Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954), Thursday 24 November 1859, page 3


REVIEW. Dottings of a Lounger. By FRANK FOWLER. London: Routledge, Warne and Routledge.-

WE are happy to be able to speak more favourably

of Mr. Fowler's second publication than we conscientiously could of his first. A certain amount of flippancy and strained wit, and sundry not very happy imitations of the styles of Dickens, of Thackeray,

and of Carlyle, being deducted, we can safely pronounce the rest of the volume very agreeable reading.

The Dottings consist of twenty-three gossips on things urban and rural. By far the best, for real good writing, is the first--"A Pilgrimage to Canter-bury." The introductory pun about Time's shyly crumbling edifices in the presence of Religion, founded

on Sydney Smith's quoted joke about his always crumbling bread in the presence of the Primate is sadly puerile; but here is a sketch of the Primate's city, worthy to stand side by side with Borrow's (of Norwich) in Lavengro:--

A big bit of Oxford, a bigger bit of Bruges, a forked river stretching its two beautiful arms round a cluster of churches, like the Greek Mother sheltering her offspring from the wrath of the

son of Artemis,--a Cathedral defiant of description,--a ruined wall set up some eighteen centuries ago by Roman hands,--solitary houses standing, like monks, in old monastic piles, and chanting sadly in the sea-gusts crooning up of nights from Whitstable,--ancient British mounds, sturdy Danish donjons, quaint Saxon hostelries, proud Norman spires,--all these thrown together in a goodly valley hallowed by the footprints of England's earliest heroes--warriors, priests, and statesmen--make up that Canter-bury seen by me for the first time on Wednesday last with a de-

light and reverence that it never entered into the hearts of

Chaucer's pilgrim's to conceive. Rare old city! History and Faith stand hand-in-hand within thy silent cloisters--the echoes of heroic voices peal through thy solemn aisles.

We must give,too, Mr. Fowler's description of the indescribable cathedral:--

It was Coleridge who said an abbey always looked to him like a petrified religion. The force and fitness of the thought came

home to me with fullest stress as I stood before the altar-screen

of the Cathedral. A soft flush--gold and purple tints commingled--lay on the stones--worn by the san-dalled feet of early Christian saints, glanced on the slabs where lie the kings and martyrs, fell in mysterious patches

on the dark oaken choir, and glinted resplendent on the broken and blackened lines of fret-work crawling round the nave. But amid all the wondrous beauty of the place, a sense of desolateness

reigned supreme. It grew upon the mind until the Spirit of the Past seemed to stand majestic amid the fossil forest of interlacing

pillars: the aisles were peopled with abbots and friars; censers were swinging in the chancel; the early Saxon queens were on their knees before the altar; and all the while the measured throbbing of the bell came like the memory or some Gregorian chant anthemed beneath that roof a thousand years before. I saw Augustine in his scarlet robe, with Ethelbert

the Yellow-haired beside him; I saw my lady Mildred hand-in-hand with old Canute; I saw the shaggy Dane stalling his steed against the marble columns; I saw Archbishop Alphage (?) by the rough invader a prisoner from the place; I saw Lan-

franc and Anselm with their clattering beads and ivory cruci-fixes; I saw the King-Confessor muttering orisons in the taper-lighted chapel of St. Bertha; I saw a'Beckett moving bare-footed through the glimmering cloister on his way to matins--I heard him chant "We beseech, thee, O Lord, in all thy mercy, that thy anger and wrath be turned away from us and from our holy

house, because we have sinned,"--I saw the band of armed assassins deepening the shadow of a neighbouring tomb--I saw

them rush upon the prelate--I hear a stifled groan, a choking "Christ have mercy!"--I saw the shaven temple strike the gra-nite flag--I saw a splash or two of blood, a----

The white-robed choristers trooping down the aisle aroused me

from my dream. I awoke as from a slumber--took a seat in front

of the tomb of Archbishop Chychely, and listened to the service. I don't know exactly when Chychely flourished--the Gothic in-scription round the mausoleum is so blurred and broken--but, judging from his effigy, he must have lived a long, long time ago,

and have been in life a right jovial son of the Church. There he sat on the dark slab of granite, dressed in archiepiscopal robes,

and with a sprinkling of the red powder which time has wafted from his vermillion cloak resting on the tip of his nose. What a nice jolly nose it is!--what a pair of aldermanic cheeks are those in which it serves as a promontory! This was the man to

see that the soup served out at the monastery wicket was

thick and slab, and to take the lion's share of that hundred (?) of wine which some early king of France bequeathed "for ever"i

to the monks of Canterbury. The archbishop evidently knew he was a well-favoured and portly hierarch, and, as a moral to all other men of similar presentable aspect, ordered his monument

to be designed in set didactic manner. That is to say: On an upper flag of shining granite plentifully sown with armorial bearings we have him in his canonicals and crown. His head reposes on a purple cushion with golden tassels, and his fingers are set with many signets. This is the Archbishop as he ap-

peared in the flesh--a sort of well-mannered, clerical Jack Falstaff.

But under--there on that block of Purbeck--how different is the picture! A naked, shrivelled corpse--so thin, that the eyes arei buried in their spheres, and every rib pricks through the skin--is

the Archbishop when death has stript him of his gauds. You have seen, reader, those companion etchings by Mr. Thackeray--"Lu-

dovicus Rex in his Purple" and "Ludovicus Rex in his Shirt?" For Ludovicus read Chychely, and we have here the same bitter pasquinade in marble. Go, get thee to thy pastor and tell him,

though he put on cambric bands, to this favour must he come at last!

Nor must we forget "Mrs. Fritz," evidently Mrs.

Nickleby, travelling under a pseudonyme:--

The service is over, and the little old lady in black who holds the keys of the cathedral volunteers to take me and some other visitors around the edifice. She begins with the tomb I have just

quitted, points out, with an awful Pre-Raphaelite nicety, the twin angels with gamboge wings at the Archbishop's head, and the two little white chaps with big books In their hands at his toes. She shows us, too, just the fringe of hair round the scalp of that poor corpse beneath--points out the hollow in its cheek, and the arched natural form of the leg-bone, just covered with its puckered skin. I am about to become sadly contemplative, when a good-tempered

old lady forming one of the party, and called by her friends Mrs. Fritz, casually remarks, "Ah! poor thing, he was uncommon thin out of his clothes!" and this diverts the current of my reflections.

Our conductor is an intelligent little body, with a sharp pair of

bead-like eyes, that seem to peer through the thickest murks and

glooms with a keenness almost feline. She carries a bunch of old brass keys in her hand, and trips along the tombstones, with the (?) damp upon them, in the (?) manner. She speaks in a

low monotone, as if afraid the owners of the graves would overhear her statements concerning them, and correct her on the spot.

Her imperturbability is great. She will describe nothing out of its turn, and receives the remarks of visitors with a set, sculp-tured sort of smile, which must have been copied from some of the more benignant of the statues. "That," she says, pointing to a coloured strip of stone-carving in the wall,--"that is the cele-brated Canterbury diaper; of which you have heard so much."

"Dear me," says Mrs. Fritz, looking everywhere, and failing to see anything which fell in with her notions of diaper, " I suppose them young singers have their overshirts made of it." Our conductress smiles and moves on to a restored monu-ment in dark granite, with a tattered jacket of uncurried leather, a pair of rough gauntlets, and a rusty helmet suspended above it. "This," she says, "is the grave and these are some of the clothes of Edward the Black Prince." I observe a sprinkling of dry dust upon the full-length face of the effigy lying on the tomb, and on examining it, I see it has crumbled from the old leathern jacket above, I fall to musing again when Mrs. Fritz once more ven-

tures a remark. "I've heard o' them black princes before," she says; and then adds, after a slight pause, "I suppose this one was converted by the missionaries." Another faint smile from our (?), and we are led to new sarcophagi. I don't care much

for the resting-place of Henry IV. and his second Queen, Joan of Navarre; but I find myself pausing before the plain, coffin-shaped, inscriptionless tomb of the grave Coligny, and the equally unostentatious cenotaph of the patriotic Langton.

I am not allowed to rest long. Our guide--scenting her fee, perhaps, from afar--comes running after me--as you may have

seen a hen run after a little one who has suddenly darted from the brood, and takes me below--down down in the "Transept of the Mar-tyrdom," where Thomas a'Beckett fell. She shows me the stone let in at the exact place where the head of the martyr struck the

pavement, the original piece, clotted with gore and brains, having been borne as a precious relic to the Vatican. The tesselated fragment is the exact image of one of those queer little Seltzer-

water bottles (neck and all), and immediately around it the flags are channelled by the knees of worshippers who, in different ages

and (?) from the spot. It is clear that Mrs. Fritz looks upon a'Beckett as a contemporary, for, after listening--with sundry (?) of "the brutes," "the villains," and so on--to the

story of his murder, she remarks interrogatively at the close,

"I haven't read anything about it; but of course, they hung 'em for it ma'am?"

"A Deputation to Downing-street," contains a pho-tograph of George Augustus Sala, Esq., Mr. Dickens'

graphic and groggy collaborateur:--

There was young Cæsar Augustus, the comic writer, too, who looked very much like a compound of Jack Sheppard and Boots at the Swan. Having heard of Augustus--having read Augustus

with considerable delight--I could not refrain from taking espe-cial notice of him. Augustus has a round, rubicund, rollicking face, purpled with good cheer, and shining out over his foamy

tight-buttoned coat, like the illuminated top of a Pharos. Augus-tus, to keep up the sporting aspects of his appearance, had a bit

of a plaid stock twisted about his neck, and centred with a shrewd, lively-looking stag. But what most struck me in the man was the sly twinkle in his eye: which, by the way, never twinkles twice alike. Now the brow dropped over it., and the eye, half-hidden, shone out like a morsel of gold embedded in

quartz. Now he glanced to the left, and winked and blinked like

a magpie sidling on his perch. Now he looked straight for-ward, and the light in the eyes danced about with fitful flashes of mirth, like the shadow of the trembling lustres in the bubbling Moselle. And talking of Moselle brings me to another feature of C. Augustus. It is reddish-blue like "Comet-port," curved like

a punch ladle, and set with jewels--of better than the best water (?) my Lord Marquis's snuff-box. It is essentially a good-

humoured nose, like Bardolph's, and a standing protest against the doctrines of Wassail and his friends.

A strange name for a teetotaller, by the bye, is "Wassail!"

In "Down the South-Eastern," and "Dover and

the way to it," there are numerous exceedingly pretty Gainsborough and Stanfield-like "bits" of scenery,

rustic and marine. We extract a specimen of each class:--

Some of the fairest spots in Christendom are to be seen on this

South-eastern line. There are so many old castles on the hills; so many strange dialects--short as is the distance--breaking on your ear over the hedges; so many ruined mills lifting up their arms above the trees; so many children gathering rushes, stripping off their (?) barks, and piling the white wands in sheaves beside the

tracks; so many old oaks protesting in gnarled force against the

pretentious competition of neighbouring elms; so many streams , overgrown with grass in each curt, yet affluent, umbrage that the

sun's rays can only make them look still cooler to the eye; so many fields favoured to that extent with buttercups and daisies that it were easy to play Tom Tiddler at any point, and gather gold and silver by the lapful; so many white clefts in the hills

through which the ghostly shadows stalk majestic; so many mysterious lights falling through the trunks of the slightly (?) saplings on the uplands; so many runlets of white straw-berry-blossom flowing about the little Canaans of gardens on the road-sides; so many sheep companioned beneath the shadiest

trees, or munching with leisurely gusto the soft, succulent tops of the wild-cabbage growing on the edge of cuttings; so many fields where the corn is just high enough to show us, by its gentle waving, the wind too light to feel; so many red May-trees over-

hanging lucid pools, and raining their fragrant blossoms on the heads of plovers cooling their feet beneath the water;--in fact, so

many, and such varied beauties, that I blame my star I was not born a clown to live among them all my days, and have "the

blood of the clover," as Mr. Emerson so fancifully puts it, beating in my veins.

The sea is before me--three or four vessels are on the sea. Big

ship with press of dingy canvas afar off, making direct for my

window, and cutting that straight line against the horizon which all ships do when you catch them fore and aft. Little yacht, with (?) white wing and a bit of a jib, skimming the wave, like a gull, just under big ship's bows. Long rakish steamer bound tor a

French port, throwing out a spark-sprinkled streamer from its (?) chimney, and agitating the water into whitest foam, like the ruffled breast of an albatross. Fishing-smacks showing their

pitchy ribs as the sea dandles them, and giving in the full slants of sunlight a sight of their dripping nets, so that the common little craft look to me--from this aerie casement--like boats with mail-clad warriors on board. Pleasure party in clean sharp-faced yacht, newly roped, steering with cheery gusts of music in the

eye of the wind--breeze catching sails aback, now and then, just to show that our friend there at the wheel with blue flannel shirt

and embroidered braces--circle of ladies about him, and brown-faced sailor grinning behind--far little better than a lubber. Bathing-machines--ugliest of objects, debauching

the aspect of all sea-side places--taking slowly to the water like gouty hippopotami. Old rickety sailor with old

rickety telescope trudging the beach, looking for Cockneys who want to see the cliffs of France. Many lights and shadows on the pier. The sunshine, darting and dazzling on the ripples, seems

to cover the expanse with glistening indentations like a rain of burning silver; a mass of slate-coloured cloud huddling up from the east reduces the sheen immediately under it, but increases it

in the background until you might swear the Field of Cloth of Gold was being played again played out on those French shores, and ten thousand lances were gathered around another Francis. There is a fine flush of blue, cold-rimmed with grey, hanging above the Castle, and throwing a bent shadow over the brow and down the face of the cliff on which it stands. That shadow, though, doesn't hide the streak of scarlet behind the balcony high up the chalk, nor do the caw-caws of the crows drown the rough martial chorus to us from the jovial red-coats congregated there. See! that must be a half-furlong high--it makes one dizzy even to look up at it--and yet so clear is the air that the little tables and the earthen jugs upon them are plain to an eye that has been dimming itself with small-print any time these eighteen years.

I look again from the Castle to the sea. The sun is clouded. A capful of wind is coming up under that slate-coloured hood of cloud, and a long labouring swell moves with it, and breaks with dismal plash and grating back-fall upon the beach. The panniered ass who has been carrying the sand from the water's edge to the higher part of the shore has to move off now--which he does with more than asinine energy; but still not nimbly enough to prevent his fet-locks being caught by the foremost line of white "cat's feet" running up the shore. I like the moody look which the sea has put on now. How well that ruinous end of pier, its every sepa-rate timber tangled with pale green fungus, looks while the ocean has its sulks. The sombre clouds, and the fall of rain which is coming from them, give once more a sharpness of outline to the weed-and-water-rounded piles. Fishing boats out there are now half-hidden in damp mist; sails of big ship, catching the slanting shower, gleam damply under the single bar of white showing through the clouds. Youth at the helm of pleasure-yacht has covered those tamboured braces with a pilot-coat; French boat

is quite out of sight, as if it had hidden itself somewhere from the wet, and would show again when the squall was over; old sailor jerks up the collar of his coat and screws on the end or his Dollond; owner of the ass gets on its back, gabloning his legs in the panniers, and jogs homewards; streak of scarlet is still up there--safe in the cliff, weather, fair or foul, affects it not--but, in one minute, every other feature of the scene has altered.

The wind swells and the rain increases. The patter on the beach is very distinct. That curdled cloud there, with the jagged edge, means thunder, and that bar of gleaming grey portends thunder.

In "Ethics of Travel" Mr. Fowler proves himself a Menteur-moralist. In fancy, perhaps, but certainly not in fact, had he perpetrated the wide roamings in-

dicated in the following ludicrously self-important paragraph:--

I am a great traveller. I have been all round the world, like tho fool in the apologue of the "Cameleon." I have supped under the Pyramids, had cold lamb in the Colosseum, strawberries baptised in sugared sherry (the only way to eat strawberries--cream is a mistake, and spoils the poignant flavour of the fruit) under the leaning tower of Pisa, oysters off the Rocks of Botany Bay, and mushrooms and beef-cutlets in the luncheon-bars of San Francisco. I have been all over England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and the Isle of Dogs. I take it, therefore, that I am entitled to speak with some autho-rity upon matters of travel, and it is to jot down a few maxims gleaned from my experience that open my desk and re-nib my quill.

"A Contested Election" gives a narrative of Mr. Fowler's ill-advised struggle for the representation of Sydney--amusing, but not nearly so ponderous as his "Log of a Defeated Candidate" (published in the Month), of which it is a warmed-up hash. As we have got into the fault-finding vein, may we ask Mr. Fowler what he meant by this application of Terence's

oft-cited line?

One member of the Board is not to be abashed by Piper's jowels. Nixon has faith in a large gold pencil-case, and flashes

its blood-stone top in Piper's face with a kind of homo-sum-humani-nihil haughtiness and scorn.

Such classicality seems to indicate a somewhat Dictionary-of-Quotations order of scholarship.

However, as we have said before, this is, on the

whole, a very agreeable little book--original and smart. The owl which the artist has unaccountably put upon the otherwise tastefully illuminated cover, is certainly no "portrait of the author."