light-hearted as ever, suddenly recollected his sister, Mrs Caxton; and not knowing where else to dine, thought he would repose his limbs under my father's trabes citrea, which the ingenious W. S. Landor opines should be translated "mahogany." You never saw a more charming man than Uncle Jack. All plump people are more popular than thin people. There is something jovial and pleasant in the sight of a round face! What conspiracy could succeed when its head was a lean and hungry-looking fellow, like Cassius? If the Roman patriots had had Uncle Jack amongst them, perhaps they would never have furnished a tragedy to Shakspeare. Uncle Jack was as plump as a partridge – not unwieldy, not corpulent, not obese, not "vastus," which Cicero objects to in an orator – but every crevice comfortably filled up. Like the ocean, "time wrote no wrinkles on his glassy (or brassy) brow." His natural lines were all upward curves, his smile most ingratiating, his eye so frank, even his trick of rubbing his clean well-fed English-looking hands, had something, about it coaxing and debonnair, something that actually decoyed you into trusting your money into hands so prepossessing. Indeed, to him might be fully applied the expression – "Sedem animæ in extremis digitis habet;" "He had his soul's seat in his finger ends." The critics observe that few men have ever united in equal perfection the imaginative with the scientific or musing faculties. "Happy he," exclaims Schiller, "who combines the enthusiast's warmth with the worldly man's light" – light and warmth, Uncle Jack had them both. He was a perfect symphony of bewitching enthusiasm and convincing calculation. Dicæopolis in the Acharnenses, in presenting a gentleman called Nicharchus to the audience, observes – "He is small, I confess, but there is nothing lost in him: all is knave, that is not fool." Parodying the equivocal compliment, I may say, that though Uncle Jack was no giant, there was nothing lost in him. Whatever was not philanthropy was arithmetic, and whatever was not arithmetic was philanthropy. He would have been equally dear to Howard and to Cocker. Uncle Jack was comely, too – clear-skinned and florid, had a little mouth, with good teeth, wore no whiskers, shaved his beard as close as if it were one of his grand national companies; his hair, once somewhat sandy, was now rather grayish, which increased the respectability of his appearance, and he wore it flat at the sides and raised in a peak at the top; his organs of constructiveness and ideality were pronounced by Mr Squills to be prodigious, and those freely developed bumps gave great breadth to his forehead. Well-shaped, too, was Uncle Jack, about five feet eight, the proper height for an active man of business. He wore a black coat; but to make the nap look the fresher, he had given it the relief of gilt buttons, on which were wrought a small crown and anchor; at a distance this button looked like the king's button, and gave him the air of one who has a place about Court. He always wore a white neckcloth without starch, a frill and a diamond pin; which last furnished him with observations upon certain mines of Mexico, which he had a great but hitherto unsatisfied desire of seeing worked by a Grand National United Britons Company. His waistcoat of a morning was pale buff – of an evening, embroidered velvet; wherewith were connected sundry schemes of an "association for the improvement of native manufactures." His trousers, matutinally, were of the colour vulgarly called "blotting-paper;" and he never wore boots, which, he said, unfitted a man for exercise, but short drab gaiters and square-toed shoes. His watch-chain was garnished with a vast number of seals: each seal, indeed, represented the device of some defunct company, and they might be said to resemble the scalps of the slain, worn by the aboriginal Iroquois, concerning whom indeed he had once entertained philanthropic designs, compounded of conversion to Christianity on the principles of the English Episcopal Church, and of an advantageous exchange of beaver-skins for bibles, brandy, and gunpowder.
That Uncle Jack should win my heart was no wonder; my mother's he had always won from her earliest recollection of his having persuaded her to let her great doll (a present from her godmother) be put up to a raffle for the benefit of the chimney-sweeps. "So like him – so good!" she would often say pensively; "they paid sixpence a-piece for the raffle – twenty tickets, and the doll cost £2. Nobody was taken in, and the doll, poor thing, (it had such blue eyes!) went for a quarter of its value. But Jack said nobody could guess what good the ten shillings did to the chimney-sweeps!" Naturally enough, I say, my mother liked Uncle Jack! but my father liked him quite as well, and that was a strong proof of my uncle's powers of captivation. However, it is noticeable that when some retired scholar is once interested in an active man of the world, he is more inclined to admire him than others are. Sympathy with such a companion gratifies at once his curiosity and his indolence: he can travel with him, scheme with him, fight with him, go with him through all the adventures of which his own books speak so eloquently, and all the time never stir from his easy-chair. My father said "that it was like listening to Ulysses to hear Uncle Jack!" Uncle Jack, too, had been in Greece and Asia Minor, gone over the site of the siege of Troy, eat figs at Marathon, shot hares in the Peloponnesus, and drank three pints of brown stout at the top of the Great Pyramid.
Therefore, Uncle Jack was like a book of reference to my father. Verily at times he looked on him as a book, and took him down after dinner as he would a volume of Dodwell or Pausanias. In fact, I believe that scholars who never move from their cells are not the less an eminently curious, bustling, active race, rightly understood. Even as old Burton saith of himself – "Though I live a collegiate student, and lead a monastic life, sequestered from those tumults and troubles of the world, I hear and see what is done abroad, how others run, ride, turmoil and macerate themselves in town and country," which citation sufficeth to show that scholars are naturally the most active men of the world, only that while their heads plot with Augustus, fight with Julius, sail with Columbus, and change the face of the globe with Alexander, Attila, or Mahomet, there is a certain mysterious attraction, which our improved knowledge of mesmerism will doubtless soon explain to the satisfaction of science, between that extremer and antipodal part of the human frame, called in the vulgate "the seat of honour," and the stuffed leather of an armed-chair. Learning somehow or other sinks down to that part in which it was first driven in, and produces therein a leaden heaviness and weight, which counteract those lively emotions of the brain, that might otherwise render students too mercurial and agile for the safety of established order. I leave this conjecture to the consideration of experimentalists in the physics.
I was still more delighted than my father with Uncle Jack. He was full of amusing tricks, could conjure wonderfully, make a bunch of keys dance a hornpipe, and if ever you gave him half-a-crown, he was sure to turn it into a halfpenny. He was only unsuccessful in turning my halfpennies into half-crowns.
We took long walks together, and in the midst of his most diverting conversation my uncle was always an observer. He would stop to examine the nature of the soil, fill my pockets (not his own) with great lumps of clay, stones, and rubbish, to analyse when he got home, by the help of some chemical apparatus he had borrowed from Mr Squills. He would stand an hour at a cottage door, admiring the little girls who were straw-platting, and then walk into the nearest farm-houses, to suggest the feasibility of "a national straw-plat association." All this fertility of intellect was, alas! wasted in that "ingrata terra" into which Uncle Jack had fallen. No squire could be persuaded into the belief that his mother-stone was pregnant with minerals; no farmer talked into weaving straw-plat into a proprietary association. So, even as an ogre, having devastated the surrounding country, begins to cast a hungry eye on his own little ones, Uncle Jack's mouth, long defrauded of juicier and more legitimate morsels, began to water for a bite of my innocent father.
CHAPTER IX
At this time we were living in what may be called a very respectable style for people who made no pretence to ostentation. On the skirts of a large village, stood a square red brick house, about the date of Queen Anne. Upon the top of the house was a balustrade; why, heaven knows – for nobody, except our great tom-cat Ralph, ever walked upon the leads – but so it was, and so it often is in houses from the time of Elizabeth, yea, even to that of Victoria. This balustrade was divided by low piers, on each of which was placed a round ball. The centre of the house was distinguishable by an architrave, in the shape of a triangle, under which was a niche, probably meant for a figure, but the figure was not forthcoming. Below this was the window (encased with carved pilasters) of my dear mother's little sitting-room; and lower still, raised on a flight of six steps, was a very handsome-looking door. All the windows, with smallish panes and largish frames, were relieved with stone copings; – so that the house had an air of solidity and well-to-do-ness about it – nothing tricky on the one hand, nothing decayed on the other.