Francis Lynde - The Dodd Family Abroad, Vol. I

"I don't know, Tom, how much further I might have gone on in my analytical researches into our national character; but the interpreter cut me short, by assuring the Court that he was totally unable to follow me. In the narrative parts of my discourse he was good enough; but it seemed that my reflections, and my general remarks on men and manners, were a cut above him. I was therefore warned to 'try back' to the line of my story, which I did accordingly.

"As for the affair itself, my Lord," resumed I, "I understand from eyewitnesses that it was most respectably and discreetly conducted. James was put up with his face to the west, so that Roger had the sun on him. The tools were beauties. It was a fine May morning, mellow, and not too bright. There was nothing wanting to make the scene impressive, and, I may add, instructive. Roger's friend gave the word – one, two, three – bang went both pistols together, and poor James received the other's fire just here, – between the bone and the artery, so Seutin described it, – a critical spot, I'm sure."

"Dodd père," said the president, solemnly, "you are trifling with the patience of the tribunal!" A grave edict, which the other judges responded to by a majestic inclination of the bead.

"If you are not," resumed he, slowly, and with great emphasis, – "if you are not a man of weak intellects and deficient reasoning powers, the conduct you have pursued is inexcusable, – it is a high contempt!"

"And we shall teach you, sir," said the red-eyed, "that no pretence of national eccentricity can weigh against the claims of insulted justice."

"Ay, sir," chimed in number three, who had not spoken before, "and we shall let you feel that the majesty of the law in this country is neither to be assailed by covert impertinence nor cajoled by assumed ignorance."

"My Lords," said I, "all this rebuke is a riddle to me. You asked me to tell you a story; and if it be not a very connected and consistent one, the fault is not mine."

"Let him stand committed for contempt," said the president. "The Petits Carmes may teach him decorum."

Now, Tom, the Petite Carmes is Newgate, no less! and you may imagine my feelings at this announcement, particularly as I saw the clerk busily taking down, from dictation, a little history of my offence and its penalty. I turned to look for Van in my sore distress, and there he was, searching the volumes, briefs, and records, to find, as he afterwards said, "some clew to what I had been saying."

"By Heaven!" cried I, losing all patience, "this is too bad. You urge me into a long account of what I know nothing, and then to rescue your own ignorance, you declare me impertinent. There is not a lawyer's clerk in Ireland, there is no pettifogging practitioner for half-crown fees, there's not a brat that carries a blue bag down the Bachelor's Walk, could n't teach you all three. You go through some of the forms, but you know nothing of the facts of justice. You sit up there, like three stucco-men in mourning, – a perfect mockery of – "

I was not suffered to finish, Tom, for, at a signal from the president, two gendarmes seized me on either side, and, notwithstanding some demonstrations of resistance, led me off to prison. Ay, I must write the word again – to prison! Kenny, I, Dodd, of Dod s borough, Justice of the Peace, and chairman of the Union of Bruff, committed to jail like a common felon!

I 'm sorry I suffered my feelings to get the better – perhaps I ought to say the worse – of me. Now that it's all over, it were better that I had not knocked down the turnkey, and kicked Vanhoegen out of my cell. It would have been both more discreet and more decorous, to have submitted patiently. I know it's what you would have done, Tom, and trusted to your action for damages to indemnify you; but I'm hasty, that's the fact; and if I wanted to deny it, the state of the jailer's nose, and my own sprained thumb, would give evidence against me. But are there no allowances to be made for the provocation? Perhaps not for a simple assault; but if I had killed the turnkey, I'm certain the jury would discover the "circonstances atténuantes."

Partly out of respect to my own feelings, partly out of regard to yours, I have not put the words "Petits Carmes" at the top of this letter; but truth will out, Tom, and the real fact is that I date the present from cell No. 65, in the common prison of Brussels! Is not that a pretty confession? Is not that a new episode in this Iliad of enjoyment, cultivation, and Heaven knows what besides, that Mrs. D. projected by our tour on the Continent? But I swear to you, solemnly, as I write this, that, if I live to get back, I'll expose the whole system of foreign travel. I don't think I could write a book, and it's hard nowadays to find a chap to put down one's own sentiments fairly and honestly, neither overlaying them with bits of poetry, nor explaining them away by any garbage of his own; so that, maybe, I'll not be able to come out hot-pressed and lettered; but if the worst comes to it, I 'll go about the country giving lectures. I 'll hire an organ-man to play at intervals, and I 'll advertise, "Kenny Dodd on Men and Manners abroad – Evenings with Frenchmen, and Nights with Distinguished Belgians." I'll show up their cookery, their morals, their modesty, their sense of truth, and their notions of justice. And though I well know that I 'll expose myself to the everlasting hate of a legion of hairdressers, dancing-masters, and white-mice men, I'll do it as sure as I live. I have heard you and Peter Belton wax warm and eloquent about the disgrace to our laws in permitting every kind of quackery to prevail unhindered; but what quackery was ever the equal to this taste for the Continent? If people ate Morison's pills like green peas, they would n't do themselves as much moral injury as by a month abroad! And if I were called before a committee of the House to declare, on my conscience, what I deemed the most pernicious reading of the day, I 'd say – Murray's Handbooks! I give you this under my hand and seal. That fellow – Murray, I mean – has got up a kind of Pictorial Europe of his own, with bits of antiquarianism, history, poetry, and architecture, that serves to convince our vulgar, vagabondizing English that they are doing a refined thing in coming abroad. He half persuades them that it is not for cheap champagne and red partridges they 're come, but to see the Cathedral of Cologne and the Dome of St. Peter's, till he breeds up a race of conceited, ill-informed, prating coxcombs, that disgrace us abroad and disgust us at home.

I think I see your face now, and I half hear you mutter, "Kenny's in one of his fits of passion;" and you'd be right, too, for I have just upset my ink-bottle over the table, and there's scarcely enough left to finish this scrawl, as I must reserve a little for a few lines to Mrs. D. Apropos to that same, Tom, I don't know how to break it to her that I'm in a jail, for her feelings will be terribly shocked at first; not but, between you and me, before a year's over, she 'll make it a bitter taunt to me whenever we have a flare-up, and remind me that, for all my justiceship of the peace, I was treated like a common felon in Brussels!

I believe that the best thing I can do is to send for Jellicot, since Vanhoegen and Draek have sent to say that they retire from my cause, "reserving to themselves all liberty of future action as regards the injury personally sustained;" which means that they require ten pounds for the kicking. Be it so!

When I have seen Jellicot, I 'll give you the result of the interview, that is, if there be any result; but my friend J. is a lawyer of the lawyers, and it is not only that he keeps his right hand on terms of distance with his left, but I don't believe that the thumb and the forefinger of the same side are ever acquainted. He is very much that stamp of man your English Protestants call a Jesuit. God help them, little they know what a real Jesuit is!