"I take this method of addressing you, in preference to that which a man of the World might think more consistent with my situation, under the present circ.u.mstances; but I feel, while I am writing it, that I am no coward, and that were human miseries to be extinguished only in blood, the last drop of mine should be spilt to save her from perdition.
"Your answer I shall most anxiously wait for at the Gloucester Coffee-house, Piccadilly, from the hour of twelve, every morning, till I receive it.
"I am, SIR,
"Your"s, &c.
"FREDERICK S------."
"I waited two days at the Coffee-house without hearing from him.
I impatiently counted every minute, and antic.i.p.ated the transition from deep despondency to transcendant joy. I called for coffee, read, or seemed to read, the papers of the day; and my heart beat at the shadow of every object I saw approaching towards the house.
"It was near one on the third morning before I heard any tidings interesting to myself. A waiter then came forward, with a smile, and told me that a Gentleman enquired for me. Half breathless, I desired him to be admitted; my trembling limbs could scarcely support me as he entered, and I begged him to be seated. I asked him if he came from Captain Nesbitt? He answered in the affirmative, and I attempted to close the door; but he desired to admit his friend; and then informed me that he was the bearer of a writ against me, in the name of Captain James Nesbitt, to whom I stood indebted for the sum of two hundred pounds, for money lent me by him in the West-Indies.
"I knew full well that a gambling debt was not by law recoverable; but my heart recoiled at the idea of contesting it, and I determined immediately to extricate myself, however inconvenient. My stock of money was reduced to four hundred and seventy pounds. I paid out of it the debt and costs, which were no small augmentation. I hired a retired lodging, and resolved to wait as patiently as I could, the result of an event which had robbed me of every terrestrial joy. Here I lived many months, with sober, well-disposed people, but gained no intelligence of those for whose sake alone I still continued to drag on the load of heavy existence.
"I was one morning surprized by the entrance of an attorney, who produced me two bills; the one for a hundred and twenty pounds, which debt, he said, had been contracted by Mrs. S------ for board and lodging; the other, for twenty-five guineas for one quarter"s schooling and masters for my boy.
"I candidly declared to him my situation, and my inability to satisfy these demands; the consequence of which was an immediate arrest; and I was hurried from my peaceful chamber to the loathsome place appropriated in Newgate for debtors. Here I pined in misery and want. The course language of my fellow-prisoners, whose hearts seemed hardened in proportion to their necessities, offended, and disgusted me. I soon after heard that Lord G---- was arrived in England. I wrote to him, and he sent a servant to me with momentary relief. Obligation was new to me.
Insensibly, and actuated more by despair than choice, I joined my companions; and the sight of a few guineas rejoicing them, I proposed our sharing them together. The sum was not sufficient to relieve me materially; and as the die of misery was cast, I endeavoured to dissipate its calamity: I drank--I laughed--I joined in their vulgar jokes, and for a while forgot myself. With the morning, rejected reason returned, but vanished as my companions of the time approached me.
"I pa.s.sed near two years in this state of mental horror, when I was unexpectedly relieved from it by the commiserating heart of the then Sheriff, Mr. P. L---- M----. To that Gentleman it is not necessary to be personally known. His urbanity, his feelings do so much honour to human Nature, that she is compelled to acknowledge him her master-piece. In him the poor find a protector; the oppressed, a friend. That Gentleman saw, heard my story, and pitied me. His heart and purse were equally opened; and he seemed to satisfy the one, while he bountifully took from the other. I endeavoured to evince my grat.i.tude; but the manly tear glistened in his eye, and I buried it in my heart. I returned to the house where I had lodged, forlorn and desolate, and took possession of the garret over my former apartment.
"I had not been there many days, before the Gentleman above-mentioned condescended to visit me. He was attended by his lawyer, who had been, by his directions, with Mrs. S----. He found her, surrounded by affluence; the new, but acknowledged favourite of the French Duke de ----. She was regardless of my situation, insensible to my misery; yet he prevailed on her, partly by intreaty, and partly by threats, in my name, of appropriating her property, to sign an instrument, which he had prepared, and which was a mutual release from all pecuniary matters between us. Nor did the generosity of my n.o.ble friend stop here: he hastily slipped into my hand a twenty-five pound note, and hurried down stairs, as if fearful to receive the bare acknowledgment of obligations which can never, never be repaid!
"Fortune seemed at this time anxious to make me amends for the many injuries with which she had lately overwhelmed me. The relation, to whom I had stood indebted for my commission, and who had left unanswered all the letters I had written to him, now sent for me. He received me with coldness, bordering on displeasure; and I briefly related to him my whole story. Ah, what a world of light did this meeting cast over my bewildered mind!--He was a very old man, who had been confined some years to his house by various bodily infirmities; and to such, the plausible appearance of youth and beauty in distress, is peculiarly interesting. I found he had received frequent visits from Mrs. S------, and had materially a.s.sisted her. Her attentions secured to her his friendship; and she had art enough to persuade him, that my conduct in the West-Indies had been such as to-forfeit every claim to his protection. She a.s.sured him, that my commission had been sold to discharge various gambling debts contracted there. This cruel, this unprecedented injury, soon, however, retorted on herself; and as "foul deeds WILL rise," I was indebted to her for the vindication of my own character, and the total overthrow of that of my unnatural accuser.
"My uncle (for by that name I shall henceforth distinguish him) had found an uncommon affection for my child, who frequently accompanied his mother in her visits to him. He had been well tutored by her how to answer any questions that might be put to him; yet where there was no suspicion, there could be little danger. Mrs. S---- had constantly a.s.sured the old gentleman that she boarded at the house of the relation where I had first seen her. He found himself one day very ill, and was desirous of the company of his little favourite. His housekeeper, whom many years service, and the solitude of her master"s life, had placed on a footing that fell little short of being mistress of his house, was the person whom he dispatched for the child: she was nearly as old and infirm as her master; and as her walks had for several years extended no farther than to and from the adjacent chapel every Sunday morning, she could have wished to evade his proposal of shaking her ancient bones in a hackney-coach, and would gladly have had the commission devolve on the foot-boy, who, with herself, composed the whole of his household establishment. But her master, though a very good man, was a very peremptory one, and she dared not risk his displeasure by a refusal.
Mrs. Wilmot accordingly equipped herself in her Sunday gown and cloak, and desiring the coachman to drive very gently over the stones, she sallied forth in quest of the little Frederick; for whom she also, after the example of her master, felt more than an usual affection."
(To be continued.)
_THE FARRAGO._
N. IV.
"One who had gain"d a princely store By cheating all, both rich and poor, Dared cry aloud "the land must sink For all its fraud," and whom d"ye think The sermonizing rascal chid?
----A GLOVER, THAT SOLD LAMB FOR KID."
MANDEVILLE.
Among the high privileges, which we digressive writers enjoy, may be reckoned that which Don Quixote gave his horse, to choose a path and pursue it at pleasure. In another point there is an affinity between us and that errant steed, so renowned in the volumes of Cervantic chivalry.
When we begin an excursion, the Lord only knows how it will be prosecuted, or where it will end. Whim and caprice being commonly our guides, and those personages never keeping in _their_ almanack a list of stages, we are sometimes most sadly benighted. As this is my day for similitudes, I stop not here; having so modestly compared myself and other ramblers to a quadruped, I will descend still lower into "the valley of humiliation," and liken them to an insect, which is a spider.
Though their stock is confessedly small, they have the art of drawing out a most lengthy texture. Thus an essayist, conscious of the scantiness of his stores, handles a topic as a farmer"s wife manages her annual pound of bohea, in such a manner as to make it last.
When I began my second speculation with some general remarks on the utility of an alliance between application and genius, I little thought that I should quit my sober task, and commence character painter. When Fancy handed me a pencil, and bade me sketch the likeness of Meander, I had no design to ransack his room, or transcribe his diary; and lastly, when the journal was published, I tremblingly thought I had said too much, and dreaded lest my readers should complain that they were surfeited by the Farrago. But they who are even tinged with the metaphysical doctrine of ideas flowing in a train, will not be confounded, though they see another speculation rising from the last, when I narrate the following incident. A friend who had attentively gazed at the portrait of Meander, saw me the day after its exhibition.
So, Mr. Delineator, cries he, must you become a dauber in caricature?
One so fond of the zigzag walk in life as you, is hardly ent.i.tled to ridicule deviation in another. I blushed; and the suffusion, like Corporal Trim"s bow, spoke as plainly as a blush could speak, "my man of remark, you are perfectly sage in your opinion." This trivial circ.u.mstance led me to reflect, first on my own inconsistency, and next on that of others. By exposing the rambles of genius I virtually made proclamation for dissipation to depart, but she taxed me with issuing contradictory orders, and pertinently asked how she could go into exile, when I insisted on her keeping me company? I then looked on my neighbours. Their characters were similar to mine, and they wore not the uniform of regularity more than myself. Celia, who murders reputations, as "butcher felleth ox" p.r.o.nounced, t"other day at a tea-table, a most bitter invective against scandal, though five minutes before she had invented a tale of calumny against her friend. Vafer censorially cautions a young gallant to beware an indulgence of the licentious pa.s.sion, but forgets, while reading his lecture, that he once was amorous, that he solicited the virgin and the wife, and that, unsatisfied with the ordinary mysteries of intrigue, he elaborately refined on the system of seduction. Vinoso, whose face is as red-lettered as the court calendar, and who makes his Virginia fence at nine in the morning, applauds a very heavy excise on distilled spirits, and zealously d.a.m.ns every drunkard in the nation. Bobbin the haberdasher, who in vending a row of pins, defrauds the heedless customer of four, and who, when furnishing the village la.s.s, with a set of ap.r.o.n-strings, pilfers from her a portion of the tape, exclaims against a vinter for adulterating his liquors, and wittily wonders, that he can adopt the Christian scheme so far, as to baptize even his wine.
Messalina, whole chast.i.ty is valiant as a holiday Captain because no enemy is at hand, and who produced a _lovely pair of twins_ six months before marriage, frowns at the forwardness of young flirts; and a decayed maiden, "far gone in her wane, Sir," who has been but twenty these ten years, and who has more wrinkles in her forehead, than dimples on her chin, even she scoffs the vestal sisterhood, and turns up her note at the staleness of antiquated virginity.
In literature, as well as in life, we may recognize this propensity.
Authors are noted for inconsistence. Instances might be selected from almost every writer in our language. Pope, in conjunction with Arbuthnot and Swift, composed a satirical treatise, the design of which was, to lash his poetical brethren for attempting to soar, when their wings only served them to sink. Yet Pope, after some fine panegyrical verses upon Lord Mansfield, fell from a n.o.ble height of poetry to the very bottom of the bathos, by concluding his eulogy with the following feeble lines,
Graced as thou art with all the power of words, So known, so honoured in the House of Lords.
Surely this was as risible a couplet of anticlimax, as the distich the bard ridicules, by merely quoting it,
Thou Dalhoussy, the great G.o.d of war, Lieutenant Colonel to the Earl of Mar.
In the works of Swift, who omits no opportunity of d.a.m.ning dullness, may be found some compositions where the disappointed reader, instead of being dazzled with the gleam of fancy, sorrowing sees nothing but the vapid insipidity of a poet laureat"s ode, and eagerly inquires if it be upon record, that Swift ever studied the sing song of Cibber. Knox, a modern and, as he in his wisdom thinketh, a cla.s.sic writer, censures, in one of his essays, the bombastic style; yet, were his own effusions arraigned in the court of criticism, they would, without any peradventure, be found guilty of turgidity. This pragmatical critic, who heated by high-church zeal, gives Gibbon to the Devil, and his writings to Lethe, presumptuously condemns that elegant historian for super-abundance of epithet, though a reader of Knox would suppose that the favourite page of this pedagogue"s grammar was that which contained the declension and variation of _adjectives_. Dr. Beattie, in the warmth of his wishes to promote social benevolent affections, almost _hates_ the man, who practices not _philanthropy_. Rocked in the cradle of the _kirk_, and implicitly believing all that the nurse and priest had taught him, this presbyterian zealot declaims in terms so acrimonious against the sceptics of the age, that one is led to think his "milk of human kindness," had became sour by the means he employed to preserve it.
Juvenal, the ancient satyrist, in one of his virulent attacks on the reigning Roman follies, avers that the most profligate of the senate were invariably strenuous advocates for a revival and execution of the obsolete rigid laws against debauchery. The indignant poet declares that if such glaring inconsistencies continue, none could be astonished should Clodius commence railer against libertines, and Cataline be first to impeach a conspirator. Were a name-sake of this bard to arise, I should tremble for the sect of modern _inconsistents_. He might brandish the lance of satire against such characters with more justice, though perhaps with less dexterity, than his cla.s.sic predecessor. The field of foibles and follies is so fully ripe, that some one should put in the sickle. In this field appears, and will again appear, a labourer, who though aukward, may be useful, and who will be "worthy of his hire,"
if he cut up nothing but tares.
A LETTER OF EXPOSTULATION TO A LADY ON HER MARRIAGE.
Your pa.s.sion, my dear Mrs. ***, was to be rich, you married a man you despised, and whose intrinsic worth is centured in his wealth: which gave charms even to deformity, transformed Hymen into Mammon, and the G.o.d of love into a satyr. Content yourself then with wealth, enjoy it, cultivate your taste for those advantages it can produce; and let these console you for the loss of every thing you have sacrificed for it. Have recourse to the principles of your determination: you had other offers: you have therefore examined, compared, chosen, and regretted. Be firm to this decision of your own judgment, and do not act inconsistently, by repining that you do not possess what you did not purchase. If the vices, if the follies of your husband, should become every day more and more intolerable to you, it will be in vain to regret the tranquility, the peace, the tender affection, endearing attention, or confidential intercourse, which might have distinguished your days, had you been united to a man of merit. In the height of your despair, you exclaim!
"Was it for this, my amiable mother nurtured me with such care, and cultivated in me, every idea replete with honour, enlivened by sentiment, and corrected with tenderness? Alas! these embellishments do now but add to my misery, in rendering me more sensible of the wretchedness of my state. The man I am chained to, is so far from possessing sensibility or taste, that he is dead to every impression of merit; and modesty, which might have endeared me to a man of delicacy, renders me hateful to this libertine; who by the indecency of his discourse, is continually offending against the sensations of a virtuous mind. While I regret the loss of intellectual enjoyment, my regret is strengthened by the direful effects of its privation on him. Mutual esteem is as necessary in a married state, as mutual affection; neither of which I enjoy. What is pomp, equipage, or splendor, compared with such seraphic sensations dwelling in the human heart? Will the blaze of diamonds atone for the deficiency of this pa.s.sion? Will the gold of Ophir, melted into one ma.s.s, weigh against the raptures of uniting hearts, warmed with sentiment and truth?"
As this man"s character was known before you married him, can you have now any just reason of complaint, especially as you have not even the excuse of partiality to plead for his person? Recollect your own sordid selfish views; prevailing pa.s.sion has been gratified, and you will pardon me, for questioning whether you would relinquish the advantages of your wealth, to be restored again to your liberty. Miss Aikin favours us with the following pa.s.sage from one of Lucian"s dialogues. "Jupiter complains to Cupid, that though he had so many intrigues, he was never sincerely beloved: in order to be beloved, says Cupid, you must lay aside your aegis and your thunderbolts; you must curl and perfume your hair, place a garland on your head, and walk with a soft step, and a.s.sume a winning obsequious deportment." "But replied Jupiter, I am not willing to resign so much of my dignity." "Then, returns Cupid, leave off desiring to be loved." He wanted to be Jupiter and Adonis at the same time: as you to be rich and happy. What right had you to expect that a miracle was to be performed in your favour? You knew well that the wretch to whom you have allied yourself, forsook humanity, and every genial feeling of an upright and honest heart, in the acquisition of that fortune, which you wished to possess, and have obtained, and which has since pampered the vices which disgust you. If he enumerates the spoils of his victories in ----, are they not covered with the blood of the vanquished? Did he give peace and happiness to the conquered? Did he accept the gifts of their princes, to use them for the comfort of those whose fathers, sons, or husbands, were ma.s.sacred? Did he use his power to gain security and freedom to the regions of oppression and slavery?
Did he endear the American name by examples of generosity? Did he return with the consciousness of his duty discharged to his country, and humanity to his fellow-creatures? If he was deficient in all this, what manner of right had you to expect tenderness and affection from him? You might with the same propriety look for the sensitive plant in a bed of nettles, and then complain you are stung by them. But you need not be upbraided for the folly of your election, since your own experience is but too severe a monitor. Debas.e.m.e.nt is the child of pride. All that remains for you now, is to render yourself as easy as possible; it is your duty to soothe the melancholy disposition your husband will be in (when alone) from a recollection of his crimes. Perhaps, by using your influence judiciously, you may yet have it in your power to humanize his pa.s.sions, and refine his pleasures: but your good sense will tell you that there is so much pride interwoven in the heart of man, that his obstinacy will never condescend to receive any more than a hint from a wife. A husband is more likely to be praised into virtue, than rallied out of vice; and the most essential point in the art of leading others, is to conceal from them that they are led at all. If he reforms, and thinks the world gives him the credit of it, in a short time he will believe it proceeded from his own will and inclinations, which will insure his constancy in it. Every method is laudable on your part, to reclaim your husband, except an affectation of fondness for him: this would be a profanation of love: and a woman capable of such abject deceit, I should look upon as capable of the most determined baseness.
If his crimes have hardened him, it will be in vain for you to attempt his reformation: but while you lament his depravity, you are left at liberty to spend your own time as you think proper. The gratifications of society, and the secrecy of solitude, are now equally in your power; please yourself and be content. If gaiety and dissipation are your pursuits, it cannot be denied that they are slight counterpoises for domestic felicity: but as the latter is entirely out of your reach, you should endeavour to make yourself easy. It is your own judgment alone that must lead you to obtaining that tranquility, which you may possibly find in the exulting joy of succouring virtue in distress, merit in indigence and obscurity; in wiping tears from the eyes of affliction, and in making the widow"s heart leap for joy. The serene complacency which springs in a good mind, on the exertion of benevolent principles, cannot be described; like the peace of G.o.d, it pa.s.seth knowledge. The poet says,
It is a joy possess"d by few indeed!
Dame Fortune has so many fools to feed, She cannot oft afford, with all her store, To yield her smiles, where nature smil"d before.
To sinking worth a cordial hand to lend; With better Fortune to surprise a friend; To chear the modest stranger"s lonely state; Or s.n.a.t.c.h an orphan family from fate: To do, possess"d with virtue"s n.o.blest fire, Such gen"rous deeds, as we with tears admire.
ARMSTRONG.
Thus you may evince the reality of your feelings, whilst it is in vain for others in less affluent circ.u.mstances to manifest their benevolence as they wish. Thus also, may you turn your husband"s (ill-acquired) perishable goods of fortune, into real blessings.
Wealth not only gilds the present moments as they pa.s.s; but like the sun, constantly supplies those rays which cherish all on whom they fall, and const.i.tute an uninterrupted series of felicity in the bosom of that person from whom they proceed: whilst, on the contrary, the weight of poverty not only distresses a person for the present, but may perhaps prevent him from emerging into happiness, and others from partic.i.p.ating of that benevolence, which warrants the means of exemplifying its sincerity. What must the poor man suffer, when the eye of friendship becomes inverted by his misfortunes in the world, and where he looks in vain around him for the benevolence of sympathy, and the consolations of human attachment!
I am, &c.
E. C.