Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850. Various
and Ireland in pursuit of grouse. But once a year they indulge their filial virtues in a visit to the old squire. The old squire, we are sorry to say, has grown of late years queer and snappish, and does not look on this visit quite as gratefully as he should. “If they would but come,” he says, “in a quiet way, as I used to ride over and see my father in his time, why I should be right glad to see them; but, here they come, like the first regiment of an invading army, and God help those who are old, and want to be quiet!”
The old gentleman, moreover, is continually haranguing about Tom’s folly and extravagance. It is his perpetual topic to his wife, and wife’s maiden sister, and Wagstaff. Wagstaff only shakes his head, and says, “Young blood! young blood!” but Mrs. Chesselton and the maiden sister say, “Oh! Mr. Chesselton, you don’t consider: Tom has great connections, and he is obliged to keep a certain establishment. Things are different now to what they were in our time. Tom is universally allowed to be a very fine man, and Lady Barbara is a very fine woman, and a prodigious clever woman! and you ought to be proud of them, Chesselton.” At which the old gentleman breaks out, if he be a little elevated over his wine:
When the Duke of Leeds shall married be
To a fine young lady of high quality,
How happy will that gentlewoman be
In his grace of Leeds good company!
She shall have all that’s fine and fair,
And the best of silk and satin to wear;
And ride in a coach to take the air,
And have a house in St. James’s-square.
Lady Barbara always professes great affection and reverence for the old gentleman, and sends him many merry and kind compliments and messages; and sends him, moreover, her new books as soon as they are out, most magnificently bound; but all won’t do. He only says, “If she’d please me, she’d give up that cursed opera-box. Why, the rent of that thing – only to sit in and hear Italian women squealing and squalling, and to see impudent, outlandish baggages kicking up their heels higher than any decent heads ought to be – the rent, I say, would maintain a parish rector, or keep half-a-dozen parish schools a-going.” As for her books, that all the world besides are in raptures about, the old squire turns them over as a dog would a hot dumpling; says nothing but a Bible ought to be so extravagantly bound; and professes that “the matter may all be very fine, but he can make neither head nor tail of it.” Yet, whenever Lady Barbara is with him, she is sure to talk and smile herself in about half an hour into his high favor; and he begins to run about to show her this and that, and calls out every now and then, “Let Lady Barbara see this, and go to look at that.” She can do any thing with him, except get him to London. “London!” he exclaims; “no; get me to Bedlam at once! What has a rusty old fellow, like me, to do at London? If I could find again the jolly set that used to meet, thirty years ago, at the Star and Garter, Pall Mall, it might do; but London isn’t what London used to be. It’s too fine by half for a country squire, and would drive me distracted in twenty-four hours, with its everlasting noise and nonsense.”
But the old squire does get pretty well distracted with the annual visit. Down come driving the young squire and Lady Barbara, with a train of carriages like a fleet of men-of-war, leading the way with their traveling-coach and four horses. Up they twirl to the door of old hall. The old bell rings a thundering peal through the house. Doors fly open – out come servants – down come the young guests from their carriages; and while embraces and salutations are going on in the drawing-room, the hall is fast filling with packages upon packages; servants are running to and fro along the passages; grooms and carriages are moving off to the stables without; there is lifting and grunting at portmanteaus and imperials, as they are borne up-stairs; while ladies’ maids and nursemaids are crying out, “Oh, take care of that trunk!” “Mind that ban’-box!” “Oh, gracious! that is my lady’s dressing-case; it will be down, and be totally ruined!” Dogs are barking; children crying, or romping about, and the whole house in the most blessed state of bustle and confusion.
For a week the hurly-burly continues; in pour all the great people to see Tom and Lady Barbara. There are shootings in the mornings, and great dinner parties in the evenings. Tom and my lady have sent down before them plenty of hampers of such wines as the old squire neither keeps nor drinks, and they have brought their plate along with them; and the old house itself is astonished at the odors of champagne, claret, and hook, that pervade, and at the glitter of gold and silver in it. The old man is full of attention and politeness, both to his guests and to their guests; but he is half worried with the children, and t’other half worried with so many fine folks; and muddled with drinking things that he is not used to, and with late hours. Wagstaff has fled – as he always does on such occasions – to a farm-house on the verge of the estate. The hall, and the parsonage, and even the gardener’s house, are all full of beds for guests, and servants, and grooms. Presently, the old gentleman, in his morning rides, sees some of the young bucks shooting the pheasants in his home-park, where he never allows them to be disturbed, and comes home in a fume, to hear that the house is turned upside-down by the host of scarlet-breeched and powdered livery-servants, and that they have turned all the maids’ heads with sweethearting. But, at length, the day of departure arrives, and all sweep away as suddenly and rapidly as they came; and the old squire sends off for Wagstaff, and blesses his stars that what he calls “the annual hurricane,” is over.
But what a change will there be when the old squire is dead! Already have Tom and Lady Barbara walked over the ground, and planned it. That horrid fright of an old house, as they call it, will be swept as clean away as if it had not stood there five hundred years. A grand Elizabethean pile is already decreed to succeed it. The fashionable architect will come driving down in his smart Brougham, with all his plans and papers. A host of mechanics will come speedily after him, by coach or by wagon: booths will be seen rising all around the old place, which will vanish away, and its superb successor rise where it stood, like a magical vision. Already are ponderous cases lying loaded, in London, with massive mantle-pieces of the finest Italian marble, marble busts, and heads of old Greek and Roman heroes, genuine burial-urns from Herculaneum and Pompeii, and vessels of terra-cotta, gloriously-sculptured vases, and even columns of verde antique – all from classic Italy – to adorn the walls of this same noble new house.
But, meantime, spite of the large income of Tom and Lady Barbara, the old squire has strange suspicions of mortgages, and dealings with Jews. He has actually inklings of horrid post-obits; and groans as he looks on his old oaks, as he rides through his woods and parks, foreseeing their overthrow; nay, he fancies he sees the land-agent among his quiet old farmers, like a wild-cat in a rabbit warren, startling them out of their long dream of ease and safety, with news of doubled rents, and notices to quit, to make way for threshing-machines, winnowing-machines, corn-crushers, patent ploughs, scufflers, scarifiers, and young men of more enterprise. And, sure enough, such will be the order of the day the moment the estate falls to the young squire. —Country Year Book.
PRESENCE OF MIND – A FRAGMENT
The Roman formula for summoning an earnest concentration of the faculties upon any object whatever, that happened to be critically urgent, was Hoc age, “Mind this!” or, in other words, do not mind that—non illud age. The antithetic formula was “aliud agere,” to mind something alien, or remote from the interest then clamoring for attention. Our modern military orders of “Attention!” and “Eyes strait!” were both included in the “Hoc age.” In the stern peremptoriness of this Roman formula we read a picturesque expression of the Roman character both as to its strength and its weakness – of the energy which brooked no faltering or delay (for beyond all other races the Roman was natus rebus agendis) – and also of the morbid craving for action, which was intolerant of any thing but the intensely practical.
In modern times, it is we of the Anglo-Saxon blood, that is, the British and the Americans of the United States, who inherit the Roman temperament with its vices and its fearful advantages of power. In the ancient Roman these vices appeared more barbarously conspicuous. We, the countrymen of Lord Bacon and Sir Isaac Newton, and