TOUJOURS PERDRIX.

We have all been occupied for a great many years in considering whether we ought to emancipate the Catholics from their disabilities. Let us at last begin to think whether it is not high time to emancipate ourselves from the discussion of them. My respectable and Popish cousin, Arthur M‘Carmick, inhabits a charming entresol in the Rue St. Honoré, where he copies Vernet and reads Delavigne, dreams of Pauline Latour, and spends six hundred a year in the greatest freedom imaginable; yet, because he is not yet entitled to frank letters and address the Speaker’s chair, Arthur M‘Carmick wants to be emancipated. I, whom fate and a profession confine in my native country, am fettered by the thraldom, and haunted by the grievance, at every turn I take. In vain I fly from the doors of Parliament, and make a circuit of five miles to avoid the very echo of the county meeting; my friend in the club and my mistress in the ball-room, the ballad-singer in the street and the preacher in the pulpit, all combine to harass my nerves, and weary my forbearance; even Dr. Somnolent wakes occasionally after dinner, to indulge in a guttural murmur [Pg 279]concerning martyrdom and the Real Presence; and Sir Roger, when the hounds are at fault, reins up at my side, and harks back to the Revolution of 1688. Our very servants wear our prejudices, as constantly as our cast-off clothes, and our tradesmen offer us their theories more punctually than their bills. Not a week ago my groom assured me that there was no reason to be alarmed, for the Pope lived a great way off; and my barber on the same day hinted that he knew as much as most people, and that all he knew was this, that if ever the Catholics were uppermost they would play the old bear with the Church. I could not sleep that night for thinking of Ursa Major and the Beast in the Revelations. Yet I, because I may put on a silk gown whenever it shall please His Majesty to adorn me in such radiant attire, and because, some twenty years hence, I may have hope to be in the great council of the nation, the mouthpiece of some two or three dozen of independent individuals—I, forsooth, am to petition for no emancipation.

There are persons who cannot bear the uninterrupted ticking of a pendulum in their chamber. The sustained converse of a wife vexes many. I have heard of a prisoner who was driven mad by the continued plashing of water against the wall of his cell. Such things are lively illustrations of the disquiet I endure. It is not that I am thwarted in an argument or beat on a division; it is not that I have a horror of innovation, or a hatred of intolerance; you are welcome to trample upon my opinions, if you will not tread upon my toes. I will waltz with any fair Whig who has a tolerable ear and a pretty figure; and I will gladly dine with any septuagenarian Tory who is liberal in his culinary system and puts no restrictions upon his cellar. The Question kills me: no matter in what garb or under what banner it come. Brunswick and Liberator, reasoner and declaimer, song and speech, pamphlet and sermon—I hate them all.

Look at that handsome young man who is so pleasantly settling himself at his table at the Travellers’. He spends two hours daily upon his curls, and the rings on his fingers would make manacles for a burglar; surely he has no leisure for the affairs of the nation? The waiter has just[Pg 280] disclosed to his view the anguilles en matelotte, and the steward is setting down beside him the pint of Johannisberg. And he only arrived yesterday from Versailles; it is impossible he can have been infected in less than four-and-twenty hours. Alas! there is the Courier extended beside his plate; and the dish grows cold, and the wine grows warm, while Morrison sympathizes with the feelings of the Home Secretary, or penetrates the mysteries of the Attorney-General’s philippic.

Watch Lady Lansquenet as she takes up her hand from the whist-table. With what an ecstasy of delight does she marshal the brocaded warriors who are the strength of her battle; how indignantly does she thrust into their appointed station the more ignoble combatants, who are distinguished, like hackney-coaches, only by their number; how reverentially does she draw towards her those three last lingering cards, as if the magic alchemy of delay were of power to transmute a spade into a club, or exalt a plebeian into a prince. Then, with what an air of anxiety does she observe the changes and chances of the contest; now flushed with triumph, now palsied with alarm; and bestowing alternately upon her adversary and her ally equal shares of her impartial indignation. Lady Lansquenet is neither pretty nor young, nor musical nor literary. She does not know a Raphael from a Teniers, nor a scene by Shakespeare from a melody by Moore. Yet to me she seems the most conversible person in the room; for at least the Question is nothing to Lady Lansquenet. One may ask her what her winnings have been without fear. “I have lost,” says her ladyship, “twenty points. I am seldom so unfortunate; but what could I expect, you know—with a Popish partner!”

I will go and see Frederick Marston. He has been in love for six weeks. In ordinary cases I shrink with unfeigned horror from the conversation of a lover—barley-broth is not more terrible to an alderman, nor metaphysics to a blockhead, nor argument to a wit. But now, in mere self-defence, I will go and see Frederick Marston. He will talk of wood-pigeons and wildernesses, of eyebrows and ringlets, of sympathies and quadrilles, of “meet me by moonlight” and[Pg 281] the brightest eyes in the world. I will endure it all; for he will have no thought to waste upon the wickedness of the Duke of Wellington or the disfranchisement of Larry O’Shane. So I spoke in the bitterness of my heart; and, after a brief and painful struggle with a Treasury clerk in the Haymarket, and a narrow escape in Regent Street from the heavy artillery of a Somersetshire divine, I flung myself into my old schoolfellow’s armchair, and awaited his raptures or his apprehensions, as patiently as the wrecked mariner awaits the lions or the savages, when he has escaped from the billow and the blast. “My dear fellow,” said my unhappy friend, and pointed, as he spoke, to a letter which was lying open on the table, “I am the most miserable of fortune’s playthings. It is but a week since every obstacle was removed. The dresses were bespoken; the ring was bought; the Dean had been applied to, and the lawyer was at work. I had written out ten copies of an advertisement, and sold Hambletonian for half his value. Λ plague on all uncles! Sir George has discovered ‘an insuperable objection.’ One may guess his meaning without comment.”

“Upon my life, not I! Have you criticized his Correggio?”

“Never.”

“Have you abused his claret?”

“Never.”

“You have thinned his preserves, then?”

“I never carried a gun there!”

“Or slept while his chaplain was preaching?”

“I never sat in his pew.”

A horrible foreboding came over me. I sat in silent anticipation of the blow which was to overwhelm me. “Oh, my dear friend,” said Frederick after a long pause, “why was I born under so fatal a planet? And why did my second cousin sign that infernal petition?”

My father’s ancient and valued friend, Martin Marston, Esq., of Marston Hall, has vegetated for forty years in his paternal estate in the West of England, proud and happy in the enjoyment of everything which makes the life of a country gentleman enviable. He is an upright magistrate,[Pg 282] a kind master, a merciful landlord, and a hearty friend. If you believe his neighbours, he has not been guilty of a fault for ten years, but when he forgave the butler who plundered his plate-closet; nor uttered a complaint for twenty, except when the gout drove him out of his saddle, and compelled him to take refuge in the pony-chair. If his son were not the readiest Grecian at Westminster, he was nearly the best shot in the county; and if his daughters had little interest in the civil dissensions of the King’s Theatre, and thought of Almack’s much as a Metropolitan thinks of Timbuctoo, they had nevertheless as much beauty as one looks for in a partner, and quite as many accomplishments as one wants in a wife. Mr. Marston has always been a Liberal politician, partly because his own studies and connections have that way determined him. and partly because an ancestor of his bore a command in the Parliamentary army at the battle of Edgehill. But his principles never interfered with his comforts. He had always a knife and fork for the vicar, a furious High Churchman; and suffered his next neighbour, a violent Tory, to talk him to sleep without resistance or remonstrance—in consequence of which Dr. Gloss declared he had never found any man so open to conviction, and Sir Walter vowed that old Marston was the only Radical that ever listened to reason.

When I visited Marston Hall two months ago, on my road to Penzance, matters were strangely altered in the establishment. I found the old gentleman sitting in his library with a huge bundle of printed placards before him, and a quantity of scribbled paper lying on his table. The County Meeting was in agitation; and Mr. Marston, to the astonishment of every one, had determined to take the field against bigotry and persecution. He was composing a speech. Poachers were neglected, and turnip-stealers forgotten; his favourite songs echoed unheeded, and the urn simmered in vain. He hunted authorities, he consulted references, he hammered periods into shape, he strung metaphors together like beads, he translated, he transcribed. He was determined that, if the good folk of the West remained unenlightened, the fault should not rest upon his shoulders. Every pursuit and amusement were at an end.[Pg 283] He had been planning a new line of road through part of his estate, but the labourers were now at a standstill; and he had left off reading in the middle of the third volume of “The Disowned.” I found that Sir Walter had not dined at his table for five weeks; and when I talked of accompanying his party to the parish church on Sunday, Emily silenced me with a look, and whispered that her papa read the prayers at home now, for that Dr. Gloss was a detestable fanatic, who went about getting up petitions. Mr. Marston could talk about nothing but the Question, and the speech he meant to make upon it. “Talk of the dangers of Popery,” he said, “why old Tom Sarney, who died the other day, was a Papist; I hunted with him for ten years; never saw a man ride with better judgment. When I had that horrid tumble at Fen Brook, if Tom Sarney had not been at my side my Protestant neck would not have been worth a whistle that day. Danger, forsooth! They are Papists at Eastwood Park, you know; and, if my son’s word is to be credited, there is one pretty Catholic there who would save at least one heretic from the bonfire. My tenant Connel is a Papist; never flinches at Lady-day and Michaelmas. Lady Dryburgh is a Papist, and Dr. Gloss says she keeps a Jesuit in her house. By George, sir, she may have a worse faith than I, but she contrived to give twice as many blankets to the poor last Christmas. And so I shall tell my friends from the hustings next week.”

When I observed the report of the proceedings at the County Meeting in the newspaper a fortnight afterwards, I find only that Mr. Marston “spoke amidst considerable uproar.” But I learn from private channels that his speech has been by no means thrown away. For it is quoted with much emphasis by his gamekeeper, and it occupies thirteen closely written pages in Emily’s album.[Pg 284]