The Chaplain of the Fleet. Walter Besant

is still a young man, Kitty; though you think thirty old.”

      That he was a very great poet we all agreed, and the more so when, after a lucky letter, he secured a subscriber or two for his next volume, and was able to present us once more with a book of his own poetry. I do not know whether he more enjoyed hearing me read them aloud (for then he bowed, spread his hands, and inclined his head this way and that, in appreciation of the melody and delicacy of the sentiments), or whether he preferred to read them himself; for then he could stop when he pleased, with, “This idea, ladies, was conceived while wandering amid the fields near Bagnigge Wells;” “This came to me while watching the gay throng in the Mall;” “This, I confess, was an inspiration caught in church.”

      “Kitty should enter these confessions in a book,” said Mrs. Esther. “Surely they will become valuable in the day – far distant, I trust – when your life has to be written, Mr. Stallabras.”

      “Oh, madam!” He bowed again, and lifted his hands in deprecation. But he was pleased. “Perhaps,” he said, “meaner bards have found a place in the Abbey, and a volume dedicated to their lives. If Miss Kitty will condescend to thus preserve recollections of me, I shall be greatly flattered.”

      I did keep a book, and entered in it all that dropped from his lips about himself, his opinions, his maxims, his thoughts, and so forth. He gradually got possessed of the idea that I would myself some day write his life, and he began insensibly to direct his conversation mainly to me.

      Sometimes he met me in the market, or on the stairs, when he would tell me more.

      “I always knew,” he said, “from the very first, that I was born to greatness. It was in me as a child, when, like Pope, I lisped in numbers. My station, originally, was not lofty, Miss Kitty.” He spoke as if he had risen to a dazzling height. “I was but the son of a hosier, born in Fetter Lane, and taught at the school, or academy, kept by one Jacob Crooks, who was handier with the rod than with the Gradus ad Parnassum. But I read, and taught myself; became at first the hack of Mr. Dodsley, and gradually rose to eminence.”

      He had, indeed, risen; he was the occupant of a garret; his fame lay in his own imagination; and he had not a guinea in the world.

      “Miss Kitty,” he said, one day, “there is only one thing that disqualifies you from being my biographer.”

      I asked him what that was.

      “You are not, as you should be, my wife. If virtue and beauty fitted you for the station of a poet’s wife, the thing were easy. Alas, child! the poet is poor, and his mistress would be poorer. Nevertheless, believe that the means, and not the will, are wanting to make thee my Laura, my Stella, and me thy Petrarch, or thy Sidney.”

      It was not till later that I understood how this starveling poet, as well as the broken baronet, had both expressed their desire (under more favourable circumstances) to make love to me. Grand would have been my lot as Lady Lackington, but grander still as Mistress Stallabras, wife of the illustrious poet, who lived, like the sparrows, from hand to mouth.

      CHAPTER VII

      HOW KITTY LEARNED TO KNOW THE DOCTOR

      Those evenings of riot from which Sir Miles was so often carried home speechless, were spent in no other place than that very room where I had seen the marriage of the sailors; and the president of the rabble rout was no other than the Doctor himself.

      I learned this of Sir Miles. If my ladies knew it, of which I am not certain, they were content to shut their eyes to it, and to think of the thing as one of the faults which women, in contempt and pity, ascribe to the strange nature of man. I cannot, being now of ripe years, believe that Heaven hath created in man a special aptitude for debauchery, sin, and profligacy, while women have been designed for the illustration of virtues which are the opposite to them. So that, when I hear it said that it is the way of men, I am apt to think that way sinful.

      It was Sir Miles himself who told me of it one morning. I found him leaning against the doorpost with a tankard of ale in his hand.

      “Fie, Sir Miles!” I said. “Is it not shameful for a gentleman to be carried home at night, like a pig?”

      “It is,” he replied. “Kitty, the morning is the time for repentance. I repent until I have cleared my brain with this draught of cool October.”

      “It is as if a man should drag a napkin in the mud of the Fleet Ditch to clean it,” I said.

      He drank off his tankard, and said he felt better.

      “Pretty Miss Kitty,” he said, “it is a fine morning; shall we abroad? Will you trust yourself with me to view the shops in Cheapside or the beaux in the Mall? I am at thy service, though, for a Norfolk baronet, my ruffles are of the shabbiest.”

      I told him that I would ask Mrs. Esther for permission. He said he wanted first a second pint, as the evening had been long and the drink abundant, after which his brain would be perfectly clear and his hand steady.

      I told him it was a shame that a gentleman of his rank should mate with men whose proper place was among the thieves of Turnmill Street, or the porters of Chick Lane, and that I would not walk with a man whose brain required a quart of strong ale in the morning to clear it.

      “As for my companions,” he said, taking the second pint which the boy brought him and turning it about in his hands, “we have very good company in the Liberties – quite as good as your friend Christian, in that story you love so much, might have had in Vanity Fair, had he been a lad of mettle and a toper. There are gentlemen of good family, like myself; poets like Solomon Stallabras; merchants, half-pay captains and broke lieutenants; clerks, tradesmen, lawyers, parsons, farmers, men of all degrees. It is like the outside world, except that here all are equal who can pay their shot. Why, with the Doctor at the head of the table, and a bowl of punch just begun, hang me if I know any place where a man may feel more comfortable or drink more at his ease.”

      “The Doctor,” I asked. Now I had seen so little of my uncle that I had almost forgotten the marriage of the sailors, and was beginning again to think of him as the pious and serious minister who spoke of sacred things to my guardians. “The Doctor?”

      “Ay;” Sir Miles drank off the whole of his second pint. “Who else?” His voice became suddenly thick, and his eyes fixed, with a strange light in them. “Who else but the Doctor? Why, what would the Rules be without the Doctor? He is our prince, our bishop, our chaplain – what you will – the right reverend his most gracious majesty the King of the Rules.” Sir Miles waved his hand dramatically. “He keeps us sweet; he polishes our wits; but for him we should be wallowing swine: he brings strangers and visitors to enliven us; drinks with us, sings with us, makes wit for us from the treasures of his learning; condescends to call us his friends; pays our shot for us; lends us money; gives food to the starving, and drink – yes, drink, by gad! to the thirsty, and clothes to the naked. Ah, poor girl! you can never see the Doctor in his glory, with all his admirers round him, and every man a glass of punch in his hand and a clean tobacco-pipe in his mouth. The Doctor? he is our boast; a most complete and perfect doctor; the pride of Cambridge; the crown and sum of all doctors in divinity!”

      He had forgotten, I suppose, his invitation to take me for a walk, for he left me here, staggering off in the direction of the Hand and Pen, where, I doubt not, he spent the rest of his idle and wasted day.

      It would have been useless and cruel to talk to my guardian about this discovery. It was another thing to be ashamed of. Sir Miles told me less than the truth. In fact the Doctor’s house was the nightly resort of all those residents in the Rules whom he would admit to his society. Hither, too, came, attracted by his reputation for eloquence, wit, and curious knowledge, gentlemen from the Temple, Lincoln’s Inn, and other places, who were expected, as a contribution to the evening, to send for bowls of punch. But of this presently.

      I saw my uncle seldom. He visited the sisters from time to time, and never failed to ask particularly after my progress in knowledge, and especially in the doctrines of the Church of England. On these occasions he generally left behind him, as a present, some maxim or precept tending to virtue, which we could repeat after his departure and turn over in our minds at