CHAPTER LXXI.

TRANSITION IN OUR NARRATIVE PREPARATORY TO A CHANGE IN THE DOCTOR'S LIFE. A SAD STORY SUPPRESSED. THE AUTHOR PROTESTS AGAINST PLAYING WITH THE FEELINGS OF HIS READERS. ALL ARE NOT MERRY THAT SEEM MIRTHFUL. THE SCAFFOLD A STAGE. DON RODRIGO CALDERON. THISTLEWOOD. THE WORLD A MASQUERADE, BUT THE DOCTOR ALWAYS IN HIS OWN CHARACTER.

This breaks no rule of order.
If order were infringed then should I flee
From my chief purpose, and my mark should miss.
Order is Nature's beauty, and the way
To Order is by rules that Art hath found.
                                                                    GWILLIM.

The question “Who was the Doctor?” has now methinks been answered, though not fully, yet sufficiently for the present stage of our memorials, while he is still a bachelor, a single man, an imperfect individual, half only of the whole being which by the laws of nature, and of Christian polity it was designed that man should become.

The next question therefore that presents itself for consideration relates to that other, and as he sometimes called it better half, which upon the union of the two moieties made him a whole man.—Who was Mrs. Dove?

The reader has been informed how my friend in his early manhood when about-to-be-a-Doctor, fell in love. Upon that part of his history I have related all that he communicated, which was all that could by me be known, and probably all there was to know. From that time he never fell in love again; nor did he ever run into it; but as was formerly intimated, he once caught the affection. The history of this attachment I heard from others; he had suffered too deeply ever to speak of it himself; and having maturely considered the matter I have determined not to relate the circumstances. Suffice it to say that he might at the same time have caught from the same person an insidious and mortal disease, if his constitution had been as susceptible of the one contagion, as his heart was of the other. The tale is too painful to be told. There are authors enough in the world who delight in drawing tears; there will always be young readers enough who are not unwilling to shed them; and perhaps it may be wholesome for the young and happy upon whose tears there is no other call.

Not that the author is to be admired, or even excused, who draws too largely upon our lacrymal glands. The pathetic is a string which may be touched by an unskilful hand, and which has often been played upon by an unfeeling one.

For my own part, I wish neither to make my readers laugh or weep. It is enough for me, if I may sometimes bring a gleam of sunshine upon thy brow, Pensoso; and a watery one over thy sight, Buonallegro; a smile upon Penserosa's lips, a dimple in Amanda's cheek, and some quiet tears, Sophronia, into those mild eyes, which have shed so many scalding ones! When my subject leads me to distressful scenes, it will as Southey says, not be

        —my purpose e'er to entertain
The heart with useless grief; but, as I may,
Blend in my calm and meditative strain
Consolatory thoughts, the balm for real pain.1

1 Tale of PARAGUAY.

The maxim that an author who desires to make us weep must be affected himself by what he writes, is too trite to be repeated in its original language. Both authors and actors however can produce this effect without eliciting a spark of feeling from their own hearts; and what perhaps may be deemed more remarkable, they can with the same success excite merriment in others, without partaking of it in the slightest degree themselves. No man ever made his contemporaries laugh more heartily than Scarron, whose bodily sufferings were such that he wished for himself

                 à toute heure
Ou la mort, ou santé meilleure:

And who describes himself in his epistle to Sarazin, as

Un Pauvret
Tres-maigret;
Au col tors,
Dont le corps
Tout tortu,
Tout bossu,
Suranné,
De'charné,
Est reduit
Jour et nuit,
A souffrir
Sans guerir
Des tourmens
Vehemens.

It may be said perhaps that Scarron's disposition was eminently cheerful, and that by indulging in buffoonery he produced in himself a pleasurable excitement not unlike that which others seek from strong liquors, or from opium; and therefore that his example tends to invalidate the assertion in support of which it was adduced. This is a plausible objection; and I am far from undervaluing the philosophy of Pantagruelism, and from denying that its effects may, and are likely to be as salutary, as any that were ever produced by the proud doctrines of the Porch. But I question Scarron's right to the appellation of a Pantagruelist; his humour had neither the heighth nor the depth of that philosophy.

There is a well-known anecdote of a physician, who being called in to an unknown patient, found him suffering under the deepest depression of mind, without any discoverable disease, or other assignable cause. The physician advised him to seek for cheerful objects, and recommended him especially to go to the theatre and see a famous actor then in the meridian of his powers, whose comic talents were unrivalled. Alas! the comedian who kept crowded theatres in a roar was this poor hypochondriac himself!

The state of mind in which such men play their part, whether as authors or actors, was confessed in a letter written from Yarmouth Gaol to the Doctor's friend Miller, by a then well-known performer in this line, George Alexander Stevens. He wrote to describe his distress in prison, and to request that Miller would endeavour to make a small collection for him, some night at a concert; and he told his sad tale sportively. But breaking off that strain he said; “You may think I can have no sense, that while I am thus wretched I should offer at ridicule! But, Sir, people constituted like me, with a disproportionate levity of spirits, are always most merry when they are most miserable; and quicken like the eyes of the consumptive, which are always brightest the nearer a patient approaches to dissolution.”

It is one thing to jest, it is another to be mirthful. Sir Thomas More jested as he ascended the scaffold. In cases of violent death, and especially upon an unjust sentence, this is not surprizing; because the sufferer has not been weakened by a wasting malady, and is in a state of high mental excitement and exertion. But even when dissolution comes in the course of nature, there are instances of men who have died with a jest upon their lips. Garci Sanchez de Badajoz when he was at the point of death desired that he might be dressed in the habit of St. Francis; this was accordingly done, and over the Franciscan frock they put on his habit of Santiago, for he was a knight of that order. It was a point of devotion with him to wear the one dress, a point of honour to wear the other; but looking at himself in this double attire, he said to those who surrounded his death-bed, “The Lord will say to me presently, my friend Garci Sanchez, you come very well wrapt up! (muy arropado) and I shall reply, Lord, it is no wonder, for it was winter when I set off.”

The author who relates this anecdote, remarks that o morrer com graça he muyto bom, e com graças he muyto māo: the observation is good but untranslateable, because it plays upon the word which means grace as well as wit. The anecdote itself is an example of the ruling humour “strong in death;” perhaps also of that pride or vanity, call it which we will, which so often, when mind and body have not yielded to natural decay, or been broken down by suffering, clings to the last in those whom it has strongly possessed. Don Rodrigo Calderon whose fall and exemplary contrition served as a favourite topic for the poets of his day, wore a Franciscan habit at his execution, as an outward and visible sign of penitence and humiliation; as he ascended the scaffold, he lifted the skirts of the habit with such an air that his attendant confessor thought it necessary to reprove him for such an instance of ill-timed regard to his appearance. Don Rodrigo excused himself by saying that he had all his life carried himself gracefully!

The author by whom this is related calls it an instance of illustrious hypocrisy. In my judgement the Father Confessor who gave occasion for it deserves a censure far more than the penitent sufferer. The movement beyond all doubt was purely habitual, as much so as the act of lifting his feet to ascend the steps of the scaffold; but the undeserved reproof made him feel how curiously whatever he did was remarked; and that consciousness reminded him that he had a part to support, when his whole thoughts would otherwise have been far differently directed.

A personage in one of Webster's Plays says,

I knew a man that was to lose his head
Feed with an excellent good appetite
To strengthen his heart, scarce half an hour before,
And if he did, it only was to speak.

Probably the dramatist alluded to some well known fact which was at that time of recent occurrence. When the desperate and atrocious traitor Thistlewood was on the scaffold, his demeanour was that of a man who was resolved boldly to meet the fate he had deserved; in the few words which were exchanged between him and his fellow criminals he observed, that the grand question whether or not the soul was immortal would soon be solved for them. No expression of hope escaped him, no breathing of repentance; no spark of grace appeared. Yet (it is a fact, which whether it be more consolatory or awful, ought to be known,) on the night after the sentence, and preceding his execution, while he supposed that the person who was appointed to watch him in his cell, was asleep, this miserable man was seen by that person repeatedly to rise upon his knees, and heard repeatedly calling upon Christ his Saviour, to have mercy upon him, and to forgive him his sins!

All men and women are verily, as Shakespear has said of them, merely players,—when we see them upon the stage of the world; that is when they are seen any where except in the freedom and undressed intimacy of private life. There is a wide difference indeed in the performers, as there is at a masquerade between those who assume a character, and those who wear dominos; some play off the agreeable, or the disagreeable for the sake of attracting notice; others retire as it were into themselves; but you can judge as little of the one as of the other. It is even possible to be acquainted with a man long and familiarly, and as we may suppose intimately, and yet not to know him thoroughly or well. There may be parts of his character with which we have never come in contact,—recesses which have never been opened to us,—springs upon which we have never touched. Many there are who can keep their vices secret; would that all bad men had sense and shame enough to do so, or were compelled to it by the fear of public opinion! Shame of a very different nature,—a moral shamefacedness,— which if not itself an instinctive virtue, is near akin to one, makes those who are endowed with the best and highest feelings, conceal them from all common eyes; and for our performance of religious duties,—our manifestations of piety,—we have been warned that what of this kind is done to be seen of men, will not be rewarded openly before men and angels at the last.

If I knew my venerable friend better than I ever knew any other man, it was because he was in many respects unlike other men, and in few points more unlike them than in this, that he always appeared what he was,—neither better nor worse. With a discursive intellect and a fantastic imagination, he retained his simplicity of heart. He had kept that heart unspotted from the world; his father's blessing was upon him, and he prized it beyond all that the world could have bestowed. Crowe says of us,

                Our better mind
Is as a Sunday's garment, then put on
When we have nought to do; but at our work
We wear a worse for thrift!

It was not so with him: his better mind was not as a garment to be put on and off at pleasure; it was like its plumage to a bird, its beauty and its fragrance to a flower, except that it was not liable to be ruffled, nor to fade, nor to exhale and pass away. His mind was like a peacock always in full attire; it was only at times indeed, (to pursue the similitude,) that he expanded and displayed it; but its richness and variety never could be concealed from those who had eyes to see them.

                 —His sweetest mind
    'Twixt mildness tempered and low courtesy,
Could leave as soon to be, as not be kind.
    Churlish despite ne'er looked from his calm eye,
Much less commanded in his gentle heart;
    To baser men fair looks he would impart;
Nor could he cloak ill thoughts in complimental art.2

What he was in boyhood has been seen, and something also of his manlier years; but as yet little of the ripe fruits of his intellectual autumn have been set before the readers. No such banquet was promised them as that with which they are to be regaled. “The booksellers,” says Somner the antiquary, in an unpublished letter to Dugdale, “affect a great deal of title as advantageous for the sale; but judicious men dislike it, as savouring of too much ostentation, and suspecting the wine is not good where so much bush is hung out.” Somebody, I forget who, wrote a book upon the titles of books, regarding the title as a most important part of the composition. The bookseller's fashion of which Somner speaks has long been obsolete; mine is a brief title promising little, but intending much. It specifies only the Doctor; but his gravities and his levities, his opinions of men and things, his speculations moral and political, physical and spiritual, his philosophy and his religion, each blending with each, and all with all, these are comprised in the &c. of my title page,—these and his Pantagruelism to boot. When I meditate upon these I may exclaim with the poet:—

Mnemosyne hath kiss'd the kingly Jove,
And entertained a feast within my brain.3

These I shall produce for the entertainment of the idle reader, and for the recreation of the busy one; for the amusement of the young, and the contentment of the old; for the pleasure of the wise, and the approbation of the good; and these when produced will be the monument of Daniel Dove. Of such a man it may indeed be said that he

Is his own marble; and his merit can
Cut him to any figure, and express
More art than Death's Cathedral palaces,
Where royal ashes keep their court!4

Some of my contemporaries may remember a story once current at Cambridge, of a luckless undergraduate, who being examined for his degree, and failing in every subject upon which he was tried, complained that he had not been questioned upon the things which he knew. Upon which the examining master, moved less to compassion by the impenetrable dulness of the man than to anger by his unreasonable complaint, tore off about an inch of paper, and pushing it towards him, desired him to write upon that all he knew!

2 PHINEAS FLETCHER, 186.

3 ROBERT GREEN.

4 MIDDLETON.

And yet bulky books are composed, or compiled by men who know as little as this poor empty individual. Tracts and treatises and tomes, may be, and are written by persons, to whom the smallest square sheet of delicate note paper, rose-coloured, or green, or blue, with its embossed border, manufactured expressly for ladies' fingers and crow quills, would afford ample room, and verge enough, for expounding the sum total of their knowledge upon the subject whereon they undertake to enlighten the public.

Were it possible for me to pour out all that I have taken in from him, of whose accumulated stores I, alas! am now the sole living depository, I know not to what extent the precious reminiscences might run.

        Per sua gratia singulare
Par ch' io habbi nel capo una seguenza,
Una fontana, un fiume, un lago, un mare,
        Id est un pantanaccio d'eloquenza. 5

5 MATTEO FRANZESI.

Sidronius Hosschius has supplied me with a simile for this stream of recollections.

Æstuat et cursu nunquam cessante laborat
    Eridanus, fessis irrequietus aquis;
Spumeus it, fervensque, undamque supervenit unda;
    Hæc illam, sed et hanc non minus ista premit.
Volvitur, et volvit pariter, motuque perenni
    Truditur à fluctu posteriore prior.

As I shall proceed

Excipiet curam nova cura, laborque laborem,
    Nec minus exhausto quod superabit erit.

But for stores which in this way have been received, the best compacted memory is like a sieve; more of necessity slips through than stops upon the way; and well is it, if that which is of most value be what remains behind. I have pledged myself, therefore, to no more than I can perform; and this the reader shall have within reasonable limits, and in due time, provided the performance be not prevented by any of the evils incident to human life.

At present, my business is to answer the question “Who was Mrs. Dove?”