Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

most obvious thing in the world. I'll always skim hereafter." We dreamt once that a woman set up some Flying Rooms, as a person does a tavern. We went to try them, and nothing could be more satisfactory and common-place on all sides. The landlady welcomed us with a curtsey, hoped for friends and favours, &c., and then showed us into a spacious room, not round, as might be expected, but long, and after the usual dining fashion. "Perhaps, Sir," said she, "you would like to try the room.' Upon which we made no more ado, but sprung up and made two or three genteel circuits; now taking the height of it, like a house-lark, and then cutting the angles, like a swallow. "Very pretty flying indeed," said we, "and very moderate."

[ocr errors]

A house for the purpose of taking flights in, when the open air was to be had for nothing, is fantastic enough; but what shall we say to those confoundings of all time, place, and substance, which are constantly happening to persons of any creativeness of stomach? Thus, you shall meet a friend in a gateway, who besides being your friend shall be your enemy; and besides being Jones or Tomkins, shall be a bull; and besides asking you in, shall oppose your entrance. Nevertheless you are not at all surprised; or if surprised, you are only so at something not surprising. To be Tomkins and a bull at once, is the most ordinary of common-places; but that, being a bull, he should have horns, is what astonishes you; and you are amazed at his not being in Holborn or the Strand, where he never lived. To be in two places at once is not uncommon to a dreamer. He will also be young and old at the same time, a schoolboy and a man; will live many years in a few minutes, like the Sultan who dipped his head in the tub of water; will be full of zeal and dialogue upon some matter of indifference; go to the opera with a dish under his arm, to be in the fashion; talk faster in verse than prose; and ask a set of horses to a musical party, telling them that he knows they will be pleased, because blue is the general wear, and Mozart has gone down to Gloucestershire, to fit up a house for Epaminondas.

It is a curious proof of the concern which body has in these vagaries, that when you dream of any particular limb being in pain, you shall most likely have gone to sleep in a posture that affects it. A weight on the feet will produce dreams in which you are rooted to the ground, or caught by a goblin out of the earth. A cramped hand or leg shall get you tortured in the Inquisition; and a head too much thrown back, give you the sense of an interminable visitation of stifling. The nightmare, the heaviest punisher of repletion, will visit some persons merely for lying on their backs; which shows how much it is concerned in a particular condition of the frame. Sometimes it lies upon the chest like a vital lump. Sometimes it comes in the guise

of a horrid dwarf, or malignant little hag, who grins in your teeth and will not let you rise. Its most common enormity is to pin you to the ground with excess of fear, while something dreadful is coming up, a goblin or a mad bull. Sometimes the horror is of a very elaborate description, such as being spell-bound in an old house, which has a mysterious and shocking possessor. He is a gigantic deformity, and will pass presently through the room in which you are sitting. He comes, not a giant, but a dwarf, of the most strange and odious description, hairy, spider-like, and chuckling. His mere passage is unbearable. The agony arises at every step. You would protest against so malignant a sublimation of the shocking, but are unable to move or speak. At length you give loud and long-drawn groans, and start up with a præternatural effort, awake.

Mr. Coleridge, whose sleeping imagination is proportioned to his waking, has described a fearful dream of mental and bodily torture. As the beautiful poems of Christabel, &c. which accompany it, seem to have been too imaginative to be understood by the critics, and consequently have wanted the general attention which the town are pleased to give or otherwise according to the injunctions of those gentlemen, we shall indulge ourselves in extracting the whole of it. It is entitled the Pains of Sleep.

Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips on bended knees;
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to love compose,
In humble trust mine eye-lids close,
With reverential resignation,

No wish conceived, no thought express'd!
Only a sense of supplication,

A sense o'er all my soul imprest,
That I am weak, yet not unblest,
Since in me, round me, everywhere
Eternal Strength and Wisdom are.

But yester-night I pray'd aloud
In anguish and in agony,
Up-starting from the fiendish crowd
Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me;
A lurid light, a trampling throng,
Sense of intolerable wrong,

And whom I scorn'd, those only strong!
Thirst of revenge, the powerless will,
Still baffled, and yet burning still!
Desire with loathing strangely mix'd
On wild or hateful objects fix'd.
Fantastic passions! madd'ning brawl
And shame and terror over all!
Deeds to be hid which were not hid,
Which all confused I could not know,
Whether I suffer'd, or I did:
For all seem'd guilt, remorse or woe,
My own or others still the same,
Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame!

So two nights pass'd: the night's dismay
Sadden'd and stunn'd the coming day.
Sleep, the wide blessing, seem'd to me
Distemper's worst calamity.

The third night, when my own loud scream
Had waked me from the fiendish dream,

O'ercome with sufferings strange and wild,

I wept as I had been a child;

And having thus by tears subdued

My anguish to a milder mood,

Such punishments, I said, were due

To natures deepliest stain'd with sin:

For aye entempesting anew

Th' unfathomable hell within
The horror of their deeds to view,
To know and loathe, yet wish to do!
Such griefs with such men well agree,
But wherefore, wherefore fall on me?
To be beloved is all I need,

And whom I love, I love indeed.

This is the dream of a poet, and does not end with the question of a philosopher. We do not pretend to determine why we should have any pains at all. It is enough for us, in our attempt to diminish them, that there are more pleasant than painful excitements in the world, and that many pains are the causes of pleasure. But what if these pains are for the same end? What if all this heaping and war of agonies were owing to the author's having taken too little exercise, or eaten a heavier supper than ordinary ? But then the proportion! What proportion, it may be asked, is there between the sin of neglected exercise and such infernal visitations as these? We answer,-the proportion, not of the particular offence, but of the general consequences. We have before observed, but it cannot be repeated too often, that Nature, charitable as any poet or philosopher can be upon the subject of merit and demerit, &c. seems to insist, beyond anything else, upon our taking care of the mould in which she has cast us; or in other words, of that ground-work of all comfort, that box which contains the jewel of existence, our health. On turning to the preceding poem in the book, entitled Kubla Khan, we perceive that in his introduction to that pleasanter vision, the author speaks of the present one as the dream of pain and disease. Kubla Khan, which was meditated under the effects of opium, he calls "a psychological curiosity." It is so; but it is also, and still more, a somatological or bodily one; for body will effect these things upon the mind, when the mind can do no such thing upon itself; and therefore the shortest, most useful, and most philosophical way of proceeding, is to treat the phenomenon in the manner most serviceable to the health and comfort of both. We subjoin the conclusion of Kubla Khan, as beginning with an exquisite piece of music, and ending with a most poetical phantasm :

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw;
It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she play'd,
Singing of Mount Abora.

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight 'twould win me, That with music loud and long

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry Beware, Beware,
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread;
For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drank of the milk of Paradise.

If horrible and fantastic dreams are the most perplexing, there are pathetic ones more saddening. A friend dreaming of the loss of his friend, or a lover of that of his mistress, or a kinsman of that of a dear relation, is steeped in the bitterness of death. To wake and find it not true, what a delicious sensation is that! On the other hand, to dream of a friend or a beloved relative restored to us, to live over again the hours of childhood at the knee of a beloved mother, to be on the eve of marrying an affectionate mistress, with a thousand other joys snatched back out of the grave, and too painful to dwell upon,-what a dreary rush of sensation comes like a shadow upon us when we wake! How true, and divested of all that is justly called conceit in poetry, is that termination of Milton's sonnet on dreaming of his deceased wife,—

But oh, as to embrace me she inclined,

I waked; she fled; and day brought back my night.

It is strange that so good and cordial & critic as Warton should think this a mere conceit on his blindness. An allusion to his blindness may or may not be involved in it; but the sense of returning shadow on the mind is true to nature, and must have been experienced by every one who has lost a person dear to him. There is a beautiful sonnet by Camoens on a similar occasion; a small canzone by Sanazzaro, which ends with saying, that although he waked and missed his lady's hand in his, he still tried to cheat himself by keeping his eyes shut; and three divine dreams of Laura by Petrarch, Sonnet xxxiv. Vol. 2. Sonnet LXXIX. ib. and the canzone beginning

Quando il soave mio fido conforto.

But we must be cautious how we think of the poets on this most poetical subject, or we shall write three articles instead of one. As it is, we have not left ourselves room for some very agreeable dreams, which we meant to have taken between these our gallant and imaginative sheets. They must be interrupted, as they are apt to be, like the young lady's in the Adcentures of a Lapdog, who blushing divinely, had just uttered the words, "My Lord, I am wholly yours," when she was awaked by the jumping up of that officious little puppy.

LVIII-A HUMAN ANIMAL, AND THE OTHER EXTREME.

WE met the other day with the following description of an animal of quality in a Biographical Dictionary that was published in the year 1767, and which is one of the most amusing and spirited publications of the kind that we remember to have seen. The writer does not give his authority for this particular memoir, so that it was probably furnished from his own knowledge; but that the account is a true one, is evident. Indeed, with the exception of one or two eccentricities of prudence which rather lean to the side of an excess of instinct, it is but an individual description, referring to a numerous class of the same nature, that once flourished with horn and hound in this country, and specimens of which are to be found here and there still.* The title we have put at the head of it is not quite correct and exclusive enough as a definition; since, properly speaking, we lords of the creation are all human animals; but the mere animal, or bodily and breathing faculty, is combined in us more or less with intellect and sentiment; and of these refinements of the perception, few bipeds that have arrived at the dignity of a coat and boots, have partaken so little as the noble squire before us. How far some of us, who take ourselves for very rational persons, do or do not go beyond him, we shall perhaps see in the course of our remarks.

"The Honourable William Hastings, a gentleman of a very singular character," says our informant, "lived in the year 1638, and by his quality was son, brother, and uncle to the Earls of Huntingdon. He was peradventure an original in our age, or rather the copy of our ancient nobility, in hunting, not in warlike times.

"He was very low, very strong, and very active, of a reddish flaxen hair; his clothes green cloth, and never all worth, when new, five pounds.

"His house was perfectly of the old fashion, in the midst of a large park well stocked with deer, and near the house rabbits to serve his kitchen; many fish-ponds; great store of wood and timber; a bowling-green in it, long but narrow, and full of high ridges, it being never levelled since it was plowed: they used round sand bowls; and it had a banqueting house like a stand, a large one, built in a tree. "He kept all manner of sport hounds, that run buck, fox, hare, otter, and badger; and hawks, long and short-wing'd. He had all sorts of nets for fish; he had a walk in the New Forest; and in the manor of Christ Church: this last supplied him with red deer, sea and

Since writing this, we have discovered that the original is in Hutchins's History of Dorsetshire. See Gilpin's Forest Scenery, or Drake's Shakspeare and his Times. It is said to have been written by the first Earl of Shaftesbury.

river fish. And indeed all his neighbours' grounds and royalties were free to him; who bestowed all his time on these sports, but what he borrowed to caress his neighbours' wives and daughters; there being not a woman, in all his walks, of the degree of a yeoman's wife, and under the age of forty, but it was extremely her fault, if he was not intimately acquainted with her. This made him very popular; always speaking kindly to the husband, brother, or father, who was to boot very welcome to his house whenever he came.

"There he found beef, pudding, and small beer in great plenty; a house not so neatly kept as to shame him or his dusty shoes; the great hall strewed with marrow-bones, full of hawks, perches, hounds, spaniels, and terriers; the upper side of the hall hung with the fox skins of this and the last year's killing; here and there a pole-cat intermixed; gamekeepers' and hunters' poles in great abundance.

"The parlour was a great room as properly furnished. On a great hearth, paved with brick, lay some terriers, and the choicest hounds and spaniels. Seldom but two of the great chairs had litters of young cats in them, which were not to be disturbed; he having always three or four attending him at dinner, and a little white round stick of fourteen inches long lying by his trencher, that he might defend such meat as he had no mind to part with to them.

"The windows, which were very large, served for places to lay his arrows, cross-bows, stonebows, and other such like acoutrements. The corners of the room, full of the best chose hunting and hawking poles. An oyster table at the lower end; which was of constant use, twice a day, all the year round. For he never failed to eat oysters, before dinner and supper, through all seasons: the neighbouring town of Pool supplied him with them.

"The upper part of the room had two small tables and a desk, on the one side of which was a Church Bible, and, on the other, the Book of Martyrs. On the tables were hawks'-hoods, bells, and such like; two or three old green hats, with their crowns thrust in, so as to hold ten or a dozen eggs, which were of a pheasant kind of poultry, which he took much care of, and fed himself. In the whole of the desk were store of tobacco-pipes that had been used.

"On one side of this end of the room was the door of a closet, wherein stood the strong beer and the wine, which never came thence but in single glasses, that being the rule of the house exactly observed. For he never exceeded in drink, or permitted it.

"On the other side was the door into an old chapel, not used for devotion. The pulpit, as the safest place, was never wanting of a cold chine of beef, venison pasty, gammon of bacon, or great apple-pye, with thick crust extremely baked. His table cost him not much, though it was good to eat at.

"His sports supplied all but beef and mutton; except Fridays, when he had the best of salt fish (as well as other fish) he could get; and was the day his neighbours of best quality most visited him. He never wanted a London pudding, and always sung it in with My peart lies therein-a.' He drank a glass or two of wine at meals; very often syrup of gilliflowers in his sack; and had always a tun glass without feet, stood by him, holding a pint of small beer, which he often stirred with rosemary.

"He was well-natured, but soon angry; calling his servants bastards and cuckoldy knaves; in one of which he often spoke truth to his own knowledge, and sometimes in both, though of the same man. He lived to be an hundred; never lost his eye-sight, but always wrote and read without spectacles; and got on horseback without help. Until past four-score, he rode to the death of a stag as well as any."

It is clear, that this worthy personage was nothing more than a kind of beaver or badger in human shape. We imagine him haunting the neighbourhood in which he lived, like a pet creature, who had acquired a certain Ægyptian godship among the natives; now hunting for his fish, now for his flesh, now fawning after his uncouth fashion upon a pretty girl, and now snarling and contesting a bone with his dogs. We imagine him the animal principle personified; a symbol on horseback; a jolly dog sitting upright at dinner, like a hieroglyphic on a pedestal.

Buffon has a subtle answer to those who argue for the rationality of bees. He says that the extreme order of their proceedings, and the undeviating apparent forethought with which they anticipate and provide for a certain geometrical necessity in a part of the structure of their hives, are only additional proofs of the force of instinct. They have an instinct for the order, and an instinct for the anticipation; and they prove that it is not reason, by never striking out anything new. The same thing is observable in our human animal. What would be reason or choice in another man, is to be set down in him to poverty of ideas. If Tasso had been asked the reason of his always wearing black, he would probably have surprised the inquirer by a series of observations on colour, and dignity, and melancholy, and the darkness of his fate; but if Petrarch or Boccaccio had discussed the matter with him, he might have changed it to purple. A lady, in the same manner, wears black, because it suits her complexion, or is elegant at all times, or because it is at once piquant and superior. But in spring, she may choose to put on the colours of the season, and in summer to be gaudier with the butterfly. Our squire had an instinct towards the colour of green, because he saw it about him. He took it from what he lived in, like a cameleon, and never changed it, because he could live in no other sphere. We see that

his green suit was never worth five pounds; and nothing, we dare say, could have induced him to let it mount up to that sum. He would have had it grow on him, if he could, like a green monkey. Thus again with his bowling-green. It was not penuriousness that hindered him from altering it, but he had no more idea of changing the place than the place itself. As change of habit is frightful to some men, from vivacity of affection or imagination, and the strangeness which they anticipate in the novelty, so Mr. Hastings was never tempted out of a custom, because he had no idea of anything else. He would no more think of altering the place he burrowed in, than a tortoise or a wild rabbit. He was feræ naturæ,a regular beast of prey; though he mingled something of the generosity of the lion with the lurking of the fox and the mischievous sporting of the cat. He would let other animals feed with him, only warning them off occasionally with that switch of his, instead of a claw. He had the same liberality of instinct towards the young of other creatures, as we see in the hen and the goat. He would take care of their eggs, if he had a mind; or furnish them with milk. His very body was badger-like. It was, “very low, very strong, and very active ;" and he had a coarse fell of hair. A good housewife might have called his house a kennel, without being abusive. What the ladies of the Huntingdon family thought of it, if ever they came to see him, we do not know; but next to hearing such a fellow as Squire Western talk, must have been the horror of his human kindred in treading those menageries, his hall and parlour. They might turn the lines of Chaucer into an exclamation :

What hawkis sitten on the perch above! What houndis liggen on the floor adown! Then the marrow-bones, the noise, and, to a delicate aucle, the sense of danger! Conceive a timid stranger, not very welcome, obliged to pass through the great hall. The whole animal world is up. The well-mouthed hounds begin barking, the mastiff bays, the terriers snap, the hawks sidle and stare, the poultry gobble, the cats growl and up with their backs. At last, the Hastings makes his appearance, and laughs like a goblin.

Three things are specially observable in our hero: first, that his religion as well as literature was so entirely confined to faith, that it allowed him to turn his household chapel into a larder, and do anything else he pleased, short of not ranking the Bible and Book of Martyrs with his other fixtures :-second, that he carried his prudential instincts to a pitch unusual in a country squire, who can rarely refrain from making extremes meet with humanity in this instance:-and third, that his proneness to the animal part of love, never finding him in a condition to be so brutal, as drinking renders a

gallant of this sort, left himself as well as others in sufficient good humour, not only to get him forgiven by the females, but to act kindly and be tolerated by the men. He was as temperate in his liquor as one of his cats, drinking only to quench thirst, and leaving off when he had enough. This perhaps was partly owing to his rank, which did not render it necessary to his importance to be emulous with his bottle among the squires. As to some grave questions connected with the promiscuous nature of his amours, an animal so totally given up to his instincts as he was, can hardly be held responsible upon such points; though they are worth the consideration of those who in their old age undertake to be moral as well as profligate. If Mr. Hastings's notion was good and even useful, so far as it showed the natural good-humour of that passion in human beings, where sickness or jealousy is out of the question, in every other respect it was as poor and paltry as could be. There was not a single idea in it beyond one of his hounds. It was entirely gross and superficial, without sentiment, without choice, without a thousand sensations of pleasure and the return of it, without the least perception of a beauty beyond the mere absence of age. The most idiotical scold in the village, "under forty," was to him a desirable object. The most loveable woman in the world above it, was lost upon him. Such lovers do not even enjoy the charms they suppose. They do not see a twentieth part of the external graces. They criticise beauty in the language of a horse-jockey; and the jockey, or the horse himself, knows just as much about it as they.

In short, to be candid on all sides with the very earthy memory of the Honourable Mr. William Hastings, we take a person of his description to be a good specimen of the animal part of the human nature, and chiefly on this account, that the animal preserves its health. There indeed it has something to say for itself; nor must we conceal our belief, that upon this ground alone, the Hastings must have had sensations in the course of his life, which many an intellectual person might envy. His perceptions must have been of a vague sort, but they were in all probability exquisitely clear and unalloyed. He must have had all the pleasure from the sunshine and the fresh air, that a healthy body without a mind in it can have; and we may guess from the days of childhood, what those feelings may resemble, in their pleasantness, as well as vagueness. At the age of a hundred he was able to read and write without spectacles; not better perhaps than he did at fifteen, but as well. At a hundred, he was truly an old boy, and no more thought of putting on spectacles than an eagle. Why should he? His blood had run clear for a century with exercise and natural living. He had not baked it black and "heavy thick"

over a fire, nor dimmed the windows of his perception with the smoke.

But he wanted a soul to turn his perceptions to their proper account?-He did so. Let us then, who see more than he did, contrive to see fair play between body and mind. It is by observing the separate extremes of perfection, to which body and mind may arrive, in those who do not now know to unite both, that we may learn how to produce a human being more enviable than either the healthiest of foxhunters or the most unearthly of saints. It is remarkable, that the same ancient family, which, among the variety and fineness of its productions, put forth this specimen of bodily humanity, edified the world not long after with as complete a specimen of the other half of human nature. Mr. William Hastings' soul seems to have come too late for his body, and to have remained afterwards upon earth in the shape of his fair kinswoman, the Lady Elizabeth Hastings, daughter of Theophilus, seventh Earl of Huntingdon. An account of her follows that of her animal kinsman, and is a most extraordinary contrast. This is the lady who is celebrated by Sir Richard Steele in the Tatler under the name of Aspasia,—a title which must have startled her a little. But with the elegance of the panegyric she would have found it hard not to be pleased, notwithstanding her modesty. "These ancients would be as much astonished to see in the same age so illustrious a pattern to all who love things praiseworthy, as the divine Aspasia. Methinks I now see her walking in her garden like our first parent, with unaffected charms, before beauty had spectators, and bearing celestial, conscious virtue in her aspect. Her countenance is the lively picture of her mind, which is the seat of honour, truth, compassion, knowledge, and innocence :—

• Thore dwells the scorn of vice and pity too.' "In the midst of the most ample fortune, and veneration of all that beheld and knew her, without the least affectation, she consults retirement, the contemplation of her own being, and that supreme power which bestowed it. Without the learning of schools, or knowledge of a long course of arguments, she goes on in a steady course of virtue, and adds to the severity of the last age all the freedom and ease of the present. The language and mien of a court she is possessed of in the highest degree; but the simplicity and humble thoughts of a cottage are her more welcome entertainment. Aspasia is a female philosopher, who does not only live up to the resignation of the most retired lives of the ancient sages, but also the schemes and plans which they thought beautiful, though inimitable. This lady is the most exact economist, without appearing busy; the most strictly virtuous, without tasting the praise of it; and shuns applause with as much

« ZurückWeiter »