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PAGE MEMOIR, xi PREFACE, xxi

FIRST SERIES.

SECOND SERIES.

THE BLACK MOUSQUETAIRE, 224 SIR RUPERT THE FEARLESS, 244 THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, 252 THE AUTO-DA-F?, 264 THE INGOLDSBY PENANCE, 282 NETLEY ABBEY, 293 FRAGMENT, 297 NELL COOK, 299 NURSERY REMINISCENCES, 306 AUNT FANNY, 308 MISADVENTURES AT MARGATE, 314 THE SMUGGLER'S LEAP, 318 BLOUDIE JACKE OF SHREWSBERRIE, 323 THE BABES IN THE WOOD, 334 THE DEAD DRUMMER, 339 A ROW IN AN OMNIBUS , 351 THE LAY OF ST. CUTHBERT, 355 THE LAY OF ST. ALOYS, 368 THE LAY OF THE OLD WOMAN CLOTHED IN GREY, 377 RAISING THE DEVIL, 393 THE LAY OF ST. MEDARD, 394

THIRD SERIES.

THE LORD OF THOULOUSE, 405 THE WEDDING-DAY; OR, THE BUCCANEER'S CURSE, 418 THE BLASPHEMER'S WARNING, 432 THE BROTHERS OF BIRCHINGTON, 449 THE KNIGHT AND THE LADY, 460 THE HOUSE-WARMING, 469 THE FORLORN ONE, 483 JERRY JARVIS'S WIG, 483 UNSOPHISTICATED WISHES, 501 HERMANN; OR, THE BROKEN SPEAR, 503 HINTS FOR AN HISTORICAL PLAY, 505 MARIE MIGNOT, 507 THE TRUANTS, 508 THE POPLAR, 512 MY LETTERS, 512 NEW-MADE HONOUR, 515 THE CONFESSION, 516 EPIGRAM, 517 SONG, 517 EPIGRAM, 518 SONG, 518 AS I LAYE A-THYNKYNGE, 519

PAGE

MEMOIR.

Richard Harris Barham, the "Thomas Ingoldsby" of literature, was born at Canterbury, December 6th, 1788. His family had long been residents in the archiepiscopal city, and had estates in Kent. He used to trace his descent from a knight who came over to England with William the Conqueror, and whose son, Reginald Fitzurse, was one of the assassins of Thomas ? Becket. After the deed Fitzurse fled to Ireland, and there changed his name to MacMahon, which has the same meaning. His brother Robert, who succeeded to the English estates, changed his patronymic to de Berham, converted in process of time into Barham.

Richard was sent to St. Paul's School, and it was on his road thither, in 1802, that he met with an accident that endangered his life. The horses of the Dover mail, in which he was travelling, took fright and galloped off furiously: the boy put his right hand out of the window to open the door, when at that moment the coach upset; his hand was caught under it, and it was dragged along on a rough road and seriously mutilated. The surgeons, believing he would die, did not amputate the limb; and through the tender care of the headmaster's wife he recovered.

At school Barham formed some friendships which lasted his life: one of these school friends was afterwards his publisher, Mr. Bentley; Dr. Roberts, who attended him in his last illness, was another. He remained captain of St. Paul's School for two years, and when nineteen was entered as a Gentleman Commoner at Brasennose College. Here he was speedily elected a member of a first-class university club,--the Phoenix Common Room,--where he became acquainted with Lord George Grenville, Cecil Tattersall, and Theodore Hook, a friend of his after-life.

A specimen of his youthful humour has been preserved in an answer he made to his tutor, Mr. Hodson, when reproved by him for the late hours he kept and his absence from chapel. "The fact is, sir," said Barham, "you are too late for me." "Too late!" repeated the tutor. "Yes, sir; I cannot sit up till seven in the morning. I am a man of regular habits; and unless I get to bed by four or five at latest, I am really fit for nothing the next day." The habit that he had acquired of sitting up late continued during his life, and he believed that he wrote best at night.

His original intention had been to study for the Bar, but a very severe though short illness brought serious thoughts to the young man, and he determined to enter the Church, his mind having also been painfully impressed by the suicide of a young college friend; consequently he took Holy Orders, and obtained the curacy of Ashford, in Kent, from whence he was transferred to Westwell, a parish a few miles distant from his first one.

In 1814, when he had attained the age of twenty-six, Barham married Caroline, third daughter of Captain Smart of the Royal Engineers, a very charming young lady; and shortly afterwards he was presented to the living of Snargate, and accepted also the curacy of Warehorn. Both these parishes were situated in Romney Marsh, at the distance of only two miles from each other. The young clergyman took up his abode at Warehorn, a place then noted as a haunt of smugglers.

We will give here the testimony of a dear friend of the poet's, as to his character, at this time. "My first acquaintance with Mr. Barham," writes the Rev. John Hughes, "dated from his election into the body of Minor Canons of St. Paul's, of which Cathedral my late father was then a Residentiary. Mr. Barham had married early in life, and in every respect enviably. His previous career as a graduate of Brasennose College had thrown him much into contact with several gifted and accomplished men, upon whom a shred of Reginald Heber's mantle, and a smack and savour of the 'Whippiad,' had descended in the way of corporate inheritance, and his quick talents had mended the lesson. It was soon evident to the Dean and Chapter, and to my father in particular, that their new subordinate combined superior powers of conversation with most decorous and gentlemanly tact and attention to all points connected with his duties."

In 1824, Mr. Barham was appointed a priest in ordinary of the King's Chapel Royal, and was shortly afterwards presented with the incumbency of St. Mary Magdalene and St. Gregory-by-St. Paul. Mr. Barham was not an eloquent preacher, because he disapproved of all oratorical display in the pulpit, but he was an excellent parish priest, ever watchful over his flock, and delighting in doing good.

Who ne'er gave him pain till they died.

He strove to be happy in making others so, especially those more congenial spirits who more directly shared in his affections .... Here it may not be amiss to notice one trait of character connected with the appointment which he held as chaplain to the Vintners' Company. Part of his duty in this capacity was to perform divine service at an almshouse in the vicinity of town, tenanted by certain widows of decayed members of the corporation. The old ladies quarrelled sadly, and Barham was in the habit of devoting one extra morning a week to a pastoral visitation of these poor isolated old women, for charity and decency's sake, and acted as arbiter and referee in their ridiculous feuds, with as much gravity as it was in his nature to assume on such an occasion." There was surely no small degree of self-denial in a man of such talent devoting his valuable time to such an office.

To Mrs. Hughes, who made me do 'em, Quod placeo est--si placeo--tuum.

"As regards the 'Dead Drummer,' the story was attested in a contemporary pamphlet, called A Narrative of the Life, Confession, and Dying Speech of Jarvis Matchan, which was signed by the Rev. J. Nicholson, who attended him as minister, and by another witness. The murder was not committed on Salisbury Plain, but near Alconbury in Huntingdonshire, and the culprit was hanged in chains at Huntingdon, August 2nd, 1786, for the wilful murder of Benjamin Jones, a drummer boy in the 48th Regiment of Foot, on August 19, 1780. Matchan's escape to sea, and the subsequent vision on Salisbury Plain, which wrung from him his confession, are given with great minuteness, and are as marvellous as any in the poem."

"Nell Cook," "Grey Dolphin," "The Ghost," and "The Smuggler's Leap" are Kentish legends, well known, though of course much embellished by the poet. "The Old Woman clothed in Grey" was taken from the story of a ghost that haunted an old rectory near Cambridge, whose custom it was to stroll about the house at midnight, with a bag of money in her hand, which she offered to whomever she met; but no one was brave enough to take it from her.

The foundation of most of the legends on subjects of Popish superstition may be found in the Monkish Chronicles which the library at Sion College contains. He tells us that the "Jackdaw of Rheims"--one, by the way, of his most popular legends--was a version of an old Roman Catholic legend "picked up" out of a High Dutch author.

In 1839, Sidney Smith placed a Residentiary house, in Amen Corner, at the disposal of Mr. Barham, and the family moved into it in September. This dwelling dated from the erection of the Cathedral itself, and, having been long unoccupied, had become the stronghold of legions of rats, which had first to be destroyed before the family could settle in it.

In 1840, Mr. Barham succeeded, in course of rotation, to the Presidency of Sion College, which was held for one year only by the London incumbents in rotation.

The death of Theodore Hook, his life-long friend, occurred in 1841, and Mr. Barham was deeply affected by it. "One of the last parties at which Hook was present" "was at Amen Corner" . He was unusually late, and dinner was served before he made his appearance; Mr. Barham apologized for having sat down without him, observing that he had quite given him up, and supposed that the weather had deterred him.

The friends met only once more after that evening.

Within a year after taking up his abode at Amen Corner, a far heavier sorrow had fallen on Mr. Barham. His youngest son, a boy of great promise and precocious talent, died. His second son had died of cholera in 1832. This last blow fell heavily on the father. His elastic spirits had rebounded from the previous ones, but this loss was never fully recovered by him. The death of Hook, coming soon after, depressed him still more.

In 1842, Mr. Barham was appointed to the Divinity Readership of St. Paul's, and was permitted to exchange the living he held for the more valuable one of St. Faith; the duties of which were, also, less onerous than those of the parish in which he had worked for twenty years.

His parishioners felt the separation from their excellent pastor deeply, and no doubt their feelings were shared by him who had so long been their guide and sympathetic friend. Mrs. Barham was also greatly loved, and had rendered good service in the management of the school, and visiting the poor; a testimonial was presented to both by their grateful people, in the shape of a handsome silver salver.

His new living being contiguous to his old one, Mr. Barham did not change his residence, in which, in fact, he was permitted to live for the remainder of his life. But he was always delighted when a little leisure enabled him to go into the country and to the seaside, or to his native Kent to find legends; but such excursions were few and brief for the hardly worked clergyman.

Mr. Barham was one of the first members of the Archaeological Association, instituted for the purpose of making trips to places where antiquarian research could be carried on; he had always possessed a great taste for, and much knowledge of, antiquarian subjects. He was also an excellent Shakspearian scholar, and could supply the context to any quotation made from the plays, and mention the play, act, and generally the scene from which it came. He was therefore deeply interested in the formation of the Garrick Club, of which he wrote the words of a glee song at the opening dinner ,--

Let poets of superior parts Consign to deathless fame The larceny of the Knave of Hearts, Who spoiled his Royal Dame.

On October 28, 1844, Her Majesty the Queen visited the city to open the Royal Exchange. Mr. Barham, his wife and daughters, had accepted an invitation from a friend to witness the procession, and, standing at an open window, he remarked that the cutting east wind then blowing would cost many of the spectators their lives. The speech seemed in his own case prophetic. In the course of the evening he was attacked by a violent fit of coughing, and his old friend and schoolfellow Dr. Roberts was called in. The poet rallied from this attack, but fresh ones succeeded it, and at length his articulation became impeded. He was advised to leave London for Bath, rest being absolutely necessary; but a meeting of the Archaeological Association induced him to hurry back to town to attend it, and then other business pressed on him, and another attack followed. His son relates a little incident that shows Barham had begun to realize the serious nature of his illness. He had been for many years on the Committee of the Garrick Club, and by the rules of the society the names of the Committee were placed in a ballot box and six withdrawn, by chance, on St. George's day, which was the anniversary of the birth and death of Shakspeare. The first name drawn out that year was Barham's; but he was unanimously re-elected. When he was told of the circumstance, he said: It had been well to have accepted the omen, and filled up his place at once. In fact he never entered the Club again.

Mrs. Barham had also been ill; therefore he and she went together in the following May to Clifton, for change of air and rest; but unhappily they had only been a few hours in their lodgings before Mrs. Barham was taken dangerously ill, and unable to attend to her husband. Their eldest daughter soon joined them, and a slight amendment enabled her to bring them back to their home; but the expedition proved to have been a fatal one. Here Dr. Roberts, and the great surgeon Coulson, did all that was possible to save the life of the beloved poet. But they knew that their skill was vain, and their patient readily divined the truth that he was dying. He learned the certainty of the approaching end with perfect calmness and cheerfulness, only disturbed by anxiety about his wife, who was still extremely ill. He arranged his worldly affairs; received the Holy Communion with his household; and waited for the certain result of his malady with patience and resolution. His last lines, "As I lay a-thinking," referring chiefly to the death of his youngest son, were written, his son tells us, just before he left Clifton; he now desired that they might be sent to Mr. Bentley for publication.

He died on the 17th of June 1845. His life as a clergyman had been most useful and beneficial to his parishioners; his poems have cheered many a weary spirit, and been a source of much innocent household mirth.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

TO RICHARD BENTLEY, ESQ.

MY DEAR SIR,

"Who steals my purse steals stuff!-- 'Twas mine--'tisn't his--nor nobody else's! But he who runs away with my GOOD NAME, Robs me of what does not do him any good, And makes me deuced poor!!"

In order utterly to squabash and demolish every gainsayer, I had thought, at one time, of asking my old and esteemed friend, Richard Lane, to crush them at once with his magic pencil, and to transmit my features to posterity, where all his works are sure to be "delivered according to the direction;" but somehow the noble-looking profiles which he has recently executed of the Kemble family put me a little out of conceit with my own, while the undisguised amusement which my "Mephistopheles Eyebrow," as he termed it, afforded him, in the "full face," induced me to lay aside the design. Besides, my dear Sir, since, as has well been observed, "there never was a married man yet who had not somebody remarkably like him walking about town," it is a thousand to one but my lineaments might, after all, out of sheer perverseness be ascribed to anybody rather than to the real owner. I have therefore sent you, instead thereof, a very fair sketch of Tappington, taken from the Folkestone road ; get Gilks to make a woodcut of it. And now, if any miscreant ventures to throw any further doubt upon the matter, why, as Jack Cade's friend says in the play, "There are the chimneys in my father's house, and the bricks are alive at this day to testify it!"

"Why, very well then--we hope here be truths!"

Heaven be with you, my dear Sir!--I was getting a little excited; but you, who are mild as the milk that dews the soft whisker of the new-weaned kitten, will forgive me when, wiping away the nascent moisture from my brow, I "pull in," and subscribe myself,

Yours quite as much as his own,

THOMAS INGOLDSBY.

FOOTNOTES:

A reading which seems most unaccountably to have escaped the researches of all modern Shakspearians, including the rival editors of the new and illustrated versions.

THE INGOLDSBY LEGENDS.

The Ingoldsby Legends.

THE SPECTRE OF TAPPINGTON.

"It is very odd, though; what can have become of them?" said Charles Seaforth, as he peeped under the valance of an old-fashioned bedstead, in an old-fashioned apartment of a still more old-fashioned manor-house; "'tis confoundedly odd, and I can't make it out at all. Why, Barney, where are they?--and where the d--l are you?"

No answer was returned to this appeal; and the lieutenant, who was, in the main, a reasonable person,--at least as reasonable a person as any young gentleman of twenty-two in "the service" can fairly be expected to be,--cooled when he reflected that his servant could scarcely reply extempore to a summons which it was impossible he should hear.

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