CECIL. CHAPTER I. Il y a fagots et fagots; et pour ceux que je fais ! Somnia sunt non docentis, sed optantis. - Cic. Ir is a trying situation for a fellow who has contented himself for the first fifty years of his life with the slender honours of coterie renown, the fame dispensed through a flageolet rather than a trumpet, to wake one morning, like Byron after the publication of Childe Harold, "and find himself famous." When I took compassion on the dulness of the British public so far as to confide to it the adventures of my days of coxcombry, I enjoyed only the reputation of being an expert pyrotechnist of those flashy squibs and crackers which irradiate the dulness of White's bay window on a rainy day; a dining-out man, good enough to fill a place when Alvanley or Rokeby, Sydney or Sneyd,-were not to be had; and was then a wit among lords, as I am now a lord among wits. My name, however, has become European. The critics, astounded by the vigour of my style and universality of my knowledge, have decided me to be, like Mrs. Malaprop's Cerberus, "three gentlemen in one;"- while the prattlers of May Fair, having been assured that I wear a gown, hail me as of epicene gender. Sinking under the weight of such commendations, dear Public, I appear before you covered with blushes. Like some popular dancer summoned to the front of the stage by the thunders of your applause, I advance trembling lest the grace of my three bows of acknowledgment should be deteriorated by the pitiless storm of bouquets pelting over my head; placing my hand on the spot where hearts are said to be, to abide your verdict. Once fairly before you, however, the footlights of publicity blazing at my feet,-the chandeliers gleaming above, and three tiers of beauty and fashion cheering me by their plaudits, the gods waiving their handkerchiefs, the pit its scruples, I feel the divinity stir within me! My blushes subside! - Cis Danby is himself again! 66 my foot is on my native heath, and my name is Macgregor!" Meanwhile I trust others are not as sick as myself of the sound of my name. The way in which society has been be-Cecilled for the last six months, is really overpowering. Multiform as the cloud of Polonius, I have been pointed out to myself at all the parties of the season, Wearing strange shapes, and bearing many names ! Methinks there have been ten Cecils in the field; and had I much faith in the doctrine of wraiths and fetches, must long ago have died of consternation, under the influence of apparitions of "the Author of Cecil." Some weeks ago, I sat by myself at a Greenwich dinner which my other self was invited to amuse; and a deuced stupid fellow I was! On the other hand, if proof against terrors of the Bodach Glas, I have run some risk of being bored to death by disclaimers of the authorship in question, Scarcely a scribbler about town but has essayed to prove to me, in nineteen sections of prose, that he was incapable of producing so silly a book as "Cecil," and that his Club accused him wrongfully; that "if he had stooped to write a novel, he trusted it would not have turned out quite so inartistical a production; A mighty maze, and all without a plan! -- without plot, design, - arrangement, and with very little moral!" One and all, in short, pride themselves on the conviction that they should have produced a Paternoster Row legitimate, in the style of James; while my discursive illegitimate was avowedly a loose string of pearls, in the style of Howell and James;" inest sua gratia parvis!" The gods give them joy of their taste! There are authors enough and to spare who write books regulationwise; but for my part, I do not pretend to be in the regulars. I am a Guerrilla a backwoodsman - anything rather than a gentleman who prattles belles lettres for the delectation of Grosvenor Square, and does small literature for the Annuals. As to your historical three volume novels per rule and compass, with a beginning, an end, and a middle, it strikes me that there is beginning to be no end to them, and they are all middling. I shall consequently continue to tell my story as I think proper. I consider myself a sort of Moor of Venice, relating my adventures; and the Public, my gentle Desdemona, "giving me for my pains a world of sighs," besides a smile or two pretty particularly well worth having. But it is time, as the man observed who went to see the School for Scandal, that we should stop talking and begin the play." And now, as the Princess Scheherazade used to say, "Where did I leave off?" -I think, I told you, Beloved Public, yes, I certainly told you, that I had deigned to accept an appointment in the household of George IV., and become a bullion tassel on the garment of royalty. It was an auspicious moment for that sort of gold-lace existence. As in the exhausted receiver of an air-pump all bodies possess equal weight, and a feather has the same importance as a guinea, in the factitious atmosphere of the court of Carlton House, Cecil Danby and Castlereagh, -(great Cas. bien entendu) — Jack Harris and the Duke of Wellington -maintained pretty nearly the same specific gravity. I know not whether my colleagues regarded the affair in so philosophical a point of view as myself; for we kept up the same plausibilities towards each other in public as monks of a confraternity when they meet in the street, or as the fellows who "honourable gentleman" each other in a place where they are "all honourable men." — From the Lord Chamberlain down to the smallest equerry, we were well-padded, well-spoken, individuals; who went through the Ko-Too of courtly life with the decent gravity of office; exhibiting the same arduous zeal about the shaping of a waistcoat or gilding of a console, as Burleigh for the signature of a treaty, or Marlborough for the opening of a campaign; for when the Sovereign is a man of fashion, it is manifestly the duty of his Courtiers to be fribbles. We bored ourselves however very little with London. Having scarcely a house over our royal heads in the capital, we took refuge from "vulgar Pall Mall's oratorio. of hisses" and the rotten apples of Charing Cross, in the happy privacy of our royal country seat; by which judicious retirement, George IV. established himself high in the list of philosophical Kings. It is clearly the duty of every enlightened monarch to concentrate and display in the highest degree, in his proper person, the national characteristics of his realm. In Spain, it is the business of His most Catholic Majesty to embroider petticoats for the Virgin, like Ferdinand; and suffer himself to be stifled by a brazier rather than violate the laws of etiquette by having it removed by hands not officially qualified for the task. In France, where "what seems its head the likeness of a kingly crown has on," the citizen King should wear worsted epaulettes and assume the contour of a Marylebone Volunteer, good-humoured, hearty, and family-mannish, while agitating in secret a thousand far-sighted plans, joining in the chorus of the Marseillaise, and keeping a spiked iron-collar round the neck of his house dog. In Turkey, but it is scarcely safe to talk about concentrated essence of Mussulmaun; and without further prolixities, I hasten to conclude that, in a country where every man's house is his castle, where exclusion and exclusiveness form the general principle, where the public monuments are shut up, the churches closed, - and the grand object of every landed proprietor is to wall out or plant out all possibility of being overlooked by the public, it is the distinctive virtue of the throne to be mysteriously unapproachable. A king of England should possess the ring of Gyges;— a queen should be the Invisible Girl. Their voices should reach the public, like faint and winged echoes; and when laid in the tomb, it should be in the heart of some Cheopsian pyramid, where it would require the lapse of centuries to make out their remains. This would be strictly in accordance with the spirit of the national character of a metropolis where next door neighbours, so far from loving each other as themselves, put patent locks upon their street doors; and in whose suburbs every rus in urbe is mouldy with an overgrowth of sallows and poplars to secure itself from observation; and I maintain therefore that the dignified self-seclusion of George IV. was the first of kingly virtues in a man who writes himself upon his penny pieces "D. G. BRIT. Rex.” -- But the caprices of the English public are the most capricious in the world. When once it is pleased to get up a storm, it blows like a Typhoon from every quarter at once; and bitter were its gusts and disgusts against its anointed sovereign. The public, and the press which is its organ, a barrel organ, wherewith it grinds reasonable people out of patience, chose to declaim against the luxurious indolence of a prince, who was nevertheless undergoing the hard labour of trying to appear young at threescore; and though it was evidently in deference to the whims of the populace who at twenty had adored him as a beau, that forty years long he grieved himself with the vocation, they were strangely out of conceit with the firmness of his Majesty's principles. But this was no affair of mine. It was not I who fixed the Court at Windsor. I was not accountable for the good taste which caused the mountain to come to Mahomet instead of letting Mahomet toil to the mountain; and if a considerable waste of ministerial post-horses and privy counciliatory patent axles attested that the sign manual was oftener times affixed in the county of Berks than the |