Olornell Untocrattg Slibratji 
 
 LIBRARY OF 
 
 LEWIS BINGLEY WYNNE 
 
 A B.. A.M. .COLUMBIAN COLLEGE. '71 .'73 
 WASHINGTON. D. C. 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 MRS. MARY A. WYNNE 
 
 AND 
 
 JOHN H. WYNNE 
 
 CORNELL '98 
 1922 
 
arV1584 ^'"^' ""'"eral'y Library 
 Notes from life in seven essays / 
 
 ,. 3 1924 031 185 584 
 
 oiin,anx 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031185584 
 
NOTES FROM LIFE 
 
 SEVEN ESSAYS. 
 
 MONET. 
 
 nUMILITT & INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 WISDOM. 
 
 CHOICE m MARRIAGE. 
 
 CHILDREN. 
 
 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 
 
 HENRY TAYLOR, 
 
 AUTHOR OP *PHILIP VAN ARTE.VBLDS 
 
 From the Third London Edition. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 TICKNOR, REED, AND FIELDS. 
 
 HDCCCLIII. 
 
THUESTOS, TOKIty, AKD BMEESOS, Pr.ISrBKa. 
 
TO 
 
 THE EARL OP ABERDEEN, K. T. 
 
 STC. BTC. ETC. 
 
 EW« 3Sao& ts finsctt&etr, 
 
 WITH 
 
 GREAT RESPECT AND REGARD, 
 
 BY 
 
 THE AUTHOR. 
 
PEEFACE. 
 
 Ik the year 1836 I published a book called the ' States- 
 man,' a title much found fault with at the time, and in truth 
 not very judiciously chosen. It contained the views and 
 maxims respecting the transaction of public business, vthich 
 twelve years of experience had suggested to me. But my 
 experience had been confined within the doors of an office, 
 and the book was wanting in that general interest which 
 might possibly have been felt in the results of a more exten- 
 sive and varied conversancy with public life. Moreover, the 
 sub-sarcastic vein in which certain parts of it were written 
 was not very well understood, and what was meant for an 
 exposure of some of the world's ways was, I believe, very 
 generally mistaken for a recommendation of them. I advert, 
 now, to this book and its indifferent fortunes, because what- 
 ever may have been its demerits, my present work must be 
 regarded as to some extent comprehended in the same design, 
 — that, namely, of embodying in the form of maxims and 
 reflections the immediate results of an attentive observation 
 of life, — of official life in the former volume, — of life at 
 large in this. For more than twenty years I hav,e been in 
 the habit of noting these results as they were thrown up, 
 when the facts and occurrences that gave rise to them were 
 
VI PHEFACE. 
 
 fresh in my mind.* A large portion of them I would more 
 willingly have transfused into dramatic compositions. Year 
 after year I have indulged the belief that I might find health, 
 leisure, and opportunity for doing so, nor do I yet relinquish 
 the hope that I may gain the time for some further efforts of 
 that nature before I lose the faculty. But the years wear 
 away, and though I do not hold that youth is the poet's 
 prime, yet I feel that after youth the imagination cannot be 
 put on and taken off with the same easy versatility, — that 
 a continuous absorption in the dramatic theme is more 
 indispensable to its treatment, and that, consequently, 
 such pursuits come to be less readily combined with other 
 avocations. Other avocations I am unable to discard, and 
 lest, therefore, T should never be in a condition to realize a 
 better hope, I have put into this prosaic form such of my 
 reflections on life as I have thought worthy in one way or 
 another to be preserved. 
 
 * Some of the notes were originally made in verse ; others were, from time 
 to time, converted into verse, to serve the purposes of dramatic or poetic 
 works in prograss or in contemplation ; and I have not hesitated to quote the 
 verses in illustration of the prose, as often as the versified form seemed to give 
 a reflection or an aphorism a better chance of finding a resting-place in the 
 memory of the reader. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAns 
 
 MONET 1 
 
 mjMANITT AND INDEPENDENCE 29 
 
 CHOICE IN HARRIAaE 43 
 
 WISDOM 74 
 
 CHILDREN 91 
 
 THE LITE POETIC 109~ 
 
 THE WATS OF THE KICH AND GREAT 151 
 
ESSAYS. 
 
 OF MONEY. 
 
 The philosophy which affects to teach us a con- 
 tempt of money, does not run very deep ; for, indeed, 
 it ought to be still more clear to the philosopher than 
 it is to ordinary men, that there are few things in the 
 world of greater importance. And so manifold are 
 the bearings of money upon the lives and characters 
 of mankind, that an insight which should search out 
 the life of a man in his pecuniary relations would 
 penetrate into almost every cranny of his nature. He 
 who knows, like St. Paul, both how to spare and how 
 to abound, has a great knowledge : for if we take 
 account of all the virtues with which money is mixed 
 up, — honesty, justice, generosity, charity, frugality, 
 forethought, self-sacrifice, — and of their correlative 
 vices, — it is a knowledge which goes near to cover 
 the length and breadth of humanity : and a right 
 measure and manner in getting, saving, spending, 
 1 
 
:* OF MONEY. 
 
 V 
 
 giving, taking, lending, borrowing, and bequeathing, 
 would almost argue a perfect man. 
 
 First : — As to the getting of money. This in- 
 volves dangers which do not belong to the mere 
 possession of it. ' Blessed is the rich that is found 
 without blemish, and hath not gone after gold,' says 
 the Son of Sirach ; and again — ' He that loveth gold ' 
 shall not be justified, and he that followeth corruption 
 shall have enough thereof.' * Yet industry must take 
 an interest in its own fruits ; and God has appointed 
 that the mass of mankind shall be moved by this 
 interest, and have their daily labor sweetened by )t ; 
 and there may be a blessing even upon the going 
 after gold, if it be not with an inordinate appetite — 
 if the gold be not loved for its own sake, and if the 
 manner of it be without blemish. But the danger 
 arises out of the tendency of the human mind to 
 forget the end in the means, and the difficulty of 
 going after gold for the love of the benefits which it 
 may confer, without going after it also for the mere 
 love of getting it and keeping it, which is ' following 
 corruption.' It behoves him who is getting money, 
 therefore, even more than him who has it by inherit- 
 ance, to bear in mind what are the uses of money, 
 and what are the proportions and proprieties to be 
 
 * Ecclesiasticus, xxxi. 8. 
 
OF MONKY. 3' 
 
 observed in saving, giving, and spending : for recti- 
 tude in the management of money consists in the 
 symmetry of these three. 
 
 Sudden and enormous gains almost always disturb 
 the balance : for a man can scarcely change his scale 
 suddenly, and yet hold his proportions : and hence 
 proceeds one of the many evils of highly speculative 
 commerce, with its abrupt vicissitudes of fortune. 
 The man who engages in it can scarcely have any 
 fixed and regulated manner of dealing with his net 
 income ; he knows not how much he ought to save, 
 how much he may permit himself to spend, how 
 much he can aiford to give : whilst, even if he could 
 know, the extreme excitements of fear and hope to 
 which he lies open, occupy his mind too much for 
 him to give many thoughts to such matters. And if 
 what is called bold commercial enterprise be a thing 
 to be rejoiced in as promoting the physical well- 
 being of mankind, and thereby, perhaps, in the train 
 of consequences, their moral interests, it is only 
 through that Providence by which good is brought 
 out of evil. And the actors in such enterprises, 
 whRi, as is mostly the case, they are merely ' going 
 after gold,' and not considering either the physical 
 or moral results, are, in their own minds and hearts, 
 ' following corruption,' and are likely to ' have enough 
 thereof.' • 
 
4: OF MONEY. 
 
 A moderated and governed course in the getting 
 of money is the more difficult, because this is, of all 
 pursuits, that in which a man meets with the greatest 
 pressure of competition. So many are putting their 
 hearts into this work, that he who keeps his out of it, 
 is not unlikely to fare ill in the strife. And for this 
 reason it were well for a man,' riot perhaps altogether 
 to abate his desire of gain, (though this should be 
 done if it be excessive,) but more assiduously still to 
 direct his desires beyond, and purify the desire of 
 gain by associating with it the desire to accomplish 
 some scheme of beneficent expenditure. And let no 
 man imagine that the mere investment for reproduc- 
 tion, though economists may justly regard it as bene- 
 ficial to mankind, will react upon his own heart for 
 good. 
 
 George Herbert is a good counsellor on this head 
 of money- getting : — 
 
 ' Yet in thy thriving still misdoubt some evil ; 
 
 Lest gaining gain on thee, and make thee dim 
 To all things else. Wealth is the Conjuror's Devil, 
 
 Whom, when he thinks he hath, the Devil hath him. 
 Gold thou may'st safely touch ; but if it stick * 
 
 Unto thy hands, it woundeth to the quick.' * 
 
 Secondly : — As to the saving of money. The 
 
 ' The Church Porch. 
 
OF MONEY. 5 
 
 saving, like the getting, should he intelligent of a 
 purpose beyond : it should not be saving for saving's 
 sake, but for the sake of some worthy object to be 
 accomplished by the money saved. And especially 
 we are to guard against that accumulative instinct or 
 passion which is ready to take possession of all col- 
 lectors. 
 
 Some very small portion of a man's income may, 
 perhaps, be justifiably saved to make provision against 
 undefined and unforeseen contingencies, and 'also to 
 assure himself that he can save. But in the case of 
 most men there will be a sufficiency of distinct and 
 definable ends, whether certain or contingent, which 
 will not only justify, but enjoin, the laying by of a 
 proportion of their income. A young man may very 
 well lay by money to enable him to be more free in 
 the , choice of a wife. A middle-aged man. may lay 
 it by in order that his old age may have fewer labors 
 and cares, or more comforts. A father may lay it 
 by for his children. But in all these cases, if the end 
 be not kept steadily in view from first to last, and the 
 means kept no more than proportionate and subordi- 
 nate, there is the risk that the saver may become a 
 miser. The young man may grow old without taking 
 a wife, and save still when he' no longer thinks of 
 marrying ; or he may think that what he has saved 
 may entitle him to a rich wife, rather than enable him 
 
6 OF MONEY. 
 
 to choose. The middle-aged man may reach old age 
 with no disposition to increase his comforts and every 
 disposition to inctease his hoard. And finally, the 
 father, though Ms motive for saving is the most natural 
 and universal, and in general the most warrantable of 
 all, may yet be betrayed by the very largeness of the 
 allowance which the world makes in such cases, into 
 avaricious errors. His case, as being the most com- 
 mon, and that in which men are least on their guard, 
 deserves to be the more closely considered. 
 
 The prudent parent is less likely to be corrupted 
 into a covetous parent, if he be saving for several 
 children, than if it be for one only chiW, or for an 
 eldest son : for avarice projects itself more readily in 
 the singular number than in the plural; and saving for 
 a provision is always to be distinguished from saving 
 for aggrandizement, which is no other than a form 
 of avarice. Saving for an only child or eldest son 
 may be defended when the father has means beyond 
 the devisable patrimony, and when that devisable pat- 
 rimony is insufBcient for the station to be inherited 
 along with it. But if the patrimony be insufBcient, 
 and the father have no extrinsic means, he must not 
 make it more insufiicient in his lifetime, in order that 
 it may be less insufficient in his son's : he is not to be 
 niggardly in order that his son may be liberal. He 
 may, indeed, retrench in matters connected with the 
 
OF MONKY. 7 
 
 keeping up of appearances — that is, he may osten- 
 sibly retire from his station for a time, or for life ; 
 but he must not, whilst keeping up the appearances of 
 his station, fall short in matters of bounty and libe- 
 rality. 
 
 la saving for younger children, the parent has to 
 consider what is a competency ; and if he be wise, 
 and can count upon an average share of health and 
 abilities in his younger sons, he will not relieve them 
 from the necessity of earning the main part of their 
 livelihood ; for unless a man's property be large 
 enough to find him an occupation in the manage- 
 ment of it, and in the discharge of the duties incident 
 to it, (which, generally speaking, can only be the case 
 of the eldest son,) it will be essential to his happiness 
 that he should have to work for his bread. And it is 
 on this fact that the custom of succession, according 
 to primogeniture, is to be defended ; for if any one 
 is sacrificed by this custom, it is rather the eldest than 
 the younger sons ; the eldest being too often pampered 
 into self-love, ^— the most wretched inheritance of all, 
 — the younger being trained in self-sacrifice, fortified 
 in self-reliance, and through industry and progress 
 leading a wiser, a better, a more generous, and a 
 happier life. » 
 
 How much to save for a daughter, is another ques- 
 tion ; and since a woman's life, for the most part. 
 
8 OF MONET. 
 
 turns upon- her marriage, it is her matrimonial pros- 
 pects which are principally to be regarded. Let not 
 her wealth be too tempting : an heiress has a large 
 assortment of suitors, and yet an ill choice : and do 
 not, if you can help it, let her poverty be an obstruc- 
 tion ; for prudent men make good husbands, and in 
 many cases a man cannot marry with prudence where 
 there is not the fair facility of 'a moderate fortune. I 
 have heard, indeed, of a father who stinted his daugh- 
 ters' dowries, on purpose that poor men might not be 
 able to marry them ; whence he inferred that rich men 
 would. He might be mistaken in his inference ; for 
 though rich men can afford to marry poor maids, yet 
 men are not found to wish less for money because 
 they want it less, and in the making of marriages it 
 is generally seen that ' wealth will after kind.' Even 
 if Ae were not mistaken, however, the calculation was 
 but a sordid one at the best ; and, considering how 
 many requisites must be combined to make a good 
 husband and a happy marriage, the father is likely to 
 impose a cruel limitation of choice who needlessly 
 adds wealth to the number of essentials. Even the 
 marriage which is poor through an improvident choice, 
 is. less likely to end ill than that which is rich through 
 a constrained choice. 
 
 There is yet another domestic object which may be 
 a fair ground for saving out of a patrimony. One of 
 
OF MONEY. 
 
 9 
 
 the incidents of the law and custom of primogeniture, 
 to which our natural feelings are the least easily recon- 
 ciled, is the effect of it upon the wife and mother 
 when she passes into widowhood. She is deposed 
 from her station and deprived of her affluence at the 
 moment of her greatest domestic calamity, and her 
 own child is the person to whom they are transferred. 
 It may be that the cares, duties and responsibilities of 
 a large property and a high proprietary station, are not 
 suitable to a widow in the decline of life : but this is 
 not left for her to determine, and very frequently the 
 still less acceptable cares of a straitened income and 
 a total change in her mode of life are fixed upon her. 
 The force of custom has brought the feelings of 
 mankind into more accordance than one would have 
 thought possible with so unnatural an arrangement; but 
 the husband needs not to be charged with parsimony, , 
 who should save' money with a view to mitigate the 
 future contrast between his wife's position and his 
 widow's. 
 
 Of all undue savings, those of churchmen should be 
 regarded with the least toleration. For though wealth 
 is, morally speaking, held in trust, the trust is of a 
 more sacred nature in the case of wealth derived from 
 the revenues of the Church. Out of that hire of which 
 the laborer is worthy, he may leave to his family a 
 competent provision ; but he does not leave to them 
 
10 
 
 OF MONET. 
 
 a good name, if he leaves to them wealth which he 
 did not inherit. On this point the Church at large has 
 latterly, perhaps, stood clear. It were to be wished 
 that, for the future, it should see the best example set 
 by the highest of its dignitaries. 
 
 Thirdly : — As to the spending of money. 
 
 The art of living easily as to money, is to pitch your 
 scale of living one degree below your means. Com- 
 fort and enjoyment are more dependent upon easiness 
 in the detail of expenditure, than upon one degree's 
 difference in the scale. 
 
 Guard against false associations of pleasure with 
 expenditure, — the notion that because pleasure can 
 be purchased with money, therefore money cannot 
 be spent without enjoyment. What a thing costs a 
 man is no true measure of what it is worth to him ; 
 and yet how often is his appreciation governed by 
 no other standard, as if there were a pleasure in 
 expenditure per se. 
 
 Let yourself feel a want before you provide against 
 it. You are more assured that it is a real want ; 
 and it is worth while to feel it a little, in order to 
 feel the relief from it. 
 
 When you are undecided as to which of two 
 courses you would like best, choose the cheapest. 
 This rule will not only save money, but save also 
 a good deal of trifling indecision. 
 
OF MONEY. • 11 
 
 Too much leisure leads to expense ; because when 
 a man is in want of objects, it occurs to him that 
 they are to be had for money ; and he invents ex- 
 penditures in order to pass the time. 
 
 A thoroughly conscientious mode of regulating 
 expenditure implies much care and trouble in resist- 
 ing imposition, detecting fraud, preventing waste, and 
 doing what in you lies to guard the honesty of your 
 stewards, servants, and tradesmen, by not leading 
 them into temptation but delivering them from evil. 
 A man who should be justly sensible of the duties 
 involved in expenditure and determined to discharge 
 them, would find the burthen of them heavy ; and 
 instead of having a pleasure in expense, he would 
 probably desire as much as might be to avoid the 
 trouble of it. We sometimes hear rich men charged 
 with parsimony because they look minutely to differ- 
 ences of cost; but if they are spending their money 
 in a right spirit, the question they have to consider 
 is, not whether the sum is of importance to them- 
 selves, but whether it is right or wrong that it should 
 be given and taken. If then the acquisition of great 
 wealth involve many cares and troubles, not few are 
 those which should attend the due dispensing and 
 managing thereof, as well as the execution of the 
 various trusts belonging to the" station into which 
 great wealth will lift a man : — 
 
12 OF MONEY. 
 
 'For now know I in veray sothfastnesse 
 That in gret lordship, if I me wel avise, 
 Ther is gret servitude in sondry wise.' * 
 
 Young men, instead of undertaking the disagree- 
 able office of checking accounts, are often inclined 
 to lay out a good deal of money in the purchase of 
 ,bows and smiles, which they mistake for respect. It 
 is only the right and just payment that commands 
 real respect : and the obsequious extortioner, well 
 understanding the weakness on which he practises, 
 will often repay himself for his own servility, not 
 only in money, but in secret contempt for his dupe. 
 
 Prodigality is indeed the vice of a weak nature, 
 as avarice is of a strong one ; it comes of a weak 
 craving for those blandishments of the world which 
 are easily to be had for money, and which, when 
 obtained, are as much worse than worthless as a 
 harlot's love is worse than none. 
 
 ' Thrice happy he whose nobler thoughts despise 
 
 To make an object of so easy gains ; 
 Thrice happy he who scorns so poor a prize 
 Should be the crown of his heroic pains : 
 Thrice happy he who ne'er was born to try 
 Her frowns or smiles ; or being born, did lie 
 In his sad nurse's arms an hour or two, and die.' f 
 
 * Chaucer. Gierke's Tale, Pars 5". 
 t Quarles. 
 
OF MONEY. 13 
 
 Fourthly : — As to giving and taking.. All giving 
 is not generous ; , and the gift of a spendthrift is sel- 
 dom given in generosity ; for prodigality is, equally 
 with avarice, a selfish vice : nor can there be a more 
 spurious view of generosity than that which has been 
 often taken by sentimental comedians and novelists, 
 when they have represented it in combination with 
 recklessness and waste. He who gives only what he 
 would as readily throw away, gives without gener- 
 osity ; for the essence of generosity is in self-sacri- 
 fice. Waste, on the contrary, comes always by 
 self-indulgence; and the weakness and softness in 
 which it begins will not prevent the hard-heartedness 
 to which all selfishness tends at last. The mother 
 of Gertruda 
 
 ' In many a vigil of her last sick bed, 
 Bid her beware of spendthrifts as of men 
 That seeming in their youth not worse than light. 
 Would end not so, but with the season change ; 
 For Time, she said, which makes the serious soft, 
 Turns lightness into hardness.' 
 
 When you give, therefore, take to yourself no credit 
 for generosity, unless you deny yourself something 
 in order that you may give. , 
 
 I have known a man who was never rich, and 
 was indeed in a fair way to be ruined, make a 
 present of several hundred pounds, under what he 
 
14 OF MONET. 
 
 probably conceived to be an impulse of generous 
 friendship : but if that man had been called upon to 
 get Up an hour earlier in the morning to serve his 
 friend, I do not believe that he would have done it. 
 The fact was that he had no real value for money, 
 no real care for consequences which were not to be 
 immediate: in parting with some hundreds of pounds 
 he flattered his self-love with a show of self-sacrifice ; 
 in parting with an hour's folding of the hands to 
 sleep, the self-sacrifice would have been real, and 
 the show of it not very magnificent. 
 ; Again, do not take too much credit even for your 
 self-denial, unless it be cheerfully and genially under- 
 gone. Do not dispense your bounties only because 
 you know it to be your duty, and are afraid to 
 leave it undone : for this is one of those duties which 
 should be done more in the spirit of love than in 
 that of fear. I have knpwn persons who have lived 
 frugally, and spent a large income almost entirely 
 in acts of charity and bounty, and yet with all this 
 they had not the open hand. When the act did not 
 define itself as a charitable duty, the spirit of the 
 God-beloved giver was wanting, and they failed in 
 all those little genial liberalities towards friends, rela- 
 tives and dependents, which tend to cultivate the 
 sympathies and kindnesses of our nature quite as 
 much as charity to the poor or munificence in the 
 contribution to public objects. — '' 
 
OF MONEY. 15 
 
 The kindness from which a gift proceeds will ap-.- 
 pear in the choice as well as in the cost of it. ' I 
 have known a couple who married on ^400 a year, 
 receive three carriages as wedding gifts, they being 
 unable of course to keep one. The donors had been 
 thinking rather of what would do credit to themselves, 
 than of what would be serviceable and acceptable : 
 or they had not been thinking at all ; and if so they 
 had not been really kind ; for real kindness is thought- 
 ful. " 
 
 When gifts proceed from public bodies, communi- 
 ties, or high functionaries, in the way of testimonials, 
 and are to do honor to the party receiving them, they 
 should if possible assume a ^ shape in which they will 
 be seen without being shown. 
 
 There is often as much generosity in accepting 
 gifts as there can be in bestowing them, — the gen- 
 erosity of a nature which stands too strong in its ' 
 humility to fear humiliation, which knows its own 
 independence, and is glad to be grateful,,- '" 
 
 Upon a very different sense of generosity are some 
 of the practices of the present time founded. It is 
 not an uncommon thing amongst some persons, with 
 peculi?ir notions of doing things delicately, for con- 
 tributions to be conveyed to some decayed gentle- 
 woman under various pretences which are meant to 
 disguise, more or less transparently, the fact that she 
 
16 OF MONEY. 
 
 receives money in charity. Some wretched products 
 of her pencil, which would not command one penny 
 in the market, are privately sold for five shillings 
 a-piece, and the proceeds are paid to her as if she 
 had earned them ; or a few deplorable verses are 
 stitched together and disposed of in the same man- 
 ner. It is surely impossible to take a more unworthy 
 view of what should be the character and spirit of a 
 gentlewoman, than that which this sort of proceeding 
 implies. If a gentlewoman be in want, she should 
 say so with openness, dignity, and truth, and accept 
 in the manner that becomes a gentlewoman, in all 
 lowliness but without the slightest humiliation or 
 shame, whatever money she has occasion for and 
 others are willing to bestow. The relations between 
 her and them will in that case admit of respect on 
 the one side and gratitude on the other. But where 
 false and juggling pretences are resorted to, no wor- 
 thy or honest feeling can have place. Delicacy is a / 
 strong thing; and whether in giving or taking, let us' 
 always maintain the maxim, that what is most sound' 
 and true is most delicate. ' 
 
 There are some other ways of the world in this 
 matter of charity, which proceed, I think, upon false 
 principles and feelings, — charity dinners, charity 
 balls, charity bazaars, and so forth ; devices (not 
 even once blessed) for getting rid of distress without 
 
OF MONEY. 17 
 
 calling out any compassionate feeling in those who 
 give or any grateful feeling in those who receive. 
 God sends misery and misfortune into the world for 
 a purpose ; they are to be a discipline- for His crea- 
 tures who endure, and also for his His creatures who 
 behold them. In those they are to give occasion for 
 patience, resignation, the spiritual hopes and aspira- 
 tions which spring from pain when there comes no 
 earthly relief, or the love and gratitude which earthly 
 ministrations of relief are powerful to promote. In 
 these they are to give occasion for pity, self-sacrifice, 
 and devout and dutiful thought, subduing — for the 
 moment at least — the light, vain, and pleasure-loving 
 motions of our nature. If distress be sent into the 
 world for these ends, it is not well that it should be 
 shuffled out of the world without any of these ends 
 being accomplished ; and still less that it should be ■ 
 made the occasion of furthering ends in some meas- 
 ure opposite to these; that it should be danced away 
 at a ball, or feasted away at a dinner, or dissipated 
 at a bazaar. Better were it in.rny mind, that misery 
 should run its course with nothing but the mercy of 
 God to stay it, than that we should thus corrupt our 
 charities. 
 
 Let me not be misunderstood. Feasting and dan- 
 cing, in themselves and by themselves, I by no means 
 disparage : there is a time and a place for them ; 
 
18 OF MONET. 
 
 but things which are excellent at one time and occa- 
 sion, are a mere desecration at another. It is much 
 more easy to dese6rate our duties than to consecrate 
 our amusements ; and Tietter therefore not to mix them 
 up with each other. 
 
 Another modern mode is to raise a subscription by 
 shillings or pennies, — fixing the contribution at so low 
 a sum that nobody can care whether they give it or 
 not, and collecting it in the casual intercourse of so- 
 ciety. This is a less vitiated mode than the others, 
 being of a more negative character : but if the others 
 are corrupted charity, this is no better than careless 
 charity. 
 
 Lastly, there is a rule, in giving which is often over- 
 looked by those whose generosity is not sufficiently 
 thoughtful and severe. Generosity comes to be per- 
 verted from its uses, when it ministers to selfishness in 
 others : and it should be our care to give all needful 
 support to our neighbor in his self-denial, rather than 
 to bait a trap for his self-indulgence ; in short, to give 
 him pleasure only when it will do him good, not when 
 sacrifices on our part are the correlatives of abuses on 
 his; for he who pampers the selfishness of another, 
 does that other a moral injury which cannot be com- 
 pensated by any amount of gratification imparted to 
 him. 
 
OF MONEY. 19 
 
 ' Give thou to no man, if thou wish him well, 
 What he may not in honor's interest take ; 
 Else shah thou but befriend his faults, allied 
 Against his better with his baser self.' 
 
 Amongst the questionable acts which are done from 
 generous motives, is the not uncommon one of a son 
 and heir in tail paying the debts of a prodigal father 
 deceased, out of property which the father had no 
 right to appropriate. There may be instances in which 
 such an act would be worthy of all praise ; but perhaps 
 the cases are not few in which the effect is purely 
 pernicious, enabling a spendthrift to squander another's 
 inheritance in addition to his own ; for the frequency 
 of the practice leads money-lenders and others to cal- 
 culate on the chances. 
 
 The motive of the son is the pious and commend- 
 able one of shielding a parent's memory from disgrace. 
 But how far is this end accomplished .' The selfishness 
 which is the ground of disgrace, is the same whether 
 it be the heir or the creditor that suifers by it. The 
 heir may suffer in silence, and the sting of personal 
 damage may make the creditor cry out; but in every 
 just judgment the shame and dishonor attaching to the 
 memory of the dead man should be measured by what 
 he did when he was alive, and not by the silence or 
 outcry ensuing ; and it is hardly a high view of moral 
 assoilment, which can regard with much complacency 
 
20 OF MONET. 
 
 the mere stifling of reproaches and hushing up of a 
 parent's memory. In many cases, therefore, the weak 
 and careless, or interested and usurious creditor, should 
 be left to bear his loss when his debtor dies insolvent. 
 Still our philosophy is not to put Nature out of office ; 
 and if the prodigality of the parent have been merely 
 one of the infirmities of ' a frail good man,' and if the 
 conduct of the creditor have not been grossly culpable, 
 natural feeling should take its course, and the bless- 
 ing will be upon Shem and Japhet rather than upon 
 Ham. 
 
 Fifthly : — As to lending and borrowing. 
 
 Never lend money to a friend, unless you are satis- / 
 fied that he does wisely and well in borrowing it. j 
 Borrowing is one of the most ordinary ways in which 
 weak men sacrifice the future to the present, and 
 thence is it that the gratitude for a loan is so prover- 
 bially evanescent : for the future, becoming present in 
 its turn, will not be well pleased with those who have 
 assisted in doing it an injury. By conspiring with 
 your friend to defraud his future self, you naturally 
 incur his future displeasure. Take to heart, therefore, 
 the admonition of the ancient courtier : — 
 
 'Neither a borrower nor a lender be ; 
 For loan oft loseth both itself and friend, 
 And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.' * ' 
 
 * Shakespeare. 
 
OF MONEY. 21 
 
 To withstand solicitations for loans is often a great 
 trial of firmness ; the more especially as the pleas and 
 pretexts alleged are generally made plausible, at the 
 expense of truth ; for nothing breaks down a man's 
 truthfulness more surely than pecuniaiy embarrass- 
 ment: — 
 
 ' An unthrift was a liar from all time ; 
 Never was debtor that was not deceiver.' 
 
 The refusal which is at once the most safe from vacil- 
 lation, and perhaps as little apt to give ofience as any, 
 is the point blank refusal, without reasons assigned. 
 Acquiescence is more easily given in the decisions of 
 a strong will, than in reasons, which weak men, under 
 the bias of self-love, will always imagine themselves 
 competent to controvert. 
 
 Some men will lend money to a friend in order, as 
 it were, to purchase a right of remonstrance : but the 
 right so purchased is worth nothing. You may buy 
 the man's ears, but not his heart or his understand- 
 ing. 
 
 I have never known a debtor or a prodigal who was 
 not, in his own estimation, an injured man ; and I have 
 generally found that those who had not suffered by 
 them wer6 disposed to side with them; for it is the 
 weak who make an outcry, and it is by the outcry that 
 the world is wont to judge. They who lend money to 
 
82 OF MONEY. 
 
 1 
 
 spendthrifts should be prepared, therefore, to suffer in 
 their reputation as well as in their purse. Let us learn 
 from the Son of Sirach: — ' Many, when a, thing was 
 lent them, reckoned it to be found, and put them to 
 trouble that helped them. Till he halh received he 
 will kiss a man's hand ; and for his neighbor's money 
 he will speak submissly \ but when he should repay, 
 he will prolong the time, and return words of grief, 
 and complain of the time. If he prevail he shall 
 hardly receive the half, and he will count as if he had 
 found it ; if not, he hath deprived him of his money, 
 and he hath gotten him an ene^ny without cause : he 
 payeth him with cursing and railings, and for honor he 
 will pay him with disgrace.' 
 
 It is a common reproach with which mankind 
 assails mankind, that those who fall into poverty are 
 forsaken by their friends : — 
 
 ' Ay, quoth Jacques, 
 Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens ;, 
 'Tis just the fashion : wherefore do you look 
 Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there ? ' * 
 
 But before the friends of the poor be condemned, it 
 would be well to inquire whether their poverty have 
 been honestly come by; and I believe it would very 
 rarely be found that a person in a fair condition of 
 
 * ' As You Like It,' Act ii. Scene 1. 
 
OF MONEY. 23 
 
 life is allowed to sink unassisted into extreme indi- 
 gence without some serious fault and offence : and 
 the person having so sunk, it will bev found to be 
 still more rarely the case that the pressure of poverty- 
 is not too strong for his character. It is when the 
 character has given way, that poverty is deserted : 
 for pity and aifection divorced from respect, lose the 
 main element of their strength and permanency. 
 
 The ordinary course of things, then, is as follows: 
 — A becoming embarrassed, through some (perhaps 
 venial) imprudence, is kindly assisted by his friends, 
 B, C, and D; who, however, do not altogether ap- 
 prove his conduct, but think it would be ungenerous 
 in them, under the protection of the favors they are 
 conferring, to assail him with reproaches. So far 
 all goes smoothly between A on the one hand, and 
 B, C, D on the other. But A, having, by the loans 
 he has received, staved off any immediate conse- 
 quences of his imprudence, is under a rather stronger 
 temptation than before to forego the severe self-denial 
 which would set him right again. He has now broken 
 the ice in the matter of asking favors : he has in- 
 curred whatever humiliation belongs to it ; and having 
 begged once, it costs him comparatively little to beg 
 again. This process of begging and borrowing goes 
 on therefore, becoming continually more frequent and 
 less efficacious; and as the borrower grows less and 
 
24 OF MONET. 
 
 less scrupulous, he nourishes his pride (the ordinary 
 refuge of those who lose their independence) and 
 resents every repulse as an insult. B, C, and D 
 then discover that they are not to be thanked for 
 vyhat they have lent, but rather reproached for not 
 lending more and more ; ' whereupon they withdraw 
 their friendship ; and those who ignorantly look on, 
 or perhaps hear the story of A, whilst B, C, and D 
 are silent out of consideration for him, make remarks 
 on inconstancy in friendship and the manner in which 
 men are forsaken in their adversity and distress. 
 
 The desertion by friends, however well merited, 
 leads the embarrassed man to consider himself as a 
 castaway, and throw himself into still more reckless 
 and shameless courses ; and on the part of men in 
 this condition there is sometirties seen a perfect in- 
 fatuation of extravagance, which seems to proceed 
 from the delusions of a disordered mind and a sort 
 of fascination in ruin. Such men come to have a 
 repugnance to spare expense, because it brings the- 
 feeling of their difficulties home to them ; and a 
 relief in profuseness, because it seems for the mo- 
 ment to renounce the very notion of embarrassment. 
 The end may be short of the gallows, (for in our 
 days the gallows has fallen out of favor,) but it will 
 scarcely be short of a punishment worse than death : 
 for men will not tolerate in its necessary conse- 
 
OF MONEY. 25 
 
 quences that to which they are very indulgent in its 
 inchoation ; and the ' unfortunate debtor ' who was 
 cockered with compassion whilst he was in that stage 
 of his existence, is regarded with just indignation 
 and abhorrence when he has passed into that of the 
 desperate outcast : though it may be as much in the 
 course of nature that the one stage should follow the 
 other, as that a tadpole, if he lives, should grow to 
 be a toad. 
 
 Creditors have always been an .obnoxious people, 
 and in divers times , and countries the laws which 
 have awarded imprisonment for insolvent debt have 
 shared in their unpopularity. But when we trace 
 debt in its consequences and look to all the social 
 evils which have their root in it, and when we con- 
 sider that in moral as well as in physical therapeutics, 
 the principle of withstanding commencements is all- 
 important, we may well, I think, bring ourselves to 
 believe that insolvent debt should be regarded as ; 
 presumably criminal, and unless proved to be other- 
 wise, should fall within the visitations of penal law. 
 
 There remains only to be considered. 
 
 Sixthly : — The subject of iequeathing : and some 
 topics which might have fallen under this head have 
 been anticipated in treating of motives for saving. 
 
 To make a will in one way or another is of course 
 the duty of every person whose heir-at-law is not the 
 
26 OF MONET. 
 
 proper inheritor of all he possesses : and unless where 
 there is some just cause for setting them aside, ex- 
 pectations generated by the customs of the world are 
 sufficient to establish a moral right to inherit and to 
 impose a corresponding obligation to bequeath. For 
 custom may be presumed, in the absence of any 
 reasons to the contrary, to have grown out of some 
 natural fitness ; and at all events it will have brought 
 about an amount of adaptation which is often suffi- 
 cient, as regards individual cases, to make a fitness 
 where there was none. Unless in exceptional in- 
 stances, therefore, in which special circumstances are 
 of an overruling force, the disappointment of expec- 
 tations growing out of custom is not to be inflicted 
 without some very strong and solid reasons for 
 believing that the custom needs to be reformed. If 
 there be such reasons, by all means let the custom 
 be disregarded, all expectations to the contrary not- 
 withstanding — 
 
 ' What custom wills, in all things should we do 't, 
 The dust on antique time would lie unswept, 
 And mountainous error be too highly heaped 
 For truth to overpeer.' * 
 
 But the presumption should be always held to be in 
 favor of custom, and he who departs from it without 
 
 * ' Coriolanus,' Act ii. Scene 3. 
 
OF MONET. 27 
 
 the plea of special circumstances, should be able to 
 find in himself a competency to correct the errors 
 of mankind. 
 
 If it be not well for. the natural or customary 
 heirs that they should be disappointed, neither ds it 
 good for those to whom an inheritance is diverted, 
 that wealth should come upon them by surprise. 
 Sudden and unexpected accessions of wealth seldom 
 promote the happiness of those to whom they accrue ; 
 and they are for the most part morally injurious ; 
 especially when they accrue by undue deprivation 
 of another. 
 
 But some part of the property of most people, 
 and a large part, or ev6n the whole of the property 
 of some people, may not be the subject of just or 
 natural expectations on the part of customary heirs ; 
 and in respect of such property there is a great 
 liberty of judgment on the part of the testator, 
 though it is to be a grave and responsible, not a 
 capricious liberty. The testator has to consider to 
 whom the property will bring a real increase of 
 enjoyment without increase of temptation ; and in 
 whose hands it is likely most to promote the happi- 
 ness of others. In general the rule of judgment 
 should he to avoid lifting people out of one station 
 into another ; and to aim at making such moderate 
 additions to moderate fortunes in careful hands as 
 
28 OF MONET. 
 
 may not disturb the proportion of property to station, 
 
 — or still better, may rectify any disproportion, and 
 enable those who are living with a difficult frugality 
 to live with a free frugality. 
 
 This rule is not, I fear, very generally regarded; 
 for mere rectitude, and the observance of measures 
 and proportions, does not much lay hold of the minds 
 of men. On the contrary, there is a general dispo- 
 sition to add to anything which affects the imagination 
 by its magnitude ; and there is also in some people 
 a sort of gloating over great wealth, which infects 
 them with a propensity to feed a bloated fortune. 
 Jacques took note of this when he saw the deer 
 that was weeping in ' the needless stream : ' — 
 
 ' Thou mak'st a testament 
 As worldings do, giving thy sum of more 
 To that which had too much.' * 
 
 Thus it is that in the most solemn acts which men 
 have to perform in the management of their money 
 
 — in those too from which selfish ends seem most 
 removed — they will often appear to be as little 
 sensible of moral motives and righteous responsibili- 
 ties as in any other transactions ; and even a testator 
 jamjam moriturus will dictate his will with a sort of 
 posthumous cupidity, and seem to desire that his 
 worldliness should live after him. 
 
 * ' As You Like It,' Act ii. Scene 1 i 
 
OF HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 I PROPOSE to treat of these jointly, because I 
 regard them as inseparably connected in life. We 
 shall find, I think, on looking below the surface, 
 that Humility is the true mother and nurse of In- 
 dependence ; and that Pride, which is so often sup- 
 posed to stand to her in that relation, is, in reality, 
 the step-mother, by whom is wrought — novercalibus 
 odiis — the very destruction and ruin of Indepen- 
 dence. 
 
 For pride has a perpetual reference to the esti- 
 mation in which we are holden by others ; fear of 
 opinion is of the essence of it ; and with this fear 
 upon us it is impossible that we should be indepen- 
 dent. The proud man is of all men the most vul- 
 nerable ; and as there is nothing that rankles and 
 festers more than wounded pride, he has much cause 
 for fear. Pride, therefore — whether active or pas- 
 sive — whether it goes forth to claim tho deference 
 of mankind, or secludes itself from tho danger of 
 
30 OF HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 their disrespect — has always much at stake, and 
 leads a life of caution and solicitude. Humility, on 
 the contrary, has no personal objects, and leads its 
 life in 'the service which is perfect freedom.' 
 
 An uneasy, jealous, or rebellious feeling in regard 
 to ranks and degrees, argues this want of indepen- 
 dence through defect of humility. It is the feeling of 
 a man who makes too much account of such things. 
 A begrudging of rank and station, and refusal of such 
 deference as the customs of the world have conceded 
 to them, will generally be found to proceed {ropn the 
 man who secretly overvalues them, and who, if him- 
 self in possession of them, would stretch his pre- 
 tensions too far. For plebeian pride and aristocratic 
 pride issue from one and the same source in human 
 nature. An illiberal self-love is at the bottom . of 
 both. 
 
 When low-born men of genius, like Burns the poet, 
 maintain the superiority of intrinsic worth to adventi- 
 tioiis distinction, we can readily go along with them 
 so far : but when they reject the claims of social rank 
 and condition in a spirit of defiance and resentment, 
 as if suffering a personal injury, we may very well 
 question whether they have not missed of the inde- 
 pendence at which they aimed : for had their inde- 
 pendence been genuine, they would have felt that all 
 they possessed which was valuable was inalienable ; 
 
OF HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 31 
 
 and having nothing to lose by the social superiority 
 of the better born, they would have made them vi'el- 
 come to it, as being perhaps a not inequitabfe com- 
 pensation for the comparatively small share bestovifed 
 on theiTi of intellectual gifts and abilities. 
 
 If equality be vifhat these men of independence 
 would contend for, it can only be had (if at all) by 
 the balance of what is adventitious : for natural equal- 
 ity there is none. If personal merit be what they 
 regard, this, at least, will not found any claim for 
 intellectual endowments to be preferred to accidents 
 of station. There is no more of personal merit in a 
 great intellect than in a great estate. It is the use 
 which is made of the one and of the other, which 
 should found the claim to respect ; and the man who 
 has it at heart to make the best use he can of either, 
 will not be much occupied with them as a means of 
 commanding respect. Thus it is that respect is com- 
 monly least due, as well as least willingly accorded, 
 where it is arrogated most, and that independence is 
 hardly possessed where it is much insisted on. ' The 
 proud man,' says St. Jerome, ' (who is the poor man,) 
 braggeth outwardly, but beggeth inwardly.' The 
 humble man, who thinks little of his independence, 
 is the man who is strdng in it ; and he who is not 
 solicitous of respect will commonly meet with as much 
 as he has occasion for. ' Who calls ? ' says the old 
 
32 OF HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 shepherd in ' As You Like it ; ' ' Your betters,' is the 
 insolent answer : and what is the shepherd's rejoinder ? 
 ' Else are they very wretched.' By what retort, re- 
 prisal, or repartee, could it have been made half so 
 manifest that the insult had lighted upon armor of 
 proof? Such is the invincible independence of hu- 
 mility. 
 
 The declaration of our Saviour that the meek shall 
 inherit the earth, may be understood, I think, as veri- 
 fied in the very nature and attributes of meekness. 
 The dross of the earth the meek do not inherit ; the 
 damnosa hareditas of the earth's pomps and vanities 
 descends to others : but all the true enjoyments, the 
 wisdom, love, peace, and independence, which earth 
 can bestow, are assured to the meek as inherent in 
 their meekness. "Tis in ourselves that we are thus 
 or thus.' It depends on our own hearts to cast off 
 the bondage of pride with all its chains and sores, 
 and by meekness to possess the earth. ' For this pos- 
 session comes not by observation, and saying ' Lo ! 
 here, or Lo ! there : ' * But as the Kingdom of God 
 is within us, so also is the inheritance of the Earth : 
 
 'How much that Genius boasts as her's 
 
 And fancies her's alone, 
 On you, Meek Spirits, Faith confers ! 
 The proud have further gone, 
 
 * Luke xvii. 21. 
 
OF HTTMIIilTY AND INDEPENDENCE. 33 
 
 Perhaps, through life's deep maze, but you 
 Alone possess the labyrinth's clue. 
 
 ' To you the costliest spoils of thought, 
 
 "Wisdom, unclaimed, yields up ; 
 To you the far-sought pearl is brought. 
 
 And melted in your "tup ; 
 To you her nard and myrrh she brings, 
 Like orient gifts to infant kings. 
 
 ' The single eye alone can see 
 
 All truths around us thrown. 
 In their eternal unity; 
 
 The humble ear alone 
 Has room to hold, and time to prize. 
 The sweetness of life's harmonies.' * 
 
 If distinctions of rank, order, and degree were of 
 no other use in the world, they might be desired fot 
 the exercise which they give to a generous humility, 
 on the part of those who have them and of those 
 who have them not. The inequahty of relation should 
 cultivate this virtue on both sides; those who have 
 the superiority being disposed to prize it at no more 
 than its worth ; -those who have it not, being glad to 
 recognise superiority in others, even in this its , least 
 substantial form — 
 
 ' Aubrey De Vere ; WaldShseS, and other Poems, p. 165. 
 3 
 
34 OF.HTMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 ' Cloth of gold, be not too nice, 
 Though thou be matched with cloth of frieze ; 
 Cloth of frieze, be not too bold, 
 Though thou be matched with cloth of gold.' * 
 
 Here are two humilities enjoined ; that which in a 
 superior forgets superiority — that which in an infe- 
 rior remembers inferiority : and neither could have 
 place without difference of rank and degree. 
 
 When the social distinctions indicate power and a 
 governing authority, the relations between the parties 
 are still more pregnant with occasions for the exercise 
 of humility. From humility there will result, not 
 only on the one side a generous care and consideration 
 in the use of power, but likewise, on the other, what 
 may be called a generous submission. For though 
 the world may be more aware of generosity shown 
 in the exercise of power, there is a generosity also in 
 the spirit of obedience, when it is cordial, willing, and 
 free ; and this is the case only when the nature is 
 humble. 
 
 It is indeed chiefly in our intercourse with equals 
 and superiors that our humility is put to the proof. 
 When the ' Serous Servorum ' at Rome washes, ac- 
 cording to annual usage, the feet of some poor pil- 
 grims, the ceremony, if it be held to typify humility, 
 
 • Old Saw. 
 
OF HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 35 
 
 should at the same time be understood to be typical of 
 the easiest of all humilities. If the same personage 
 were to hold the stirrup of an emperor, the proceeding 
 would be typical of another degree of humility, — and 
 one to which the Potentates of the Earth could not 
 bear witness in his predecessors. Many people are 
 gentle and forbearing with those placed tinder them, 
 but proud and quarrelsome in their dealings with those 
 above them. Where humility is wanting, there may 
 be much submission without generosity, or, on the 
 other hand, much resistance without an independent 
 spirit. The disposition to submit to authority unduly, 
 and where the interests of others or our own are un- 
 justly injured, will never arise out of humility ; it will 
 always arise out of those worldly anxieties from which 
 the humble heart is exempt. The disposition to resist 
 authority from personal feelings, where no duty dic- 
 tates the resistance, will never proceed from a genuine 
 spirit of independence ; for the heart is not indepen- 
 dent which is engaged in a struggle for personal ob- 
 jects. And whether submitting or resisting, humitity 
 and independence will still be found to go together ; 
 but they will for the most part be found to be favored 
 by submission; for the pride of the human heart, 
 which is commonly called up by resistance even when 
 not undue, is in like manner abated by submission, 
 even when carried too far ; and wherever pride is 
 
36 OF HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 abated-, the heart is raised and purified and made 
 free. Elevation, therefore, is chiefly to be found in 
 submission — ' Govern them and lift them up.' 
 
 JEumility, like most other virtues, has its credit a 
 good deal shaken by the number of counterfeits that 
 are abroad. Amongst the false humilities by which 
 the world is most flattered and beguiled, is that of the 
 professor in this kind who shrinks from all censure 
 and reprobation of what is evilj under cover of the 
 text, ' Judge not lest ye be judged ; ' as if it were the 
 intent of that text, not to warn us against rash, pre- 
 sumptuous and uncharitable judgments, but absolutely* 
 to forbid our taking account of the distinction between 
 right and wrong. ' It is not for us to judge our broth- 
 er,' says the humilitarian of this way of thinking ; 
 ' we know not how he may have been tempted ; per- 
 haps he was bom with stronger passions than other 
 people ; it may have been that he was ill brought up ; 
 peradventure he was thrown amongst evil associates: 
 we ourselves, had we been placed in the same cir- 
 cumstances, might have been in like manner led 
 astray.' Such are the false charities of a false and 
 popular humility. If we are to excuse all the moral 
 evil that we can account for, and abstain from judging 
 all of which \ife can suppose that there is some adequate 
 explanation, where are we to stop in our absolutions ? 
 Whatever villany ei^ists in the world is compounded 
 
OF HTTMILITY AND INIIEPENDENCE. 37 
 
 of wha^- is inborn and what comes by circumstance : 
 there is nothing so base or detestable but it is the 
 consequence of some adequate cause ; and if we are 
 to rnake allowances for all but causeless wickedness, 
 there is an end of condemnation. 
 
 The man of true humility, oH the contrary, will not 
 spare the vices and errors of his fellow-creatures, any 
 more than he would his o\yn ; he will exercise man- 
 fully, and without fear or favor, those judicial functions 
 which God has committed, in some greater or less 
 degree, to every member of the human community; 
 but he will come to the task, on serious occasions, 
 npt lightly or unawed, but playing to have ' a right 
 judgment in all things ; ' and whilst exercising that 
 judgment in no spirit of compromise or evasion, he 
 will fepl that to judge his brother is a duty and not a 
 privilege ; and he will judge him in sorrow, humbled 
 by the contemplation of that "fallen nature of which he 
 is himself part and parcel. 
 
 There is a current and a natural opinion, that a man 
 has no right to censure in others a fault with which he 
 is himself chargeable. But even this limitation is 
 founded, I think, upon the se^pe erroneous notion, of 
 moral censure being an honorable privilege instead pf 
 a responsible function, a franchise instead of a due. 
 No faults are better known and understood by us than 
 those whereof, we have ourselves been guilty ; none, 
 
38 OF EUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 surely, should be so personally obnoxious to us as 
 those by which we have ourselves been defiled and de- 
 graded : and may we not, therefore, be expected to 
 be quick in perceiving them, and to regard them with 
 a peculiar bitterness, rather than to overlook them in 
 others ? I would answer, assuredly yes : but always 
 with this proviso — that to bitterness of censure should 
 be added confession and humiliation and the bitterness 
 of personal shame and contrition. Without this the 
 censure is not warrantable, because it is not founded 
 upon a genuine moral sense ; it is not, indeed, sincere : 
 for though the offence may be worthy of all disgust 
 and abhorrence, that abhorrence and disgust cannot 
 be really felt by those who have committed the like 
 offence themselves without shame or repentance. 
 
 Besides the false humility under cover of which we 
 desert the duty of censuring our fellow-creatures, there 
 are others by which we evade or pervert that of cen- 
 suring ourselves. The most common of the spurious 
 humilities of this kind, is that by which a general lan- 
 guage of self-disparagement is substituted for a dis- 
 tinct discernment and specific acknowledgment of our 
 real faults. The humble individual of this class will 
 declare himself to be very incontestably a miserable 
 sinner ; but at the same time there is no particular 
 fault or error that can be imputed to him from which 
 he will not find himself to be happily exempt. Each 
 
OF HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 39 
 
 item is severally denied ; and the acknowledgment of 
 general sinfulness turns out to have been an unmeaning 
 abstraction — a sum total of ciphers. It is not thus 
 that the Devil makes up his accounts. 
 
 Another way is to confess faults from which we are 
 tolerably free, being perhaps chargeable with no larger 
 share of them than is common to humanity, whilst we 
 pass over the sins which are more peculiarly and abun- 
 dantly our own. Real humility will not teach us any 
 undue severity, but truthfulness in self-judgment. ' My 
 Son, glorify thy soul in meekness, and give it honor 
 according to the dignity thereof.' * For undue self- 
 abasement and self-distrust will impair the strength 
 and independence of the mind, which, if accustomed 
 to have a just satisfaction with itself where it may, will 
 the better bear to probe itself, and will lay itself open 
 with the more fortitude to intimations of its weakness 
 on points in which it stands truly in need of correction. 
 No humility is thoroughly sound which is not thor- 
 oughly truthful. The man who brings misdirected or 
 inflated accusations against himself, does so in a false 
 humility, and will probably be found to indemnify him- 
 self on one side or another. Either he takes a pride 
 in his supposed humility ; or escaping in his self-con- 
 demnations from the darker into the lighter shades of 
 
 * Ecclesiasticus, x. 28. 
 
40 OF UXTMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 tis life and nature, he plays at hide-and-seek with his 
 conscience. 
 
 And true humility, being a wise virtue, will deal 
 more in self-examination and secret coptridon than in 
 confession. For confession is often a mere luxury of 
 the conscience, — used as the epicures of ancient 
 Rome would use an emetic and a warm bath before 
 they sat down to a feast. It is often also a very snare 
 to the maker of it, and a delusion practised on the 
 party to whom it is made. For, first, the faults may 
 be such as words will not adequately explain : sec- 
 ondly, the plea of 'guilty' phiikes judgment in her 
 seat : thirdly, the indulgence shown to confession 
 might be better bestowed on the shame which coil- 
 ceals ; for this tends to correction, whereas confession 
 will many times stand instead of penitence to the 
 wrong-doer; and sometimes even a sorrowful peni- 
 tence stands in the place of amendment, and is washed 
 away in its own tears. 
 
 There is a frivolous practice of confession, much 
 used in certain classes of society, by which young 
 ladies or others, in the earlier moments of a friend- 
 ship, take out a license to talk of themselves. In the 
 confessionals of the ball-room, much superfluity of 
 naughtiness is mutually disclosed, by persons who 
 might have been better employed in dancing than in 
 confessing. This needs not to be very severely no- 
 
OF HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 41 
 
 ticed ; yet it points to an infirmity against which it may 
 be well to be on our guard ; and when the occasion is 
 sufficiently serious, we should take care that our con- 
 fessions are free from any egotistical taint. 
 
 Of all false humilities, the most false is to be found 
 in that meeting of extremes wherein humility is cor- 
 rupted into pride. John Wesley, when he was de- 
 sirous to fortify his followers against ridicule, taught 
 them to court it. ' God forbid,' said he, ' that we should 
 not be the laughing-stock of mankind ! ' But it is 
 through pride, and not in humility, that any man will 
 desire to be a laughing-stock.- And though it may 
 seem at first sight that he has attained to an indepen- 
 dence of mankind when he can brave their laughter, 
 yet this is a fallacious appearance : it will be found 
 that in so far as his humility was corrupted, his inde- 
 pendence was undermined ; and whilst courting the 
 ridicule of the world, he is in reality courting the 
 admiration and applause of his party or sect, or fear- 
 ing their rebuke. This is the dependence into which 
 he has fallen, and there is probably no slavery of the 
 heart which is comparable to that of sectarian pride. 
 Moreover, Mr. Wesley's followers doubtless deemed 
 that the laughers were in danger of hell-fire. Where 
 then was their charity when they desired to be laughed 
 at by all mankind ? Or if (without desiring it) they 
 deem mankind, themselves only excepted, to be in so 
 
42 OF HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 reprobate a state, that the religious must needs be a 
 laughing-stock, — was this their humility ? I wish to 
 speak of Mr. Wesley with respect, not to say rever- 
 ence : but in this instance I think that his appeal was 
 made to a temper of mind in his followers which was 
 nQt purely Christian. It 'is not the meek who will 
 throw out this sort of challenge and defiance : and it is 
 pride, and not humility, which we shall find to lie 
 at the bottom of any such ostentatious self abase- 
 ment — 
 
 'For Pride, 
 Which is the Devil's toasting-fork, doth toast 
 Him brownest that his whiteness vaunteth most.' 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 ' What do you think of marriage ? ' says the Duch- 
 ess of Malfy in Webster's play, and Antonio answers, 
 
 ' I take it as those that deny purgatory ; 
 It locally contains or heaven or hell ; 
 There is no third place in it.' 
 
 When I was young and inexperienced in wives, I 
 did not take the same view of marriage which Antonio 
 took. I used to say that there were two kinds of mar- 
 riages, with either of which a man might be content ; 
 the one 'the incorporate existence marriage,' the other 
 ' the pleasant additament marriage.' For I thought 
 that if a man could not command a marriage by which 
 all interests would be deepened, all objects exalted, 
 rewards and forfeitures doubled and far more than 
 doubled, and all the comparatives of life turned into 
 superlatives, then there remained, nevertheless, a very 
 agreeable kind of resource, — a marriage, that is, in 
 which one might live one's own substantive life with 
 the additional embellishment of some graceful, simple, 
 
44 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 gay, easy-hearted creature, who would lie light upon 
 the surface of one's being, be at hand whenever soli- 
 tude and serious pursuits had become irksome, and 
 never be in the way when she is not wanted. Visions 
 these are ; merely dreams of our Epicurean youth. 
 There is no such wife, and marriage is what Antonio 
 took it to be. 
 
 And marriage being thus the highest stake on this 
 side the grave, it seems strange that men should be 
 so hasty in the choice of a wife as they sometimes 
 are ; for if we look about us at those marriages in 
 which men and women have chosen for themselves, 
 we shall find that even where there has been'no abso- 
 lute passion to expedite the business, the choice has 
 not always been preceded by much deliberation. Per- 
 haps it is owing to that very fact of the decision being 
 so critical, that it is often a little hurried ; for when 
 great interests are depending, we deliberate with an 
 anxiety to avoid error which presently becomes too 
 painful to be endured, and perhaps, also, too disturbing 
 to be successful ; and it is at some crises of their 
 fortunes that men in all times have been disposed to 
 commit them to Providence, under vEirious forms of 
 reliance, some religious, others superstitious. We are 
 most sensible of the fallibility of human judgment in 
 those matters in which it is most essential to judge 
 well, and to the irreligious man, fate, destiny, chance. 
 
OF CHOICE IN MAEEIAGE. 45 
 
 sortilege, the stars — anything seems more trustwor- 
 thy ; whilst he who is not irreligious knows that what 
 is done in faith will be justified in the fruits, be they 
 sweet or bitter. The maid who * was married one 
 morning as she went into the garden for parsley to 
 stuff a rabbit,' might have nothing to fear in marriage 
 if she was one to whom all things work together for 
 good. 
 
 Men who know not in what to put trust will often 
 fall into the fatal error of supposing that some of the 
 graver consequences of marriage are to be escaped 
 by concubinage, — a supposition from which, if there 
 be no better monitor at hand, eVen the wisdom of this 
 world might withhold them. Unless they be utterly 
 heartless and worthless, they will find that the looser 
 tie is not the lighter. Mistresses, if they have any 
 hold on the affections, are generally more exacting 
 than wives; and with reason, for there will naturally 
 be the most assertion of claims where there is the 
 least ground for confidence. The claims strengthen 
 with time, whilst the qualities for which mistresses are 
 commonly chosen, and on which they depend for their 
 charm, are proverbially perishable. Beauty and the 
 vivacities of youth fall away as soon from the con- 
 cubine as if she were a wife ; domestic cares and 
 jealousies will accrue as readily in the one case as in 
 the other ; and unless generosity be out of the ques- 
 
46 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 tion, and a man have so ' corrupted his compassions,' 
 as to have deliberately determined to keep a woman's 
 affections until they should involve the cares naturally 
 belonging to the affections and then to cast them off, 
 there is no one of the burthens, vexations, dues and 
 responsibilities incident to marriage, which will not be 
 felt with tenfold force in concubinage. Such are the 
 miscalculations of selfishness. A man thinks that he 
 has hung a trinket round his neck, and behold ! it is 
 a millstone. 
 
 Whilst one man will be hurried into a marriage 
 from the very painfulness of perplexity, another will 
 live and die a bachelor out of mere indecision. The 
 latter case is the more rare, and requires a peculiar 
 serenity of temper and strength of irresolution. But 
 it can occur. And the cases occur very frequently in 
 which a man misses, through indecision, the opportu- 
 nity of making the marriage he would have liked best, 
 and then, resolving to be indecisive no more, takes 
 a wrong decision. So that, having regard to the 
 various sources from which error proceeds in such 
 matters, it may perhaps be reasonably doubted wheth- 
 er a passion, with all its impetuosities and illusions, 
 affords, comparatively speaking, an ill guidance ; and 
 whether those who have surrendered to it might not 
 have been as much misled, had they proposed to 
 themselves the task of making a calm and judicious 
 choice. 
 
OF CHOICE IN MAEEIAGE. 47 
 
 And indeed the seasonable time for the exercise of 
 prudence, is not so much in choosing a wife or a 
 husband, as in ohoosing with whom you will so asso- 
 ciate as to risk the engendering of a passion. Even 
 in this choice the prudence should not be cold-blooded ; 
 for a cold-blooded choice of associates is likely to lead 
 to a cold-blooded marriage. With the leanings and 
 leaps of the heart in the new acquaintanceships of the 
 young, there should be just so much prudence pre- 
 siding, as will turn them away from what there is 
 reasonable ground for believing to be false, selfish, 
 weak or vicious. There should be thus much and 
 no more. If the taste and fancy are resisted upon 
 grounds less substantial than these, they are resisted 
 by what is less worthy to prevail than they ; for the 
 taste and fancy are by no means of small account — 
 they are indeed of all but paramount importance — 
 in human life and intercourse. The taste lies deep 
 in our nature, and strikes the key-note with which 
 outward circumstance is to harmonize. 
 
 But if the taste be, in truth, a matter of such 
 import and ascendancy in our life, it follows that we 
 are deeply responsible for the formation of it. It is, 
 like everything else in us, partly of Nature's fashion- 
 ing, partly of our own ; and though it is to rest upon 
 the foundation of our natural dispositions, it is to be 
 built, not like a baby-house at our pleasure, but ac- 
 
48 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 cording to the laws and m&del of the great Architect, 
 like a temple. If there can be little that is genial or 
 cordial in our life, married or unmarried, unless the 
 taste be indulged, for that very reason it behoves us 
 so to raise and purify the taste, as to be enabled to 
 give way to it in safety and innocence — not certainly 
 with a total abandonment or an absolute affiance — 
 nothing short of perfection in taste could justify that — 
 but with a trust proportioned to the degree of purity 
 and elevation which has been attained. According 
 to this measure our habitual propensities will be to- 
 wards what is good; whilst the habit of guarding and 
 correcting the taste will prevail to some extent even 
 over its more impassioned movements ; and if^we are 
 carried away by our fancy, we shall yet know whither 
 we are going, and give some guidance as well as take 
 some. ^ 
 
 Wealth and worldly considerations have a good deal 
 to do with the choice made in most marriages ; and 
 though the taste which is under these influences will 
 not be supposed to be very high, j'et if it cannot be 
 elevated, better that a man should take the lower 
 course to whidi it points, than aim at what is above 
 him. If his mind be habitually involved in worldly 
 interests and pursuits, he has no right to suppose that 
 by stepping aside from them on a single occasion, 
 even though it be the most important of all occasions, 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 49 
 
 he can place himself in a different order of beings, 
 or bring himself into harmony with what is high and 
 free. What he has to do is to emancipate his mind 
 if he can ; but if not, to marry according to the con- 
 ditions of his slavery. For if he marries from a mere 
 impulse of his higher mind, whilst he is still in habitual 
 subjection to the lower, the impulse will pass away, 
 whilst the habit stands fast, and the man will find that 
 he has introduced a discord into his life, or rather 
 that he has composed it in the wrong key. The man 
 who marries for money has one advantage over those 
 who marry for other considerations ; he can know 
 what he gets ; if he can feed upon husks and draff, 
 it is competent to him to see that his trough is filled. 
 
 But if marrying for money is to be justified only 
 in the case of those unhappy persons who are fit for 
 nothing better, it does not follow that mariying without 
 money is to be justified in others, — marrying, that is, 
 without the possession or the fair prospect of a com- 
 petency suited to their condition in life. What is to 
 constitute such a competency, depends in a great 
 measure on the prudence, independence, and strength 
 in self-denial of the piirties. Those -who resolve to 
 many on very small means, against the wishes of. 
 their relatives and friends, shouM always consider 
 that they are setting up a claim to an extraordinary- 
 share of these excellent virtues; and they should not 
 4 
 
50 
 
 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 expect their claim to be readily acknowledged unless 
 it be founded, not merely on good intentions, but on 
 actual savings, on ascertained facts of frugality and 
 habits of self-sacrifice. Without such habits, they may 
 intend and profess what they please as to indepen- 
 dence and self-reliance : the result wUl be, that they 
 have indulged their unworldly inclinations at the ex- 
 pense of others. 
 
 Whether money have much to do with a marriage 
 or little, proper marriage settlements are, of great 
 importance. And whether or not they be insisted 
 on by the woman's friends, no man should consider 
 that his individual probity or good intentions are to 
 stand instead of what is just and right upon general 
 principles, or that it can be otherwise than a disgrace 
 to him to marry without divesting himself of all power 
 which is not right .and just that he should possess. 
 Many are the cases in which the settled money comes 
 to be the only stay of the family, and this in itself is 
 a strong reason for maintaining the principle of just 
 marriage settlements ; but there are objects other than 
 pecuniary and prudential, which are effected by it. 
 The negotiations and transactions connected with 
 marriage settlements are eminently useful, as search- 
 ing character and testing affection, before an irrevo- 
 cable step be taken. 
 
 Eank and station have an influence which, though 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 51 
 
 not very high or worthy, is to be regarded, I think, as 
 somewhat less bare and poor than motives which are 
 merely mercenary. There is something in differences 
 of rank and degree which affects the imagination, as 
 everything does which is unfamiliar ; and an imagina- 
 tive person is perhaps more apt to fall in love with 
 what is either above him or below him in station, than 
 with what is on a dead level with him. This, however 
 natural, should be looked upon as a misdirection of the 
 fancy ; for any extreme inequality of station will com- 
 monly lead to sore trials in marriage. 
 
 Beauty, in itself and of itself, has, I believe, less 
 power in determining matrimoniar choice, than at first 
 sight it might seem natural that it should have. The 
 charm of mere physical and corporeal beauty is per- 
 haps too open and immediate to involve consequences ; 
 its first effect is too strong in proportion to its further 
 effects : for the imagination of man wishes to feel that 
 it has something to come to ; and there is a charm 
 more insidiously winning in that which turns to beauty 
 as you advance, than in that which declares itself as 
 beauty from the first. 
 
 Lord Bacon' has said that ' There is no excellent 
 beauty without some strangeness in the proportion ; ' 
 from which I infer that the beauty which had indi- 
 viduality was alone excellent in his eyes ; and I 
 believe this to be so far prevalent amongst mankind, 
 
52 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 that whilst the name of beauty is given to perfection 
 of symmetry, the power of beauty is felt in a slight 
 deviation from it — '■ just sufficient to individualize ' 
 without impairing. It is this peculiarity, this ' some 
 strangeness,' which lays hold of the imagination. 
 
 But even when such a hold has been taken, the first 
 feelings are those of admiration rather than love, and 
 there must be something in the beauty indicating 
 something besides the beauty, in order that the admi- 
 ration may pass into love. If other forces are behind, 
 admiration is an excellent herald and harbinger of 
 love ; if not, admiration will not of itself constitute 
 love ; indeed, where the passion of love has attained 
 to its full force, admiration will sometimes be almost 
 lost and absorbed : ' She loved too deeply to admire,' 
 said one lady writing of another some thirty years 
 ago. 
 
 It is commonly said that beauty, howsoever enchant- 
 ing before marriage, becomes a matter of indifference 
 after. But if the ,beauty be of that quality which not 
 only attracts admiration, but helps to deepen it into 
 love, I am not one of those who think that what 
 charmed the lover is forthwith to be lost upon the 
 husband. It is doubtless a question of kind. There 
 may be much beauty, eminent in its way, which is but 
 ' the perfume and suppliance of a minute ; ' but there 
 exists also a species and quality of beauty, the effect 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 53 
 
 whereof (as I conceive) it would not be possible for 
 daily familiarity to deaden, and the power whereof / 
 may be expected to last as long as the beauty itself 
 lasts, and perhaps much longer. Pictures aijd statues ] 
 wrought by the more spiritual masters of art, do not 
 satiate the sense ; and if in that beauty which is of 
 art's creation, when the art is of the highest order, 
 there is this cleaving and abiding power, we are not 
 to doubt that Nature, which creates the art, is compe- 
 tent to create, without the intervention of the art, a 
 beauty expressed in flesh ^nd blood, that may be con- 
 stantly lived with and daily dwelt upon, yet be found 
 to ,be not less inexhaustible in its charm. Other 
 objects will intervene, no doubt, where beauty is 
 present to our daily life ; a man cannot be consciously 
 and continually occupied with such impressions ; in- 
 susceptible moods will intervene also, E^nd the percep- 
 tions will from time to time be overclouded ; this will 
 be the case in regard to works of art, and even in 
 regard to those natural and universal sources from 
 which the sense of beauty in man is nourished as with 
 its daily food ; nor can it be otherwise in regard to 
 human beauty : but when this beauty is pure and spir- 
 ituaj^ I see no reason to suppose that it will be a less 
 permanent source than those others; and I will not 
 consent to believe that daily familiarity with it will 
 make it of no effect, any more than that the flowers 
 
54 OF CHOICE IN MAREIAGE. 
 
 will cease to please because they hang over our doors, 
 or the stars because they shine nightly. /^ 
 
 The exception to be taken to beauty as a marriage 
 portion, (if it be beauty of the highest order,) is not 
 therefore that it can" become otherwise than precious 
 whilst it lasts, but rather that, as it is precious so is it 
 perishable, and that, let it be valued as it may, it must 
 be accounted at the best but a melancholy posses- 
 sion : — 
 
 ' For human beauty is a sight 
 
 To sadden rather than delight ; 
 
 Being the prelude of a lay 
 
 Whose burthen is decay.' 
 
 And if it be our fortune to encounter in flesh and 
 blood a beauty which seems, to revive for us the reali- 
 ties from which EafTaello and Perugino painted, we 
 are to consider whether to possess such beauty in 
 marriage, and see it subjected to the changes and 
 chances of this mortal life, would not bring upon us 
 the same sort of feeling with which we should con- 
 template a Madonna or a St. Cecilia hanging exposed 
 to the weather, and losing some tenth part of its form 
 and coloring with each successive winter. 
 
 I have said that, considering the many misguidances 
 to which a deliberative judgment is exposed in the 
 matter of marriage, there may often be less risk of 
 error in a choice which is impassioned. But I ought, 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE., 55 
 
 t 
 
 perhaps, to have explained that hy a passion I do not 
 mean — what young ladies sometimes mistake for it 
 — a mere imaginative sentiment, dream, or illusion. 
 Such imaginative sentiments, dreams, or illusions, not 
 only do not constitute a passion, but they commonly 
 render the person who indulges them incapable of con- 
 ceiving one ; they bring out a strong fancy perhaps, 
 but a weak and wasted heart. This is well understood 
 by worldly mothers, who will rather promote than dis- 
 courage a rapid succession of such sentiments, resting 
 upon the maxim that there is safety in numbers. In 
 destitution there is security from arrest, in nakedness 
 there is security from a rending of garments, and in 
 this beggary of the heart there is security from a 
 passion. ' 
 
 . But if the heart have been trained in the way that 
 it should go, the passion to which it will lie open 
 will be something very different from a warm illusion 
 or a sentimental dream, though very possibly including 
 these, and having* begun in .them. For true love is 
 not, I think, that isolated and indivisible unity which 
 it might be supposed to be from the way in which 
 it is sometimes spoken of. It is mixed and manifold 
 according to the abundance of the being, and in a 
 large nature becomes in its progress a highly com- 
 posite passion ; commonly, no doubt, having its source 
 in admiration and imaginative sentiment, but as it rolls 
 
56 OP CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 on, involving divers tributaries, swollen by accessoty 
 passions, feelings, and affections, — pity, gratitude*, 
 generosity, loyalty, fidelity, anxiety, fear, and de- 
 votion, — ^and deepened by the embankments of duty 
 and justice — foreign to the subject as these last may 
 seem to some. In short, the vi^hole nature and con- 
 science being worked upon by this passion, re-act 
 upon it and become interfused and blended with it; 
 not by an absorption of all elements into one, but 
 by a development of each into each : and when, 
 therefore, I affirm that passion, err though it may, 
 will be often less misleading than the dispassionate 
 judgment, I do but aver that the entire nature — 
 reason, conscience, and affections, interpenetrating 
 and triune, — that this totality of the nature, raised, 
 vivified, and enlarged by love— is less likely to take 
 an erroneous direction than a part of the nature 
 standing aloof and dictating to the other parts. 
 
 I say not, however, that the risk is small in either 
 case or under any guidance. Far from it. And the 
 preference to be given to passion as a guide, will 
 depend upon the natural capabilities, and the maturity 
 and cultivation of the moral, spiritual, and intellectual 
 mind. If there be much of this for the passion to 
 call out, it will be an exalted and enlightened passion, 
 and may see its way. If there be little, it will be 
 a blind passion. Whence it follows that passion is 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 57 
 
 not to be taken for a guide in extreme youth; in 
 the rawness of the moral and spiritual elements, and 
 the greenness of the judgment. And as - it is in 
 these days that a first passion will most frequently 
 take place, it will generally be found, I believe, that 
 a second may be better trusted. 
 
 If, however, I maintain that passion in one season 
 or another of our soul's progress, is to have a voice 
 of much force and^ potency in the direction of the 
 judgment, and will enlighten it on some points more 
 than it may bedarken it on others, this is not because 
 I imagine that it can realize its illusions or establish 
 its empire in marriage. Passion is of course designed 
 by Nature to be transitory, — a paroxysm, — not a 
 state. And then the question arises which has been 
 so often agitated, whether the affection which succeeds 
 marriage is in all cases much influenced — and if 
 influenced, how influenced — by the nature of the 
 feeling which preceded ? — Whether a passion which 
 has transmigrated into an affection carries with it 
 into the affection any elements which could not exist 
 in an affection otherwise originating ? When it begins 
 with passion, there must needs be a period of collapse 
 and regurgitation, or at least of subsidence. Whether, 
 therefore, is the affection the weaker for never having 
 known the high tide, or the stronger for not having 
 felt the refluence ? — This temporary flooding of the 
 
58 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 affections, does it devastate as regards durable results, 
 or does it enrich ? 
 
 I think that the predominance, amounting almost 
 to universality, of the law of Nature which places 
 us once in our lives at least under the dominion of 
 this passion, would afford of itself a strong presump- 
 tion that some beneficial result is to be brought about 
 by it. And if it be admitted (as without any offence 
 to Calvin I hope it well may) that the better part of 
 most human beings is the larger part, it will follow 
 that this temporary expansion ,and outburst of the 
 whole of the being, will bring a greater accession of 
 good activities than of bad ; and as the first cry of 
 the infant is necessary to bring the lungs into play, 
 so the first love of the adult may, through a transitory 
 disturbance, be designed to impart a healthy action 
 to the moral and spiritual nature. The better the 
 tree, the better of course will be the fruits; neither 
 the rains of spring nor the glow of summer will 
 make grapes grow upon , brambles ; but whatever the 
 fruits may be, the yield will be larger after every 
 seasonable operation of Nature has been undergone. 
 With the few in whom envy, jealousy, suspicion, 
 pride, and self-love are predominant, there may be 
 an aggravation of these evil dispositions or of some 
 of them ; but to them (and God be praised- they are 
 the many)' with whom humility, generosity, the love 
 
OF CHOICE IN MAKRIAGE. 59 
 
 of God, and the love of God's creatures, though partly 
 latent perhaps, is powerfully inherent, the passion of 
 love will bring with it an enlargement and a deepening 
 and strengthening of these better elements, such as 
 no other visitation of merely natural influences, how- 
 ever favorably received and dutifully cherished, could 
 avail to produce. And when the passion has passed 
 away, the enlargement of the nature will remain ; 
 and as the better and more abounding, human being 
 will make the better and more abounding husband 
 or wife, so will the marriage which has been preceded 
 by a passion, be a' better marriage — other things 
 alike — than that which has not — more exalted, more 
 genial, more affluent in affections. 
 
 If the passion have ended, not in a marriage, but in 
 a disappointment, the nature, if it have strength to bear 
 the pressure, will be more ennobled and purified by 
 that than by success. Of the uses of adversity which 
 are sweet, none are' sweeter than those which grow 
 out of disappointed love ; nor is there any greater 
 mistake in contemplating the issues of life, than to 
 suppose that baffled endeavors and disappointed hopes 
 bear no fruits, because they do not bear those par- 
 ticular fruits which were sought and sighed for : — 
 
 ' The tree 
 Sucks kindlier nurture from a soil enriched 
 By its own fallen leaves ; and man is made, 
 
60 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 In' heart and spirit, from dicidaous hopes 
 And things that seem to perish.' 
 
 Indeed the power and spiritual efRcacy of love can 
 hardly be realized to its full extent without either 
 disappointment, or at least reverses, vicissitudes, and 
 doubts; and of the fact which Shakspeare observes, 
 that 
 
 ' The course of true love never did run smooth,' 
 
 perhaps this explanation may be given, — that rough- 
 nesses are needful in ordef to make the love true ; 
 and marriages that follow upon trouble, trial, and vicis- 
 situde, will be more likely to be conservative of the 
 lOve by which they have been achieved, than those 
 which are merely the crown or coronal of a triumphal 
 career in courtship : 
 
 ' The flowers in sunshine gathered soonest fade.' 
 
 Amongst the obstructions which the course of love 
 has commonly to encounter, one which is specified by 
 Shakspeare is the opposition of parents ; and it is often 
 one of the most perplexing problems in human life, to 
 determine to what length parental opposition should 
 proceed in such cases. A moderate opposition can 
 seldom do harm, unless there be positive perversity in 
 the parties opposed, so that opposition shall be in itself 
 a provocative to folly. Such perversity apart, a mode- 
 
OF CHOICE IN M4ERIAGE. 61 
 
 rate opposition will suffice to set aside a weak love, 
 whilst it will tend to consolidate a strong one ; and it 
 will thus act favorably in either case, so far as regards 
 that rrfost essential element in all such matters, — the 
 weakness or strength of the aifection. In respect of 
 an opposition beyond this, it seems hardly possible to 
 generalize, the qualities of the persons and the special- 
 ties of the cases being so all-important. In extreme 
 youth, obedience should be the rule of the child. But 
 so soon as the child shall have attained to a fair matu- 
 rity of judgment, there is a moral responsibility for the 
 just exercise of that judgment, which must not be over- 
 laid by an exaggerated notion of filial duty. Of the 
 members of a family it is for the benefit of all that 
 each should act upon each with some degree, though 
 with very difierent degrees, of controlling influence. 
 The sons and daughters, when children no longer, are 
 to demean themselves towards the parents with humil- 
 ity, deference, and a desire to conform, but not with 
 an absolute subjection of the judgment and the will. 
 There is such a thing as a spoilt parent. On the 
 question of choice in marriage, as on other questions 
 in which both child and parent are personally con- 
 cerned, if the child presumptuously conceive that his 
 judgment is mature when it is not mature, or that it is 
 worthy to be weighed with his parents' when it is not 
 worthy, he is culpable, of course ; being chargeable, 
 
62 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 not with mere error of judgment, but with the sin of 
 presumption. On the other hand, if, in all humility of 
 heart and desire to be dutiful, he shall nevertheless 
 clearly perceive, or think he perceives, that his judg- 
 ment is the juster, and is guided by higher, purer, and 
 more righteous views of life, it behoves him, after 
 much patience, and the neglect of no endeavor to 
 bring about a coincidence of judgment, to resist his 
 parents' judgment, and give effect to that which he ,; 
 conceives to be better ; and this for his parents' sake 
 as well as for his own. We all need resistance to our 
 errors on every side. ' Woe unto us when all men 
 speak well of us ! ' and woe unto us, also, when all 
 men shall give way to us ! It may be a sacred duty 
 on the part of a child to give a helpful resistance to a 
 parent, when the parent is the more erring of the two ; 
 and the want of such resistance, especially on the part 
 of daughters, (for they are more prone than, sons to 
 misconceive their duties of this kind, or to fail in 
 firnffiess,) has often betrayed a parent into fatal errors, 
 followed by lifelong remorse. Women, in a state of 
 •exaltation from excited feelings, imagining, because 
 duty often requires self-sacrifice, that when they are 
 sacrificing themselves they must needs be doing their 
 duty, will often be capable of taking a resolution, 
 when they are not capable of undergoing the conse- 
 quences with fortitude. For it is one sort of strength 
 
OF CHOICE IN MAHRIAGE. 63 
 
 that is required for an act of heroism ; another, and a 
 much rarer sort, which is available for a life of endur- 
 ance. Probably most people could quote instances 
 within their own knowledge, in which the daughter 
 has obeyed, and then losing her health, and with it 
 perhaps her temper and her resignation, has died of 
 what is called a broken heart ; thus, as it were, heap- 
 ing coals of fire upon the parents' head. 
 
 But if an unreasonable opposition to a daughter's 
 choice be not to prevail, I think that, on the other 
 hand, the parents, if their views of marriage be pure 
 fromworldliness, are justified in using a good deal of 
 management — not more than they very often do use, 
 but more than they are wont to avow or than society 
 is wont to countenance, — with a view to putting their 
 daughters in the way of such marriages as they can 
 approve. It is the way of the world to give such 
 management an ill name, — probably because it is 
 most used by those who abuse it to worldly purposes ; 
 and I have heard a mother pique herself on iTever 
 having taken a single step to get her daughters mar- 
 ried, — which appeared to me to have been a derelic- 
 tion of one of the most essential duties of a parent. 
 If the mother be wholly passive, either the daughters 
 must take steps and use management for themselves, 
 (which is not desirable,) or the happiness and the most 
 important interests of their lives, moral and spiritual. 
 
64 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 must be the sport of chance and take a course purely- 
 fortuitous; and in many situations, where unsought 
 opportunities of choice do not abound, the result may. 
 be not improbably such a love and marriage as the 
 mother and every one else contemplates with astonish- 
 ment Some such astonishment I recollect to have- 
 expressed on an occasion of the kind to an illustrious 
 poet and philosopher, whose reply I have always borne 
 in mind wheri other such cases have come under my 
 observation : — * We have no reason to be surprised, 
 unless we knew what may have been the young lady's 
 opportunities. If Miranda had not fallen in with Fer- 
 dinand, she would have been in lo^e with Caliban.' 
 
 But management, if it is to be recommended, must 
 be good management, and not .the management by 
 which young ladies are hurried from ball-room to ball- 
 room, so that a hundred prelibations may give one 
 chance to be swallowed. I^ very few ball-rooms will 
 afford the means of introduction and selection of ac- 
 quaintances ; and the intercourse which, by imparting 
 a real knowledge of the dispositions^ will give the best 
 facilities of choice, will be that which is withdrawn, by 
 one remove and another, from gay metropolitan as- 
 semblies — first, to intercourse in country places ; sec- 
 ondly, to domestic society. Our present manners 
 admit, perhaps, too much freedom of intercourse in 
 public, too little in private. The light familiarity of 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 65 
 
 festive meetings is carried far enough, further than 
 tends to attach ; but the graver intimacy is wanting. 
 > Milton complained that in his time choice in marriage 
 was difficult, because there was not ' that freedom of 
 access, granted or presumed, as may suffice to a per- 
 fect discerning till too late.' * In our age the freedom 
 of access is sufficient ; but the access is, for the most 
 part, at times and places where nothing can be dis- 
 cerned but the features of a restless and whirling life. 
 And if Milton could say, ' Who knows not that the 
 bashful muteness of a virgin may ofttimes hide all the 
 unliveliness and natural sloth which is really unfit for 
 conversation,' we, on the other hand, who cannot rea- 
 sonably complain of the bashful muteness of the vir- 
 gins, may be in our own way perplexed in the attempt 
 to discover what is the life that lies beneaith those 
 dancing and glancing outsides of which we see so 
 much. But the difficulty of managing well in this 
 respect depends less on our manners in regard to 
 the intercourse between girls and men, than on the 
 general mode of living, which, in some sections of 
 society, (not in all) tends to separate domestic from 
 social life, and to subjugate the former to the latter. 
 
 It may be observed, I think, that women of high 
 intellectual endowments and much dignity of deport- 
 ment, have the greatest difficulty in marrying, and 
 
 * Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, ch. 3. 
 5 
 
66 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 Stand most in need of a mother's help. And this, not 
 because they are themselves fastidious, (for they are 
 often as little so as any,) but because men are not 
 humble enough to wish to have their superiors for 
 their wives. 
 
 Great wealth in a woman tends to keep at a dis- 
 tance both the proud and the humble, leaving the 
 unhappy live-bait to be snapped at by the hardy and 
 the > greedy. If the wealthy father of an only daugh- 
 ter could be gifted with a knowledge of what parental 
 care and kindness really is, it is my assured belief that 
 he would disinherit her. If he leaves her his wealth, 
 the best thing for her to do is to marry the most re- 
 spectable person she can find of the class of men whp 
 marry for money. An heiress remaining unmarried 
 is a prey to all manner of extortion and imposition, 
 and with the best intentions becomes, through ill- 
 administered expenditure and misdirected bounty, a 
 corruption to her neighborhood and a curse to the 
 poor; or if experience shall put her on her guard, 
 she will lead a life of resistance and suspicion, to 
 the injury of her own mind and nature. 
 
 In the case, therefore, of either high endowments 
 or great wealth in a daughter, the care of a parent 
 is peculiarly needed to multiply her opportunities of 
 making a good choice in marriage ; and in no case ' 
 can such care be properly pretermitted. 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 67 
 
 When the mother takes no pains, the marriage of 
 the daughter, even if not in itself ineligible, is likely to 
 be unduly deferred. For the age at which marriages 
 are to be contracted is a very material consideration. 
 Aristotle was of opinion that the bridegroom should 
 be thirty-seven years of age and the bride eighteen ; 
 alleging physical reasons which 1 venture to think 
 exceedingly inconclusive. Eighteen for the bride is 
 the least' to be objected to, and would yet be rather 
 early in this climate. A girl of that age may be 
 not absolutely unprepared for marriage ; but she has 
 hardly had time for that longing and yearning affection 
 which is to be her best security after. Sir Thomas 
 More, in accounting for Jane Shore's infidelity to her 
 husband, observes, that ' foreasmuche as they wer 
 coupled ere she wer wel ripe, she not very fervently 
 loved for whom she never longed.' But whether or 
 not the girl be to be considered ripe at eighteen, I 
 know no good reason, moral or physical, why the 
 man should withhold himself till seven-and-thirty, and 
 many excellent reasons against it. Some few years 
 of seniority on the part of the man, I do conceive 
 to be desirable ; and on this, as well as on other 
 grounds, the woman should marry young ; for if the 
 woman were to be past her first youth and the man 
 to be some years older, it follows that the man would 
 remain longer unmarried than it is good for him to 
 
68 OF CHOICE IN MABRIAGE. 
 
 be alone. On the point of seniority, let us listen to 
 
 the Duke and Viola — 
 
 I 
 Duke. ' Let still the woman take 
 
 An older than herself; so wears she to him, 
 
 So sways she level in her husband's heart. 
 
 ' For, boy, however we do praise ourselves. 
 
 Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm, 
 
 More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn 
 
 Than women's are. 
 
 Viola. I think it well, my Lord. 
 
 Duke. Then let thy love be younger than thyself. 
 
 Or thy affection cannot hold the bent : 
 
 For women are as roses, whose fair flower 
 
 Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour.' • 
 
 The woman should marry, therefore, rather before 
 than after that culminating period of personal charm, 
 which, varying much in different individuals, is but 
 a short period in any, and occurs in early youth in 
 almost all. She should marry between twenty and 
 thirty years of age, but nearer the former than the 
 latter period. Now the man at such an age would 
 probably be too light for the man's part in marriage ; 
 and the more so when marrying a wife equally young. 
 For when two very young people are joined together 
 in matrimony, it is as if one sweet-pea should be 
 put as a prop to another. The man, therefore, may 
 
 * « TwelAh Kight,» Act ii. Sc. 4. 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 69 
 
 be considered most marriageable when he is nearer 
 thirty than twenty, or perhaps when he is a little 
 beyond thirty. If his marriage be deferred much 
 longer, there is some danger of his becoming hardened 
 in celibacy. In the case of a serious and thoughtful 
 man, it need not be deferred so long ; for in such 
 a case, a remark made in a letter of Lord Bacon's 
 will probably be verified — that a man finds himself 
 seven years older the day after his marriage. 
 
 In thes6 times men are disposed, I think, to be 
 rather too tardy than too precipitate in marrying. 
 Worldly prudence is strong in us now, even to a 
 vice; and a competency, or what is estimated -to be 
 a competency, is not attainable at a very early age. 
 A circle of friends and relatives commonly resent, 
 as an injury to themselves, a poor marriage contracted 
 at an early age ; and not without reason, if the virtues 
 of the parties contracting it are not such as to justify 
 it. But that will be prudence in a prudent man which 
 is imprudence in another; and one thing is certain, 
 that the prudence which postpones marriage is ex- 
 cessive to a vice when it involves other vices, and 
 presents temptations less likely to be resisted than 
 those to which a poor marriage lies open. 
 
 There are other motives and circumstances besides 
 those connected with prudence, which, in the case 
 of men, militate against early marriages. If their 
 
70 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 first passion (as it happens with most first passions) 
 have issued in a disappointment, and if they have 
 passed through their disappointment without being 
 betrayed, by the heart's abhorrence of its vacuum, 
 into some immediate marriage of the pis-aller kind, 
 resorted to for mere purposes of repose, they will 
 probably find that a first seizure of the kind guarantees 
 them for a certain number of years against a second. 
 In the meantime, the many interests, aspirations, and 
 alacrities of youth, its keen pursuits and its fresh 
 friendships, fill up the measure of life, and make 
 the single heart sufficient to itself. It is when these 
 things have partly passed away and life has lost 
 something of its original brightness, that men begin 
 to feel an insufficiency and a want. I have known 
 it to be remarked by a Roman Catholic priest, as 
 the result of much observation of life amongst his 
 brethren, that the pressure of their vow of celibacy 
 was felt most severely towards forty years of age. 
 
 If a man have fairly passed that period without 
 marrying or attempting marriage, then, I think, or 
 very soon after, he may conclude that there is no 
 better fortune in store for him, and dispose himself 
 finally for the life celibate. 
 
 ' Till age, refrain not ; but if old, refrain,' 
 
 says one of the shrewdest of the unpoetical poets.* 
 
 • Crabbe. 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 71 
 
 And this abstinence from marriage on the part of old 
 men, is to be enjoined, not only on their own account, 
 but on account of the offspring to which such mar- 
 riages may give birth. The sort of age in youth, and 
 the weakness of constitution which is observable in the 
 offspring of old men, involves national as well as indi- 
 vidual evil, because it tends to degeneracy of the race ; 
 and amongst the Romans, who were careful of their 
 breed, there was a law, the Lex Pappia, which for- 
 bade the marriage of a man of more than sixty years 
 of age with a Woman of less than fifty. If the old 
 man have male issue, there will generally be further 
 the evils to the son of an ill-tended minority and a 
 premature independence. 
 
 The marriages of old men to young women are, for 
 the most part, as objectionable in their motives as in 
 their results; and the mistake of such marriages is 
 generally as great as the moral misfeasance. There 
 is no greater error of age, than to suppose that it can 
 recover the enjoyment of youth by possessing itself 
 of what youth only can enjoy ; and age will never 
 appear so unlovely, as when it is seen with such an 
 ill-sorted accompaniment — 
 
 ' A chaplet of forced flowers on Winter's brow 
 Seems not less inharmonious to me 
 Than the untimely snow on the green leaf.' 
 
72 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 For the young women who make such marriages, 
 there is sometimes more to be said than for the old 
 men. When the motives are mercenary, there is 
 nothing to be said for them ; and but little when the 
 case is one of weak consent to the mercenary baseness 
 of parents, or when they sacrifice themselves (as they 
 will sometimes allege) in a rich alliance for the relief 
 of a large family of destitute brothers and sisters. 
 These are but beggarly considerations, and might be 
 equally plead in defence of a less disguised pros- 
 titution. But a case will sometimes occur in which 
 a young woman is dazzled by great achievements or 
 renown ; and what is heroical or illustrious may inspire 
 a feeling which, distinct though it be from that which 
 youth inspires in youth, is yet not unimaginative, 
 and may suffice to sanctify the marriage vow. And 
 there is another case, not certainly to be altogether 
 vindicated, and yet not to be visited with much harsh- 
 ness of censure, in which a woman who has had her 
 heart broken, seeks, in this sort of marriage, such an 
 asylum as, had she been a Eoman Catholic, she might 
 have found in a convent. 
 
 Marriages of the old with the old are rare, and are 
 thought by some people to be ridiculous. They do 
 not, however, fall within the purview of the Lex Pap- 
 pia, or of any other prohibition that I am acquainted 
 with, and I hardly know why they should be so unfre- 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 73 
 
 quent as they are. Solitude is ill suited to old age, 
 and the course of circumstances tends too often to 
 leave the old in solitude. Cases must be continually- 
 occurring, in which it would be for the comfort and 
 happiness of old friends of different sexes to live to; 
 gether; and if they cannot do so conveniently or 
 creditably without being married, I tnow not why they 
 should be laughed at for marrying. It must be, no 
 doubt, a totally different connection from that which is 
 formed in earlier life ; and it is one which might be, 
 perhaps, more fitly ratified by a civil contract than by 
 a religious ceremony; but the lawful rights of a wife 
 are necessary to the female friefld, in order that she 
 may be regarded with due respect by her husband's 
 relatives and by the world, and in order that she may 
 have authority in her household : and if the marriage 
 be ascribed to this reasonable motive, instead of sup- 
 posing any which would be unreasonable and ridicu- 
 lous, it may be regarded, I think, as a wise and com- 
 mendable species of arrangement. 
 
OF WISDOM. 
 
 Wisdom is not the same with understanding, talents, 
 capacity, ability, sagacity, sense, or prudence — not 
 the same with any one of these ; neither will all these 
 together make it up. It is that exercise of the reason 
 into which the heart enters — a structure of the under- 
 standing rising out of the moral and spiritual nature. 
 
 It is for this cause that a high order of wisdom — 
 that is, a highly intellectual wisdom — is still more 
 rare than a high order of genius. When they reach 
 the very highest order they are one ; for each includes ' 
 the other, and intellectual greatness is matched with 
 moral strength. But they hardly ever reach so high, 
 inasmuch as great intellect, according to the ways of 
 Providence, almost always brings along with it great 
 infirmities — or, at least, infirmities which appear great 
 owing to the scale of operation; and it is certainly 
 exposed to unusual temptations ; for as power and pre- 
 eminence lie before it, so ambition attends it, which, 
 whilst it determines the will and strengthens the ac- 
 tivities, inevitably weakens the moral fabric. 
 
OF WISDOM. 75 
 
 Wisdom is corrupted by ambition, even when the 
 quality of the ambition is intellectulil. For ambition, 
 even of this quality, is but a form of self-love, which, 
 seeking gratification in the consciousness of intellec- 
 tual power, is'too much delighted with the exercise to 
 have a single and paramount regard to the end ; and 
 it is not according to wisdom that the end — that is, the 
 moral and spiritual consequences — should suffer dero- 
 gation in favor of the intellectual means. God is 
 love, and God is light ; whence it results that love . is 
 light ; and it is only by following the effluence of that 
 light, that intellectual power issues into wisdom. The 
 intellectual power which loses that light and issues 
 into intellectual pride, is out of the way to wisdom, 
 and will not attain even to intellectual greatness. For 
 though many arts, gifts, and attainments may co-exist 
 in much force with intellectual pride, an open great- 
 ness cannot ; and of all the correspondences between 
 the moral and intellectual nature, there is none more 
 direct and immediate than that of humility with capa- 
 ciousness. If pride of intellect be indulged, it will 
 mark out to a man conscious of great talents the circle 
 of his own intellectual experiences as the only one in 
 which he can keenly recognise and appreciate the 
 intellectual universe ; and there is no order of intel- 
 lectual men which stands in a more strict limitation 
 than that of the man who cannot conceive what he 
 
76 OF WISDOM. 
 
 does not contain. Such men will oftentimes dazzle 
 the world, and ej&rcise in their day and generation 
 much influence oh the many whose range is nq wider 
 than theirs, and whose force is less ; but the want of 
 spiritual and imaginative wisdom will stop them there ; 
 and the understandings from which mankind will seek 
 a permanent and authentic guidance, will be those 
 which have been exalted by love and enlarged by 
 humility. ' 
 
 If wisdom be defeated by ambition and self-love 
 when these are occupied with the mere inward con- 
 sciousness of intellectual power, still more is it so 
 when they are eager to obtain recognition* and admira- 
 tion of it from without. Men who are accustomed to 
 write or speak for effect, may write or speak what is 
 wise from time to time, because they may be capable 
 of thinking and intellectually adopting what is wise : 
 but they will not be wise men ; because the love of 
 God, the love of man, and the love of truth not having 
 the mastery with them, the growth and structure of 
 their minds must needs be perverted if not stunted. 
 Thence it is that so many men are observed to speak 
 wisely and yet act foolishly ; they are not deficient in 
 their understandings, but the wisdom of the heart is 
 wanting to their ends and objects, and to those feelings 
 which have the direction of their acts. And if they 
 do speak wisely, it is not because they are wise ; for 
 
OF WISDOM. 77 
 
 the permanent shape and organization of the mind 
 proceeds from what we feel and do, and not from 
 what we speak, write, or think. There is a great 
 volume of truth in the admonition which teaches us 
 that the spirit of obedience is to prepare the way, 
 action to come next, and that knowledge is not pre- 
 cedent to these, but consequent : ' Do the will of my 
 Father which is in heaven, and thou shalt know of the 
 doctrine.' 
 
 Those who are much conversant with intellectual 
 men will observe, I think, that the particular action of 
 self-love by which their minds are most frequently 
 warped from wisdom, is that which belongs to a pride 
 and pleasure taken in the exercise of the argumenta- 
 tive faculty; whence it arises that that faculty is en- 
 abled to assert a predominance over its betters. With 
 such men, the elements of a question which will make 
 effect in argument, — those which are, so far as they 
 go, demonstrative, — will be rated above their value; 
 and those which are matter of proportion and degree, 
 not palpable, ponderable, or easily or shortly produ- 
 cible in words, or which are matters of moral estima- 
 tion and optional opinion, will go for less than they 
 are worth, because they are not available to ensure 
 the victory or grace the triumph of a disputant. 
 
 In some discussions, a wise man will be silenced by 
 argumentation, only because he knows that the ques- 
 
78 OF WISDOM. 
 
 tion 'should be determined by considerations which lie 
 beyond the reach of argumentative exhibition. And 
 indeed, in all but purely scientific questions, arguments 
 are not to be submitted to by the judgment as first in 
 command; rather they are to be used as auxiliaries 
 and pioneers ; the judgment should profit by them to 
 the extent of the services they can render, but after 
 their work is done, it should come to its conclusions 
 upon its own free survey. I have seldom known a 
 man with great powers of argumentation abundantly 
 indulged, who could attain to an habitually just judg- 
 ment. In our courts of law, where advocacy and 
 debate are most in use, ability, sagacity, and intellec- 
 tual power flourish and abound, whilst wisdom is said 
 to have been disbarred. In our houses of parliament 
 the case is somewhat otherwise ; the silent members, 
 and those who take but little part in debate, and indeed 
 the country at large which may be said to listen, exer- 
 cise some subduing influence over the spirit of argu- 
 mentation, and the responsibility for results restrains 
 it, so that here its predominance is much less than in 
 the courts of law ; yet even in the houses of parliament 
 wisdom has been supposed to have less to say to the 
 proceedings than a certain species of courage. 
 
 Ambition and self-love will commonly derange that 
 proportion between the active and passive understand- 
 ing which is essential to wisdom, and will lead a 
 
OF WISDOM. 79 
 
 man to value thoughts and opinions less according 
 to their worth and truth, than according as they are 
 his own or another's. The objection made by Brutus 
 to Cicero in the play, — that he ' would never follow 
 anything which other men began ' — points to one 
 corruption operated by selfrlove upon a great under- 
 standing. Some preference a man may reasonably 
 accord to what is the growth of his own mind apart 
 from its absolute value, on the ground of its specific 
 usefulness to himself; for what is nature to the soil 
 will thrive better and bear more fruit than what has 
 been transplanted : but, on the other hand, if a man 
 would enlarge the scope and diversify the kinds of 
 his thoughts and contemplations, he should not think 
 too much to apprehend nor talk too much to listen. 
 He should cherish the thoughts of his own begetting 
 with a loving care and a temperate discipline, — they 
 are the family of his mind and its chief reliance — 
 but he should give a hospitable reception to guests 
 and to travellers with stories of far countries, and the 
 family ^should not be suffered to crowd the doors. 
 
 Even without the stimulant of self-love, some minds, 
 owing to a natural redundance of activity and excess 
 of velocity and fertility, cannot be sufficiently passive 
 to be wise. A capability to take a thousand views 
 of a subject is hard to be reconciled with directness 
 and singleness of judgment ; and he who can find a 
 
80 OF WISDOM. 
 
 great deal to say for any view, will not often go the 
 straight road to the One view that is right. If subtlety 
 be added to exuberance, the judgment is still more 
 endangered — 
 
 ' Tell Wit how oft she wrangles 
 In tickel points of niceness, 
 Tell Wisdom she entangles ' 
 
 Herself in over-wiseness.' * 
 
 But when self-love is not at the root, there is better 
 hope for wisdom. Nature presents us with various 
 walks of intellectual life, and such a selection may 
 be made as shall render a disproportion of the active 
 to the passive intellect less dangerous. Speculative 
 wisdom will suffer less by excess of thinking than 
 practical wisdom. There are fields to be fought, in 
 which a wide range is more essential than an unerring 
 aim. In some regions we are to cultivate the surface ; 
 in others to sink the shaft. No one intellect can be 
 equally available for opposite avocations, and where 
 there is no interference of self-love, wisdom will be 
 attained through a wise choice of work. One eminent 
 man of our times has said of another, that 'science 
 was his forte, and omniscience his foible.' But that 
 instance was not an extreme one. Cases have oc- 
 curred in which wisdom has suffered total overthrow ; 
 
 • Sir Walter Raleigh. 
 
, OF WISDOM. 81 
 
 the greatest intellect and the greatest folly have been 
 known to meet ; and the universalist who handles 
 everything and embraces nothing, has been seen to 
 pass into a pursuer of the mere vanities and frivolities 
 of intellectual display. 
 
 If, however, a man of genius be fortunately free 
 from ambition, there is yet another enemy which 
 will commonly lie in wait for his wisdom ; to wit, 
 a great capacity of enjoyment. This generally ac- 
 companies genius, and is, perhaps, the greatest of 
 all trials to the moral and spiritual heart. It was 
 
 a trial too severe even for Solomon, 
 
 * 
 
 • whose heart, though large, 
 Beguiled by fair Idolatresses, fell 
 To idols foul.' * 
 
 The temptation by which such a man is assailed, con- 
 sists in imagining that he has within himself and by 
 virtue of his temperament, sources of joy altogether 
 independent of conduct and circumstances. It is true 
 that he has these sources on this unconditional tenure 
 for a time ; and it is owing to this very truth that his 
 futurity is in danger, — not in respect of wisdom only, 
 but also in respect of happiness. And if we look to 
 recorded examples, we shall find that a great capacity 
 of enjoyment does ordinarily bring about the destruc- 
 
 * Paradise Lost. 
 
82 OF WISDOM 
 
 tion of enjoyment in its own ulterior consequences, 
 having uprooted wisdom by the way. 
 
 A man of genius, so gifted — or, let us rather 
 say, so tempted — lives, until the consummation ap- 
 proaches, as if he possessed some elixir or phylactery, 
 reckless of consequences, because his happiness, be- 
 ing so inward to his nature, seems to be inherent and 
 indefeasible. Wisdom is not wanted. The intellect, 
 perhaps, amidst the abundance of its joys, rejoices in 
 wise contemplations ; but wisdom is not adopted and 
 domesticated in the mind, owing to the fearlessness of 
 the heart. For wisdom will have no hold on the heart 
 in which joy is not tempered by fear. The fear of the 
 Lord, we know, is the beginning of it ; and some hal- 
 lowing and chastening influences of fear will always 
 go along with it. Fear, indeed, is the mother of fore- 
 sight ; spiritual fear, of a foresight that reaches beyond 
 the grave ; temporal fear, of a foresight that falls 
 short ; but without fear there is neither the one fore- 
 sight nor the other ; and as pain has been truly said 
 to be the deepest thing in our nature, so is it fear 
 that will bring the depths of our nature within our 
 knowledge : — 
 
 'What sees rejoicing genius in the Earth ? 
 A thousand meadows with a thousand herds 
 Freshly luxuriant in a May-day dawn,; 
 A thousand ships that caracole and prance 
 
OF WISDOM. 83 
 
 With freights of gold upon a sunny sea ; 
 
 A thousand gardens gladdened by all flowers, 
 
 That on the air breathe out an odorous beauty.' 
 
 Genius may see all this and rejoice ; but it will not 
 exalt itself into wisdom, unless it see also the meadow 
 in the livid hues of winter, the ship under bare poles, 
 and the flower when the beauty of the fashion of it 
 perishes. 
 
 It is true, however, that the cases are rare and 
 exceptional, in which this dangerous capacity of en- 
 joyment is an unbroken haBit, so as to bring a steady 
 and continuous pressure upon the moral mind. A 
 great capacity of suffering belongs to genius also ; and 
 it has been observed that an alternation of joyfulness 
 and dejection is quite as characteristic of the man of 
 genius as intensity in either kind. Doubtless these 
 alternations will greatly enlarge his knowledge, both 
 of Man and of the universe. The many moods of his 
 own mind will give him a penetrating and experienced 
 insight into many minds ; and he will contemplate the 
 universe and all that goes on in it from many points 
 of view. Moreover, it is by reaction from the extreme 
 of one state, that the mind receives the most powerful 
 impulse towards another — in resilience that it has its 
 plenary force. But though these alternations of excess 
 ,do thus enlarge and enrich the understanding, and 
 minister to wisdom so far forth, they njust yet, by the 
 
84 OF WISDOM. 
 
 shocks which they occasion to the moral will, do injury 
 on the whole to that composite edifice, built up of the 
 moral and rational mind, in which Wisdom has her 
 dwelling. The injury is not so great as. in the other 
 case : better are winter and summer for the mind than 
 the torrid zone — feasts and fasts than a perpetual 
 plenty — but either way the temperament of genius is 
 hardly ever favorable to wisdom ; that is, the highest 
 order of genius, or that which includes wisdom, is of 
 all things the most rare. 
 
 On the other hand, wisdom without genius (a far 
 more precious gift than genius without wisdom) is, by 
 God's blessing upon the humble and loving heart, 
 though not as often^met with as ' the ordinary of 
 Nature's sale-work,' yet not altogether rare ; f or the 
 desire__to be^ rightwill go a great way Jgwards-^^is- 
 dom. Intellectual guidance is the less needed where 
 there is little to lead astray — where humilityjets the 
 heart_loose to the impulses of love. That we can be 
 wise by impulse will seem a paradox to some ; but it 
 is a part of that true doctrine which traces wisdom to 
 the moral as well as the intellectual mind, and more 
 surely to the former than to the latter — one of those 
 truths which is recognised when we look into our 
 nature through the clearness of a poetic spirit : — 
 
 ' Moments there are in life — alas how few ! — 
 ', When casting bold prudential doubts aside, 
 
OF WISDOM. 85 
 
 ^^ We take a generous impulse for our guide, 
 j And following promptly what the heart thinks best, 
 \. Commit to Providence the rest ; 
 Sure that no after-reckoning will arise ' 
 
 Of shame or sorrow, for the heart is wise. 
 I And happy they who thus in faith obey 
 / Their better nature : err sometimes they may, 
 And somesad thoughts lie heavy in the breast. 
 Such as by hope deceived are left behind ; 
 But like a shadow these will pass away 
 From the pure sunshine of the peaceful mind.' * 
 
 The doctrine of wisdom by impulse is no doubt 
 liable to be much misused and misapplied. The right 
 to rest upon such a creed accrues only to those who 
 have so trained their nature as to be entitled to trust 
 it. It is the impulse of the habitual heart which the 
 judgment may fairly follow upon occasion — of the 
 heart which, being habitually humble and loving, has 
 been framed by love to wisdom. Some such fashion- 
 ing love will always effect ; for love cannot exist 
 without solicitude, solicitude brings thoughtfulness, 
 and it is in a thoughtful love that the wisdom of 
 the heart consists. The impulse of such a heart will 
 take its shape and guidance from the very mould in 
 which it is cast, without any application of the reason 
 express ; and the most inadvertent motion of a wise 
 
 • Southey's Oliver JVeicman. 
 
86 OF WISDOM. 
 
 heart will for the most part be wisely directed ; 
 providentially, let us rather say : for Providence has 
 no more eminent seat than in the wisdom of the 
 heart. 
 
 Wisdom by impulse, then, is to be trusted in by 
 those only who have habitually used their reason to 
 the full extent of its powers in forming the heart and 
 cultivating the judgment, whilst, owing to its constitu- 
 tional deficiency, or to its peculiarity (for the reason 
 may be unserviceable from other causes than deficien- 
 cy), they are conscious that their judgment is likely to 
 be rather perplexed than cleared by much thinking on 
 questions on which they are called upon to act or 
 decide. Those in whom the meditative faculty is 
 peculiarly strong, > will often find themselves in this 
 predicament ; witness Christopher Hervie's com- 
 plaint : — 
 
 ' One while I think ; and then I am in pain \ 
 To think how to unthink that thought again.' * \ 
 
 And they whose deliberative judgment is weak and 
 indecisive from a natural debility of the reason, may 
 act from impulse, and even though the consequences 
 be evil, may be held to be wise According to their 
 kind. For the course they took may have been the 
 wisest for them, being, founded upon a just measure- 
 
 • The Synagogue, 41. 
 
OF WISDOM. 87 
 
 ment of the insufficiencies of their understanding. 
 And those who can take this just measurement, and 
 holding their opinions, with due diffidence, yet act in 
 love and faith and without fear, may be wise of heart 
 though erring in judgment ; and though not gifted with 
 intellectual wisdom, may yet be deemed to have as 
 much understanding as innocence has occasion for. 
 
 Upon this, however, the question will arise, whether 
 errors of the judgment are, as such, absolutely void 
 of offence ; and whether he'who has committed them 
 may look back upon them, whatever may have been 
 their consequences, without any compunctious visitings. 
 An eminent statesman is said to have averred, that 
 when he was conscious of having taken a decision 
 with all due care and consideration, to the best of his 
 judgment and with the best intentions, he never looked 
 back to it with a moment's regret, though the result 
 might prove it to have been wholly erroneous. This 
 is a frame of mind highly conducive to civil courage, 
 and therefore not without its advantages in political 
 life. But it is not easily conducive to wisdom. Nor, 
 perhaps, in -this unqualified form, is it to be altogether 
 vindicated in morals. At all events, so much regret 
 might be felt, if no more, as would suffice to awaken 
 some self-questionings, not merely as to the specific 
 moral rectitude accompanying or proximately pre- 
 ceding the particular act, but as to that general and 
 
88 
 
 OF WISDOM. 
 
 life-long training of the heart to wisdom, which gives 
 the best assurance of specific results, and of which, 
 therefore, specific failures should suggest the de- 
 ficiency. Some short-comings of this kind there must 
 of course be in all human beings, and they should be 
 at all times aware of it ; but it is in the order of 
 Nature that tlys consciousness should be quickened 
 from time to time by the contemplation of evil con- 
 sequences arising from specific errors of judgment, 
 however innocent in themselves ; which contemplation, 
 accompanied with a natural regret, constitutes what 
 may be called a repentance of the understanding — 
 not easily to be escaped by a plain man, nor properly 
 to be repudiated by a philosopher. 
 
 Yet when the consequences of an error of judgment 
 are irremediable, how often are those who would ani- 
 madvert upon it, met with the admonition to ' let the 
 past be past : ' as if the past had no relations with the 
 future ; and as if the experience of our errors of 
 judgment, and the inquisition into their sources, did 
 not, by its very painfulness, effect the deepest cultiva- 
 tion of the understanding, — that cultivation whereby 
 what is irremediable is itself converted into a rem- 
 edy. 
 
 The main scope and design of this disquisition 
 having been to inculcate that wisdom is still more 
 essentially a moral and spiritual than it is an intellec- 
 
OF WISDOM. 89 
 
 tiial attribute, that genius can mount to wisdom only 
 by Jacob's ladder, and that knowledge can only be 
 converted into wisdom by an application of the heart, 
 I cannot better close it than with that declaration of 
 the nature of wisdom which is delivered in the 28th 
 chapter of the book of Job : — 
 
 ' Whence then cometh wisdom ? and where is the 
 place of understanding ? 
 
 ' Seeing it is hid from the eyes of all living, and 
 kept close from the fowls of the air. 
 
 ' Destruction and death say, we have heard the fame 
 thereof with our ears. 
 
 ' God understandeth the way thereof, and he know- 
 eth the place thereof. 
 
 ' For he looketh to the ends of the earth, and seeth 
 under the whole Heaven ; 
 
 ' To make the weight for the winds ; and he weigh- 
 eth the waters by measure. 
 
 ' When he made a decree for the rain, and a way 
 for the lightning of the thunder : 
 
 'Then did he see it, and declare it; he prepared it, 
 yea, and searched it out. 
 
 'And unto man he said. Behold, the fear of the 
 Lord, that is wisdom ; and to depart from evil is un- 
 derstanding.' 
 
CHILDREN. 
 
 From the complaints which everybody brings against 
 everybody in the matter of the management of chil- 
 dren, one might be led to suppose that such a thing as 
 good management of them did not exist amongst man- 
 kind. And no doubt this is so far true, that on a 
 subject on which so many and such various kinds of 
 errors may be committed, the best management can 
 be but very imperfect, and those who are complained 
 of should be willing to listen, in the assurance that 
 real errors there are, and for the chance of those being 
 the errors that are hit upon and pointed out. 
 
 But remonstrance and admonition, whether listened 
 to or not, seem in general to be of as little avail on 
 these questions as theories and doctrines ; and from 
 the uselessness of all these, and from the fact that 
 thoughtful and cultivated people are seen, not unfre- • 
 quently, to get as wrong as others, it may be inferred 
 that the most essential qualifications for training a child 
 well, are not of a nature to be communicated by books 
 
CHILDREN. 
 
 91 
 
 or lectures on education. They are, 1st, The desire 
 to be right in the matter ; 2d, Sense ; 3d, Kindness ; 
 and 4th, Firmness. 
 
 Where these are wanting, the wisest admonitions 
 in the world will be of no other use than to relieve 
 the mind of the person who throws them away. 
 
 Theories, however, seem to have more power to 
 pervert the natural understanding, in this case, than 
 they have to enlighten it. ' The doctrine of an eminent 
 writer (of a generation now nearly gonp), that a child 
 should be reasoned into obedience, had,' in its day, 
 more of a misleading "efficacy than might ,have been 
 thought possible ; and many a parent was induced 
 to believe that a child should be taught to give its 
 obedience, not because it ipas obedience, but because 
 the thing ordered was reasonable; the Kttle casuists 
 and controversialists being expected to see the reason 
 of things as readily in real life, as in the dialogues 
 between Tutor and Charles. The common sense of 
 mankind has now made an end of this doctrine, and 
 it is known now, as it was before the transit of that 
 eminent person, that obedience — prompt, implicit, un- 
 reasoning, and almost unconscious — is the first thing 
 to be taught to a child, and that he can have no 
 peace for his soul without it. 
 
 The notion of setting up the reason to be the pivot 
 of humanity from the cradle forwards, belongs to a 
 
92 CHILDREN. 
 
 gdneration of fallacies which have returned to the 
 dust from which they came ; but it included one error 
 in theories of education which will be found to belong 
 to many that are still extant : the error of assuming 
 that the parent is to be perfect. Under the reason^ 
 ing regimen, what was to happen when the parent's 
 reasons were bad ? And in like manner, with respect 
 to many less unnatural systems which are recom- 
 mended as if they were of universal applicability, 
 the question may be asked, Will most parents be 
 competent fo give effect to them ? And, bearing in 
 mind the not inconsiderable number of mankind who 
 labor under imperfections of the understanding or 
 other disqualifying defects, I believe we shall find 
 that a few strong instincts and a few plain rules, 
 are all that can be appealed to for general guidance 
 in the management of children. 
 
 That first and foremost rule of exacting obedience, 
 is so far from being subject to the condition of showing 
 reasons, that I believe a parent with a strong will, 
 although it be a perverse one, will train a child 
 better than a parent of a reasonable mind, tainted 
 by infirmity of purpose. For as ' Obedience is better 
 than sacrifice,' and to hearken than the fat of rams,' 
 so an authority which is absolute by virtue of its 
 own inherent strength, is better than one which is 
 shaken by a reference to ends and purposes, and by , 
 
CHILDREN. 93 
 
 reasonable doubts as to whether they are the best 
 
 and most useful. Nor will the parent's perversity, 
 
 unless it be unkind or ill-tempered, occasion the child 
 
 half so much uneasiness in the one case, as the child 
 
 will suffer from those perversities of its own which 
 
 will spring up in the other.? For habits of instant 
 
 and mechanical obedience are those that give rest to 
 
 the child, and spare its health and temper; whilst a 
 
 recusant or dawdling obedience will keep it distracted 
 
 . ... ' 
 
 in propensity, bringing a perpetual pressure on its 
 
 nerves, and consequently on its mental and bodily 
 strength. 
 
 To enforce this kind of obedience, our most effica- 
 cious instrument is a clear and determinate manner; 
 because with children at least this is the most signifi- 
 cant expression of an authoritative will. But it is 
 an instrument which those only can employ who are 
 authoritative by temperament ; for an assumed man- 
 ner, or one which is not true to the temperament, 
 will be of no avail. Those parents who are not gifted 
 with this temperament and this manner, must needs, 
 if they do their duty, have recourse to punishments ; 
 of whicb, in the case of most children, those are 
 best which are sharp and soon over. And let not 
 the parents think that by a just and necessary amount 
 of punishment they run any risk of impairing the 
 child's affections. The risk is far greater of impairing 
 
94 
 
 CHILDREN. 
 
 them by indulgence. A spoilt child never loves its 
 mother ; never at least with the same measure ol 
 love as if it were unspoilt. And there is in human 
 nature an essential though somewhat mysterious con- 
 nection of love with fear, which, though chiefly 
 recognised in the relations between man and God, 
 is also discernible in the relations between man and 
 man, and especially in those between parent and 
 child. Love in either relation is deepened by some 
 degree — not oppressive or too disturbing — some 
 slight degree of fear ; and the very truth of the 
 text, that ' perfect love casteth out fear,' shows thai 
 fear must be there before the love is made perfect. 
 Therefore the parent who shrinks from inflicting jusi 
 and proper punishments upon a child, deprives thai 
 child not only of the rest to be found in duty and 
 obedience, but also of the blessings of a deepei 
 love. 
 
 There is another way not much adverted to by 
 blind parents, in which children are injured by undue 
 indulgence. It prevents them from benefiting by 
 the general tendency of mankind to have kind and 
 friendly feelings towards children. Such feelings are 
 checked and abated when it is seen that children 
 are unduly favored by their parents. And when the 
 rights and comforts of others are sacrificed for theii 
 sake, instead of being objects for the protection and 
 
CHILDKEN. 95 
 
 good offices of all around them, they become odious 
 in the same manner as princes' favorites do, and 
 their parents' sins are visited upon them. 
 
 Then the repugnance which people feel towards 
 the objects of an unjust partiality, provokes them 
 to exaggerate the demerits of the children, — not 
 probably to the face of the parents, but in a way 
 to go round to them, — whereupon the parents come 
 in with some show of reason as protectors of injured 
 innocence, and fortify themselves in their own de- 
 lusions by detecting injustice in the views of others. 
 It is not the nature of mankind to be unjust to 
 children, and where parents find this injustice to 
 prevail, they should look for the source of it in 
 itheir children or in themselves. 
 
 Indeed, it is the nature of mankind to be only 
 too kind to children, and to take too much notice 
 of them; and this is a reason for not throwing them 
 too much in the way of strangers and casual visitors. 
 When the visitors are intelligent, and the parents 
 are not the sort of people to whom flattery is accept- 
 able, the children may be no worse for meeting the 
 visitors, though they should never be sent for to be 
 shown. But when the parents are known to have 
 open ears for the praises of their children, there are 
 hardly any strangers so careful and conscientious as 
 not to say what is expected of them, and very many 
 
96 CHILDREN. 
 
 will carry their blandishments to an extreme of gross- 
 ness and falseness. A considerate visitor will observe 
 the conduct of a judicious parent towards a child, 
 and be guided by it ; but the instances are far more 
 frequent in which the folly of injudicious parents is 
 unscrupulously abetted by the levity of others ; and 
 the only consolation for a rational bystander is that 
 the children may have more sense than their flatterers 
 and more discernment than their parents, and be 
 unflattered and ill-pleased (as will sometimes happen) 
 by these coarse attempts at adulation. 
 
 It is selfishness on the part of parents which gives 
 rise to undue indulgence of children, — the selfishness 
 of sacrificing those for whom they care tess to those 
 for whom they care more ; and the selfishness of 
 the parent for the child will invariably produce 
 selfishness of the child for himself. A spoilt child ' 
 is never generous. And selfishness is induced in a 
 child not only by too much indulgence, but even 
 by too much attention. It will be most for a child's 
 happiness and well-being, both present and to come, 
 that he should feel himself, in respect to comforts 
 and enjoyments, the most insignificant person in the 
 house. In that case he will have his own resources, 
 which will be more available to him than any which 
 perpetual attention can minister; he will be subject 
 to fewer discontents ; and his affections will be more 
 
CHILDREN. 97 
 
 cultivated by the occasional tokens of kindness which 
 a contented child will naturally receive in sufficient 
 abundance, than they would be by continual endeavors 
 to make him happy. 
 
 And if continual attention to making him happy 
 will not produce happiness, neither will continual at- 
 tention to making him good produce goodness. For 
 if the child feels that there is some one incessantly i 
 occupied with his happiness and goodnessy he will 
 come to be incessantly occupied with himself. Some< 
 thing must be left in a spirit of faith and hope to 
 Nature and God's providence. Parents; are the in- 
 struments, but they are not to be all in all. Room 
 must be left for some liberty of action, for, many 
 an untended impulse, for self-reliance, for temptations 
 and trials, with their natural results of victory with 
 self-respect, or defeat with remorse. By such treat- 
 ment the child's moral nature, being amply exercised, 
 will be seasonably strengthened ; and when he comes 
 into the wOrld as a man, he will come with a man's 
 weapons of 'defence ; whereas if the child be con- 
 stantly watched and kept out of harm's way, he will 
 come into the world a moral weakling. I was once 
 present when an old mother, who had brought up 
 a large family of children with eminent success, was 
 asked by a young one what she would recommend 
 in .the case of some children who were too anxiously 
 7 
 
»0 CHILDREN. 
 
 educated, and her reply was — 'I think, my dear, a 
 little wholesome neglect.' 
 
 For similar reasons it may be well that children 
 should not be hedged in with any great number of 
 rules and regulations. Such as are necessary to be 
 established, they should be required implicitly to ob- 
 serve. But there should be none that are superfluous. 
 It is only in rich families, where there is a plentiful 
 attendance of governesses and nurses, that many rules 
 can be enforced ; and I believe that the constant 
 attentions of governesses and nurses is one of the 
 greatest moral disadvantages to which the children 
 of the rich are exposed. 
 
 I have heard a multiplicity of petty regulations 
 defended, on the ground that it was a constant exer- 
 cise of the child's sense of right and wrong. But 
 will a child be really the better for always thinking 
 about whether he does right or wrong, that is, — 
 always thinking about himself.? Were it not well, 
 that, for hours together, no question of right or wrong 
 should arise in his path ? or at least none that de- 
 mands from him more than a half-mechanical atten- 
 tion ? For the conscience of a child may easily be 
 worn out, both by too much pressure and by over- 
 stimulation. I have known a child to have a con- 
 science of such extraordinary and premature sensi- 
 bility, that at seven years of age she would be i made 
 
CHILDREN. 99 
 
 ill by remorse for a small fault. She was brought 
 up by persons of excellent understanding, with infinite 
 care and affection, and yet, by the time she was 
 twenty yea"rs of age, she had next to no conscience 
 and a hard' heart. A person who had some experi- 
 ence of precocious consciences once observed to me, 
 in respect to those children who are said to be too 
 good and too clever to live, that it was very desira- 
 ble they should not. 
 
 These views are not, of course, to be pushed too 
 far. A child's conscience should always have that 
 sufficiency of exercise which due discipline and the 
 occasions of life will not fail to supply, without facti- 
 tious duties or needless rules. And with respect to 
 the treatment of the conscience on the point of sen- 
 sibility, natural constitutions are so diverse that it is 
 difficult to speak generally ; but though I would not 
 have it much stimulated or unintermittingly worked 
 upon — though I would avoid to intimidate or inten- 
 erate the conscience — I do not agree with those 
 who think that the appeals to it should be invariably 
 made with a judicial calmness, and that all punish- 
 ments should be inflicted dispassionately. Moral dis- 
 approbation on the part of parents towards children 
 (as indeed on the part of men towards men throughout 
 all relations of life) should not operate mechanically, 
 bringing with it, like a calculating machine, a pro- 
 
100 CHILDREN. 
 
 portionate evil to be suffered as a consequence of 
 every evil act. It should operate according to its 
 own human nature, as a matter of emotion, not only- 
 bringing an evil to be suffered, but a moral sentiment 
 to be recognised and taken to heart — a passion which 
 should strike upon the moral sense. 
 
 According to the nature of the child and of the 
 fault, the emotion should be sometimes more of sorrow 
 than of anger, sometimes more of anger than of sor- 
 row. But it were better for the child's conscience 
 that there should be some errors of emotion, than 
 that punishments should be cold and dry. A parent 
 should ' be angry and sin not ; ' that is, the anger 
 should be a just and moral anger, and grave and 
 governed ; but at the same time it should be the real 
 anger of flesh and blood, and not the mere vis motrix 
 of an instrument of discipline. In this way the moral 
 sentiments of the parent, if they be virtuous, gener- 
 ous, and just, will be imparted to the child : for it 
 is a truth never to be lost sight of in the treatment 
 of our children, that their characters are formed, not 
 by what we do, think, or teach, but by what we feel 
 and by what we are. 
 
 With respect to the intellectual cultivation of chil- 
 dren, it is very important that the body, mind, and 
 moral sense of the child should proceed in their 
 growth proportionately and pari passu : — 
 
CHILDREN. 101 
 
 ' For nature, crescent, does not grow alone 
 In thews andbalk ; but as this temple waxes. 
 The inward service of the mind and soul 
 Grows wide withal.' * 
 
 As this temple waxes let it be ; not before this 
 temple waxes. Whichsoever of these constituents of 
 the human being, the body, the intellect, and the 
 moral sense, shall shoot forth prematurely and in 
 advance of the others, will run a great risk of being 
 nipped and blighted. The intellectual is, of the three 
 — in these times at least — that which is most liable 
 to premature development. The evil consequences 
 of such development have been very generally per- 
 ceived, and many maxims are afloat against over- 
 education ; but the ambition of parents is commonly 
 too strong for their wisdom and prudence, and the 
 over-education proceeds, the maxims notwithstanding. 
 And schools and colleges and all tutors and teachers 
 being governed by the same spirit, it is difficult for 
 a wise parent to give effect to wise views, even when 
 he heartily desires it. One rule, however, it is in his 
 own hands to carry out, and this is, if he talk much 
 to his children, not to talk intellectually. The intel- 
 lectual talk of adults is apt, not only to stimulate 
 the child's intellect to efforts beyond its strength, 
 but also to overlay many intellectual taste? which 
 
 * Hamlet. 
 
102 
 
 CHILDREN. 
 
 have their natural place in childhood, and which 
 it is good for every mind to have passed through. It 
 is best for a child that he should admire cordially 
 what he does admire ; but if the intellectual tastes 
 and criticisms of the adult mind are brought to bear 
 upon him, he will try to admire what he cannot, and 
 fail to admire what he might. 
 
 On the other hand, I would not be understood to 
 recommend the sort of jocular nonsense which some 
 intellectual parents will have recourse to in order to 
 place their conversation on a level with a child's 
 understanding; nor do I observe that children are 
 fond of it, or at all flattered by it, but rather the 
 contrary. For it is a mistake to suppose that any 
 joke is good enough for a child. Intelligent children, 
 if not absolutely fastidious as to jokes, (which cer- 
 tainly all children are as to taste and manners,) will 
 not, however, accept as complacently as might be 
 wished, the mere good-natured disposition to make 
 them merry; nor can they respond in the manner 
 that is sometimes expected from them, to every well- 
 meant effort of hpavy gambolling and forced faceti- 
 ousness. Whatever is most simple and natural is 
 most pleasing to a child ; and if the parent be not 
 naturally light and gay, he had better be grave with 
 his children, only avoiding to be deep or subtle in 
 discourse. 
 
CHILDREN. 103 
 
 But however parents may demean themselves, it is 
 not desirable that they and their children should be 
 always together. Children and young people — and 
 I should say even adults — are not the better in their 
 understandings for an exclusive association with their 
 superiors in understanding. Such association should 
 be occasional, not constant. The inferior mind so 
 associated may possibly not be of a nature to be over- 
 excited and over-wrought ; it may' be safe from those 
 evils through defect of spontaneous force and activity ; / 
 but in that case another evil arises ; it is led to adopt' 
 its opinions instead of thinking them, and finds a shor; 
 cut to posts to which it would be better that it should 
 fight its way. In the case of a young man who has 
 been brought up in the constant society of a parent 
 greatly superior to himself, it will generally be found 
 that he has come by his opinions not (as is best in 
 youth) partly through deference to authority, partly 
 through conflict with evils, and partly by spontaneous 
 impulse, but almost entirely by adoption, as if they 
 were certified facts. And this leaves the mind unen- 
 larged and the judgment unexercised. 
 
 There is a class of opinions, however, — those con- 
 nected with the moral and spiritual nature, — which 
 are to be inculcated on a different principle from those 
 which concern merely the cultivation of the intellect. 
 For these are opinions which are not to be valued 
 
104 CHILDKEN. 
 
 merely as opinions, but on account of the feelings and 
 affections which are to be incorporated with them. 
 Great as is the importance of true religious doctrine — 
 which is, as it were, the body of religion — it is, 
 nevertheless, an importance subsidiary and derivative ; 
 it is derived from the efficacy of true religious doctrine 
 to cherish and protect the growth of genuine religious 
 feeling, which is the soul of religion. The opinions 
 are the organic structure ; the feelings are the vital 
 principle. It is for the sake of the feelings that the 
 organization is so important ; and I think, therefore, 
 that religious truths, or what the parent believes to be 
 religious truths, should be presented to children through 
 the conveyance of the feelings for implicit adoption, 
 and not as matters to be wrought out in the under- 
 standing. For the primary object, which is to fix the 
 feeling, will be in some measure frustrated — the feel- 
 ing will be in some measure abated or supplanted— if 
 more thought be called up than the feeling of its own 
 mere motion will naturally generate. 
 
 But if the religious beliefs of a child be not founded 
 in his reason, what, it may be asked, will become of 
 them when the credulous simplicity of childhood shall 
 be at an end, and the thinking faculty shall have set 
 itself to work .' I answer, that whether his beliefs 
 have been founded in reason, or whether they have 
 been founded in love, receiving from reason merely a 
 
CHILDHEN. 105 
 
 collateral support, it is probable that if the child be 
 of an active and inquisitive understanding, the beliefs 
 will, at one period or another within childhood or 
 succeeding it, sustain some shock and trial. But those 
 who have taken much note of human nature will have 
 observed, I think, that the reason is the weakest part 
 of it, (God forbid that it should not!) and that the 
 most reasonable opinions are seldom held with much 
 tenacity, unless when they have been adopted in the 
 same way as that in which prejudices are adopted ; 
 that is, when they have been borne in upon the under- 
 standing by the feelings. Whilst I think, therefore, 
 that love is that constituent of faith of which a child's 
 nature is most capable, I also believe it to be that 
 groundwork of faith on which all nature must rest, if 
 it have any resting-place at all ; and love, therefore, 
 inspiring the reason, but not reduced to the reason, 
 must be so imparted to the child as to animate 
 the grow;ing and changing forms of doctrine through- 
 out the several stages of childhood; and when child- 
 hood shall have been left behind, it is this, and 
 nothing else, that can be relied upon to withstand 
 the rashness of a youthful intellect, flushed by its first 
 discoveries. The struggle will be great at this season, 
 in proportion to the largeness of the nature and the 
 force of the elements at work ; and if a strong under- 
 standing should be too suddenly expanded, it is 
 
106 CHILDREN. 
 
 probable that there will be some disruption of the 
 material fabric of doctrine in which the spiritual 
 feeling has hitherto had its abode. But if the principle 
 of love have been cherished and made strong from 
 the first, the broken forms of doctrine will reunite, and 
 love, with whatever strivings and wrestlings, will find 
 an organic faith in which to set up its rest and secure 
 itself from accidents of the intellect, as well as from 
 whatsoever the world can do against it. And in most 
 cases (though not in all unhappily) the faith will be 
 the more strongly founded for the conflict in which 
 it has been engaged. It was by Eros and Eris, by 
 Love ■ and Strife, that Order was brought out of 
 Chaos. 
 
 ' I can just remember,' says a theologian of the last 
 century, ' when the women first taught me to say my 
 prayers, I used to have the idea of a venerable old 
 man, of a composed benign countenance, with his own 
 hair, clad in a morning gown of a grave-colored flower- 
 ed damask, sitting in an elbow-chair.' * And he pro- 
 ceeds to say, that in looking back to these beginnings, 
 he is in no way disturbed at the grossness of his infant 
 theology. The image thus shaped by the imagination 
 ' of the child was in truth merely one example of the 
 various forms and conceptions, fitted to divers states 
 
 * Lights of Nature and Gospel Blended, ch. iii., s. 1. 
 
CHILDREN. 107 
 
 and seasons and orders and degrees of the religious 
 mind, whether infant or adult, which represent the 
 several approximations such minds, or minds at 
 such seasons, can respectively make to the complete- 
 ness of faith. These imperfect ideas should be held 
 to be reconciled and comprehended in that complete- 
 ness not rejected by it ; and the nearest approximation 
 which the greatest of human minds can accomplish 
 is surely to be regarded as much nearer to the 
 imperfection of an infantine notion than to the fulness 
 of truth. The gown of flowered damask and the 
 elbow-chair may disappear ; the anthropomorphism of 
 childhood may give place to the divine incarnation of 
 the Second Person in after years ; and we may come 
 to conceive of the Deity as Milton did when his 
 epithets were most abstract : 
 
 ' So spake the Sovkan Presenoe.'- 
 
 But after all, -these are but different grades of 
 imperfection in the forms of doctrinal faith; and if 
 there be a devouter love on the part of the child 
 for what is pictured in his imagination as a vener- 
 able old man, than in the philosophic poet for 
 the ' Sovran Presence,' the child's faith has more 
 of the efficacy of religious truth in it than the poet's 
 and philosopher's. What we have to take care of 
 in the religious training of a child is, that the love 
 
108 CHILDREN. 
 
 shall be indestructible and paramount ; so that in 
 all the transmutations of doctrine which after years 
 may bring, from the palpable picturihgs of Tucker's 
 infant imagination to the ' Three Incomprehensibles ' 
 of St. Athanasius, he may preserve the same relig- 
 ious heart ; and whatever other knowledge or sup- 
 posed knowledge shall supervene, may still ' know 
 that there is nothing- better than the fear of the 
 Lord, and that there is nothing sweeter than to take 
 heed unto the commandments of the Lord.'* 
 
 * Ecclesiasticus, xxiii. 27. 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 Let it not be too contemplative for action, nor 
 too active to afford room and space for contempla- 
 tion. The tendency of" our times is to bring every 
 man of eminent abilities into great outward activity, 
 and thereby perhaps in some cases to dam up and 
 divert to the turning of this mill or that, the stream 
 ■which should ' have flowed unbroken ' in omne 
 volubilis avum,'' and made itself a mirror to nature. 
 But it may happen to a man of genius, conscious of 
 this tendency of the age, to throw himself too much 
 into the opposite extreme. His leanings should be 
 towards retirement, no doubt; but he should indulge 
 them, though largely, yet still with a measured free- 
 dom, not a total abandonment. 
 
 ' Fountain-heads and pathless groves, 
 Places which pale passion loves ' — * 
 
 should be, without question, his favorite haunts: but 
 * Fletcher. 
 
110 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 he is not to forget that for the cultivation of the 
 highest order of poetry, it is necessary that he should 
 be conversant with life and nature at large, and 
 
 ' Know all qualities with a learned spirit 
 Of human dealings ' — * 
 
 that his poetry should spring out of his life, and that 
 his life should abound in duties as well as in con- 
 templations. 
 
 For that poetic vision which is the vision of the 
 introverted eye alone, has but a narrow scope : and 
 observation comes of action, and most of that action 
 which is the most responsible. And if it be true that 
 ' a man's mind is sometimes wont to tell him more 
 than seven watchmen that sit above in an high tower,' t 
 it is also true that that, man will hear most of all, 
 who hearkens to his own mind and to the seven watch- 
 men besides ; whilst what he hears will turn to know- 
 ledge, and will be fixed, amplified, and defined, in 
 proportion as there are deeds and consequences to 
 follow, and sweet or bitter fruits. He is but a child in 
 knowledge, hbwever versed in meditation, who has not 
 to act, to suffer, and to teach, as well as to inquire and 
 to learn. If a meditatiye man be used to be taken 
 about a city in a carriage or led about it by a friend, 
 it will be long before he knows his way in it ; but 
 
 * Shakespeare. f Ecclesiasticus, xxzvii. 14. 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. Ill 
 
 not SO if he have to go about in it by himself, still 
 less if he have to lead another. 
 
 If, then, a poet would entitle himself to take the 
 highest rank in his art, — to be numbered, that is, 
 amongst the ' poets sage,^ he should be, to a moderate 
 extent, mixed up with the affairs of life. His mind 
 should be not a vessel only, but a vat. His wisdom 
 should be a tried and stirring wisdom. His, specula- 
 tions should emanate from facts and . events, and his 
 poetry should have its roots in the common earth. 
 
 But it is difficult to say how this conversancy with 
 men and affairs is to be attempted in these times, 
 without losing hold of the contemplative life altogether, 
 and becoming involved in the inordinate activities of 
 the age. If a profession be adopted, there is hardly 
 any which leaves a moderate degree of leisure except 
 to men of inferior abilities. Men of eminent abilities 
 embarked in a profession, are placed under obligations 
 of exertion which they -cannot escape. In trade, 
 strenuous efforts are enforced upon a man by the 
 pressure of competition ; and trading occupations are 
 perhaps in other respects unsuited to a poet. Political 
 life is not open to him unless circumstances be favor- 
 able ; and to a man who is alert and excitable, (as a 
 poet must be supposed it to be,) it will prove too 
 violent a diversion from poetic pursuits ; and this, not 
 from the nature of the business only, but because it 
 
112 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 commonly leads a man of quick sympathies (which 
 again must be supposed in the poet's case) into a good 
 deal of social dissipation. 
 ' If life,' says Cowley, 
 
 ' If life should a well-ordered poem be, 
 (In which he only hits the white 
 Who joins true profit with the'best delight,) 
 The more heroic strain let others take, 
 Mine the Pindaric way I '11 make, 
 
 The matter shall be grave, the numbers loose and free.' 
 
 This liberty of life cannot, I think, in these days — 
 and in the case of a man of eminent abilities — be 
 secured, if a man be confined to any of the establish- 
 ed ruts in which -life is made to run. 
 
 If, then, neither professional, commercial, nor po- 
 litical life will sort well with the- life poetic, there 
 remains little besides casual employments and the 
 duties which accrue in every station, to supply a poet 
 with the quota of action required for his purposes. 
 These, however, may suffice if they be sedulously 
 pursued. The poor are always with us, and their 
 affairs fall fitly into the hands of educated men 
 who have no professional avocations. Let the poet 
 be a man of fortune, and the duties of a landlord 
 are incumbent upon him, whilst those of a magis- 
 trate lie before him, with the whole field of county 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 113 
 
 business.. If he be not a proprietoi", yet one place 
 he must occupy — that of a parishioner, with parochial 
 functions ; and the vestry will present, to an observant 
 eye, as instructive an exponent of human nature, 
 with pretty nearly the same variety of features, as 
 the Lords spiritual and temporal with Her Majesty's 
 faithful Commons in Parliament assembled. Nor is 
 the business of a parish to be regarded as unworthy 
 the diligent attention of a wan of genius. It ,is not 
 impossible that, from time to time, it may require 
 the same species of ability as the business of an 
 empire, and exercise the same faculties in its adjust- 
 ment ; for the amount of prudence and sagacity 
 needful for the successful transaction of business 
 depends comparatively little on the scale of operation. 
 Sometimes, indeed, the larger the scale the easier the 
 
 Furthermore, a man of judgment and ability will 
 find, as he advances in life; that the duties- of 
 friendship and relationship will multiply upon him 
 more than upon men of inferior capacity, if only he 
 be found willing to discharge them. And if he shall 
 attain to eminence as a poet, that, like every other 
 species of eminence, will bring with it no inconsider- 
 able demands upon his activity. To these may be 
 added — if they should fall in his way — casual and 
 temporary employments in the public service, taking 
 8 
 
114 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 care, however, not to let that service fix itself upon 
 him and suck the blood out of his poetic veins. Milton 
 had employments of this nature ; and before he should 
 hold himself equipped for his great enterprise in 
 poetry, he deemed it indispensable that to ' industrious 
 and select reading' should be added ' steady observa- 
 tion ' and ' insight into all seemly and generous arts 
 and affairs.' * Spenser and Cowley had such employ- 
 ments also ; and many others might be named, were 
 they worthy to be named after these. 
 
 But if a poet shall fail to find any field for external 
 activity, which would admit also of leisure and retire- 
 ment, or if. he shall have an invincible repugnance 
 to an outward life, (which may not unnaturally be 
 his predicament,) then it behoves . him the more to 
 place, his life under a well-devised discipline, in order 
 that it may be, if not externally active, yet orderly 
 and sedulous. For by how much a man shall reserve 
 himself to a contemplative life, by so much will he 
 need a more constant and watchful self-regulation in 
 the conduct of it ; and by so much, . also, will the 
 task' of self-regulation be difficult and severe. The 
 regimen of external circumstance and of obligations 
 contracted to others, .is an aid which only a strong 
 man can dispense with in the ordering of his days 
 
 * Reason of Church Government, Book 3d. 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 115 
 
 and hours ; and moreover, if the course of the hours 
 is to be governed wholly from within and pro re 
 natd as it were, there will be some danger of self- 
 government being accompanied by too much of self- 
 occupation. 
 
 Nor is it to be forgotten that the man who lies 
 under no external obligation, (none that is apparent 
 and palpable,) to occupy himself in one way or 
 another, will become a prey to many demands for 
 small services, attentions, and civilities, such as will 
 neither exercise his faculties, add to his knowledge, 
 nor leave him to his thoughts. The prosecution of a 
 contemplative life is not an answer to any of these 
 demands ; for though the man who is in the pursuit 
 of an active calling, is not expected to give up his 
 guineas for the sake of affording some trifling grati- 
 fication to some friend or acquaintance or stranger, 
 yet the man who has renounced the active calling 
 and the guineas in order that he may possess his 
 soul in peace, is constantly expected to give up his 
 meditations, and no one counts it for a sacrifice. 
 Meditation, it is thought, can always be done some 
 other day. A man without something indispensable 
 to do, will find his life to be involved in some of the 
 difficulties by which a woman's life is often beset, 
 one of which difficulties is the want of a claim para- 
 mount upon her time. And these difficulties will not 
 
116 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 be tlje less if the poet have, as he ought to have, 
 something of the woman in his nature; as he ought 
 to have, I aver ; because the poet should be Jiic et 
 hcBC homo — the representative of human nature at 
 large and not of one sex only. With the difficulties 
 of a woman's life, the poet will not find that any of 
 its corresponding facilities accrue ; he will find claims 
 to be made upon him as upon a man, and no in^ 
 demnities granted to him as a poet. Thus it is that 
 in the bustling crowds of this present world, a medi- 
 tative man finds himself, however' passively disposed, 
 in a position of oppugnancy to those around him, 
 and must struggle in order to staiid still. 
 
 But even if a poet devoted wholly to retirement, 
 should be able to seclude himself from petty and 
 unprofitable interruptions, he would still be the better 
 for methodizing his life by some severity of self- 
 restraint. Meditation is a wild business when there 
 is nothing else to be done. An excitable -mind will 
 wander and waste itself if it be unenclosed ; and 
 nothing needs to be intermitted more than the exer- 
 cise of the imaginative faculties. I have heard a 
 man of ardent religious feelings declare, that his 
 devotions were toore lively and spiritual after a day 
 of business than iii a day consecrated to devotional 
 exercises; and in like manner it may happen with 
 a poet, that there shall be more freshness and vigor 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 117 
 
 in the contemplations which spring up after compres- 
 sion, than in those which are the predetermined occu- 
 pation of the day. 
 
 Next to conversancy with life and affairs, a poet 
 should cultivate a conversancy with external nature. 
 The cultivation, indeed, will come of itself, if his 
 life be led where nature is favorably presented to 
 him; and not where it is soiled and obscured, as in 
 the smoky parts of Yorkshire and Lancashire, or 
 built out, as in great cities. If, however, circum- 
 stances should oblige him to live in a city, occasional 
 visits to the country may still do much for him — in 
 some cases, perhaps, even as much as constant ' resi- 
 dence. The loss of continual intercourse with Nature 
 is, no doubt, a great loss to those who have an ever- 
 flowing love and a never-failing admiration of her; 
 which are, indeed, supreme amongst poetical gifts : 
 but on the other hand, if there be some short-comings 
 in this kind, the benefits of continual residence will 
 bear a less proportion to those of occasional inter- 
 course. What we see rarely is seen with an access 
 of enjoyment which quickens observation and bright- 
 ens recollection ; and if the susceptibilities need to 
 be stimulated, the stimulation will redound more from 
 what is fresh than from what is familiar. 
 
 Mr. Tennyson has described — as he only could — 
 a sort of semi-seclusion, which would seem to com- 
 
118 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 bine all that a poet could want to favor his intercourse 
 with Nature and with his kind : 
 
 ' Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite 
 Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love : 
 News from the humming city comes to it 
 In sound of funeral or iparriage bells ; 
 And, sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear 
 The windy clanging of the minster clock ; 
 Although between it and the garden lies 
 A league of grass, washed by a slow, broad stream, 
 That, stirred with languid pulses of the oar. 
 Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on, 
 Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge, 
 Crowned with the minster-towers.' * 
 
 It must be acknowledged, however, that the greatest 
 English Poets of past times did undoubtedly live 
 much in London ; and of those, he who excelled 
 most in the treatment of external nature, composed 
 his best descriptions from the images retained in his 
 imagination, when the knowledge of nature was at 
 one entrance quite shut out. 
 
 In our own times the greatest poets have lived in 
 the country; but indeed they had good reasons for 
 doing so, independently of intercouse with nature. 
 For the social life of cities is much changed from 
 what it was two hundred years ago. In London, in 
 
 * The Gardener's Daiighter. 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 119 
 
 the present times, an eminent man is beset with a 
 multiplicity of social enjoyments and excitements, 
 the very waste-pipes of genial sensibility; and the 
 poet's imagination, instead of forming a fund to be 
 continually deepened and widened by influx from 
 secret sources, is diffused and spread abroad and 
 speedily dried up. Such, at least, is the case with 
 those eminent men who are lively in discourse or 
 cordial and courteous in demeanor. Others, perhaps, 
 invested with an adequate unpopularity, may be in 
 little danger. ' Me, though blind,' says a poet who 
 seems not to have perceived the perils of social 
 popularity till they had passed by him, — 
 
 ■ Me, though blind, 
 God's mercy spared, from social snares wilh ease 
 Saved by that gracious gift, inaptitude to please.' 
 
 But social repulsiveness has its evils too, when fully 
 brought out in a metropolitan life : the garb of hedge- 
 hog skins, though a coat of proof, may be turned 
 outside in, and not worn with the equanimity with 
 which that sort of garment is said to have been worn 
 by the Saint. Whether, therefore, the poet be so- 
 cially unacceptable, or be courted, flattered, and 
 caressed, but most in the latter case, London, in 
 these times, is not the place in which his faculties 
 will be most favorably developed. 
 
120 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 And a due appreciation of the temptations to which 
 a poet is exposed by popular admiration and the 
 courtings and wooings of social fife, may lead us to 
 juster views than are, I think, generally entertained, of 
 the ways in which genius and art are to be chei- 
 ished by nations and governments. There is much 
 complaint made by the admirers of arts and litera- 
 ture, that their professors are not sufficiently advanced 
 and honored by the State and by mankind. In 
 my estimation they are honored more than is good 
 either for themselves or for their calling. Good for 
 mankind it may be to admire whatever is admirable i^ 
 'genius or art; but as to the poet himself, a very 
 moderate extent of favorable acceptance in his own 
 times is all that can be beneficial to him either as a 
 man or as an artist. He is by temperament but too 
 excitable ; with him the vita umbraiilis is essential to 
 repose and self-possession ; and it is from repose and 
 self-possession, — 
 
 ' Deep self-possession, an intense repose — ' * 
 
 that all genuine emanations of poetic genius proceed. 
 To the poet, solitude itself is an excitement, intp 
 which none that is adventitious shpuld intrude : the 
 voices which come to him in solitude should not be. 
 mixed witK acclamations from without ; and the voices 
 
 ~ * Coleridge. 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 121 
 
 which proceed from him should not he confounded hy 
 the amiable intrusion of their own echoes, apt, when 
 quickly reverberated, to, be too intently listened for. 
 
 It is true that he must have some more or less 
 conscious anticipation of sympathy to come; he must 
 feel that his voice will not be as the voice of one 
 crying, in the desert, hut that his just thoughts, his 
 glorious visions, his passions and ' the high reason of 
 his fancies,' will in their due time of maturity, and 
 after so many revolutions of the seasons as are need- 
 ful for the ripening of such results, reach the hearts of 
 multitudes, and find an echo in the ages that are 
 unborn. But these anticipations of what is distant are 
 not of a nature to agitate or disturb the mind in its 
 self-communion. They serve to animate his lighter 
 eiforts, and they support him in his severer labors and 
 more strenuous studies ; but they do not dissipate or 
 distract the mind. It is far otherwise in respect to 
 contemporaneous and immediate admiration ; and I 
 doubt whether any high endeavor of poetic art ever 
 has been or ever will be promoted by the stimulation of 
 popular applause. 
 
 Still less would poetic art be advanced by rewards 
 in the shape of civil honors and distinctions ; and the 
 proposals which have been made for so rewarding it 
 tbetray, when they are examined, the inconsistency of 
 the views on which they are founded. It would prob^ 
 
122 THE LIFE POETIC, 
 
 ably be admitted by their authors that poetic art 
 should not be accounted in any respect inferior to 
 military or political art. Yet has any one entertained 
 the notion of assigning to the greatest poet of an age, 
 civil honors and distinctions tantamount to those which 
 are assigned to the greatest soldier or politician ? The 
 creation of a Duke of Rydal, with an appanage of 
 .£10,000 a year, is not the sort of measure which has 
 been suggested, and probably there is no one who 
 would not acknowledge it to be absurd. Yet it could 
 be hardly more absurd than the assignment to our 
 greatest poets, of titular distinctions, which, being the 
 highest that are proposed as a reward of poetic genius, 
 are yet amongst the lowest that would be considered 
 worthy the --acceptance of a meritorious general officer 
 or a serviceable county member. The truth is, that 
 civil honors and titular distinctions are altogether unfit 
 for great poets ; who, being but two or three in a cen- 
 tury, are to be distinguished by the rarity of their kind. 
 With regard to pensions, were they intended merely 
 as honorary rewards, they would be open to the same 
 objections. If they were supposed to have reference to 
 the dignity of the calling, such pensions as are given to 
 Lord Chancellors and Ambassadors should pitch the 
 scale, rather than such as fflre given to Clerks and 
 Collectors of Customs. But they are assigned upon 
 different principles, and their sufficiency is to be 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 123 
 
 brought to another test. In treating of the life which 
 a poet ought to lead, I have left out of the account 
 one material question, — whether it be such a life as 
 it is likely that he will be able to lead. And as there 
 is no reason to suppose him one of the few who are 
 born to a competency, the renunciation which I have 
 recommended of all professional and commercial pur- 
 suits, and also of all public employments except such 
 as are casual and temporary, may well suggest the 
 inquiry in what manner he is to be maintained. Not, 
 certainly, on the profits of poetry ; for unless he apply 
 himself merely to please and pamper and not to ele- 
 vate or instruct, his poetry will do little indeed towards 
 procuring him a subsistence : it will probably not even 
 yield him such a return as would suffice to support a 
 laboring man for one month out of the twelve. This 
 has been the case with the greatest poets, if not during 
 the whole, at least during the greater part of their 
 lives ; and even when their poetry has attained to 
 what may be called popularity, it is still a popularity 
 which extends only to the cultivated, as distinguished 
 from the merely educated classes, and does not bring 
 with it any very profitable sale. 
 
 If poetry, then, be unavailable, will the poet' be 
 enabled to subsist by the aid of prose ? This will 
 probably be his best resource ; but even prose will fail 
 to return a profit, unless it be written for the market. 
 
124 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 Having been almost the only resource of one who was 
 at once an eminent poet, and in general literature 
 the most distinguished writer of his age, Mr. Southey, 
 his example may be fairly adduced as showing what 
 can be made of it under the most favorable circum- 
 stances. By a small pension and the office of 
 laureate, (yielding together about ,£200 per annum,) 
 he was enabled to insure his life, so as ,to make a 
 moderate posthumous provision for his family ; and 
 it remained. for him to support himself and them, 
 so long as he should live, by his writings. With 
 unrivalled industry, infinite stores of knowledge, ex- 
 traordinary talents, a delightful style, and the devotion 
 of about one half of his time to writing what should 
 be marketable rather than what he would have desired 
 to write, he defrayed the cost of that frugal and 
 homely way of life which he deemed to be the hap- 
 piest and the best. So far it may be said that all 
 was well ; and certainly never was man more con- 
 tented with a humble lot than he. But at sixty years 
 of age he had never yet had one year's income in 
 advance; and when between sixty and seventy his 
 powers of writing failed, had it not been for the 
 timely grant of an additional pension,* his means 
 of subsistence would have failed too, , It was owing 
 
 * Through the care of Sir R. Feel. 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 125 
 
 to this grant alone, that" the last years of a life of 
 such literary industry as was the wonder of his time, 
 were not harassed by pecuniary difficulties; and at 
 his death the melancholy spectacle was presented, of 
 enormous preparations thrown away, one great labor 
 of his life half finished, and other lofty designs which 
 had been cherished in his heart of hearts from youth 
 to age, either merely inchoate or altogether unat- 
 tempted. 
 
 We mourn over the lost books of Tacitus and 
 Pliny, and rake in the ruins of Herculaneum to 
 recover them ; but i£300 a-year — had it been given 
 in time — might have realized for us works, over 
 the loss of which our posterity may perhaps mourn 
 as much or more ! 
 
 ' Things incomplete, and purposes betrayed, 
 Make sadder transits o'er Truth's mystic glass, r 
 
 Than noblest objects utterly decayed.' * 
 
 If one moiety of Mr. Southey's timet' — applied 
 to procure, by marketable literature, the means of 
 
 * Wordsworth. 
 
 t I will allow myself to note here, whether or not it be 
 to the purpose, that the only son of the author of the Book 
 of the Church — a most active and exemplary clergyman 
 with a large family — is left (unavoidably perhaps, but the 
 well-wishers of the Church must surely wish that it 
 
126 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 subsistence — is found to leave such miserable results 
 as these, it may easily be imagined what fortune 
 would attend the efforts in marketable prose, (always 
 assuming them, of course, to be good and worthy, 
 and not the mere suppliance of the literary toyshop,) 
 of a man of like poetical gifts, but not endowed with 
 the same grace and facility in composition, the same 
 unwearied industry and almost unexampled produc- 
 tiveness. 
 
 Pensions to poets, then, in such cases — and, in- 
 deed, pensions to all writers, poetical or other, in the 
 higher and graver and therefore less popular and 
 lucrative walks of literature — may be deemed, I 
 think, though not appropriate as honors or rewards, 
 yet desirable as providing a subsistence which may 
 not be attainable in other ways without great injury 
 to the interests of literature. The provision should 
 be suited to the retired and homely way of life, by 
 which the true dignity of a poet will be best sus- 
 tained, and in which his genius will have its least 
 obstructed development; but it should be a provision 
 calculated — if prudently managed — to make his life, 
 in its pecuniary elements, easy and untroubled. I 
 
 be avoided) to struggle with the world, on a hard-working 
 poverty-stricken curacy. This he' does, however, in a spirit 
 of manly contentedness worthy of his father. / 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 127 
 
 say ' if prudently managed,' because as to the wants 
 of. a spendthrift poet, or of one who is incompetent 
 to the management of his affairs, they are wants 
 which it is hard to measure and impossible to supply. 
 If the pensions now given to men of. letters, to scien- 
 tific men, and to artists, be of such amount as would 
 enable them, living frugally, to give all or most of 
 their time, with an easy mind, to those arts and pur- 
 suits by which they may best consult the great and 
 perdurable interests committed by Providence to their 
 charge, then the amount is sufficient, though it be 
 but little ; and the fact which is so often brought 
 forward, that it is less than the ordinary emoluments 
 of trades, professions, or the humbler walks of the 
 public service, is not material to the case. If the 
 pensions, on the other hand, be of less a-mount than 
 will effect this purpose, then I think that the just 
 ground on which the grant of such pensions is to be 
 rested, — that is, the true interests of men of genius 
 themselves, and, through them, the interests of litera- 
 ture and art, — require that they should be advanced 
 in amount so far as may be sufficient for this purpose, 
 and no farther. 
 
 It is not only to secure to him the undisturbed 
 possession of his time, and the undiverted direction 
 of his endeavors, that it is expedient to make some 
 sufficient pecuniary provision for a poet : such a pro- 
 
128 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 vision is important also as a safeguard to his character 
 and conduct ; for few indeed are the men whose 
 character and conduct are unimpaired by pecuniary 
 difficulties; and though wise men will hardly be 
 involved in such difficulties, let their need be what 
 it may, and though none but a wise man can be a 
 great poet, yet the wisdom of the wisest may be weak 
 ill action ; it may be infirm of purpose ; through 
 emotions or abstractions it may be accessible to one 
 inroad or another ; and though I am far from claim- 
 ing any peculiar indulgence for the infirmities of men 
 of genius — on the contrary, in my mind, nothing 
 can be more erroneous than to extend indulgence to 
 moral aberrations precisely in those cases in which, 
 operating to the corruption of the greatest gifts, they 
 are the most malign and pernicious, — yet, for this 
 very reason, whilst refusing them any indult or abso- 
 lution, I would claim for men of genius all needful 
 protectioti — more perhaps thari ought to be needful — 
 in order that no danger that can be avoided may 
 attend the great national and universal interests in- 
 volved in their life and character. For never let this 
 truth depart from the minds of poets, or of those 
 who would cherish and jirotect them — that the poet 
 and the man are one and indivisible ; that as the life 
 and character is, so is the poetry ; that the poetry ' 
 'is the fruit of the whole moral, spiritual, intellectual, 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 129 
 
 and practical being; and howsoever m the imperfec- 
 tion of humanity, fulfilments may have fallen short 
 of aspirations, and the lives of some illustrious poets 
 may have seemed to be at odds with greatness and 
 purity, yet in so far as the life has faltered in wisdom 
 and virtue, failing thereby to be the nurse of high 
 and pure imaginations, the poet, we may be sure, has 
 been shorn of his beams; and whatsoever splendor 
 may remain to him, even though to our otherwise 
 bedarkened eyes wandering in a terrestrial dimness, 
 it may seem to be consummate and the very ' off- 
 spring of Heaven first-born,' yet it is a reduced 
 splendor and a merely abortive offspring as compared 
 with what it might have been, and with what it is in 
 the bounty of God to create, by the conjunction of 
 the like ^ gifts of high reason, ardent imagination, 
 efflorescence of fancy and intrepidity of impulse, 
 with a heart subdued to Him and a pure and un- 
 spotted life. Out of the heart are the issues of life, 
 and out of the life are the issues of poetry. 
 
 And the greatest of those poets whose lives, though 
 perhaps less blemished in reality than evil report 
 would have them to be, are certainly not free from 
 reproach, have seen and acknowledged all this, and 
 have known what they have lost. If the little that 
 has come down to us concerning Shakspeare includes 
 somewhat against him, we know also from himself 
 9 
 
132 THE LTFE POETIC. 
 
 companionship which, being indeed essential to any 
 one who would bring out his better nature and fulfil 
 his duties as a man, is eminently essential to a 
 poet. 
 
 There is another companionship to be Considered, ^-^ 
 that of books. The reading by which Milton proposed 
 to prepare himself to write poetry was, as appears 
 by a passage to which I have already referred, ' select 
 reading.' In these times I think that a poet should 
 feed chiefly (not of course exclusively) on the litera- 
 ture of the seventeenth century. The diction and 
 the movement of that literature, both in verse and 
 in v?hat Dryden calls 'that other harmony,' are, in 
 my apprehension, far more fitted than the literature 
 which has "followed it, to be used for the training of 
 the mind to poetry. There was no writing public 
 nor reading populace in that age. The age was the 
 worse for that, but the written style of the age was 
 the better. The writers were few and intellectual; 
 and they addressed themselves to learned, or, at least, 
 to studious and diligent readers. The structure of 
 their language is in itself an evidence that they count- 
 ed upon another frame of mind and a different pace 
 and speed in reading, from that which can alone be 
 looked to by the writers of these days. ' Their books 
 were not written to be snatched up, run through, 
 talked over, and forgotten; and their diction, there- 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 133 
 
 fore, was not such as lent wings to haste and impa- 
 tience, making everything so clear that he who ran 
 or flew might read. Eather it was so constructed 
 as to detain the reader over what was pregnant and 
 profound, and compel him to that brooding and pro- 
 lific posture of the mind, by which, if he had wings, 
 they might help him to some more genial and profit- 
 able employment than that of running like an ostrich 
 through a desert. And hence those characteristics of 
 diction by which these writers are made more fit 
 than those who have followed them, to train the ear 
 and utterance of a poet. For if we look at the 
 long-suspended sentences of those days, with all their 
 convolutions and intertextures — the many parts wait- 
 ing for the ultimate wholeness — we shall perceive 
 that without distinctive movement and rhythmical sig- 
 nificance of a very high order, it would be impossible 
 that they could be sustained in any sort of clearness. 
 One of these writer's sentences is often in itself a 
 work of art, having its strophes and antistrophes, its 
 winding changes and recalls, by which the reader, 
 though conscious of plural voices and running di- 
 visions of thought, is not however permitted to disso- 
 ciate them from their mutual concert and dependency, 
 but required, on the contrary, to give them entrance 
 into his mind, opening it wide enough for the purpose, 
 as one compacted and harmonious fabric. Sentences 
 
134 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 thus elaborately constructed, and complex though mu- 
 sical, are not easy to a remiss reader, but they are 
 clear and delightful to an intent reader. Sentences, 
 on the other hand, such as are demanded in these 
 times by the reading commonalty, and written by 
 those who aspire to be their representatives in the 
 republic of letters, lie, under little obligation to address 
 themselves to the ear of the mind. Sense is to be 
 taken in by so little at a time, that it matters not 
 greatly what sound goes with it ; or, at all events, 
 one movement and one tune, which all the world 
 understands, is as much as our sentence can make 
 room for or our reader will taJce time for; and as 
 matter and style will ever re-act upon each other, 
 I fear "there is a tendency in our popular writers to 
 stop short of that sort of matter to which brief bright 
 sentences are not appropriate and all-sufficient. How- 
 ever this be, the finer melodies of language will 
 always be found in those compositions which deal 
 with many considerations at once — some principal, 
 some subordinate, some exceptional, some gradational, 
 some oppugnant ; and deal with them compositely, 
 by blending whilst they distinguish. And so much 
 am I persuaded of the connection between true intel- 
 lectual harmony of language and this kind of pom- 
 position, that I would rather seek for it in an Act of 
 Parliament — if any arduous matter of legislation be 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 135 
 
 in hand — than in the productions of our popular 
 writers, however lively and forcible. An Act of Par- 
 liament, in such subject-matter, is studiously written 
 and expects to be diligently read, and it generally 
 comprises compositions of the multiplex character 
 which has been described. It is a kind of writing, 
 therefore, to which some species of rhythmical move- 
 ment is indispensable, as any one will find who 
 attempts to draft a difRcult and comprehensive enact- 
 ment, with the omission of all the words which speak 
 to the ear only, and are superfluous to the sense. 
 
 Let me not be misunderstood as presuming to find 
 fault generally and indiscriminately with our modern 
 manner of writing. It may be adapted to its age and 
 its purposes ; which purposes, as bearing directly upon 
 living multitudes, have a yastness and momentousness 
 of their own. All that it concerns me to aver is, that 
 the purpose which it will not answer is that of training 
 the ear of a poet to rhythmical melodies. And how 
 little it lends itself to any high order of poetipal pur- 
 poses, may be judged by the dreary results of every 
 attempjt which is made to apply it to purposes of a 
 cognate character — to prayers, for example, and 
 spiritual exercises. Compare our modern compositions 
 of this kind with the language of the liturgy — a lan- 
 guage which, though for the most part short and ejac- 
 ulatory and not demanding to be rhythmic in order to 
 
134 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 thus elaborately constructed, and complex though mu- 
 sical, are not easy to a remiss reader, but they are 
 clear and delightful to an intent reader. Sentences, 
 on the other hand, such as are demanded in these 
 times by the reading commonalty, and written by 
 those who aspire to be their representatives in the 
 republic of letters, lie, under little obligation to address 
 themselves to the ear of the mind. Sense is to be 
 taken in by so little at a time, that it matters not 
 greatly what sound goes with it ; or, at all events, 
 one movement and one tune, which all the world 
 understands, is as much as our sentence can make 
 room for or our reader will take time for ; and as 
 matter and style will ever re-act upon each other, 
 I fear "there is a tendency in our popular writers to 
 stop short of that sort of matter to which brief bright 
 sentences are not appropriate and all-sufficient. How- 
 ever this be, the finer melodies of language will 
 always be found in those compositions which deal 
 with many considerations at once — some principal, 
 some subordinate, some exceptional, some gradational, 
 some oppugnant; and deal with them compositely, 
 by blending whilst they distinguish. And so much 
 am I persuaded of the connection between true intel- 
 lectual harmony of language and this kind of pom- 
 position, that I would rather seek for it in an Act of 
 Parliament — if any arduous matter of legislation be 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 135 
 
 in hand — than in the productions of our popular 
 writers, however lively and forcible. An Act of Par- 
 liament, in such subject-matter, is studiously written 
 and expects to be diligently read, and it generally 
 comprises compositions of the multiplex character 
 which has been described. It is a kind of writing, 
 therefore, to which some species of rhythmical move- 
 ment is indispensable, as any one will find who 
 attempts to draft a difficult and comprehensive enact- 
 ment, with the omission of all the words which speak 
 to the ear only, and are superfluous to the sense. 
 
 Let me not be misunderstood as presuming to find 
 fault generally and indiscriminately with our modern 
 manner of writing. It may be adapted to its age and 
 its purposes ; which purposes, as bearing directly upon 
 living multitudes, have a yastness and momentousness 
 of their own. All that it concerns me to aver is, that 
 the purpose which it will not answer is that of training 
 the ear of a poet to rhythmical melodies. And how 
 little it lends itself to any high order of poetical pur- 
 poses, may be judged by the dreary results of every 
 attempt which is made to apply it to purposes of a 
 cognate character — to prayers, for example, and 
 spiritual exercises. Compare our modern compositions 
 of this kind with the language of the liturgy — a lan- 
 guage which, though for the most part short and ejac- 
 ulatory and not demanding to be rhythmic in order to 
 
136 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 be understood, partakes, nevertheless, in the highest 
 degree, of the musical expressiveness which pervaded 
 the compositions of the time. Listen to it in all its 
 varieties of strain and cadence, sudden or sustained, — ' 
 now holding on in assured strength, now sinking ih a 
 ' soft contrition, and anon soaring in the joyfulness of 
 faith, — confession, absolution, exultation, each to its 
 appropriate music, and these again contrasted with the 
 steady statements of the doxologies ; — let us listen, I 
 say, to this language, which is one effusion of celestial 
 harmonies, and compare with it the flat and uninspired 
 tones and flagging movements of those compounds of 
 petition and exhortation, (frora their length and multi- 
 fariousness peculiarly demanding rhythmic support,) ■ 
 which are to be found in modern collections of prayers 
 for the use of families. I think the comparison will 
 constrain us to acknowledge that short sentences in 
 long succession, however' clear in construction and 
 correct in grammar, if they have no rhythmic im- 
 pulse — though they may very well deliver themselves • 
 of what the writer thinks and means — wiU fail to 
 bear in upon the mind any adequate impression of 
 what he feels — his hopes and fears, his joy, his 
 gratitude, Ijis compunction, his anguish and tribula- 
 tion ; or, indeed, auy assurance that he had not 
 merely framed a document of piety, in which he 
 had carefully set down whatever was most proper to 
 
THE LIFE POETIC, 137 
 
 be said on the mornings and evenings of each day. 
 These compositions have been, by an illustrious sol- 
 dier, designated ' fancy prayers,' and this epithet may 
 be suitable to them in so far as they make no account 
 of authority and prescription ; but neither to the fancy 
 nor to the imagination do they appeal through any 
 utterance which can charm the ear. 
 
 I come back, then, to the position that a poet 
 should make companions chiefly of those writers who 
 haVe written in the confidence that their books would 
 be learned and inwardly digested, and whose language 
 was framed for patient and erudite ears, .and an atti- 
 tude of the mind like that in which St. Paul listened 
 to Gamaliel, sitting at his feet. And I think that 
 he should rather avoid any habitual resort to books, 
 however delightful in their kind, such as are written 
 in these times and for these times, to catch the 
 fugacious or stimulate the sluggish reader ; books 
 such as may be read in the captiousness of haste 
 by a lawyer with an appointment to keep and a 
 watch on the table, or in an inapprehensive weari- 
 ness by a country gentleman after a day of field 
 sports. 
 
 Moreover, by this abstinence, and by a conversancy 
 with elder models in the matter of diction, the poet 
 will be enabled to employ as his own, by the habit 
 which is a second nature, that slightly archaistip 
 
138 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 coloring of language, which, being removed from 
 what is colloquial and familiar, at the same time that 
 it has no incongruity or unnatural strangeness, is, I 
 think, in these times at least, (as by Spenser and 
 others it was deemed to be formerly also,) the best 
 costume in which poetry can be clothed, combining 
 what is common to other ages with what is charac- 
 teristic of its own. At the same time the true poet 
 will be choice and chary, as well as moderate, in 
 the use of archaisms ; by no means detaining or 
 reviving old forms of speech, which, being intrinsi- 
 cally bad, are in a way to be worthily forgotten. The 
 wells of English were not altogether undefiled in 
 any age ; and they who aspire to be what poets ought 
 to be, the conservators of language, will proceed, not 
 by obstructing the expurgation of their mother tongue, 
 — a process which, "as well as its corruption, is con- 
 tinually on foot, — but by remanding to their more 
 derivative significations, words which are beginning 
 to go astray, and by observing with a keener insight 
 the latent metaphorical fitness or unfitness by which 
 all language is pervaded. 
 
 Nor is it to be supposed that the true poet will 
 
 betray his trust in the conservation of his country's 
 
 tongue, through any latitude popularly permitted to 
 
 him for convenience of rhyme or rhythm. For what- 
 
 ■ ever may be meant by those who speak of poetical 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 139 
 
 license, that phrase would mislead us much, were we 
 to suppose that the language of poetry is not required 
 to be precise for the most part, and beyond all other 
 language apt and discriminative. And though this 
 peculiar aptitude will escape many of the poet's 
 readers, (if he have many,) and much of it will hot 
 be recognised at once even by the more skilful few, 
 yet in this, as in other matters of art, it is what can 
 be fully appreciated only by continual study, that 
 will lay the strongest foundations of fame. The 
 'hsec placuit semel' should be, to the^ poet, of infi- 
 nitely less account than the ' hsec decies repetita 
 placebit : ' nor is he worthy of the name of a poet 
 who would not rather be read a hundred times by 
 one reader than once by a hundred. 
 
 When that great man of whom I have already 
 made mention, speaks of his life as led in his library 
 and with his books, those to which he adverts as his 
 never-failirig friends, are the books of othef times ; 
 and a poet's feelings as to this 'companionship, could 
 not be, more expressively conveyed than in the verses 
 in which he has given them utterance : — 
 
 ' My days among the dead are past, 
 
 Around me I behold 
 Where'er these casual eyes are cast, 
 The mighty minds of old : 
 
140 THE LIFE POETIC, 
 
 My never-failing friends are they, 
 With whom I converse day by day. 
 
 ' With them I take delight in weal, 
 
 And seek relief in woe ; 
 And while I understand and feel 
 
 How much to them I owe. 
 My cheeks have often been bedewed 
 With tears of thoughtful gratitude. 
 
 ' My thoughts are with the dead ; with them 
 
 I live in long past years ; 
 Their virtues love, their faults condemn, 
 
 Partake their hopes and fears : 
 And from their lessons, seek and find 
 Instruction with an humble mind. 
 
 ' My hopes are with the dead. Anon 
 
 My place with them will be ; 
 And I with them shall travel on 
 
 Through all eternity ; 
 Yet leaving here a name, I trust, 
 That will not perish in the dust.' 
 
 With regard to the habitual reading of books in 
 foreign languages, whether living languages or other, 
 I, being but' very imperfectly acquainted vsrith any 
 but my own, am not competent to say what would 
 be the effect of it upon a poet's diction and numbers ; 
 but this subject is • one which would deserve to be 
 
THE LIFE POETIC, 141 
 
 investigated by some duly qualified critic* Milton, 
 I think, though he greatly enriched his store of poeti- 
 cal images and materials by his conversancy with 
 Latin, Greek, and Italian books, did yet suffer injury 
 on the other hand in the perverting of his diction 
 to the Latin ; his numbers, however, (for numbers 
 are less than diction accessible to foreign influence,) 
 remaining unwarped and eminently his country's and 
 his own. Dante had no indigenous literature to assist 
 him in the moulding of his verse, being himself the 
 founder of the Italian as a literate language ; and he 
 rebukes with some severity of disdain, those who 
 Were ' tam obscense rationis,' as to magnify the lan- 
 guage of their native country above every other. 
 
 * Since the first and second editions of this hook were 
 published, I have been informed by Mr. Crabbe Robinson, 
 the friend of Schiller and of most of the other great men of 
 letters of his times in England and Germany, — indeed I 
 may add, the friend of all men, great and small, who stand 
 in need of his friendship, — that being one day with Schiller 
 in his library, and observing on the shelves a collection of 
 German translations of Shakspeare, he inquired how it was 
 that Schiller, who understood English, could require these 
 translations. Schiller's answer was, that he was in thft 
 habit of reading as little as possible in foreign languages, 
 because it was his business to write German, and he thought 
 that by reading in other languages he should lose his nicer 
 perceptions of what belonged to his own. 
 
142 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 ' For myself,' he says, ' whose country is the world, 
 being native to that as the fish to the sea, though I 
 drank the waters of the Arno before I had a tooth 
 in my head, - and have so loved Florence as, by 
 reason of my love, to undergo an unjust banishment, 
 yet have I holden my judgment subject to my reason 
 rather than to my senses; and as to Florence whence 
 I am sprung, regard it though I may as the place in 
 the world most pleasant to me, yet when I revolve 
 the works of the poets and other writers by whom 
 the world has been described in all its particulars 
 from pole to pole, I am strong and absolute in the 
 opinion, derived from other evidence than that of 
 the senses, that there are regions and cities more 
 delightful and noble than those of Tuscany, and 
 languages better both for their use and their charm 
 than the Latian.'* 
 
 * ' Nam quicunque tarn obscenae rationis est ut locum suae 
 nationis deliciosissimum credat esse sub sole, huic etiam prse 
 cunctis proprium vulgare licebit, id est maternam locutionem, 
 praeponere : . . . . Nos autem, cui mundus est patria velut 
 piscibus aequor, quamquam Sarnum biberimus ante dentes, 
 et Florentiam adeo diligamus ut, quia dileximus, exilium 
 patiamur injuste, ratione magis quam sensu spatulas nostri 
 judicii podiamus : et quamvis ad voluptatem noslram, sive 
 nostrse sensualitatis quletem, in terris amcenior locus quam 
 Florentia non existat, revolventes et poetarum, et.aliorum 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 143 
 
 It would be matter of much interest to know from 
 competent critics, how far the operation of these 
 sentiments is to be traced in the fabric of Dante's 
 verse, he having had, as it were, to build it up from 
 the ground ; or how far the native genius of the 
 language has ruled supreme. If Milton, however, 
 have accepted foreign aid, and perhaps Dante also,' 
 yet Shakspeare is a signal example of the all-suffi- 
 ciency of national resources ; having, with his 'small 
 Latin and less Greek,' so large and various a vocabu- 
 lary, it hardly seems possible that any extent of 
 erudition could have bettered it, and a structure of 
 language so flexible and multiform, that it could not 
 have been more so had there been a confluence of 
 twenty tributary tongues at its formation. 
 
 Having considered, if not sufficiently, yet at suffi- 
 cient length, after what manner a pOet is to live, it 
 
 seriptorum, volumina, quibus mundus univcrsaliter et mem- 
 bratim describitur, ratiocinantesque, in nobis situationes va- 
 ries mundi locornm et eorum habitudinem ad utrumque 
 polum et circulum seqUatoreum, multas esse perpendimus 
 firmiterque censemus, et magis nobiles et magis deliciosas 
 et regiones et urbes, quam Thusciam et Florentiam, unde 
 sum oriundus et civis, et plerasque nationes et gentes delec- 
 tabiliori atque utiliori sermone uti, quam Latinos.' — De 
 Vulgari Eloquio, 1-6. I extract the passage, because in 
 translating I have abridged it. 
 
144 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 may be well, . before I conclude, to inquire at what 
 period of his life he should deem himself to be pre- 
 pared for the exercise of his vocation on a large scale. 
 And from the nature of some of the preparations 
 which have been treated of as indispensable, it will 
 plainly appear that 'this period will not arrive in early 
 youth. For if contemplation, action, conversancy with 
 life and affairs, varied duties, much solitude in its turn, 
 with observation of Nature, and reading select and 
 severe if not extensive, be, as I have deemed them to 
 be, essential requisites for the writing of poetry in its 
 higher and graver kinds, some not inconsidereible 
 tract of matured life must have been travelled through 
 before these fruits can have been gathered. And with 
 this hypothesis our literary history and biography will 
 be found to accord. Milton, at twenty-three years of 
 age, thought that he ripened slowly ; and when he 
 supposed himself less happy in that respect than 
 others, doubtless it was because his own deficiencies 
 were better known to him than theirs : — 
 
 ' How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, 
 Stolen, on his wing, my three-and-twentieth year, 
 My hasting days fly on with full career. 
 
 But my late spring no bud or blossom sheweth. 
 
 Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth 
 That I towards manhood am arrived so near. 
 And inward ripeness doth much less appear, 
 
 Than some more timely happy spirits indueth.' 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 145 
 
 Even in his twenty-ninth year he regarded his 
 poetical efforts, (and comparing himself with himself, 
 perhaps we may say with reason,) as a plucking of ' 
 the ' berries harsh and crude.' But the history of 
 poetry at large would show, I think, that Milton's poet- 
 ical faculties were not of slower growth than those of 
 other poets of the high and intellectual orders ; and 
 that at all events the period of the culmination of 
 such poets is in middle life. And with regard to 
 exceptional cases — instances of high achievement at 
 other periods, — whilst a few may be cited as belong- 
 ing to the periods short of middle life, more illustrious 
 examples still will be found belonging to periods be- 
 yond it. Pope wrote verses with singular grace and 
 dexterity in his early youth : but, on the other hand, 
 Dryden when he produced the ' Alexander's Feast,' 
 was in his sixty-seventh year ; and ' are not the glean- 
 ings of the grapes of Ephraim better than the vintage 
 of Abiezer .' ' Goethe may be quoted as an authority 
 as well as an example. When the poet, in the pro- 
 logue to the Faust, sighs after his lost youth, his friend 
 reproves him, and whilst admitting that youth is pro- 
 pitious to divers other ends and exercises, declares that, 
 for the purposes of poetry, the elder is the better 
 man : — 
 
 ' The cunning hand of art to fling 
 With spirit o'er the accustom'd string ; 
 10 
 
146 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 To seem to wander, yet to bend 
 
 Each motion to the harmonious end : 
 
 Sach is the task our ripened age imposes, 
 
 Which makes our day more glorious ere it closes.'* 
 
 Nor is it only the poetry of the highest intellectual 
 order which is better written after youth than in youth. 
 Even for amorous poetry, there is a richer vein than 
 that of youth's temperament, and a more attractive art 
 than youth can attain to. Let the masters of erotic- 
 verse be mustered, and it will appear,'! think, that few 
 or none of them wrote consummately in early youth, 
 whilst the best of them gave utterance to- their best 
 strains long after they had sung their ' Vixi PuelUs.' 
 The sense of proportion, which is required equally in 
 the lighter as in the graver kinds of poetry, is natural- 
 ly imperfect in youth, through undue ardor in particu- 
 lars ; and no very young poet will be content to 
 sacrifice special felicities to general effect. Nor can 
 there well exist, at an early period of life, that rare and 
 peculiar balance of all the faculties, which, even more 
 perhaps than a peculiar force in any, constitutes a 
 great poet : — the balance of reason with imagination, 
 passion with self-possession, abundance with reserve, 
 and inventive conception with executive ability. 
 
 On the whole, therefore, it is not desirable that a 
 poet should prosecute any great enterprise in early , 
 
 • Lord F. Egerton's translation. 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 147 
 
 youth ; nor is it likely that his lighter efforts will be 
 worth much. Nevertheless, it is the period for prac- 
 tice and exercise ; and a poet must and will write much 
 verse in youth, and he will be much the better for it ; 
 nor will he write it with the purpose of throwing it 
 away. If he be affected with the usual impatience of 
 an ardent temperament in early life, it will perhaps be 
 best for him to publish ; for till he have rid himself of" 
 this impatience, he will not go to work with an ambi- 
 tion suiBciently long-sighted and a steady preference of 
 ulterior to early results. And publication, if unsuc- 
 cessful, (as the juvenile publications of great poets are 
 almost sure to be,) is a sedative of much virtue and 
 eiScacy in such cases. ' Be not ambitious of an early 
 fame,' says Mr. Landor, ' for such is apt to shrivel and 
 drop under the tree.' Early success puts an end to 
 severe study and strenuous endeavor ; whereas early 
 failure in those in whom there is genuine poetic genius, 
 and what commonly accompanies it — 
 
 ' Faith in the whispers of the lonely Muse — ' * 
 
 acts as a sort of narcotic stimulant, allaying impatience, 
 but quickening the deeper mind. 
 
 The outset of a poet's life, and the conduct of it 
 ' nel mezzo del cammiti' — the seasons in which his 
 
 * Wordsworth. 
 
148 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 poetry is sown and reaped — are most important to the 
 interests of the art and of mankind. The manner in 
 which it shall be drawn to a close may be supposed to 
 be important chiefly to the poet himself: yet it is not 
 altogether so ; and a few words may not be wasted in 
 speaking of that latter autumn of a poet's life which 
 succeeds his harvest-home. With poets whose life 
 reaches its three-score-years-and-tien, this will be a 
 period of some years' duration. For the fact that by 
 some great poets some short poetical efforts have been 
 hazarded in old age with eminent success, should not 
 certainly lead to the conclusion that an old man should 
 occupy himself in adding to the bulk of his poetical 
 Works, (especially if already voluminous,) when he can 
 no longer hope to enhance their rateable and specific 
 value. It is important to every poet to keep his works 
 within compass. Moreover, the intensities of life 
 should be allowed to come to their natural close some 
 steps short of the grave ; and passionate writing should 
 not be extended over this period, even if the imagina- 
 tion have not ceased to be impassioned. 
 
 There are other ways, at once congenial with the 
 poetic life and consentaneous with its decline, in which 
 the activities that remain may be gently exercised, 
 when the passion has been laid to rest. The long edu- 
 cation of a poet's life (for as long as he lives he should 
 learn) will have enabled him to detect, at the end of it, 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 149 
 
 many faults in his writings which he knew not of he- 
 fore ; and there will he many faults, also, of which he 
 was cognisant, but which, in the eagerness of his pro- 
 ductive years, he had not found leisure or inclination 
 to amend. In his old age, as long as the judgment 
 and the executive power over details shall be unim- 
 paired, — as long as the hand shall not have lost its 
 cunning, — the work of correction may be carried on 
 to completeness, and the poet's house be put in order. 
 Some caution will be requisite. Age is prone to fas- 
 tidiousness ; and if the poet can no longer go along 
 with the ardors of his younger years, he should take 
 care lest he quench them with too cold a touch. Age, 
 too, is vacillating : . and if he have lost his clearness 
 and decisiveness of choice, he should not deal with 
 any delinquencies of his younger verse except those 
 which are flagrant ; and in all his corrections, indeed, 
 the presumption should be ill favor of the first draft, 
 which should have the benefit of the doubt if there be 
 one ;' otherwise the works may be the worse for the 
 last hand. But, subject to these conditions, there seems 
 to be no employment better suited to the old age of a 
 poet, than that of purifying and makipg less perishable 
 that which he trusts may be the earthly representative 
 of his immortal part. 
 
 For such purpose and in so far forth, he may permit 
 himsplf, even at a period when ' the last infirmity ' 
 
150 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 should be on its last legs, to be occupied with himself 
 and' his fame. But when his own works are as he 
 would wish to leave them, nothing of that which is pe- 
 culiar to him as a poet and not common to him as a 
 man, will so well become his latter days, as to look 
 beyond himself and have regard to the future fortunes 
 of his art involved in the rising generation of poets. 
 It should be his desire and his joy to cherish the lights 
 by which his own shall be succeeded, and, perhaps, 
 outshone. The personal influence of an old poet 
 upon a young one — youth and age being harmonized 
 by the sympathies of the art — may do what no writ- 
 ings can, to mould those spirits by which, hereafter, 
 many are to be moulded ; and as the reflex of a glori- 
 ous sunset will sometimes tinge the eastern sky, the 
 declining poet may communicate to those who are to 
 come after him, not guidance only, but the very colors 
 of his genius, the temper of his moral mind, and the 
 inspiration of his hopes and promises. That done, or 
 ceasing to be practicable through efflux of light, it will 
 only remain for the poet to wait in patience and peace. 
 
 '"While night 
 Invests the sea, and wished morn delays.' * 
 
 * Paradise Lost. 
 
THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 
 
 There is a great and grievous complaint in some 
 quarters, that the Rich are too rich, and that their 
 riches are continually increasing, whilst from other 
 quarters the complaint is, that those who thus com- 
 plain have as great a desire for riches as if they 
 saw no harm in them. A few years ago a writer 
 of great sagacity and knowledge of the world, repre- 
 sented England to be a country in which poverty is 
 contemptible. Such an account of things tends to 
 propagate the sentiment it proclaims; because in all 
 countries there are many who are prepared to go 
 with the stream. But let us hope that it is not a 
 true account. There are large numbers of English- 
 men, though not, perhaps, of the particular section of 
 society which fell more directly under the observa- 
 tion of that writer, by whom poverty is not despised, 
 unless resulting from indolence or misconduct, and 
 by whom riches are not respected, unless well won 
 or well spent. 
 
152 
 
 THE WAYS OF THE KICH AND GKEAT. 
 
 Nevertheless it is true enough that riches are too 
 much valued by some classes, whilst they are re- 
 garded with jealousy by others ; and in the present 
 state of society it were well if all classes could be 
 led to consider justly, and if .none would permit 
 themselves to consider enviously or ungently, the 
 manner in which riches are expended, and the gen- 
 eral demeanor of the Rich and the Great. 
 
 Although the Rich are a small minority of the 
 people, there is no reason why their happiness and 
 enjoyments should not be cared for ; and there is in 
 human nature so much of a disposition to sympathize 
 with happiness and prosperity, that their enjoyment 
 of their wealth will not be unpopular, if it be not 
 seen to be selfish or absurd. But it is desirable both 
 for the sake of the Rich and Great, and for the sake 
 of the sentiments with which the other classes may 
 regard them, that what is expended for enjoyment 
 should really contribute to enjoyment, and also that 
 it should not be more than duly proportioned to what 
 is expended for the benefit of others. 
 
 The expenditure of the Rich and Great in matters 
 of mere appearance is often objected to, and it is 
 true that by far the greatest portion of their expendi- 
 ture is more for show than for any other species of 
 luxury. But this is not to be indiscriminately de- 
 
THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GKEAT. 153 
 
 i 
 
 nounced ; and those by whom it should be so dealt 
 with, even though they were the poorest of the poor, 
 would probably, be found to be, in their practice, 
 within the condemnation of their own principle. 
 ' What need of five-and-twenty, or of ten, or of five 
 followers ? ' said Goneril. ' What need of one ? ' 
 added Regan. But the King made answer — 
 
 ' Oh reason not the need ; our basest beggars 
 Are in the poorest thing superfluous : 
 Allow not Nature more than Nature needs, 
 Man's life is cheap as beast's ! ' 
 
 The plea of ' supporting the station to which Provi- 
 dence has called us,' is not unmeaning, though it 
 be often much abused ; and when it is not abused, 
 the common sense of the people will generally recog- 
 nise it sufficiently to make matters of show inoffen- 
 sive. But in order to give validity to the plea, the 
 shows should be such as have attached themselves 
 to the- station very gradually, so as to form part of 
 the transmitted usages of society, and be harmonized 
 in men's imaginations. New inventions in the way 
 of show, or new extensions of old expenditures in 
 this way, are obnoxious, and should tend to derogate 
 from the respect in which a man is held by his 
 equals, as well as to impair his popularity ; because 
 they are evidence that he is not merely sliding into 
 
154 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GKEAT. 
 
 the track which is prepared for him, but deliberately 
 turning his thoughts to ostentation. A" man's expen- 
 diture for show, should therefore belong either to the 
 station to which he is born, or to that into which he 
 has gradually passed by the natural influence of in- 
 creasing riches, superior abilities, or other circum- 
 stances, which make the shows incidental to the life 
 rather than expressly devised and prepared. Even 
 if the show be no more than proportioned to the 
 wealth, it will not avoid to be obnoxious, if the wealth 
 have been suddenly acquired, and the transition from 
 obscurity be abrupt. ' For I,' says Mr. Lander, 
 
 ' have shunn'd on every side, 
 The splash of newly mounted pride.' 
 
 And who has not.' And in whatever measure show 
 is indulged, let it be apparent that other things are 
 uppermost, and that a man's heart is in his benefi- 
 cence and in his business. 
 
 Amongst the superfluities which add nothing to 
 the enjoyments of the Rich, and detract from their 
 usefulness, may not superfluous houses be numbered.? 
 A man who has many houses, will oftentimes have 
 no home : for the many objects and associations which 
 a man gathers about him, as a shell-fish forms its 
 shell, in a conformity with his manner of being, 
 cannot be so gathered in more places than one. And 
 
THE "WATS OF THE KICK AND GKEAT. 155 
 
 the perplexity which will beset him from time to 
 time, especially if there be different opinions in his 
 family, in determining to which house to go, will 
 more than counteract the pleasures of change ; and 
 his life will need more of forecasting. 
 
 And as to usefulness and popularity. Operations 
 for the improvement of his neighborhood will be 
 interrupted or impaired by changing from house to 
 house, and his own interest in them will tte broken 
 and imperfect. If on the other hand he leave any 
 of his houses long unoccupied, the neighborhood is 
 deprived of the services which are due from a resi- 
 dent man of property. And moreover there is a 
 sense of waste in seeii\g a house constantly and 
 deliberately left unoccupied. It is something good, 
 which is neither to be used and enjoyed, nor sold 
 nor lent, nor given — one of the most naked forms 
 of superfluity. 
 
 If these views be just, it would follow that rich 
 men should not wantonly embarrass themselves with 
 many houses ; and that those to whom they have 
 accrued as unavoidable adjuncts of large estates, 
 should, if possible, let them even for a nominal rent, 
 or establish in them some junior members of their 
 family. 
 
 There are objections also to an excessive extent 
 of park, pleasure-ground, and demesne. For this 
 
156 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 
 
 tends to isolate the owner, and to place his neighbors 
 and his duty to his neighbors at a distance from him. 
 The physical element of distance will often make 
 an important difference in a man's relations with his 
 fellow-creatures. An extensive park introduces more 
 or less of this element in the case of all a man's 
 neighbors except his lodge-keepers ; and a great 
 extent of contiguous landed property added to this, 
 introduce's it in respect of all his neighbors except 
 his tenants. This is no small evil. The tenantry 
 and dependents of the Rich and Great are not the 
 only persons with whom they should be in relations 
 of good neighborhood. It is perhaps equally impor- 
 tant that they should be in such relations with the 
 clergy- and the smaller gentry around them. The 
 attraction of cohesion by which society is to be kept 
 together, will not be brought about by an approxi- 
 mation of its opposite poles, but by an attraction of 
 the nearest to the nearest throughout the social body. 
 The distancing of country neighbors by large parks 
 and estates is the more to be deprecated now, because 
 railroads have recently operated in the same direction, 
 by filling great country-houses more than ever with 
 metropolitan society. 
 
 In this case again, what is to be done when parks 
 of this excessive extent have descended to the owners, 
 consecrated, perhaps, by hereditary and historical 
 
THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GEE AT. 157 
 
 associations ? — or when they could not be disparked 
 or contracted in size without injury to the beauty 
 of the country ? Little, perhaps, to abate the specific 
 evil ; but much to compensate for it. Such parks, 
 instead of being disparked,^ may be popularized. 
 Access should never be refused to strangers ; certain 
 spaces in them should be assigned for the sports of 
 the neighboring peasantry ; and periodical games and 
 festivities should be celebrated' in them for the benefit 
 of the neighbors of all classes. The Aristocrat should 
 ever bear in mind, that his position has something 
 in it of a public and national character, and that 
 aristocratic possessions exist for popular purposes. 
 
 That portion of the expenditure of the Kich which 
 is devoted to luxuries of the table, may escape the 
 obseiration of the Poor, and be, therefore, perhaps 
 less unpopular than it ought to be. But of all excess 
 in luxury, that of the table is the most offensive to 
 the taste of those who would wish to see the higher 
 classes distinguished by refinement at least, if not by 
 simplicity of life. To do the Rich justice, the extent 
 to which this species of expenditure is carried in 
 these times, is to be attributed less to sensuality than 
 to ostentation ; and it is to parade expenditure rather 
 than to pamper the appetite, that those never-ending 
 still-beginning dinners are served up, at which a 
 
158 THE WAYS OF THE EICH AND GREAT. 
 
 person of a taste unvitiated by custom could hardly 
 look on without a sense of dreariness and disgust. 
 That the offence to good taste is wanton and gratui- 
 tous rather than gluttonous, may be inferred from the 
 small quantity of the dainties displayed that is really 
 eaten; and one proof out of many that costliness is 
 chiefly aimed at, is to be found in the practice of 
 providing esculents which are out of season. By a 
 true and unsophisticated taste, what is out of season 
 would be rejected as out of keeping with Nature ; 
 and even without reference to any such principle of 
 taste, a strawberry in March is at all events no better 
 than a strawberry in July, though it is about a hun- 
 dred times dearer; and by our greedy anticipations 
 and our jumbling together of the products of the 
 seasons, we deprive ourselves of that change and 
 variety which Nature, in her own orderly successions, 
 would provide. 
 
 But if the motive for this sort of sumptuousness is 
 display more than gluttony, it has, nevertheless, a most 
 pernicious tendency to promote gluttony ; and, indeed, 
 the length of time that people are required to sit at 
 these dinners would be intolerable if there were not 
 much eating and drinking to fill it up. The sensuality 
 is not so gross, certainly, as that of our drunken fore- 
 fathers ; but having regard to the fact that dinners are 
 late as well as long, and that in these times men's brains 
 
THE WAYS OF THE KICH AND GREAT. 159 
 
 are taxed as well as their stomachs, the pressure on 
 health is perhaps almost as severe. It has been ob- 
 served by an eminent physician, that more pressure of 
 that kind results from a life of steady high living than 
 from one of occasional debauch. To long and late 
 dinners, longer and later social entertainments of 
 divers kinds succeed, till the sun rises upon a worn- 
 out world. Everything in the nature of an amusement 
 is protracted and strained, and there cannot be a 
 greater mistake than this in the economy of enjoy- 
 ment. The art of carrying oif a pleasure is not to sit 
 it out. 
 
 Expense in furniture is perhaps as innocent as 
 any expense can be which is not meritorious. Yet 
 the internal garnishing and decorations of a house 
 have nothing of the public and patriotic attributes 
 which may be ascribed to the house itself, if it be 
 designed as a work of architectural art, to adorn the 
 land from age to age. The garnishings are for the 
 more exclusive and selfish enjoyment of the owner 
 and of those whom he may admit to his society, and 
 they are fugitive Eind perishing. Therefore the very 
 large proportionate expenditure of the Rich in these 
 times on luxuries of furniture (designated, perhaps, 
 by the sober and respectable name of ' comforts ') is, 
 to say the least, not to be commended. Moreover, 
 
160 THE WAYS OF THE KICH AND GREAT. 
 
 many of these luxuries are in reality less conducive 
 to comfort than what is cheap and common ; and there 
 are many more which impair the comfort through the 
 health. The air we breathe in our rooms would be 
 lighter and fresher if there were no such things as 
 carpets, window-curta:ins, bed-curtains, or valances ; 
 and the more full and heavy the draperies of a room, 
 the less light arid nimble is the air. And this effect 
 is aggravated if the room be spacious. It is an error 
 to suppose that rooms which are very large and lofty 
 are more airy than others. They may be more airy 
 than very small rooms, but they are less so (and thjs 
 is well known to the asthmatic) than rooms of mod- 
 erate dimensions, every corner of which is near the 
 external air. Again, the love of displaying cost and 
 magnificence in furniture is seldom accompanied, even 
 amongst the richest of the lich, by an indifference- as 
 to whether it is spoilt or blemished : and yet solicitude 
 on this point militates much against comfort. The sun 
 is often shut out to save the color of carpets and cur- 
 tains, at times when Nature's sunshine might well be 
 preferred to the best of upholstery. In short, there 
 are -a hundred ways in which luxury overreaches 
 itself — a hundred in which penance enters into the 
 worship of , Mammon. Double windows make our 
 rooms close. Artificial waters poison our parks. And 
 one truth the Rich would do well to keep in mind, for 
 
THE WAYS Ot THE HIGH AND GREAT. 161 
 
 very comfort's sake — that comfort, like health, may- 
 be impaired by being too anxiously cared for. 
 
 Very different is the view to be taken of a Eich 
 man's in-door expenditure, when he is sparing of mir- 
 rors and jars and satin and velvet-pile, but lavish in 
 objects which address themselves to the intellectual 
 and imaginative tastes. In libraries, and works of art, 
 pictures, sculpture, and engravings, a rich house can- 
 not be too rich : and the house of an educated gentle- 
 man should no more be without the works of Michael 
 Angelo or Raphael, in one form or another, than with- 
 out the works of Milton and Shakspeare. And with 
 regard to the galleries of the Rich, if unoccupied as 
 apartments, should they not be always open to stran- 
 gers ? and if they be so occupied, should they not be 
 open on certain days of every week ? In the Palazzo 
 Borghese at Rome, the' rooms are not ofily always 
 open, but they are provided with fires in cold weather, 
 with seats, catalogues, and tubes to look through, so 
 that the stranger feels bimself to be a guest, and the 
 guest of a gentleman, and is sensible, not only of the 
 mere liberality of the owner, but of his attentions, 
 courtesy, and good-breeding. 
 
 As to the free access to libraries, and the free loan 
 of books, those who lend books no doubt run some 
 risk of losing them. There is nothing which bor- 
 11 
 
162 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 
 
 rowers take so little care to return. Yet the value of 
 a book is only realized in proportion as it is read. A 
 book which is never read is of absolutely no value. 
 Therefore, though many books are said to be lost by 
 lending them, more are lost indeed by leaving them on 
 the shelf. And for the personal and particular loss to 
 the owner, he loses more than he need, if he allows 
 himself to be cheated of his liberality by the occa- 
 sional thoughtlessness or thanklessness of- those whom 
 he gratifies. That old scholar and gentleman who, 
 after -his name written in Latin in the blank page of 
 his books, wrote ' et amicorum ejus,' had a better 
 possession than that of a library. But the Rich might 
 guard their possessions in books by keeping a libra- 
 rian, who would not cost so much (alas !) as an under 
 butler or a groom of the chambers. 
 
 Amongst the most important of the relations in 
 which the Rich and Great stand to their fellow- 
 creatures, are their relations with their servants and 
 their relations with their tradesmen. 
 
 Under the former head, there may be, perhaps, 
 little to find fault with on the score of mere manner, 
 and outward demeanor. To use servants with harsh- 
 ness, or to be wanting in that species of consideration 
 for them which consists in a certain mildness and 
 amenity of manner, would ruffle and deform that 
 
THE ■WAYS OF THE KICH AND GREAT. 163 
 
 smooth surface of things which it is agreeable to 
 the taste of people in high life to see around them. 
 Nor do they, perhaps, interfere with the comforts of 
 their depepdents^by any undue or onerous exactions of 
 service ; for their establishments, being for the most 
 part calculated for show, are more numerous than is 
 required for use, and are therefore necessarily under- 
 worked, except, perhaps, in the case of some poor 
 drudges at the bottom, who slink up and down the 
 back stairs unseen, and whose comfort, therefore, may 
 not always engage the attention of a family of this 
 class ; and even these will not be oppressed with their 
 labors, unless when some impoverished people of 
 fashion may find it necessary to dock the tails of their 
 establishments in order to keep the mor§ prominent 
 portions entire. 
 
 Nevertheless the exceptions which may be taken 
 against the life of the Rich and Great, as affecting 
 the class of servants, are of a very grave description. 
 Late hours and habits of dissipation in the heads of 
 a family make it almost impossible, especially in 
 London, to exercise that wholesome household disci- 
 pline which is requisite to secure the well-being of a 
 servant. The usages of high life require that the 
 servants 'of these people should be numerous ; their 
 number unavoidably makes them idle ; idleness makes 
 them debauched; debauchery renders them often ne- 
 
164 THE WATS OF THE RICH AND GKEAT. 
 
 cessitous ; the affluence or the prodigality," the indo- 
 lence or indulgence or indifference o£ their masters, 
 affords them every facility for being dishonest ; and 
 beginning with the more venial kinds of peculation, 
 their consciience has an opportunity of making an 
 easy descent through the various gradations of lar- 
 ceny, till the misdemeanant passes into the felon. In 
 the meantime, the master, taking no blame to himself, 
 nor considering that servants are, to no inconsiderable 
 extent, what- their masters make them, — that they 
 are the creatures, at least, of. those circumstances 
 which their masters throw around them, and might 
 be moulded in the generality of cases, with a fair 
 prospect of successful results, by the will and conduct 
 of the master — passes over, with an indolent and 
 epicurean censure, the lighter delinquencies which he 
 may happen to detect, laughs perhaps at his own 
 laxity, and, when at length alarmed, discharges the 
 culprit without a character, and relieves himself, at 
 the expense of he knows not whom, by making of 
 a corrupted menial a desperate outcast. Hospitals,, 
 work-houses, and prisons, swarm with tlie broken- 
 down servants of the Rich; and it is but a small 
 portion of them that live to be old. 
 
 If it be said that a man cannot be expected to 
 change his mode of life for the sake of his servants, 
 it must be answered, that a mode of life which 
 
THE WAYS OF THE KICK AKD GKEAT. 165 
 
 hazards the perdition of several of his fellow-crea- 
 tures, ought to be changed, and cannot be persevered 
 in vcithout guilt. But if no such sacrifice were con- 
 sented to, there remain means by which the evil 
 might be mitigated. 
 
 A reduction in the number of servants would be 
 one great means of, promoting their well-being, and 
 would involve no real sacrifice of comfort or even 
 of luxury. The way to be well served is to keep 
 few servants ; and the keeping of superfluous servants 
 is one of the many ways in which luxury is self- 
 destroyed. Some little time ago, a lady who kept 
 nine men-servants, after several vain attempts to get 
 some coals for her fire, received from her butler the 
 explanation that none of the footmen would bring 
 them up, because ' the odd man * had forgotten to 
 fill the scuttles; the odd man on such establishments, 
 being the drudge who is hired to do the work of the 
 house. Thus it is that the multiplying of means will 
 often defeat the end ; work is seldom well done except 
 by those who have much to do; the- idleness of one 
 hour spreads itself rapidly over the whole twenty-four ; 
 and servants whose numbers are calculated for show 
 become unavailable for use. 
 
 And , again, even ' good servants conduce less to 
 comfort on many occasions than is often supposed. 
 Is it not frequently most for your comfort to serve 
 
166 TUE WAYS Of THE HIGH ANO GREAT. 
 
 yourself? How much easier to get yourself some- 
 thing, than to wait doing nothing till it is gotten for 
 you. For impatience is prevented or abated by instru- 
 mental activity. ' A watched pot is long in boiling,' 
 says the proverb : but go into the garden, gather some 
 dry sticks, put them imder the pot and blow the bel- 
 lows, and you will not have felt it long. And a rich 
 man, though aware of this, may not be able to help 
 himself; for his household being formed upon the 
 system . of everything being done for him, the system 
 becomes too strong for him, and he will not be per- 
 mitted to do, though often compelled to wait. 
 
 Every superfluous servant removed, not only re- 
 moves from the master one superfluous responsibility, 
 but also lightens the difiiculties of exercising due 
 discipline over those that remain. It diminishes the 
 risk of disorders and disputes, ■ not merely by sub- 
 tracting one from the chances ; for the one super- 
 fluous servant who is the cause of idle time in the 
 establishment, will probably open as many sources 
 of dissipation and discontent as there are members 
 of the household ; and many servants, having little 
 occupation, will invariably employ their leisure in 
 quarrelling with each other : — 
 
 ' Nothing to do was Master Squabble's mother, 
 And much ado his child;' 
 
THE WATS OF THE EICH AND GREAT. 167 
 
 But in recommending that the numhers of servants 
 should be so reduced as to give them full work, let 
 this be understood to mean full w^ork in working 
 hours only, always taking care that there be fair time 
 allowed for relaxation — time, in the case of those 
 who will so use it, for reading and self-cultivation — 
 and occasional time for the maintenance 6f those 
 original domestic affections which, in the circumstan- 
 ces in which servants are placed, are so apt to be 
 supplanted. 
 
 Another way in which the characters of servants 
 in high life nfight be improved, would be by seeing 
 their masters a little more scrupulous than some of 
 the more fashionable amongst them are wont to be, 
 in matters of truth and honesty. The adherence to 
 honesty on the part of the masters might be exem- 
 plary ; whereas their actual measure of honesty would 
 perhaps be indicated with sufficient indulgence, if 
 they were described (in the qualified language which 
 Hamlet applies to himself) to be ' indifferent honest.' 
 And there is a currency of untruth in daily use 
 amongst fashionable people for purposes of conve- 
 nience, which proceeds to a much bolder extent than 
 the form of well-understood falsehood by which the 
 middle classes also, not perhaps withotft some occa- 
 sional violation of their more tender consciences, 
 excuse themselves from receiving a guest. Fashion- 
 
168 THE WAYS OF THE KICH AND GEEAT. 
 
 able people, moreover, arei the most unscrupulous 
 smugglers and buyers of smuggled goods, and have 
 less difficulty than others and less shame, in making 
 various illicit inroads upon the public property and 
 revenue. It is not to be .denied that these practices 
 are, in point of fact, a species of lying and cheating,; 
 and the latter of them bears a close analogy to the 
 sort of depredation in which the dishonesty of a 
 servant commonly commences. To a servant it must 
 seem quite as venial an oifence to trench upon the 
 revenues of a duke, as to the duke" it may seem to de- 
 fraud the revenues of a kingdom. Such proceedings, 
 if not absolutely to be branded as dishonest, are not at 
 least altogether honorable ; they are such as may be 
 more easily excused in a menial than in a gentleman. 
 Nor can it ever be otherwise than of evil example to 
 make truth and honesty matters of degree. 
 
 But there is a worse evil in the manners of this 
 country in regard to servants. It is rarely that they 
 are considered in any other light than as mechanical 
 instruments. It unfortunately belongs very little to 
 our national character, to feel what the common 
 brotherhood of humanity requires of us in a relation 
 with , our fellow-creatures, which, however unequal, 
 is so close as that of master and servant. We are 
 not accustomed to be sensible that it is any part of 
 our duty to enter into their feelings, to understand 
 
THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT; 169 
 
 their dispositions, to acquire their confidence, to culti- 
 vate their sympathies and our own upon some common 
 ground which kindness might always discover, and to 
 communicate with them habitually and unreservedly 
 upon the topics which touch upon that ground. This 
 deficiency would, perhaps, be more observable in the 
 middle classes than in the highest — who seem gen- 
 erally to treat their inferior with less reserve — but 
 that in the latter the scale of establishment often 
 removes the greater part of a man's servants from 
 personal communication with him. Whether most 
 prevalent in the fashionable or in the unfashionable 
 classes, it is an evil which in the growing disunion 
 of the several grades of society, is now more than 
 ever, and for more reasons than one, to be re- 
 gretted. 
 
 The operation of the habits of the Rich and Great 
 upon the class of tradesmen, (and here, again, refer- 
 ence should be made more especially to those amongst 
 the Rich and Great who form what are called the 
 fashionable circles,) — the operation of their habits 
 of life upon tradesmen is, perhaps, a subject of 
 greater moral and political importance than either 
 party is aware of. 
 
 People of fashion are for the most part improvi- 
 dent : but even when they are not so in the long run, 
 
170 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 
 
 it seems to be their pride to be wantonly and per- 
 versely disorderly in the -conduct of their pecuniary 
 transactions. The result of this to themselves is not 
 here the point in question, — although there are few 
 things which in their effects are more certain to 
 pervade the entire moral structure of the mind, than 
 habits of order and punctuality, especially in money 
 matters; nor is there- anything to which character and 
 honor are more likely to give way than to pecuniary 
 difficulties. But what are the consequences to the 
 tradesmen with whom they deal ? In proportion to 
 the delays which the tradesman has had to contend 
 with in procuring payment of the account, is the 
 degree , of laxity with which he may expect to be 
 favored in the examination of the items ; especially 
 if he have not omitted the usual means of corrupting 
 the fidelity of servants. The accuracy of a bill of 
 old date is not in general very ascertainable, and it 
 would seem to be but an ungracious return for the 
 accommodation which the creditor has afforded, if 
 the debtor were to institute a very strict inquisition 
 into the minutise of his claims. These considerations 
 concur with the habitual carelessness and indolence 
 of people of fashion, as inducements to them to lead 
 their tradesmen into temptation ; and the result is 
 such a demoralization of the whole class, that it is 
 rare indeed to meet with a tradesman accustomed to 
 
THE WAYS OF THE SICH AND GEEAT. 171 
 
 be employed by people of fashion, whose accounts, 
 if closely scrutinized, would not betray a want of 
 integrity and fair dealing. The tradesman's want of 
 probity again, will second the customer's want of 
 care; and he will often, from dishonest motives, per- 
 tinaciously resist sending in a bill of short date; well 
 Itnowing in what cases he can rely upon an ultimate 
 payment in full, of an account ' of which the memory 
 of man runneth not to the contrary.' 
 
 Again, people of fashion, though (with occasional 
 coarse exceptions) very civil-spoken to their trades- 
 men, are accustomed to show in their conduct an 
 utter disregard of what amount of trouble, inconve- 
 nience, and vexation of spirit they may occasion, 
 either by irregularity in paying their bills, by requir- 
 ing incessant attendance, or by a thousand fanciful 
 humors, changes of purposes, and fastidious objections. 
 Possibly, indeed, they are very little aware of the 
 amount of it ; so inconsiderate are they of every- 
 thing which is not made to dance before their eyes, 
 or to appeal to their sensibilities through their senses. 
 Their tradesmen, and the workmen whom their trades- 
 men employ, are compelled, those by the competition 
 they encounter in their business, these by the necessi- 
 ties of their situation in life, to submit to all the 
 hardships and disquietudes which it is possible for 
 fashionable caprice to impose, without showing any 
 
172 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 
 
 sign of disturbance oi* discontent ; and because there 
 is no outcry made, nor any pantomime exhibited, the 
 fashionable customer may possibly conceive that he 
 dispenses nothing but satisfaction among all with 
 whom he deals. He rests assured, moreover, that if 
 he gives more trouble and inconvenience than others, 
 he pays for it ; the charges of the tradesmen of 
 fashionable people being excessively high. Hete, 
 however, there is a distinction to be taken. There 
 is no doubt that all the fantastical plagues and pre- 
 posterous caprices which the spirit of fashion can 
 engender, will be submitted to for money : but he 
 who supposes that the outward submission will be 
 accompanied by no inward feelings of resentment or 
 contempt, either is wholly ignorant of human nature 
 or grossly abuses his better judgment. Between 
 customer and tradesman the balance is adjusted : 
 between man and man there is an account which 
 money will not settle. It is not indeed to be desired 
 that any class of men should be possessed with such 
 a spirit of venal servility, as to be really insensible" 
 to the folly and oppression which enters into the ex- 
 actions of fashionable caprice ; or that, however com- 
 pelled to be obsequious in manner, they should alto- 
 gether lose their perception of what is due to common 
 sense and common consideration for others — 
 
 ' And by the body's action teach the mind 
 A most inherent baseness.' 
 
THE WAYS OF THE KICH AND GREAT. 173 
 
 If such be the actual result in some instances, then 
 is that consequence still more to be regretted than 
 the other. 
 
 Moreover, if the master-tradesmen are willing to 
 sell themselves into this slavery, the consequences 
 to the much more numerous classes of those whom 
 they employ, remains to be taken into the account. 
 These, at least, are not paid for the hardships which 
 ensue to them. Many is the milliner's apprentice 
 whom every London season sends to her grave, 
 because the dresses of fine ladies must be completed 
 with a degree of celerity which nothing but night 
 labor can accomplish. To the question, 'When must 
 it be done ? ' ' Immediately,' is the readiest answer ; 
 though it is an answer which would perhaps be less 
 inconsiderately and indiscriminately given, if it were 
 known how many young creatures have come to a 
 premature death in consequence of it, and how many 
 hearts have been hardened by the oppression which 
 it necessitates. Nor does the evil stop there. The 
 dressmaker's apprentices in a great city have another 
 alternative ; and it is quite as much to escape from 
 the intolerable labors which are imposed upon them 
 in the London season, as from any sexual frailty, 
 that such multitudes of them adopt a vocation which 
 affords some immediate relief, while it ensures a 
 doubly fatal termination of their career. The temp- 
 
174 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 
 
 tations by which these girls are beset might be deemed 
 all-sufficient, without the compulsion by which they 
 are thus, as it were, driven out into the streets. Upon 
 them, • the fatal gift of beauty ' has been more lavishly 
 bestowed than upon any other class — perhaps not 
 excepting even the gj-istocracy. There are many of 
 them, probably, the spurious offspring of aristocratical 
 fathers, and inherit beauty for the same reason as the 
 legitimate daughters of aristocrats, because the wealth 
 of these persons enables them to select the most 
 beautiful women either for wives or for concubines. 
 Nor are they wanting in the grace and simplicity of 
 manner which distinguish the aristocracy ; whilst 
 constant manual occupation produces in them more 
 vacuity of mind, than even that which dissipation 
 causes in their sisters of the superior class. They 
 are thus possessed of exterior attractions, which will 
 at any moment place them in a condition of com- 
 parative affluence, and keep them in it so long as 
 those attractions last, — a period beyond which their 
 portion of thought and foresight can scarcely be 
 expected to extend : whilst, on the other hand, they 
 have before them a most bitter and arduous servitude, 
 constant confinement, probably a severe task-mistress, 
 (whose mind is harassed and exacerbated by the 
 exigent and thoughtless demands of her employers,) 
 and a destruction of health and bloom which t^e 
 
THE WAYS OF THE KICH AND GREAT. 175 
 
 alternative course of life can scarcely make- more 
 certain or more speedy. Goethe wels well aware 
 how much light he threw upon the seduction of 
 Margaret, when he made her let fall a hint of dis- 
 content at domestic hardships : — 
 
 ' Our humble household is butsmall, 
 And I, alas ! must look to all. 
 We have no maid, and I may scarce avail 
 
 To wake so early and to sleep so late ; 
 And then iny mother is in each detail 
 
 So accurate.'* 
 
 If people of fashion knew at what cost some of 
 their imaginary wants are gratified, it is possible that 
 they might be disposed to forego the gratification ; it 
 is possible, also, that they might not. On the one hand 
 they are not wanting in benevolence to the young and 
 beautiful ; the juster charge against them being that 
 their benevolence extends no farther. On the other 
 hand, unless there he a visual perception of the youth 
 and beauty which is to sufier, or in some way a distinct 
 image of it presented, dissipation will not allow them a 
 moment for the feelings which reflection might sug- 
 gest : 
 
 ' Than vanity there's nothing harder hearted ; 
 For thoughtless of all sufferings unseen, 
 
 * ' Faust,' Lord F. L. Gower's translation. 
 
176 THE WATS OF THE RICH AND &REAT. 
 
 Of all save those which touch upon the round 
 Of the day's palpable doings, the vain man, 
 And oftener still the volatile woman vain. 
 Is busiest at heart with restless cares, 
 Poor pains and paltry joys, that make within 
 Petty yet turbulent vicissitude.' 
 
 If it be against people of fashion mainly that these 
 charges lie, there is another and a heavier charge, 
 which lies against the aristocratic classes generally ; 
 and not against them only, but also against no incon- 
 siderable portion of the classes next below them. 
 Many, we fear most, of the mothers of these classes, 
 are in the habit of refusing to suckle their children, 
 even when perfectly able to do so, and of bribing the 
 mothers of the Poor to abandon their duty to their own 
 infants, in order to perform the function thus devolved. 
 A denunciation of this practice was delivered some 
 years ago by an eminent person in . the House of 
 Lords, which it were well if he would repeat every 
 session till the country shall be cleansed from so foul 
 an offence. It may be stated, on the highest medical 
 authority, that out of every five infants of wet-nurses 
 thus deserted, four perish. They are delivered over to 
 women who take no interest in them, to be brought up 
 by hand — a species of nurture peculiarly requiring a 
 mother's care and the aids -and appliances of wealth; 
 they die miserably of starvation or neglect, and their 
 
THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 177 
 
 deat|h is to be laid at the door, not so much of their 
 own mothers whose poverty consents, as of those who 
 corrupt the maternal instincts of the Poor, and betray 
 them into a cruelty which nothing but ignorance and 
 poverty can palliate. The injunction ' Thou shalt not 
 seethe the kid in its mother's milk,' pointed to a lesser 
 sin than this. 
 
 Erasmus held her to be scarcely half a mother who 
 refused to suckle the child that was born to her. He 
 accounted the ofience against nature as little less than 
 that of the desertion and exposure of an infant ; and 
 he asks her, when the child began to speak, with 
 what face could she hear him call her mother, who 
 had neglected to perform for him that most matSrnal 
 office. In our times the lady's child may not suffer, 
 but the child of the nurse is much more certainly 
 sacrificed ; and thus it is that one unnatural mother 
 makes another that is more unnatural still.* 
 
 But besides those who are able, but not willing, to 
 
 * ' Alipqui cum infans jam fari meditabitur, ac blanda, 
 balbutie te mammam vocabit, qu^ fronte hoc audies ab eo, 
 cui mammam negaris, et ad conductitiam mammam relegiris, 
 perinde quasi capiae aut ovi subjecisses ? Ubi jam erit fandi 
 potens, quid si te pro matre vocet semi-matrem ? Virgam 
 expedies; opinor. Atqui vix semi-mater est, quae recusat 
 alere, quod peperit . . . Et in tales foeminas mihi competere 
 Gra;corum videtur etymologia, qui ,m/'^i;? dici putant £i .ui/ 
 12 
 
178 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 
 
 suckle their infants, there are many who profess to he 
 willing, hut not ahle. Do they diligently try ? or do 
 they satisfy their consciences with the easy assurances 
 of nurses, attendants, or friends, who are willing to 
 say what they desire to hear ? If they he unable, does 
 not their inahility grow out of a luxurious and un- 
 wholesome mode of life, which there is no necessity 
 that they should adopt ? and why should the children 
 bf the Poor be defrauded of their mother's milk, to 
 supply deficiencies wilfully created by the indolence 
 and luxury of the Rich ? Occasional cases there are, 
 1)0 doubt, in which the inability to suckle is both real 
 and inevitable ; and if these cases cannot be met by 
 the Employment of such wet-nurses as have already 
 lost their children through natural causes, the wet-nurse 
 should bring her own child with her ; and with the 
 sufficient supervision which wealth and maternal vigi- 
 lance might supply on the part of a rich mother, to 
 guard against maternal partiality on the part of the 
 wet-nurse, a fair and equal share of natural- nurture 
 should be secured to the one child and the other; 
 what is wanting to each being made up by the best 
 artificial substitute. 
 
 Tiyjefv, hoc est, k non servando. Nam prorsus conductitiam 
 nutricem infantulo adhuc k matre tepenti adsciscere, genus est 
 expositionis.' — Ekasmi Colloq. Puerpera. 
 
THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 179 
 
 Amongst the incidental evils of the system of wet- 
 nursing, one is that unmarried mothers are most fre- 
 quently employed, and not unfrequently preferred, for 
 this purpose ; and being pampered as well as highly 
 paid, a countenance and encouragement is afforded to 
 vice, and women of tainted character are mixed up 
 with the rich man's household. On the other hand, if 
 the wet-nurse be married, it is almost invariably (and 
 for physical reasons) made a condition, that during the 
 period for which she is hired she shall not see her hus- 
 band ; and he and her elder children are exposed to 
 the tennptations and evils consequent on such a disrup- 
 tion of domestic ties. 
 
 The charge of deserting the mother's function in the 
 suckling of infants lies, as has been said, against other 
 classes, as well as against the Hich and Great ; but 
 the practice is more universal amongst the Rich and 
 Great ; it is politically more important that they should 
 rescue themselves from the reproach of it ; their ex- 
 ample is of more account ; nor is there any person in 
 the realm, however high in station, who, on the very 
 ground of that rank and pre-eminence, should not be 
 the foremost to withstand this crying corruption of the 
 humanities of domestic life. 
 
 When such accusations as these are brought against 
 the wealthier classes, it ought by no means to be for- 
 
180 THE WAYS OF THe' KICH AND GREAT. 
 
 gotten that such things are exceptional, not character- 
 istic ; and that there is amongst those classes in these 
 times an activity in charitable works, and a bounty and 
 beneficence, such as probably has never been witnessed 
 in the world before. All classes have been rapidly 
 improving in the last five-and-twenty years. Increase 
 of crime does not prove the contrary, even of the 
 lowest class; it only proves an increased activity of 
 the bad elements as well as of the good ; it may show 
 that bad men are worse, — it does not show that fewer 
 men are not bad, or that good men are not far more 
 than proportionately better. But if other classes have 
 improved, (the commercial least, perhaps, owing to 
 over-stimulated love of gain,) there can be little ques- 
 tion that the higher classes have stepped the farthest in 
 advance. Ask our bishops who are the best of the 
 clergy, and will they not answer, the middle-aged 
 and the young, rather than the old or the elderly „? 
 Amongst the country gentlemen not advanced in 
 years, how few are there now who think that they 
 have nothing else to do in life but to make the most of 
 their property and their game. The charity of the 
 Rich is often, indeed, misdirected and mischievous; 
 their liberality sometimes runs ahead of their personal 
 activity as almoners ; their judgment still more often 
 halts behind their personal activity. But as long as it 
 is the spii-it of love and duty which is active in them, 
 
THE WAYS OF THE KICH AND GEEAT. 181 
 
 they must be doing good, if not to others, at least to 
 themselves : and in spite of all the errors of injudicious 
 zeal, they will do well upon the whole, and they will 
 be continually learning to do better. 
 
 The system of visiting the poor at their houses has 
 been much found fault with for its obtrusiveness. It is 
 very certain that the somewhat unsocial character and 
 manners of the English, both rich and poor, does put 
 difficulties in, the way of it. It is not all sorts of 
 ladies and gentlemen who can carry it out with suc- 
 cess, and now that so much is done . by organizatidn 
 and the division of labor, it would seem desirable that 
 charitable persons should consider what are their per- 
 sonal aptitudes, and employ themselves accordingly in 
 this or other departments of charitable ministration. 
 Even in -that of visiting, there are many varieties. 
 Where there is grievous sickness or other emergency, 
 zeal and care will compensate for dryness of manner. 
 In the more ordinary intercourse of good offices, it is 
 very important to be pleasant to the Poor : for services 
 alone will not cultivate their affections; and those who 
 would visit them for every-day purposes of charity, 
 should be by their nature and temperament genial j 
 cordial, and firm. ' 
 
 But charity in detail to the lower orders will afford 
 no sufficient vent for what should be considered the 
 due and adequate bounty of the Rich and Great, — 
 
182 THE "WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 
 
 not even though it be distributed through numerous 
 and well-chosen almoners. The Poor of the lower 
 orders are not the only Poor ; they are not always 
 the Poor who are most to be pitied for their poverty ; 
 and it devolves upon the Rich and Great to take 
 charge of the many cases of penury in the classes 
 more proximate to their -own, which they have the 
 means of duly sifting and appreciating. To them also 
 belong works of munificence, — the providing and en- 
 dowing of churches, schools, hospitals ; and "to these 
 let them add, libraries, picture-galleries, public gardens 
 and play-grounds, for the Poor. In order that the 
 Poor may feel that the Rich are in sympathy with 
 them, the Rich must take a pleasure in their pleasures, 
 as well as pity them in their distress. When the Rich 
 give of their abundance to those who want bread, it 
 may be supposed to be done for very shame, or under 
 the constraint of common humanity. When they take 
 order for the instruction and discipline of the Poor, 
 they are conferring a species of benefit, for which, 
 however essential, they must not expect a return in 
 gratitude or affection. But if they bear in mind that 
 amusement is in truth a necessary of life, that human 
 nature cannot dispense with it, and that by the nature 
 of men's amusements their moral characters are, in a 
 great measure, determined, they will be led so to deal 
 with the Poor as to make it manifest to them that they 
 
THE "WAYS OF THE EICH AND GREAT. 183 
 
 like to see them happy, and they will be beloved ac- 
 cordingly. 
 
 But if the amusements of men have so much to 
 do in forming them, it may be well to consider what 
 are the amusements of the Rich and Great themselves. 
 Into these it will be found that the ambitious activity 
 of the times has made its way. • It is no longer 
 enough for the Rich and Great to be passively 
 entertained ; to look on and admire does not content 
 them ; and hence the theatre has fallen out of favor. 
 They must be where they are themselves in part 
 performers, or they must find their amusement in the 
 prosecution of some object and end. Society, there- 
 fore, becomes their theatre ; and to the not incon- 
 siderable number of them who constitute what are 
 called the 'fashionable circles,' a particular position 
 and reputation in society becomes an object, in the 
 pursuit of which they find their amusement. 
 
 The effect of this upon the character is not favor- 
 able. It used to be supposed that whatsoever of 
 effort and uneasy pretension might prevail elsewhere, 
 in the highest walk of society, amongst those whose 
 born rank and worldly consideration was unquestion- 
 able, where nothing further was to be attained and 
 everything possessed was secure, the charm of confi- 
 dence and quiescence would be found at last. But 
 
184 THE WAYS OF THE EICH AND GREAT. 
 
 when into this circle, as into others, the pursuit of a 
 personal object is introduced, into this, as into others, 
 cares and solicitudes will accompany it ; and the 
 object of success in a social career has little in it 
 that is elevating, or can help much to modify the 
 selfishness of human nature. Into circles, therefore, 
 where social reputation is aimed at, rather than merely 
 the giving and ■ receiving of pleasure, the feelings 
 connected with the lower kinds of rivaliy and com- 
 petition must be expected to intrude, disturbing, in 
 some more or less degree, the ease and grace of 
 aristocratic life. And accordingly fashionable society, 
 whatever may be its charms and brilliancy, when 
 compared with other aristocratic society, is said to 
 be characterized by some inferiority of tone, even 
 in its higher walks ; and in its lower by a tone which, 
 without any desire to use hard words, can hardly be 
 called anything else than vulgar. 
 
 It may, no doubt, be said for these circles, that 
 talents are appreciated in them ; and if talents were 
 the one thing needful in this world, on that they 
 might take their stand. But it is not by the posses- 
 sion and cultivation of talents, but by the best use and 
 direction of them, that the aristocracy of this country 
 is to be sustained in public estimation. Knowledge 
 and ability which are merely made subservient to 
 conversational effects, will do nothing for the aris- 
 
THE WAYS OF THE HIGH AND GREAT. 185 
 
 tocracy. We may well allow that in the casual 
 intercourse of life, or as common acquaintances, 
 people of fashion, in spite of occasional inferiorities 
 and vulgarities, are the most agreeable people that 
 are to be met with. How should it be otherwise ? 
 That persons who have spent their lives in cultivating 
 the arts of society should have acquired no peculiar 
 dexterity in the exercise of them, would be as strange 
 as that one who had spent his life as a hackney 
 coachman, should not know his way through the 
 streets. Those who have been trained in the habits 
 of society from their childhood, will generally be 
 free from timidity, which is the most ordinary source 
 of affectation. By those who are free from timidity, 
 unaffected, and possessed of an average share of 
 intelligence, address in conversation is easily to be 
 attained with much less practice than the habits of 
 fashionable life afford. It is an art which, like that 
 of the singer, the dancer, and the actor, is almost 
 sure to be acquired, up to a certain mark, by prac- 
 tising with those who understand it. ' The elite of 
 such society, therefore, will probably be found to be 
 more adroit, vivacious, and versatile in their talk than 
 others, more prompt and nimble in their wit, and 
 more graceful and perfect in the performance of the 
 many little feats of agility in conversation, which, 
 come easily to those who have been used to consider 
 
186 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GKEAT. 
 
 language rather as a toy than as an instrument. At 
 the same time, even if entertainment were the only 
 thing to be sought, a man of sense who should seek 
 it in this style of conversation, would probably fall 
 upon much that would be offensive to his taste, and 
 not a little to which he would refuse the name of 
 good breeding. He would find, perhaps, that sharp- 
 ness and repartee were in general aimed at more 
 than enough ; and that some persons possessed of a 
 small sort of talent, and but meagrely provided with 
 subject-matter of discourse, cultivate habitually a 
 spirit of sarcasm and disparagement to which they 
 do not very well understand how to give a proper 
 direction. Quickness has justly been observed by 
 Mr. Landor to be amongst the least of the mind's 
 properties : ' I would persuade you,' says that very 
 brilliant and remarkable writer, ' that banter, pun, 
 and quibble, are the properties of light men and 
 shallow capacities ; that genuine humor and true wit 
 require a sound and capacious mind, which is always 
 a grave one.'* 
 
 Convjsrsation is, in truth, an exercise very danger- 
 ous to the understanding when practised in any large 
 measure as an art or an amusement. To be ready 
 
 * Lm^or's ' Imaginary Conversations,' 1st Series, Vol. 2, 
 p. 404, 2d edition. 
 
THE WAYS OF THE KICH AND GREAT. 187 
 
 to speak before he has time to think, to say something 
 apt and specious, — something which he may very 
 well be supposed to think when he has nothing to 
 say that he really does think, — to say what is con- 
 sistent with what he' has said before, to touch topics 
 lightly and let them go, — these are the arts of a 
 conversationist: of which perhaps the last is the 
 worst, because it panders to all the others. Nothing 
 is searched out by conversation of this kind, — noth- 
 ing is heartily believed, whether by those who say 
 it or by those who hear it. It may be easy, graceful, 
 clever, and sparkling, and bits of knowledge may 
 be plentifully tossed to and fro in it ; but it will be 
 vain and unprofitable: it may cultivate a certain 
 micacious, sandy surface of the mind, but all that 
 lies below will be unmoved and unsunned. To say 
 that it is vain and unprofitable, is, indeed, to say too 
 little ; for the habit of thinking with a view to conver- 
 sational effects, will inevitably corrupt the understand- 
 ing, which will never again be sound or sincere. 
 
 The dealings of these people with literature and 
 art, like their dealings with society, have some tinc- 
 ture of personal ambition. Books are not read, 
 pictures seen, or music listened to, merely for the 
 delight to be found in them, or the private improve- 
 ment of the mind. The Rich and Great make effbrts 
 of their own in these lines, and become candidates 
 
188 THE WAYS OF THE KICH AND GREAT. 
 
 for public applause. This is by no means to be 
 deprecated when the efforts made are such as to 
 command respect as well as notice and attention. 
 Let the works produced be admirable for their genius, 
 or respectable for the labor and perseverance bestowed 
 upon them, or the knowledge and capacity evinced 
 by them, and nothing can be more commendable in 
 the Rich and Great than to produce them, nothing 
 more calculated to strengthen the hold of these classes 
 upon the classes below. But the opposite consequence 
 follows, when the Rich and Great are paraded and 
 panegyrized by a particular department of the peri- 
 odical press as the authors of light and frivolous tales ; 
 or when they are found exhibitipg their indifferent 
 accomplishments in collections of ephemeral verses, 
 or in engravings from their drawing, not unfrequently 
 sold at' bazaars on those pretexts of charity which 
 stand so much in need of a charitable construction. 
 Imperfect efforts in literature and art make a refined 
 and innocent amusement for the Rich and Great, and 
 as far as they go are cultivating : but publication 
 needs to be vindicated 'on other grounds. 
 
 But let amusements be as innocent as they may, 
 and let society be as free as it may from ambition 
 and envy, still, if the life be a life of society and a 
 life of amusement, instead of a life of serious avoca- 
 tions diversified by amusement and society, it will 
 
THE -WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 189 
 
 hardly either attain to happiness or inspire respect. 
 And the more it is attempted to make society a pure 
 concentration of charms and delights, the more flat 
 will be the failure. Let us resolve that our society 
 shall consist of none but the gay, the brilliant, and 
 the beautiful, — that is, that we will exclude from it 
 all attentions towards the aged, all forbearance towards 
 the dull, all kindness towards the ungraceful and un- 
 attractive, — and we shall find that when our social 
 duties and our social enjoyments have been thus 
 sedulously set apart, we have let down a sieve into 
 the well instead of a bucket. What is meant to be 
 an unmixed pleasure will not long be available as a 
 pleasure at all ' On n'aime guere d'etre empoisonne 
 meme avec esprit de rose.' Nor is it in our' nature 
 to be durably very well satisfied with an end, which 
 does not come to us in the disguise either of a means 
 or of a duty. Duty being proscribed, the want of 
 an aim will be felt in the midst of all the enjoyments 
 that the choicest society can afford, and what was 
 entered upon as an innocent amusement, will lose, 
 in no long time, fitst its power to amuse, and next 
 its innocence. The want of an "object will be sup- 
 plied, either by aiming at the advancement of this 
 person or the depreciation of that — in which case 
 the pursuit of social pleasure will degenerate into the 
 indulgence of a vulgar pride and envy — or, (which 
 
190 THE WAYS OF THE KICH AND GREAT. 
 
 is worse and more likely,) by merging the social 
 pursuit in the vortex of some individual passion. 
 
 It is upon the blank weariness of an objectless life 
 that these amorous seizures are most apt to supervene ; 
 and the seat which pleasure has usurped from duty 
 will be easily abdicated in favor of passion and guilt. 
 Such is the ancient and modern history of what is 
 called a life of pleasure, with some variations of the 
 particulars from century to century, but with little 
 difference in the result. When Berkeley cast up, 
 under distinct articles of credit and debt, the , account 
 of pleasure and pain of a fine lady and a fashionable 
 gentleman of the last century, he mentions some items 
 which may now be omitted, — (drinking and quarrel- 
 ling are not now the vices of men of fashion, nor 
 amongst the women is gaming so prevalent as it once 
 was,) but he also supposed the omission of some which 
 are now to be placed in the head and front of the bal- 
 ance sheet : — 
 
 ' "VVe will set down,' he says, ' in the life of your fine lady, 
 ricli clothes, dice, cordials, scandal, late hours, against va- 
 pors, distaste, remorse, losses at play, and the terrible distress 
 of ill-spent age increasing every day. Suppose no cruel acci- 
 dent of jealousy — no madness or infamy of love ; yet at the foot 
 of the account you shall find that empty, giddy, gaudy, flut- 
 tering thing, not half so happy -as a butterfly or a grasshopper 
 on a summer's day. And for a rake,, or man of pleasure, the 
 reckoning will be much the same, if you place listlessness, 
 
THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 191 
 
 ignorance, rottenness, loathing, craving, quarrelling, and such 
 qualities or accomplishments over-against his little circle of 
 fleeting amusements.' • 
 
 Assuredly, in this day and generation, the partic- 
 ulars which Berkeley was willing to pretermit, are no 
 longer to be regarded as doubtful elements in the cal- 
 culation. Laxity in respect of the cardinal female 
 virtue is unquestionably the cardinal sin. of fashionable 
 society : and what renders it most offensive is, that it 
 is a discriminating laxity. It is impossible to deny 
 that the frailties of persons who, by means of their 
 wealth, can surround themselves with a surpassing 
 degree of splendor, meet with an extraordinary quan- 
 tum of indulgence. Absolutions and dispensations of 
 a certain kind are bought and sold ; and of two women 
 taken in adultery, the one of whom riot^ in a profusion 
 of riches and is lavish of costly entertainments, whilst 
 the other enjoys no more than an ordinary share of 
 affluence, fashionable infallibility will issue, to the one 
 its indult, and to the other its anathema. Many who 
 contemplate at a safe distance the ways of the -great 
 world, will feel the injustice and baseness of the dis- 
 tinction, even more sensibly than the immorality, 
 pernicious though it be, of the looser proceeding. An 
 indiscriminate indulgence might pass for an amiable 
 
 * Alciphron, Dial. 2. 
 
192 THE WAYS OF THE EICH AND GREAT. 
 
 weakness or an excess of charity. But if it be 
 through qi charitable spirit that the great and sump- 
 tuous sinners are admitted into society, what shall we 
 call that spirit by which the more obscure or indigent 
 are expelled .? Society acts either in the one case with 
 the cruelty of a tyrant, or in the other with the vile- 
 ness of a parasite. It is true, that if the paramount 
 interests of morality did not require that the rule of 
 expulsion should be universal, there are some unfor- 
 tunate and penitent creatures who might be very fit 
 objects for a charitable exception: but these are 
 precisely they who would have no desire to profit by 
 it : on them society has no longer any boon to bestow ; 
 for they know that their place is in retirement, and that 
 it is there they must seek their consolation and set up 
 their rest. It is not by the humble, the pardonable, 
 and the contrite, that admittance or restoration to 
 society is sought, after one of these forfeitures ; it is 
 only by the callous, the daring, and obtrusive — and it 
 is they who succeed. 
 
 Such are the tmfavorable features of society 
 amongst the Eich and Great ; and were they to per- 
 vade aristocratic life at large, instead of being, as they 
 are, incidental merely to this set or that circle, it would 
 not be easy for the aristocracy to hold their ground in 
 the country. The sets and circles in question are, no 
 doubt, from political and domestic connection, neces- 
 
THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. l93 
 
 sarily mixed up with better aristocratic society ; and 
 as the show and pretension which belongs to them 
 obtrudes them more upon the world, they bring upon 
 that better aristocratic society a measure of disgrace 
 which is far beyond its deserts. For let us clear away 
 this clever, showy, frivolous outside of the aristocracy, 
 and there will be found beneath it a substance as 
 different from what might be expected as the old oak 
 which is sometimes discovered beneath a coat of 
 whitewash. And not only do the more favorable fea- 
 tures prevail with the larger portion of the aristocracy, 
 but they prevail most with the younger portion, and 
 are therefore more full of hope and promise. The 
 circle of the idle and the dissolute is a narrowing 
 circle. The circle of the grave and religious, the 
 active and instructed, is a widening circle. ' That one 
 improvement which is the improvement of all others, 
 — improvement in education, — is reaching the higher 
 classes at last, though by slow degrees and with 
 difficulty; for pedantic prejudice is of all prejudice the 
 most obstinate. The improvement at present tends 
 perhaps more to ambition and attainment than to the 
 elevation of the mind ; but more than one example 
 has shown that this is not an inevitable inferiority of 
 schools and colleges; and a higher order of school- 
 masters will, in time, effect by personal influence what 
 mere tuition is utterly inadequate to accomplish. 
 13 
 
194 THE WAYS. OF THE KICK AND GREAT. 
 
 The better training of our aristocratic youth' at 
 schools and colleges, is followed by better conditions 
 of life in its outset and progress. It is expected of 
 almost every young man that he should embark in 
 some career, if not professional, then political; and 
 a political career, even to those who dp not hold 
 office, is a much more serious thing than it used to 
 be. The days of dilettante politicians are well nigh 
 past. A member of parliament can no longer subsist 
 upon a stock of great principles and an occasional 
 fine speech. Public business consists now of dry 
 detail in enormous masses; and he who is called 
 upon to deal with it, is constrained to take upon 
 himself some moderate share, at leaist, of the infinite 
 drudgery by which the masses are broken down. 
 This is a wholesome element in the lives of our 
 aristocratic youth ; and if they shall aspire to a 
 prominent position in political life, they must undergo 
 an amount of labor in itself enough to entitle to 
 respect the man who, not being in want of bread, 
 shall submit to it from an impulse of no unworthy 
 ambition. ' 
 
 ' Besides the discipline of hard labor, there is another 
 to which a man in a prominent public station must 
 submit himself, — the discipline of obloquy and public 
 reproach. There is no discipline by which strength 
 is more tried, none by which it is more cultivated 
 
THE WAYS OF THK KICH AND GKEAT. 195 
 
 and confirmed if the trial be borne with temper, 
 fortitude, and self-reliance, and with a disregard of 
 all ends which are not public as well as personal. 
 It is in the strength of silence that such trials are 
 often best encountered : for silence has a marvellous 
 force and efiicacy in rebutting slanders ; being felt 
 to be what it almost always is, the attribute of a 
 clear conscience and of self-respect. Above all, let 
 persons in a high station beware of defending them- 
 selves in the press, or responding to challenges there 
 made. They will lose more in pleading to that juris- 
 diction, than they could possibly gain by a favorable 
 issue, even if a favorable issue were to be expected. 
 But there is no such thing as a favorable issue in 
 such an encounter. A controversy with the press 
 in the press, is the controversy of a fly with a 
 spider. 
 
 The good repute of the Rich and Great, as of 
 others, is endangered much more by not attending 
 to just reproaches, than by disregarding those which 
 are unjust. Not, therefore, by descending into the 
 arena and hustling those by whom they are hustled — 
 not by writing and reclaiming when babblers and 
 scribblers assail them, let the aristocracy approve 
 themselves — not by jealous assertions or angry ap- 
 peals, but by silence and works. Let those of them 
 who regard thepiselves as elected and ordained to 
 
196 THE WATS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 
 
 act from a vantage-ground for the good of their 
 country and their kind, demean themselves accord- 
 ingly, using those transmitted weapons which are 
 tempered by time, though the handling of them be 
 by circumstance, — or, far better, those which make 
 no account of time, but are sent with their perennial 
 aptitudes direct from the armory above, — the breast- 
 plate of righteousness, the sword of the Spirit, and 
 the- shield of faith. By charity, by munificence, by 
 laborious usefulness, by a studious and not merely 
 Epicurean cultivation of literature and the arts, by 
 that dignity which sees not itself, by a maintenance 
 of their Order as a national institution, for patriotic 
 purposes, not for individual aggrandizement ;' and, 
 lastly, by standing apart, both in social life and in 
 political, from that portion of their Order, however 
 distinguished by rank or wealth, or useless and per- 
 nicious talents, whose follies or vices or selfishness 
 or pride tend to bring the whole into contempt; — 
 by holding on in this high and constant course, the 
 aristocracy of this intellectual country, which was 
 once, and after a sleepy century is ■ now again, a 
 pre-eminently intellectual aristocracy, will fulfil its 
 appointed purposes, giving a support, not to be dis- 
 pensed with, to that social fabric of which it may 
 well be accounted the key-stone ; and sustaining, 
 peradventure, for so long as the good of mankind 
 
THE WAYS OF THE EICH AND GREAT. 197 
 
 may require it to be sustained, that strength by which 
 England js enabled at this instant time to look out 
 from the shelter, which the winds and waves of a 
 thousand years have scooped out for her, and see in 
 safety the disastrous wrecks which are strewn about 
 on every side, through the pride of aristocracies in 
 times past and the present madness of the nations. 
 
 THE END. 
 
BOSTOS, 135 WASHIHOTOH SrBZET, 
 
 Jmir, 1856. 
 
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