CORRESPONDENCE.
ROLLING-STONE RAMBLES.—I. BY THE AUTHOR OP "A LAZY JOURNEY."
44 DID you aver see such a winter as this I" asked one sufferer of another. "Yes, last summer," was the answer. And the melancholy epigram was present in my mind the ether day, as I looked. listlessly from the window of the Siddons Club, having returned from my holiday outing, upon the usual procession of impure particles which make a London atmosphere ; and Wilkins, who never leaves town, but stays there on purpose to abuse it, asked me, in that tone of unoccu- pied depression which is peculiar to a club window, whether I had ever seen such a London fog as that in September. "Yes," I said, "this September, on the Italian lakes." For it is true that Mrs. Balbus and myself had recently visited those climes of the perennial sun. Years lapse, and I do not like to think how long it is since I chronicled, for the patient readers of the Spectator, the story of a lazy ramble through nearer-lying regions, which I ventured to describe under fictitious' names, for fear of rousing susceptibilities. That was but my humour, - which has passed, like most humours, and leaves me in a mood of solid realism. These kind of half-. fairy fancies are but the cynthias of a minute, and "no two dreams are like." Terrefolle ha assumed to me the common-place guise of France ; Feuille-inorte and Eau-qui-dort have evaporated in the guide-book into Avrau ches and Coutances, and giddy and brilliant Trouville asks me with scorn howl can have dared to paraphrase her into Trou-vilain P How a man's old work seems to jibe at him some limes, as he takes it up, as if to say to him, "It isn't you that did me, you know !" Three years after : and what changes have passed over the whole mental and moral frame, gradual ministers of the law of growth, forerunners of the final change ! Illusions have been lived down, and hopes have been disappointed ; dreamed-of reconciliations have not come about, and. short, sharp partings have come in where none such were feared, to toss about the cards of life in quite another deal. Unexplained estrangements have elbowed out old. friendships, and stieming accident has knit again, more strongly than before, former ties which had been all unloosed ; trusted affections have proved as rotten as tinder, where the hot spark of self has fallen; and honour has tumbled like a house.without foundations, when treachery and "expediency," vanity and ingratitude, have sprung their little mines beneath it ;—till looking back, over a three years' space, its moral reads as this,—that there is nothing certain but uncertainty. Of what we believed would be, nothing has been ; of what we purposed to do, nothing has been done. But much has been done that we did not purpose ; and much has been which we never believed in, and— nobody knows. Even scientific congresses have made mistakes ; and only American weather-prophets are never wrong. Can it be I, for Instance, that but three years since was dilat- ing on the advantages of living in a valley, and scoffing at those who built thew houses upon hills P How soon afterwards was it that the irony of Fate avenged the mountaineers, and the pale spectre of typhoid drove us forth bag and baggage, to join the hill faction at once, and, as I now suppose, for ever ! My land-
lord—he was at once of the legal and house-letting persuasions, and therefore doubly acute—was a great admirer of those papers of mine, and for a long time convinced me out of my own mouth (as against my noSe), when I suggested smells. The thing was not possible, in so sweet a valley. Moreover, he was one, he said, who had. himself lost a thumb through bad. drainage, and was sure to be very tender of mine. I have every reason to hope, in the ordinary course of justice, that he has by this time lost the other. I am not vindictive ; but, as we said in the Catechism, such is my desire. He persuaded me of many things, assisted by my views. He spoke of imprudent diet, of the habit of servants to throw vegetables down the sink, and so forth, and for a long time persuasively. The garrison held out. The whole household lived upon brandy-and-water, and nothing else. (After I had left, the local wine merchant sent me in a magnificent account for succulent drinks which I had never seen. I resisted him before the judge of the county, and had to pay. "My dear Sir," said an eminent legal expert, to console me, "the trick is obvious, and the books' palpably cooked. But County-court Judges always decide for a tradesman versus a "gentleman," which is a pleasant reputation for justices to sleep on ; and I am glad I am not one of them.) This is parenthesis ; but I am talking of migrations, and I migrated from North Bitten on Silverstreak, this time guarding a strict anonymous, because it is not a good place for simple-minded people to live in. At last my cook took to rolling about upon the floor in fits, regu- larly, when she "opened up" the scullery in the morning. And one evening, after various premonitory whiffs, there burst forth between cod and mutton such an overmastering stink, that we literally packed our clothes and fled into the darkness, then and there. It was impossible even for that soliciting landlord, this time, to persuade me that it was the fish that smelt. No cod could ever do it, even there. It was a Saturday night, as I well remember ; for we picnicked for the Sunday at the house of a comparatively sweet and. positively hospitable friend ; and on the Monday we departed from the district for ever, leaving, as our last contribution, a just action behind us, which, I trust, smells sweet, as in the poem, in spite of surrounding example from the County-court downwards.
So it was that we left that ancient town upon the river, and found ourselves another home, with all the conditions reversed, except as to Conservative Members. Our lines are cast this time in a city by the sea, on whose grey-and-blue pattern we look down, from a height above it, over a sloping garden, which provides us with the regulation lawn-tennis ground, circled with a halo of vegetables. We are our own landlords, taught by the bitter experience of another's smells. Henceforth, at least, my smells shall be my own, and I will pay no rout for them. The bonny, bright town, which shall be called Sunbourne, lies before us in a tempting maze of tree-planted streets, which recall the green alleys and avenues of certain foreign cities. They bisect each other at odd angles, instead of running in a series of parallel lines to the water, after the dull, uncompromising fashion of most sea-side towns. And beautiful bits of green, sudden bursts of unexpected fields and parks, with endless varieties of comfortable and tasteful homes, each to itself in its own walled garden, and built in all the quaint- nesses of parti-coloured form with which modern architects have exorcised the grim, old. barrack-spirit of monotony, leave us but small room to regret the cottage in the plain, and the enter- prising, but inventive, wine merchant, or his friend and backer, the County-court Judge.. Before us, a broad plain of level marsh, dotted with old castles and new gas works, and other landmarks upon the wrinkled face of Time ; and behind us, an amphitheatre of breezy down, stretching its arms out to the sea and folding Sunbourne to its heart, as well it may, in gratitude for the balmiest air and the most perpetual and buoyant sun- shine which the spirit of man can crave for ; and. as a result, I have solemnly recanted to Mrs. Balbus all the theories I for- merly expressed as to the proper requisites for a residence ; she has said, "Yes, Tom," in each instance in a spirit of unmur- muring adhesion ; and I cannot tell how it is that I seem to realise that she fails to attach any serious importance to my opinions. Indeed, she distinctly said, upon one occasion, when I was emphasising the importance of living on a hill, that "we'd got to de it now, and it didn't matter." Some people have a way of putting things which is fatal to argument.
I attribute it partly to the novelty of the new home, and partly to the Machiavellian craft of which I am a master, that for the three years which have passed since that same lazy journey through the Cider lands, I succeeded in staving off the fatal question of foreign parts. I leaned upon the exquisite pleasure of that former tour, and the pity it would be to spoil its memories ; I insisted on the disagreeable characteristics of foreigners, and the alluring qualities of home, I quoted Sir Charles Coldstream on the general inadequacy of the Continent, and his opinion even of the Crater of Vesuvius, that there was nothing in it ; I appealed to my advancing years (for which I was pulled up something sharply) ; I pointed out that I had seen it all, to be met by the undeniable counter that other people had not; I used household arguments about the purse, which were forcible, but not convincing; and was met throughout by that steady persistency which wins campaigns and civilises deserts, and compasses in lesser matters what it will. And so it came about that I found myself committed to a foreign tour, this time upon the understanding that we were to reverse our former plan, —never stop more than two nights anywhere, and see as many lands as could be seen in the space of four weeks. And so we did. Belgium and the Rhine, Coblentz and the Mosel, Heidel- berg and the Neckar, Lucerne and the Reuss, Verona and the Adige, with a kaleidoscope of lakes and the climbing of many mountains (in railway trains), chase each other in picturesque confusion through my brain, like the whirligig of spires and towers which, after his famous visit to Oxford, made havoc with the head of Mr. Verdant Green's papa.
It was with a Sense of awe due to the occasion, that a day or two ago I took up the Times—no lesser medium would have met the emergency—and read therein a letter of some proportions, by a Professor of eminent fame, both in the world of science aud in that of Alpine enterprise. It was couched in language of much dignity and authority, and the text of it was this. That, on the whole, the weather in Switzerland this summer had not been fine. It was true that this had been for some time freely reported in many prints and in various places, and that a large number of tourists of the baser sort had come to the same conclusion as the Professor. But obviously it could not be accepted as a fact till it had received his counter-seal, and it was very good of him to affix, as it were,'his black mark to the weather, and to let unscientific people feel sure that it had really rained. I thought it did at the time, myself; and now, of course, I know it. When I came to the end of that letter, tears of gratitude stood in my eyes. I do not mean because I had come to the end of it, but from sympathy with the admirable sentiment which wound it up. in spite of its raining in Switzerland—indeed, whilst it was raining —the Professor had heard how we had been winning in Egypt, and felt called upon publicly to express his devout thankfulness that England was still a nation. It was impossible for me—or, I should think, for England—not to feel this condescension on the Professor's part all the more, from his having gone rather out of his way to show it, at least to the lay mind. To the man of science, the connection between the nature of England and the weather in Switzerland may, of course, be clear. But from the outside world, in that letter, that connection was artistically veiled ; so much so, . that it was impossible to conceive what one fact had to do with the other, except, possibly, that both had occurred to other people before, though they had no authority to mention them. Let me add, however, that the letter was a great comfort to me, because I had just been reading, in the same unerring journal, an article on a text it has been persistently preaching of late, on what may be called the monohippoid or one-horse character of England in the matter of literature. I had derived therefrom the Melancholy information that we have no novelists, no play- wrights, no humourists, no historians, no poets, and no orators, only a large number of critics—apparently with nothing •to criticise—and science, and the Times, So I, too, lifted up my voice and wept, and thanked God (if, indeed, I may mention him in this connection), that we have still critics to tell us of our faults, and Professors to let us know when it is raining. How it rained (for I am bound to confirm the Professor, and. to say that it did), I hope to be permitted to show another day. I remember a dramatist who was congratulated on having obtained the services of a certain actress for his new burlesque. "Yes," he said, "I'm lucky. She can't sing, and she can't dance, and she can't act. And she's very plain. Otherwise, she's delightful." So might I say, that we were in Switzerland a fortnight, and never saw the mountains ; and in Italy Tor another, and never saw the sun. And we ate too little, and
paid too much, Otherwise, it was lovely. To Balms.
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