CORRESPON DENCE.
A LAZY JOURNEY.—I.
T HAVE never been able tosfind, in Mangnall, Marcett, or Mark- 1 ham, the three " M's " of my infancy, the exact boundaries of Cockaigne. Time was when, according to the old proverb, the "sound of Bow Bells" bounded the land everywhere. It was the land of the Mercers and the Goldsmiths and the 'pren- tices, which lives in the pages of old romance and older plays, memory-haunted by the 13arnveells and Millwoods, or later on, by the Tappertite and others of that sort,—a country of fine gables and finer barges, and oxen frozen whole on the whole- some River, before factories and smoke, and the general hurry to be rich at the expense of our neighbours and of a rococo morality, had poisoned the God-given waters, and let in a flood of talk about the "changes of the seasons "—which are the
beginning, are now, and ever shall be same as they were in the —because the English climate, no bad one in its way, is be- coming rapidly invisible for smoke and money-coining. .Babylon was Babylon then, and the Babylonians cared little enough to wander beyond it. It is not 50 now. The boundaries of Cockaigne
lie very far and wide. Further and wider is the smoke-pest spreading, which made 80 grim and sad a text for the great Chelsea painter's sermons in oils ; and further and further afoot must the smoke-dried Babylonian wander for his day's pleasure, or for the pitching of his suburban tent. Where will it all end, I wonder P In a general emigration to some new Salamis,—atatin. avant teltu,re nova ? In a sudden collapse of trade and million-making, through sheer weariness, and some new and Heaven-born perception of the Vanitas vanitatven- that eternal, terrible, yet all-consoling law, of which Thackeray loved to write P In some startling, Wesley-like revival, which shall stir the nation's sleeping conscience through the length and breadth of the land, sick to death as it grows of dreary speculations upon the old problem which was solved at once and for ever two thousand years ago, for all who care to accept the simple and loving solution in the spirit of simplicity and love; and for those who will not, will never be solved anew until the Judgment P Or in what P As I sit at my study window, looking on one of the high-roads of Cockaigne, some ten or twelve miles from Babylon, the rain is pouring down with steady persistence, refreshing the grateful earth, but
sousing the vans full of Babylonians, wending homewards, alter a summer holiday.
Poor, drenched people ! There they go, cart after cart, van after van, with mackintoshes or umbrellas, some of them, but most without. Limp ribands, of many colours originally, washed into a common rainbow-mixture; limp flags, trying to wave; limp horses, trying to trot; limp horns, trying to blow, with the tunes dammed up in them by the water, as Munch- hausen's were frozen by the cold; limp choruses about being happy, breaking down at the first bar ; limp Tapleys, making-believe generally ; and poor little limp children, who are the really sad part of the show, with their little disappointed faces, which make one almost a sceptic for a passing moment. Here and there comes the crowning depression of all,—one of those dreadful bicycles, the latest terror added to life by civilisation. Has it ever occurred to Professor Haeckel, of Jena, or to any of his friends, who devote their powers to making quiet people uncomfortable, to consider the question which forces itself upon my reflecting mind, whether the mounted bicyclist be not the missing link P
But Babylon now-a-days must get out of Babylon, when it can. I am more grateful than I can say for having myself given up living in its foggy circle, if only that I am thereby saved the ceaseless speculations on the where to spend my next holiday, and the how of " getting away," which is an essential part of the modern Babylonish captivity. Your true Babylonian maintains through thick and thin that his town is the finest place in the world to live in, but none the less he rushes away by train whenever and wherever he can,—to Babylon-super- Mare, to Pugin's Gate, to Shrimpington-by-the-Sea,—or crosses the channel to the sister-city of Belle 'Etoile,—to all the crannies and corners of far-lying Cockaigne. I never knew but one who loved his Babylon so thoroughly, that he boasts of never having slept one night outside it for more than forty years, and honestly regards the "6cole buissonniere " as one of those pleasures but for which, as Sir Cornewall Lewis said, life would be very tolerable. So it comes to pass that when July and August come round, the Babylonians have homes only to break them up,—to rush off to poison them- selves with the mineral-waters of Geist-land, at the Teufels- quell° or the Heillehrunn, dispatched thither by their favourite physician, wisely bent upon sending them as far off as he possibly can for a time, in order to secure his own wholesome holiday on the moor or the trout-stream. It is an odd result of all the rail- ways and rushings of the age, that nien really seem to hate "rest," which is still to some of us the ideal food both of brain and heart, both of earth and heaven, and to avoid it at all hazards.
They have set up for their idol, without apparently understand- ing overmuch what they mean by it, what Mr. Justin Macarthy describes as "the terribly disturbing thing which unresting people call 'p1-ogress.'" But I am transgressing my own broad boundaries already, after the wanderer's time-honoured fashion. A comfortable old Cockaigner, placidly regarding my own little home at North- Bitton-on-Silverstreak as the prettiest and most comfortable in the world, my work as the pleasantest that any man can have
to do—oh, the pleasure of the pen to those who really love it, and cannot help themselves I—and Mrs. Tom Balbus as out of all comparison the best helpmeet that any of the Balbuses (they built walls in the days of Henry's first Latin book, and William the Conqueror came over with them), ever took to himself, I am exceedingly content, and have small desire for change of air. We have pitched our tents in the valley, and entirely decline to believe in another modern mania, which drives people to live on the most exposed and loftiest spots they can find, in order to be "braced." I dislike being braced, and resent it. They knew more of life than we are inclined to allow, our unprogressiug fore- fathers, when they nestled their homes in the dells and hollows, cosily sheltered from the rude south-westerly gale, which was their bugbear, as the east wind is ours. Let the winds blow as they were wont to list, or as the Americans list for them now, and. freeze the marrow of the hill-siders. Our withers are unwrung ; for we let them pass harmlessly over us, and stroll and watch the shifting scenery of Cloudland from our green and level garden, just large enough for the delights of lawn-tennis, and. no more. We had some friends staying with us in the frost last winter (which is scarcely last winter yet, I suppose), who- revelled in our warmth, and wondered why the Silverstreak Valley should be called unwholesome. Their own home is Ozone Lodge, Bracenose on the Mount, and they had become- rather overbraced than not, and something uneven in their temper. They came to us to be relaxed. While they were our guests, they went to dine with our friend Mrs. Hilltop, having to get out of the fly and walk, because the horses, like water, wanted to find their natural level, and insisted on slipping backwards.. Mrs. Balbus and I dozed over a comfortable fire and some new books just bought, which I was lazily cutting with a paper. knife,—a pleasure to the true book-lover which is becoming an- other thing of the past, while the circulating libraries are growing up, to parody Sir Anthony Absolute, into evergreen trees of un- digested knowledge. I love to feel that a book is all my own ;: I love the pleasant, well-known scent of the new, crisp leaves, as I put my nose to. them, and the ivory knife crackles through them. It gives me a sort of sense of Elia, and all the delight- ful associations with his dear and gentle name. I can fancy him standing by me, and approving. Poor old Elia! a friend of mine not long ago, proffering an article with some new and curious knowledge about him, was met by the very modern answer, that "Charles Lamb was played out." Not he, believe me. In the hearts and on the shelves of book-lovers, in spite- of progress, there shall be a nook for him to the end of time, which emleth not. Yet even as I write, I find in a literary journal this astounding sentence, "On the whole, no collection of the British essayists is, in the near future, likely to go much beyond Elia." Oh, the yiaric 'AOxyciTas ! Which is the most wonderful, the humour of Elia, or the perfect innocence of humour there P When our friends returned and found us, they had to be re- laxed again at once. The men had dined in ulsters and. the- women in seal-skins, and the very soup had frozen on the plates But what matter They had been dining in a very healthy spot, as how could it be otherwise, where all the drainage 9?1,21,8i run downwards? They went back to Ozone Lodge, however, a little shaken in their mistrust of valleys.
Yet even Mrs. Balbus and I, comfortable and restful as we are, to the standing annoyance of the visitors from Babylon, who come to us in half-an-hour's train, pale and anxious-looking, and object to our rude health and immunity from tonics, can- not quite escape the general condemnation, and go away for a day or two sometimes as a concession to public opinion. The other day we took a. great resolution. We would "go abroad." Not as was my wont in other days, when I was a Babylonian and a solitary Balbus, to the furthest point in the shortest time, but for a lazy saunter within easy reach of our little home, within the tourist's boundary of Cockaigne-beyond-Sea. Mrs. Balbus and I turned over maps and guides, and she decided upon the two provinces of Cidorland, East and West. Rumours
were afloat about my liver, which required to be equibalanced with my spleen. I threw out hints about the weather, about the comforts of home under a Conservative Goverament, and the dangerous political complications abroad. But Mrs. Balbus, though quiet, was resolved ; and after a time, I yielded, as others have done before me. "Tom," she said, "I have noticed a yellow tinge upon your hands for some days, and you are not yourself. And besides,—please, dear, I want to go." "Dorothy, my God-gift," I answered, "you have conquered. Only, let us see and do as little as we can, and be as slow as possible about it." And we started by the night-steamer for Harbour-of-
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