THE TALE OF CHLOE AN EPISODE IN THE HISTORY OF BEAU BEAMISH - CHAPTER I
’Fair Chloe, we toasted
of old,
As the Queen of our festival meeting;
Now Chloe is lifeless and cold;
You must go to the grave for her greeting.
Her beauty and talents were framed
To enkindle the proudest to win her;
Then let not the mem’ry be blamed
Of the purest that e’er was a sinner!’
Captain Chanter’s
Collection.
A proper tenderness for the Peerage
will continue to pass current the illustrious gentleman
who was inflamed by Cupid’s darts to espouse
the milkmaid, or dairymaid, under his ballad title
of Duke of Dewlap: nor was it the smallest of
the services rendered him by Beau Beamish, that he
clapped the name upon her rustic Grace, the young duchess,
the very first day of her arrival at the Wells.
This happy inspiration of a wit never failing at a
pinch has rescued one of our princeliest houses from
the assaults of the vulgar, who are ever too rejoiced
to bespatter and disfigure a brilliant coat-of-arms;
insomuch that the ballad, to which we are indebted
for the narrative of the meeting and marriage of the
ducal pair, speaks of Dewlap in good faith
O
the ninth Duke of Dewlap I am, Susie dear!
without a hint of a domino title.
So likewise the pictorial historian is merry over
‘Dewlap alliances’ in his description of
the society of that period. He has read the ballad,
but disregarded the memoirs of the beau. Writers
of pretension would seem to have an animus against
individuals of the character of Mr. Beamish.
They will treat of the habits and manners of highwaymen,
and quote obscure broadsheets and songs of the people
to colour their story, yet decline to bestow more than
a passing remark upon our domestic kings: because
they are not hereditary, we may suppose. The
ballad of ‘The Duke and the Dairymaid,’
ascribed with questionable authority to the pen of
Mr. Beamish himself in a freak of his gaiety, was
once popular enough to provoke the moralist to animadversions
upon an order of composition that ’tempted every
bouncing country lass to sidle an eye in a blowsy
cheek’ in expectation of a coronet for her pains and
a wet ditch as the result! We may doubt it to
have been such an occasion of mischief. But that
mischief may have been done by it to a nobility-loving
people, even to the love of our nobility among the
people, must be granted; and for the particular reason,
that the hero of the ballad behaved so handsomely.
We perceive a susceptibility to adulteration in their
worship at the sight of one of their number, a young
maid, suddenly snatched up to the gaping heights of
Luxury and Fashion through sheer good looks. Remembering
that they are accustomed to a totally reverse effect
from that possession, it is very perceptible how a
breach in their reverence may come of the change.
Otherwise the ballad is innocent;
certainly it is innocent in design. A fresher
national song of a beautiful incident of our country
life has never been written. The sentiments are
natural, the imagery is apt and redolent of the soil,
the music of the verse appeals to the dullest ear.
It has no smell of the lamp, nothing foreign and far-fetched
about it, but is just what it pretends to be, the
carol of the native bird. A sample will show,
for the ballad is much too long to be given entire:
Sweet Susie she tripped
on a shiny May morn,
As blithe as the lark
from the green-springing corn,
When, hard by a stile,
’twas her luck to behold
A wonderful gentleman
covered with gold!
There was gold on his
breeches and gold on his coat,
His shirt-frill was
grand as a fifty-pound note;
The diamonds glittered
all up him so bright,
She thought him the
Milky Way clothing a Sprite!
‘Fear not, pretty
maiden,’ he said with a smile;
’And, pray, let
me help you in crossing the stile.
She bobbed him a curtsey
so lovely and smart,
It shot like an arrow
and fixed in his heart.
As light as a robin
she hopped to the stone,
But fast was her hand
in the gentleman’s own;
And guess how she stared,
nor her senses could trust,
When this creamy gentleman
knelt in the dust!
With a rhapsody upon her beauty, he
informs her of his rank, for a flourish to the proposal
of honourable and immediate marriage. He cannot
wait. This is the fatal condition of his love:
apparently a characteristic of amorous dukes.
We read them in the signs extended to us. The
minds of these august and solitary men have not yet
been sounded; they are too distant. Standing
upon their lofty pinnacles, they are as legible to
the rabble below as a line of cuneiform writing in
a page of old copybook roundhand. By their deeds
we know them, as heathendom knows of its gods; and
it is repeatedly on record that the moment they have
taken fire they must wed, though the lady’s finger
be circled with nothing closer fitting than a ring
of the bed-curtain. Vainly, as becomes a candid
country lass, blue-eyed Susan tells him that she is
but a poor dairymaid. He has been a student of
women at Courts, in which furnace the sex becomes
a transparency, so he recounts to her the catalogue
of material advantages he has to offer. Finally,
after his assurances that she is to be married by
the parson, really by the parson, and a real parson
Sweet Susie is off for
her parents’ consent,
And long must the old
folk debate what it meant.
She left them the eve
of that happy May morn,
To shine like the blossom
that hangs from the thorn!
Apart from its historical value, the
ballad is an example to poets of our day, who fly
to mythological Greece, or a fanciful and morbid mediaevalism,
or save the mark! abstract ideas,
for themes of song, of what may be done to make our
English life poetically interesting, if they would
but pluck the treasures presented them by the wayside;
and Nature being now as then the passport to popularity,
they have themselves to thank for their little hold
on the heart of the people. A living native duke
is worth fifty Phoebus Apollos to Englishmen,
and a buxom young lass of the fields mounting from
a pair of pails to the estate of duchess, a more romantic
object than troops of your visionary Yseults and Guineveres.