Christopher Crayon's Recollections. The Life and Times of the late James Ewing Ritchie as told by himself
speculations of Isaac Taylor, of Ongar, and Dick’s writings had also a wonderful sale. I fancy no one cares much now for any of the writers I have named. Such is fame!
As a boy it seemed to me I had too much of the Assembly’s Catechism and Virgil, to whose poetic beauties I was somewhat blind. I resolved to run away, as I fancied there was something better and brighter than village life. Religion was not attractive to me. Sunday was irksome. The land was barren, from Dan to Beersheba. I longed for the conflict and excitement and life of the distant town, and I ran away unconscious of the pain I should inflict on parents I dearly loved. Oh, that running away! If I live – and there is little chance of that – to the age of Methuselah I shall never forget it! It took place in the early morn of a long summer’s day. The whole scene rises distinctly before me. I see myself giving a note to my sister for father and mother when they came down to breakfast, I see myself casting an eye to the bedroom window to see if there was any chance of their being up and so stopping the enterprise on which I had set my mind. Happily, as I thought, the blinds were down and there was nothing to forbid my opening the garden gate and finding myself on the London road. I was anxious to be off and yet loth to leave. I had a small parcel under my arm, consisting of very small belongings; and I was free of Latin and the Assembly Catechism, free as the air – my own master. All the world was hushed in slumber. There was no one to stop me or bid me return to the roof where I had been happy, and to the parents whom I was to return to, to love more than I had ever done before, and whom it then saddened me to think that I might never see again. Not a soul was in the street, and the few shops which adorned it were shut up – cottagers and shopkeepers, they were all in the arms of Morpheus. I hastened on, not wishing to be seen by any one; but there was no fear of that, only cows, horses at grass, and pigs and hens and birds were conscious of my flight, and they regarded me with the indifference with which a Hottentot would view an ape. In my path was a hill on which I stayed awhile to take a last look at the deserted village. The white smoke was then curling up from the chimneys and the common round of daily life was about to begin. How peaceful it all seemed. What a contrast to my beating heart! There was not one of those cottages behind into which I had not been with my father as he visited the poor and the afflicted – not a lane or street along which I had not trundled my hoop with boyish glee – not a meadow into which I had not gone in search of buttercups and cowslips and primroses or bird’s nests. I only met one man I knew, the miller, as he came from the mill where he had been at work all night, and of him I stood somewhat in awe, for once when the mill was being robbed he had sat up alone in darkness in the mill till the robbers came in, when he looked, through a hole in the upper floor, as they were at their wicked work below, and had thus identified them; and I had seen them in a cart on their way to Beccles gaol. Perhaps, thought I, he will stop me and ask me what I am about; but he did nothing of the kind, and henceforth the way was clear for me to London, where I was to fight the battle of life. Did I not write poetry, and did not I know ladies who were paid a guinea a page for writing for the Annuals, and could not I do the same? And thus thinking I walked three miles till I came to a small beershop, where I had a biscuit and a glass of beer. The road from thence was new to me, and how I revelled in the stateliness of the trees as I passed a nobleman’s (Earl Stradbrooke’s) mansion and park. In another hour or so I found myself at Yoxford, then and still known as the Garden of Suffolk. There lived a Mr. Bird, a Suffolk poet of some note in his day. On him I called. He gave me a cordial welcome, kept me to dinner, and set me to play with his children. Alas! Yoxford was to me what Capua was to Hannibal – I got no further; in fact, my father traced me to the house, and I had nothing for it but to abandon my London expedition and return home. I don’t think I was very sorry that my heroic enterprise had thus miscarried. What annoyed me most was that I was sent home in an open cart, and as we got into the street all the women came to their doors to see Master James brought back. I did not like being thus paraded as a show. I found my way to the little attic in which I slept, not quite so much of a hero as I had felt myself in the early morn.
It was a stirring time. The nation was being stirred, as it was never before or since, with the struggle for Reform. The excitement reached us in our out-of-the-way village. We were all Whigs, all bursting with hope. Yet some of the respectable people who feared Sir Thomas Gooch were rather alarmed by my father’s determination to vote against him – the sitting Member – and to support the Liberal candidate. People do not read Parliamentary debates now. They did then, and not a line was skipped. I was a Radical. An old grocer in the village had lent me Hone’s “House that Jack Built,” and similar pamphlets, all illustrated by Cruikshank. My eyes were opened, and I had but a poor opinion of royalty and the Tory Ministers and the place men and parasites and other creeping vermin that infest courts. It is impossible to believe anything more rotten than that glorious Constitution which the Tories told us was the palladium of our liberties, the glory of our country, and the envy of surrounding nations. The Ministry for the time being existed by bribery and corruption. The M.P. bought his seat and sold his vote; the free and independent electors did the same. The boroughs were almost entirely rotten and for sale in consequence of the complicated state of voting in them, and especially in those incorporated by charter. In one borough the right was acquired by birth, in another by servitude, in another by purchase, in a fourth by gift, in a fifth by marriage. In some these rights were exercised by residents, in others by non-residents; in one place by the mayor or bailiff and twelve aldermen only, as at Buckingham, Malmesbury, &c.; in another by eight aldermen or ten or twelve burgesses, as at Bath, Andover, Tiverton, Banbury, &c.; in another by a small number of burgesses – three or four or five, as at Rye, Winchelsea, Romney, &c. As to what was called long ago tenure in boroughs there was no end to its absurdity. At Midhurst the right was in the possession of a hundred stones erected in an open field; at Old Sarum it was in the remaining part of the possession of a demolished castle; at Westbury in a long wall. In many other places it was in the possession of half-a-score or a dozen old thatched cottages, the conveyances to which were made on the morning of election to a few trusty friends or dependents, who held a farcical election, and then returned them to the proprietor as soon as the business was finished. In the little borough of Aldeburgh, where Crabbe was born, the number of electors was eighty, all the property of a private individual; at Dunwich, a little further on the coast, the number of voters was twelve; at Bury St. Edmunds the number of voters was thirty-seven; another little insignificant village on the same coast was Orford, where the right of election was in a corporation of twenty individuals, composed of the family and dependents of the Marquis of Hertford. No wonder the popular fury swept away the rotten boroughs, and no wonder that the long struggle for reform ended in the triumph, not so much of the people, as the middle-class.
CHAPTER III.
Village Life
In recalling old times let me begin with the weather, a matter of supreme importance in country life – the first thing of which an Englishman speaks, the last thing he thinks of as he retires to rest. When I was a boy we had undoubtedly finer weather than we have now. There was more sunshine and less rain. In spring the air was balmy, and the flowers fair to look on. When summer came what joy there was in the hayfield, and how sweet the smell of the new-mown hay! As autumn advanced how pleasant it was to watch the fruit ripening, and the cornfields waving, far as the eye could reach, with the golden grain! People always seemed gay and happy then – the rosy-cheeked squire, the stout old farmer with his knee-breeches and blue coat with brass buttons, and Hodge in his smock-frock, white as the driven snow, on Sunday, when he went now to his parish church, or more generally to the meeting-house, where he heard sermons that suited him better, and where the musical part of the service, by means of flute and bass violin and clarionet, was ever a gratification and delight. And even winter had its charms in the shape of sliding and skating under a clear blue sky – all the trees and hedges everywhere decked out with diamonds, ever sparkling in the rays of an unclouded sun. We were all glad when the snow came and covered the earth with a robe of white. We were glad when it went away, and the birds began to build their nests, and the plougher went forth to turn up the soil, which had a fragrant savour after the wet and snow of winter, and the sower went forth to sow, while the rooks cawed in the morning air as they followed like an army in search of worms and whatever else they could feed on, and the graceful swallow, under the eaves of the old thatched cottage, built her clay nest, and lined it carefully for the reception of the little ones that were to come. They were always welcome,