This revolutionist, who has been the cause of sending many men to the grave, has, like nearly every Italian I have known, a horror of death, and of everything strongly reminding him of mortality.
One morning, when landlady and servant were out, he answered to a knock, opened the street door, and shrank back into the passage in affright, for two undertaker’s men, bearing an immense coffin, stood bolt before him.
| 202 | MAZZINI | [CHAP. XX |
“What for you bring dat to dis house?” he exclaimed; “here are no deads!” The fellows had mistaken the number; the coffin was for poor Ned Howard, the sea-novelist, who lived in the same street or terrace, somewhere in the Sloane Street district, but a door to two higher up, or lower down. As Ned had been an enormous eater as well as a copious drinker, he had grown enormously fat, and had been carried off by apoplexy. Mazzini, seeing the size of the coffin, might very well have thought it was intended for two or more single gentlemen. Hence his Italian use of the inadmissible English plural, “deads.” His vernacular, which he put into English, would have been “Qui non vi sono morti.” His landlady or servant came to the rescue, found the Tribune of the People, the man who talks of “Dio e popolo,” very pale, and sent poor Ned’s coffin to its proper destination.
I always thought that poor “Rattlin the Reefer” would not have ended so soon, nor have made so bad an end, if his old shipmate and then patron, Captain Marryat, had treated him more considerately and liberally, and had set him a better example in the late hours of night, and in one or two other particulars.
I have had reason to believe the fact, of which the poor novelist was very
proud, that he was a natural son of the Duke of
Norfolk, the “Black Surrey,” of Whiggish,
parliamentary celebrity. Poor Ned was not very
aristocratic in manners or in personal appearance, but no more was his reputed father,
His Grace of Norfolk; at least, not for many a long year before he
filled a coffin big enough for “deads.” But poor Ned,
though an imitator and almost a copyist of Marryat
his chief, had considerable ability and verve, as his novels will show. He had gone through
a considerable variety of adventures. Before starting as a professional littérateur, he had been in the Navy; he had been a
partner or shareholder in a gunpowder manufactory, which blew up and
| CHAP. XX] | COUNT NIEMCEWITZ | 203 |
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