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They would concede nothing, and would stand up and fight if the word concession were named to them. They would not only have one member, but would have half the aldermen, half the town-councillors, half the mayor, half the patronage in beadles, bell-ringers and bumbledom in general. Had the great reformer of the age given them household suffrage for nothing?
Whether he shall be put into the main road by constables, or by beadles, or by bell-ringing, or by force of figures, or by correct principles of taste, or by high church, or by low church, or by no church; whether he shall be set to splitting trusses of polemical straws with the crooked knife of his mind or whether he shall be put to stone-breaking instead.
"Omnes gurgites tui et fluctus tui super me transierunt."* * "All thy waves and thy billows have gone over me." At the same time, the intermittent clash of the iron butts of the beadles' halberds, gradually dying away among the columns of the nave, produced the effect of a clock hammer striking the last hour of the condemned.
You would think it a sad experience to see it, as I have seen it, crowned with flames which leaped up and licked the spire, while the copper on the roof curled up like paper in the heat; and to hear, as I heard, the poor beadles and guards, from the height of yonder platform, calling the city to the aid of its cathedral.
A few of the more moderate bishops happened to be going out of the Tuileries from the imperial mass; the emperor approached them. "I have desired to act by you as princes of the Church," said he; "It is for you to say if you will henceforth be only beadles, The Pope refuses to execute the Concordat; ah, well! I no longer wish for the Concordat."
Behind these, bestriding four immense horses of Norman breed, were four beadles in their long black gowns, and broad- brimmed hats, looped up with cockades. Behind these four were two mounted soldiers, dressed like those in front, in the municipal colors of the city of Paris, and in place of trumpets they carried halberds.
"Governesses, maids of honour, women of the bedchamber, noblemen, officers, grooms of the chamber, cooks, scullions, messengers, guards, beadles, pages, and footmen; she also touched the horses in the stables, the grooms, the great mastiffs in the yard, and little Pouffe, the Princess's lap-dog, which lay near her upon her bed. * Contes de Perrault, édition Aadré Lefevre, p. 87
All this in your contempt for beadles and tip-staves, even overseers and churchwardens, and all subdividing machinery of country government, that, when it came in and fairly established itself, drove away the "good people," and with them merriment and love, and sweet fear, from off the earth that twenty wheedling, flattering Autolycuses did not do half the hurt to morals or manners that one grim-visaged justice did the curmudgeon, you called him, Eusebius, that would, were they now on earth, and sleeping all lovely with their pearly arms together, locked in leafy bower, have Cupid and Psychè taken up under the Vagrant Act, or have them lodged in a "Union House" to be disunited.
Those who pay well are married at the high altar; the rector addresses to them a speech in which he exhorts them to live happily together; the beadles perform their duty; and the organist strikes up a voluntary. In regard to marriages, the present and former times presenting no other contrast, I have nothing more to add on the subject. Paris, February 6, 1803.
Deny him the right to sit among the elect, if you will; talk of his tendency to farce and caricature; call his humour low comedy, and his pathos bathos although you shall say none of these things in my presence unchallenged; the fact remains that every child, in America at least, knows more of England its almshouses, debtors' prisons, and law-courts, its villages and villagers, its beadles and cheap-jacks and hostlers and coachmen and boots, its streets and lanes, its lodgings and inns and landladies and roastbeef and plum-pudding, its ways, manners, and customs, knows more of these things and a thousand others from Dickens's novels than from all the histories, geographies, biographies, and essays in the language.
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