Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850. Various
otherwise than that the squire must be a prodigious scholar, seeing all that array of big books? And, in fact, the old squire is a great reader in his own line. He reads the Times daily; and he reads Gwillim’s “Heraldry,” the “History of the Landed Gentry,” Rapin’s “History of England,” and all the works of Fielding, Richardson, and Sterne, whom he declares to be the greatest writers England ever produced, or ever will produce.
But the old squire is not without his troubles. In his serious judgment all the world is degenerating. The nation is running headlong to ruin. “Lord, how different it was in my time!” is his constant exclamation. The world is now completely turned topsy-turvy. Here is the Reform Bill, the New Poor-law, which though it does make sharp work among the rogues and vagabonds, yet has sorely shorn the authority of magistrates. Here are the New Game-laws, Repeal of the Corn-laws, and the Navigation-laws; new books, all trash and nonsense; and these harum-scarum railroads, cutting up the country and making it dangerous to be riding out any where. “Just,” says he, “as a sober gentleman is riding quietly by the side of his wood, bang! goes that ‘hell-in-harness,’ a steam-engine, past. Up goes the horse, down goes the rider to a souse in the ditch, and a broken collar bone.”
Then all the world is now running all over the continent, learning all sorts of Frenchified airs and fashions and notions, and beggaring themselves into the bargain. He never set foot on the d – d, beggarly, frog-eating Continent – not he! It was thought enough to live at home, and eat good roast beef, and sing “God save the King,” in his time; but now a man is looked upon as a mere clown who has not run so far round the world that he can seldom ever find his way back again to his estate, but stops short in London, where all the extravagance and nonsense in creation are concentrated, to help our mad gentry out of their wits and their money together. The old squire groans here in earnest; for his daughter, who has married Sir Benjamin Spankitt, and his son Tom, who has married the Lady Babara Ridemdown, are as mad as the rest of them.
Of Tom, the young squire, we shall take a more complete view anon. But there is another of the old squire’s troubles yet to be noticed, and that is in the shape of an upstart. One of the worst features of the times is the growth and spread of upstarts. Old families going down, as well as old customs, and new people, who are nobody, taking their places. Old estates bought up – not by the old gentry, who are scattering their money in London, and among all the grinning monsieurs, mynheers, and signores, on the frogified continent, but by the soap-boilers and sugar-bakers of London. The country gentry, he avers, have been fools enough to spend their money in London, and now the people they have spent it among are coming and buying up all the estates about them. Ask him, as you ride out with him by the side of some great wood or venerable park, “What old family lives there?” “Old family!” he exclaims, with an air of angry astonishment; “old family! Where do you see old families nowadays? That is Sir Peter Post, the great horse-racer, who was a stable-boy not twenty years ago; and that great brick house on the hill there is the seat of one of the great Bearrings, who have made money enough among the bulls and bears to buy up the estates of half the fools hereabout. But that is nothing; I can assure you, men are living in halls and abbeys in these parts, who began their lives in butchers’ shops and cobblers’ stalls.”
It might, however, be tolerated that merchants and lawyers, stock-jobbers, and even sugar-bakers and soap-boilers, should buy up the old houses; but the most grievous nuisance, and perpetual thorn in the old squire’s side, is Abel Grundy, the son of an old wheelwright, who, by dint of his father’s saving and his own sharpness, has grown into a man of substance under the squire’s own nose. Abel began by buying odds and ends of lands and scattered cottages, which did not attract the squire’s notice; till at length, a farm being to be sold, which the squire meant to have, and did not fear any opponent, Abel Grundy bid for it, and bought it, striking the old steward actually dumb with astonishment; and then it was found that all the scattered lots which Grundy had been buying up, lay on one side or other of this farm, and made a most imposing whole. To make bad worse, Grundy, instead of taking off his hat when he met the old squire, began now to lift up his own head very high; built a grand house on the land plump opposite to the squire’s hall-gates; has brought a grand wife – a rich citizen’s daughter; set up a smart carriage; and as the old squire is riding out on his old horse Jack, with his groom behind him, on a roan pony with a whitish mane and tail, the said groom having his master’s great coat strapped to his back, as he always has on such occasions, drives past with a dash and a cool impudence that are most astonishing.
The only comfort that the old squire has in the case is talking of the fellow’s low origin. “Only to think,” says he, “that this fellow’s father hadn’t even wood enough to make a wheel-barrow till my family helped him; and I have seen this scoundrel himself scraping manure in the high roads, before he went to the village school in the morning, with his toes peeping out of his shoes, and his shirt hanging like a rabbit’s tail out of his ragged trowsers; and now the puppy talks of ‘my carriage,’ and ‘my footman,’ and says that ‘he and his lady purpose to spend the winter in the town,’ meaning London!”
Wagstaff laughs at the squire’s little criticism on Abel Grundy, and shakes his head; but he can not shake the chagrin out of the old gentleman’s heart. Abel Grundy’s upstart greatness will be the death of the old squire.
By smiling fortune blessed
With large demesnes, hereditary wealth.
The Old Squire and the Young Squire are the antipodes of each other. They are representatives of two entirely different states of society in this country; the one, but the vestige of that which has been; the other, the full and perfect image of that which is. The old squires are like the last fading and shriveled leaves of autumn that yet hang on the tree. A few more days will pass; age will send one of his nipping nights, and down they will twirl, and be swept away into the oblivious hiding-places of death, to be seen no more. But the young squire is one of the full-blown blossoms of another summer. He is flaunting in the sunshine of a state of wealth and luxury, which we, as our fathers in their days did, fancy can by no possibility be carried many degrees farther, and yet we see it every day making some new and extraordinary advance.
It is obvious that there are many intervening stages of society, among our country gentry, between the old squire and the young, as there are intermediate degrees of age. The old squires are those of the completely last generation, who have outlived their contemporaries, and have made a dead halt on the ground of their old habits, sympathies, and opinions, and are resolved to quit none of them for what they call the follies and new-fangled notions of a younger, and, of course, more degenerate race. They are continually crying, “Oh, it never was so in my day!” They point to tea, and stoves in churches, and the universal use of umbrellas, parasols, cork-soled shoes, warming-pans, and carriages, as incontestible proofs of the rapidly-increasing effeminacy of mankind. But between these old veterans and their children, there are the men of the middle ages, who have, more or less, become corrupted with modern ways and indulgences; have, more or less, introduced modern furniture, modern hours, modern education, and tastes, and books; and have, more or less, fallen into the modern custom of spending a certain part of the year in London. With these we have nothing whatever to do. The old squire is the landmark of the ancient state of things, and his son Tom is the epitome of the new; all between is a mere transition and evanescent condition.
Tom Chesselton was duly sent by his father to Eton as a boy, where he became a most accomplished scholar in cricket, boxing, horses, and dogs, and made the acquaintance of several lords, who taught him the way of letting his father’s money slip easily through his fingers without burning them, and engrafted him besides with a fine stock of truly aristocratic tastes, which will last him his whole life. From Eton he was duly transferred to Oxford, where he wore his gown and trencher-cap with a peculiar grace, and gave a classic finish to his taste in horses, in driving, and in ladies. Having completed his education with great éclat, he was destined by his father to a few years’ soldiership in the militia, as being devoid of all danger, and moreover, giving opportunities for seeing a great deal of the good old substantial families in different parts of the kingdom. But Tom turned up his nose, or rather his handsome upper lip, with a most consummate scorn at so groveling a proposal, and assured his father