The Project Gutenberg EBook of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843, by Various

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Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843

Author: Various

Release Date: January 21, 2005 [EBook #14753]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE ***

Produced by Jon Ingram, donlei, Internet Library of Early Journals and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

BLACKWOOD'S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. CCCXXXV. SEPTEMBER, 1843. VOL. LIV.

* * * * *

"WE ARE ALL LOW PEOPLE THERE."

A TALE OF THE ASSIZES.

IN TWO CHAPTERS.

CHAPTER THE FIRST.

Some time ago, business of an important character carried me to the beautiful and populous city of ——. I remember to have visited it when I was a child, in the company of a doating mother, who breathed her last there; and the place, associated with that circumstance, had ever afterwards been the gloomiest spot in the county of my birth. A calamity such as that to which I have alluded leaves no half impressions. It stamps itself deep, deep in the human heart; and a change, scarcely less than organic, for good or ill, is wrought there. Agreeably with this fact, the scene itself of the event becomes at once, to the survivor, either hallowed and beloved, or hated and avoided. Not that natural beauty or deformity has any thing to do in the production of such feelings. They have a mysterious origin, and are, in truth, not to be accounted for or explained. A father sees the hope and joy of his manhood deposited amongst the gardens of the soil, and from that moment the fruitful fields and unobstructed sky are things he cannot gaze upon; whilst the brother, who has lived in the court or alley of a crowded city with the sister of his infancy, and has buried her, with his burning tears, in the dense churchyard of the denser street, clings to the neighbourhood, close and unhealthy though it be, with a love that renders it for him the brightest and the dearest nook of earth. He cannot quit it, and be at peace. Causes that seem alike, are not always so in their effects. For my own part, for years after the first bitter lesson of my life became connected with that city, I could not think of it without pain, or hear its name spoken without suffering a depression of spirits, as difficult to throw off as are the heavy clouds that follow in the track, and hide the little light of a December sun. At school, I remember well how grievously I wept upon the map on which I first saw the word written, and how completely I expunged the characters from the paper, forbidding my eyes to glance even to the county from which I had erased them. Time passes, hardening the heart as it rolls over it, and we afford to laugh at the strong feelings and extravagant views of our youth. It is well, perhaps, that we do so; and yet on that subject a word or two of profitable matter might be offered, which shall be withholden now. For many years I have battled through the world, an orphan, on my own account; and it is not surprising that the vehemence of my early days should have gradually sobered down before the stern realities that have at every step encountered me. Long before I received the unwelcome intelligence, that it was literally incumbent upon me to revisit the spot of my beloved mother's dissolution, the mention of its name had ceased to evoke any violent emotion, or to affect me as of old. I say unwelcome, because, notwithstanding the stoicism of which I boast, I felt quite uncomfortable enough to write to my correspondent by the return of post, urging him to make one more endeavour to complete my business without my aid, and to spare, if possible, my personal attendance. I gave no reason for this wish. I did not choose to tell a falsehood, and I had hardly honesty to acknowledge, even to myself—the truth. I failed, however, in my application, and with any but a cheerful mind, I quitted London on my journey. Thirty years before I had travelled to —— in a stupendous machine, of which now I recollect only that it seemed to take years out of my little life in arriving at its destination, and that, on its broad, substantial rear, it bore the effigy of "an ancient Briton." Locomotion then, like me, was in a state of infancy. On the occasion of my second visit to the city, I had hardly time to wonder at the velocity with which I was borne along. Distance was annihilated. The two hundred miles over which the ancient Briton had wearisomely laboured, were reduced to twenty, and before I could satisfy myself that our journey was more than begun, my horseless coach, and fifty more besides, had actually gone over them. I experienced a nervous palpitation at the heart as I proceeded from the outskirts of the city, and grew more and more fidgety the nearer I approached the din and noise of the prosperous seat of business. I could not account for the feeling, until I detected myself walking as briskly as I could, with my eyes fixed hard upon the ground, as though afraid to glance upon a street, a house, an object which could recall the past, or carry me back to the first dark days of life. Then it was that I summoned courage, and, with a desperate effort to crush the morbid sensibility, raised myself to my full height, gazed around me, and awoke, effectually and for ever, from my dream. The city was not the same. The well-remembered thoroughfares were gone; their names extinct, and superseded by others more euphonic; the buildings, which I had carried in my mind as in a book—the thought of meeting which had given me so much pain, had been removed—destroyed, and not a brick remained which I could call a friend, or offer one warm tear, in testimony of old acquaintance. A noble street, a line of palaces—merchants' palaces—had taken to itself the room of twenty narrow ways, that, in the good old times, had met and crossed in close, but questionable, friendship. Bright stone, that in the sunlight shone brighter than itself, flanked every broad and stately avenue, denoting wealth and high commercial dignity. Every venerable association was swept away, and nothing remained of the long-cherished and always unsightly picture, but the faint shadow in my own brain—growing fainter now with every moment, and which the unexpected scene and new excitement were not slow to obliterate altogether. I breathed more freely as I went my way, and reached my agent's house at length, lighter of heart than I had been for hours before. Mr Treherne was a man of business, and a prosperous one too, or surely he had no right to place before the dozen corpulent gentlemen whom I met on my arrival—a dinner, towards which the viscera of princes might have turned without ruffling a fold of their intestinal dignity. I partook of the feast—that is to say, I sat at the groaning table, and, like a cautious and dyspeptic man, I eat roast beef—toujours roast beef, and nothing else—appeased my thirst with grateful claret, and retired at last to wholesome sleep and quiet dreams. Not so the corpulent guests. It may be to my dyspeptic habit, which enables me to be virtuous at a trifling cost, and to nothing loftier, that I am bound to attribute the feeling with which I invariably sit down to feasting; be this the fact or not, I confess that a sense of shame, uneasiness, and dislike, renders an affair of this kind to me the most irksome and unpleasant of enjoyments. The eagerness of appetite that one can fairly see in the watery and sensual eyes of men to whom eating has become the aim and joy of their existence—the absorption of every faculty in the gluttonous pursuit—the animal indulgence and delight—these are sickening; then the deliberate and cold-blooded torture of the creatures whose marrowy bones are crunched by the epicure, without a thought of the suffering that preceded his intensely pleasurable emotions, and the bare mention of which, in this narrative, is almost more than sufficient, then, worst of all, the wilful prodigality and waste—the wickedness of casting to the dogs the healthy food for which whole families, widows, and beggared orphans are pining in the neighbouring street—the guilty indifference of him who finds the wealth for the profusion, and the impudent recklessness of the underling who abuses it. Such are a few of the causes which concur in giving to the finest banquet I have seen an aspect not more odious than humiliating; and here I dwell upon the fact, because the incident which I shall shortly bring before the reader's eye, served to confirm the feelings which I entertain on this subject, and presented an instructive contrast to the splendid entertainment which greeted my immediate arrival.

I slept at the house of Mr Treherne, and, on the following morning, was an early riser. I strolled through the city, and, returning home, found my active friend seated at his breakfast-table, with a host of papers, and a packet of newly-arrived letters before him. The dinner was no more like the breakfast, than was my friend in the midst of his guests like my friend alone with his papers. His meal consisted of one slice of dry toast, and one cup of tea, already cold. The face that was all smile and relaxation of muscle on the preceding evening, was solemn and composed. You might have ventured to assert that tea and toast were that man's most stimulating diet, and that the pleasures of the counting-house were the highest this world could afford him. I, however, had passed the evening with him, and was better informed. Mr Treherne requested me to ring the bell. I did so, and his servant speedily appeared with a tray of garnished dainties, of which I was invited to partake, with many expressions of kindness uttered by my man-of-business, without a look at me, or a movement of his mind and eye from the pile of paper with which he was busy. In the course of half an hour, I had brought my repast to a close, and Mr Treherne was primed for the conflict of the day. His engagements did not permit him to give me his assistance in my own matters until the following morning. He begged me to excuse him until dinner-time—to make myself perfectly at home—to wile away an hour or so in his library—and, when I got tired of that, to take what amusement I could amongst the lions of the town—offering which advice, he quitted me and his house with a head much more heavily laden, I am sure, than any that ever groaned beneath the hard and aching knot. Would that the labourer could be taught to think so!

After having passed an unsatisfactory hour in Mr Treherne's library, in which the only books which I cared to look at were very wisely locked up, on account of their rich binding, too beautiful to be touched, I sauntered once more through the broad streets of the city, and, in my solitary walk, philosophized upon the busy spirit of trade which pervaded them. It is at such a time and place that the quiet and observant mind is startled by the stern and settled appearance of reality and continuance which all things take. If the world were the abiding-place of man, and life eternity, such earnestness, such vigour, such intensity of purpose and of action as I saw stamped upon the harassed brows of men, would be in harmony with such a scene and destination. HERE such concentration of the glorious energies of man is mockery, delusion, and robs the human soul of—who shall say how much? Look at the stream of life pouring through the streets of commerce, from morn till night, and mark the young and old—yes, the youngest and the oldest—and discover, if you can, the expression of any thought but that of traffic and of gain, as if the aim and end of living were summed up in these. And are they? Yes, if we may trust the evidence of age, of him who creeps and totters on his way, who has told his threescore years and ten, and on the threshold of eternity has found the vanity of all things. Oh, look at him, and learn how hard it is, even at the door of death, to FEEL the mutability and nothingness of earth! Palsied he is, yet to the Exchange he daily hies, and his dull eye glistens on the mart—his ear is greedy for the sounds that come too tardily—his quick and treble voice is loud amongst the loudest. He is as quick to apprehend, as eager now to learn, as ravenous for gain, as when he trusted first an untried world. If life be truly but a shadow, and mortals but the actors in the vision, is it not marvellous that age, and wisdom, and experience build and fasten there as on a rock? Such thoughts as these engaged my mind, as I pursued my way alone, unoccupied, amongst the labouring multitude, and cast a melancholy hue on things that, to the eye external, looked bright, beautiful, and enduring. I was arrested in my meditations at length by a crowd of persons—men, women, and children—who thronged about the entrance of a spacious, well-built edifice. They were for the most part in rags, and their looks betrayed them for poor and reckless creatures all. They presented so singular a feature of the scene, contrasted so disagreeably with the solid richness and perfect finish of the building, that I stopped involuntarily, and enquired into the cause of their attendance. Before I could obtain an answer, a well-dressed and better-fed official came suddenly to the door, and bawled the name of one poor wretch, who answered it immediately, stepped from the crowd, and followed the appellant, as the latter vanished quickly from the door again. A remark which, at the same moment, escaped another of the group, told me that I stood before the sessions'-house, and that a man, well known to most of them, was now upon trial for his life. He was a murderer—and the questionable-looking gentleman who had been invited to appear in court, had travelled many miles on foot, to give the criminal the benefit of his good word. He was the witness for the defence, and came to speak to character! My curiosity was excited, and I was determined to see the end of the proceeding. It is the custom to pay for every thing in happy England. I was charged box-price for my admittance, and was provided with as good a seat as I could wish, amongst the élite of the assembly. Quick as I had been, I was already too late. There was a bustle and buzz in the court, that denoted the trial to be at an end. Indeed, it had been so previously to the appearance of the devoted witness, whose presence had served only to confirm the evidence, which had been most damnatory and conclusive. The judge still sat upon the bench, and, having once perceived him, it was not easy to withdraw my gaze again. "The man is surely guilty," said I to myself, "who is pronounced so, when that judge has summed up the evidence against him." I had never in my life beheld so much benignity and gentleness—so much of truth, ingenuousness, and pure humanity, stamped on a face before. There was the fascination of the serpent there; and the longer I looked, the more pleasing became the countenance, and the longer I wished to protract my observation and delight. He was a middle-aged man—for a judge, he might be called young. His form was manly—his head massive—his forehead glorious and intellectual. His features were finely formed; but it was not these that seized my admiration, and, if I dare so express myself, my actual love, with the first brief glance. The EXPRESSION