their infancy; and she had very neat knees and very neat satin
boots. Immediately after singing a slang song and dancing a slang
dance, this engaging figure approached the fatal lamps, and,
bending over them, delivered in a thrilling voice a random eulogium
on, and exhortation to pursue, the virtues. ‘Great Heaven!’ was my
exclamation; ‘Barlow!’
There is still another aspect in which Mr. Barlow perpetually
insists on my sustaining the character of Tommy, which is more
unendurable yet, on account of its extreme aggressiveness. For the
purposes of a review or newspaper, he will get up an abstruse
subject with definite pains, will Barlow, utterly regardless of the
price of midnight oil, and indeed of everything else, save cramming
himself to the eyes.
But mark. When Mr. Barlow blows his information off, he is not
contented with having rammed it home, and discharged it upon me,
Tommy, his target, but he pretends that he was always in possession
of it, and made nothing of it, – that he imbibed it with mother’s
milk, – and that I, the wretched Tommy, am most abjectly behindhand
in not having done the same. I ask, why is Tommy to be always the
foil of Mr. Barlow to this extent? What Mr. Barlow had not the
slightest notion of himself, a week ago, it surely cannot be any
very heavy backsliding in me not to have at my fingers’ ends today!
And yet Mr. Barlow systematically carries it over me with a
high hand, and will tauntingly ask me, in his articles, whether it
is possible that I am not aware that every school-boy knows that
the fourteenth turning on the left in the steppes of Russia will
conduct to such and such a wandering tribe? with other disparaging
questions of like nature. So, when Mr. Barlow addresses a letter
to any journal as a volunteer correspondent (which I frequently
find him doing), he will previously have gotten somebody to tell
him some tremendous technicality, and will write in the coolest
manner, ‘Now, sir, I may assume that every reader of your columns,
possessing average information and intelligence, knows as well as I
do that’ – say that the draught from the touch-hole of a cannon of
such a calibre bears such a proportion in the nicest fractions to
the draught from the muzzle; or some equally familiar little fact.
But whatever it is, be certain that it always tends to the
exaltation of Mr. Barlow, and the depression of his enforced and
enslaved pupil.
Mr. Barlow’s knowledge of my own pursuits I find to be so profound,
that my own knowledge of them becomes as nothing. Mr. Barlow
(disguised and bearing a feigned name, but detected by me) has
occasionally taught me, in a sonorous voice, from end to end of a
long dinner-table, trifles that I took the liberty of teaching him
five-and-twenty years ago. My closing article of impeachment
against Mr. Barlow is, that he goes out to breakfast, goes out to
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
dinner, goes out everywhere, high and low, and that he WILL preach
to me, and that I CAN’T get rid of him. He makes me a Promethean
Tommy, bound; and he is the vulture that gorges itself upon the
liver of my uninstructed mind.
CHAPTER XXXV – ON AN AMATEUR BEAT
It is one of my fancies, that even my idlest walk must always have
its appointed destination. I set myself a task before I leave my
lodging in Covent-garden on a street expedition, and should no more
think of altering my route by the way, or turning back and leaving
a part of it unachieved, than I should think of fraudulently
violating an agreement entered into with somebody else. The other
day, finding myself under this kind of obligation to proceed to
Limehouse, I started punctually at noon, in compliance with the
terms of the contract with myself to which my good faith was
pledged.
On such an occasion, it is my habit to regard my walk as my beat,
and myself as a higher sort of police-constable doing duty on the
same. There is many a ruffian in the streets whom I mentally