be tormented with country neighbours!" forgetful of the drizzly autumnal mornings in Shropshire, when the sight of Lady Pettitoe's family-coach in the avenue has formed the event of the day; and the fourteen miles which her ladyship and Sir Claudius have driven over without a murmur, on the most moonless nights, to meet the judges on the winter assizes, or make up a rubber for the bishop on his visitation! Those two tell-tale knocks have raised an equiknocksial storm in the bosom of the ungrateful marchioness! By the time the poor relation and country neighbour are gone to their short account, and the marchioness is installed in her stately drawing-room for the morning, the knocker became unintermittent. Footmen of all plumage, "black, white, and grey, and all their trumpery;" coaches, britzkas, caleches, chariots, and horsemen, keep up and sustain that damnable iteration. Even after her ladyship's carriage has driven from the door, the uproar continues. "O Plato! O tempora! O mores !" Let it not be supposed that the temporary lull that succeeds while the equipage class of the community is idling in the park, brings more than momentary relief to my poor head-aching wife, or poor heart-aching self. Though the knocker has become for a time in-knockcuous, dinner-parties shortly commence, at the rate of half-a-dozen first-rate cannonades per hour, against half-a-dozen doors in my vicinity. But for that horrible anticipation, it would gladden mine eyes to behold the spruce and trimly elegance of a ducal chariot, turned out for a dinnerparty, with its varnish tags, lace, cocked-hats, and prancing bays, to say nothing of the jolly Silenus, in his towy wig, on the box, and the twin Apollos, in their silk stockings (with patent calves) on the monkey-board behind. As it glanceth like a meteor past my window I should doat upon its brilliancy, but that I know it to be the precursor of a thunder-clap, such as startles one out of one's sleep in the dogdays, after retiring to rest, with the thermometer at 90°. Hitherto I have treated of knockers by themselves, knockers. It remains to consider them when they come upon us like a thief in the night, by the junction of Nox and Erebus. It remains to depict "The double, double, double beat Of the thundering drum !” Cruel is it to be intruded upon by the empty rattle of a vulgar lackey amid one's Platonic beatitudes! But oh! one's peaceful rest! one's happy dreams! After sinking into a snooze upon a conjugal pillow, and finding the plaintive murmurs of our invalid partner deepen into the regular snore of "Tired Nature's boon restorer, balmy sleep," think of being roused from that blessed oblivion of the world and its woes, by a sound as though "Lightning and dread thunder Rent stubborn rocks asunder!" the lightning being the linkman's torch; the thunder the knockturnal uproar of the marchioness's weekly assembly! Reader! you were, perhaps, at the battle of Waterloo? perhaps at the storming of Bhurtpoor? At all events, you have heard the opera of the "Huguenots," or visited the Adelaide Gallery? I beseech you, therefore, to conceive the cannonading of Hougoumont, or the roaring of the opera-roarious Académie de Musique, united with the continuous detonation of Perkins's steam-gun! Such are the orchestral accompaniments of a fashionable fête. From eleven at night till four in the morning, knock! knock! knock! like all the anvils of all the Cyclops! The porter of the Capulets, in Shakspeare's Veronese tragedy, recurs to your mind; and, like the wierd sister, you long to exclaim "Open locks, but, oh! in mercy, most Christian brethren, knock less lustily! What an abuse of common sense! Half-a-dozen servants are in waiting in the marquis's hall, the door whereof stands open. Yet it would be esteemed indecorous in Lady Pettitoe's two footmen to escort her ladyship up the steps, before they had executed on the knocker an obligato movement in D. In the estimation of such people, who has a right to sleep in the vicinity of a ball-giving marchioness? Sleep is an essentially plebeian enjoyment. Sleep costs nothing. Sleep belongs to the beggar on his rug, as well as to the noble in his eider-down; and it is like plucking a blackberry from a bramble to destroy so vulgar and universal a blessing. There is a feeble girl at No. 13, who has been struggling these five months past against a deep decline. To her, indeed, a good night's rest may be important. But, what business have people in decline to live so near a marchioness! To No. 44, opposite, the bishop's widow has just returned, after laying her husband in the grave. But bishops' widows ought to remain in the country. Besides, she may retaliate. She has as good a right to keep the street in a state of frenzy half-adozen of the dark hours as her nobler neighbour. It is true the marchioness, who is accustomed to double-knocks, (the music of her sphere!) would sleep through it all unheeding; nay, on hearing from her maid the morning after her ball, that it has been said in the neighbourhood the noise of her ladyship's knocker was enough to "waken the dead!" she uttered a facetious observation concerning the terrors to the episcopal relict, far from honourable to her weeds. The marchioness seems to imagine that the widow's ought to be a percussion-cap! The tumult of an occasional assembly, however, might be borne with; for "Poppy or mandragora, Or other drowsy syrup of the East," might subdue one's nightcap to patience once a month, or so. It is the ever-recurring nocturnal knock, the fatal summons which once in every blessed night dispels the visions of one's slumber, that forms the severest infliction. Throughout the fashionable season, as I live by bread, not a night, save one, in every seven, that I am not as regularly roused every quarter of an hour from my slumbers by the rappings of my gayer neighbours, as a monk of La Trappe by the recital of a penitential psalm. No sooner have I closed my eyes after the return of the bishop's widow from her early party, than my Lady Jane rattles back from her conversazione. Then comes her husband from the House; then my lord from his club; then (nock ein !) Lord John from his cigar on the steps of Crockford's. In my intervals of feverish rest my poor head seems to go knickety knock, "Like a pebble in Carisbrook well;" reverberating from knocker to knocker, from No. 9 to No. 24, with the new torture of a more cruelly tormented Sisyphus. The nuisance of the knocker, as I have heretofore considered it, regards exclusively the miseries of the great, the wantonness of the wealthy. But knockology has another branch, a withered, or rather withering branch, connected only too closely with the miseries of social life. That branch flourishes at my right hand! That branch sheds eternal gloom over my dwelling from the street-door of No. 11, -bang! bang! bang!-(Hear it not, Duncombe!) When the clock strikes one, it is the awful signal for apparitions. When the knocker strikes one, it is the still more awful signal of-A CREDITOR! Whoever of my gentle readers hears a single knock, is entitled to exclaim, "A dun, for a ducat!" Now, the knocker of my neighbour, Sir John Squander, at No. 11, strikes one every ten minutes, every five,-nay, (about quarter-day,) every minute, from daybreak to nightfall! Before I attack my muffin at breakfast my appetite is sure to be damped by one of these brisk reminders. I seem to hear it with the ears of my unfortunate neighbour. I seem to gaze upon the fellow in a fustian jacket and blue apron, who holds in his hand a narrow slip of paper, containing only that disgraceful memento of financial unpunctuality, the words, "To bill delivered;" the figures under the initials £. s. d. being written, as it were, in characters of fire. At first, these knockers, and these slips paper, come as "single spies," at length, "in battalions!" Some are enclosed, and wafered; some enclosed, and sealed with wax; some left insolently open to the cognizance of the footman. of Some are backed by a lithographed circular, signifying that Messrs. Turbot and Redgill will be obliged to Sir John Squander to settle their small account at his earliest convenience; little suspecting, or, perhaps, suspecting too well, that such a date remits the adjustment of their claim to the day of judgment, i. e. in the Court of Queen's Bench. Some are couched in many lines; as "1835, To bill delivered £. s. d. 78 16 4 143 4 2 1836, To bill delivered 1837, To bill delivered 1838, To bill delivered 1839, To bill delivered 197 2 4 224 4 6 259 8 6 301 4 8 1840, To bill delivered Interest on the same, 357 0 0 44 3 0 357 0 0 £401 3 0" But the most unsatisfactory of all are delivered by lean and hungrylooking mechanics, evidently in want of their money; or by care-crazed women, in patched gowns, of whom it may be said, as of Romeo's apothecary, that "Sharp penury has worn them to the bone." And each of these miserable claimants is announced by a single knock!-a knock as painfully distinct in my ears as the click of one's particular friend's particularly fine Manton, when levelled against one's life on Wimbledon Common! I know them all by heart! by head and soul! I know the knocker of the tax-gatherer, for it is surely to be followed by the harsh tones of governmental authority. I know the knocker of the parochial rates, which is sharp, succinct, and menacing. I know the knock of the water-rates, which is slovenly and grumbling. I know the knock of the interested tailor of 1835, which is impatient and desperate, as who should say, "Here I am again at your door, for the one hundred and nineteenth time." (Surely, by the way, " deaf as a door-nail" must allude to the impafribility of a door infested by a single knocker.) I beg my reader to believe that such knocks as these afflict my nervous system far more profoundly than the knocks in as many chapters, as a Presbyterian sermon! I expire of them; they form the memento banco Regina of my banquet of life! Between Sir John Squander and the marquis, I abide, as it were, between Dives and Lazarus! Pounds, shillings, and pence, are eternally knocked into my head. Vain are the soothings of Plato! Vain the Hoffman's elixir of my dispirited wife! I can never exorcise from my parlour the evil spirit called Mammon, conjured up by those cruel warnings! Sir Astley Cooper, when roused from his slumbers at three in the morning by the Marquis of Waterford's bullets hitting the face of the clock in Trinity Chapel (which forms so capital a target from Limmer's Hotel), was not more irritated in mind and body than I, when roused from the blessedness of sleep by those frightful detonations. Another, as I live! Another long, narrow letter, and two burlylooking men in waiting at the corner of the street! "Another and another still succeeds!" I'll hear no more! There is a Serpentine River! there is a Waterloo Bridge! Anything rather than this damnable iteration. Like Gribonelle, I will throw myself into the river for shelter from the rain! I will encounter EREBUS itself to escape from KNOCKS. THE GENUINE REMAINS OF WILLIAM LITTLE. WILLIAM (or, as it is pronounced in the dialect of North Wilts, Willem, or Willum) Little was an old man when the editor of these fragments was a boy. He was a Wiltshire shepherd, and flourished when Mechanics' Institutes were not known. If his anecdotes are, therefore, without polish, and his maxims not in accordance with those of the present polished days, the fault is not his. It is true these "genuine remaines" have not the profundity of Bacon, nor the abstruseness of Locke, nor the egotism of Montaigne; but still there are among them some things which the present race may lay to heart. I therefore beseech the candid reader to peruse them with attention; and he may perchance be as fortunate as the happy scholar who dug up the soul of the deceased licentiate, while his companion went on his way deriding that which he could not understand.-PAUL PINDAR. I. THERE be two zarts o' piple in this here world ov ourn: they as works ael day loang and ael the year round, and they as dwon't work at ael. The difference is jist a graat a-year, and they as dwon't work at ael gets the graat-that's zartin! II. It's oondervul to me how thengs do move about whenever a body's got a drap o' zummut in 's yead. Last harrest, a'ter zupper at t' house yander, I walked whoam by myzelf, and zeed the moon and the zeven stars dancin' away like vengeance. Then they there girt elmen trees in the close was a dancin' away like Bill Iles and his mates at a morris. "My zarvice to 'e," zays I; "I haups you won't tread on my twoes;" zo I went drough a sheard in th' hedge, instead o' goin' drough th' geat. Well, when I got whoam, I managed to vind the kay-hole o' th' doower-but 'twas a lang time before I could get un to bide still enough, and got up stayers. Massy upon us! the leetle table (I zeed un very plain by the light o' th' moon) was runnin' round the room like mad, and there was th' two owld chayers runnin' a'ter he, and, by and by, round comes the bed a'ter they two. "Ha! ha!" zays I, "that's very vine; but how be I to lay down while you cuts zich capers?" Well, the bed comed round dree times, and the vowerth time I drowd myzelf flump atop ov un ; but in the marnin' I vound myzelf laying on the vloor, wi' ael me duds on! I never could make out this. III. I've allus bin as vlush o' money as a twoad is o' veathers; but, if ever I gets rich, I'll put it ael in Ziszeter bank, and not do as owld Smith, the miller, did, comin' whoam vrom market one nite. Martal avraid o' thieves a was, zo a puts his pound-bills and ael th' money a'd got about un, in a hole in the wall, and the next marnin' a' couldn't remember whereabouts 'twas, and had to pull purty nigh a mile o' wall down before a' could vind it. Stoopid owld wosbird! IV. Owld Jan Wilkins used to zay he allus cut 's stakes, when a went a hedgin', too lang; bekaze a' cou'd easily cut 'em sharter if a' wanted, but a' cou'dn't make um langer if 'em was too shart. Zo zays I; zo I allus axes vor more than I wants. Iv I gets that, well and good; but if I axes vor little, and gets less, it's martal akkerd to ax a zecond time, d' ye kneow! V. Piple zay as how they gied th' neam o' moonrakers to us Wiltshire vauk, bekase a passel o' stupid bodies one night tried to rake the shadow o' th' moon out o' th' bruk, and tuk't vor a thin cheese. But that's th' wrong ind o' th' story. The chaps az was doin' o' this was smugglers, and they was a vishin' up zome kegs o' sperrits, and only purtended to rake out a cheese! Zo the exciseman az axed 'em the questin had his grin at 'em; but they had a good laugh at he, when 'em got whoame the stuff! VI. Everybody kneows owld Barnzo, as wears his yead o' one zide. One night a was coming whoame vrom market, and vell off's hos onto the road, a was so drunk. Some chaps coming by picked un up, and zeein' his yead was al o' one zide, they thought 'twas out o' jint, and began to pull 't into 'ts pleace agen, when the owld bwoy roar'd out, "Barn zo, (born so) I tell 'e!" Zo a' was allus called owld Barnzo ever a'terwards. VII. Measter Tharne used to zay as how more vlies was cot wi' zugar or honey than wi' vinegar, and that even a body's enemies med be gammoned wi' vine words. Jim Pinniger zeemed to thenk zo too, when a run agin the jackass one dark night. Jem tuk th' beawst vor th' devil, and cot un by th' ear. "Zaat's yer harn, zur," zays Jem. * Soft's your horn, sir. |