Lively cheer of vigour born; The thoughtless day—the easy night— The spirits pure—the slumbers light— That fly the approach of morn.
The one drawback was the long-drawn darkness of the winter night. I slept in an old attic in an old house, where every creak on the stairs, when the wind was roaring all round, gave me a stroke of pain, and where ghastly faces came to me in the dark of old women haggard and hideous and woebegone. De Quincy hints in his numerous writings at boyish times of a similar kind. I fancy most of us in boyhood are tortured in a similar way. Fuseli supped on pork chops to procure fitting subjects for his weird sketches. But we never had pork chops; yet in the visions of the night what awful faces I saw—almost enough to turn one’s brain and to make one’s hair stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine.
Country villages are always fifty years behind the times, and so it was with us. In the farmyard there was no steam engine, and all the work was done by manual labour, such as threshing the corn with the flail. In many families the only light was that of the rushlight, often home made. Lucifer matches were unknown, and we had to get a light by means of a flint and tinder, which ignited the brimstone match, always in readiness. Cheap ready-made clothes were unknown, and the poor mother had a good deal of tailoring to do. In the cottage there was little to read save the cheap publications of the Religious Tract Society, and the voluminous writings of the excellent Hannah More, teaching the lower orders to fear God and honour the king, and not to meddle with those that were given to change. Her “Cœlebs in Search of a Wife” was the only novel that ever found its way into religious circles—with the exception of “Robinson Crusoe” and “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and that was awfully illustrated. Anybody who talked of the rights of man at that time was little better than one of the wicked. One of Hannah More’s characters, Mr. Fantom, is thus described:—“He prated about _narrowness_ and _ignorance_ (the derisive italics are Hannah’s own), and _bigotry_ and _prejudice_ and priestcraft on the one hand, and on the other of _public good_, the _love of mankind_, and _liberality_ and _candour_, and above all of benevolence.” Dear Hannah made her hero, of course, come to a shocking end, and so does his servant William, who as he lies in Chelmsford gaol to be hung for murder confesses, “I was bred up in the fear of God, and lived with credit in many sober families in which I was a faithful servant, till, being tempted by a little higher wages, I left a good place to go and live with Mr. Fantom, who, however, never made good his fine promises, but proved a hard master.” Another of Hannah’s characters was a Miss Simpson, a clergyman’s daughter, who is always exclaiming, “’Tis all for the best,” though she ends her days in a workhouse, while the man through whose persecution she comes to grief dies in agony, bequeathing her £100 as compensation for his injustice, and declares that if he could live his life over again he would serve God and keep the Sabbath. And such was the literature which was to stop reform, and make the poor contented with their bitter lot!