Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847

And our walls are the free,
And we laugh at thy "grande enceinte, Paris."

Deep and dark on their quay,
Like lions at bay,
Stand the guns that set earth at defiance;
With mountains of ball,
Which, wherever they fall,
With their message make speedy compliance.

Along the Parade
Lies the brisk carronade,
With Wellington's joy, the twelve-pounder.
And the long sixty-eight,
Made for matters of weight,
The world has no arguments sounder.

There stands the long rocket,
That shot, from its socket,
Puts armies, pell-mell, to the rout, sir;
At Leipsic, its tail
Made Napoleon turn pale,
And sent all his braves right about, sir.

And there gapes the mortar,
That seldom gives quarter,
When speaking to ship or to city;
For, although deaf and dumb,
Its tongue is a bomb—
And so, there's an end of my ditty.

The sun had now overcome the mists of the morning, and was throwing a rich lustre over the long sheets of foliage which screened, but without concealing, a large and classic villa on the Essex side. The park reached to the water's edge, in broad vistas, green as the emerald; deer were moving in groups over the lawn, or on standing still to gaze on the wonder of our flying ship. A few boats were slowly passing near the shore, along with the tide; the water was without a ripple,—the air was soft and fragrant, as it flowed from grove and garden; and the whole was a scene of sylvan and summer beauty. The thought suddenly shot across my mind, what a capital prize this would be, in a revolution! How handsomely it would repay a patriot for his trouble in uprooting lords and commons! What a philosophic consummation of a life of husting harangues, and league itinerancy, it would be, to lie on the drawing-room sofa of a mansion so perfectly Greek, railing at the tyranny of thrones, the bigotry of bishops, and the avarice of aristocracies; lamenting the privations of the poor, over a table of three courses, and drinking confusion to all monopolies in Vin de Comete!

But, who was the present possessor? I asked the name and heard it. But, from the captain to the cabin-boy, not a soul could give me another syllable of information. Like the gravedigger in Hamlet, they might "cudgel their brains," but all came to the gravedigger's confession at last,—"Mass, I cannot tell."

Such, thought I, are the chances of the world. The owner of this marine palace,—of these gardens, groves, deer, and dovecotes,—cannot have less than £10,000 a-year; yet his name has never reached the auricular sensibilities of man, beyond the fence of his own park. Was he philosopher, statesman, lawyer, orator, historian? inventor of steam-engine, of spinning jenny, of gunpowder, or of gun-cotton? No, I searched every cell of memory for some "trivial fond record" which might justify his title to a mansion and grounds fit for Sophocles, Schiller, or Shakspeare, the master of them all. I could not find, in all the rolls of the court of reminiscences, a single scrape of the pen to inform me; not so much as the commemorative smoke of a candle on the ceiling of the alcove of Mnemosyne; not a vestige of the "light fantastic toe," of those sylphs who treasure the flippancies of noble pens, and live in the fragrance of albums, otto-perfumed. Still I was driven to the confession, "Mass, I cannot tell."

I had brought a volume of poor Tom Campbell in my pocket, and had been glancing over his chef-d'œuvre, "Ye Mariners of England," when this stately edifice first checked my inspiration. In the wrath of my spirit I tossed the volume overboard. "Psha!" I involuntarily exclaimed, "what is the use of being a genius? What is the gratitude of a country, where a cotton-spinner can purchase the fee-simple of a province, while the man who spreads its fame over the world is left to gather his contemplations over a stove in an attic, watch the visage of his landlady, and shudder at the rise of coals!

'England, with all thy faults I love thee still.'

But it must be confessed, that thou art the most pitiful, paltry, beggarly, blind—" I shall say no more. Thy whole munificence, thy whole magnanimity, thy whole generosity, to the living lights of thy sullen region of toil, trimming, and tribulation, of the dulness of dukes and the mountainous fortunes of pinmakers—is exactly £1200 a-year! and this to be divided among the whole generation of the witty and the wise, of the sons and daughters of the muse,—the whole "school of the prophets," the lustres of the poetry and the science of England! £1200 a-year for the only men of their generation who will be remembered for five minutes by the generation to come. £1200 a-year, the salary of an Excise commissioner, of a manipulator of the penny post, of a charity inspector, of a police magistrate, of a register of cabs, of any thing and every body: and this, reduced to decimals, is to be the national prize, the luxurious provision, the brilliant prospect, the illustrious tribute of a treasury of fifty millions sterling a-year, to the whole literature of a land which boasts of its being the intellectual leader of the world!

I have found the poems of our living bards on the shores of Hudson's Bay, and heard men talking of them round a stove, while the thermometer outside the window was 30° below zero. I have found them in a plantain-thatched hovel on the banks of the Niger, and forgotten while I read them that the thermometer was 110° in the shade. I have found them in the hands of a learned pundit on the banks of the Ganges, whom they were seducing into dreams of dewy pastures and crystal rills. And one of the pleasantest evenings I ever remember to have spent, was, by the help of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," as I sat at a supper of rice milk, after a day of fire on the eastern branch of the Nile, a thousand miles above Tourists, sheltered under the wagon of a Moorish ambassador from Sultaun Abderahman to the monarch of Gondar. "England!" exclaimed this ebony-visaged worshipper of the Beaux Arts, as he displayed the volume before me. It was the only civilised word in his vocabulary. But I felt the compliment with patriotic fervency, and in spirit thanked the bard for the barbarian's acknowledgment of my poetic and penurious country.

I have not done with the theme yet. On returning from the equator, I saw Campbell's funeral. Westminster Abbey was a mob of dukes, statesmen, privy-councillors, and men of countless acres. Poor Tom's whole life had been thankless toil; wasting in meagre industry the powers which ought to have been cherished by his country for purposes of national honour. Such is always the course of things. The very stones of Burns' pillars would have made the great poet happy for life, if their price had been given to him to cheer his melancholy fireside. Why has the poetic spirit of England folded its wings, and been content to abandon its brilliant region to the butterflies of albums, but that the spirit of England has suffered itself to be fettered by the red tape of a peddling parsimony? Should we have had a Shakspeare without the smiles of an Elizabeth, and the generosity of a Southampton? No. He would have split his pen after his first tragedy; have thrown his ink-stand into the Thames; have taken the carrier's cart to Stratford, and there finished his days in writing epitaphs in the churchyard, laughing at Sir Thomas Lucy, and bequeathing deathless scoffs, to the beggary of mankind.

I was growing into what the dramatists call a "towering passion," and meditating general reforms of Civil Lists, Chancellors of the Exchequer, and Lord Chamberlains, when my attention was turned to a very animated scene going on between a pair who seemed perfectly unconscious of all the external creation. One of the parties was a showy-looking fellow, with the mingled expression of rouéism and half-pay, which is so frequent and so unmistakeable in the neighbourhood of St James's. The lady was a calm and composed personage, whom, on a second glance, I remembered to have seen wherever the world could bow down to the fair possessor of countless "consols." But the passion for a handsome mansion, a handsome stud, and a handsome rental, is indefatigable, and the ex-staff man poured his adorations into her ear with all the glow of a suitor ten thousand pounds worse than nothing.

Poesy! sweetest of all the maids of Parnassus! it is thou that givest thy votary power to read the soul: it is thou that canst translate the glance into a speech, and give eloquence to the clasp of a hand. It is thou alone to whom the world is indebted for this true version of the pleadings of the Guardsman.

TRUE LOVE

Exquisite Miss Millionaire!
Hear a lover's genuine prayer:
Let the world adore your charms,
Swan-like neck, or snowy arms,
Rosy smile, or dazzling glance,
Making all our bosoms dance;
For your purse alone I care,
Exquisite Miss Millionaire!
Ringlets blackest of the black,
Ivory shoulders, Grecian back,
Tresses so divinely twined,
That we long to be the wind,
Waiting till the lady's face
Turns, to give the coup de grace.
All those spells to me are air.
Truth is truth, Miss Millionaire.

Let them talk of finger-tips,
Pearly teeth, or coral lips,
Cheeks the morning rose that mock,
Still there is a charm in Stock!
Solid mortgage, five per cent,
Freehold with "improving" rent,
Russia bond, and railroad share,
Steal my soul, Miss Millionaire.

Let your rhymers (all are crackt)
Rave of cloud or cataract;
On the Rhine, or Rhone, or Arve,
Let romancers stroll and starve.
Cupid loves a gilded cage,
(Let me choose your equipage,)
Passion pants for Portman Square,
(Be but mine,) Miss Millionaire.

There you'll lead a London life,
More a goddess than a wife;
Fifty thousand pounds a-year
Making our expenses clear;
Giving, once a-week, a fête,
Simply to display our plate.
Never earth saw such a pair,
Exquisite Miss Millionaire!

But a steeple starts up from its green thickets; not one of the hideous objects which the architects of our district churches perpetrate, to puzzle the passer-by as to the purpose of its being,—whether a brewer's chimney, or a shot-tower,—a perch for city pigeons, or a standing burlesque on the builders of the nineteenth age of the fine arts in England. This steeple is an old grey turret, ivy-mantled, modest, and with that look of venerable age which instinctively makes us feel, that it has witnessed memorable things in its time.

And it has witnessed them. On the slope of the hill above this church once waved the banners of a king, and the opposing banners of his nobles: the one receiving the lesson, that kings have duties as well as their subjects; and the others enforcing the lesson by the sight of lines and columns of the stout bowmen and billmen of the Norman chivalry.—On this spot, just this day six hundred and thirty years ago, was held the grand conference between John and the Barons.