Tales and Novels Volume IX Part 1

Tales And Novels.

Volume 9.

by Maria Edgeworth.

TO THE READER.

In my seventy-fourth year, I have the satisfaction of seeing another work of my daughter brought before the public. This was more than I could have expected from my advanced age and declining health.

I have been reprehended by some of the public critics for the _notices_ which I have annexed to my daughter's works. As I do not know their reasons for this reprehension, I cannot submit even to their respectable authority. I trust, however, the British public will sympathize with what a father feels for a daughter's literary success, particularly as this father and daughter have written various works in partners.h.i.+p.

The natural and happy confidence reposed in me by my daughter puts it in my power to a.s.sure the public that she does not write negligently. I can a.s.sert that twice as many pages were written for these volumes as are now printed.

The first of these tales, HARRINGTON, was occasioned by an extremely well-written letter, which Miss Edgeworth received from America, from a Jewish lady, complaining of the illiberality with which the Jewish nation had been treated in some of Miss Edgeworth's works.

The second tale, ORMOND, is the story of a young gentleman, who is in some respects the reverse of Vivian. The moral of this tale does not immediately appear, for the author has taken peculiar care that it should not obtrude itself upon the reader.

Public critics have found several faults with Miss Edgeworth's former works--she takes this opportunity of returning them sincere thanks for the candid and lenient manner in which her errors have been pointed out.

In the present Tales she has probably fallen into many other faults, but she has endeavoured to avoid those for which she has been justly reproved.

And now, indulgent reader, I beg you to pardon this intrusion, and, with the most grateful acknowledgments, I bid you farewell for ever.

RICHARD LOVELL EDGEWORTH.

_Edgeworthstown, May_ 31,1817.

_Note_--Mr. Edgeworth died a few days after he wrote this Preface--the 13th June, 1817.

HARRINGTON.

CHAPTER I.

When I was a little boy of about six years old, I was standing with a maid-servant in the balcony of one of the upper rooms of my father's house in London--it was the evening of the first day that I had ever been in London, and my senses had been excited, and almost exhausted, by the vast variety of objects that were new to me. It was dusk, and I was growing sleepy, but my attention was awakened by a fresh wonder. As I stood peeping between the bars of the balcony, I saw star after star of light appear in quick succession, at a certain height and distance, and in a regular line, approaching nearer and nearer. I twitched the skirt of my maid's gown repeatedly, but she was talking to some acquaintance at the window of a neighbouring house, and she did not attend to me. I pressed my forehead more closely against the bars of the balcony, and strained my eyes more eagerly towards the object of my curiosity.

Presently the figure of the lamp-lighter with his blazing torch in one hand, and his ladder in the other, became visible; and, with as much delight as philosopher ever enjoyed in discovering the cause of a new and grand phenomenon, I watched his operations. I saw him fix and mount his ladder with his little black pot swinging from his arm, and his red smoking torch waving with astonis.h.i.+ng velocity, as he ran up and down the ladder. Just when he reached the ground, being then within a few yards of our house, his torch flared on the face and figure of an old man with a long white beard and a dark visage, who, holding a great bag slung over one shoulder, walked slowly on, repeating in a low, abrupt, mysterious tone, the cry of "Old clothes! Old clothes! Old clothes!"

I could not understand the words he said, but as he looked up at our balcony he saw me--smiled--and I remember thinking that he had a good-natured countenance. The maid nodded to him; he stood still, and at the same instant she seized upon me, exclaiming, "Time for you to come off to bed, Master Harrington."

I resisted, and, clinging to the rails, began kicking and roaring.

"If you don't come quietly this minute, Master Harrington," said she, "I'll call to Simon the Jew there," pointing to him, "and he shall come up and carry you away in his great bag."

The old man's eyes were upon me; and to my fancy the look of his eyes and his whole face had changed in an instant. I was struck with terror--my hands let go their grasp--and I suffered myself to be carried off as quietly as my maid could desire. She hurried and huddled me into bed, bid me go to sleep, and ran down stairs. To sleep I could not go, but full of fear and curiosity I lay, pondering on the thoughts of Simon the Jew and his bag, who had come to carry me away in the height of my joys. His face with the light of the torch upon it appeared and vanished, and flitted before my eyes. The next morning, when daylight and courage returned, I asked my maid whether Simon the Jew was a good or a bad man? Observing the impression that had been made upon my mind, and foreseeing that the expedient, which she had thus found successful, might be advantageously repeated, she answered with oracular duplicity, "Simon the Jew is a good man for naughty boys." The threat of "Simon the Jew" was for some time afterwards used upon every occasion to reduce me to pa.s.sive obedience; and when by frequent repet.i.tion this threat had lost somewhat of its power, she proceeded to tell me, in a mysterious tone, stories of Jews who had been known to steal poor children for the purpose of killing, crucifying, and sacrificing them at their secret feasts and midnight abominations. The less I understood, the more I believed.

Above all others, there was one story--horrible! most horrible!--which she used to tell at midnight, about a Jew who lived in Paris in a dark alley, and who professed to sell pork pies; but it was found out at last that the pies were not pork--they were made of the flesh of little children. His wife used to stand at the door of her den to watch for little children, and, as they were pa.s.sing, would tempt them in with cakes and sweetmeats. There was a trap-door in the cellar, and the children were dragged down; and--Oh! how my blood ran cold when we came to the terrible trap-door. Were there, I asked, such things in London now?

Oh, yes! In dark narrow lanes there were Jews now living, and watching always for such little children as me; I should take care they did not catch me, whenever I was walking in the streets; and Fowler (that was my maid's name) added, "There was no knowing what they might do with me."

In our enlightened days, and in the present improved state of education, it may appear incredible that any nursery-maid could be so wicked as to relate, or any child of six years old so foolish as to credit, such tales; but I am speaking of what happened many years ago: nursery-maids and children, I believe, are very different now from what they were then; and in further proof of the progress of human knowledge and reason, we may recollect that many of these very stories of the Jews, which we now hold too preposterous for the infant and the nursery-maid to credit, were some centuries ago universally believed by the English nation, and had furnished more than one of our kings with pretexts for extortion and ma.s.sacres.

But to proceed with my story. The impression made on my imagination by these horrible tales was greater than my nursery-maid intended. Charmed by the effect she had produced, she was next afraid that I should bring her into disgrace with my mother, and she extorted from me a solemn promise that I would never tell any body the secret she had communicated. From that moment I became her slave, and her victim. I shudder when I look back to all I suffered during the eighteen months I was under her tyranny. Every night, the moment she and the candle left the room, I lay in an indescribable agony of terror; my head under the bed-clothes, my knees drawn up, in a cold perspiration. I saw faces around me grinning, glaring, receding, advancing, all turning at last into the same face of the Jew with the long beard and the terrible eyes; and that bag, in which I fancied were mangled limbs of children--it opened to receive me, or fell upon my bed, and lay heavy on my breast, so that I could neither stir nor scream; in short, it was one continued nightmare; there was no refres.h.i.+ng sleep for me till the hour when the candle returned and my tyrant--my protectress, as I thought her--came to bed. In due course she suffered in her turn; for I could not long endure this state, and, instead of submitting pa.s.sively or lying speechless with terror, the moment she left the room at night I began to roar and scream till I brought my mother and half the house up to my bedside.

"What could be the matter with the child?" Faithful to my promise, I never betrayed the secrets of my prison-house. Nothing could be learned from me but that "I was frightened," that "I could not go to sleep;"

and this, indeed, my trembling condition, and convulsed countenance, sufficiently proved. My mother, who was pa.s.sionately fond of me, became alarmed for my health, and ordered that Fowler should stay in the room with me every night till I should be quite fast asleep.

So Fowler sat beside my bed every night, singing, caressing, cajoling, hus.h.i.+ng, conjuring me to sleep: and when in about an hour's time, she flattered herself that her conjurations had succeeded; when my relaxing muscles gave her hope that she might withdraw her arm unperceived; and when slowly and dexterously she had accomplished this, and, watching my eyelashes, and cautiously shading the candle with her hand, she had happily gained the door; some slipping of the lock, some creaking of the hinge, some parting sound startled me, and bounce I was upright in my bed, my eyes wide open, and my voice ready for a roar: so she was compelled instantly to return, to replace the candle full in my view, to sit down close beside the bed, and, with her arm once more thrown over me, she was forced again to repeat that the Jew's bag could not come there, and, cursing me in her heart, she recommenced her deceitful songs. She was seldom released in less than two hours. In vain she now tried by day to chase away the terrors of the night: to undo her own work was beyond her power. In vain she confessed that her threats were only to frighten me into being a good boy. In vain she told me that I was too old now to believe such nonsense. In vain she told me that Simon was only an old-clothes-man, that his cry was only "Old clothes! Old clothes!" which she mimicked to take off its terror; its terror was in that power of a.s.sociation which was beyond her skill to dissolve. In vain she explained to me that his bag held only my old shoes and her yellow petticoat. In vain she now offered to let me _see with my own eyes_. My imagination was by this time proof against ocular demonstration. One morning early, she took me down stairs into the housekeeper's room, where Simon and his bag were admitted; she emptied the bag in my presence, she laughed at my foolish fears, and I pretended to laugh, but my laugh was hysterical. No power could draw me within arm's-length of the bag or the Jew. He smiled and smoothed his features, and stroked his white beard, and, stooping low, stretched out his inoffensive hand to me; my maid placed sugared almonds on the palm of that hand, and bid me approach and eat. No! I stood fixed, and if the Jew approached, I ran back and hid my head in Fowler's lap. If she attempted to pull or push me forwards I screamed, and at length I sent forth a scream that wakened my mother--her bell rang, and she was told that it was only Master Harrington, who was afraid of poor Simon, the old-clothes-man. Summoned to the side of my mother's bed, I appeared nearly in hysterics--but still faithful to my promise, I did not betray my maid;--nothing could be learned from me but that I could not bear the sight of Old Simon the Jew. My mother blamed Fowler for taking me down to see such a sort of a person. The equivocating maid replied, that Master Harrington could not or would not be asy unless she did; and that indeed now it was impossible to know how to make him asy by day or by night; that she lost her natural rest with him; and that for her part she could not pretend to stand it much longer, unless she got her natural rest. Heaven knows _my_ natural rest was gone! But, besides, she could not even get her cup of tea in an evening, or stir out for a mouthful of fresh air, now she was every night to sing Master Harrington to sleep.

It was but poetical justice that she who had begun by terrifying me, in order to get me to bed, and out of her way, should end by being forced to suffer some restraint to cure me of my terrors: but Fowler did not understand or relish poetical justice, or any kind of justice: besides, she had heard that Lady de Brantefield was in want of a nursery-maid for the little Lady Anne Mowbray, who was some years younger than Master Harrington, and Fowler humbly represented to my mother that she thought Master Harrington was really growing too stout and too much of a man; and she confessed quite above and beyond her management and comprehension; for she never pretended to any thing but the care of young children that had not arrived at the years of discretion; this she understood to be the case with the little Lady Anne Mowbray; therefore a recommendation to Lady de Brantefield would be very desirable, and, she hoped, but justice to her. The very desirable recommendation was given by my mother to Lady de Brantefield, who was her particular friend; nor was my mother in the least to blame on this occasion, for she truly thought she was doing nothing but justice; had it been otherwise, those who know how these things are usually managed, would, I trust, never think of blaming my mother for a _sort of thing_ which they would do, and doubtless have done themselves without scruple, for a favourite maid, who is always a _faithful creature_.

So Fowler departed, happy, but I remained unhappy--not with her, departed my fears. After she was gone I made a sort of compromise with my conscience, and without absolutely breaking my promise, I made a half confession to my mother that I had somehow or other horrid notions about Jews; and that it was the terror I had conceived of Simon the Jew which prevented me from sleeping all night. My mother felt for me, and considered my case as no laughing matter.

My mother was a woman of weak health, delicate nerves, and a kind of morbid sensibility; which I often heard her deplore as a misfortune, but which I observed every body about her admire as a grace. She lamented that her dear Harrington, her only son, should so much resemble her in this exquisite sensibility of the nervous system. But her physician, and he was a man who certainly knew better than she did, she confessed, for he was a man who really knew every thing, a.s.sured her that this was indisputably "the genuine temperament of genius."

I soon grew vain of my fears. My antipathy, my _natural_, positively natural antipathy to the sight or bare idea of a Jew, was talked of by ladies and by gentlemen; it was exhibited to all my mother's acquaintance, learned and unlearned; it was a medical, it was a metaphysical wonder, it was an _idiosyncrasy_, corporeal, or mental, or both; it was--in short, more nonsense was talked about it than I will repeat, though I perfectly remember it all; for the importance of which at this period I became to successive circles of visitors fixed every circ.u.mstance and almost every word indelibly in my memory. It was a pity that I was not born some years earlier or later, for I should have flourished a favourite pupil of Mesmer, the animal magnetizer, or I might at this day be a celebrated somnambulist. No, to do myself justice, I really had no intention to deceive, at least originally; but, as it often happens with those who begin by being dupes, I was in imminent danger of becoming a knave. How I escaped it, I do not well know. For here, a child scarce seven years old, I saw myself surrounded by grown-up wise people, who were accounting different ways for that, of which I alone knew the real, secret, simple cause. They were all, without my intending it, my dupes. Yet when I felt that I had them in my power, I did not deceive them much, not much more than I deceived myself. I never was guilty of deliberate imposture. I went no farther than affectation and exaggeration, which it was in such circ.u.mstances scarcely possible for me to avoid; for I really often did not know the difference between my own feelings, and the descriptions I heard given of what I felt.

Fortunately for my integrity, my understanding, and my health, people began to grow tired of seeing and talking of Master Harrington. Some new wonder came into fas.h.i.+on; I think it was Jedediah Buxton, the man of prodigious memory, who could multiply in his head nine figures by nine; and who, the first time he was taken to the playhouse, counted all the steps of the dancers, and all the words uttered by Garrick in Richard the Third. After Jedediah Buxton, or about the same time, if I recollect rightly, came George Psalmanazar, from his Island of Formosa, who, with his pretended Dictionary of the Pormosan language, and the pounds of raw beef he devoured per day, excited the admiration and engrossed the attention of the Royal Society and of every curious and fas.h.i.+onable company in London: so that poor little I was forgotten, as though I had never been. My mother and myself were left to settle the affair with my nerves and the Jews, as we could. Between the effects of real fear, and the exaggerated expression of it to which I had been encouraged, I was now seriously ill. It is well known that persons have brought on fits by pretending to have them; and by yielding to feelings, at first slight and perfectly within the command of the will, have at last acquired habits beyond the power of their reason, or of their most strenuous voluntary exertion, to control. Such was my pitiable case; and at the moment I was most to be pitied, n.o.body pitied me. Even my mother, now she had n.o.body to talk to about me, grew tired of my illness. She was advised by her physician, on account of her own health, by no means to keep so close to the house as she had done of late: she went out therefore every night to refresh herself at crowded parties; and as soon as she left the house, the nurse and every body in the family left me.

The servants settled it, in my hearing, that there was nothing in life the matter with me, that my mother and I were equally vapoursome-ish and _timersome_, and that there was no use in nursing and pampering of me up in them fantastical _fancifulnesses_: so the nurse, and lady's maid, and housekeeper, went down all together to _their_ tea; and the housemaid, who was ordered by the housekeeper to stay with me, soon followed, charging the under housemaid to supply her place; who went off also in her turn, leaving me in charge of the cook's daughter, a child of nine years old, who soon stole out of the room, and scampered away along the gallery out of the reach of my voice, leaving the room to darkness and to me--and there I lay, in all the horrors of a low nervous fever, unpitied and alone.

Shall I be pardoned for having dwelt so long on this history of the mental and corporeal ills of my childhood? Such details will probably appear more trivial to the frivolous and ignorant than to the philosophic and well informed: not only because the best informed are usually the most indulgent judges, but because they will perceive some connexion between these apparently puerile details and subjects of higher importance. Bacon, and one who in later days has successfully followed him on this ground, point out as one of the most important subjects of human inquiry, equally necessary to the science of morals and of medicine, "The history of the power and influence of the imagination, not only upon the mind and body of the imaginant, but upon those of other people." This history, so much desired and so necessary, has been but little advanced. One reason for this may be, that both by the learned and the unlearned it is usually begun at the wrong end.

"_Belier, mon ami, commences par le commencement_," is excellent advice; equally applicable to philosophical history and to fairy tale. We must be content to begin at the beginning, if we would learn the history of our own minds; we must condescend to be even as little children, if we would discover or recollect those small causes which early influence the imagination, and afterwards become strong habits, prejudices, and pa.s.sions. In this point of view, if they might possibly tend to turn public attention in a new direction to an important subject, my puerile anecdotes may be permitted. These, my experiments, _solitary and in concert, touching fear_, and _of and concerning sympathies and antipathies_, are perhaps as well worth noting for future use, as some of those by which Sir Kenelm Digby and others astonished their own generation, and which they bequeathed to ungrateful posterity.

CHAPTER II.

My mother, who had a great, and perhaps not altogether a mistaken, opinion, of the sovereign efficacy of the touch of gold in certain cases, tried it repeatedly on the hand of the physician who attended me, and who, in consequence of this application, had promised my cure; but that not speedily taking place, and my mother, naturally impatient, beginning to doubt his skill, she determined to rely on her own. On Sir Kenelm Digby's principle of curing wounds, by anointing the weapon with which the wound had been inflicted, she resolved to try what could be done with the Jew, who had been the original cause of my malady, and to whose malignant influence its continuance might be reasonably ascribed; accordingly one evening, at the accustomed hour when Simon the old-clothes-man's cry was heard coming down the street, I being at that time seized with my usual fit of nerves, and my mother being at her toilette crowning herself with roses to go to a ball, she ordered the man to be summoned into the housekeeper's room, and, through the intervention of the housekeeper, the application was made on the Jew's hand; and it was finally agreed that the same should be renewed every twelvemonth, upon condition that he, the said Simon, should never more be seen or heard under our windows or in our square. My evening attack of nerves intermitted, as the signal for its coming on, ceased. For some time I slept quietly: it was but a short interval of peace. Simon, meanwhile, told his part of the story to his compeers, and the fame of his annuity ran through street and alley, and spread through the whole tribe of Israel. The bounty acted directly as an encouragement to ply the profitable trade, and "Old clothes! Old clothes!" was heard again punctually under my window; and another and another Jew, each more hideous than the former, succeeded in the walk. Jews I should not call them; though such they appeared to be at the time: we afterwards discovered that they were good Christian beggars, dressed up and daubed, for the purpose of looking as frightful, and as like the traditionary representations and vulgar notions of a malicious, revengeful, ominous looking Shylock as ever whetted his knife. The figures were well got up; the tone, accent, and action, suited to the parts to be played; the stage effect perfect, favoured as it was by the distance at which I saw and wished ever to keep such personages; and as money was given, by my mother's orders, to these people to send them away, they came the more.

If I went out with a servant to walk, a Jew followed me; if I went in the carriage with my mother, a Jew was at the coach-door when I got in, or when I got out: or if we stopped but five minutes at a shop, while my mother went in, and I was left alone, a Jew's head was at the carriage window, at the side next me; if I moved to the other side, it was at the other side; if I pulled up the gla.s.s, which I never could do fast enough, the Jew's head was there opposite to me, fixed as in a frame; and if I called to the servants to drive it away, I was not much better off, for at a few paces' distance the figure would stand with his eyes fixed upon me; and, as if fascinated, though I hated to look at those eyes, for the life of me I could not turn mine away. The manner in which I was thus haunted and pursued wherever I went, seemed to my mother something "really extraordinary;" to myself, something magical and supernatural. The systematic roguery of beggars, their combinations, meetings, signals, disguises, transformations, and all the secret tricks of their trade of deception, were not at this time, as they have in modern days, been revealed to public view, and attested by indisputable evidence. Ignorance is always credulous. Much was then thought wonderful, nay, almost supernatural, which can now be explained and accounted for, by asy and very ign.o.ble means. My father--for all this time, though I have never mentioned him, I had a father living--my father, being in public life, and much occupied with the affairs of the nation, had little leisure to attend to his family. A great deal went on in his house, without his knowing any thing about it. He had heard of my being ill and well, at different hours of the day; but had left it to the physicians and my mother to manage me till a certain age: but now I was nine years old, he said it was time I should be taken out of the hands of the women; so he inquired more particularly into my history, and, with mine, he heard the story of Simon and the Jews. My mother said she was glad my father's attention was at last awakened to this extraordinary business. She expatiated eloquently upon the medical, or, as she might call them, magical effects of sympathies and antipathies: on the nervous system; but my father was not at all addicted to a belief in magic, and he laughed at the whole _female_ doctrine, as he called it, of sympathies and antipathies: so, declaring that they were all making fools of themselves, and a Miss Molly of his boy, he took the business up short with a high hand. There was some trick, some roguery in it. The Jews were all rascals, he knew, and he would soon _settle_ them. So to work he set with the beadles, and the constables, and the overseers. The corporation of beggars were not, in those days, so well grounded in the theory and so alert in the practice of evasion as, by long experience, they have since become. The society had not then, as they have now, in a certain lane, their regular rendezvous, called the _Beggars' Opera_; they had not then, as they have now, in a certain cellar, an established school for teaching the art of scolding, kept by an old woman, herself an adept in the art; they had not even their regular nocturnal feasts, where they planned the operations of the next day's or the next week's campaign, so that they could not, as they now do, set at nought the beadle and the parish officers: the system of signals was not then perfected, and the means of conveying secret and swift intelligence, by telegraphic science, had not in those days been practised. The art of begging was then only art without science: the native genius of knavery unaided by method or discipline. The consequence was, that the beggars fled before my father's beadles, constables, and overseers; and they were dispersed through other parishes, or led into captivity to roundhouses, or consigned to places called asylums for the poor and indigent, or lodged in workhouses, or crammed into houses of industry or penitentiary houses, where, by my father's account of the matter, there was little industry and no penitence, and from whence the delinquents issued, after their seven days' captivity, as bad or worse than when they went in. Be that as it may, the essential point with my father was accomplished: they were got rid of that season, and before the next season he resolved that I should be out of the hands of the women, and safe at a public school, which he considered as a specific for all my complaints, and indeed for every disease of mind and body incident to childhood. It was the only thing, he said, to make a man of me. "There was Jack B----, and Thomas D----, and d.i.c.k C----, sons of gentlemen in our county, and young Lord Mowbray to boot, all at school with Dr. Y----, and what men they were already!"

A respite of a few months was granted, in consideration of my small stature, and of my mother's all eloquent tears. Meantime my father took me more to himself; and, mixed with men, I acquired some manly, or what were called manly, ideas. My attention was awakened, and led to new things. I took more exercise and less medicine; and with my health and strength of body my strength of mind and courage increased. My father made me ashamed of that nervous sensibility of which I had before been vain. I was glad that the past should be past and forgotten; yet a painful reminiscence would come over my mind, whenever I heard or saw the word _Jew_. About this time I first became fond of reading, and I never saw the word in any page of any book which I happened to open, without immediately stopping to read the pa.s.sage. And here I must observe, that not only in the old story books, where the Jews are as sure to be wicked as the bad fairies, or bad genii, or allegorical personifications of the devils, and the vices in the old emblems, mysteries, moralities, &c.; but in almost every work of fiction, I found them represented as hateful beings; nay, even in modern tales of very late years, since I have come to man's estate, I have met with books by authors professing candour and toleration--books written expressly for the rising generation, called, if I mistake not, Moral Tales for Young People; and even in these, wherever the Jews are introduced, I find that they are invariably represented as beings of a mean, avaricious, unprincipled, treacherous character. Even the peculiarities of their persons, the errors of their foreign dialect and p.r.o.nunciation, were mimicked and caricatured, as if to render them objects of perpetual derision and detestation. I am far from wis.h.i.+ng to insinuate that such was the serious intention of these authors. I trust they will in future benefit by these hints. I simply state the effect which similar representations in the story books I read, when I was a child, produced on my mind. They certainly acted most powerfully and injuriously, strengthening the erroneous a.s.sociation of ideas I had accidentally formed, and confirming my childish prejudice by what I then thought the indisputable authority of _printed books_.

About this time also I began to attend to conversation--to the conversation of gentlemen as well as of ladies; and I listened with a sort of personal interest and curiosity whenever Jews happened to be mentioned. I recollect hearing my father talk with horror of some young gentleman who had been _dealing with the Jews_, I asked what this meant, and was answered, "'Tis something very like dealing with the devil, my dear." Those who give a child a witty instead of a rational answer, do not know how dearly they often make the poor child pay for their jest.

My father added, "It is certain, that when a man once goes to the Jews, he soon goes to the devil. So Harrington, my boy, I charge you at your peril, whatever else you do, keep out of the hands of the Jews--never go near the Jews: if once they catch hold of you, there's an end of you, my boy."

Had the reasons for the prudential part of this charge been given to me, and had the nature of the disgraceful transactions with the Hebrew nation been explained, it would have been full as useful to me, and rather more just to them. But this was little or no concern of my father's. With some practical skill in the management of the mind, but with short-sighted views as to its permanent benefit, and without an idea of its philosophic moral cultivation, he next undertook to cure me of the fears which he had contributed to create. He took opportunities of pointing out how poor, how helpless, how wretched they are; how they are abused continually, insulted daily, and mocked by the lowest of servants, or the least of children in our streets; their very name a by-word of reproach: "He is a Jew--an actual Jew," being the expression for avarice, hard-heartedness, and fraud. Of their frauds I was told innumerable stories. In short, the Jews were represented to me as the lowest, meanest, vilest of mankind, and a conversion of fear into contempt was partially effected in my mind; partially, I say, for the conversion was not complete; the two sentiments existed together, and by an experienced eye, could easily be detected and seen even one through the other.

Now whoever knows any thing of the pa.s.sions--and who is there who does not?--must be aware how readily fear and contempt run into the kindred feeling of hatred. It was about this time, just before I went to school, that something relative to the famous _Jew Bill_ became the subject of vehement discussion at my father's table. My father was not only a member of parliament, but a man of some consequence with his party. He had usually been a staunch friend of government; but upon one occasion, when he first came into parliament, nine or ten years before the time of which I am now writing, in 1753 or 54, I think, he had voted against ministry upon this very bill for the Naturalization of the Jews in England. Government liberally desired that they should be naturalized, but there was a popular cry against it, and my father on this one occasion thought the voice of the people was right. After the bill had been carried half through, it was given up by ministry, the opposition to it proving so violent. My father was a great stickler for parliamentary consistency, and moreover he was of an obstinate temper.

Ten years could make no change in his opinions, as he was proud to declare. There was at this time, during a recess of parliament, some intention among the London merchants to send addresses to government in favour of the Jews; and addresses were to be procured from the country.

The county members, and among them of course my father, were written to; but he was furiously against _the naturalization_: he considered all who were for it as enemies to England; and, I believe, to religion. He hastened down to the country to take the sense of his const.i.tuents, or to impress them with his sense of the business. Previously to some intended county meeting, there were, I remember, various dinners of const.i.tuents at my father's, and attempts after dinner, over a bottle of wine, to convince them, that they were, or ought to be, of my father's opinion, and that they had better all join him in the toast of "The Jews are down, and keep 'em down."

A subject apparently less liable to interest a child of my age could hardly be imagined; but from my peculiar a.s.sociations it did attract my attention. I was curious to know what my father and all the gentlemen were saying about the Jews at these dinners, from which my mother and the ladies were excluded. I was eager to claim my privilege of marching into the dining-room after dinner, and taking my stand beside my father's elbow; and then I would gradually edge myself on, till I got possession of half his chair, and established a place for my elbow on the table. I remember one day sitting for an hour together, turning from one person to another as each spoke, incapable of comprehending their arguments, but fully understanding the vehemence of their tones, and sympathizing in the varying expression of pa.s.sion; as to the rest, quite satisfied with making out which speaker was _for_, and which against the Jews. All those who were against them, I considered as my father's friends; all those who were _for_ them, I called by a common misnomer, or metonymy of the pa.s.sions, my father's enemies, because my father was their enemy. The feeling of party spirit, which is caught by children as quickly as it is revealed by men, now combined to strengthen still more and to exasperate my early prepossession. Astonished by the attention with which I had this day listened to all that seemed so unlikely to interest a boy of my age, my father, with a smile and a wink, and a side nod of his head, not meant, I suppose, for me to see, but which I noticed the more, pointed me out to the company, by whom it was unanimously agreed, that my attention was a proof of uncommon abilities, and an early decided taste for public business. Young Lord Mowbray, a boy two years older than myself, a gawkee schoolboy, was present; and had, during this long hour after dinner, manifested sundry symptoms of impatience, and made many vain efforts to get me out of the room.

After cracking his nuts and his nut-sh.e.l.ls, and thrice cracking the cracked--after suppressing the thick-coming yawns that at last could no longer be suppressed, he had risen, writhed, stretched, and had fairly taken himself out of the room. And now he just peeped in, to see if he could tempt me forth to play.

"No, no," cried my father, "you'll not get Harrington, he is too deep here in politics--but however, Harrington, my dear boy, 'tis not _the thing_ for your young companion--go off and play with Mowbray: but stay, first, since you've been one among us so long, what have we been talking of?"

"The Jews, to be sure, papa."

"Right," cried my father; "and what about them, my dear?"

"Whether they ought to be let to live in England, or any where."