Nero fiddled while Rome blazed! We possess the record of the main fact, but all details connected with that memorable performance have perished in the lapse of ages. We can imagine, however, that the novelty and horrid grandeur of the situation by no means interfered with the skill and execution of the imperial amateur; but rather added a force and brilliancy to his playing, for which it may not have been usually remarkable. If he had at all a turn for improvisation, an opportunity then offered for his making a great hit; the roaring of the flames, the crash of falling buildings, the coarse laughter of a brutal soldiery, mingling with the shrieks of women and children, and with the shouts changing to the half-curse, half-prayer, of the death agony of brave, true-hearted men, striving to rescue the helpless ones, and perishing in the exercise of their noble daring, all must have afforded a suggestive theme for the crescendo and diminuendo of the tyrant’s catgut, which may have been handed down to posterity, until the tradition may have furnished the thesis of that classic and artistic composition, the “Battle of Prague.”

Everybody considers Nero a hateful tyrant, and everybody may be in the main right; although good Dr. Goldsmith, in his interesting Roman history (which has been perpetually “abridged for the use of schools” ever since it was written, and is not half short enough yet), has probably applied too deep a coating of lamp-black even to Nero. But, though as manners and customs change, the outward seeming of things varies with them, human nature, too bad ever to be all good, and too good to be all bad, remains much the same, despite the preaching of Paul, and the watering-pot of Apollos.

Thus, while in the heart of mighty London vice filled model prisons with the recklessly depraved, or, far worse, the recklessly hypocritical—while hospital-wards teemed with those comparatively fortunate victims of disease and improvidence whom some good Samaritan had thus far rescued, when a frightful majority were dying untended in reeking alleys and other hotbeds of pestilence—while covetousness and hatred were scarcely restrained from breaking forth into rapine and murder by the strong arm of the law—my Lord Alfred Courtland, and the leeches who sought to prey upon his youth and inexperience, drove down to Blackwall to nibble a small fry of ridiculous little fishes, enveloped in batter, called whitebait, and esteemed, for some undiscoverable reason, a delicacy.

Exactly as the clock struck five, a dark, well-appointed drag, with three bays and a chestnut—all thorough-bred, or thereabouts—drew up at the entrance to the Pandemonium. Captain O’Brien, handing the reins to a dark-whiskered, good-looking young fellow, who was his companion on the box, descended, and entering the club, was introduced by D’Almayne to Lord Alfred Courtland and Jack Beaupeep; the first mentioned individual acknowledging his salutation by the slightest possible removal of the hat, together with an all but invisible motion of the head, the latter by a profound salaam, together with the diffident remark—

“Sir, you do me proud.”

“Not at all, sir, not at all; on the contrary, it’s proud I am to make your acquaintance, and you a mimber of the government, too. Did ye know Smith O’Brien, now?” Not waiting a reply, he continued—“Oh, he’s a great legislathur entirely; and sure them that don’t die first will live to see him prime-minister of this country, one of these fine mornings; and a prime minister he’ll make, sure! ‘Justice to Ireland’ will be found engraved in copper-plate on his heart, by any gentleman who may have the pleasure of attending the post-mortem examination of his remains, and long life to ’em!”

“Are we waiting for any one?” inquired Horace, fearful lest his Hibernian associate should disgust Lord Alfred by his offensive familiarity at first starting. “Guillemard has, I see, already taken his seat. Have you any objection to pull up at the Guards’ Club, O’Brien? There are three or four army men who have promised to come, and your drag will carry them easily.”

The Captain agreeing to this—as indeed he appeared willing to agree to any and everything suggested by D’Almayne—they took their places; O’Brien insisting on Lord Alfred succeeding to the box-seat, vacated for that purpose by the dark-whiskered, hawkeyed youth, who was none other than Phil Tirrett, the horse-breeder’s son, whom Horace D’Almayne had designated as a very promising young scoundrel—a style of character which he was so well able to recognise, and so thoroughly competent to form an opinion upon, that we feel convinced he only did the young gentleman’s merits justice.

By no means captivated by O’Brien’s manners or address, Lord Alfred was at first haughty and monosyllabic; but perceiving that D’Almayne was us scrupulously polite to this son of Erin as to the most polished member of the fashionable world, it occurred to him that in his character of man-about-town the correct thing was to assume a general languid citizen-of-the-worldship; and, as a duty to his presumed imperturbability, to appear, not all things to all men, but the same thing to every man. Thus, rousing himself, he paid a die-away and meaningless compliment to the workmanlike manner in which Captain O’Brien—“Ar—put his team along, and—ar—the correct style of the whole affair.”

This led to an equestrian and sporting rhapsody on the part of the Hon. Terence, interspersed with anecdotes—strange, if true—of the dams and the sires, and the own brothers and sisters, of the individual members of the team, and especially of the chestnut, which had been—“The sweetest thing, sir, across a stiff country that ever man rode; no day was too long and no burst too fast for him, bedad! and the bitterest moment ever I, Terence O’Brien, knew (barring the loss of me maternal grandmother, by spontaneous combustion, from fortuitously sitting down upon a lighted cinder, which had providentially popped out of the fire for that purpose), was when I staked him above the near hock at Melton, last season; and he’s never been fit to gallop since, or it isn’t in harness ye’d see him now—and him costing me a cool £400, and worth all the money now, if he was but sound,” &c. &c.

The witty author of Tristram Shandy, in introducing to the reader that most lovable of humorists, my Uncle Toby, has discoursed eloquently on the various hobby-horses which take possession of, and enslave, the mind of man. Fortification, which was my Uncle Toby’s mania, engrossed his thoughts, and influenced his conversation, until nothing but his simplicity and kindness of heart saved him from degenerating into a complete bore; but when a man’s hobby-horse is the equine animal itself, you can no more unhorse him than if he were—as assuredly he ought to have been, if mind and body had borne a proper affinity to each other—a centaur. O’Brien was a centaur, and having once mounted his hobby, he rode him all the way to Blackwall, to Lord Alfred’s extinction, or thereabouts; but considering that a certain amount of “turf” adheres to the character of a man-about-town, he bore the infliction like a—well, suppose, though we have foresworn slang as low, we for this once say—a brick.

Three guardsmen, and a young heavy dragoon, who lived to consume beer and cigars, and produce moustachios and stupidity were duly added to the party; and by the time they reached Blackwall everybody grew hungry, and prepared to do ample justice to the whitebait. Of course, everybody has at some period of their earthly career eaten a Blackwall dinner, and such feeds are all exactly alike. First appears a course of fish, enough to constitute a dinner in itself: sea-fish, river-fish, pond-fish—fishes boiled, fried, stewed, and bedeviled in various ways, which it would require the knowledge of the supposed inventor of cooks himself to detail; then come the wonderful whitebait themselves, their stupid little bodies enveloped in skeleton dresses of batter; and then fishes are ignored, and develop, according to the “Vestiges of Creation” theory, into the higher forms of animal, into which the highest form of all—man—pitches cannibal-like, until the culinary cosmos is resolved into its pristine chaotic elements. And around this hecatomb of slaughtered zoology and feasting humanity skip nimble waiters, furnished with bottles of every shape and hue; for, since Noah first discovered the seductive beverage, wine-bibbing has been a levelling principle, by means of which the lords of the creation have been accustomed to assimilate themselves to their subjects the brutes, despite the hydraulic pressure of Father Matthew, and all others who have pledged themselves to cold-water such degrading customs. And, indeed, we fear that of the two parties whose respective mottoes might be “in vino veritas” and “truth lies at the bottom of a well,” the latter will continue to constitute the minority until the end of the chapter; or, as Jack Beaupeep expressed the same sentiment, when D’Almayne propounded to him a somewhat similar theory, be “safe to kick the bucket, if they don’t put their foot in it in any other way:” but that misguided young man not only made, but rejoiced in shocking bad puns.

The dinner had been done ample justice to—the wines (and their name was legion) had not been at all neglected—Lord Alfred had become quite intimate with the guardsmen, who, as the wine unlocked their tongues, began, in a quiet, gentlemanly way, to quiz everything and everybody, especially the heavy dragoon, who rejoiced in the patronymic of Gambier—a name on which the other military gentlemen were pleased to exercise their wit whenever they addressed him. As, for example, 1st guardsman, loquitur:——

“I say, Beaupeep, have you heard Fred’s (2nd guardsman’s) last?”

“I haven’t even heard his first,” was the rejoinder.

“No; I should think not,” continued No. 1; “he made that when he was quite a baby in arms.”

“Ye may as well say before he could speak, while ye are about it,” suggested O’Brien.

“Bravo, Captain! you won’t better that,” said the narrator.

“However, Fred’s last and worst was this—‘Why is the gallant cornet opposite, an addition to any mess-table?’ Do you give it up? ‘Because he’s half game and half beer!’”

“I dare say it’s very funny,” muttered the heavy subject of the jest, “but I don’t see the point myself.”

“It’s a pint of half-and-half,” observed Jack Beaupeep, explanatorily.

“Or ‘heavy’ wet, if he were out in the rain,” added guardsman No. 2.

“Talking of heavy wet, puts me in mind of coming down with the dust. When are you going to perform that operation in regard to the Windsor Steeple-chase?” inquired the cornet, surlily; who, not having anything witty to reply to his assailant, substituted instead the most unpleasant topic he could select.

“That is soon answered,” was the rejoinder; “whenever you’ll make a fresh match between the horses, and give Rattletrap a chance of showing Teacaddy the way home, when he’s not been pricked in shoeing by a confounded blacksmith.”

“Oh! if that’s all, you may hand over the cash to-morrow morning,” returned the dragoon; “the mare’s in first-rate order, and I’m game to back her for a match, hurdle-race, steeple-chase, or what you will,” was the confident reply.

“Ah! is it a steeple-chase now, ye’re talking of?” interrupted O’Brien, filling himself a tumbler of Claret; “sure an’ I’ve got a horse I’d be proud to enter, if it wasn’t jist putting me hand in your pockets and taking the money out of ’em; for if he’s in the race, I’d name the winner before they start.”

“He must be a wonderful animal, Captain,” observed the first guardsman; “high-pressure, express train style of quadruped, eh?”

“Furnished with a screw-propeller, more likely,” added his companion, ironically.

“Faith, an’ ye’re wrong there entirely: it’s little of the screw ye’ll find about Broth-of-a-boy. Talk about railroads, indeed, I never knew what flying was till the day I first galloped him in the Phoenix Park. I only wish I’d had him in Spain, when I served with the legion of Sir De Lacy Evans; it isn’t overtaken and kilt entirely by their blackguard dragoons I’d have been then—though it’s little but hard blows and hard swearing they got out of me, as it was, the Lord be praised!”

“Hear, hear! a story, a story!”

“Military reminiscences of Captain O’Brien! order, order!”

“Silence for the noble anecdote!”

“Out with it, Captain!” &c. &c., were some of the exclamations with which the Hibernian’s last speech was hailed by various members of the party, upon whom the whitebait (?) was beginning to tell.

Thus urged, that worthy, clearing his throat by a sip at the Claret, which half emptied the tumbler, began:—

“Well, boys” (here he caught a look from Horace D’Almayne, which caused him, nothing abashed, to add parenthetically), “if in the congeniality of good fellowship you will permit me to call ye so, the story’s nothing so very wonderful, after all—it was just a bit of a spree, do ye see, nothing more; but such as it is ye’re welcome to it”—(polite aside from Jack Beaupeep for Lord Alfred’s benefit—“You’re too liberal, really!”) “I was with Sir De Lacy Evans in Spain, captain in a regiment of lancers; a rare set of rattling dogs they were, too—up to everything, from robbing a henroost to burning towns and sacking monasteries”—(Beaupeep aside—“A decidedly sac-religious act that last!”)

“On one occasion, we were stationed at a place distant about four miles from a village occupied by a strong body of Carlists; well, sir, for several nights running, our sentinels on the side towards the village were assassinated—stabbed through the heart they were! We had ’em doubled, two men to each post; bedad, the only improvement that effected was, we got two men murdered instead of one; and yet the scamp that did it always contrived to get away clear and clean—we never so much as clapped eyes on him! Well, I bothered and puzzled the matter over, and thought of this thing and that thing, and at last I got hold of a notion I fancied might work well; so I cut off to our Colonel, and ‘Colonel,’ says I, ‘with your kind permission, I think I can stop these assassinations.’ ‘What is it, O’Brien?’ says he, ‘you’re a clever, rising young officer, and a man that bids fair to be an ornament to his profession;’ but I won’t trouble ye with the illegant eulogy he was so polite as to pronounce upon me that day”—(“Hear, hear!” from Beaupeep and the guardsmen). “So I jist obtained his permission to select two well-mounted troopers out of my own company, and leave to do what I pleased with them and myself during the night, and that was all I wanted. I happened at that time to have a particularly fast mare—a sweet thing she was, bay, with black points, nearly thorough-bred, a head like an antelope, and as to pace, ’gad there wasn’t a horse in the regiment could come near her. Before nightfall I picked out my two troopers—sharp, plucky young fellows, that I knew I could depend upon if it came to hard fighting, each of them well mounted; and I took care to see that their horses and the mare were properly fed and watered, so as to be fit for a stiff burst; then I amused myself with sharpening the point of my lance till it was as keen as a razor. About a stone’s throw from the post where the sentry they used to assassinate was stationed”—(“Of course, the same man every night till further notice,” murmured Jack Beaupeep, continuing his running commentary)—“there was a thicket of olive bushes and other shrubs; behind this, as soon as it grew dusk, I posted my men with the horses, while I availed myself of a rise in the ground to advance nearer, and lie down, hidden from sight by a stunted bush or two. Well, I waited and waited, and watched and watched, so that a mouse could not have stirred without my noticing it; but nothing did I see, except the shadowy figure of the sentinel pacing up and down in the moonlight, as though he were the discontented ghost of one of his murdered comrades”—(“Very pretty—quite poetical, I declare!” from Beaupeep).

“Well, at last, just about a quarter of an hour before daybreak, which is the darkest period of the night in those latitudes, whether I had dozed off for a minute I don’t know, but I was startled by a noise differing from the monotonous tread of the sentinel, and which sounded to my ear like the cracking of a dry twig; in another moment I perceived a dark, round object moving upon the ground, which I soon made out to be the head of a man drawing himself along, snake-fashion, upon his stomach—while so close had he got to the unconscious soldier that I perceived, if I would save the poor lad’s life, not an instant was to be lost. I therefore gave the signal to my troopers to come up, and drawing my sword, rushed forward to secure the assassin. As I did so, a light active figure sprang up from the ground, and brandishing a long keen dagger, made a furious stab at the sentry; but, fortunately, my approach confused the scoundrel, so that he missed his stroke, and, instead of killing the man, merely inflicted a slight flesh wound of no consequence. Notwithstanding his surprise,—for, as the soldier afterwards declared to me, his antagonist seemed to have risen out of the earth,—the sentry attempted to seize him; but he contrived to slip out of his hands like an eel, and before I could reach the spot, had disappeared in the darkness. In another moment the dull sound of a horse’s feet galloping over the turf proved to me that he was away; but my own horse being brought up, I sprang into the saddle, snatched my lance from the trooper who held it, and ordering the men to follow me, started in pursuit. ’Pon me conscience, gentlemen, I niver reflect on me feelings at that critical moment but it makes me—Ah, well! I’ll trouble your Lordship for the Claret.”