Journeys Through Bookland Volume Viii Part 18

WALTER THE DOUBTER

It was in the year of our Lord 1629 that Mynheer Wouter Van Twiller was appointed governor of the province of Nieuw Nederlandts, under the commission and control of their High Mightinesses the Lords States General of the United Netherlands and the privileged West India Company.

The renowned Wouter (or Walter) Van Twiller was descended from a long line of Dutch burgomasters, who had successively dozed away their lives and grown fat upon the bench of magistracy in Rotterdam, and who had comported themselves with such singular wisdom and propriety that they were never either heard or talked of; which, next to being universally applauded, should be the object of ambition of all magistrates and rulers. There are two opposite ways by which some men make a figure in the world--one by talking faster than they think, and the other by holding their tongues and not thinking at all. By the first many a smatterer acquires the reputation of a man of quick parts; by the other many a dunderpate, like the owl, the stupidest of birds, comes to be considered the very type of wisdom. This, by the way, is a casual remark, which I would not for the universe have it thought I apply to Governor Van Twiller. It is true he was a man shut up within himself, like an oyster, and rarely spoke except in monosyllables; but then it was allowed he seldom said a foolish thing. So invincible was his gravity that he was never known to laugh or even to smile through the whole course of a long and prosperous life. Nay, if a joke were uttered in his presence that set light-minded hearers in a roar, it was observed to throw him into a state of perplexity. Sometimes he would deign to inquire into the matter, and when, after much explanation, the joke was made as plain as a pike-staff, he would continue to smoke his pipe in silence, and at length, knocking out the ashes, would exclaim, "Well! I see nothing in all that to laugh about."

The person of this ill.u.s.trious old gentleman was formed and proportioned, as though it had been molded by the hands of some cunning Dutch statuary, as a model of majesty and lordly grandeur. He was exactly five feet, six inches in height and six feet, five inches in circ.u.mference. His head was a perfect sphere, and of such stupendous dimensions that Dame Nature with all her s.e.x's ingenuity would have been puzzled to construct a neck capable of supporting it; wherefore she wisely declined the attempt, and settled it firmly on the top of his backbone just between the shoulders. His body was oblong and particularly capacious at bottom; which was wisely ordered by Providence, seeing that he was a man of sedentary habits and very averse to the idle labor of walking. His legs were short, but st.u.r.dy in proportion to the weight they had to sustain, so that when erect he had not a little the appearance of a beer-barrel on skids. His face, that infallible index of the mind, presented a vast expanse, unfurrowed by any of those lines and angles which disfigure the human countenance with what is termed expression. Two small gray eyes twinkled feebly in the midst, like two stars of lesser magnitude in a hazy firmament, and his full-fed cheeks, which seemed to have taken toll of everything that went into his mouth, were curiously mottled and streaked with dusky red, like a spitzenberg apple.

In his council he presided with great state and solemnity. He sat in a huge chair of solid oak, hewn in the celebrated forest of The Hague, fabricated by an experienced timmerman of Amsterdam, and curiously carved about the arms and feet into exact imitations of gigantic eagle's claws. Instead of a scepter he swayed a long Turkish pipe, wrought with jasmine and amber, which had been presented to a stadtholder of Holland at the conclusion of a treaty with one of the petty Barbary powers. In this stately chair would he sit and this magnificent pipe would he smoke, shaking his right knee with a constant motion, and fixing his eye for hours upon a little print of Amsterdam which hung in a black frame against the opposite wall of the council-chamber. Nay, it has even been said that when any deliberation of extraordinary length and intricacy was on the carpet the renowned Wouter would shut his eyes for full two hours at a time, that he might not be disturbed by external objects; and at such times the internal commotion of his mind was evinced by certain regular guttural sounds, which his admirers declared were merely the noise of conflict made by his contending doubts and opinions.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HE WAS INTERRUPTED BY WANDLE SCHOONHOVEN]

The very outset of the career of this excellent magistrate was distinguished by an example of legal ac.u.men that gave flattering presage of a wise and equitable administration. The morning after he had been installed in office, and at the moment that he was making his breakfast from a prodigious earthen dish filled with milk and Indian pudding, he was interrupted by the appearance of Wandle Schoonhoven, a very important old burgher of New Amsterdam, who complained bitterly of one Barent Bleecker, inasmuch as he refused to come to a settlement of accounts, seeing that there was a heavy balance in favor of the said Wandle. Governor Van Twiller, as I have already observed, was a man of few words; he was likewise a mortal enemy to multiplying writings or being disturbed at his breakfast. Having listened attentively to the statement of Wandle Schoonhoven, giving an occasional grunt as he shoveled a spoonful of Indian pudding into his mouth, either as a sign that he relished the dish or comprehended the story, he called unto him his constable, and, pulling out of his breeches pocket a huge jack-knife, dispatched it after the defendant, as a summons, accompanied by his tobacco-box as a warrant.

This summary process was as effectual in those simple days as was the seal ring of the great Haroun Alraschid among the true believers. The two parties being confronted before him, each produced a book of accounts written in a language and character that would have puzzled any but a High Dutch commentator or a learned decipherer of Egyptian obelisks. The sage Wouter took them one after the other, and, having poised them in his hands and attentively counted over the number of leaves, fell straightway into a very great doubt, and smoked for half an hour without saying a word; at length, laying his finger beside his nose and shutting his eyes for a moment with the air of a man who had just caught a subtle idea by the tail, he slowly took his pipe from his mouth, puffed forth a column of tobacco-smoke, and with marvelous gravity and solemnity p.r.o.nounced--that, having carefully counted over the leaves and weighed the books, it was found that one was just as thick and as heavy as the other; therefore it was the final opinion of the court that the accounts were equally balanced; therefore Wandle should give Barent a receipt, and Barent should give Wandle a receipt; and the constable should pay the costs.

This decision, being straightway made known, diffused general joy throughout New Amsterdam, for the people immediately perceived that they had a very wise and equitable magistrate to rule over them. But its happiest effect was that not another lawsuit took place throughout the whole of his administration, and the office of constable fell into such decay that there was not one of those losel scouts known in the province for many years.

HOW THE COLONISTS LIVED IN THE DAYS OF WALTER THE DOUBTER

The houses of the higher cla.s.s were generally constructed of wood, excepting the gable end, which was of small black and yellow Dutch bricks, and always faced on the street, as our ancestors, like their descendants, were very much given to outward show, and were noted for putting the best leg foremost. The house was always furnished with abundance of large doors and small windows on every floor, the date of its erection was curiously designated by iron figures on the front, and on the top of the roof was perched a fierce little weatherc.o.c.k, to let the family into the important secret which way the wind blew. These, like the weatherc.o.c.ks on the tops of our steeples, pointed so many different ways that every man could have a wind to his mind; the most stanch and loyal citizens, however, always went according to the weatherc.o.c.k on the top of the governor's house, which was certainly the most correct, as he had a trusty servant employed every morning to climb up and set it to the right quarter.

In those good days of simplicity and sunshine a pa.s.sion for cleanliness was the leading principle in domestic economy and the universal test of an able housewife--a character which formed the utmost ambition of our unenlightened grandmothers. The front door was never opened except on marriages, funerals, New Year's days, the festival of Saint Nicholas, or some such great occasion. It was ornamented with a gorgeous bra.s.s knocker, curiously wrought, sometimes in the device of a dog, and sometimes of a lion's head, and was daily burnished with such religious zeal that it was ofttimes worn out by the very precautions taken for its preservation. The whole house was constantly in a state of inundation under the discipline of mops and brooms and scrubbing brushes; and the good housewives of those days were a kind of amphibious animal, delighting exceedingly to be dabbling in water, insomuch that an historian of the day gravely tells us that many of his townswomen grew to have webbed fingers like unto a duck; but this I look upon to be a mere sport of fancy, or, what is worse, a willful misrepresentation.

The grand parlor was the sanctum-sanctorum where the pa.s.sion for cleaning was indulged without control. In this sacred apartment no one was permitted to enter excepting the mistress and her confidential maid, who visited it once a week for the purpose of giving it a thorough cleaning and putting things to rights, always taking the precaution of leaving their shoes at the door and entering devoutly in their stocking feet. After scrubbing the floor, sprinkling it with fine white sand, which was curiously stroked into angles, and curves, and rhomboids with a broom--after washing the windows, rubbing and polishing the furniture, and putting a new bunch of evergreen in the fireplace--the window shutters were again closed to keep out the flies, and the room carefully locked up until the revolution of time brought round the weekly cleaning day.

As to the family, they always entered in at the gate, and most generally lived in the kitchen. To have seen a numerous household a.s.sembled round the fire one would have imagined that he was transported back to those happy days of primeval simplicity which float before our imagination like golden visions. The fireplaces were of a truly patriarchal magnitude, where the whole family, old and young, master and servant, black and white--nay, even the very cat and dog--enjoyed a community of privilege and had each a right to a corner. Here the old burgher would sit in perfect silence, puffing his pipe, looking in the fire with half-shut eyes, and thinking of nothing for hours together; the goede vrouw on the opposite side would employ herself diligently in spinning yarn or knitting stockings. The young folks would crowd around the hearth, listening with breathless attention to some old crone of a negro who was the oracle of the family, and who, perched like a raven in a corner of the chimney, would croak forth for a long winter afternoon a string of incredible stories about New England witches, grisly ghosts, horses without heads, and hair-breadth escapes and b.l.o.o.d.y encounters among the Indians.

In those happy days a well-regulated family always rose with the dawn, dined at eleven, and went to bed at sunset. Dinner was invariably a private meal, and the fat old burghers showed incontestable signs of disapprobation and uneasiness at being surprised by a visit from a neighbor on such occasions. But, though our worthy ancestors were thus singularly adverse to giving dinners, yet they kept up the social bonds of intimacy by occasional banquetings called tea-parties.

These fashionable parties were generally confined to the higher cla.s.ses--or n.o.blesse--that is to say, such as kept their own cows and drove their own wagons. The company commonly a.s.sembled at three o'clock and went away about six, unless it was in winter time, when the fashionable hours were a little earlier, that the ladies might get home before dark. The tea-table was crowned with a huge earthen dish well stored with slices of fat pork fried brown, cut up into morsels, and swimming in gravy. The company, being seated round the genial board and each furnished with a fork, evinced their dexterity in launching at the fattest pieces in this mighty dish--in much the same manner as sailors harpoon porpoises at sea, or our Indians spear salmon in the lakes.

Sometimes the table was graced with immense apple pies or saucers full of preserved peaches and pears; but it was always sure to boast an enormous dish of b.a.l.l.s of sweetened dough, fried in hog's fat, and called doughnuts, or olykoeks--a delicious kind of cake at present scarce known in this city, except in genuine Dutch families.

The tea was served out of a majestic delft teapot ornamented with paintings of fat little Dutch shepherds and shepherdesses tending pigs, with boats sailing in the air, and houses built in the clouds, and sundry other ingenious Dutch fantasies. The beaux distinguished themselves by their adroitness in replenishing this pot from a huge copper tea-kettle which would have made the pigmy macaronies of these degenerate days sweat merely to look at it. To sweeten the beverage a lump of sugar was laid beside each cup, and the company alternately nibbled and sipped with great decorum, until an improvement was introduced by a shrewd and economic old lady, which was to suspend a large lump directly over the tea-table by a string from the ceiling, so that it could be swung from mouth to mouth--an ingenious expedient which is still kept up by some families in Albany, but which prevails without exception in Communipaw, Bergen, Flatbush, and all our uncontaminated Dutch villages.

At these primitive tea-parties the utmost propriety and dignity of deportment prevailed. No flirting nor coquetting; no gambling of old ladies nor hoyden chattering and romping of young ones; no self-satisfied struttings of wealthy gentlemen with their brains in their pockets; nor amusing conceits and monkey divertis.e.m.e.nts of smart young gentlemen with no brains at all. On the contrary, the young ladies seated themselves demurely in their rush-bottomed chairs and knit their own woollen stockings, nor ever opened their lips excepting to say _Yah, Mynheer_, or _Yah ya, Vrouw_, to any question that was asked them, behaving in all things like decent, well-educated damsels. As to the gentlemen, each of them tranquilly smoked his pipe and seemed lost in contemplation of the blue and white tiles with which the fireplaces were decorated, whereon sundry pa.s.sages of Scripture were piously portrayed: Tobit and his dog figured to great advantage; Haman swung conspicuously on his gibbet; and Jonah appeared most manfully bouncing out of the whale, like Harlequin through a barrel of fire.

The parties broke up without noise and without confusion. They were carried home by their own carriages--that is to say, by the vehicles Nature had provided them--excepting such of the wealthy as could afford to keep a wagon. The gentlemen gallantly attended their fair ones to their respective abodes, and took leave of them with a hearty smack at the door, which as it was an established piece of etiquette, done in perfect simplicity and honesty of heart, occasioned no scandal at that time, nor should it at the present: if our greatgrandfathers approved of the custom, it would argue a great want of reverence in their descendants to say a word against it.

In this dulcet period of my history, when the beauteous island of Manna-hata presented a scene the very counterpart of those glowing pictures drawn of the golden reign of Saturn, there was, as I have before observed, a happy ignorance, an honest simplicity, prevalent among its inhabitants, which, were I even able to depict, would be but little understood by the degenerate age for which I am doomed to write.

Even the female s.e.x, those arch innovators upon the tranquillity, the honesty, and gray-beard customs of society, seemed for a while to conduct themselves with incredible sobriety and comeliness.

Their hair, untortured by the abominations of art, was scrupulously pomatumed back from their foreheads with a candle, and covered with a little cap of quilted calico which fitted exactly to their heads. Their petticoats of linsey-woolsey were striped with a variety of gorgeous dyes, though I must confess these gallant garments were rather short, scarce reaching below the knee; but then they made up in the number, which generally equalled that of the gentlemen's small-clothes; and, what is still more praiseworthy, they were all of their own manufacture, of which circ.u.mstance, as may well be supposed, they were not a little vain.

These were the honest days in which every woman stayed at home, read the Bible, and wore pockets--ay, and that too of a goodly size, fashioned with patchwork into many curious devices and ostentatiously worn on the outside. These, in fact, were convenient receptacles where all good housewives carefully stored away such things as they wished to have at hand, by which means they often came to be incredibly crammed; and I remember there was a story current when I was a boy that the lady of Wouter Van Twiller once had occasion to empty her right pocket in search of a wooden ladle, when the contents filled a couple of corn baskets, and the utensil was discovered lying among some rubbish in one corner.

But we must not give too much faith to all these stories, the anecdotes of those remote periods being very subject to exaggeration.

Besides these notable pockets, they likewise wore scissors and pincushions suspended from their girdles by red ribbons, or among the more opulent and showy cla.s.ses by bra.s.s, and even silver, chains--indubitable tokens of thrifty housewives and industrious spinsters. I cannot say much in vindication of the shortness of the petticoats: it doubtless was introduced for the purpose of giving the stockings a chance to be seen, which were generally of blue worsted with magnificent red clocks, or perhaps to display a well-turned ankle and a neat, though serviceable foot, set off by a high-heeled leathern shoe with a large and splendid silver buckle. Thus we find that the gentle s.e.x in all ages have shown the same disposition to infringe a little upon the laws of decorum in order to betray a lurking beauty or gratify an innocent love of finery.

From the sketch here given it will be seen that our good grandmothers differed considerably in their ideas of a fine figure from their scantily dressed descendants of the present day. A fine lady in those times waddled under more clothes, even on a fair summer's day, than would have clad the whole bevy of a modern ball-room. Nor were they the less admired by the gentlemen in consequence thereof. On the contrary, the greatness of a lover's pa.s.sion seemed to increase in proportion to the magnitude of its object, and a voluminous damsel, arrayed in a dozen of petticoats, was declared by a Low Dutch sonneteer of the province to be radiant as a sunflower and luxuriant as a full-blown cabbage. Certain it is that in those days the heart of a lover could not contain more than one lady at a time; whereas the heart of a modern gallant has often room enough to accommodate half a dozen. The reason of which I conclude to be, that either the hearts of the gentlemen have grown larger or the persons of the ladies smaller; this, however, is a question for physiologists to determine.

But there was a secret charm in these petticoats which no doubt entered into the consideration of the prudent gallants. The wardrobe of a lady was in those days her only fortune, and she who had a good stock of petticoats and stockings was as absolutely an heiress as is a Kamschatka damsel with a store of bear skins or a Lapland belle with a plenty of reindeer. The ladies, therefore, were very anxious to display these powerful attractions to the greatest advantage; and the best rooms in the house, instead of being adorned with caricatures of Dame Nature in water colors and needlework, were always hung round with abundance of homespun garments, the manufacture and the property of the females--a piece of laudable ostentation that still prevails among the heiresses of our Dutch villages.

The gentlemen, in fact, who figured in the circles of the gay world in these ancient times corresponded, in most particulars, with the beauteous damsels whose smiles they were ambitious to deserve. True it is their merits would make but a very inconsiderable impression upon the heart of a modern fair; they neither drove their curricles nor sported their tandems, for as yet those gaudy vehicles were not even dreamt of, neither did they distinguish themselves by their brilliancy at the table, and their consequent renconters with watchmen, for our forefathers were of too pacific a disposition to need those guardians of the night, every soul throughout the town being sound asleep before nine o'clock. Neither did they establish their claims to gentility at the expense of their tailors, for as yet those offenders against the pockets of society and the tranquility of all aspiring young gentlemen were unknown in New Amsterdam; every good housewife made the clothes of her husband and family, and even the goede vrouw of Van Twiller himself thought it no disparagement to cut out her husband's linsey-woolsey galligaskins.

Not but what there were some two or three youngsters who manifested the first dawning of what is called fire and spirit, who held all labor in contempt, skulked about docks and market-places, loitered in the sunshine, squandered what little money they could procure at hustle-cap and chuck-farthing, swore, boxed, fought c.o.c.ks, and raced their neighbors' horses; in short, who promised to be the wonder, the talk, and abomination of the town, had not their stylish career been unfortunately cut short by an affair of honor with a whipping-post.

Far other, however, was the truly fashionable gentleman of those days.

His dress, which served for both morning and evening, street and drawing-room, was a linsey-woolsey coat, made, perhaps, by the fair hands of the mistress of his affections, and gallantly bedecked with abundance of large bra.s.s b.u.t.tons; half a score of breeches heightened the proportions of his figure; his shoes were decorated by enormous copper buckles; a low-crowned, broad-brimmed hat overshadowed his burly visage; and his hair dangled down his back in a queue of eel-skin.

Thus equipped, he would manfully sally forth with pipe in mouth to besiege some fair damsel's obdurate heart--not such a pipe, good reader, as that which Acis did sweetly tune in praise of his Galatea, but one of true Delft manufacture and furnished with a charge of fragrant tobacco. With this would he resolutely set himself down before the fortress, and rarely failed, in the process of time, to smoke the fair enemy into a surrender upon honorable terms.

Happy would it have been for New Amsterdam could it always have existed in this state of lowly simplicity; but alas! the days of childhood are too sweet to last! Cities, like men, grow out of them in time, and are doomed alike to grow into the bustle, the cares, and miseries of the world.

WILLIAM THE TESTY

Wilhelmus Kieft, who in 1634 ascended the gubernatorial chair (to borrow a favorite though clumsy appellation of modern phraseologists), was of a lofty descent, his father being inspector of windmills in the ancient town of Saardam; and our hero, we are told, when a boy made very curious investigations into the nature and operation of these machines, which was one reason why he afterward came to be so ingenious a governor. His name according to the most authentic etymologists, was a corruption of Kyver--that is to say, a _wrangler_ or _scolder_--and expressed the characteristic of his family, which for nearly two centuries had kept the windy town of Saardam in hot water, and produced more tartars and brimstones than any ten families in the place; and so truly did he inherit this family peculiarity that he had not been a year in the government of the province before he was universally denominated William the Testy. His appearance answered to his name. He was a brisk, wiry, waspish little old gentleman; such a one as may now and then be seen stumping about our city in a broad-skirted coat with huge b.u.t.tons, a c.o.c.ked hat stuck on the back of his head, and a cane as high as his chin. His face was broad but his features were sharp, his cheeks were scorched into a dusky red by two fiery little gray eyes; his nose turned up, and the corners of his mouth turned down, pretty much like the muzzle of an irritable pug-dog.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WILLIAM THE TESTY]

I have heard it observed by a profound adept in human physiology that if a woman waxes fat with the progress of years, her tenure of life is somewhat precarious, but if haply she withers as she grows old she lives forever. Such promised to be the case with William the Testy, who grew tough in proportion as he dried. He had withered, in fact, not through the process of years, but through the tropical fervor of his soul, which burnt like a vehement rushlight in his bosom, inciting him to incessant broils and bickerings.

Wilhelmus Kieft was a great legislator on a small scale, and had a microscopic eye in public affairs. He had been greatly annoyed by the factious meetings of the good people of New Amsterdam, but, observing that on these occasions the pipe was ever in their mouth, he began to think that the pipe was at the bottom of the affair, and that there was some mysterious affinity between politics and tobacco smoke. Determined to strike at the root of the evil, he began, forthwith, to rail at tobacco as a noxious, nauseous weed, filthy in all its uses; and as to smoking, he denounced it as a heavy tax upon the public pocket, a vast consumer of time, a great encourager of idleness, and a deadly bane to the prosperity and morals of the people. Finally, he issued an edict prohibiting the smoking of tobacco throughout the New Netherlands.

Ill-fated Kieft! Had he lived in the present age and attempted to check the unbounded license of the press, he could not have struck more sorely upon the sensibilities of the million. The pipe, in fact, was the great organ of reflection and deliberation of the New Netherlander. It was his constant companion and solace: was he gay, he smoked; was he sad, he smoked; his pipe was never out of his mouth; it was a part of his physiognomy; without it his best friends would not know him. Take away his pipe? You might as well take away his nose!

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TESTY WILLIAM ISSUED FORTH LIKE A WRATHFUL SPIDER]

The immediate effect of the edict of William the Testy was a popular commotion. A vast mult.i.tude, armed with pipes and tobacco boxes and an immense supply of ammunition, sat themselves down before the governor's house and fell to smoking with tremendous violence. The Testy William issued forth like a wrathful spider, demanding the reason of this lawless fumigation. The st.u.r.dy rioters replied by lolling back in their seats and puffing away with redoubled fury, raising such a murky cloud that the governor was fain to take refuge in the interior of his castle.

A long negotiation ensued through the medium of Antony the Trumpeter.

The governor was at first wrathful and unyielding, but was gradually smoked into terms. He concluded by permitting the smoking of tobacco, but he abolished the fair long pipes used in the days of Wouter Van Twiller, denoting ease, tranquillity and sobriety of deportment; these he condemned as incompatible with the dispatch of business; in place whereof he subst.i.tuted little captious short pipes, two inches in length, which he observed could be stuck in one corner of the mouth or twisted in the hat-band, and would never be in the way. Thus ended this alarming insurrection, which was long known by the name of The Pipe Plot, and which, it has been somewhat quaintly observed, did end, like most plots and seditions, in mere smoke.

But mark, O reader! the deplorable evils which did afterward result. The smoke of these villainous little pipes, continually ascending in a cloud about the nose, penetrated into and befogged the cerebellum, dried up all the kindly moisture of the brain, and rendered the people who used them as vaporish and testy as the governor himself. Nay, what is worse, from being goodly, burly, sleek-conditioned men, they became, like our Dutch yeomanry who smoke short pipes, a lantern-jawed, smoke-dried, leathern-hided race.

Nor was this all. From this fatal schism we may date the rise of parties in Nieuw Nederlandts. The rich burghers, who could afford to be lazy, adhered to the ancient fashion and were known as _Long Pipes_; while the lower order were branded with the plebeian name of _Short Pipes_.

PETER THE HEADSTRONG

Peter Stuyvesant was the last, and, like the renowned Wouter Van Twiller, the best, of our ancient Dutch governors, Wouter having surpa.s.sed all who preceded him, and Pieter or Piet, as he was sociably called by the old Dutch burghers, who were ever p.r.o.ne to familiarize names, having never been equalled by any successor. He was, in fact, the very man fitted by Nature to retrieve the desperate fortunes of her beloved province, had not the fates, those most potent and unrelenting of all ancient spinsters, destined them to inextricable confusion.

To say merely that he was a hero would be doing him great injustice: he was in truth a combination of heroes; for he was of a st.u.r.dy, raw-boned make like Ajax Telamon, with a pair of round shoulders that Hercules would have given his hide for (meaning his lion's hide) when he undertook to ease old Atlas of his load. He was, moreover, as Plutarch describes Coriola.n.u.s, not only terrible for the force of his arm, but likewise of his voice, which sounded as though it came out of a barrel; and, like the self-same warrior, he possessed a sovereign contempt for the sovereign people, and an iron aspect which was enough of itself to make the very bowels of his adversaries quake with terror and dismay.

All this martial excellency of appearance was inexpressibly heightened by an accidental advantage with which I am surprised that neither Homer nor Virgil have graced any of their heroes. This was nothing less than a wooden leg, which was the only prize he had gained in bravely fighting the battles of his country, but of which he was so proud that he was often heard to declare he valued it more than all his other limbs put together; indeed, so highly did he esteem it that he had it gallantly enchased and relieved with silver devices, which caused it to be related in divers histories and legends that he wore a silver leg.

Like that choleric warrior Achilles, he was somewhat subject to extempore bursts of pa.s.sion, which were rather unpleasant to his favorites and attendants, whose perceptions he was apt to quicken, after the manner of his ill.u.s.trious imitator, Peter the Great, by anointing their shoulders with his walking-staff.

He was, in fact, the very reverse of his predecessors, being neither tranquil and inert like Walter the Doubter, nor restless and fidgeting like William the Testy, but a man of such uncommon activity and decision of mind that he never sought nor accepted the advice of others, depending bravely upon his single head, as would a hero of yore upon his single arm, to carry him through all difficulties. To tell the simple truth, he wanted nothing more to complete him as a statesman than to think always right, for no one can say but that he always acted as he thought. He was never a man to flinch when he found himself in a sc.r.a.pe, but to dash forward through thick and thin, trusting by hook or by crook to make all things straight in the end. In a word, he possessed in an eminent degree that great quality in a statesman called perseverance by the polite, but nicknamed obstinacy by the vulgar. A wonderful salve for official blunders, since he who perseveres in error without flinching gets the credit of boldness and consistency, while he who wavers in seeking to do what is right gets stigmatized as a trimmer. This much is certain--and it is a maxim well worthy the attention of all legislators great and small who stand shaking in the wind, irresolute which way to steer--that a ruler who follows his own will pleases himself, while he who seeks to satisfy the wishes and whims of others runs great risk of pleasing n.o.body. There is nothing, too, like putting down one's foot resolutely when in doubt, and letting things take their course. The clock that stands still points right twice in the four and twenty hours, while others may keep going continually and be continually going wrong.