BOOK I
THE EARLY YOUTH OF HENRY ESMOND, UP TO THE TIME OF HIS LEAVING TRINITYCOLLEGE, IN CAMBRIDGE.
The actors in the old tragedies, as we read, piped their iambics toa tune, speaking from under a mask, and wearing stilts and a greathead-dress. 'Twas thought the dignity of the Tragic Muse required theseappurtenances, and that she was not to move except to a measure andcadence. So Queen Medea slew her children to a slow music: and KingAgamemnon perished in a dying fall (to use Mr. Dryden's words): theChorus standing by in a set attitude, and rhythmically and decorouslybewailing the fates of those great crowned persons. The Muse of Historyhath encumbered herself with ceremony as well as her Sister of theTheatre. She too wears the mask and the cothurnus, and speaks tomeasure. She too, in our age, busies herself with the affairs only ofkings; waiting on them obsequiously and stately, as if she were but amistress of court ceremonies, and had nothing to do with the registeringof the affairs of the common people. I have seen in his very old age anddecrepitude the old French King Lewis the Fourteenth, the type andmodel of kinghood--who never moved but to measure, who lived and diedaccording to the laws of his Court-marshal, persisting in enactingthrough life the part of Hero; and, divested of poetry, this was but alittle wrinkled old man, pock-marked, and with a great periwig and redheels to make him look tall--a hero for a book if you like, or for abrass statue or a painted ceiling, a god in a Roman shape, but whatmore than a man for Madame Maintenon, or the barber who shaved him, orMonsieur Fagon, his surgeon? I wonder shall History ever pull off herperiwig and cease to be court-ridden? Shall we see something of Franceand England besides Versailles and Windsor? I saw Queen Anne at thelatter place tearing down the Park slopes, after her stag-hounds, anddriving her one-horse chaise--a hot, red-faced woman, not in the leastresembling that statue of her which turns its stone back upon St.Paul's, and faces the coaches struggling up Ludgate Hill. She wasneither better bred nor wiser than you and me, though we knelt to handher a letter or a wash-hand basin. Why shall History go on kneeling tothe end of time? I am for having her rise up off her knees, and take anatural posture: not to be for ever performing cringes and congeeslike a court-chamberlain, and shuffling backwards out of doors in thepresence of the sovereign. In a word, I would have History familiarrather than heroic: and think that Mr. Hogarth and Mr. Fielding willgive our children a much better idea of the manners of the presentage in England, than the Court Gazette and the newspapers which we getthence.
There was a German officer of Webb's, with whom we used to joke, and ofwhom a story (whereof I myself was the author) was got to be believed inthe army, that he was eldest son of the hereditary Grand Bootjack of theEmpire, and the heir to that honor of which his ancestors had been veryproud, having been kicked for twenty generations by one imperial foot,as they drew the boot from the other. I have heard that the oldLord Castlewood, of part of whose family these present volumes are achronicle, though he came of quite as good blood as the Stuarts whomhe served (and who as regards mere lineage are no better than a dozenEnglish and Scottish houses I could name), was prouder of his post aboutthe Court than of his ancestral honors, and valued his dignity (as Lordof the Butteries and Groom of the King's Posset) so highly, that hecheerfully ruined himself for the thankless and thriftless race whobestowed it. He pawned his plate for King Charles the First, mortgagedhis property for the same cause, and lost the greater part of it byfines and sequestration: stood a siege of his castle by Ireton,where his brother Thomas capitulated (afterward making terms with theCommonwealth, for which the elder brother never forgave him), andwhere his second brother Edward, who had embraced the ecclesiasticalprofession, was slain on Castlewood Tower, being engaged there both aspreacher and artilleryman. This resolute old loyalist, who was with theKing whilst his house was thus being battered down, escaped abroad withhis only son, then a boy, to return and take a part in Worcester fight.On that fatal field Eustace Esmond was killed, and Castlewood fled fromit once more into exile, and henceforward, and after the Restoration,never was away from the Court of the monarch (for whose return we offerthanks in the Prayer-Book) who sold his country and who took bribes ofthe French king.
What spectacle is more august than that of a great king in exile? Who ismore worthy of respect than a brave man in misfortune? Mr. Addison haspainted such a figure in his noble piece of Cato. But suppose fugitiveCato fuddling himself at a tavern with a wench on each knee, a dozenfaithful and tipsy companions of defeat, and a landlord calling outfor his bill; and the dignity of misfortune is straightway lost. TheHistorical Muse turns away shamefaced from the vulgar scene, and closesthe door--on which the exile's unpaid drink is scored up--upon him andhis pots and his pipes, and the tavern-chorus which he and his friendsare singing. Such a man as Charles should have had an Ostade or Mieristo paint him. Your Knellers and Le Bruns only deal in clumsy andimpossible allegories: and it hath always seemed to me blasphemy toclaim Olympus for such a wine-drabbled divinity as that.
About the King's follower, the Viscount Castlewood--orphan of his son,ruined by his fidelity, bearing many wounds and marks of bravery,old and in exile--his kinsmen I suppose should be silent; nor if thispatriarch fell down in his cups, call fie upon him, and fetch passers-byto laugh at his red face and white hairs. What! does a stream rush outof a mountain free and pure, to roll through fair pastures, to feed andthrow out bright tributaries, and to end in a village gutter? Lives thathave noble commencements have often no better endings; it is not withouta kind of awe and reverence that an observer should speculate upon suchcareers as he traces the course of them. I have seen too much of successin life to take off my hat and huzzah to it as it passes in its giltcoach: and would do my little part with my neighbors on foot, that theyshould not gape with too much wonder, nor applaud too loudly. Is it theLord Mayor going in state to mince-pies and the Mansion House? Is itpoor Jack of Newgate's procession, with the sheriff and javelin-men,conducting him on his last journey to Tyburn? I look into my heartand think that I sin as good as my Lord Mayor, and know I am as bad asTyburn Jack. Give me a chain and red gown and a pudding before me, andI could play the part of Alderman very well, and sentence Jack afterdinner. Starve me, keep me from books and honest people, educate me tolove dice, gin, and pleasure, and put me on Hounslow Heath, with a pursebefore me, and I will take it. "And I shall be deservedly hanged," sayyou, wishing to put an end to this prosing. I don't say No. I can't butaccept the world as I find it, including a rope's end, as long as it isin fashion.
The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., a Colonel in the Service of Her Majesty Queen Anne Page 3
