of the memorable places in our metropolis, the historical history of which is little known by Londoners themselves, save indeed to the few whose taste and leisure induce them to consult the pages of antiquarian lore; and it is probable we should know but little of Old London had it not been for the quaint writers, whose delight it was to record for the benefit of posterity the marvels of the London of their own times.

the reign of Henry VIII., and he died in 1605, a few years after the accession of James I. Eighty years must have shown the old chronicler many strange things, and he lived in strange and dangerous times. In 1568 Stowe was brought before the Queen's Council for having a great many dangerous books of superstition in his custody. His study was searched by order of the Bishop of London, and the literary treasures of the laborious scholar were ruthlessly overhauled, among them being certain papistical books, which caused Stowe to be regarded with much suspicion. It does not appear that his favourite pursuit supported the antiquarian, or, more properly, the chronicler ; for his trade is said to have been that of a tailor. In 1549 he dwelt near the pump in Aldgate. Stowe's own account of his labours were, that they cost him many a weary winter night's study, many a hard-earned penny and pound, and many a weary mile's travel. His largest work, however, was never published, nor is it known what became of it. The poor historian's lot in age was, sad to relate, the extremity of poverty, aggravated by sickness and bodily infirmity. It was now that the Crown granted Stowe relief of an extraordinary character. A royal letter authorized him to collect alms in certain districts of the kingdom, recommending his case to the consideration of the charitable. Such are the details of Stowe to be gathered from the ample pages of Strype. His monument still exists, or did some years ago, in his parish church of St. Andrew's Undershaft, bearing the good scholar's effigy and a short Latin inscription. It was erected by Elizabeth, his wife. To Stowe succeeded, as chroniclers, Strype, Munday, and Dr. William Stukely, which ends the list of the antiquarian writers of any celebrity.

The earliest investigators of ancient London were Fabian and Arnold. Both these men laid claim to be poets, as well as antiquarians and chroniclers. Fabian was a mercer, a sheriff, and an alderman, who wrote verses-a very indifferent rhymer, according to his biographer, Warton. I doubt if among our modern corporation the city can boast of a poet, unless indeed the metrical advertisements of certain renowned clothing firms should turn out to emanate from one of the body municipal. Fabian, indeed, arouses Warton's wrath by his record of small things, one of his historical anecdotes being, that in the reign of Henry V. a new weathercock was placed on the cross of St. Paul's steeple; but these minute descriptions are the very things that in a modern reader's view give value and interest to Fabian's chronicle. Fabian died in 1512, and in 1521 Arnold's "Chronicle or Customs of London" made its appearance. A curious mixture is this volume, being a kind of literary olla podrida intended to suit the taste of all readers. It contains a catalogue, to commence with, of the mayors and sheriffs, the customs and charters of the City of London. Further on are given receipts to pickle sturgeon, and to make vinegar, ink, and gunpowder; how to raise parsley in an hour (a convenient thing to know, inasmuch as our own horticultural experience has Time has wrought strange changes in the shown us that parsley takes the longest time to Smithfield which all middle-aged persons recome out of the earth of any known herb); the member so well; and ere long we may look for arts of brewing and soap-making; an estimate a busy retail market on its site, buying our beef of the livings in London; an account of the and mutton where formerly sheep bleated and last visitation of St. Magnus's church; the fat oxen lowed; but one memorable memento weight of Essex cheese; and a letter to Car-will still stand, whose walls were in Smithfield

H

« AnteriorContinuar »