Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845

At all events, Horace found the mixed system would not answer for entertaining his friends. So the next time he asked a few of the reading men, some of whom he knew used to be good fellows, together; and as he really had a kindred taste with them on many subjects, he found an hour or so pass away very pleasantly: when just as he was passing the wine about the third round, and his own brilliancy and good-humour were beginning to infect some of his guests—so that one grave genius of twenty had actually so far forgotten himself as to fill a bumper by mistake—up jumped the senior man of the party, and declaring that he had an engagement to walk with a friend at seven politely took his leave. This was the signal for a general dispersion; in vain did Horace assure them they should have some coffee in the course of an hour, and entreat some one or two to return. Off they all went with sundry smiles and shakes of the head, and left their unfortunate host sitting alone in his glory over the first glass of a newly opened bottle of claret.

I happened to be crossing the quadrangle from chapel in company with Savile, at the moment when Leicester put his head out of his window as if to enquire of the world in general what on earth he was to do with himself for the next hour or two. Savile he hailed at once, and begged him to come up; and though I knew but little of him, and had never been in his rooms before, still, as I was one or two terms his senior, there was nothing contrary even to Oxford etiquette in my accompanying Savile. We laughed heartily when he explained his disappointment. Savile tried to comfort him by the assurance that, as he had an hour to spare, he would sit down and help him to finish a bottle or two of claret with a great deal of pleasure; and was inclined to attribute the failure of the evening, in a great measure, to his name not having been included in the list of invitations—an omission by which he declared all parties had been the losers; Horace's reading friends standing very much in need of some one to put a little life into them, and himself as a candidate for a degree, having missed a fair opportunity of meeting, among so many choice fellows, some one to "put him up to the examiners' dodges." But Leicester was irrecoverably disgusted. Nothing, he declared, would ever induce him to ask a party of reading men to his rooms again; and from that hour he seemed to eschew fellowship with the whole fraternity. Not that he became idle all at once; on the contrary, I believe, for some time he worked on steadily, or at least tried to work; but he was naturally fond of society, and having failed to find what he wanted, was reduced to make the best of such as he could find. So he gradually became acquainted with a set of men who, whatever their good qualities might be, had certainly no claim whatever to be considered hard readers, and who would have considered a symposium which broke up at seven o'clock as unsatisfactory as a tale without a conclusion. Amongst these, his gentlemanly manners and kindness of heart made him beloved, while his talents gave him a kind of influence; and, though he must have felt occasionally that he was not altogether in his right place, and that, besides his popular qualities, he had higher tastes and endowments with which the majority of his companions could hardly sympathise, he was too light-hearted to philosophise much on the subject, and contented himself with enjoying his popularity, occasionally falling back upon his own resources, and keeping up, in a desultory kind of way, his acquaintance with scholarship and literature. The reading men of course looked upon him as a lost sheep; the tutors shook their heads about him; if he did well, it was set down as the result of accident; while all his misdoings were labouring in his vocation. For, agreeably to the grand division aforesaid, Horace was now set down as a "rowing-man;" and he soon made the discovery, and did more thereupon to deserve the character than he ever would have done otherwise. He was very willing to go on in his own way, if all parties would but let him alone; he was not going to be made a proselyte to long walks, and toast and water, nor had he any conscientious abhorrence of supper-parties; and, as his prospects in life were in no way dependent upon a class or a scholarship, and he seemed to be tacitly repudiated by the literati of his college, young and old, on account of some of his aforesaid heterodox notions on the subject of study, he accustomed himself gradually to set their opinions at defiance; while the moderate reading, which encouragement and emulation had made easy at school, became every day more and more distasteful.

Horace's tottering reputation was at last completely overset in the eyes of the authorities by a little affair which was absurd enough, but in which he himself was as innocent as they were. It happened that a youthful cousin of his, whose sole occupation for the last twelve months of his life had been the not over-profitable one of waiting for a commission, had come up to Oxford for two or three days, pursuant to invitation, to see a little of the manners and customs of the inhabitants. I think he had some slight acquaintance with our then vice-principal—a good-natured, easy man—and Horace had got leave for him to occupy a set of very small, dark rooms, which, as the college was not very full, had been suffered to remain vacant for the last two or three terms; they were so very unattractive a domicile, that the last Freshman to whom they were offered, as a Hobson's choice, was currently reported, in the plenitude of his disgust, to have take his name off the books instanter. It is not usual to allow strangers to sleep within college walls at all; but our discipline was somewhat lax in those days. So Mr Carey had a bed put up for him in the aforesaid quarters. He was, of course, duly fêted, and made much of by Horace and his friends; and a dozen of us sat down to a capital dinner in the rooms of the former, on the strength of having to entertain a "stranger from the country;" the hospitality of Oxford relaxing its rules even in favour of under-graduates upon such occasions. It must have been somewhere towards the next morning, when two or three of us accompanied young Carey down to No. 8; and, after chatting with him till he was half undressed, left him, as we thought, safe and quiet. However, soon after we had retired, some noisy individual in the same staircase thought proper to give a view-hollo out of his window, for the purpose of wishing the public good-night. Now there was one of the Fellows, a choleric little old gentleman, always in residence, holding some office, in which there was as little to do, and as much to get as might be, and who seldom troubled himself much about college discipline, and looked upon under-graduates with a sort of silent contempt; never interfering with them, as he declared himself, so long as they did not interfere with him. But one point there was, in which they did interfere with his personal comfort occasionally, and whereby his peace of mind and rest of body were equally disturbed. Mr Perkins always took a tumbler of negus at ten precisely, and turned in as the college clock struck the quarter past; by the half-hour he was generally asleep, for his digestion was good, and his cares few. But his slumbers were not heavy, and any thing like a row in the quadrangle infallibly awoke him, and then he was like a lion roused. He was wont to jump up, throw up his window, thrust out a red face and a white nightcap, and after listening a few seconds for the chance of the odious sounds being repeated, would put the very pertinent question usual in such circumstances, to which one so seldom gets an equally pertinent reply—"Who's that?" In case this intimation of Mr Perkins being wide awake proved sufficient, as it often did, to restore quiet, then after the lapse of a few more seconds the head and the nightcap disappeared, and the window was shut down again. But if the noise was continued, as occasionally it was out of pure mischief, than in a minute or two the said nightcap would be seen to emerge hastily from the staircase below, in company with a dressing-gown and slippers, and Mr Perkins in this disguise would proceed to the scene of disturbance as fast as his short legs could carry him. He seldom succeeded in effecting a capture; but if he had that luck, or if he could distinguish the tone of any individual voice so as to be able to identify the performer, he had him up before the "seniority" next morning, where his influence as one of the senior fellows ensured a heavy sentence. But he had been engaged in so many unsuccessful chases of the kind, and his short orations from his window so often elicited only a laugh, though including sometimes brief but explicit threats of rustication against the noisy unknown, strengthened by little expletives which, when quoted by under-graduates, were made to sound somewhat doubtfully—that at last he altered his tactics, and began to act in silence. And so he did, when upon opening his window he saw a light in the ground-floor rooms of the staircase whence the sounds proceeded on the evening in question. Carey, by his own account, was proceeding quietly in his preparations for bed, singing to himself an occasional stanza of some classical ditty which he had picked up in the course of the evening, and admiring the power of the man's lungs in the room above him, when he heard a short quick step, and then a double rap at his door. He was quite sufficiently acquainted, by this time, with the ways of the place, not to be much surprised at the late visit and at the same time to consider it prudent to learn the name and status of his visitor before admitting him; so he retorted upon Mr Perkins, quite unconsciously, his own favourite query—"Who's that?" his first and obvious impression being that it was one of the party he had just quitted, coming probably, in the plenitude of good fellowship, to bring him an invitation to wine or breakfast next day.

"It's me, sir—open the door," was the reply from a deep baritone, which the initiated would never have mistaken.

"Who are you?" said Carey again.

"My name is Perkins, sir: have the goodness to let me in." He was getting more angry, and consequently more polite.

"Perkins?" said Carey, pausing in his operations, in the vain endeavour to recall the name among the score or two to whom he had been introduced. "I'm just in bed—were you up at Leicester's?"

"Open the door, sir, if you please, immediately," and then came what our friend took for a smothered laugh, but was really a sort of shiver, for there was a draft in the passage playing all manner of pranks with the dressing-gown, and Mr Perkins was getting cold.

An indistinct notion came into Carey's mind, that some one who had met him in College might have taken him for a Freshman, and had some practical joke in view; so he contented himself with repeating that he was going to bed, and could let no one in.

"I tell you, sir, I'm Mr Perkins; don't you know me?"

"I wish you a very good night, Mr Perkins."

"What's your name, sir? eh? You impudent young puppy, what's your infernal name? I'll have you rusticated, you dog—do you hear me, sir?"

On a sudden it struck Carey that this might possibly be a domiciliary visit from one of the authorities, and that his best plan was to open the door at once, though what had procured him such an honour he was at a loss to imagine. He drew back the spring lock, therefore, and the next moment stood face to face with the irate Mr Perkins.

His first impulse was to laugh at the curious figure before him; but when demands for his name, and threats of unknown penalties, were thundered forth upon him with no pause for a reply, then he began to think that he had made a mistake in opening the door at all—that he might get Leicester into a scrape if not himself—and as his person was as unknown to Mr Perkins as that gentleman's to him, it struck him that if he could give him the slip once, it would be all right. In a moment he blew out his solitary candle, bolted through the open door, all but upsetting his new acquaintance, whom he left storming in the most unconnected manner, alone, and in total darkness. Up to Leicester's rooms he rushed, related his adventure, and was rather surprised that his cousin did not applaud it as a very clever thing.

What Mr Perkins thought or said to himself, what degree of patience he exhibited in such trying circumstances, or in what terms he apostrophised his flying enemy, must ever remain a secret with himself. Five minutes after, Solomon the porter, summoned from his bed just as he had made himself snug once more after letting out Horace's out-college friends, confronted Mr Perkins in about as sweet a temper as that worthy individual himself, with this difference, that one was sulky and the other furious.

"Who lives in the ground-floor on the left in No. 8?"

"What, in 'Coventry?' Why, nobody, sir."

"Nobody! you stupid old sinner, you're asleep."

"No, sir, I ain't," and Solomon flashed his lantern in Mr Perkins's face as if to ascertain whether his eyes were open. Mr Perkins started back, and Solomon turned half round as if to disappear again.

"Who lives there, Solomon, I ask you? Do you mean to tell me you don't know? You are not fit—"

"I knows every gentleman's rooms well enough: nobody hasn't lived in them as you means not these four terms. Mr Pears kept his fox in 'em one time, till the vice-principal got wind of him. There may be some varmint in 'em for all I knows—they a'n't fit for much else."

"There's some confounded puppy of a Freshman in them now—at least there was—and he lives there too."

"I know there be'n't," said the persevering Solomon. And, without deigning a word more, he set off with his lantern towards the place in dispute, followed by Mr Perkins, who contented himself with an angry "Now you'll see."

"Ay, now we shall see," replied Solomon, as, somewhat to Mr Perkins's astonishment, they found the oak sported. Having made a selection from a huge bunch of keys, the porter succeeded, after some fumbling, in getting the door open. The room bore no traces of recent occupation. Three or four broken chairs and a rickety table were the only furniture: as far as the light of Solomon's lantern could penetrate, it looked the very picture of desolation. Solomon chuckled.

"There is a man living here. I'll swear there is. He was undressing when I came. Look in the bedroom."

They opened the door, and saw a bare feather-bed and bolster, the usual matériel in an unoccupied college chamber. "Seeing's believing," said the porter.

But, with Mr Perkins, seeing was not believing. He saw Solomon, and he saw the empty room, but he did not believe either. But he had evidently the worst side of the argument as it stood, so he wished the porter a sulky good-night, and retreated.

The fact was, that the noisy gentleman in the rooms above, as soon as he caught the tones of Mr Perkins's voice at Carey's door, had entered into the joke with exceeding gusto, well aware that the visit was really intended as a compliment to his own vocal powers. Carey's sudden bolt puzzled him rather; but as soon as he heard Mr Perkins's footsteps take the direction of the porter's lodge, he walked softly down-stairs to the field of action, and, anticipating in some degree what would follow, bundled up together sheets, blankets, pillow, dressing apparatus, and all other signs and tokens of occupation, and made off with them to his own rooms; sporting the oak behind him, and thus completing the mystification.

As the facts of the case were pretty sure to transpire in course of time, Horace took the safe course of getting his cousin out of college next morning, and calling on Mr Perkins with a full explanation of the circumstances, and apologies for Carey as a stranger unacquainted with the police regulations of their learned body, and the respect due thereto. Of course the man in authority was obliged to be gracious, as Leicester could not well be answerable for all the faults of his family; but there never from that time forth happened a row of any kind with which he did not in his own mind, probably unconsciously, associate poor Horace.

Whether my readers will set down Horace Leicester as a rowing man or not, is a point which I leave to their merciful consideration: a reading man was a title which he never aspired to. He took a very creditable degree in due season, and was placed in the fourth class with a man who took up a very long list of books, and was supposed to have read himself stupid.

"He ought to have done a good deal more," said one of the tutors; "he had it in him." "I think he was lucky not to have been plucked, myself," said Mr Perkins; "he was a very noisy man."

Hawthorne.

ZUMALACARREGUI

On a dull damp October morning of the year 1833—concerning the more exact date of which it can only be ascertained that it was subsequently to the twentieth day of the month—a man rather above the middle height, wrapped in a military cloak of dark grey cloth, and wearing an oilskin schako upon his head, was seen proceeding through the streets of Pampeluna in the direction of the gate known as the Puerta del Cármen. Although the cloak and schako, which were all that could at first be distinguished of his dress, indicated their wearer to be an officer, it was observed, that on passing the guard-house at the gate, he took some pains to conceal his face, as though fearful of being recognised. Once outside the walls, he crossed the river Arga by the Puente Nuevo, and continued his progress along the Irurzun road. He had arrived at about cannon-shot distance from the fortress of Pampeluna, when a man, leading a small horse by the bridle, suddenly emerged from a place of concealment by the roadside. The officer hastily fastened on a spur which he had brought with him, put foot in stirrup, and mounted. For a few moments he remained motionless, gazing at Pampeluna, as though bidding a silent adieu to the friends he left behind him; then striking his single spur into his horse's flank, he rapidly disappeared. Two hours later he entered at full trot the village of Huarte Araquil, five leagues from Pampeluna. The officer alighted at the house of a friend, where there presently came to meet him a respectable inhabitant of Pampeluna, by name Don Luis Mongelos, and the vicar or parish priest of Huarte, Don Pedro Miguel Irañeta. The latter, as well by his sacred character as by reason of the services that, at a former period, he had rendered to the cause of the Spanish monarchy, enjoyed some influence in his district.

The conference that Mongelos and Irañeta held with the unknown officer lasted till a late hour of the night, when they separated to take a few hours' repose. At early dawn they reassembled, and set out for the valley of Berrueza, where they were told that they would find the chief of the Navarrese Carlists, Don Francisco Iturralde, whom they were desirous of seeing. They were fortunate enough to meet with him that same day at the village of Piedramillera.

In those early days of the Royalist insurrection, and in the state of anxiety and fermentation in which men's minds then were, the appearance in the Carlist camp of an officer of rank could not do less than excite, in the highest degree, the curiosity and interest of the inhabitants, especially of those who had taken up arms for Don Carlos. Accordingly, whilst the three strangers were with Iturralde, there was rapidly formed at the door of the latter's quarters a large group, composed of volunteers and peasants, and even of women and children. All were eager to know who the person in the colonel's uniform might be; but nevertheless, when he at last came out, and the crowd pressed forward to examine him, not one of the numerous assemblage could tell his name. The disappointed gazers were dispersing, when a party of officers came up; and no sooner did these behold the stranger, than they exclaimed simultaneously, and in a tone of mingled surprise and enthusiasm—"Zumalacarregui!"

Rarely has the axiom, that circumstances and opportunity make the man, been more fully exemplified than in the person of the chief whose name we have just written. For forty-five years he lived unknown and unnoticed beyond a very limited circle, remarked only by his own comrades, and by the generals under whom he served, as a good drill and an efficient regimental officer. After twenty-five years' service, he occupied the undistinguished post of colonel of a Spanish line regiment. The probabilities were, that he would end his life with the embroidered cuff of a brigadier-general, and be forgotten as soon as the earth had closed over him. One man died, leaving a disputed crown; and spurred on, as some say, by injustice done to him, as others maintain, by an enthusiastic devotion to a principle, Zumalacarregui, in the twenty months of life that were still accorded to him, raised and organized, by his own unaided energies, a numerous and efficient army, outmanœuvered the practised leaders, and defeated the veteran troops that were sent against him, and made himself a name that has been repeated with respect and admiration by some of the highest military authorities in Europe.

Don Tomas Zumalacarregui, a native of Guipuzcoa, was twenty years of age when he first saw fire at Saragossa in 1808. When the French raised the siege, he returned home, and remained there till Guipuzcoa, following the example of the other Spanish provinces, declared against the usurpation of Napoleon. He then immediately joined Jauregui, better known as El Pastor or the Shepherd, on account of his having, like another Viriatus—but without becoming a bandit—exchanged the crook for the sabre. In spite of the youth of his new follower, El Pastor found him of great assistance; and it is even said that Zumalacarregui, ashamed of having for leader a man who could not write, undertook to teach him, and succeeded in so doing,. The war of independence at an end, Areizaga, captain-general of the Basque provinces, appointed Zumalacarregui his aide-de-camp; and finally, by his interest and recommendation, procured him a captain's commission in the line. In this new position the young officer made himself remarked for two things—an inflexible firmness of character, and an enthusiastic love of his profession. All his leisure was passed in the study of tactics, and he rarely opened a book that treated of any other subject.

In 1822, under the constitutional regime, Zumalacarregui, being of known Royalist opinions, was deprived of his company. He joined Quesada, who was at the head of the realistas in Navarre, and from him received command of a battalion, which he kept till, at the end of the war, it was disbanded in common with all the Navarrese corps. Whilst holding this command, his skill and merit, and a certain air of superiority, which was natural to him, excited the envy and dislike of some of his brother officers; but to the intrigues and artifices employed to injure him, he only opposed a redoubled zeal in the execution of his duty. Subsequently he commanded a regiment with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and was at last made full colonel of the 3d light infantry. The excellent state into which he brought this corps, caused it to be sent from Valencia to Madrid, to form part of the military pageant by which Queen Christina's first arrival at the capital of Spain was celebrated. This piece of duty, it was expected, would have procured Zumalacarregui his brigadier's rank; but the only thing he got by it was a fall from his horse, from the effects of which he afterwards suffered.

Zumalacarregui's last command in the service of Ferdinand was that of the 14th of the line. A curious narrative of the circumstances that occurred whilst he had this regiment, is to be found in a letter from the Carlist general, Don Carlos Vargas, who was at that time aide-de-camp to Eguia, captain-general of Galicia, in which province the 14th was quartered.

"From time immemorial," says Vargas, "there had existed in the district of the Ferrol a society of robbers, regularly sworn in and organized, having branches all over the country, and so well directed in their operations, that it was found impossible to make an end of them, or to discover who they were. When any one of the associates was seen to falter, or was suspected of an intention to betray his companions, he was immediately assassinated, and almost always in some horrible manner. Persons of every class and description belonged to this association—even women, old men, and government functionaries of high grade. From 1826 to 1832, a merchant of the name of C– was at the head of it—a very wealthy man, with respect to whom no one could explain how it was that in so few years he had accumulated such great riches. The public authorities, whose duty it was to discover and suppress so infamous a society, had been drawn into it by bribery or intimidation, or both; so that, instead of preventing the robberies, they protected the robbers, and gave them all the opportunities in their power. In spite of his known zeal, energy, and activity, General Eguia had been unable to destroy, or even discover, this numerous band. He had been deceived by the apparent zeal of the alcalde mayor of the Ferrol, Don V.G. D–, and of an escribano, named R–, a captain of royalist volunteers. These two men denounced and prosecuted sundry small offenders who formed no part of the grand association; and, by the good understanding between them, baffled all the efforts of the captain-general."