My Life as an Author. Martin Farquhar Tupper
Such exquisite eatables! and for your drink
Not porter or ale, but—what do you think?
'Tis Burgundy, Bourdeaux, real red rosy wine,
Which you quaff at a draught, neat nectar, divine!
Thus they pamper the taste with everything good
And of an old shoe can make savoury food,
But the worst of it is that when you have done
You are nearly as famish'd as when you begun!"
For a more serious morsel, take the closing lines on Rouen:—
"Yes, proud Cathedral, ages pass'd away
While generations lived their little day—
France has been deluged with her patriots' blood
By traitors to their country and their God—
The face of Europe has been changed, but thou
Hast stood sublime in changelessness till now,
Exulting in thy glories of carved stone,
A living monument of ages gone!—
Yet—time hath touch'd thee too; thy prime is o'er—
A few short years, and thou must be no more;
Ev'n thou must bend beneath the common fate,
But in thy very ruins wilt be great!"
More than enough of this brief memory of "Sixty Years Since," which has no other extant record, and is only given as a sample of the rest, equally juvenile. Three years however before, this, my earliest piece printed, I find among my papers a very faded copy of my first MS. in verse, being part of an attempted prize poem at Charterhouse on Carthage, written at the age of thirteen in 1823; for auld langsyne's sake I rescue its conclusion thus curtly from oblivion—though no doubt archæologically faulty:—
"Where sculptured temples once appeared to sight,
Now dismal ruins meet the moon's pale light—
Where regal pomp once shone with gorgeous ray,
And kings successive held their transient sway;—
Where once the priest his sacred victims led
And on the altars their warm lifeblood shed—
Where swollen rivers once had amply flowed
And splendid galleys down the stream had rowed,
A dreary wilderness now meets the view,
And nought but Memory can trace the clue!"
The poor little schoolboy's muse was perhaps quite of the pedestrian order: but so also, the critics said, had been stern old Dr. Johnson's in his "London."
Mere school-exercises (whereof I have some antique copybooks before me), cannot be held to count for much as early literature; though I know not why some of my Greek Iambic translations of the Psalms and Shakespeare, as also sundry very respectable versions of English poems into Latin Sapphics and Alcaics still among my archives, should not have been shrined—as they were offered at the time—in Dr. Haig Brown's Carthusian Anthology. However somehow these have escaped printer's ink—the only true elixir vitæ—and we must therefore suppose them not quite worthy to be bracketed with the classical versification of Buchanan or even of Mr. John Milton—albeit actually superior to sundry of the aforesaid Anthologia Carthusiana; so of these we will say nothing.
Of other sorts of schoolboy literaria whereof from time to time I was guilty let me save here (by way of change) one or two of my trivial humoristics: here is one, not seen in print till now; "Sapphics to my Umbrella—written on a very rainy day," in 1827. N.B. If Canning in his Eton days immortalised sapphically a knifegrinder, why shouldn't a young Carthusian similarly celebrate his gingham?
"Valued companion of my expeditions,
Wanderings, and my street perambulations,
What can be more deserving of my praises
Than my umbrella?
"Under thine ample covering rejoicing,
(All the 'canaille' tumultuously running)
While the rain streams and patters from the housetops,
Slow and majestic,
"I trudge along unwetted, though an ocean
Pours from the clouds, as if some Abernethy
Had given all the nubilary regions
Purges cathartic!
"Others run on in piteous condition,
Black desperation painted in their faces,
While the full flood descends in very pailfuls
Streaming upon them.
"Yea, 'tis as if some cunning necromancer
Had drawn a circle magically round me,
Till like the wretched victim of Kehama,
(Southey's abortion)
"Nothing like liquor ever could approach me!
But it is thou, disinterested comrade,
Bearest the rainy weather uncomplaining,
Oh, my umbrella!
"How many hats, and 'upper Bens,' and new coats,
How many wretched duckings hast thou saved me
Well—I have done—but must be still indebted
To my umbrella!"
Another such trifle may be permissible, as thus: also about an umbrella, a stolen one. On the occasion of my loss I wrote this to rebuke the thief, "The height of honesty:"—
"Three friends once, in the course of conversation,
Touch'd upon honesty: 'No virtue better,'
Says Dick, quite lost in sweet self-admiration,
'I'm sure I'm honest;—ay—beyond the letter:
You know the field I rent; beneath the ground
My plough stuck in the middle of a furrow
And there a pot of golden coins I found!
My landlord has it, without fail, to-morrow.'
Thus modestly his good intents he told:
'But stay,' says Bob,' we soon shall see who's best,
A stranger left with me uncounted gold! But I'll not touch it; which is honestest?' 'Your honest acts I've heard,' says Jack, 'but I Have done much better, would that all folks learn'd it, Mine is the highest pitch of honesty— I borrow'd an umbrella and—return'd it!!'".
N.B.—I remember that Dr. Buckland, whose geological lectures I attended, had the words "Stolen from Dr. Buckland" engraved on the ivory handle of his umbrella: he never lost it again.
In the way of prose, not printed (though much later on I have since published "Paterfamilias's Diary of Everybody's Tour") I have kept journals of holiday travel passim, whereof I now make a brief mention. Six juvenile bits of authorship are before me, ranging through the summers of 1828 to 1835 inclusive; each neatly written in its note-book on the spot and at the time (therefore fresh and true) decorated with untutored sketches, and all full of interest ab least to myself in old memories, faded interests, and departed friends. As very rare survivals of the past (for who cares to keep as I have done his schoolboy journals of half a century ago?) I will give at haphazard from each in its order of time a short quotation by way of sample—a brick to represent the house. My first, a.d. 1828, records how my good father took his sons through the factories of Birmingham and the potteries of Staffordshire, down an iron mine and a salt mine, &c. &c., thus teaching us all we could learn energetically and intelligently; it details also how we were hospitably entertained for a week in each place by the magnate