1830.] A Chapter on Old Coals. 319 



a Scotch novel and, above all, a social, independent, unembarrassed 

 attitude. With a new coat this last blessing is unattainable. Imprisoned 

 in this detestable tunic oh, how unlike the flowing toga of the ancients ! 

 we are perpetually haunted with a consciousness of the necessities of 

 our condition. A sudden pinch in the waist dispels a philosophic 

 reverie ; another in the elbow withdraws us from the contemplation of 

 the poet to the recollection of the tailor ; Snip's goose vanquishes Ana- 

 ereon's dove ; while, as regards our position, to lean forward, is inconve- 

 nient ; to lean backward, extravagant ; to lean sideways, impossible. 

 The great secret of happiness is the ability to merge self in the contempla- 

 tion of nobler objects. This a new coat, as I have just now hinted, forbids. 

 It keeps incessantly intruding itself on our attention. While it flatters 

 our sense of the becoming, it compromises our freedom of thought. 

 While it insinuates that we are the idol of a ball-room, it neutralizes the 

 compliment by a high-pressure power on the short ribs. It bids us be 

 easy, at the expense of respiration ; comfortable, with elbows on the rack. 



There is yet another light in which old coats may be viewed : I mean 

 as chroniclers of the past, as vouchers to particular events. Agesilaus, 

 king of Sparta, always dated from his last new dress. Following in the 

 wake of so illustrious a precedent, I date from my last (save one) new 

 coat, which was first ushered into being during the memorable period of 

 the Queen's trial. Do I remember that epoch from the agitation it 

 called forth? From the loyalty, the radicalism, the wisdom and the 

 folly it quickened into life ? Assuredly not. I gained nothing by the 

 wisdom. I lost as much by the folly. I was neither the better nor the 

 worse for the agitation. Why then do I still remember that period ? 

 'Simply and selfishly from the circumstance of its having occasioned the 

 dismemberment most calamitous to a poor annuitant ! of the very 

 coat in which I have the honour of addressing this essay to the public. 

 In an olfactory crowd, whom her Majesty's " wrongs" had congregated 

 at Hammersmith, my now invalid habiliment was transformed after the 

 fashion of an Ovidian metamorphosis, where the change is usually from 

 the better to the worse, from a coat into a spencer. In a word, some 

 adroit conveyancer eloped with the hinder flaps, and by so doing, 

 secured a snuff-box which played two waltz tunes. 



The same coat, on which subsequently, by a sort of Taliacotian pro- 

 cess, a pair of artificial skirts were grafted, accompanied me through 

 Wales, among mountains where the eagle dwells alone in his supremacy. 

 It was the sole adjunct who was with me, when I rambled along the 

 banks of the Sawthy, when the lark was abroad and singing in the sky, 

 or the shy nightingale flung her song to the winds from among the 

 hushed dells of Keven-gornuth. It was at my back when I climbed the 

 loftiest peak of Cader-Idris, and when with feelings not to be described, 

 1 looked down upon sapphire clouds floating in quaint huge masses at 

 an immense distance below me, and saw through their filmy chinks the 

 glittering of thirty lakes, the faint undulating line of a thousand billowy 

 ridges, or the blue expanse of the drowsy ocean, dotted here and there 

 with a passing sail, and bordered far away on the horizon by the dim 

 boundaries of the Irish coast. Moreover, it was at my back when I 

 plunged chin-deep into the isle of Ely bogs, in which picturesque condi- 

 tion I was shot at, (and of course missed) by a Cockney sportsman, who 

 had mistaken me for a rare and handsome species of the wild duck. 



But by far the most singular adventure in which this old-fashioned 



