supernecessary, although so ornamental withal. It no doubt (as its
name, indeed indicates) had its origin in gallantry, and was invented
in the age of fans, for the purpose of cooling their mistresses'
bosoms, heated--as they would necessarily be--at fair time, by their
gravel-grinding walks, under a fervid sun, to the elegant revels of
West-end, of Greenwich, or of Tothill-fields. Breeches, rejected by
common consent of young and old alike, cling to the legs of the
coalheaver with an abiding fondness, as to the last place of refuge;
and, on gala-days, a dandy might die of envy to mark the splendour
of those nether integuments--which he has not soul enough to dare
to wear--of brilliant eye-arresting blue, or glowing scarlet plush,
glittering in the sun's rays, giving and taking glory! But enough of
the dress of these select "true-born Englishmen"--for right glad I am
to state that there are but _two_ Scotch coalheavers on the whole
river, and _no_ Irish. I beg leave to return to the more important
consideration of their manners. Most people you meet in your walks in
the common thoroughfare of London, glide, shuffle, or crawl onward, as
if they conscientiously thought they had no manner of right to tread the
earth but on sufferance. Not so our coalheaver. Mark how erect _he_
walks! how firm a keel he presents to the vainly breasting human tide
that comes rolling on with a show of opposition to his onward course!
It is he, and he only, who preserves, in his gait and in his air,
the self-sustained and conscious dignity of the first-created man.
Surrounded by an inferior creation, he gives the wall to none. That
pliancy of temper, which is wont to make itself known by the waiving
a point or renouncing a principle for others' advantage, in him
has no place; he either knows it not, or else considers it a poor,
mean-spirited, creeping baseness, altogether unworthy of his imitation,
and best befitted with ineffable contempt. He neither dreads the contact
of the baker--the Scylla of the metropolitan peripatetic, nor yet shuns