Loe raamatut: «The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 12, No. 337, October 25, 1828», lehekülg 2

THE SKETCH BOOK

AN HOUR TOO MANY

Hail, land of the kangaroo!—paradise of the bushranger!—purgatory of England!—happy scene, where the sheep-stealer is metamorphosed into the shepherd; the highwayman is the guardian of the road; the dandy is delicate no more, and earns his daily bread; and the Court of Chancery is unknown—hail to thee, soil of larceny and love! of pickpockets and principle! of every fraud under heaven, and primeval virtue! daughter of jails, and mother of empires!—hail to thee, New South Wales! In all my years—and I am now no boy—and in all my travels—and I am now at the antipodes—I have never heard any maxim so often as, that time is short; yet no maxim that ever dropt from human lips is further from the truth. I appeal to the experience of mankind—to the three hundred heirs of the British peerage, whom their gouty fathers keep out of their honours and estates—to the six hundred and sixty-eight candidates for seats in parliament, which they must wait for till the present sitters die; or turn rebellious to their noble patrons, or their borough patrons, or their Jew patrons; or plunge into joint-stock ruin, and expatriate themselves, for the astonishment of all other countries, and the benefit of their own;—to the six thousand five hundred heroes of the half-pay, longing for tardy war;—to the hundred thousand promissory excisemen lying on the soul of the chancellor of the ex-chequer, and pining for the mortality of every gauger from the Lizard to the Orkneys;—and, to club the whole discomfort into one, to the entire race of the fine and superfine, who breathe the vital air, from five thousand a year to twenty times the rental, the unhappy population of the realms of indolence included in Bond Street, St. James's, and the squares.

For my own part, in all my experience of European deficiencies, I have never found any deficiency of time. Money went like the wind; champagne grew scanty; the trust of tailors ran down to the dregs; the smiles of my fair flirts grew rare as diamonds—every thing became as dry, dull, and stagnant as the Serpentine in summer; but time never failed me. I had a perpetual abundance of a commodity which the philosophers told me was beyond price. I had not merely enough for myself, but enough to give to others; until I discovered the fact, that it was as little a favourite with others as myself, and that, whatever the plausible might say, there was nothing on earth for which they would not be more obliged to me than a donation of my superfluous time. But now let me give a sketch of my story. A single fact is worth a hundred reflections. The first consciousness that I remember, was that of having a superabundance of time; and my first ingenuity was demanded for getting rid of the encumbrance. I had always an hour that perplexed my skill to know what to do with this treasure. A schoolboy turn for long excursions in any direction but that of my pedagogue, indicative of a future general officer; a naturalist-taste for bird-nesting, which, in maturer years, would have made me one of the wonders of the Linnaean Society; a passion for investigating the inside of every thing, from a Catherine-wheel to a China-closet, which would yet have entitled me to the honours of an F.R.S.; and an original vigour in the plunder of orchards, which undoubtedly might have laid the foundation of a first lord of the treasury; were nature's helps to get rid of this oppressive bounty. But though I fought the enemy with perpetual vigour and perpetual variety, he was not to be put to flight by a stripling; and I went to the university as far from being a conqueror as ever. At Oxford I found the superabundance of this great gift acknowledged with an openness worthy of English candour, and combated with the dexterity of an experience five hundred years old. Port-drinking, flirtation, lounging, the invention of new ties to cravats, and new tricks on proctors; billiards, boxing, and barmaids; seventeen ways of mulling sherry, and as many dozen ways of raising "the supplies," were adopted with an adroitness that must have baffled all but the invincible. Yet Time was master at last; and he always indulged me with a liberality that would have driven a less resolute spirit to the bottom of the Isis.

At length I gave way; left the university with my blessing and my debts; and rushed up to London, as the grand place d'armes, the central spot from which the enemy was excluded by the united strength, wit, and wisdom of a million and a half of men. I might as well have staid bird-nesting in Berkshire. I found the happiest contrivances against the universal invader fail. Pigeon-matches; public dinners; coffee-houses; bluestocking reunions; private morning quadrille practice, with public evening exhibitions of their fruits; dilettanti breakfasts, with a bronze Hercules standing among the bread and butter, or a reposing cast of Venus, fresh from Pompeii, as black and nude as a negress disporting on the banks of the Senegal, but dear and delicate to the eyes of taste; Sunday mornings at Tattersal's, jockeying till the churches let out their population, and the time for visits was come; and Sunday evening routs at the duchess's, with a cotillon by the vraies danseuses of the opera, followed by a concert, a round game, and a select supper for the initiated;—the whole failed. I had always an hour too much—sixty mortal minutes, and every one of them an hour in itself, that I could never squeeze down.

 
"Ye gods, annihilate both space and time,
And make two lovers happy,"
 

may have been called a not over-modest request; but I can vouch for at least one half of it being the daily prayer of some thousands of the best-dressed people that the sun ever summoned to a day of twenty-four hours long. On feeling the symptoms of this horary visitation, I regularly rushed into the streets, on the principle that some alleviation of misery is always to be found in fellow-suffering. This maxim I invariably found false, like every other piece of the boasted wisdom of mankind. I found the suffering infinitely increased by the association with my fellow-fashionables. A man might as well have fled from his chamber to enjoy comfort in the wards of an hospital. In one of my marches up and down the pavé of St. James's Street, that treadmill of gentlemen convicted in the penalty of having nothing to do, I lounged into the little hotel of the Guards, that stands beside the great hotel of the gamblers, like a babe under its mamma's wing—the likeness admirable, though the scale diminutive. That "hour too many," cost me three games of billiards, my bachelor's house, and one thousand pounds. This price of sixty minutes startled me a little; and, for a week, I meditated with some seriousness on the superior gaiety of a life spent in paving the streets, driving a wagon, or answering the knocker of a door. But the "hour" again overflowed me. I was walking it off in Regent Street, when an old fellow-victim met me, and prescribed a trot to Newmarket. The prescription was taken, and the hour was certainly got rid of. But the remedy was costly; for my betting-book left me minus ten thousand pounds. I returned to town like a patient from a watering-place; relieved of every thing but the disease that took me there. My last shilling remained among the noble blacklegs; but nothing could rob me of a fragment of my superfluous time, and I brought even a tenfold allowance of it back. But every disease has a crisis; and when a lounge through the streets became at once useless and inconvenient—when the novelty of being cut by all my noble friends, and of being seduously followed by that generation who, unlike the fickle world, reserve their tipstaff attentions for the day of adversity, had lost its zest, and I was thinking whether time was to be better fought off by a plunge to the bottom of the Thames, or by the muzzle of one of Manton's hair-triggers—I was saved by a plunge into the King's Bench. There life was new, friendship was undisguised, my coat was not an object of scorn, my exploits were fashion, my duns were inadmissible, and my very captors were turned into my humble servants. There, too, my nature, always social, had its full indulgence; for there I found, rather to my surprise, nine-tenths of my most accomplished acquaintance. But the enemy still made his way; and I had learned to yawn, in spite of billiards and ball-playing, when the Act let me loose into the great world again. Good-luck, too, had prepared a surprise for my debut. I had scarcely exhibited myself in the streets, when I discovered that every man of my set was grown utterly blind whenever I happened to walk on the same side of the way, and that I might as well have been buried a century. I was absurd enough to be indignant; for nothing can be more childish than any delicacy when a man cannot bet on the rubber. But one morning a knock came to my attic-door which startled me by its professional vigour. An attorney entered. I had now nothing to fear, for the man whom no one will trust cannot well be in debt; and for once I faced an attorney without a palpitation. His intelligence was flattering. An old uncle of mine, who had worn out all that was human about him in amassing fifty thousand pounds, and finally died of starving himself, had expired with the pen in his hand, in the very act of leaving his thousands to pay the national debt. But fate, propitious to me, had dried up his ink-bottle; the expense of replenishing it would have broken his heart of itself; and the attorney's announcement to me was, that the will, after blinding the solicitor to the treasury and three of his clerks, was pronounced to be altogether illegible.

The fact that I was the nearest of kin got into the newspapers; and in my first drive down St. James's, I had the pleasure of discovering that I had cured a vast number of my friends of their calamitous defect of vision. But if the "post equitem sedet atra cura" was the maxim in the days of Augustus, the man who drives the slower cabriolet in the days of George the Fourth, cannot expect to escape. The "hour too many" overtook me in the first week. On one memorable evening I saw it coming, just as I turned the corner of Piccadilly; fair flight was hopeless, and I took refuge in that snug asylum on the right hand of St. James's Street, which has since expanded into a palace. I stoutly battled the foe, for I "took no note of time" during the next day and night; and when at last I walked forth into the air, I found that I had relieved myself of the burden of three-fourths of my reversion. A weak mind on such an occasion would have cursed the cards, and talked of taking care of the fragment of his property; but mine was of the higher order, and I determined on revenge. I had my revenge, and saw my winners ruined. They had their consolation, and at the close of a six months' campaign saw me walk into the streets a beggar. I grew desperate, and was voted dangerous. I realized the charge by fastening on a noble lord who had been one of the most adroit in pigeoning me. His life was "too valuable to his country," or himself, to allow him to meet a fellow whose life was of no use to any living thing; and through patriotism and the fear of being shot, he kept out of my way. I raged, threatened to post his lordship, and was in the very act of writing out the form of the placard declaring the noble heir of the noble house of – a cheat and a scoundrel, when by the twopenny-post I received a notice from the Horse Guards that I was on that day to appear in the Gazette as an ensign in his majesty's – regiment, then serving in the Peninsula, with orders to join without delay. This was enough from his lordship, and was certainly better for me than running the chance of damages in the King's Bench, for provoking his majesty's subjects to a breach of the peace.

I was gazetted, tried on my uniform before the mirror, entirely approved of my appearance, and wrote my last letter to my last flirt. The Portsmouth mail was to start at eight. I had an hour to spare, and sallied into the street. I met an honest-faced old acquaintance as much at a loss as myself to slay the hour. We were driven by a shower into shelter. The rattle of dice was heard within a green-baize-covered door. We could not stay for ever shivering on the outside. Fortune favoured me; in half an hour I was master of a thousand pounds; it would have been obvious folly and ingratitude to check the torrent of success for the paltry prospects of an ensigncy. I played on, and won on. The clock struck eight. I will own that I trembled as the first sound caught my ear. But whether nervous or not, from that instant the torrent was checked. The loss and gain became alternate. Wine was brought in; I played in furious scorn of consequences. I saw the board covered with gold. I swept it into my stake; I soon saw my stake reduced to nothing. My eyes were dazzled, my hand shook, my brain was on fire, I sang, danced, roared with exultation or despair. How the night closed, I know not; but I found myself at last in a narrow room, surrounded with squalidness, its only light from a high-barred window, and its only furniture the wooden tressel on which I lay, fierce, weary, and feverish, as if I lay on the rack. From this couch of the desperate, I was carried into the presence of a magistrate, to hear that in the mélée of the night before, I had in my rage charged my honest-faced acquaintance with palpable cheating; and having made good my charge by shewing the loaded dice in his hand, had knocked him down with a violence that made his recovery more than doubtful. He had seen my name in the Gazette, and had watched me for the express purpose of final plunder. The wretch died. I was brought to trial, found guilty of manslaughter, and sentenced to seven years' expatriation. Fortunate sentence! On my arrival in New South Wales, as I was found a perfect gentleman, and fit for nothing, there was no resource but to make me try the labour of my hands. Fortunate labour! From six at morning till six at night, I had the spade or the plough in my hands. I dragged carts, I delved rocks, I hewed trees; I had not a moment to spare. The appetite that once grew languid over venison, now felt the exquisite delight of junk beef. The thirst that scorned champagne was now enraptured with spring water. The sleep that had left me many a night tossing within-side the curtains of a hundred-and-fifty-guinea Parisian bed, now came on the roughest piece of turf, and made the planks of my cabin softer than down. I can now run as fast as one of my Newmarket stud, pull down a buffalo, and catch a kangaroo by the tail in fair field. Health, vigour, appetite, and activity, are my superabundance now. I have every thing but time. My banishment expires to-morrow; but I shall never recross the sea. This is my country. Since I set my foot upon its shore I have never had a moment to yawn. In this land of real and substantial life, the spectre that haunted my joyless days dares not be seen—the "hour too many" is no more.