CHAP XVI. Tom commences an amour with a young lady of his own kidney.—He turns actor and makes his first appearance on the stage at Bartholomew-fair.

Tom was according to the custom of this celebrated place invested with all the requisite apparatus of Yates and Shuter. The day was proclaimed by the Lord-Mayor, and the usual solemnities, performed, of which Tom was entirely ignorant. To describe this great festival would be superfluous to most, therefore, for the sake of the few, we shall confine ourselves to the department of Tom the Cat. The bill run thus, several pantomime entertainments by a real Cat, who excels Maddox on the wire, plays the slight of hand better than —— performs the dexterity of rope-dancing, and tells fortunes; little, very little of this, oh! ingenious reader did Tom the Cat, know any thing of it; yet his wise promulgators, thought proper to impose on his supposed wisdom, and on the ignorance of those who had met there to be imposed upon.

The German had however employed a piece of canvass to represent the figure of Tom, in his various attitudes, something like those exhibited of Steward, Saunders, Maddox, and Miss Wilkinson; attitudes which the Cat never performed.

The populace were drawn in, and more came to see Tom the Cat’s performance than that of either Shuter or Yates.

When Tom the Cat, made his first appearance at Bartholomew-fair, it was not doubted but he would give the greatest satisfaction. The monkeys and their tribe were first introduced to the people, who played their old tricks over and over; but when the people called aloud for Tom’s appearance it was then, and not till then, that the sport of the fair begun; they gaped wide, when there appeared several gentlemen of the human species; two by two, then several ladies of the female species, two by two, dressed in robes of mimic tissue; maids of honour in pairs, with white gloves. Next baboon, king at arms, dressed in his regalia, attended by two ushers; next came the ladies of the bed-chamber, followed by two pages of the back-stairs, two train bearers; who bore the princesses coronet on a velvet cushion, adorned with the arms of the singeric order; and in the middle, supported by two feline lords, appeared Tom beneath a canopy of state. He was known, as Garrick is, or as Barry and Mossop was, by the dignity of his steps, and by other marks and badges of his superiority over all the rest. For oh! reader; believe me, who was present at this triumphal procession, that this mock entrance was no more than the artifice of a German, purely invented to deceive you, and to draw you in, whereas, there was nothing worthy to be seen, but the figure and appearance of Tom, graced or rather disgraced by the attendance of these syngeric animals.

When he appeared first there was an universal clap of applause, tho’ he neither said or did any thing; he had been taught to make his usual obedience in private, as players study their parts and get one to hold them, to see if they are gotten perfect.

The first part he appeared in was in the jack-scene, which as it was drawing up, he times the motion, leaping upon it, goes it ever so swiftly, on which he stands till the leads are drawn up. Then, like Harlequin, he is seen in the wheel turning a heavy spit, laden with several joints of flesh and fowl, cut out in wood, at length he leaps out of the wheel, and is received by the cook in the frying pan, out of which he jumps into the fire, to verify the good old proverb, out of the frying pan into the fire. This fire being painted to deceive, did accordingly deceive the ignorant, but as Tom’s feet never felt the heat of it, so did he after many grimaces of the feet (allow me the expression) jump directly on the ladder of ropes placed in a vertical position, on which he descended and ascended better than e’er a minister of them all. The monkeys were put to the trial, but they could not execute like him; in his begging attitude, he collected for his master forty pence, out of a hundred and fifty present; but when he jumped through the hoop on the stage, they all threw down half-pence, pence, and shillings, which he had too much honour to gather up, but left that to his substitute, the German’s wife.

A female cat was then introduced, with whom he was to dance a minuet: This too he performed to the satisfaction of all present; and when the stewards appointed him to lead up the country dances, no person there was more alert or brisk, than he to see that the ladies were properly served with negus, tea, or coffee, as they desired: After this it is said, there was an Harlequin entertainment performed, in which Tom played the part of Harlequin, and his mistress or partner that of Columbine, to the utmost satisfaction of all the people who visited the German’s booth on this occasion, and some go so far as to say that neither Shuter or Yates had much company that night, as the German had cunningly inserted it at the top of his bills that the character of the Harlequin, was to be performed by Tom the Cat, who never appeared on any stage before, and the character of Columbine by a young Lady of the Cat-kind, it being the first time of her appearing in that character. This is the lady of the feline quality with whom Tom from this happy occasion of playing Harlequin with her commenced an amour.

With this young virgin Tom was locked up by the German, in order to have a fine breed by them. She was of a pure milk white, unspotted as her chastity, had been the favourite puss of a lady not so unspotted as herself; her ladyship seldom went a visiting without her dear Araminta, (so she called her;) unhappy for poor Minty she was one summer’s evening diverting herself with catching flies, when this cruel son of Judah took her up, and ran away with her; and though her ladyship advertised her with marks, and tokens, and a handsome reward, yet the Jew locked her up so close, that there never was any tidings of her since, till this respectable history discovered the place of her confinement, and sent Tom to be the knight to this distressed damsel.

On being closetted by this superb beauty, Tom fell deeply ennamoured, as indeed what Cat could withstand her insuperable charms without feeling the flames of love. It is said that his passion for her gave him a poetical turn, and produced these lines of the feline composition.

On the Charms of Minty the Cat, written by her lover Tom,

Whether he sat it to music himself, or some other celebrated master framed the vocal composition, we cannot certainly say, but we hear it was sung by a very good voice at the fair in the presence of Minty’s self, who doubtless was not a little proud to hear her beauties extolled by her own lover.

Tom was too courtly to attack her any other way, than en Cavalier—and she was not so prudish as to cry Pish! like some modern fine ladies, or say—I would not have you imagine me so easy a conquest,—or I am none of those creaters you think me, and such stuff—as his professions were honourable, and as she was conscious of her own beauty, she believed his vows to be unfeigned, and though,

Yet, she was not ashamed to confess an equal passion for him, and to repay his love and sincerity, with the surrender of those charms, which none but so handsome a fellow as Tom could either conquer or deserve; we shall here be silent, and draw a curtain over those conubial delights, which we cannot paint: Certain it is, that they were both virgins, and therefore some people may be apt, superstitiously to apprehend that the first child must be a fool; but to falsify that vulgar opinion, we can affirm, that the first child Minty ever had, was the wittiest of the five, of which she was delivered this lying in, and that the last born died of a miserable consumption, contracted in the womb from the imbecility of its texture. However, she was not so delicate or tender as to keep her room for the fashionable month: History affirms, that she killed two lusty mice, eat a slice of bacon, which she lighted on by accident, and went through the part of Columbine two days after delivery. The applause Tom got in the character of Harlequin procured him such a character as the celebrated Lun himself never purchased, with all his feats of activity; nay, this approbation went so far, that several people came to converse and familiarly play with him and actually gave him money, which he put into his master’s hands to keep for him; notwithstanding his confinement grew very irksome to Tom and his young lady, yet he fared very elegantly. He had bread and milk, for his breakfast every day, fresh meat for his dinner, and milk for supper; she indeed during her pregnancy longed for tea, of which the Jew seldom drank any.

To obtain freedom for himself and dear Minty, became now the sole object of his attention; it engrossed all his thoughts, and almost interfered with his business. No husband on earth, could love a wife better than he did his Minty, but love itself, incompatible with bondage and confinement seemed to give way to the noble efforts for freedom, with which his mind struggled. She indeed was a sharer in his misfortunes, which in some measure sweetned the bitter cup, and alleviated his misery, and though he did not understand Latin, yet he thought with the Roman Poet,

As he was taking a walk with Minty, he observed a mouse under the bed, and darting at it, he missed his aim, but made a happy discovery.

Not the famous Erwin, when he thought he found out the longitude by discovering the immersion of the satellite of Jupiter, could be more sensibly affected with raptures of delight, than our hero was on the discovery of a mouse-hole, which led into the next garret. Not Columbus, when he found America, nor Cortez on discovering the Indian mines of gold could be more overjoyed. He would have cried, ευρηκαμεν, but he happened not to understand the Greek—sure it is he thought it, though he did not express it in terms; but he was no sooner about reconnoitring the place, in order to invest it vi et armis, than the door opened, and he was for ever torn away from the arms of his beloved Minty. Oh! dire misfortune to lose his mistress, together with the means of escape, and just at the very crisis of the discovery.

So have I known a bard who having happily nicked a line, finds himself embarressed and sorely perplexed to discover a rime to it. He consults Bysshe’s Art of Poety, turns over the leaves, and investigates the whole volume to catch the rhime, but in vain—at length he scratches his head, pares his nails with his teeth, and fathoms the depth of his own memory, when, oh! unspeakable! a dun raps at the door, the rhime, just in the point of view, escapes him, and is lost for ever, never alass to be again recovered. It had been some consolation thought Tom, with himself, if this interruption was deferred only till I had made the discovery to my charming Minty—now she must pine in solitude, and waste the remainder of her widowhood in fruitless anguish and imprisonment; constrained to obey, though reluctant, every summons of her lordly ruler, to frisk, and dance without inclination, for the entertainment of a pitiful mob. Thus he lamented, till he was brought down stairs to be exhibited as a shew; for his extroardinary beauty and the rumour of his many excellent qualifications had drawn several to drink at the house where the Jew lodged, in order to have a sight of Tom the Harlequin, as he was now nick-named though other historians, and some commentators differ in this point, insisting that he was more universally called Harlequin Tom. Our penetration is not sufficiently piercing to discuss this, or to determine the dispute either in the affirmative or the negative. Many, however, were the encomiums bestowed on the singularity of his shape, his fine skin, and extraordinary stature, the brightness of his eyes, the symmetry of his limbs, the poignancy of his wit, or the agility of his body.

When our hero had gone through his several exercitations, the Jew pinned down his chain to the floor, and sat himself down with the company who had invited him to regale over a pot of beer, which when he consented one of the company who did not come there for nothing, entered into the following dissertation, which the reader will find in the next chapter, and if he chuses to read it through, he will find it none of the most frivolous in the history.