Northumberland was plaintiff, and my friend, Mr.
Clowes, the defendant. The printer, who carried on
his business in Northumberland Court, had erected a
steam-press in his cellar, the wall of which abutted
on the Duke s princely mansion at Charing Cross.
Ludicrous it was to hear the extravagant terms in
which the counsel for the plaintiff and his witnesses
described the alleged nuisance the noise made by
this engine, quite horrid, sometimes resembling
thunder, at other times like a threshing-machine,
and then again like the rumbling of carts and wag
gons. With surpassing ability was the cause of the
defendant conducted by the Attorney-General (Cop
ley). The course of the trial is beside my present
purpose. Mi-. Donkin, the celebrated engineer, de
posed that there were not less than twenty engines
erected for printing in London. Simplifications of
the original invention had rendered the Printing
Machine applicable to the production of books as
well as newspapers. The second rain was beginning
to descend. In 1814 I was very far from a concep
tion of the extent in which the invention of the
Printing Machine would affect a future stage in my
working life. But in the boundless fertility of that
second rain I anticipated a wider scope for my pro
fessional labours. I had incurred new responsibilities,
118 PASSAGES OF A WORKING LIFE:
and had gained new motives for exertion, in marrying.
The Christmas of that year saw my once solitary
home lighted up with love and cheerfulness.
In February, 1815, a Bill was hurried through
Parliament which absolutely closed the ports against
the introduction of foreign corn till the price of wheat
should rise to eighty shillings a quarter. I rejoice to
see that I was fearless of the indignation which the
Windsor paper, circulating chiefly in an agricultural
district, would produce, when I wrote " It is hardly
fair that the landowner and cultivator should enter
Parliament with such a formidable power as the
united voice of the people will scarcely be able to
put down, and there demand that the price of wheat
should now be fixed at the average rate of a time of
war. There are many noble lords and right honour
able gentlemen who have doubled their rentals since
the year 1794, and there are many very thrifty agri
culturists who have purchased the estates which their
fathers only tilled, and have adjourned, with unsoiled
hands, from the oak-chair in the chimney-corner to
the velvet sofa in the drawing-room. Doubtless all
this is very agreeable to the parties themselves, and
worldly wisdom will blame no man for preferring
20,OOOZ. to 10,000, or a hunter and madeira to a
market-cart and ale. But then it is rather galling
to be told that all this is essentially necessary to our
existence and prosperity, and to hear it very gravely
asserted that we shall be all the happier and better
for being shortly allowed to get two loaves with the
money for which we now purchase three."
The " hunter and madeira " as contrasted with the
" market-cart and ale " of the old times, was not un
generously applied to the generation of Southern
THE FIRST EPOCH. 119
farmers, who had sprung up in the days of protection
and paper currency.
The marriage of the Princess Charlotte with Prince
Leopold, on the 2nd of May, 1816, was an event in
which I took exceeding interest. It set me poetizing ;
for I was somewhat too apt to be moved into writing
verse on passing subjects, forgetting that poetry ought
to be almost exclusively conversant with the perma
nent and universal. My Mask, " The Bridal of the
Isles," whatever might have been its defects, was
not written in the spirit of a courtier ; for in the
Second Canto, in which I called up the shades of the
great British rulers of old, I put these lines in the
mouth of Alfred addressing the Genius of England :
" 0, I have watch d thy monarchs as they pass d,
Now leaping upward to my tempting throne,
Now toppling down in hateful civil strife,
Or sliding to the slumbers of the tomb ;
But never saw I one who fill d that seat
In rightful ministration, who might say,
* This is my couch of ease, my chair of joy,
This sceptre is a pleasure-charming rod
To call up all fresh luxuries around me.
The lofty soul, with reverend eye and meek,
"Would look upon the trappings of its state
As emblems of a fearful trust, that ask d
The smile of Heaven on self-denying virtue.
Yes ! I will hover round those youthful hearts,
Unblighted yet by power and with a voice
Borne on the ear by eveiy morning breeze,
Cry Live not for yourselves. "
I had a very pleasant, because a very character
istic, letter from Leigh Hunt about this Mask. He
complimented me by saying, "It is very crisp and
luxuriant, and shows that you possess in a great
degree my favourite part of the poetical spirit that
6
120 PASSAGES OE A WORKING LIFE:
of enjoyment." Yes. It was that spirit of enjoy
ment which gave Hunt his perennial youth, amidst
worldly troubles as great as most men have endured ;
which, carried somewhat to excess, made him almost
indifferent to adversity in its stern realities. " But,"
he continued, " I would rather talk with you about
these matters than write about them ; for when I get
upon poetry I feel my wings on, and do not like to
wait the zig-zag travelling of the pen." Happy
nature ! I did not cultivate his acquaintance as I
ought to have done in this fresh time of hope. I
knew him in later years when I was sobered ; but
when I had not lost the power of enjoyment in his
delightful conversation, so charming especially to
one who was also battling with the world in its
constant looking at the sunny side of human affairs.
The transition from joy at the auspicious marriage
of the Princess Charlotte, to the universal mourning
for her death, was not sudden in point of time, but it
nevertheless came upon the nation as an unexpected
blow, suspending all lesser interests of domestic
politics. The interval between May, 1816, and No
vember, 1817, was one of very serious aspects. The
Government and the People were not in accord ;
suffering and sedition went hand in hand ; dema
gogues flourished; spies were more than tolerated.
Of this unhappy period I shall have to speak in
another chapter. Let me at present advert to some
personal experiences at the funeral of the Princess
Charlotte, on Wednesday evening, the 19th of No
vember, which I thus related in a Supplementary
Number of "The Windsor Express," published on
the following morning. In this narrative I laid
aside the usual editorial style, and signed my name
THE FIRST EPOCH. 121
as to facts which I was prepared individually to sub
stantiate :
" On the morning of Tuesday I received from one
of the Canons of the College of Windsor a ticket of
admission to the organ-loft of St. George s Chapel, to
witness the ceremonial of the late Princess Charlotte s
interment. This, I was given to understand, was
presented to me by the particular direction of the
Dean and Chapter, to allow me to make a faithful
report of the solemnities, and as a compliment to
the office of chief magistrate which my father holds
in the borough. At seven o clock this evening I
claimed an entrance at the outer gate of the lower
ward of the Castle, which was kept by two subalterns
of the Foot Guards, and a numerous body of rank
and file. Constables of the borough were also posted
here, but they were evidently considered as intruders
upon these unconstitutional guardians of the peace.
I was roughly thrust back against the wheels of the
carnages which were passing behind me, and told, in
common with many others who, like myself, had
tickets, that no more would be admitted. For an
hour I was buffeted about, with my unfortunate com
panions, who comprised some of the most respectable
inhabitants of Windsor ; sometimes collared by the
soldiers, sometimes jammed against the castle wall,
and at all times insulted by dogmatical assertions or
sneering indifference. We at last retired in despair,
having risked our lives till danger was no longer
endurable. Ten minutes before the procession
entered the gate, I procured access to one of the
officers, under the escort of a sentinel ; and having
represented the peculiar circumstances under which
I had obtained my ticket, and the duty which I
123 PASSAGES OF A WORKLNG LIFE I
owed to tlae public to enforce my claim for admission,
requested that the order of exclusion might be with
drawn. I was haughtily repulsed. At this instant,
two military men, not on duty, with four ladies, were
passed through the gate without any other authority
than the dictum of the officer I was addressing. I
complained of the unjust partiality in a respectful
manner. For that presumption I was instantly
handed over to the next corporal, with orders to
take back that man. Collared like a felon, I was
forced along the line of foot-guards, and on reaching
the last soldier was thrust against a carriage like an
intrzsive hound."
Never shall I forget the feelings of that evening.
After my long detention in the vain endeavour to
assert my right of passing the outer gate, I waited to
look upon the street procession. When I came back
to my home, exhausted, boiling over with indigna
tion, I found my wife in a situation of extreme
danger. For some days she had been seriously ill.
The funeral procession had passed under our windows.
The lurid glare of the torches ; the roll of carriages ;
the tramp of horses, amidst the universal silence of
the crowd ; these, almost unendurable for any in
valid, who could hear all but who could not look out
upon a scene so solemn and so exciting, produced the
most alarming effects upon one who was at the
extreme point of weakness. By God s Providence,
our medical friend, a surgeon of the first eminence
in Windsor, returned with me to my house, having
been himself subjected to the outrages of the mili
tary. He was thus the means of bestowing such
immediate attentions upon his patient as probably
saved her in the dangerous crisis of that melan-
THE FIRST EPOCH. 1.23
clioly November night. The one great and enduring
happiness of my life was to be preserved to me.
At this Royal Funeral, when a whole nation was
present in heart and mind, these military outrages
were not the sole disorders and indecencies. The
undertaker s men were unmistakeably drunk, as they
reeled up the steep Castle street. Within St. George s
Chapel there were struggles and murmurs, as in an
overcrowded pit at the theatre ; for three or four
hundred rank and file of the Guards were placed
from the western entrance to the extremity of the
nave, so as to prevent nine-tenths of the assemblage
admitted by tickets from seeing more of the
solemnity than they could have seen had the outer
walls of the Chapel been the barrier to their desires.
Just before the procession arrived, there was a noisy
conflict at the door of the Choir, which had ulterior
consequences. One of the Canons refused to admit
a confidential page of the Regent, who had been
commanded to notice and report to his royal master
how the ceremony was conducted. " It is our free
hold," said the Church Dignitary. " It is the Chapel
of the Order of the Garter," replied the offended
Ruler; " and until the clerical ministers of the
Order can behave better, they shall come down
from their accustomed seats in the stalls of the
Knights."
In my newspaper of the Saturday which followed
the Supplement of the 20th of November, I wrote an
article entitled " Excessive Employment of Soldiery
in a Religious Solemnity, and Abuses in Military
Power." My animadversion on "Abuses in Military
Power " was bitter enough in its general invective ;
but there was nothing that the epauletted puppies
124 PASSAGES OF A WORKING LIFE:
who talked of horsewhipping the newspaper-fellow
could have produced in a court of justice as a justi
fication of a new outrage. I have detailed this
occurrence at somewhat greater length than it pro
bably deserved ; but it presents a striking contrast
not only to the altered temper of the military in
these happier times, but to the manner in which the
conductors of the Press are now respected in the dis
charge of their useful functions as the accredited
representatives of the people.
CHAPTER IV.
HATEVER might have been the monotony
of the life of the editor of a provincial
journal in the mere discharge of his office
duties, I could always find an ever-chang
ing interest in the necessity for seeing many things
with my own eyes ; in making personal inquiries in
distant places as to the correctness of reputed occur
rences in fact, in being my own reporter. Much of
my time was spent on horseback. My ordinary
costume was knee-breeches and top-boots. My
varied out-door life was as healthful as it was
instructive. In these local operations the brain was
not heavily taxed. Education was going on. Some
exercise of the intellect was essential to report the
speeches at a public meeting. The facts exhibited
at a coroner s, inquest might be best dispatched in
that brief style which was once considered sufficient
for the London newspaper, but which is now dis
placed by the most wonderful accumulation of "horror
on horror s head." Sometimes, however, the country
newspaper might attempt to be graphic when it had
to record occurrences of an unusual nature ; and yet
the absolute limitation of space would often compel
rne to throw away the kernel of the picturesque to
give my readers the hard shell of the literal.
On the 4th of July, 1816, I rode out to Maiden
head Thicket to behold a remarkable proof of the
126 PASSAGES OF A WORKING LIFE:
alleged want of employment in the mining and
manufacturing districts. On the road from Henley
there was the halt of a cavalcade not such as the
poet and the novelist have so often described as the
halt of jovial pilgrims taking their morning meal in
the beechen shade ; but of a party of grim colliers
clustered round a waggon laden with coals, which
they had drawn for many miles, and whose further
progress was interrupted at the mandate of a Bow-
street magistrate. From Bilston Moor where the
furnaces of many iron-works no longer darkened the
air with their smoke, and the windlass of many a pit
was now idle forty-one men, having a leader on
horseback, had the day before passed through Oxford,
dragging the waggon in solemn silence, asking no
alms, but bearing a placard, on which was inscribed,
"Willing to work, but none of us will beg." Their
intention, as well as that of another party march
ing on the St. Alban s Road, was to proceed to
London, in the belief that the Prince Regent
could order them employment. At Maidenhead the
military were prepared for some dire conflict with
want and desperation. But Sir Richar d Birnie very
wisely went forward with two police-officers, finally
persuading these men to let their coals be taken into
Maidenhead, and to receive a handsome present
which would enable them to return to their homes.
They were punctilious in refusing to sell their coals.
The march of the blanketeers of Manchester in the
next year was not so quietly prevented.
There never was a problem more difficult of solu
tion, even by the soundest political economists of the
time, than that of the condition of the labouring
classes in 1816 and 1817. When I look back on
THE FIRST EPOCH. 127
what I wrote on this overwhelming subject in the
last four years of the reign of George the Third, I
behold a succession of fallacies and half-truths pro
pounded with a sincere belief and with a benevolent
earnestness. I was groping my way, in common with
most public writers, in the thick darkness by which we
were surrounded. The text upon which I commonly
preached was from Southey not the Southey de
nounced by the "Anti-Jacobin" of 1797, but the
Southey of 1817, who denounced Byron and the
" Satanic School." The text was not in any great
degree an exaggerated description of the condition of
England. " We are arrived at that state in which the
extremes of inequality are become intolerable." The
fallacies and half-truths of the usual comment upon
this doctrine sprang from a narrow and one-sided
view of the causes of these extremes.
I maintained, not without reason, that the existence
of some radical disease in the condition of the labour
ing classes had been long indicated by the progressive
increase of the Poor Rates. I held that the prodigious
increase in the demands of pauperism, from the
million and a half sterling in 1776, to the eight
millions in 1815, was the consequence of some system
which, as it had multiplied the temporary sources of
profitable labour, had a natural tendency to multiply
population, without providing for the regular support
of the human beings which it called forth. I averred
that the mechanical improvements of the forty years
constituted that system. The war, which produced
a comparative monopoly of commerce, gave birth to a
new machinery to supply that monopoly. The manu
facturing system made no provision for that inevitable
period when the trading intercourse of the world
128 PASSAGES OF A WORKING LIFE:
would return to its accustomed channels, and man
kind would be free to use the same instruments of
commercial advantage that we had employed. The
system had called into action half a million of human
beings whom it had now unavoidably abandoned.
The State must therefore supply the means of life,
which the ordinary modes of employment could no
longer give.
I had never seen the practical working of the
manufacturing system, and thus I talked, as it) was
the fashion to talk when Southey wrote, "The nation
that builds upon manufactures sleeps upon gun
powder." But I was perfectly familiar with the
condition of the agricultural districts. I held, truly,
that the organization of society in Great Britian had
been completely changed by the system of inclosures
and agricultural improvements. These were forced
on by the increased demand for corn, originating in
the extraordinary consumption and waste of war, and
in the increased wants of an increased manufactur
ing population. I wept over the diminution of the
labour which was once required by imperfect modes
of cultivation. I grieved over the extinguishing of
those indirect means of support which supplied the
primitive wants of the ancient peasantry. I missed
the old commons on which I used to ramble in my
boyhood. I saw no longer the half-starved cow
of the cottager tethered before the broken-down
hedge of his slovenly garden, and the pig lying on
the dunghill that blocked up the dirty approach to
his ruinous hovel. The additional patch of garden-
ground that was allotted to him seemed to me but a
poor compensation for the heath where he once might
freely cut the turf for his fire. I grieved the grief of
THE FIRST EPOCH. 129
ignorance when I quoted the population returns of
1811, to prove that while two or three millions of
additional mouths had been maintained from the
land, some thousands less had been maintained upon
the land. The interests of the consumers appeared
to me small in comparison with those of the pro
ducers. Had I looked more deeply into the matter,
I might have mourned over a greater evil than; the
destruction of the semi-barbarous independence of
the squatters who had regarded the heaths and
commons as their proper and peculiar inheritance.
I might have reasonably mourned that the Agricul
tural Labourers were slaves to the Poor Laws
brought into the world as paupers by the improvi
dent encouragement to early marriages under the
allowance-system ; kept through life as paupers by
receiving as alms what they had fairly earned as
wages ; deprived of profitable employment, and
hunted from parish to parish, by the laws of Settle
ment ; punished with the most unrelenting severity
if they should knock down a rabbit. I might at
that time have protested against the bulk of the
population being kept in the most degrading igno
rance, by the dread which then very generally pre
vailed in rural districts, that to educate the labourer
was to unfit him for the duties (they might have said
the degradations) of " that state of life into which it
had pleased God to call him " the formula of conso
lation always addressed to the poor for the repression
of any impious desire to better their condition.
The experience of all men, whether in the South
or the North, was sufficient to show that a superfluous
population was now pressing upon the capital devoted
to the maintenance of labour. But, in that time of
bold and impudent assertion, there were believers ever.
130 PASSAGES OF A WORKING LIFE:
in Cobbett when he said "I am quite convinced that
the population, upon the whole, has not increased,
in England, one single soul since I was born." Still
less would many doubt the truth of his description
of the Labourers Paradise in the days " before they
were stripped of the commons, of their kettles, their
bedding, their beer-barrels."
Whatever might be my heresies as to the best
modes of bettering the condition of the Poor, I never
had any doubt of the advantages of educating them.
It was not often that I came into contact with men
who were capable of uniting strong benevolent im
pulses with the broad view of the consequences of
making the pauper more comfortable than the inde
pendent labourer. A sort of instinctive horror of the
Malthusian doctrine was at the bottom of the thoughts
of many sensible persons, who, in spite of their own
convictions, were for the most liberal parish allow
ances according to the number of children in a family,
and for the best dietary within the Workhouse walls.
Such were, to some extent, the convictions of one of
the shrewdest and most warm-hearted of self-taught
men with whom it was ever my happiness to become
acquainted. Mr. Ingalton had a flourishing business
as a shoemaker at Eton. His son, a young artist of
great promise, was for some years the most intimate
companion of my leisure ; and he is one of the few
whom time has spared to show me how justly I
esteemed him. In his painting-room I have had
many a friendly argument with his intelligent father.
There was another occasional visitor of that painting-
room, who was ready to discuss controverted subjects
of social economy, with a perfect theoretical know
ledge, but with the practical earnestness of a Christian
THE FIKST EPOCH. 131
love for his fellow-creatures. Often have I listened
with real delight to an instructive dialogue between
the refined scholar and the thoughtful tradesman,
who was not wanting in book-knowledge but was
stronger in his mother-wit. I see his stately figure
in his working garb fresh from the " cutting out "
of his back-shop standing side by side with the tall
and thin clergyman before his son s easel, and dis
coursing, with no ordinary knowledge of the prin
ciples of Art, upon the composition of the " Cottage
interior " or the " Village Concert." The characters
of the English scenes which his son painted, in the
days of Wilkie, were studies from life ; and thus the
transition of talk was natural enough from the picture
to the reality. The accomplished divine, who was
not unfamiliar with many an abode of poverty, was
a patient listener to every plea for tenderness to the
improvident, and of compassion for the ignorant fol
lowers of things evil. But he believed in more en
during helps than casual charity. A few years before,
he had proclaimed the great principle, that "the only
true secret of assisting the poor is to make them agents
in bettering their own condition, and to supply them,
uot with a temporary stimulus, but with a permanent
energy Many avenues to an improved con
dition are open to one whose faculties are enlarged
and exercised ; he sees his own interest more clearly,
he pursues it more steadily, and he does not study
immediate gratification at the expense of bitter and
late repentance, or mortgage the labour of his future
life without an adequate return." * A year or two
later, I had a more intimate knowledge of this
admirable expositor of principles which have even-
* " Records of Creation," 1816.
132 PASSAGES OF A WOKKING LIFE :
tually triumphed over the fears of the rich and the
doubts of the learned. But in yielding up some
prejudices to the gentle persuasiveness of the Fellow
of Eton who, by his recent sermons in the College
Chapel had produced a marked effect in the moral
conduct of five hundred youths T could scarcely
then have believed that I was receiving lessons of
practical wisdom from a future Archbishop of Can