as in a mesmeric sleep, the second grand scene of the human drama, where, for aught known to the contrary, the heel of the present cobbler may be made a gag to the mouth of the late chatting Prime Minister of green bags and budgets—these vile imitators of that fellow who once carried the purse amongst a very respectable little company of our earth's poor world-worn reformers. Meanwhile I look back to the morning of the 9th of August, 1811, when I arose at Bowden, no more there to live a single person, and stitched up a fellow to a shoe I had made on the previous day, to form my wedding pair, with which I walked down to St. Boswell's here, meeting my bride, with a very few friends, where the priest paid us the respect of attending in our cottage, and joining us by one of the most beautiful sacramental sort of ceremonies that can be heard in the whole range of human composition. Two things have been very peculiarly gratifying to me through life-to see loving couples linked together in honest wedlock, and little children drink milk; and these pleasures are particularly heightened when they happen to be sensible, cheerful-looking young people, and curly-haired children. So, of course, my own marriage was a treat which I have not lost the relish of to this day and hour. CHAPTER XXVI. HE first month of marriage is verily a lovely and loving affair-the summer blossom month in a man's life, come the autumn fruit as it may. Nothing here below the moon falls so short in idea of the reality as the picture of marriage in the imagination of the bachelor, when occasionally amongst his most genuine calculations of cool prudence such "a change comes o'er the spirit of his dream!" No, this is so like the joining of the soul and the body that there seems to be no proper comprehension of it until the junction is effected. He must be a very coarse sort of a once married man who, ever in after life, no matter to what age he live, cannot warm his cold heart in a winter night with a casual reflection on the first month of his marriage-I might say his first marriage; but this might appear an invidious distinction, though I have no doubt whatever that a second marriage may often be as agreeable as a first, since so much depends on circumstances. But the fellow who cannot, particularly with the casual assistance of a single bottle of good evening ale, warm his old heart of seventy with the thought of his marriage week five-and-fifty years ago, is not a right old chap. I should even want faith to credit him a pair of winter shoes, how ever cold-like he might look amongst the frozen dews. "Tis pity that first month of marriage does not last the long life throughout; and yet, in such case, what would become of its natural effects? when such are to be palpably forthcoming, and constitute "life's cares," which "are comforts," as we all know as well as did the grand gloomy bard of starlight and solemn shadow.. At anyrate, we may say of marriage what Mr. Macbone* said when rallied upon the inutility of his profession: "Oh! man, there's shinteel manners, an' mony muckle mair grand tings to be learnt at a dansin'-skule, forby the bare dansin'." The woman of our heart, however, never in any month of her life. looks exactly so well, either before or after, in the eyes of her husband as in the first month of her marriage, when he finds he is succeeding in polishing off the maiden shyness from his fair bride, and letting the native modesty shine out unsophisticated, in its own fine-tinted colours, to adorn and set out her other housewife virtues, and form, as it were, the rose-knot in her dress cap. Well, it is needless to attempt an illustration of a honeymoon, which shines with a milder light than any other moon throughout a long lifetime. He who has had his honeymoon knows it already, and he who has not can make little of the matter from any possible description "in prose or numerous verse," and this from the want of anything to give him com * A Highland dancing master of the old school, to whom many hundreds of the Tweedside beaus and belles of the first decade of the century owed their callisthenic skill and grace. parison by. Almost every one come the length of eighteen or twenty understands something about that "draught of heavenly pleasure, below the milkwhite thorn that scents the evening gale." But heavenly fine as that is, and finely as it is described in living language by my grand countryman, Burns, it still can give "the youthful, loving, modest pair" but little comparative notion of the dear associable interests which crowd themselves together into the first month of marriage. But I wish I were out of this particular piece of description-it is too frill-fine a theme for my handling, so unlike any other of the common occurrences, hardships; necessities, flittings, and fightings of this journey of mine through sixty years; and too long thinking upon it at a time is a disqualifying exercise of the mind, very ready to bring a poor fellow into some ideal sort of Mark Antony situation, losing a present world for an imaginary honeymoon. It is lucky that few of us have his sort of world to lose, and that not so much for himself, as for the world so to be lost, and left to be brutalized. Indeed, if I had stood in his shoes at the time, I should likely have lost the world, with my share of the benefit of moon and stars to the bargain, as I cannot see how it would have been possible to resist that splendid madam, unless he had just happened to have been nicely married a neat fortnight previously to seeing her; and then, of course, all the eyes, diamonds, ruffs, fans, and furs-below of Egypt, with the ambitions, victories, and triumphs of Rome, could not have drawn his affections from home. No, he had too much of heart in him to have left a lovely bride within the first fortnight of their wedded love. Yet this is indeed what history, in accordance with the brute spirit of those times, accounts his fault or failing, a love affair through and through—itself a long honeymoon-for which he lost a Roman world, like a true man. Indeed, I admire that Mark Antony for this as a far grander character than any of his compeers. Their Roman kind of virtue was far too rugged and stern for my taste; like a death's-head, rough and shaggy with iron-wire hair. And then that still more upsetting fellow of recent date, that Buonaparte, though I did not dislike to hear of him kicking a pack of saucy kings about, yet the yetlen-hearted* ruffian seemed to have none of the softer sensibilities of the true manly character, or the common meltings of human affection, in his castmetal nature, and was so magnificently mad, outré, and insolent as to suppose the whole wide world, land and water, man and beast, made and spread out thick over the broad surface for the abuse or gratification of his personal strutting consequentiality. I have never seen a figure on earth that I liked as ill to see as that of Buonaparte set up here and there in all metals, and in clay, stone, and stucco, all in the same starch-up, arm a-kimbo, quite disgusting position, expressive of nothing so much as of main bad taste both in the man and the model-maker. Those on chimney-pieces, set amidst crockery and curiosities, look wretchedly bad, corroding the sympathy of all around them, and spoiling the soft sweetness of a fireside. And that large one I saw lately, on a private pleasure plat at Stratford-on-Avon, gave me *Cast iron. |