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Mr Kennedy, running, open-mouthed, to the aid of the fallen champion. But the unsparing Ex-Secretary drove off the ineffectual rescue, and the Ex-Reviewer, by his silence, signified submission.

A man cannot be, like a bird, at all places at once; and this want of ubiquity on our part must be our excuse for not attempting Chronicles of the High Street and the Canongate on the day of the Edinburgh Election. His Lordship's speech was -for him at least who speaks in general so admirably-a poor—an impotent one, and, as might perhaps have been expected, very peevish. Birr it had none-nor fushion. It had all the inflammatory symptoms, without any of the convulsive strength, of a brain-fever. Did we not dislike exaggeration, we might say that it reminded us of delirium tremens. The Tories, as is the use and wont of gentlemen on all occasions, listened mildly to its vapid, or, at least, airy nothings, and gave the speaker not a moment's interruption, even while prating his way through some paragraphs that might have been thought somewhat insulting to the Elective Body, and through others not free from the expression of something of the same feeling towards the party who were his opponents. Of Mr Dundas his Lordship spoke courteously as it is his nature to. do; yet in his niggard compliments there was a tinge of hauteur that was far from being impressive. But the Whigs-and the Whiglings! How they did crow! Their eyes seemed absolutely leaping out of their heads from the mere force of want of expression. During the whole speech, all their mouths stood wide openand ever and anon, as they drank and devoured the manna, those children of Israel bolted out in return small hurried hurrahs, that, though feeble in their individual capacity, formed at times a passable enough cheer-which being taken up from a batch of blockheads on the balcony, was mouthed to a blotch of black guards below, and so, like a sort of Tumbering electricity, the rational and patriotic noise pursued its path down the High Street, and died away in the distance among the general jakes. Of course, what they were hooting, and howling, and hurraing

at, is to the blockheads and blackguards then and there congregated, unknown even unto this day. Sufficient to set afloat" that windy suspiration of forced breath," was the knowledge of the mere fact that the "holy sugh" was in utterance from the lips of the Man of the People.

Though we have called the mob by their proper names of blockheads and blackguards, we are far from meaning you to believe that all Whigs and Radicals assembled there answered to that description. Nay, far from it, indeed. There were, of course, besides Edinburgh Tories, always peaceable, many hundreds of obscure people of unsuspected worth-some hundred of respectable, and half a dozen distinguished persons-among the latter, with the fine face and head of the Solicitor between, a brace of members of the late Parliament, blooming from the bed of her sudden dissolution. The dense, foul, and black mud of the mob was sprinkled

studded-with countenances of the "finer clay." A few flowers, (how poetical!) both bright and bold, were blushing among the binweeds-here and there a lily or a rose-(how more poetical still!)-among the wretched ragweeds that were scattered midst gaunt and ghastly Scotch thistles, ahungered as the hemlocks by their side, which, again, looked so shabby, that no gentlemanly dog would have condescended to honour them en passant by the uplifting of his thorough-bred leg. An English radical mob is often a fine, jolly-looking fellow. A Scotch radical mob always painful to look on, from the inhuman length of his cheek-bones, and the unearthly length of his jaws. When you hear him-and, what is more trying, see him-shout, you know not how to behave; for the sight and the sound -to say nothing of the smell-is at once so ludicrous, so loathsome, and so frightful, that you are lost between merriment, disgust, and terror, and unable to determine whether you shall laugh, puke, or faint-such is the puzzling power of that most unholy triple alliance.

Pray, will you be so considerate as to tell us how it happens, that on no occasion whatever does a large collection of people, assembled to petition for any thing, ever dream of behaving themselves in such a way

as might induce those who have in their hands the thing petitioned for, with right and power to bestow or withhold it, for a few minutes to be so silly as to believe it possible that the petitioners may, in some measure, deserve the boon? It might be unreasonable to expect a composed and demure demeanour from the petitioners, few of them probably being Quakers; but why not-on such an occasion as this, for example-should they not attempt to treat us, if not with a little common sense, at least with some small share of common decency? Of the seventeen thousand inhabitants of Edinburgh who had petitioned the Town Council to elect the Lord Advocate, as the person in their humble judgment best qualified to represent them in Parliament, a few thousands, let us suppose, of about the average merit of the whole, were present at "the place where merchants most do congregate." They surely should not have all hissed like geese, and brayed like asses at every intimation, how ever indistinctly conveyed to them, of a vote having been given in favour of Mr Dundas. That the candidate should be elected unanimously was a very unreasonable expectation in a world of sin and sorrow, or, in other words, of Whiggery and Toryism. It was "really too bad" not to allow one single vote to poor Mr Dundas, if it had been but for the look of the thing; and then they should have reflected that the finest racehorse-Priam himself, or Riddlesworth-is never seen to less advantage than when walking over the course. Besides, since they had proved that they could not only read but write-witness so many thousand signatures-they should have assumed some shew of still higher mental cultivation, had it only been to justify the Schoolmaster and the Lord Chancellor. Instead of that, why, they furnished the enemies of popular education with arguments against it, to which it became impossible to turn a deaf ear; and forced all, who, like us, are its friends, to confess, in disgust, that a tolerable knowledge of letters-yea, even of the whole twenty-four-may be found united in great masses even of the reformers, if not of the reformed, with an intolerable ignorance of the decen

cies of life, and with what would even seem to be the habitual practice of some of its worst brutalities. Such beastly bawling, to say the least of it, was neither witty nor wise; and, had we had any doubts about it before, would, we fear, have forced us to feel that such a body of self-appointed electors were fitter to run up a beer than a Reform bill-to carry down coals in silence to a cellar, than to carry by acclamation a member to Parliament. Many mobs there are, which we know must be of desperadoes "all compact;" but we were hardly prepared to find this one falling so unexceptionably under that appropriate description. That so many ruffians should have been enemies of the magistracy it is easy to understand, but puzzling even to conjecture how they should have been such friends of the Lord Advocate. Perhaps they wished to curry favour with the highest law-officer of the crown; but, if so, their lungs have lost their labour; for though his lordship did certainly address them in language not usual with such a dignitary, "imploring" and "beseeching" them as "friends" to behave after the fashion of human creatures, and that he would order away these nasty soldiers, that extreme urbanity cannot be expected in the nature of things long to survive the day of election; so that some of them may yet curse the change of his courtesy into what to them will then appear cruelty even beyond the law, when, at the instance of his Majesty's Advocate, they stand quivering at the bar, uncertain, during the dreary length of a trial, curious from its circumstantial evidence, whether their doom shall be transportation for life, or simply "to be carried to the usual place of execution, and there, between the hours of eight and nine of the morning, on Wednesday the of April, (1832,) to be hanged by the neck till you are dead, and the Lord have mercy on your soul !"-a prayer in which one criminal would one day or other have stood much in need, had he not been prevented, by our chief magistrate's strength and intrepidity, from throwing the right honourable the Lord Provost over the North Bridge. The ruffian had hold of his lordship for that especial purpose; but as

much falls out between the cup and the lip, so does much between the curb-stone and the parapet. "If I go over the ledge, you go with me," said, grimly, the unterrified Tartar whom the battled butcher had caught; and the cowardly miscreant, extricating himself from the powerful grasp of a brave man, replunged, with halfthrottled execrations, into the dense mob of electors yelling for blood.

The announcement of the election of Mr Dundas had roused the rabble to madness, and they had striven to storm the Hall, that they might murder him and his supporters. If that were not their intention in their furious onset against its doors, will any one of themselves, or of Mr Jeffrey's other friends, please to inform us what they were intending, when hundreds of the ragged and raging regiment were beaten back from the assault by a score of batons? Were they wishing simply to get a sight of Mr Jeffrey, whose person was as yet known but to such of them as had ever figured "as prisoners at the bar," panels," whom his ingenu ity and eloquence might have been instrumental in helping to escape the hulks or the gallows?

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Hang-dog-looking blackguards most -but not all of them-were; the only persons among them, that seemed at all respectable-some hundred or so of shabby-genteel young Whigs excepted, who, we believe, had no harm in them, in either will or power, and had got hustled in among the gang-being manifestly adorned for the occasion by those wretches who come up to the unsuspecting passerby, and hesitatingly mutter something offensive about old clothes. These in the brilliancy of their appointments were the elite of the corps-but the shirtless led the van in the cast-off pantaloons and boots of valets and butlers, that they might not bring disgrace on the great cause by too glaring a want of stockings.

The high-minded Whigs will thank us now for these distinctive traits of our description. Yet most culpable were they in priding themselves, before the day of election, on having with them the mob as well as the people. They never could allude surely to the people, in their forewarnings to the Town Council of

violence and bloodshed-for the perpetration of such deeds, from such motives, has always, in the opinion of the high-minded Edinburgh Whigs, been held to be alien from the charac ter of our middle classes. How bitterly-justly or not we are not now saying-they abused the late Lord Advocate Rae, but for saying some thing to that effect in the House of Commons! From the rabble alone, therefore, must it have been that they feared danger to the persons and pro perties of the citizens from the elec tion of Mr Dundas. Indeed,had it been from that class which includes those who, by the new bill, would as L.10 a-year householders become themselves electors, that they apprehended the commission of robbery and murder, they might have communicated their fears to the Council as potent but not as very heroic argu ments in favour of a friend of that measure. They must have meant then the rabble-the whole rabble

and nothing but the rabble; and even then their argument was as insulting as it was foolish; for it is the duty of good citizens to enlighten the heads and to strengthen the hands of their civic rulers, against all criminal intentions and acts of the rabble-and, above all, is it their duty to do so, in those cases where the rabble in their ignorance have been exasperated by the conduct of those very good citizens themselves→→ conduct which in itself they seem to think needs no justification-by their speeches, their placards, their newspapers, their agents, and their agencies, against another part of the citizens not so good, we shall suppose, and not so wise by far, but still vested with undisputed authority, and with certain powers and privileges as yet constitutional, and which they were about, as they ought, constitutionally to exercise. Let us hope that these gentlemen did not know, previously to the hour of their election, what a murderous mob was on their side. And yet, without including all the vicious vagabonds in Edinburgh, how could the petition for Reform have borne thirty thousand signatures? All the male adults-including those in their dotage-do not amount to that number-and how many thousands are there who, sooner than have signed that petition,

would have put their hands into the fire? Of the seventeen thousand subscribers, again, in support of the Lord Advocate's claims, some thou sands must have formed sad, sorry, and scoundrel sets. Such admirers of honour, virtue, and chastity, as hailed Caroline for their Diana, and, with Denman, declared that Queen of the Liberals pure as the unsunned snow in the mountain hollow.

Suppose a bee-hive upset-or rather for we must not calumniate the most peaceable and industrious of all the working orders-a wasp's -or hornet's nest dug up from the dust, or blown to rags on a tree. There's a ferment! Into a motley globe of insect-life explodes, as from a small centre, the thunder-showerswarm of stings. Each yellow wretch seems a dragon, and each dragon a devil. What a raging round-robin torments the sultry air! We defy you to fix on the ringleader, for they are all ringleaders. Yet, strange to say, it is all a hum. Whig naturalists, we know, have said, that in this state of objectless excitement, three thousand wasps (a populous nest) are less to be dreaded than one intruder, who, intent on jam or jelly on the breakfast-table, comes, in his ena mourment, with ferocious insolence in at the window, which has been left open for the sweet entrance of the breath of incense-breathing morn, preluding its approach by a rustle in the lattice-loving tree, as if the house were his own, and in a sudden change of passion, foul ravisher! curls himself up in an agony of hatelike love on Lavinia's lip-no more "a rose without a thorn"-rankest poison interfused there, alas! with the medicinal balm one drop of which might turn bale into bliss, death into life, and earth into heaven. We have also heard the same Whig naturalist say, that the aforesaid thunder-showerswarm of wasps is not so dangerous as one single enormous ring'd robber, rushing right, on hissing wings, into a butcher's shop, and then with fierce feet traversing a round of beef, till suddenly you see him settle down on a tid-bit, in fiercest instinct piercing the bloody prey with his proboscis, clinging to the red ooze as if he would incorporate himself with that sole relic of an incomparable cow from Colonsay, and become, on

the spot, part and parcel of the yet uncut steak, already almost broiling in the sun, so hot his " perpendicular height" in the meridian hour of the dog-days. Disturb him then, and the scientific warn you that you are a dead man. Fell then is the poison in his punctum labeis. Your little finger, we shall suppose, is in possession of the "stang." Look at it now, and but for its manual position you would swear 'twas Tom Thumb. The whole hand-erewhile so dexterous in its muscularity-is now swollen into a blue-puff about as big as a pigeon. The inflammation extends rapidly to elbow-shoulderneck-back of the head-headspine-rump; and 'tis all over with you ere vespers. Whereas, contrary to all rational but ignorant expectation, the thunder-shower-swarm of wasps keeps humming so harmlessly over your head, that by and by you suspect them to be absolute sirens in disguise the masquerade becomes most musical-without being, like Philomela's strain, most melancholy; and falling asleep under the very hornets' tree, through "dream and vision do you sink" away among the Silent People in Fairy-Land; till, without a single sting on your sun-bronzed face or fingers, with a start you awake in the midst of your nuptials with the fairy queen, back into this noisy world, a perfect bachelor, at the tingle-tingle-ting of the dinner-bell, or the sound, mayhap, of the great gong, that in India used sublimely to give forth the dull monotony of its dismal thunder through clouds of Mahratta-Horse hanging or rolling along the open bases of the wooded mountains-and how large the leaf of those gorgeous Oriental trees!

Now we believe our Whig naturalist was pretty much in the right of it in these his anecdotical notices of wasps and hornets; but he fell pretty much into the wrong of it, when he began, from certain facts in the natural history of those winged insects, to utter certain falsehoods as facts in the political history of these unwinged ones, called Whigs and Radicals-to wit, that a mob of them will not hurt a hair of your head, if you but let them alonewhereas, ten to one that a single blackguard, if you but look at him,

will strike you; till we add, of course by a legitimate conclusion from the premises-especially the major proposition, which you take care to keep in your own hand-you knock down the ruffian.

The absurdity of this sort of analogical reasoning from wasps to Whigs, became particularly transparent in the old and new town of Edinburgh on this disgraceful day. No single ruffian would have dared to look at you even in the darkest close; for he knew not but that you might be a true man, and feared the Tory-fist. But compress some thousand cowards into a close and compact mob-mass; and though in the mud there be but the "false seeming" of courage, yet there is there a formidable reality of brute-force, which may sweep the streets as a spate the gutters. But, oh! how unlike the mighty measured march of that fine Highland regimentthose noble young fellows, officers and men alike, the 79th-"moving along with military glee" to the wild mountain music of their streamer'd bagpipes-and the mean and miscellaneous movement of a Lowland rabble, tumultuously rushing, the devil only knows where or wherefore, to the filthy flats and sharps of their windpipes too, their own greasy gullets, which emit yells even more vulgar than they are ferocious!

We have seen many mobs in our time, and without vanity may say that we have a scientific acquaintance with their most remarkable phenomena. Meal-mobs, even, have we assisted at, (you are a French scholar, and know our harmless meaning,) that were at once beautiful and sublime. How picturesque the many-coloured gathering of the clans into a mottled multitude, harmoniously proportioned even in its irregular patches of men, women, and children, hatted, broad-bonneted, mutched, capped, and bareheaded, with grey and golden tresses all mingling in the wind, and here and there a bald sconce black in a mass of shade, or brighter in a flood of light, that would have en. raptured Rembrandt! On the peaceful sacks, high-heaped, and bulging over the waggon-wheels, how fierce the onslaught! Feeble elders find now that their backs can yet bear many firlots-hobbletihoys make no

VOL. XXIX. NO. CLXXXI.

thing of the weight of two bolls-and milliners go to work like millers. The carts have all got the white-vomit. And now, through the meal and flour that lightens-not darkens the air-how fly the more than peripatetic potatoes! You might fondly dream at small expense of poesy, that the mealies and waxies, as they revolve through the many-circled air in fantastic gyrations, have been for the nonce endowed with wings like butterflies or birds; till ever and anon you are awakened from the dear delusion by a bash on the face from a morning call from an unceremonious visitor without either down or plumage. All over the empty sack-bestrewn street or square of market-town on market-day, through an atmosphere afloat with the almost invisible spiritual essence of wheat, oats, and barley, shines out the merry-the wicked sun, as fond, undisguisedly, of a row by day, as the moon, hypocritically, by night. Beneath that soft, aerial, yet dusty and almost husky haze, rolls and raves a sea of men, women, and children, as when a neap-tide comes flowing beachward in a pitchy swell illumined with a crest of breakers. Shut your eyes, and the dashing din reminds you of sea and shipwreck. But 'tis an inland town-not a sailor there-though tailors in tens and twenties-a perilous people, and fractious exceedingly-shepherds from the hills-farmers from the carsehorse-cowpers from the plains-cattle-dealers from the isles-horsemen travellers in the hard, and eke in the soft line-(videlicet nails and sugar)-bagmen in gigs from faraway towns and cities-forty miles off at the shortest computation-pedlars on their annual excursion among their rural customers-learned clerks on a visit to their native place from the confinement of a coach-officeand the stubborn versus the obstinate pig-drivers, sulky from the suburbs, personified curses with uplifted cudgels all a-swear for ever at their own peculium of the swinish multitude. Creed and caste are forgotten; all are instinct with one spirit.

The barber is bound by sympathy to the smith-in spite of both the formal and essential difference of their tongs; and you see the tailor flourishing his tiny scissors along

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