1830.] [ 505 ] 



MY FIRST LOUD MAYORS SHOW. 



THE old proverb says, " Once a man twice a child/' I have no 

 objection to urge against the truth of the maxim none to the sage 

 Sancho who in his wisdom indited it ; but I must frankly confess that, 

 if this rule in mortal man's existence be invariable, some villain destiny 

 has brought the two extremes (the two childhoods) of my particular life 

 together, and I am afraid, intends to defraud me entirely of the middle 

 term : for (shall I confess it ?) I am at forty in some respects as great a 

 child as I was at ten. Wordsworth has very truly said, after Dryden,* 

 that 



" The child is father to the man ;" 



and it is only to be regretted that the child-father cannot keep the man 

 his son under more subjection in his riper years. Indeed, it would 

 be well for us if our pursuits as men were as innocent as our pursuits as 

 children our crimes would then be as venial, and their punishment as 

 merciful. 



I love childish shows those <f trivial, fond records"- and my Lord 

 Mayor's Show usually finds me a gaping observer of the wonder of the 

 9th of November. But, out alas ! if there is one honour more than 

 another which illustrates the short-livedness of all honours, it is this 

 preparatory pageant to a whole year of honour. There is something 

 more or less melancholy in all grandeur, and more or less ridiculous in 

 the most serious exhibition of it : if these sad deductions of sad experi- 

 ence are remarkable in one solemnity more than another, it is in " My 

 Lord Mayor's Show." The whole design of the pageant is so incon- 

 gruous, from the mixture of barbaric pomp (its men in armour) with 

 modern refinement (its men in broad cloth) so cheerless, from the 

 season and its sure circumstances of fog, frost, or drenching rain, under 

 one or more of which it yearly takes place, that, instead of being a grati- 

 fication to the eye, or pleasing to our sense of the outward glory of 

 public homage, it passes before us like the mockery and not the majesty 

 of pomp, which should have somewhat of the poetry of pageantry, or 

 else it is duller than a twice-told tale. Yet for this brief glory, good men, 

 and therefore good citizens, have struggled "through evil report and 

 good report," and having enjoyed it, have sat down contented for the rest 

 of their lives. There are much worse ambitions ; and it is well, perhaps, 

 that this is so short-lived: the best governors of Rome were her consuls 

 for a year. 



My first " Lord Mayor's Show" occurred in that happy period of 

 life, boyhood, when we are soonest " pleased with a feather." To be 

 sure, a dense and thoroughly English fog, one " native and to the 

 manner born," one of unadulterated Essex home-manufacture, did, 

 both on its going forth and on its return, make f " darkness visible," 

 obscured the glories of the day, and, accompanied with a sleety sort of 

 drizzle, rendered the paths of honour as slippery as the sledge at Schaff- 

 hausen. But what to me, then, were these accidental drawbacks upon 

 the great occasion ! True, I had seen what I went out to see as 

 " through a glass darkly; 1 ' but that which I saw not, my imagination 

 exhibited all the rest was " leather and prunella/' The obscured 



* " The priest continues what the nurse began, 

 And thus the child imposes on the man." 



M.M. New Series. VOL. X. No. 59. 3 S 



