C CERTAIN words sound like caresses. "Thou vagabond!" must have been at some time or other a gentler appellation than our rude transition would make it. Why not? "Rogue" and "truant" have yet their playful uses. Though we translate illy such endearments of antiquity, we may read in Gascoigne:— "O Abraham's brats! O brood of blessÈd seed!" The "goodly and virtuous young imps" of old citation, we should also construe but saucily. Besides, "vagabond" lendeth itself gracefully to the affectionate diminutives of alien tongues, which, to a philologist, may be as good as an argument: what can be tenderer than vagabÖndchen, vagabondellino, and a like musical play of syllables over the solid English rock? The vagabond is the modern representative of the knight-errant, shorn of his romance, inasmuch as both fall neatly under the definition of a stroller, a free lance, whom the domestic Lar does not allure or attach to any one fireside. The immortal Don of la Mancha, revived in this age, should figure as a tramp in the police station, before he had adorned public life twenty-four hours. But the vagabond proper has an Asiatic cousin, who gets princelier treatment. The RÔnin of chivalrous Japan is a gentleman of leisure, who, not averse to a chance of seasonable employment, roams at large, settling his private differences, and serving Heaven unmolested, according to his lights. Vagabonds are legally denominated "such as wake on the night, and sleep on the day; and haunt customable taverns and ale-houses, and rout about; and no man wots whence they come nor whither they go:" a comprehensive statement in three parts, which has, moreover, a covert whimsical reference categorically to actors, politicians, and bank-clerks. A vagabond, primarily, was merely an idle person; Our friend is vagrant as the swallow, "born in the eighth climate, and framed and constellated unto all." He is the world's freeman. He strays at his fancy, sign-boards and mile-stones his only ritual, and changes of weather the sole political economy of his study, by which he abides. Everybody's property is his in fief. Terminus and his stakes were never set up for him. He has no particular reason for moving on the first of May, nor for passing the winter in warm quarters. When he is very weary, since he has no tent to strike, nor bed to make, he unconcernedly "lays his neck on the lap of his mother." Neither landlord nor tenant is he; and never has he known a spring-cleaning, nor packed a trunk, nor priced a door-plate. He trolls out that joyful strophe which Richard Brome wrote for his forefathers, as he swings past inland villages: "Come away! why do we stay? He has his choice of professions: he may have a natural disposition to beg, yet, on the whole, consider it genteeler to steal. He is exempt from Adam's curse. Nobody expects him to work, save in a moment of inspiration. When he has no funds, he travels on his dignity. There is that in his eye which awes the merchantman, and mesmerizes the maid at the hostel gate. The vagabond, "extravagant and erring spirit," as Horatio would call him, has had his court-painter, who took the portraits of several of his eccentric family in the year of Waterloo, and exposed them for sale in Covent Garden under the title: "Etchings of Remarkable Beggars, Itinerant Traders, and other persons of Notoriety," drawn from the life in London town. There glisten perennially the seraphic upturned The vagabondistic sect is of exceedingly mutable nature. It distends, it contracts; it swears in, now a person of probity, not of wealth; now a sinner, like the rest of us, who seldom moves in good society: an odd congregation, comprising dozens that have no business among the elect, and lacking a proportionate number who stray untethered into other folds. On this showing, We could wish that a new Plutarch should write up the patron-saint of vagabonds,—one We have a sneaking kindness for him and his votaries. A congenital affinity softens us towards suspicious characters. We were early aware that we startled shop-keepers with our roving thumb, how or whence we know not; but we have come to love the indiscreet something in us which calls forth Puritan vigilance, and we should violently resent a change of tactics. More than once a jeweller (who might have made a mad wag if Our career of vagabond by brevet had well footer header |