Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ little settees, a good massy table, and a fine large carved mantle-piece, with bright steel dogs instead of a modern stove, and logs of oak burning, if it be cold. At table, all his plate is of the most ancient make, and he drinks toasts and healths in tankards of ale that is strong enough to make a horse reel, but which he continually avows is as mild as mother’s milk, and wouldn’t hurt an infant. He has an old rosy butler, and loves very old venison, which fills the whole house with its perfume while roasting; and an old double-Gloucester cheese, full of jumpers and mites; and after it a bottle of old port, at which he is often joined by the parson, and always by a queer, quiet sort of a tall, thin man, in a seedy black coat, and with a crimson face, bearing testimony to the efficacy of the squire’s port and “mother’s milk.”

      This man is always to be seen about, and has been these twenty years. He goes with the squire a-coursing and shooting, and into the woods with him. He carries his shot-belt and powder-flask, and gives him out his chargings and his copper caps. He is as often seen about the steward’s house; and he comes in and out of the squire’s just as he pleases, always seating himself in a particular chair near the fire, and pinches the ears of the dogs, and gives the cat, now and then, a pinch of snuff as she lies sleeping in a chair; and when the squire’s old lady says, “How can you do so, Mr. Wagstaff?” he only gives a quiet, chuckling laugh, and says, “Oh, they like it, madam; they like it, you may depend.” That is the longest speech he ever makes, for he seldom does more than say “yes” and “no” to what is said to him, and still oftener gives only a quiet smile and a soft of little nasal “hum.” The squire has a vast affection for him, and always walks up to the little chamber which is allotted to him, once a week, to see that the maid does not neglect it; though at table he cuts many a sharp joke upon Wagstaff, to which Wagstaff only returns a smile and a shake of the head, which is more full of meaning to the squire than a long speech. Such is the old squire’s constant companion.

      But we have not yet done with the squire’s antiquities. He has an old woodman, an old shepherd, an old justice’s clerk, and almost all his farmers are old. He seems to have an antipathy to almost every thing that is not old. Young men are his aversion; they are such coxcombs, he says, nowadays. The only exception is a young woman. He always was a great admirer of the fair sex; though we are not going to rake up the floating stories of the neighborhood about the gallantries of his youth; but his lady, who is justly considered to have been as fine a woman as ever stepped in shoe-leather, is a striking proof of his judgment in women. Never, however, does his face relax into such pleasantness of smiles and humorous twinkles of the eye, as when he is in company with young ladies. He is full of sly compliments and knowing hints about their lovers, and is universally reckoned among them “a dear old gentleman.”

      When he meets a blooming country damsel crossing the park, or as he rides along a lane, he is sure to stop and have a word with her. “Aha, Mary! I know you, there! I can tell you by your mother’s eyes and lips that you’ve stole away from her. Ay, you’re a pretty slut enough, but I remember your mother. Gad! I don’t know whether you are entitled to carry her slippers after her! But never mind, you’re handsome enough; and I reckon you’re going to be married directly. Well, well, I won’t make you blush; so, good-by, Mary, good-by! Father and mother are both hearty – eh?”

      The routine of the old squire’s life may be summed up in a sentence: hearing cases and granting warrants and licenses, and making out commitments as justice; going through the woods to look after the growth, and trimming, and felling of his trees; going out with his keeper to reconnoitre the state of his covers and preserves; attending quarter sessions; dining occasionally with the judge on circuit; attending the county ball and the races; hunting and shooting, dining and singing a catch or glee with Wagstaff and the parson over his port. He has a large, dingy room, surrounded with dingy folios, and other books in vellum bindings, which he calls his library. Here he sits as justice; and here he receives his farmers on rent-days, and a wonderful effect it has on their imaginations; for who can think 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; СКАЧАТЬ