Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 68, No 420, October 1850

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Various. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 68, No 420, October 1850

MODERN STATE TRIALS.1

MY NOVEL; OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

MILITARY LIFE IN NORTH AFRICA.16

THE GREEN HAND. A "SHORT YARN." A WIND-UP

THE FRENCH WARS OF RELIGION.27

A WILD-FLOWER GARLAND. BY DELTA

THE DAISY

THE WHITE ROSE

THE SWEET BRIAR

THE WALL-FLOWER

THE MASQUERADE OF FREEDOM

Dies Boreales. No. VIII. CHRISTOPHER UNDER CANVASS

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In my next chapter I shall present Squire Hazeldean in patriarchal state – not exactly under the fig-tree he has planted, but before the stocks he has reconstructed. – Squire Hazeldean and his family on the village green! The canvass is all ready for the colours.

But in this chapter I must so far afford a glimpse into antecedents as to let the reader know that there is one member of the family whom he is not likely to meet at present, if ever, on the village green at Hazeldean.

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A very few hours sufficed to show the sea-captain to be a most capital electioneerer for a small and not very enlightened borough. It is true that he talked the saddest nonsense ever heard from an open window; but then his jokes were so broad, his manner so hearty, his voice so big, that in those dark days, before the schoolmaster was abroad, he would have beaten your philosophical Radical and moralising Democrat hollow. Moreover he kissed all the women, old and young, with all the zest of a sailor who has known what it is to be three years at sea without sight of a beardless lip; he threw open all the public-houses, asked a numerous committee every day to dinner, and, chucking his purse up in the air, declared "he would stick to his guns while there was a shot in the locker." Till then, there had been but little political difference between the candidate supported by Lord Lansmere's interest and the opposing parties – for country gentlemen, in those days, were pretty much of the same way of thinking, and the question had been really local – viz., whether the Lansmere interest should or should not prevail over that of the two squirearchical families who had alone, hitherto, ventured to oppose it. But though Captain Dashmore was really a very loyal man, and much too old a sailor to think that the State (which, according to established metaphor, is a vessel, par excellence,) should admit Jack upon quarterdeck, yet, what with talking against lords and aristocracy, jobs and abuses, and searching through no very refined vocabulary for the strongest epithets to apply to those irritating nouns-substantive, his bile had got the better of his understanding, and he became fuddled, as it were, by his own eloquence. Thus, though as innocent of Jacobinical designs as he was incapable of setting the Thames on fire, you would have guessed him, by his speeches, to be one of the most determined incendiaries that ever applied a match to the combustible materials of a contested election; while, being by no means accustomed to respect his adversaries, he could not have treated the Earl of Lansmere with less ceremony if his Lordship had been a Frenchman. He usually designated that respectable nobleman by the title of "Old Pompous;" and the Mayor, who was never seen abroad but in top-boots, and the Solicitor, who was of a large build, received from his irreverent wit the joint soubriquet of "Tops and Bottoms!" Hence the election had now become, as I said before, a personal matter with my Lord, and, indeed, with the great heads of the Lansmere interest. The Earl seemed to consider his very coronet at stake in the question. "The man from Baker Street," with his preternatural audacity, appeared to him a being ominous and awful – not so much to be regarded with resentment, as with superstitious terror: he felt as felt the dignified Montezuma, when that ruffianly Cortez, with his handful of Spanish rapscallions, bearded him in his own capital, and in the midst of his Mexican splendour. – "The gods were menaced if man could be so insolent!" wherefore said my Lord, tremulously, – "The Constitution is gone if the Man from Baker Street comes in for Lansmere!"

But, in the absence of Audley Egerton, the election looked extremely ugly, and Captain Dashmore gained ground hourly, when the Lansmere Solicitor happily bethought him of a notable proxy for the missing candidate. The Squire of Hazeldean, with his young wife, had been invited by the Earl in honour of Audley; and in the Squire the Solicitor beheld the only mortal who could cope with the sea-captain, – a man with a voice as burly, and a face as bold – a man who, if permitted for the nonce by Mrs Hazeldean, would kiss all the women no less heartily than the Captain kissed them; and who was, moreover, a taller, and a handsomer, and a younger man – all three, great recommendations in the kissing department of a contested election. Yes, to canvass the borough, and to speak from the window, Squire Hazeldean would be even more popularly presentable than the London-bred and accomplished Audley Egerton himself.

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