her, and said without prelude or preface, "Sally! | rectory, accompanied by two police-officers. The will you marry me?" "Lord, sir," cried the mother tremulously, "what do you mean?" "Ask me no questions, or I leave the house," said he, more firmly than impetuously. "Will you marry me, child, or will you not?" doctor and Sally were fast asleep; for they had been (backward and forward) eight miles the day before. Mr. Samuel was examining the heel of a horse: he heard the visitors, and, without looking at them, asked them roughly what they wanted. 'Margaret Pollock," said one in a clear voice; She looked at her mother. "Sally, if the doctor another said, "Parson Chisholm." is in earnest, you must not say no." "Put on your Sunday clothes then; and, Rebecca! while she is putting them on, come you with me." The mother went out with him. "Step in.. Will the girl come or not? What a quantity of clothes she must be putting on!" The mother, holding up two pins, to hint that she could stick them in, if requisite, as they went along, called her thrice, with an admixture of coaxing and reproof. She descended the staircase with timidity, and would have walked by the side of the carriage: but the rector caught her up, and (somewhat asthmatically) lifted her in. He followed; and, putting his arm partly round her, although on the cushion, that he might not be indecorous, he ordered his coachman to drive to Mr. Gamaliel Shark's at Elvington. Alighting there, leaving the daughter and mother in the chaise, he told Mr. Shark that he came for a licence; and, after the necessary questions, he received it. "And now, sir," said the doctor, "are you ready to unite us?" Mr. Shark assented: they were united: they returned home at the moment of dinner-time. The mother was left at her own door very carefully, with an affectionate kiss from the daughter, and not without a generous declaration from the doctor that he would really have made her a present, if he had found in his pocket any less piece than a half-crown. The bridegroom placed Sally by his side quietly. The son was civil, and said, on their arrival, "I suppose, Sally, you have said your catechism better to-day than usual?" She looked at her husband. "Yes," answered he placidly, "and read a page more." After supper he called for his bed-candle, and, wishing Lady Fosset a good-night, conducted Sally upstairs. The elder bride and younger bridegroom at top and bottom looked steadfastly at each other. "Let him go!" said Mr. Samuel, "let him have his way and will: I did think better of the wench: she had hardly a curtesy for me. Rectory or laundry, barn or stable, what matters it! it comes to the same thing at last." "O fie for shame !" cried her ladyship, looking at him and smiling through her fingers, "I can not sit and hear this." She tripped across the room, opened the door, turned round again, and cried, "Positively I have a great mind to lock you out, you rude creature!" Mr. Samuel ruminated. Early the next morning a bailiff entered the "What have you to do with me, pray !" shouted he furiously. "Nothing, sir, if you pay these trifles. You have married Margaret Pollock." "Not I: no such woman has been married in my parish." "Mr. Chisholm, you have taken as your lawful wife Margaret (otherwise called Peg) Pollock." "Sirrah!" said the divine, going up to him with clenched fist, "I would have you to know, I led to the altar Lady Fosset." "You could not have done better," said the officer, "but she wanted no leading that way. Howsoever we take possession of the rectory." Mr. Chisholm ran to his father, whom he awakened. Sally still slept; as being little used to the motion of the carriage; and I hardly know a rougher road than the road to Elvington, considering it is so flat. "Father," said Mr. Samuel, "take the resignation". . throwing it on the bed. While the bailiffs were in the house, he mounted his horse, rode into Rutlandshire, and exchanged his curacy with a sporting friend, whom he had known at college. The doctor was surprised to see a neat young clergyman introduce himself the next Friday, and to hear a eulogy on his son's liberality, in giving a curacy of a hundred a-year for one of seventy, when the hounds were at equal distances; and in return was never so uncivil as to gainsay him until a whole twelvemonth had elapsed, when he complimented him on his horses and sermons, his bold leaps and impressive delivery, and on fifty pounds going farther at Sandyhurst than seventy at Grantham. "I believe, sir, you will find," added he, "that here are five ten-pound Bank of England notes: do me the favour just to cast your eyes over them, and to give me a receipt." Lady Fosset, by the account of the bailiff and his attendants, had been a street-walker, a kept mistress, and an actress. Her associates at Sandyhurst were of the same strolling company. She escaped by putting on the riding-coat of a groom; exercising first the functions of a butler, taking care of the plate; and not forgetting in the performance of this service, that her husband had presented her a brilliant ring and some other ornaments, rich almost as any of those which had devolved on the family of Sir Nathaniel. Seeing her husband gallop off on Blaze, she was contented to mount the horse whose fetlock or hoof had excited such suspicion in her lord, and which he was examining when his guests entered. They obtained nothing from the rector. "My son was my curate," said he; " of his wife I know nothing. Take him ; take is the rectory-house, and the rectory is mine." They grumbled: they begged a breakfast, as nobody was up: the rector held his spread hand before his face, and looked aside. her; but touch a tin kettle on your peril. This wager, and which he feared he might lose by want of punctuality. At dinner he told the company that, whatever they might think of it, he never in his born days was the man to be abashed by anybody, and that he defied any soul alive to prove he had been choused of one penny by the old carrion. After the harvest a company of players applied to the magistrates for permission to open a theatre at Sandyhurst, one night only: it was granted. They acted a farce entitled The Two Rectors, and were committed to bridewell for an attack on the church. Not long afterward, it was discovered that the stratagem introductory to the marriage had been devised by a young gentleman who was fond of theatricals, and no less fond of the young lady who played the niece. The inexperience and giddiness of this prodigal Mr. Chisholm had turned to account at the university, two years before, not without a few sarcasms on his folly, and the inauspicious boast conveyed in the words, "I shall make him remember his rubbers." Hearing that the reverend gentleman was now resident in a village near Grantham, and well surmising that on market-days and fairs he would be bustling about the town, he drove his curricle thither on the great horse-fair, accompanied by his mistress, the niece; and, meeting Mr. Chisholm in the crowd, he drew up his horses, inquired after the health of Lady Fosset, and expressed an earnest wish to pay her his respects. "Lookye now, Mr. Randal," said the curate, "If you ar' n't off the ground in a twinkling, I'll make the place too hot to hold you." "I don't doubt your interest in a place too hot to hold me, Mr. Chisholm! but I appeal to the gentlemen here present whether my language was other than civil and friendly." The fashionable young traveller was cheered heartily: he was declared to be an over-match for the parson, and his shrewdness in a minute had drawn the clerical mouth awry. Observing the advantage he had gained, he appealed to every lady who did him the unexpected and unmerited honour of listening to him, and who by such politeness had rendered the present hour the brightest of his life, whether a syllable had escaped his lips which could possibly shock the modesty of the most delicate among them, or could justly wound the feelings of the reverend gentleman, whose sensibility was surely too acute for the occasion. "Cute!" cried a farmer with thin yellow whiskers and white eyebrows. "Cute! 'Sblood! but you have the parson under the short rib there, master! You've doubled him up with that wiper." "Permit me, gentlemen," said Mr. Randal, "permit to relate the few facts I have collected on the road concerning Mr. Chisholm's adventure." "There's a cross-buttocker for ye!" cried again the same orator as before. "Venture you may well call it. The parson has mettle; but what a main did he throw on your game! my eyes!" Mr. Chisholm would have returned homeward, but he had promised to meet somebody at the ordinary, to receive a guinea which he had won in a "But, parson! can you marry again?" was the interrogation of the feeder next him. "Who the devil has the stomach to eat after such a choker?" squeaked a fat man opposite. "Right!" said his son. "Nevertheless, the spring physic has sweated you, parson !" "Damned ungenteel!" cried Mr. Chisholm, "to talk about physic at dinner-time. I'll take the sense of the company upon it; is it not so? It would cost a young hound his best appetite. And so, gentlemen, I'm off." At which words he emptied his bottle; and rising (as the cloth was being removed) stiffly and sorely, whistled, wiped his forehead, and drew up with two smart twitches the buckskin from behind. Toward the end of the year the doctor sold the perpetual advowson of the rectory. He did not calculate on the grand climacteric or its effects, and died about fourteen months after his marriage, leaving only Porphyrogenitus the fruit of it. He called his infant by that name, declaring that among all the names he knew he never knew one but had many rogues under it, and that he was almost out of humour with his own. He bequeathed his whole property to his children by his last wife, to be equally divided among males and females, reserving a maintenance for his widow of one hundred pounds yearly, on condition that she never married again. I found his successor an unaffected, quiet, good young man; rather idle, and therefore he often visited me at my cottage, and was surprised to see how straight I drew the lines for my winter cabbage, and thought the string a most ingenious contrivance. His sister was fond of walking in the green lane, and said to me the second time I found her there, "O, what a mercy it is, Mr. Normanby, that Miss Penelope left the hollies! they are so covered with woodbine and travellers'-joy! It seems never to have been a lane; here are no marks of wheel or horse-shoe; it is as hollow as an apple-scoop; and a sheep could not lie crosswise on it comfortably." Le Doux. The story would end abruptly if it ended thus. Normanby. Yet thus it must end. She has twelve thousand pounds, like her brother. Le Doux. Indeed, my dear sir; I did not ask about the fortune. I have no designs upon her, and will abstain from mentioning it in the country to which I am going. Normanby. I could not walk but I met her: she has done me as much mischief as an Age of Reason. A second time I left my country; and it was for her. Le Doux. And, if am not greatly mistaken, it is for her you are a second time going back. Normanby. What can be done? Her brother will have me in the parish. Le Doux. I wish Lady Glengrin and Sir Firebrace were ready for breakfast: I am starving now you have concluded. to the people of Ireland, in general as orderly and loyal as any in the United Kingdom; that if a little excess had been committed, it was rather the result of conviviality than of discontent; and he trusted that what he had risen to state, was a triumphant answer to the malicious and disaffected in England. He then told a story about a mail-coach and a fur-cap, so convincing to the simplest understanding, that the House of Commons voted unanimously any inquiry into the state of Ireland quite unnecessary and useless: unfortunately, he added that it might be dangerous at the present juncture; which, out of doors, raised some alarm. . . . The Swiss, having seen the sailor and his master twice in conversation, and unwilling that any but himself should be familiar with so great a personage, whispered to Mr. Normanby the secret of his lord's dignity, and rejoiced at the impression of his whisper. Afterward there always was civility, always frankness, but never confidence, never conversation. Le Doux on his part was just as a man is who has read a novel: he has done with it. Princes and kings are often kind, both from constitution and from fulness of power, in which they usually are without fear and "For my soul," after a pause ejaculated Le jealousy but I doubt whether there ever was a Doux, "I can not comprehend it: no one is to minister in the world capable of sincerity and blame, and the blame is large enough for all." amity, or who, having conversed for years together He meditated; and he found what at first apwith any one, cared if he were drowned or hanged peared the grossest mismanagement, to be in when he no longer could amuse or serve him. reality the finest stroke of policy. "What adThe possession and maintenance of power occupy mirable calculations of loss and profit! None but a such men totally. If the horse they ride will go commercial people is capable of this precision and on with patting, they will not feed him; if he exactness! It costs a great deal of money to keep cares little for patting and much for provender, the Irish in subjection: but to whom does the they curse him heartily and fill the rack. All money go? To the friends of ministers, to the supcunning men who wish for power may have it: porters of government, to the loyal and the rich. but all cunning men are men of narrow views: and Again, if they did not make a very large portion here, when they take possession of power, they of the people discontented, how would they find must leave some places vacant which are incom- soldiers? Who will leave his family if he can patible with it. They are jockeys that sweat them-feed it and enjoy it; unless he has such a sense selves to ride light; and after they have changed of honour as a Frenchman, who flies to arms the their great-coat for a calico jacket, they discover that their heart is too large, and must be swathed and contracted. The habit of haranguing is in itself pernicious: I have known even the conscientious and pious, the humane and liberal, dried up by it, and have watched the mind growing black and rancid in its own smoke. During the voyage the conversation was usually on Ireland. No people talk so much about their country as the Irish; not because they are more patriotic (I beg pardon for using a word out of use in that acceptation, and should have said more national) than others, but because they are less capable of conversing on literature and science. Le Doux was surprised at exalted eulogies and vehement invective, used by the same persons on the same, as high spirits or low prevailed. Surely, said he to himself, this is the conflict of light and darkness, of the good principle and the evil, of Saint Michael and Satan. On the whole, however, Lady Glengrin and Sir Firebrace agreed on the wretched state of Ireland; but Sir Firebrace insisted that, although the fact was incontrovertible, no fault whatever attached to his majesty's ministers (meaning the king's) or those employed under them, military or civil; and that the clergy and gentlemen of Ireland, resident and non-resident, had done everything in their power to alleviate the distresses and promote the prosperity of the people. Le Doux was aware, from the roundness and fulness of the period, that the sentence could not be Sir Firebrace's, and attributed it rightly to a minister; who added that he must also do justice moment a mayor orders him to be carried off; and a handcuff unites him to a comrade? The English are wanted to labour and pay taxes; the Irish must be kept as they are. Even Cromwell with all his cunning did not see this: his son Henry was the only governor who has made them quiet and contented these six hundred years. The policy now revived is more complex: we can not attribute the glory of the invention to fellows who never learned, from a dictionary and a smuggler, that Walcheren is a pestilential island and Antwerp a fortified town. O my country! my first wish is that thou mayest have no enemies; my second is that, having them, they may be men like these: but it would be unfair to deny them the merit of walking firmly and undeviatingly in the footsteps of their predecessors." It was on the seventh or eighth morning, that Le Doux, rising from the cabin, cried, "Mr. Normanby! Mr. Normanby! what vast harbour are we entering?" "This is the Strait of Gibraltar" answered he. "O yes," said Le Doux, "so it is. We are far from the Barbary coast, yet how wild it looks even at this distance! See the difference between Christian industry and Moorish apathy!" "Great indeed, sir," replied Normanby, "but that rock is Gibraltar, and this beautiful country to the left is Barbary. In fact, the Moors are industrious, and always were intelligent on agriculture, even before the Romans, into whose language their books on that science were translated, and at a time when no original one on the subject had appeared at Rome. The Africans on the coast of Mauritania had a custom, claimed as an invention by the Tuscans, of interring corn for its preservation. The writer of Caesar's war in Africa mentions the practice, but mistakes the cause. Spaniards never were cultivators, in modern times or ancient: they only sow in the furrows ploughed for them by the Moors. The southern parts of the Peninsula retain the traces of Moorish enter prise and the kingdom of the Moors in Spain if they had been Christians, would have exhibited the most perfect model, ever existing in the world, of industry and civilisation, gallantry and glory. The men were valiant, and the women were chaste; robberies and murders were unknown; music was heard from road to road, from castle to castle; wars were the sports of valour, jousts and tournaments its idle recreations. At last, divided by faction, they were oppressed by numbers, leaving such monuments behind them as the powerfullest of our empires never will erect." Michael heard this, and whispered to Renault, "I should not be surprised to see our Englishman turn renegade, if the ship draws nearer the coast." It was then about one mile off: the harvest was gathered, still the country seemed a garden. Several boats approached the vessel with pomegranates of unusual size, undetached from their bright and glossy leaves; and the late fig; and grapes of various forms, sizes, and colours; and live quails and partridges and doves; and little kids, that leaped back among them from the deck again, and would not leave them. Suddenly the ship tacked, and a fresh breeze blew them into Gibraltar, where they must take in water. "This long point of land could surely be cultivated," said Le Doux to the captain; "it is level and not very rocky." "Sir," answered the captain," the inhabitants of the city are three-fourths Jews, and most of the rest Spaniards. These people will never work if they can help it. Monopolies and privileges and exemptions furnish the greater part of the governor's emoluments, which are about five hundred guineas a week in time of war, and in peace little more than fifty a day; and he would not like to see plantations; they bring no tariff." "It is nearly a mile in length," said Le Doux, "and shady walks might be formed upon it, for the convenience and health of the garrison." "No tariff for the governor from shady walks," replied the captain. Le Doux and Sir Firebrace went ashore in uniform, in order to leave their cards at the governor's. "Precede them with flambeaux, for they are persons of distinction," said the governor to his valet. "My lord, it is mid-day," answered the valet. "Go down then," said his lordship . . "it is time I should think of sleeping." * For the distance of many miles inland, and many along the shore, there was hardly a sign of cultivation. "How do the people live?" asked Le Doux. "By means of the Moors," answered the captain. Different were the colonel's exclamations all the way from Cape St. Vincent to Cape Finisterre. "Is it possible that sea-coasts can be so beautiful! O how fine! O how pretty! superb! magnificent! brilliant!" There were rocks that were charming, and villages that were minions, and vineyards that were tapestry, and meadows that were carpets. "These countries have very worthy kings," said he, "they only want good ministers." A thousand plans in an instant were ready for the consummation of their happiness. "O heaven! this must be France!" exclaimed he one day in ecstacy. "No, sir," said the captain, "it is the coast of Asturias." Le Doux thought the rocks prettier even than those of the Petit Trianon. He expressed a second time his admiration of the coast. "We have passed a better," said the captain, “and you never noticed it. There are no harbours in Asturias like Ferrol and Coruña." Off the Scilly Isles they found themselves in the midst of fishing-boats. Normanby took leave; sailed in one of them to Bristol; two days afterward reached Sandyhurst; and had the courage to walk directly toward the green lane, just as if he had never met an intruder. He The vessel that conveyed Lady Glengrin, Sir Firebrace, and Le Doux, at length cast anchor in the bay of Dublin, not without another subject of wonder to Le Doux, at seeing a pestilential marsh under one of the finest cities in Europe. "If this had been at Odessa, it would have been converted into docks," said he to himself. passed the Parliament-house, and lifted up his hands in astonishment. "An Englishman I met at Genoa," said he to the general and the countess, " at an old minister's, fond as he was of extolling the public architecture of his country, and preferring the cathedrals and abbeys to anything antiquity has left us, never said a word about this noble fabric. It was perhaps too modern for him. He was a sort of half-author, a creature so devoted to antiquity, that when he snored he seemed in drawing his breath to say grec, and emitting it to say romain. I had the personal proof of it; for whenever he was disposed to sleep he slept, and would have done so had he been called to the levee or to the ministry. I never saw him quite decorous but in church, where he always seemed immersed in the deepest meditation; and if a person but whispered, even during the music, he fixed his eyes upon him with a stern rebuke." *Est in Africâ consuetudo incolarum, ut in agris et in * The sages of antiquity have each left an aphorism on omnibus fere villis sub terrâ specus, condendi frumenti | human life; and there seemed hardly room for another; gratiâ, clam habeant, atque id propter bella maximè but this our sage, if he has not given, causes one: vita hostiumque subitum adventum præparant." somni breve intervallum. The society introduced to Le Doux was the moment so many vacant and rosy faces. The next most select. The beauty of the women held him morning he heard that two of them had been breathless. “ Am I in Poland, or in Paradise ? " | was his soliloquy. He paid his principal attentions to those who put on a clean pair of gloves every day, because he considered it a test of civilisation. Even among these, within the first week, his suspicions were confirmed by his valet that the linen was not always changed so often: but he thought it a scandalous tale when he heard that some of them came to breakfast in a part of the apparel in which they had slept. “Do not tell me such nonsense, Renault ! Depend upon it, the girl that gave you the information has been discharged: you will see her off soon." "Well, sir," said Renault, sighing, "would you believe it? a few years ago there was not a bidet in the kingdom of Ireland. The duchess of Rutland, consort of a lord-lieutenant, brought over the first. The duke (some say it was satirically) ordered one from London for the lady of the lord chancellor. It was of porcelain, as you may suppose, being the present of a lord-lieutenant; and its inauguration was in the centre of the table, filled with green-pea scup, at a cabinetdinner given to his grace the lord-lieutenant." "A cabinet-dinner! .. and a vengeance. . with its green-pea soup, rogue!" cried Le Doux, laughing immoderately. "Sir," said Renault, gravely, "nobody laughed: everybody admired the contrivance for the ladle, and the maker had made his fortune, if the duchess had mystified as well and reasonably as the duke had done." Opposite to Le Doux one day at dinner sat a nobleman of high rank, a member of every administration for forty years, placid and pliant, and attentive to nobody but him, into whose history he had been admitted by the countess. "Colonel," said he, "in all countries there are discontented; there are even in this." "Is it possible?" answered Le Doux, lifting up his eyebrows with surprise and concern. "But," rejoined the peer, "such is the kindness of Providence, the sounder part of the people is perfectly tranquil, and assured of its being well governed." "His lordship means those that govern," said a worthy major: "None are more open to conviction; the fact stares them in the face. Every country is rich and flourishing if you look at it through claret." 6 shot by their antagonists, in a quarrel arising from this toast; the Immortal Memory of some one they had never seen or thought about. He imagined that silence and sorrow would have come better after; that wine should make men joyous, and duels serious. On reflection he feared to be compromised,' and suspected that the immortal memory so religiously observed, and with such awe and taciturnity, might be the memory of Bonaparte. To relieve his suspicions, he joked about it with two of the youngest, whom he found at billiards the succeeding day. They laughed aloud at his mistake. "It was king William," said one. "It was William Pitt," said the other. "It was no more Pitt than it was my pointer," rejoined the first. In fact, the immortal memory, in eighteen hours, had as much obscurity and as many thorns about it as the tomb of Archimedes. Le Doux was walking one day in the streets of Dublin, when the appearance of perfumery in a window reminded him that he wanted a toothbrush. He went into the shop, and asked for one. The master, a tall, florid, well-dressed, genteellooking man, took up several, and rubbing them against the extremities of his fingers, recommended one particularly. "Take this: it will keep your teeth clean twenty years at once using. You are a Frenchman, sir, I find by your way of speaking, and I see you have hardly three hairs on a side. In your country they make good pomatum: try mine: but.. take the word of a friend wash your hands well afterward in soap and warm water, or you will have hair upon the palm an inch thick before night. And no razor can touch it." .. "What is the price, sir?" "Ah now! is it the price? I never sell for lucre of gain: a halfcrown contents me.. and, just for the peg-polisher, a thirteen-penny. Recommend me to your friends, if you have any, and I'll thank you." "Favour me with the number of your shop." Magazine, if you please. The poor beggar of a schoolmaster over the way calls his, seminary; and sure then I might call mine so; but I would be modest; magazine does for me." Le Doux was leaving the door, when he was Politics on this occasion were discussed in few met on the threshold by a young clergyman, who, words. The illustrious visiter could collect, how- flapping his lustrous boot with a thin whip, and ever, that most complaints were ill-founded; that | drawing up his shirt-collar with his left hand, red those who complained of any specific grievance as a pigeon's claw and broad as an ostrich's, pushed were unfair and partial in not considering the whole; and that those who took a view of the whole, and who proposed an inquiry into it, should state some specific grievance. rudely by him into the shop. Le Doux bowed and begged pardon. At the same moment, the hairdresser, for such he was no less than perfumer, caught him by the arm, and taking the clergyman's too, said, "Brother Joe, I must introduce you to this gentleman, who dines with us." "A. thousand thanks! excuse me to-day." To-day or never! now for your name." name is Le Doux, sir: but really.." "Le Doux!" said the clergyman, eyeing him suspiciously. "I'm damned if it is: that's a neger's." "I would not In another house, after several glasses were drunk with great cheerfulness, the whole company rose up to a mysterious toast, in silence and sadness. He sipped the wine in doubt, and found" that it was the same as he had been drinking from the first, and excellent bordeaux. He could not conceive what had saddened at a single "My |
