This changed the subject in an instant, and made us
hurriedly resolve to go to the play. So, when
I had pledged myself to comfort and abet Herbert in
the affair of his heart by all practicable and impracticable
means, and when Herbert had told me that his affianced
already knew me by reputation and that I should be
presented to her, and when we had warmly shaken hands
upon our mutual confidence, we blew out our candles,
made up our fire, locked our door, and issued forth
in quest of Mr. Wopsle and Denmark.
Chapter 31
On our arrival in Denmark, we found the king and queen
of that country elevated in two arm-chairs on a kitchen-table,
holding a Court. The whole of the Danish nobility
were in attendance; consisting of a noble boy in the
wash-leather boots of a gigantic ancestor, a venerable
Peer with a dirty face who seemed to have risen from
the people late in life, and the Danish chivalry with
a comb in its hair and a pair of white silk legs,
and presenting on the whole a feminine appearance.
My gifted townsman stood gloomily apart, with folded
arms, and I could have wished that his curls and forehead
had been more probable.
Several curious little circumstances transpired as
the action proceeded. The late king of the country
not only appeared to have been troubled with a cough
at the time of his decease, but to have taken it with
him to the tomb, and to have brought it back.
The royal phantom also carried a ghostly manuscript
round its truncheon, to which it had the appearance
of occasionally referring, and that, too, with an
air of anxiety and a tendency to lose the place of
reference which were suggestive of a state of mortality.
It was this, I conceive, which led to the Shade’s
being advised by the gallery to “turn over!”
— a recommendation which it took extremely ill.
It was likewise to be noted of this majestic spirit
that whereas it always appeared with an air of having
been out a long time and walked an immense distance,
it perceptibly came from a closely contiguous wall.
This occasioned its terrors to be received derisively.
The Queen of Denmark, a very buxom lady, though no
doubt historically brazen, was considered by the public
to have too much brass about her; her chin being attached
to her diadem by a broad band of that metal (as if
she had a gorgeous toothache), her waist being encircled
by another, and each of her arms by another, so that
she was openly mentioned as “the kettledrum.”
The noble boy in the ancestral boots, was inconsistent;
representing himself, as it were in one breath, as
an able seaman, a strolling actor, a grave-digger,
a clergyman, and a person of the utmost importance
at a Court fencing-match, on the authority of whose
practised eye and nice discrimination the finest strokes
were judged. This gradually led to a want of
toleration for him, and even — on his being
detected in holy orders, and declining to perform
