Philip Gilbert Hamerton | Page 8

time was beginning to be lucrative, and would no doubt have become much more so in a few years; but the blow to his happiness that occurred in the September of 1834 produced such discouragement that he sought relief from his depression in the society of lively companions. Most unfortunately for him, there was no lively masculine society in the place where he lived that was not at the same time a constant incitement to drinking. There were a few places in the Lancashire of those days where convivial habits were carried to such a degree that they destroyed what ought to have been the flower of the male population. The strong and hearty men who believed that they could be imprudent with impunity, the lively, intelligent, and sociable men who wanted the wittiest and brightest talk that was to be had in the neighborhood, the bachelor whose hearth was lonely, and the widower whose house had been made desolate, all these were tempted to join meetings of merry companions who set no limits to the strength or the quantity of their potations. My poor father was a man of great physical endowments, and he came at last to have a mistaken pride in being able to drink deeply without betraying any evil effects; but a few years of such an existence undermined one of the finest constitutions ever given to mortal man. A quarryman once told me that my father had appeared at the quarry at six o'clock in the morning looking quite fresh and hearty, when, taking up the heaviest sledge-hammer he could find, he gayly challenged the men to try who could throw it farthest. None of them came near him, on which he turned and said with a laugh of satisfaction, --"Not bad that, for a man who drank thirty glasses of brandy the day before!" Whether he had ever approached such a formidable number I will not venture to say, but the incident exactly paints my father in his northern pride of strength, the fatal pride that believes itself able to resist poison because it has the muscles of an athlete.
It was always said by those who knew the family that my father was the cleverest member of it, but his ability must have expended itself in witty conversation and in his professional work, as I do not remember the smallest evidence of what are called intellectual tastes. My mother had a few books that had belonged to her family, and to these my father added scarcely anything. I can remember his books quite clearly, even at this distance of time. One was a biography of William IV., another a set of sketches of Reform Ministers, a third was Baines's "History of Lancashire," a fourth a Geographical Dictionary. These were, I believe, almost all the books (not concerned with the legal profession) that my father ever purchased. His bookcase did not contain a single volume by the most popular English poets of his own time, nor even so much as a novel by Sir Walter Scott. I have no recollection of ever having seen him read a book, but he took in the "Times" newspaper, and I clearly remember that he read the leading articles, which it was the fashion at that time to look upon as models of style. This absence of interest in literature was accompanied by that complete and absolute indifference to the fine arts which was so common in the middle classes and the country aristocracy of those days. I mention these deficiencies to explain the extreme dulness of my poor father's existence during his widowhood, a dulness that a lover of books must have a difficulty in imagining. A man living alone with servants (for his son's childhood was spent elsewhere), who took hardly any interest in a profession that had become little more than nominal for him, who had not even the stimulus of a desire to accumulate wealth (almost the only recognized object in the place where he lived), a man who had no intellectual pursuits whatever, and whose youth was too far behind him for any joyous physical activity, was condemned to seek such amusements as the customs of the place afforded, and these all led to drinking. He and his friends drank when they were together to make society merrier, and when they happened to be alone they drank to make solitude endurable. Had they drunk light wines like French peasants, or beer like Germans, they might have lasted longer, but their favorite drink was brandy in hot strong grogs, accompanied by unlimited tobacco. They dined in the middle of the day, and had the spirit decanters and the tobacco-box on the table instead of dessert, frequently drinking through the whole afternoon and a long evening