Some Roundabout Papers | Page 4

an infant to his chambers in
Brick Court, and he gave you some sugar-candy, for the doctor was
always good to children. That gentleman who well-nigh smothered you
by sitting down on you as you lay in a chair asleep was the learned Mr
S. Johnson, whose history of "Rasselas" you have never read, my pour
soul; and whose tragedy of "Irene" I don't believe any man in these
kingdoms ever perused. That tipsy Scotch gentleman who used to come
to the chambers sometimes, and at whom everybody laughed, wrote a
more amusing book than any of the scholars, your Mr Burke and your
Mr Johnson, and your Dr Goldsmith. Your father often took him home
in a chair to his lodgings; and has done as much for Parson Sterne in
Bond Street, the famous wit. Of course, my good creature, you
remember the Gordon Riots, and crying No Popery before Mr
Langdale's house, the Popish distiller's, and that bonny fire of my Lord
Mansfield's books in Bloomsbury Square? Bless us, what a heap of
illuminations you have seen! For the glorious victory over the
Americans at Breed's Hill; for the peace in 1814, and the beautiful
Chinese bridge in St James's Park; for the coronation of his Majesty,
whom you recollect as Prince of Wales, Goody, don't you? Yes; and
you went in a procession of laundresses to pay your respects to his
good lady, the injured Queen of England, at Brandenburg House; and
you remember your mother told you how she was taken to see the
Scotch lords executed at the Tower. And as for your grandmother, she
was born five months after the battle of Malplaquet, she was; where her
poor father was killed, fighting like a bold Briton for the Queen. With
the help of a "Wade's Chronology," I can make out ever so queer a
history for you, my poor old body, and a pedigree as authentic as many
in the peerage-books.
Peerage-books and pedigrees? What does she know about them?
Battles and victories, treasons, kings, and beheadings, literary
gentlemen, and the like, what have they ever been to her? Granny, did

you ever hear of General Wolfe? Your mother may have seen him
embark, and your father may have carried a musket under him. Your
grandmother may have cried huzza for Marlborough; but what is the
Prince Duke to you, and did you ever so much as hear tell of his name?
How many hundred or thousand of years had that toad lived who was
in the coal at the defunct exhibition? -- and yet he was not a bit better
informed than toads seven or eight hundred years younger.
"Don't talk to me your nonsense about Exhibitions, and Prince Dukes,
and toads in coals, or coals in toads, or what is it?" says granny. "I
know there was a good Queen Charlotte, for she left me snuff; and it
comforts me of a night when I lie awake."
To me there is something very touching in the notion of that little pinch
of comfort doled out to granny, and gratefully inhaled by her in the
darkness. Don't you remember what traditions there used to be of chests
of plate, bulses of diamonds, laces of inestimable value, sent out of the
country privately by the old Queen, to enrich certain relatives in M-ckl-
nb-rg Str-l-tz? Not all the treasure went. Non omnis moritur. A poor old
palsied thing at midnight is made happy sometimes as she lifts her
shaking old hand to her nose. Gliding noiselessly among the beds
where lie the poor creatures huddled in their cheerless dormitory, I
fancy an old ghost with a snuff-box that does not creak. "There, Goody,
take of my rappee. You will not sneeze, and I shall not say 'God bless
you.' But you will think kindly of old Queen Charlotte, won't you? Ah!
I had a many troubles, a many troubles. I was a prisoner almost so
much as you are. I had to eat boiled mutton every day: entre nous, I
abominated it. But I never complained. I swallowed it. I made the best
of a hard life. We have all our burdens to bear. But hark! I hear the
cock-crow, and snuff the morning air." And with this the royal ghost
vanishes up the chimney -- if there be a chimney in that dismal harem,
where poor old Twoshoes and her companions pass their nights -- their
dreary nights, their restless nights, their cold long nights, shared in
what glum companionship, illumined by what a feeble taper!
"Did I understand you, my good Twoshoes, to say that your mother was
seven-and-twenty years old when you were born, and that she married
your esteemed father when she herself was twenty-five? 1745, then,
was the date of