Signor Tomkins turned to the waiter, who still lingered in the room for the definite answer of "ces, messieurs." Combang de persons o tabbledote ?" he inquired, with a fine air, as if he were speaking the French of Blois. "Je ne saurais vous dire exactement, Monsieur. Trente ;-trentecinq, peutêtre." "Ocoon dams?" "Oh, oui! Beaucoup de dames, Monsieur! Alors, vous viendrez tout deux, n'est-ce-pas ?" And, taking the reply for granted, he straightway disappeared. He says there will be no end to ladies. What a lucky thing for me I came abroad well provided. But what will you do?" "Do! As I said before, I shall go down as I am. There's no remedy for it. But tell me, Tomkins, how came you to think of making yourself such a swell? I fancied you had had enough of ladies." "I have not sought them, Stubbs! They lie in my path, you see. I wish you were nearer my height, Stubbs !" "Why?" "I could lend you all you want." "Thank you-but you're at least six inches taller than I am. Nothing of yours would fit me." "I am afraid not," observed Signor Tomkins, in a desponding tone, as he sat down on a carpet-bag. "You're not ashamed of me, I hope," said Stubbs, resolutely. "If so, I can make it quite square: dine by myself at a side-table, and cut the whole concern to-morrow.' Signor Tomkins rose from his seat, put out both hands, and grasped those of Stubbs. "Injure me not, my friend," he said, "by unworthy suspicions. Ashamed of you! No! I was only anxious to be of service. I would not that our compact should be so soon, so lightly broken!” "Beg your pardon. I was a little warm. I meant no harm. I'll stick to you as long as it's agreeable. In the mean time, while you're dressing, if you don't mind, I'll go and take a stroll, and see how the land lies." This was assented to by Signor Tomkins, who then proceeded to take out his things and dress. He had not miscalculated the time it would take, and had only just given the finishing curl to his whiskers when Stubbs returned, just as a gong in the hall below was loudly intimating that the evening meal was served. 66 By George!" said Stubbs, examining his friend's elaborate costume, "you have come it strong! You look as if you had just got out of a bandbox." "I hope I shall do," replied Signor Tomkins, taking a last look in "What did you make of it outside ?" the glass. "I had some jolly good fun! But I'll tell you all about it at dinner. Let's go down.' On this invitation, Signor Tomkins, not without design, linked his arm in that of Richard Stubbs, and they descended together. VOL. LVI. C 16 BEN JONSON'S MOROSE: TYPICALLY CONSIDERED. BY FRANCIS JACOX. WE (ἡμεῖς, ἵνα μὴ λέγωμεν ἔγω) must own to a sneaking kindness for Ben Jonson's Morose, on the one ground (with which alone we here propose to deal) that he is, by his author's preliminary definition, “a gentleman that loves no noise." Odious and ridiculous he may be, from first to last. But it is only with his horror of noise that we have any concern, in this typical tractate; and it so happens that a deranged physical economy gives us an unwelcome intensity of sympathy with the poor man's dread of din,-which fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind to his characteristic infirmity. Poor Morose-butt and laughing-stock of all that compass him about. He walks abroad with a huge turban of nightcaps on his head, buckled over his ears, to muffle the sounds of traffic and street bustle. He has been upon divers treaties with the fish-wives and orange-women, to abate their clamour, and articles have been propounded between them. To his sore vexation, the chimney-sweepers will be drawn in. To his great discouragement, the broom-men stand out stiffly. He cannot endure a costard-monger, but swoons if he hear one. A brazier is not suffered to dwell in the parish, nor an armourer. A trumpet frights him terribly, and the hautboys-out of his senses. The waits of the city have a pension of him not to come near that ward. He hath chosen a street to lie in so narrow at both ends, that it will receive no coaches, nor carts, nor any of these common noises. A bearward is prompted, one day, to come down with the dogs of four parishes that way, and cries his games under Master Morose's window; till he is sent crying away, with his head made a most bleeding spectacle to the multitude. Another time, a fencer, marching to his prize, has his drum most tragically run through, for taking that street in his way. The infliction of church bells, perpetually ringing, has made him devise a room, with double walls and treble ceilings; the windows close shut and caulked; and there he lives by candle-light. He turned away a man, last week, for having a pair of new shoes that creaked. And his present fellow waits on him in tenniscourt socks, or slippers soled with wool: and they talk to each other in a "trunk." At his first entry on the stage,* he appears with a tube in his hand, followed by Mute, his man,-and begins asking himself, "Cannot I, yet, find out a more compendious method, than by this trunk, to save my servants the labour of speech, and mine ears the discord of sounds? . . . Is it not possible, that thou shouldest answer me by signs, and I apprehend thee, fellow? Speak not, though I question you. You have taken the ring off from the street-door, as I bade you? answer me not by speech, but by silence; unless it be otherwise [MUTE makes a leg.]-very good." And Mute has fastened on a thick quilt, or flock * Namely in Act II. of "The Silent Woman." bed, on the outside of the door; that if they knock with their daggers, or with brickbats, they can make no noise. The Turk, in this divine discipline, Morose pronounces admirable, exceeding all the potentates of the earth: still waited on by mutes; and all his commands so executed; yea, even in the war, and in his marches, as Morose has heard, giving his charges and directions mainly by signs, and with silence: an exquisite art! and I am heartily ashamed, and angry oftentimes, that the princes of Christendom should suffer a barbarian to transcend them in so high a point of felicity." His wife must be a Silent Woman-not taking pleasure in her tongue, which is a woman's chiefest pleasure. She must be, quite literally, an inexpressive she. Poor Morose-hardly put upon, and sharply practised against. In the last act of the play, he gives some account of the training that has brought him to this pass. His rationale of the peculiarity that besets him, is not utterly irrational. His father had been wont to advise him, it seems, that, in order always to collect and contain his mind, he should endear himself to rest, and avoid turmoil; which cultivation of ataraxia is now grown to be another nature to him. "So that I came not to your public pleadings, or your places of noise; not that I neglect those things that make for the dignity of the commonwealth; but for the mere avoiding of clamours and impertinences of orators, that know not how to be silent. "And for the cause of noise," he piteously appeals to his persecutors, "am I now a suitor to you! You do not know in what a misery I have been exercised this day, what a torrent of evil! my very house turns round with the tumult! I dwell in a windmill: the perpetual motion is here, and not at Eltham." Poor Morose! again say we (μeîs, iva μǹ Xéywμev ëyw)—recognising with Sir Dauphine a plain confederacy to abuse a gentleman. Just as we say poor Malvolio, in a concatenation accordingly. It is like Mr. Babbage's neighbours, feeing the organ-boy and brass band to perturb the calculations of that harassed philosopher. And our sympathies are entirely with Mr. Babbage; our antipathies clean against the brass band. Would that every sitting magistrate were but of the same mind! Verily, for every sufferer like master Morose or Professor Babbage, Il faudrait, dans l'enclos d'un vaste logement, If in a city such temperaments must live, it should be in such a city as Mr. Disraeli pictures in Venice not yet fallen; where "all was stirring life, yet all was silent; the fantastic architecture, the glowing sky, the flitting gondolas, and the brilliant crowd gliding about with noiseless step -this city without sound-it seemed a dream!"† For our part (ueis, ïva μù déywμev eyw), thanks to a morbid temperament, we own to something like tolerance for that else intolerable Sybarite in the "Woman in White," who licenses no sound to be heard on the premises. His home ought to have been within the Castle of Indolence, under the protection and patronage of that enchanting wizard, whose programme of attractions included this comforting stanza: * Boileau, sat. vi. † Venetia, book v. ch. viii. No cocks, with me, to rustic labour call, Then again we We must be allowed a digression, in the crooked shape of one little note of interrogation. Is We or I the less objectionably egotistical, in papers of this pattern? To this hour We, I, the present writer, cannot satisfactorily resolve that query. Could We, I, or he, settle which is the least obtrusive form, that form should be the one henceforth consistently and exclusively adopted. I, may be, literally and philologically speaking, the most purely and simply egotistic form. But We, in its plural pretentiousness, is inclusive of, made up indeed of, capital I's. Sometimes the one form seems preferable, sometimes the other; though it might be hard to find exquisite reasons for the preference. However, the last unfinished paragraph ending (that is to say not ending) with a We, the next and complementary one will properly commence with that form of speech. So then We (for, ὡς προειρήκαμεν, καὶ ἄρτι πάλιν λέγω—and it is an Apostle who so uses WE verb and I verb in one sentence) must own ourselves, again, a very little less than kin, if not more than kind, to that poor Bachelor of the Albany, removed into country quarters, whose ear was "exceedingly aggrieved" by the various rural sounds which reached it from the surrounding meadows-who was "harassed a little by the grasshoppers, and pronounced a sweeping anathema upon the entire insect kingdom."t It is set down in holy writ that the grasshopper is a burden to old age. And if to old age, on the score of physical debility and broken spirits, why not to nervous sufferers of any age?-As to the irrepressible chatter, twitter, tittle-tattle, chirp and squeal, bubble and squeak, hedge-notes shrill and wood-notes wild and wearisome, of the so-called songsters of the grove, we have a cherished conviction that an enormous deal of humbug has been written in their praise. Here and there among them you may hear a musical tone, and a melodious trill,-but what an overbearing excess of unmusical notes; harsh, creaking, shrill, strident; and then, at the best, so stupidly monotonous. All well for a change, and for a few minutes at a time. But come to be shut up in a woodland district for a whole spring and summer season, and be so placed that you must listen to them; and then, if you still rave in unqualified panegyrics on the concert powers of thrush, blackbird, lark, chaffinch, yellowhammer, and all the sort of them,-why, me judice, reader (or, to adhere to the prescribed form, nobis judicibus), either you have a not over fine ear for music, or else uncommonly good nerves. very True, this may go nigh to bring us under the commination of one clause of the Welsh triad, which says, Let no one love such as dislike the Thomson, Castle of Indolence, canto i. st. xiv. †The Bachelor of the Albany, ch. xxi. xxvi. scent of cloves, the taste of milk, and the song of birds. But we hope not to be so far gone as the bird-hater commemorated by Chamfort, who, when he heard the nightingale in full song, exclaimed, “Ah, la vilaine bête!" Still, the continuous clamour of piping choristers in all keys, in season and out of season, in tune and out of tune, is a vexation to some folks, who again are the laughing-stock of others,--and who are therefore the more consoled when, as now and then happens, they find an authority to feel with them in their grievance, and to back their complaint. In the last series of Friends in Council there are, if our memory serve us, incidental but iterated allusions to the tiresome character of continuous birdbabble. But to resume our less particular and more miscellaneous annotations. We have a tenderness-haud ignari ejusdem mali-for a Launcelot Langstaff, Esquire's, peculiar sensibility to discordant sounds, to whom the rattling of a wheelbarrow was "horrible"-whom the noise of children drove distracted-and who once left excellent lodgings, merely because the landlady wore high-heeled shoes, in which she clattered up and down stairs, till, to use his own emphatic expression," they made life loathsome” to him.* Quid Romæ facium? How can constitution thus strung to sensation pitch, endure city life on any terms? The restless bells such din in steeples keep, That scarce the dead can in their churchyards sleep; Such a loud medley of confusion make, As drowsy Archer on the bench would wake.† Montaigne inclines to the opinion of his very worthy and approved good masters, the physicians, that certain complexions are agitated by the same sounds and instruments even to fury. He had seen some men who could not hear a bone gnawed under the table without manifest discomposure; "and there is scarce any man who is not disturbed at the sharp shrill noise that the file makes in grating upon iron; as also to hear chewing near them, or to hear any one speak who has an impediment in the throat or nose, will move some people even to anger and hatred."+ Charles Lamb declares at least his alter et idem, Elia, does-" I am constitutionally susceptible of noises. A carpenter's hammer, in a warm summer noon, will fret me into more than midsummer madness."§ Not from a guilty conscience, like Shakspeare's Thane, How is't with me when every noise appals me?|| To the pachydermatous and robustious it may seem pitiful, but to us galled jades and poor creatures whose withers are wrung, it is matter of melancholy interest to know, that such a warrior as Wallenstein was acutely sensitive to acoustic influences. That rugged son of steel and gunpowder, as Mr. Carlyle describes him, could not endure the least noise * Salmagundi, No. 8. Essais de Montaigne, l. ii. c. xii. † Oldham, after Juvenal. Essays of Elia: A Chapter on Ears. |