Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 66, No. 408, January 1849

Hamilton, Canada West,

August 1849.

THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH, OR THE GLORY OF MOTION

Some twenty or more years before I matriculated at Oxford, Mr Palmer, M.P. for Bath, had accomplished two things, very hard to do on our little planet, the Earth, however cheap they may happen to be held by the eccentric people in comets: he had invented mail-coaches, and he had married the daughter[17 - Lady Madeline Gordon.] of a duke. He was, therefore, just twice as great a man as Galileo, who certainly invented (or discovered) the satellites of Jupiter, those very next things extant to mail-coaches in the two capital points of speed and keeping time, but who did not marry the daughter of a duke.

These mail-coaches, as organised by Mr Palmer, are entitled to a circumstantial notice from myself – having had so large a share in developing the anarchies of my subsequent dreams, an agency which they accomplished, first, through velocity, at that time unprecedented; they first revealed the glory of motion: suggesting, at the same time, an under-sense, not unpleasurable, of possible though indefinite danger; secondly, through grand effects for the eye between lamp-light and the darkness upon solitary roads; thirdly, through animal beauty and power so often displayed in the class of horses selected for this mail service; fourthly, through the conscious presence of a central intellect, that, in the midst of vast distances,[18 - "Vast distances." – One case was familiar to mail-coach travellers, where two mails in opposite directions, north and south, starting at the same minute from points six hundred miles apart, met almost constantly at a particular bridge which exactly bisected the total distance.] of storms, of darkness, of night, overruled all obstacles into one steady co-operation in a national result. To my own feeling, this Post-office service recalled some mighty orchestra, where a thousand instruments, all disregarding each other, and so far in danger of discord, yet all obedient as slaves to the supreme baton of some great leader, terminate in a perfection of harmony like that of heart, veins, and arteries, in a healthy animal organisation. But, finally, that particular element in this whole combination which most impressed myself, and through which it is that to this hour Mr Palmer's mail-coach system tyrannises by terror and terrific beauty over my dreams, lay in the awful political mission which at that time it fulfilled. The mail-coaches it was that distributed over the face of the land, like the opening of apocalyptic vials, the heart-shaking news of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo. These were the harvests that, in the grandeur of their reaping, redeemed the tears and blood in which they had been sown. Neither was the meanest peasant so much below the grandeur and the sorrow of the times as to confound these battles, which were gradually moulding the destinies of Christendom, with the vulgar conflicts of ordinary warfare, which are oftentimes but gladiatorial trials of national prowess. The victories of England in this stupendous contest rose of themselves as natural Te Deums to heaven; and it was felt by the thoughtful that such victories, at such a crisis of general prostration, were not more beneficial to ourselves than finally to France, and to the nations of western and central Europe, through whose pusillanimity it was that the French domination had prospered.

The mail-coach, as the national organ for publishing these mighty events, became itself a spiritualised and glorified object to an impassioned heart; and naturally, in the Oxford of that day, all hearts were awakened. There were, perhaps, of us gownsmen, two thousand resident[19 - "Resident." – The number on the books was far greater, many of whom kept up an intermitting communication with Oxford. But I speak of those only who were steadily pursuing their academic studies, and of those who resided constantly as fellows.] in Oxford, and dispersed through five-and-twenty colleges. In some of these the custom permitted the student to keep what are called "short terms;" that is, the four terms of Michaelmas, Lent, Easter, and Act, were kept severally by a residence, in the aggregate, of ninety-one days, or thirteen weeks. Under this interrupted residence, accordingly, it was possible that a student might have a reason for going down to his home four times in the year. This made eight journeys to and fro. And as these homes lay dispersed through all the shires of the island, and most of us disdained all coaches except his majesty's mail, no city out of London could pretend to so extensive a connexion with Mr Palmer's establishment as Oxford. Naturally, therefore, it became a point of some interest with us, whose journeys revolved every six weeks on an average, to look a little into the executive details of the system. With some of these Mr Palmer had no concern; they rested upon bye-laws not unreasonable, enacted by posting-houses for their own benefit, and upon others equally stern, enacted by the inside passengers for the illustration of their own exclusiveness. These last were of a nature to rouse our scorn, from which the transition was not very long to mutiny. Up to this time, it had been the fixed assumption of the four inside people, (as an old tradition of all public carriages from the reign of Charles II.,) that they, the illustrious quaternion, constituted a porcelain variety of the human race, whose dignity would have been compromised by exchanging one word of civility with the three miserable delf ware outsides. Even to have kicked an outsider might have been held to attaint the foot concerned in that operation; so that, perhaps, it would have required an act of parliament to restore its purity of blood. What words, then, could express the horror, and the sense of treason, in that case, which had happened, where all three outsides, the trinity of Pariahs, made a vain attempt to sit down at the same breakfast-table or dinner-table with the consecrated four? I myself witnessed such an attempt; and on that occasion a benevolent old gentleman endeavoured to soothe his three holy associates, by suggesting that, if the outsides were indicted for this criminal attempt at the next assizes, the court would regard it as a case of lunacy (or delirium tremens) rather than of treason. England owes much of her grandeur to the depth of the aristocratic element in her social composition. I am not the man to laugh at it. But sometimes it expressed itself in extravagant shapes. The course taken with the infatuated outsiders, in the particular attempt which I have noticed, was, that the waiter, beckoning them away from the privileged salle-à-manger, sang out, "This way, my good men;" and then enticed them away off to the kitchen. But that plan had not always answered. Sometimes, though very rarely, cases occurred where the intruders, being stronger than usual, or more vicious than usual, resolutely refused to move, and so far carried their point, as to have a separate table arranged for themselves in a corner of the room. Yet, if an Indian screen could be found ample enough to plant them out from the very eyes of the high table, or dais, it then became possible to assume as a fiction of law – that the three delf fellows, after all, were not present. They could be ignored by the porcelain men, under the maxim, that objects not appearing, and not existing, are governed by the same logical construction.

Such now being, at that time, the usages of mail-coaches, what was to be done by us of young Oxford? We, the most aristocratic of people, who were addicted to the practice of looking down superciliously even upon the insides themselves as often very suspicious characters, were we voluntarily to court indignities? If our dress and bearing sheltered us, generally, from the suspicion of being "raff," (the name at that period for "snobs,"[20 - "Snobs," an its antithesis, "nobs," arose among the internal factions of shoe-makers perhaps ten years later. Possibly enough, the terms may have existed much earlier; but they were then first made known, picturesquely and effectively, by a trial at some assizes which happened to fix the public attention.]) we really were such constructively, by the place we assumed. If we did not submit to the deep shadow of eclipse, we entered at least the skirts of its penumbra. And the analogy of theatres was urged against us, where no man can complain of the annoyances incident to the pit or gallery, having his instant remedy in paying the higher price of the boxes. But the soundness of this analogy we disputed. In the case of the theatre, it cannot be pretended that the inferior situations have any separate attractions, unless the pit suits the purpose of the dramatic reporter. But the reporter or critic is a rarity. For most people, the sole benefit is in the price. Whereas, on the contrary, the outside of the mail had its own incommunicable advantages. These we could not forego. The higher price we should willingly have paid, but that was connected with the condition of riding inside, which was insufferable. The air, the freedom of prospect, the proximity to the horses, the elevation of seat – these were what we desired; but, above all, the certain anticipation of purchasing occasional opportunities of driving.

Under coercion of this great practical difficulty, we instituted a searching inquiry into the true quality and valuation of the different apartments about the mail. We conducted this inquiry on metaphysical principles; and it was ascertained satisfactorily, that the roof of the coach, which some had affected to call the attics, and some the garrets, was really the drawing-room, and the box was the chief ottoman or sofa in that drawing-room; whilst it appeared that the inside, which had been traditionally regarded as the only room tenantable by gentlemen, was, in fact, the coal-cellar in disguise.

Great wits jump. The very same idea had not long before struck the celestial intellect of China. Amongst the presents carried out by our first embassy to that country was a state-coach. It had been specially selected as a personal gift by George III.; but the exact mode of using it was a mystery to Pekin. The ambassador, indeed, (Lord Macartney) had made some dim and imperfect explanations upon the point; but as his excellency communicated these in a diplomatic whisper, at the very moment of his departure, the celestial mind was very feebly illuminated, and it became necessary to call a cabinet council on the grand state question – "Where was the emperor to sit?" The hammer-cloth happened to be unusually gorgeous; and partly on that consideration, but partly also because the box offered the most elevated seat, and undeniably went foremost, it was resolved by acclamation that the box was the imperial place, and, for the scoundrel who drove, he might sit where he could find a perch. The horses, therefore, being harnessed, under a flourish of music and a salute of guns, solemnly his imperial majesty ascended his new English throne, having the first lord of the treasury on his right hand, and the chief jester on his left. Pekin gloried in the spectacle; and in the whole flowery people, constructively present by representation, there was but one discontented person, which was the coachman. This mutinous individual, looking as blackhearted as he really was, audaciously shouted – "Where am I to sit?" But the privy council, incensed by his disloyalty, unanimously opened the door, and kicked him into the inside. He had all the inside places to himself; but such is the rapacity of ambition, that he was still dissatisfied. "I say," he cried out in an extempore petition, addressed to the emperor through a window, "how am I to catch hold of the reins?" – "Any how," was the answer; "don't trouble me, man, in my glory; through the windows, through the key-holes – how you please." Finally, this contumacious coachman lengthened the checkstrings into a sort of jury-reins, communicating with the horses; with these he drove as steadily as may be supposed. The emperor returned after the briefest of circuits: he descended in great pomp from his throne, with the severest resolution never to remount it. A public thanksgiving was ordered for his majesty's prosperous escape from the disease of a broken neck; and the state-coach was dedicated for ever as a votive offering to the God Fo, Fo – whom the learned more accurately call Fi, Fi.

A revolution of this same Chinese character did young Oxford of that era effect in the constitution of mail-coach society. It was a perfect French revolution; and we had good reason to say, Ca ira. In fact, it soon became too popular. The "public," a well known character, particularly disagreeable, though slightly respectable, and notorious for affecting the chief seats in synagogues, had at first loudly opposed this revolution; but when all opposition showed itself to be ineffectual, our disagreeable friend went into it with headlong zeal. At first it was a sort of race between us; and, as the public is usually above 30, (say generally from 30 to 50 years old,) naturally we of young Oxford, that averaged about 20, had the advantage. Then the public took to bribing, giving fees to horse-keepers, &c., who hired out their persons as warming-pans on the box-seat. That, you know, was shocking to our moral sensibilities. Come to bribery, we observed, and there is an end to all morality, Aristotle's, Cicero's, or anybody's. And, besides, of what use was it? For we bribed also. And as our bribes to those of the public being demonstrated out of Euclid to be as five shillings to sixpence, here again young Oxford had the advantage. But the contest was ruinous to the principles of the stable-establishment about the mails. The whole corporation was constantly bribed, rebribed, and often sur-rebribed; so that a horse-keeper, ostler, or helper, was held by the philosophical at that time to be the most corrupt character in the nation.

There was an impression upon the public mind, natural enough from the continually augmenting velocity of the mail, but quite erroneous, that an outside seat on this class of carriages was a post of danger. On the contrary, I maintained that, if a man had become nervous from some gipsy prediction in his childhood, allocating to a particular moon now approaching some unknown danger, and he should inquire earnestly, – "Whither can I go for shelter? Is a prison the safest retreat? Or a lunatic, hospital? Or the British Museum?" I should have replied – "Oh, no; I'll tell you what to do. Take lodgings for the next forty days on the box of his majesty's mail. Nobody can touch you there. If it is by bills at ninety days after date that you are made unhappy – if noters and protesters are the sort of wretches whose astrological shadows darken the house of life – then note you what I vehemently protest, viz., that no matter though the sheriff in every county should be running after you with his posse, touch a hair of your head he cannot whilst you keep house, and have your legal domicile, on the box of the mail. It's felony to stop the mail; even the sheriff cannot do that. And an extra (no great matter if it grazes the sheriff) touch of the whip to the leaders at any time guarantees your safety." In fact, a bed-room in a quiet house seems a safe enough retreat; yet it is liable to its own notorious nuisances, to robbers by night, to rats, to fire. But the mail laughs at these terrors. To robbers, the answer is packed up and ready for delivery in the barrel of the guard's blunderbuss. Rats again! there are none about mail-coaches, any more than snakes in Von Troil's Iceland; except, indeed, now and then a parliamentary rat, who always hides his shame in the "coal-cellar." And, as to fire, I never knew but one in a mail-coach, which was in the Exeter mail, and caused by an obstinate sailor bound to Devonport. Jack, making light of the law and the lawgiver that had set their faces against his offence, insisted on taking up a forbidden seat in the rear of the roof, from which he could exchange his own yarns with those of the guard. No greater offence was then known to mail-coaches; it was treason, it was læsa majestas, it was by tendency arson; and the ashes of Jack's pipe, falling amongst the straw of the hinder boot, containing the mail-bags, raised a flame which (aided by the wind of our motion) threatened a revolution in the republic of letters. But even this left the sanctity of the box unviolated. In dignified repose, the coachman and myself sat on, resting with benign composure upon our knowledge – that the fire would have to burn its way through four inside passengers before it could reach ourselves. With a quotation rather too trite, I remarked to the coachman, —

– "Jam proximus ardet

Ucalegon."

But, recollecting that the Virgilian part of his education might have been neglected, I interpreted so far as to say, that perhaps at that moment the flames were catching hold of our worthy brother and next-door neighbour Ucalegon. The coachman said nothing, but by his faint sceptical smile he seemed to be thinking that he knew better; for that in fact, Ucalegon, as it happened, was not in the way-bill.

No dignity is perfect which does not at some point ally itself with the indeterminate and mysterious. The connexion of the mail with the state and the executive government – a connexion obvious, but yet not strictly defined – gave to the whole mail establishment a grandeur and an official authority which did us service on the roads, and invested us with seasonable terrors. But perhaps these terrors were not the less impressive, because their exact legal limits were imperfectly ascertained. Look at those turnpike gates; with what deferential hurry, with what an obedient start, they fly open at our approach! Look at that long line of carts and carters ahead, audaciously usurping the very crest of the road: ah! traitors, they do not hear us as yet, but as soon as the dreadful blast of our horn reaches them with the proclamation of our approach, see with what frenzy of trepidation they fly to their horses' heads, and deprecate our wrath by the precipitation of their crane-neck quarterings. Treason they feel to be their crime; each individual carter feels himself under the ban of confiscation and attainder: his blood is attainted through six generations, and nothing is wanting but the heads-man and his axe, the block and the sawdust, to close up the vista of his horrors. What! shall it be within benefit of clergy, to delay the king's message on the highroad? – to interrupt the great respirations, ebb or flood, of the national intercourse – to endanger the safety of tidings running day and night between all nations and languages? Or can it be fancied, amongst the weakest of men, that the bodies of the criminals will be given up to their widows for Christian burial? Now, the doubts which were raised as to our powers did more to wrap them in terror, by wrapping them in uncertainty; than could have been effected by the sharpest definitions of the law from the Quarter Sessions. We, on our parts, (we, the collective mail, I mean,) did our utmost to exalt the idea of our privileges by the insolence with which we wielded them. Whether this insolence rested upon law that gave it a sanction, or upon conscious power, haughtily dispensing with that sanction, equally it spoke from a potential station; and the agent in each particular insolence of the moment, was viewed reverentially, as one having authority.

Sometimes after breakfast his majesty's mail would become frisky; and in its difficult wheelings amongst the intricacies of early markets, it would upset an apple-cart, a cart loaded with eggs, &c. Huge was the affliction and dismay, awful was the smash, though, after all, I believe the damage might be levied upon the hundred. I, as far as was possible, endeavoured in such a case to represent the conscience and moral sensibilities of the mail; and, when wildernesses of eggs were lying poached under our horses' hoofs, then would I stretch forth my hands in sorrow, saying (in words too celebrated in those days from the false[21 - "False echoes" – yes, false! for the words ascribed to Napoleon, as breathed to the memory of Desaix, never were uttered at all. They stand in the same category of theatrical inventions as the cry of the foundering Vengeur, as the vaunt of General Cambronne at Waterloo, "La Garde meurt, mais ne se rend pas," as the repartees of Talleyrand.] echoes of Marengo) – "Ah! wherefore have we not time to weep over you?" which was quite impossible, for in fact we had not even time to laugh over them. Tied to post-office time, with an allowance in some cases of fifty minutes for eleven miles, could the royal mail pretend to undertake the offices of sympathy and condolence? Could it be expected to provide tears for the accidents of the road? If even it seemed to trample on humanity, it did so, I contended, in discharge of its own more peremptory duties.

Upholding the morality of the mail, à fortiori I upheld its rights, I stretched to the uttermost its privilege of imperial precedency, and astonished weak minds by the feudal powers which I hinted to be lurking constructively in the charters of this proud establishment. Once I remember being on the box of the Holyhead mail, between Shrewsbury and Oswestry, when a tawdry thing from Birmingham, some Tallyho or Highflier, all flaunting with green and gold, came up alongside of us. What a contrast to our royal simplicity of form and colour is this plebeian wretch! The single ornament on our dark ground of chocolate colour was the mighty shield of the imperial arms, but emblazoned in proportions as modest as a signet-ring bears to a seal of office. Even this was displayed only on a single pannel, whispering, rather than proclaiming, our relations to the state; whilst the beast from Birmingham had as much writing and painting on its sprawling flanks as would have puzzled a decipherer from the tombs of Luxor. For some time this Birmingham machine ran along by our side, – a piece of familiarity that seemed to us sufficiently jacobinical. But all at once a movement of the horses announced a desperate intention of leaving us behind. "Do you see that?" I said to the coachman. "I see," was his short answer. He was awake, yet he waited longer than seemed prudent; for the horses of our audacious opponent had a disagreeable air of freshness and power. But his motive was loyal; his wish was that the Birmingham conceit should be full-blown before he froze it. When that seemed ripe, he unloosed, or, to speak by a stronger image, he sprang his known resources, he slipped our royal horses like cheetahs, or hunting leopards after the affrighted game. How they could retain such a reserve of fiery power after the work they had accomplished, seemed hard to explain. But on our side, besides the physical superiority, was a tower of strength, namely, the king's name, "which they upon the adverse faction wanted." Passing them without an effort, as it seemed, we threw them into the rear with so lengthening an interval between us, as proved in itself the bitterest mockery of their presumption; whilst our guard blew back a shattering blast of triumph, that was really too painfully full of derision.

I mention this little incident for its connexion with what followed. A Welshman, sitting behind me, asked if I had not felt my heart burn within me during the continuance of the race? I said – No; because we were not racing with a mail, so that no glory could be gained. In fact, it was sufficiently mortifying that such a Birmingham thing should dare to challenge us. The Welshman replied, that he didn't see that; for that a cat might look at a king, and a Brummagem coach might lawfully race the Holyhead mail. "Race us perhaps," I replied, "though even that has an air of sedition, but not beat us. This would have been treason; and for its own sake I am glad that the Tallyho was disappointed." So dissatisfied did the Welshman seem with this opinion, that at last I was obliged to tell him a very fine story from one of our elder dramatists, viz. – that once, in some Oriental region, when the prince of all the land, with his splendid court, were flying their falcons, a hawk suddenly flew at a majestic eagle; and in defiance of the eagle's prodigious advantages, in sight also of all the astonished field-sportsmen, spectators, and followers, killed him on the spot. The prince was struck with amazement at the unequal contest, and with burning admiration for its unparalleled result. He commanded that the hawk should be brought before him; caressed the bird with enthusiasm, and ordered that, for the commemoration of his matchless courage, a crown of gold should be solemnly placed on the hawk's head; but then that, immediately after this coronation, the bird should be led off to execution, as the most valiant indeed of traitors, but not the less a traitor that had dared to rise in rebellion against his liege lord the eagle. "Now," said I to the Welshman, "how painful it would have been to you and me as men of refined feelings, that this poor brute, the Tallyho, in the impossible case of a victory over us, should have been crowned with jewellery, gold, with Birmingham ware, or paste diamonds, and then led off to instant execution." The Welshman doubted if that could be warranted by law. And when I hinted at the 10th of Edward III. chap. 15, for regulating the precedency of coaches, as being probably the statute relied on for the capital punishment of such offences, he replied drily – That if the attempt to pass a mail was really treasonable, it was a pity that the Tallyho appeared to have so imperfect an acquaintance with law.

These were among the gaieties of my earliest and boyish acquaintance with mails. But alike the gayest and the most terrific of my experiences rose again after years of slumber, armed with preternatural power to shake my dreaming sensibilities; sometimes, as in the slight case of Miss Fanny on the Bath road, (which I will immediately mention,) through some casual or capricious association with images originally gay, yet opening at some stage of evolution into sudden capacities of horror; sometimes through the more natural and fixed alliances with the sense of power so various lodged in the mail system.

The modern modes of travelling cannot compare with the mail-coach system in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity, but not however as a consciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge, resting upon alien evidence, as, for instance, because somebody says that we have gone fifty miles in the hour, or upon the evidence of a result, as that actually we find ourselves in York four hours after leaving London. Apart from such an assertion, or such a result, I am little aware of the pace. But, seated on the old mail-coach, we needed no evidence out of ourselves to indicate the velocity. On this system the word was —Non magna loquimur, as upon railways, but magna vivimus. The vital experience of the glad animal sensibilities made doubts impossible on the question of our speed; we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of an animal, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and echoing hoofs. This speed was incarnated in the visible contagion amongst brutes of some impulse, that, radiating into their natures, had yet its centre and beginning in man. The sensibility of the horse uttering itself in the maniac light of his eye, might be the last vibration in such a movement; the glory of Salamanca might be the first – but the intervening link that connected them, that spread the earthquake of the battle into the eyeball of the horse, was the heart of man – kindling in the rapture of the fiery strife, and then propagating its own tumults by motions and gestures to the sympathies, more or less dim, in his servant the horse.

But now, on the new system of travelling, iron tubes and boilers have disconnected man's heart from the ministers of his locomotion. Nile nor Trafalgar has power any more to raise an extra bubble in a steam-kettle. The galvanic cycle is broken up for ever; man's imperial nature no longer sends itself forward through the electric sensibility of the horse; the inter-agencies are gone in the mode of communication between the horse and his master, out of which grew so many aspects of sublimity under accidents of mists that hid, or sudden blazes that revealed, of mobs that agitated, or midnight solitudes that awed. Tidings, fitted to convulse all nations, must henceforwards travel by culinary process; and the trumpet that once announced from afar the laurelled mail, heart-shaking, when heard screaming on the wind, and advancing through the darkness to every village or solitary house on its route, has now given way for ever to the pot-wallopings of the boiler.

Thus have perished multiform openings for sublime effects, for interesting personal communications, for revelations of impressive faces that could not have offered themselves amongst the hurried and fluctuating groups of a railway station. The gatherings of gazers about a mail-coach had one centre, and acknowledged only one interest. But the crowds attending at a railway station have as little unity as running water, and own as many centres as there are separate carriages in the train.

How else, for example, than as a constant watcher for the dawn, and for the London mail that in summer months entered about dawn into the lawny thickets of Marlborough Forest, couldst thou, sweet Fanny of the Bath road, have become known to myself? Yet Fanny, as the loveliest young woman for face and person that perhaps in my whole life I have beheld, merited the station which even her I could not willingly have spared; yet (thirty-five years later) she holds in my dreams; and though, by an accident of fanciful caprice, she brought along with her into those dreams a troop of dreadful creatures, fabulous and not fabulous, that were more abominable to a human heart than Fanny and the dawn were delightful.

Miss Fanny of the Bath road, strictly speaking, lived at a mile's distance from that road, but came so continually to meet the mail, that I on my frequent transits rarely missed her, and naturally connected her name with the great thoroughfare where I saw her; I do not exactly know, but I believe with some burthen of commissions to be executed in Bath, her own residence being probably the centre to which these commissions gathered. The mail-coachman, who wore the royal livery, being one amongst the privileged few,[22 - "Privileged few." The general impression was that this splendid costume belonged of right to the mail coachmen as their professional dress. But that was an error. To the guard it did belong as a matter of course, and was essential as an official warrant, and a means of instant identification for his person, in the discharge of his important public duties. But the coachman, and especially if his place in the series did not connect him immediately with London and the General Post-Office, obtained the scarlet coat only as an honorary distinction after long or special service.] happened to be Fanny's grandfather. A good man he was, that loved his beautiful granddaughter; and, loving her wisely, was vigilant over her deportment in any case where young Oxford might happen to be concerned. Was I then vain enough to imagine that I myself individually could fall within the line of his terrors? Certainly not, as regarded any physical pretensions that I could plead; for Fanny (as a chance passenger from her own neighbourhood once told me) counted in her train a hundred and ninety-nine professed admirers, if not open aspirants to her favour; and probably not one of the whole brigade but excelled myself in personal advantages.

Ulysses even, with the unfair advantage of his accursed bow, could hardly have undertaken that amount of suitors. So the danger might have seemed slight – only that woman is universally aristocratic: it is amongst her nobilities of heart that she is so. Now, the aristocratic distinctions in my favour might easily with Miss Fanny have compensated my physical deficiencies. Did I then make love to Fanny? Why, yes; mais oui donc; as much love as one can make whilst the mail is changing horses, a process which ten years later did not occupy above eighty seconds; but then, viz. about Waterloo, it occupied five times eighty. Now, four hundred seconds offer a field quite ample enough for whispering into a young woman's ear a great deal of truth; and (by way of parenthesis) some trifle of falsehood. Grandpapa did right, therefore, to watch me. And yet, as happens too often to the grandpapas of earth, in a contest with the admirers of granddaughters, how vainly would he have watched me had I meditated any evil whispers to Fanny! She, it is my belief, would have protected herself against any man's evil suggestions. But he, as the result showed, could not have intercepted the opportunities for such suggestions. Yet he was still active; he was still blooming. Blooming he was as Fanny herself.

"Say, all our praises why should lords – "

No, that's not the line:

"Say, all our roses why should girls engross?"

The coachman showed rosy blossoms on his face deeper even than his granddaughter's, —his being drawn from the ale-cask, Fanny's from youth and innocence, and from the fountains of the dawn. But, in spite of his blooming face, some infirmities he had; and one particularly, (I am very sure, no more than one,) in which he too much resembled a crocodile. This lay in a monstrous inaptitude for turning round. The crocodile, I presume, owes that inaptitude to the absurd length of his back; but in our Grandpapa it arose rather from the absurd breadth of his back, combined, probably, with some growing stiffness in his legs. Now upon this crocodile infirmity of his I planted an easy opportunity for tendering my homage to Miss Fanny. In defiance of all his honourable vigilance, no sooner had he presented to us his mighty Jovian back, (what a field for displaying to mankind his royal scarlet!) whilst inspecting professionally the buckles, the straps, and the silver turrets of his harness, than I raised Miss Fanny's hand to my lips, and, by the mixed tenderness and respectfulness of my manner, caused her easily to understand how happy it would have made me to rank upon her list as No. 10 or 12, in which case a few casualties amongst her lovers (and observe – they hanged liberally in those days) might have promoted me speedily to the top of the tree; as, on the other hand, with how much loyalty of submission I acquiesced in her allotment, supposing that she had seen reason to plant me in the very rearward of her favour, as No. 199+1. It must not be supposed that I allowed any trace of jest, or even of playfulness, to mingle with these expressions of my admiration; that would have been insulting to her, and would have been false as regarded my own feelings. In fact, the utter shadowiness of our relations to each other, even after our meetings through seven or eight years had been very numerous, but of necessity had been very brief, being entirely on mail-coach allowance – timed, in reality, by the General Post-Office – and watched by a crocodile belonging to the antepenultimate generation, left it easy for me to do a thing which few people ever can have done – viz., to make love for seven years, at the same time to be as sincere as ever creature was, and yet never to compromise myself by overtures that might have been foolish as regarded my own interests, or misleading as regarded hers. Most truly I loved this beautiful and ingenuous girl; and had it not been for the Bath and Bristol mail, heaven only knows what might have come of it. People talk of being over head and ears in love – now, the mail was the cause that I sank only over ears in love, which, you know, still left a trifle of brain to overlook the whole conduct of the affair. I have mentioned the case at all for the sake of a dreadful result from it in after years of dreaming. But it seems, ex abundanti, to yield this moral – viz. that as, in England, the idiot and the half-wit are held to be under the guardianship of Chancery, so the man making love, who is often but a variety of the same imbecile class, ought to be made a ward of the General Post-Office, whose severe course of timing and periodical interruption might intercept many a foolish declaration, such as lays a solid foundation for fifty years' repentance.

Ah, reader! when I look back upon those days, it seems to me that all things change or perish. Even thunder and lightning, it pains me to say, are not the thunder and lightning which I seem to remember about the time of Waterloo. Roses, I fear, are degenerating, and, without a Red revolution, must come to the dust. The Fannies of our island – though this I say with reluctance – are not improving; and the Bath road is notoriously superannuated. Mr Waterton tells me that the crocodile does not change – that a cayman, in fact, or an alligator, is just as good for riding upon as he was in the time of the Pharaohs. That may be; but the reason is, that the crocodile does not live fast – he is a slow coach. I believe it is generally understood amongst naturalists, that the crocodile is a blockhead. It is my own impression that the Pharaohs were also blockheads. Now, as the Pharaohs and the crocodile domineered over Egyptian society, this accounts for a singular mistake that prevailed on the Nile. The crocodile made the ridiculous blunder of supposing man to be meant chiefly for his own eating. Man, taking a different view of the subject, naturally met that mistake by another; he viewed the crocodile as a thing sometimes to worship, but always to run away from. And this continued until Mr Waterton changed the relations between the animals. The mode of escaping from the reptile he showed to be, not by running away, but by leaping on its back, booted and spurred. The two animals had misunderstood each other. The use of the crocodile has now been cleared up – it is to be ridden; and the use of man is, that he may improve the health of the crocodile by riding him a fox-hunting before breakfast. And it is pretty certain that any crocodile, who has been regularly hunted through the season, and is master of the weight he carries, will take a six-barred gate now as well as ever he would have done in the infancy of the Pyramids.

Perhaps, therefore, the crocodile does not change, but all things else do: even the shadow of the Pyramids grows less. And often the restoration in vision of Fanny and the Bath road, makes me too pathetically sensible of that truth. Out of the darkness, if I happen to call up the image of Fanny from thirty-five years back, arises suddenly a rose in June; or, if I think for an instant of the rose in June, up rises the heavenly face of Fanny. One after the other, like the antiphonies in a choral service, rises Fanny and the rose in June, then back again the rose in June and Fanny. Then come both together, as in a chorus; roses and Fannies, Fannies and roses, without end – thick as blossoms in paradise. Then comes a venerable crocodile, in a royal livery of scarlet and gold, or in a coat with sixteen capes; and the crocodile is driving four-in-hand from the box of the Bath mail. And suddenly we upon the mail are pulled up by a mighty dial, sculptured with the hours, and with the dreadful legend of TOO LATE. Then all at once we are arrived in Marlborough forest, amongst the lovely households[23 - "Households." – Roe-deer do not congregate in herds like the fallow or the red deer, but by separate families, parents, and children; which feature of approximation to the sanctity of human hearths, added to their comparatively miniature and graceful proportions, conciliate to them an interest of a peculiarly tender character, if less dignified by the grandeurs of savage and forest life.] of the roe-deer: these retire into the dewy thickets; the thickets are rich with roses; the roses call up (as ever) the sweet countenance of Fanny, who, being the granddaughter of a crocodile, awakens a dreadful host of wild semi-legendary animals – griffins, dragons, basilisks, sphinxes – till at length the whole vision of fighting images crowds into one towering, armorial shield, a vast emblazonry of human charities and human loveliness that have perished, but quartered heraldically with unutterable horrors of monstrous and demoniac natures; whilst over all rises, as a surmounting crest, one fair female hand, with the fore-finger pointing, in sweet, sorrowful admonition, upwards to heaven, and having power (which, without experience, I never could have believed) to awaken the pathos that kills in the very bosom of the horrors that madden the grief that gnaws at the heart, together with the monstrous creations of darkness that shock the belief, and make dizzy the reason of man. This is the peculiarity that I wish the reader to notice, as having first been made known to me for a possibility by this early vision of Fanny on the Bath road. The peculiarity consisted in the confluence of two different keys, though apparently repelling each other, into the music and governing principles of the same dream; horror, such as possesses the maniac, and yet, by momentary transitions, grief, such as may be supposed to possess the dying mother when leaving her infant children to the mercies of the cruel. Usually, and perhaps always, in an unshaken nervous system, these two modes of misery exclude each other – here first they met in horrid reconciliation. There was also a separate peculiarity in the quality of the horror. This was afterwards developed into far more revolting complexities of misery and incomprehensible darkness; and perhaps I am wrong in ascribing any value as a causative agency to this particular case on the Bath road – possibly it furnished merely an occasion that accidentally introduced a mode of horrors certain, at any rate, to have grown up, with or without the Bath road, from more advanced stages of the nervous derangement. Yet, as the cubs of tigers or leopards, when domesticated, have been observed to suffer a sudden development of their latent ferocity under too eager an appeal to their playfulness – the gaieties of sport in them being too closely connected with the fiery brightness of their murderous instincts – so I have remarked that the caprices, the gay arabesques, and the lovely floral luxuriations of dreams, betray a shocking tendency to pass into finer maniacal splendours. That gaiety, for instance, (for such at first it was,) in the dreaming faculty, by which one principal point of resemblance to a crocodile in the mail-coachman was soon made to clothe him with the form of a crocodile, and yet was blended with accessory circumstances derived from his human functions, passed rapidly into a further development, no longer gay or playful, but terrific, the most terrific that besieges dreams, viz. – the horrid inoculation upon each other of incompatible natures. This horror has always been secretly felt by man; it was felt even under pagan forms of religion, which offered a very feeble, and also a very limited gamut for giving expression to the human capacities of sublimity or of horror. We read it in the fearful composition of the sphinx. The dragon, again, is the snake inoculated upon the scorpion. The basilisk unites the mysterious malice of the evil eye, unintentional on the part of the unhappy agent, with the intentional venom of some other malignant natures. But these horrid complexities of evil agency are but objectively horrid; they inflict the horror suitable to their compound nature; but there is no insinuation that they feel that horror. Heraldry is so full of these fantastic creatures, that, in some zoologies, we find a separate chapter or a supplement dedicated to what is denominated heraldic zoology. And why not? For these hideous creatures, however visionary,[24 - "However visionary." – But are they always visionary? The unicorn, the kraken, the sea-serpent, are all, perhaps, zoological facts. The unicorn, for instance, so far from being a lie, is rather too true; for, simply as a monokeras, he is found in the Himalaya, in Africa, and elsewhere, rather too often for the peace of what in Scotland would be called the intending traveller. That which really is a lie in the account of the unicorn – viz., his legendary rivalship with the lion – which lie may God preserve, in preserving the mighty imperial shield that embalms it – cannot be more destructive to the zoological pretensions of the unicorn, than are to the same pretensions in the lion our many popular crazes about his goodness and magnanimity, or the old fancy (adopted by Spenser, and noticed by so many among our elder poets) of his graciousness to maiden innocence. The wretch is the basest and most cowardly among the forest tribes; nor has the sublime courage of the English bull-dog ever been so memorably exhibited as in his hopeless fight at Warwick with the cowardly and cruel lion called Wallace. Another of the traditional creatures, still doubtful, is the mermaid, upon which Southey once remarked to me, that, if it had been differently named, (as, suppose, a mer-ape) nobody would have questioned its existence any more than that of sea-cows, sea-lions, &c. The mermaid has been discredited by her human name and her legendary human habits. If she would not coquette so much with melancholy sailors, and brush her hair so assiduously upon solitary rocks, she would be carried on our books for as honest a reality, as decent a female, as many that are assessed to the poor-rates.] have a real traditionary ground in medieval belief – sincere and partly reasonable, though adulterating with mendacity, blundering, credulity, and intense superstition. But the dream-horror which I speak of is far more frightful. The dreamer finds housed within himself – occupying, as it were, some separate chamber in his brain – holding, perhaps, from that station a secret and detestable commerce with his own heart – some horrid alien nature. What if it were his own nature repeated, – still, if the duality were distinctly perceptible, even that– even this mere numerical double of his own consciousness – might be a curse too mighty to be sustained. But how, if the alien nature contradicts his own, fights with it, perplexes, and confounds it? How, again, if not one alien nature, but two, but three, but four, but five, are introduced within what once he thought the inviolable sanctuary of himself? These, however, are horrors from the kingdoms of anarchy and darkness, which, by their very intensity, challenge the sanctity of concealment, and gloomily retire from exposition. Yet it was necessary to mention them, because the first introduction to such appearances (whether causal, or merely casual) lay in the heraldic monsters, which monsters were themselves introduced (though playfully) by the transfigured coachman of the Bath mail.

GOING DOWN WITH VICTORY

But the grandest chapter of our experience, within the whole mail-coach service, was on those occasions when we went down from London with the news of victory. A period of about ten years stretched from Trafalgar to Waterloo: the second and third years of which period (1806 and 1807) were comparatively sterile; but the rest, from 1805 to 1815 inclusively, furnished a long succession of victories; the least of which, in a contest of that portentous nature, had an inappreciable value of position – partly for its absolute interference with the plans of our enemy, but still more from its keeping alive in central Europe the sense of a deep-seated vulnerability in France. Even to tease the coasts of our enemy, to mortify them by continual blockades, to insult them by capturing if it were but a baubling schooner under the eyes of their arrogant armies, repeated from time to time a sullen proclamation of power lodged in a quarter to which the hopes of Christendom turned in secret. How much more loudly must this proclamation have spoken in the audacity[25 - "Audacity!" Such the French accounted it, and it has struck me that Soult would not have been so popular in London, at the period of her present Majesty's coronation, or in Manchester, on occasion of his visit to that town, if they had been aware of the insolence with which he spoke of us in notes written at intervals from the field of Waterloo. As though it had been mere felony in our army to look a French one in the face, he said more than once – "Here are the English – we have them: they are caught en flagrant delit." Yet no man should have known us better; no man had drunk deeper from the cup of humiliation than Soult had in the north of Portugal, during his flight from an English army, and subsequently at Albuera, in the bloodiest of recorded battles.] of having bearded the élite of their troops, and having beaten them in pitched battles! Five years of life it was worth paying down for the privilege of an outside place on a mail-coach, when carrying down the first tidings of any such event. And it is to be noted that, from our insular situation, and the multitude of our frigates disposable for the rapid transmission of intelligence, rarely did any unauthorised rumour steal away a prelibation from the aroma of the regular despatches. The government official news was generally the first news.

From eight P.M. to fifteen or twenty minutes later, imagine the mails assembled on parade in Lombard Street, where, at that time, was seated the General Post-Office. In what exact strength we mustered I do not remember; but, from the length of each separate attelage, we filled the street, though a long one, and though we were drawn up in double file. On any night the spectacle was beautiful. The absolute perfection of all the appointments about the carriages and the harness, and the magnificence of the horses, were what might first have fixed the attention. Every carriage, on every morning in the year, was taken down to an inspector for examination – wheels, axles, linchpins, pole, glasses, &c., were all critically probed and tested. Every part of every carriage had been cleaned, every horse had been groomed, with as much rigour as if they belonged to a private gentleman; and that part of the spectacle offered itself always. But the night before us is a night of victory; and behold! to the ordinary display, what a heart-shaking addition! – horses, men, carriages – all are dressed in laurels and flowers, oak leaves and ribbons. The guards, who are his Majesty's servants, and the coachmen, who are within the privilege of the Post-Office, wear the royal liveries of course; and as it is summer (for all the land victories were won in summer,) they wear, on this fine evening, these liveries exposed to view, without any covering of upper coats. Such a costume, and the elaborate arrangement of the laurels in their hats, dilated their hearts, by giving to them openly an official connection with the great news, in which already they have the general interest of patriotism. That great national sentiment surmounts and quells all sense of ordinary distinctions. Those passengers who happen to be gentlemen are now hardly to be distinguished as such except by dress. The usual reserve of their manner in speaking to the attendants has on this night melted away. One heart, one pride, one glory, connects every man by the transcendent bond of his English blood. The spectators, who are numerous beyond precedent, express their sympathy with these fervent feelings by continual hurrahs. Every moment are shouted aloud by the Post-Office servants the great ancestral names of cities known to history through, a thousand years, – Lincoln, Winchester, Portsmouth, Gloucester, Oxford, Bristol, Manchester, York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Perth, Glasgow – expressing the grandeur of the empire by the antiquity of its towns, and the grandeur of the mail establishment by the diffusive radiation of its separate missions. Every moment you hear the thunder of lids locked down upon the mail-bags. That sound to each individual mail is the signal for drawing off, which process is the finest part of the entire spectacle. Then come the horses into play; – horses! can these be horses that (unless powerfully reined in) would bound off with the action and gestures of leopards? What stir! – what sea-like ferment! – what a thundering of wheels, what a trampling of horses! – what farewell cheers – what redoubling peals of brotherly congratulation, connecting the name of the particular mail – "Liverpool for ever!" – with the name of the particular victory – "Badajoz for ever!" or "Salamanca for ever!" The half-slumbering consciousness that, all night long and all the next day – perhaps for even a longer period – many of these mails, like fire racing along a train of gunpowder, will be kindling at every instant new successions of burning joy, has an obscure effect of multiplying the victory itself, by multiplying to the imagination into infinity the stages of its progressive diffusion. A fiery arrow seems to be let loose, which from that moment is destined to travel, almost without intermission, westwards for three hundred[26 - "Three hundred." Of necessity this scale of measurement, to an American, if he happens to be a thoughtless man, must sound ludicrous. Accordingly, I remember a case in which an American writer indulges himself in the luxury of a little lying, by ascribing to an Englishman a pompous account of the Thames, constructed entirely upon American ideas of grandeur, and concluding in something like these terms: – "And, sir, arriving at London, this mighty father of rivers attains a breadth of at least two furlongs, having, in its winding course, traversed the astonishing distance of 170 miles." And this the candid American thinks it fair to contrast with the scale of the Mississippi. Now, it is hardly worth while to answer a pure falsehood gravely, else one might say that no Englishman out of Bedlam ever thought of looking in an island for the rivers of a continent; nor, consequently, could have thought of looking for the peculiar grandeur of the Thames in the length of its course, or in the extent of soil which it drains: yet, if he had been so absurd, the American might have recollected that a river, not to be compared with the Thames even as to volume of water – viz. the Tiber – has contrived to make itself heard of in this world for twenty-five centuries to an extent not reached, nor likely to be reached very soon, by any river, however corpulent, of his own land. The glory of the Thames is measured by the density of the population to which it ministers, by the commerce which it supports, by the grandeur of the empire in which, though far from the largest, it is the most influential stream. Upon some such scale, and not by a transfer of Columbian standards, is the course of our English mails to be valued. The American may fancy the effect of his own valuations to our English ears, by supposing the case of a Siberian glorifying his country in these terms: – "Those rascals, sir, in France and England, cannot march half a mile in any direction without finding a house where food can be had and lodging: whereas, such is the noble desolation of our magnificent country, that in many a direction for a thousand miles, I will engage a dog shall not find shelter from a snow-storm, nor a wren find an apology for breakfast."] miles – northwards for six hundred; and the sympathy of our Lombard Street friends at parting is exalted a hundredfold by a sort of visionary sympathy with the approaching sympathies, yet unborn, which we were going to evoke.

Liberated from the embarrassments of the city, and issuing into the broad uncrowded avenues of the northern suburbs, we begin to enter upon our natural pace of ten miles an hour. In the broad light of the summer evening, the sun perhaps only just at the point of setting, we are seen from every storey of every house. Heads of every age crowd to the windows – young and old understand the language of our victorious symbols – and rolling volleys of sympathising cheers run along behind and before our course. The beggar, rearing himself against the wall, forgets his lameness – real or assumed – thinks not of his whining trade, but stands erect, with bold exulting smiles, as we pass him. The victory has healed him, and says – Be thou whole! Women and children, from garrets alike and cellars, look down or look up with loving eyes upon our gay ribbons and our martial laurels – sometimes kiss their hands, sometimes hang out, as signals of affection, pocket handkerchiefs, aprons, dusters, anything that lies ready to their hands. On the London side of Barnet, to which we draw near within a few minutes after nine, observe that private carriage which is approaching us. The weather being so warm, the glasses are all down; and one may read, as on the stage of a theatre, everything that goes on within the carriage. It contains three ladies, one likely to be "mama," and two of seventeen or eighteen, who are probably her daughters. What lovely animation, what beautiful unpremeditated pantomime, explaining to us every syllable that passes, in these ingenuous girls! By the sudden start and raising of the hands, on first discovering our laurelled equipage – by the sudden movement and appeal to the elder lady from both of them – and by the heightened colour on their animated countenances, we can almost hear them saying – "See, see! Look at their laurels. Oh, mama! there has been a great battle in Spain; and it has been a great victory." In a moment we are on the point of passing them. We passengers – I on the box, and the two on the roof behind me – raise our hats, the coachman makes his professional salute with the whip; the guard even, though punctilious on the matter of his dignity as an officer under the crown, touches his hat. The ladies move to us, in return, with a winning graciousness of gesture: all smile on each side in a way that nobody could misunderstand, and that nothing short of a grand national sympathy could so instantaneously prompt. Will these ladies say that we are nothing to them? Oh, no; they will not say that. They cannot deny – they do not deny – that for this night they are our sisters: gentle or simple, scholar or illiterate servant, for twelve hours to come – we on the outside have the honour to be their brothers. Those poor women again, who stop to gaze upon us with delight at the entrance of Barnet, and seem by their air of weariness to be returning from labour – do you mean to say that they are washerwomen and charwomen? Oh, my poor friend, you are quite mistaken; they are nothing of the kind. I assure you, they stand in a higher rank: for this one night they feel themselves by birthright to be daughters of England, and answer to no humbler title.

Every joy, however, even rapturous joy – such is the sad law of earth – may carry with it grief, or fear of grief, to some. Three miles beyond Barnet, we see approaching us another private carriage, nearly repeating the circumstances of the former case. Here also the glasses are all down – here also is an elderly lady seated; but the two amiable daughters are missing; for the single young person, sitting by the lady's side, seems to be an attendant – so I judge from her dress, and her air of respectful reserve. The lady is in mourning; and her countenance expresses sorrow. At first she does not look up; so that I believe she is not aware of our approach, until she bears the measured beating of our horses' hoofs. Then she raises her eyes to settle them painfully on our triumphal equipage. Our decorations explain the case to her at once; but she beholds them with apparent anxiety, or even with terror. Sometime before this, I, finding it difficult to hit a flying mark, when embarrassed by the coachman's person and reins intervening, had given to the guard a Courier evening paper, containing the gazette, for the next carriage that might pass. Accordingly he tossed it in so folded that the huge capitals expressing some such legend as – GLORIOUS VICTORY, might catch the eye at once. To see the paper, however, at all, interpreted as it was by our ensigns of triumph, explained everything; and, if the guard were right in thinking the lady to have received it with a gesture of horror, it could not be doubtful that she had suffered some deep personal affliction in connexion with this Spanish war.

Here now was the case of one who, having formerly suffered, might, erroneously perhaps, be distressing herself with anticipations of another similar suffering. That same night, and hardly three hours later, occurred the reverse case. A poor woman, who too probably would find herself, in a day or two, to have suffered the heaviest of afflictions by the battle, blindly allowed herself to express an exultation so unmeasured in the news, and its details, as gave to her the appearance which amongst Celtic Highlanders is called fey. This was at some little town, I forget what, where we happened to change horses near midnight. Some fair or wake had kept the people up out of their beds. We saw many lights moving about as we drew near; and perhaps the most impressive scene on our route was our reception at this place. The flashing of torches and the beautiful radiance of blue lights (technically Bengal lights) upon the heads of our horses; the fine effect of such a showery and ghostly illumination falling upon flowers and glittering laurels, whilst all around the massy darkness seemed to invest us with walls of impenetrable blackness, together with the prodigious enthusiasm of the people, composed a picture at once scenical and affecting. As we staid for three or four minutes, I alighted. And immediately from a dismantled stall in the street, where perhaps she had been presiding at some part of the evening, advanced eagerly a middle-aged woman. The sight of my newspaper it was that had drawn her attention upon myself. The victory which we were carrying down to the provinces on this occasion was the imperfect one of Talavera. I told her the main outline of the battle. But her agitation, though not the agitation of fear, but of exultation rather, and enthusiasm, had been so conspicuous when listening, and when first applying for information, that I could not but ask her if she had not some relation in the Peninsular army. Oh! yes: her only son was there. In what regiment? He was a trooper in the 23d Dragoons. My heart sank within me as she made that answer. This sublime regiment, which an Englishman should never mention without raising his hat to their memory, had made the most memorable and effective charge recorded in military annals. They leaped their horses —over a trench, where they could into it, and with the result of death or mutilation when they could not. What proportion cleared the trench is nowhere stated. Those who did, closed up and went down upon the enemy with such divinity of fervour – (I use the word divinity by design: the inspiration of God must have prompted this movement to those whom even then he was calling to his presence) – that two results followed. As regarded the enemy, this 23d Dragoons, not, I believe, originally 350 strong, paralysed a French column, 6000 strong, then ascending the hill, and fixed the gaze of the whole French army. As regarded themselves, the 23d were supposed at first to have been all but annihilated; but eventually, I believe, not so many as one in four survived. And this, then, was the regiment – a regiment already for some hours known to myself and all London as stretched, by a large majority, upon one bloody aceldama – in which the young trooper served whose mother was now talking with myself in a spirit of such hopeful enthusiasm. Did I tell her the truth? Had I the heart to break up her dream? No. I said to myself, tomorrow, or the next day, she will hear the worst. For this night, wherefore should she not sleep in peace? After to-morrow, the chances are too many that peace will forsake her pillow. This brief respite, let her owe this to my gift and my forbearance. But, if I told her not of the bloody price that had been paid, there was no reason for suppressing the contributions from her son's regiment to the service and glory of the day. For the very few words that I had time for speaking, I governed myself accordingly. I showed her not the funeral banners under which the noble regiment was sleeping. I lifted not the overshadowing laurels from the bloody trench in which horse and rider lay mangled together. But I told her how these dear children of England, privates and officers, had leaped their horses over all obstacles as gaily as hunters to the morning's chase. I told her how they rode their horses into the mists of death, (saying to myself, but not saying to her,) and laid down their young lives for thee, O mother England! as willingly – poured out their noble blood as cheerfully – as ever, after a long day's sport, when infants, they had rested their wearied heads upon their mothers' knees, or had sunk to sleep in her arms. It is singular that she seemed to have no fears, even after this knowledge that the 23d Dragoons had been conspicuously engaged, for her son's safety: but so much was she enraptured by the knowledge that his regiment, and therefore he, had rendered eminent service in the trying conflict – a service which had actually made them the foremost topic of conversation in London – that in the mere simplicity of her fervent nature, she threw her arms round my neck, and, poor woman, kissed me.

DIARY OF SAMUEL PEPYS.[27 - Diary and Correspondence of Samuel Pepys, F.R.S., Secretary at the Admiralty in the Reigns of Charles II. and James II. With a Life and Notes by Richard Lord Braybrooke. Third edition considerably enlarged. London, 1849.]

Lord Braybrooke has established a strong claim to the gratitude of the literary world for his present elegant, improved, and augmented edition of the Diary of Samuel Pepys. The work may now, we presume, be regarded as complete, for there is little chance that any future editor will consider himself entitled to supply the lacunæ or omissions which still confessedly exist. Lord Braybrooke informs us that, after carefully re-perusing the whole of the manuscript, he had arrived at the conclusion, "that a literal transcript of the Diary was absolutely inadmissible; and he more than hints that most of the excluded passages have been withheld from print on account of their strong indelicacy." We cannot blame the noble editor for having thus exercised his judgment, though we could wish that he had been a little more explicit as to the general tenor and application of the proscribed entries. The Diary of Pepys is a very remarkable one, comprehending both a history or sketch of the times in which he lived, and an accurate record of his own private transactions and affairs. He chronicles not only the faults of others, as these were reported to him or fell under his personal observation, but he notes his own frailties and backslidings with a candour, a minuteness, and even occasionally a satisfaction, which is at once amusing and uncommon. The one division of his subject is a political and social – the other a psychological curiosity. We are naturally desirous to hear all about Charles and his courtiers, and not averse to the general run of gossip regarding that train of beautiful women whose portraits, from the luxuriant pencil of Lely, still adorn the walls of Hampton Court. But not less remarkable are the quaint confessions of the autobiographer, whether he be recording, in conscious pride, the items of the dinner and the plate with which he appeased the appetite and excited the envy of some less prosperous guest, or junketing with Mrs Pierce and equivocal Mrs Knipp the actress, whilst poor Mrs Pepys was absent on a fortnight's visit to the country. Far are we from excusing or even palliating the propensities of Pepys. We have enough before us to show that he was a sad flirt, and a good deal of a domestic hypocrite: all this he admits, and even exhibits at times a certain amount of penitence and compunction. But we confess that we should be glad to know from which section of the Diary the objectionable matter has been expunged. If from the public part, or rather that disconnected with the personality of Pepys, we acquiesce without further comment in the taste and judgment of the editor. We do not want to have any minute details, even though Pepys may have written them down, of the drunken and disgraceful exhibitions of Sir Charles Sedley and his comrades, or even of the private actings of the Maids (by courtesy) of Honour. We have enough, and more than enough, of this in the Memoirs of Grammont, and no one would wish to see augmented that repertory of antiquated scandal. History, and the products of the stage as it then existed, speak quite unequivocally as to the general demoralisation of those unhappy times, and it cannot serve any manner of use to multiply or magnify instances. But whilst we so far freely concede the right of omission to Lord Braybrooke, we must own that we are not a little jealous lest, out of respect to the individual memory of Pepys, he should have concealed some personal confessions, which may have been really requisite in order to form an accurate estimate of the man. We cannot read the Diary without strong suspicions that something of the kind has taken place. Mere flirtation on the part of her husband could hardly have driven Mrs Pepys to the desperate extremity of heating the tongs in the fire, and approaching the nuptial couch therewith, obviously for no good purpose, to the infinite dismay of Samuel. Pepys might perhaps be excused for a reciprocated oscillation of the eyelid, when Mrs Knipp winked at him from the stage; but why, if his motives for frequenting her company were strictly virtuous and artistical, did he go to kiss her in her tireing-room? why should she have pulled his hair, when she sat behind him in the pit? or why should he have been sorely troubled "that Knipp sent by Moll (an orange-woman, whose basket was her character) to desire to speak to me after the play, and I promised to come; but it was so late, and I forced to step to Mrs Williams' lodgings with my Lord Brouncker and her, where I did not stay, however, for fear of her showing me her closet, and thereby forcing me to give her something; and it was so late, that, for fear of my wife's coming home before me, I was forced to go straight home, which troubled me"? If Pepys was really innocent in deed, and but culpable in thought and inclination, his escape was a mighty narrow one, and Mrs Pepys may well stand excused for the strength and frequency of her suspicions. The truth is, that Pepys, at least in the earlier part of his life, was a very odious specimen of the Cockney, and would upon many occasions have been justly punished by a sound kicking, or an ample dose of the cudgel. It seems to us perfectly inexplicable how the coxcomb – who, by the way, was a regular church-goer, and rather zealous religionist – could have prevailed upon himself to make such entries as the following in his journal: "August 18, 1667.– I walked towards Whitehall, but, being wearied, turned into St Dunstan's church, where I heard an able sermon of the minister of the place; and stood by a pretty, modest maid, whom I did labour to take by the hand; but she would not, but got further and further from me; and at last I could perceive her to take pins out of her pocket to prick me if I should touch her again, which seeing, I did forbear, and was glad I did spy her design. And then I fell to gaze upon another pretty maid in a pew close to me, and she on me; and I did go about to take her by the hand, which she suffered a little, and then withdrew. So the sermon ended, and the church broke up, and my amours ended also." What a pity that the first maid in question had not been more nimble with her fingers! The poisoned bodkin which the goblin page shoved into the knee of Wat Tinlinn, would have been well bestowed, if buried to the very head, on this occasion, in the hip of Pepys; and charity does not forbid us from indulging ourselves in fancy with the startling hideousness of his howl! No wonder that Mrs Pepys not only made hot the tongs, but incoherently insisted, at times, on the necessity of a separate maintenance.

The great charm of the book is its utter freedom from disguise. The zeal of antiquaries, and the patriotic exertions of the literary clubs, have, of late years, put the public in possession of various diaries, which are most valuable, as throwing light upon the political incidents and social manners of the times in which the authors lived. Thus we have the journals of honest John Nicholl, writer to the signet in Edinburgh, who saw the great Marquis of Montrose go down from his prison to the scaffold; of the shrewd and cautious Fountainhall; of the high-minded and accomplished Evelyn, and many others – the manuscripts of which had lain for years undisturbed on the shelf or in the charter-chest. But it cannot be said of any one of those diaries, that it was kept solely for the use and reference of the writer. Some of them may not have been intended for publication; and it is very likely that the thoughts of posthumous renown never crossed the mind of the chronicler, as he set down his daily jotting and observation. Nevertheless those were family documents, such as a father, if he had no wider aim, might have bequeathed for the information of his children. Diaries of more modern date have, we suspect, been kept principally with a view to publication; or, at least, the writers of them seem never to have been altogether devoid of a kind of consciousness that their lucubrations might one day see the light. Owing to that feeling, the veil of domestic privacy is seldom withdrawn, and seldomer still are we treated to a faithful record of the deeds and thoughts of the diarist. But Pepys framed his journal with no such intention. He durst not, for dear life, have submitted a single page of it to the inspection of the wife of his bosom – had he been as fruitful as Jacob, no son of his would have been intrusted with the key which could unlock the mysterious cipher in which the most private passages of his life were written. No clerk was allowed to continue it in a clear, legible hand, when failing eyesight rendered the task irksome or impossible to himself. There is something of pathos in his last entry, when the doors of the daily confessional were just closing for ever. "And thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my journal, I being not able to do it any longer, having done now so long as to undo my eyes almost every time that I take a pen in my hand; and, therefore, whatever comes of it, I must forbear; and therefore resolve, from this time forward, to have it kept by my people in long hand, and must be contented to set down no more than is fit for them and all the world to know; or, if there be anything, I must endeavour to keep a margin in my book open, to add now and then a note in short-hand, with my own hand." Perhaps it is as well that the marginal continuation so hinted at was withheld; for, in the process of decanting, the wine would have lost its flavour, and must have suffered terribly in contrast with the raciness of the earlier cooper.

The position in life which Pepys occupied renders his Diary doubly interesting. Had he been only a hanger-on of the court, we might have heard more minute and personal scandal, conveyed through the medium of Bab May, or Chiffinch, or other unscrupulous satellites of a very profligate monarch. Had he been a mere private citizen or merchant, his knowledge of or interest in public events would probably have been so small, as to assist us but little in unravelling the intricate history of the time. But, standing as he did between two classes of society, then separated by a far stronger line of demarcation than now, – a citizen of London by birth and connexion, by occupation a government official, and through instinct an intense admirer of the great – he had access to more sources of information, and could interpret general opinion better, than the professional courtier or tradesman. Shrewd, sharp, and not very scrupulous, he readily seized all opportunities of making his way in the world; and though privately a censor of the more open vices of the great, he never was so truly happy as when admitted by accident to their society. Lord Braybrooke, we think, is too partial in his estimate of Pepys' character. If we are to judge of him by his own confessions, he was largely imbued with that spirit of meanness, arrogance, and vanity, which dramatic writers have always seized on as illustrative of the parvenu, but which is never apparent in the conversation, or discernible in the dealings, of a true and perfect gentleman.

Sam does not appear to have troubled himself much about his pedigree until he became a person of considerable note and substance. Indeed, the circumstances of his immediate extraction were not such as to have found much favour in the eyes of the professors of Herald's College. His father was a respectable tailor, and, in his own earlier years, Pepys had carried doublets to customers, if not actually handled the goose. The impressions that he received in his boyhood seem to have been indelible through life; prosperity could not make him insensible to the flavour of cucumber. The sight of a new garment invariably kindled in his mind the aspirations of his primitive calling, and very proud, indeed, was he when brother Tom brought him his "jackanapes coat with silver buttons." In his way he was quite a Sir Piercie Shafton, and never formed a complete opinion of any man without due consideration of his clothes. At the outset of his diary we find him married, and in rather indifferent circumstances. He was then a clerk in some public office connected with the Exchequer, at a small salary. But he was diligent in his vocation, and prudent in his habits; so that he and his wife, and servant Jane, fared not much worse, or perhaps rather better, than Andrew Marvell, for we find them living in a garret, and dining on New Year's day on the remains of a turkey, in the dressing whereof Mrs Pepys unfortunately burned her hand. A few days afterwards, they mended their cheer at the house of "cosen Thomas Pepys" the turner, where the dinner "was very good; only the venison pasty was palpable mutton, which was not handsome." But the advent of better banquets was near. In the preceding autumn, the old protector, Oliver Cromwell, had been carried to the grave, and the reins of government, sorely frayed and worn, were given to the weak hands of Richard. In truth, there was hardly any government at all. The military chiefs did not own the second Cromwell as their master; Lambert was attempting to get up a party in his own favour; and Monk, in command of the northern army, was suspected of a similar design. The bulk of the nation, in terror of anarchy, and heartily sick of the consequences of revolution, which, as usual, had terminated in arbitrary rule, longed for the restoration of their legitimate sovereign, as the only means of arresting further calamity; and several of the influential officers, not compromised by regicide, were secretly of the same opinion. Amongst these latter was Sir Edward Montagu, admiral of the fleet, afterwards created Earl of Sandwich, whose mother was a Pepys, and with whom, accordingly, Samuel was proud to reckon kin. Sir Edward had been already very kind to his young relative, and now laid the foundation of his fortunes by employing him as his secretary, during the expedition which ended with the return of Charles II. to his hereditary dominions. Pepys, in his boyish days, had been somewhat tainted with the Roundhead doctrines, but he was now as roaring a royalist as ever danced round a bonfire; and the slight accession of profit which accrued to him for his share in the Restoration, gave him an unbounded appetite for future accumulations. He made himself useful to Montagu, who presently received his earldom, and through his interest Pepys was installed in office as clerk of the Acts of the Navy.

Other snug jobs followed, and Pepys began to thrive apace. It is possible that, if judged by the standard of morality recognised in his time, our friend may have been deemed, on the whole, a tolerably conscientious officer; but, according to our more strict ideas, he hardly could have piqued himself, like a modern statesman, on the superior purity of his palms. If not grossly avaricious, he was decidedly fond of money; he cast up his accounts with great punctuality, and seems to have thought that each additional hundred pounds came into his possession through a special interposition of Providence. Now, although we know well that there is a blessing upon honest industry, it would appear that a good deal of Pepys' money flowed in through crooked channels. Bribes and acknowledgments he received without much compunction or hesitation, only taking care that little evidence should be left of the transaction. The following extract shows that his conscience was by no means of stiff or inflexible material: "I met Captain Grove, who did give me a letter directed to myself from himself. I discerned money to be in it, knowing as I found it to be, the proceeds of the place I have got him to be – the taking up of vessels for Tangier. But I did not open it till I came home – not looking into it until all the money was out, that I might say I saw no money in the paper, if ever I should be questioned about it. There was a piece in gold, and £4 in silver." Pepys made altogether a good thing out of the Tangier settlement, for which he was afterwards secretary, as, besides such small pickings as the above, we read of magnificent silver flagons – "the noblest that ever I saw all the days of my life" – presented to him, in grateful acknowledgment of services to come, by Gauden, victualler of the navy. Samuel had twinges of conscience, but the sight of the plate was too much for him: "Whether I shall keep them or no," saith he, striving to cast dust in his own eyes, "I cannot tell; for it is to oblige me to him in the business of the Tangier victualling, wherein I doubt I shall not; but glad I am to see that I shall be sure to get something on one side or other, have it which will; so with a merry heart I looked upon them, and locked them up." The flagons, however, did the business. Gauden was preferred; and, from an entry in the Diary, made about a year afterwards, we must conclude that his profits were enormous: "All the afternoon to my accounts; and then find myself, to my great joy, a great deal worth – above £4000 – for which the Lord be praised! and is principally occasioned by my getting £500 of Cocke for my profit in his bargains of prize goods, and from Mr Gauden's making me a present of £500 more, when I paid him £800 for Tangier. Thus ends this year, to my great joy, in this manner. I have raised my estate from £1300, in this year, to £4400." A pretty accretion: but made, we fear, at the expense of the nation, by means which hardly would have stood the scrutiny of a court of justice. It may be quite true that every man in office, from the highest to the lowest, from the chancellor to the doorkeeper, was then doing the like; still we cannot give Pepys the benefit of a perfect indemnity on the score of the general practice. Even when he tells us elsewhere, with evident satisfaction – "This night I received, by Will, £105, the first-fruits of my endeavours in the late contract for victualling of Tangier, for which God be praised! for I can, with a safe conscience, say that I have therein saved the king £5000 per annum, and yet got myself a hope of £300 per annum, without the least wrong to the king" – it is impossible to reconcile his conduct with the strict rules of morality, or of duty: nor, perhaps, need we do so, seeing that Pepys makes no pretence of being altogether immaculate. He began by taking small fees in a surreptitious way, and ended by pocketing the largest without a single twinge. It is the progress from remuneration to guerdon, as philosophically explained by Costard – "Guerdon! – O sweet guerdon! better than remuneration; eleven-pence farthing better. Most sweet guerdon! – I will do it, sir, in print; – guerdon – remuneration!"

The common proverb tells us that money easily got is lightly expended. In one sense Pepys formed no exception to the common rule; for, notwithstanding divers good resolutions, he led rather a dissipated life for a year or two after the Restoration, and was in the constant habit of drinking more wine than altogether agreed with his constitution. This fault he strove to amend by registering sundry vows, which, however, were often broken; and he was finally weaned from the bottle by the pangs of disordered digestion. His expenses kept pace with his income. The "jackanapes coat, with silver buttons," was succeeded by a "fine one of flowered tabby vest, and coloured camelot tunique, made stiff with gold lace at the bands," in which Pepys probably expected to do great execution in the Park, or, at any rate, to astonish Mrs Knipp; but it proved to be so extravagantly fine, that his friends thought it necessary to interfere. "Povy told me of my gold-laced sleeve in the Park yesterday, which vexed me also, so as to resolve never to appear in court with them, but presently to have them taken off, as it is fit I should, and so called at my tailor's for that purpose." Povy's hint might have its origin in envy; but, on the whole, it was wise and judicious. Also Mrs Pepys was indulged with a fair allowance of lace, taffeta, and such trinkets as females affect; and both of them sat for their portraits to Hales, having previously been refused by Lely. Furniture and plate of the most expensive description were ordered; and finally, to his intense delight, Samuel achieved the great object of his own ambition, and set up a carriage of his own. The account of his first public appearance in this vehicle is too characteristic to be lost: – "At noon home to dinner, and there found my wife extraordinary fine, with her flowered gown that she made two years ago, now laced exceeding pretty, and indeed was fine all over; and mighty earnest to go, though the day was very lowering; and she would have me put on my fine suit, which I did. And so anon we went alone through the town with our new liveries of serge, and the horses' manes and tails tied with red ribbons, and the standards gilt with varnish, and all clean, and green reins, that people did mightily look upon us; and, the truth is, I did not see any coach more pretty, though more gay, than ours all the day. But we set out, out of humour – I, because Betty, whom I expected, was not come to go with us; and my wife, that I would sit on the same seat with her, which she likes not, being so fine; and she then expected to meet Sheres, which we did in the Pell Mell, and, against my will, I was forced to take him into the coach, but was sullen all day almost, and little complaisant; the day being unpleasing, though the Park full of coaches, but dusty, and windy, and cold, and now and then a little dribbling of rain; and, what made it worse, there were so many hackney coaches as spoiled the sight of the gentlemen's; and so we had little pleasure." The tale of Seged, Emperor of Ethiopia, does not convey a clearer moral. No peacock was prouder than Samuel Pepys, as he stepped that day, in all the luxury of gorgeous apparel, into his coach, and drove through the streets of London, under the distinct impression that, for the moment, he was the most remarked and remarkable man in the whole of his Majesty's dominions. Yet there were drops of bitterness in the cup. Betty Turner was not there to enjoy the triumph, and Sheres, who must needs join the party, was supposed by Samuel to stand rather high in the good graces of Mrs Pepys, insomuch that he mourned not a whit when he heard that the gallant captain was about to set off to Tangier. Add to this, the ungenial weather, and the insolent display of hackney coaches, obscuring somewhat the lustre of his new turn-out, and detracting from the glory of red ribbons, gilt standards, and green reins, and we need hardly wonder if, even in the hour of triumph, Pepys felt that he was mortal. It is to be hoped that, when he returned home, he vented his ill-humour neither upon his wife nor his monkey, both of whom, on other occasions, were made to suffer when anything had gone wrong.

Three great national events, which have not yet lost their interest, are recorded in this Diary. These are the plague, the great fire of London, and the successful enterprise of De Ruyter and the Dutch fleet at Chatham. The account of the plague will be read with much interest, especially at the present time, when another terrible epidemic has been raging through the streets and lanes of the metropolis. The progress of the plague through Europe seems, in many respects, to have resembled that of the cholera. It did not burst out suddenly in one locality, but appears to have pervaded the Continent with a gradual and irresistible march, sometimes lingering in its advance, and ever and anon breaking out with redoubled virulence. Several years before it reached England, the pestilence raged in Naples, and is said to have carried off in six months nearly 400,000 victims. Its introduction was traced to a transport ship, with soldiers on board, coming from Sardinia. It reached Amsterdam and Hamburg more than a year before it broke out in London, and its malignity may be judged of by the following entry in Pepys' Diary: "We were told to-day of a sloop, of three or four hundred tons, where all the men were dead of the plague, and the sloop cast ashore at Gottenburg." In England there had been great apprehension of its coming, long before the visitation; and two exceedingly unhealthy seasons, occurring in succession, had probably enfeebled the constitutions of many, and rendered them more liable to the contagion. Pepys' note of 15th January 1662 is as follows: "This morning Mr Berkenshaw came again, and after he had examined me, and taught me something in my work, he and I went to breakfast in my chamber upon a collar of brawn; and after we had eaten, asked me whether we had not committed a fault in eating to-day; telling me that it is a fast-day, ordered by the parliament, to pray for more seasonable weather; it having hitherto been summer weather: that it is, both as to warmth and every other thing, just as if it wore the middle of May or June, which do threaten a plague, (as all men think,) to follow, for so it was almost the last winter; and the whole year after hath been a very sickly time to this day." The plague appeared in London in December 1664, and reached its deadliest point in August and September of the ensuing year. The number of those who died from it has been differently estimated from sixty-eight to one hundred thousand. London is now, according to the best authorities, about four times as populous as it was then, so that we may easily judge of the consternation into which its inhabitants must have been thrown when the pestilence was at its worst. During the month of September 1849, the greatest number of deaths occurring from cholera in the metropolis, in one day, was about four hundred and fifty – a proportion very small when compared with the ravages of the plague at its most destructive season, and yet large enough to justify great apprehension, and to demand humiliation and prayer for national apathy and transgression. Yet, great as the alarm was, when death was waving his wings over the affrighted city, it does not seem to have been so excessive as we might well imagine. The truth is, that, not withstanding intramural interment, bad sewerage, and infected air, the sanatory condition of London, since it was rebuilt after the great fire, has improved in a most remarkable degree. Prior to that event, the metropolis had at various times suffered most severely from epidemics. In 1204, when the population must have been very small, it is recorded that two hundred persons were buried daily in the Charterhouse-yard. The mortality in 1367 has been described as terrific. In 1407, thirty thousand persons perished of a dreadful pestilence. There was another in 1478, which not only visited London with much severity, but is said to have destroyed, throughout England, more people than fell in the wars which had raged with little intermission for the fifteen preceding years. In 1485, that mysterious complaint called the sweating sickness was very fatal in London. Fifteen years later, in 1500, the plague there was so dreadful that Henry VII. and his court were forced to remove to Calais. The sweating sickness, described as mortal in three hours, again scourged England in 1517, and its ravages were so great, that, according to Stowe, half of the inhabitants of most of the larger towns died, and Oxford was almost depopulated. In 1603-4, upwards of thirty thousand persons died of the plague in London alone; and in 1625 there was another great mortality. Since the great plague of London in 1664-5, down to our time, no very fatal epidemic – at least none at all comparable to those earlier pestilences – seems to have occurred in the metropolis, and it is therefore natural that any extraordinary visitation should, from its increased rarity, occasion a much higher degree of alarm. Of all the accounts extant of the plague, that of Pepys appears to be the most truthful and the least exaggerated. He remained in London at his post until the month of August, when he removed to Greenwich; and although a timorous man, and exceedingly shy of exposing himself to unnecessary risks, he seems on this occasion to have behaved with considerable fortitude. One anecdote we cannot omit, for it tells in a few words a deep and tearful tragedy, and is moreover honourable to Pepys. It occurred when the plague was at its height. "My Lord Brouncker, Sir J. Minnes, and I, up to the vestry, at the desire of the justices of the peace, in order to the doing something for the keeping of the plague from growing; but, Lord! to consider the madness of people of the town, who will, because they are forbid, come in crowds along with the dead corpses to see them buried; but we agreed on some orders for the prevention thereof. Among other stories, one was very passionate, methought, of a complaint brought against a man in the town, for taking a child from London from an infected house. Alderman Hooker told us it was the child of a very able citizen in Gracious Street, a saddler, who had buried all the rest of his children of the plague; and himself and wife, now being shut up in despair of escaping, did desire only to save the life of this little child, and so prevailed to have it removed, stark-naked, into the arms of a friend, who brought it, having put it into fresh clothes, to Greenwich; when, upon hearing the story, we did agree it should be permitted to be received, and kept in the town." It is now generally admitted that the Account of the Plague, written by Defoe, cannot be accepted as a genuine narrative, but must be classed with the other fictions of that remarkable man, whose singular power of giving a strong impression of reality to every one of his compositions must always challenge the admiration of the reader. He has not, perhaps, aggravated the horrors of the pestilence, for that were impossible; but he has concentrated them in one heap, so as to produce a more awful picture than probably met the eye of any single citizen of London even at that disastrous period. Pepys, in his account of different visits which he was forced to make to the City when the epidemic was at its height, has portrayed the outward desolation, and the inward anxiety and apprehension, which prevailed, in more sober, yet very striking colours: "28th August 1665.– To Mr Colville the goldsmith's, having not been for some days in the streets; but now how few people I see, and those looking like people that had taken leave of the world. To the Exchange, and there was not fifty people upon it, and but few more like to be, as they told me. I think to take adieu to-day of the London streets… 30th.– Abroad, and met with Hadley, our clerk, who, upon my asking how the plague goes, told me it increases much, and much in our parish; for, says he, there died nine this week, though I have returned but six; which is a very ill practice, and makes me think it is so in other places, and therefore the plague much greater than people take it to be. I went forth, and walked towards Moorefields, to see – God forgive my presumption! – whether I could see any dead corpse going to the grave, but, as God would have it, did not. But, Lord! how everybody's looks and discourse in the street is of death, and nothing else! and few people going up and down, that the town is like a place deserted and forsaken… 6th Sept.– To London, to pack up more things; and there I saw fires burning in the street, (as it is through the whole city,) by the lord mayor's order. Hence by water to the Duke of Albemarle's: all the way fires on each side of the Thames, and strange to see, in broad daylight, two or three burials upon the Bankside, one at the very heels of another: doubtless, all of the plague, and yet at least forty or fifty people going along with every one of them… 20th.– Lord! what a sad time it is to see no boats upon the river; and grass grows all up and down Whitehall Court, and nobody but poor wretches in the streets!" By this time the plague had become so general, that all attempt to shut up the infected houses was abandoned; so that, says Pepys, "to be sure, we do converse and meet with people that have the plague upon them." A little later, when the pestilence was abating, we find this entry: "I walked to the town; but, Lord! how empty the streets are, and melancholy! so many poor, sick people in the streets, full of sores, and so many sad stories overheard as I walk, everybody talking of this dead, and that man sick, and so many in this place, and so many in that; and they tell me that, in Westminster, there is never a physician, and but one apothecary, left – all being dead; but that there are great hopes of a great decrease this week: God send it!" Still, without the circle of the plague, (for it does not seem to have penetrated beyond the immediate environs of London,) men ate, drank, and made merry, as though no vial of divine wrath had been poured out amongst them. Even Pepys, after returning from the melancholy spectacles of this day, seems to have drowned his care in more than usual jollity; and his records go far to confirm the truthfulness of Boccaccio, in the account which he has given of the levity of the Florentines during the prevalence of a like contagion.

The fire of London, which occurred about the middle of the succeeding year, not only dispelled the more poignant memories of the plague, but is thought to have done good service in eradicating its remains, which still lingered in some parts of the city, and may perhaps have been the means of preventing a second outbreak of this pestilence. On the second night the conflagration was awful: Pepys watched it from the river, – "So near the fire as we could for the smoke; and all over the Thames, with one's face in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of fire-drops. This is very true; so as houses were burned by these drops and flakes of fire – three or four, nay, five or six houses, one from another. When we could endure no more upon the water, we to a little alehouse on the Bankside, over against the Three Cranes, and there stayed till it was dark almost, and saw the fire grow, and, as it grew darker, appeared more and more; and in corners, and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City, in a most horrid, malicious, bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire. Barbary and her husband away before us. We stayed till, it being darkish, we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire, from this to the other side of the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it. The churches, houses, and all on fire and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruin." For five days the conflagration raged, nor was its force spent until the greater part of London was laid in ashes. The terror of the calamity was heightened by rumours industriously propagated, though their origin never could be traced. The fire was said to be the result of a deep-laid Popish plot; and that report, though in all probability utterly without foundation, was at a future day the cause of shameful persecution and bloodshed. A great alarm was raised that the Dutch, with whom England was then at war, and whose fleet was actually in the Channel, had landed; so that a kind of sullen despair and apathy seized upon the minds of many. It was long before London could recover from the blow; but at length a new city, far more substantial and splendid than the first, arose from the scattered ruins.

England was at that time contesting the supremacy of the seas with the States of opulent and enterprising Holland. Amsterdam was then considered the most wealthy capital of Europe. The Dutch navy was powerful, well equipped, and well manned, and the admirals, De Ruyter and De Witt, were esteemed second to none living for seamanship and ability. The struggle was not a new one. In 1652, after a desperate engagement with Blake, Van Tromp, the renowned commander of Holland, had sailed in triumph through the Channel, with a broom at his masthead, to denote that he had swept the English from the seas. That premature boast was afterwards terribly avenged. Three times, in three successive months, did these foes, worthy of each other, encounter on the open seas, and yet victory declared for neither. Four other battles were fought, which England has added to her proud list of naval triumphs; but most assuredly the decisive palm was not won until, on the 31st July 1653, gallant Van Tromp fell in the heat of action. A braver man never trod the quarterdeck, and Holland may well be proud of such a hero. For a time the States succumbed to the stern genius of Cromwell; nor did the struggle commence anew until after the Restoration of Charles. The first engagement was glorious for England. The Duke of York, afterwards James II., commanded in person: he encountered the Dutch fleet off Harwich, and defeated it after a stubborn engagement. Eighteen of their finest vessels were taken, and the ship of the admiral (Opdam) blown into the air. Mr Macaulay, in his late published History of England, has not deigned even to notice this engagement – a remarkable omission, the reason of which it is foreign to our purpose to inquire. This much we may be allowed to say, that no historian who intends to form an accurate estimate of the character of James II., or to compile a complete register of his deeds, can justly accomplish his task without giving that unfortunate monarch due credit for his conduct and intrepidity, in one of the most important and successful naval actions which stands recorded in our annals. The same year (1665) is memorable for another victory, when the Earl of Sandwich captured fourteen of the enemy's ships. Prince Rupert and the Duke of Albemarle were less successful in the engagement which commenced on 1st June 1666. The fight lasted four days, with no decisive result, but considerable loss on either side. The next battle, fought at the mouth of the Thames, ended in favour of England; the Dutch lost four-and-twenty men-of-war, and four of their admirals, and four thousand officers and seamen, fell. When we take into consideration the state of the navy during the earlier part of the reign of Charles, it is absolutely astonishing that England was able not only to cope with the Dutch on equal terms, but ultimately to subdue them. We learn from Pepys the particulars of a fact long generally known, that in no department of the state were there greater corruptions, abuses, and frauds practised than in that of the Admiralty. The pay both of officers and men was constantly in arrear, insomuch that some of them were reduced to absolute starvation whilst considerable sums were due to them. Stores were embezzled and plundered almost without inquiry. The fleets were often wretchedly commanded, for there was not then, as there is now, any restriction between the services; and new-made captains from the circle of the court, who never in their lives had been at sea, were frequently put over the heads of veterans who from boyhood had dwelt upon the ocean. There was scarcely any discipline in the navy; impressment was harshly and illegally practised, and after each engagement the sailors deserted by hundreds. So bad did matters at length become, that, towards the close of the year 1666, the fleet was in actual mutiny, and the naval arm of England paralysed. The subsequent reform of the navy is mainly attributable to the firmness and determination of the Duke of York, who, being a far better man of business than his indolent and selfish brother, applied himself resolutely to the task. The most important suggestions and rules for remedying grievances, and securing future efficiency, were made and drawn out by Pepys, who showed himself, in this respect, a most able officer of the crown, and who, in consequence, acquired an ascendency in navy affairs, which lie never lost until the Revolution deprived him of a master who thoroughly understood his value. But, before any steps were taken towards this most necessary reform, her daring adversaries aimed at the capital of England a blow which narrowly failed of success.

The seamen, as we have said, being in a state of mutiny arising from sheer wanton mismanagement, it became apparent that no active naval operations could be undertaken in the course of the following year. All this was well known to the Dutch, who determined to avail themselves of the opportunity. During the spring of 1667, the whole British coast, as far north as the firth of Forth, was molested by the Dutch cruisers, insomuch that great inconvenience was felt in London from the total stoppage of the coal trade. In the month of June, De Ruyter, being by that time fully prepared and equipped, sailed boldly into the Thames, without encountering a vestige of opposition. It is not too much to say, that the plague and fire combined, had not struck the citizens of London with so much alarm as did this hostile demonstration. All the former naval triumphs of England seemed to have gone for nothing, for here was invasion brought to the very doors of the capital. The supremacy of the seas was not now in dispute: it was the occupancy of the great British river, the highway of the national commerce. Strange were the thoughts, that haunted the minds of men whilst that mighty armament was hovering on our shores: it seemed a new Armada, with no gallant Drake to oppose it. "We had good company at our table," wrote Pepys, upon the 3d of June; "among others, my good Mr Evelyn, with whom, after dinner, I stepped aside, and talked upon the present posture of our affairs, which is, that the Dutch are known to be abroad with eighty sail of ships of war, and twenty fireships; and the French come into the Channel, with twenty sail of men-of-war, and five fireships, while we have not a ship at sea to do them any hurt with; but are calling in all we can, while our ambassadors are treating at Breda; and the Dutch look upon them as come to beg peace, and use them accordingly: and all this through the negligence of our prince, who had power, if he would, to master all these with the money and men that he hath had the command of, and may now have if he would mind his business. But, for aught we see, the kingdom is likely to be lost, as well as the reputation of it, for ever; notwithstanding so much reputation got and preserved by a rebel that went before him." All this was true. Had he been alive – he whose senseless clay had six years before been exhumed and dishonoured at Tyburn – England would not then have been submitting to so unexampled a degradation. Traitor and renegade as he was, Cromwell loved his country well. Self-ambition might be his first motive, but he was keenly alive to the glory of England, and had made her name a word of fear and terror among the nations. He was no vulgar demagogue, like those of our dogmatic time. Unlawfully as he had usurped the functions of a sovereign, Britain suffered nothing in foreign estimation while her interests were committed to his charge. What wonder if, at such a crisis, Pepys and others could not help reverting to the memory of the strong man whose bones were lying beneath the public gallows, whilst the restored king was squandering among his harlots that treasure which, if rightfully applied, might have swept the enemies of England from the seas?

On the 8th of June, the Dutch fleet appeared off Harwich. Two days afterwards they ascended the river, took Sheerness, and, breaking an enormous chain which had been drawn across the Medway for defence, penetrated as far as Upnor Castle, where, in spite of all resistance, they made prize of several vessels, and burned three men-of-war. By some shameful mismanagement the English ships had been left too far down the river, notwithstanding orders from the Admiralty to have them removed: they were, besides, only half manned; and on this occasion the English sailors did not exhibit their wonted readiness to fight. It was even reported to Pepys, by a gentleman who was present, "that he himself did hear many Englishmen, on board the Dutch ships, speaking to one another in English; and that they did cry and say, We did heretofore fight for tickets, now we fight for dollars! and did ask how such and such a one did, and would commend themselves to them – which is a sad consideration." Reinforcements arrived from Portsmouth; but instead of working, they "do come to the office this morning to demand the payment of their tickets; for otherwise they would, they said, do no more work; and are, as I understand from everybody who has to do with them, the most debauched, damning, swearing rogues that ever were in the navy – just like their profane commander." It seemed, at one time, more than probable that the Dutch would attack the city: had they made the attempt, it is not likely, so great was the panic, that they would have been encountered by effectual opposition; but De Ruyter was apprehensive of pushing his advantage too far, and contented himself with destroying such shipping as he found in the river.

Meanwhile, great was the explosion of public wrath, both against the Court and the Admiralty officials. Crowds of people congregated in Westminster, loudly clamouring for a parliament. The windows of the Lord Chancellor's house were broken, and a gibbet erected before his gate. "People do cry out in the streets of their being bought and sold; and both they, and everybody that do come to me, do tell me that people make nothing of talking treason in the streets openly; as, that they are bought and sold, and governed by Papists, and that we are betrayed by people about the king, and shall be delivered up to the French, and I know not what." Poor Pepys expected nothing else than an immediate attack upon his office, in which, by some miraculous circumstance, there happened to be at the moment a considerable sum of public money. His situation rendered him peculiarly obnoxious to abuse; and at one time it was currently reported that he was summarily ordered to the Tower. These things cost him no little anxiety; but what distracted him most was, the agonising thought that the whole of his private savings and fortune, which he had by him in specie, might, in a single moment, be swept away and dissipated for ever. If the seamen who were mutinous for pay should chance to hear of the funds in hand, and take it into their heads to storm the office, there was little probability of them drawing nice distinctions between public and private property: and, in that case, money, flagons, and all would find their way to Wapping. Also, there might be a chance of a reckoning in any event; "for," said he, "the truth is, I do fear so much that the whole kingdom is undone, that I do this night resolve to study with my father and wife what to do with the little I have in money by me, for I give up all the rest that I have in the king's hands, for Tangier, for lost. So God help us! and God knows what disorders we may fall into, and whether any violence on this office, or perhaps some severity on our persons, as being reckoned by the silly people, or perhaps may, by policy of state, be thought fit to be condemned by the king and Duke of York, and so put to trouble; though, God knows! I have in my own person done my full duty, I am sure." So, in the very midst of the confusion, Samuel, like a wise man, set about regulating his own affairs. He was lucky enough to get £400 paid him, to account of his salary, and he despatched his father and wife to Cambridgeshire, with £1300 in gold in their night-bag. Next day Mr Gibson, one of his clerks, followed them with another 1000 pieces, "under colour of an express to Sir Jeremy Smith." The two grand silver flagons went to Kate Joyce's, where it is to be presumed they would be tolerably safe. Pepys, moreover, provided himself a girdle, "by which, with some trouble, I do carry about me £300 of gold about my body, that I may not be without something in case I should be surprised; for I think, in any nation but ours, people that appear – for we are not indeed so – so faulty as we would have their throats cut." Still he had £200 in silver by him, which was not convertible into gold, there having been, as usual on such occasions, a sharp run upon the more portable metal. His ideas as to secreting this sum would not have displeased Vespasian, but he seems to have been deterred from that experiment by the obvious difficulty of recovering the silver at the moment of need. These dispositions made, Pepys obviously felt himself more comfortable, and manfully resolved to abide the chances of assault, imprisonment, or impeachment.