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place (which his family had altogether abandoned), a sturdy cripple ; and after disturbing the quiet of the town hospital for a few weeks, when confined with a renewed sore in his broken limb, he was transferred to the workhouse, to live at the expense of his old prosecutor, the parish.

Next to Lundface, the glazier, on a backed bench placed in front of the fire, sate a mild-looking, old-womanish man, with a red nose, the relic of frequent fuddlings with porter. He was the tailor of the establishment; a respectable, but weak, improvident man, whose life had been a series of failures. His industry, though of a slow and botching order, procured him the privilege of a separate room, for his bed and work-board. Next him sat a silent boy in a pinafore, about ten years of age, his head bigger than any in the room, and wrapped in dirty rags. His features were white and swollen, and distorted with pain. Under those rags, and under his clothes, were sights more horrible than the heel of Philoctetes. He had the king's evil. The master had found the poor boy in the house at his entrance upon office, five years ago, and that was all that was known about him. He was allowed to stay with the tailor, who tended him with maternal care; and the boy followed his only friend from bed to board, and from board to bed, like a sick dog. The doctor saw the tailor take his rags off once a week, and let the boy hear him say that he would probably get worse till he died.

The next man was a worn-out coachman, who had afterwards been a watchman as long as he could keep awake, and then he came to the parish near him was a sailor; and beyond, a group-no longer motley, but all in regulation dingies-of decrepid labourers, mechanics, servants, beggars, ballad-mongers, reclaimed rascals (too old to relapse), and other the children of poverty and ignorance. Born in different stations, tried in different adversities, they had all come to the same dreary, hopeless lot, the dregs of existence; to pursue the same "noiseless tenour of their way"-noise being against the regulations. One man, however, was "snatching a fearful joy," smoking up the chimney and behind his hat, to evade the nose and eye of the expected master. No one noticed Banks as he entered; and where he sate himself down behind the circle, there he stayed till his "potato hash," as the dietary called it, was set before him. There he ate; in that house he slept; and in that house, if the parish of Gullumbury succeed, he will die. He is a pauper par excellence; a picked man of his class: he never knew any other condition; he had no knowledge, no means, no wish to avoid his fate. Born in a workhouse, he knew no other home. He never knew a parent; he had known no love; he was scarcely conscious that he had children-for

that was a matter all between his wife and the matron. He was first swaddled in the regulation baby-linen; he was brought up by hand, on regulation gruel and anti-regulation gin, administered by a superannuated, drunken, smoking old nurse; he had received a regulation education, which he had forgotten; he married, for regulation morality's sake; he ate regulation food, and had, by habit, acquired a dietary appetite and a dietary stomach; he slept in regulation sheets; he went to chapel in his turn, for regulation piety; he left his wife to be provided for by the regulations; he helped to make the regulation coffins, in one of which he was to be carried from the deadhouse, at a trot, to the regulation grave, to have a brief regulation service muttered over his unlamented corpse. He was an involuntary stoic; a man without a motive. His affairs-his affairs! what affairs had he?-himself, we should say-himself he left to be disposed of by the parish authorities; he had no voice in the matter. His vicissitudes were, to get some work, when the workhouse-master told him he was lucky, and turned him out of the house, which he did not like; to be out of work, when the master told him he was unlucky, not to say vicious, but he was no longer hurried and teased; to be sent from one parish to another, which he did not care for ; and to appear before the score of comfortable gentlemen who had taken the place of the as comfortable overseers at the board. These were the remote, Olympian arbiters of his destiny, God's vicegerents upon earth-or, perhaps, even his mythology; seldom seen, never understood, always powerful. They could grant, if they would hear, every prayer a pauper could put. If the pauper had an imagination, the board was the thing to move it visions of power, of magnificence, of luxury, of authority, of high and privileged peccadilloes, crowned the heads of its Jupiter, the chairman, too vast for the pauper's wildest flights. He sought not to solve the mystery of the relation between himself and the bright vision of each succeeding Monday, to which he was sometimes admitted. He saw that some bullied the rulers of pauper fate, as the heroes of old used to bully the celestials; but, for his part, he never troubled himself with metaphysical inquiries into the dispensations of the hierarchy: he suspected that only that amphibious, crude, unsettled class, out-door paupers, ever indulged in such audacity. Or, if ever in-door paupers did so, it was only such as had not been matured, as he had been, by long submission to the fiat of a board.

His life was undisturbed by ambitions and inquietudes so extravagant he was christened, for the regulations required it; married, for the regulations required it; and will be buried when the regulations require it. His annals go no further.

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Why, sir, in such a government as ours, no man is appointed to office because he is the fittest for it.

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THE CABINET MINISTER.

BY A TORY-WHIG-RADICAL.

THE Cabinet Minister is the paragon of animals. He wants no attribute of a divinity but wings, and the power of keeping himself out of Westminster Abbey for ever. His is the quintessence of dust while alive. His mind is the exquisite essence compounded " from the finest and best of all other men's powers." All his colleagues are unparelleled prodigies, but he was unprecedentedly prodigious in his cradle. His family is a family of giants, and he is the head of it. He is to be taken for all in all, and we are never to see his like again. He is not only the greatest man of his age, but he is a far greater man than any of the great who have either gone before him or are contemporaneous with him in the cabinet. Thousands of honest people are ready, every morning of their lives, to go and make affidavit of the fact before the Lord Mayor. He is nominally the servant of the sovereign, but in reality the master of the sovereign's subjects. Of all created things born with heads, he has the most indisputable claim to admission into this collection of crania. the "Head of the People."

He is

The Cabinet Minister is descended (not in a direct line, for all his ways are crooked) from the smallest, meanest, vilest, and most pitiful of all the creeping things that went up with Noah into the ark. Not only has he sprung from the most wretched of the race of reptiles, but he is a disgrace to his family besides. A flea of character would blush to be his bedfellow. The common rogue and vagabond would lose caste, in the eyes of Europe, if he were to change places with him, and quit the House of Correction for the House of Commons. He wants no attribute of the diabolical being, except the cloven foot and a tail—the latter, indeed, he is sometimes said to have. His nature is an essence compounded from all that is most noisome and noxious in other natures. His colleagues and connexions are first-rate rascals in their way, but he towers far above them in baseness and infamy. All that they do worst, he does in a worse way. Other men 66 do wrong by design;" but it is his peculiar privilege, by a felicity of wickedness that has no parallel

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