Part 5 (1/2)
His intellect was not for a moment clouded. His fort.i.tude was the more admirable because he was not willing to die. He had very lately said to one of those whom he most loved, 'You know that I never feared death; there have been times when I should have wished it, but, now that this great new prospect is opening before me, I do wish to stay here a little longer.' Yet no weakness, no querulousness disgraced the n.o.ble close of that n.o.ble career. To the physicians the king returned his thanks graciously and gently. 'I know that you have done all that skill and learning could do for me, but the case is beyond your art; and I submit.' From the words which escaped him he seemed to be frequently engaged in mental prayer. Burnet and Tenison remained many hours in the sick-room. He professed to them his firm belief in the truth of the Christian religion, and received the sacrament from their hands with great seriousness. The antechambers were crowded all night with lords and privy-councillors. He ordered several of them to be called in, and exerted himself to take leave of them with a few kind and cheerful words. Among the English who were admitted to his bedside were Devons.h.i.+re and Ormond. But there were in the crowd those who felt as no Englishman could feel, friends of his youth, who had been true to him, and to whom he had been true, through all vicissitudes of fortune; who had served him with unalterable fidelity when his Secretaries of State, his Treasury, and his Admiralty had betrayed him; who had never on any field of battle, or in an atmosphere tainted with loathsome and deadly disease, shrunk from placing their own lives in jeopardy to save his, and whose truth he had at the cost of his own popularity rewarded with bounteous munificence. He strained his feeble voice to thank Auverquerque for the affectionate and loyal services of thirty years. To Albemarle he gave the keys of his closet and of his private drawers.
'You know,' he said, 'what to do with them.' By this time he could scarcely respire. 'Can this,' he said to the physicians, 'last long?' He was told that the end was approaching. He swallowed a cordial, and asked for Bentinck. Those were his last articulate words. Bentinck instantly came to the bedside, bent down, and placed his ear close to the king's mouth. The lips of the dying man moved, but nothing could be heard. The king took the hand of his earliest friend, and pressed it tenderly to his heart. In that moment, no doubt, all that had cast a slight pa.s.sing cloud over their long and pure friends.h.i.+p was forgotten. It was now between seven and eight in the morning. He closed his eyes, and gasped for breath. The bishops knelt down and read the commendatory prayer.
When it ended William was no more!”
It was a.s.suredly the stumbling of his horse against a mole-hill that led more immediately to the death of this great monarch. It is but one link in the chain of many providences affecting his life. We all remember the schoolboy ditty--
”For want of a nail the shoe was lost; For want of a shoe the rider was lost; For want of the rider the battle was lost; For want of the battle the kingdom was lost.”
How much the death of King William r.e.t.a.r.ded progress in Great Britain can never be judged or determined. His appointed hour had come. It was no bullet with its billet on the banks of the Boyne that laid the Dutchman low, but the cast-up earth of a specimen of a little insectivorous quadruped called the mole, which laid him on that bed from which he never arose.
FOOTNOTES:
[28] Jeremy Taylor, if I remember aright.
[29] Vol. V., pp. 305-310.
BEARS.
A most comfortably clad set of plantigrade creatures, as fond, most of them, of fruits as they are of flesh. No creatures are more amusing in zoological gardens to children, who wonder at their climbing powers. Who is so heartless as not to have pitied the roving polar bear, caged, on a sultry July day, in a small paddock with a puddle, and wandering about restlessly in his few feet of ground, as the well-dressed mob lounged to hear the military band performing in the Regent's Park Zoological Gardens? Even young bears have an _adult_ kind of look about them. The writer remembers the manner of one, disappointed at its bread sap, most of the milk of which had been absorbed. A little girl standing by, not two years old, perfectly understood what the little creature was searching for, and, looking up, said ”milka,” or something closely resembling it. We recently saw a little brown bear, on board a Russian s.h.i.+p at Leith. He acted as a capital guard. The little creature had a grown-up face, more easily observed than described.
Bear hams, we speak from rare experience, are truly excellent. Bears, in our early London days, were kept by many hairdressers and perfumers. The anecdote or pa.s.sage from d.i.c.kens's ”Humphrey's Clock” is very characteristic.
In one of Wilkie's pictures the brown bear is figured on its way with its owners to the parish beadle's ”house of detention.” We remember the very bear and its owners. A fine chapter might be written on the animals that used to be led about the country by wandering foreigners. Our first sight of guinea-pigs, our first view of the black-bellied hamster, our first sight of the camel and dromedary, with a monkey on his neck, and our first bear, were seen in this way. Boys and girls in those days seldom saw menageries. A muzzled bear on its hind legs in Nicolson Street, or at the Sciennes, was an exotic sight seldom witnessed, and not easily forgotten. The last we saw was in Bernard Street, Leith, in 1869. That very day, the police were hunting for Bruin and its leaders all over Edinburgh. Bears are now debarred from parading our streets.
AN AUSTRIAN GENERAL AND A BEAR.[30]
Mr Paget was told an excellent story of a bear hunt, which took place in the mountains of Transylvania, and in the presence of the gentleman who told him the story.
”General V----, the Austrian commander of the forces in this district, had come to Cronstadt to inspect the troops, and had been invited by our friend, in compliment to his rank, to join him in a bear hunt. Now, the general, though more accustomed to drilling than hunting, accepted the invitation, and appeared in due time in a c.o.c.ked hat and long gray greatcoat, the uniform of an Austrian general. When they had taken up their places, the general, with half a dozen rifles arrayed before him, paid such devoted attention to a bottle of spirits he had brought with him, that he quite forgot the object of his coming. At last, however, a huge bear burst suddenly from the cover of the pine forest, directly in front of him. At that moment the bottle was raised so high that it quite obscured the general's vision, and he did not perceive the intruder till he was close upon him. Down went the bottle, up jumped the astonished soldier, and, forgetful of his guns, off he started, with the bear clutching at the tails of his greatcoat as he ran away. What strange confusion of ideas was muddling the general's intellect at the moment it is difficult to say, but I suspect he had some notion that the attack was an act of insubordination on the part of Bruin, for he called out most l.u.s.tily, as he ran along, 'Back, rascal! back! I am a general!'
Luckily, a poor Wallack peasant had more respect for the epaulettes than the bear, and, throwing himself in the way, with nothing but a spear for his defence, he kept the enemy at bay till our friend and the jagers came up, and finished the contest with their rifles.”
BYRON'S BEAR AT CAMBRIDGE.
When at Trinity College, Cambridge, Lord Byron had a strange pet. He ”brought up a bear for a degree.” He said to Captain Medwyn,[31] ”I had a great hatred of college rules, and contempt for academical honours.
How many of their wranglers have ever distinguished themselves in the world? There was, by the by, rather a witty satire founded on my bear. A friend of Sh.e.l.ley's made an ourang-outang (Oran Hanton, Esq.) the hero of a novel ('Melincourt'), had him created a baronet, and returned for the borough of One Vote.”
CHARLES d.i.c.kENS ON BEARS' GREASE AND ITS PRODUCERS.
Any one who has been long resident in London, or who has pa.s.sed through Fenchurch Street, or Everett Street, Russell Square, must have been struck with the way in which ”bears' grease” is or used to be advertised in these localities. d.i.c.kens makes Mr Samuel Weller tell of an enthusiastic tradesman of this description.[32]
”His whole delight was in his trade. He spent all his money in bears, and run in debt for 'em besides, and there they wos a growling away in the front cellar all day long and ineffectually gnas.h.i.+ng their teeth, vile the grease o' their relations and friends wos being retailed in gallipots in the shop above, and the first floor winder wos ornamented with their heads; not to speak o' the dreadful aggrawation it must have been to 'em to see a man always a walkin' up and down the pavement outside, with the portrait of a bear in his last agonies, and underneath, in large letters, 'Another fine animal was slaughtered yesterday at Jenkinson's!' Hous'ever, there they wos, and there Jenkinson wos, till he was took very ill with some inward disorder, lost the use of his legs, and wos confined to his bed, vere he laid a wery long time; but sich wos his pride in his profession even then, that wenever he wos worse than usual the doctor used to go down-stairs, and say, 'Jenkinson's wery low this mornin', we must give the bears a stir;'
and as sure as ever they stirred 'em up a bit, and made 'em roar, Jenkinson opens his eyes, if he wos ever so bad, calls out, 'There's the bears!' and rewives agin.”
The author of a most amusing article in the seventy-seventh volume of the _Edinburgh Review_, on the modern system of advertising, records that, in his puff, the first vendor of bears' grease cautioned his customers to wash their hands in warm water after using it, to prevent them from a.s.suming the hairy appearance of a paw.
A BEARABLE PUN.