[Sidenote: _T.E. Brown_]
I am generally rather a happy "sort" of man, but your letter makes me very happy. How kind you are! Up in the morning betimes to catch people still in their beds warm with a generous enthusiasm, to surprise their sympathies before they had "faded into the light of common day," and to collect all their "loving" words for me. That was a good and faithful act; and I am deeply grateful.
Yes, the man was right. I do love the poor wastrels, and you are right, I have it from my father. He had a way of taking for granted, not only the innate virtue of these outcasts, but their unquestioned respectability. He, at least, never questioned it. The effect was twofold.
Some of the "weak brethren" felt uncomfortable at being met on those terms of equality. My father might have been practising on them the most dreadful irony; and they were "that shy" and confused. But it was not irony, not a bit of it; just a sense of respect, fine consideration for the poor "sowls," well--respect, that"s it, respect for all human beings; _his_ respect made _them_ respectable. Wasn"t it grand? To others my father was a perfect Port-y-shee.[3] To be in the same room with him was enough. To be conscious that he was there, that he didn"t fight strange of them, that he never dreamt of "scowlin"" them, that they were treated as gentlemen. Oh the comfort, the gerjugh,[4] the interval of repose! Extraordinary, though, was it not? To think of a _Pazon_ respecting men"s vices even; not as vices, G.o.d forbid! but as parts of _them_, very likely all but inseparable from them; at any rate, _theirs_. Pitying with an eternal pity, but not exposing, not rebuking.
My father would have considered he was "taking a liberty" if he had confronted the sinner with his sin. Doubtless he carried this too far.
But don"t suppose for a moment that the "weak brethren" thought he was conniving at their weakness. Not they--they saw the delicacy of his conduct. You don"t think, do you, that these poor souls are incapable of appreciating _delicacy_? G.o.d only knows how far down into their depths of misery and degradation the sweetness of that delicacy descends. It haunts the drunkard"s dreams, and breathes a breath of purity into the bosom of the abandoned. That is the power of a n.o.ble innocence, a _respect_ for our fellow creatures--glib phrases, but how little understood and acted on! With my father it was quite natural.... He was a hot hater, though, I can tell you. He hated hypocrisy, he hated lying, and he hated presumption and pretentiousness. He loved sincerity, truth, and modesty. It seemed as if he felt sure that, with these virtues, the others could not fail to be present. Was he far wrong? Yet how many people would have thought him stern!
One dear old cousin of his comes to my mind. We called him U.T., that is Uncle Tom. He was not our uncle--we never had one--but the uncle of our predecessors at Kirk Braddan. And almost every Sunday evening he spent at the Vicarage--poor old thing! He was quite silent. One thing, though, he would say, as "regglar as clockwork." My mother occasionally apologised for the evening being so exclusively musical (we were great singers). Whenever she did so, the reply was prompt from U.T.: "I"m pa.s.sionately fond of music." This, to us children, was highly ludicrous.
Indeed, my mother was amused--she had no Manx blood in her--but my father accepted U.T."s a.s.surance with the utmost confidence. His chivalrous nature, more deeply tinged than hers with Celtic tenderness, or the very finest kind of Celtic make-believe (_Anglice_--humbug; oh those English!), had no difficulty in accepting U.T."s "pa.s.sionately."
_Pa.s.sion_ in U.T.! Well, to us it was a splendid joke. I sometimes wonder whether the vicar, too, at times, had lucid intervals of the bare, naked reality. He had a fine sense of humour, and he would have considered it a baseness to laugh at the poor thing, with its pretence of pa.s.sion, trying to screen its forlornness. What U.T. felt was not the pa.s.sion for music, but just the soothing, comforting sense of being at home with us, of being accepted as one of ourselves, of not being "scoulded," of indisputable respectability, of being thought capable of "pa.s.sion," even so ethereal a pa.s.sion as that of music. How blessed those hours must have been to U.T.! He sometimes missed them. But it never was my father"s fault. Was it U.T."s? Well, we children had no idea that he drank. But now, of course, I know that when U.T. did not appear on a Sunday, he must have been "hard at it" on Sat.u.r.day; and into the kingdom of heaven he must have taken the Sundays, not the Sat.u.r.days.
Forgive all this. But I have been so much touched with your taking up my reference to the dear old Vicar of Braddan that I could not help extending the portrait a little.
And for the backsliders, the "weak brethren, the outcasts--aw! let"s feel for the lek, and "keep a houl" o" their ban.""
Do write again. You will do me so much good.
VISIONS [Sidenote: _Calverley_]
In lone Glenartney"s thickets lies crouched the lordly stag, The dreaming terrier"s tail forgets its customary wag; And plodding ploughman"s weary steps insensibly grow quicker, As broadening cas.e.m.e.nts light them on toward home, or home-brewed liquor.
It is, in brief, the evening--that pure and pleasant time When stars break into splendour, and poets into rhyme; When in the gla.s.s of Memory the forms of loved ones shine-- And when, of course, Miss Goodchild"s is prominent in mine.
Miss Goodchild!--Julia Goodchild!--how graciously you smiled Upon my childish pa.s.sion once, yourself a fair-haired child: When I was (no doubt) profiting by Dr. Crabb"s instruction, And sent those streaky lollipops home for your fairy suction!
"She wore" her natural "roses, the night when first we met"-- Her golden hair was gleaming "neath the coercive net: "Her brow was like the snawdrift," her step was like Queen Mab"s, And gone was instantly the heart of every boy at Crabb"s.
The parlour boarder _cha.s.seed_ tow"rds her on graceful limb; The onyx deck"d his bosom--but her smiles were not for him: With _me_ she danced--till drowsily her eyes "began to blink,"
And _I_ brought raisin wine, and said, "Drink, pretty creature, drink!"
And evermore, when winter comes in his garb of snows, And the returning schoolboy is told how fast he grows; Shall I--with that soft hand in mine--enact ideal Lancers, And dream I hear demure remarks, and make impa.s.sioned answers:--
I know that never, never may her love for me return-- At night I muse upon the fact with undisguised concern-- But ever shall I bless that day: I don"t bless as a rule, The days I spent at "Dr. Crabb"s Preparatory School."
And yet we two _may_ meet again--(be still, my throbbing heart!)-- Now rolling years have weaned us from jam and raspberry-tart.
One night I saw a vision--"twas when musk-roses bloom, I stood--_we_ stood--upon a rug, in a sumptuous dining-room:
One hand clasped hers--one easily reposed upon my hip-- And "Bless ye!" burst abruptly from Mr. Goodchild"s lip: I raised my br.i.m.m.i.n.g eye, and saw in hers an answering gleam-- My heart beat wildly--and I woke, and lo! it was a dream.
"BOSWELL AND JOHNSON"
[Sidenote: _Macaulay_]
The Life of Johnson is a.s.suredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. He has distanced all his compet.i.tors so decidedly that it is not worth while to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.
We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a phenomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. He was, if we are to give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. Johnson described him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality by not having been alive when "The Dunciad" was written. Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the laughing-stock of the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part of its fame. He was always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, and begging to be spit upon and trampled upon. He was always earning some ridiculous nickname, and then "binding it as a crown unto him," not merely in metaphor, but literally. He exhibited himself at the Shakespeare Jubilee, to all the crowd which filled Stratford-on-Avon, with a placard round his hat bearing the inscription of "Corsican Boswell." In his Tour, he proclaimed to all the world that at Edinburgh he was known by the appellation of Paoli Boswell. Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally bl.u.s.tering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common b.u.t.t in the taverns of London; so curious to know everybody who was talked about that, Tory and High Churchman as he was, he manoeuvred, we have been told, for an introduction to Tom Paine; so vain of the most childish distinctions that, when he had been to Court, he drove to the office where his book was printing without changing his clothes, and summoned all the printer"s devils to admire his new ruffles and sword,--such was this man, and such he was content and proud to be.
Everything which another man would have hidden, everything the publication of which would have made another man hang himself, was matter of gay and clamorous exultation to his weak and diseased mind.
What silly things he said, what bitter retorts he provoked, how at one place he was troubled with evil presentiments which came to nothing, how at another place, on waking from a drunken doze, he read the prayer-book and took a hair of the dog that had bitten him, how he went to see men hanged and came away maudlin, how he added five hundred pounds to the fortune of one of his babies because she was not scared at Johnson"s ugly face, how he was frightened out of his wits at sea, and how the sailors quieted him as they would have quieted a child, how tipsy he was at Lady Cork"s one evening and how much his merriment annoyed the ladies, how impertinent he was to the d.u.c.h.ess of Argyle and with what stately contempt she put down his impertinence, how Colonel Macleod sneered to his face at his impudent obtrusiveness, how his father and the very wife of his bosom laughed and fretted at his fooleries--all these things he proclaimed to all the world, as if they had been subjects for pride and ostentatious rejoicings. All the caprices of his temper, all the illusions of his vanity, all his hypochondriac whimsies, all his castles in the air, he displayed with a cool self-complacency, a perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself, to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the whole history of mankind. He has used many people ill; but a.s.suredly he has used n.o.body so ill as himself.
That such a man should have written one of the best books in the world is strange enough. But this is not all. Many persons who have conducted themselves foolishly in active life, and whose conversation has indicated no superior powers of mind, have left us valuable works.
Goldsmith was very justly described by one of his contemporaries as an inspired idiot, and by another as a being
"Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll."
La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton. His blunders would not come in amiss among the stories of Hierocles. But these men attained literary eminence in spite of their weaknesses. Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses. If he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer. Without all the qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof, he never could have produced so excellent a book. He was a slave, proud of his servitude, a Paul Pry, convinced that his own curiosity and garrulity were virtues, an unsafe companion who never scrupled to repay the most liberal hospitality by the basest violation of confidence, a man without delicacy, without shame, without sense enough to know when he was hurting the feelings of others, or when he was exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he has, in an important department of literature, immeasurably surpa.s.sed such writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol Johnson.
Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his books a single remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society which is not either commonplace or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples. To say that these pa.s.sages are sophistical would be to pay them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable observations made by himself in the course of conversation. Of those observations we do not remember one which is above the intellectual capacity of a boy of fifteen. He has printed many of his own letters, and in these letters he is always ranting or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation and a retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but, because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a c.o.xcomb, they have made him immortal.
Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fulness of his fame and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other man in history. Everything about him, his coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus"s dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked his approbation of his dinner, his insatiable appet.i.te for fish-sauce and veal-pie with plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the posts as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up sc.r.a.ps of orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputations, his contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings, his vigorous, acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his vehemence, his insolence, his fits of tempestuous rage, his queer inmates, old Mr.
Levett and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat Hodge and the negro Frank, all are as familiar to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded from childhood....
From nature, he had received an uncouth figure, a diseased const.i.tution, and an irritable temper. The manner in which the earlier years of his manhood had been pa.s.sed had given to his demeanour, and even to his moral character, some peculiarities appalling to the civilised beings who were the companions of his old age. The perverse irregularity of his hours, the slovenliness of his person, his fits of strenuous exertion, interrupted by long intervals of sluggishness, his strange abstinence, and his equally strange voracity, his active benevolence contrasted with the constant rudeness and the occasional ferocity of his manners in society, made him, in the opinion of those with whom he lived during the last twenty years of his life, a complete original. An original he was, undoubtedly, in some respects. But if we possessed full information concerning those who shared his early hardships, we should probably find that what we call his singularities of manner were, for the most part, failings which he had in common with the cla.s.s to which he belonged. He ate at Streatham Park as he had been used to eat behind the screen at St. John"s Gate, when he was ashamed to show his ragged clothes. He ate as it was natural that a man should eat who, during a great part of his life, had pa.s.sed the morning in doubt whether he should have food for the afternoon. The habits of his early life had accustomed him to bear privation with fort.i.tude, but not to taste pleasure with moderation. He could fast; but, when he did not fast, he tore his dinner like a famished wolf, with the veins swelling on his forehead and the perspiration running down his cheeks. He scarcely ever took wine; but, when he drank it, he drank it greedily and in large tumblers. These were, in fact, mitigated symptoms of that same moral disease which raged with such deadly malignity in his friends Savage and Boyse. The roughness and violence which he showed in society were to be expected from a man whose temper, not naturally gentle, had been long tried by the bitterest calamities, by the want of meat, of fire, and of clothes, by the importunity of creditors, by the insolence of booksellers, by the derision of fools, by the insincerity of patrons, by that bread which is the bitterest of all food, by those stairs which are the most toilsome of all paths, by that deferred hope which makes the heart sick.
Through all these things the ill-dressed, coa.r.s.e, ungainly pedant had struggled manfully up to eminence and command. It was natural that, in the exercise of his power, he should be _eo immitior, quia toleraverat_; that, though his heart was undoubtedly generous and humane, his demeanour in society should be harsh and despotic. For severe distress he had sympathy, and not only sympathy, but munificent relief; but for the suffering which a harsh world inflicts upon a delicate mind he had no pity, for it was a kind of suffering which he could scarcely conceive. He would carry home on his shoulders a sick and starving girl from the streets. He turned his house into a place of refuge for a crowd of wretched old creatures who could find no other asylum; nor could all their peevishness and ingrat.i.tude weary out his benevolence. But the pangs of wounded vanity seemed to him ridiculous; and he scarcely felt sufficient compa.s.sion even for the pangs of wounded affection. He had seen and felt so much of sharp misery that he was not affected by paltry vexations; and he seemed to think that everybody ought to be as much hardened to those vexations as himself. He was angry with Boswell for complaining of a headache, with Mrs. Thrale for grumbling about the dust on the road, or the smell of the kitchen. These were, in his phrase, "foppish lamentations," which people ought to be ashamed to utter in a world so full of sin and sorrow. Goldsmith crying because _The Good-natured Man_ had failed, inspired him with no pity. Though his own health was not good, he detested and despised valetudinarians. Pecuniary losses, unless they reduced the loser absolutely to beggary, moved him very little. People whose hearts had been softened by prosperity might weep, he said, for such events; but all that could be expected of a plain man was not to laugh. He was not much moved even by the spectacle of Lady Tavistock dying of a broken heart for the loss of her lord. Such grief he considered as a luxury reserved for the idle and the wealthy. A washerwoman, left a widow with nine small children, would not have sobbed herself to death.
A person who troubled himself so little about small or sentimental grievances was not likely to be very attentive to the feelings of others in the ordinary intercourse of society. He could not understand how a sarcasm or a reprimand could make any man really unhappy. "My dear doctor," said he to Goldsmith, "what harm does it do to a man to call him Holofernes?" "Pooh, ma"am," he exclaimed to Mrs. Carter, "who is the worse for being talked of uncharitably?" Politeness has been well defined as benevolence in small things. Johnson was impolite, not because he wanted benevolence, but because small things appeared smaller to him than to people who had never known what it was to live for fourpence halfpenny a day....
Many of his sentiments on religious subjects are worthy of a liberal and enlarged mind. He could discern clearly enough the folly and meanness of all bigotry except his own. When he spoke of the scruples of the Puritans, he spoke like a person who had really obtained an insight into the divine philosophy of the New Testament, and who considered Christianity as a n.o.ble scheme of government, tending to promote the happiness and to elevate the moral nature of man. The horror which the sectaries felt for cards, Christmas ale, plum-porridge, mince-pies, and dancing bears excited his contempt. To the arguments urged by some very worthy people against showy dress he replied with admirable sense and spirit, "Let us not be found, when our Master calls us, stripping the lace off our waistcoats, but the spirit of contention from our souls and tongues. Alas! sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat will not find his way thither the sooner in a grey one." Yet he was himself under the tyranny of scruples as unreasonable as those of Hudibras or Ralpho, and carried his zeal for ceremonies and for ecclesiastical dignities to lengths altogether inconsistent with reason or with Christian charity. He has gravely noted down in his diary that he once committed the sin of drinking coffee on Good Friday. In Scotland, he thought it was his duty to pa.s.s several months without joining in public worship, solely because the ministers of the kirk had not been ordained by bishops. His mode of estimating the piety of his neighbours was somewhat singular. "Campbell," said he, "is a good man, a pious man.
I am afraid he has not been in the inside of a church for many years, but he never pa.s.ses a church without pulling off his hat: this shows he has good principles." Spain and Sicily must surely contain many pious robbers and well-principled a.s.sa.s.sins. Johnson could easily see that a Roundhead who named all his children after Solomon"s singers, and talked in the House of Commons about seeking the Lord, might be an unprincipled villain whose religious mummeries only aggravated his guilt; but a man who took off his hat when he pa.s.sed a church episcopally consecrated must be a good man, a pious man, a man of good principles. Johnson could easily see that those persons who looked on a dance or a laced waistcoat as sinful deemed most ign.o.bly of the attributes of G.o.d and of the ends of revelation; but with what a storm of invective he would have overwhelmed any man who had blamed him for celebrating the redemption of mankind with sugarless tea and b.u.t.terless buns!...
Johnson, as Mr. Burke most justly observed, appears far greater in Boswell"s books than in his own. His conversation appears to have been quite equal to his writings in matter, and far superior to them in manner. When he talked, he clothed his wit and his sense in forcible and natural expressions. As soon as he took his pen in his hand to write for the public, his style became systematically vicious. All his books are written in a learned language; in a language which n.o.body hears from his mother or his nurse; in a language in which n.o.body ever quarrels, or drives bargains, or makes love; in a language in which n.o.body ever thinks. It is clear that Johnson himself did not think in the dialect in which he wrote. The expressions which came first to his tongue were simple, energetic, and picturesque. When he wrote for publication he did his sentences out of English into Johnsonese. His letters from the Hebrides to Mrs. Thrale are the original of that work of which the "Journey to the Hebrides" is the translation; and it is amusing to compare the two versions. "When we were taken upstairs," says he in one of his letters, "a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on which one of us was to lie." This incident is recorded in the Journal as follows: "Out of one of the beds on which we were to repose started up, at our entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from the forge." Sometimes Johnson translated aloud. "_The Rehearsal_" he said, very unjustly, "has not wit enough to keep it sweet"; then, after a pause, "it has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction."
Mannerism is pardonable, and is sometimes even agreeable, when the manner, though vicious, is natural. Few readers, for example, would be willing to part with the mannerism of Milton or of Burke. But a mannerism which does not sit easy on the mannerist, which has been adopted on principle, and which can be sustained only by constant effort, is always offensive. And such is the mannerism of Johnson.
The characteristic faults of his style are so familiar to all our readers, and have been so often burlesqued, that it is almost superfluous to point them out. It is well known that he made less use than any other eminent writer of those strong, plain words, Anglo-Saxon or Norman-French, of which the roots lie in the inmost depths of our language; and that he felt a vicious partiality for terms which, long after our own speech had been fixed, were borrowed from the Greek and Latin, and which, therefore, even when lawfully naturalised, must be considered as born aliens, not ent.i.tled to rank with the King"s English.
His constant practice of padding out a sentence with useless epithets, till it became as stiff as the bust of an exquisite, his ant.i.thetical forms of expression, constantly employed even where there is no opposition in the ideas expressed, his big words wasted on little things, his hard inversions, so widely different from those graceful and easy inversions which give variety, spirit, and sweetness to the expression of our great old writers--all these peculiarities have been imitated by his admirers and parodied by his a.s.sailants till the public has become sick of the subject.
Goldsmith said to him, very wittily and very justly, "If you were to write a fable about little fishes, doctor, you would make the little fishes talk like whales." No man surely ever had so little talent for personation as Johnson. Whether he wrote in the character of a disappointed legacy-hunter or an empty town fop, of a crazy virtuoso or a flippant coquette, he wrote in the same pompous and unbending style.
His speech, like Sir Piercy Shafton"s Euphuistic eloquence, bewrayed him under every disguise. Euphelia and Rhodoclea talk as finely as Imlac the poet or Seged, Emperor of Ethiopia. The gay Cornelia describes her reception at the country-house of her relations in such terms as these: "I was surprised, after the civilities of my first reception, to find, instead of the leisure and tranquillity which a rural life always promises, and, if well conducted, might always afford, a confused wilderness of care, and a tumultuous hurry of diligence, by which every face was clouded, and every motion agitated." The gentle Tranquilla informs us that she "had not pa.s.sed the earlier part of life without the flattery of courtship and the joys of triumph; but had danced the round of gaiety amidst the murmurs of envy and the congratulations of applause, had been attended from pleasure to pleasure by the great, the sprightly, and the vain, and had seen her regard solicited by the obsequiousness of gallantry, the gaiety of wit, and the timidity of love." Surely Sir John Falstaff himself did not wear his petticoats with a worse grace. The reader may well cry out, with honest Sir Hugh Evans, "I like not when a "oman has a great peard: I spy a great peard under her m.u.f.fler."
We had something more to say; but our article is already too long, and we must close it. We would fain part in good-humour from the hero, from the biographer, and even from the editor, who, ill as he has performed his task, has at least this claim to our grat.i.tude, that he has induced us to read Boswell"s book again. As we close it, the club-room is before us, and the table on which stands the omelet for Nugent and the lemons for Johnson. There are a.s.sembled those heads which live for ever on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of Burke and the tall, thin form of Langton; the courtly sneer of Beauclerk and the beaming smile of Garrick; Gibbon tapping his snuff-box and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up--the gigantic body, the huge, ma.s.sy face, seamed with the scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the grey wig with the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the "Why, sir!" and the "What then, sir?" and the "No, sir!" and the "You don"t see your way through the question, sir!"
What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man! To be regarded in his own age as a cla.s.sic, and in ours as a companion! To receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received only from posterity! To be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries!
That kind of fame which is commonly the most transient is, in his case, the most durable. The reputation of those writings which he probably expected to be immortal is every day fading, while those peculiarities of manner and that careless table-talk the memory of which, he probably thought, would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.
THE SUPPER [Sidenote: _Sterne_]
A shoe coming loose from the fore-foot of the thill-horse, at the beginning of the ascent of Mount Taurira, the postillion dismounted, twisted the shoe off, and put it in his pocket. As the ascent was of five or six miles, and that horse our main dependence, I made a point of having the shoe fastened on again as well as we could; but the postillion had thrown away the nails, and the hammer in the chaise box being of no great use without them, I submitted to go on.
He had not mounted half a mile higher when, coming to a flinty piece of road, the poor devil lost a second shoe, and from off his other fore-foot; I then got out of the chaise in good earnest, and, seeing a house about a quarter of a mile to the left hand, with a great deal to do, I prevailed upon the postillion to turn up to it. The look of the house, and of everything about it, as we drew nearer, soon reconciled me to the disaster. It was a little farm-house, surrounded with about twenty acres of vineyard, about as much corn, and close to the house, on one side, was a _potagerie_ of an acre and a half, full of everything which could make plenty in a French peasant"s house; and, on the other side, was a little wood, which furnished wherewithal to dress it. It was about eight in the evening when I got to the house, so I left the postillion to manage his point as he could; and, for mine, I walked directly into the house.
The family consisted of an old grey-bearded man and his wife, with five or six sons and sons-in-law, and their several wives, and a joyous genealogy out of them.
They were all sitting down together to their lentil-soup, a large wheaten loaf was in the middle of the table, and a flagon of wine at each end of it promised joy through the stages of the repast; "twas a feast of love.