Dbckhbkr 8, 1859.1 BENJAMIN HARRIS AND HIS WIPE PATIENCE. 473
folks like them might enjoy the gaiety with more
comfort and safety, than exposed to the pressure
and restlessness of the people.
Benjamin readily assented, and made way for the petitioner, an old man with a very homely, kindly cast of countenance, his beard close shaven, and in place of a periwig his own hair of a silvery whiteness, which no powder could emulate, and “my daughter Dorothy,” a buxom, barn-door lass, with such a demure hood, as her mother and grandmother might have worn before her.
The younger members of the little company were soon familiar, and the seniors conversed in a friendly way. The squire, or vicar, as he could only be, commenting on the weather with an earnestness that was scarcely in keeping with the vicinity of Bow-bell, and remarking that it was a rare fine season for the hay crop.
“I perceive your heart is in your rural domain, sir,” says Benjamin, with a slight smile.
“Where better?“ asks the gentleman simply;
“It hath been there this many a year, since it was a sore burdened heart within the precincts of White- hall. Nay, I do not need to hide it now, I am Oliver Cromwell’s son, Master Richard.“
Harris started unfeignedly and removed his hat, but Master Richard declined the compliment.
“I receive only neighbourly tokens of good will, and I will be glad to accept such from you or any man — but none else. You see, sir, my father was born Oliver Cromwell, whom the Lord com- pelled all men to acknowledge; but I was nought save Master Richard — as such I am not ashamed to be greeted down in our shire, where, I trust, it shames no man to greet me, and where I know it would grieve my own folk if I failed them.”
But Harris bowed lower to good Master Richard than to Richard Cromwell; and the printer and the Protector '8 son stood lovingly together and took note of the stream that flowed past them.
Would that a painter’s hand could arrest some of these groups and single figures! Sailors and soldiers, nuns and Turks, Italians and Savoyards, Highlandmen and highwaymen, mackrel women and broom-sellers; and where there was no disguise there were still some of the high lace and ribband plaited commodes which Mary brought in from Holland, rising like steeples above the brows of the women, and there were everywhere the gro- tesquely wide skirts and the tremendous Marl- borough wigs making up the men; there were the political patches and the hideous carved ashen walking-sticks, and, to the delight of the unso- phisticated lasses, the fans whose manoeuvres Mr. Spectator had wickedly arranged into an exercise: “Handle your fans, unfurl your fans, discharge your fans, ground your fans, recover your fans, flutter your fans.”
It was a perceptible fact that those who were famous in any way, even for so small a matter as a fair face or a fine figure, did not much affect either mask or mantle, so that the populace might shout at their notorieties. There was Dr. Sacheverell bewigged with the best, with his bold blustering. face equally “firm“ to the Church of England and his holiness the Pope. There was starred and gartered, exquisitely moulded, evil-eyed Konigsmark, before he shot Mr. Thynne in broad day in
the park — certainly the most direct way in which
an heiress was approached through a friend by a
villain who wished to plunder her — the brother of
that other Kfinigsmark who slept so darkly under
the floor of Princess Sophia’s dressing-room over in
Hanover. There was a fellow squire of Master
Richard’s nodding frankly to him, a man of greater
mind and bearing, a goodly gentleman as any
present in other particulars than velvet coat and
lace cravat, with mingled humour and simplicity
in his eye, and a union of heat and benevolence in
brow, mouth, and chin. Shut your eyes and you
can spy him riding as high sheriff, noticing the
yeomen and their families at the church door,
giving alms to the poor in his great hall, spoiled
by the wheedling gipsy, remembering with pride
and tenderness the “vain, cruel widow,” visiting
Westminster Abbey and Vauxhall in this very
town sojourn. Among the belles is “the little
Whig,” with flowing chesnut hair like her mother’s
and Queen Anne’s, and yet more marketable, for
she bribes the Tory gentlemen with a sight of
these tresses while she entertains them at her
toilet. “Dulcinea!“ groans Benjamin, and turns
his back almost vexed that he had allowed his
humble, industrious girls to behold — a syren.
But clear the way for two still more potent women; one in the seat of honour, in the glass-coach, the other with her back to the horses, meditating how their places are to be reversed. There can be no mistake here; the large, brilliant, fierce-eyed dame, blazing with jewels and in scarlet stockings, is one who certainly loved her husband and wept her son; “the wicked woman Marlborough” of the dramatist and architect, Vanbrugh, the dreaded Mrs. Freeman of cowering Mrs. Morland; the pale, quiet, soft, sleek, poor relation, in un- courtly Pinners, is her assistant and successor, Mrs. Masham.
Benjamin sighs again, though he scarcely guesses how far Sarah and Abigail have played into Louis' hands, have governed — and will govern — mighty England.
At this moment a slight stoppage occurs in the procession. Sarah waves her mittened hand, and calls out furiously to her coachman to get on. The scared Jehu whips out of the way and dashes across the kennel, and Sarah and Abigail bespatter, from head to foot, those representatives of other interests in the realm; the enlightened printer and the contented tiller of the ground — the asserter of the truth, who suffered without dreaming of compensation — and Richard Cromwell, who, with his brother Henry, bore the best testimony to their great father’s honesty, inasmuch as standing in his shoes, they had yet no mind to play the parts of Hippias and Hipparchus.
But there was quite another sort of enterprise with which Benjamin Harris and his wife had more concern. After Patience could no longer pretend to a necessity for keeping accounts and revising columns of figures on the example of good methodical painstaking Mrs. Dunton in her grave, years and years agone, and her too vaga- bond and easy John, not only married to another, but separated from his second spouse, waned into shabbiness and disrepute, and fallen out of sight;
or with a happier reference to cordial Mrs. Walton,