322 This talent, which, it is to be presumed, he a poor place! an independent borough, and subject, accordingly, to the infliction (privi- acquired in the ladies' club at Belford, and lege, I believe, the voters are pleased to call which probably contributed to his popularity it) of an election. For thirty years-during in that society, stood him in great stead in the which period there had been seven or eight of aristocratic circle of Delworth Castle. The these visitations- -the calamity had passed whole family was equally delighted and over so mildly, that, except three or four days amused by his bonhommie and simplicity; of intolerable drunkenness, (accompanied, of and he, in return, captivated by their kindcourse, by a sufficient number of broken heads,) ness, as well as grateful for their benefits, no other mischief had occurred; the two great paid them a sincere and unfeigned homage, families, whig and tory, might be said to di- which trebled their good-will. Never was so vide the town, for this was before the days honest and artless a courtier. There was of that active reformer, Stephen Lane,-hav- something at once diverting and amiable in ing entered, by agreement, into a compromise the ascendency which every thing connected with his patron held over Mr. Singleton's imto return one member each; a compact which might have held good to this time, had not agination. Loyal subject as he unquestionasome slackness of attention on the part of the bly was, the king, queen, and royal family whigs (the Blues, as they were called in would have been as nothing in his eyes, comelection jargon) provoked the Yellow or tory pared with Lord and Lady Delworth, and their part of the corporation, to sign a requisition to illustrious offspring. He purchased a new the Hon. Mr. Delworth, to stand as their se- peerage, which, in the course of a few days, cond candidate, and produced the novelty of a opened involuntarily on the honoured page sharp contest in their hitherto peaceful bo- which contained an account of their genealorough. When it came, it came with a ven- gy; his walls were hung with ground-plans geance. It lasted eight days-as long as it of Hadley House, elevations of Delworth Cascould last. The dregs of that cup of evil tle, maps of the estate, prints of the late and were drained to the very bottom. Words are present lords, and of a judge of Queen Anne's faint to describe the tumult, the turmoil, the reign, and of a bishop of George the Second's, blustering, the brawling, the abuse, the ill-worthies of the family; he had, on his diningwill, the battles by tongue and by fist, of that disastrous time. At last the Yellows carried it by six; and on a petition and scrutiny in the House of Commons, by one single vote: and as Mr. Singleton had been engaged on the side of the winning party, not merely by his own political opinions, and those of his ancient vicar, Dr. Grampound, but, also, by the predilections of his female allies, who were Yellows to a man, those who understood the ordinary course of such matters were not greatly astonished, in the course of the ensuing three years, to find our good curate rector of Hadley, vicar of Delworth, and chaplain to the new member's father. One thing, however, was remarkable, that amidst all the scurrility and ill blood of an election contest, and in spite of the envy which is sure to follow a sudden change of fortune, Mr. Singleton neither made an enemy nor lost a friend. His peaceful, unoffending character disarmed offence. He had been unexpectedly useful too to the winning party, not merely by knowing and having served many of the poorer voters, but by possessing one eminent qualification, not sufficiently valued or demanded in a canvasser: he was the best listener of the party,* and is said to have gained the half-dozen votes which decided the election, by the mere process of letting the people talk. A friend of mine, the lady of a borough member, who was very active in canvassing for her husband, once said to me, on my complimenting her on the number of votes she had obtained: "It was all done by listening. Our good friends, the voters, like to hear themselves talk." room mantel-piece, models of two wings, once projected for Hadley, but which had never been built; and is said to have once bought an old head of the first Duke of Marlborough, which a cunning auctioneer had fobbed off upon him, by pretending that the great captain was a progenitor of his noble patron. Besides this predominant taste, he soon began to indulge other inclinations at the rectory, which savoured a little of his old bachelor habits. He became a collector of shells and china, and a fancier of tulips; and when he invited the coterie of Belford ladies to partake of a syllabub, astonished and delighted them by the performance of a piping bullfinch of his own teaching, who executed the Blue Bells of Scotland in a manner not to be surpassed by the barrel-organ, by means of which this accomplished bird had been instructed. He engaged Mrs. Martin as his housekeeper, and Patty as his housemaid; set up the identical one-horse chaise in which he was riding to-day; became a member of the clerical dinner club; took in St. James's Chronicle and the Gentleman's Magazine; and was set down by every body as a confirmed old bachelor. All these indications notwithstanding, nothing was less in his contemplation than to remain in that forlorn condition. Marriage, after all, was his predominant taste; his real fancy was for the ladies. He was fifty-seven, or thereabouts, when he began to make love; but he has amply made up for his loss of time, by marrying no less than four wives since that period. Call him Mr. Singleton, indeed! why, his proper name would be Doubleton.. Four wives has he had, and of all varieties. | His first was a pretty rosy smiling lass just come from school, who had known him all her life, and seemed to look upon him just as a school-girl does upon an indulgent grandpapa, who comes to fetch her home for the holidays. She was as happy as a bird, poor thing! during the three months that she lived with him but then came a violent fever, and carried her off. His next wife was a pale, sickly, consumptive lady, not over-young, for whose convenience he set up a carriage, and for whose health he travelled to Lisbon and Madeira, and Nice, and Florence, and Hastings, and Clifton, and all the places by sea and land, abroad and at home, where sick people go to get well,-at one of which she, poor lady, died. Then he espoused a buxom, jolly, merry widow, who had herself had two husbands, and who seemed likely to see him out; but the small-pox came in her way, and she died also. Then he married his present lady, a charming woman, neither fat nor thin, nor young nor old-not very healthy, nor particularly sickly-who makes him very happy, and seems to find her own happiness in making him so. especially of the less affluent class, (and although such a thing may be found here and there, a rich old maid is much rarer than a poor one,) a provincial town in this protestant country, where nunneries are not, is the natural refuge. A village life, however humble the dwelling, is at once more expensivesince messengers and conveyances, men and horses, of some sort, are in the actual country indispensable, and more melancholy, for there is a sense of loneliness and insignificance, a solitude within doors and without, which none but an unconnected and unprotected woman can thoroughly understand. And London, without family ties, or personal importance, or engrossing pursuit,-to be poor and elderly, idle and alone in London, is a climax of desolation which every body can comprehend, because almost every one must, at some time or other, have felt, in a greater or less degree, the humbling sense of individual nothingness-of being but a drop of water in the ocean, a particle of sand by the seashore, which so often presses upon the mind amidst the bustling crowds and the splendid gaieties of the great city. To be rich or to be busy, is the necessity of London. The poor and the idle, on the other hand, get on best in a country town. Belford was He has no children by any of his wives; the paradise of ill-jointured widows and porbut has abundance of adherents in parlour and tionless old maids. There they met on the hall. Half the poor of the parish are occa- table-land of gentility, passing their mornings sionally to be found in his kitchen, and his in calls at each other's houses, and their evendining-room is the seat of hospitality, not ings in small tea-parties, seasoned with a only to his old friends of the town and his rubber or a pool, and garnished with the little new friends of the country, but to all the fami- quiet gossiping (call it not scandal, gentle lies of all his wives. He talks of them (for reader!) which their habits required. So large he talks more now than he did at the Belford a portion of the population consisted of single election, having fallen into the gossiping habit ladies, that it might almost have been called of" narrative old age") in the quietest manner a maiden town. Indeed, a calculating Cantab, possible, mixing, in a way the most diverting happening to be there for the long vacation, and the most unconscious, stories of his first amused his leisure by taking a census of the wife and his second, of his present and his female householders, beginning with the Mrs. last. He seems to have been perfectly happy Davisons-fine alert old ladies, between sewith all of them, especially with this. But venty and eighty, who, being proud of their if he should have the misfortune to lose that sprightliness and vigour, were suspected of delightful person, he would certainly console adding a few more years to their age than himself, and prove his respect for the state, would be borne out by the register,—and endby marrying again; and such is his reputation ing with Miss Letitia Pierce, a damsel on the as a superexcellent husband, especially in the confines of forty, who was more than suspected main article of giving his wives their own of a slight falsification of dates the converse way, that, in spite of his being even now an way. I think he made the sum total, in the octogenarian, I have no doubt but there would three parishes, amount to one hundred and be abundance of fair candidates for the heart seventy-four. and hand of the good Rector of Hadley. KING HARWOOD. THE good town of Belford swarmed, of course, with single ladies-especially with single ladies of that despised denomination which is commonly known by the title of old maids. For gentlewomen of that description, The part of the town in which they chiefly congregated, the lady's quartier, was one hilly corner of the parish of St. Nicholas', a sort of highland district, all made up of short rows, and pigmy places, and half-finished crescents, entirely uncontaminated by the vulgarity of shops, ill-paved, worse lighted, and so placed that it seemed to catch all the smoke of the more thickly inhabited part of the town, and was constantly encircled by a wreath of vapour, like Snowdon or Skiddaw. Why the good ladies chose this elevated and inconvenient position, one can hardly tell; perhaps, because it was cheap; perhaps, because it was genteel-perhaps, from a mixture of both causes; I can only answer for the fact; and of this favourite spot the most favoured portion was a slender line of houses, tall and slim, known by the name of Warwick-terrace, consisting of a tolerably spacious dwelling at either end, and four smaller tenements linked two by two in the centre. The tenants of Warwick-terrace were, with one solitary exception, exclusively female. One of the end houses was occupied by a comfortable-looking, very round Miss Blackall, a spinster of fifty, the richest and simplest of the row, with her parrot, who had certainly more words, and nearly as many ideas, as his mistress: her black footman, whose fine livery, white, turned up with scarlet, and glittering with silver lace, seemed rather ashamed of his "sober-suited" neighbours; the plush waistcoat and inexpressibles blushing as if in scorn. The other corner was filled by Mrs. Leeson, a kind-hearted, bustling dame, the great ends of whose existence were visiting and cards, who had, probably, made more morning calls and played a greater number of rubbers than any woman in Belford, and who boasted a tabby cat, and a head maid called Nanny, that formed a proper pendant to the parrot and Cæsar. Of the four centre habitations, one pair was the residence of Miss Savage, who bore the formidable reputation of a sensible woman-an accusation which rested, probably, on no worse foundation than a gruff voice and something of a vinegar aspect, and of Miss Steele, who, poor thing, underwent a still worse calumny, and was called literary, simply because forty years ago she had made a grand poetical collection, consisting of divers manuscript volumes, written in an upright taper hand, and filled with such choice morceaux as Mrs. Greville's "Ode to Indifference," Miss Seward's "Monody on Major Andre," sundry translations of Metastasio's "Nice," and a considerable collection of enigmas, on which stock, undiminished and unincreased, she still traded; whilst the last brace of houses, linked together like the Siamese twins, was divided between two families, the three Miss Lockes,-whom no one ever dreamt of talking of as separate or individual personages- -one should as soon have thought of severing the Graces, or the Furies, or the Fates, or any other classical trio, as of knowing them apart: the three Miss Lockes lived in one of these houses, and Mrs. Harwood and her two daughters in the other. It is with the Harwoods only that we have to do at present. Mrs. Harwood was the widow of the late and the mother of the present rector of Dighton, a family living, purchased by the father of her late husband, who, himself a respect The son proved a bright pattern of posthumous duty; exactly the sort of rector that the good old farmer would have wished to see, did he turn out,-respectable, conscientious, always just, and often kind; but so solemn, so pompous, so swelling in deportment and grandiloquent in speech, that he had not been half a dozen years inducted in the living before he obtained the popular title of bishop of Dighton-a distinction which he seems to have taken in good part, by assuming a costume as nearly episcopal as possible, at all points, and copying, with the nicest accuracy, the shovel hat and buzz wig of the prelate of the diocese, a man of seventy-five. He put his coachman and footboy into the right clerical livery, and adjusted his household and modelled his behaviour according to his strictest notions of the stateliness and decorum proper to a dignitary of the church. Perhaps he expected that the nickname by which he was so little aggrieved would some day or other be realized; some professional advancement he certainly reckoned upon. But, in spite of his cultivating most assiduously all profitable connexions-of his christening his eldest son "Earl" after a friend of good parliamentary interest, and his younger boy "King," after another-of his choosing one noble sponsor for his daughter Georgina, and another for his daughter Henrietta - he lived and died with no better preferment than the rectory of Dighton, which had been presented to him by his honest father five-andforty years before, and to which his son Earl succeeded: the only advantage which his careful courting of patrons and patronage had procured for his family being comprised in his having obtained for his son King, through the recommendation of a noble friend, the situation of clerk at his banker's in Lombard-street. Mrs. Harwood, a stately portly dame, almost as full of parade as her husband, had, on her part, been equally unlucky. The grand object of her life had been to marry her daughters, and in that she failed, probably because she had been too ambitious and too open in her attempts. Certain it is that, on the removal of the widow to Belford, poor Miss Harwood, who had been an insipid beauty, and whose beauty had turned into sallowness and haggardness, was forced to take refuge in ill health and tender spirits, and set up, as a last chance, for interesting; whilst Miss Hen rietta, who had five-and-twenty years before reckoned herself accomplished, still, though with diminished pretensions, kept the fieldsang with a voice considerably the worse for wear, danced as often as she could get a partner, and flirted with beaux of all ages, from sixty to sixteen-chiefly, it may be presumed, with the latter, because of all mankind a shy lad from college is the likeliest to be taken in by an elderly miss. A wretched personage, under an affectation of boisterous gaiety, was Henrietta Harwood! a miserable specimen of that most miserable class of single women who, at forty and upwards, go about dressing and talking like young girls, and will not grow old. Earl Harwood was his father slightly modernized. He was a tall, fair, heavy-looking man, not perhaps quite so solemn and pompous as “the bishop,” but far more cold and supercilious. If I wished to define him in four letters, the little word "prig" would come very conveniently to my aid; and perhaps, in its compendious brevity, it conveys as accurate an idea of his manner as can be given a prig of the slower and graver order was Earl Harwood. His brother King, on the other hand, was a coxcomb of the brisker sort; up- not like generous champagne; but like cider, or perry, or gooseberry-wine, or “the acid flash of sodawater;" or, perhaps, more still like the slight froth that runs over the top of that abomination, a pot of porter, to which, by the way, together with the fellow abominations, snuff and cigars, he was inveterately addicted. Conceit and pretension, together with a dash of the worst because the finest vulgarity, that which thinks itself genteel, were the first and last of King Harwood. His very pace was an amble-a frisk, a skip, a strut, a prance he could not walk; and he always stood on tiptoe, so that the heels of his shoes never wore out. The effect of this was, of course, to make him look less tall than he really was; so that, being really a man of middle height, he passed for short. His figure was slight, his face fair, and usually adorned with a smile half supercilious and half self-satisfied, and set off by a pair of most conceited-looking spectacles. There is no greater atrocity than his who shows you glass for eyes, and, instead of opening wide those windows of the heart, fobs you off with a bit of senseless crystal which conceals, instead of enforcing, an honest meaning "there was no speculation in those pebbles which he did glare withal." For the rest, he was duly whiskered and curled; though the eyelashes, when by a chance removal of the spectacle they were discovered, lying under suspicion of sandiness; and, the whiskers and hair being auburn, it was a disputed point whether the barber's part of him consisted in dyeing his actual locks, or in a supplemental periwig: that the curls were of their natural colour, nobody believed that took the trouble to think about it. But it was his speech that was the prime distinction of King Harwood: the pert fops of Congreve's comedies, Petulant, Witwoud, Froth, and Brisk, (pregnant names!) seemed but types of our hero. He never opened his lips (and he was always chattering) but to proclaim his own infinite superiority to all about him. He would have taught Burke to speak, and Reynolds to paint, and John Kemble to act. The Waverley novels would have been the better for his hints; and it was some pity that Shakspeare had not lived in these days, because he had a suggestion that would greatly have improved his Lear. Nothing was too great for him to meddle with, and nothing too little; but his preference went very naturally with the latter, which amalgamated most happily with his own mind and when the unexpected legacy of a plebeian great-aunt, the despised sister of his grandfather, the farmer, enabled him to leave quill-driving, of which he was heartily weary, and to descend from the high stool in Lombard-street, on which he had been perched for five-and-twenty years, there doubtless mingled with the desire to assist his family, by adding his small income to their still smaller onefor this egregious coxcomb was an excellent son and a kind brother, just in his dealings, and generous in his heart, when, through the thick coating of foppery, one could find the way to it some wish to escape from the city, where his talents were, as he imagined, buried in the crowd, smothered against the jostling multitudes, and to emerge, in all his lustre, in the smaller and more select coteries of the country. On his arrival at Belford, accordingly, he installed himself, at once, as arbiter of fashion, the professed beau garçon, the lady's man of the town and neighbourhood; and having purchased a horse, and ascertained, to his great comfort, that his avocation as a banker's clerk was either wholly unsuspected in the county circles which his late father had frequented, or so indistinctly known, that the very least little white lie in the world would pass him off as belonging to the House, he boldly claimed acquaintance with every body in the county whose name he had ever heard in his life, and, regardless of the tolerably visible contempt of the gentlemen, proceeded to make his court to the ladies with might and with main. He miscalculated, however, the means best fitted to compass his end. Women, however frivolous, do not like a frivolous man: they would as soon take a fancy to their mercer as to the man who offers to choose their silks; and if he will find fault with their embroidery, and correct their patterns, he must lay his account in being no more regarded by them than their milliner or their maid. Sooth to say, your fine lady is an ungrateful personage: she accepts the help, and then laughs at the offi- | rot to scream, and Mrs. Leeson's cat to mew, cious helper-sucks the orange and throws away the peel. This truth found King Harwood, when, after riding to London, and running all over that well-sized town to match, in German lamb's wool, the unmatchable brown and gold feathers of the game-cock's neck, which that ambitious embroideress, Lady Delaney, aspired to imitate in a tablecarpet, he found himself saluted for his pains with the malicious sobriquet of King of the Bantams. This and other affronts drove him from the county society, which he had intended to enlighten and adorn, to the less brilliant circles of Belford, which, perhaps, suited his taste better, he being of that class of persons who had rather reign in the town than serve in the country; whilst his brother Earl, safe in cold silence and dull respectability, kept sedulously among his rural compeers, and was considered one of the most unexceptionable grace-sayers at a great dinner, of any clergyman in the neighbourhood. now the solitary maid of all-work, or perchance the King himself, tinkled and jangled the door-bell, or the parlour-bell, to tell those who knew it before that dinner was ready, (I wonder he had not purchased a gong,) and to set every lady in the Row a moralizing on the sin of pride and the folly of pretension. Ah! if they who are at once poor and gently bred could but understand how safe a refuge from the contempt of the rich they would find in frank and open poverty! how entirely the pride of the world bends before a simple and honest humility!-how completely we, the poorest, may say with Constance (provided only that we imitate her action, and throw ourselves on the ground as we speak the words,) "Here is my throne,-let kings come bow to me!"-if they would but do this, how much of pain and grief they might save themselves! But this was a truth which the Harwoods had yet to discover. Much of his unpopularity might, however, be traced to a source on which he particularly prided himself:-a misfortune which has befallen a wiser man. To Belford, therefore, the poor King of the Bantams was content to come, thinking himself by far the cleverest and most fashionable man in the place; an opinion which, I am sorry to say, he had pretty much to himself. of the Bantams had a small genius for music, Amongst his other iniquities the poor King The gentlemen smiled at his pretensions, and an accomplishment that flattered at once his the young ladies laughed, which was just the reverse of the impression which he intended love of noise and his acquired love of consepropensities and his pretensions, his natural to make. How the thing happened, I can hardly tell, for, in general, the young ladies quence. He sung, with a falsetto that rang of a country town are sufficiently susceptible through one's head like the screams of a to attention from a London man. Perhaps the young peacock, divers popular ballads in vaman was not to their taste, as conceit finds each from each; he was a most pertinacious rious languages, very difficult to distinguish few favourers; or, perhaps, they disliked the and intolerable scraper on the violincello, an kind of attention, which consisted rather in instrument which it is almost as presumptuous making perpetual demands on their admira- to touch, unless finely, as it is to attempt and tion, than in offering the tribute of his own; to fail in an epic poem or an historical picture; perhaps, also, the gentleman, who partook of and he showed the extent and variety of his the family fault, and would be young in spite want of power, by playing quite as ill on the of the register, was too old for them. How-flute, which again may be compared to a failever it befell, he was no favourite amongst the Belford belles. Neither was he in very good odour with the mammas. He was too poor, too proud, too scornful, and a Harwood, in which name all the pretension of the world seemed gathered. Nay, he not only in his own person out-Har wooded Harwood, but was held accountable for not a few of the delinquencies of that obnoxious race, whose airs had much augmented since he had honoured Belford by his presence. Before his arrival, Miss Henrietta and her stately mamma had walked out, like the other ladies of the town, unattended: the King came, and they could not stir without being followed as their shadow by the poor little footboy, who formed the only serving-man of their establishment; before that avatar they dined at six, now seven was the family hour; and whereas they were wont, previously, to take that refection without alarming their neighbours, and causing Miss Blackall's par ure in the composition of an acrostic, or the equally bad in all; and yet he contrived to be drawing of a butterfly. Sooth to say, he was quite as great a pest to the unmusical part of tainly, and, I suspect, everywhere-as if he society-by far the larger part in Belford cerhad actually been the splendid performer he fancied himself. Nay, he was even a greater singers of all ranks. It is only the very best and the Non-articulation is the besetting sin of flourishing very highest who condescend, not merely to give expression to their words, but words to their expression. Some, of a far better order of taste than Mr. King remember an instance of two such, who were singing Harwood, are addicted to this tantalizing defect. Î very sweetly, as to mere musical sound, some Italian duets, when an old gentleman, quite of the old school, complained that he could not understand them. They then politely sung an English air; but as they had vered the change of language, and repeated his old omitted to announce their intention, he never discocomplaint, "Ah, I dare say it's all very fine; but I can't understand it!" |