From the New Monthly Magazine. BY FRANCIS JACOX. another of the craft, "How sick and tremulous, the next morning, is the spirit that has dared so much only the night before!"* It is interesting, says an essayist on the subject of Early Rising, † to reflect upon the MR. DICKENS once observed, in one of change that comes over a man's mind on his earlier and most popular-not to say, waking up early in the morning after what more popular-works, that although to is called a good night's rest. He retired to restless and ardent minds morning may be bed with rather a good opinion of himself. the fitting season for exertion and activity, His conversation, in his own opinion at least, it is not always at that time that hope is had been, if not decidedly brilliant, essenstrongest, or the spirit most sanguine and tially agreeable. He had accomplished rathbuoyant. In trying and doubtful positions, er a neat bon mot, unearthed an apt quohe said, use, custom, a steady contem- tation, turned a graceful compliment in honplation of the difficulties which surround us, our of a fair neighbour, whose beaming eyes and a familiarity with them, imperceptibly evinced that it was duly appreciated, and diminish our apprehensions and beget com- delivered himself of a few well-constructed parative indifference, if not a vague and sentences on a subject under discussion with reckless confidence in some relief, the means so much effect, that respectful silence on all or nature of which we care not to foresee. sides proved him to be master of the situa"But when we come, fresh, upon such tion. He was pleased with the part he had things in the morning, with that dark and silent gap between us and yesterday; with every link in the brittle chain of hope to rivet afresh; our hot enthusiasm subdued, and cool, calm reason substituted in its stead; doubt and misgiving revive. "As the traveller sees farthest by day, and becomes aware of rugged mountains and trackless plains which the friendly darkness had shrouded from his sight and mind together, so the wayfarer in the toilsome path of human life sees, with each returning sun, some new obstacle to surmount, some new height to be attained. Distances stretch out before him which, last night, were scarcely taken into account, and the light which gilds all nature with its cheerful beams seems but to shine upon the weary obstacles that yet lie strewn between him and the grave." At night, as Mr. Procter sings, -in verces set to music by the Chevalier Neukomm, and familiar to the drawing-rooms of town, long long ago, long ago, At night all wrongs are right, And all perils of life grow smooth; Then why cometh the fierce daylight, When fancy is bright as truth? At night, particularly, says the author of a hardly appreciated novel," and in a scene of excitement, we remember with tenfold pleasure that which has pleased us, and we do so without dwelling on the possibly attendant evils, however they may occur to us at another time." But, in the words of Nicholas Nickleby, ch. liii. + Songs by Barry Cornwall," Midnight Rhymes." + Violet, or the Danseuse, ch. vii. He played affable but not familiar with the His collects his "Morning breaks"- here is the essayist's picture of this representative man's next morning" a winter morning of darkness visible-chilly and grim, no light, but a wannish glare.' The man struggles once more into consciousness somewhat obfuscated senses, and thinks upon his general position, past, present, and future. Last night's career of social and intellectual success naturally claims his earliest attention. What a very unpleasant change steals over the aspect of affairs! He had bade adieu to the company, not elated, not excited, simply satisfied with himself, and on good terms with everybody else - wrapped in a mild glow of tranquil self-complacency. What has become of it all? He does not look at the matter by any means from the same point of view. Words, smiles, looks, gestures, recur to him. Was he altogether so successful, so ingratiating and impressive, as he fondly imagined? A mist of doubt begins to spread over the scene. That bon mot hovered on the verge of absurdity. That quotation was just a stale trifle. Was the *Hawthorne, Transformation, ch. xx. † See an essay with that title in No. 331 of the Saturday Review. gleam of light that danced in the eyes of his fair neighbour, when he turned that easy compliment, a token of grateful pleasure or an indication of suppressed merriment at his expense? Was that respectful silence a tribute of public homage or an avowal of universal fatigue? In short, did he not make himself rather a bore? Was he not a little absurd? Did he not, on the whole, and speaking dispassionately, make a fool of himself? Such are the unwelcome thoughts that grate upon the waking mind. You feel exceedingly small. You are ready to apologize to all your acquaintances, individually and collectively. You meditate vaguely upon retiring from the world, embarking for Australia, or subsiding into a Lilliputian lodging at a fifth rate wateringplace, in Devon or Somerset. Probably, however, your satisfaction the night before, and your despondency at break of day, are equally exaggerated. Probably you did not make a fool of yourself, but probably also you did not electrify the public with either your wisdom or your wit. You were about as agreeable as anybody else, neither more nor less." Indeed, as the essayist goes on to show, the waking up of a morning is a sort of double process -a shaking off both of bodily slumber and of mental delusion- but its first shock is often over-harsh, and drives us from undue contentment into morbid self-abasement: the balance is only regained as the day advances and the judgment resumes its natural sway. Two sonnets of Wordsworth's, recording a thrush's jubilant ecstasies over-night, and the "sad vicissitude" in his wood-notes wild, next morning, admit of an entirely human application. The second sonnet commen ces: but how sub "Tis he whose yester-evening's high disdain Beat back the roaring storm dued and embellished with stories, illustrations, gestures, and phrases so broad and unceremonious, that you half expected the appearance of the Lady Margaret, to remind the master of the house that she had built that long gallery, and those oriel windows, for meditation and studious silence. But "call again in the morning, and you found him broken-hearted over some of the sorrows to which flesh is heir, or agitated by some college controversy, or debating with his apothecary how many scruples of senna should enter into his next draught, as though life and death were in the balance."* A page of Byron's Diary, at three-andthirty, opens with this wistfully self-addressed note of interrogation: I have been considering what can be the reason why I always wake, at a certain hour in the morning, and always in very bad spirits- I may say, in actual despair and despondency, in all respects-even of that which pleased me over-night. In about an hour or two this goes off, and I compose either to sleep again, or, at least, to quiet." The Very Reverend Isaac, Dean of Carlisle, and the, of malice aforethought, very irreverend George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron, had not much in common ;- - but this "next morning" hypochondria was to each of them a thorn in the flesh-associated with infinitely diverse circumstances, moral and metaphysical, but traceable in some essential particulars to an affinity in physical constitution. Burns knew what he was about when he sealed, as well as wrote, at midnight, the rapturous epistles to Clarinda that his cooler brains would have repudiated as pure "bosh" next morning. One of them thus winds up: ""Tis now the witching time of night;' and whatever is out of joint in the foregoing scrawl, impute it to enchantments and spells; for I cannot look over it, but will seal it up directly, as I don't care for to morrow's criticism upon it.' ‡ Next morning's verdicts are so apt to be in the teeth of last night's evidence. Not Does the hour's drowsy weight his glee re- to be eclipsed in pious ardour by any reli His daybreak note, a sad vicissitude! strain ? Or, like the nightingale, her joyous vein gious community, Laynez, we are told, at the twenty-fifth and last session at Trent, Pleased to renounce, does this dear Thrush at- solicited and obtained the boon that the tune His voice to suit the temper of yon Moon Under the presidency of Dean Milner, call at the lodge at Queen's College in the evening, and you heard him with stentorian lungs, we are told, tumbling out masses of knowledge, illuminated by remarks so pungent * Wordsworth's Miscellaneous Sonnets, xxxv. Jesuits should continue to be bound by their self-denying renunciation of all worldly wealth. But, says Father Paul," with the return of day other thoughts returned;" the council to reverse their sentence, so as and, on the morrow, Laynez persuaded says in Ecclesiast. Biog. vol. ii.) The Clapham Sect, by Sir James Stephen (Es ↑ Diary of Lord Byron, Feb. 2, 1821. To Clarinda, Let. xii. to leave to his society the privilege of holding estates as a body corporate.* Not without significance is the attempt that was made in the House of Commons, on the bill of Stafford's attainder being referred to a committee of the whole House, to defer the committee till next morning, "as the business was of great weight, and morning thoughts were the best and strongest; " but the motion for going into committee forthwith was carried. In such an affair, next morning would never do. Mr. Herman Melville's Adventures in the South Seas present a graphic sketch of his companion there, the long-limbed doctor, getting "mellow" one night on the liquor named Tee (inappropriately enough so named, for English ears at least), together with an old native toper, of hyper-haustive powers. It was a curious sight. Every one knows, that, so long as the occasion lasts, there is no stronger bond of sympathy and good feeling among men than getting tipsy together. And how earnestly a brace of worthies, thus employed, will endeavour to shed light upon, and elucidate, their mystical ideas! We are told to fancy Varvy and the doctor, then; lovingly tippling, and brimming over with a desire to become better acquainted; the doctor politely bent upon carrying on the conversation in the language of his host, and the old hermit persisting in trying to talk English. The result was, that between the two, Hesternis vitiis animum quoque prægravat they made such a fricassee of vowels and Next morning, after a drinking bout, where a man has committed himself, he knows not to what extent, is notoriously and beneficently a trying time. Multi tristantur post delicias, convivia, dies festos. Rattlebrained and light-headed at night; headachy and brow-bent next morning. Horace was not beating the air as a mere speculator or theorist, when he taught how last night's indulgence weighs down the body, and how the down-weighted body weighs down the mind too. unà. Corpus onustum Scott describes the belated actors in the Porteous riots as gliding about with "an humble and dismayed aspect, like men whose spirits being exhausted in the revel and the dangers of a desperate debauch over-night, are nerve-shaken, timorous, and unenterprising on the succeeding day."‡ His own Francis Osbaldistone, after the rude revel at his uncle, Sir Hildebrand's, § when morning light puts such a new colour on objects, sensations, and sentiments, is a case in point. Nay, is not the Wisest of men, King Solomon himself, as Prior paraphrases him? consonants, that it was enough to turn one's brain. "The next morning, on waking, I heard a voice from the tombs. It was the doctor, solemnly pronouncing himself a dead man. He was sitting up, with both hands clasped over his forehead, and his pale face a thousand times paler than ever. 'That infernal stuff has murdered me!' he cried. Heavens! my head's all wheels and springs, like the automaton chess-player. What's to be done, Paul? I'm poisoned.""† But, in the oracular words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, metaphorically designed to convey a political lesson, "A sick stomach and a throbbing head are as little favourable to just conceptions as the gay madness of the midnight carousal. This I drank; I liked it not: 'twas rage, 'twas is the morning after a debauch." And so noise; it was that the doctor, after drinking an herbal draught, concocted by his host, and eating a light meal, at noon, "felt much better," and began to behave himself more rationally, and see things more accurately, than was practicable either the last thing over-night, or the first thing next morning. It is a truthful picture that Wordsworth draws, of another pair of carousers, early on the morrow of their revel, —— Benjamin the Waggoner, pacing heavily beside his team, with his raffish Sailor-friend slouching alongside him, And, after their high-minded riot, In his rhetorical résumé of first this, that, and the other, - first friendship, first love, &c. &c., Mr. Slick of Slickville is not forgetful of "gettin' out o' winders at night [in school days], goin' down to old Ross's, orderin' a supper, and pocketin' your fust whole bottle o' wine-oh! that fust whole bottle christened the man, and you woke up sober next mornin', and got the fust taste o' the world- sour in the mouth, sour in the stomach, sour in the temper, and sour all over;-yes, that's the world."† Naïve and pithy is worthy maister Mansie Wauch's avowal, that on the morning after the business of the play-house, he had to take his breakfast in bed, a thing very uncommon to him, being generally up at cockcrow; but, on this occasion, "having a desperate sore head, and a squeamishness at the stomach, occasioned, I jealouse in a great measure, from what Mr. Glen and me had discussed at Widow Grassie's, in the shape of warm toddy, over our cracks concerning what is called the agricultural and manufacturing interests." Throughout the whole of the forepart of the day, Mansie remains rather queerish, as if something was working about his inwards, and a droll pain (he calls it) between his eyes. In vain he tries a turn at the spade, in his bit garden; it would not do; and when he comes in at one o'clock to his dinner, the steam of the fresh broth, instead of making him feel, as usual, as hungry as a hawk, is like to turn his stomach; while the sight of the sheep's head, "one of the primest ones I had seen the whole season, looked, for all the world, like the head of a boiled blackamoor, and made me as sick as a dog; so I could do nothing but take a turn out again, and swig away at the small beer, that never seemed able to slacken my drouth." + *The Waggoner, canto iv. The Attaché, ch. liv. Moir's Mansie Wauch, ch. xviii. "I would take refuge in weak punch," says Byron, - but rack (In each sense of the word), whene'er I fill My mild and midnight beakers to the brim, Wakes me NEXT MORNING With its synonym.* There was a great dinner at Charlottenburg, one day in April, 1730, where, says his English Excellency, Hotham, in a despatch about it, "we all got immoderately drunk," - his Prussian Majesty, Frederick William II., signally included. At this symposium it was that the king committed himselforally, and post-prandially to the proposition of marriage between his daughter and our Frederick, Prince of Wales. For, in a state of exhilaration, as Mr. Carlyle depicts him, he blabs out the secret, and they openly drink, "To the health of Wilhelmina, Princess of Wales!" Upon which the whole Palace of Charlottenburg now bursts into tripudiation; the very valets cutting capers, making somersaults, and rushing off with the news to Berlin. But how opens the ensuing chapter in Mr. Carlyle's history of that court? "Already next morning, after that grand dinner at Charlottenburg, Friedrich Wilhelm, awakening with his due headache, thought, and was heard saying, He had gone too far."† Or as Excellency Hotham reports the matter, in his despatch to my Lord Townshend at London, "So soon as his Majesty was sober, he found that he had gone too far at that grand dinner of Monday the 3d; and was in very bad humour in consequence." And when Frederick William was in bad humour even though it was not, like this, very bad woe, and again woe, to wife, children, and friends. Note-worthy among next mornings, after a long session over strong drink, is a domestic incident in the story of the Countess of Stair. Her husband, the celebrated earl, — otherwise a fond and admiring husband, pretty sure, on reaching home after a debauch, to pick a quarrel with his wife (for liquor soured, not dulcified, his blood), and sometimes even proceeded to blows. One night, in an extra transport, he struck her so severely on the upper part of the face as to draw blood. This done, incontinently his lordship fell asleep as soundly as though it were the sleep of the innocent, o'er which good angels keep tender watch and *Don Juan, canto iv. -was Carlyle's Hist. of Fredk. the Grt., vol. ii. book vii. ch. í. ii. Ibid., p. 162. THIRD SERIES. LIVING AGE. VOL. XXIX. 1357. So complete, indeed, and periodical was the reaction, that during some time, by one contemporary account, the regularly wrote a confession every forenoon when he was sober, and burned it every night when he was merry. ward. Lady Stair, we read, was so over-block, the axe, and the sawdust arose in his whelmed by a tumult of bitter and poignant mind."* feeling, that she made no attempt to bind up her wound. "She sat down on a sofa near her torpid husband, and wept and bled till morning. When his lordship awoke, and perceived her dishevelled and bloody figure, he was surprised to the last degree, and eagerly inquired how she came to be in such an unusual condition. She answered by detailing to him the whole history of his conduct on the preceding evening; which stung him so deeply with regret for he naturally possessed the most generous feelings-that he instantly vowed to his wife never afterwards to take any species of drink, except what was first passed through her hands." This vow, we are assured, he kept most scrupulously to the day of his death * for he never afterwards sat in any convivial company where his lady-wife could not attend to sanction his potations; and whenever he gave any entertainment, she always sat next him and filled his wine, till it was time for her to retire; after which, he drank only from a certain quantity which she had first laid aside. Another noticeable sort of next morning, with an alcoholic antecedent, is that typified in the Benbow of the poet Crabbe: With wine inflated, man is all upblown, Like Preston, the Jacobite conspirator against William and Mary in 1691, when irresolutely awaiting his fate in prison-urged to confess, and shrinking from the alternative, a simple question of life and death. As Macaulay describes this vacillation,- Preston listened to his brother Jacobites, and his courage rose; listened to the agents of the government, and his heart sank within him. In an evening when he had dined and drunk his claret, he feared nothing. He would die like a man, rather than save his neck by an act of baseness. But his temper was very different when he woke the next morning, when the courage which he had drawn from wine and company had evaporated, when he was alone with the iron grates and stone walls, and when the thought of the * See Traditions of Edinburgh, by Robert Chambers Story of the Countess of Stair. † Crabbe, The Borough, Let. xvi. As with the subjective and interior department of those who have spent the overnight in boozing, so with the objective and exterior aspect of those who have spent it at ball and rout, next morning worketh great annoy, and playeth strange pranks. The Latin poet who constructed an Art of Love counsels us to consult the daylight not only about gems, and purple-dyed wools, and the like, but about face and figure as well: Consule de gemmis, de tinctâ murice lanâ, The belle that bounded through the ball-room at midnight, artificially illuminated, shows so different, next morning, when daylight doth appear. Has not the same poet admonished unwary males, Tu fallaci nimium ne crede lucernæ ? All her complexion safe and sound; The black, which would not be confined, And mingles in her muddy checks. § Addison strenuously warned the belles of great Anna's time, that nothing wears out a fine face like the vigils of the card-table: hollow eyes, haggard looks, and pale complexions, being the natural indications of a female gamester. "Her morning sleeps are not able to repair her midnight watchings. I have known a woman carried off half dead from bassette, and have many a time grieved to see a person of quality gliding by me in her chair at two o'clock in the morning, and looking like a spectre amidst a glare of flambeau." Goldsmith's cosmopolite Chinese takes and makes an observation of the same kind, at a later hour next morning. He en |