Punch: Punch (17.1849)

PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.

123

THE SHUT-UP ONE.

a lay of the regent's park.

OUR LITTLE BIRD.

the london clay.

The night is dark and dreary,
The grass extremely damp ;

My ear, it is aweary

Of yon policeman's stamp ;

I'd call him, but I fear he
Would seize me for a tramp.

Alone within the railings,
And it groweth late and lone :

Vain my repeated bailings—■
The porters must have gone ;

I may not climb the palings,
For I am sixteen stone.

I pass'd the gate a quarter v
Before the clocks toll'd seven ;

And now it's ten or arter—
By jingo that's eleven !

And here I sit a martyr,
Beneath the cope of 'Even.

While getting mild and mellow
At Dobbs's pleasant board,

I little thought my pillow
Would be the swampy sward,

With nought but an umbrella
My wretched 'ead to guard !

•Cuss on the fatal liquor,
Cuss on the pleasant talk,

That sent the bottle quicker,
And srood intents did baulk ;

Till I felt that I talk'd thicker,
And resolved to take a walk.

For in general over drinking 's

An 'abit I abhor,
And I felt an 'usband's shrinkings

From knocking at my door,
To tell my Missis Jenkins,

That I'd do so no more.

Therefore I pass'd the gateway,

To go across the park ;
Thinking to save a great way,

And not provoke remark,
By not walking in a straight way,

Which I didn't, 'cause 't.was dark.

What man, whate'er the season,

Could reasonably doubt
That all let in, by reason,

Must also be let out;
Not left To perch the trees on,

Or bivouac about ?

What man of business habits,
I ask, could e'er suppose,

That the Regent's Park would n ab its
Walkers at evening's close,

And passengers, like rabbits,
Within its toils enclose ?

My wife will scarce be apt to

Believe me if I say
That the Park gates are clapt to,

At the same hour each day :
That their times they don't adapt to

Let people get away.

The dews fall chill and steady,
And damp me to the skin ;

I was cold without already,
And now I 'm wet within :

If the porter is in bed, he
Is were I should have been !

And Missis Jenkins fretteth

Beside her flaring dip
And oft her brow she knitteth,

And pulls an injured lip,
While her wretched husband sitteth

In a dreary state of drip.

I'll write the Times to-morrow,
About these vile park-keepers,

And teach them to their sorrow
That men ain't railway sleepers,

To camp out thus or borrow
Trees to stick on like creepers.

High is the Fence and frowning,
And there are spikes a-top,

With a Ditch outside for drowning
Poor creatures when they drop.

No ! here damp and done brown, in
The Regent's Park I'll stop !

Napier's Directory.—The nearest way to the Admiralty is through
Downing Street.

A HOT war rages between the dead of the metropolis and the quick ;
between the London clay of churchyards, and the London clay that is
still householder. It must be confessed that the living have been very
patient under the aggressions they have suffered ; the enemy fighting
with all advantages upon their side, secure from all sensible reverse;
in veriest truth not knowing when they are beaten. The citizen, whose
chamber window opens upon a grave-yard, sleeping and waking, is a
mark for his enemy whose unconscious particles are fighting millions
strong in the domestic atmosphere of the breathing man ; killing him
quietly but surely—very surely. And what his solace, what his reno-
vating comfort against these mortal odds ? Why, he can open his
mouth, and protest at a parish gathering ; or what may be ?, still dearer
satisfaction, the feeling making musical his every heart-string, he can
draw a grey goose quill, and—write to the Times. And the same night,
the enemy's millions are attacking him under his tester ; destroying the
roses in his wife's cheeks, and making yellow the baby.

This is hard upon the living, hard upon the dead. We have sym-
pathies for either side. Why should the dead be made mischievous ?
The thought of it must be the longest nail in a good man's coffin. Why,
when man has turned his face to the wall,—that wall, where eternal
sky-light comes through upon him,—why should he be made, in the
clay, to turn again, and, without his will or knowledge, carry on an
exterminating war against those he has left behind him? Imagine a
good, gracious grandfather, made, by the tyranny of the sexton, to
poison his daughter, to kill his grandchildren. Good fellow ! with the
spirit in him, he may have been the tenderest, the kindbest of men;
and that spirit, bving its eternal reward, the offal once his property is
turned into wickedness and mischief, and kills about it. After this
manner, a Howard in life, may be a homicide in his coffin.

There was an old thought—one of the many noisome pets of super-
stition—that the spinal marrow of a dead man became quickened into a
serpent. Our London churchyards, in the London clay removed from
London chambers, breed clouds of poisonous things, devouring as
locusts. We may not see them. We may not, by the aid of the best
microscope, read their veined wings, and count one by one their organs
of destruction. The more the pity. Otherwise, we had never endured
them ; had never generated them, not in a cord of marrow, but in every
particle of that " paste and covering " that makes the biggest alder-
man. Their worst evil has been in their invisibility. They have carried
mortality down the throats of men, and destroyed unseen. Hence, the
mischief in its long-continuing.

And good men, and tenderest women, with most pious intentions, up
to the present hour, insist upon doing their best, when dead, to add to
their number. Or wherefore, at this time, do London grave-diggers—
their ordinary force strengthened by helping hands—sweat in London
churchyards '? Family graves are to be opened. The dead are to have
kindred followers. Widow would rejoin husband, widower would rest
with sometime wife. It is very touching: there is natural .religion,
pathos in the wish. And so we pile the London clay—layer upon layer
—pile it up, until the noon-day sun scorching the crust of earth, makes
hot the very coffin-plate.

Parishioners have a vested right in the mischief of the London clay
that makes a London churciiyard,_ and—the admiring world has seen it
will not forego the privilege of evil. They will vindicate their citizen-
ship even in their coffins; and when dead, insist upon the good old
English prerogative of becoming a nuisance. It is after this unyielding,
literal fashion, we must henceforth translate the sentiment that makes
our neighbour crave for London interment. Why should he not take
up his last home in the country ? Why not—if he will have sentiment
—why not gradually become grass, the while the skylark sings to the
change, and haply, the sheep take a bite above him ? Why not to soft
rural harmonies pass into dust, the stone at his head, with t he gravity
of an allowed fiction, telling a century onward where he lies ? If
sentiment must be satisfied, this country home is a sweeter, pleasanter
abode than a house of London clay. Or is it that the parishioner of
St. Bride's thinks there may be an after soothing, a continual droning
to continual rest in tho sound of carriage wheels ? Is it his thought
that, even in the grave, the civic cry of old clothes "—significant cry
near the cast-off suits of the sons of Adam !—is sweeter, far more social,
than the bleating of lambs ? Skylarks are very well in their way, but—
thinks our tradesman—it is something to have even above one's grave
the delicious shoutings of—" City ! " " Bank ! "

Again, a dead man may be made a sort of burglar if insisting upon
burial in a London churchyard. He in his bran-new coffin, with its
honest number of ornaments, and everything about him in the pride
and ceremony of recent death, turns out—evicts—a previous tenant,
made, it is sad to think it, of no more account when dead than an Irish
cotter when living. Yes, the pompous dead man of Saturday last,
needing full room for his full-length, turns out, or crushes into
abominable flatness, the withered fellow beneath him, who, to be sure,