The Pirate
good crops may be safely predicted; modest sages, in fine, who, careless
of the rise and downfall of empires, content themselves with pointing
out the fit seasons to reap and sow, with a fair guess at the weather
which each month will be likely to present; as, for example, that if
Heaven pleases, we shall have snow in January, and the author will stake
his reputation that July proves, on the whole, a month of sunshine. Now,
although the Rector of Saint Leonard's was greatly pleased, in general,
with the quiet, laborious, and studious bent of Triptolemus Yellowley,
and deemed him, in so far, worthy of a name of four syllables having a
Latin termination, yet he relished not, by any means, his exclusive
attention to his favourite authors. It savoured of the earth, he said,
if not of something worse, to have a man's mind always grovelling in
mould, stercorated or unstercorated; and he pointed out, but in vain,
history, and poetry, and divinity, as more elevating subjects of
occupation. Triptolemus Yellowley was obstinate in his own course: Of
the battle of Pharsalia, he thought not as it affected the freedom of
the world, but dwelt on the rich crop which the Emathian fields were
likely to produce the next season. In vernacular poetry, Triptolemus
could scarce be prevailed upon to read a single couplet, excepting old
Tusser, as aforesaid, whose Hundred Points of Good Husbandry he had got
by heart; and excepting also Piers Ploughman's Vision, which, charmed
with the title, he bought with avidity from a packman, but after reading
the two first pages, flung it into the fire as an impudent and misnamed
political libel. As to divinity, he summed that matter up by reminding
his instructors, that to labour the earth and win his bread with the
toil of his body and sweat of his brow, was the lot imposed upon fallen
man; and, for his part, he was resolved to discharge, to the best of his
abilities, a task so obviously necessary to existence, leaving others to
speculate as much as they would, upon the more recondite mysteries of
theology.
With a spirit so much narrowed and limited to the concerns of rural
life, it may be doubted whether the proficiency of Triptolemus in
learning, or the use he was like to make of his acquisitions, would have
much gratified the ambitious hope of his affectionate mother. It is
true, he expressed no reluctance to embrace the profession of a
clergyman, which suited well enough with the habitual personal indolence
which sometimes attaches to speculative dispositions. He had views, to
speak plainly, (I wish they were peculiar to himself,) of cultivating
the _glebe_ six days in the week, preaching on the seventh with due
regularity, and dining with some fat franklin or country laird, with
whom he could smoke a pipe and drink a tankard after dinner, and mix in
secret conference on the exhaustless subject,
Quid faciat lætas segetes.
Now, this plan, besides that it indicated nothing of what was then
called the root of the matter, implied necessarily the possession of a
manse; and the possession of a manse inferred compliance with the
doctrines of prelacy, and other enormities of the time. There was some
question how far manse and glebe, stipend, both victual and money, might
have outbalanced the good lady's predisposition towards Presbytery; but
her zeal was not put to so severe a trial. She died before her son had
completed his studies, leaving her afflicted spouse just as disconsolate
as was to be expected. The first act of old Jasper's undivided
administration was to recall his son from Saint Andrews, in order to
obtain his assistance in his domestic labours. And here it might have
been supposed that our Triptolemus, summoned to carry into practice what
he had so fondly studied in theory, must have been, to use a simile
which _he_ would have thought lively, like a cow entering upon a clover
park. Alas, mistaken thoughts, and deceitful hopes of mankind!
A laughing philosopher, the Democritus of our day, once, in a moral
lecture, compared human life to a table pierced with a number of holes,
each of which has a pin made exactly to fit it, but which pins being
stuck in hastily, and without selection, chance leads inevitably to the
most awkward mistakes. "For how often do we see," the orator
pathetically concluded,--"how often, I say, do we see the round man
stuck into the three-cornered hole!" This new illustration of the
vagaries of fortune set every one present into convulsions of laughter,
excepting one fat alderman, who seemed to make the case his own, and
insisted that it was no jesting matter. To take up the simile, however,
which is an excellent one, it is plain that Triptolemus Yellowley had
been shaken out of the bag at least a hundred years too soon. If he had
come on the stage in our own time, that is, if he had flourished at any
time within these thirty or forty years, he could not have missed to
have held the office of vice-president of some eminent agricultural
society, and to have transacted all the business thereof under the
auspices of some noble duke or lord, who, as the matter might happen,
either knew, or did not know, the difference betwixt a horse and a cart,
and a cart-horse. He could not have missed such preferment, for he was
exceedingly learned in all those particulars, which, being of no
consequence in actual practice, go, of course, a great way to constitute
the character of a connoisseur in any art, and especially in
agriculture. But, alas! Triptolemus Yellowley had, as we already have
hinted, come into the world at least a century too soon; for, instead of
sitting in an arm-chair, with a hammer in his hand, and a bumper of port
before him, giving forth the toast,--"To breeding, in all its branches,"
his father planted him betwixt the stilts of a plough, and invited him
to guide the oxen, on whose beauties he would, in our day, have
descanted, and whose rumps he would not have goaded, but have carved.
Old Jasper complained, that although no one talked so well of common and
several, wheat and rape, fallow and lea, as his learned son, (whom he
always called Tolimus,) yet, "dang it," added the Seneca, "nought
thrives wi' un--nought thrives wi' un!" It was still worse, when Jasper,
becoming frail and ancient, was obliged, as happened in the course of a
few years, gradually to yield up the reins of government to the
academical neophyte.
As if Nature had meant him a spite, he had got one of the _dourest_ and
most intractable farms in the Mearns, to try conclusions withal, a place
which seemed to yield every thing but what the agriculturist wanted; for
there were plenty of thistles, which indicates dry land; and store of
fern, which is said to intimate deep land; and nettles, which show where
lime hath been applied; and deep furrows in the most unlikely spots,
which intimated that it had been cultivated in former days by the
Peghts, as popular tradition bore. There was also enough of stones to
keep the ground warm, according to the creed of some farmers, and great
abundance of springs to render it cool and sappy, according to the
theory of others. It was in vain that, acting alternately on these
opinions, poor Triptolemus endeavoured to avail himself of the supposed
capabilities of the soil. No kind of butter that might be churned could
be made to stick upon his own bread, any more than on that of poor
Tusser, whose Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, so useful to others of
his day, were never to himself worth as many pennies.[22]
In fact, excepting an hundred acres of infield, to which old Jasper had
early seen the necessity of limiting his labours, there was not a
corner of the farm fit for any thing but to break plough-graith, and
kill cattle. And then, as for the part which was really tilled with some
profit, the expense of the farming establishment of Triptolemus, and his
disposition to experiment, soon got rid of any good arising from the
cultivation of it. "The carles and the cart-avers," he confessed, with a
sigh, speaking of his farm-servants and horses, "make it all, and the
carles and cart-avers eat it all;" a conclusion which might sum up the
year-book of many a gentleman farmer.
Matters would have soon been brought to a close with Triptolemus in the
present day. He would have got a bank-credit, manoeuvred with
wind-bills, dashed out upon a large scale, and soon have seen his crop
and stock sequestered by the Sheriff; but in those days a man could not
ruin himself so easily. The whole Scottish tenantry stood upon the same
level flat of poverty, so that it was extremely difficult to find any
vantage ground, by climbing up to which a man might have an opportunity
of actually breaking his neck with some eclat. They were pretty much in
the situation of people, who, being totally without credit, may indeed
suffer from indigence, but cannot possibly become bankrupt. Besides,
notwithstanding the failure of Triptolemus's projects, there was to be
balanced against the expenditure which they occasioned, all the savings
which the extreme economy of his sister Barbara could effect; and in
truth her exertions were wonderful. She might have realized, if any one
could, the idea of the learned philosopher, who pronounced that sleeping
was a fancy, and eating but a habit, and who appeared to the world to
have renounced both, until it was unhappily discovered that he had an
intrigue with the cook-maid of the family, who indemnified him for his
privations by giving him private entrée to the pantry, and to a share of
her own couch. But no such deceptions were practised by Barbara
Yellowley. She was up early, and down late, and seemed, to her
over-watched and over-tasked maidens, to be as _wakerife_ as the cat
herself. Then, for eating, it appeared that the air was a banquet to
her, and she would fain have made it so to her retinue. Her brother,
who, besides being lazy in his person, was somewhat luxurious in his
appetite, would willingly now and then have tasted a mouthful of animal
food, were it but to know how his sheep were fed off; but a proposal to
eat a child could not have startled Mistress Barbara more; and, being of
a compliant and easy disposition, Triptolemus reconciled himself to the
necessity of a perpetual Lent, too happy when he could get a scrap of
butter to his oaten cake, or (as they lived on the banks of the Esk)
escape the daily necessity of eating salmon, whether in or out of
season, six days out of the seven.
But although Mrs. Barbara brought faithfully to the joint stock all
savings which her awful powers of economy accomplished to scrape
together, and although the dower of their mother was by degrees
expended, or nearly so, in aiding them upon extreme occasions, the term
at length approached when it seemed impossible that they could sustain
the conflict any longer against the evil star of Triptolemus, as he
called it himself, or the natural result of his absurd speculations, as
it was termed by others. Luckily at this sad crisis, a god jumped down
to their relief out of a machine. In plain English, the noble lord, who
owned their farm, arrived at his mansion-house in their neighbourhood,
with his coach and six and his running footmen, in the full splendour
of the seventeenth century.
This person of quality was the son of the nobleman who had brought the
ancient Jasper into the country from Yorkshire, and he was, like his
father, a fanciful and scheming man.[23] He had schemed well for
himself, however, amid the mutations of the time, having obtained, for a
certain period of years, the administration of the remote islands of
Orkney and Zetland, for payment of a certain rent, with the right of
making the most of whatever was the property or revenue of the crown in
these districts, under the title of Lord Chamberlain. Now, his lordship