Mary. Luke. Mary. Luke. Mary. Be content: Thanks, Ere then I shall be watching o'er thee. Thanks, thanks, O, thanks! Why, if it be so soon, [Falling on his neck and weeping. I am too ready in the same offence. But now farewell! Until we meet again I'd have thee pass thy time in thinking over Indeed 'twas very melancholy. Luke. But say thou wilt. Mary. I shall not soon forget. But why art thou so earnest? Luke. Heed it not. Thou knowest I have that which makes me sad. once more, farewell! Caleb, your hand. God speed Your journey, Luke! [He re-enters his boat and pushes off, So now 'tis past! Poor widow'd Mary, we shall meet no more! [The river becomes wider as he proceeds, and at last expands into a large circular pool. He rests upon his pole, and looks slowly and cautiously about him. This is the place.-How fitting for a deed Like mine! The high and shelving banks have nursed To an uncommon growth, as if to hide All eyes from me, and me from all the world. The sun did leap aloft an hour ago, But here he hath not been-'tis scarcely twilight, VOL. IV. No. 21.-1822. 12 From chance or choice, who long have lain in secret Leaving no thing but vague surmise behind. I'll find their mystery. [He pushes the boat into the middle of the pool, and then, laying down his pole, sinks upon his knees.-The scene closes. THE LAST OF THE PIGTAILS. "The body is the shell of the soul; apparel is the husk of that shell; the husk often tells you what the kernel is.-QUARLES. No; never will I forgive thee, Frank Hartopp! Hadst thou been mine enemy, I might have obeyed the divine injunction, and pardoned thee; but as we are no where enjoined to forgive our friends, thou shalt never have absolution for thine offence. Talk not to me of the last of the Romans; thou hadst a prouder distinction, for thou wert the last of the pigtails!—And to cut it off at the solicitation of thy Dalilah of a daughter!-verily, Frank, thou must wear in thy head the instrument that Samson wielded :-it was an act of capillary suicide, a crinigerous felo-de-se; and were the locks of Berenice, which ascended from the temple of Venus, to shoot from their constellations or the golden hair by which Absalom was suspended in the forest of Ephraim, or the immortal ringlet ravished from Belinda, to offer themselves as a substitute for thy loss, they could neither restore thee to thy former honours, nor to thy pristine place in my esteem. Feeling with that author who could not bear to see an old post grubbed up to which he had been long familiarised, what must I endure at the excision of this appendage, which I had seen hanging from a head I loved for nearly half a century, until I had identified it with my friend as part and parcel of himself? The blow, too, fell upon a wounded spirit, for I had scarcely recovered the extinction of the last of the cocked-hats, with which my old friend John Nutt, of happy civic memory, had walked away into the other world. What a treat was it to me, some of whose senses have already left me, and gone forward to the land of shadows to announce my speedy coming-what a treat was it to me, in my walks citywards, to throw mine eyes over the profane round-hatted vulgar of Fleet-street or Cheapside, and encounter in the distance the lofty triangular summit of my friend, like some precious argosy or "huge ammiral" sailing up out of the last century, every corner richly freighted with antique reminiscences, and as pregnant with triple associations as the trident of Pluto! What a collyrium to my feeble eyes to gaze upon his blue, collarless, basket-buttoned coat, ever fresh in texture though venerable in form, with its circular halo of powder behind, gradually shading off into that debateable land which was daily invaded by pulvillio, and daily recovered by the brush! His long-flapped waistcoat was of the same material and hue; so were his breeches, (for I renounce the new-fangled squeamishness of expressing them by "small clothes ;") his narrow stock allowed his worked frill to meander upon his bosom, or wanton in the wind, in sympathy with the ruffles on his sleeve; his powdered wig balanced itself with majestic curls, like fins, on either side; and behind-(dost thou hear, Frank Hart opp ?) there depended a goodly pigtail. By heavens! I'll have a starling taught that word to ring it in thine ear!-John was characteristic in every thing, even in epicurism, of which he was the professed high priest. Methinks I now behold the peevish expression and drop of the under-jaw, which would sometimes follow the first mouthful of venison, and hear the gentle oath with which he would excommunicate the gamekeepers for shooting a buck and leaving it to die slowly while they went in pursuit of another. His, however, was not the anger of feeling, but of taste; inasmuch as the animal thus expiring in a feverish state, the flesh (to use his own phrase) "ate tough and coddied, instead of being short and crisp in the mouth!" How important and reflective was his look, as his palate toyed with the first glass of Madeira, ere he pronounced that verdict against which there was no appeal; for to question his authority in a tavern would have been to deny Diana at Ephesus. It was said that he could distinguish by the flavour from what island a turtle had been imported, and in what forest a buck had been shot; but these, I apprehend, are fond exaggerations of his disciples. He is swept into the invisible world, but his form and figure are still present to my mind's eye the warrants of the grim serjeant cannot be served upon those who reside within the verge of the imagination; Death himself cannot prevent our friends from living in our memory. Time, alas! has not left me many with whom I can grapple in a more tangible form, and I am jealous of the smallest fragments of these relics. Three-fourths of my heart, like an old ivy-plant, are underground, and I do but cling with a more stubborn and sinewy grasp to that which I can still embrace. The least change, even in the external appearance of my remaining friends, is as an uplifted finger, point*ing to the great metamorphosis impending over them. Their outward figure is finally made up in my mind, and I cannot bear to have it altered; they are all remnants, and should consider themselves as having survived the fashions. I miss even an old button from their coats, as if I had lost one of my hold-fasts. To me the very hairs of their head are numbered; and to cut off a whole handful of my affections at once !Frank! Frank! if I should pardon thee, how canst thou forgive thyself? Whither am I now to turn these aged eyes, if I would seek anything antique or picturesque in the surface of society? I see the earth thickly studded with black and blue reptiles called men; but as to distinguishing one from another, I might as well attempt to pick out a particular bee from his hive, or ant from its nest. The world is nothing now but a monotonous modification of broad-cloth-a homogeneous mass of bipeds;-and so far from encountering those pictorial varieties of costume which give such graphic animation to Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims, we have lost even the wig and gold-headed cane of our Doctors; our cocked-hats have fallen into as much desuetude as the desecrated Tripod of the Pythoness, and the last of our pigtails has been decollated! When I look around me I seem to have survived myself, or to have walked by mistake into a wrong century. I hate such a congregation of duplicates as our streets present-such a mass of dittos -such an accumulation of fac-similes-such a civil regiment :-and as if the human monotony were not sufficient, we build our streets so like barracks or manufactories, so mathematically uniform, so much like prolonged honey-combs, that it has always puzzled me to explain how the tenants find their respective cells, even in the day-time. By night, I take it for granted that they rarely succeed. If I ever change my residence, it shall be to Regent-street, where there is at least a chance of my finding my own house; or where, if I am at a loss, I may at all events describe it as a non-descript, belonging to the order of Disorder. The establishment of mail coaches accelerated this social amalgamation, by conveying the fashions in four or five days from Bond-street to the Highlands and the Land's End, and enabling the extremities of the island to be whisked up to London by four blood-horses. Bell and Lancaster have completed the process we can all read and talk alike, though I flatter myself some can still write a little better than their neighbours: the rural Echoes no longer babble in dialect, and our farmers neither wear cowskin waistcoats, nor rusticise like Hobbinol and Diggon Davy. Character, as to its broad delineations, is blotted out; individuality is extinct; nobody is himself, we are all everybody, and we ought each of us to be designated as Mr. Cominunity or Public, Esq. I pity the dramatist who is compelled to see the broad foot of Improvement (as it is termed,) trampling down his harvest, and crushing the very elements and materials of his art. We have no longer any genuine quizzes or odd fellows-society has shaken us together in its bag until all our original characters and impressions have been rubbed out, and we are left as smooth and polished as old shillings. Having no angles, we slip through the fingers of the play-wright: he might as well attempt to dramatize a bag of marbles. Can we wonder at the degraded state of the drama, the remaining interest of which is still feebly upheld by a gross violation of existing costume, and the retention of those ancient modes, particularly in our farces, which by stamping the age, character, and profession of the wearer, adapted themselves so happily to dramatic representation. Dress is a greater ingredient in the formation of character than is generally supposed, and we may be strictly called in more senses than one the creatures of habit. The Romans were aware of this when they gave their citizens the exclusive jus toga, as a garment which might distinguish them in every quarter of the world, and stimulate them to uphold the national reputation. Our clergymen are restrained from any public indecorum by respect for their cloth: Quakers carry about with them a drab-coloured Mentor which sticks closer to them than did Minerva to Telemachus; and the gentlemen of the long robe see in their garment a Janus-like kind of monitor, somewhat resembling the Agatho-demon of Socrates. As an artificial memory may be created by types and symbols, so we may peruse these wollen didactics until we acquire a morality of broad-cloth, and derive a character from our wardrobe. Individuals may partake this sentiment without reference to their profession. Could the wearer of laced garments, when they were in vogue, be seen in any act or situation unworthy of a gentleman? No! he must act up to his clothes. But now all distinctions of rank are annihilated :-hair-powder, the last difference between masters and servants, has vanished; our heads are as much alike externally as they are within; we are become a characterless multitude. Elijah's mantle retained his inspiration, but I should wish to know what gifts can be expected to reside in a poodle upperbenjamin, or whether artists can extract more from our modern uniforms than the dramatist. What sort of a figure should we cut in marble; or could any existing Hogarth throw a mass of modern hats into the corner of his picture, so that we might individualize every one, and appropriate it to its owner amid the group of living figures ?-The drab-coloured Quakers have never yet produced an artist; and the black and blue ones will probably be no better provided should the present modes continue. But worse than this confusion of ranks is the levelling and jumbling of ages by this preposterous omniparity of appearance. It was but last week that a young acquaintance of mine overtaking, as he imagined, a fellow collegian, and saluting him with a hearty slap on the back and the exclamation-" Ah! Harry, is it you?" found he had nearly knocked the breath out of his own grandfather! These pedestrian anachronisms, these walking impostors, these liars in broad-cloth, these habitual cheats, all ought to be sent to Bridewell; for, if the reputation of juvenility be a good, is it not felonious to obtain it under false pretences? Every superannuated Adonis and "Dandy of sixty" should be shut up with all the Grandmothers of the Loves in a House of mutual correction. What! is the tailor to be our modern alchymist, and take measure of us for a new youth? Is his magical goose to lay the golden egg which we may resolve into the true aurum potabile and elixir vita? Are his scissors to dash the fatal shears from the hand of Atropos, and is he to pass the thread of life through his needle? Some of our juvenile septuagenaries, who strive to escape a second childhood by never going out of the first, seem besotted enough to imagine that they can stop the great wheel of time by stuffing their wigs and cocked-hats between the spokes, and blunt the scythe of Death by wreathing it with bunches of touch-me-not, as the Tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogiton, twined roses around their swords. As well might they expect to arrest the progress of senility by stopping their watches, or ensure a perpetual spring by sticking artificial primroses in their button-holes. Let them " bid Taliocotius trim them the calves of twenty chairmen," and if he obey the summons, I will credit the possibility of their rejuveniscence; let them imitate Sinbad the Sailor and shake the old man from their shoulders, and I will allow them to be covered with a youthful habit. Rather should they recollect the reproach of Fontenelle to a greybeard who had dyed the hair of his head black-"Sir, it is easy to see that you have worked more with your jaws than your brains." The old Frenchman who refused to take physic because he was in hopes death had forgotten him, and was afraid of putting him in mind, had better plea for his folly than these ancient simpletons, who hope to sneak by him in the disguise of boy's clothes. When any such are detected and carried off by the hawkeyed King of shadows, I recommend their friends to insert their deaths in somewhat the following style: "Died in the full flower of his poodle great-coat, aged eighty" or, "Cut off in the prime of his Cossack trowsers, aged threescore and ten" or, "Suddenly snatched from his friends in the first year of his Petersham hat, and sixty-seventh of his age"-Mr. such-a-one. And should I myself survive a certain friend, which I hardly wish now that he has disfigured himself so piteously, I will take care to perpetuate that which he has vainly endeavoured to cut off from my recollection, by inscribing on his tomb-"Here lies Frank Hartopp, the last of the Pigtails." H. |