winter months they never see daylight unless when the dawn overtakes them on their way home. Respectability, he goes on to say, may denounce this taste, but cannot condemn it as utterly irrational; it being undeniable that noctambulism has charms and enjoyments of a high order. Who, for instance, but the noctambulist has ever thoroughly and honestly enjoyed a sunrise? "Sunrise finds him [unlike the ill-conditioned early riser, who has to get up on purpose] in the full possession of all his faculties-no remnant of a hastily-snatched sleep lies heavy on his eyelids, like an ill-digested morsel. It steals upon him gently, courting but not demanding his admiration, and he sinks to rest with a mind filled with impressions of beauty which crystallise into golden dreams." Furthermore this apologist for noctambulism maintains that none but the night-walker is competent to give an opinion of any value on the architecture of a great city; that no one, for example, can be said to have seen St. Paul's until he has seen it through the smokeless air of the early summer morning, when all its lines come out clear and sharp, and the cross above glitters in the first rays of the rising sun. "On the Rialto every night at twelve I take my evening's walk of meditation," says Pierre, in Venice Preserved. And though the habit may seem in keeping with Pierre's character as a conspirator, it will not tell against him with the candid and the contemplative. In one of Lord Jeffrey's gushing letters to Mr. Dickens, a paragraph begins with this note of admiration: "How funny that besoin of yours for midnight rambling in city streets, and how curious that Macaulay should have the same taste or fancy! If I thought there was any such inspiration as yours to be caught by the practice, I should expose my poor irritable trachea, I think, to a nocturnal pilgrimage without scruple. But I fear I should have my venture for my pains." This was written in 1847; and presumably it is in reference to that period that Mr. Dickens describes, in the Uncommercial Traveller, his having suffered "some years ago" from a temporary inability to sleep, which caused him to walk about the streets all night for a series of several nights. This disorder, the result of "a distressing impression," might, he says, have taken a long time to conquer, if it had been faintly experimented on in bed; but it was soon defeated by the brisk treatment of getting up directly after lying down, and going out and coming home tired at sunrise. And in the course of these nights he professes to have finished his education in a fair amateur experience of houselessness. His principal object being to get through the night, the pursuit of it, as he says, brought him into sympathetic relations with people who have no other object every night in the year. Besides the chapter expressly devoted to the subject of Night-walks, his various stories abound in incidental glimpses of the great city on its night-side, or after dark. Mr. de Quincey delighted in night-ramblings through the streets of London before they began to empty of their wayfarers; and some of these ramblings led the Opium-eater to great distances-"for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time"-and occasionally in his attempts to steer homewards, as he phrases it, upon nautical principles, by fixing his eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and headlands he had doubled in his outward voyage, he "came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, alleys without soundings, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx's riddles of streets without obvious outlets or thoroughfares, as must baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen." But the pleasure this "nicht-wanderin' man," as the Ettrick Shepherd calls him, took in the London streets by night was apparently identical with that so heartily and almost passionately avowed by Charles Lamb. The author of Paris au gaz, already referred to, invites us to follow him in tracking the erratic life of a company of noctambulists-men who turn day into night and vice versa, sleeping till half-past four in the afternoon, and then starting for peregrinations which they prolong through the night-not, he assures us, with any design of malice prepense, of murdering or housebreaking, but merely for the pleasure of walking about in the company of cats, police-patrols, and chiffonniers. The eccentric Dr. Gourdy is especially commemorated in this capacity by M. Julien Lemer; but perhaps the most noteworthy of these noctambules is the poet Gérard de Nerval, hailed by British critics as the author of so many delightful tales, and a distinguished contributor to the Revue des Deux Mondes, who "at last was found, after a night of noctambulism, hanging at dawn from a lamp-post at a street-corner." Edgar Allan Poe professes, as a tale-teller extraordinary, to have taken to noctambulism in Paris, with one Auguste Dupin, whose freak of fancy it was to be enamoured of the night for her own sake, a bizarrerie into which his companion quietly fell, giving himself up, indeed, to all the wild whims of ce cher Auguste with a perfect abandon. "The sable divinity would not herself dwell with us always; but we could counterfeit her presence." And this they effected by a process reminding us of Butler's charge against the Duke of Bucks, of damming up the lights of nature and opening other little blind loopholes, turning day into night and night into day. For at the first dawn of morning they closed all the massive shutters of the old building they occupied, and lighted a couple of tapers, which threw out only the ghastliest and feeblest of rays. "By the aid of these we then busied our souls in dreams-reading, writing, or conversing, until warned by the clock of the advent of true darkness." Then they sallied forth into the streets, arm-in-arm, continuing the topics of the day, or roaming far and wide, generally until a very early hour; seeking amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford. Morbid as the practice may have been, at any rate it is not morbid in the same degree or kind even as Sydney Carton's night-wanderings round and about the house of Dr. Manette. "Many a night he vaguely and unhappily wandered there when wine had brought no transitory gladness to him; many a dreary daybreak revealed his solitary figure lingering there, and still lingering there when the first beams of the sun brought into strong relief removed beauties of architecture in spires of churches and lofty buildings, as perhaps the quiet time brought some sense of better things, else forgotten and unattainable, into his mind. Of late, the neglected bed in the Temple-court had known him more scantily than ever; and often when he had thrown himself upon it no longer than a few minutes, he had got up again and haunted that neighbourhood." Kate Coventry declares that she does like perambulating London streets by gas-light; of course with a gentleman to take care of her (honest John being the gentleman)-it is so much pleasanter than being stewed up in a brougham; and if it is delightful even in winter, how much more so in the hot summer nights of the season! "Your spirits rise and your nerves brace themselves as you inhale the midnight air, with all its smoky particles pure by comparison with that which has just been poisoning you in a crowded drawing-room." When the Country Parson of the Recreations became a City one, and still continued them, it was his avowed practice to think out some of his essays "in solitary half-hour walks, on quiet winter evenings, in a certain broad gas-lit street remarkable for that absence of passers-by which is characteristic of many of the streets of this beautiful city" (Edinburgh). Different indeed is the spirit of such noctambulism from that intimated by Shakespeare's Faulconbridge, when he says, "Who dares not stir by day must walk by night." And those who so walk by night, in their own despite, may be too generally referred to the disreputable category summarised by Mr. Barham in one of his Ingoldsby Legends : "In the dead of the night, though with labour opprest, Your cracksman, for instance, thinks night-time the best To break open a door, or the lid of a chest ; And the gipsy who close round your premises prowls FRANCIS JACOX. THE VOICE OF GRIEF O RUGGED, toilsome path of thorns and briers, Peopled with shadows of unreaped desires, Land of unchanging sorrow for the dead, Where noble lives by cruel hands are shed, Where Pain eternal, like the Alpine snows, Broods dark as night, and from her bosom throws Shall the sweet breath of Summer sweep the earth, And make it smile with flowers, Yet leave to man the pestilential dearth Of ever-withering powers? Behold how Sorrow, wandering through the world, Weeps passionate tears of blood, And Charity upon the stones is hurled, Crying aloud for good! The voice of grief pierces the Silent Land, Where victory is won— Is there no haven past Time's dangerous strand, No joy beyond the sun? GEORGE SMITH. BELGRAVIA MAY 1869 MY ENEMY'S DAUGHTER BY JUSTIN M'CARTHY AUTHOR OF “PAUL MASSIE,” “THE WATERDALE NEIGHBOURS," ETC. CHAPTER XIX. SWEARING ETERNAL FRIENDSHIP. BITTERLY and severely did I echo next morning the opinion of my friend the critic. What a confounded fool I had made of myself! was the first thought present to my mind. How she must have despised me! How steadily I had been sinking of late! This proof, the most grotesque and ridiculous humiliation I had ever been put to, was perhaps not the sharpest proof of a lowered nature which pricked my conscience. For I had yet a conscience and a sense of honour. I have read somewhere a story of a prince to whom a loving fairy gave a magical ring, which was to be his guide and guard through life. Whenever he did wrong, the ring was to prick his finger-sharply, in proportion to the magnitude of his fault. He erred and erred; was pricked and pricked. At last he could not stand the thing any longer; and so he angrily plucked the ring off his finger and flung it away. For a while he was perfectly happy, and could do as he liked unpricked of conscience. But of course I need not say that he went to the bad utterly— unless, perhaps, the fairy came in and somehow redeemed him in the end. Now I had not thrown away my ring, and I felt its sharp pressure very keenly even if I had not conscience and spirit enough to do right and thus avoid its censure. Two things, at all events, I must do. I must make a humble apology to Christina, and another to Mr. Levison, the critic. The latter gave me no troubling thought; I knew he would receive it like a gentleman, and, indeed, that he was not likely in any case to feel much about the matter. But to meet Madame Reichstein and talk of my shame to her was something quite different-something I dreaded. Perhaps I dreaded it none the less because I saw how altered were our VOL. VIII. U |