CHAPTER CII.

MORE CONCERNING THE AFORESAID TOBACCONIST.

I doubt nothing at all but that you shall like the man every day better than other; for verily I think he lacketh not of those qualities which should become any honest man to have, over and besides the gift of nature wherewith God hath above the common rate endued him.

ARCHBISHOP CRANMER.             

Mr. Allison was as quiet a subject as Peter Hopkins, but he was not like him a political quietist from indifference, for he had a warm sense of loyalty, and a well rooted attachment to the constitution of his country in church and state. His ancestors had suffered in the Great Rebellion, and much the greater part of their never large estates had been alienated to raise the fines imposed upon them as delinquents. The uncle whom he succeeded in Bishopsgate Street, had, in his early apprenticeship, assisted at burning the Rump, and in maturer years had joined as heartily in the rejoicings, when the Seven Bishops were released from the Tower: he subscribed to Walker's “Account of the Sufferings of the Clergy,” and had heard sermons preached by the famous Dr. Scott, (which were afterwards incorporated in his great work upon the Christian Life,) in the church of St. Peter le Poor (oddly so called, seeing that there are few districts within the City of London so rich, insomuch that the last historian of the metropolis believed the parish to have scarcely a poor family in it); and in All-hallows, Lombard Street, where, during the reign of the Godly, the puritanical vestry passed a resolution that if any persons should come to the church “on the day called Christ's birth-day,” they should be compelled to leave it.

In these principles Mr. Allison had grown up; and without any profession of extra-religion, or ever wearing a sanctified face, he had in the evening of his life attained “the end of the commandment, which is charity, proceeding from a pure heart, and a good conscience, and a faith unfeigned.” London in his days was a better school for young men in trade than it ever was before, or has been since. The civic power had quietly and imperceptibly put an end to that club-law which once made the apprentices a turbulent and formidable body, at any moment armed as well as ready for a riot; and masters exercised a sort of parental controul over the youth entrusted to them, which in later times it may be feared has not been so conscientiously exerted, because it is not likely to be so patiently endured. Trade itself had not then been corrupted by that ruinous spirit of competition, which, more than any other of the evils now pressing upon us, deserves to be called the curse of England in the present age. At all times men have been to be found, who engaged in hazardous speculations, gamester-like, according to their opportunities, or who mistaking the means for the end, devoted themselves with miserable fidelity to the service of Mammon. But “Live and let live,” had not yet become a maxim of obsolete morality. We had our monarchy, our hierarchy and our aristocracy,—God be praised for the benefits which have been derived from all three, and God in his mercy continue them to us! but we had no plutarchy, no millionaires, no great capitalists to break down the honest and industrious trader with the weight of their overbearing and overwhelming wealth. They who had enriched themselves in the course of regular and honourable commerce, withdrew from business, and left the field to others. Feudal tyranny had past away, and moneyed tyranny had not yet arisen in its stead—a tyranny baser in its origin, not more merciful in its operations, and with less in its appendages to redeem it.

Trade in Mr. Allison's days was a school of thrift and probity, as much as of profit and loss; such his shop had been when he succeeded to it upon his uncle's decease, and such it continued to be when he transmitted it to his son. Old Mr. Strahan the printer (the founder of his typarchical dynasty) said to Dr. Johnson, that “there are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money;” and he added, that “the more one thinks of this, the juster it will appear.” Johnson agreed with him; and though it was a money-maker's observation, and though the more it is considered now, the more fallacious it will be found, the general system of trade might have justified it at that time. The entrance of an Exciseman never occasioned any alarm or apprehension at No. 113, Bishopsgate Street-Within, nor any uncomfortable feeling, unless the officer happened to be one, who, by giving unnecessary trouble, and by gratuitous incivility in the exercise of authority, made an equitable law odious in its execution. They never there mixed weeds with their tobacco, nor adulterated it in any worse way; and their snuff was never rendered more pungent by stirring into it a certain proportion of pounded glass. The duties were honestly paid, with a clear perception that the impost fell lightly upon all whom it affected, and affected those only who chose to indulge themselves in a pleasure which was still cheap, and which, without any injurious privation, they might forego. Nay, when our good man expatiated upon the uses of tobacco, which Mr. Bacon demurred at, and the Doctor sometimes playfully disputed, he ventured an opinion that among the final causes for which so excellent an herb had been created, the facilities afforded by it toward raising the revenue in a well-governed country like our own, might be one.

There was a strong family likeness between him and his sister, both in countenance and disposition. Elizabeth Allison was a person for whom the best and wisest man might have thanked Providence, if she had been allotted to him for help-mate. But though she had, in Shakspeare's language, “withered on the virgin thorn,” hers had not been a life of single blessedness: she had been a blessing first to her parents; then to her brother and her brother's family, where she relieved an amiable, but sickly sister-in-law, from those domestic offices which require activity and forethought; lastly, after the dispersion of his sons, the transfer of the business to the eldest, and the breaking up of his old establishment, to the widower and his daughter, the only child who cleaved to him,—not like Ruth to Naomi, by a meritorious act of duty, for in her case it was in the ordinary course of things, without either sacrifice or choice; but the effect in endearing her to him was the same.

In advanced stages of society, and no where more than in England at this time, the tendency of all things is to weaken the relations between parent and child, and frequently to destroy them, reducing human nature in this respect nearer to the level of animal life. Perhaps the greater number of male children who are “born into the world” in our part of it, are put out at as early an age, proportionally, as the young bird is driven from its nest, or the young beast turned off by its dam as being capable of feeding and protecting itself; and in many instances they are as totally lost to the parent, though not in like manner forgotten. Mr. Allison never saw all his children together after his removal from London. The only time when his three sons met at the Grange, was when they came there to attend their father's funeral; nor would they then have been assembled, if the Captain's ship had not happened to have recently arrived in port.

This is a state of things more favorable to the wealth than to the happiness of nations. It was a natural and pious custom in patriarchal times that the dead should be gathered unto their people. “Bury me,” said Jacob, when he gave his dying charge to his sons,—“bury me with my fathers, in the cave that is in the field of Machpelah, which is before Mamre in the land of Canaan, which Abraham bought with the field of Ephron the Hittite, for a possession of a burying place. There they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife; there they buried Isaac and Rebecca his wife; and there I buried Leah.” Had such a passage occurred in Homer, or in Dante, all critics would have concurred in admiring the truth and beauty of the sentiment. He had buried his beloved Rachel by the way where she died; but although he remembered this at his death, the orders which he gave were that his own remains should be laid in the sepulchre of his fathers. The same feeling prevails among many, or most of those savage tribes who are not utterly degraded. With them the tree is not left to lie where it falls. The body of one who dies on an expedition is interred on the spot, if distance or other circumstances render it inconvenient to transport the corpse; but however long the journey, it is considered as a sacred duty that the bones should at some time or other be brought home. In Scotland, where the common rites of sepulture are performed with less decency than in any other Christian country, the care with which family burial-grounds in the remoter parts are preserved, may be referred as much to natural feeling, as to hereditary pride.

But as indigenous flowers are eradicated by the spade and plough, so this feeling is destroyed in the stirring and bustling intercourse of commercial life. No room is left for it: as little of it at this time remains in wide America as in thickly peopled England. That to which soldiers and sailors are reconciled by the spirit of their profession and the chances of war and of the seas, the love of adventure and the desire of advancement cause others to regard with the same indifference; and these motives are so prevalent, that the dispersion of families and the consequent disruption of natural ties, if not occasioned by necessity, would now in most instances be the effect of choice. Even those to whom it is an inevitable evil, and who feel it deeply as such, look upon it as something in the appointed course of things, as much as infirmity and age and death.

It is well for us that in early life we never think of the vicissitudes which lie before us; or look to them only with pleasurable anticipations as they approach.

                                      Youth
Knows nought of changes: Age hath traced them oft,
Expects and can interpret them.1

The thought of them, when it comes across us in middle life, brings with it only a transient sadness, like the shadow of a passing cloud. We turn our eyes from them while they are in prospect, but when they are in retrospect many a longing lingering look is cast behind. So long as Mr. Allison was in business he looked to Thaxted Grange as the place where he hoped one day to enjoy the blessings of retirement,—that otium cum dignitate, which in a certain sense the prudent citizen is more likely to attain than the successful statesman. It was the pleasure of recollection that gave this hope its zest and its strength. But after the object which during so many years he had held in view, had been obtained, his day-dreams, if he had allowed them to take their course, would have recurred more frequently to Bishopsgate Street than they had ever wandered from thence to the scenes of his boyhood. They recurred thither oftener than he wished, although few men have been more masters of themselves; and then the remembrance of his wife, whom he had lost by a lingering disease in middle age; and of the children, those who had died during their childhood, and those who in reality were almost as much lost to him in the ways of the world, made him alway turn for comfort to the prospect of that better state of existence in which they should once more all be gathered together, and where there would be neither change nor parting. His thoughts often fell into this train, when on summer evenings he was taking a solitary pipe in his arbour, with the church in sight, and the church yard wherein at no distant time he was to be laid in his last abode. Such musings induced a sense of sober piety,—of thankfulness for former blessings, contentment with the present, and humble yet sure and certain hope for futurity, which might vainly have been sought at prayer meetings, or evening lectures, where indeed little good can ever be obtained without some deleterious admixture, or alloy of baser feelings.

1 ISAAC COMMENUS.

The happiness which he had found in retirement was of a different kind from what he had contemplated: for the shades of evening were gathering when he reached the place of his long-wished-for rest, and the picture of it which had imprinted itself on his imagination was a morning view. But he had been prepared for this by that slow change of which we are not aware during its progress till we see it reflected in others, and are thus made conscious of it in ourselves; and he found a satisfaction in the station which he occupied there, too worthy in its nature to be called pride, and which had not entered into his anticipations. It is said to have been a saying of George the Third, that the happiest condition in which an Englishman could be placed, was just below that wherein it would have been necessary for him to act as a Justice of the Peace, and above that which would have rendered him liable to parochial duties. This was just Mr. Allison's position: there was nothing which brought him into rivalry or competition with the surrounding Squirarchy, and the yeomen and peasantry respected him for his own character, as well as for his name's-sake. He gave employment to more persons than when he was engaged in trade, and his indirect influence over them was greater; that of his sister was still more. The elders of the village remembered her in her youth, and loved her for what she then had been as well as for what she now was; the young looked up to her as the Lady Bountiful, to whom no one that needed advice or assistance ever applied in vain. She it was who provided those much approved plum-cakes, not the less savoury for being both homely and wholesome, the thought of which induced the children to look on to their Lent examination with hope, and prepare for it with alacrity. Those offices in a parish which are the province of the Clergyman's wife, when he has made choice of one who knows her duty and has both will and ability to discharge it, Miss Allison performed; and she rendered Mr. Bacon the farther, and to him individually the greater service of imparting to his daughter those instructions which she had no mother to impart. Deborah could not have had a better teacher; but as the present chapter has extended to a sufficient length,

Diremo il resto in quel che vien dipoi,
Per non venire a noja a me e voi. 2

2 ORLANDO INNAMORATO.