CHAPTER IX.

On the Graces and Anxieties of Pig-Driving.

FROM the perusal of this article we beg leave to warn off vulgar readers of all denominations, whether of the "great vulgar or the small." Warn, did we say? We drive them off; for Horace tells us that they, as well as pigs, are to be so treated. Odi profanum vulgus, says he, et arceo. But do thou lend thine ear, gentle shade of Goldsmith, who didst make thy bear-leader denounce "everything as is low ;" and thou Steele, who didst humanize upon public-houses and puppet-shows; and Fielding, thou whom the great Richardson, less in that matter (and some others) than thyself, did accuse of vulgarity, because thou didst discern natural gentility in a footman, and yet was not to be taken in by the airs of Pamela and my lady G.

The title is a little startling; but "style and sentiment," as a lady said, "can do anything." Remember then, gentle reader, that talents are not to be despised in the humblest walks of life; we will add, nor in the muddiest. The other day we happened to be among a set of spectators who could not help stopping to admire the patience and address with which a pig-driver huddled and cherished onward his drove of unaccommodating élèves, down a street in the suburbs. He was a born genius for a manœuvre. Had he originated in a higher sphere, he would have been a general, or a stage-manager, or at least the head of a set of monks. Conflicting interests were his forte; pigheaded wills, and proceedings hopeless. To see the hand with which he did it! How hovering, yet firm; how encouraging, yet compelling; how indicative of the space on each side of him, and yet of the line before him; how general, how particular, how perfect! No barber's could quiver about a head with more lightness of apprehension; no cook's pat up and propor

tion the side of a pasty with a more final eye. quoth old Chapman, speaking of Neptune,

The whales,

The whales exulted under him, and knew their mighty king.

The pigs did not exult, but they knew their king. Unwilling was their subjection, but "more in sorrow than in anger.” They were too far gone for rage. Their case was hopeless. They did not see why they should proceed, but they felt themselves bound to do so; forced, conglomerated, crowded onwards, irresistibly impelled by fate and Jenkins. Often would they have bolted under any other master. They squeaked and grunted as in ordinary; they sidled, they shuffled, they half stopped; they turned an eye to all the little outlets of escape; but in vain. There they stuck (for their very progress was a sort of sticking), charmed into the centre of his sphere of action, laying their heads together, but to no purpose; looking all as if they were shrugging their shoulders, and eschewing the tip end of the whip of office. Much eye had they to their left leg; shrewd backward glances; not a little anticipative squeak, and sudden rush of avoidance. It was a superfluous clutter, and they felt it; but a pig finds it more difficult than any other animal to accommodate himself to circumstances. Being out of his pale, he is in the highest state of wonderment and inaptitude. He is sluggish, obstinate, opinionate, not very social; has no desire of seeing foreign parts. Think of him in a multitude, forced to travel, and wondering what the devil it is that drives him! Judge by this of the talents of his driver.

We beheld a man once, an inferior genius, inducting a pig into the other end of Long-lane, Smithfield. He had got him thus far towards the market. It was much. His air announced success in nine parts out of ten, and hope for the remainder. It had been a happy morning's work; he had only to look for the termination of it; and he looked (as a critic of an exalted turn of mind would say) in brightness and in joy. Then would he go to the public-house, and indulge in porter and a pleasing security. Perhaps he would not say much at first, being oppressed with the greatness of his success; but by degrees, especially if

interrogated, he would open, like Æneas, into all the circumstances of his journey and the perils that beset him. Profound would be his set out; full of tremor his middle course; high and skilful his progress; glorious, though with a quickened pulse, his triumphant entry. Delicate had been his situation in Duckingpond row; masterly his turn at Bell-alley. We saw him with the radiance of some such thought on his countenance. He was just entering Long-lane. A gravity came upon him, as he steered his touchy convoy into this his last thoroughfare. A dog moved him into a little agitation, darting along; but he resumed his course, not without a happy trepidation, hovering as he was on the borders of triumph. The pig still required care. It was evidently a pig with all the peculiar turn of mind of his species; a fellow that would not move faster than he could help; irritable; retrospective; picking objections, and prone to boggle; a chap with a tendency to take every path but the proper one, and with a sidelong tact for the alleys. He bolts!

He's off!-Evasit! erupit !

"Oh!" exclaimed the man, dashing his hand against his head, lifting his knee in an agony, and screaming with all the weight of a prophecy which the spectators felt to be too true, "He'll go up all manner of streets!"

Poor fellow! we think of him now sometimes, driving up Duke. street, and not to be comforted in Barbican.

CHAPTER X.

Pantomimes.

HE that says he does not like a pantomime, either says what he does not think, or is not so wise as he fancies himself. He should grow young again and get wiser. "The child," as the poet says, "is father to the man ;" and in this instance he has a very degenerate offspring. Yes, John Tomkins, aged 35, and not liking pantomimes, is a very unpromising little boy. Consider, Tomkins, you have still a serious regard for pudding, and are ambitious of being thought clever. Well, there is the Clown who will sympathize with you in dumplings; and not to see into the cleverness of Harlequin's quips and metamorphoses, is to want a perception, which other little boys have by naNot to like pantomimes, is not to like animal spirits; it is not to like motion; not to like love; not to like a jest upon dulness and formality; not to smoke one's uncle; not to like to see a thump in the face; not to laugh; not to fancy; not to like a holiday; not to know the pleasure of sitting up at Christmas; not to sympathize with one's children; not to remember that we have been children ourselves; nor that we shall grow old, and be as gouty as Pantaloon, if we are not as wise and as active as they.

ture.

Not wishing to be dry on so pleasant a subject, we shall waive the learning that is in us on the origin of these popular entertainments. It will be sufficient to observe, that among the Italians, from whom we borrowed them, they consisted of a run of jokes upon the provincial peculiarities of their countrymen. Harlequin, with his giddy vivacity, was the representative of the inhabitant of one state; Pantaloon, of the imbecile carefulness of another; the Clown, of the sensual, macaroni-eating Neapolitan, with his instinct for eschewing danger; and Columbine, Harlequin's mistress, was the type, not indeed of the out

ward woman (for the young ladies were too restrained in that matter), but of the inner girl of all the lasses in Italy, the tender fluttering heart, the turtle dove (colombina), ready to take flight with the first lover and pay off old scores with the gout and the jealousy, that had hitherto kept her in durance.

The reader has only to transfer the characters to those of his own countrymen, to have a lively sense of the effect which these national pictures must have had in Italy. Imagine Harlequin, a gallant adventurer from some particular part of the land, full of life and fancy, sticking at no obstacles, leaping gates and windows, hitting off a satire at every turn, and converting the very scrapes he gets in, to matters of jest and triumph. The old gen tleman that pursues him, is a miser from some manufacturing town, whose ward he has run away with. The Clown is a London cockney, with a prodigious eye to his own comfort and muffins, a Lord Mayor's fool, who loved "everything that was good ;" and Columbine is the boarding-school girl, ripe for running away with, and making a dance of it all the way from Chelsea to Gretna Green.

Pantomime is the only upholder of comedy, when there is nothing else to show for it. It is the satirist, or caricaturist of the times, ridiculing the rise and fall of hats and funds, the growth of aldermen or of bonnets, the pretences of quackery; and watching innovations of all sorts, lest change be too hasty. But this view of it is for the older boys. For us, who, upon the strength of our sympathy, boast of being among the young ones, its life, its motion, its animal spirits are the thing. We sit among the shining faces on all sides of us, and fancy ourselves at this moment enjoying it. What whim! what fancy! what eternal movement! The performers are like the blood in one's veins, never still; and the music runs with equal vivacity through the whole spectacle, like the pattern of a watered ribbon. In comes Harlequin, demi-masked, party-colored, nimble-toed, lithe, agile; bending himself now this way, now that; bridling up like a pigeon; tipping out his toe like a dancer; then taking a fantastic skip; then standing ready at all points, and at right angles with his omnipotent lath-sword, the emblem of the converting power of fancy and light-heartedness. Giddy as we