The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 by Various

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"We accordingly find him shortly after making his _debut_, as it is
called, upon the Norwich boards, in the season of that year, being then
in the twenty-second year of his age. Having a natural bent to tragedy,
he chose the part of Pyrrhus in the 'Distressed Mother,' to Sally
Parker's Hermione. We find him afterwards as Barnwell, Altamont,
Chamont, etc.; but, as if Nature had destined him to the sock, an
unavoidable infirmity absolutely discapacitated him for tragedy. His
person, at this latter period of which I have been speaking, was
graceful, and even commanding; his countenance set to gravity; he had
the power of arresting the attention of an audience at first sight
almost beyond any other tragic actor. But he could not hold it. To
understand this obstacle, we must go back a few years to those appalling
reveries at Charnwood. Those illusions, which had vanished before the
dissipation of a less recluse life and more free society, now in his
solitary tragic studies, and amid the intense calls upon feeling
incident to tragic acting, came back upon him with tenfold vividness. In
the midst of some most pathetic passage, the parting of Jaffier with his
dying friend, for instance, he would suddenly be surprised with a fit of
violent horse-laughter. While the spectators were all sobbing before
him with emotion, suddenly one of those grotesque faces would peep out
upon him, and he could not resist the impulse. A timely excuse once or
twice served his purpose; but no audiences could be expected to bear
repeatedly this violation of the continuity of feeling. He describes
them (the illusions) as so many demons haunting him, and paralyzing
every effect. Even now, I am told, he cannot recite the famous soliloquy
in 'Hamlet,' even in private, without immoderate bursts of laughter.
However, what he had not force of reason sufficient to overcome he had
good sense enough to turn into emolument, and determined to make a
commodity of his distemper. He prudently exchanged the buskin for the
sock, and the illusions instantly ceased; or, if they occurred for a
short season, by their very cooperation added a zest to his comic
vein,--some of his most catching faces being (as he expresses it) little
more than transcripts and copies of those extraordinary phantasmata.

"We have now drawn out our hero's existence to the period when he was
about to meet for the first time the sympathies of a London audience.
The particulars of his success since have been too much before our eyes
to render a circumstantial detail of them expedient. I shall only
mention, that Mr. Willoughby, his resentments having had time to
subside, is at present one of the fastest friends of his old renegado
factor; and that Mr. Listen's hopes of Miss Parker vanishing along with
his unsuccessful suit to Melpomene, in the autumn of 1811 he married his
present lady, by whom he has been blest with one son, Philip, and two
daughters, Ann and Angustina."

* * * * *

"Ask anybody you meet," writes Lamb to Miss Wordsworth, then visiting
some friends in Cambridge, "who is the biggest woman in Cambridge, and
I'll hold a wager they'll say Mrs. ----. She broke down two benches in
Trinity Gardens,--one on the confines of St. John's, which occasioned a
litigation between the societies as to repairing it. In warm weather she
retires into an ice-cellar, (literally,) and dates from a hot Thursday
some twenty years back. She sits in a room with opposite doors and
windows, to let in a thorough draft, which gives her slenderer friends
toothaches. She is to be seen in the market every morning at ten,
cheapening fowls, which I observe the Cambridge poulterers are not
sufficiently careful to stump."

On the person thus briefly sketched Elia wrote an article for the
"London Magazine." As it is not to be found in the standard editions of
its author's works, we herewith present it to our readers. They will
find it to be a clever specimen of Lamb's peculiar and delightful humor.
In truth, it is one of the very best things he ever conjured up. We
observe he has changed the locality of the stout woman, and places her
in Oxford, instead of Cambridge.

* * * * *

"THE GENTLE GIANTESS.

"The widow Blacket, of Oxford, is the largest female I ever had the
pleasure of beholding. There may be her parallel upon the earth, but
surely I never saw it. I take her to be lineally descended from the
maid's aunt of Brainford, who caused Master Ford such uneasiness. She
hath Atlantean shoulders; and as she stoopeth in her gait,--with as few
offences to answer for in her own particular as any of Eve's
daughters,--her back seems broad enough to bear the blame of all the
peccadilloes that have been committed since Adam. She girdeth her
waist--or what she is pleased to esteem as such--nearly up to her
shoulders, from beneath which that huge dorsal expanse, in mountainous
declivity, emergeth. Respect for her alone preventeth the idle boys, who
follow her about in shoals, whenever she cometh abroad, from getting up
and riding. But her presence infallibly commands a reverence. She is,
indeed, as the Americans would express it, something awful. Her person
is a burden to herself, no less than to the ground which bears her.

"To her mighty bone she hath a pinguitude withal which makes the depth
of winter to her the most desirable season. Her distress in the warmer
solstice is pitiable. During the months of July and August she usually
renteth a cool cellar, where ices are kept, whereinto she descendeth
when Sirius rageth. She dates from a hot Thursday, some twenty-five
years ago. Her apartment in summer is pervious to the four winds. Two
doors in north and south direction, and two windows fronting the rising
and the setting sun, never closed, from every cardinal point catch the
contributory breezes. She loves to enjoy what she calls a quadruple
draught. That must be a shrewd zephyr that can escape her. I owe a
painful face-ache, which oppresses me at this moment, to a cold caught,
sitting by her, one day in last July, at this receipt of coolness. Her
fan in ordinary resembleth a banner spread, which she keepeth
continually on the alert to detect the least breeze.

"She possesseth an active and gadding mind, totally incommensurate with
her person. No one delighteth more than herself in country exercises and
pastimes. I have passed many an agreeable holiday with her in her
favorite park at Woodstock. She performs her part in these delightful
ambulatory excursions by the aid of a portable garden-chair. She setteth
out with you at a fair foot-gallop, which she keepeth up till you are
both well breathed, and then she reposeth for a few seconds. Then she is
up again for a hundred paces or so, and again resteth,--her movement, on
these sprightly occasions, being something between walking and flying.
Her great weight seemeth to propel her forward, ostrich-fashion. In this
kind of relieved marching I have traversed with her many scores of acres
on those well-wooded and well-watered domains.

"Her delight at Oxford is in the public walks and gardens, where, when
the weather is not too oppressive, she passeth much of her valuable
time. There is a bench at Maudlin, or rather, situated between the
frontiers of that and ----'s College,--some litigation, latterly, about
repairs, has vested the property of it finally in ----'s,--where at the
hour of noon she is ordinarily to be found sitting,--so she calls it by
courtesy,--but, in fact, pressing and breaking of it down with her
enormous settlement; as both those Foundations, who, however, are
good-natured enough to wink at it, have found, I believe, to their cost.
Here she taketh the fresh air, principally at vacation times, when the
walks are freest from interruption of the younger fry of students. Here
she passeth her idle hours, not idly, but generally accompanied with a
book,--blest, if she can but intercept some resident Fellow, (as usually
there are some of that brood left behind at these periods,) or stray
Master of Arts, (to most of whom she is better known than their
dinner-bell,) with whom she may confer upon any curious topic of
literature. I have seen these shy gownsmen, who truly set but a very
slight value upon female conversation, cast a hawk's eye upon her from
the length of Maudlin Grove, and warily glide off into another
walk,--true monks as they are, and ungently neglecting the delicacies of
her polished converse, for their own perverse and uncommunicating
solitariness!

"Within doors her principal diversion is music, vocal and instrumental,
in both which she is no mean professor. Her voice is wonderfully fine;
but, till I got used to it, I confess it staggered me. It is for all the
world like that of a piping bulfinch, while from her size and stature
you would expect notes to drown the deep organ. The shake, which most
fine singers reserve for the close or cadence, by some unaccountable
flexibility, or tremulousness of pipe, she carrieth quite through the
composition; so that her time, to a common air or ballad, keeps double
motion, like the earth,--running the primary circuit of the tune, and
still revolving upon its own axis. The effect, as I said before, when
you are used to it, is as agreeable as it is altogether new and
surprising.

"The spacious apartment of her outward frame lodgeth a soul in all
respects disproportionate. Of more than mortal make, she evinceth withal
a trembling sensibility, a yielding infirmity of purpose, a quick
susceptibility to reproach, and all the train of diffident and blushing
virtues, which for their habitation usually seek out a feeble frame, an
attenuated and meagre constitution. With more than man's bulk, her
humors and occupations are eminently feminine. She sighs,--being six
foot high. She languisheth,--being two feet wide. She worketh slender
sprigs upon the delicate muslin,--her fingers being capable of moulding
a Colossus. She sippeth her wine out of her glass daintily,--her
capacity being that of a tun of Heidelberg. She goeth mincingly with
those feet of hers,--whose solidity need not fear the black ox's
pressure.

"Softest and largest of thy sex, adieu! By what parting attribute may I
salute thee?--last and best of the Titanesses!--Ogress, fed with milk
instead of blood!--not least, or least handsome, among Oxford's stately
structures!--Oxford, who, in its deadest time of vacation, can never
properly be said to be empty, having thee to fill it!"

* * * * *

MY PALACE.

Wound round and round within his mystic veil
The poet hid a noble truth;
The Soul's Art-Palace then he named the tale
Of those far days in youth.

I sought that palace on its haughty height,
And came to know its starry joys,
Its sudden blackness, and the withering blight
Of all its mortal toys.

At length the soul took lesson from her past,
And found a vale wherein to dwell,
With no Arcadian visions overcast
Or history to tell.

My fellows tended wandering flocks and herds,
Or tilled and nursed their scanty corn;
Little they heeded life that grew to words,
Yet gave no man their scorn.

Like them I wrought my task and took its gain,
That one might serve their homely need,
When skies were dark, and every cloud a pain,
And there were mouths to feed.

Thus labored day by day these unskilled hands,
Whose only master was a willing heart,
Till barren space smiled into garden-lands
Where roses shone apart.

Half faint with toil from morn to set of sun,
One night I watched the shadows creep
With stealthy footstep, when the day was done,
Toward my encastled steep.

The palace gleamed upon my dazzled sight,--
From long estrangement grown more fair:
I sank and dreamed my feet were mounting light
Over each golden stair.

Once more there came the voice of waters low
On cooling breezes perfume-fed:
It seemed I followed a grand leader, slow
Through marble galleries led.

Then sad I wakened in the vale, but found
The stately guide still drew me on:
Her name was Charity; her voice a sound
Of pure compassion.

She said,--"Beside thee every day I stood
To keep false memories aloof;
To-night I sorrowed for thy labor rude,
And put thee to the proof.

"Ascend again to yon high palace-towers,
With brothers share its plenitude,
And gather up with all thy princely powers
Joys to infinitude."

"Ay me!" I cried, "bid me not go afar,
While yet these little children call,
Lest life grow pallid as the morning star
In that cold shining hall!

"All shall be theirs: my lot is here below
To minister the goods I hold,
While suffering ones shall watch the torrent flow
In waves of amber gold.

"There childhood shall be laid on gleaming beds,
A saintly-eyed prophetic band,
And tinted oriels flame above their heads
To picture the new land.

"And dusky men shall press the snowy lawn,
Shall feel those tears that ease all pain,
Then wake to greet the free earth's noble dawn
And turn to rest again.

"There tired soldiers wash their bleeding feet,
Who gave for us their ripening youth
To earn pure freedom, dared all danger meet,
Content to die for truth.

"There, in the sleepless watch the organ's tone
Shall bear them on its swelling wing
To dreamful space, while star-fires one by one
In vibrant chorus sing."

Sudden there came a thought,--Thou hast no home,
No shaded haunt, or mansion wide,
No refuge after toil in which to roam,
Where silence may abide.

And then I saw a palace broad as earth,
Built beautiful of land and seas,--
Its eastern gate shone in the morning's birth,
The west o'ertopped the trees.

Free as wild waves upon an autumn day,
A world of brothers through its space
Might wander up and down, and sunbeams play
Even on Sorrow's face.

Here in the broad sunned silence of the noon
Peace waiteth to salute the worn,
And ever crowneth with her tender boon
Those who have nobly borne.

Like shafted light dropped in a sunset sea,
The radiant pillars of my home
Send from their glowing swift mortality
Great voices crying, "Come!"

* * * * *

THE DEACON'S HOLOCAUST.

I

A First-class old lady is the most precious social possession of a
New-England town. I have been in places where this office of Select
Woman had languished for want of a proper incumbent,--that is, where the
feminine element was always supplicatory, never authoritative. In such a
place you may find the Select Men as vulgar and unclean as are some of
the more pretentious politicians of State or nation; the variety-store
sands its sugar quite up to the city-standard; and the parson is as
timid a timeserver as the Bishop of Babylon. No rich local tone and
character are to be found in such a place.

This deplorable state of things had never existed in Foxden. When
strangers took a carriage at the depot and asked to be shown whatever
was noteworthy in the town, they were driven to a many-gabled house
shaded by a majestic oak, and informed that there lived Mrs. Widesworth,
the grand-daughter of Twynintuft, the famous elocutionist. They were
also assured that the oak was no other than the Twynintuft Oak,
celebrated in the well-known sonnet of a distinguished American poet.
Moreover, they were instructed that the room just to the right of the
porch was a study added by Twynintuft himself in the year '87, and that
the shattered shed in the background was originally an elocutionary
laboratory which had seen the forming of many Congressional orators.

In so confident a way was this information imparted, that visitors were
compelled to receive it in all humbleness, and as a matter of course.
They could only feign that Twynintuft had been a household word from
their tenderest infancy, and that they have made pilgrimage to Foxden to
gaze upon the earthly abiding-place of this remarkable man. Accordingly,
young ladies sent their best respects from the hotel, and "Would dear
Mrs. Widesworth spare them a few leaves from her grandfather's oak?" And
simple young gentlemen, with a morbid passion for notorieties and moral
sentiments, forwarded little books, bound in sheepskin heavily gilt,
inscribed, "World-Thoughts of My Country's Gifted Minds," and "Mrs.
Widesworth is requested to write any maxim which her experience of life
may have suggested on page 209 of this volume, just between the remarks
of the Living Skeleton and the autograph of the Idiot Albino."

If invited to visit any one of consideration in Foxden, you would no
sooner have deposited your travelling-bag and subsided into the
arm-chair than you would perceive a curious nervous twitching about the
features of your host, which would finally culminate in these, accents
of patronizing triumph:--"My dear Sir, I shall be glad to take you
across the street to pay your respects to Mrs. Widesworth!" Every
householder quivered with anxiety until this rite had been solemnly
performed.

Mrs. Widesworth, the actual, was a plump, well-to-do widow, of
threescore years. She lived among her fellow-creatures, but not of
them,--and that in a sense far more comfortable than Byronic misanthropy
could imagine. She managed to keep all the tumult and competition of
this rough world just outside the little whitewashed fence which
inclosed her premises. No solitary saint of the Middle Ages floated in a
more lofty independence of the foolish heresies of vulgar humanity. The
mission of woman must, of necessity, be identical with the mission of
Mrs. Widesworth,--and this was, to bestow a mellow patronage upon all
creation. That whatever is is right, and that this is the best possible
of worlds, were to Mrs. Widesworth propositions which her perfect health
and unmitigated prosperity continually proved. That, in a theological
point of view, everything was wrong, she considered an esoteric
condiment to add piquancy to the loaves and fishes which Providence had
set before her.

Concerning the eminent Twynintuft, it may be remarked that he had
devoted a long life to elocution, and produced a bulky manual full of
illustrative quavers. And as it happened that his work was the first of
the sort published in America, it obtained a pretty general circulation
in schools and colleges, and was even patronisingly noticed in a British
Review,--at that time the apotheosis of our native authorship. But, alas
for the perishable nature of literary productions! "Twynintuft on the
Human Voice" had long been superseded, and lay comfortably buried in
that cemetery of dead textbooks from which there is no resurrection.
Yet, as he had once been one of the notables of Foxden, the inhabitants
of the town indulged themselves in the soothing fiction that his memory
was still verdant among men, and did pious homage to his representative.

Until the correspondence of Colonel Prowley had drawn Miss Hurribattle
to Foxden, Mrs. Widesworth reigned by divine right. All quilting-bees
and charitable fairs seemed but manifestations of her pervading
vitality. Every social detail was submitted to her arbitrament. She
hovered over the gossips of the town like Fate in a Greek tragedy,--but
it was a reformed Fate, with a wholesome respect for family and
condition.

An entertainment widely famous as "Mrs. Widesworth's Semiannual
Singing-School" brought forth every spring and fall the entire strength
of this excellent lady. The origin of this festivity was of ancient
date. The early settlers in Foxden, while holding decided opinions
concerning the mischief of church-organs, were unusually tolerant of
vocal music. They doubted not that a preached gospel might be worthily
seconded by a vigorous psalmody. Weekly meetings of the young men and
maidens were allowed for practice, and the pot of beans, surmounted by
its crisp coronal of pork, closed the evening in simple conviviality.
This singing-school had descended through the generations, and in solemn
rotation visited the families of all church-members. Under the fostering
care of Mrs. Widesworth, the occasion grew to a musical festival of
considerable importance. When the meeting was at her house, there were
invited many citizens of distinction from the neighboring towns; also,
there was summoned all that was lively, pretty, or profound in Foxden.
From three in the afternoon until nine in the evening the old house
broke out into singing, chatting, love-making, and sermonizing in rich
variety. The ancient bean-pot gave place to a tea-table loaded with
everything which might be baked or fried or stewed. Upon that day people
in wise foresight made but slender dinners. The hostess was known to
possess a culinary experience of no ordinary scope, and the air of the
house was heavy with the delicate incense of waffles and dough-nuts.
When the evening happened to be mild, and that comfortable estate of
fulness whose adjectives the Latin Grammar tells us require the ablative
had been attained, there was more music, secular, but highly decorous,
beneath the rustling boughs of the oak. Then the merriment grew hearty,
and mocked the sombre night. In vain the crickets chirped their shrill
jeer at fallen humanity; the crackling leaves whispered,--but no more
audibly than to the painted Indians who once danced beneath the tree
which the unborn Twynintuft was to monopolize.

Perhaps you think Mrs. Widesworth a kind-hearted, charitable,
respectable old lady,--in short, a model citizeness! Many Foxden people
thought so, until, in the fulness of time, they were drugged with
iconoclastic logic, ghastly and fierce. Then this worthy person suddenly
loomed before them as a patron and upholder of every social abuse. She
was a trampler upon the rights of her sex, and deeply involved in the
guilt of baby-selling at Charleston. Above all, she was a _Moderate
Drinker_, (half a glass of Sherry with her dinner, you know,) and, as
such, could be proved to be the bulwark of the bar-room, and directly
responsible for the ruin of the most talented graduates of Harvard
College. The brutalities of every wife-beating drunkard just landed upon
our shores might be logically credited to Mrs. Widesworth, and to those
_respectable_ (with great sarcasm) _church-members_ (sarcasm more
intense) who countenanced the moderate use of intoxicating drinks.

For now there had come upon Foxden that political, sanatory,
anti-everything revival, which, in those days, thrilled through our
river-towns and took the place of the theological revival, which the
churches seemed too feeble to produce. And--but this is addressed only
to simple souls who think that Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and Luther
instituted the Reformation--the settlement of Miss Patience Hurribattle
in a Foxden boarding-house produced the social upheaval which shook the
place. Of course, the enlightened reader of the "Atlantic" is well aware
that the mighty personages of history may be philosophically bejuggled
out of all claim to the admiration or reprobation of men. What did they
do but react on the society which created them?--what were they but the
average tendencies of an age clad in petticoats or top-boots, as the
case might be? So let it be written, that the great Cosmos-machine had
ground itself to the precise point which necessitated a reformatory
tumult in Foxden, and it mattered little who happened to be there to
patronize it.

For several previous years Miss Hurribattle had borne about her an
uncomfortable turbulence of heroic effort. She had gradually accustomed
herself to regard our crooked humanity as something capable of being
caught up and reformed by a rapacious philanthropist. She had reached a
mental condition to which the time was as thoroughly out of joint as it
ever appeared to Hamlet, although, unlike that impracticable character,
she took great comfort in the belief that she was especially born to set
it right. The choice varieties of _men_ know that truth as it is and
truth as it appears to them are very different matters. But, thank
Heaven, the feminine nature is bound by no such doleful barrier! The man
who thinks is limited; the woman who feels may expand indefinitely. Miss
Hurribattle's mission was to attract the world's capital of unemployed
sentiment, and to set it to work in the mills of society. Let it be said
of this woman, that, without wealth of talent or any exact culture, she
possessed the sweetest accompaniments of the highest masculine
genius,--enthusiasm and simplicity.

The questioning spirit gradually took form in various radical clubs and
associations. Pleasing themselves with shining symbols, and
complimenting each other with antique titles of nobility, a large
majority of the Foxden shop-keepers enlisted in the sacred crusade. This
new physical revival, like the old religious revivals, soon got into the
schools, and processions of children, fluttering many-colored ribbons,
paraded the streets. There was an Anti-Spirit League and an
Anti-Tea-and-Coffee League; also an Anti-Tobacco League was in hopeful
process of formation. And soon professional reformers of most
destructive character were attracted to the place, and, having once
attached themselves, hung like leeches upon the community. The
celebrated Mrs. Romulus, and the great socialist, Mr. Stellato, snuffing
their victims afar off, left their work unfinished in towns of less
importance, and hurried to Foxden. Shrewd wasps were these, bent upon
getting up beehives of cooperative activity. Less and less grew the
stanch garrison who must defend the conservative citadel against the
daring hordes. Nevertheless, some boldly stood out, and showed a
spirit--or shall it be said an obstinacy?--which cowed unpractised
assailants. Deacon Greenlaw had not yet been persuaded to burn his
cider-mill,--although committees of matrons had visited him to ascertain
when he proposed to do so,--although bevies of children had been dressed
in white and set upon Mrs. Greenlaw,--although Mr. Stellato, as Chief
of the Progressive Gladiators, had called in person to demand a public
destruction of that accursed instrument for the ruin of men. The Deacon
defied the moral sentiment of the town. Doctor Dastick sturdily
maintained that tea and coffee were not injurious, and had got hold of
the preventing-waste-of-tissue theory in respect to more potent
beverages. The old-fashioned hospitable soul of Colonel Prowley took
cognizance of the fact that the Odes of Horace made no unkindly mention
of ripe Falernian, and that the most admirable heroes of Plutarch do not
appear to have been teetotalers. Mrs. Widesworth, good lady, rode like a
cork upon the deep unrest of society: she thought the whole business
infidel as well as absurd, and, so thinking, did not trouble herself
much about it. Mr. Clifton had preached a sermon in which he took the
ground that morality could be best promoted by regulating, instead of
extirpating, human propensities.

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