The Last Man
one of those men on whom nature had bestowed to prodigality the envied
gifts of wit and imagination, and then left his bark of life to be
impelled by these winds, without adding reason as the rudder, or
judgment as the pilot for the voyage. His extraction was obscure; but
circumstances brought him early into public notice, and his small
paternal property was soon dissipated in the splendid scene of fashion
and luxury in which he was an actor. During the short years of
thoughtless youth, he was adored by the high-bred triflers of the day,
nor least by the youthful sovereign, who escaped from the intrigues of
party, and the arduous duties of kingly business, to find never-failing
amusement and exhilaration of spirit in his society. My father’s
impulses, never under his own controul, perpetually led him into
difficulties from which his ingenuity alone could extricate him; and
the accumulating pile of debts of honour and of trade, which would have
bent to earth any other, was supported by him with a light spirit and
tameless hilarity; while his company was so necessary at the tables and
assemblies of the rich, that his derelictions were considered venial,
and he himself received with intoxicating flattery.
This kind of popularity, like every other, is evanescent: and the
difficulties of every kind with which he had to contend, increased in a
frightful ratio compared with his small means of extricating himself.
At such times the king, in his enthusiasm for him, would come to his
relief, and then kindly take his friend to task; my father gave the
best promises for amendment, but his social disposition, his craving
for the usual diet of admiration, and more than all, the fiend of
gambling, which fully possessed him, made his good resolutions
transient, his promises vain. With the quick sensibility peculiar to
his temperament, he perceived his power in the brilliant circle to be
on the wane. The king married; and the haughty princess of Austria, who
became, as queen of England, the head of fashion, looked with harsh
eyes on his defects, and with contempt on the affection her royal
husband entertained for him. My father felt that his fall was near; but
so far from profiting by this last calm before the storm to save
himself, he sought to forget anticipated evil by making still greater
sacrifices to the deity of pleasure, deceitful and cruel arbiter of his
destiny.
The king, who was a man of excellent dispositions, but easily led, had
now become a willing disciple of his imperious consort. He was induced
to look with extreme disapprobation, and at last with distaste, on my
father’s imprudence and follies. It is true that his presence
dissipated these clouds; his warm-hearted frankness, brilliant sallies,
and confiding demeanour were irresistible: it was only when at a
distance, while still renewed tales of his errors were poured into his
royal friend’s ear, that he lost his influence. The queen’s dextrous
management was employed to prolong these absences, and gather together
accusations. At length the king was brought to see in him a source of
perpetual disquiet, knowing that he should pay for the short-lived
pleasure of his society by tedious homilies, and more painful
narrations of excesses, the truth of which he could not disprove. The
result was, that he would make one more attempt to reclaim him, and in
case of ill success, cast him off for ever.
Such a scene must have been one of deepest interest and high-wrought
passion. A powerful king, conspicuous for a goodness which had
heretofore made him meek, and now lofty in his admonitions, with
alternate entreaty and reproof, besought his friend to attend to his
real interests, resolutely to avoid those fascinations which in fact
were fast deserting him, and to spend his great powers on a worthy
field, in which he, his sovereign, would be his prop, his stay, and his
pioneer. My father felt this kindness; for a moment ambitious dreams
floated before him; and he thought that it would be well to exchange
his present pursuits for nobler duties. With sincerity and fervour he
gave the required promise: as a pledge of continued favour, he received
from his royal master a sum of money to defray pressing debts, and
enable him to enter under good auspices his new career. That very
night, while yet full of gratitude and good resolves, this whole sum,
and its amount doubled, was lost at the gaming-table. In his desire to
repair his first losses, my father risked double stakes, and thus
incurred a debt of honour he was wholly unable to pay. Ashamed to apply
again to the king, he turned his back upon London, its false delights
and clinging miseries; and, with poverty for his sole companion, buried
himself in solitude among the hills and lakes of Cumberland. His wit,
his bon mots, the record of his personal attractions, fascinating
manners, and social talents, were long remembered and repeated from
mouth to mouth. Ask where now was this favourite of fashion, this
companion of the noble, this excelling beam, which gilt with alien
splendour the assemblies of the courtly and the gay—you heard that he
was under a cloud, a lost man; not one thought it belonged to him to
repay pleasure by real services, or that his long reign of brilliant
wit deserved a pension on retiring. The king lamented his absence; he
loved to repeat his sayings, relate the adventures they had had
together, and exalt his talents—but here ended his reminiscence.
Meanwhile my father, forgotten, could not forget. He repined for the
loss of what was more necessary to him than air or food—the excitements
of pleasure, the admiration of the noble, the luxurious and polished
living of the great. A nervous fever was the consequence; during which
he was nursed by the daughter of a poor cottager, under whose roof he
lodged. She was lovely, gentle, and, above all, kind to him; nor can it
afford astonishment, that the late idol of high-bred beauty should,
even in a fallen state, appear a being of an elevated and wondrous
nature to the lowly cottage-girl. The attachment between them led to
the ill-fated marriage, of which I was the offspring. Notwithstanding
the tenderness and sweetness of my mother, her husband still deplored
his degraded state. Unaccustomed to industry, he knew not in what way
to contribute to the support of his increasing family. Sometimes he
thought of applying to the king; pride and shame for a while withheld
him; and, before his necessities became so imperious as to compel him
to some kind of exertion, he died. For one brief interval before this
catastrophe, he looked forward to the future, and contemplated with
anguish the desolate situation in which his wife and children would be
left. His last effort was a letter to the king, full of touching
eloquence, and of occasional flashes of that brilliant spirit which was
an integral part of him. He bequeathed his widow and orphans to the
friendship of his royal master, and felt satisfied that, by this means,
their prosperity was better assured in his death than in his life. This
letter was enclosed to the care of a nobleman, who, he did not doubt,
would perform the last and inexpensive office of placing it in the
king’s own hand.
He died in debt, and his little property was seized immediately by his
creditors. My mother, pennyless and burthened with two children, waited
week after week, and month after month, in sickening expectation of a
reply, which never came. She had no experience beyond her father’s
cottage; and the mansion of the lord of the manor was the chiefest type
of grandeur she could conceive. During my father’s life, she had been
made familiar with the name of royalty and the courtly circle; but such
things, ill according with her personal experience, appeared, after the
loss of him who gave substance and reality to them, vague and
fantastical. If, under any circumstances, she could have acquired
sufficient courage to address the noble persons mentioned by her
husband, the ill success of his own application caused her to banish
the idea. She saw therefore no escape from dire penury: perpetual care,
joined to sorrow for the loss of the wondrous being, whom she continued
to contemplate with ardent admiration, hard labour, and naturally
delicate health, at length released her from the sad continuity of want
and misery.
The condition of her orphan children was peculiarly desolate. Her own
father had been an emigrant from another part of the country, and had
died long since: they had no one relation to take them by the hand;
they were outcasts, paupers, unfriended beings, to whom the most scanty
pittance was a matter of favour, and who were treated merely as
children of peasants, yet poorer than the poorest, who, dying, had left
them, a thankless bequest, to the close-handed charity of the land.
I, the elder of the two, was five years old when my mother died. A
remembrance of the discourses of my parents, and the communications
which my mother endeavoured to impress upon me concerning my father’s
friends, in slight hope that I might one day derive benefit from the
knowledge, floated like an indistinct dream through my brain. I
conceived that I was different and superior to my protectors and
companions, but I knew not how or wherefore. The sense of injury,
associated with the name of king and noble, clung to me; but I could
draw no conclusions from such feelings, to serve as a guide to action.
My first real knowledge of myself was as an unprotected orphan among
the valleys and fells of Cumberland. I was in the service of a farmer;
and with crook in hand, my dog at my side, I shepherded a numerous
flock on the near uplands. I cannot say much in praise of such a life;
and its pains far exceeded its pleasures. There was freedom in it, a
companionship with nature, and a reckless loneliness; but these,
romantic as they were, did not accord with the love of action and
desire of human sympathy, characteristic of youth. Neither the care of
my flock, nor the change of seasons, were sufficient to tame my eager
spirit; my out-door life and unemployed time were the temptations that
led me early into lawless habits. I associated with others friendless
like myself; I formed them into a band, I was their chief and captain.
All shepherd-boys alike, while our flocks were spread over the
pastures, we schemed and executed many a mischievous prank, which drew
on us the anger and revenge of the rustics. I was the leader and
protector of my comrades, and as I became distinguished among them,
their misdeeds were usually visited upon me. But while I endured
punishment and pain in their defence with the spirit of an hero, I
claimed as my reward their praise and obedience.
In such a school my disposition became rugged, but firm. The appetite
for admiration and small capacity for self-controul which I inherited
from my father, nursed by adversity, made me daring and reckless. I was
rough as the elements, and unlearned as the animals I tended. I often
compared myself to them, and finding that my chief superiority
consisted in power, I soon persuaded myself that it was in power only
that I was inferior to the chiefest potentates of the earth. Thus
untaught in refined philosophy, and pursued by a restless feeling of
degradation from my true station in society, I wandered among the hills
of civilized England as uncouth a savage as the wolf-bred founder of
old Rome. I owned but one law, it was that of the strongest, and my
greatest deed of virtue was never to submit.
Yet let me a little retract from this sentence I have passed on myself.
My mother, when dying, had, in addition to her other half-forgotten and
misapplied lessons, committed, with solemn exhortation, her other child
to my fraternal guardianship; and this one duty I performed to the best