Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 1/Benjamin Harris and his wife Patience - Part 3

by Henrietta Keddie

BENJAMIN HARRIS AND HIS WIFE PATIENCE. By H. K.

CHAPTER III. THE NEW WORLD, AND BACK AGAIN TO OLD GRACECHURCH STREET FOR GOOD.

Benjamin Harris and his wife Patience crossed the Atlantic, beyond which Scotch Covenanters and French Huguenots were fain to wander. They reached that America which was still in its vastness virgin soil, but in which town -steads and meeting-houses and governors’ mansions were fast rising in many quarters. They tarried at one of those youthful log -built cities, among the pumpkin- beds and bean-fields, and closing around them in the distance the shades of the great forest from which the dusky Indian, with his war-paint and his poisoned arrows, stalked and traded warily with the settlers, and through which John Elliot journeyed to reach the tribes with the sword of the Spirit and the shield of faith. There stood their own miniature gables round the centre chimney and the shingled roof-tree, beneath which they took up their abode, while Benjamin Harris easily established his trade among the intellectual wants of the thoughtful population.

A community of earnest, devout men, so bent upon purity that they condescended in their turn to pile the faggots for witch hags, and lash, brand, and hang wretched Quaker men and women, it might have been thought that it would have been congenial to the serious, storm-tossed young couple; but even here there were exceptions.

Benjamin Harris, a Nonconformist’s son, reared as it were under penalty, was one of those true men, who, whatever the nature or origin of their defects, are capable of receiving light from every quarter and for all time. It has been seen that the harshness of his youth was mellowing amidst crosses, privations, and persecutions; how much more here, where his life was full, his love, his friend, his godliness, morality, and independence no longer grievously offended. Another motive: Harris had been born a Londoner, and to London in those days, Nature, primitive and fresh from God’s hand, as it lingers on the moors and the mountains, was a clasped book in an unknown tongue. This new world was as much, and even more, the grand, gracious teacher to Benjamin Harris, that it must have been to the single hearts among the company of yeomen, soldiers, merchants, preachers, and brave women who first trod its rock-bound shores; for he was not driven back upon himself and his fellows by its awful loneliness, or distracted by physical hardships and perils. This unweighed power must have helped effectually to combat the counter depths of bigotry and covetousness which the Harrises sounded.

“I know not why it is, Benjamin, but the sons

do always in some respect belong most to the mother — the daughters to the father.” “Because the daughters be the pictures of the good wife, and the sons be the marrows of the good man.”

Yes, Patience, who had grown grave with her - young husband (what he had not bargained for), was wise and happy in adopting his new humour as indefatigably. In truth, the wife and mother - promoted to her just dignity regained her lost health and cheer, and was as contented and bright,

At first the Harrises attracted considerable as she was laborious and untiring, attention from the magnates of the place; but The news salted by months on shipboard, had they were soon suffered to drop into obscurity, long ago reached the Puritans, that another king save among a few extravagant dreamers, or humble- reigned in England in the room of the vain and minded fools, when it was on record that, in spite forbidding sons of the “Man Charles,” that tole- of all their trials they were so weak, or had been so ration was proclaimed, and the fetters on men’s corrupted, as to prove shy in their experiences and consciences and liberties for ever broken. In the loose in their discipline. Then Benjamin Harris end the Harrises resolved to return to the old was left to re-print his forbidden English books, business, if possible to the old house in Grace- his Baxter, Howe, and beloved Milton, with the church Street, to bear no malice, to restore to the many charters and missives already in request, to mother country their children, to be received by cultivate his garden, and bring in wild plants and the unblushing, untroubled Chiswells as honoured wild birds, to ponder and hold converse with his . kindred, fit to be called to court, or to receive a dear wife Patience, the children born to them, and pension — and to bestow on Mrs. Lucy Soule, to the few congenial spirits who adhered to him — and! cure her moping, and arrest her flights, and bring grew well-to-do, and bland too, and jocose in his her back to the soft, cordial self under her whims, works and his amusements before a rival rose to their lads and lasses for the dear, bodily presence supersede him, by the charm involved in the pre- of her aged mother in the dust, servation of fierce denunciations. These indomitable, buoyant people did it all.

“Good wife,” owned Harris, one day, after he They came again in joy where they went out had been listening long to the chattering and weeping; flourished, Phoenix-like, out of their warbling of some feathered favourites. “I must ashes, because these were the ashes of the righteous; think that God has also ordained singing men and dwelt in London under Anne, when Newton occu- singing women to express mere human sympathies, pied an ordinary house in Leicester Square, and and instinctive gladness in addition to deliberate Swift and De Foe were the nameless scribblers; thanksgiving, which part no man disputes. I will ( walked with their children in the Mercers’ Gardens, not assail the class again, though, alas! many wax and were not frightened or ashamed to show them miserably wanton; just as I have had objections where the pillory was reared in Chepe; and, to summing up the arguments against the smoker’s depend upon it, Benjamin Harris found space and weed here, after I once saw how it cooled down time for his curious plumed pets, his seeds, his Governor Hawley’s intemperate heat which might sapling trees in pots, his creepers for porches, have been the destruction of the whole state.” balconies, and terraces, besides his collection of “Why it Beeraeth to me, that you have been battered black-letter volumes, and his ragged MSS; always merciful, Benjamin, save to yourself and , while Patience had her china closet containing, the boys when froward,” alleged Patience. among its valuables, some barbarous quill-work,

“I would be a craven to spare myself and my and a few tufted heads of gorgeous feathers, own flesh and blood; but the lads understand me, Benjamin Harris and his wife were not people think you not, Patience?” of quality, nor did they let loose their principles

“I fear they regard you before the minister; more than righteousness warranted, so that they even Sam who, you say, is upright, but tempted to doggedness.”

were not likely to frequent auctions and masquerades; but Benjamin humoured his young

“And they regard you, Patience, the most of daughters once by tucking them tightly under each the three.” I arm, and standing in a door way near Burlington

Patience plaited the curtain of her matronly House, somewhat sheltered from the crowd of hood round a face fuller and fairer than in her sedans, link-boys, and general spectators, to watch youth, though she had been always, in what she the company pour into one of those fashionable would have called her graceless days, a woman of and perilous diversions. As he kept his ground, a sweet, good favour, and she smiled sunnily. with his grave, manly face, and his modest but

“I do not say so, and yet you may give me our eager pair, a country gentleman by the cut of his sons, Benjamin, our tall, active sons, for you know! square coat, and the full hose tied at the knee,

I you have the chief share in the hearts of our which had gone out as far back as King Charles, foolish daughters.” eyed Harris carefully, and as if satisfied with the

“Tush, not foolish, Patience, woman; free from investigation, taking off his three-cornered hat, care, and, perchance slow of thought yet awhile,! begged mildly to be allowed to occupy a place though swift of feeling; but modest, and maidenly, near him and his party. The stranger was attended and docile, and children of many prayers.” by a young daughter, and he wished that rustic Dbckhbkr 8, 1859.1 BENJAMIN HARRIS AND HIS WIPE PATIENCE. 473

folks like them might enjoy the gaiety with more comfort and safety, than exposed to the pressure and restlessness of the people.

Benjamin readily assented, and made way for the petitioner, an old man with a very homely, kindly cast of countenance, his beard close shaven, and in place of a periwig his own hair of a silvery whiteness, which no powder could emulate, and “my daughter Dorothy,” a buxom, barn-door lass, with such a demure hood, as her mother and grandmother might have worn before her.

The younger members of the little company were soon familiar, and the seniors conversed in a friendly way. The squire, or vicar, as he could only be, commenting on the weather with an earnestness that was scarcely in keeping with the vicinity of Bow-bell, and remarking that it was a rare fine season for the hay crop.

“I perceive your heart is in your rural domain, sir,” says Benjamin, with a slight smile.

“Where better?“ asks the gentleman simply;

“It hath been there this many a year, since it was a sore burdened heart within the precincts of White- hall. Nay, I do not need to hide it now, I am Oliver Cromwell’s son, Master Richard.“

Harris started unfeignedly and removed his hat, but Master Richard declined the compliment.

“I receive only neighbourly tokens of good will, and I will be glad to accept such from you or any man — but none else. You see, sir, my father was born Oliver Cromwell, whom the Lord com- pelled all men to acknowledge; but I was nought save Master Richard — as such I am not ashamed to be greeted down in our shire, where, I trust, it shames no man to greet me, and where I know it would grieve my own folk if I failed them.”

But Harris bowed lower to good Master Richard than to Richard Cromwell; and the printer and the Protector '8 son stood lovingly together and took note of the stream that flowed past them.

Would that a painter’s hand could arrest some of these groups and single figures! Sailors and soldiers, nuns and Turks, Italians and Savoyards, Highlandmen and highwaymen, mackrel women and broom-sellers; and where there was no disguise there were still some of the high lace and ribband plaited commodes which Mary brought in from Holland, rising like steeples above the brows of the women, and there were everywhere the gro- tesquely wide skirts and the tremendous Marl- borough wigs making up the men; there were the political patches and the hideous carved ashen walking-sticks, and, to the delight of the unso- phisticated lasses, the fans whose manoeuvres Mr. Spectator had wickedly arranged into an exercise: “Handle your fans, unfurl your fans, discharge your fans, ground your fans, recover your fans, flutter your fans.”

It was a perceptible fact that those who were famous in any way, even for so small a matter as a fair face or a fine figure, did not much affect either mask or mantle, so that the populace might shout at their notorieties. There was Dr. Sacheverell bewigged with the best, with his bold blustering. face equally “firm“ to the Church of England and his holiness the Pope. There was starred and gartered, exquisitely moulded, evil-eyed Konigsmark, before he shot Mr. Thynne in broad day in

the park — certainly the most direct way in which an heiress was approached through a friend by a villain who wished to plunder her — the brother of that other Kfinigsmark who slept so darkly under the floor of Princess Sophia’s dressing-room over in Hanover. There was a fellow squire of Master Richard’s nodding frankly to him, a man of greater mind and bearing, a goodly gentleman as any present in other particulars than velvet coat and lace cravat, with mingled humour and simplicity in his eye, and a union of heat and benevolence in brow, mouth, and chin. Shut your eyes and you can spy him riding as high sheriff, noticing the yeomen and their families at the church door, giving alms to the poor in his great hall, spoiled by the wheedling gipsy, remembering with pride and tenderness the “vain, cruel widow,” visiting Westminster Abbey and Vauxhall in this very town sojourn. Among the belles is “the little Whig,” with flowing chesnut hair like her mother’s and Queen Anne’s, and yet more marketable, for she bribes the Tory gentlemen with a sight of these tresses while she entertains them at her toilet. “Dulcinea!“ groans Benjamin, and turns his back almost vexed that he had allowed his humble, industrious girls to behold — a syren.

But clear the way for two still more potent women; one in the seat of honour, in the glass-coach, the other with her back to the horses, meditating how their places are to be reversed. There can be no mistake here; the large, brilliant, fierce-eyed dame, blazing with jewels and in scarlet stockings, is one who certainly loved her husband and wept her son; “the wicked woman Marlborough” of the dramatist and architect, Vanbrugh, the dreaded Mrs. Freeman of cowering Mrs. Morland; the pale, quiet, soft, sleek, poor relation, in un- courtly Pinners, is her assistant and successor, Mrs. Masham.

Benjamin sighs again, though he scarcely guesses how far Sarah and Abigail have played into Louis' hands, have governed — and will govern — mighty England.

At this moment a slight stoppage occurs in the procession. Sarah waves her mittened hand, and calls out furiously to her coachman to get on. The scared Jehu whips out of the way and dashes across the kennel, and Sarah and Abigail bespatter, from head to foot, those representatives of other interests in the realm; the enlightened printer and the contented tiller of the ground — the asserter of the truth, who suffered without dreaming of compensation — and Richard Cromwell, who, with his brother Henry, bore the best testimony to their great father’s honesty, inasmuch as standing in his shoes, they had yet no mind to play the parts of Hippias and Hipparchus.

But there was quite another sort of enterprise with which Benjamin Harris and his wife had more concern. After Patience could no longer pretend to a necessity for keeping accounts and revising columns of figures on the example of good methodical painstaking Mrs. Dunton in her grave, years and years agone, and her too vaga- bond and easy John, not only married to another, but separated from his second spouse, waned into shabbiness and disrepute, and fallen out of sight; or with a happier reference to cordial Mrs. Walton, without whom patient Izaak had no heart to carry on the business, but wound it up in a prodigious hurry, and strolled off from the half- shop in Fleet Street to his angling, to escape the dreary gap in the old pleasant drudgery and cheerful routine. Now Benjamin Harris and his wife Patience, in the leisure of their age and ripe- ness of their wit, are conjectured to have had shares, interests and personal tokens, in that petted and prosperous child of the Society of Stationers, the “Ladies’ Diary, ’’once mainly under the conduct of a lady as a reward for the services of her deceased husband, Mr. Henry Bleighton, “ the most eminent civil engineer of his time,” and editor of the said work for upwards of twenty years. Benjamin cer- tainly wrote accounts of the American wolf, par- tridge and snake, as he had met them in the other world; and Patience, who had inherited a little talent for painting, long allowed to rust, when spurred on by the admiration of her children and grandchildren, after her hands began to tremble, coloured from memory and her husband’s direc- tions, those sheets of engravings of foreign plants which adorned one of the Diaries, and were so much admired, that hundreds of young ladies throughout the kingdom copied them, and hung them up framed above their harpsichords.

Is any one grossly ignorant of the first “ Ladies’ Diaries,” and arrogantly contemptuous of their merits? Let them learn that (shall it be said in the face of their title? certainly, in oppo- sition to some of their assertions,) their renown was that of mathematics. They are believed to have exerted “ a great and beneficial influence upon the state of mathematical science in this coun- try for nearly a century and a-half.” The “Ladies’ Diary” was not married to the “Gentlemen’s Diary” till 1841.

In this age of new publications, it may be worth while, before leaving old Benjamin Harris and his true dame on the list of contributors, to look back to their title-page and study the intentions which they sought in their unfading energy and noble spirit, in advanced life, to promote and fulfil. Here it stands. “ The Lady’s Diary, or Woman’s Al- manack, containing Directions of Love and Mar- riage, of Cookery, Preserving, Perfumery, Bills of Fare for every Month, and many other things peculiar to the Fair Sex,” — strange that mathema- tics should have been among them.

The first number consists of “ a Preface to the Fair Sex, containing the Happiness of England under the reign of Queen Elizabeth and the pre- sent Queen, with an account of the subject of the present and future Almanacks (if any be).” Ah! modest doubt! Then follows “ a Copy of Verses in Praise of the Queen, which were actually spoken (with others), at the Maiour’s Parlour by one of the Blew Coat Boys (at the last Thanks- giving Day, about the Vigo business), with uni- versal applause.” Next, “an Account of the Calendar at large.” Then, “the Calendar itself on one side (of each leaf), and on the other side an Account of Bills of Fare for each Month,” and, also, “ Medicinal and Cookery Receipts, col- lected from the best Authors.” Then succeeds “the Common Notes of the Year, the four Terms, the Times when Marriage comes in and out, the Eclipses, and all in one page.” After this is the second part of the Almanack, which contains the “ Praise of Women in general, with directions for Love and Marriage, intermixt with delightful stories,” (Oh! for the stories of those “ Old Ladies’ Diaries,“ like the tales in Charlotte Brontfe’s “ Ladies’ Magazines.”) Then ensues “the Marriage Cere- monies of divers Nations, together with several Enigmas, some explained and others omitted to be explained, till next year“ (the patience of the ancients!). “All this second part is intermixt with poetry, the best of the kind, to the best of my judgment lastly is “ a Table of the Births of all the Crowned heads in Europe, with the time when they began to reign, and how long they have reigned.“ “ The Calendar part (I should have noted before) has a great variety of particulars all at length, because few tcomen make reflections , or are able to deduce consequences from premises.“

Another communication on the subject, apolo- gises for the absence of the song of “Dear Albana,” and intimates “ I shall fill one page with a Chro- nology of famous Women, according to your directions last year. I think to put in Eve, Deborah, and Jael, Queen of Sheba, Delilah, Jephtha’s daughter, Esther, Susannah, Judith, the Virgin Mary, Lot’s wife out of Sacred story; and Helen, Cleopatra, Roxana, Hero, Lucretia, Pene- lope, Alceste, Semiram is, Boadicea, Zenobia, Queen Margaret, Queen Elizabeth, and Queen Anne; or as many of them as a page will hold. But for the ages of Susannah, Judith, and of the rest that follow (except the two last Queens), I cannot yet find out.” *

A little comforted by the concluding doubt, we hide our diminished heads in contemplating the enterprise of our predecessors, and quit Benjamin Harris and Mistress Harris, their children and grandchildren, commenting on their last editions of this “Ladies’ Diary,” which the Maids of Honour were so solicited to patronise, because in- numerable women throughout the kingdom would adopt their practice, over the dishes of tea which had pushed an inch or two aside the cider and the ale, the sack and the sweet waters, of the days of the Merry Monarch.

• Letters of Mr. John Tipper, of Coventry. Edition 1704.