or
Javan and Gadire; but at home there were highways in abundance, and what
is your genuine tramp but a dry-land sailor? The Red Man is exhausted of
everything but sordidness; but under that round-shouldered little tent at
the bend of the road, beside that fire artistically built beneath that
kettle of the comfortable odours, among those horses and colts at graze
hard by, are men and women more mysterious and more alluring to the
romantic mind than any Mingo or Comanch that ever traded a scalp. While
as for your tricks of fence--your immortal _passado_, your _punto
reverso_--if that be no longer the right use for a gentleman, have not
Spring and Langan fought their great battle on Worcester racecourse? and
has not Cribb of Gloucestershire--that renowned, heroic, irresistible
Thomas--beaten Molyneux the negro artist in the presence of twenty
thousand roaring Britons? and shall the practice of an art which has
rejoiced in such a master as the illustrious Game Chicken, Hannibal of
the Ring, be held degrading by an Englishman of sufficient inches who,
albeit a Tory and a High Churchman, is at bottom as thoroughgoing a
Republican as ever took the word of command from Colonel Cromwell? And
if all this fail, if he get nobody to put on the gloves with him, if the
tents of the Romany prove barren of interest, if the king's highway be
vacant of adventure as Mayfair, he has still philology to fall back upon,
he can still console himself with the study of strange tongues, he can
still exult in a peculiar superiority by quoting the great Ab Gwylim
where the baser sort of persons is content with Shakespeare. So that
what with these and some kindred diversions--a little horse-whispering
and ale-drinking, the damnation of Popery, the study of the Bible--he can
manage not merely to live but to live so fully and richly as to be the
envy of some and the amazement of all. That, as life goes and as the
world wags, is given to few. Add to it the credit of having written as
good a book about Spain as ever was written in any language, the
happiness of having dreamed and partly lived that book ere it was
written, the perfect joy of being roundly abused by everybody, and the
consciousness of being different from everybody and of giving at least as
good as ever you got at several things the world is silly enough to hold
in worship--as the Toryism of Sir Walter, or the niceness of Popery, or
the pleasures of Society: and is it not plain that B