Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

J >> John Wilson >> Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2




The Doctor then treats of the best Season for travelling, and very
judiciously observes that it is during these months when there is no
occasion for a fire--that is, just before and after the extreme heat. In
winter, Dr Kitchiner, who was a man of extraordinary powers of
observation, observed, "that the ways are generally bad, and often
dangerous, especially in hilly countries, by reason of the snow and ice.
The days are short--a traveller comes late to his lodging, and is often
forced to rise before the sun in the morning--besides, the country looks
dismal--nature is, as it were, half dead. The summer corrects all these
inconveniences." Paradoxical as this doctrine may at first sight
appear--yet we have verified it by experience--having for many years
found, without meeting with one single exception, that the fine, long,
warm days of summer are an agreeable and infallible corrective of the
inconveniences attending the foul, short, cold days of winter--a season
which is surly without being sincere, blustering rather than bold--an
intolerable bore--always pretending to be taking his leave, yet
domiciliating himself in another man's house for weeks together--and, to
be plain, a season so regardless of truth, that nobody believes him till
frost has hung an ice-padlock on his mouth, and his many-river'd voice
is dumb under the wreathed snows.

"Cleanliness when travelling," observes the Doctor, "is doubly
necessary; to sponge the body every morning with tepid water, and then
rub it dry with a rough towel, will greatly contribute to preserve
health. To put the feet into warm water for a couple of minutes just
before going to bed, is very refreshing, and inviting to sleep; for
promoting tranquillity, both mental and corporeal, a clean skin may be
regarded as next in efficacy to a clear conscience."

Far be it from us to seek to impugn such doctrine. A dirty dog is a
nuisance not to be borne. But here the question arises--who--what--is a
dirty dog? Now there are men (no women) naturally--necessarily--dirty.
They are not dirty by chance--or accident--say twice or thrice per diem;
but they are always dirty--at all times and in all places--and never and
nowhere more disgustingly so than when figged out for going to church.
It is in the skin, in the blood--in the flesh, and in the bone--that
with such the disease of dirt more especially lies. We beg pardon--no
less in the hair. Now, such persons do not know that they are
dirty--that they are unclean beasts. On the contrary, they often think
themselves pinks of purity--incarnations of carnations--impersonations
of moss-roses--the spiritual essences of lilies, "imparadised in form of
that sweet flesh." Now, were such persons to change their linen every
half-hour, night and day, that is, were they to put on forty-eight clean
shirts in the twenty-four hours--and it might not be reasonable,
perhaps, to demand more of them under a government somewhat too
Whiggish--yet though we cheerfully grant that one and all of the shirts
would be dirty, we as sulkily deny that at any given moment from sunrise
to sunset, and over again, the wearer would be clean. He would be just
every whit and bit as dirty as if he had known but one single shirt all
his life--and firmly believed his to be the only shirt in the universe.

Men again, on the other hand, there are--and, thank God, in great
numbers--who are naturally so clean, that we defy you to make them _bona
fide_ dirty. You may as well drive down a duck into a dirty puddle, and
expect lasting stains on its pretty plumage. Pope says the same thing of
swans--that is, Poets--when speaking of Aaron Hill diving into the
ditch,--

"He bears no tokens of the sabler streams,
But soars far off among the swans of Thames."

Pleasant people of this kind of constitution you see going about of a
morning rather in dishabille--hair uncombed haply--face and hands even
unwashed--and shirt with a somewhat day-before-yesterdayish hue. Yet are
they, so far from being dirty, at once felt, seen, and smelt, to be
among the very cleanest of her Majesty's subjects. The moment you shake
hands with them, you feel in the firm flesh of palm and finger that
their heart's-blood circulates purely and freely from the point of the
highest hair on the apex of the pericranium, to the edge of the nail on
the large toe of the right foot. Their eyes are as clear as unclouded
skies--the apples on their cheeks are like those on the tree--what need,
in either case, of rubbing off dust or dew with a towel? What though,
from sleeping without a nightcap, their hair may be a little toozy? It
is not dim--dull--oily--like half-withered sea-weeds! It will soon comb
itself with the fingers of the west wind--that tent-like tree its
toilette--its mirror that pool of the clear-flowing Tweed.

Some streams, just like some men, are always dirty--you cannot possibly
tell why--unproducible to good pic-nic society either in dry or wet
weather. In dry, the oozy wretches are weeping among the slippery weeds,
infested with eels and powheads. In wet, they are like so many
common-sewers, strewn with dead cats and broken crockery, and
threatening with their fierce fulzie to pollute the sea. The sweet,
soft, pure rains, soon as they touch the flood are changed into filth.
The sun sees his face in one of the pools, and is terrified out of his
senses. He shines no more that day. The clouds have no notion of being
caricatured, and the trees keep cautiously away from the brink of such
streams--save, perchance, now and then, here and there, a weak
well-meaning willow--a thing of shreds and patches--its leafless wands
covered with bits of old worsted stockings, crowns of hats, a bauchle
(see Dr Jamieson), and the remains of a pair of corduroy breeches, long
hereditary in the family of the Blood-Royal of the Yetholm Gypsies.

Some streams, just like some men, are always clean--you cannot well tell
why--producible to good pic-nic society either in dry or wet weather. In
dry, the pearly waters are singing among the freshened flowers--so that
the trout, if he chooses, may breakfast upon bees. In wet, they grow, it
is true, dark and drumly--and at midnight, when heaven's candles are put
out, loud and oft the angry spirit of the water shrieks. But Aurora
beholds her face in the clarified pools and shallows--far and wide
glittering with silver or with gold. All the banks and braes reappear
green as emerald from the subsiding current--into which look with the
eye of an angler, and you behold a Fish--a twenty-pounder--steadying
himself--like an uncertain shadow; and oh! for George Scougal's leister
to strike him through the spine! Yes, these are the images of trees far
down, as if in another world; and, whether you look up or look down,
alike in all its blue, braided, and unbounded beauty, is the morning
sky!

Irishmen are generally men of the kind thus illustrated--generally
sweet--at least in their own green Isle; and that was the best argument
in favour of Catholic Emancipation.--So are Scotsmen. Whereas,
blindfolded, take a London, Edinburgh, or Glasgow Cockney's hand,
immediately after it has been washed and scented, and put it to your
nose--and you will begin to be apprehensive that some practical wit has
substituted in lieu of the sonnet-scribbling bunch of little fetid
fives, the body of some chicken-butcher of a weasel, that died of the
plague. We have seen as much of what is most ignorantly and malignantly
denominated dirt--one week's earth--washed off the feet of a pretty
young girl on a Saturday night, at a single sitting in the little
rivulet that runs almost round about her father's hut, as would have
served him to raise his mignonette in, or his crop of cresses. How
beautifully glowed the crimson-snow of the singing creature's new-washed
feet! First, as they shone almost motionless beneath the lucid
waters--and then, fearless of the hard bent and rough roots of the
heather, bore the almost alarming Fairy dancing away from the eyes of
the stranger; till the courteous spirit that reigns over all the
Highland wilds arrested her steps knee-deep in bloom, and bade her bow
her auburn head, as, blushing, she faltered forth, in her sweet Gaelic
accents, a welcome that thrilled like a blessing through the heart of
the Sassenach, nearly benighted, and wearied sore with the fifty
glorious mountain-miles that intermit at times their frowning forests
from the corries of Cruachan to the cliffs of Cairngorm.

It will be seen from these hurried remarks, that there is more truth
than perhaps Dr Kitchiner was aware of in his apothegm--"that a clean
skin may be regarded as next in efficacy to a clear conscience." But the
Doctor had but a very imperfect notion of the meaning of the words
"clean skin"--his observation being not even skin-deep. A wash-hand
basin, a bit of soap, and a coarse towel, he thought would give a
Cockney on Ludgate-hill a clean skin--just as many good people think
that a Bible, a prayer-book, and a long sermon, can give a clear
conscience to a criminal in Newgate. The cause of the evil, in both
cases, lies too deep for tears. Millions of men and women pass through
nature to eternity clean-skinned and pious--with slight expense either
in soap or sermons; while millions more, with much week-day bodily
scrubbing, and much Sabbath spiritual sanctification, are held in bad
odour here, while they live, by those who happen to sit near them, and
finally go out like the stink of a candle.

Never stir, quoth the Doctor, "without paper, pen, and ink, and a
note-book in your pocket. Notes made by pencils are easily obliterated
by the motion of travelling. Commit to paper whatever you see, hear, or
read, that is remarkable, with your sensations on observing it--do this
upon the spot, if possible, at the moment it first strikes you--at all
events do not delay it beyond the first convenient opportunity."

Suppose all people behaved in this way--and what an absurd world we
should have of it--every man, woman, and child who could write, jotting
away at their note-books! This committing to paper of whatever you see,
hear, or read, has, among many other bad effects, this one
especially--in a few years it reduces you to a state of idiocy. The
memory of all men who commit to paper becomes regularly extinct, we have
observed, about the age of thirty. Now, although the Memory does not
bear a very brilliant reputation among the faculties, a man finds
himself very much at a stand who is unprovided with one; for the
Imagination, the Judgment, and the Reason walk off in search of the
Memory--each in opposite directions; and the Mind, left at home by
itself, is in a very awkward predicament--gets comatose--snores loudly,
and expires. For our own part, we would much rather lose our Imagination
and our Judgment--nay, our very Reason itself--than our Memory--provided
we were suffered to retain a little Feeling and a little Fancy.
Committers to paper forget that the Memory is a tablet, or they
carelessly fling that mysterious tablet away, soft as wax to receive
impressions, and harder than adamant to retain, and put their trust in a
bit of calf-skin, or a bundle of old rags.

The observer who instantly jots down every object he sees, never,
properly speaking, saw an object in his life. There has always been in
the creature's mind a feeling alien to that which the object would, of
its pure self, have excited. The very preservation of a sort of style in
the creature's remarks, costs him an effort which disables him from
understanding what is before him, by dividing the small attention of
which he might have been capable, between the jotting, the jotter, and
the thing jotted. Then your committer to paper of whatever he sees,
hears, or reads, forgets or has never known that all real knowledge,
either of men or things, must be gathered up by operations which are in
their very being spontaneous and free--the mind being even unconscious
of them as they are going on--while the edifice has all the time been
silently rising up under the unintermitting labours of those silent
workers--Thoughts; and is finally seen, not without wonder, by the Mind
or Soul itself, which, gentle reader, was all along Architect and
Foreman--had not only originally planned, but had even daily
superintended the building of the Temple.

Were Dr Kitchiner not dead, we should just put to him this simple
question--Could you, Doctor, not recollect all the dishes of the most
various dinner at which you ever assisted, down to the obscurest kidney,
without committing every item to your note-book? Yes, Doctor, you could.
Well, then, all the universe is but one great dinner. Heaven and earth,
what a show of dishes! From a sun to a salad--a moon to a mutton chop--a
comet to a curry--a planet to a pate! What gross ingratitude to the
Giver of the feast, not to be able, with the memory he has given us, to
remember his bounties! It is true, what the Doctor says, that notes made
with pencils are easily obliterated by the motion of travelling; but
then, Doctor, notes made by the Mind herself, with the Ruby Pen Nature
gives all her children who have also discourse of Reason, are with the
slightest touch, easilier far than glass by the diamond, traced on the
tablets that disease alone seems to deface, death alone to break, but
which, ineffaceable, and not to be broken, shall with all their
miscellaneous inscriptions endure for ever--yea, even to the great Day
of Judgment.

If men will but look and listen, and feel and think--they will never
forget anything worth being remembered. Do we forget "our children, that
to our eyes are dearer than the sun?" Do we forget our
wives--unreasonable and almost downright disagreeable as they sometimes
will be? Do we forget our triumphs--our defeats--our ecstasies, our
agonies--the face of a dear friend, or "dearest foe"--the ghost-like
voice of conscience at midnight arraigning us of crimes--or her seraph
hymn, at which the gates of heaven seem to expand for us that we may
enter in among the white-robed spirits, and

"Summer high in bliss upon the hills of God?"

What are all the jottings that ever were jotted down on his jot-book, by
the most inveterate jotter that ever reached a raven age, in comparison
with the Library of Useful Knowledge, that _every_ man--who is a
man--carries within the Ratcliffe--the Bodleian of his own breast?

What are you grinning at in the corner there, you little ugly Beelzebub
of a Printer's Devil? and have you dropped through a seam in the
ceiling? More copy do you want? There, you imp--vanished like a
thought!




DR KITCHINER.

SECOND COURSE.


Above all things, continues Dr Kitchiner, "avoid travelling through the
night, which, by interrupting sleep, and exposing the body to the night
air, is always prejudicial, even in the mildest weather, and to the
strongest constitutions." Pray, Doctor, what ails you at the night air?
If the night air be, even in the mildest weather, prejudicial to the
strongest constitutions, what do you think becomes of the cattle on a
thousand hills? Why don't all the bulls in Bashan die of the asthma--or
look interesting by moonlight in a galloping consumption? Nay, if the
night air be so very fatal, how do you account for the longevity of
owls? Have you never read of the Chaldean shepherds watching the courses
of the stars? Or, to come nearer our own times, do you not know that
every blessed night throughout the year, thousands of young lads and
lasses meet, either beneath the milk-white thorn--or on the lea-rig,
although the night be ne'er sae wet, and they be ne'er sae weary--or
under a rock on the hill--or--no uncommon case--beneath a frozen
stack--not of chimneys, but of corn-sheaves--or on a couch of snow--and
that they are all as warm as so many pies; while, instead of feeling
what you call "the lack of vigour attendant on the loss of sleep, which
is as enfeebling and as distressing as the languor that attends the want
of food," they are, to use a homely Scotch expression, "neither to haud
nor bind;" the eyes of the young lads being all as brisk, bold, and
bright as the stars in Charles's Wain, while those of the young lasses
shine with a soft, faint, obscure, but beautiful lustre, like the dewy
Pleiades, over which nature has insensibly been breathing a mist almost
waving and wavering into a veil of clouds?

Have you, our dear Doctor, no compassion for those unfortunate blades,
who, _nolentes-volentes_, must remain out perennially all night--we mean
the blades of grass, and also the flowers? Their constitutions seem
often far from strong; and shut your eyes on a frosty night, and you
will hear them--we have done so many million times--shivering, ay,
absolutely shivering under their coat of hoar-frost! If the night air be
indeed what Dr Kitchiner has declared it to be--Lord have mercy on the
vegetable world! What agonies in that field of turnips! Alas, poor
Swedes! The imagination recoils from the condition of that club of
winter cabbages--and of what materials, pray, must the heart of that man
be made, who could think but for a moment on the case of those carrots,
without bursting into a flood of tears!

The Doctor avers that the firm health and fine spirits of persons who
live in the country, are not more from breathing a purer air, than from
enjoying plenty of sound sleep; and the most distressing misery of "this
Elysium of bricks and mortar," is the rareness with which we enjoy "the
sweets of a slumber unbroke."

Doctor--in the first place, it is somewhat doubtful whether or not
persons who live in the country have firmer health and finer spirits
than persons who live in towns--even in London. What kind of persons do
you mean? You must not be allowed to select some dozen or two of the
hairiest among the curates--a few chosen rectors whose faces have been
but lately elevated to the purple--a team of prebends issuing sleek from
their golden stalls--a picked bishop--a sacred band the elite of the
squirearchy--with a corresponding sprinkling of superior noblemen from
lords to dukes--and then to compare them, cheek by jowl, with an equal
number of external objects taken from the common run of Cockneys. This,
Doctor, is manifestly what you are ettling at--but you must clap your
hand, Doctor, without discrimination, on the great body of the rural
population of England, male and female, and take whatever comes
first--be it a poor, wrinkled, toothless, blear-eyed, palsied hag,
tottering horizontally on a staff, under the load of a premature old age
(for she is not yet fifty), brought on by annual rheumatism and
perennial poverty;--Be it a young, ugly, unmarried woman, far advanced
in pregnancy, and sullenly trooping to the alehouse, to meet the
overseer of the parish poor, who, enraged with the unborn bastard, is
about to force the parish bully to marry the parish prostitute;--Be it a
landlord of a rural inn, with pig eyes peering over his ruby cheeks, the
whole machinery of his mouth so deranged by tippling that he
simultaneously snorts, stutters, slavers and
snores--pot-bellied--shanked like a spindle-strae--and bidding fair to
be buried on or before Saturday week;--Be it a half-drunk horse-cowper,
swinging to and fro in a wraprascal on a bit of broken-down blood that
once won a fifty, every sentence, however short, having but two
intelligible words, an oath and a lie--his heart rotten with falsehood,
and his bowels burned up with brandy, so that sudden death may pull him
from his saddle before he put spurs to his sporting filly that she may
bilk the turnpike man, and carry him more speedily home to beat or
murder his poor, pale, industrious char-woman of a wife;--Be it--not a
beggar, for beggars are prohibited from this parish--but a pauper in the
sulks, dying on her pittance from the poor-rates, which altogether
amount in merry England but to about the paltry sum of, more or less,
six millions a-year--her son, all the while, being in a thriving way as
a general merchant in the capital of the parish, and with clear profits
from his business of L300 per annum, yet suffering the mother that bore
him, and suckled him, and washed his childish hands, and combed the
bumpkin's hair, and gave him Epsoms in a cup when her dear Johnny-raw
had the belly-ache, to go down, step by step, as surely and as obviously
as one is seen going down a stair with a feeble hold of the banisters,
and stumbling every foot-fall down that other flight of steps that
consist of flags that are mortal damp and mortal cold, and lead to
nothing but a parcel of rotten planks, and overhead a vault dripping
with perpetual moisture, green and slobbery, such as toads delight in
crawling heavily through with now and then a bloated leap, and hideous
things more worm-like, that go wriggling briskly in and out among the
refuse of the coffins, and are heard, by imagination at least, to emit
faint angry sounds, because the light of day has hurt their eyes, and
the air from the upper world weakened the rank savoury smell of
corruption, clothing, as with a pall, all the inside walls of the
tombs;--Be it a man yet in the prime of life as to years, six feet and
an inch high, and measuring round the chest forty-eight inches (which is
more, reader, than thou dost by six, we bet a sovereign, member
although thou even be'st of the Edinburgh Six Feet Club), to whom
Washington Irving's Jack Tibbuts was but a Tims--but then ever so many
gamekeepers met him all alone in my lord's pheasant preserve, and though
two of them died within the month, two within the year, and two are now
in the workhouse--one a mere idiot, and the other a madman--both
shadows--so terribly were their bodies mauled, and so sorely were their
skulls fractured;--yet the poacher was taken, tried, hulked; and there
he sits now, sunning himself on a bank by the edge of the wood whose
haunts he must thread no more--for the keepers were grim bone-breakers
enough in their way--and when they had gotten him on his back, one
gouged him like a Yankee, and the other bit off his nose like a Bolton
Trotter--and one smashed his _os frontis_ with the nailed heel of a
two-pound wooden clog, a Preston Purrer;--so that Master Allonby is now
far from being a beauty, with a face of that description attached to a
head wagging from side to side under a powerful palsy, while the
Mandarin drinks damnation to the Lord of the Manor in a horn of
eleemosynary ale, handed to him by the village blacksmith, in days of
old not the worst of the gang, and who, but for a stupid jury, a
merciful judge, and something like prevarication in the circumstantial
evidence, would have been hanged for a murderer--as he was--dissected,
and hung in chains;--Be it a red-haired woman, with a pug nose, small
fiery eyes, high cheekbones, bulging lips, and teeth like
swine-tusks,--bearded--flat-breasted as a man--tall, scambling in her
gait, but swift, and full of wild motions in her weather-withered arms,
all starting with sinews like whipcord--the Pedestrian Post to and fro
the market town twelve miles off--and so powerful a pugilist that she
hit Grace Maddox senseless in seven minutes--tried before she was
eighteen for child-murder, but not hanged, although the man-child, of
which the drab was self-delivered in a ditch, was found with blue
finger-marks on its windpipe, bloody mouth, and eyes forced out of their
sockets, buried in the dunghill behind her father's hut--not hanged,
because a surgeon, originally bred a sow-gelder, swore that he believed
the mother had unconsciously destroyed her offspring in the throes of
travail, if indeed it had ever breathed, for the lungs would not swim,
he swore, in a basin of water--so the incestuous murderess was let
loose; her brother got hanged in due time after the mutiny at the
Nore--and her father, the fishmonger--why, he went red raving mad as if
a dog had bitten him--and died, as the same surgeon and sow-gelder
averred, of the hydrophobia, foaming at the mouth, gnashing his teeth,
and some said cursing, but that was a calumny, for something seemed to
be the matter with his tongue, and he could not speak, only
splutter--nobody venturing, except his amiable daughter--and in that
particular act of filial affection she was amiable--to hold in the
article of death the old man's head;--Be it that moping idiot that would
sit, were she suffered, on, on, on--night and day for ever, on the
self-same spot, whatever that spot might be on which she happened to
squat at morning, mound, wall, or stone--motionless, dumb, and, as a
stranger would think, also blind, for the eyelids are still shut--never
opened in sun or storm;--yet that figure--that which is now, and has for
years been, an utter and hopeless idiot, was once a gay, laughing,
dancing, singing girl, whose blue eyes seemed full of light, whether
they looked on earth or heaven, the flowers or the stars--her
sweetheart--a rational young man, it would appear--having leapt out upon
her suddenly, as she was passing through the churchyard at night, from
behind a tombstone, in a sack which she, having little time for
consideration, and being naturally superstitious, supposed to be a
shroud, and the wearer thereof, who was an active stripling of sound
flesh and blood, to be a ghost or skeleton, all one horrid rattle of
bones; so that the trick succeeded far beyond the most sanguine
expectation of the Tailor who played the principal part--and sense,
feeling, memory, imagination, and reason, were all felled by one blow of
fear--as butcher felleth ox--while by one of those mysteries, which
neither we, nor you, nor anybody else, can understand, life remained not
only unimpaired, but even invigorated; and there she sits, like a clock
wound up to go a certain time, the machinery of which being good, has
not been altogether deranged by the shock that sorely cracked the case,
and will work till the chain is run down, and then it will tick no
more;--Be it that tall, fair, lovely girl, so thin and attenuated that
all wonder she can walk by herself--that she is not blown away even by
the gentle summer breeze that wooes the hectic of her cheek--dying all
see--and none better than her poor old mother--and yet herself
thoughtless of the coming doom, and cheerful as a nest-building
bird--while her lover, too deep in despair to be betrayed into tears, as
he carries her to her couch, each successive day feels the dear and
dreadful burden lighter and lighter in his arms. Small strength will it
need to support her bier! The coffin, as if empty, will be lowered
unfelt by the hands that hold those rueful cords!

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