Shelf. 
 
 PRINCETON, N. J 
 
 ^fC^l^ 
 
 BS 511 .J326 
 
 Jacox, Francis, 1825-1897. 
 Side-lights on Scripture 
 texts 
 
SIDE-LIGHTS ON SCRIPTURE TEXTS. 
 
SIDE-LIGHTS 
 
 ON 
 
 SCRIPTURE TEXTS 
 
 BY 
 
 FRANCIS JACOX, B.A., Cantab. 
 
 AtitJior of ^Scripture Proverbs Illustrated,' ' SJuxkspeare Diversions,'' etc 
 
 HODDER AND STOUGHTON, 
 27, paternoster row. 
 
 MDCCCLXXVII. 
 
Printed by Hazell, Watson, and Viney, London and Aylesbury. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. The Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life i 
 
 Genesis ii. 9, 17. 
 
 II. The Dove's Flight from the Ark : Seeking 
 
 Rest, and Finding None 14 
 
 Genesis viii. 9. 
 
 III. The Tower of Babel . .... 22 
 
 Genesis xi. i — 9. 
 
 IV. Sociable Silence . 29 
 
 Job ii. 13. 
 
 V. ' I WOULD NOT Live Alway ' 43 
 
 Job vii. 16. 
 
 VI. Misery bygone and forgotten .... 57 
 
 Job. xi. 16. 
 
 VII. Pent-up, Tongue-tied Grief 66 
 
 Job xiii. 19. 
 
 VIII. Craving for Pity 71 
 
 Job xix. 21. 
 
 IX. Multiplied Words 78 
 
 Job xxxv. 16. 
 
vi CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 X. Jacob's Dream 86 
 
 Genesis xxxviii. lo — 12. 
 
 XI. The Seven Years' Service that to Jacob 
 
 SEEMED BUT A FEW DaYS 90 
 
 Genesis xxix. 20. 
 
 XII. Wronged, and Hated for it , . . .95 
 
 I Samuel xviii. 29. 
 
 * XIII. The Cave of Adullam . . . . . .103 
 
 I Samuel xxii, 2. 
 
 XIV. The Measure and Pressure of Rehoboam's 
 
 Little Finger 107 
 
 I Kings xii. 6 — 1 1. 
 
 XV. ZiMRi's End 119 
 
 I Kings xvi. 18. 
 
 XVI. Ahab's Appetite; why lost, and how re- 
 covered 125 
 
 1 Kings xxi. 4 — 7. 
 
 XVII. Seaward Gazing from Mount Carmel . .132 
 
 I Kings xviii. 43 — 46. 
 
 XVIII. The Last of Sennacherib . . . . . 143 
 
 2 Kings xix. 28 sq. 
 
 XIX. Clean Forgotten, as a Dead Man out of 
 
 Mind 152 
 
 Psalm xxxi. 14 (English Prayer Book \ersion). 
 
 XX. Well Spoken of if Well to Do . . .159 
 
 Psalm xlix. 18. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 XXI I I. The Earth Abiding 
 
 Ecclesiastes i. 4. 
 
 XXIV. The more Knowledge the more Sorrow 
 
 Ecclesiastes iv. 4. 
 
 >AGE 
 
 XXI. Far away Remembrance of Zion . . .170 
 Psalm cxxxvii. I, 5, 6. 
 
 XXII. Flattering Lips i;8 
 
 Proverbs xxix. 5. 
 
 193 
 
 . 212 
 
 XXV, Envied Merit 222 
 
 Ecclesiastes iv. 4. 
 
 XXVI. Obvious Duty done with Might . . . 227 
 Ecclesiastes ix. 10. 
 
 XXVII. Penal Panegyric 240 
 
 Proverbs xxvii. 14. 
 
 XXVIII. Counting Heads and Weighing Brains . 247 
 
 Ecclesiastes ix. 15, 16. 
 
 XXIX. Martha and Mary 255 
 
 St. Luke x. 28 sq. 
 
 XXX. Daylight and Day's Work . . . .262 
 
 St. John xi. 9. 
 
 XXXI. Gallic .... .... 271 
 
 Acts xviii. 12 — 17. 
 
 XXXII. A Last Parting 278 
 
 Acts XX. 36 — 38. 
 
viii CONTENTS, 
 
 PAGE 
 
 XXXIII. A Plea for the Weakly .... 284 
 
 Romans xv. i ; i Thessalonians vi. 14. 
 
 XXXIV. The Untempted that Stand, and the 
 
 Tempted that Fall 294 
 
 Galatians v. i. 
 
 XXXV. Nature's Law of Life out of Death. . 300 
 
 1 Corinthians xv. 36, 
 
 XXXVI. Forcible Pen and Faltering Tongue . 312 
 
 2 Corinthians x. 10. 
 
 XXXVII. The Fall of Eutychus 321 
 
 Acts XX. 9 — 12. 
 
 XXXVIII. The Anger that stops short of Sin . . 328 
 
 Ephesians iv. 26. 
 
 XXXIX. Swift to Hear, Slow to Speak . . .334 
 
 St. James i. 19. 
 
 XL. No MORE Sea 349 
 
 Revelation xxi. i 
 
 XLI. No MORE Pain 358 
 
 Revelation xxi. 4. 
 
 INDEX 369 
 
SIDE-LIGHTS ON SCRIPTURE TEXTS. 
 
 I. 
 
 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE TREE OF LIFE. 
 Genesis ii. 9, 17. 
 
 EASTWARD in Eden lay the garden; and out of the 
 garden ground there gi'ew every tree that is pleasant to 
 the sight and good for food ; the tree of life also in the midst 
 of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. 
 Of every tree of the garden but that might its privileged pair 
 of tenants freely eat ; but of the tree of the knowledge of good 
 and evil might they not eat; for to eat thereof was all too 
 surely to die. 
 
 *' All trees of noblest kind for sight, smell, taste ; 
 And all amid them stood the tree of life. 
 High, eminent, blooming ambrosial fruit 
 Of vegetable gold ; and next to life. 
 Our death, the tree of knowledge, grew fast by. 
 Knowledge of good bought dear by knowing ill." 
 
 So near grows death to life. For, as Milton has it in the 
 Areopagitica, good and evil in the field of this world grow up 
 together almost inseparably ; and the knowledge of good is so 
 involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in 
 so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that 
 "those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as 
 an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not 
 more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted 
 that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving 
 
 1 
 
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 together, leaped forth into the world." And perhaps, surmises 
 in his prose the poet of Paradise Lost, this is the doom which 
 Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say, of 
 knowing good by evil."^ Jeremy Taylor makes it observable 
 that in the mentions of Paradise in the Apocalypse, twice is 
 the tree of life spoken of, but never once the tree of knowledge 
 of good and evil, because this was the symbol of secular know- 
 ledge, of prudence and skill of doing things of this world, which 
 we can naturally use : we may smell and taste them, but not 
 feed upon them. Of that forbidden free, however, the smell 
 alone of the fruit must, by its fascination, have been perilous, 
 and the taste of it was death. 
 
 *• Whereof whoso did eat, eftsoones did know 
 Both good and ill : O mournfull memory ! 
 That tree through one man's fault hath doon us all to dy !" 
 
 In the thirty-second canto of his vision of purgatory, Dante 
 hears a throng with one voice murmuring " Adam," and sees 
 them circhng a tree despoiled of leafage,* and takes note of a 
 benediction on 
 
 *' Gryphon,f whose beak hath never pluck'd that tree 
 Pleasant to taste ; for hence the appetite 
 Was warp'd to evil." 
 
 And in the next canto the subject is renewed, and mystically 
 expounded in warning words and tones. Dr. Spiegel, in his 
 elaborate comparison of Genesis with the Zend-avesta, is of 
 course mindful of the two trees in the midst of the garden, — 
 the acquaintance of the Iranians with two trees (one of them 
 
 * Treating the Biblical narrative of the fall as an allegorical representation 
 of the development of the consciousness of our first parents, Blasche affirms 
 their life in Paradise, their state of innocence, to have been, like the state 
 of earliest infancy in general, an unconscious life of instinct ; for all mental 
 development begins with the consciousness of man : the higher spiritual 
 creation, the culture of the mind, commences with consciousness. 
 
 f The coincidence may be worth noting of the alleged identity of griffin 
 with the cherub that had charge of the Tree of Life, — Delitzch, for instance, 
 deriving the name from charab, "grab, grapple, grasp, gripe," Sanscr. 
 gyibh, Pers. giriften, Goth, griffan: comp. Greek 'ipv^, as a being that 
 holds fast, and makes what it holds unapproachable. Dr. Thomas Burnet 
 
AND THE TREE OF LIFE, 
 
 called the Painless) being shown by Dr. Windischmann ; but 
 English scholars, however favourably predisposed to the results 
 of comparative mythology, and familiar with its details, have 
 demurred to the comparison of the painless tree ^\'ith the tree 
 of knowledge, though admitting that the white Haoma tree 
 might remind us of the tree of life, considering that Haoma 
 as well as the Indian Soma, was supposed to give immortality 
 to those who drank its juice. Kalisch recognizes analogies to 
 the tree of life in the " king of trees " which the Persians 
 believed to grow at the spring Ardechsur, issuing from the 
 throne of Ormuzd, and in the tall Pilpel of the Indians, to 
 which was also ascribed the power of securing immortality and 
 every other blessing ; but the tree of knowledge he compares 
 rather wdth the *' well of wisdom " in northern mythology, from 
 which even the great god Odin drinks, and which gives know- 
 ledge even to the wise Mimer. But the confusion of trees 
 may only bring us into confusion worse confounded, and we 
 may end by mistaking one of the two in Eden for the other, 
 as Mr. Thackeray, by a presumed slip of the pen, has done, 
 when tellingus of the experiences of Pendennis since he first 
 " tasted of the fruit of that a\\ful Tree of Life which, from 
 the beginning, has tempted all mankind." German scholarship 
 tells us that the Iranian two trees are the same as the one 
 fig tree out of which the Indians believed (but did they ?) the 
 world to have been created. In dealing with our old-fashioned 
 English Bible it is better, upon the whole, to treat the dis- 
 tinction between the two trees in the midst of the garden, as 
 a distinction not without a difference. 
 
 refers to the dragons said by the poets to have guarded the apples of the 
 Hesperides. Kuenen refers to the corresponding mythology of the Baby- 
 lonians and Assyrians, whose cherubim guard precious stones and gold, and 
 drive away any one who would approach these treasures. In Robert Lord 
 Lytton's poem of The Apple of Life we have mention near together of 
 
 " The fruit of the Tree that in Paradise God hideth under the wing 
 Of the Cherub that chased away Adam," 
 
 and of flowers and fruitage that are 
 
 "guarded by dragons to brighten the gardens of kings." 
 
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 Chamfort, no Bibliolater or even Bibliophile, pronounces the 
 tree of knowledge of good and evil which produces death, to be 
 tme belle allegorie. This emblem he takes to signify, that when 
 we have penetrated to the bottom of things, the loss of illusions 
 induces the death of the soul, that is to say, an absolute in- 
 difference to all that touches and occupies others. Voltaire, 
 in his time, and after his sort, had given another turn and tone 
 to the sacred narrative : 
 
 ** Dans les bosquets d'Eden I'arbre de la science 
 
 Portait un fruit de mort et de corruption ; 
 
 Notre bon pere en eut un indigestion. 
 
 Pour lui bien conserver sa fragile innocence 
 
 II eut fallu planter I'arbre de I'ignorance." 
 
 Innocence ? Ignorance ? Among the pensees of Sainte-Beuve 
 this one occurs : that by a profound signification, the word 
 " innocence," the literal usage of which denotes the no'i doing oi 
 evil, really imports the not knowing it. To know what is wrong, 
 unless careful watch be kept, is to do it. F. W. Robertson 
 describes innocence as apprehending the approach of evil, by 
 the instinctive tact of contrast; and guilt, by the instinctive 
 consciousness of similarity. " This dreadful burden the Scrip- 
 tures call the knowledge of good and evil : can we not all 
 remember the salient sense of happiness which we had when 
 all was innocent ? " Victor Hugo says of Faust and of Don 
 Juan that both have plucked at the tree of knowledge ; the 
 one as a sensualist, the other as a spiritualist. The one has 
 indulged an appetite for every kind of material pleasure, for- 
 bidden pleasures most of all ; the other, for the entire range 
 of sciences, and for more than may be known by mortal man. 
 The one has stolen the fruit, the other has rummaged at the 
 roots. "Don Juan, c'est le corps; Faust, c'est I'esprit." "Le 
 premier se damne pour jouir, le second pour connaitre." And 
 so the two dramas are treated as coefficients, and comple- 
 mentary the one of the other. " The desire of knowledge in 
 excess caused man to fall," says Bacon in his essays. Bishop 
 Berkeley's belief and contention that God is too bountiful not 
 to have placed knowledge within our reach, of which He has 
 
OF GOOD AND EVIL. 5 
 
 given us the desire, moves Mr. Lewes to remark, that the good 
 bishop here " forgets the lesson man was taught in Paradise, 
 where the Tree of Knowledge was placed within his reach, but 
 the fruits thereof forbidden him." Butler calls it 
 
 "the cider-tree* in Eden, 
 Which only grew, to be fordidden." 
 
 Sorrow is knowledge, mourns Byron's Manfred; and they 
 
 * What fruit the forbidden tree bore, doctors have differed and disputed 
 about, with characteristic duhiess or audacity of speculation. Thibaut the 
 Troubadour, King of Navarre (1201 — 53) started a theory that the law of 
 God is ripe and wholesome fruit, and that Adam sinned by eating unripe 
 fniit ; but he does not appear to have been wise beyond what is written 
 by specifying the fruit in question. That it was an apple is a tradition per- 
 petuated, as Sir Thomas BrowTie says, by writings, verses, pictures ; " and 
 some have been so bad prosodians as from thence to derive the Latin word 
 mahun, because that fruit was the first occasion of evil." Others have 
 declared for a vine ; or are peremptory for the Indian fig-tree. The 
 "forbidden fruit" of the London markets is a small sort of shaddock. 
 What Matthiolus meant by Pomum Adami, Professor , Lindley deems it 
 impossible to ascertain, except that it was a citrus of some kind : the 
 common Italian Fomo d' Adamo is a variety oi citrus litnetta — that of Paris 
 is a thick-skinned orange ; and at least three other things, the Professor 
 tells us, have been so called. Poniicm is a conveniently comprehensive 
 name : the goddess of gardens is Pomona ; and besides the great variety 
 of apples — again to cite the old expositor of Vulgar Errors, ' ' the word in 
 Greek comprehendeth oranges [so in Latin], lemons, citrons, quinces ; and 
 as Ruellius defineth, such fruits as have no stone within, and a soft covering 
 without, excepting the pomegranate." Spigelius would, however, include 
 all round fruits under the name of apples — nuts and plums among the rest. 
 Does the reader need reminding of Elia's persuasion in favour of the peach? 
 His essay, " The Last Peach," records his experiences as a child in a mag- 
 nificent fruit-garden, whose lordly owner left him free to pull the currants 
 and gooseberries, but straitly interdicted him from touching the wall-fruit. 
 Indeed, of the latter there was little left : only on the south wall (could the 
 boy ever forget the hot feel of the brickwork ?) there lingered the one last 
 peach. Now, peaches he abominated : to his palate there was something 
 singularly harsh and repulsive in the flavour of them. Yet, inspired by some 
 demon of contradiction, he found himself on this occasion haunted with 
 an irresistible desire to pluck that solitary peach. Tear himself as oftea 
 as he would from the spot, he found himself still returning to it ; till 
 maddening with desire — no, not desire ; with wilfulness, rather — in an evil 
 
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 who know the most will mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth, 
 " The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life." The theme was 
 an attractive one to Byron ; and in his Cain he dilates upon it, 
 and recurs to it with bitter earnestness despite seeming levity. 
 The ungodliness of their first-born is matter of grief and 
 sombre forebodings to our first parents. Eve utters an Alas ! 
 
 hour he reached out his hand, and plucked the peach. " Some few rain- 
 drops just then fell : the sky (from a bright day) became overcast : and I 
 was a type of our first parents, after the eating of that fatal fruit. I felt 
 myself naked and ashamed, stripped of my virtue, spiritless. The downy 
 fruit, whose look rather than savour had tempted me, dropped from my 
 hand never to be tasted." All the commentators in the world could not 
 persuade Elia, from that time forth, but that the Hebrew word translated 
 "apple" (as he by mistake alleges), should be rendered "peach." Only 
 in that way, he says, could he reconcile that mysterious story ; about 
 which we can well fancy him to have had many a free talk, first and last, 
 with that confessedly inquiring spirit, S. T. C. 
 
 We may, and indeed cannot but, suppose that Lamb was put in mind of 
 this old experience of his, by a passage in one of Crabbe's Tales, which he, 
 the gentle Charles, adapted for the stage, or rather turned into a play for 
 the closet. The passage is in a tale within a tale, just as in Ha^nlet there 
 is a play within a play; and it tells how among the attendants and favourites 
 of Haroun Alraschid there 
 
 "was a lively bo}', 
 Eager in search of every trifling joy , 
 His feelings vivid, and his fancy strong, 
 He sigh'd for pleasure while he shrunk from wrong : 
 When by the Caliph in the garden placed, 
 He saw the treasures which he long'd to taste ; 
 And oft alone he ventured to behold 
 Rich hanging fruits with rind of glowing gold ; 
 Too long he stay'd forbidden bliss to view, 
 His virtue failing as his longings grew ; 
 Athirst and wearied with the noontide heat, 
 Fate to the garden led his luckless feet ; 
 With eager eyes and open mouth he stood. 
 Smelt the sweet breath, and touch'd the fragrant food ; 
 The tempting beauty sparkling in the sun 
 Charm'd his young sense — he ate, and was undone." 
 
 What pains and penalties ensued, and how the young transgressor found 
 even his young life become a burden to him, one couplet from the sequel 
 will sufficiently indicate ; one in which he vents the bitter cry, 
 
 " Oh ! had that stolen fruit the power possess'd 
 To war with .life, I now had been a.t rest." 
 
AND THE TREE OF LIFE, 
 
 *' The fruit of our forbidden tree begins 
 
 To fall. 
 Adam. And we must gather it again. 
 
 Oh, God ! why didst thou plant the tree of knowledge ? 
 Cain. And wherefore pluck'd ye not the tree of life ? 
 
 Ye might have then defied Him. 
 Aa'af?i. Oh ! my son, 
 
 Blaspheme not : these are serpent's words. 
 Cain. Why not ? 
 
 The snake spoke truth ; it zcas the tree of knowledge ; 
 
 It was the tree of life : — knowledge is good. 
 
 And life is good ; and how can both be evil ? " 
 
 Lucifer is Cain's interlocutor in a later act ; and to him the 
 reprobate uses quite opposite language : 
 
 ' ' It was a lying tree — for we know nothing. 
 At least it promised knowledge at the price 
 Of death — but knowledge still : but what knows man ? 
 Lucifer. It may be death leads to the highest knowledge ; 
 And being of all things the sole thing certain, 
 At least leads to the surest science : therefore 
 The tree was true, though deadly." 
 
 Where there is an obscurity too deep for our reason, the 
 Religio Medici would have a " haggard and unreclaimed reason 
 to stoop unto the lure of faith ; " and Sir Thomas Browne 
 accordingly is free to profess, for his part, '' I believe there was 
 already a tree, whose fruit our unhappy parents tasted, though 
 in the same chapter where God forbids -it, 'tis positively said, 
 the plants of the field Avere not yet grown ; for God had not 
 caused it to rain upon the earth." Asgill, renowned for his 
 Argument against the necessity of dying, in one part of that 
 curious performance exclaims, " Behold, ye despisers, and 
 wonder ! Wonder to see Paradise lost, \\ith the Tree of Life in 
 the midst of it ! Wonder and curse at Adam for an original 
 fool, who in the length of one day never so much as thought to 
 put forth his hand, for him and us, and pull and eat and live for 
 ever ! " Van Helmont opined that no metallic preparation, such 
 as Paracelsus hoped to discover as the Elixir of Life, could 
 contain in itself the blessing of the Tree of Life, but he sought 
 for the true secret in the Cedar, induced, as it seems, by the 
 
THE TREE OF LIFE. 
 
 frequent mention of that tree in the Old Testament; and 
 asserting that when all other plants were destroyed by the Flood, 
 and their kinds preserved only in their seeds, the Cedars of 
 Lebanon remained uninjured under the waters. A wild legend 
 of the Rabbis tells of a branch of the Tree of Life that was 
 planted on Adam's grave,* and a wilder fiction of Christian 
 fancy has traced to the wood which that branch produced, the 
 centre cross of Calvary's three. 
 
 Whately accepts and expounds with characteristic literalness 
 the divine endowment of the Tree (whether its fruits or its 
 leaves) with some property of warding off death ; ascribing to 
 it the medicinal virtue, when applied from time to time, of pre- 
 venting, or curing, the decay of old age ; and he assumes our 
 first parents to have been in the habit of using it — " as doubt- 
 less they had, since there was nothing to prevent them " — and 
 so argues that could they have continued the use of such a 
 medicine, they would have continued exempt from decay and 
 death ; but ceasing to do so, they would die at last, though 
 their constitution had been so far fortified, as to ensure for 
 them, and for their nearest descendants, by transmission, a life 
 much longer than our natural term — this vital force of longevity, 
 by hypothesis due to the medicinal virtue of the Tree of Life, 
 only wearing out gradually, in many successive generations. 
 Jeremy Taylor's argument is, that as everything with a begin- 
 ning can have also an ending, and shall die, unless it be 
 " daily watered with the purls flowing from the fountain of 
 life," — therefore God provided a tree in Paradise to have sup- 
 ported Adam in his artificial immortality — immortality not 
 being in his nature ; for man was always the same mixture of 
 heat and cold, of dryness and moisture ; " ever the same 
 weak thing, apt to feel rebellion in the humours, and to suffer 
 the evils of a civil war in his body natural : and, therefore, 
 health and life was to descend upon him from heaven, and he 
 
 * Another legend tells how to King Solomon was offered 
 " an apple yet bright from the Tree 
 In whose stem springs the Life never-faihng which Sin lost to Adam when he 
 Tasting knowledge forbidden, found death in the fruit of it." 
 
THE TREE OF LIFE. 
 
 was to suck life from a tree on earth ; himself being but in- 
 grafted into a tree of life, and adopted into the condition of 
 an immortal nature." It may be compared in its effects and 
 elevating power to the mythological tree commemorated in 
 Southey's Paraguay poem, 
 
 " A wondrous Tree there grew, 
 By which the adventurer might with foot and hand 
 From branch to branch his upward course pursue ; 
 An easy path, if what were said be true, 
 Albeit the ascent was long ; and when the height 
 Was gain'd, that blissful region was in view." 
 
 Milton exalts the height of the Tree of Life above all the 
 trees of the Garden — " the middle tree and highest there that 
 grew " — on which account, seemingly, the arch-fiend and arch- 
 felon selects it for his seat aloft, and there he 
 " Sat like a cormorant : yet not true life 
 Thereby regain'd, but sat devising death 
 To them who lived ; nor on the virtue thought 
 Of that life-giving plant, but only used 
 For prospect what, well used, had been the pledge 
 Of immortality." 
 
 Spenser had anticipated Milton in strains that live, touching 
 the Tree of Life, — that goodly tree " loaden with fruit and 
 apples rosy redd, as they in pure vermilion had been dide ; " 
 and 
 
 "happy life to all to which thereon fedd 
 And life eke everlasting did befall : 
 Great God it planted in that blessed stedd 
 "With His Almighty hand, and did it call 
 The Tree of Life;" 
 
 and from it flowed, as from a well, a trickling stream of balm, 
 " most soveraine and dainty deare : " " life and long health 
 that gracious ointment gave, and deadly wounds could heale " 
 — though of the leaves of that tree of life, of power for the 
 healing of the nations, Spenser takes no account, comparable 
 though they be, in comparative mytholog}', with that Indian 
 blooming bower 
 
 '* Whose every amaranthine flower 
 
 Its deathless blossom interweaves 
 
 With bright and undecaying leaves." 
 
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 Both trees being eventually forbidden, we are sometimes 
 uncertain which of the two the poets refer to, or whether con- 
 fusedly to both at once, in such lines as those of Longfellow 
 on " the hunger and thirst of the heart, the frenzy and fire of 
 the brain, 
 
 **That grasps at the fruitage forbidden, 
 The golden pomegranates of Eden, 
 To quiet its fever and pain." 
 
 Such fever and pain the suffering author of Small Books on 
 Great Subjects endured, in wistful speculations on high matters 
 metaphysico-theological, from which, in that sick-room, there 
 was no escape for that restlessly inquiring spirit, as there might 
 have been in active life. " But in utter loneliness the ,mind 
 turns inward to search into its own nature and prospects ; and 
 this research shakes the mortal case shrewdly. Few can com- 
 prehend this, and I who feel it can hardly describe; but 
 I certainly feel that those who eat largely of the tree of know- 
 ledge will surely die, and that soon." Here was a pained 
 recognition of the Miltonic maxim that to be weak is miserable ; 
 with a painful failure to recognize the maxim ascribed to 
 Bacon, though not to be found in his works, unless indirectly, 
 that knowledge is power. Rather, such knowledge intensified 
 and aggravated the sense of weakness. 
 
 The mysterious vendor of la peaii de chagrift, in Balzac, 
 instructs the purchaser in what he calls " un grand mystere 
 de la vie humaine," — to wit, that man exhausts himself by 
 acting out the verbs vouloir and pouvoir, whereas savoir 
 leaves his feeble organization in a perpetual state of calm. 
 Nor is the calm a mere stagnation. Knowledge is power. 
 What a world of essay-writing has been lavished on that 
 apophthegm, first and last. Quanti est sapere I had Terence 
 exclaimed of old. Man is finite and crippled on all sides, 
 says Newman, and frailty in one kind causes frailty in another : 
 " Deficient power causes deficient knowledge, deficient know- 
 ledge betrays him into false opinion, and entangles him in 
 false positions." There is an apologue by one of our old 
 friends in council which is designed to show the exceeding 
 
' KNO WLEDGE IS PO WER: i i 
 
 misery of man, and how much too small he is for his place, 
 that he should go on suffering all this misery (in one particular 
 instance) for thousands of years when a little knowledge would 
 have raised him above it. Many such evils, it is contended, 
 moral, intellectual, and physical, a little more knowledge would 
 dispel. Mr. Carlyle has said, " Power is the one thing need- 
 ful, and that Knowledge which is Power : thus also Intellect 
 becomes the grand faculty, in which all the others are well- 
 nigh absorbed." A man, says Bacon, is but what he knoweth. 
 The diffused knowledge of an age of school boards may not 
 rank very high as a motive power; and indeed we are told 
 that knowledge has become, in its lower forms, so common, 
 and is spread so \\'idely, that it is no longer looked on as 
 something precious — at least for his own sake. It is easy, 
 Mr. Stuart Mill replied, to scoff at the kind of intelligence 
 which is thus diffusing itself; but it is intelligence still. " The 
 knowledge which is power, is not the highest description of 
 knowledge only : any knowledge which gives the habit of form- 
 ing an opinion, and the capacity of expressing that opinion, 
 constitutes a political power." Mr. Lister's Conservative parson 
 quotes against his Whig peer the "approved axiom" that know- 
 ledge is power, and objects that surely you give a dangerous 
 power to the people, if you augment their knowledge. And 
 Arlington grants that by giving them knowledge we augment 
 their power; but not that we render it more dangerous. 
 "You say true — 'Knowledge is power;' it is and ought to be 
 power, and God forbid that it should ever cease to be so I — 
 Are there no dangers to be apprehended from ignorance? 
 The uneducated may equally be led by the mischievous." 
 Parson Dale, of Caxtonian celebrity, is more vivacious in 
 his opposition to the aphorism in dispute : to his thinking, 
 it either says a great deal too much, or just nothing at all. 
 Grant that it is undeniable : does it prove much in favour of 
 knowledge ? is not ignorance power too ? All evil is power, 
 and does its power make it any the better? Fanaticism is 
 power — and a power that has often swept away knowledge like 
 a whirlwind ; as where the Mussulman burns the library of a 
 
12 INTELLECT WITHOUT GOD. 
 
 world, "Hunger is power. The barbarians, starved out of 
 their forests by their own swarming populations, swept into 
 Italy and annihilated letters. The Romans, however degraded, 
 had more knowledge, at least, than the Gaul and the Visigoth." 
 The theme is pursued through many variations; one of its 
 moral aspects being, that a man of very moderate intelligence, 
 who believes in God, and suffers his heart to beat with human 
 sympathies, will probably gain in ordinary life a vast deal more 
 power than knowledge ever gives to a rogue. Randal Lesli-e 
 is the accomplished advocate and persevering actor-out of the 
 maxim that knowledge is power ; and it is only for a time that 
 Randal Leslie is successful. All too soon in his course he 
 has to argue with himself, — " If power is only to be won " by 
 sinister use of knowledge, (and of what use is knowledge if it 
 be not power?) "does not success in life justify all things? 
 and who prizes the wise man if he fails ? " He has entered 
 life with no patrimony but knowledge. He has to turn know- 
 ledge from books to men ; for books may give fame after 
 death, but men give us power in Hfe. He finds himself at last 
 standing very near to fortune and to power ; and " I owe it but 
 to knowledge," he muses, — " knowledge of men — life — of all 
 that books can teach us." Despising literature, save as means 
 to some end of power, Randal Leslie is presented to us as 
 "the incarnation of thought, hatched out of the corruption of 
 will." His "arid self-seeking looked to knowledge for no 
 object but power." Satan has been defined Intellect without 
 God ; and there is more of the satanic than the divine in this 
 representative young man. 
 
 But however much abused or perverted may be the maxim, 
 the truth it enforces is a vital one ; and the saying of Imlac 
 the sage holds good, that knowledge will always predominate 
 over ignorance, as man governs the lower animals. When the 
 Abyssinian prince asks him what he has found to be the effect 
 of knowledge, and whether European culture makes its favoured 
 nations happier than African ignorance can, Imlac is cautious 
 and hesitating in his reply; but he can at least allege that 
 knowledge is certainly one of the means of pleasure — a fact 
 
' KNO WLEDGE IS PO WER: 13 
 
 inferred from the natural desire which every mind feels of 
 increasing its ideas ; ignorance being mere privation, by which 
 nothing can be produced — a vacuity, in which the soul sits 
 motionless and torpid for want of attraction. " Riches are 
 Power," says the economist; — and is not Intellect? asks 
 Mr. Disraeli's philosopher, who yet is impelled to inquire how 
 it is that, while the influence of the millionaire is instantly felt 
 in all classes of society, " noble mind " so often leaves its 
 possessor unknown and unhonoured. Is it because he has 
 thought only of himself, and, a constant and laborious student 
 of his own exalted nature, has forgotten or disdained the study 
 of all others ? It is, observes Mr. Hamilton Aide, the use we 
 make of knowledge, in maturing our judgment and reflection, 
 that is power, and not knowledge itself, if we cannot turn it to 
 account j for many learned men have been but poor thinkers 
 and reasoners. So Hartley Coleridge agrees that knowledge is 
 power where in the possession of a powerful mind ; for \\4th 
 such, truths old as the creation are original : but it is no com- 
 pliment to a man to be called a walking encyclopaedia. Far 
 too little considered in the present day, urges Dr. John Brown, 
 is the means of turning knowledge to action, " making it what 
 Bacon meant when he said it was power," invigorating the 
 thinking substance — giving tone, and what he would call 
 muscle and nerve, blood and bone, to the mind ; a firm gripe, 
 and a keen and sure eye. — But a farther examination of the 
 disputed maxim would take us too far — in a direction not 
 indeed altogether away from our starting-point, yet suflficiently 
 apart from it to give us pause. 
 
 Backing then, from that by-path to the main road whence 
 we started, we come again upon, and take a parting glance 
 accordingly at, the Tree of Knowledge and its fatal fruit — this 
 time through a medium of French verse, that of France's most 
 classical poet, satirist, and critic. Boileau versifies in sonorous 
 rhythm the temptation of Adam " par I'eclat trompeur d'une 
 funeste pomme," and stigmatizes the tempter who 
 
 " fit croire au premier homme 
 Qu'il allait, en goutant de ce morceau fatal. 
 
14 THE DOVE'S FLIGHT 
 
 Combl^ de tout savoir, a Dieu se rendre egal. 
 II en fit sur-le-champ la folk experience. 
 Mais tout ce qu'il acquit de nouvelle science 
 Fut que, triste et honteux de voir sa nudite, 
 II sut qu'il n'etait plus, grace a sa vanite, 
 Qu'un chetif animal p6tri d'un peu de terre, 
 A qui la faim, la soif, partout faisaient la guerre, 
 Et qui, courant toujours de malheur en malheur, 
 A la mort arrivait enfin par la douleur." 
 
 II. 
 
 THE DOVES FLIGHT FROM THE ARE; SEEKING REST 
 AND FINDING NONE. 
 
 Genesis viii. 9. 
 
 THE dove that Noah put forth from the ark at the end 
 of forty days, took flight, we may be sure, with entire 
 wilUngness to leave her prison-refuge, and with gladsome 
 longing to find in a new world fresh woods and pastures new. 
 " But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and ?he 
 returned unto him in the ark, for the waters were on the face 
 of the whole earth." Another week, and the dove might find 
 a green leaf on a topmost bough, if not a bough itself to rest 
 on.* Yet another week, and the dove might find lasting rest 
 for the sole of her foot, and so be seen no more by her still 
 floating friends. But our present concern is (unless in the 
 footnotes) with the first and fruitless flight from the ark, when 
 
 * Bellarmine and the Rabbis say that the dove plucked the leaf which 
 she brought to Noah from the Garden of Eden, vrhich vi^as too loftily- 
 situated to be reached by the flood. To this tradition Jean Paul Richter 
 alludes, in one of his novellets, where he likens our internal joy to an olive- 
 leaf, brought to us by a dove over the foaming deluge that is spread around 
 us, and gathered by her in the far sunny Paradise high above the flood. 
 
 One in whom Wordswoilh hailed an "ingenuous poet," of ** true sensi- 
 bility," little known to most of us by name, John Edwards, compares the 
 blue-eyed Spring, that met him with her blossoms, to "the Dove of old, 
 
FROM THE ARK. 15 
 
 she beat about on that waste of waters, seeking rest and finding 
 
 none. 
 
 ** Of rest was Noah's dove bereft 
 When with impatient wings she left 
 That safe retreat, the ark ; 
 
 returned with olive leaf, to cheer the Patriarch mourning o'er a world 
 destroy'd." And Wordsworth has himself a sonnet beginning 
 '.' Near Anio's stream I spied a gentle Dove 
 
 Perch'd on an olive-branch, and heard her cooing 
 
 'Mid new-born blossoms that soft airs were wooing, 
 
 While all things present told of joy and love. 
 
 But restless fancy left that olive grove 
 
 To hail the exploratory bird renewing 
 
 Hope for the few, who, at the world's undoing, 
 
 On the great flood were spared to live and move. 
 
 O bounteous Heaven ! signs true as dove and bough 
 
 Brought to the ark are coming evermore, 
 
 Given though we seek them not, but, while we plough 
 
 This sea of life without a visible shore, 
 
 Do neither promise ask nor grace implore 
 
 In what alone is ours, the living Now." 
 
 In a lighter vein, yet sad-hearted atifond, writes Arthur Clough's Claude 
 to Eustace about Luther bringing back Theology once again in a flood 
 upon Europe ; and the dove and the leaf are made to do service in the 
 description, — which things are an allegory : 
 
 " Lo you, for forty days from the windows of heaven it fell, the 
 Waters prevail on the earth yet more for a hundred and fifty ; 
 Are they abating at last ? the doves that are sent to explore are 
 Wearily fain to return, at the best with a leaflet of promise, — 
 Fain to return, as they went, to the wandering wave-tost vessel, — 
 Fain to re-enter the roof of which covers the clean and the unclean." 
 
 Theology was here to A. H. Clough what Dogma is to his old Oxford 
 friend and contemporary ; and what the former thus hinted many years 
 .since in his hexametrical Amours de Voyage^ the latter has expanded and 
 elaborated into a treatise that may be said to have made a mark, as well as 
 a noise, — the book, namely, known and read by almost all men that read 
 at all, or think even, and called Literature and Dogma. 
 
 One of Les Contemplations of France's most romantic poet of the romantic 
 school compliments a brother penman on certain presentation volumes with 
 this Biblical conceit : 
 
 " Et voila qu'a travers ces brumes et ces eaux, 
 Tes volumes exquis m'arrivent, blancs oiseaux, 
 ^ M'apportant le rameau qu'apportent les colombes 
 
 Aux arches." 
 
 Beranger made the Raven and the Dove his theme for a copy of verses 
 that might be called the Two Voices; the Dove all hope and faith and 
 
i6 THE DOVE'S FLIGHT 
 
 Giving her vain excursions o'er, 
 
 The disappointed bird once more 
 
 Explored the sacred bark." 
 
 So writes either Cowper or Cotton (suuni cidque) in a fireside 
 poem designed to show that the jewel of solid happiness lies 
 within a man's own bosom, " and they are fools who roam : 
 
 " This world has nothing to bestow ; 
 From our own selves our bliss must flow, 
 And that dear hut our home." 
 
 There is quoted in Mr. Davies' Pilgrhnage of the Tiber a 
 
 charity, his black companion all cynicism and unbelief. And La Colovibe 
 et le Corbeau du Deluge ends with the dove's avowal, 
 
 " Je vais aux mortels malheureux 
 De I'olivier porter la branche 
 Que Dieu m'a fait cueillir pour eux." 
 
 Whereat, as usual, the biped in black has a wicked laugh, Poiseau noir se 
 prend a rire^ and assures his innocent companion that the mortels he is about 
 to rejoin will cook her with the wood of the olive-branch she is carrying to 
 them. 
 
 How characteristically different the tone of Hartley Coleridge's applica- 
 tion of the story, in his verses entitled Religious Differences, where even the 
 raven comes in for a good word, a kind one, at least, of compassionate 
 sympathy — as though not, of necessity, so black as he is painted : 
 
 " 'Tis little that we know, and if befall 
 That faith do wander, like the restless raven. 
 That rather chose without an aim to roam 
 O'er the blank world of waters, than to seek 
 In the one sacred ark a duteous home, 
 May good be with it ! Yet the bird so meek, 
 The missive dove, that ne'er begrudged her pain. 
 Bat duly to the ark return'd again, 
 And brought at last the promise and the pledge 
 Of peace, hath won a dearer privilege," etc. 
 
 It might be permissible to put some such meaning on Victor Hugo's lines: 
 
 " Dieu, qui tient dans sa main tous les oiseaux perdus, 
 Parfois au mekne nid rend la meme colombe." 
 
 It is noteworthy among Mexican antiquities that tradition reports the 
 boat in which Tezpi escaped the deluge to have been filled with various 
 kinds of quadrupeds and birds ; and that after some time a vulture was 
 sent out of it, which remained feeding on the dead bodies of the giants, as 
 the waters subsided ; but a little humming-bird (Jniitzit-zilin), being sent 
 forth, returned with a twig in its mouth. 
 
FROM THE ARK. 17 
 
 versicle which critics have cited from his pages to show how 
 living a thing poetry still is in Italy, for it is one of those 
 charming " canti " an Italian peasant-girl thinks it nothing 
 wonderful to produce ; and putting our own interpretation 
 upon it, for present purposes, we may imagine the patriarch 
 addressing it to his dove : 
 
 *' Vola, palomba, quanto pusi volare, 
 Salisei in alto quanto pusi salire, 
 Gira lo mondo quanto pusi girare, 
 
 Un giomo alle miei mani hai da venire ! " * 
 
 Mr. Watts' picture of the Return of the Dove has been 
 admired for that suggestion of thought which shows what 
 power is obtained over the imagination even by materials the 
 most scanty : the eye rests on the solitary dove (that rests not), 
 weary of wing, wending her way across the waste of waters to 
 the far-off home in the ark, her only refuge ; the artist awakens 
 interest in the fate of the poor bird, for the gazer thinks of her 
 long search from early morn to close of day ; the dove is ready 
 to drop into the sea that covers the earth, and there is no help 
 in the silence and soHtude. 
 
 '* So, when the soul finds here no true content, 
 And, like Noah's dove, can no sure footing take, 
 She doth return from whence she first was sent, 
 And flies to him that first her wings did make." 
 
 The lines are by Sir John Davies, Shakspeare's contemporary, 
 and noted for his long philosophical poem 0)1 the Soul of Man 
 and the Immortality thereof. The soul's seeking rest and finding 
 none, the wide world over, is like Spenser's knight bound on a 
 bootless quest : " He through the endless world did wander 
 wide, It seeking evermore, yet nowhere it descride ; " not to 
 compare it with the more terrible experience of a station or 
 standing-point in Milton: Such resting found the sole of unblest 
 feet. 
 
 * " Fly, dove, as far as you can fly ; mount as high as you can mount ; 
 wheel round the wide world as far as you can wheel ; one day you will 
 have to come to my hands." 
 
 2 
 
SEEKING REST 
 
 O that I had the wings of a dove ! for then would I flee 
 away, and be at rest. But it is one thing to flee away, 
 another to find rest. The wings of a dove, it is on record, 
 may carry her away, without her being at rest, without 
 her finding any hold for the sole of her foot. It is possible 
 by flying, to fly away from home and shelter, to be lost in 
 landless space. It is possible by going further to fare worse. 
 It is more than possible to do worse than bear those ills 
 we have, by flying to others that we know not of Seeking 
 rest, and finding none, — if the quest is common, so is the 
 failure to find. Evil spirit, or not, then saith he, I will return 
 unto my house from whence I came out ; even as the dove — 
 symbol of a holy spirit — perforce returned to its asylum within 
 the ark. Seeking rest, and finding none, — the tale is older 
 even than that of 16, stung by Here's gadfly, and goaded by that 
 fiery sting over hill and valley, across sea and river, to torment 
 her if she lay down to rest, and madden her with pain when 
 she sought to sleep. On and still on she went, resting not by 
 night or day, through the Dorian and Thessalian plains, to the 
 wild Thracian land "^ — her feet bleeding on the sharp stones, 
 her body torn by the thorns and brambles, as well as tor- 
 tured by the stings of the fearful gadfly. We might apply 
 what one of the most energetic of Shakspeare's characters is 
 made to say of himself : 
 
 "And I, — like one lost in a thorny wood, 
 That rends the thorns, and is rent with the thorns ; 
 Seeking a way, and straying from the way ; 
 Not knowing how to find the open air, 
 But toiling desperately to find it out." . . . 
 
 So a voice is heard in the Harmo7iies rehgieuses to give a 
 pourquoi for the complainer's tossings to and fro of heart and 
 hope, conime un inalade dans son lit : 
 
 * ' Pourquoi mon errante pensee, 
 Comme une colombe blessee, 
 Ne se repose en aucun lieu." 
 
 * See Mr. G. W. Cox's rendering (ft-om ^schylus) of the tale of 16 and 
 Prometheus. 
 
AND FINDING NONE. 19 
 
 The Edward Shore of Crabbe's Tales is one who, " unfix'd, 
 unfixing, look'd around, and no employment but in seeking 
 found." He loved not labour, though he could not rest, " Nor 
 firmly fix the vacillating mind, that, ever working, could no 
 centre find." For such as him was meant the moral embodied 
 in, and openly attached to, one of Wordsworth's Inscriptions 
 (On the banks of a rocky stream) : 
 
 " Behold an emblem of our human mind 
 Crowded with thoughts that need a settled home, 
 Yet, like to eddying balls of foam 
 Within this whirlpool, they each other chase 
 Round and round, and neither find 
 An outlet nor a resting-place ! 
 Stranger, if such disquietude be thine, 
 Fall on thy knees and sue for help divine." 
 
 In Edward Shore's case, although " faith, \\ath his virtue, he 
 indeed profess'd," there were "doubts that deprived his 
 ardent mind of rest ; " and, not adopting the counsel of the 
 bard of Rydal, 
 
 *' Still the same scruples haunted Edward's mind. 
 Who found no rest, nor took the means to find." 
 
 A companion picture, like in unlikeness, is to be seen in one 
 of the later tales, — that of Rachel, who lived in sorrow and in 
 solitude : 
 
 "Religious neighbours, kindly calling, found 
 Her thoughts unsettled, anxious, and unsound : 
 Low, superstitious, querulous, and weak, 
 She sought for rest but knew not how to seek : 
 . And their instructions, though in kindness meant, 
 Were far from yielding the desired content." 
 
 Like neither of these is that seeker in Shelley, who " sought, 
 for his lost heart was tender, things to love, but found them 
 not" — ''a spirit that strove for truth, and like the Preacher 
 found it not." " Ah me," sighs the Licinius of Chronicles and 
 Characters, 
 
 " What goal to us remains, whose course some Fate 
 Impels unwilling where no prize can wait 
 The weary runner ? " 
 
20 SEEKING REST 
 
 And something such is the strain of the Lotos-eaters, weighed 
 upon with heaviness while all things else have rest from wea ri- 
 ness. All things have rest : why should they toil alone, and 
 make perpetual moan, still from one sorrow to another thrown, 
 
 " Nor ever fold our wings, 
 And cease from wanderings, 
 Nor steep our brows in slumber's holy balm ; 
 Nor harken what the spirit sings, 
 ' There is no joy but calm ' ? " 
 
 For is there " any peace in ever climbing up the climbing 
 wave ? " Sheer misery is that described in the legend of 
 Rabbi Ben Ephraim's Treasure, where we read how 
 
 "a fever-famisht human hope 
 That is doom'd from grief to grief to grope 
 On darkness blind to a doubtful goal, . . . 
 Consumes the substance of the soul 
 In wavering ways about the world." 
 
 Nor so very far behind it is the trouble of him that wrought 
 upon his shield, for his device, a fountain springing ever to 
 reach a star, with the legend subscribed, " I shall attain," — 
 though, to mock his eyes, his heart replied, " In vain !" — for 
 where that fountain seemed to rise highest, back again was it 
 straightway consigned to earth, and fell in void despair, like 
 the worn knight's " sad seven-years' hope to find Fair Yoland 
 with the yellow hair." Within those seven years, how many 
 lands and climes had he ransacked, and yet he seemed to be, 
 indeed, 
 
 *' No nearer to the endless quest. 
 Neither by night nor day I rest ; 
 My heart burns in me like a fire : 
 My soul is parch'd with long desire : 
 Ghostlike I grow, and where I go 
 I hear men mock and mutter low, 
 And feel men's finger point behind — 
 ' The moonstruck knight that talks to air ! 
 Lord help the fool who hopes to find 
 Fair Yoland with the yellow hair. ' 
 
 This grieving after unknown good, 
 Though but a sickness in the blood, 
 
AND FINDING NONE. 
 
 Cries from the dust. And God is just. 
 No rock denies the raven food. 
 For who would torture, night by night, 
 Some starving creature with the sight 
 Of banquets fair with plenty spread, 
 Then mock, ' Crawl empty thou to bed, 
 And dream of viands not for thee ! ' 
 Yet night by night, dear God, to me, 
 In wake or sleep, such visions creep 
 To gnaw my heart with hunger deep. 
 How can I meet dull death, resign'd 
 To die the fool of dreams so fair ? 
 Nay, love hath seen, and love shall find 
 Fair Yoland with the yellow hair ! " 
 
 No observant reader of these rhymes but must have been 
 struck with the rhymer's rec.urrence to this order of themes, 
 in hngering longing strains, diversified enough in manner and 
 accident, but nearly identical in import. Thus, in a later work, 
 we often light on such passages as this : 
 
 " For I know what it is to wander, alas ! 
 It is only to fall from bad to worse. 
 And find no rest in the universe." 
 
 Elsewhere the same poet begins another poem with the re- 
 flection, — 
 
 "The rest that man runs after lures the wretch 
 
 From e^ery place where he at rest may be. 
 
 So that his legs are ever on the stretch, 
 
 And not one moment of repose hath he." 
 
 So again where the Tree tells the Alan, in the last poem of the 
 
 series, — 
 
 ' ' Vainly the world, wherein no root thou hast, 
 Thou wanderest seeking what, when found, is fled. 
 And think'st thou I am solitary ? Thou 
 It is who art a wandering solitude. 
 For from thy life away thy life doth flow, 
 And, self-pursuing, thou art self-pursued. 
 * * * * 
 
 The Tree stands steadfast ... by the root he hath. 
 For whoso hath no root, no life hath he. 
 No path leads to him. And by every path 
 He from himself must needs a wanderer be." 
 
THE TOWER OF BABEL. 
 
 But in yet another poem from the same source we may find a 
 passage that, by way of conclusion, may serve to bring us round 
 nearer to our starting-point : 
 
 ' ' My heart is a storm-beaten ark, wildly hurl'd 
 O'er the whirlpools of time, with the wrecks of a world. 
 The dove from my bosom hath flown far away : 
 It is flown, and returns not, though many a day 
 Have I watch'd from the windows of life for its coming. 
 Friend, I sigh for repose, I am weary of roaming. 
 I know not what Ararat rises for me, 
 Far away, o'er the waves of the wandering sea. " 
 
 III. 
 
 THE TOWER OF BABEL. 
 Genesis xi. i — 9. 
 
 ARCHBISHOP WHATELY is the alleged author of a 
 Latin tractate, anonymously published in 1849, which 
 freely recognizes as very considerable the difficulties under 
 which this short narrative labours. He asks how the pre- 
 caution against being scattered abroad was to be secured by 
 building a very high tower ; and again how the purpose of it 
 was to be frustrated by a confusion of tongues ; and w^hy it was 
 necessary that- they should all be dispersed through far-apart 
 regions? His notion of the matter, upon the whole, seems 
 to be that some leading men had determined to found a 
 world-wide empire, with a temple, dedicated to some idol, 
 for world-wide worship; and that since it was not in their 
 power, as dwellers on a plain, to erect that building on a- 
 mountain, (as one of the " high places " afterwards so notorious 
 in holy writ,) they resolved on building a very lofty tower, a 
 sort of artificial mountain. Whereupon their counsels were 
 baffled by divine interposition, which moved the founders to 
 discord, causing them to quarrel about religious worship — and 
 thus " much more effectively vitiating their attempt than by 
 a diversity of tongues." "Thus it came to pass at Babel, 
 
THE TOWER OF BABEL. 23 
 
 that the strongest of the factions kept possession of the city 
 and tower, only dropping the magnitude of the tower and 
 that height which they had at first designed, while the other 
 factions went off in different directions, and settled themselves, 
 some in one locality, some in another." There is a cele- 
 brated imaginary conversation between the two Isaacs, Newton 
 and Barrow, in which the Jews are roundly charged ^vith 
 "inventing" the story, because themselves ignorant of the 
 sciences and envious of the scientific. "Astronomy, among 
 the rest, was odious to them; and hence the fables stuck 
 against the Tower of Babel, the observator}^ of a better and a 
 wiser people, their enemy, their conqueror." Coleridge, on the 
 other hand, descries in the cosmotheism, or identification ot 
 God with the universe, the first apostacy of mankind after the 
 flood, when they " combined to raise a temple to the heavens, 
 and which is still the favoured religion of the Chinese." 
 Glancing in another direction for varieties of \-iew, we come 
 upon Mr. Charles Kingsley's plea for the builders of Babel, 
 as to some extent right and well-meaning. From the Babel 
 society, argues one of his spokesmen, sprung our architecture, 
 our astronomy, politics, and colonization : no doubt the old 
 Hebrew scheiks thought them impious enough, for daring to 
 build brick walls instead of keeping to the good .old-fashioned 
 tents, and gathering themselves into a nation instead of re- 
 maining a mere family horde. And no doubt the same adverse 
 critics " gave their own account of the myth, just as the ante- 
 diluvian savages gave theirs of that strange Eden scene, by the 
 common interpretation of which the de\il is made the first 
 inventor of modesty. Men are all conserv'atives ; everything 
 new is impious, till we get accustomed to it ; and if it fails, 
 the mob piously discover a divine vengeance in the mischance, 
 from Babel to Catholic Emancipation." From another stand- 
 point Mr. Carlyle took his survey of the Shinar structure, when 
 he uttered one of his seer-like denunciations of "this our 
 new Tower-of-Babel era" and its "soul-confusing Babylonish 
 hubbub." For now, as in that old time, he complains, had 
 men said to themselves, Come, let us build a tower which shall 
 
24 THE TOWER OF BABEL. 
 
 reach to heaven \ and by our steam-engines, and logic-engines, 
 and skilful mechanism and manipulation, vanquish not only 
 physical nature, but the divine Spirit of Nature, and scale 
 the empyrean itself " Wherefore they must needs again be 
 stricken with confusion of tongues (or of printing-presses); 
 and dispersed — to other work ; wherein also, let us hope, their 
 hammers and trowels shall better avail them." Ccelum ipsum 
 petimus stultitia, says Horace ; for, nil i7io7^talibus arduum est. 
 Another ode of his might remind us of Babel, in the Hne 
 "Molem propinquam nubibus arduis," — and again, in yet 
 another, "Regalique situ pyramidum altius." Dante saw 
 Nimrod in Purgatory : 
 
 * ' At foot of the stupendous work he stood, 
 As if bewilder'd, looking on the crowd 
 Leagued in his proud attempt on Sennaar's plain." 
 
 One recalls the strain of the Hebrew prophet, Though Babylon 
 should mount up to heaven, and though she should fortify 
 the height of her strength, yet from heaven should spoilers 
 come upon her. " For her judgment reacheth unto heaven, 
 and is Hfted up even to the skies." Or as it is written in 
 another place, " Thy terribleness hath deceived thee, and the 
 pride of thine heart, O thou that . . . holdest the height 
 of the hill : though thou shouldest make thy nest as high 
 as the eagle, I will bring thee down from thence, saith the 
 Lord." An apostrophe from the Essay on Man is here not in- 
 applicable : 
 
 "Oh, sons of earth ! attempt ye still to rise, 
 By mountains piled on mountains, to the skies ? 
 Heaven still with laughter the vain toil surveys, 
 And buries madmen in the heaps they raise." 
 
 Pope has a more direct allusion to the story of Shinar in 
 his modernization, or as he called it versification, of Donne's 
 satire \ in one passage of which, the rugged elder poet is fain 
 to tell a pretentious prig, 
 
 " If you had lived, sir, 
 Time enough to have been interpreter 
 To Babel's bricklayers, sure the Tower had stood : " 
 
THE TOWER OF BABEL. 25 
 
 and this in Pope's version becomes, 
 
 ' ' You prove yourself so able, 
 Pity you were not druggerman at Babel ; 
 For had they found a linguist half so good, 
 I make no question but the Tower had stood." 
 
 Dr. Gumming got a rap on the knuckles for his halting 
 scholarship, when he implied in one of his books that Greek 
 might already have been heard at Babel in advance of the age 
 of Gadmus : " Then, when one asked for something in Hebrew, 
 another asked him what he meant in another language ; and 
 when another asked for something in Greek, he was replied to 
 in some dialect of the Hebrew." The confusion of tongues 
 at Babel, Mr. Farrar can cite many competent authorities for 
 regarding rather as a " sublime emblem than a material verity." 
 But the subject is a dangerously favourite one ^^'ith sciolists 
 as well as scholars ; and one of the former was not long since 
 derided by one of the latter for deriving Babel from Bab-bel — 
 "the palace of the star of Good Fortune;" for which reading 
 he was advised to substitute Bab-ble, as that would be quite 
 as scholarlike, with the advantage of expressing much more 
 definitely the phenomenon with which the Tower of Babel is 
 familiarly associated. 
 
 Worthy and inquiring Mr. John Evelyn records in his Diary 
 how he " had some discourse with certain strangers not un- 
 learned, who had been born not far from old Nineveh ; they 
 assured me of the ruines being still extant, and vast and won- 
 derfull were the buildings, vaults, pillars, and magnificent 
 fragments; but they could say little of the Toure of Babel 
 that satisfied me." Few can say much on that subject that 
 is satisfactory, to this day.* 
 
 * In Mr. Pierson's Traditions of Freemasonry, of which several editions 
 have been sold, there is a very noticeable "legend of the Tower of Babel 
 recited in a degree called the Noachites or Prussian Chevaliers " — a title, by 
 the way, concerning which Mr. Freeman, or one of his school, inquiringly 
 observed that he had heard of Uhlans and of Teutonic knights, but did 
 not know that either of these professed to be Noachites in any sense but 
 that in which all mankind might be said to be Noachites. The story 
 goes that Peleg, who suggested the plan of the tower, and who had been 
 
26 THE CONFUSION OF TONGUES. 
 
 The confusion of tongues on the plains of Shinar has led to 
 strife of tongues on the part of commentators and expositors 
 ever since. It is a relief to betake one's self to the poets, out 
 of that strife of tongues. There is an old poem of Sir Da^iid 
 Lyndesay's, in which the Lord Lyon King at Arms goes 
 through the early part of the Old Testament at great length, 
 and sometimes with considerable freedom ; and here the Tower 
 of Babel is uniformly styled a " dungeoun " — the same word 
 as "donjon"; his account of what happened at the foot of 
 the dungeon might not, as partial criticism admits, satisfy a 
 comparative philologer, but it is at least comforting to find 
 so early a date given to our own branch of the common 
 speech : — 
 
 " Affore that tyme all spak Ebrew ; 
 
 Than sum began for to speik Grew, 
 
 Sum Duche, sum language Sarazyne, 
 
 And sum began to speik Latyne." 
 
 It is a poet of our own day who recites his trials of travelling 
 experience, as a confirmed wanderer about in the world, who 
 from many strange mouths has heard many strange tongues 
 and himself has in many a language groaned many a groan, — 
 " And have often had reason to curse those wild fellows 
 Who built the high house at which heaven turn'd jealous, 
 Making human audacity stumble and stammer 
 When seized by tlie throat in the hard gripe of Grammar. " 
 
 the Grand Architect during the construction, being struck with the force 
 of conscience, condemned himself to most rigorous penance, and migrated 
 with his followers to the North of Germany, suffering extreme miseries 
 on the way. Settling in Prussia, he *' built a triangular temple, where 
 he enclosed himself that he might be able at leisure to worship God, and 
 implore Him to pardon his transgression. In the course of excavation in 
 the salt mines of Prussia, A.D, 553, there were discovered at the depth of 
 fifteen cubits the foundations of a triangular edifice, in the centre of which 
 was a small pillar of marble, on which the above history was inscribed in 
 Hebrew characters, containing these words : ' Here were deposited the 
 ashes of the Grand Architect of the Tower of Babel — God showed him 
 mercy, because he humbled himself.' These monuments are said to be in 
 the possession of the King [1870] of Prussia." — Traditions of Fi'eemasonry 
 and its Coincidences with the Ancient Mysteries. By A. T. C. Pierson, 
 New York. 
 
THE TOWER OF BABEL. 
 
 The castle wall up to which Alma led the knights in the 
 Faerie Queene, was of towering height, and not built of brick, 
 nor yet of stone and lime, 
 
 " But of thing like to that Egyptian slime 
 Whereof king Nine whilome built Babel towre : 
 But O great pity, that no longer time 
 So goodly workmanship should not endure ! 
 Soone it must tume to earth : no earthly thing is sure." 
 
 Byron takes Babel tower as his text for a homily against big 
 houses and big sepulchres : 
 
 " Alas ! man makes that great which makes him little : 
 I grant you in a church 'tis very well : 
 What speaks of Heaven should be by no means brittle, 
 But strong and lasting, till no tongue can tell 
 Their names who rear'd it, but huge houses fit ill — 
 And huge tombs worse — mankind, since Adam fell : 
 Methinks the story of the Tower of Babel 
 Might teach them this much better than I'm able." 
 
 Wordsworth was reminded of it by the procedure of certain 
 leaders of party in the time of the first French Revolution : 
 
 " Hence could I see how Babel-like their task, 
 Who, by the recent deluge stupefied. 
 With their whole souls went culling from the day 
 Its petty promises, to build a tower 
 For their own safety. " 
 
 Elsewhere, in stately verse, he tells us how the Babylonian 
 
 " from the plain, -with toil immense, upreared 
 Tower eight times planted on the top of tower, 
 That Belus, nightly to his splendid couch 
 Descending there might rest : upon that height 
 Pure and serene, diffused — to overlook 
 Winding Euphrates, and the city vast 
 Of his devoted worshippers, far-stretched. 
 With grove and field and garden interspersed : 
 Their town, and foodful region for support 
 Against the pressure of beleaguering war." 
 
 Wordsworth's successor, as wearer of the bays, likens a 
 clamour, in the Princess, to that of "a new-world Babel, 
 
28 THE TOWER OF BABEL. 
 
 woman-built, and worse-confounded." And one may be par- 
 doned for thinking of Shinar when reading what Sir Pelleas 
 said, in the Holy G^^ail, when he saw 
 
 " High up in heaven the hall that Merlin built 
 Blackening against the dead green stripes of even, — 
 ' Black nest of rats,' he groan'd, ' ye build too high. ' " 
 
 The Duchess of Friedland's charge against her too ambitious 
 husband, in the Wallensteins Tod, is that he is ever building, 
 building to the clouds, still building higher, and still higher 
 building, nor bears in mind that the poor narrow basis cannot 
 sustain the giddy tottering structure. He builds too low who 
 builds beneath the clouds. As in one of his poems Victor 
 Hugo describes the structural imaginings of Piranese, 
 
 " Oii se melent I'arche et le ciel, 
 L'escalier, la tour, la colonne ; 
 Ovi croit, monte, s'enfle et bouillonne 
 L'incommensurable Babel," 
 
 SO in another he moralizes his song, with an allegorized picture 
 of Babel tower reversed : 
 
 " O chatiment ! dedale aux spirales funebres ! 
 Construction d'en bas qui cherche les tenebres, 
 Plonge au-dessous du monde et descend dans la nuit, 
 Et, Babel renversee, au fond de rombre fuit !" 
 
 So, and yet hardly so, but otherwise, moralizes his song the 
 author of The New Timoji, when describing one 
 
 " Intent, the Babel art has built, to trace, 
 
 Here scan the height and there explore the base ; 
 
 That stnicture called ' The Civilized, ' as vain 
 
 As its old symbol on the Shinar plain, 
 
 Where Pride collects the bricks and slime, and then 
 
 But builds the city to divide the men ; 
 
 Swift comes the antique curse, — smites one from one, 
 
 Rends the great bond, and leaves the pile undone." 
 
yOB'S COMFORTERS. 20 
 
 IV. 
 
 SOCIABLE SILENCE. 
 
 Job ii. 13. 
 
 ALREADY in an earlier volume of Biblical annotations 
 has the above text been treated as a suggestive argu- 
 ment for Silent Sympathy.* We now propose to take it as also 
 suggestive of what may be called Sociable Silence. Let us get 
 what good we can out of such proverbially bad comforters as 
 Job's three friends. He at any rate got some good out of 
 them, until they began to talk. 
 
 For it was when they began to talk, and to talk as they did, 
 that Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar became a trouble to the Man 
 of Uz, and not a solace. Silent, they were sociable, and he 
 was glad of their society. But when they broke that silence, 
 they broke too the bonds of that good fellowship. Save me 
 from my friends, he might say, when they became argumenta- 
 tive, disputatious, and dogmatical. It was with him then as 
 Anth the vexed questionist in Crabbe : 
 
 "Questions now vex'd his spirit, most from those 
 Who are call'd friends, because they are not foes. " 
 
 Most of what Job's friends said to him were veracious state- 
 ments, remarks Robertson of Brighton, and much of what Job 
 said for himself was unveracious and mistaken ; and yet these 
 veracities of theirs were so torn from all connexion with fact 
 and truth, that they became falsehoods ; and the speakers were 
 nothing more than " orthodox liars " in the sight of God. Sir 
 Thomas Browne calls " these oblique expostulations of Job's 
 friends a deeper injury than the downright blows of the devil.' 
 Cowper's couplets are pointed, and to the point : 
 
 "Job felt it when he groan'd beneath the rod 
 And the barb'd arrows of a frowning God ; 
 And such emolhents as his friends could spare, 
 . Friends such as his for modem Jobs prepare." 
 
 * la Secular Annotations on Scripture Texts, First Series, pp. 6 10. 
 
30 JOB AND HIS FRIENDS. 
 
 Somewhere comparing himself with Job, on the score of 
 patience, and in regard of friends, Edmund Burke observes, 
 with ingenious self-appUcation, " I do not find him blamed for 
 reprehending, and with a considerable degree of verbal asperity, 
 those ill-natured neighbours of his who visited his dunghill to 
 read moral, political, and economical lectures on his misery." 
 A later philosopher argues that Job's comforters only failed 
 because they tried to comfort Job ; that their comfort was very 
 fair businesslike comfort in its way, but it happened to be 
 applied in a case where the capacity for feeling was great, and 
 where the problems which great suffering awakes had seized 
 hold of a reflective mind. Coleridge was arguing against the 
 literalities of indiscriminate verbal inspiration, when he asked, 
 by a sort of reductio ad abstirdiwi, if we are to receive as alike 
 dictated by an infallible Intelligence the pathetic appeals and 
 the close and powerful reasoning of the poor sufferer, smarting 
 at once from his wounds and from the oil of vitrol which the 
 orthodox " liars for God " were dropping into them, — and the 
 " hollow truisms, the unsuflficing half-truths, the false assump- 
 tions and malignant insinuations of the supercilious bigots who 
 corruptly defended the truth." Hard words, my masters ! What 
 Coleridge thus controversially wrote in the Letters on Inspira- 
 tion, he had, long before, virtually affirmed in the Friend, where 
 he calls attention to the sentence passed by the All-just on the 
 friends of the sufferer, who had hoped, like venal advocates, 
 to purchase the favour of God by uttering truths of which in 
 their own hearts they had neither conviction nor comprehen- 
 sion : " the truth from the lips did not atone for the lie in 
 the heart, while the rashness of agony in the searching and 
 bewildered complainant was forgiven in consideration of his 
 sincerity and integrity in not disguising the true dictates of his 
 reason and conscience." 
 
 It has been propounded as a general rule, all comforters 
 have been ofi&cious and disagreeable people since the days of 
 Job : the difference between comforting a sufferer and triumph- 
 ing over his misfortunes is occasionally imperceptible, and 
 when the triumph takes the form of bombardment with moral 
 
SOCIABLE SILENCE. 31 
 
 platitudes it is especially offensive.* Sir Mungo Malagrowther, 
 *'like one of the comforters of the Man of Uz," drew close up 
 to impoverished and embarrassed young Nigel, to enlarge on 
 the former grandeur of the Lords of Glenvarloch, and the 
 regret wath which he had heard that their representative was 
 not likely to possess the domains of his ancestry. And later in 
 the stages of the young nobleman's decline and fall, when his 
 very head is in peril, the old knight afflicts him \\ith positive 
 assurances that he wall not fail him on the scaffold itself; for, 
 " I bear a heart," quoth Sir Mungo, " to stand by a friend in 
 the worst of times " — and so saying, he bids Lord Glenvarloch 
 farewell, who feels as heartily rejoiced at his departure, though 
 it may be a bold word, as any person who had ever undergone 
 Sir Mungo's society. It was scarcely that troublesome person- 
 age's privilege to enjoy the freedom from interruption appa- 
 rently secured to Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, neither of whom, 
 observe the commentators, is ever broken in upon while speak- 
 ing — no matter how sarcastic his invectives, how torturing his 
 reproaches, how unjust his assumptions, how one-sided his 
 inferences. 
 
 But as exemplars, in the anti-controversial stage, of sociable 
 and sympathetic silence, let us take leave of Job's friends with 
 goodwill, in a Shakspearian similitude, referring to those who 
 
 "Do glue themselves in sociable grief, 
 Like true, inseparable, faithful loves, 
 Sticking together in calamity." 
 
 There is a silence which is felt to be sociable, when the 
 silent associates are tried and trusty friends. Wherever, in fact, 
 there is implicit confidence, and an underlying sense of general 
 
 * George Eliot somewhere remarks that the harder problems of our life 
 have changed less than our manners ; we wrestle with the old sorrows, but 
 more decorously : so that even the patriarch Job, if he had been a gentle- 
 man of the modem West (and especially if a gentleman of the modern 
 West-end), would have avoided disorder and poetical laments ; while the 
 friends who called on him, though not less disposed than Bildad the 
 Shuhite to hint that their unfortunate friend was in the wrong, would have 
 sat on their chairs, and held their hats in their hands. 
 
32 SOCIABLE SILENCE. 
 
 % ^ 
 
 sympathy, it is often a relief to be able to hold one's peace 
 without any risk of misapprehension. Whereas, with a compa- 
 rative stranger, one puts on company manners, and has to 
 keep up the shuttlecock ot colloquial inanity with all one's 
 battledoor might. Everybody who has friends must have felt 
 this ; and though — nay, because the feeling is a common one, 
 it may be interesting to show by examples how it has been ex- 
 pressed in literature. 
 
 Horace Walpole tells a story of two old cronies, who, sitting 
 together one evening till it was quite dark, without speaking, 
 one called to the other, "Tom, Tom." "Well," said his 
 friend, "what do you say?" "Oh," said the other, "are you 
 there?" "Ay," said old Tom. "Why, then, don't you say 
 humph V^ demanded the first. So that there was but a felt 
 presence, the silence was enjoyable between these twain. The 
 mute companionship was scarcely the less companionable for 
 being mute. Old friends, remarks Walpole in another of his 
 letters, are the great blessing of one's later years — half a word 
 conveys one's meaning.* He makes this remark in reference 
 to the loss of his intimate friend Mr. Chute, whom he used to 
 see oftener than any one, and to whom he had recourse in 
 every difficulty. "And him I loved to have here, as our 
 friendship was so entire, and we knew one another so entirely, 
 that he alone was never the least constraint to me. We passed 
 many hours together without saying a syllable to each other ; 
 for we were both above ceremony." 
 
 It is the concluding couplet in the following lines which best 
 attests the confiding friendship that existed between Sir Walter 
 Scott and Mr. Skene : 
 
 "To thee, perchance, this rambling strain 
 
 Recalls our summer walks again ; 
 . When doing nought^and, to speak true, 
 
 Not anxious to find aught to do, — 
 
 * Jean Ingelow, in her "first romance," takes notice of it as a remark- 
 able thing, "and I have noticed it too often to think I can have been 
 deceived, that moods of mind, and sometimes even thoughts, will occasion- 
 ally pass from one person to another while both are silent, almost as dis- 
 tinctly as they can be conveyed by words." — OfftheSkelligs,\o\. ii., p. 17. 
 
SOCIABLE SILENCE. 33 
 
 The wild unbounded hills we ranged, 
 While oft our talk its topic changed, 
 And desultory, as our way, 
 Ranged unconfined from grave to gay ; 
 E'en when it flagged, as oft will chance, 
 No effort made to break its trance, 
 We could right pleasantly pursue 
 Our sports in social silence too." 
 
 To the large power of silent sensibility shared alike by 
 Wordsworth and his sister, — the tongue still, the eye and heart 
 awake, — would Principal Shairp refer most of what is best in 
 the Journal of Dorothy, as well as in the Poems of William. 
 They were, during their tour in Scotland, as much in sympathy 
 wvth. each other as with nature. And therefore, says the author 
 of Ctiltui-e and Religion^ as editor of Miss Wordsworth's Recol- 
 lections of that tour, " I can well imagine that in a state of pure 
 receptivity they may have dreamed away mile after mile with- 
 out interchanging a word." This is incidentally remarked, by 
 way of meeting the complaint of those readers who were dis- 
 appointed at finding so few and meagre records of conversation 
 in that delightful Journal. 
 
 Had Lavender, in A Princess of Thule, been asked if Sheila's 
 silence had not a trifle of dulness in it, he would have replied, 
 says his author, by asking if there is dulness in the stillness and 
 the silence of the sea. 
 
 Wisely and well La Bruyere says that, merely to be \\\\.h. 
 those we love is enough. To indulge in reverie the while ; to 
 talk to them ; not to talk to them ; to think about them ; to 
 think on matters indifferent and irrelevant to them, — but mth 
 themselves beside us, — all goes well on that single condition : 
 tout est egal. The Abbe Barthelemy speaks happily of those 
 happy moments between like-minded friends, when the very 
 silence is a proof of the enjoyment each feels in the mere pre- 
 sence of the other; for it is a silence productive of neither 
 weakness nor disgust."'^' They say nothing, but they are to- 
 
 * A suggestive passage occurs in one of Rowland Williams's letters, 
 descriptive of a visit to Abergwili, in April 1852 : "The Bishop [whose 
 chaplain he was at that time] was exceedingly kind. We dined tete-a-tete. 
 
 3 
 
34 SOCIABLE SILENCE. 
 
 gether. On ne dit rien^ mais on est ensemble. Rousseau is 
 even rapturous in his eulogies of sympathetic silence ; he 
 dilates with enthusiasm on the quantity and quality of good 
 things that are said without ever opening the mouth — on the 
 ardent sentiments that are communicated without the frigid 
 medium of speech. Fenelon expatiates on the charm of free 
 communion, sa7ts ceremonie, with a dear friend who don't tire 
 you, and whom neither do you tire ; you see one another ; at 
 times one talks ; at others, listens ; at others, both keep silence ; 
 for both are satisfied with being together, even with nothing to 
 say. " On ne se dit rien^ 07i est content d'etre ense77ible sans se 
 rien diix.^^ 
 
 The great test, the only sure and abiding test, of love. Sir 
 Arthur Helps takes to be this — that it has the victory over 
 weariness, tiresomeness, and famiHarity ; for when you are with 
 the person loved, you have no sense of being bored. " With 
 the persons you do not love, you are never supremely at your 
 ease. You have the sense of walking upon stilts. In conver- 
 sation with them, however much you admire them and are 
 interested in them, the horrid idea Avill cross your mind of 
 * What shall I say next ? ' Converse with them is not perfect 
 association." On the other hand, with those you love, the 
 satisfaction in their presence is likened to the relation of the 
 heavenly bodies to one another, which, in their silent revolu- 
 tions, lose none of their attractive power : the sun does not 
 talk to the world ; but it attracts it. 
 
 For those who have managed that things shall run smoothly 
 over the domestic rug, says the author of Orley Farm, there is 
 no happier time of Hfe than the long candlelight hours of home 
 and silence. "No spoken content or uttered satisfaction is 
 necessary. The fact that is felt is enough for peace." This 
 fact is touchingly exemplified in the American story of The 
 
 on Monday, and spent the evening subsequently in reading new books 
 opposite one another, only varying the silence occasionally by a remark or 
 a question one to the other ; nothing could be really more sensible, though 
 in the eyes of some people it might appear funny."— Zz/^ and Letters of 
 Rowland Williams, D.D., vol. i. , p. 204. 
 
SOCIABLE SILENCE. 35 
 
 Gayworthys, in the instance of stolid Jaazaniah Hoogs and his 
 leal-hearted wife Wealthy. We see Jaazaniah in his chair, the 
 three-legged chair tilted up, the man whittling a stick, and 
 whistling. Wealthy is busy chopping, following her own soli- 
 tary thoughts, but feeling a certain habitual comfort in having 
 him at her elbow. Standing up for the poor soul, she main- 
 tains in one place that his thoughts come out in his whistling : 
 he could never make such music as that out of nothing. " You 
 never heard it, nor nobody else, as I have. Why, when we're 
 sitting here, all alone .... he'll go on so [whistling], that 
 I hold my breath for fear o' stopping him. It's like all the 
 Psalms and Revelations to listen to it. There's something 
 between us then that's more than talk." — Presently it is beside 
 his death-bed that she sits, in the same expressive silence. 
 " She sat by him for hours ; sometimes laying her hand softly 
 down upon the coverlet, and letting his seek it, as it always 
 would j and the spring breath and music in the air spoke gently 
 for theni both, and there was something between them that 
 was more than talk." 
 
 One thinks of Dr. Johnson in his last illness, visited by 
 Malone, and proving so unusually silent that the visitor rose 
 to leave, believing him to be in pain, or incommoded by 
 company. " Pray, sir, be seated," Johnson said. " I cannot 
 talk, but I like to see you there." Indeed, great talker in every 
 sense as the doctor had been in his prime, he was never in- 
 sensible to the value of sympathetic silence. During his tour 
 to the Hebrides, his companion, Boswell, took the liberty one 
 evening of remarking to Johnson, that he very often sat quite 
 silent for a long time, even when in company with a single 
 friend. " It is true, sir," replied Johnson. " Tom Tyers de- 
 scribed me the best. He once said to me, ' Sir, you are like a 
 ghost; you never speak till you are spoken to.'" Boswell was 
 apparently incapable of seeing anything enjoyable in social 
 silence. Not so his every way bigger friend. 
 
 A delightful essayist of the present time, discussing the com- 
 panionship of books, accounts it no forced paradox to say 
 that a man may sometimes be far more profitably employed in 
 
36 SOCIABLE SILENCE. 
 
 surveying his bookshelves in meditative mood, than if he were 
 to pull this or that volume down and take to reading it; ''just 
 as two friends may hold sweeter converse in perfect silence 
 together, than if they were -talking all the time." The note 
 of exclamation is sounded by Miss Rhoda Broughton, "Oh, 
 blessed state of intimacy, when you may sit by a person for 
 hours and never utter to them ! " " When Esther Craven is 
 dilating on the blissfulness of her evenings at home all alone 
 with her brother Jack, that darling of her heart, as yet fancy- 
 free, "You find plenty to say to him always, I suppose?" 
 quoth rueful Robert Brandon ; and her answer is pat : " Not 
 a word sometimes. We sit opposite or beside each other in 
 sociable silence." 
 
 Henry Mackenzie's Montauban congratulates himself on the 
 footing upon which already he stands with his new acquaint- 
 ance. Monsieur de Roubigne : " He does not think himself 
 under the necessity of eternally talking to entertain me ; and 
 we sometimes spend a morning together pleased with each 
 other's society, though we do not utter a dozen sentences." 
 It is of Julia de Roubigne, in the same epistolary novel, that 
 another letter-writer declares, after adverting to the sprightliness 
 of a Mademoiselle Dorville, — " Oh, Beauvaris ! I have laid out 
 more soul in sitting five minutes with Julia de Roubigne in 
 silence, than I should in a year's conversation with this little 
 Dorville." Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different 
 meanings, writes the autobiographer of Villette : " no words 
 could inspire a pleasanter content than did M. Paul's wordless 
 presence." Miss Austen's William, in Mansfield Park, tells 
 Fanny that he is worn-out with civility; he has been talking 
 to people incessantly all night, and with nothing to say. " But 
 with you, Fanny, there may be peace. You will not want to 
 be talked to. Let us have the luxury of silence." We see 
 Mrs. Gaskell's squire and his son Roger smoking together in 
 prolonged silence : " But the voluntary companionship of his 
 
 * The "never utter to them" is a little loose in constiiiction ; but the 
 authoress is at least consistent in pluralizing "a person," as readers of her 
 books will have noticed more than once and again. 
 
SOCIABLE SILENCE, 2>7 
 
 son was very soothing to the Squire, though not a word might 
 be said." And in the same story we are told of Osborne's 
 preference of Molly's society, that to her he needed not to talk 
 if the mood was not on him — they were on those happy terms 
 where silence is permissible, and where efforts to act against 
 the prevailing mood of the mind are not required. 
 
 An observant writer assumes that his observant readers may, 
 or must, have some time or other remarked a couple of persons 
 pacing the deck of a ship — walking step for step, through half 
 a day, turning with the same short jerk, to resume the same 
 short path, and yet never interchanging a word; the rhythm 
 of the footfall the only tie of companionship between them.'^ 
 They halt occasionally, too, as he describes them, to look over 
 the bulwarks, at some white sail far away, or some cloud-bank 
 rising from the horizon; mayhap they linger to watch the 
 rolling porpoises as they pass, or the swift nautilus, as he glides 
 along; yet never a sound or a token of mutual intelligence 
 escapes them : — it is enough that they live surrounded by the 
 same influences, breathe the same air, and step in the same 
 time ; they have their separate thoughts — wide, perhaps, as the 
 poles asunder, and yet by some strange magnetism they feel 
 there is a kind of sociality in their speechless intercourse. 
 
 Most of us, with Kenelm Chillingly, have known the attrac- 
 tion that draws one human being to another, and makes it so 
 exquisite a happiness to sit quiet and mute by another's side ; 
 which stills for the moment the busiest thoughts in our brain, 
 
 * There is a picture in Mr. Henry Kingsley's Hetty of two figures seated 
 together on the deck of a steamboat — one of which, " sitting in a Cashmere 
 shawl like a figure-head, " from time to time said to the other, ' ' Are you 
 tired?" and the other, a sailor, said, "No. He was very happy. Why 
 should he be tired?" "Because you are not talking to anybody," said 
 Rebecca: "I don't wish to talk; and I am afraid that I am bad com- 
 pany." "You are very good and comfortable company," said Hartop ; 
 "the worst mate of all is a sulky mate, and the next worse is a jawing 
 mate. I took you out for pleasure, not to talk to me." " Now that is 
 like a friend, a real friend," gratefully exclaims Hardie to his adherent, 
 in Hard Cash, "to sit by me, and not make a row. Thank you, thank 
 
38 SOCIABLE SILENCE. 
 
 the most turbulent desires in our heart, and renders us but 
 conscious of a present ineffable bliss. 
 
 Elia accounts that to be but an imperfect solitude which a 
 man enjoys by himself, and applauds the sense of the first 
 hermits when they retired into Egyptian solitudes, not singly, 
 but in shoals, " to enjoy one another's want of conversation. 
 The Carthusian is bound to his brethren by this agreeing spirit 
 of incommunicativeness." In secular occasions, EUa adds, 
 what so pleasant as to be reading a book through a long winter 
 evening, with a friend sitting by — say a wife — he, or she, too 
 (if that be probable), reading another, without interruption, or 
 oral communication. " Can there be no sympathy without the 
 gabble of words ? . . . Give me. Master Zimmermapn, a sym- 
 pathetic sohtude." 
 
 Lamb's reference to the agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness 
 cultivated in monastic retreats, may remind us of what is told 
 of a celebrated meeting between St. Louis, king of France, in 
 disguise, and Egidius of Assisi, a rich citizen, "famous for many 
 graces," writes Sir James Stephen, " and for not a few miracles." 
 At Perugia the two saints met, and long knelt together in silent 
 embrace. On the departure of the king, Egidius was rebuked 
 by his brethren for his rudeness in not having uttered a word 
 to so great a sovereign. " Marvel not," he answered, " that we 
 did not speak ; a divine light laid bare to each of us the heart 
 of the other. No words could have intelligibly expressed that 
 language of the soul, or have imparted the same sacred con- 
 solation." 
 
 One of the most popular of French authors comments, in his 
 autobiography, on the analogy he professes to have observed 
 between the two races of sailors and forest-rangers, and tells, for 
 instance, how the mariner or the woodman will remain by the 
 side of his best friend, in the one case on the ocean, in the 
 other deep in the forest, mthout exchanging a single word. 
 But as the two entertain the same train of ideas — as their 
 silence has been no more than a long tacit communion with 
 nature, "You will be astonished to find that, at the proper 
 moment, they have but to exchange a word, a gesture, or a 
 
SOCIABLE SILENCE. 39 
 
 glance, and they will have communicated more to each other 
 by this word, this gesture, or glance of the eye, than others 
 could have done in a long discourse." As Scott and Skene 
 with their sports, so can these 
 
 " Right pleasantly pursue 
 Their craft, in social silence too." 
 
 Sir Arthur Helps' three Friends in Council return home, after 
 one of their outdoor colloquies, or peripatetic philosophisings, 
 " not sorry to be mostly silent " as they go along, and glad that 
 their friendship is so assured that they can be silent mthout the 
 slightest danger of offence. 
 
 Uncle Sol and Mr. Toots, in Domhey and So?t, wait patiently 
 in the churchyard, sitting on the copingstone of the railings, 
 until Captain Cuttle and Susan come back. Neither being at 
 all desirous to speak, or to be spoken to, they are expressly 
 described as excellent company, and quite satisfied. Glance 
 again at the same author's picture of Mr. Willet and his com- 
 panions, Mr. Cobb and long Phil Parkes, enjoying one another's 
 society at the Maypole ; and how enjoying it ? " For two mortal 
 hours and a half, none of the company had pronounced one 
 word. " Yet were they all firmly of opinion that they were very 
 jolly companions — every one — rather choice spirits than other- 
 wise ; and their look at each other every now and then is said 
 to have been as if there were a perpetual interchange of ideas 
 going on — no man among them considering himself or his 
 neighbour by any means silent ; and each of them nodding 
 occasionally when he caught the eye of another, as if to say, 
 " You have expressed yourself extremely well, sir, in relation to 
 that sentiment, and I quite agree with you." * 
 
 Mr. Shirley Brooks, in his last and best novel, says : " It is 
 a happy time when a man and a woman can be long silent 
 together, and love one another the better that neither speaks 
 
 * Applicable in its way is the stoiy of the two famous coachmen who 
 met each other daily on the Dover road, for four-and-twenty years, never 
 exchanging any other greeting than a jerk of the wrist ; and yet, when 
 one died, the other pined away, and soon afterwards followed him. 
 
40 SOCIABLE SILENCE. 
 
 of love. A few years later, and silence is perhaps thought to 
 mean either sorrow or sulks." And if this reflection relate to 
 fiction, here is a sketch from fact, which may go with it — a 
 reminiscence by Mary Ann Schimmelpenninck of her early 
 childhood, and of happy hours spent alone with her mother, 
 for whom absolute quiet was indispensable during many hours 
 of the day : " She was generally seated at her table with her 
 books, her plans of landscape gardening, or ornamental needle- 
 work, whilst I was allowed to sit in the room, but to be in perfect 
 silence, unless when my mother called me to fetch anything, or 
 addressed to me some little kind word, which seemed not so 
 much to break the silence as to make it more complete and 
 happy by an united flow of hearts." The lovers, in a modern 
 poem on love, are taken to be a deal more eloquent in their 
 silence than in their converse : 
 
 ** Which was most full — our silence or our speech ? 
 Ah, sure our silence ! Though we talk'd high things 
 Of life and death, and of the soul's great wings, 
 And knowledge pure, which only Love can teach ; 
 And we have sat beside the lake's calm beach, 
 Wordless and still, a long and summer day, 
 As if we only watch'd the insect-play, 
 Or rippling wave." 
 
 The young lover in Mr. Disraeli's Love Story, expressly so 
 called, apologizes to Henrietta Temple for a long term of 
 significant silence, with the candid avowal that he's afraid he's 
 very stupid. " Because you are silent ? " she asks. " Is not 
 that a sufficient reason?" he submits. "Nay, I think not," 
 replies Miss Temple; "I think I am rather fond of silent 
 people myself; I cannot bear to live with a person who feels 
 compelled to talk because he is my companion. The whole 
 day passes sometimes without papa and myself exchanging fifty 
 words; yet I am very happy; I do not feel that we are dull." 
 So, when the tenant of Wildfell Hall is being courted by 
 Markham, the latter plumes himself on possessing the faculty 
 of enjoying the company of those he loves, as well in silence as 
 in conversation. One feels sure that this faculty was possessed 
 
SOCIABLE SILENCE. 41 
 
 in a marked degree by all the Bronte family, to the youngest of 
 whom we owe the rather grim and very characteristic story last 
 named. 
 
 There is a fragment in print of an unpublished play of Leigh 
 Hunt's, picturing an ideal home — a heaven this side the stars 
 (as happy husband tells his happy wife) : 
 
 " By men call'd home, when some blest pair are met 
 As we are now ; sometimes in happy talk, 
 Sometimes in silence (also a sort of talk, 
 "Where friends are match'd), each at its gentle task 
 Of book, or household need, or meditation. " 
 
 To like effect, in all intents and purposes, writes the poet of 
 the Angel in the House, a sufficiently cognate theme; where 
 Frederick sends his mother this suggestive sketch of his wedded 
 life; 
 
 ** For hours the clock upon the shell 
 
 Has all the talking to itself ; 
 
 But to and fro her needle runs 
 
 Twice, while the clock is ticking once ; 
 
 And, where a wife is well in reach. 
 
 Not silence separates, but speech ; 
 
 And I, contented, read or smoke, 
 
 And idly think, or idly stroke 
 
 The winking cat, or watch the fire. 
 
 In social peace that does not tire." 
 
 With entire approbation Swift puts on record the notion, 
 practically enforced, of the Houyhnhnms, that when people 
 are met together, a short silence does much improve conversa- 
 tion : Lemuel Gulliver found this to be true ; for during these 
 intermissions of talk, new ideas would arise iii their minds, which 
 very much enlivened the discourse. Not the least attractive is 
 the last clause in Lamartine's descriptive line, 
 
 " Lectures, reverie, entretiens, doux silences." 
 So again Coleridge pictures himself and a friend 
 
 " Seated at ease, on some smooth mossy rock ; 
 In social silence now, and now to unlock 
 The treasured heart ; arm link'd in friendly arm. " 
 
42 SOCIABLE SILENCE. 
 
 And Shelley has his stanzas telling how 
 
 ' ' we sat in silence there, 
 Beneath the golden stars of the clear azure air. 
 In silence which doth follow talk that causes 
 The baffled heart to speak with sighs and tears, 
 When wildering passion swalloweth up the pauses 
 Of inexpressive speech. " 
 
 Joanna Baillie accounted this a special blessing in respect 
 to her sisterly intercourse with Agnes, that, because they were 
 sisters, and sisterly, she could sit by her 
 
 " Silent if dull — O precious privilege ! " 
 
 without having to " make talk," as for a less dear and familiar 
 associate she might, or must. Only of a dear friend, with con- 
 fidence between them, could Hawthorne have written in one of 
 his note-books : " So there he sits in the sea breezes, and there 
 I sit with him — not keeping up a continual flow of talk, but 
 each speaking as any wisdom happens to come into his mind." 
 Not that either of these experts in sociable silence was Hkely to 
 emulate the Anglais described by a French traveller of the last 
 century, " qui, toutes les fois qu'on veut le forcer a rompre le 
 silence, a coutume de repondre, que parler c'est gater la con- 
 versation." ''' Ducis says in one of his letters to Deleyre, that 
 he is so glad to find their recent companionship is felt by the 
 latter to have been douce et agreable ; and then the successor to 
 Voltaire in the French Academy remarks : " II y a des fagons 
 d'etre qui sont plus puissantes que les discours ; on les gagne, 
 on les respire. Le coeur jouit, la fete se repose ; on ne definit 
 plus, on goute." Such an epistolaire was surely qualified, 
 though a Frenchman, to gouter le silence itself, if only it was 
 sociable. 
 
 * Lettres d'un Francais, ii., io8 (1745). 
 
DEATH THE DELIVERER. 43 
 
 V. 
 
 */ WOULD NOT LIVE ALWAY: 
 Job vii. i6. 
 
 HE may have said it in his haste, certainly he said it in 
 his depth of suffering, when Ufe seemed least desirable, 
 and death itself better than life ; for if it came to choosing, 
 Job would choose strangling rather than continue thus to 
 suffer, and be a burden to himself; there it was, and thus it 
 was, that he uttered the negative volition, positive in its pathos, 
 if not despair, " I would not live alway." He loathed his hfe 
 when he said that. Some who have suffered less may have said 
 the same thing with deliberation, and thoroughly meaning what 
 they more calmly said. 
 
 Philosophy assures us — at least a leader of the Scottish 
 school of metaphysics does — that the very briefness of life, 
 afflicting as it is in many cases, in many others is essential to 
 comfort ; these being situations in which hope, so litttle apt to 
 desert the afflicted, scarcely arises, unless when it speaks of 
 other scenes, and in which death, the opener of immortaUty, is 
 hailed as that gracious comforter who receives the combatant 
 when the warfare of life is over, and leads him to repose. And 
 Poetry, Young's for instance and in particular, takes up the 
 strain, and swells it with no uncertain sound ; though the scep- 
 tical as to Young's sincerity (for some think the Doctor sang 
 falsetto) may insist that with him the sound is vox et prceterea 
 nihil : 
 
 " And feel I, death ! no joy from thought of thee? . . . 
 
 Death, the deliverer, who rescues man . . . 
 
 Death, that absolves my birth ; a curse without it ! , . . 
 
 Death, of all pain the period, not of joy. . . . 
 
 This king of terrors is the prince of peace." • 
 
 Or take the utterance (somewhat hysterical) of a later min- 
 strel, musing on the possible history of a star with its possible 
 denizens : 
 
 " Perchance they do not die that dwell in thee, 
 Perchance theirs is a darker doom than ours : 
 
44 'I WOULD NOT LIVE ALJVAV: 
 
 Unchanging woe and endless misery, 
 
 And mourning that hath neither days nor hours. 
 
 Horrible dream ! — Oh, dark and dismal path, 
 
 Where I now weeping walk, I will not leave thee ; 
 
 Earth has one boon for all her children — death : 
 
 Open thy arms, oh mother ! and receive me. 
 
 Take off the bitter burthen from the slave. 
 
 Give me my birthright ! give — the grave, the grave ! " 
 
 Successless proved all Calypso's blandishments and promises 
 to Odysseus, though one promise was the gift of " immortal 
 life, exempt from age and woe." Often would Haroun, strange 
 oracle of a Strange Story, repeat, with mournful solemnity, that 
 the soul is not meant to inhabit this earth, and in fleshy taber- 
 nacle, for more than the period usually assigned to mortals j 
 and that when by art in repairing the walls of the body we so 
 retain it, the soul repines, becomes inert or dejected. And he 
 takes leave of his disciple with the words, " If thou hear that the 
 death which, to my sorrow and in my fooHshness, I have failed 
 to recognize as the merciful minister of Heaven, has removed 
 me at last from the earth, believe that the pale visitant was 
 welcome, and that I humbly accept as a blessed release the lot 
 of our common humanity." The hoary sage in Talfourd's Ion 
 declines the congratulation of Cleon upon his immunity from 
 disease, in a plague-stricken city : he would have his friends and 
 well-wishers rather mourn that he is destined still to linger here, 
 in strange unnatural strength, while death is all around him : 
 
 " I chide these sinews that are framed so tough, 
 Grief cannot palsy them ; I chide the air 
 Which round this citadel of nature breathes 
 With sweetness not of this world ; I would share 
 The common grave of my dear countrymen, 
 And sink to rest while all familiar things 
 Old custom has endear'd are failing with me, 
 Rather than shiver on in life behind them." 
 
 Crabbe's Richard meets the Squire's trite reflection, "Yes, 
 doubtless, we must die," with an assent and an addendum : 
 
 " 'We must,' said Richard ; * and we would not live 
 To feel what dotage and decay would give.' " 
 
'I WOULD NOT LIVE ALWAY 
 
 45 
 
 Dining one day with a party at Pucklechurch, the Borough 
 poet heard mention of a professor of gastronomy who looked 
 to the time when his art should get to such perfection as to 
 keep people alive for ever. " God forbid ! " exclaimed Crabbe, 
 devoutly and emphatically ; for he had begun to feel that old 
 age, even without any severe disease, is not a state to be clung 
 to with tenacity. His letters at this period abound with such 
 avowals as, " I feel the heaviness and languor of time " — 
 " grievous stupidity grows on me daily," though there was no 
 symptom of mental decay. John Foster congratulated a cor- 
 respondent and himself, in 1801, that for them life was passing 
 fast away : " What a superlatively grand and consoling idea is 
 that of Death ! " Without it, life would, to his view, darken 
 into midnight melancholy. " The expectation of living here, 
 and hving thus, always, would be indeed a prospect of over- 
 whelming despair. But thanks to that fatal decree that dooms 
 us to die ! " To him, what he called the " sacred possibility " 
 of making the shortness of life a felicity, was so much the 
 more welcome that he neither had found, nor hoped to find, 
 anything that could entitle long life to be so deemed. " O 
 welcome hour whenever ! " is the exclamation of the Miltonic 
 Adam : " How gladly would I meet Mortality, my sentence, 
 and be earth Insensible ! how glad would lay me down, As in 
 my mothers lap 1 there I should rest. And sleep secure." It is 
 Blind Old Milton himself that is made by Aytoun to ask if he, 
 
 " Tithonus-like, must linger here, 
 And count each step along the rugged road, 
 A phantom tottering to a long-made grave, 
 And eager to lay down my weary load." 
 
 His Adam, of a lost Paradise, is again the speaker in the 
 avowal, " Hencefore I fly not death, nor would prolong Life 
 much : bent rather how I may be quit, Fairest and easiest, of 
 this cumbrous charge." Hawthorne's Aylmer, self-persuaded of 
 his attained skill to concoct a liquid that should prolong life 
 for years, perhaps interminably, forbears to use a power that 
 would produce a discord in nature, and which all the world, 
 but chiefly the quaffer of the immortal nostrum, would find 
 
46 'I WOULD NOT LIVE ALWAY.' 
 
 cause to curse. When Nell — Miss Broughton's Nell, not Mr. 
 Dickens's — wishes aloud there were no such word as dying in 
 the dictionary, so little likes she her father's frequent use of it, 
 " If there were not, it would be a terrible world, Nell," he 
 replies, gravely; " every man with Cain's curse upon his brow." 
 And when, on an after page, the young lady flippantly refers to 
 Methuselah, her clerical papa sips his coffee reflectively, and 
 rejoins with a " Poor Methuselah ! nine hundred and sixty-six 
 years he had of it, hadn't he ? How sick he must have been 
 of the eternal millround — seed-time and harvest, summer and 
 winter coming back near a thousand times to find him hanging 
 on still." Even the clerical side of the Le Strange family must 
 have its allowance of slang. Item, the 966 years should be 969. 
 Giles Brandon argues that so far from death being dreaded 
 by the race, however much feared by individuals, it is regarded 
 as the great conclusion which we feel to be wanted \ in fact, 
 that, although death be an enemy, the human race instinctively 
 feels that it could not do without it, so long as it has crime, or 
 even imperfection. " And even as individuals — of course, none 
 of us would like to die now, or soon, or at any specified time, 
 and yet, if we were told to-day that we were all going to live 
 for five hundred years, I don't think we should like it. We 
 should get restless and fretful as children do if they pass the time 
 when they should sleep."* Longa Tithonum minuit senectii-s. 
 He saw, as the laureate words it, the woods decay and fall, 
 the vapours weep their burthen to the ground, and man come 
 and till the field and lie beneath, and after many a summer 
 die the swan : hhn only, cruel immortality consumed — the im- 
 mortality he had asked, and yet not it, nor anything like it, as 
 he meant it, so far as he meant anything at all : 
 
 " I ask'd thee, 'Give me immortality.' 
 Then didst thou grant my asking with a smile, 
 Like wealthy men who care not how they give. 
 
 * *' But," objects Dorothea, " they scarcely ever like being put to bed," 
 " Any more than we do," adds her brother; "that may be less because 
 we fear to go to sleep, than because we know so little of the predicted 
 waking."— C^^/i!^ Skelligs, by Jean Ingelow, vol. ii., p. 82. 
 
'I WOULD NOT LIVE ALWAYS 47 
 
 But thy strong Hours indignant work'd their wills, 
 And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me," 
 
 the ininuit of Horace. And now he would pray away that 
 sort of immortality, and pray back his share of the common 
 lot. " Take back thy gift. Why should a man desire in any 
 way To vary from the kindly race of men, Or pass beyond the 
 goal of ordinance Where all should pause, as is most meet for 
 all? " And wstfully his dim eyes scan "those dim fields about 
 the homes 
 
 " Of happy men that have the power to die, 
 And grassy barrows of the happier dead." 
 
 Byron's Manfred tells the chamois hunter that he has lived 
 many years, many long years, but nothing to those he yet must 
 number — ages — ages — space and eternity — and consciousness, 
 with the fierce thirst of death, and still unslaked. He had 
 affronted death ; but in the war of elements the waters shrunk 
 from him, and fatal things passed harmless. " ^Vhat a blessing 
 from God is death ! " exclaims Chateaubriand in his Mhnotres 
 d' oictre-tombe. Immortality on earth, — how muses Salathiel on 
 that boon or bane, at the commencement of his wondrous 
 story ? " Immortality on earth ! — I was still in the vigour of 
 life ; but must it be always so ? Must not pain, feebleness, the 
 loss of mind, the sad decay of all the resources of the human 
 being, be the natural result of time?" Might not Salathiel 
 the Immortal sink into the perpetual sick-bed, hopeless de- 
 crepitude, pain without relaxation, the extremities of famine, of 
 disease, of madness ? — Yet this was to be borne, for ages of 
 ages. His was then to be the permanent compulsion of exist- 
 ence in a world made for change : he would have to feel 
 thousands of years bending down his wTetched head ; alienated 
 from all the hopes, enjoyments, and pursuits of man, to bear 
 the heaviness of that existence which palls even with all the 
 stimulants of the most vivid career ; life passionless, exhausted, 
 melancholy, old. He was to be a criminal bound to the floor 
 of his dungeon for ever. He was to feel the keen misery of 
 surviving all he loved, and to stand on the verge of the per- 
 
48 'I WOULD NOT LIVE ALWAY: 
 
 petual grave, without the power to sink into its refuge. 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne proposes as a curious subject for the 
 imagination, what murmurings and discontents would be ex- 
 cited if any of the great so-called calamities of human beings 
 were to be abolished, — as, for instance, death. How much of 
 life we should lose if we lived perpetually ! argues the metaphy- 
 sical author of Gravenhurst : how stagnant would have been 
 the condition of man ! He shows the ever-recurring renewal of 
 springs of youth, of love, of child and mother, to have dark 
 death for its necessary condition. " Would you wish it other- 
 wise? The same dry tree for ever," without buds breaking 
 forth, or leaves falling; and the same eternal man, neither 
 young nor old : no glad anticipations, and no cherished 
 memories ; both lost in the actual and eternal " repetition of a 
 monotonous existence. I think, in our madness, we should 
 wish the sun to fall out of heaven." South ey had a favourite 
 story of a poor old woman, very old and very poor, who re- 
 tained her senses long after the body had become a weary 
 burthen, and who, when she heard the bell toll for a funeral 
 used to weep, and say she was afraid God had forgotten her. 
 She had not forgotten Him, however, and it was Southey's 
 conviction that such impatience would not be accounted to her 
 for a sin. 
 
 " Life is good ; but not life in itselt. Life eternal, eternally young, 
 That were life to be lived or desired. . . . 
 Life is sweet to the young that yet know not what life is. But life after 
 
 youth, 
 The gay liar, leaves hold of the bauble, and Age, with his terrible truths 
 Picks it up, and perceives it is broken, and knows it unfit to engage 
 The care it yet craves. . . . Life eternal, eternally wedded to Age, 
 What gain were in that ? Why should any man seek what he loathes to 
 
 prolong ? 
 The twilight that darkens the eyeball, the dull ear that's deaf to the 
 
 song." 
 
 The same is the strain of Spenser's query : '' O ! what availes 
 it of immortall seed To beene ybredd and never borne to dye ? 
 Farre better I it deeme to dye with speed Than waste in woe 
 and waylfull miserye." Such reasoning is easy to the sceptical 
 
' WERE IT NOT BETTER NOT TO BE? 
 
 49 
 
 mind that has reasoned itself into the behef or negation of 
 belief, of M. Ampere's Caesar : 
 
 " Dans le tombeau 
 Nul tourment ne nous suit ; de toutes nos miseres 
 C'est la fin ; c'est, apres nos peines passageres, 
 Le repos et I'oubli ; souffre-t-on quand on dort ? 
 II n'est rien, ni douleur ni joie apres la mort." 
 
 How heavily the fear of something after death weighed on 
 the Gentile spirit, Hartley Coleridge infers from the "ex- 
 travagant admiration of the Epicureans for their founder, who 
 had lulled them wdth the horrid hope of annihilation." Henri 
 Beyle (De Stendhal) is no unfair specimen of the modern 
 Epicurean in this respect, when he writes to a friend, concern 
 ing an attack which proved fatal some months later, "Je me 
 suis collete avec le neant ; c'est le passage qui est desagreable, 
 et cette horreur provient de toutes les niaseries qu'on nous a 
 mises dans la tete a trois ans." Byron says in one of his 
 letters that " men, miserable as they are, cling so to anything 
 like life, that they probably would prefer damnation to quiet." 
 In his Childe Harold he puts the question, 
 
 " Is't not enough, unhappy thing ! to know 
 Thou art ? Is this a boon so kindly given 
 That being, thou wouldst be again ? ' ' 
 
 And the last two stanzas of his Eutha7iasia resume the sombre 
 strain : 
 
 *' * Ay, but to die, and go,' alas ! 
 
 "Where all have gone, and all must go ! 
 To be the nothing that I was 
 Ere born to life and living woe ! 
 
 Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, 
 Count o'er thy days from anguish free, 
 
 And know, whatever thou hast been, 
 'Tis something better not to be." 
 
 Were it not better not to be ? is the suggestion of the worse 
 of Mr. Tennyson's Two Voices. Frederick the Great's favourite 
 consolation in moments of difficulty and danger was (next, 
 as Earl Stanhope parenthesizes, to writing verses of his own) 
 
so THE CREED OF ANNIHILATION, 
 
 the perusal of Lucretius — of those passages, especially, which 
 
 attempt to prove the annihilation of the soul. 
 
 " There are, who waste their souls in working out . 
 Life's problem on these sands betwixt two tides, 
 And end, — 'Now give us the beast's part, in death.'" * 
 
 Referring to some such, and yet other, speculators and 
 speculations, Wordsworth speaks of those who hope, or trust, 
 that our existence winds her stately course beneath the sun, 
 like Ganges, to make part of a living ocean; or, to sink 
 engulfed, like Niger, in impenetrable sands and utter darkness : 
 thought, he adds, "which may be faced, though comfortless. "t 
 
 Arguing from the recognition by the Buddhist creed, of 
 annihilation J as the blessing from heaven which it proposes as 
 a reward, to be earned by perseverance in the highest order of 
 virtuous life, Mr. Stuart Mill held it to be impossible to mistake 
 in this religion the work of legislators and moralists endeavour- 
 ing to supply supernatural motives for the conduct which they 
 were most anxious to encourage — who yet could find nothing 
 more transcendent to hc4d out as the capital prize to be won 
 by the mightiest efforts of labour and self-denial, than what is 
 by most of ourselves regarded as the terrible idea of annihila- 
 tion. He takes this to be surely a proof that the idea is not 
 really or naturally terrible ; that not philosophers only, but the 
 common order of mankind, can easily reconcile themselves to 
 it, and even consider it as a good ; and that it is no unnatural 
 part of the idea of a happy life, that life itself be laid down, 
 after the best that it can give has been fully enjoyed through 
 
 * E. B. Browning, Aurora Leigh, book vii. 
 
 I Buddhism regards man, we are told, as a being full of sorrow — a legacy 
 of woe inherited from a series of previous existences, of which he is doomed 
 to bear the burden ; starting with which fatal adhesion to the popular doc- 
 trine of transmigration, Buddhism sets itself to find some way of escape 
 from this intolerable anguish of changing modes of existence. Nirvana is 
 the goal. Annihilation is the desiderated blessing. *' Une fois aneanti," 
 writes M. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, 'Thomme est bien assure de ne plus 
 renaitre sous quelque forme que ce soit, dans le cercle odieux des exist- 
 ences," etc. — Le Bouddha et sa Religion. 
 
 X The cessation, at least, of all conscious or separate existence. 
 
THE OPPRESSIVE IDEA OF ETERNITY. 51 
 
 a long lapse of time ; when all its pleasures, even those "of 
 benevolence, are familiar, and nothing untasted and unknown 
 is left to stimulate curiosity and keep up the desire of prolonged 
 existence. " It seems* to me not only possible but probable, 
 that in a higher, and, above all, a happier condition of human 
 life, not annihilation but immortality may be the burdensome 
 idea ; and that human nature, though pleased with the present, 
 and by no means impatient to quit it, would find comfort, and 
 not sadness, in the thought that it is not chained through 
 eternity to a conscious existence which it cannot be assured 
 that it will always wish to preserve." Historical students of 
 the civilization of the Aztecs tell us that, like the nations of 
 the old Continent, they sought relief from the " oppressive idea 
 of eternity," by breaking it up into distinct cycles, or periods of 
 time, each of several thousand years' duration. In a letter of 
 John Foster's, written as late as 1839, may be read his avowal 
 of any view of eternity being overwhelming to the thought : 
 " Sometimes, even apart from the idea of retribution, it seems 
 almost fearful. ' How can I sustain an endless existence ? 
 How can I prolong sentiment and action for ever and ever ? 
 What may or can become of me in so stupendous a predica- 
 ment?'" So early as 1837 poor Blanco White had written, 
 " I feel as if an eternal existence was already an insupport- 
 able burden laid upon my soul." And in 1840 he says again, 
 *•' I feel oppressed by the notion of eternal existence, even 
 when the absence of evil is made one of its conditions." As 
 if in the spirit of Milton's Adam when confessing, 
 
 ' ' Yet one doubt 
 
 Pursues me still, lest all I cannot die ; 
 
 Lest that pure breath of life, the spirit of Man 
 
 Which God inspired, cannot together perish 
 
 With this corporeal clod." 
 
 Addison's Cato finds in eternity, if a pleasing, yet also a 
 dreadful thought. The Prometheus of Shelley plunges into 
 that thought, 
 
 "and the reluctant mind 
 Flags, wearily, in its unending flight, 
 Till it sink, dizzy, blind, lost, shelterless." 
 
52 THE OPPRESSIVE IDEA OF ETERNITY. 
 
 Even Charles Lamb, with all his constitutional horror of a 
 change from this familiar life, could see and say that eternity 
 must have its delights to be bearable : give him those delights, 
 and then indeed 
 
 " I'd drink of time's rich cup, and never surfeit : 
 Fling in more days than went to make the gem 
 That crown'd the white top of Methusalem : 
 Yea, on my weak neck take, and never forfeit, 
 Like Atlas bearing up the dainty sky, 
 The heaven-sweet burthen of eternity." 
 
 But to the otherwise-minded, that burthen, instead of seeming 
 heaven-sweet, is in idea a burthen too heavy to bear ; and 
 under the oppression of its crushing weight they are ready to 
 cry with the prince in the Golden Legefid for 
 
 *' Rest ! rest ! Oh, give me rest and peace ! 
 The thought of life that ne'er shall cease 
 Has something in it like despair, 
 A weight I am too weak to bear ! 
 Sweeter to this afflicted breast 
 The thought of never-ending rest ; 
 Sweeter the undisturbed and deep 
 Tranquillity of endless sleep." 
 
 How welcome to the wretched the dread hand of annihilation ! 
 exclaims Brackenburg in Goethe's Egmont. So De Montfort : 
 
 "To be annihilated. 
 What all men shrink from ; * to be dust, be nothing, 
 Were bliss to me compared to what I am ! " 
 
 The free-spoken as well as free-thinking heroine of Not Wisely 
 hut Too Well is made to say, in envy of her dog, " Just think 
 of being utterly freed from all responsibility — no remorse for 
 what is gone, no fear for what is to come. I'd be annihilated 
 this minute if I could ! '^ That is fiction ; but as a matter of 
 fact we find Coleridge writing to Cottle in 1814, " The tempta- 
 
 * Mr. Thornbury tells us of Turner the painter that " the dreadful 
 despairing fear of annihilation pressed upon " his heart at the last — in the 
 absence of all religious hope to cheer him at that hour. See Life of 
 J. M. W. Turner, vol. ii., p. 275. 
 
ANNIHILATION AS A MATTER OF CHOICE, 53 
 
 tion which I have constantly to fight up against, is a fear that, 
 if annihilation and the possibiHty of heaven were offered to my 
 choice, I should choose the former." Yet was Hartley Coleridge 
 his father's son when he, in one of his best essays, affirmed the 
 idea of extinction to be not terrible, simply because man can- 
 not form such an idea at all: — let him try as long as he will, — 
 let him negative every conceived and conceivable form of 
 future existence, — he is as far as ever. Hartley maintained, 
 from having exhausted the infinitude of possibility : imagina- 
 tion mil continually produce the line of consciousness through 
 hmitless darkness. But such transcendental philosophy tran- 
 scends by far the comprehension of any one apt, in Churchill's 
 phrase, to 
 
 " curse his abject birth; 
 
 Whose hope is, once returned to earth. 
 
 There to lie do\\Ti, for worms a feast, 
 
 To rot and perish like a beast." 
 
 It is the nature of the beast, — without hope, because without 
 God in the world. For which base option, or irregular form of 
 an optative mood, some show^ of precedent might be claimed 
 in the diction of Milton's First Man, when he miserably argues, 
 that as his will concurred not to his being, it were but right 
 and equal to reduce him to his dust, desirous to resign and 
 render back all he received. 
 
 In days long before she had given up belief in a future life, 
 and when, as a writer of essays on life in a sick-room, she 
 found certitude of the inextinguishable vitality of the spirit, 
 supplied by the experience of material decay, Miss Martineau 
 discarded as a fallacy the frequent remark that, A\ith regard to 
 a future existence, " the wish is father to the thought," alwavs 
 or generally. Long-suffering invalids can tell, she said, that 
 there are seasons, neither few nor short, when the wishes are 
 all the other way, — when life is so oppressive to the frame that 
 the happiest news would be that we should soon be non-existent, 
 — when, thankful as we are that our beloved friends, the de- 
 parted and the remaining, are to live for evermore with God, 
 and enjoy His universe and its intercourses, we should be glad 
 
54 '/ WOULD NOT LIVE ALWAY.' 
 
 to decline it for ourselves, and to lie down in an eternal un- 
 broken rest."^ 
 
 Sainte-Beuve tells us, in one of his Nottveaux Lundis, that if 
 there are souls ahungred for life, for living again and again, 
 sans cesse affamees de vivre ei de renaltre, others there certainly 
 are who, as they advance along the road, feel so worn-out and 
 all weary, that fain would they sleep for long and for ever the 
 sleep that has no awaking. Not only, he says, the wretched 
 and the crushed who have of their own accord cast off the 
 unbearable burden of life, but others, many others, who have 
 borne it even to the bitter end — tender poets, of delicate feel- 
 ing and fancy, — mournful and suffering spirits, — the timid and 
 the affrighted, who have traversed the pathway with trembling, 
 and been sorely wounded as they made their way along, — ■ 
 those again who, without being sorely wounded, have been 
 fortunate enough to effect narrow escapes on peak and preci- 
 pice, and to be let off the hardest part of the trial, — all these, 
 and the like of these, are ready to echo the patriarch's depre- 
 cation, " I would not live alway." Charles Nodier is cited as 
 one of those who are eager for the last long sleep, and averse 
 to the thought of its being broken — " qui ont hate de dormir 
 et frayeur de se reveiller." A memorable line of his puts the 
 remonstrant query, 
 
 *' A quoi sert de mourir, si Ton ne se repose ? " 
 
 Les Malheureux is the title of a remarkable poemf by one who, 
 
 * "At these seasons, when, though we know all that can be said of 
 renewed powers and relish, and a more elevated and privileged life beyond 
 the grave, we cannot ye"^/ it ; and, while admitting all such consolations as 
 truth, we cannot enjoy them, but, as a mere matter of inclination, had 
 rather resign our privileges ; — in these seasons, when the wish would be 
 father to an opposite thought, the belief in our immortality is at the 
 strongest ; the truth of our inability to die becomes overwhelming, and the 
 sleep of the grave appears too light to satisfy our need of rest. I believe 
 it to be owing to this natural and unconquerable belief in our immortality, 
 that suicide is not more common than it is among sufferers .... from a 
 mere despair of getting rid of life — a sense of necessary immortality." — 
 Life hi a Sick-room: Essays by an Invalid, p. io8. 
 
 f In Contes et Poesies, Nice, 1862. 
 
PLEADING FOR EVERLASTING REST. 55 
 
 without sharing in the optative mood so vividly described in 
 it, has given very forcible utterance to the piteous aspirations 
 of these miserrimi, these terque quaterque vifelices. By a daring 
 flight of fancy, the last trump is supposed to have sounded, 
 and they that are in their graves are awakened : but they do 
 not all come forth. Some there are among them — and not the 
 guiltiest, not even (we are to infer) the guilty — who persist in 
 .a deaf disregard of the trumpet of the archangel, and refuse to 
 arise at that shrill summons : come forth they will not ; arise, 
 or show themselves, they mil not ; but their voices, and only 
 their voices, are heard, and this is the strain of their strange 
 reluctance : 
 
 "Quoi ! renaitre, revoir le ciel et la lumiere, 
 Ces temoins d'un malheur qui n'est point oublie, 
 Eux qui sur nos douleurs et sur notre misere 
 Ont souri sans pitie 1 
 
 Non, non, plutot la Nuit, la Nuit sombre, etenielle I 
 Fille du vieux Chaos, garde-nous sous ton aile ; 
 Et toi, soeur du Sommeil, toi qui nous as berces, 
 Mort, ne nous livres pas ; contre ton sein fidele 
 Tiens-nous bien embrasses. 
 
 * * * * 
 Nous arrivions a toi, venant d'un long voyage, 
 Battus par tous les vents, haletants, harasses ; 
 L'Esperance elle-meme, au plus fort de I'oi'age, 
 
 Nous avait delaisses. 
 
 * * * * 
 Contre leur gre pourquoi ranimer nos poussieres ? 
 .... Tu I'entends, tu le vois, la SoufFrance a vaincu. 
 Dans un sommeil sans fin, 6 Puissance etemelle ! 
 Laisse-nous oublier que nous avons vecu." 
 
 Mrs. Jameson was free to own that while her soul, like 
 Cato's, shrank back upon herself and startled at destruction, 
 it was not of her own destruction she thought, but of that 
 which she loved, ''That I should cease to be is not very 
 intolerable; but that what I love, and do now in my soul 
 possess, should cease to be — there is the pang, the terror ! I 
 desire that which I love to be immortal, whether I be so 
 myself or not." Jean Paul, in the Kampaner Thai, expatiates 
 
56 DREAD OF ANNIHILATION. 
 
 with vehemence of fervid protest against the, to him, in- 
 expressibly painful, monstrous, and horrible thought of an 
 annihilating death, of an eternal grave, — and mainly for the 
 sake of one beloved and departed, whom to have lost for ever 
 was to be for ever most miserable. Let the believer in anni- 
 hilation, said he, place before him, instead of a life of sixty 
 years, one of sixty minutes ; then let him look upon the face 
 of a beloved being, or upon a noble and wise man, as upon an 
 aimless hour-long appearance, apparition, phantasm ; as a thin 
 shadow that melts into light and leaves no trace ; can he bear 
 the thought of it ? " No ! The supposition of imperishable- 
 ness is always with him. Else there would hang always before 
 his soul, as before Mahomet's in the fairest sky, a black cloud ; 
 and as Cain upon the earth, an eternal fear would pursue him." 
 " I can bear no annihilation but my own," one of Richter's 
 characters, like Mrs. Jameson, is fain to own. As to Richter 
 himself, we can fancy him ready to exclaim with John Sterling, 
 
 " Oh, rather bear beyond the date of stars 
 
 All torments heap'd that nerve and soul can feel, 
 Than but one hour believe destruction mars 
 Without a hope the life our breasts reveal." 
 
 If there be no future, and the aims of life with old age become 
 shorter and shorter, well may there be no heart for effort and 
 no eye for beauty, and well may love, as James Martineau has 
 somewhere put it, " gather itself up to die." But open perfection 
 to its veneration and immortality to its step, and "the proximity 
 to death will quicken instead of withering the mind ; " the eye 
 will grow dim on the open page of knowledge ; the hand will be 
 found clasping in death the instruments of human good ; the 
 heart's last pulse will beat with some new emotion of benignity." 
 So Jules Simon, again, in his treatise on Le Devoir: "L'ineVi- 
 table mort ne change-t-elle pas pour nous de caractere quand, au 
 lieu d'apporter avec elle le neant, elle ne parait plus que le 
 commencement d'une existence nouvelle? Qu'y a-t-il de si 
 puissants dans ces pensees d'immortalite qui nous soutiennent 
 dans I'agoine et nous consolent de mourir ? . . . Ne sentons- 
 nous pas I'immense bonheur de ne pas tomber dans le neant ? 
 
MISERY BYGONE AND FORGOTTEN. 57 
 
 •d'echapper k cette destruction de notre etre, de sauver notre 
 pensee notre conscience, notre cceur, tout ce moi qui nous est 
 si cher, et d'entrer en possession de la vie reelle, apres cet 
 usufruit de la vie terrestre ? " Reflecting on a certain type of 
 morbid indifference to life, and professed longing for death, 
 Charlotte Bronte muses that God surely did not create us, and 
 cause us to live, with the sole end of wishing always to die : 
 she believed, in her heart, we were intended to prize Hfe and 
 enjoy it, so long as we retain it. If we that are in this taber- 
 nacle do groan, being burdened, it is not that we would be 
 unclothed, but clothed upon, — ha. KaTa-TroOrj to Ov-qrov 'vTTO tt}s 
 ^w^s, — that death may be swallowed up of life. 
 
 ** Whatever crazy sorrow saith, 
 No life that breathes with human breath 
 Has ever truly long'd for death, 
 
 'Tis life, whereof our nei^ves are scant, 
 Oh life, not death, for which we pant j 
 More life, and fuller, that I want." 
 
 VI. 
 
 MISERY BYGONE AND FORGOTTEN. 
 Job xi. 16. 
 
 THERE should come a day for Job, so Zophar the 
 Naamathite was fain to hope and believe, when his 
 present misery, however complete and overwhelming, should 
 have passed away, and be no more remembered. Not only 
 should the pressure of it, but the very memory of it, be got rid 
 of Not only should the now downcast sufferer cease to suffer, 
 but fail to recall what he once suffered. The blessedness of 
 release should become twice blessed in the added boon of 
 oblivion. His term of calamity over, it should be counted not 
 merely among things that are not, but among those that have 
 not been. "Because thou shalt forget thy misery, and remember 
 
58 AGONY THAT CANNOT BE REMEMBERED. 
 
 it as waters that pass away." If remembered at all, it should 
 be to that extent only; as waters lost in the ocean, whither 
 they are now passing, and now are past, away. 
 
 Coleridge has emphasized in a memorable line the " agony 
 that cannot be remembered." A line in Byron's Lara runs, 
 "It was an agony — but now forgot." It is in reference to 
 another of his poems that he writes in his journal : " To 
 describe the feelings of that situation were impossible — it is icy 
 even to recollect them." In another occur the lines, 
 
 '"Twere vain to paint to what his feelings grew — 
 It even were doubtful if their victim knew. 
 There is a war, a chaos of the mind, 
 When all its elements convulsed — combined — 
 Lie dark and jarring with perturbed force," 
 
 and to recall which distressful chaos is happily impracticable. 
 At the summit of fortune, because on the rampart of the walls 
 of Bethhoron, was Salathiel at one moment : in the next he 
 felt a sudden shock ; darkness covered his eyes, and he plunged 
 headlong : he awoke in a dungeon ; in that dungeon he lay 
 for two years. And " how I lived," he says, " or how I bore 
 existence, I can now have no conception." As with Words- 
 worth's Solitary, in the depth of his bereavement, desolation, 
 and despair, 
 
 *' What follow'd cannot be review'd in thought, 
 Much less, retraced in words. . . . From toils abstruse 
 Some trace am I enabled to retain 
 Of time, else lost ; — existing unto me 
 Only by records in myself not found." 
 
 The same poet's Francis, in the White Doe of Rylstone, finds 
 how stunning may be the effect of bewildering sorrows : we 
 see him stand ^silent under dreary weight, "thus overwhelm'd, 
 and desolate, 
 
 There stood he, leaning on a lance 
 Which he had grasp'd unswervingly, 
 Had blindly grasp'd in that strong trance, 
 That dimness of heart-agony " — 
 
MISERY BVGOXE AND FORGOTTEN. 59 
 
 in some sort resembling the bereaved husband in Campbells 
 Gertrude of Wyoming, when, '' mute, gazing, agonizing as he 
 knelt, Of them that stood encircHng his despair, He heard 
 some friendly words ; — but knew not what they were." The 
 autobiographer of Lord Lytton's Strange Story tells us of one 
 awful passage in his marvellous record, that he must hurry over 
 it ; that it tortured him to dwell on the details, and that indeed 
 he had so sought to chase them from his remembrance, that 
 they now came back to him only in hideous fragments, like the 
 incoherent remains of a horrible dream. Elsewhere he deems 
 it amazing to think how soon such incidents, though not actually 
 forgotten, though they can be recalled — and recalled too vividly 
 for health — at our will, are, nevertheless, thrust, as it were, out 
 of our mind's sight, as we cast into lumber-rooms the crutches 
 and splints that remind us of a broken limb which has recovered 
 its strength and tone. A philosophic essayist, commenting on 
 the accepted fact that the remembrance of calamities, however 
 great, tends slowly but steadily to fade away, asks if it is not 
 the case that often the very recollection of a great loss can 
 only be recalled by some chance train of thought — a hasty 
 word — an outward token or object associated with it : and he 
 takes this to be nature's effort to heal a wound that would 
 other\\ase destroy our usefulness. But as it seems to savour 
 of hardness of heart or fickleness, though he denies it to be 
 an)thing of the kind, we often struggle against the tendency, 
 are sorrowful over the gradual subsidence o-f our sorrow, and 
 would fain bring back the very anguish from which, when the 
 blow first fell, we ineffectually struggled for relief. " Dans les 
 grandes circonstances de la vie," UTites Balzac, " notre ame 
 s'attache fortement aux lieux oil les chagrins fondent sur nous 
 . . . . e'ternellement mele's a cette heure supreme, par une 
 mnemotechnie particuliere aux passions." But the tendency of 
 nature is away from any such "damned spot." Well recognized 
 is that felicitous peculiarity in our organization, in virtue of 
 which, a bodily pain once past, very soon becomes erased from 
 the memory — so very soon and invariably the mind refuses to 
 linger over and recall it. " No man freed an hour from a 
 
6o MISERY BYGONE AND FORGOTTEN. 
 
 raging toothache, the rack of a neuralgia, seats himself in his 
 armchair to recollect and ponder upon the anguish he has 
 undergone."* It is the same, we are assured, with certain 
 afflictions of the mind — not with those which strike on our 
 affections, or blast our fortunes, overshadowing our whole 
 future with a sense of loss ; but where a trouble or calamity 
 has been an accident, an episode in our wonted life, where it 
 affects ourselves alone, where it is attended with a sense of 
 shame and humiliation, where the pain of recalling it seems idle, 
 and if indulged would almost madden us — agonies of that kind 
 we do not brood over as we do over the death or falsehood of 
 beloved friends, or the train of events by which we are reduced 
 from wealth to penury. For instance, "no one who has escaped 
 from a shipwreck, from the brink of a precipice, from the jaws 
 of a tiger, spends his days and nights in reviving his terrors 
 past, re-imagining dangers not to occur again, or, if they do 
 occur, from which the experience undergone can suggest no 
 additional safeguards." Hawthorne describes his Hilda as 
 one of those persons whose delicate organization requires a 
 peculiar protection, and who are endowed accordingly with an 
 elastic faculty of throwing off such recollections as would be 
 too painful for endurance : " Once enabled to relieve herself 
 of this ponderous anguish, . . . she practised a subtle watch- 
 fulness in preventing its return," Dr. Wendell Holmes some- 
 where speaks of what he, professionally, terms "encysted" griefs 
 
 * It is a merciful thing, observes a medical reviewer of Mr. Hilton's 
 treatise on Physiological Rest, — merciful, considering how sharp are the 
 agonies endured, that memory seldom reproduces to us the whole severity 
 of physical suffering — certainly not with that intense realization which often 
 accompanies the recollection, even in dreams, of great mental anguish. 
 
 Miss Martineau, describing how when extreme pain seizes us, dov\Ti go 
 our spirits, fathoms deep, and the sickening question rises, " How j'/z^// I 
 bear this for five minutes? What 7vill become of me?" adds, not merely 
 that the bystanders can never fully understand this suffering ; no, though 
 they may themselves have suffered to extremity ; but that the patient 
 himself, in any interval, when devoutly ready to endure again, cannot 
 understand, nor believe in, his late emotion, or fancy that he can feel it 
 again. 
 
SOOTHIXG OBLIVION. 6i 
 
 — griefs men never put into words, and, as much as may be, 
 to be kept out of mind. It is with them as with Shelley's 
 speechless sufferer : 
 
 " I, who can feign no image in my mind 
 Of that which has transform'd me ; I, whose thought 
 Is like a ghost shrouded and folded up 
 In its own formless horror." 
 
 Lethierry is forcibly pictured in Les Travailleurs de la Mer, as 
 in that cloudy and confused condition of intellect \vith which 
 those are familiar who have undergone overwhelming afflictions : 
 when he was in his hammock forgetfulness came to him a 
 little, and he called that sleeping ; but chimeras floated about 
 him and within him, and a cloud of confused faces traversed 
 his brain. 
 
 " ^^^lat I felt I can't remember ; an oblivion which the gleam 
 Of light which oft comes thro' it shows for blessedness extreme." 
 
 That is the experience of the Yew-Berry minstrel. But the 
 blessedness in his case is incomplete, the oblivion is but 
 partial : 
 
 " I struggled to forget . . . but, forgetfulness too sweet ! 
 It startled with its sweetness, thus involved its own defeat ; 
 And every time this happen 'd, aching memory would repeat 
 The shock of that discovei7 : so at length I learn'd by heart, 
 And never, save when sleeping, suffer'd thenceforth to depart 
 The feeling of my sorrow : and in time this soothed the smart." 
 
 Remembering his affliction and his misery, the wormwood and 
 the gall, the soul of the lamenting Hebrew had them still in 
 remembrance, and was humbled ^^^thin him. But rightly, to 
 De Quincey's deeming, is it said of utter, utter misery, that it 
 " cannot be remembered." '' Itself, as a rememberable thing, 
 is swallowed up in its own chaos. Mrs. Jameson deems "it 
 curious that the memory, most retentive of images, should yet 
 
 * "I stood in unimaginable trance 
 
 And agony, which cannot be remembered." 
 The speaker is Alhadra, in Coleridge's tragedy of Remorse, 
 
62 MEMORY BENUMBED BY GRIEF. 
 
 be much more retentive of feelings than of facts : for instance, 
 we remember with such intense vividness a period of suffering, 
 that it seems even yet to renew itself through the medium of 
 thought ; yet, at the same time, we perhaps find difficulty in 
 recaUing, with any distinctness, the causes of that pain. In 
 her Diary narrative of her husband's last illness and death, 
 Madame d'Arblay records of herself: "I suffered certainly a 
 partial derangement, for I cannot to this moment recollect 
 anything that now succeeded, with truth or consistency ; my 
 memory paints things that were necessarily real, joined to others 
 that could not possibly have happened, yet so amalgamates 
 the whole together as to render it impossible for me to separate 
 truth from indefinable, unaccountable fiction." 
 
 Aurora Leigh can shudderingly recall a day, the bare remem- 
 brance of which will catch her breath like a nightmare. For, 
 
 " There are fatal days, indeed, 
 In which the fibrous years have taken root 
 So deeply, that they quiver to their tops 
 Whene'er you stir the dust of such a day." 
 
 In an earlier book she likens her recollection of one sad interval 
 to a man, after fever, threading back the passage of delirium, 
 missing the turn still, baffled by the door, " a weary, wormy 
 darkness, spurred in the flank with flame, that it should eat 
 itself, like some tormented scorpion." So Charles Kingsley 
 describes his Lancelot's period of dull, stupefied misery^, after 
 the storm and stress of distressful excitement — a misery with 
 no foreground, no distance, but only one dead, black, colour 
 less present : just as victims on the rack have fallen, it is said, 
 by length of torture, into insensibility, and even calm repose, 
 his brain had been wrought until all feeling was benumbed. Or 
 we might start the query put in the Laureate's In Me?noriam, — 
 
 ' * Or has the shock, so harshly given, 
 Confused me like the unhappy bark 
 That strikes by night a craggy shelf, 
 And staggers blindly ere she sink ? 
 And stunn'd me from my power to think, 
 And all my knowledge of myself? " 
 
AGONY THAT CANNOT BE REMEMBERED. 63 
 
 Or take the experience of him of the Golden Legend : 
 
 ** All this I can remember well ; 
 But of what afterwards befell 
 I nothing further can recall 
 Than a blind, desperate, headlong fall ; 
 The rest is blank and darkness all," 
 
 just as in the case of Salathiel, already cited. So again the 
 sweet singer of Good-night in the Porch : " Then I remember 
 a numb mood . . . and nothing could I realize but the great 
 fact of my own pain. . . . The world went on : my heart 
 stood still." Or, again, one of the more passionate bits in 
 generally unimpassioned Crabbe : 
 
 ** Oh, the strange distress 
 Of these new feelings ! — misery's excess ; 
 What can describe it ? words will not express. 
 When I look back upon that dreadful scene, 
 I feel renew'd the anguish that has been, 
 And reason trembles," — 
 
 that way madness lies ; and the thinker's effort must be not to 
 think, not to recall ; it must be to emulate Zophar's ideal of 
 blessedness in oblivion, the miserable forgetting his misery, br, 
 at worst, remembering it as waters that pass away. Indeed, 
 we presently come upon the same narrator's avowal, 
 
 ** There was I left, — and I have now no thought 
 Remains with me, how fear or fancy wrought, " — 
 
 dim fancy, or blind fear, he knew not, nor could tell : there 
 was a blank from this he could not fill ; it was a puzzle and a 
 terror still. " I have but a confused remembrance of my 
 feehngs," says Henry Mackenzie's Montauban, in the now 
 shelved epistolary novel Julia de Roiibigne ; " there was a 
 be\\ildered pause of thought as if I had waked in another 
 world." Scott's Henry Bertram tells the la^vyer who would 
 have him recall the details of his capture, "Though the terrible 
 outlines of that day are strongly impressed upon my memory, 
 yet somehow the very terror which fixed them there has in 
 a great measure confounded and confused the details." In 
 
64 AGONY THAT CANNOT BE REMEMBERED. 
 
 another work Sir Walter remarks that so nearly does the 
 mental portion of our feelings resemble those which are cor- 
 poral, that the first severe blows we receive bring with them 
 a stunning apathy, which renders us indifferent to those which 
 follow. Thus said Mandrin, when he was undergoing the 
 punishment of the wheel; and so have all felt, upon whom 
 successive inflictions have descended with continuous and 
 reiterated violence. " There are times," said Charles Kingsley, 
 " when the very intensity of our misery is a boon, and kindly 
 stuns us till we are unable to torture ourselves by thought." 
 George Eliot recognizes something sustaining in the very agita- 
 tion that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an 
 acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement 
 which is transient strength; but no one can more forcibly 
 suggest, if not fill up, " a hideous blank of something un- 
 remembered." Charles de Bernard observes that " dans cer- 
 taines tortures morales, le meme feu qui embrase de ses 
 lancrues aigues les fibres irritable du coeur, fait monter au 
 cerveau une vapeur obscure; et plus le flamme devore, plus 
 la fumee etouffe ; plus les sentiments sont poignants, plus 
 les» idees se troublent." With which may be compared a 
 remark by Coleridge, that by a wise ordinance of nature 
 our feelings have no abiding-place in our memory ; nay, the 
 more vivid they are in the moment of their existence, the 
 more dim and difficult to be remembered do they make 
 the thoughts which accompanied them. " Darkness comes 
 over my eyes," retrospective of a great loss, writes David 
 Copperfield; "and, for a time, all things are blotted out of 
 my remembrance." Of the catastrophe in the closing book of 
 his Venetia, Mr. Disraeli writes : " What ensued must neither 
 be attempted to be described, nor even remembered. It was 
 one of those tragedies of life which enfeeble the most faithful 
 memories at a blow, shatter nerves beyond the faculty of 
 revival, cloud the mind for ever." Often had been observed, 
 before Gibbon repeated the observation, that the highest 
 agitation of the mind is such as no language can describe, 
 since language can only paint ideas, and not that " senti- 
 
BENUMBING ANGUISH. 65 
 
 mental, silent, almost stupid* excess of rage or grief" which 
 the soul feels with such energy, that it is not master of itself 
 enough to have any distinct perceptions ; such passion baffles 
 all description; but when this storm subsides, passion is as 
 fertile in ideas, as it was at first barren. " Les grandes plaies 
 du corps et de Tame ne saignent pas a I'instant qu'elles sont 
 faites," said Rousseau in the Ernile ; " elles n'impriment pas si 
 tot leurs plus vives douleurs ; la nature se recueille pour en 
 soutenir toute la violence, et souvent le coup mortel est porte 
 longtemps avant que la blessure se fasse sentir." But misery, 
 after a certain point, " becomes its own anaesthetic : " happily 
 for the sufferer, there is attendant upon all great mental anguish 
 a kind of numbness, a stupefaction of the senses, which in some 
 manner deadens the sharpness of the torture : " And all your 
 efforts," Dr. Boyd asserts, " will not bring back the first sorrow, 
 nor recall the thoughts of the atmosphere of that time."f Mrs. 
 Schimmelpenninck testifies of a troublous experience of her own 
 in early life : " Of the time which immediately followed I have 
 no distinct recollection, but that it seemed a chaos of misery, 
 and an eternal now of despair." There are some moments, 
 it has been said, so painful in their endurance, we would 
 
 * The word "stupid" in this connection, reminds us of a passage in some 
 in memoriam lines by Mr. Quillinan, Wordsworth's son-in-law : — 
 " I felt at first too stupid to repine ; 
 But soon was roused to consciousness of pain 
 By stormy thoughts and tumults of the brain." 
 
 + Yet will the remembrance of unremembcrable agony seem ever vivid, 
 and ever agonizing anew, to some minds and under certain conditions. 
 Fifteen years old was Robert Story, of Rosneath, when an elder brother, 
 to whom he was devotedly attached, was drowned one July afternoon. 
 Robert refers to himself as then ' ' young enough to suffer unutterable 
 agony. " And long afterwards he writes : * * O ! I cannot tell the agony of 
 that hour which, after a long period of years and many vicissitudes, stands 
 forth in my mind still like no other hour of grief, when I heard a voice 
 echo through my father's garden, ' George is drowned ! ' " Of his mother's 
 funeral Theodore Hook wrote in after-life: "That day will never be 
 forgotten by me. . . . Years, years have rolled on, and yet that hour is 
 still vividly fresh in my mind — the smell of the soldered coffin is still in my 
 nostrils — the falling earth upon its lid still rings in my ears." 
 
66 'GIVE SORROW WORDS: 
 
 gladly forget that they belong to human existence — moments 
 in which it would have been better to have been sleeping the 
 sleep of death, than to have lived and suffered their anguish. 
 " They don't last long, those horrible moments," Miss Thacke- 
 ray observes ; " they pass on, but they leave a burning taste ; 
 it comes back again and again with the troubles of life."* 
 Dr. Beattie used to tell how an old survivor of Lord Anson's 
 company, in the voyage of the Centurion, " durst not recollect 
 or think " of the sufferings they endured between Cape Horn 
 and Juan Fernandez. And De Quincey, in his stirring narra- 
 tive of the Revolt of the Tartars, records of some of the 
 survivors, after a storm of misery so fierce, that in the end 
 (as happened also at Athens during the Peloponnesian war, 
 from a different form of misery) very ipany lost their memory ; 
 all records of their past life were wiped away as with a sponge 
 — utterly erased and cancelled. 
 
 Vtt. 
 
 PENT-UP, TONGUE-TIED GRIEF. 
 Job xiii. 19. 
 
 WHOM might Job find to plead with him? "for now," 
 said he, " if I hold my tongue, I shall give up the 
 ghost." Speech is sometimes the safety-valve of a great sorrow. 
 To be tongue-tied is to have the very heart-strings tied too, and 
 tightly tied, to heart-break point. 
 
 " Give sorrow Words : the grief that does not speak 
 Whispers the o'erfraught heart, and bids it break. " 
 
 * In another of h^r books she describes the sensations of one whose 
 trouble had been merged in a greater trouble, and so put out of mind : — 
 the despair of a few hours before seemed like a remembrance of some old 
 tune played out and come to an end abruptly in the midst of its most 
 passionate cadence. The tunes of life, she adds, stop short just in the 
 middle, and that is the most curious part of our history. ." Another music 
 sounds, mighty, sadden, and unexpected, and we leave off our song to 
 listen to it, and when it is over some of us have forgotten the song we were 
 singing." — Sola, § x. 
 
YEARNING FOR SYMPATHY. 67 
 
 Then was the psahnist comforted when he could say, " I 
 poured out my complaints before Him, and showed Him of 
 my trouble." In that craving of the heart, said Frederick 
 Robertson, which gives the system of the Confessional its 
 dangerous power, there is something far more profound than 
 any sneer can fathom. Besides the ''yearning to be true," 
 there is the desire of sympathy : the heart severed from God, 
 feels severed from all other hearts; goes alone, as if it had 
 neither part nor lot \A^th other men ; itself a shadow among 
 shadows. And it wants some human heart to know what it 
 feels.* Aurelio assures Malfato, in one of John Ford's plays, 
 that to the sorely perplexed and distressed, a friend 
 
 " Upon whose faith and confidence we may 
 Vent with security our grief, becomes 
 Ofttimes the best physician, . . . And believe, 
 It is an ease, Malfato, to disburthen 
 Our souls of secret clogs, where they may find 
 A rest in pity, though not in redress." 
 
 It must be a Beatrice Cenci who can, and cannot but, say, " If 
 I try to speak, I shall go mad," when implored by motherly 
 affection not to hide from it her sufferings in proud, impenetrable 
 grief : speak she cannot, '' for there are deeds which have no 
 form, sufferings which have no tongue." For almost any less 
 exceptional grief, the safer rule is to abide by the counsel of 
 the old man in Terence, when help is ready and practicable : 
 " Ne retice : ne verere : crede inquam mihi : 
 Aut consolando aut consilio aut re juvero." 
 
 Lonely, aged, an impoverished, an embarrassed man, 'vvTote Sir 
 Walter Scott of himself, the day after his wife died, " deprived 
 of the sharer of my thoughts and counsels, who could alwavs 
 talk down my sense of the calamitous apprehensions which 
 
 * "Thousands upon thousands of laden hearts around us are cr>'ing, 
 Come and bear my burden with me : and observe here, the apostle says, 
 '■ ^tzx yt one another' s burdens.' Nor let the priest bear the burdens of 
 all : that were most unjust. Why should the priest's heart be tlie common 
 receptacle of all the crimes and v/ickedness of a congregation ? ' Bear ye 
 oae another's burdens. — F. W. Robertson's Sermons, vol. ii., No. x\. 
 
68 RELIEF IN UTTERANCE, 
 
 break the heart that must bear them alone." The very nature 
 of all our emotions, as Dr. Thomas Brown says, will lead them 
 to pour themselves out to some other breast ; and the stronger 
 the emotion, the more ardent is this propensity. So, again, 
 Adam Smith exclaims, " How are the unfortunate relieved 
 when they have found out a person to whom they can com- 
 municate the cause of their sorrow ! " For upon his sympathy 
 they seem to disburden themselves of a part of their distress ; 
 and he is not improperly said to share it with them. What 
 though by relating their misfortunes they in some measure 
 renew their grief? There is pleasure to them in the renewal ; 
 for the sweetness of the sympathy more than compensates the 
 bitterness of the sorrow. The Horatian philosophy is sound : 
 
 *' Sunt verba et voces quibus hunc lenire dolorem 
 Possis, et magnam morbi deponere partem." 
 
 So the Tennysonian CEnone, mournful CEnone, wandering 
 forlorn of Paris, once her playmate on the hills, when her 
 heart is breaking, and her eyes are dim, and she is all aweary 
 of her life, resolves, and wisely, to give her sorrow speech, 
 
 " for it may be 
 That, while I speak of it, a little while 
 My heart may wander from its deeper woe. " 
 
 Even communication on paper, by means of pen and ink, is, 
 to some at least, in whom perhaps the caco'ethes scrtbendi is 
 ingrained, a sensible relief When Lamennais, so frequently 
 lugubrious and lamentation-given, one day talked to Beranger 
 about certain natures being born with a wound in the heart, 
 Beranger suggested that authors at least, 7ious mit7'es, are born 
 with a writing-desk in the brain. And as the ink in it is from a 
 fountain that never fails, if the pen is allowed to rest the black 
 liquid in question overflows even to the seat of the affections. 
 Then, said he, we see everything en noir, men and things. But 
 only let us blacken our paper with it, and anon our spirits 
 revive, our imagination refines, and that open wound in the 
 heart which Lamennais talked about, closes. As with the 
 laid-by pen of the penman, so with the tied tongue of repining 
 
RELIEF IN UTTERANCE. 69 
 
 reserve. After this sort does Martinus Scriblerus treat versi- 
 fication as a natural or morbid secretion from the brain \ and as 
 he would net suddenly stop a cold in the head, or dry up his 
 neighbour's issue, as little would he hinder him from necessary 
 writing, " I have known a man thoughtful, melancholy, and 
 raving for divers days, who forthwith grew wonderfully easy, 
 lightsome, and cheerful, upon a discharge, of the peccant 
 humour." Shrewd even in its simple tenderness is the counsel 
 of Jeanie Deans to Butler with regard to her afflicted father : 
 " And dinna ye say muckle to him, but set him on speaking him- 
 sel', for he'll bring himsel' mair comfort that way." Kotzebue's 
 Stranger seems rather proud than otherwise of his heart being 
 like a close-shut sepulchre : let what is A\ithin it moulder and 
 decay ; why open the wTetched charnel-house, to spread pesti- 
 lence around ? — but for all that, his friend the Baron urges him 
 to talk if he cannot weep, for both words and tears relieve the 
 heart. So the knight urges the distressed lady in Spenser : 
 
 '* But, woefull lady, let me you intreate 
 For to unfold the anguish of your hart : 
 Mishaps are maistred by advice discrete, 
 And counsell mitigates the greatest smart ; 
 Found never help, who never would his hurts impart." 
 
 When the heart is full, wTites Thomas Carlyle, it seeks, for a 
 thousand reasons, in a thousand ways, to impart itself. " How 
 sweet, indispensable, in such cases, is fellowship ; soul mystically 
 strengthening soul ! " Rien ne lie iajtt les cceiirs qice la douceur 
 de pleurer ense7)ibl£, says Rousseau. A burden that \vi\\ crush 
 a single pair of shoulders, will, when equally divided, become 
 light as a feather, Mr. Trollope puts it : " There is no folly 
 so great as keeping one's sorrows hidden. " Whether or not a 
 man should have his private pleasures, he declines to say ; but 
 " it can never be worth his while to keep his sorrows private." 
 Charlotte Bronte, in the depth of her desolation, tells the 
 correspondent in whom she entirely confides, that she gives 
 the sad details of her sufferings, " because it is absolutely 
 necessary for me to have some relief" She is already better, 
 '' because I can speak about it, which I never can when grief 
 
^o JOB AND HIS FRIENDS. 
 
 is at its worst." George Eliot tells us of Janet Dempster con- 
 fiding her griefs to Mr. Tryan, that even while she was confessing, 
 she felt half her burden removed : the act of confiding in human 
 sympathy, the consciousness that a fellow-being was listening to 
 her with patient pity, prepared her soul for that stronger leap by 
 which faith grasps the idea of the Divine sympathy. 
 
 *' Yet hear my tale ; thou wilt esteem me less j 
 But Grief, the egoist, yearneth to corifess." 
 
 One could almost think of Dr. South as siding with, and 
 catching the style of. Job's three friends, in their most objur- 
 gatory mood, when he taxes Job with " filling heaven and earth 
 with querulous outcries." " So long, as his towering passion 
 was upon the wing, it beat the air with loud and vain com- 
 plaints ; . . . but the same temper of mind which reduced 
 him to submission, reduced him also to silence." "A lamb, 
 we know, suffers with silence, and parts not only with its fleece, 
 but even with its life also, without noise ; but it is the unclean 
 swine which roars and cries," etc. Rather hard measure upon 
 Job, some may think ; and, as we said, in the style and spirit 
 of his friends. Save me from my friends ! might Job, of all 
 men, be privileged to say. But he must n-eeds pour out his 
 grief to them, all the same. 
 
 The Man of Uz was last, not least, in Lamartine's thoughts 
 when he compared his own d7?ie triste to a variety of things 
 sombre and sad in nature and in holy writ, — among others to 
 the psalmist's harp that hung from the willow while the harper 
 wept ; to Horeb veiled beneath a darksome cloud ; to a starless 
 sky, etc., — and then to 
 
 " ce vieillard qu'on ne put consoler, 
 Qui, le coeur d^bordant d'une douleur farouche, 
 Ne pouvait plus tarir la plainte sur sa bouche, 
 Et disait : Laissez-moi parler ! " 
 
JOB'S APPEAL FOR PITY. 71 
 
 ' VIII. 
 
 CRAVING FOR PITY. 
 
 Job xix. 21. 
 
 " T T AVE pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my 
 ll friends; for the hand of God hath touched me." 
 And the afflicted petititioner had already reminded those whom 
 he thus implored to be compassionate, that " to him that is 
 afflicted pity should be showed from his friend." Well might 
 the psalmist be full of heaviness, when he looked for some to 
 have pity on him, but there was no man, neither found he any 
 to comfort him. 
 
 Adam Smith says of sympathy with the afflicted that it 
 alleviates affliction by insinuating into the heart almost the 
 only agreeable sensation which it is at that time capable of 
 receiving ; and that the cruellest insult which can be offered 
 to the unfortunate, is to appear to make light of their cala- 
 mities. 
 
 " Pity me, then, dear friend, and I assure ye 
 Even that your pity is enough to cure me," 
 
 exclaims Shakspeare in one of the Sonnets. His Moor of 
 Venice, all whose life has been passed in camps and perils, 
 himself every inch a soldier, and in all respects fitted bravely 
 to endure as well as ably to command, was won to love 
 Desdemona for the pity she lavished on his life of battle and 
 trial : 'twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful, she vowed ; and as 
 she loved him for the dangers he had passed, so loved he her 
 that she did pity them. 
 
 But another aspect of the question may be summarized in 
 Southey's remark : " I cannot tell why men like to be pitied, 
 for pity proceeds from superiority." Goldsmith alleged pity 
 and friendship to be passions incompatible with each other; 
 friendship being made up of esteem and pleasure, while pity 
 is composed of sorrow and contempt : " the mind may for 
 some time fluctuate between them, but it never can enter- 
 tain both together." Sainte-Beuve writes of Bussy-Rabutin in 
 
72 IMPATIENT OF PITY. 
 
 trouble, " II craint qu'on ne le plaigne ; sa vanite domine 
 encore son malheur." Scott's unfortunate Nigel was the more 
 interested in Martha Trapbois when he found how proud was 
 the spirit of that unhappy woman, and that she seemed deter- 
 mined to owe as little as possible either to the humanity or 
 the pity of others. The Master of Ravenswood checked the 
 first advances of practical sympathy, by the assurance that the 
 next mortification, after being unhappy, is the being loaded 
 with undesired commiseration. The daughter of Roubigne, 
 the wife of Montauban, will not bear to be pitied. The 
 clerical Casaubon of Middlemarch, of all things, and in all 
 things, shrinks from pity ; to him there is sheer bitterness in 
 the suspicion of being pitied for anything in his lot known or 
 surmised in spite of himself. It is a pithy saying of Crabbe's, 
 a rhyme with reason, however partial may be its legitimate 
 application, that 
 
 "but few 
 Can bear their sorrows and our pity too." 
 
 Hence, he infers, the many small expedients used to conceal 
 the evils they betray ; *' When, if our pity chances to be seen. 
 The wounded pride retorts, with anger keen. And man's in- 
 sulted grief takes refuge in his spleen." To others besides a 
 very proud nature, envy is much better worth having than 
 pity : 'AA,A,' o/xws Kpuacrov twv oLKTLpfxwv ^Oovo^. Shelley's 
 Prometheus cannot away with the proffered pity of Mercury : 
 
 " Pity the self-despising slaves of heaven, 
 Not me, within whose mind sits peace serene, 
 As light in the sun, throned." 
 
 Ion's merest hint of pity stirs the lonely tyrant Adrastus to 
 fury : " Pity ! dare to speak that word again, and torture waits 
 thee !" Balzac assures us that no feeHng is nearly so hard to 
 encounter as that of pity, especially when it is deserved. Hate 
 is a tonic ; it quickens, stimulates, animates ; it inspires ven- 
 geance ; but pity kills, pity makes our very weakness weaker. 
 " C'est le mal devenu patelin, c'est le mepris dans la tendresse, 
 ou la tendresse dans I'offense." Wordsworth's Oswald im- 
 patiently discards and rejects all semblance of compassion : 
 
GALLING COMPASSION. 73 
 
 " Compassion ! — pity ! — pride can do without them ; 
 And what if you should never know them more ! — 
 He is a puny soul who, feeling pain, 
 Finds ease because another feels it too. 
 If e'er I open out this heart of mine, 
 It shall be for a nobler end — to teach, 
 And not to purchase puling sympathy." 
 
 A very different character of Wordsworth's drawing, the de- 
 spondent recluse of the mountains, deprecates by anticipation 
 the expression of pity on his companions' part : " But spare 
 your pity, if there be in me Aught that deserves respect, for I 
 exist, Within myself, not comfortless." Jean Paul tells us of 
 Siebenkas that he would have indignantly disclaimed his 
 author's compassion, could he have foreseen it. He demanded 
 no compassion, but said, " If 1 am cheerful, why do you pity 
 me?" Give him credit at least for consuming his o^^^l smoke, 
 and licence to do so. Qui se fait plaindre se fait mep?'iser, 
 was a maxim with the ill-starred French poet, George Farcy. 
 Sainte-Beuve tells us of Mdlle. de Meulan, aftenvards Madame 
 Guizot, that in her days of hard work for the periodical press, 
 those Job's friends, " ces amis qu'on a dans le malheur," were 
 an offence to her by the pity they vouchsafed to express for 
 her straits and constraints ; and that, ennuyee de cette compassion 
 7;ialigne, she answered them as they deserv-ed. The Czarina 
 Catherine XL, in her early days of adversity, bravely curbed 
 every inclination to utter complaint or invoke compassion : 
 " Je me serais crue avilie si on m'avait temoigne de I'amitie 
 que j'aurais pu prendre pour de la pitie." The suffering spirit, 
 as Mr. Trollope says of one of his characters, cannot descend 
 from its dignity of reticence : it has a nobility of its o^\^l, made 
 sacred by many tears, by the flo\\dng of streams of blood from 
 unseen wounds, which cannot descend from its dais to receive 
 pity and kindness. " A consciousness of undeserv^ed woe pro- 
 duces a grandeur of its own, with which the high-souled sufferer 
 will not easily part." On Cresset's showing, 
 
 ** Un esprit male et vraiment sage 
 Dedaigne le triste avantage 
 De se faire plaindre d'autrui." 
 
74 CRAVING FOR PITY. 
 
 With what he feels to be the unanswerable question, "And 
 who to pity thee?" does Landor's Opas, in Count Julian, sum 
 up the miseries of the Last of the Goths. " Behold my solace ! 
 none. I want no pity," is Roderigo's reply.* Sir Walter Scott, 
 when things were with him at their very worst, recorded in his 
 journal his sense of relief at the departure even of some the 
 dearest to his heart of heart : " I am pleased to be left to my 
 own regrets, without being melted by condolences, though of 
 the most sincere and affectionate kind." " I never had an 
 ambition to be pitied," wrote John O'Keeffe, when recording 
 his loss of sight ; " and, indeed, effort to be envied, rather 
 than pitied, often proves a successful stimulus to the greatest 
 actions of human life." A late divine remarked that were we 
 to strip our sufferings of all the aggravations which our over- 
 busy imaginations heap upon them, and of all that a morbid 
 craving for sympathy induces us to display to others, they 
 would shrink to less than half their bulk, and what remained 
 would be comparatively easy to support. It was a maxim with 
 Horace Walpole that nobody has a right to tax another for pity 
 on what is past ; and on this ground, he, as " martyr to gout," 
 
 * Especially is the avowed pity of the vulgar intolerable to higher natures 
 in their time of trouble. "When Dockwrath, in Orley Farm, assures Pere- 
 grine Orme, "I feel for you, and I pity you," the latter feels it is not 
 pleasant to be pitied by such a man as that, and says so. He declines 
 pity on any terms, and from any quarter. " I require no pity from you or 
 from any man." — ^Jane Eyre tells Rochester, ** I pity you — I do earnestly 
 pity you." And the discriminating reply, worthy of him and of her, is : 
 " Pity, Jane, from some people is a noxious and insulting sort of tribute, 
 which one is justified in hurling back in the teeth of those who offer it" — 
 but that is the sort of pity native to callous, selfish hearts ; it is what he 
 calls a hybrid, egotistical pain at hearing of woes, crossed with ignorant 
 contempt for those who have endured them. Hers, on the other hand, he 
 hails and welcomes, as " the suffering mother of love." To get pity instead 
 of love, after love is gone, — can anything be much more bitter than that ? 
 Yet in two at least of his best-known songs Burns makes a plaintive lover 
 press the selfsame piteous plea. In Lord Gregory the forsaken one prays, 
 "At least some pity on me shaw, if love it may na be ;" and a male voice 
 sings, " If love for love thou wilt na gie. At least be pity to me shown," in 
 (and to) Mary Morrison, 
 
PITYING ONES SELF. 75 
 
 courteously waived the advances of compassionate visitors or 
 correspondents, whenever the attack was over. Complaint of 
 what is over can only make the hearer glad you are in pain 
 no longer, he argued. " Yes, yes, my dear madam," he tells 
 Miss Hannah More, " you generally place your pity so profit- 
 ably, that you shall not waste a drop upon me." And in a 
 letter some ten months later, again : " One has no right to 
 draw on the compassion of others for what one has suffered 
 and is past. Some love to be pitied on that score ; but forget 
 that they only excite, in the best-natured, joy on their deliver- 
 ance." Elia calls the convalescent "his own sympathiser" — 
 instinctively feeling, as the poor man does, that none can so 
 well perform that office for him : he keeps his sympathy, like 
 some curious vintage, under trusty lock and key, for his own 
 use only. "He lies pitying himself, honing and moaning to 
 himself; he yearneth over himself; his bowels are even melted 
 within him, to think what he suffers; he is not ashamed to 
 weep over himself" And on the score of physical prostration, 
 allowance would be made for him by Hartley Coleridge, who 
 was thinking of a hale weeper when he said that a full-gro^vn 
 blubberer, mth great greenish-grey goggles, swimming in " his 
 own pathos, like half-cold calfs-foot jelly, soaked in his own 
 drizzling tenderness, makes one ashamed of humanity. Elia's 
 convalescent has Hcence, or takes it, to compassionate him- 
 self all over; and his bed is a very discipline of humanity, 
 and tender heart. II a pitie de soi-meme.^ To him might be 
 
 * y at pitie de moi-meme: — the phrase is Comeille's. Pronounced ex- 
 perts or adepts in the art and practice of self-pity, might have a section 
 to themselves. Not among those would we reckon such as Bertha in the 
 lane, as Mrs. Browning interprets her, when she walked as if apart from 
 herself, and pitied her own heart, as if she held it in her hand. Nor again 
 such as the laureate's Earl in Eiiid, when 
 
 " sweet self-pity, or the fancy of it, 
 Made his eye moist." 
 
 But there would be perhaps a Martin Fruse, with his heart melting with 
 tender compassion for himself, and nearly weeping at the "pitiful images 
 he had called up of his own fate, in his own mind ; " and a Susan Posey, 
 in Dr. Holmes's Guardian Angel, when a " last touch of self-pity overcame 
 
76 GALLING COMPASSION. 
 
 addressed the opening line of the confidante's harangue in 
 Racine, i'Ainsi, dans vos malheurs ne songeant qu'a vous 
 plaindre." Montaigne says that whoso makes himself pitied 
 without reason, is a man not to be pitied when there shall 
 be real cause ; by always craving pity, he comes to get none 
 from any. Such too, in effect, the philosophy of that sufferer 
 from neuralgia and other ills, the Mr. Christian of George 
 Eliot's drawing, who, next to the pain itself, disliked that any 
 one should know of it : defective health diminished a man's 
 market value. " Poor Blake ! one can't help calHng him 
 * poor,' " we read in Tom Brown at Oxfoi'd, " although he 
 himself would have winced at it more than at any other name 
 you could have called him :" the object of his life was to raise 
 such feelings towards him as admiration and envy, but pity 
 was the last which he would have liked to excite. Miss 
 Porter's Polish hero can put up with anything rather than 
 the pity which seems to load him with a heavier sense of 
 his calamities. If one chances, as in Mr. Trollope's simile? 
 to slip into the gutter on a wet day, one finds the sympathy 
 
 her, as it is so apt to do those who indulge in that delightful misery;" 
 and even that unhappily obstinate and obstinately unhappy man, the 
 clerical Crawley, in the Last Chronicle of Barset, where he "pitied himself 
 with a tenderness of commiseration which knew no bounds," as he sat on 
 the gate at Hoggle End, while the rain came down heavily upon him — 
 pitied himself with a commiseration that was sickly in spite of its truth. 
 
 " This pity, which some people self-pity call, 
 Is sure the most heart-piercing pity of all," 
 
 sings Cowper's slave-trader, with the refrain, "which nobody can deny, 
 deny, which nobody can deny." The Mr. Sheldon of one popular author, 
 " if he pitied anybody, pitied himself" — a kind of compassion very common 
 with that kind of character. The Mr. Amedroz of another, "pitied him- 
 self so much in his own misery, that he expected to live in an atmosphere 
 of pity from others." The Parson Levincourt of a third, was apt to spend 
 a good deal of his available store of compassion on himself; his author 
 remarking, however, that there is no more effectual check to the indulgence 
 of our own failings and weaknesses, than the exaggerated manifestation of 
 the same defect in another : — that which in us is only a reasonable and 
 well-grounded dissatisfaction, becomes mere selfish unjustifiable repining in 
 our neighbours. 
 
TOO PROUD FOR PITY. 77 
 
 of bystanders to be by far the severest part of one's mis- 
 fortune. " Did you not declare to yourself that all might 
 yet be well, if the people would only walk on and not look 
 at you?" It was so with Lily Dale, the wounded fawn: the 
 people of Allingham could not regard her \\ith their ordinary 
 eyes : they would look at her tenderly, knowing that she was 
 a wounded fawn, and thus they aggravated the soreness of 
 her wound. So with Mrs. Oliphant's Madonna Mary, to 
 whom "all this was very galling ; " who "felt that she would 
 rather die than come down " to be pitied by all these people ; 
 and who thought, in her disturbed and uneasy mind, that she 
 could bear all the different tones in which they would say 
 "Poor Mar}'!" The Honourable Miss Byron, in that prolix 
 novel of Richardson's which Macaulay told Mr. Greville, in 
 1833, that he had read through fifteen times, has this to con- 
 fess of her deahngs with the peerless Sir Charles Grandison : 
 " My pride made me want to find out pity for me in his looks 
 and behaviour, on purpose to quarrel with him in my mind." 
 Not that she aped the mood, any more than she emulated the 
 morals, of Rowe's Fair Penitent : 
 
 ** No, Altamont ; my heart, that scorn'd thy love, 
 Shall never be indebted to thy pity, " — 
 
 a style as large as Sir Fleureant's in Philip van Artevelde, who 
 fires up at the Regent's token of compassion, and bids him 
 
 " Spare your pity, 
 And use your power. You see before you one 
 Who would more willingly confront the worst 
 Unpitying power inflicts, than cry for mercy. " 
 
 There is nothing, it has been said, more grim and repelling 
 than an unbending refusal to acknowle.dge pain which never- 
 theless cannot be concealed ; it can only make anxious friends 
 feel that they are kept at arm's length. Granted that people 
 who have much to endure are entitled to any alleviation which 
 they can innocently obtain; but the suffering is often too 
 obvious to be thus disposed of; and "nothing adds more 
 
78 CRAVING FOR PITY, 
 
 bitterness to the pain of seeing suffering than to be denied 
 the right of offering even sympathy." Emily Bronte, in her 
 last illness, made no complaint, would not endure questioning, 
 and rejected sympathy and help. Many a time did her sisters 
 drop their sewing, or cease from their writing, to listen with 
 wrung hearts, as Charlotte's biographer tells us, to the failing 
 step, the laboured breathing, the frequent pauses, with which 
 the dying girl climbed the short staircase; yet they dared 
 not take other notice of what they observed, with pangs of 
 suffering deeper even than hers : they dared not notice it in 
 words, far less by the caressing assistance of a helping arm or 
 hand. But then, to be sure, " Ellis Bell's" was an exceptional, 
 abnormal, anomalous nature altogether. She was an exception 
 to what Mr. de Quincey, commenting on the dying Kant's 
 appeal by signs to his attendant to stoop down and kiss his 
 pallid lips, and on the similar but more memorable " Kiss me, 
 Hardy," of the dying Nelson* on board the Victory, calls the 
 "mighty power of death in its final agencies ;" when the brave 
 man has ceased to be in any exclusive sense a man, but has 
 become an infant in his weakness — has become a woman in 
 his craving for tenderness and pity. 
 
 IX. 
 
 MULTIPLIED WORDS. 
 Job XXXV. i6. 
 
 WORDS, words, words,— the phrase is pregnant with 
 import on the lips of the Prince of Denmark. And 
 it is charged against the Man of Uz that he '' multiplieth 
 words without knowledge." "Job hath spoken without know- 
 
 * The mention of the "mighty admiral's" name may remind some of 
 his impatient refusal to be "pitied" on account of the restraint once im- 
 posed upon him, as Southey tells the story. " Pity !" exclaimed Nelson : 
 " Pity, did you say? I shall live, sir, to be envied; and to that point I 
 shall always direct my course." — Southey's Life of Nelson^ chap. iii. 
 
MULTIPLIED WORDS. 
 
 79 
 
 ledge," said Elihu, " and his words were without wisdom. . . . 
 Therefore doth Job open his mouth in vain." And the Divine 
 Voice that answered Job out of the whirlwind, began the 
 answer by a crushing question : '' Who is this that darkeneth 
 counsel by words without knowledge?" The words, words, 
 words might be multiplied till the air was filled as with a 
 rushing mighty sound ; but there is such a thing as sounding 
 brass, sounding and resounding because so hollow. The 
 words, words, words might be multiplied till the air seemed 
 thick with them ; but this was to darken it only, not to give 
 light. Multiply zero as you will, you make nothing of it. The 
 grand total of all the aggregated ciphers is but a hollow o. 
 
 Towards the commencement of the controversy \\ith his 
 friends, " How forcible are right words," had Job exclaimed ; 
 but what did arguing such as theirs reprove? Did they 
 imagine to reprove words, and the speeches of a desperate 
 man, that are as wdnd ? " They are but vain words," as the 
 Assyrian envoy himself vainly worded it. 
 
 Inanis torrens verbarum, is a familiar phrase of Quintilian's^ 
 Palingenius speaks of verba which nullas medullas intus habe?ti; 
 marrowless bones, innutritions and unprofitable. "Words, 
 words, mere words, no matter from the heart," as Troilus says 
 of Cressida. Lycurgus taught the Spartans that the worth of 
 speech consists in paucity of words, but these pregnant with 
 sense ; that intemperance of the tongue is fatal to conversa- 
 tion ; that Laconia should study to be laconic. Plutarch says 
 of the speeches of Phocion that they were to be estimated hke 
 coins, not for the size, but for the intrinsic value. Phocion it 
 was who snubbed the young orator Pytheas, with his torrent 
 of words, by the demand, " Is it for a novice like thee to prate 
 like that?" And Phocion it was who told Leosthenes that his 
 speeches were like cypress trees, large and lofty, but without 
 fruit. The secret of Hobbes' style is said to be this, that with 
 a few simple direct words, he produces a greater impression 
 than would all the swelling pomp of a passage bristling with 
 notes of exclamation. So again of Locke's, Mr. Lewes remarks 
 (though verboseness is held to be Locke's great fault), that his 
 
8o MULTIPLIED WORDS. 
 
 plainness deceives the careless reader, who is led to suppose 
 that what is there so plain must have been obvious, there being 
 so many writers who cover their vanity (perhaps it might be 
 written cover their nakedness) Avith a veil of words, and who 
 seem profound because they are obscure. Locke had a just 
 and incurable suspicion of all "great volumes swollen with 
 ambiguous words," — knowing how much jugglery goes on with 
 words ; some of it conscious, some of it unconscious, but all 
 pernicious. Sunt qui " trouvent toujours L'art de ne vous rien 
 dire avec de grands discours." Mephistopheles in Faust's long 
 gown instructed his inquiring class that 
 
 "over-anxious thought's of no avail; 
 For there precisely where ideas fail, 
 A word comes opportunely into play. 
 Most admirable weapons words are found, 
 On words a system we securely ground, 
 In words we can conveniently believe, 
 Nor can we of one jot a word bereave." 
 
 A more legitimate professor denounces the " verbal mysteries 
 of the schools," where there is no refreshment of truth to the 
 eye, wearied as it is with wandering only from shadow to 
 shadow, and where there is all the fatigue of continual pro- 
 gress, without real advance of a single step. "Waste words 
 addle questions," pithily said old Bishop Andrewes, to whom 
 even David Hume would have seemed praiseworthy when, 
 expressing a doubt whether the reader would readily appre- 
 hend his reasoning (on the idea of necessary connexion), he 
 added, "I am afraid that, should I multiply words about it, 
 it would only become more obscure and intricate." Feuillu de 
 J)aroles et sterile de fruits^ is but 2. pauvre style, after all. VagUQ 
 phrases, 'prjixaTia-KLa alvLyfjLaTwSr], help rather to obscure than 
 to elucidate. 
 
 It has been said of PhiUp II. that he was prolix and verbose, 
 not from affluence, but from paucity of ideas : he took refuge 
 in a cloud of words, sometimes to conceal his meaning, oftener 
 to conceal the absence of any meaning, thus mystifying, not 
 only others, but himself. George the Third, once, with rather 
 
CLOUDY VERBIAGE. 8i 
 
 savage irony, asked Mr. Pitt by letter whether he would not 
 " prepare another essay, containing as many empty words and 
 little information as the one" previously transmitted to His 
 Majesty.''' The extraordinary ecclesiastical Latin of Papal allo- 
 cutions has been, probably with justice, pronounced, of all 
 known forms of human expression, to contain the least meaning 
 in proportion to the verbiage. State Papers which deal verbosely 
 in platitudes and generalities, and affect to enunciate first prin- 
 ciples, when the discussion is of matters temporar}^ and prac- 
 tical, are not far behind ; England, at any rate, may claim to be 
 impatient of such platitudes, for she can claim, in politics, to 
 have outlived the period of generalities. Mr. Dickens would 
 seem, however, to charge his fellow-countrymen with a relish 
 equal to ]\Ir. Micawber's for a formal piling-up of words : in 
 the taking of legal oaths, for instance, deponents seem to 
 enjoy themselves mightily when they come to several good 
 words in succession, for the expression of one idea; as, 
 that they utterly detest, abominate, and abjure, and so forth ; 
 and the old anathemas were made relishing on the same 
 principle. We talk about the tyranny of words, said he, but 
 we like to tyrannize over them too ; we are fond of having a 
 large superfluous estabUshment of words to wait upon us on 
 great occasions ; we think it looks important, and sounds well. 
 " As we are not particular about the meaning of our liveries on 
 
 * A later Prime Minister, of our own day, has often -given scope, to 
 even admiring critics, for satirical comments on the cloudy verbiage with 
 which he so often foiled too eager an assailant in the House of Commons ; 
 airy shadows of ideas which seem to be thoughts till you come to examine 
 them closely, but which, on a nearer scrutiny, turn out to be nothing 
 but impalpable masses of verbal mist, wreathed into the most beautiful 
 forms the English language can supply. Much the same kind of thing 
 as what Coleridge calls "mere bubbles, flashes, and electrical apparitions, 
 from the magic cauldron of a fervid and ebullient fancy, constantly fuelled 
 by an unexampled opulence of language." Another veteran statesman, 
 the reverse of a ready speaker, was said to debate as the cuttle-fish fights — 
 leaving the waters behind him so impenetrably turbid as to blind his 
 pursuer ; but then the matter that issues from the sepia was declared to be 
 clear and transparent compared with the explanations of this hazy officml. 
 
 6 
 
82 CIRCUMLOCUTION AND 
 
 state occasions, if they be but fine and numerous enough, so, 
 the meaning or necessity of our words is a secondary con- 
 sideration, if there be but a great parade of them. And as 
 individuals get into trouble by making too great a show of 
 liveries, or as slaves when they are too numerous rise against 
 their masters, so I think I could mention a nation that has got 
 into many great difficulties, and will get into many greater, 
 from maintaining too large a retinue of words." It was of 
 "human laws" Dr. South was speaking when he said that you 
 shall be sure to have words enough in them; but, for the 
 most part, to discern the sense and reason of them, you had 
 need read them with a microscope. He was here contrasting 
 human with Divine : " Was not the work of all the six days 
 transacted in so many words ? There was no circumlocution, 
 or amplification, in the case." And South holds it for certain, 
 accordingly, that the greatest and wisest conceptions that ever 
 issued from the mind of man, have been couched under, and 
 delivered in, a few close, home, and significant words. He 
 contends that the most excellent among books, in whatever 
 art or science, have been still the smallest and most com- 
 pendious ; for the reason of things lies in a little compass, if 
 the mind could at any time be so happy as to light upon it : 
 it is the work of fancy to enlarge, but of judgment to shorten 
 and contract; and "most of the writings and discourses ' in 
 the world are but illustration and rhetoric." The Burgundian 
 court of the fifteenth century, as described by Michelet, was 
 "all rhetorical," but the towns imitated the court, and there 
 were formed in every direction by the citizens fraternities of 
 fine speakers and talkers, styled Chambers of Rhetoric ; nor 
 are English vestrymen of the nineteenth century universally 
 aliens in that respect. What was said of French oratory a 
 hundred years ago may still be said of others beside the 
 French : 
 
 *' L'Eloquence aujourd'hui, prodigue en m^taphores, 
 Avec un air penseur enfle des riens sonores ; 
 Que d'orateurs guindes dans un discours savant, 
 Se tourmentent sans fin pour enfanter du vent ! " 
 
A MP LI PICA TION. 83 
 
 The Chateaubriand school soon got a bad name for pro- 
 ducing effects more by words than ideas, — adding to the stock 
 of phrases without increasing that of thought. The Italian 
 prose literature of modern times incurred the strictures of 
 Madame de Stael on account of its declamator}^ diffuseness ; 
 the \\Titers possessing in its highest degree the art of inflating 
 an idea, or frothing up a sentiment ; insomuch that she was 
 tempted to ask them the sort of question put by negress to 
 Frenchwoman, in the days of hoop-petticoats, " Pray, madame, 
 is all that yourself? " Or as the ver\^ plain Englishman asked, 
 after listening to a long speech in parliamentar}-- and platitudi- 
 nary English, — " And pray what might all that come to when 
 it's peeled and biled ? " Professor Lowell accredits a fellow- 
 countryman of prosaic as well as poetical propensities, with 
 having perfectly adapted his productions to the amplitude of 
 the American soil, manufactured as they were on the theory 
 of covering the largest surface with the least possible amount of 
 meaning that would hold words together. Of all things to be 
 scouted, by such practitioners, is the spirit as well as the letter 
 of Horace's admonition, 
 
 " Est brevitate opus, ut currat sententia, neu se 
 Impediat verbis lassas onerantibus aures." 
 
 Swift ironically cautions a young poet not to gag his muse, or 
 stint himself in words and epithets which cost him nothing ; 
 and warns him accordingly against the practice and example of 
 some few out-of-the-way waiters, who use a natural and con- 
 cise expression. '' They \nll not afford you a word more than 
 is necessary- to make them intelligible ; which is as poor and 
 niggardly as it would be to set down no more meat than your 
 company will be sure to eat up. Words are but lackeys to 
 sense, and ^vill dance attendance without wages or compulsion." 
 Quite out of the common way was the case of Niebuhr, one of 
 whose strange peculiarities was the stammering, not over words, 
 but sentences : he would repeat the same sentence more than 
 half a dozen times in the most different ways ; the reason alleged 
 being, that from his wide range of imagination and immense 
 
84 RED UNDA NT A MP LI PICA TION. 
 
 fund of information, language could not keep pace with his 
 thoughts. Little had he in common with the French professor 
 in Balzac, whom " un long professorat avait habitue " to a too 
 fluent facility in " la verbeuse elegance et les eloquentes peri- 
 phrases." But at least Niebuhr varied his repetitions and 
 diversified his iterations ; by such variety and diversity reUeving 
 himself of liabihty to the sort of complaint Dorio makes in 
 Terence : At enim tcedet jam audire eadem millies ; even if 
 his outflow of words, words, words, subjected him in the long- 
 run to a subsequent sneer of Dorio's, Verba isthcec stmt. Nor 
 would he come within range of Frederick the Great's shot at 
 an elder Herr Professor, on the score of transgressions in what 
 Old Fritz called the Chancery style, and which his English 
 historian explains to be the solemn style of ceremonial and 
 circumlocution, mainly wig and buckram. Lord Brougham 
 was fairly chargeable with a habit of illustrating an idea, and 
 putting it in new forms, till the original impression was wellnigh 
 obliterated ; or, as Sir Archibald Alison put it, " buried under 
 the redundance of its own expression." Sir Archibald is him- 
 self the Mr. Wordy of Mr. Disraeli's sarcasm; and Mr. Disraeli, 
 after he became Minister, was taunted with having thrown over 
 his epigrammatic style in novel-wTiting, and as always speaking 
 in the opposite style, rounding off and diluting his sentences, 
 and beating out his statements with all the energy of a gold- 
 beater, so that three minutes' worth of information should 
 stretch over a quarter of an hour of speaking, lest at any time 
 his oratory should stray into the unstatesmanlike vice of brevity. 
 " For my part, Fm fond of the figure of amplification in dis- 
 course," avows the Sir Oliver Oldstock of a now forgotten 
 comedy ; and he is for " confounding " the laconic style in 
 general, and monosyllables in particular. " Marvellous fine 
 words, neighbour Happer," quoth Dame Glendining to the 
 miller, at the close of one of the Euphuist's verbose flourishes. 
 " Brave words — very exceedingly pyet words," answers the 
 miller ; " nevertheless, to speak my mind, a lippy of bran were 
 worth a bushel o' them." Honest Happer would have been 
 much of Boileau's mind : 
 
A NEBULOUS MASS OF VERBIAGE. 85 
 
 " A quoi bon mettre au jour tous ces discours frivoles, 
 Et ces liens enfenn^s dans de grandes paroles ? " 
 
 What time Samuel Taylor Coleridge fed the daily press with 
 diatribes against the Minister whose policy he then abhorred — 
 " letters four do form his name " — there one day appeared this 
 bit of critical invective : " Our Minister's meaning generally 
 bears an inverse proportion to the multitude of his words. If 
 his declaration consist of fifty Hnes, it may be compressed into 
 ten ; if it extend to five hundred, it may be compressed into five. 
 His style is infinitely porous : deprived of their vacuities, the 
 TO TTttv, the universe of his bills and speeches would take up 
 less room than a nutshell." Hardly Despreaux could be more 
 contemptuous on such a theme, though flying at much smaller 
 game : 
 
 " Tous ces pompeux amas d 'expressions frivoles, 
 Sont d'un declamateur amoureux des paroles." 
 
 But what English Minister of mark has not, perhaps, been 
 marked out, sooner or later, for strictures of this sort ? Even 
 professed admirers of Sir Robert Peel complained that his 
 conceptions, however clear, were clothed in such a nebulous 
 mass of verbiage that one had to probe and disengage them to 
 get at their substance : it was said to be like blowing the froth 
 from a syllabub, or squeezing the liquor out of a sponge, or 
 draining, drop by drop, the product of a jelly-bag. His language 
 was called the '' intricate envelope " of a statesman of great 
 importance, who, for protection' sake, diffused or diluted his 
 meaning, and dissolved rather than expressed it in parts of 
 speech. But at the worst a hard-and-fast line may, and ought 
 to be, drawn between the copious verbiage of a Peel or a 
 Gladstone, and what Mr. Reade styles the *' misty nothings 
 of diplomatists " and the " gibberish and jargon " of political 
 placemen. If Pope's couplet may be applied to both in kind, 
 it must be differently in degree : 
 
 " Words are like leaves ; and where they most abound, 
 Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found." 
 
86 THE ANGELS ON THE LADDER 
 
 JACOB'S DREAM. 
 Genesis xxviii. lo — 12. 
 
 SIR THOMAS BROWNE, in his tractate on Dreams, 
 follows up his reflection that virtuous thoughts of the day 
 lay up good treasures for the night, whereby the impressions 
 of imaginary forms arise into sober similitudes, acceptable to 
 our slumbering selves and preparatory to divine impressions, 
 — by the example, "Thus prepared, Jacob might well dream 
 of angels upon a pillow of stone." Equally characteristic of 
 the old commentator is the after-allusion to interpreters and 
 masters of oneiro-criticism, who, " while we read of a ladder in 
 Jacob's dream, will tell us that ladders and scalary ascents 
 signify preferment." But what can such oneiro-criticism 
 signify ? 
 
 A ladder, or scalary ascent, of obvious resemblance to 
 Jacob's, figures in Dante's beatific vision : 
 
 " I saw rear'd up, 
 In colour like to sun-illumined gold, 
 A ladder, which my ken pursued in vain, 
 So lofty was the summit ; down whose steps 
 I saw the splendours in such multitude 
 Descending, every light in heaven, methought, 
 "Was shed thence." 
 
 And in the next canto there is a direct reference to the dream 
 at Bethel, which was called Luz at the first. The ladder seen 
 by Dante, and explained by his celestial conductress, tops the 
 highest sphere of all, 
 
 " For space is none to bound ; nor pole divides. 
 Our ladder reaches even to that clime, 
 And so, at giddy distance, mocks thy view. 
 Thither the patriarch Jacob saw it stretch 
 Its topmost round ; when it appear'd to him 
 "With angels laden. " 
 
 How little, muses Dr. Newman, did Jacob think there was 
 anything very wonderful in that spot : it looked Hke any other 
 
IN JACOB'S DREAM. 87 
 
 spot : it was a lone uncomfortable place ; there was no house 
 there ; night was coming on ; and he had to sleep on the bare 
 rock. " Yet how different was the truth ! He saw but the 
 world that is seen ; he saw not the world that is not seen ; yet 
 the world that is not seen was there." He saw it in his sleep. 
 Angels were all about him, though he knew it not ; and what 
 Jacob saw in his sleep, that Elisha's servant saw as if \\dth his 
 eyes. And that Nathanael was told he should see hereafter. 
 " Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God 
 ascending and descending upon the Son of man." 
 
 •X- * * * 
 
 " Sick of my days, 
 I wished not life, but cried out, Let me die ; 
 But at Luz God came to me ; in my heart 
 He put a better mind, and showed me how, 
 While we discern it not, and least believe, 
 On stairs invisible betwixt His heaven 
 And our unholy, sinful, toilsome earth, 
 Celestial messengers of loftiest good 
 Upward and downward pass continually. " * 
 
 The theme is a favourite one with Lamartine and his school, 
 in their variations of harmoJiies religieuses : 
 
 '*Ne t'etonne done pas qu'un ange d'harmonie 
 Vienne d'en-haut te reveiller, 
 Souviens-toi de Jacob ! Les songes du genie 
 Descendent sur des fronts qui n'ont dans I'insomnie 
 Qu'une pierre pur oreiller ! " 
 
 All these French exercises close with a note of admiration — 
 as if like Katerfelto with his hair on end at his own wonders. 
 La void again : 
 
 "Et la creation toujours, toujours nouvelle, 
 Monte eternellement la symbolique echelle 
 Que Jacob reva devant lui !" 
 
 And yet again : 
 
 " Et les peuples, troupeau qui dormait sous le glaive, 
 Ont vu, comme Jacob, dans un etrange r^ve, 
 Des anges remonter aux cieux ! " 
 
 * Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough : Jacob. 
 
THE ANGELS ON THE LADDER 
 
 Victor Hugo, in the longest, least effective, and most extra- 
 vagant of all his plays, introduces the Earl of Rochester, in 
 the presence of Cromwell, discussing the gibbet as one means 
 of ascending to the skies ; and with characteristic irreverence 
 comes the allusion — 
 
 " Et Dieu fit voir en reve a son berger fidele 
 
 Qu'on monte au del de meme au moyen d'une echelle." 
 
 To pulpiteer as well as poet the allusion is ever serviceable ; 
 Young was both, and there is a flavour of both about his lines 
 on the heavenly minded, all whose 
 
 " thoughts, like angels, seen of old 
 In Israel's dream, come from, and go to, heaven." 
 
 Others have taken the story as typifying that of every young 
 man when he leaves his home, and goes out to shift for him- 
 self in this hard world : the vision came to the very point of 
 the lonesome sleeper's necessities ; he saw that there was a way 
 between him and God, and that there were those above who 
 did care for him, and who could come to him to help him. 
 And analogies of allusion abound in miscellaneous literature — ■ 
 as where an American poet sings of forms of light that come 
 to exalt the homely facts and features of common life, and of 
 an ideal atmosphere "in which fair angels come and go;" and 
 in another place describes a tranquil death-bed, of one who 
 passed to peaceful slumber like a child, 
 
 " The while attendant angels built the dream 
 On which she rode to heaven. " 
 
 So, in his old drama of The Bfvthers, Shirley speaks of one 
 whose eyes had gained a victory o'er grief, 
 
 " And with it many beams twisted themselves, 
 Upon whose golden threads the angels walk 
 To and again from heaven." 
 
 Coleridge has a simile, as though the spirits of all lovely 
 flowers, inweaving each its wreath and dewy crown, or ere they 
 sank to earth in vernal showers, " had built a bridge to tempt 
 
. IN JACOB'S DREAM. 
 
 the angels down." And Mrs. Browning's House of Clouds 
 includes a spacious hall, 
 
 "Branched with corridors sublime, flecked with winding stairs — ■ 
 Such as children wish to climb, following their own prayers." 
 
 Lamartine's Jocelyn is enraptured of the rainbow and its sug- 
 gestive significance : 
 
 *' Est-ce un pont pour passer tes anges, 
 O toi qui permets a nos yeux 
 De voir ces merveilles etranges, 
 Est-ce un pont qui mene a tes cieux?" 
 
 In Spenser's vision of the city of the Great King, the seer 
 beholds " The blessed Angels to and fro descend from highest 
 heven in gladsome companee." Milton's fallen archangel, 
 wandering after he has alighted on the bare convex of this 
 world's outermost globe, comes anon to the gate of heaven with 
 an ascent by stairs ; and 
 
 " The stairs were such as whereon Jacob saw 
 Angels ascending and descending, bands 
 Of guardians bright, when he from Esau fled 
 To Padan-Aram, in the field of Luz 
 Dreaming by night under the open sky, 
 And waking cried, * This is the gate of heaven.' " 
 
 And then again, reader, " Have you read in the Talmud 
 of old, in the Legends the Rabbins have told of the limitless 
 realms of the air," — have you read it, — the marvellous story of 
 Sandalphon, the x\ngel of Glory, Sandalphon, the Angel of 
 Prayer, — told by the Rabbins aforesaid, and by Longfellow 
 retold ; with whose initial note of interrogation we are content 
 to end : 
 
 How, erect, at the outermost gates 
 Of the City Celestial he waits, 
 
 With his feet on the ladder of light, 
 That, crowded with angels unnumber'd, 
 By Jacob was seen, as he slumber'd 
 
 Alone in the desert at night " ? 
 
90 JACOB AND RACHEL, 
 
 XI. 
 
 THE SEVEN YEARS' SERVICE THAT TO JACOB SEEMED 
 BUT A FEW DAYS. 
 
 Genesis xxix. 20. 
 
 SEVEN years served Jacob for Rachel, in her father 
 Laban's service; "and they seemed unto him but a 
 few days for the love he had to her." Omnes mihi labores, 
 qtios cepi, leves, affirms an attached "labourer," in Terence, — 
 for the labour we delight in physics pain. Fiction but follows 
 fact when it pictures such a day-labourer, to whom, when he 
 forged, his hammer felt a feather in his hand ; the mountains 
 in the way looked molehills, and life itself became a sweet 
 delirium. There is in another work of fiction an aspirant 
 who takes Jacob for his exemplar in working for his Rachel, 
 all through the long years — long in the prospect, short in the 
 retrospect ; and who, with a changed mode of life, and with 
 full purpose of heart, set himself to accomplish his allotted 
 task, and had need even to exercise restraint over himself, lest, 
 in his eagerness, he should overtask his strength — so anxious 
 was he to push on upon the road " whose goal was so fair a 
 temple," and so light seemed that labour of love which was 
 performed that he might win his Rachel. Desire is the spring 
 of diligence, says Dr. South, and the heart infallibly sets both 
 head and hands and everything else to work. " Great desire 
 is like a great fire, and all difficulties before it are like stubble, 
 it will certainly make its way through them and devour them." 
 Or like Hannibal in his march, it cuts through rocks and 
 mountains, till it either finds or makes a way to its beloved 
 object. " What made Jacob think those seven years of hard 
 service for Rachel but a few days, but the extraordinary and 
 invincible love which he bore to her?" To apply a line of 
 Odysseus in Sophocles, 
 
 The toiling young prince in the Tempest can encounter the 
 
LABOUR OF LOVE. 
 
 heaviest of his irksome labours smilingly, for Miranda's 
 sake : 
 
 " There be some sports are painful ; but their labour 
 Delight in them sets off . . . 
 
 . . . This my mean task would be 
 As heaVy to me as 'tis odious ; but 
 The mistress, which I serve, quickens what's dead, 
 And makes my labours pleasures." 
 
 .\nd presently Ferdinand tells Miranda that but for her he 
 would no more endure " this wooden slavery/' of fetching logs, 
 than he would suffer the flesh-fly blow his mouth. 
 
 ' ' Hear my soul speak ; — 
 The very instant that I saw you, did 
 My heart fly to your service ; there resides 
 To make me slave to it ; and for your sake 
 Am I this paticat log-man." 
 
 So, in the Tiuo Gentlemen of Verona, when Julia is bent on 
 undertaking a journey to her (supposed) loving Proteus, 
 Lucetta's, "Alas ! the way is wearisome and long," is at once 
 dismisse'd mth the reflection, 
 
 " A true-devoted pilgrim is not weary 
 To measure kingdoms with his feeble steps. 
 . . . Then let me go, and hinder not my course : 
 I'll be as patient as a gentle stream, 
 And make a pastime of each weary step, 
 Till the last step have brought me to my love." 
 
 For Festo's sad sweet song, in Tivelfth Night, " Come away, 
 come away, Death," the Duke offers him money payment : 
 "There's for thy pains." "No pains, sir; I take pleasure 
 in singing," Festo replies. But then, as Clitipho muses, in 
 the Heautontimoroumenos, " Nulla est tam facilis res, quin 
 difficilis siet, quam invitus facias." If there be but the willing 
 mind, there is love's labour ; and love's labour is not lost. 
 Euripides said, and showed, that "love esteems no office 
 mean." The Italian proverb runs. Amor nan conosce travaglio : 
 love knows nothing of labour. To Mr. Reade's ill-starred but 
 stout-hearted clergyman on the desert island, labouring with 
 all his might for his delicate companion, that " feverish labour 
 
92 ' THE LABOUR WE DELIGHT IN 
 
 was an unmixed joy. He was working, not only for the com- 
 fort, but the health, and even the life, of the lady he loved ; " 
 and this feeling made his homeliest work poetical, his heaviest 
 work light* 
 
 " For the man that lo'es his mistress weel, 
 Nae travel makes him weary," 
 
 sings Robert Burns, — and sings it not from the throat merely, 
 but in those deep chest notes of his which are so musically 
 sympathetic. A later poet might tell of days and nights of 
 painful patientness and toilful tendance, in pinching cold, and 
 on short commons, — 
 
 " But love makes warmth and fulness everywhere ; 
 The lover lives on love luxuriously, 
 And lacks for nothing." 
 
 There is a passage in John Evelyn's Diary, in which, after 
 recording some cheerfully undergone extreme of " drudgery," 
 he breaks into, or breaks off with, the note of interrogation, 
 " But what will not love and friendship make one do ? " A 
 woman of genius has said that household toils are a drudgery 
 only when unpervaded by sentiment : when they are an offering 
 of love, a ministry of care and devotion to the beloved, every 
 detail has its interest. Kirby the entomologist points a moral 
 to his description of certain insects doomed to arduous and 
 incessant toil, to exertions apparently so disproportioned to 
 their size. It would be a mistaken inference, he cautions us, 
 to conclude that with these laborious little creatures the pains 
 of life must far outweigh the pleasures. What strikes us as 
 wearisome toil, is to the tiny agents, labouring for their young, 
 delightful occupation. "Like the affectionate father, whose 
 love for his children sweetens the most painful labours, these 
 
 * St. Francis Xavier has spiritualized in his own experience a more 
 sacred work and labour of love. "The toils I undergo," he said of him- 
 self, as a missionary in the Spice Islands, " are an inexhaustible source of 
 spiritual joys ; insomuch that these islands, bare as they are of all worldly- 
 necessaries, are the very places in the world for a man to lose his sight 
 through excess of weeping — but they are tears of joy." 
 
PHYSICS PAIN. 
 
 little insects are never more happy than when thus actively 
 engaged." Paley affirms a bee amongst the flowers in spring, 
 when it is occupied without intermission in collecting farina for 
 its young or honey for its assQciates, to be one of the cheerful- 
 lest objects that can be looked upon. That no man loves 
 labour for itself, is a rule to which Johnson would admit of no 
 exception, — and when Boswell suggested one, — "Yes, sir, I 
 know a person who does : he is a very laborious Judge, and 
 he loves the labour." — "Sir," replied Johnson, "that is because 
 he loves respect and distinction. Could he have them without 
 labour, he would like it less." " He tells me he likes it for 
 himself," urged Boswell ; only to be answered, " Why, sir, he 
 fancies so, because he is not accustomed to abstract." An old 
 divine puts the question and answer. What makes many men 
 so strangely immerse themselves, some in chemical, and some 
 in mathematical inquiries, but because they strangely love the 
 things they labour in? Their intense study gives them skill 
 and proficiency ; and their particular affection to these kinds 
 of knowledge puts them upon such study. According to esthe- 
 tics, as expounded by Kenelm Chillingly, man arrives at his 
 highest state of moral excellence when labour and duty lose 
 all the harshness of effort — when they become the impulse and 
 habit of life ; when, as the essential attributes of the beautiful, 
 they are, like beauty, enjoyed as pleasure; and thus "each 
 day becomes a holiday." By his model pastor, labour and duty 
 are so taken up 
 
 " In den heitem Regionen 
 Wo die reinen Formen wohnen," 
 
 that they become joy and beauty. When Trefalden, in another 
 work of fiction, declares himself to be as firmly chained to 
 Chancery Lane for the next five months as any galley-slave 
 to his oar, " But, my dear sir," objects the Earl who has asked 
 for his company out of town, " is it worth any man's while to 
 be a galley-slave, if he can help it ? " the answer comes that all 
 depends on the motive, and that self-imposed chains are never 
 very heav)' to the wearer. In the activity of Phoebe, sprightly 
 inmate of his drear House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne 
 
94 LABOUR OF LOVE. 
 
 descries a spiritual quality : the life of the long and busy day 
 — spent in occupations that might so easily have taken a squalid 
 and ugly aspect — was made pleasant, and even lovely, by the 
 spontaneous grace with which these homely duties seemed to 
 bloom out of her character; so that labour, while she dealt 
 with it, had the easy and flexible charm of play. " Angels do 
 not toil, but let their good works grow out of them ; and so 
 did Phoebe." A poet of our day enforces the lesson that let a 
 man live as long as he may, he may love on through life : 
 
 "■ Love in fame ; love in knowledge ; in work ; earth is rife 
 With labour, and therefore with love, for a man. 
 If one love fails, another succeeds, and the plan 
 Of man's life includes love in all objects." 
 
 Expatiating on Lord Palmerston's wonderful power of mas- 
 tering, even to the point of ignoring, bodily pain, Sir Henry 
 Holland speaks of having seen him, under a fit of gout which 
 would have sent other men groaning to their couches, continue 
 his work almost without abatement, amid the chaos of papers 
 which covered the floor as well as the tables of his room. And 
 though his physician at first remonstrated against these un- 
 usual labours during illness, he soon learnt that such remon- 
 strance was not only fruitless but injudicious, because to Lord 
 Palmerston work was itself a remedy : " The labour he loved 
 'physicked pain.' No anodyne I could have prescribed would 
 have been equally effectual in allaying it — or, as I may better 
 say, in lessening that seiise of suffering which is always aug- 
 mented by the attention of the mind directed to it."* A 
 passage may be remembered in the Confessions of Rousseau, 
 in which he describes the intense study to which he devoted 
 himself in serious illness : he was told he was injuring himself; 
 he was convinced that he was acting kindly by body as well as 
 mind ; " car cette application, pour laquelle je me passionnais, 
 me devint si delicieuse, que, ne pensant plus a mes maux, j'en 
 etais beaucoup moins afl"ecte." 
 
 * This curious point in Physiology is explicitly treated of in Sir H. 
 Holland's Mental Physiology^ chapter iii. 
 
WRONGED, AND HATED FOR IT. 95 
 
 Of La Fontaine it has been said — all whose work was so 
 carefully finished — that lazy though he was, Venfatit de la 
 paresse et du sommeil, he would give nothing to the world but 
 what was his best. " He did no task-work : but the labour 
 that he delighted in physicked pain." It was at once his 
 chosen amusement and his work ; and, as Thackeray wisely 
 says, he is the happiest ma^n who gets the work to do best 
 fitted to his hand, and does not get tired of it — and therefore 
 does not get to be tired by it. 
 
 Wordsworth has a sonnet on a certain piece of toil under- 
 taken and accomplished with the energy of real heart in the 
 work — 
 
 ''Not by the sluggish and ungrateful pains 
 Of labourer plodding for his daily gains, 
 But by an industry that wrought in love." 
 
 And his successor in the laureateship has an in memoriam 
 stanza, more subtle in import and suggestiveness, with which 
 we may bring these excercitations and excerpts to an end : 
 
 *' But this it was that made me move 
 As light as carrier-birds in air ; 
 I loved the weight I had to bear, 
 
 Because it needed help of Love." 
 
 XII. 
 
 WRONGED, AND HATED FOR IT. 
 I Samuel xviii. 29. 
 
 MOST scrupulously on his guard was young David the 
 Bethlehemite to give no occasion of distrust or dislike 
 to King Saul. But the distrust and the dislike arose, and soon 
 gi-ew intensely strong. Jealousy tortured the moody monarch, 
 though the young man's loyalty remained unimpeachable. And 
 one day Saul cast the javelin he had in his hand at the innocent 
 harpist, saying to himself, " I will smite David even to the wall 
 
96 ' ODISSE QUEM L^SERIS: 
 
 with it." And David "avoided out of his presence twice." 
 And from that time forth seems the king to have hated his 
 minstrel worse and worse — hating him all the worse for having 
 himself done him this foul wrong. Odisse quern Iceseris is an 
 original sin in fallen nature. And even thus "Saul became 
 David's enemy continually," and sought occasion to slay him. 
 
 By Amnon is Tamar foully wronged, and hated for it. His 
 guilt accomplished, "then Amnon hated her exceedingly." 
 The hate in shameful proportion to the wrong. 
 
 Dean Milman accounts for the excess of vindictive violence 
 to which Philip the Fair was goaded by passion in his treatment 
 of Guy of Dampierre, by significantly telling us that " Philip 
 had the most deep-rooted hatred of the Count of Flanders, as 
 a rebellious vassal, and as one whom he had cruelly injured." 
 Dr. Thomas Brown somewhere speaks of it as a very common 
 form of injustice, that we first oppress, and then despise because 
 we have oppressed. Still more observably common is the prac- 
 tice of wronging, and then of hating him we have wronged.* 
 And the man who has a secret consciousness that he has 
 injured you, is, we know, very ready to find cause of offence 
 or complaint against you : it balances matters somewhat. Such 
 observations are of every-day growth. 
 
 Odisse quern Iccseris. — That is our text — a trite text. The 
 hatred one comes to feel, and then to cherish, towards the 
 
 * "Let us be open-hearted and candid, Earnshaw," proposes Mr. Harris 
 in the Gordian Knot. ' ' You hate me like the devil, or ppssibly a good 
 deal worse, and you have a right to do so, because you have injured me ; 
 and I, knowing human nature, blame you not." (Chapter xlvi.) 
 
 Lord Lytton speaks of it as the most common thing in the world, when 
 we have once wronged a person, to go on in the wrong, from a certain 
 soreness with which conscience links the associations of the injured party. 
 He ilhistrates this in the character of Godolphin, whose "very remorse 
 made him unkind." (Chapter xli.) 
 
 Not inapplicable to the philosophy of the subject is that ironically 
 humorous query put by Mr. Thackeray in Pendcnnis — What more can one 
 say of the Christian charity of a man than that he is actually ready to forgive 
 those who have done him every kindness, and with whom he is wrong in 
 a dispute ? 
 
WRONGED, AND HATED EOR IT. 97 
 
 person one has wronged — that is our theme. The terse texf 
 of Tacitus is become an accepted truism. It is one of the 
 commonplaces of stock quotation. 
 
 Indeed, Macaulay taxed the late Earl Stanhope — on the 
 score of this selfsame text — with being a little too fond of 
 uttering moral reflections in a style too sententious and oracular; 
 and the Whig critic quoted from the Conservative historian this 
 instance to his purpose: "Strange as it seems, experience shows 
 that we usually feel far more animosity against those whom we 
 have injured than against those who injure us ; and this remark 
 holds good with every degree of intellect, with every class of 
 fortune, with a prince or a peasant, a stripling or an elder, a 
 hero or a prince." This remark, observed Macaulay, in his 
 review of Lord Mahon's Wa^-'of the Succession hi Spain, might 
 have seemed strange at the court of Nimrod or Chedorlaomer ; 
 but it has now been for many generations considered as a truism 
 rather than a paradox. " Every boy has written on the thesis 
 Odisse quern Icesej-is. Scarcely any lines in English poetry are 
 better known than that vigorous couplet, 
 
 * Forgiveness to the injured does belong ; 
 But they ne'er pardon, who have done the wrong.' 
 
 The historians and philosophers have quite done with this 
 maxim, and have abandoned it, like other maxims which have 
 lost their gloss, to bad novelists, by whom it will very soon be 
 worn to rags." 
 
 At the risk of being ranked with lower even than bad 
 novelists, it is proposed in the present section to illustrate this 
 trite text, this threadbare truism, by instances and allusions 
 gathered here and there; in the belief that even a truism 
 may be inspected wdth interest under side-lights from opposite 
 quarters, — the interest lying in the diversity of ways in which 
 various minds regard and exemplify the text. Worn to rags 
 it may be ; but there are such things -as purpu7-ei panni. 
 
 Here, for instance, is Sir Mulberry Hawk, who, when he 
 began to dislike his dupe and victim, young Lord Frederick, 
 measured his dislike, as men (we are reminded) often do, by 
 
 7 
 
9S WRONGED, AND HATED FOR IT. 
 
 the extent of the injuries he had inflicted upon its object. 
 ''When it is remembered that Sir Mulberry Hawk had plun- 
 dered, duped, deceived, and fooled his pupil in every possible 
 way, it will not be wondered at, that, beginning to hate him, 
 he began to hate him cordially." Sir Walter Scott illustrates 
 the text in a conference between Buckingham and his tool, 
 Edward Christian ; where the former winds up a characteristic 
 speech with the jaunty bidding, " Never be downcast, man ; 
 I forgive thee, I forgive thee." "Your Grace is of a most 
 merciful disposition," is Christian's sneering reply, " especially 
 considering it is I who have had the wrong; and sages have 
 said, that he who doth the injury is less apt to forgive than he 
 who only sustains it." 
 
 Mrs. Gore tells us of Augustus Hamilton and his maltreated, 
 patient wife, whom he almost hated the more for the forbearance 
 which kept her silent under strong emotion, that "he was 
 conscious of having used her too ill not to wish to wreak 
 further vengeance on her head." So with the Laird o' Grippy 
 in John Gait's tale, when estranging himself from the son whom 
 he has wronged of his inheritance. " Conscious that he had 
 done him wrong — aware that the wrong would probably soon 
 be discovered — and conscious, too, that this behaviour was 
 calculated to beget suspicion, he began to dislike to see Charles," 
 etc. Still, in this case it is to be not-ed, to Claud's credit, that 
 so much was there of the "leaven .of original virtue in the 
 composition of his paternal affection," that this disagreeable 
 feeling never took the decided nature of enmity. " He did 
 not hate because he had injured." 
 
 The Edinburgh Reviewer of Lord Nelson's Letters to Lady 
 Hamilton was candid in his censure of the great seaman's 
 culpable disregard of domestic ties, and of his neglect, almost 
 cruel neglect, of one whom he was bound by honour, as well 
 as religion, morality, and law, to cherish. This neglect, the 
 consequence of an illicit passion, seems (as frequently happens 
 in minds otherwise virtuous) to have " rankled to a degree of 
 hatred, from the workings of self-reproach." Nor can a more 
 melancholy instance, adds the Reviewer, be found of the maxim. 
 
' ODISSE QUEM L^SERIS: 99 
 
 that we are apt to dislike those whom we have wronged, and 
 thus preposterously to visit upon them the sins of our own 
 injustice. Familiar, or cheerful, or affectionate intercourse with 
 those who have been ^^Tonged, is tBuly said to be generally out 
 of the question ; and the closer the intercourse, the less easily 
 is it restored. " To forgive artistically," in the words of an 
 essayist on social subjects, parents or friends ought to go so 
 far as not merely to pass over, but to ignore what has been 
 done. But even if they can bring themselves to this " gentle 
 hypocrisy," the difficulty wall not have disappeared,^" for those 
 who are the wTong-doers wall probably have a more tenacious 
 memory, and not be easily ready to do the same." 
 
 Gibbon owed many things, both in matter and manner, or 
 mannerism, to Tacitus ; and the famous apophthegm of the 
 Roman historian is again and again illustrated by the historian 
 of Rome, Proprium huniani generis est odisse quem Iceset'is. 
 Thus, in describing the murder of Para, king of Armenia, in 
 the fourth century of our era. Gibbon writes : " After his return 
 to his native kingdom. Para still continued to profess himself 
 the friend and ally of the Romans ; but the Romans had 
 injured him too deeply ever to forgive, and the secret sentence 
 of his death was signed in the council of Valens." So in the 
 instance of Arcadius and his too powerful minister, Rufinus : 
 "The emperor would soon be instructed to hate, to fear, 
 and to destroy, the powerful subjects whom he had injured." 
 And once again in the case of Genseric and the nobilit}^ of 
 Carthage •. "It was natural enough that Genseric should hate 
 those whom he had injured." Cleomenes, says one historian 
 of Athens, chafed at the failure of his attempt on the Athenian 
 liberties, " conceived, in the true spirit of injustice, that he had 
 been rather the aggrieved than the aggressor," and feeding up 
 a cordial dislike to those he had wTonged, set to work to wTong 
 them anew, and wath better success this time. 
 
 ^Vhen Thomas Moore, in his Life of Byron, comes to treat of 
 the mysterious feud that separated husband and wafe in 1S16, 
 he remarks that if there be any truth in the principle that they 
 " never pardon who have done the wrong," Lord Byron, who 
 
WRONGED, AND HATED FOR IT. 
 
 was, to the last, disposed to conciliation, proved so far, at least, 
 his conscience to have been unhaunted by any very disturbing 
 consciousness of aggression. It is observable that Byron him- 
 self cites the adage, in a letter he wrote to his wife seven years 
 later, one paragraph in which closes thus : " I assure you that I 
 bear you now (whatever I may have done) no resentment what- 
 ever. Remember that, if you have injured me in aught, this 
 forgiveness is something ; and that, if I have injured you, it is 
 something more still, if it is true, as the moralists say, that the 
 most offending are the least forgiving." 
 
 Lucius Mason, in Orley Farm, no sooner finds that the pro- 
 perty he has been enjoying has rightfully belonged all the time 
 to another, than he begins to wax wroth with that other whom 
 he has thus and for so long a time, however involuntarily, 
 wronged. " His head, he said to himself, should never again 
 rest under a roof which belonged of right to Joseph Mason. 
 He had injured Joseph Mason — had injured him innocently, 
 indeed, as far as he himself was concerned — but he had injured 
 him greatly, and therefore now hated him all the more." 
 
 La Bruyere, in his pithy way, enunciates the double-faced or 
 two-eyed proposition, with its negative pole, so to speak — that 
 we violently hate those whom we have deeply offended, just 
 as we foster a growing regard for those to whom we have 
 done a kindness. " Comme nous nous affectionnons de plus 
 en plus aux personnes a qui nous faisons de bien, de meme 
 nous haissons violemment ceux que nous avons beaucoup 
 offenses." 
 
 There came a crisis in the relations of the Emperor Domi- 
 tian with Agricola, when the prince plainly intimated to the 
 general that he dared not again employ him ; and Agricola is 
 said to have discreetly refrained from soliciting employment. 
 If he was named for an important government, it was, says 
 Dean Merivale, with the understanding that he should himself 
 decline it ; but the emperor took what was deemed a base 
 advantage of his moderation, in withholding the salary of the 
 office, which, it seems, ought in fairness to have been pressed 
 upon him. " Domitian knew that he had now openly mortified 
 
' ODISSE QUEM L.ESERIS! loi 
 
 a gallant and popular oiificer, and he began to hate the man 
 he had injured : such, as Tacitus reminds us, is a common 
 infirmity of our nature. But Domitian's temper, he adds, was 
 prone to take offence, and the more he dissembled, the more 
 was he implacable." 
 
 Sir Charles Grandison, in his stately, sonorous way, apprises 
 a clerical correspondent, "I have more than once, Dr. Bartlett, 
 experienced the irreconcileable enmity of a man whom I have 
 forgiven for a meanness, and who was less able to forgive me 
 my forgiveness than I was him his fault." And as with Richard- 
 son, so with Fielding, the theme is once and again a topic for 
 illustration. Booth's friend, the colonel, is described as eager 
 in quest of any the shallowest reason for hating the man whom 
 he could not help hating w^ithout any reason — at least, without 
 any which he durst fairly assign even to himself And Mrs. 
 Bennet, in the same story, relating her step-mother's success in 
 setting her father against her, and making him use her ill, de- 
 clares her to have been unable so perfectly to subdue his under- 
 standing as to prevent him from being conscious of such ill- 
 usage ; and from this consciousness," she goes on to say, " he 
 began inveterately to hate me. Of this hatred he gave me 
 numberless instances ; and I protest to you, I know not any 
 other reason for it than what I have assigned, and the cause, 
 as experience hath convinced me, is adequate to the effect." 
 Rousseau was quite of the same mind when he emphatically 
 asserted, as the alleged result of manifold experience on his 
 part, that "la haine des me'chants ne fait que s'animer davantage 
 par rimpossibilite de trouver sur quoi la fonder ; et le senti- 
 ment de leur injustice n'est qu'un grief de plus contre celui qui 
 en est I'objet." In another of his autobiographical works, 
 where he is expatiating after his peculiar and peculiarly ag- 
 grieved manner on the rancour of his alleged foes, all and 
 sundry — he says of the doctors, to whom he had given cause 
 of offence, that possibly they might become reconciled to him, 
 but that as for the oratoriens, whom he had loved, in whom he 
 had reposed confidence, and whom he had never offended — 
 they, he was persuaded, would for ever be implacably hostile to 
 
WRONGED, AND HATED FOR IT. 
 
 him : " Leur propre iniquite fait mon crime, que leur amour- 
 propre ne me pardonnera jamais." 
 
 Beattie says in one of his letters that Lord Monboddo had 
 never pardoned him for calUng Captain Cook a philosopher, 
 and probably never would ; but v/hat made the doctor hopeless 
 of regaining the judge's goodwill was the odisse qiiem Iceseris 
 maxim ; for, he adds, " I think he did not use me quite well in 
 the preface to his Metapkysic, and when a man uses you ill, he 
 seldom fails to hate you for it." Swift introduces the truism in 
 his Modest hiquiry into the Repoi't of the Qiieeiis Death. It is 
 a common observation, he says, '• that the offended party often 
 forgives ; but the offending party seldom. It is one of the 
 corrupt sentiments of the heart of man to hate one the more 
 for having used them ill ; and to wish those out of the way 
 who, we beheve, ought in justice to revenge the injuries we 
 have done them." In this last particular may be descried an 
 efficient reason, in cases not a few, for the cherished hatred 
 observable in the wrong-doer. Fear and apprehension keep 
 him uneasy, and the object of his uneasiness is increasingly 
 the object of his dislike.* Again, in the Dean's History of the 
 Four Last (or should it be Last Four ?) Yea7's of Queen Anne, 
 he gives this finishing touch to his portrait of the Earl of 
 Sunderland : " The sense of the injuries he has done, renders 
 him (as it is very natural) implacable towards those to whom 
 he has given greatest cause to complain ; for which reason he 
 will never forgive either the queen or the present treasurer." 
 
 As Charles Fox is said to have never forgiven George IV. 
 the falsehood which duped him into denying in the House the 
 Fitzherbert marriage, so is it said of His Majesty that he too, on 
 his part, could never prevail upon himself to forgive Mr. Fox 
 for having so much to pardon. 
 
 * It has been wittily said of continental hotel keepers and lodging-house 
 keepers, in whose bosoms the fleecing to which they have subjected you in 
 bygone years stirs up hospitable emotions as often as you visit them again, 
 that of them the old saying of odisse que?n Iceseris is most emphatically 
 untrue ; for the more they have been able to injure you, the less do they 
 hate you. 
 
TI^^E CAVE OF ADULLAM. 103 
 
 XIII. 
 THE CAVE OF ADULLAM. 
 I Samuel xxii. 2. 
 
 FOR fear of Saul, fled David to Achish, king of Gath ; and 
 for fear of Achish he hied him to the cave of Adullam. 
 In the cave he found a refuge, and to the cave there came other 
 refugees, — a mixed multitude, more imposing in numbers than 
 credit. For, '' every one that was in distress, and every one 
 that was in debt, and every one that was discontented [or bitter 
 of soul], gathered themselves unto him; and he became a 
 captain over them : and there were with him about four hundred 
 men." The character of the confederates would scarcely seem 
 to have ranked much above that of the adventurers who, in 
 like manner, once associated themselves to Jephthah, when 
 that mighty man of valour, the outcast Gileadite, fled from 
 his brethren, and dwelt in the land of Tob ; and there were 
 gathered vain men to Jephthah, and went out with him. 
 
 Once accepted as authentic history was the record of 
 Romulus issuing a proclamation with a view to the peopling of 
 his new city, — declaring it to be an " asylum," a sanctuary and 
 place of safety, for such as were banished from the other cities 
 of Italy ; a device which brought to him many who had quitted 
 their respective towns, whether for debt, or on account of 
 crimes by them committed.* And Chesterfield, in one of his 
 
 * Spartacus in revolt was presently joined by slaves and outlaws of all 
 descriptions : he has the credit, however, of having enforced strict discipline, 
 and so long as he was able, obliged his lawless followers to abstain from 
 acts of violence and rapine. But discipline failed anon ; and as incidental 
 evidence of the extent of the ravages committed in central and southern 
 Italy by the rude bands under his command, historians refer to the well- 
 known line of Horace, in which the poet promised his friend a jar of wine 
 made during the Social War, if he could find one that had '' escaped the 
 clutches of roaming Spartacus." 
 
 On Caesar's side, against Pompey, were ranged '• all the criminal and 
 obnoxious," as the most elaborate and old-fashioned of our biographers of 
 Cicero words it, following the wording of Cicero himself ; '" all who had 
 
104 CONGREGATED DESPERADOES. 
 
 French letters, pauses to moralize on the surprising fact that 
 the " wisest and most virtuous nation the world ever saw " 
 should deduce its origin from cet amas de vauriens ei de coquins 
 — this seething mass of rascality and scoundrelism. 
 
 Gulliver was asked by his master the Houyhnhmm, how he 
 could persuade strangers out of different countries to venture 
 with him, after the losses he had sustained and the hazards he 
 had run ? And Captain Lemuel replied, in regard of his fifty 
 Yahoos, that they were " fellows of desperate fortunes, forced 
 to fly from the places of their birth on account of their poverty 
 or their crimes." Some were undone by lawsuits ; others spent 
 all they had in debauchery and gaming; others fled for treason; 
 many for homicide, theft, perjury, forgery, coining false money, 
 or for flying from their colours and deserting to the enemy : 
 most of them had broken prison ; and none of them durst 
 
 suffered punishment, or deserved it ; the greatest part of the youth, and the 
 city mob ; some of the popular tribunes, and all who were oppressed with 
 debts." Caesar in Gaul was thus a loadstone to Mark Antony when he left 
 Egypt, but was too deeply in debt to show himself in Rome ; for Caesar's 
 camp was the " sure refuge of all the needy, the desperate, and the auda- 
 cious." In his letters to Atticus, Cicero inveighs against that "needy, pro- 
 fligate, audacious crew, prepared for everything that was desperate. " Then 
 again, after his personal interview with Cassar : '' Good gods ! what a crew 
 he has with him ! What a hellish band, as you call them — what a troop of 
 desperadoes ! " Catiline, in Ben Jonson, bids Cethegus 
 
 " draw to you any aids 
 
 That you think fit, of men of all conditions. 
 
 Of any fortunes, that may help a war." 
 
 The commander of the opposing host describes the Catiline crew as com" 
 prising ' ' all sorts of furies, 
 
 " Adulterers, dicers, fencers, outlaws, thieves. 
 The murderers of their parents, all the sink 
 And plague of Italy met in one torrent." 
 During Caligula's time the history of the Babylonian Jews makes pro- 
 minent mention of the brothers Asinai and Anilai, around whom gathered 
 a number of indigent and discontented youths, and who thus became the 
 captains of a formidable band of robbers. They built a strong fortress, 
 secured by the marshes around, and levied tribute on the shepherds, whom, 
 however, they defended from all other assailants — on something of the 
 black-mail system of the Scottish Highlands. Artabanus, king of Parthia, 
 was sufficiently impressed by their valour in the field to send an embassy 
 offering terms of accommodation. 
 
AN AS7LVM FOR THE LA WLESS. 105 
 
 return to their native countries, for fear of being hanged or of 
 starving in a jail : hence their recourse to a service such as his. 
 
 The classical advocates for that ambassadorial right of asylum 
 in Rome which Innocent XL determined to do away Avith, and 
 the abuse of which in favour of malefactors and mauvais siijets 
 all and sundry had become contagious, took good care to quote 
 the example of Romulus. But the Pope was not pagan enough, 
 though full of pride, to accept the precedent. The Sanctuary 
 of Whitefriars is best known to us in the Alsatia of Scott, 
 as a place abounding with desperadoes of every description, — 
 bankrupt citizens, ruined gamesters, irreclaimable prodigals, des- 
 perate duellists, bravoes, homicides, and debauched profligates 
 of every degree, all leagued together to maintain the immunities 
 of their asylum, — so that it was both difficult and unsafe for the 
 officers of the law to execute warrants, emanating even from the 
 highest authority, amongst men whose safety was inconsistent 
 with warrants or authority of any kind. 
 
 While in a critical position as to his relation with the Liegers 
 and with Charles of Burgundy, it suited the policy of Lewis 
 the Eleventh to become a seemingly warm friend of the city 
 of Paris : great as it was, he desired to have it greater still, 
 fuller of populous life and popular spirit ; and he had procla- 
 mation made, accordingly, by sound of trumpet, that men of 
 all nations, who might have fled for theft or for murder, would 
 find shelter here. Michelet assures us of Warwick the King- 
 maker, that the city of London was what he most loved and 
 honoured in this world ; and of Warwick he tells us how safe 
 were all who were under the ban of the law whilst that great 
 earl was lord of the marches of Calais and Scotland ; and how, 
 if there were a " tall man " on the border, who resorted in 
 trouble to Warwick, he was at once set down to dinner, instead 
 of being strapped up to the next tree. Geraint, in the Idylls 
 of the King, sets forth before his liege lord the very practical 
 grievance that his princedom lay 
 
 '* Close on the borders of a territory 
 "Wherein were bandit earls, and caitiff knights, 
 Assassins, and all flyers from the hand 
 Of Justice, and whatever loathes a law." 
 
io6 CAVE OF ADULLAM. 
 
 The peopling of New Orleans is likened by Yankee vivacity 
 to the place itself, as built on a bar in the harbour, made of 
 snags, driftwood, and chokes, heaped up by the river, and then 
 filled and covered with the sediment brought down by the 
 freshets. " The froth and scum are washed up and settle at 
 New Orleans. It's filled with all sorts of people, . . . mottled 
 with black and all its shades. It is a great caravansary filled 
 with strangers, dissolute enough to make your hair stand on 
 end, drinking all day, gambUng all night, and fighting all the 
 time." But it is the same graphic humorist who, not less proudly 
 than pungently, compares his country to the Thames as it was 
 when sewers and drains, and dye-stuffs and factory-wash, and 
 unmentionables without stint (not without stink), were poured 
 into it. " Our great country is like that are Thames water, — 
 it does receive the outpourins of the world, — homicides and 
 regicides, — ^jail-birds and galley-birds, poorhouse chaps and 
 workhouse chaps, — rebels, infidels, and forgers, — rogues of all 
 sorts, sizes, and degrees, — but it farments, you see, and works 
 clear." History traces the Cossack nation to a mixed multi- 
 tude composed of those who took refuge beyond the islands of 
 the Dnieper, from the first general invasion of the Tartars, and 
 of those again who fled thither during the Lithuanian wars, 
 whose number was afterwards swelled by adventurers and 
 outcasts, lovers of a free life, and fugitives from the law of 
 arrest, deserters from various armies, and serfs who had broken 
 their bonds and renounced the yoke. Here too the fermenting 
 process has, in its way, worked clear. A cave of Adullam may 
 be the cradle of a compact, imposing, and influential race. 
 
 From various parts of Shakspeare we might gather lines 
 more or less applicable to the Adullamite adventurers. The 
 adversaries too contemptuously described by Richard of Gloster, 
 for instance, as 
 
 ' ' A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways, 
 Whom their o'er-cloyed country vomits forth 
 To desperate ventures and assured destruction. 
 . . . [Mere] famish'd beggars, weary of their lives ; 
 Who but for dreaming on this foul exploit, 
 For want of means, poor rats, had hang'd themselves." 
 
RE-HOBOAM'S POLICY. 107 
 
 Or again those scouted by Chatillon, in King yohn, as embody- 
 ing "all the unsettled humours of the land." Or those so 
 bitterly invoked by dying Bolingbroke, in prospect of a reign of 
 license under his presumably still dissolute son : 
 
 '• Now, neighbour confines, purge you of your scum : 
 
 Have you a ruffian that will swear, drink, dance. 
 
 Revel the night, rob, murder, and commit 
 
 The oldest sins the newest kind of ways ? 
 
 Be happy, he will trouble you no more . . . 
 
 For the fifth Harry from curb'd license plucks 
 
 The muzzle of restraint, and the wild dog 
 
 Shall flesh his tooth in every innocent. 
 
 O my poor kingdom ! . . . 
 
 Oh, thou wilt be a wilderness again, "— 
 
 or a cave of Adullam, without a David in it. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 THE MEASURE AND PRESSURE OP REHOBOAM'S 
 LITTLE PINGER. 
 
 I Kings xii. 6 — 11. 
 
 WITH the old men that had stood before Solomon his 
 father did Rehoboam first consult, as to his treatment 
 of pleading Israel. And the advice of the elders was that the 
 new king should be compliant and concihatory, and so win the 
 hearts of his people for ever. To the young men that were of 
 his own standing, and of his own tastes and habits, Rehoboam 
 next addressed himself; and they, knowing his tastes, and 
 chiming in mth his prejudices, counselled irritating words of 
 arrogant menace as the only proper reply to such canaille. His 
 subjects complain, forsooth, of being overburdened. Let him 
 clap heavier loads on their backs. Let him prove to them at 
 once, and once for all, that he is master, and means to be ; that 
 he has a will of his own, and that they are to have none. Let 
 him stamp out the last spark of their independence of spirit. 
 
io8 REHOBOAiWS LITTLE FINGER. 
 
 His part is to rule, and to make the rule absolute ; theirs is to 
 submit, to succumb, to efface themselves before him, to know 
 that he is monarch of all he surveys, whose right there is none 
 to dispute. 
 
 The counsel of the flippant youngsters jumped with the 
 humour of the king, and for it he forsook the counsel of the 
 graybeards, trained in Solomon's court, and the confidants and 
 abettors of his policy. So Rehoboam answered the people 
 roughly. Asperity was the tone he deemed it politic to use ; 
 and at the young men's prompting he used their very words. 
 " My father made your yoke heavy, and I will add to your 
 yoke : my father also chastised you with whips, but I will 
 chastise you with scorpions." It is hard to suppose that he 
 omitted that other graphic clause in the dictated speech : " My 
 little finger shall be thicker than my father's loins." His 
 remonstrant subjects Were thus to be defied, not appeased ; 
 provoked, not conciliated : they were thus to be taught to 
 know their place, and to know his — to know themselves, and 
 to know him. He gave them the measure of his little finger 
 that day, and its pressure they were to feel from that day forth, 
 more and more, continually. Solomon's girdle would not go 
 round Rehoboam's little finger. A greater than Solomon was 
 here. 
 
 Altering but a word or two, the sombre forecastings of Henry 
 the Fourth, happily groundless, in Shakspeare, might be attri- 
 buted to the wise father of foolish Rehoboam : 
 
 ' * Only compound me with forgotten dust ; 
 Give that, which gave thee life, unto the worms ; 
 Phxck down my officers, break my decrees ; 
 For now a time is come to mock at form. 
 Once Rehoboam crown'd — up, vanity ! 
 Down, royal state ! all you sage counsellors, hence ! 
 And to the Jewish court assemble now, 
 From every region, apes of idleness ! " 
 
 With a sore heart Samuel Pepys recorded in his Diary the 
 impolitic wilfulness of England's Merry Monarch. " If any of 
 the sober counsellors give him good advice, and move him in 
 
REHOBOAM'S SYCOPHANTS. 109 
 
 anything that is to his good and honour, the other part, which 
 are his counsellors of pleasure, take him when he is ... in a 
 humour of delight, and then persuade him that he ought not to 
 hear nor listen to the advice of those old dotards," etc. Several 
 years later we again read in the Diary of the "mcked men 
 that command the King," the " idle companions " that are 
 always about him, the "young rogues" to whom he always 
 gives way. When a revolution in Greece put an end at last 
 to the reign of King Otho, we were told by Mr. Finlay that 
 a thousand petty acts of the misguided prince had long been 
 rankling in the hearts of his subjects, who felt themselves 
 despised ; and indeed that for some months past King Otho 
 had been universally and passionately hated. *•' Yet the syco- 
 phants who surrounded the King persuaded him that the 
 opposition was a mere digue of place-hunters." We recall the 
 vigorous anathema in an old tragedy of John Marston's, 
 
 " Confusion to those limber sycophants. 
 No sooner mischief's bom in regency, 
 But flattery christens it with policy. " 
 
 How rarely does a king attain wisdom ! muses Goethe's Egmont, 
 in regard of the policy of Philip II. in the Netherlands; and he 
 urges recourse to counsellors that have grown old in the service 
 of the State, and to measures of conciliation towards the revolt- 
 ing remonstrants. He tells Alva, all for blood and iron, " The 
 measures you propose will never do. I know my countrymen. 
 It may be difficult to win their confidence, but it is easy to 
 retain it. Firm and unbending, they may be crushed, but not 
 subdued." But Philip had resolved as no sovereign ought to 
 resolve. ' In order to govern his subjects more easily, he would 
 crush, subvert, nay ruthlessly destroy, their strength, their spirit, 
 and their self-respect. It was Rehoboam over again— that 
 infatuated prince whom, so changed, the Florentine seer beheld 
 in the first cornice of the purgatorial mount : 
 " O Rehoboam ! here thy shape doth seem 
 Louring no more defiance ; but fear-smote, 
 With none to chase him, in his chanot whirled." 
 
 Could he but have assented to the counsel of the elders, 
 
no CONCILIATE OR CRUSH? 
 
 that with fair words, kindly spoken, he might mn the cordial 
 allegiance of his people, and make them, in no servile spirit, his 
 servants for ever ! — Errat longe, decides the Micio of Terence, 
 mea quidem sententia, 
 
 *' Qui imperium credat gravius esse aut stabilius, 
 Vi quod fit, quam illud, quod amicitia adjungitur." 
 
 Political observers have described as " astonishing " how much 
 a conciliatory manner can disarm, nay sometimes convert, 
 opponents, and preserve authority to resistance and dignity 
 to defeat. No one overcomes the difficulties in his way by 
 acridity and spleen. '' Hannibal, in spite of the legend, did 
 7tot dissolve the Alps by vinegar." The conciliatory negotiator 
 makes the adversary ashamed of violence. " The Greeks repre- 
 sent Persuasion as crowned " — so potent in families well ordered 
 is the one firm, sweet temper, which controls without seeming 
 to dictate. If a skilfuf orator desire to propitiate a hostile 
 assembly, though it be the " most unmanageable of all assem- 
 blies, an angry mob," he will certainly not begin by scolding 
 and railing against it. " Even in outlaws and thieves them- 
 selves, they who have undertaken the benevolent task of 
 reforming them bear general testimony in favour of the good 
 effects of praise, and the comparative nullity of scolding." 
 The advice is tendered in one of W. S. Landor's historical 
 dramas, not to decry the object of one's solicitude, but to try 
 what can be done rather by cherishing 
 
 " The good we see in it, and overlooking 
 What is less pleasant in the paths of life. 
 All have some virtue if we leave it them 
 In peace and quiet ; all may lose some part 
 By sifting too minutely bad and good." 
 
 Such the policy advocated and illustrated by Shelley in his 
 Revolt of Islam, where it is found to answer in the case of 
 " bloody bands " of lawless evil-doers : 
 
 " The sweet awe 
 Of such mild looks made their oM'n hearts grow mild, 
 And did with soft attraction ever draw 
 Their spirits to the love of freedom's equal law." 
 
MILD POLICY OR IMPOLICY 
 
 The opposite policy has its advocates too, — of the style of Mr. 
 Randolph Marcy's Rocky Mountain philosopher, who affirmed 
 that " the only way to treat Injuns [for instance] is to thrash 
 them well at first, and then the balance will sorter take to you 
 and behave themselves." So vAih General John Campbell and 
 his experience of the ways of the mid tribes of Khondistan : 
 like all savages, he says of them — and he is ready to say it of 
 all Orientals — they require to be treated with much more of 
 the fortiter in re than of the stiaviter in viodo : demonstrations 
 of physical force he found to be at once indispensable and 
 infallible. A type of such natures, so interpreted, might be 
 found in that historical elephant to whose \vald doings in 
 civilized society Mr. Charles Reade has devoted the best part 
 of a volume — a brute to be won by no amount of kindness, 
 and amenable only to harsh, cruel, painful discipline, as brutal 
 as herself. Her keeper's secret lay in simply "walking into her 
 with a pitchfork." The riddle-key of Mademoiselle Djek was 
 " steel." And our author assures us that there are no two ways 
 with wild beasts. " If there is a single white spot in your heart 
 — leave them; for your life will be in danger every moment. 
 If you can despise them, and keep the rod always in sight, 
 they are your humble servants ; nobody more so." Years of 
 experience with ]\Idlle. Djek show how lump-sugar was a 
 signal failure in the long run, while pitchfork held good. 
 The policy would seem to have thrived better in this case 
 than it did as appUed by Spenser's " unlovely Proteus " to fair 
 Florimell : 
 
 " For, when as neither gifts nor graces kind 
 Her constant mind could move at all he saw, 
 He thought her to compell by crueltie and awe." 
 
 A previous canto had intimated the same failure of ingratiatincr 
 overtures, and the consequent resort to harsher treatment : 
 '* But when all this he nothing saw prevaile, 
 With harder meanes he cast her to subdewe, 
 And with shar]De threates her often did assayle : 
 So thinking for to make her stubbome corage quayle." 
 
 Very manvais indeed is the siijet against whom Duke 
 
1 1 2 SUA VITV AND SEVERITY. 
 
 Vincentio in Shakspeare issues his edict, " Take him to prison, 
 
 officer ; 
 
 *' Correction and instruction must both work, 
 Ere this rude beast will profit." 
 
 To Cecil wrote Rokesby from Ireland, in the spring of 1570, 
 " So beastly are this people, that it is not lenity that will 
 win them. ... It must be fire and sword, the rod of God's 
 vengeance." Even thus outspake Miles Standish, the stalwart 
 Captain of Plymouth, muttering deep in his throat, for his voice 
 was husky with anger : 
 
 ' * ' Truly, the only tongue that is understood by a savage 
 Must be the tongue of fire that speaks from the mouth of the 
 
 cannon ! ' * 
 Whereupon answer'd and said the excellent Elder of Plymouth, 
 Somewhat amazed and alarm'd at this irreverent language : 
 ' Not so thought Saint Paul, nor yet the other Apostles ; 
 Not from the cannon's mouth were the tongues of fire they spake 
 
 with.'" 
 
 From one of the pilgrim fathers might have come, with con- 
 sistency, a sterner note — more consonant with the protest of 
 John Foster, gentle of heart though he was — against systematic 
 resort to the milder suasives of love, and disparagement of 
 threats and terrorism. He insisted that the larger proportion 
 of what in the Bible is said of sinners, and addressed to them, 
 " is plainly in the tone of menace and alarm. Strange if it had 
 been otherwise, when a righteous Governor was speaking to a 
 
 * Similar is the strain of the good archer, Gilbert Greenleaf, to De 
 Walton, the Governor of Castle Dangerous: "Your honour knows how 
 to deal with [the Scots of the border], — ride them strongly and rein them 
 hard, — you are not like those simple novices who imagine that all is to be 
 done by gentleness, and wish to parade themselves as courteous and generous 
 to those faithless mountaineers, who never, in the course of their lives, knew 
 any tincture either of courteousness or generosity." 
 
 Experts in travel, while regretting the something eminently unsatisfactory 
 in relations between Englishmen and Egyptians, assure us that kindness is 
 weakness in native eyes, on the banks of the Nile ; that an act of good- 
 nature is the signal for abuse ; and that the outward and visible sign by 
 which your Nile crew, for instance, recognize a master, are harshness and 
 sternness : if he push hardness to brutality, he will be the more respected 
 
APPEALS TO FEAR. 113 
 
 depraved, rebellious race." And he cites assentiiigly the testi- 
 mony of Dr. Watts, who, all mild and amiable as he was, and 
 delighting to dwell on the congenial topics, said deliberately, 
 that " of all the persons to whom his ministry had been effi- 
 cacious, only one had received the first effectual impressions 
 from the gentle and attractive aspects of religion ; all the rest 
 from the awful and alarming ones — the appeals to fear." And 
 this John Foster asserted to be all but universally the manner 
 of the Divine process of conversion. Compare with this the 
 tone of an eloquent and perhaps more conventionally orthodox 
 nonconformist of our day, when discoursing on God's love 
 as the attracting power — "with lovingkindness have I drawn 
 thee ; " for by terrifying man " you only keep him from God." 
 " Little is said in this book about penalties, about the fearful 
 apparatus of punishment in the futiire ; much is said about 
 love, about pardon, about salvation for the lost. Punishment 
 does little for men; love is the only conqueror of hearts." 
 Perhaps we might find a sort of middle term for both views, a 
 composition of the two conflicting forces, in what one of our 
 old Anglican divines has to say of the word of God as a spiritual 
 sword, with an irresistible edge entering the heart and affections, 
 — that it is not like the song of one that has a pleasant voice, 
 that only strikes the ear, gratifies the fancy, and courts those 
 affections which it should command ; but it comes with such 
 a searching, invincible quickness, such a spiritual keenness, that 
 it shall cut and make its way through the hardest heart, and 
 
 and arbitrary tyranny is the surest way to be beloved. Mr. Frederick Eden, 
 who essayed and who wrote The Nile without a Dragoman, blamed himself 
 at least as much as the Arab ingrates he had to do with, for " the foolish 
 fancy that gratitude may be found in Arab nature : " — it was confessedly his 
 own weakness — the foolish consideration he sometimes sh()wed them, in spite 
 of dear-bought experience — that had spoiled them so thoroughly. As one of 
 his reviewers said, Had he only treated them like dogs, they would probably 
 have served him better in the time of his necessity. 
 
 But there are more tnistful and enduring souls who would be for stigma- 
 tizing every such apologist for severity, in the style of Varney's apostrophe 
 to Tony Foster, — "Thou sullen, uninventive companion, who knowest no 
 mode of control, save downright brute force." 
 
 8 
 
IT4 POLICY OF CONCILIATION. 
 
 not find admittance by mere petition, or precarious suasion ; 
 for a sword never enters by entreaty. 
 
 When Don Carlos, in Schiller, pleads with his unrelenting 
 father in behalf of the revolted Netherlands, whither he would 
 fain be sent, with terms of conciliation, Philip's reply is, 
 
 " Terror alone can tie rebellion's hands : 
 Humanity were madness. Thy soft soul 
 Is tender, son ; they'll tremble at the Duke" 
 
 of Alva ; whose thorough policy of blood and iron was neverthe- 
 less a failure with the Dutch. Philip's ambassador in England, 
 Renard, as astute as his name might betoken him, counselled 
 his royal master as to the likeliest mode of mastering and 
 managing us refractory English. " Above all, there must be 
 no more of this barbarous precipitancy in putting heretics to 
 death. The people must be won from their errors by gentleness 
 and by better instruction. Except in cases of especial scandal, 
 the bishops must not be permitted to irritate them by cruelty." 
 So Maitland advised Leicester, for the hearing of Elizabeth, 
 that with the Scots force would accomplish nothing, whereas by 
 conciliating treaties she might bring all parties to accord, pacify 
 the country, and deserve and win the gratitude of every class. 
 Mr. Froude begins his chapter on the Spanish Treaty (1573-77) 
 with some remarks on Elizabeth's disposition to compromise, 
 and her extreme objection to severity or coercion, which were 
 eminently suited to conciliate defeated enemies ; and he goes 
 on to say of her that, whether from policy, or because, like 
 Hamlet, she " lacked gall," she never remembered an injury. 
 She fought with treason, he adds, by being blind to it, and made 
 men loyal in spite of themselves by persistently trusting them. 
 
 Masters of the art of education, and head-masters in the 
 public school practice of it, have found success in managing 
 the young by showing confidence in them, and trusting to their 
 implied honour. By a sort of imputed righteousness they have 
 gained their purpose. Dr. Arnold was the great practitioner on 
 this method. He took for granted the boys were honourable j 
 and they in time came to see and to say that it was a shame 
 
TRUSTY EEC A USE TRUSTED. 115 
 
 to deceive him, or to take advantage of the trust he placed 
 in their word. Instead of suspecting, he confided. " Call 
 a man a thief, and he'll steal ;" " Give a dog a bad name, and 
 he'll bite you ; " and a commentator on these saws goes on to 
 add, "Tell a child that he is 'a member of Christ, a child of 
 God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven,' and he feels, 
 to say the least, civilly disposed towards religion ; " whereas 
 to be told that he is under God's wrath and curse, makes 
 his religious associations less acceptable — especially if he has 
 the lesson whipped into him, or has to go to bed without his 
 supper for not learning it by heart and repeating it offhand. 
 William Forsyth showed his acquaintance with human nature, 
 and boys' nature, when he thus dealt with the Cromarty lads 
 who were brought before him charged A\dth stealing green-peas 
 out of a field. If they did it again, he told them, they were 
 safe to be locked up in the Tolbooth for a fortnight ; but 
 meanwhile, to keep them honest, he would sow a field of peas 
 himself, to which he would make them all heartily welcome. 
 Accordingly, next season the field was sown, and there could 
 not be a more exposed locality. Such, however, testifies a 
 Cromarty man, Hugh Miller, was the appreciative spirit of the 
 lads, that not one pod of Mr. Forsyth's peas was touched. As 
 with a recorded experience of Charles Lamb's at Christ Hospital, 
 when, the gates being for once left without watchers, the whole 
 body of that great school, with one or two graceless exceptions, 
 kept rigorously within their bounds, by a voluntary self-imprison- 
 ment — the exceptions being consigned to infamy and repro- 
 bation : " so much natural government have gratitude and the 
 principles of reverence and love." As with the Thicket Street 
 girl Nixy, in an American story, a crisis in whose life occurred 
 when a ''real lady" professed readiness to take her at her word, 
 and to believe whatever she deliberately said. " Nixy under- 
 stood, at least, that she was trusted." And partly from a keen 
 sense of policy, partly from a genuine though crude sense of 
 honour, she from that moment decided, in her own words, to 
 " go it honest" with her benefactress. So again with the thievish 
 negro children in one of Mrs. Stowe's tales, who were cured by 
 
ii6 TRUSTY BECAUSE TRUSTED. 
 
 being formally and unconditionally trusted — everything in the 
 house left unlocked, by way of experiment, and no watching 
 allowed. All the dainties were left untouched after that : it was 
 a taste of a new kind of pleasure — the novelty of being trusted. 
 The principle is pretty much the same with that which led 
 Chatham to show confidence in the Highlanders in 1757. As 
 he told the House of Lords, twenty years later: "I remember 
 how I employed the very rebels in the service and defence of 
 their country. They were reclaimed by this means ; they fought 
 our battles ; they cheerfully bled in defence of those liberties 
 which they had attempted to overthrow but a few years before." 
 So at Naples in i860, when the Camorristi troubles had come 
 to a head, Liborio Romano, the Minister of PoHce, determined 
 to imitate Lamartine's experiment of the Garde Mobile, and 
 make use of the organization of the Camorra for the defence 
 of the city : it was made to take the place of the police ; and 
 the new civic force not only conducted itself well, but with 
 honesty, and maintained the security of life and property in the 
 streets. The principle finds poetical exposition and expression 
 in various pages of Mr. Coventry Patmore's love poems. For 
 instance : 
 
 " The generous credit he accords 
 
 To all the signs of good in her 
 Redeems itself ; his praiseful words 
 
 The virtues they impute confer." 
 
 Long afterwards we come upon this bit of sage counsel from 
 the Dean, to quite the same purpose : 
 
 " Her strength is your esteem ; beware 
 Of finding fault ; her will's unnerved 
 By blame ; from you 'twould be despair ; 
 
 But praise that is not quite deserved 
 Will all her noble nature move 
 To make your utmost wishes true." 
 
 Long before we had had this picture of the Dean's own wife, 
 dead and gone now : 
 
 " Her life, all honour, observed, with awe 
 Which cross experience could not mar, 
 The fiction of the Christian law 
 That all men honourable are ; 
 
POLICY OF CONCILIA TION. 1 17 
 
 And so her smile at once conferr'd 
 
 High flattery and benign reproof; 
 And I, a rude boy, strangely stirr'd, 
 
 Grew courtly in my own behoof." 
 
 Napoleon at St. Helena, discoursing on human weakness of 
 character and principle, and on the best way of dealing with it, 
 and, if possible, of raising and strengthening it, said that at any 
 rate the worst way is to treat it harshly and overwhelm it with 
 contempt. He was for persuading it to account itself better 
 than it really is, if all the good of which it is capable is to be 
 obtained from it. Among soldiers, tell the cowardly they are 
 brave fellows, and you go the way to make them so. And after 
 the same sort, he argued, should men in general be treated, 
 imputing to them the good qualities to which you would train 
 them — et leur supposer les vertus qu'on vent leur inspirer. 
 
 But to revert, before closing this chapter, to the subject of 
 State policy in adopting gentleness rather than defiant rigour 
 and menace as a rule of action.''' One other illustration from 
 history may here be offered. The British ambassador (Lord 
 Bristol) at the court of Madrid under Charles HI., wrote home 
 to Mr. Pitt this character of that mild and well-intentioned 
 monarch : " He ever prefers carrying a point by gentle means. 
 . . . Yet with the greatest air of gentleness, he keeps his 
 Ministers and attendants in the utmost awe." In Philip van 
 Artevelde, Lestovet urges Burgundy to control by conciliation ; 
 assuring him that not only 
 
 " His gi-ace of Bourbon, but full many lords 
 Who bear a part against you in the council, 
 Would yield upon a gentle provocation, 
 That stiffen with a rougher. " 
 
 * A noteworthy experimentalist in both directions was Alexander Pope's 
 namesake and good friend, the minister of Reay, who used to drive his 
 graceless parishioners to church with a stick when he found them engaged 
 on Sundays at outdoor games ; but who also used to make all the "rough 
 characters " in his parish elders of the kirk, so that, invested with eccle- 
 siastical dignity and responsibility, they might be shamed out of their 
 misdoings. 
 
ii8 POLICY OF CONCILIATION. 
 
 To Orlando, rushing in upon the company with his sword 
 drawn, and his style menacing and forbidding, Arden's natu- 
 ralized Duke addresses the very temperate and successful 
 remonstrance, 
 
 " What would you have ? Your gentleness shall force, 
 More than your force move us to gentleness. " 
 
 Blushing, Orlando puts by his sword, and prays them to let 
 gentleness his strong enforcement be. In Timon of Athens the 
 senators tell besieging Alcibiades that what he wills, he rather 
 shall enforce it with his smile, than hew to't with his sword. 
 Speaking for her sex at large, though by an equestrian simile, 
 H-ermione assures Leontes, in A Wintei^s Tale, 
 
 "You may ride us, 
 
 With one soft kiss, a thousand furlongs, ere 
 
 With spur w^e heat an acre. " 
 
 The rough old king in the Princess thinks otherwise of the sex ; 
 " Look you, sir ! Man is the hunter : woman is his game. . . . 
 They love us for it, and we ride them down." The king's son 
 had not spoken to his father's mind when he spoke out his 
 preference for a policy of conciliation : " More soluble is this 
 knot by gentleness than war. I want her love," — the Princess's, 
 to wit ; and his sire thought he went the wrong way to get 
 what he wanted. Take as another type of the rougher sort, 
 one of the brothers in Crabbe's Family of Love : 
 
 *' For lenient measures James had no regard — 
 * Hardship,' he said, ' must work upon the hard : 
 Labour and chains such desperate men require ; 
 To soften iron you must use the fire.' " 
 
 The education of a poor, perplexed, and recalcitrant boy in the 
 same tale is pertinent to our subject : 
 
 " Thus fed and beaten, Tom was taught to pray 
 
 For his true friends : ' But who,' said he, ' are they ?' 
 
 By nature kind, when kindly used, the boy 
 
 Hail'd the strange good with tears of love and joy ; 
 
 But, roughly used, he felt his bosom burn 
 
 With wrath he dared not on his uncles turn : 
 
 So with indignant spirit, still and strong, 
 
 He nursed the vengeance, and e-ndured the wrong." 
 
HAD ZIMRI PEACE ? 1 19 
 
 XV. 
 
 ZIMRFS END. 
 I Kings xvi. 18. 
 
 HAD Zimri peace, who slew his master?* Jezebel from 
 the window cried that question to Jehu. But Jehu 
 was not the man to be daunted by such questioning. Not 
 long afterwards we hear him saying to all the people, " Behold, 
 I conspired against my master, and slew him," — and a good 
 thing too, he seems to say, and to wish them to join him in 
 saying. He hoped for another sort of career than that of 
 Zimri, and another sort of ending to it. Zimri was servant 
 and captain under Elah, king of Israel, and conspired against 
 him as he was in Tirzah, drinking himself drunk in the house 
 of his steward. " And Zimri went in and smote him, and killed 
 him," and reigned in his stead. And all the house of Elah he 
 destroyed. But there was to be nothing of prosperity or peace 
 for Zimri. For all Israel made Omri, the captain of the host, 
 king over Israel that day in the camp ; and Omri went up, and 
 all Israel ^\^th him, and besieged Tirzah. " And it came to 
 pass, when Zimri saw that the city was taken, that he went into 
 the palace of the king's house, and burnt the king's house over 
 him with fire, and died." 
 
 During the first period of the Civil Wars of Rome, Judacilius, 
 finding that he could hold Asculum no longer, raised a funeral 
 
 * Spenser was sounding the depths of early English history when he 
 told how 
 
 " 'gan Carausius tjTannize anew, — 
 But hirfAllectus treacherously slew, 
 And tooke on him the robe of emperoure ; 
 Nath'lesse the same enjoyed but short happy howre. 
 For Asclepiodate him overcame. 
 And left inglorious on the vanquisht playne. 
 Without or robe or rag to hide his shame ; 
 And afterwards he in his stead did raigne." 
 
 Had Zimri peace ? had Allectus ? To Don Carlos in Schiller is pointed 
 the like moral when Lerma warns him, " Undertake no bloody deed against 
 your father, Prince ! " 
 
 " Philip compell'd his father to yield up 
 The throne to him ; and this same Philip now 
 Trembles at his own son. ' 
 
ZIMRPS END. 
 
 pile in sight of his banqueting-hall, and after a sumptuous 
 entertainment given to his friends, drained a poisoned cup of 
 wine to its dregs, ascended the pile, and bade his guests set 
 fire to it. At the close of the siege of Masada, we find Eleazar, 
 worthy descendant of Judas the Galilean, proposing to his fol- 
 lowers to set the city on fire, and perish together, with their 
 wives unviolated, their children free from captivity, on that 
 noble funeral pile. And stirring is the story of their resolute 
 fulfilment of the design — the multitude vying with each other 
 in eagerness to begin on the instant the work of self-devotion, 
 and loyally carrying out the internecine plan, until there was 
 a last man left, who, after he had carefully searched whether 
 there was any more work for him to do, seized a lighted brand, 
 set fire to the palace, and then, with unflinching hand, drove 
 the sword to his own heart. 
 
 At the siege by Cimon of Eion in Thrace, garrisoned under 
 a Persian noble, the commandant collected his treasure on a 
 pile of wood, which mounting with his slaves, women, and 
 children, he set fire to it — a mode of suicide then accepted as 
 orthodox in the East. Plutarch gives in detail, in his Life of 
 Alexander, the characteristic circumstances of the death of 
 Callanus — how he caused his funeral pile to be erected, ap- 
 proached it on horseback, poured the libations on himself, and 
 taking leave of the Macedonians, desired them to spend the 
 day in jolHty and drinking with the king — then stretched himself 
 on the pile, and welcomed the flames. 
 
 In Trajan's time, the final defeat of the Dacians was effected 
 when the hill fort in which resided their cl^eftain, Decebalus, 
 was stormed after a desperate resistance : Decebalus fell on his 
 own sword amidst the ruins of his capital, and the nobles of 
 the conquered land followed the example of their sovereign, 
 first firing their houses, and then handing round the poisoned 
 bowl.* 
 
 * "Such is the scene represented on the column at Rome, which still 
 records in monumental sculpture the chief features of this memorable 
 struggle." — Merivale, History of the Ko7nans under the Empire, vol. vii., 
 P- 239- 
 
ZIMRI S END. 
 
 In the days of the massacre of the Jews in York, a number 
 of the besieged, at the bidding of their Rabbi, collected their 
 most precious effects, burned all that was combustible, and 
 buried the rest ; then set fire to the castle in many places, cut 
 the throats of their wives and children, and, that done, their 
 own. 
 
 Whatever the century in which such acts occur, it may seem 
 to be so far safe from Mr. Carlyle's derision or disdain of the 
 eighteenth, which to him has nothing grand in it, except what 
 he calls that grand universal Suicide, named French Revolution, 
 by which it terminated " its otherwise worthless existence \\ith 
 at least one worthy act; — setting fire to its old home and 
 self; and going up in flames and volcanic explosions, in a truly 
 memorable and important manner." 
 
 But to go on with our historical illustrations and parallels. 
 At the battle of Chalons, Attila had provided for the worst, by 
 collecting into a funeral pile the saddles and rich furniture of 
 the cavalry — that magnanimous barbarian having resolved, if 
 his entrenchments should be forced, to rush headlong into the 
 flames, and so deprive his enemies of the glory which they 
 might have acquired by the death or captivity of Attila. Both 
 the friends and the enemies of Chosroes were persuaded of his 
 intention to bury himself under the ruins of his city and palace 
 of Dastagerd. But he disappointed them all, and proved how 
 much there was of a difference in him, not however for the 
 
 better, from 
 
 "ces rois d' Assyria 
 Qui trainaient au tombeau femmes, enfans, patrie, 
 
 Et ne savaient pas mourir seuls : 
 Qui jetaient au bucher, avant que d'y descendre, 
 Famille, amis, coursiers, tresors reduits en cendre, 
 Espoir ou souvenirs de leurs jours plus heureux, 
 Et livrant leur empire et leurs dieux a la flamme, 
 Auraient voulu qu'aussi I'univers n'eut qu'une ame 
 
 Pour que tout mourut avec eux ! " * 
 
 * In Mr. Wilkie Collins's Antonina^ or, The Fall of Rome, Vetranio 
 promises himself and his guests that the last banquet given in Rome, ere 
 the city is annihilated, shall be his. The Goths and the famine shall have 
 
122 SUICIDAL HOLOCAUST. 
 
 The Veiled Prophet, Hakem Ben Haschem, besieged in 
 Nekhscheb, and reduced to despair, is said to have poisoned 
 his seides at a banquet, and "exploded" himself and his 
 belongings in a cellar filled with combustibles — from which 
 general explosion his horses, and one concubine out of the 
 many, managed somehow to escape. In an imaginary con- 
 versation between Metellus and Marius, Landor pictures with 
 telling suggestiveness the voluntary holocaust of the Numan- 
 tians — the assembled inhabitants, about the altar ? no, upon it : 
 " It blazed under them and over them and round about them." 
 The catastrophe of the Siege of Corinth is told in Byron's most 
 vigorous manner, — Minotti's last and stern resource, — and old 
 Minotti's was the hand to fire the train. 'Tis fired : 
 
 " Spire, vaults, the shrine, the spoil, the slain, 
 The turban'd victors, the Christian band, 
 All that living or dead remain, 
 Hurl'd on high with the shiver'd fane, 
 In one wild roar expii-ed ! " 
 
 With equal resolve perished the Dutch Vice-Admiral Klaas- 
 zoon, in 1606, after drifting about for two whole days in his 
 crippled ship. With his surviving oificers and men he knelt 
 upon the deck, and prayed a last prayer ; with his own hand 
 he then lighted the powder magazine, and the ship was blown 
 into the air. 
 
 In the Guadaloupe revolt of 1801, Delgrasse blew himself 
 up, with three hundred of his followers, rather than surrender 
 to the enemy. In 1808, the Grand Vizier Bairakdar, defeated 
 by the Janissaries, himself set fire to a powder magazine, 
 
 no part in his death. Pleasure shall preside at his last moments, as over 
 his whole previous life. " I will die like Sardanapalus, with my loves and 
 my treasures around me ; and the last of my guests who remains proof 
 against our festivity, shall set fire to my palace, as the kingly Assyrian 
 set fire to his." He makes his last oration as the host of the Banquet of 
 Famine, and demands who would sink ignobly beneath the slow superiority 
 of famine, or perish under the quickly-glancing steel of the barbarian con- 
 queror's sword, when such a death is offered to the choice — when wine 
 flows bright, to drown sensation in oblivion, and a palace and its treasures 
 furnish alike the scene of the revel and the radiant funeral pile. 
 
EXIT SARDANAPALUS. 123 
 
 which he had provided as a last resource against his enemies, 
 and, with his whole household, was blown into the air. Ali 
 Pacha, in 1822, found or meant to find his last resource in 
 a tower three storeys in height — the uppermost one housing 
 himself, his harem, and fifty armed followers — the second, his 
 treasures — and the loAvest forming a powder magazine, at the 
 door of which a trusty guardian was stationed, with a lighted 
 match in his hand. The Pacha, if it came to the worst, would 
 perish en roi : 
 
 " Et s'il me faut tomber, eh bien ! tombant en roi,* 
 Que toute ma maison s'engloutisse avec moi ! " 
 
 A salient contrast we see between the great Mahmoud who 
 first styled himself Sultan, and the voluptuary Sardanapalus, in 
 the recorded close of their respective lives, so far as the treat- 
 ment of their treasures is concerned ; — Mahmoud ordering all 
 his costliest apparel, and his vessels of silver and gold, and his 
 pearls and precious stones, the inestimable spoils of the East 
 to be displayed before him : to what end ? that he might weep 
 like a child at having to die and leave them ; — Sardanapalus 
 collecting his, to be consumed with himself and his household, 
 in one fiery mass : he would have one banquet more, and there 
 an end : the banquet over, he would rejoin his fathers, with what 
 was left of their squandered treasures : 
 
 ** And the light of this 
 Most royal of funereal pyres shall be 
 
 * So we read of Arbaces the Egyptian: "He resolved to. crowd, 
 monarch-like, on his funeral pyre, all that his soul held most dear." — 
 Last Days of Pompeii, bk. ii., ch. viii. The penultimate chapter of John 
 Marchmonfs Legacy is entitled "A Modern Sardanapalus;" and it tells 
 how Paul Marchmont, having systematically lived for a year past like that 
 Assyrian prince, resolves to die like him ; and heaps together accordingly 
 all his treasures of art. " I will die like Sardanapalus. The King Arbaces 
 shall never rest in the palace I have beautified. 
 
 " Now order here 
 
 Fagots, pine-nuts, and wither'd leaves, and such 
 
 Things as catch fire with one sole spark . . . 
 
 Bring cedar, too, and precious drugs and spices, 
 
 And mighty planks, to nourish a tall pile ; 
 
 Bring frankincense and myrrh too, for t 
 
 For a great sacrifice I build the pyre." 
 
124 AHAES GREED FOR NABOTH'S VINEYARD. 
 
 Not a mere pillar form'd of cloud and flame, 
 A beacon in the horizon for a day, 
 And then a mount of ashes, but a light 
 To lesson ages, rebel nations, and 
 
 Voluptuous princes 
 
 A problem few dare imitate, and none 
 Despise — but, it may be, avoid the life 
 Which led to such a consummation." 
 
 XVI. 
 
 AHAB'S APPETITE; WHY LOST, AND HOW RECOVERED. 
 I Kings xxi. 4—7. 
 
 KING Ahab set his heart upon Naboth's vineyard, to have 
 and to hold. He had taken a fancy to it, for a garden 
 of herbs, because it was near his house. And the royal fancy 
 must be indulged, or some one would suffer, — perhaps more 
 than one, first and last. Ahab was himself the first to suffer. 
 His fancy was made known to Naboth the Jezreelite, and that 
 proprietor declined to part with his possession ; even the offer 
 of a better vineyard in place of it, if he preferred that to hard 
 cash, failed to induce compliance on Naboth's part; for the 
 Jezreelite cherished his vineyard as the heritage of his house, 
 and would come to no terms with the king for parting with a 
 plot of ground he held so dear. It was a matter of religion 
 with him to keep in the family what had been theirs for gene- 
 rations past. He would think foul scorn of himself to traffic in 
 a matter of sentiment, a point of honour. All that was high- 
 minded and honourable within him revolted at the bare notion. 
 " The Lord forbid it me, that I should give the inheritance of 
 my fathers unto thee." And Ahab came into his house heavy 
 and displeased because of the word which Naboth the Jezreelite 
 had spoken unto him ; and he laid him down upon his bed, 
 and turned away his face, and would eat no bread. And 
 Jezebel his wife came to him, and said unto him, " Why is thy 
 spirit so sad, that thou eatest no bread ? " And he told her 
 
APPETITE IN ADVERSITY 
 
 what he had asked of Naboth, and what the bluff answer had 
 been. Cur qiiis non prandeat, hoc est. He had no stomach for 
 victuals, but went sulky to bed. The affront rankled in the 
 moody monarch. His appetite was so great for what was not 
 his own, that it cost him his appetite for what was. Jezebel 
 was the man of the family,* and she treated her lord and 
 
 * And as such she would have no sympathy with the approved style of 
 the sex, in modem verse and fiction at least, in marvelling at male powers 
 of appetite under adverse conditions. Miss Marjoribanks ordered tea for 
 her father, the Doctor, instead of dinner, for which she imagined he could 
 have little appetite, on the day of their common loss ; but the Doctor ran^ 
 the bell violently when he saw the tea-service, and desired its instant 
 removal, and required to be told at once when dinner was ready. " On the 
 whole, master stood lessened in the eyes of all the household by his ability 
 to eat his dinner, and his resentment at having his habitudes disturbed 
 ' Them men would eat and drink if we was all in our graves, ' said the 
 indignant cook, who indeed had a real grievance." Mrs. Jemingham jots 
 down in her journal the fact that whereas hecself too excited far to eat her 
 "John would eat or well or ill (Men never seem to turn from meat. 
 Their dinner never comes amiss)." 
 
 Gifted Hopkins's mother, fearmg he might pine away in his disappointment 
 solicited his appetite \\dth her choicest appliances — but his manner of dis * 
 posing of these satisfied her there was no immediate cause of alarm. " II 
 dit qu'il ne veut pas manger " is the answer le Pere Grandet gets from 
 his womankind when he asks at dinner-time after the nephew suddenly 
 fatherless. "Bah! il ne pleurera pas toujours," rejoins the old hunks • 
 "La faim chasse le loup hors du bois." The similarly bereaved sisters' 
 in Cooper, wept instead of eating, while the Deerslayer "gave proof of 
 possessing one material requisite of a good soldier— that of presenting his 
 appetite in the midst of the most alarming and embarrassing circumstances." 
 So again one of Marryat's naval heroes, under a corresponding loss, feelsa 
 positive interest in the clock's notification of dinner-time. " That he could 
 eat his dinner was certain, and he scorned to pretend to feel what he did 
 not." " Goldery, tu penserais a manger le jour de la mort de ton pere !-" 
 exclaims Goldery's master, and the man is not a whit ashamed to avow it 
 People must eat and drink even when the grim monarch is in the house as 
 Mr. TroUope observes— and it is held to be a relief when they first dare to 
 do so with some attention to the comforts which are ordinarily so important 
 to them. "For themselves alone women seldom care to exercise much 
 trouble in this direction ; but the presence of a man at once excuses and 
 renders necessary the ceremony of a dinner." "Come, come, my lad " 
 urges the good-natured baronet in Tylney Hall, as he puts a cold pigeon on 
 
126 ARAB'S APPETITE; WHY LOST, 
 
 master, in his weaker than weak womanish whinings, as a 
 child — a child that cries for the moon. He should have his 
 fancy. The toy should be his, and at once ; so let him take 
 his food again as usual. Nay, let him make an extra meal of 
 it — a festive one, sparing not the good wine. She would make 
 it all right for him. Let him leave it to her. She would give 
 him the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite. 
 
 Ahab, poor creature, had given up as soon as the sturdy 
 Jezreelite had said him nay. The almost vehement scouting 
 of his proposal by Naboth, had made the king think it a hope- 
 less case. Well might one with Jezebel's instincts of domi- 
 nation utter the contemptuous query, " Dost thou now govern 
 the kingdom of Israel ? " He might reign, but that was not 
 governing; and Jezebel had no predilection for that modern 
 figment of constitutional kingship, where his majesty regne mats 
 ne gouverne pas. Well ; she would give him the vineyard he 
 thought to have had for the asking. His it should be, without 
 more ado. Never mind as to the means ; that was her business. 
 He had found Naboth recalcitrant, refractory, uncompromising ; 
 and perhaps he doubted his wife's succeeding much better, 
 
 his nephew's plate at breakfast ; '* supposing your poor father to be look- 
 ing down from above at this moment, he wouldn't object to our taking our 
 meals." There is murder in this story, and a later chapter tells how the 
 Justice returned to the Hall with his hunger much sharpened by the exami- 
 nation of a batch of suspected persons, — a process which took off the edge 
 of their stomachs in the same proportion, so that they went back to durance 
 with little more appetite than Wordsworth's cattle, forty of which ate like 
 only one. 
 
 When Queen Mary was captured, after the battle of Carberry Hill, a 
 lodging had been prepared for her at the Provost's house, to which she was 
 forced along past Kirk o' Field, which still lay charred in ruins ; and Mr. 
 Froude relates that ' ' supper was on the table ; but she was one of those 
 high-blooded people, whose bodies do not ask attention when the soul is 
 sick." Not that she shared the weakness of Archie Lovell's stepmother, in 
 Mrs. Edwardes' fiction, whom we discover in the act, when surprised by a 
 visitor, of hurriedly putting out of sight the remains of an excellent high tea 
 — cold chicken bones, salad reliques, remnants of cake, butter, and marma- 
 lade — for "nothing exasperated Bettina so much as the imputation of being 
 able to swallow food when she was alone or in adversity." When trouble 
 
AND HO W RECO VERED. 127 
 
 woman of business though she was. Methinks the lady doth 
 protest too much ? Nay, but she'll keep her word. 
 
 If a man of an unbounded stomach in one sense, alie7ii 
 appetefis, this poor creature of a king had a crazy enough 
 stomach in another sense — one easily deranged, one quickly 
 put out of working order ; cross his whim, and the tone of his 
 stomach was gone. Whatever he took to heart, it seems, told 
 on his stomach. To be vexed was to lose his appetite. Like 
 the great English Cardinal that Shakspeare drew, King Ahab 
 seems to have been " of an unbounded stomach ; " but cross 
 him in his cravings, gainsay his greed, and straightway you sent 
 him moping to bed, with no stomach at all. 
 
 How he recovered it, was by severely simple means; for 
 Jezebel set to work at once, and by trumping up a malicious 
 and foundationless charge against Naboth, made a summary 
 end of him, and so made over his coveted vineyard to the 
 king. When did ever unscrupulous might fail of a pretext, 
 plausible or otherA\dse, against unprotected right ? It is the 
 old story of the wolf and the lamb ; " la raison du plus fort est 
 toujours la meilleure " — and short work the wolf makes of the 
 lamb, "sans autre forme de proces." Another of La Fontaine's 
 fables contains a line still more applicable to poor incriminated 
 Naboth : On resolui sa mort, fiit-il. -coupable ou iion. As 
 
 of the heart overtakes Patty Maynard, in Miss Thackeray's new reading 
 or adaptation oi Little Red Riding Hood, her mother silently gives her at 
 tea-time her cupful of tea, and cuts her bx-ead-and-butter, and puts liberal 
 helpings' of jam and fruit before her ; and Patty eats her bread and jam in 
 sorrowful silence. There is no great harm done, Mrs. Maynard thinks, as 
 she keeps her daughter supplied ; she has herself been so disturbed and 
 overcome by the stormy events of the day that she cannot eat. "She 
 made the mistake that many elders have made before her : they mistake 
 physical for mental disturbance ; poor well-hacked bodies that have been 
 jolted, shaken, patched and mended, and strained in half a dozen places, 
 are easily affected by the passing jars of the moment : they suffer and 
 lose their appetite, and get aches directly which take away much sense of 
 the mental inquietude which brought the disturbance about." But young 
 healthy creatures like Patty, her author argues, can eat a good dinner and 
 feel a keen pang and hide it, and chatter on scarcely conscious of their 
 heroism. 
 
128 HOW JEZEBEL GOT RID OF NABOTH. 
 
 Bassanio says, "It must appear that malice bears down truth." 
 Accepted as an adage is the saying of Syrus, Malefacere qui 
 vult, niisquam non caiisam inveniet. A Spanish proverb suggests 
 to him that has a mind to quarrel with his wife, to bid her 
 bring water to him in the sunshine — a very fair quarrel may be 
 picked up about the motes in the clearest water. Charles de 
 Bernard nothing exaggerates when he says, " Les duellistes qui 
 ont envie d'une querelle savent fort bien se faire coudoyer ou 
 marcher sur le pied. Un pretexte ! tu n'as done jamais lu la 
 fable du loup et de I'agneau ? " Wretch ! cried the reign of 
 terrorists to the mild and benign Archbishop of Aries, "you 
 shed the blood of the patriots." " I never injured a human 
 being," replied the prelate. " Then I will despatch you," was 
 the very practical logic of a rough-and-ready general practi- 
 tioner. Buffon fils explained to the Revolutionary Tribunal 
 that he could not have conspired as they alleged — he could 
 prove an alibi. " No matter," said Fouquier-Tinville, " you 
 have conspired ^^w^where " — and the guillotine was the penalty. 
 Afais que ne proiive-t-on pas quand on est le plus fo7't2 is a line 
 by Berchoux that Father Prout admired so much, one is sur- 
 prised he could refrain from translating it. Victor Hugo tells 
 us, 
 
 " J'ai vu le loup mangeant I'agneau, dire : II m'a nui ! " 
 
 and another pregnant line of his may be applied : 
 
 " Le fer dit que le sang qui jaillit, se revoke." 
 
 In one of his Odes, Dryden with too much reason affirms 
 that "conquerors will never want pretence, when armed, to 
 justify the offence." Nor is a couplet in his Absalom and 
 Achitophel altogether wide of the mark : 
 
 "And when to sin our biassed nature leans, 
 The careful devil is still at hand with means," 
 
 such as false witnesses to incriminate Naboth, and stalwart 
 stone-throwers to stone him to death. An American historian 
 significantly remarks of the early accusations against the 
 Indians, that informers abounded where tale-bearing met with 
 
SHAMELESS PRETEXTS OF SPOLIATION. 129 
 
 countenance and reward; and the sword was readily un- 
 sheathed when its success was certain, and it carved out 
 empire. In his Histoire de Languedoc, Vaissette says of the 
 treaty of cession to the King of France, that it is clear the 
 chief instigators of the war against Raymond thought very 
 much less about his cathoHcity, than about the readiest mode 
 of ousting him from his dominions and securing the spoil. 
 Cortez solemnly protested that his prime motive in the expedi- 
 tion he directed was a desire to wean the natives from their 
 idolatry. For the seizure of the hospitable monarch, Montezuma, 
 a plausible pretext was found — the most barefaced action, as 
 Mr. Prescott observes, seeking to veil itself under some show 
 of decency. So again in the history of Peru : religion furnished 
 a plausible pretext for incessant aggression, and disguised the 
 lust of conquest in the Incas, probably from their own eyes. 
 The Incas, in their turn, were similarly treated by Pizarro, 
 whose twelve charges against them, drawn up in the form of 
 interrogatories, " are so absurd, that they might well provoke a 
 smile, did they not excite a deeper feeling : "' — the mere specifi- 
 cation of the articles must have sufficed to show that the doom 
 of the Incas was already sealed. 
 
 The historian last quoted remarks elsewhere of the treaty 
 of Cambray, that, in that corrupt age, the more flagitious 
 the meditated enterprise, the deeper was the veil of hypocrisy 
 thrown over it. Ferdinand's conquest of Navarre was a " bold 
 unblushing usurpation rendered more odious by the mask of 
 religious hypocrisy." Mr. Carlyle's second act or epoch of 
 the Thirty Years' War is concerned ^\'ith the Kaiser's zeal 
 in getting Germany ready for conversion to orthodoxy : " All 
 Europe shall become Papist again, by the heFp of God and 
 the devil." So the Kaiser, on hardly any pretext, seized 
 Mecklenburg ; and that done, seized Pommern, stirring up Max 
 of Bavaria to make some idle pretence to it. Bolingbroke dis- 
 misses as '^ ridiculous " the various pretences that France took 
 for attacking the states of the Low Countries : " they imposed 
 on no one ; and the true object of Louis the Fourteenth was 
 manifest to all." The Grand Monarque seized into his own 
 
 9 
 
I30 AHAB'S APPETITE J WHY LOST, 
 
 hands, under the notion of dependencies and the pretence of 
 reunions, whatever towns or districts of country tempted his 
 ambition, or suited his conveniency. " Pretexts for a quarrel 
 were easily found," writes Macaulay, in his story of the march 
 of Surajah Dowlah with a great army against Fort William. 
 But pretexts were equally abundant on the other side ; and in 
 the case of Clive's successor, a pretext was the last thing that 
 Warren Hastings was ever likely to want. Homer Wilbur, in 
 his Biglow annotations, asks, "When hath Satan been to seek for 
 attorneys ? " in reference to those of his compatriots who have 
 maintained that their inroad upon Mexico was undertaken, not 
 so much for the avenging of any national quarrel, as for the 
 spreading of free institutions and of Protestantism. Very old 
 indeed is the divinity that inspired the words metrically done 
 to order by Spenser : 
 
 " For never wight so evill did or thought, 
 But would some rightfull cause pretend, though rightly nought." 
 
 But it is more than time to retrace these wandering steps of 
 ours to their starting-point in Naboth's vineyard. 
 
 Readers of Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great will not 
 have forgotten the Potsdam miller, who had in him the sturdy 
 spirit of Naboth, happily free as the Prussian king was from 
 Ahab's repining wretchedness. It was while Sans-Souci was 
 getting built that the celebrated affair occurred of this Potsdam 
 miller, and his obstinate windmill, which still grinds on its 
 knoll in those localities, and would not, at any price, become 
 part of the King's Gardens. "Not at any price?" said the 
 King's agent : " cannot the King take it from you for nothing, 
 if he chose ? "* " Haven't we the Kammergericht at Berlin ! " 
 answered the miller. To Frederick's great delight, his EngHsh 
 historian accords ; for the miller's stout assertion of his rights, 
 and hearty reHance on the means of enforcing them, may have 
 rendered the mill itself a kind of ornament to the royal Gardens 
 from that time forth.* 
 
 * One of Sir Walter's best historical fictions represents our King James 
 the First urging on Lord Huntinglen theexpediency of young NigelV assent 
 
AND HOW RECOVERED. 131 
 
 Naboth's point-blank rejection of the king's advances had 
 sent Ahab home savagely in the sulks. To bed he went 
 straightway, supperless and spiritless. In bed he brooded on 
 his bitter mortification. The Jezreelite had miserably humbled 
 the miserable man, and for the time there was neither relish 
 nor nutriment in food left to him. How he hated that dogged 
 stickler for private rights — how gladly would he be revenged 
 upon him, if only he knew how ! 
 
 "Had all his hairs been lives, my great revenge 
 Had stomach for them all," — 
 
 the more so because stomach for daily food was lost by the 
 Jezreelite's refusal. But Jezebel had made all things smooth 
 again ; Ahab was avenged ] the coveted vineyard was his, with 
 none to gainsay, for the one gainsayer was disposed of, stoned 
 to death ; and meet and right it now was that the king should 
 comply with her behests, '' Arise, and eat bread, and let thine 
 heart be merry;" for the royal whim was gratified to the full. 
 It was meet that he should make merry and be glad ; for his 
 dead interest in life was alive again, and his lost appetite was 
 found. 
 
 to the alienation of his family estate : ' ' Let the land gang, man, let the 
 land gang ; Steenie [Buckingham] has the promise of it from om- Scottish 
 Chancellor — it is the best hunting-ground in Scotland — and Baby Charles 
 and Steenie want to kill a buck there this next year — they maun hae the 
 land — they maun hae the land ; and our debt shall be paid to the young 
 man [Nigel], plack and bawbee, and . . . we'll stuff his stomach with 
 English land, which is worth twice as much, ay, ten times as much, as these 
 accursed hills and heughs, and mosses and muirs, that he is sae keen after.'' 
 But the stout old Scottish lord composedly replies: "An it please your 
 Majesty [so learned in divinity], there was an answer yielded by Naboth 
 when Ahab coveted his vineyard — 'The Lord forbid that I should give the 
 inheritance of my fathers unto thee ! ' " — Fortunes of Ni^el, chap. ix. 
 
I-,2 
 
 SEAWARD GAZING 
 
 XVII. 
 
 SEAWARD GAZING FROM MOUNT CARMEI. 
 
 I Kings xyiii. 43 — 46. 
 
 GREAT famine was throughout all the land, in the days of 
 Elias, when the heaven was shut up three years and six 
 months. When would there be rain ? The ear of the prophet 
 was quick to catch the sound, at last, of abundance of rain. 
 So " Elijah went up to the top of Carmel ; and he cast himself 
 down upon the earth, and put his face between his knees, and 
 said to his servant, Go up, now, look toward the sea. And he 
 went up, and looked, and said. There is nothing. And he said, 
 Go again seven times. And it came to pass at the seventh 
 time that he said, Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of 
 the sea, like a man's hand."* It was enough. The seaward 
 sazer had seen in that little cloud the assured end of the 
 famine. Let the king prepare his chariot, and start for Jezreel, 
 that the rain stop him not. For meanwhile the heaven 
 blackens with clouds and wind, and there is anon a down- 
 pour of deluging rain. 
 
 No picture in holy writ of wistful watcher, with strained 
 gaze fixed on vacancy, is more picturesque than this of the 
 seer and his servant on the heights of Carmel. But there are 
 various pictures of such gazing, for one purpose or another, 
 and all of them more or less striking ; whether it be the mother 
 of Sisera looking out at a window, t and crying through the 
 
 * Scott has an imposing simile that may be called to mind : 
 " As that sea-cloud, in size like human hand 
 
 When first from Carmel by the Tishbite seen. 
 Came slowly overshadowing Israel's land, 
 
 Awhile, perchance, bedeck'd with colours sheen. 
 While yet the sunbeams on its skirts had been, 
 Lining with purple and with gold its shroud. 
 Till darker folds obscured the blue serene, 
 And blotted heaven with one broad sable cloud — 
 Then sheeted rain burst down, and whirlwinds howl'd aloud." 
 
 TJie Vision of Don Roderick, xxxvi. 
 f As with Madame, or Milady, in what Father Prout calls " the im- 
 mortal air of Malbrouck," where 
 
 " Madame a sa tour monte, 
 
 Le plus haut qu'on peut monter," etc. 
 
FROM MOUNT CARMEL. 133 
 
 lattice, "Why is his chariot so long in coming? why tarry 
 the wheels of his chariot?" or Eli, infirm and aged, sitting 
 upon a seat by the wayside, watching — for his heart trembled 
 for the ark of God ; or King David's watchman gone up to the 
 roof over the gate unto the wall, and lifting up his eyes, and 
 looking, and behold, a man running alone — whose running 
 is like the running of Ahimaaz the son of Zadok — a good 
 man, that cometh, it is to be hoped, with good tidings; or 
 again. King Joram's watchman, that stood on the tower in 
 Jezreel, and spied a company advancing, and marked how 
 the king's messenger came to them, but came not back again, 
 — and who reported presently that the driving was like 
 the dri\dng of Jehu the son of Nimshi, for this charioteer was 
 driving furiously. Nor be overlooked that strained gaze of 
 another watchman in Isaiah's burden of the desert of the sea — 
 who beheld a chariot vvith two horsemen, a chariot of asses, 
 and a chariot of camels ; and who hearkened diligently v\4th 
 much heed ; and who cried, " A Hon ! My lord, I stand con- 
 tin-ually upon the watch-tower, in the daytime, and I am set 
 in my ward whole nights;" — and to whom the iterated cry 
 came, echoed through all time, and of late made musically 
 vocal by an inspired master, " Watchman, what of the night ? 
 Watchman, what of the night ? " 
 
 Seaward gazing, in hope of sighting some token of deliver- 
 ance or relief: be the standpoint Mount Carmel or whatever 
 other, be it in history or in fiction, the attitude is always 
 more or less impressive, sometimes sublime. Memorable in 
 English verse is the picture of Enoch Arden on his desert 
 island, 
 
 "As do\\Ti the shore he ranged, or all day long 
 Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge, 
 A shipA\Teck'd sailor, waiting for a sail :* 
 No sail from day to day, but every day 
 
 * Alliteration is not a weak point with Mr. Tennyson ; but, as in this 
 line, and in the last one of the passage above quoted, he can and does 
 make effective use of it when he pleases. Not so often he pleases as 
 
134 SEAWARD GAZING. 
 
 The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts 
 Among the pahns and ferns and precipices 
 The blaze upon the waters to the east ; 
 The blaze upon his island overhead ; 
 
 Coleridge did in an elder generation ; nothing like so often as Robert Lord 
 Lytton does in a younger one. Li Memoriam offers us such incidental 
 examples as, ' ' On the <5ald street <5reaks the <51ank day ; " the stanza 
 immediately following which is melodiously liquescent with I's : 
 ' ' A happy /over who has come 
 
 To /ook on her that /oves him well, 
 Who /ights and rings the gateway bell, 
 And /earns her gone and far from home," etc. 
 
 Farther on we have a delirious man " Whose yancy/lises old and new, And 
 y lashes into/alse and true." And again, later, the seamew that dives in 
 " greening ^leam, " and birds that "^uild and ^rood ; that /ive their /ives 
 From /and to /and," and the poet's regret that, violet-like, "(5uds and 
 blossoms," in the same stanza. Having named Coleridge, we may refer 
 to such lines as (in the Kubla Khaii) *' Five miles meandering with a mazy 
 motion," — or these from a sibilant stanza, "Soft his speech, and soft his 
 sigh; But no sound like simple truth," — or this, from a fragment on Moles, 
 "Nature's mute monks, live mandrakes of the ground." It is more 
 dangerous to have named the second Lord Lytton, for, once begin 
 quoting from him instances of alliteration, and where would a full-stop 
 come ? But if the reader cai-e to see the manner of a few of them, here 
 are some random specimens from the Chronicles and C/ia)-aciers (the title 
 itself alliterative): " Cramp'd in <rold clasp of day-born Circumstance;" 
 " If he smiles, a j-warm of gilded daves Smiles also, fateful for the^ace 
 that saves Their /ortunes one day longer: if he/rowns, -5'pears sparkle on 
 the walls of frighten'd towers," etc, 
 
 " Him all these immense means to make him glad. 
 
 Misused immensely, make immensely sad . . . 
 
 How things desired, and had, desire destroy ! 
 
 How hard it is, enjoyment to enjoy ! " 
 
 Then we come upon "Music's strenuous stream Of pining sounds makes 
 passionatest pain" — "A greater than their greatest in that great Grey- 
 headed, blind, old man, who sits sedate And serious " — and doomed roofs 
 that blaze in many a globed fold 
 
 " Of i'plendour, ^et with silver xtuds and discs : 
 
 And rambre cypress i-tripe with blackest shade 
 
 6'ea-terraces, by Summer overlaid." 
 
 Such Hnes again as " Stript, singed him, stabb'd him, stampt upon him, 
 smote His cheek, and spat upon it, slit his throat, Crusht his big brow, 
 and cleft his crown ; " — " Her fervid foot with fiery purpose shod (Forged 
 by strong Faith) the formidable field Of frenzied Opposition firmly trod ; "> 
 
SEAWARD GAZING. 135 
 
 The blaze upon the waters to the west ; 
 Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven, 
 The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again 
 The scarlet shafts of sunrise — but no saiL"* 
 Old-fashioned lovers of Cowper may recall his description of 
 the "gentle savage," Omai, straying on the beach, and duly 
 every morn climbing the mountain top, or with eager eye 
 exploring far and wide the wateiy waste for sight of ship from 
 England. " Every speck seen in the far horizon, turns thee 
 pale with conflict of contending hopes and fears." Or Mr. 
 Tennyson himself will ply us with another picture : 
 
 *' Now thrice that morning Guinevere had climb'd 
 The giant tower, from whose high crest, they say. 
 Men saw the goodly hills of Somerset, 
 And white sails flying on the yellow sea, " etc. 
 
 — "Heroism, and Hope, and Hate, Hunger, Horror;" ''Stormy starve- 
 lings, smutcht and soil'd ; " *' Whose endeavour undoes our deedless 
 doings;" "The cold clung to her, creeping up the creepy stream;" 
 " In this tense tangle of tormented souls," etc. Nor does the noble poet 
 seem less inclined to dally with this ''artful aid," as time matures his 
 powers and ripens his taste. Here follow a few examples from the Fables 
 in Song. A lion "rose, and round him roll'd a regnant eye." The cry 
 of the cock "set smarting in his sensitive strong soul a secret nerve." The 
 "gregarious goat and ruminating ram." "Reynard's romantic and a 
 
 radical." 
 
 " Princes for provinces, and pads for purses. 
 Creatures of crocodile-creating clay." 
 
 Liquids are predominant in lines about the "rippled liquid in her lone low 
 reedy creeks," and "the liveried lackeys of Light." Then we have the 
 "reed-fenced rivage damp" and the "filth of the fenny swamp." To 
 swan is offered by swine his "fulsome friendship filthy and free, and a 
 swan is shamed by a swinish offer. " A workman we see, ever working, 
 waxing old, and "wearily wending that way thro' the world whereunto is 
 no ending." "A shower of stormy sleet thro' shroud and spars shriek'd," 
 'mid a "trouble of tiller and tackle." — But this footnote is stepping out 
 beyond all measure. The note-maker's own transgressions in alliterative 
 prosing, must be more than sufficiently known to every note-taker, and 
 must have tried some good tempers, in their time. 
 
 * Memorable too in French prose is the story of Gilliat, in Lcs Travail- 
 leurs de la Mer, as we see him climbing upon the wreck, grasping the 
 knotted rope, and mounting the Great Dourre ; but not a sail was in sight 
 around the horizon, not a boat's lantern : the wide expanse, as far as eye 
 could reach, was a desert. 
 
136 ON THE LOOK OUT. 
 
 Nothing, it has been said, can be more grand and impres- 
 sive than the opening of the Agamemnon of ^schylus, with the 
 solitary watchman on the tower, who for ten long years has 
 watched nightly for the beacon fires that are to announce the 
 fall of Ilion, and who now beholds them blaze at last. 
 
 Gibbon described with animation, and almost with sympathy, 
 the pastoral diligence of Bishop Anianus, at the siege of 
 Orleans by Attila and the Huns, in exhausting every art of 
 religious policy to support the courage of the besieged, till 
 the arrival of the expected succour ; and how that " bishop 
 of primitive sanctity and consummate prudence," anxiously 
 counting the days and hours, despatched a trusty messenger 
 to observe, from the rampart, the face of the distant country. 
 Twice that messenger returned, without any intelligence that 
 could inspire hope or comfort ; but in his third report — are we 
 not put in mind of the seaward gazing from Mount Carmel ? — 
 he "mentioned a small cloud, which he had faintly descried 
 at the extremity of the horizon. 'It is the aid of God ! ' 
 exclaimed the bishop, in a tone of pious confidence; and 
 the whole multitude repeated after him, ' It is the aid of 
 God!'" The remote object, on which every eye was fixed, 
 became each moment larger and more distinct; the Roman 
 and Gothic banners were gradually perceived; and a favour- 
 able wind blowing aside the dust, discovered, in deep array, 
 the impatient squadrons of ^tius and Theodoric, who pressed 
 forward to the relief of Orleans. Another available description 
 in Gibbon is that of the relief brought at sunset to Abdallah 
 and his five hundred, when encompassed and overwhelmed at 
 the "fair of Abyla" (a.d. 634): "About the hour of sunset, 
 when their weapons dropped from their hands, when they 
 panted on the verge of eternity, they discovered an approaching 
 cloud of dust ; they heard the welcome sound of the teebir [so 
 the Arabs call their shout of onset], and they soon perceived 
 the standard of Caled, who flew to their refief with the utmost 
 speed of his cavalry." We recall the picture in Tasso, done into 
 English by old Fairfax, of the wary watchman that "looked 
 over, 
 
WELCOME RELIEF. 137 
 
 From tops of Sion's towers, the hills and dales, 
 And saw the dust the fields and pasture cover, 
 As when the thick mists rise from moory vales : 
 At last the sun-bright shields he 'gan discover, 
 And glist'ring helms, for violence none that fails ; 
 The metal shone like lightning bright in skies. 
 And man and horse amid the dust descries. 
 Then loud he cries, Oh, what a dust* ariseth ! ; 
 Oh, how it shines with shields and targets clear ! " 
 
 At the siege of Neuss, during the wars between Charles of 
 Burgundy and the Swiss, that brave Httle town held out till 
 famine set in, when a procession was made in honour of the 
 Virgin, in the midst of which there fell among the starving 
 citizens a ball \\\t\\ written words on it of promised deliver- 
 ance. They looked from the tops of their walls, and soon had 
 reason to return thanks to God : the innumerable banners of 
 the empire were already fluttering in the horizon. 
 
 The chronicles of the Conquest of Granada show us Queen 
 
 * Will it be casting dust in the reader's e^es to make this dust a reminder 
 of that other dust commemorated in Mr. F. W. Bayley's metrical version of 
 Blite Beard ? 
 
 " Sister Anne saw at once, time was not to be lost, 
 So on to the castle her body she toss'd ; 
 On to the battlement nearest the sky. 
 And she clapp'd the telescope close to her eye, 
 And she kept looking out while her sister downstairs 
 Was momently crying .... 
 
 ' Sister Anne, sister Anne, pray what do you see ? ' 
 ' See ! not the ghost of a soul ! ' said she. 
 ' Sister Anne, on what do your eyes now fall ? ' 
 * Alas ! dear sister, on nothing at all ! ' 
 ' Sister Anne, is nobody coming, my dear ? ' 
 
 ' You've exactly guess'd it — there's nobody here. 
 * ■>«■ * * * 
 
 ' Tell me, oh, tell me, does no one approach, 
 No one on horseback, and no one by coach. 
 No one by garden, no one by wall ? ' 
 ' In so much plain English — no one at all.' 
 ' Sister Anne, sister Anne, see something you must.' 
 ' Yes . . . now 
 You're right, I vow ! 
 I do see something — I do see — a dust ! ' 
 ' What is it kicking that dust up afar ? ' 
 
 ' It's a great flock of sheep, and they're all crying [a cockney rhyme] baa ! 
 They're bleating it loud, and bleating it fast ; '— 
 - : * T/ie/i, thank heaven, mj/ brothers are coming at last I ' " 
 
138 SEAWARD AND LANDWARD GAZING: 
 
 Isabella at Vaena, in anxious suspense as to the result of 
 the expedition, on the castle heights, looking towards the road 
 that winds through the mountains from Moclin, and regarding 
 the watch-towers that crowned the neighbouring heights, in 
 hope of favourable signals. Elsewhere we see Joan of Naples 
 on the tower top, watching that furious contest which should 
 decide her fate, — following with her eyes the cloud of dust 
 which rose from her husband's horse, through the thickest of 
 the fight. The lot of many ladies, royal and of low degree, 
 from Sisera's mother downwards, in time and station, is typified 
 in a stanza of the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spens : 
 
 ' ' O lang, lang, may the ladies sit, 
 Wi' their fans in their hand. 
 Before they see Sir Patrick Spens 
 Come sailing to the strand !" 
 
 Admissible too among our medley of instances are those of 
 Columbus and his crew intently watching for the first sight of 
 land : every seaman so eagerly on the look-out — mounting 
 to the masthead, or climbing about the rigging, straining their 
 eyes in the direction pointed out. Again and again their cloud- 
 built hopes faded away, and the fancied land melted into thin 
 air. One evening, as the light is waning, we see Columbus him- 
 self take his station on the top of the castle or cabin on the 
 high poop of his vessel, ranging his eye along the dusky horizon, 
 and maintaining an intense and unremitting watch. About 
 ten o'clock, he thought he could descry a light glimmering at a 
 great distance ; nor was he deluded this time : he saw it, and 
 was glad. Later voyages afford repetitions in plenty of the 
 like strained gaze, but hardly one so intense in interest as this 
 one, of the discovered light — not a light that never was on sea 
 or land, though it might fitly be called a consecration of the 
 poet's dream. 
 
 The distresses of the voyagers, in Pizarro's first expedition to 
 the south, are prominent in the history of the Conquest of Peru 
 — when day after day, week after week, passed away without 
 tidings of the vessel that was to bring relief to the wanderers : 
 in vain did they strain their eyes over the distant waters to 
 
ON THE LOOK OUT FOR RELIEF. 139 
 
 catch a glimpse of their coming friends : not a speck was to be 
 seen in the blue distance, where the canoe of the savage dared 
 not venture, and the sail of the white man was not yet spread. 
 Gonzalo Pizarro's expedition, some sixteen years later, when 
 Orellana sailed down the Amazon, had its corresponding pic- 
 ture of suffering expectancy : " Days and weeks passed away, 
 yet the vessel did not return ; and no speck was to be seen on 
 the waters, as the Spaniards strained their eyes to the farthest 
 point, where the line of light faded in the dark shadows of the 
 foliage on the borders." Southey's return of ^ladoc to Aztlan 
 recurs to the memory ; for although 
 
 " No watchman had been station'd on the height 
 To seek his sails, — for with Cadwallon's hope 
 Too much of doubt was blended and of fear : 
 Yet thitherward whene'er he walk'd abroad 
 His face, as if instinctively, was tum'd ; 
 And duly morn and eve Lincoya there, 
 As though religion led his duteous feet, 
 Went up to gaze . . . 
 [And] all his pleasure was at earliest light 
 To take his station, and at latest eve, 
 If he might see the sails where far away 
 Through wide savannahs roll'd the silver stream. 
 Oh, then with what a sudden start his blood 
 Flow'd from its quicken'd spring, when far away 
 He spied the glittering topsails ! " 
 
 Of Lord Cornwallis, besieged in Yorktown, historians (of 
 Old, not New England) sympathisingly surmise how often and 
 anxiously he must have looked out for a white sail gleaming 
 in the distance on the blue waters of the bay. In a like spirit 
 Earl Stanhope relates the relief from England to the ahungred 
 defenders of Gibraltar in 1781 — how they beheld ^\'ith delight 
 from their ramparts, one morning as the mist slowly rolled 
 away, the flag-ship of Admiral Darby steer into their bay, 
 followed by several other men-of-war and by his convoy, 
 consisting of near a hundred vessels laden with provisions and 
 supplies. In the same noble author's Life of Pitt, we have a 
 rememberable glimpse of Napoleon in Boulogne in 1S05, all ex- 
 pectation and suspense : " For hours and hours together he was 
 
140 ON THE rOOK OUT FOR RELIEF. 
 
 seen to stand on the seashore straining his eyes along the vast 
 expanse, and watching for a sail to rise on the blue horizon." 
 One of Schill and his troops at Stralsund, four years later, is 
 quotable from AHson, who, with reproachful reflections on 
 English apathy, describes all eyes as turned in vain towards 
 the ocean : in vain every steeple was crowded with gazers 
 anxiously surveying with telescopes the distant main ; not a 
 friendly sail appeared, not a pennon of England brought hope 
 and consolation to the besieged. 
 
 The Russian generals who repulsed so vigorously the attack 
 on the citadel of Smolensko by Ney's corps, are yet described 
 as most anxiously looking out for the approach of the main 
 army : at length vast clouds of dust were seen afar off, and 
 through their openings long black columns, resplendent with 
 steel, appeared advancing with uttermost speed : it was Barclay 
 and Bagrathion hastening to the relief of their comrades, at 
 the head of a hundred and twenty thousand men ; and rap- 
 turous was the enthusiasm of the besieged. But examples to 
 the same effect might be multiplied indefinitely from history, 
 let alone fiction, historical or otherwise. * Let us glance instead 
 at some passages in miscellaneous literature which may be taken 
 to illustrate divers aspects of our theme. 
 
 Tiberius is gloomily pictured by Thomson, as, day after day, 
 
 * Not to let it quite alone, however, reference may be allowed, in 
 passing, to the Fair Maid of Perth on the castle top, gazing on the forest 
 glade through which she could see a body of horsemen advancing at full 
 gallop — in time to save Catharine, though not the Duke of Rothsay. And 
 again, to Henry Morton in the hands of the Covenanters, when his death is 
 delayed by that distant noise which, to one of them, sounds like the rushing 
 of the brook over the pebbles, — to another, as the sough of the wind among 
 the bracken: "It Is the galloping of horse," said Morton to himself, his 
 sense of hearing rendered acute by the peril of his position. " God grant 
 they may come as my deliverers ! " As indeed they did. Nor be over- 
 looked the weird figure of Scott's Highland Widow, as she sat at her 
 cottage door and watched the road — her imagination forming out of the 
 morning mist or the evening cloud the wild forms of an advancing band 
 of "dark soldiers," Sidier Dhti ; albeit for so long in vain Elspat's eyes 
 surveyed the distant path, by the earhest light of the dawn and the latest 
 
SEAWARD GAZING. r^i 
 
 sad on the jutting eminence he sat, and viewed the main that 
 
 ever toils below ; 
 
 " Still fondly forming in the farthest verge, 
 "Where the round ether mixes with the wave, 
 Ships, dim-discovered, dropping from the clouds." 
 
 Byron gives us Medora rising to rouse the beacon-fire, and out- 
 watching each star, night after night, — 
 
 ** And morning came — and still thou wert afar. 
 Oh, how the chill blast on my bosom blew, 
 And day broke dreary on my troubled view. 
 And still I gazed and gazed — and not a prow 
 Was granted to my tears — my truth — my vow I 
 At length — 'twas noon — I hail'd and blest the mast 
 That met my sight — it near'd — Alas, it past ! 
 Another came — Oh, joy ! 'twas thine at last ! " 
 
 In the tragedy of Constantine Faleologus, the second act closes 
 with the signal cries of a ship in sight, " supplies and warlike 
 aid. O blessed sound ! there is salvation in it " to the brave 
 besieged. The same dramatist's better-known Family Legend 
 has a sensation scene of a gentle outcast on a rock at sea — ■ 
 the scene concluding with her excitement and emotion at 
 catching, as she believes, a sound of voices in the wind, like 
 hope upon a hopeless state. She starts up from a crag of the 
 rock, gazes eagerly around her, and resolves, 
 
 glimmer of the twilight : no rising dust awakened the expectation of noddino- 
 plumes or flashing arms. — Compare, or contrast, with this last figure, that 
 of Madonna Mary as Mrs. Oliphant sketches her, when she wandered from 
 room to room, watching the two bits of road, as the shadows of evening 
 stole into the corners, and a star, which it made her heart sick to see, 
 peeped out in the darkling sky — first the one bit of road, which was fainter 
 and farther off, then the other, which was overshadowed by trees, yet visible 
 and near : every time that she changed the point of watching, she felt sure 
 that her boy must be coming ; but the stars peeped out in numbers, and 
 the lamps were lighted on the road, and he appeared not. — If Romola's 
 picturesque or classical form occurs to us in any such connection as this, it 
 is on account of the simile her attitude suggests, when we see her, as she 
 sees herself, as in the midst of a stonii- troubled sea, caring nothing about 
 the storm, but only about holding out a signal till the eyes that looked for 
 it could see it no more. 
 
142 STRAINED GAZE. 
 
 " I'll to that highest crag and take my stand : 
 Some little speck upon the distant wave 
 May to my eager gaze a vessel grow — 
 Some onward wearing thing — some boat — some raft — 
 Some drifted plank. — 0-hope! thou quitt'st us never! " 
 
 And in yet another of the Plays on the Passion, Ethwald, there 
 is a tower-top scene, which opens with Bertha exclaiming — 
 
 " O, will they ne'er appear ? I'll look no more ; 
 Mine eager gazing but retards their coming. 
 Holla ; good Murdoch ! — 
 Thou putst thy hand above thy sunned eyes, 
 Dost thou descry them ? 
 M^lrd. Mercy, gentle lady, 
 
 If you descry them not from that high perch, 
 How should I from my level station here ? " 
 
 May that allowably make way to Wordsworth's Betty Foy, high 
 upon the down, where she can see a mile of road, but not a 
 single soul abroad ? 
 
 " She listens, but she cannot hear 
 
 The foot of horse, the voice of man ; 
 
 The streams with softest sound are flowing, 
 
 The grass you almost hear it growing. 
 
 You hear it now, if e'er you can." 
 
 More consonant with the sustained dignity of the poet's larger 
 style, is a passage in his Prelude, where he describes his wistful 
 watching, as a schoolboy, for the envoy that should summon 
 
 him home : 
 
 " There rose a crag. 
 That, from the meeting-point of two highways 
 Ascending, overlooked them both, far stretched ; 
 Thither, uncertain on which road to fix 
 My expectation, thither I repaired. 
 Scout-like, and gained the summit : 'twas a day 
 Tempestuous, dark, and wild, and on the grass 
 I sat, half-sheltered by a naked wall . . . 
 Straining my eyes intensely, as the mist 
 Gave intermitting prospect of the copse 
 And plain below." 
 
T 
 
 FUTILE INVASION. 143 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 THE LAST OF SENNACHERIB. 
 2 Kings xix. 28 sq. 
 
 HE last march of Sennacherib, as chronicled in holy 
 writ, was a disastrous failure. Overwhelming as might 
 seem to be his invading host, and inevitable the destruction it 
 menaced, the virgin, the daughter of Zion, was emboldened to 
 despise him, and laugh him to scorn — the daughter of Jerusalem, 
 to shake her head at him. Imposing as was his array, multi- 
 tudinous as were the ranks of his army, he should not come 
 into Jerusalem, nor shoot an arrow there, nor cast a bank 
 against it. By the way that he came, by the same should he 
 return, but should not come into that city, decreed the King of 
 Kings. What was this invading lord of a host, against Zion's 
 protecting Lord of Hosts ? 
 
 So much for Sennacherib's last military progress. It was to 
 provoke derision from its intended victim, presumably helpless 
 and despairing. True, there was an appalling tragedy in the 
 background ; but meanwhile the irony of high comedy was to 
 be, in Jerusalem, the inspired order of the day. The King of 
 Assyria was to go back by the way that he came, 7-e infecta, and 
 to be laughed at for his pains. 
 
 '' A fixed figure, for the time of scorn, 
 To point his slow unmoving finger at." 
 
 History is apt to be scornful of any such portentous expe- 
 dition, resulting in zero or worse. Charles VI. of France ex- 
 hausted his resources in the equipment of such a force, for the 
 invasion of England, and had to return foiled to Paris, after 
 desolating by the consequences of that march the face of 
 the country which he traversed. Our Edward II. obeyed his 
 father's injunctions to prosecute the war in Scotland, to the 
 extent of proceeding on his march into that country as far 
 as Cumnock in Ayrshire; but here he turned round ^^ithout 
 having done anything, and made his way back to England. 
 
144 IMPOTENT INVASIONS. 
 
 Many years later, he set out again for the conquest of Scot- 
 land, but only got as far as Culross, in Fife, whence he returned 
 with nothing achieved except the destruction of a few religious 
 houses. Even his vigorous son is to be seen in 1328 heading 
 a numerous army against the Scots, but failing to encounter 
 them ; and after a campaign of three weeks, this expedition too 
 ended in nothing. Ridiculed by the nickname of the Chicken 
 War was that miserable expedition got up by Sigismund of 
 Poland in 1539, against the Wallachians, when 150,000 militia, 
 splendidly armed, assembled at the royal summons, but separated 
 without striking a blow. 
 
 '* Thms with a blessed and unvex'd retire, 
 With unhack'd swords, and helmets all unbruised, 
 We will bear home that kisty blood again, 
 Which here we came to spout against your towns. " 
 
 Philip Augustus might well fume when required by the Pope 
 to desist from further hostilities against John, who had now 
 made his peace with th€ Church. What ! after equipping one 
 of the noblest armaments which had ever met under a King 
 of France, at infinite expense, and at the Holy Father's own 
 entreaty, was he now to dismiss them, and nothing to come of 
 it all ? The case would be as bad nearly as the traditional one 
 of that King of France who, with twenty thousand men, marched 
 up a hill, and then marched down again ; or of Beranger's King 
 
 of Yvetot, who 
 
 " each year call'd his fighting men, 
 And march'd a league from home, and then 
 March'd back again." 
 
 So again we see Philip, the son of Charfes of Valois, de- 
 scendincf the Alps, in 132 1, at the head of three thousand 
 men-at-arms, the Guelfs eagerly flocking to his standard, — but 
 anon retreating beyond the Alps without striking a blow. The 
 fag-end of La Fontaine's fable has never wanted practical inter- 
 preters, with perhaps, crab-like, their strategic movements : 
 
 ' ' Quant a tourner le dos 
 A son but, j'y reviens ; la methcde en est bonne, 
 Surtout au metier de Bellone : 
 Mais il faut le faire a propos." 
 
COLLAPSED EXPEDITIONS. 145 
 
 Heraclian, Count of Africa, in arms against Honorius, with 
 an armament which might, says Gibbon, " have subverted or 
 restored the greatest empire of the earth," ignominiously fled 
 with a single ship. Six miUions of ducats have been computed 
 as the cost of Philip's Armada in a single year — with all which 
 outlay nothing was accomplished, and Spain, in a moment, 
 instead of seeming terrible to all the world, became ridiculous. 
 It has been said of Charles the Fifth of France that he only 
 represented the universal sneer of the world in his famous in- 
 structions to the French forces not to engage with their English 
 opponents : " Although a storm or a tempest rage over a land, 
 they go away and disperse of themselves. So will it be with these 
 English ; " and indeed English historians discern in the collapse 
 of Lancaster's expedition in 1373 the death-blow of chivalry. 
 Never, we are told, had knighthood started in a more imposing 
 guise : the mightiest army England could pour out had simply 
 marched across France without a blow, and without a blow 
 it was turned by a few simple marches into such a horde as 
 Napoleon brought back from Russia.* The Foul Raid was the 
 name given to Albany's invasion of England, so long remem- 
 bered in the north on account of its inglorious progress and 
 impotent conclusion. A century later, an English army, led by 
 the Duke of York and the Earl of Salisbury, approached with 
 hostile front the Scottish Marches, but this host of more than 
 forty thousand men fell to pieces and dispersed without perform- 
 ing anything else worth notice. Another Albany, in 1522, has 
 been perhaps unfairly taxed with pusillanimity for the manner 
 in which, encamped at Annan with a well-appointed army, 
 eighty thousand strong, and mth a formidable train of artillery, 
 he yet disbanded that army without striking a blow, f 
 
 * " He found the place too warm for him, 
 
 For they set fire to Moscow. 
 To get there had cost him much ado, 
 
 And then no better course he knew . . . 
 But to march back again from Moscow. " 
 
 SOUTHEY — The March to Moscow. 
 f Few defaulting commanders but find an apologist sooner or later. 
 Domitian has been duly (or unduly) derided for his expedition against the 
 
 10 
 
146 THE LAST OF SENNACHERIB. 
 
 Mr. Carlyle writes of the Siege of Dresden, in 1759, — " So far 
 as I can gather, that superb park of Austrian artillery, though 
 built into batteries, and talked about in a bullying manner, was 
 not fired from at all." His readers will easily recall his drawing, 
 or caricature, of His Britannic Majesty, in 1742, not getting out 
 his sword, but, after all that straining of every fibre for a twelve- 
 month past, having to sit down again, panting in an Olympian 
 manner, with that expensive long-sword of his still sticking in 
 the scabbard. Or again that earlier misunderstanding, when 
 war or duel seemed so imminent, but the " huge world-wide 
 tumult suddenly collapses, sinks into something you can put 
 into a snuff-box." 
 
 When it was the turn of the British to threaten the shores of 
 Lake Champlain from Montreal, Sir George Provost advanced 
 at the head of 11,800 troops, many of whom had served in 
 Spain ; but his indecision more than neutralized his advantages 
 in numbers and quality, and "this fine army retreated (from 
 before Plattsburg) into Canada without having struck a blow." 
 One storm sufficed to discourage France from her project of 
 invading England in behalf of the Pretender : the royal exile, 
 who had embarked so eagerly, was put ashore again ; and his- 
 torians aver that history has few parallels, of a plan so large and 
 elaborate, collapsing so suddenly and so utterly. 
 
 One tragically fatal distinction differentiates the baffled 
 return home of Sennacherib from nearly all the others here 
 referred to, and that is, the total destruction in one night of his 
 mighty host, leaving him to return all alone. '^ So Sennacherib 
 king of Assyria departed, and went and returned, and dwelt at 
 Nineveh. And it came to pass, as he was worshipping in the 
 house of Nisroch his god, that Adrammelech and Sharezer his 
 sons smote him with the sword ; and they escaped into the land 
 of Armenia. And Esarhaddon his son reigned in his stead." 
 
 Chatti, which was a mere summer promenade : but Dean Merivale, for 
 one, declines to join the laughers, or to treat as merely contemptuous that 
 campaign from which the young emperor hastened back to Rome, and no 
 doubt vaunted his prowess to the utmost. 
 
KILLED IN CHURCH. 147 
 
 Killed during divine service, killed in church, so to say. Even 
 thus did Jehu contrive the wholesale slaughter of the priests 
 and prophets and servants of Baal, when the solemn assembly 
 for Baal was proclaimed, and the house of Baal was full from 
 one end to another; and vestments were put upon all the 
 worshippers, — and not one of them escaped. 
 
 In one of the volumes of translations published by or for 
 the Society of Biblical Archaeology, the Rev. A. H. Sayce has 
 given what is believed to be the oldest will in the world — the 
 private testament, namely, of Sennacherib, who, with exemplary 
 precision and brevity conjoined, bequeaths all his personal 
 property to Esarhaddon, his son, who reigned in his stead. 
 Had this to do with the " deep damnation of his taking off " 
 at the hands of his two other sons ? And was it of express 
 design that they killed him at his prayers — as though to show 
 that Nisroch could not save him ? Nothing had they, it would 
 seem, of the reverence for temple sanctity that made Benaiah 
 scruple about slaying Joab when holding on the horns of the 
 altar. Slain in God's house — the stigma on the slayer is broad 
 and deep and dark, to the eye of common humanity. In hell 
 saw Dante him who 
 
 "in God's bosom smote the heart 
 Which yet is honour'd on the bank of Thames " — 
 
 the allusion being to Simon de Montfort's " murther of Prince 
 Henrie, committed afore the high altar, as the same Henrie 
 kneeled there to hear divine service" — and to the alleged 
 putting of Henry's heart into a golden cup, and placing it on 
 a pillar at London bridge, " for a memorial to the English of 
 the said outrage." Nor is Dante unmindful of the king of 
 Assyria ; but the' vision this time is in Purgatory, not that "other 
 place ; " and there by Virgil was he shown 
 
 " How, in the temple, on Sennacherib fell 
 His sons, and how a corpse they left him there." 
 
 In the church he had hied him to for refuge was the last 
 Visigoth king of Spain, Amalric, killed without scruple or 
 remorse. In church was slain the Emperor Leo V. (the Arme- 
 
148 SLAIN AT THE ALTAR. 
 
 nian), as he began chanting a new psahn. Fredegonde caused 
 the Archbishop of Rheims to be murdered while he was chant- 
 ing the service in church — and in this crime a bishop and an 
 archdeacon were her accompUces. " Talk not to me," fierce 
 Lorn declaimed, 
 
 " Talk not to me of sheltering hall, 
 The Church of God saw Comyn fall ! 
 On God's own altar stream'd his blood, 
 While o'er my prostrate kinsman stood 
 The ruthless murderer." ^ 
 
 Later on in the Lord of the Lsles that denounced manslayer is 
 again denounced as " a wretch, beneath the ban of Pope and 
 Church, for murder done even on the sacred altar-stone." But 
 the Abbot, that, Balaam-like, arose to curse the Bruce, ends, 
 Balaam-like, by blessing — overpowered by an influence within, 
 which in vain he struggles to resist : 
 
 *' De Bruce, thy sacrilegious blow 
 Hath- at God's altar slain thy foe : 
 O'ermaster'd yet by high behest, 
 I bless thee, and thou shalt be blest ! " 
 
 Of that Solomon who filled with honour the place of Beli- 
 sarius, we read in Gibbon that " the Arians piously resolved " 
 to sacrifice him ''at the foot of the altar, during the awful 
 mysteries of the festival of Easter." At Moscow, in 1771, 
 the plague then raging, the primate Ambrosius was savagely 
 murdered while officiating at the altar, by the maddened 
 mob, with whose superstitions he had ventured to interfere. 
 The Dance of Death may claim many verifications by violence, 
 as well as by "natural" course, of the lines in it — 
 
 " J'attrape I'un pendant qu'il prie . . . 
 L'autre qui dans son oratoire 
 A son Dieu rend honneur et gloire." 
 
 Philaster tells Pharamond, in Beaumont and Fletcher, "But 
 were't the church, ay, at the altar, there's no place so safe but I 
 dare kill thee." "Sir, will you have him murdered in a church?" 
 asks Black Will of Mosby, in the matter of Arden of Feversham. 
 " Or on the altar ? " suggests Shakebag, Black Will's accommo- 
 
TEMPLE MASSACRE. 149 
 
 dating accomplice : Mosby has only to say the word, and it 
 shall be done. 
 
 It was a favourite trick with the Sicarii, or Assassins, the 
 most extravagant of the school of Judas the Galilean, to make 
 the Temple itself no place of safety for worshippers in those 
 troublous times : for all the worshipper knew, the man who 
 knelt by his side was preparing to plunge a dagger to his heart. 
 During the conflicts of the factions, the Zealots being unham- 
 pered by religious scruples, clouds of missiles were continually 
 discharged into the inner court of the Temple, and the whole 
 sacred pavement was strewn with dead bodies. Milman refers 
 to it as a strange feature in this fearful contest, that the religious 
 ceremonies still went on upon the altar, which was often en- 
 circled with the dead. Visitors and strangers from afar would 
 pass over pavement slipper)^ with human blood, and themselves 
 pay with their lives the price of kneeUng and worshipping in 
 the sacred place. At the siege of the Temple, in a.d. 70, men 
 with swords reeking with blood rushed to and fro along the 
 Holy Place, or even the Holy of HoHes, — the very Romans are 
 said to have shuddered at the profanation, and Titus protested 
 with vigour against this Jewish \dolation of the Je^^^sh sanctuar}^, 
 by thus defiUng it with blood and carnage. Was the house of 
 Jehovah, then, to become a shambles? Was there to be no 
 sanctuar}^, where man's life should be safe, — no sanctity, where 
 God's honour was concerned ? 
 
 The Pazzi conspiracy, designed to overthrow the power of 
 the Medici, and to substitute the rule of another faction and 
 family, is alleged to have been deliberately planned at Rome 
 in the Papal counsels ; the Pope's nephew being the prime 
 mover, the leading agent an archbishop, and the means of the 
 revolution foul murder. The place of that murder, pointedly 
 writes Dean Milman, was the great church of Florence, the 
 time of that murder the celebration of the Mass, the signal for 
 that murder the elevation of the Host, the presentation to the 
 adoring people (as all believed) of the God of mercy and love. 
 " Lorenzo saw the dagger driven home to the heart of his 
 brother Giuliano; but escaped himself by a strange accident," 
 
I50 SLAIN AT THE ALTAR. 
 
 — to wit, that the ruffian to whom his death was assigned, a 
 man whose hands were dyed with a hundred murders, and who 
 was inured to the death-shriek of innocent men, scrupled at 
 his task ; he would not murder in a church. " A priest was 
 easily found with none of these compunctious visitings ; but the 
 priest's hand was feeble and unpractised, and Lorenzo came off 
 with a slight wound. The Pope's complicity is beyond all 
 doubt." Ranke speaks of Alexander VI. as not only cognizant 
 of the Pazzi conspiracy, but in the secret of the murder' which 
 these men perpetrated before the altar of the cathedral — he 
 the Father of the Faithful. 
 
 Stigmatized by South as diabolical in its malice is the re- 
 venge taken by " that wretch who made a poor captive renounce 
 his religion, in order to the saving of his life ; and when he 
 had so done, presently ran him through, glorying that he had 
 thereby destroyed his enemy, both body and soul." Roderick 
 Random's literary patroness thought she had made a master- 
 stroke in planning a tragedy, the subject of which should be the 
 murder of a prince before the altar, while busy at his devotions. 
 Desperate as John Chiesley of Dairy was, in scheming the 
 murder of Sir George Lockhart, his design to shoot the judge 
 while attending upon divine service was not carried out, — some 
 feeling as to the sanctity of the place restraining him, if not any 
 care for the soul of the President of the Court of Session : the 
 High Street, and not the High Church, of Edinburgh became 
 accordingly the scene of murder. The fate of Captain Porteous, 
 in the following century, supplied Sir Walter Scott with mate- 
 rial for illustrating the vehemence of vengeance which refuses 
 time and scope for a soul's salvation : the pastor's pleading 
 voice to the mob, '' We will not kill both his soul and body," 
 being drowned in the clamour for instant execution. In Victor 
 Hugo's grotesquely unhistorical Crojuwell, the conspirators — 
 some of them, at least — propose to slay Oliver and his body- 
 guard as they kneel in prayer : 
 
 ** lis sont tous a genou, le tyran et sa garde ; 
 Que ne frappons-nous ? Dieu ! — Le frapper quand il prie ! " etc. 
 
 Hamlet subtilizes with a devilish refinement of calculating 
 
KILLED AT PR A VERS. 151 
 
 vindictiveness on the expediency or otherwise of despatching 
 Claudius while that wicked king is on his knees in prayer.* 
 
 " Now might I do it, pat, now he is praying ; 
 And now I'll do't ; and so he goes to heaven : 
 And so am I revenged ? That would be scann'd ; 
 [For] . . . am I then revenged 
 To take him in the purging of his soul, 
 When he is fit and season'd for his passage ? 
 No. — Up, sword ; and know thou a more horrid hent ; 
 When he is drunk, asleep, or in his rage ; 
 ... At gaming, swearing ; or about some act 
 That has no relish of salvation in't : 
 Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven, " 
 
 and vengeance be complete not only on body but on soul, f 
 
 * The Princess Clcelia, in Mr. C. Reade's powerful story of the times of 
 Erasmus, having occasion to hire a bravo in the Eternal City, is instructed 
 by that worthy in the distinctive grades of greater and lesser vendetta. 
 "The lesser vendetta, lady, is the death of the body only. We watch 
 our man come out of church ; or take him in an innocent hour ; and so 
 deal with him. In the greater vendetta we watch him, and catch him 
 hot from some unrepented sin, and so slay his soul as well as body. But 
 this vendetta is not so run upon now as it was a few years ago." — The 
 Cloister and the Hearth, vol. iii. , ch. xv. 
 
 t Hartley Coleridge characterized this as a speech which Shakspeare, had 
 he lived in these days, would not have written — nor indeed would, in his 
 own day, have put into the mouth of Hamlet, had he meant to represent 
 him as a sane and exemplary youth. " Yet I know not whether the notion 
 of retributive revenge as a propitiation to the departed, will not justify 
 this horrid scruple. The speech, whatever it were meant for, certainly 
 is a tremendous satire on revenge." The same critic, writing for once 
 at least in the Noctes Ambrosiance^ under the name and in the style of 
 Christopher North himself, (and John Wilson would have welcomed his 
 endeared Hartley to play that part very much oftener, ) described Hamlet 
 as vindicating his adjournment of vengeance on the King by arguments 
 which certainly " have no relish of salvation in them," but which, perhaps, 
 sounded less impious in an age w^hen every staunch Protestant, no less than 
 orthodox Roman Catholic, thought himself bound to beUeve in the eternal 
 perdition of his dissentient neighbours. 
 
 The excellent critic who wrote Shakspeare in Germany, held that in all 
 these purposes of refined and fearful revenge Hamlet is in truth representing 
 his own state of mind and his o\\ti determination as darker and more hideous 
 than they are : could we believe them real, our pity for him would merge 
 
152 ' CLEAN FORGOTTEN, 
 
 XIX. 
 
 CLEAN FORGOTTEN, AS A DEAD MAN OUT OF MIND. 
 Psalm xxxi. 14 (English Prayer Book version). 
 HIS, among the more salient indications of his over- 
 
 T 
 
 clouded lot, the Psalmist deplored : that already was he 
 forgotten by acquaintance and friends, — clean forgotten, as a 
 dead man out of mind. As in the words of another Psalm, if 
 not of another Psalmist, he was " counted as one of them that 
 go down into the pit," " free among the dead, like unto them 
 that ... lie in the grave, who are out of remembrance." The 
 oblivion might be construed from the language of Bildad the 
 Shuhite concerning one who is destroyed from his place, and 
 then it shall deny him, saying, I have not seen thee. Behold, 
 this is the joy of his way, and out of the earth shall others 
 grow. The race endures, but the individual man dies out, 
 and, being dead, is soon forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind. 
 And yet, "Absence and Death, how differ they!" the poet 
 exclaims. And if, living, but absent, and so out of sight, is 
 to be out of mind, how much more is the dead and gone to 
 be beyond ordinary remembrance — forgotten, clean forgotten, 
 as a dead man out of mind ! 
 
 The pathetic exhortations on country tombstones, " Grieve 
 not for me, my wife and children dear," etc., are all too truly 
 said to be for the most part speedily complied with : we do not 
 leave &o great a void in society as we are inclined to imagine, 
 partly to magnify our own importance, and partly to console 
 ourselves by sympathy. Even in the same family, as Hazlitt 
 says, the gap is not so great ; the wound closes up sooner than 
 we should expect; nay, our "room" is not unfrequently thought 
 better than our " company." People walk along the streets the 
 day after our deaths just as they did before, and the crowd is 
 not diminished. The same moralist accounts it amazing how 
 
 in horror and disgust : but he is trying to excuse his delay and irresolution, 
 even to his- own mind, by dwelling on the more complete and awful ven- 
 geance which the future 7nay afford. 
 
AS A DEAD MAN OUT OF MIND. 153 
 
 soon the rich and titled, and even some of those who have 
 wielded great political power, are forgotten. " A little rule, a 
 little sway, Is all the great and mighty have Betwixt the cradle 
 and the grave" — and, after its short date, they hardly leave 
 a name behind them. " A great man's memory may, at the 
 common rate, survive him half a year." Why be surprised that 
 those are forgotten so much sooner after quitting this mortal 
 stage, who are scarcely noticed while upon it? Leave your 
 place in the world for ten minutes, and when you come back 
 some one else has taken it, Mrs. Colonel Poyntz remarks ; but 
 when you leave the world for good, who remembers that you 
 had ever a place even in the parish register?'" Apemantus 
 cynically assures the recluse in his cave, 
 
 *' Thy flatterers yet wear silk, drink wine, lie soft, 
 Hug their diseased perfumes, and have forgot 
 That ever Timon was." 
 
 To La Bruyere's mortifying query there is no complacent answer 
 easily forthcoming : " Qui peut, avec les plus rares talens et 
 le plus excellent merite, n'etre pas convaincu de son inutility, 
 quand il considere qu'il laisse, en mourant, un monde qui ne 
 
 * "It is veiy mournful, yet not useless, to see and know, how the 
 Greatest and Dearest, in a short while, would find his place quite filled 
 up here, and no room for him." — Sartor Resarttis, book i., chap. vii. 
 
 Ah, mes amis, sighs a commonplace philosopher, after we die, it would 
 not be expedient, even if it were possible, to come back : many of us would 
 not like to find how little they miss us. Few, once observed Sydney Smith, 
 have the plain sense to see that they must soon be inevitably forgotten, — or 
 the fortitude to bear it when, yet alive, they are. They represent to them- 
 selves imaginary scenes of deploring friends and dispirited companies— but 
 the ocean might as well regret the drops exhaled by the sunbeams. Life 
 goes on ; and whether the absent have retired into a cottage or a grave, 
 is much the same thing. De non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est 
 ratio. Whoever, remarks one of Jeremy Taylor's biographers, has revisited 
 scenes and persons from whom he had long been separated, must have 
 sighed over the comparative indifference that welcomed his return : other 
 associations have effaced his own : the most familiar door turns upon a rusty 
 hinge ; and little remains for him but to moralize over the fragility of the 
 structure which expectation builds. Redux Rip Van Winkle's "How 
 soon we are forcot ! " speaks homely and homeless pathos both in one. 
 
154 CLEAN FORGOTTEN, 
 
 se sent pas de sa perte : et ou tant de gens se trouvent pour 
 le remplacer?" 'Tis the law of nature, quoth that seasoned 
 worldling, Sir Horace Lumley : if graves did not close over the 
 dead, Hke traps in a pantomime, how could the business of 
 the stage be carried on ? His own brother was the subject of 
 Samuel Pepys's exclamatory reflection, " But, Lord ! to see how 
 the world makes nothing of the memory of a man, an hour 
 after he is dead !" The living, Chateaubriand complains, are in 
 haste to usher the defunct into eternity, and to rid themselves 
 of his corpse : amongst friends, some accompany the corpse to 
 church, and, the grave once filled up, all memory is effaced. 
 
 ** Even thus life's rushing tide 
 Bears back affection from the grave's dark side ; 
 Alas, to think of this ! — the heart's void place 
 Fill'd up so soon ! — so like a summer cloud 
 All that w^e loved to pass and leave no trace ! " 
 
 To Nathaniel Hawthorne there was something awful in the 
 "endless endurance," the "almost indestructibility" of a marble 
 bust, — for this reason, that, whether in our own case, or that of 
 other men, it bids us sadly measure the little, little time during 
 which our lineaments are likely to be of interest to any human 
 being. Helas ! is Madame de Stael's utterance, to think that, 
 after the loss of life's dearest object, the activity of living dis- 
 limns the memory of the dead, so that often, in the midst of 
 one's enjoyments, one feels remorse at being so capable of 
 them, and seems to hear a resigned yet half remonstrant voice 
 asking, " Hast thou, whom I loved so dearly, so soon forgotten 
 me?" Le pere Aubry was not talking at random when he 
 thus avowed his misgivings : " Si un homme revenait a la 
 lumiere quelques annees apres sa mort, je doute qu'il fut revu 
 avec joie par ceux-la meme qui ont donne le plus de larmes a 
 sa memoire : tant on forme vite d'autres liaisons, tant on prend 
 facilement d'autres habitudes, tant I'inconstance est naturelle 
 a I'homme, tant notre vie est peu de chose, meme dans le 
 coeur de nos amis !"* One of Overbury's elegists can speak 
 
 * Says Chateaubriand, in defending this passage, " Sans parler des morts 
 dont on ne se souvient guere, que de vivants sont revenus dans leurs 
 
AS A DEAD MAN OUT OF MIND. 155 
 
 of "wearing the sprigs of memory No longer than thy friends 
 did rosemary, Or than the doale was eating for thy sake, And 
 thou hadst sunke in thine owne wine and cake." Qu'esi-ce, 
 done que PhofPime, dont la viemoire perit si vite I Ah, what is 
 man ! is Byron's prelude to the story of Lambro's return to the 
 family that had supposed him dead : 
 
 " Lambro's reception at his people's banquet 
 Was such as fire accords to a wet blanket." * 
 
 Nobody has time to miss his neighbour who goes away, \\TOte 
 Thackeray of Londoners at large ; nor do we weep when he 
 leaves us. " We humbly acknowledge, if fate calls us away 
 likewise, we are no more" missed than any other atom." Th^ 
 drearier of the Two Voices tells him that listens, 
 
 ** ' Tho' thou wert scattered to the wind, 
 Yet is there plenty of the kind.' 
 
 Then did my response clearer fall : 
 ' No compound of this earthly ball 
 Is like another, all in all' 
 
 To which he answer'd scoffingly ; 
 ' Good soul ! suppose I grant it thee 
 Who'll weep for thy deficiency ? 
 * * * * 
 
 Do men love thee ? Art thou so bound 
 To men, that how thy name may sound 
 Will vex thee lying underground ? 
 The memoiy of the wither'd leaf 
 In endless time is scarce more brief 
 Than of the gamer'd Autumn-sheaf.'" 
 
 Le monde, saurait-il aller sans nous ? Mais oui done, millefois 
 oui. So muses the historiographer of the Dedlock family, 
 
 families, et n'y ont trouve que I'oubli, I'humeur, et le degout!" — Preface 
 
 d'Atala (1805). 
 
 * Compare the metrical legend of a dead pope, to whom, as he eyed the 
 
 public festivity, 
 
 " That sight was somewhat provoking : millions of men, all jostling, joking. 
 As merr>' as so many Prodigal Sons ; . . . and yet not one of those millions 
 Who seem'd aware of the dead Pope there, or even very much to care 
 What had become of His Holiness, how he must feel now, or how he might fare ; 
 Who, all the while, was nevertheless sole cause of the general joyousness. 
 This was certainly hard to bear." Chronicles and Characters, ii. 120. 
 
1 56 CLEAN FORGOTTEN, 
 
 whose pictured forms are upon the walls before him : " So did 
 these come and go ', so did they see this gallery hushed and 
 quiet, as I see it now -, so think, as I think, of the gap that 
 they would make in this domain when they were gone ; so find 
 it, as I find it, difficult to beHeve that it could be, without 
 them; so leave no blank to miss them, and so die." If the 
 faults of the dead are soon forgotten, yet the memory of their 
 virtues is not much longer lived, — by the reckoning, at least, of 
 Mr. Peacock, who suggests, as an appropriate inscription for 
 ninety-nine grave-stones out of every hundred, these words of 
 Rabelais : Sa mhnoire expira avecques le son des cloches qui 
 carillonaient a son enterrement. 
 
 By the next morning, after a day of trouble and humiliation, 
 the autobiographic heroine of Jean Ingelow's "first romance" 
 began to notice how unchanged everything else was, in spite of 
 the change in herself. " What a commonplace experience ! — 
 and yet we are all surprised by it in our turn, and with it comes 
 the first power to understand how (greatly as some of us may 
 be loved) we shall make no abiding change even in any one 
 human face by our going away." It is said that ghosts loiter 
 about their former haunts a good deal when they are first dead ; 
 flit wistfully among their old friends and companions, and, as 
 Thackeray surmised, expect to hear a plenty of conversation 
 and friendly tearful remark about themselves. " But suppose 
 they return, and find nobody talking of them at all? Or 
 suppose, Hamlet (Pere, and Royal Dane) comes back and 
 finds Claudius and Gertrude very comfortable over a piece of 
 cold meat, or what not?" Would not that be a signal for the 
 prompter's cry of Crow, cocks ! Quick, sun-dawn ! Open, trap- 
 doors ! and for the revenant to s'en aller, or get out of that, 
 with all practicable despatch? Had the old vicar of Hurst 
 Staple, of Mr. Trollope's depicting, come up from his grave at 
 the end of three months, he would hardly have found that he 
 was missed : a very elegant little tablet had been placed to 
 his memory ; and there apparently was an end of him. " The 
 widow's cap did make some change in the appearance of the 
 family circle ; but it is astonishing bow soon we get used even 
 
AS A DEAD MAN OUT OF MIND. 157 
 
 to a widow's cap." It is a clergyman who moralizes on the 
 thought, how many of his reverend brethren, seeing the strong 
 marks of grief evinced by the congregation as they preach their 
 farewell sermon before going to another parish, can scarcely 
 conceive how quickly the congregation will get over its loss ; 
 and how soon it mil come to assemble Sunday by Sunday with 
 no remembrance at all of the familiar face that used to look at 
 it from the pulpit, or of the voice which once was pleasant to 
 hear. In public as in private life, reflects a political dissertator, 
 the most valuable and necessary existence, the life upon which 
 all hopes hang, and at the close of which the very sun in 
 heaven seems as if it must pale — when it actually ends at last, 
 leaves the bystanders lost in amaze that it should be so little 
 missed. "The world which God has taken the trouble to 
 make, gets on moderately well, and takes its own way, whoever 
 may die or be overthrown." When Ben Jonson's Knowell talks 
 of the whole nation sustaining a felt loss indeed were it to lose 
 Bobadil, that bragadocio has the grace, or the mock humility, 
 to reply, " Alas, no ! What's a pecuHar [private, or individual] 
 man to a nation ? not seen." Many a homily has been preached 
 on Napoleon's text, that No man is indispensable — none of 
 whom it might not sooner or later be said, mth whatever more 
 or less of difficulty, that we could do without him. And as to 
 peculiars, or privates, or blank individuals, they are typified 
 en masse by the Gartneys who disappeared out of the places 
 that had known them so long, and could yet, their best friend 
 allows, do so exceedingly well \vithout them. " Do the cloven 
 waters stand agape for the little dipperfull of drops that may 
 be drawn c^ut from among them ?" Lord Beaconsfield's account 
 of the cordial parting of Vivian Grey with the German Prince 
 is qualified by the reflection that, most probably, in less than 
 another week his affectionate Highness would not be able to 
 recall Mr. Grey's name under an hour's effort. "Such are 
 friends ! The moment that we are not at their side, we are 
 neglected; and the moment that we die, we are forgotten." 
 The bond of kindred is broken, as Dr. Ne\vman words it, and 
 the silver cord of love is loosed : we talk about the dead as 
 
158 AS A DEAD MAN OUT OF MIND. 
 
 if they were persons we do not know ; we talk about them as 
 third persons ; whereas they used to be always with us, and 
 every other thought which was in us was shared by them. 
 " Or perhaps ... we do not mention their names at all." 
 The world goes on without them ; it forgets them. The great 
 preacher charges the world with contriving to forget that men 
 have souls, and with looking upon them' all as mere parts of 
 some great visible system : this continues to move on, and to 
 this the world ascribes a sort of life and personality ; when one 
 or other of its members dies, it considers them only as faUing 
 out of the system, and as come to nought, — for a minute, 
 perhaps, it thinks of them in sorrow, then leaves them — leaves 
 them for ever. 
 
 Here shift the scene, to represent How those Swift loved his 
 death lament. 
 
 " Poor Pope would grieve a month, and Gay 
 A week, and Arbuthnot a day. 
 St. John himself will scarce forbear 
 To bite his pen and drop a tear. 
 The rest will give a shrug, and cry, 
 
 * I'm sorry — but we all must die ! ' 
 
 Indifference, clad in Wisdom's guise, 
 All fortitude of mind supplies . . . 
 My female friends, whose tender hearts 
 Have better learnt to act their parts, 
 Receive the news in doleful dumps : 
 'The dean is dead : (Pray, what is trumps?)' . . , 
 
 * Madam, your husband will attend 
 The funeral of so good a friend ? ' 
 
 ' No, madam, 'tis a shocking sight ; 
 And he's engaged to-morrow night . . , 
 He loved the dean— (I lead a heart), 
 But dearest friends, they say, must part. 
 His time was come : he ran his race ; 
 We hope he's in a better place.' 
 
 Why do we grieve that friends should die ? 
 No loss more easy to supply. 
 One year is past ; a different scene ! 
 No further mention of the dean ; 
 Who now, alas ! no more is miss'd 
 Than if he never did exist." 
 
WELL SPOKEN OF IF WELL TO DO. 159 
 
 XX. 
 
 WELL SP0I<:EN of if WELL TO DO. 
 Psalm xlix. 18. 
 
 " O O long as thou doest well unto thyself^ men will speak 
 v3 good of thee." Very successful, they say ; and the saying 
 is a benediction. It is the way of the world. 
 
 " Prosperity 
 Is warranty of wisdom with the world ; 
 Failure is foolishness." 
 
 Men are apt to gauge the great, not by their merit, but their 
 success. Wallenstein's scheme, 
 
 " Plann'd merely, is a common felony ; 
 Accomplish'd, an immortal undertaking : 
 And with success comes pardon hand in hand." 
 
 Or as the schemer himself words it, there's many a crown 
 shines spotless now, that yet was deeply sullied in the ^vinning. 
 As old Agrippa d'Aubigne said of his co-religion7iaires, the 
 reform party in France, they were " criminels de leurs faiblesses 
 et malheurs, les ligues au contraire justifies par leurs forces et 
 prosperites." The growing fashion of modern historians to 
 admire success at the expense of morality, has called forth 
 some very desirable protests, from others who decline the 
 invitation to fall down and worship a Caesar or a Frederick, 
 without even the pretence that they were virtuous, but simply 
 because they were successful. One such objector declares the 
 modern Temple of Fame to be beginning to resemble a shady 
 sort of pawnbroker's shop; no questions are to be asked as 
 to antecedents, and no inquiries to be made as to character. 
 " The Ten Commandments are to be superseded in favour of 
 the one simple injunction. Succeed. Get to the top of the tree, 
 and nobody will care how you got there." There is nothing, it 
 has been said, so abject as the worship of mere success, unless 
 indeed it be the worship of mere wealth ; there is nothing lower 
 than to admire and flatter a man simply because he has got on, 
 and to think scorn of others whose merits and efforts may have 
 
i6o NOTHING SUCCEEDS LIKE SUCCESS. 
 
 been equal to his, or very likely much greater, though from 
 some cause or other they have come signally short of success. 
 Cornelius Nepos may say that we estimate great men by their 
 virtue, not by their success : magnos homines virtute inetimur, 
 non fortu7ia ; but the comment of scholiasts is. Philosophers 
 may do this, but not so the public. Such a public, at any rate, 
 as Juvenal had in his mind's eye when he said that had Sejanus 
 been successful in his intrigues, the populace that hurried him 
 to death would have hailed him as Imperator and Augustus. 
 When the French king, in Shakspeare, pondering the claims 
 of England's rival York and Lancaster, demands of Edward's 
 advocate, " But is he gracious in the people's eye ? " " The 
 more that Henry was unfortunate," is Warwick's answer. And 
 anon we find King Lewis addressing himself to Henry's queen 
 after this sort — 
 
 " But if your title to the crown be weak, — 
 As may appear by Edward's good success," 
 
 for his majesty of France lends his august authority to confirm 
 the maxim, that nothing succeeds like success. Adam Smith 
 asserts of Caesar that had he, instead of gaining, lost the battle 
 of Pharsalia, his character would, at this hour, have ranked 
 a little above that of Catiline ; and that the weakest man would 
 have viewed his enterprise against the laws of his country in 
 blacker colours than, perhaps, even Cato, with all the animosity 
 of a party man, ever viewed it at the time. Cato would have 
 found Dryden's couplet to his liking, 
 
 *' Unpraised by me, though Heaven may sometimes bless 
 An impious act with undeserved success. " 
 
 That the world judges by the event, and not by the design, has 
 been in all ages the complaint, and is called in the Theory of 
 Moj-al Se?tHments " the great discouragement of virtue. Every- 
 body agrees to the general maxim, that as the event does not 
 depend on the agent, it ought to have no influence upon our 
 sentiments with regard to the merit or propriety of his conduct. 
 But when we come to particulars, we find that our sentiments 
 are scarce in any one instance exactly conformable to what this 
 
PROSPEROUS RASCALITY. i6i 
 
 . <L 
 
 equitable maxim would direct." For it is made clear that the 
 happy or unprosperous event of any action is not only apt to 
 give us a good or bad opinion of the prudence with which it 
 was conducted, but, moreover, almost always animates our 
 gratitude or resentment, our sense of the merit or demerit of 
 the design.* La Bruyere never wrote in hot haste, or let his 
 pen run away \\\\h. him ; and upon this subject La Bruyere 
 emphatically ^vrites, " Les hommes sur la conduite des grands 
 et des petits, indifferemment sont preVenus, charmes, enleves 
 par la reussite : il s'en faut peu que le crime heureux ne soit 
 loue comme la vertu meme, et que le bonheur ne tienne lieu de 
 toutes leurs vertus." It must be a very black business indeed, 
 he adds, an extremely foul and altogether loathsome enterprise, 
 that cannot find its justification in its success. Has not Pope 
 said pretty much the same thing of Vice in his Epilogue to the 
 Satires ? — 
 
 " Let greatness o\xn her, and she's mean no more ; 
 
 Her birth, her beauty, crowds and courts confess, 
 
 Chaste matrons praise her, and grave bishops bless ; 
 
 In golden chains the willing world she draws, 
 
 And hers the gospel is, and hers the laws ; 
 
 Mounts the tribunal, lifts her scarlet head, 
 
 And sees pale Virtue carted in her stead." 
 
 The sophist adventurer Randal Leslie argues \nth himself, " If 
 power is only so to be won," the so meaning by sinister prac- 
 tices, "does not success in life justify all things? And who 
 prizes the mse man if he fails ? " When the very French 
 Cromwell of French romance is assured by a toady that his 
 abortive idea of a mined felucca was sublime, " It is absurd," 
 he replies, " because it has proved useless. There are no ideas 
 sublime in politics, but such as bear fruit ; ever}' abortive idea 
 is foolish." He would have made great eyes at the sentiment 
 of a French satirist, unless explained to be satirical, 
 
 " Vos coupables succes ont ouvert tous les yeux ; 
 Le crime couronne parait plus odieux." 
 
 * Compare chapter iii. of the section on Merit or Demerit, with the third 
 section in Part vi., on the Character of Virtue. 
 
 1 1 
 
i62 GUILTY OF UNSUCCESSFULNESS. 
 
 But we may refer to the unsatirical sense of this couplet of 
 Colnet's what Mr. J. Stuart Mill says of the popular party in 
 France when the Bastille fell, — namely, that success, which is 
 often said to be a justification, has here proved the reverse ; 
 for men who " would have ranked with Hampden and Sidney 
 if they had quietly waited to have their throats cut, passed 
 for odious monsters because they have been victorious." The 
 French Revolution, first and last, would furnish many a text 
 for varied readings of our theme. On divers pages of Carlyle's 
 History of it may be read, for instance, such passages as this 
 on the summary condemnation of General Custine : " Custine 
 was accused of harshness, of unskilfulness, perfidiousness ; 
 accused of many things ; found guilty, we may say, of one 
 thing, unsuccessfulness." Or this again, some half-dozen chap- 
 ters later : " The Generals go fast to the guillotine ; justly 
 and unjustly. From which what inference? This, among 
 others : That ill-success is death ; that in victory alone is 
 life." To conquer or die was no theatrical palabra, in these cir- 
 cumstances, but a practical truth and necessity. In Past and 
 Present, Mr. Carlyle has, explicitly enough, put on record his 
 estimate of mere success, military or other, as such ; where he 
 assures a very successful friend, that if he had all the artillery 
 of Woolwich trundling at his back in support of an unjust 
 thing, and infinite bonfires visibly waiting ahead of him, to 
 blaze centuries long for his victory in behalf of it, his " success" 
 cannot go for much, after all : " If the thing is unjust, thou hast 
 not succeeded ; no, not though bonfires blazed from north to 
 south, and bells rang, and editors wrote leading articles, and 
 the just thing lay trampled out of sight, to all mortal eyes an 
 abolished and annihilated thing." To pass in one stride from 
 a Thomas Carlyle to a Horace Walpole may seem to require 
 a very long stride indeed, amounting to a strain on the mus- 
 cular system, and perhaps on the nervous too ; but the dapper 
 dilettante of Strawberry Hill may be heard saying, in his thin 
 but clear voice, " I am far from allowing that even wise measures, 
 with all the prospect of success, are good ; for then fortunate 
 conquerors would be excusable, which I shall never think." 
 
THE WORSHIP OF SUCCESS. 163 
 
 He was capable, with all his levity, of taking the side of those 
 English critics of M. Thiers' histories who declare the French 
 historian's highest morality to be the worship of success ; his 
 passion being for war if it is successful, while there is no one of 
 Napoleon's acts of spoliation which he does not defend : it is 
 only when the Empire was falling to pieces that M. Thiers can 
 detect any errors in the Imperial policy, and regrets that the 
 system of the Consulate had not been persevered in. Lord 
 Brougham set himself the task (before Mr. Carlyle took up Old 
 Fritz) to " reduce to their true dimensions " the merits of 
 Frederick the Great, a task '* rendered necessary' " by the uni- 
 versal belief in that prince's greatness, and the disposition to 
 exalt his merits because of the success which followed his 
 ambition. " To the success of his intrigues and arms [he owes] 
 the appellation of Great ; — a title which is the less honourable, 
 that mankind have generally agreed to bestow it upon those to 
 whom their gratitude was least of all due." Elsewhere his lord- 
 ship claims credit for attempting at least to reclaim mankind 
 from the evil habit, " so nearly akin to vicious indulgence," of 
 palliating cruelty and fraud committed on a large scale, by 
 regarding the success which attended those foul enormities ; 
 and in yet another volume, for sho^\-ing the glare that success 
 gives to bad actions, and the shade into which good ones are 
 thrown by failure, to be temporar)- only ; constantly warning 
 his readers, as he does, to struggle against the prepossession 
 thus raised by the event, and to mete out praise or blame by 
 the just measure of desert. Samuel Butler, among his Miscel- 
 laneous Thoughts, had preached with point and pungency 
 from the selfsame text, — albeit ^^^th a halting rhyme : 
 " Success, that o\\tis and justifies all quarrels, 
 And vindicates deserts of hemp with laurels ; 
 Or, but miscarrying in the bold attempt, 
 Turns wreaths of laurel back again to hemp." 
 The topic was a favourite one with Butler, who thus touches 
 on it, for instance, in Hiidibras, that puritan and predestinarian 
 hero being, however, the speaker : 
 
 " Success, the mark no mortal wit 
 Or surest hand can always hit : 
 
iG4 WELL SPOKEN OF 
 
 For whatsoe'er Ave perpetrate, 
 We do but row, we're steer'd by fate, 
 Which in success oft disinherits. 
 For spurious causes, noblest merits." 
 
 And again, in a later canto : " 'Tis not the least disparagement 
 To be defeated by th' event." That the present age, notwith- 
 standing the intellectual culture and widespread inquiry into 
 all subjects which distinguish it, is probably remarkable above 
 its predecessors in its adoption of a coarse and material standard 
 in judging of men and things, the authority of England's 
 "leading journal." may be cited to show; for we are there 
 assured that success never succeeded as it does now — that is, 
 never was regarded with such entire confidence, favour, and 
 admiration. It is there in evidence that measures ill conceived 
 and badly executed are quite sure to enUst a host of admirers 
 if only by some strange caprice of fortune they escape the 
 failure which they deserve. " The adoption of such a criterion 
 saves an infinity of trouble. We have only to suspend our 
 judgment while events are in preparation, and when the event 
 is decided to give it roundly in favour of the winner." The 
 worst of this kind of proceeding confessedly is, that it is always 
 making and unmaking heroes : men are raised to a temporary 
 eminence and depressed again to very humble positions by 
 successes which have had little merit, and by failures which do 
 not really imply any serious blame. '' II n'y a rien de plus 
 bas," says La Bruyere, " que de parler en des termes magni- 
 fiques de ceux memes dont I'on pensoit tres-modestement avant 
 leur elevation." And how like the moralist is that stroke of 
 his in the chapter Des Biens de Fortune, where he remarks that 
 if a financier misses his aim, court folks call him a bourgeois, a 
 nobody, a mere snob ; but if he hits the mark, they ask for his 
 daughter in marriage. No sooner was Columbus successful, 
 than the courtiers began to caress the man they had so per- 
 sistently kept out in the cold. Leigh Hunt says of Wolsey, 
 that, '• as the prosperous and the upper classes are apt to do 
 in all ages," he probably worshipped success itself as the final 
 proof of all which the divine Governor of the world intended, 
 
IF WELL TO DO. 165 
 
 in His dealings with individuals or society : hence the cardinal's 
 proud swelling while possessed of it, and his undisguised tears 
 and lamentations during his decline. Mr. Herman Merivale, 
 in his historical study of Joseph H., charges the world with 
 having judged that '' excellent though unfortunate sovereign," 
 as it usually judges, by success :— because he failed, he has 
 become a byword ; but had he carried into execution the 
 scheme of policy which he conceived, he would have been 
 regarded as the greatest, as well as the most beneficent, monarch 
 who ever swayed the destinies of the human race. To apply 
 Corneille's words, in his preface to the Heraclius, " Dans un 
 dessein de cette nature, ce qu'un bon succes fait passer pour 
 une ingenieuse hardiesse, un mauvais le fait prendre pour une 
 temerite ridicule." Byron is satirical as regards vrhat is 
 
 *' Firmness yclept in heroes, kings, and seamen, 
 That is, when they succeed ; but gi-eatly blamed 
 As obstinacy, both in men and women, 
 Whene'er their triumph pales, or star is tamed. 
 ***** 
 Had Bonaparte won at Waterloo, 
 It had been firmness ; now 'tis pertinacity : 
 Must the event decide between the two ? 
 I leave it to your people of sagacity 
 To draw the line between the false and true, 
 If such can e'er be drawn by man's capacity." 
 
 When the Count de Cabra, who had captured one king of 
 Granada, attempted to capture another, and failed, some of 
 the counsellors of Isabella, " of that politic class who seek to 
 rise by the faults of others," * were loud in their censures of his 
 
 * And of such as whom Dean Swift makes food for satire, where he 
 makes them say of themselves, 
 
 " Fools may pursue their adverse fate, 
 And stick to the unfortunate ; 
 
 We laugh while they condemn us. 
 For, being of that generous mind, 
 To success we are still inclined, 
 
 And quit the suffering side ; 
 If on our friends cross planets frown, 
 We join the cry and hunt them down. 
 
 And sail with wind and tide. " 
 
1 66 WORSHIP OF SUCCESS. 
 
 rashness. The queen defended him with prompt generosity. 
 " The enterprise," she said, " was rash, but not more so than 
 his previous one, which was crowned with success, and which 
 we have all applauded as the height of heroism. Had the 
 Count de Cabra succeeded in capturing the uncle [El Zagal], 
 as he did the nephew [Boabdil el Chico], who is there that 
 would not have praised him to the skies?" As a queen of 
 older times enunciates the truism : 
 
 " Success is made the measure of our acts . . . 
 Between the culprit and the demigod 
 There's but one difterence me* regard — success." 
 
 Dr. J. C. Bruce, in his elucidations of the Bayeux Tapestry, 
 commenting on the oath of Harold, goes on to say : " Success 
 attended the side which Raol espoused, and we hear nothing of 
 his perjury. Harold fell on the hard-fought field of Hastings, 
 and heaven and earth resounded with cries of horror at the foul 
 sin." Michelet ascribes to the success of Lewis the Eleventh a 
 great shock to the morality of the period; for craft and wisdom 
 came to be confounded in men's minds, and the long-abiding 
 consequence was admiration of cunning, and the worship of 
 success. The same historian writes of the Guises : " Leur 
 audace seduisit la France. Quoique eminemment faux, et tout 
 mensonge, ils plurent par le succes." To them was attributed 
 the supreme gift which in after-days Mazarin preferred in a 
 general to any solid merit, — for his question ever was, " Est-il 
 heiireuxV The philosophy is that derivable from Samuel 
 Daniel's lines, — 
 
 " Where evei-more the fortune that prevails 
 Must be the right : the ill-succeeding mars 
 The fairest and the best-faced enterprize." 
 
 Of Guise, an admiring France that watched his progress was 
 able to say, " II est heureux ; " and he was adored accordingly. 
 He was looked upon as a gambler who always won, who was 
 safe always to win. "Fatale idolatrie, et punissable! La France 
 expie bientot d'avoir fait un dieu du succes." Cicero recom- 
 mends Pompey under this particular head to the Romans, with 
 whom the character of being fortunate was so popular, that 
 
SC'CCESS THE TEST OF MERIT. 167 
 
 several of the emperors gave it a place among their titles. The 
 felicity of Augustus, observes De Quincey, was often vaunted by- 
 antiquity, — success being then not so much a test of merit as 
 itself a merit of the highest quality. Lucan takes for granted 
 that the cause of Caesar had the approbation of the gods, simply 
 from the event, because notoriously it was the triumphant cause. 
 " I am sure," said Bishop Gauden, " the event or success can 
 never state the justice of any cause ; " but this was a Christian 
 conviction. In every age and clime there are numbers who, 
 as the Winterslow essayist puts it, judge by the event, and 
 change mth fortune : they extol the hero of the day, and join 
 the prevailing clamour whatever it is ; they blow hot or cold, 
 according as the wind sets favourably or otherwise ; and with 
 them the only infallible test of merit is success. 
 
 *' Had Sejanus thrived 
 In his design, and prosperously opprest 
 The old Tiberius ; then, in that same minute, 
 These very rascals that now rage like furies 
 Would have proclaim'd Sejanus emperor." 
 
 Pizarro's American historian remarks that "Success only, the 
 best argument with the multitude," redeemed the expeditions 
 of that daring Spaniard from the fatal imputation of utter extra- 
 vagance. Another of Mr. Prescott's histories illustrates the 
 caprice of " the fickle populace, mth whom misfortune passes 
 for misconduct." Macaulay, treating of Mackay in 1689, than 
 whom no general had ever been more completely beaten, refers 
 scornfully to the detractors who therefore distrusted him, and 
 who considered success as the only test of the ability of a 
 commander : whoever wins a battle is, in the estimation of 
 such persons, a great general; whoever is beaten, is a bad 
 general. *- Cest que le succes est un grand maitre^ said Barante ; 
 pour presque tous les homtnes il est le jugement de Dieu. Glory 
 covers the multitude of sins. Mr. Napier quotes as a maxim 
 of Raleigh's — haply somewhat garbled however in the quoting 
 — that " good success admits of no examination ; " in which 
 sardonically expressed /^;z^<?^, Sir Walter, as his devout admirer 
 and apologist, Mr. Charles Kingsley contended, was not 
 
1 63 WELL SPOKEN OF 
 
 giving his own morality, but that of the world, which makes 
 every man who has failed (as Raleigh had failed in the 
 mining scheme) a mark for slander and insolent detraction. 
 In another of his books the sometime Cambridge Professor of 
 History describes Archbishop Aldred as endowed with prudence 
 of the sort that will " honour the powers that be," if they be 
 but prosperous enough : " For after all, if success be not God, 
 it is like enough to Him in some men's eyes to do instead." 
 When it was known in England that Nelson had returned after 
 an unsuccessful pursuit of the French fleet, the cry was raised 
 that he ought to be impeached ; for the young officer had not 
 yet attained that fame which compels en\7 to be silent. "^ 
 Marlborough is Mr. Addison's theme when he, in Esmond, 
 affirms the greatest of a great man's qualities to be success ; it 
 is the result of all the others, — a latent power in him which 
 " compels the favour of the gods, and subjugates fortune. Of 
 all his gifts I admire that one in the great Marlborough. To 
 be brave ? every man is brave. But in being victorious, as he 
 is, I fancy there is something divine." Sachons prefirer a cer- 
 taines victoires une 7ioble defaite, is not a rule of universally easy 
 construction, or ready application. Remarking upon the way of 
 the world, which is to huzza prosperity, and to turn away from 
 misfortune as from some contagious disease, Mr. Thackeray 
 asks, " Indeed, how can we see a man's brilliant qualities, if 
 he is what we call in the shade ? " We are told of the great 
 Rothschild, that he did not care to meet mth any one who 
 was proverbially unlucky : like Mazarin, Est-il heureux ? was 
 a test question with the shrewd old Hebrew. " If I were to 
 give the best advice I could to a young man," said he, " it 
 should be this: 'Always associate with successful men.'" To 
 him that hath shall be given ; and from him that hath not 
 
 * Churchill wrote, in his Epistle to Williatn Hogarth, 
 " Is any one so foolish to succeed ? 
 On Envy's altar he is doom'd to bleed." 
 
 And ]\Ir. Dickens said, in one of his earlier books, If a man would commit 
 an inexpiable offence against society, let him be successful : they will iorgive 
 him any crime but that. 
 
IF WELL TO DO. 169 
 
 shall be taken even that which he hath — this, according to the 
 author of The Way we Live Now, is the special text that we 
 delight to follow, and success the god we deUght to worship. 
 But Churchill long ago explained to us that 
 
 ** Beggars, in every age and nation, 
 Are rogues and fools by situation ; 
 The rich and great are understood 
 To be of course both wise and good." 
 
 It is by the thoughtful deemed matter of great congratulation 
 that there is not an invariable alliance between prosperity and 
 desert ; and some think it even more fortunate that it is not 
 the province of society at large to gauge the exact merits of its 
 members, and to assign them precedence accordingly — for the 
 result would demonstrably be, not only a social slavery of the 
 most degrading kind, but the introduction of a universal system 
 of Mammon-worship such as the world has happily never seen. 
 " At present, a poor man feels that no one but an insolent fool 
 would despise his poverty ; but it would be far otherwise if 
 poverty and misfortune were the sure marks of crime or folly." 
 Pope glances at this hypothetical state of things, as actual, in 
 those expressive lines of his, 
 
 " The grave Sir Gilbert holds it for a rule 
 That every man in want is knave or fool : 
 ' God cannot love, ' says Blount, with tearless eyes, 
 'The wretch He stars^es,' — and piously denies," 
 
 therefore, the assistance implored. Fielding's Allworthy had often 
 observed with concern that distress is more apt to excite con- 
 tempt than commiseration, especially among men of business, 
 with whom poverty is understood to indicate want of ability. 
 
 ' ' If your lot in this life should be hard, men will treat you with scorn and 
 
 neglect : 
 For they always mete out their regard by the credit that yours will 
 
 reflect. 
 While you till your poor acre alone, they will mock as they sit and 
 
 carouse ; 
 When your wide fields are harrow'd and sown, they will hasten to lend 
 
 you their ploughs. 
 
1 70 HEBRE W EXILES IN BA B YL ON. ' 
 
 If your foes shall be thoroughly thrash'd, they will see your success with 
 
 delight ; 
 But if your own head should get smash'd, their verdict will be ' Serve 
 
 you right ! ' 
 For, how noble soever your plan, the world lays it down as a rule — 
 ' To succeed is to be a great man, to fail is to be a great fool. ' " 
 
 XXI. 
 
 FAR AWAY REMEMBRANCE OF ZION. 
 Psalm cxxxvii. i, 5, 6, 
 
 TEARFUL were the remembrances of Zion, that swelled 
 the hearts of the Hebrew exiles as they sat down by 
 the rivers of Babylon, and hanged their harps upon the willows 
 that fringed those watercourses. Singer's voice may be all the 
 sweeter, more sympathetic, more telling, more thrilling, for les 
 larmes dans la voix. But how if the tears choke utterance? 
 How then sing the home songs of Zion in a strange land ? 
 
 "Tears from the depth of some divine despair, 
 Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, . . . 
 In thinking of the days that are no more," 
 
 and of the native land that is very far off. And as Camoens 
 paraphrased in a sonnet the psalm of pious, patriotic remem- 
 brance, " When the cup of woe Is fill'd, till misery's bitter 
 draught o'erfiow, The mourner's cure is not to sing — but die." 
 So at least Mrs. Hemans Englished the Portuguese ; and from 
 her own miscellaneous poems might be offered a choice of more 
 or less parallel passages; as where the Norsemen bade the 
 Sicilian captive sing of her distant land, whose lyre she held 
 with a trembling hand, till the spirit its blue skies had given 
 her woke, and the stream of her voice into music broke : 
 
 ' ' They bid me sing of thee, mine own, my sunny land, of thee ! 
 Am I not parted from thy shores by the mournful-sounding sea ? 
 — How should thy lyre give here its wealth of buried sweetness forth — 
 Its tones of summer's breathings born, to the wild winds of the north ? " 
 
 But the heart of the songstress breaks with the singing. 
 
FAR AWAY REMEMBRANCE OF ZION. 171 
 
 The weeping Hebrews were not a cheerful sight to those 
 who had carried them away captive. And if the captors 
 required of them a song, it was with a view to gladsomeness. 
 Might not music, in the sense and spirit of mirth, disperse their 
 heaviness ? Might not singing help them to forget ? But that 
 was just what the exiles would riot hear of, could not bear the 
 mere thought of. Forget ? " If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, 
 let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember 
 thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth ; if I prefer 
 not Jerusalem above my chief joy." 
 
 Breathes there a man ^vith soul so dead, as not to respond 
 to, not to beat in unison with, this utterance of the exiles ? 
 Who can forget, or who would, in such a case ? 
 
 *' Nescio quid natale solum dulcedine cunctos 
 Ducit, et immemores non sinit esse sui." 
 
 There is, says Goldsmith, something so seducing in that spot 
 in which we first had existence, that nothing but it can please ; 
 whatever vicissitudes we experience in life, however we toil, or 
 wherever we wander, our fatigued wishes still recur to home 
 for tranquillity, and we long to die in that spot which gave us 
 birth. His Traveller sets the sentiment in metre : 
 
 ' ' And as a hare, whom hounds and horns pursue, 
 Pants to the place from which at first she flew, 
 I still had hopes, my long vexations past, 
 Here to return — and die at home at last." * 
 
 * Old as human nature itself is the wish to die at home, and. if not, at 
 least to be buried there, Barzillai prayed David the King to let him turn 
 back again, in his old age, and die in his own city, and be buried by the 
 grave of his father and of his mother. It was part of the prophetic male- 
 diction upon Coniah, the son of Jehoiakim (Jerem. xxii. 26), that he should 
 be cast out, and his mother that bai-e him, into another country where they 
 were not born, and there should they die ; but to the land whereunto they 
 desired to return, thither should they not return. Vain would it for them 
 to emulate Joseph, who " gave commandment concerning his bones." The 
 night before the exiled Hippias conducted the Persians to the plains of 
 Marathon, he dreamt a dream which he was fain to hope promised his 
 reinstatement at Athens, and his dying in his own house there of old age. 
 Neither the pomps of Rome nor the pleasant seclusion of Montefiascone, 
 
172 'ET MORI ENS DULCES 
 
 Sternttur, et moriens dukes reminiscitur Argos. Byron's dying 
 Gladiator, butchered to make a Roman holiday, regards not 
 the brutal shout that hails his fall : he heard it, but he heeded 
 not — his heart was far away, at his rude hut on the banks of 
 the Danube. Campbell's Swedish soldier, one of the bleeding 
 thousands marched by their Charles to Dnieper's swampy 
 shore, — ere yet he sank in Nature's last repose, 
 
 *'Ere life's warm torrent to the fountain froze, 
 The dying man to Sweden turn'd his eye, 
 Thought of his home, and closed it with a sigh." 
 
 The military hospital experiences of Sisters of Mercy show how 
 very generally the force of early association asserts itself in 
 
 writes Dean Milman, could retain a French prelate, though that prelate 
 was Urban V. To Avignon he returned to die ; his alleged excuse a 
 parental desire to reconcile the kings of France and England (a.d. 1370), 
 but the accepted motive "a secret inward longing for his native land." 
 We find a later Pope, ^neas Sylvius, wanting : "I dread nothing so much 
 as to lay my bones in a foreign land, though the way to heaven or to hell 
 lies open alike from both." It is touching to read of the deprived Arch- 
 bishop Sancroft retiring to Fresingfield, the place of his birth, and writing 
 his own epitaph, "returned hither to end his life," when deprived of all he 
 could not keep with a good conscience. So it is to find Charles Leslie, the 
 non-juror, seeking permission from the government of King George I. to 
 retui-n and die in the land which gave him birth, and not in that sunny 
 Italy whither he had followed the Pretender, Hanz Egede, the apostle of 
 Greenland, carried back with him to Copenhagen the coffined wife who had 
 so vainly yearned to see her native land again ; and when, some twenty 
 years later, his own time was drawing nigh, and he too again at a distance, 
 he was for going to Copenhagen to die there, and would have done so, dying, 
 but that he was promised he should be laid beside her, dead. We bear 
 within us, said the first Lord Lytton, an irresistible attraction to our earliest 
 home : "It matters not where our mid-course is run, but we will die in the 
 place where we were born — in the point of space whence began the circle, 
 there shall it end." Like Adrastus in Ion : 
 
 " Here let me rest ; 
 
 In this old chamber did my life begin, 
 
 And here I'll end it.' 
 
 Charles Magnin's attachment to the town of Salins, "ou il a voulu que ses 
 restes furent transportes pour y reposer dans le terroir paternel," evokes 
 from Sainte-Beuve a note of admiration for " cette fidelite au pays, a la 
 source originelle," which was " un des traits de sa nature." Shakspeare's 
 
REMIiMSCITUR ARGOS: 173 
 
 supreme moments of physical weakness, — the thought of the 
 household grave, in the familiar churchyard, pressing upon the 
 last thoughts of the men, especially of those countr}-^ born. 
 " Oh, ynth. what vivid hues life comes back oft on death ! " 
 Macaulay's exiled Jacobite, " grey-haired wdth sorrow in his 
 manhood's prime," pined to death in Italy for his own English 
 lakes and falls, — 
 
 "Heard on Lavernia Scargill's whispering trees, 
 And pined by Arno for his lovelier Tees ; 
 Beheld each night his home in fevered sleep, 
 Each morning started from the dream to weep," 
 
 till his last sleep overtook him, and his last thoughts were still 
 
 Camillo, after fifteen years' absence, importunes his royal master to let him 
 see Sicily again : * ' Though I have, for the most part, been aired abroad, 
 I desire to lay my bones there." Some there are, muses Wordsworth's 
 Solitary, 
 
 " Who, drawing near their final home, and much 
 
 And daily longing that the same were reached, 
 
 Would rather shun than seek the fellowship 
 
 Of kindred mould." 
 
 But with the morbid muser the poet could have little sympathy ; and the 
 suggested instinct of the dying hart of Harp -leap Well is more to his mind 
 — coming to make his death-bed near the well, whose water was perhaps 
 the first he drank when he had wandered from his mother's side : "And 
 he, perhaps, for aught we know, was bom Not half a furlong from that 
 selfsame spring. " Burns's wanderer beside the Thames is pining for his 
 native banks of the Nith : 
 
 " Though wandering now must be my doom, far from thy bonnie banks and braes. 
 May these my latest hours consume, amang the friends of early days." 
 
 In one of Crabbe's tales we see old Allen landing in his native bay. 
 ' ' Willing his breathless form should blend with kindred clay ; " for, when 
 
 "years advancing undermined his health, 
 Then ofttimes in delightful dreams he flew 
 To England's shore, and scenes his childhood knew, . . . 
 And thus excited, in his bosom rose 
 A wish so strong, it baffled his repose : 
 Anxious he felt on English earth to lie ; 
 To view his native soil, and there to die." 
 
 Nothing can be simpler or quieter than the pathos of John Evelyn's 
 entry in his Diary, of his going, " after more than 40 years, to spend the 
 rest of my dayes at Wotton, where I was bom." Macaulay writes of 
 Warren Hastings that when, under a tropical sun, he mled fifty millions of 
 
174 ' ET MORTENS BULGES 
 
 of home. The Lakes have their own laureate, and this is his 
 apostrophe to them, in the Latin poet's spirit of dulcet remi- 
 niscence in articulo mortis : 
 
 *' Dear native Regions, wheresoe'er shall close 
 My mortal course, there will I think on you ; 
 Dying, will cast on you a backward look ; 
 Even as this setting sun (albeit the Vale 
 Is nowhere touched by one memorial gleam) 
 Doth with the fond remains of his last power 
 Still linger, and a farewell lustre sheds 
 On the dear mountain-tops where first he rose." 
 
 The testamentary codicil that Columbus is said to have 
 written on the blank page of his little breviary (the gift of 
 Pope Alexander VL), has stirred biographers to admire its 
 evidence of the affection with which his last thoughts were bent 
 on his native city. The elder Disraeli is touched with Racine's 
 death-bed desire to be buried in the solitudes of Port Royal, 
 where he was bred; and on the same beloved retreat did 
 Arnauld, persecuted, and dying in a foreign country, still cast 
 his lingering, longing looks, — and to it he bequeathed his 
 heart, to be there inurned. 
 
 When Sir Walter Scott, during his last and fruitless sojourn 
 
 Asiatics, his hopes, amidst all the cares of war, finance, and legislation, still 
 pointed to Daylesford ; and that when his long public life, so singularly 
 chequered with good and evil, had at length closed for ever, it was to 
 Daylesford that he retired to die. Edmund Waller's purchase of a small 
 property at Coleshill was just too late for securing the fulfilment of his wish, 
 " to die like the stag, where he was roused" — for death overtook him at 
 Beaconsfield ; a spot now associated with the name of one English states- 
 man, and with the home-life of two. Bolingbroke had long wished to fetch 
 his last breath at Battersea, where he was bom ; and fortune, that had 
 through life, says one of his biographers, " seemed to traverse all his aims, 
 at last indulged him in this." Not so was it to be with that first of the four 
 Georges whose accession dealt a heavy blow and great discouragement to 
 accomplished St. John and his party. The heart of Georgius Rex was 
 ever away in Hanover ; and to many is familiar the picture of him when 
 taken ill on his last journey, as he was passing through Holland, thrusting 
 his livid head out of the coach- window, and gasping out, ' ' Osnaburg ! 
 Osnaburg !" 
 
 An English traveller in Russia speaks of the people of that country in 
 
REMINISCITUR ARGOS: 175 
 
 on the Continent, heard news of the death of Goethe, — to be 
 followed within a few months by his own, — " Alas for Goethe !" 
 he exclaimed; "but he at least died at home. — Let us to 
 Abbotsford." Grata qiiies patriae was then a quotation that 
 trembled more than once on his paralysed lips and pen. Hame, 
 ha7fie, hame wad he be. And when home was almost reached, 
 and the sight of Gala AVater revived him, and of Buckholm, 
 and of Torwoodlee, when the hill at I.adhope was rounded, and 
 the outline of the Eildons burst on him, and at length his own 
 towers, at the distance of a mile, his gradually advancing excite- 
 ment was wellnigh too much for him, if not for his companions, 
 especially when at that first glimpse of Abbotsford he sprang up 
 with a cr}- of delight. For he, after all, like Goethe, beatus ille, 
 was to die at home. Numerous and varied are the incidental 
 illustrations of the general subject that might be cited from his 
 pages. In the Talis??ia?t, the Scottish esquire who Hes sick 
 in the crusaders' camp near Ascalon, is overheard murmuring 
 how cold and refreshing taste the waters of the Clyde, after 
 the brackish springs of Palestine. He dreams of his native 
 land, and is happy in his slumbers. Again, there is Quentin 
 Durward on French soil, in the hands of Petit-Andre and Trois- 
 Eschelles, bethinking him of the little rude and unroofed 
 chapel which now held almost all his race but himself : " Our 
 
 general as an exception to the rule which makes most men yearn to retur 
 home to die. According to him, it very rarely happens that moujiks who 
 from serfs have become merchants of the second guild, and amassed large 
 fortunes, ever think in their declining days of retiring to the village which 
 gave them birth ; and soldiers too, when discharged from service, scarcely 
 ever retrace their steps to their native hamlet. At any rate they have no 
 credit such as the Cornish miner enjoys, of always, however far he may 
 become, returning home to die : 
 
 " Should he get rich in other zones, 
 To Cornwall he brings back his bones,' 
 rhymes the author of Rhymes from Cornwall, who is glad withal to'remind 
 us that "Australian, Califomian gold, Tells where a Comishman takes 
 hold." But the sentiment is pure and potent as in the more refined 
 instance of Lamartine's wistful wanderer : 
 
 " II a voulu revoir ce ciel de son enfance, 
 Revenir et mourir au lieu d(2 sa naissance." 
 
176 FAR A WA V REMEMBRANCES 
 
 feudal enemies gave my kindred graves in our own land," he 
 thought, "but I must feed the ravens and kites of a foreign 
 land, like an excommunicated felon." And there is the con- 
 victed and condemned chieftain, Fergus Mac-Ivor, hoping the 
 gaol authorities will set his head on the Scotch gate of Carlisle 
 Castle, that he may look, even after death, to the blue hills of 
 his own country, by him loved so dearly. 
 
 The Alexander Oldworthy of one of Mr. Charles Reade's 
 most charmingly told historiettes, reverts in affection and 
 longing to his native Warwickshire, at the close of his long life 
 in the greatest of cities, — and his thoughts are on the pleasant 
 fields where he had played among the lambs and the butter- 
 cups in the morning of his days. Fain would he see once more 
 those pleasant fields, and sit in the sun a little while, and then 
 lie beside his father in the old churchyard. And humbly he lies 
 there, as he wished, beneath the shadow of Coventry's great old 
 loftiest spire. It is of his own neighbouring cathedral town that 
 Dickens is writing when he refers to those who, in their dying 
 hours afar off, have imagined their chamber-floor to be strewn 
 with the autumnal leaves fallen from the elm-trees in the Close : 
 so have the rustling sounds and fresh scents of their earliest im- 
 pressions revived when the circle of their lives was very nearly 
 traced, and the beginning and the end were drawing close 
 together. So with De Quincey's Spanish Military Nun, when, 
 her brain wandering, now that her feet were not, she said to 
 herself, " It is evening; and the hour is come for the Angelus 
 to be sounding through St. Sebastian," — her memories revert- 
 ing to cathedral choirs, and to St. Sebastian's chapel, with its 
 silvery bells that carried the echoing Angelus far into mountain 
 recesses. 
 
 On the plains of Troy, and amid Ida's spreading woods 
 
 "fair Ida, watered with descending floods" — the forlorn 
 
 Achilles feeds his fancy on memories of a far-away stream, — 
 "Sperchius, whose waves in mazy errors lost, Delightful roll 
 along my native coast." No distant charge or dignity availed 
 to eflace from Cicero's very present remembrance the endeared 
 aspect of Arpinum. " I do and must love my country," wrote 
 
OF ONES NATIVE LAND. i-jf 
 
 expatriated x\tterbury : " My last wish shall be like that of 
 Father Paul, Esto perpetua ! and when I die at a distance from 
 it, it will be in the same manner as Virgil describes the ex- 
 piring Peloponnesian," who, in the act of expiring, reminiscitur 
 Argos. Of le Marechal Marmont (Due de Raguse) we read 
 that, " par un sentiment precurseur, et comme il arrive a ceux 
 qui, loin du ciel natal, se sentent decliner et approcher du 
 terme, il nourrissait depuis quelque temps un vif et secret 
 de'sir de revoir la France;" a yearning not destined to be 
 gratified. " Le mal du pays le gagna ; ce coeur si fort fut 
 brise." The French and the Scotch might perhaps divide 
 honours on the score of patriotic attachment. Dr. James 
 Hamilton somewhere expatiates on the instinct that seems to 
 bring back the exile, perhaps after the interval of a generation, 
 to his Highland glen, whether it be from luxury in a soft 
 Bermudan life, or from that Canadian clearing in which a rosy 
 household has sprung up, and in proud affection clings around 
 him : towards the haunts of his childhood there is a strange 
 deep-hidden yearning, which often sends absent looks towards 
 northern stars, and ends at last in the actual pilgrimage. As 
 in Grahame's lines : 
 
 " Yes ! I may love the music of strange tongues, 
 
 And mould my heart anew, to take the stamp 
 
 Of foreign friendships in a foreign land ; 
 
 But to my parched mouth's roof cleave this tongue, 
 
 My fancy fade into the yellow leaf, 
 
 And this oft-pausing heart forget to throb, 
 
 If, Scotland ! thee and thine it e'er forget." 
 
 Verstigan tells how a traveller in Palestine was once startled 
 by hearing a captive Scotswoman singing as she dandled her 
 baby at the door of one of the Arab tents, " Oh, Bothwell 
 bank, thou bloomest fair !" John Leyden, in the delirium of 
 a mortal fever in Java, was heard repeating snatches of old 
 Border songs. Happier was Sir James Mackintosh, in that 
 his lot was not far-away exile, when, in his dying moments, 
 the image of the woods of Aldourie and the banks of Loch 
 Ness, — every object seeming to be imprinted indelibly on his 
 memory, — haunted him to the very last. 
 
 12 
 
178 FLATTERING LIPS. 
 
 XXII. 
 
 FLATTERING LIPS. 
 
 Proverbs xxix. 5. 
 
 THE words of wisdom warn us that a man who flattereth 
 his neighbour spreadeth a net for his feet. Surely the 
 net is spread in vain in the sight of any bird ? Not always in 
 vain. Witness the Nonne Prest His Tale in Chaucer of the 
 cock and the fox, and again the crow that warbled a hoarse 
 croak to charm Reynard, and so was caught, — at least his cheese 
 was. " A flattering mouth worketh ruin," another proverb has 
 it. And another runs : " He that rebuketh a man shall after- 
 wards find more favour than he that flattereth with the tongue." 
 It was Elihu's pride, so to speak, that he knew not to give 
 flattering titles unto men. The Psalmist couples flattering lips 
 with a double heart. And St. Paul exulted in the conscious- 
 ness of not having at any time used flattering words, as the 
 Thessalonians knew, and as he called God to witness. 
 
 Especially to them of high degree is there need of warning : 
 
 ** Alias ! ye lordlynges, many a false flatour 
 Is in your house, and many a lozengour, 
 That pleasen yow wel more, by my faith, 
 Than he that sothfastnesse unto you saith. 
 Redith Ecclesiast of flaterie ; 
 Bethwar, ye lordes, of her trecherie." 
 
 Clarendon traces a considerable measure of Edmund Waller's 
 success in high circles, and where it craved wary walking, to 
 his exercise of " servile flattery to the height the vainest and 
 most imperious nature could be contented with it." We have 
 South's word for it, that if ever you find an ignoramus in place 
 and power, and can have so little conscience, and so much 
 confidence, as to tell him to his face that he has a wit and an 
 understanding above all the world beside, — "as fulsome a dose 
 as you give him, he shall readily take it down, and admit the 
 commendation, though he cannot believe the thing." Blanditic?, 
 
GREED OF FLA TTER Y. 179 
 
 etiam cii??i exduduntur, placent. It is Glenalvon's conviction, 
 
 and one he acts upon, that 
 
 " flattery direct 
 Rarely disgusts. They little know mankind 
 Who doubt its operation : 'tis my key, 
 And opes the wicket of the human heart." 
 
 Moliere's Valere will not allow the cleverest of men, les plus 
 ■fins, ever to be safe from becoming the dupes of flattery ; there 
 is nothing, he asserts, too extravagant or ridiculous for them to 
 swallow, if only it is well seasoned with paneg5nic. Himself 
 a pronounced flatterer, he owns that sincerity is something of 
 a sufferer in a game such as he systematically plays ; but when 
 you have need of people, you must accommodate yourself to 
 them; and since flattery is the only way of making sure of them 
 the fault (on his showing) lies not ^vith those who so flatter, but 
 with those who must and will be flattered, at whatever cost. 
 La Fontaine's fox tells his crow^, " Apprenez que tout flatteur 
 \it au depens de celui qui I'ecoute." An apostrophe in the old 
 historical play (1597, author unknown) oi Edward the Third, 
 runs into an aspiration : 
 
 ' ' O thou World, great nurse of flattery, 
 Why dost thou tip men's tongues with golden words, 
 And poise their deeds with weight of heavy lead, 
 That fair performance cannot follow promise ? 
 O that a man might hold the heart's close book 
 And choke the lavish tongue when it doth utter 
 The breath of falsehood, not character'd there ! " 
 
 St. Simon describes Lewis the Fourteenth as spoiled by 
 adulation — for his ministers, his mistresses, his generals, his 
 courtiers, perceiving his weakness — an unmeasured love of 
 admiration — were emulous in flattering him ; and the flattery 
 "pleased him to such an extent, that the coarsest was well 
 received, the vilest still better relished. It was the sole means 
 by which you could approach him." Catharine the Great was 
 little enough to be notoriously insatiable of flattery: she expected 
 to be addressed in a strain of Oriental adulation, and to be 
 approached with all the deference due to a divinity. Kaiser 
 Joseph IL, during his visit to her in 1780, is said, "by the 
 
i8o GI^OSS ADULATION. 
 
 most delicate and artful flattery," to have "wrought up her 
 admiration of his character almost to enthusiasm." 
 
 The husband of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu has been 
 characterized as combining very moderate talents with most 
 overweening vanity : from several of her ladyship's letters to 
 him the inference is obvious that no flatteries were too gross 
 for his taste. "No man of real sense would have endured such 
 fulsome praise of it," Earl Stanhope remarks. David Garrick's 
 portrait, as painted by Goldsmith, was painted from the life : 
 
 " Of praise a mere glutton, he swallowed what came, 
 And the puff of a dunce, he mistook it for fame. " 
 
 Less good-natured is what the younger Colman says of him — 
 (not thus would George the elder have written down his fellow- 
 playwright and old friend :) that after gorging upon the applause 
 of thundering audiences and judicious critics, Garrick's un- 
 satiated and grovelling appetite hungered for the admiration of 
 a shoeblack or an infant : "he would steal a sidelong look at 
 a duke's table, to ascertain whether he had made a hit upon 
 the butler and the footmen. Such were the littlenesses of the 
 Great Roscius." John Gay asserts that 
 
 " flattery never seems absurd ; 
 The flattered always take your word : 
 Impossibilities seem just : 
 They take the strongest praise on tmst. 
 Hyperboles, though ne'er so great, 
 Will still come short of self-conceit." 
 
 By help of this false magnifying glass, as John Oldham words 
 it, '*a louse or flea shall for a camel pass;" and if before his 
 "vile rascal" of a fulsome flatterer you "produce a hideous 
 wight, more ugly far than those ill shapes which in old hang- 
 ings are, 
 
 ** He'll make him straight a beau gar9on appear ; 
 Commend his voice and singing, tho' he bray 
 Worse than Sir Martin Marrall in the play . . ; 
 And here's the mischief ... he is believed." 
 
 The effrontery is marvellous, as the late Mr. Savage once 
 remarked, with which some men can flatter others in the 
 
GREED OF FLATTERY. 
 
 grossest manner to their faces : but then there are people on 
 whom flattery can never be laid too thick to be agreeable ; you 
 may lay it on them with trowels; nay, you may shovel it over 
 them ; they can bear any weight of it ; cartloads of encomium, 
 mountains of compHments, Pelion on Ossa, and. Ossa on 
 Olympus. " There are gross feeders, or there would not be 
 gross caterers." It has been severely said of Tom Moore, as 
 self-portrayed in his Diary, that he gloats over adulation in 
 every page, and with the most unflinching nerve licks up the 
 most nauseous and greasy draughts of flattery — nothing coming 
 amiss to him. The cant and blarney of an Irish linkboy were 
 as acceptable as the insolent familiarity of a Royal Duke. 
 " Moore had nostrils very undiscriminating. It was equally 
 incense whether the tribute was of the gums of Arabia or a 
 pastile of camel's dung." Lalande was noted while yet a child 
 for his "unusual love of adulation." Benjamin West was taunted 
 with a like charge by Peter Pindar (whose accentuation of 
 Niagara is exceptionable, as so many things about him were) : 
 
 * * Don't be cast do\\Ti — instead of gall, 
 Molasses from my pen shall fall : 
 
 And yet I fear thy gullet it is such 
 That could I pour all Niagara down. 
 Were Niagara praise, thou wouldst not fro^vn, 
 
 Nor think the thundering gulf one drop too much. " 
 
 Mr. Seward related an early inter\-iew of Hannah More ^^^th 
 Johnson, when the lady peppered so highly that the Doctor 
 turned suddenly to her, with a stern and angry countenance, 
 and said, "Madam, before you flatter a man grossly to his 
 face, you should consider whether or not your flattery is worth 
 having." 
 
 John Ballantyne's hearty praise of Woodstock was dear to Sir 
 Walter, — " did me much good," the Diary says. " I think I 
 make no habit of feeding on praise, and despise those whom 
 I see greedy for it, as much as I should an underbred fellow 
 who, after eating a cherr)^-tart, proceeded to lick the plate. 
 But when one is flagging, a little praise (if it can be had genuine 
 and unadulterated by flattery, which is as difficult to come by 
 
1 82 FULSOME FLATTERY. 
 
 as the real mountain-dew) is a cordial after all." The Ettrick 
 Shepherd declares him that ''disna like flattery" to be either 
 '' less or mair nor man. It's the natural language o' freenship, 
 and as distinck frae flummery as a bee frae a drone, a swan 
 frae a guse," etc. " Commend me to freens that flatter you, 
 as it is ca'd, afore your face, and defend ye ahint your back." 
 In England, a man who tries to recommend himself by saying 
 fulsome things, is, as an essayist on Compliments observes, very 
 soon marked, and shunned accordingly; or, at best, he sinks into 
 the position of toady en titre to some very empty-headed grandee. 
 " In private life, compliments are discreditable to the utterer, 
 and odious to the receiver." But it is complained that the 
 moment a man appears in public, all his decent reserve is 
 thrown aside ; and at a public dinner or meeting the flatteries 
 are a matter of course, which most men would turn red all 
 over before they could hear said of themselves, or say of 
 another. Even prayer is pressed into this service ; and prayer 
 is held to be a more effective vehicle, both of flattery and of 
 detraction, than any other species of composition. If your 
 catalogue of praises of a " noble chairman," for instance, takes 
 the form of a thanksgiving to the Supreme Being for the blessing 
 He has vouchsafed to His people by endowing with rank and 
 fame a vessel of so much piety, wisdom, zeal, etc., etc., you 
 " may venture upon a very considerable amount of unctuous 
 hyperbole without palling on the taste of your audience." 
 Meanwhile, the noble chairman, it is added, undergoes the 
 oleaginous application with a modest smile, and, when it is 
 over, with a few friendly counter-compliments, and a pious 
 ascription, accepts the fact of his own canonization. Oil of 
 Flattery, Mr. Carlyle prescribes, (and yet proscribes,) as the best 
 patent anti-friction known, subduing all irregularities whatever. % 
 Crabbe's Laughton is skilled, "by pouring oil of flattery on 
 its rage," the swelling force of the angriest deep to assuage. 
 "Delicious essence!" Sterne apostrophizes it; "how refreshing 
 art thou to nature ! how strongly are all its powers and all its 
 weaknesses on thy side ! how sweetly dost thou mix with the 
 blood, and help it through the most difficult and tortuous 
 
ADROIT FLA TTER V. 183 
 
 passages to the heart!" Mr. Thackeray calls a "blundering 
 idiot" the author of the saying that "fine words butter no 
 parsnips" — half the parsnips of society being in fact served 
 and rendered palatable with no other sauce : a skilful artist 
 will make a few simple and pleasing phrases go further than 
 ever so much substantial benefit-stock in the hands of a mere 
 bungler. " Nay, we know that substantial benefits often sicken 
 some stomachs ; whereas most will digest any amount of fine 
 words, and be always eager for more of the same food." But 
 here too there are stomachs and stomachs, and some soon turn. 
 Recording in his diary a compliment paid him by Madame 
 d'Arblay, Sir Walter Scott \mtes, "This was really a compliment 
 to be pleased with — a nice little handsome pat of butter made 
 up by a ' neat-handed Phillis ' of a dairymaid, instead of the 
 grease, fit only for cart-wheels, which one is dosed with by the 
 pound." The crowning merit of a clever woman's flattery is 
 said to be the fact that it never seems like flattery ; and this is 
 illustrated in the description of Sir Jasper Denison's acceptance 
 of every syllable of Mrs. Harding's honeyed discourse, as if 
 unconscious that she was anything but a very sensible woman, 
 — a little worldly-\vise, of course, yet in a general way a really 
 candid creature, with plenty of sound common sense. The 
 widow, it seems, drew her most potent magic from the vanity of 
 her victim, and her highest art consisted in a skilful cultivation 
 of his own weakness. He was mortal, and he Hked incense, 
 and she flattered him. She "kept the perfumed censer burning 
 as steadily as if it had been the sacred fire which classic vestals 
 watched." In every word, in every gesture, in every glance, 
 in every tone, she contrived to convey some breath of the 
 insidious vapour which lulled him into a " delicious trance of 
 self-complacency." She would appear to have studied the 
 tactics of Byron's hero, concerning whom we are told that 
 Aurora, 
 
 *' who in her indifference 
 Confounded him in common with the crowd 
 Of flatterers, though she deem'd he had more sense 
 Than whispering foplings, or than witlings loud, — 
 
1 84 FLATTERING LIPS, 
 
 Commenced — (from such slight things will great commence) 
 To feel that flattery which attracts the proud 
 Rather by deference than compliment, 
 And wins even by a delicate dissent. " 
 
 Byron himself takes note in- his diary of having received a letter 
 from Madame de Stael, in which "she flatters me very prettily; 
 — but I know it." The reason, he adds, that adulation is not 
 displeasing is, that, though untrue, it shows one to be of con- 
 sequence enough, in one way or other, to induce people to lie, 
 to make us their friend. " That is their concern," he cynically 
 concludes. To Boswell's remark that no quality will get a man 
 more friends than a disposition to admire the qualities of others, 
 — meaning, not flattery, but a sincere admiration,^ — " Nay, sir," 
 replied Johnson, " flattery pleases very generally. In the first 
 place, the flatterer may think what he says to be true ; but, in 
 the second place, whether he thinks so or not, he certainly 
 thinks those whom he flatters of consequence enough to be 
 flattered." A maxim of Swift's is, that love of flattery, in most 
 men, proceeds from the mean opinion they have of themselves; 
 in women, from the contrary. Among his Hints on Good Manners 
 occur these two : ''Nothing is so great an instance of ill manners 
 as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none : 
 if you flatter only one or two, you affront the rest." " Flattery 
 is the worst and falsest way of showing our esteem." Take the 
 word of Timon of Athens for it, and verily we are all of us 
 
 guilty in this matter : 
 
 *' Who dares, who dares, 
 In purity of manhood stand upright, 
 And say, 'This man's a flatterer'? if one be, 
 So are they all ; for every grize of fortune 
 Is smoothed by that below." 
 
 But laflatterie n^hnane jajfiais des grandes mnes^ says Balzac; 
 "elle est I'apanage des petits esprits, qui re'ussissent a se 
 rapetisser encore pour mieux entrer dans la sphere vitale de la 
 personne autour de laquelle ils gravitent." Laflatterie soics- 
 entend un interet. As with the model flatterer in Crabbe's 
 Boj'ough^ 
 
 " Falsehood in him was not the useless lie 
 Of boasting pride or laughing vanity ; 
 
FLA TTERING LIPS. 1 8 ^ 
 
 It was the gainful, the persuading art, 
 That made its way and won the doubting heart, 
 Which argued, soften'd, humbled, and prevail'd ; 
 Nor was it tried till every truth had fail'd ; 
 No sage on earth could more than he despise 
 Degrading, poor, unprofitable lies." 
 
 Coleridge somewhere observes, sententiously, that truth is not 
 detraction, and that assuredly we do not hate him to whom we 
 tell the truth ; but that with whomsoever we play the deceiver 
 and flatterer, him at the bottom we despise. " He that slanders 
 me," writes Co^^^)er to Ne^^'ton, disclaiming all design to flatter 
 him, " paints me blacker than I am, and he that flatters me, 
 whiter — they both daub me, and when I look in the glass of 
 conscience, I see myself disguised by both : I had as lief my 
 tailor should sew gingerbread-nuts on my coat instead of buttons, 
 as that any man should call my Bristol stone a diamond. The 
 tailor's trick would not at' all embellish my suit, nor the flatterer's 
 make me at all the richen I never make a present to a friend 
 of what I dislike myself : ergo ... I did not mean to flatter 
 you." His lines are more serious, if not more earnest, to the 
 same eflect, and with the same assurance : 
 
 '•' The worth of these three kingdoms I defy 
 To lure me to the baseness of a lie : 
 And of all lies (be that one poet's boast) 
 The lie that flatters I abhor the most." 
 
 Rousseau declares la verite qui blame to be plus honorable que 
 la verite qui loue — because praise serves but to corrupt those 
 who relish it, and the least worthy are ever the most hungry 
 for it; whereas censure is useful, and only real merit can 
 endure it. 
 
 * ' Know, glutton-like, on praise each monarch crams : 
 Hot spices suit alone their pampered nature : 
 Alas ! the stomach, parched by burning drams, 
 
 With mad-dog terror starts at simple water. 
 Fierce is each royal mania for applause ; 
 And as a horsepond wide are monarch maws, — 
 Formed therefore on a pretty ample scale : 
 To sound the decent paneg>Tic note, 
 To pour the modest flatteries down their throat, 
 W^ere offering shrimps for dinner to a whale. " 
 
1 86 FULSOME FLA TTER F. 
 
 So Dr. Wolcot assured his readers ; and much he knew about 
 it. But the same sort of thing is asserted on higher authority, 
 by those conversant with courts. One of Chesterfield's mis- 
 cellaneous x^^^oXxons, pensees, or maxims, is, that flattery, though 
 a base coin, is the necessary pocket-money at court ; where, by 
 custom and consent, it has obtained such a currency, that it 
 is no longer a fraudulent, but a legal payment. Of kings in 
 general he elsewhere scruples not to affirm that " flattery cannot 
 be too strong for them ; drunk with it from their infancy, like 
 old drinkers, they require drams." Samuel Pepys hies him to 
 the Tennis Court to see the King play at tennis, and goes home 
 to journalize his impressions of the scene : " But to see how 
 the King's play was extolled, without any cause at all, was a 
 loathsome sight, though sometimes, indeed, he did play very 
 well, and deserved to be commended ; but such open flattery 
 is beastly." Le flatteur lia pas assez bonne opinion de soi ni 
 des atdres, La Bruyere says. Goldsmith's Chinese philosopher 
 maintains that no people in the world flatter each other more 
 than the English, but that none understand the art less, or 
 flatter with such little refinement. He likens their panegyric 
 to a Tartar feast, served up indeed with profusion, but of which 
 the cookery is insupportable. " A client here shall dress up a 
 fricassee for his patron, that shall offend an ordinary nose before 
 it enters the room." A master of the art inveighs against the 
 clumsiness of indiscriminate dabblers in it, who, instead of re- 
 pairing and heightening the piece judiciously, with soft colours 
 and a delicate pencil, daub and besmear it with a coarse brush, 
 and a great deal of whitewash. Such a dauber's flattery '' offends 
 even his patron ; and is almost too gross for his mistress. A 
 man of the world knows the force of flattery as well as he does ; 
 but then he knows how, when, and where to give it ; he propor- 
 tions his dose to the constitution of the patient. He flatters by 
 art, by application, by inference, by comparison, by hint ; and 
 seldom directly." Moliere is disdainful of " ces adulateurs a 
 outrance, ces flatteurs insipides, qui n'assaisonnent d'aucun sel 
 les louanges qu'ils donnent, et dont toutes les flatteries ont une 
 douceur fade qui fait mal au cceur a ceux qui les ecoutent.', 
 
ARTFUL COMPLIMENTS. 187 
 
 Contrasting the compliments of commonplace men with those 
 of the all-incomparable Sir Charles, her peerless Grandison, the 
 Hon. Miss Byron observes that the highest things are ever said 
 by men of the lowest understandings ; and their bolts once shot, 
 the poor souls can go no farther. Sir Ralph Esher remarks of 
 fawning Mr. Braythwaite, that " with all his cunning he had not 
 the art of making his flattery agreeable," a defect more common 
 than is suspected. Perhaps there is not one more common 
 with pretenders of all kinds, nor less conceivable by their under- 
 standings. Macaulay prescribes a study of Voltaire's corre- 
 spondence \vith Frederick the Great as likely to be of advantage 
 to those who wish to become proficients in the ignoble art of 
 flattery. No man, he says, ever paid compliments better than 
 Voltaire, whose sweetest confectionery had always a delicate 
 yet stimulating flavour, which was delightful to palates w^earied 
 by the coarse preparations of inferior artists. " It was only 
 from his hand that so much sugar could be swallowed wthout 
 making the swallower sick." The most effective flattery is said 
 to be the praising a person for qualities which he or she ought 
 to have, or pretends to have, and has not. If a respectable 
 man of letters, Mr. Hayward surmises, had told Madame de 
 Stael that her Germany was a great work, she would have turned 
 from him with a sneer ; but, by alluding to her feminine fasci- 
 nations, the veriest coxcomb might have become her oracle. 
 So again, though it might have been a hazardous feat to 
 commend Cardinal Richelieu for his statesmanship, a judicious 
 compliment to his tragedy might have earned a pension or a 
 place. Goldsmith had long before \mtten about compliments 
 being the more agreeable the less they are deserved : those we 
 think deserved we accept only as debts, with indifference ; but 
 those which we are conscious of not meriting, we receive \\^th 
 the same gratitude that we do favours given away. 
 
 Noteworthy among adroit flatterers is Pho'tius, whom at one 
 time we see, by his skill in the art, securing the protection of 
 the Emperor Michael ; at another, overcoming the resentment 
 and rancour of the Emperor Basil, who was then induced to 
 recall him from his monastic retreat, and reinstate him in the 
 
i88 FLATTERY AS A FINE ART. 
 
 see of Constantinople. Clarendon makes particular mention 
 of Sir John Colepepper's " wonderful insinuation and address," 
 all the more effective because of his uncourtliness, "for sure no 
 man less appeared a courtier," — and how he was believed at 
 court to speak with all plainness and sincerity, " flattery being 
 a weed not so natural to the air and soil of the country, where 
 he had wholly lived." Hence his influence with both king and 
 queen, though, or indeed because, " no man more complied 
 with those infirmities they both had," and by compliance he 
 prevailed. No flattery, a contemporary thinker observes, is so 
 delicate as that which consists in a listener's Hvely perception 
 of the force of your every remark, and a thorough approval of 
 .your sentiment. Being indirect, it is free from the liability of 
 direct flattery to make, as M. Paul Mesnard says, " trebucher 
 dans le mauvais gout et dans le ridicule les esprits les plus fins 
 et les plus judicieux." When Vivian Grey tries his art upon 
 Mrs. Million, that lady muses on the secret of his spell : It is 
 not flattery, she flatters herself, nor is it a rifacimento of com- 
 pliments : apparently she has heard a young philosopher deliver- 
 ing his sentiments upon an abstract point in human life, and 
 yet has not listened to a triumphant defence of her conduct. 
 " Of course it was unintentional, and yet how agreeable to be 
 unintentionally defended ! " She is not to be taken in what 
 Boileau calls ih^ filets dune sotte louange : 
 
 ** Aussitot ton esprit, prompt a se revolter, 
 
 S'echappe, et rompt le piege ou Ton veut I'arreter. 
 
 II n'en est pas de ces esprits frivoles 
 
 Que tout flatteur endort au son de ses paroles." 
 
 Burns owns to Mrs. Dunlop his having had his head turned 
 by the " artful compliments " of certain demoiselles at Dunlop : 
 they did not " lard " him over as so many a poet does his 
 patron, but so intoxicated him with their " sly insinuations and 
 delicate innuendos of compliment," that he was all but carried 
 off his feet. He was not one, he implies, to swallow sans degoui 
 le plus grassier Hoge ; but it was hardly in him to resist (again 
 to quote Despreaux) " la louange adroite et delicate dont la trop 
 forte odeur n'ebranle point les sens." Such praise as Madame 
 
THOSE WHO 'CANNOT flatter: 189 
 
 de Sevigne accredits De Bussy with the knack of besto^ving, 
 attributing, or suggesting — praise so neatly conferred and so 
 smoothly finished off that the object of it was all but convinced 
 of deserving at least a part of it, quelqite exageratio?i qii'il y ait. 
 Whatever dirty-shirted philosophers may say to the contrary, 
 quoth the Chronicler of Clovernook, flattery is a fine social 
 thing — the beautiful handmaid of life, he styles it, casting 
 flowers and odoriferous herbs in the paths of men, who, 
 crushing out the sweets, curl up their noses as they snuff the 
 odour, and walk half an inch higher to heaven by what they 
 tread upon. 
 
 Trompart is, on Spenser's showing, fit man for Braggadocchio, 
 making it his one study to uphold "his ydle humour with fine 
 flattery, and blow the bellows to his swelling vanity." Base is 
 the slave that fawns, has been the motto of many a proud spirit, 
 that so far did well to be proud. Dante was notably on his 
 guard against ever making any approach to flattery ; " a vice," 
 says Gary, "which he justly held in the utmost abhorrence." 
 In the eighth circle of rinfe^-no he comes across Alessio of 
 Lucca, who, "beating on his brain," thus bewails his gross 
 indulgence in that vice : 
 
 ** Me thus low down my flatteries have sunk, 
 Wherewith I ne'er enough could glut my tongue." 
 
 Hotspur thanks his stars he cannot flatter, and disdains the 
 tongues of soothers. Gloster finds himself out of favour because 
 he cannot flatter and speak fair, smile in men's faces, smooth, 
 deceive, and cog, duck with French nods and apish courtesy. 
 "My tongue could never learn sweet soothing word." Coriolanus 
 would not flatter Neptune for his trident, or Jove for his power 
 to thunder: he is one that would, as Menenius rates him, 
 rather follow his enemy in a fiery gulf, than flatter him in a 
 bower. Cassius is avowedly one that cannot fawn on men, and 
 hug them hard ; to his proud nature the humiliation is severe 
 when Brutus tells him of his faults, and, to his deprecating 
 1 rotest that a friendly eye could never see such faults, replies, 
 "A flatterer's would not, though they do appear as huge as high 
 
I90 AVOWED 'INCAPABLES' IN 
 
 Olympus." Hamlet doubles the value of his hearty praise of 
 Horatio by the assurance, " Nay, do not think I flatter : for 
 what advancement may I hope from thee ? " Cordelia cannot 
 flatter ; and thereby loses her father's love and her share of his 
 divided realm : unhappy that she is, she cannot heave her 
 heart into her mouth ; her love is richer than her tongue ;* she 
 wants " that glib and oily heart to speak and purpose not." 
 Kent^ is as true to Lear, in his way, as Cordelia in hers ; as 
 true a friend, as she a daughter. But he is plain and outspoken, 
 and his duty dreads not to speak when power to flattery bows. 
 What is aftenvards said of Kent in disguise, though untrue of 
 him, is a faithful enough portrait of some folks : 
 
 " This is some fellow 
 Who, having been praised for bluntness, doth affect 
 A saucy roughness. . . . He cannot flatter, he ! — 
 An honest mind and plain — he must speak truth, 
 An' they will take it, so ; if not, he's plain, " 
 
 Moliere's Clitandre takes credit to himself for that " son coeur 
 n'a jamais pu, tant il est ne sincere," descend to flatter even 
 the most charming of her sex. Swift's cringing knave, who 
 seeks a place without success, thus tells his case : " Why should 
 he longer mince the matter ? He failed because he could not 
 flatter." So again, 
 
 " The chaplain vows he cannot fawn, 
 Though it would raise him to the lawn : . . . 
 But o\vns he had a stubborn spirit, 
 That made him trust alone to merit." 
 
 For himself as well as for Horace is Pope speaking when he 
 strenuously disclaims all ascription of praise undeserved — 
 
 *' And when I flatter, let my dirty leaves 
 Clothe spice, line trunks, or fluttering in a row. 
 Befringe the rails of Bedlam and Soho." 
 
 As Megabate in Le Grand Cyrus is very upright, he is the 
 avowed enemy of all flattery -, he cannot praise what he deems 
 undeserving of praise, — cannot debase himself to say what he 
 does not believe ; he likes much better to pass for severe 
 among those who are ignorant of what true virtue is, than to 
 
THE ART OF FLATTERY. 191 
 
 expose himself to the charge of adulation. So closely does the 
 rest of the description tally with the lines in Le Misanthrope^ 
 " Plus on aime quelqu'un, moins il faut qu'on le flatte," etc., 
 that M. Victor Cousin starts the note of interrogation, Had 
 Moliere read this passage of the Cyrus ? — More than one or 
 two great artists have piqued themselves, with better or worse 
 reason for it, on their incapacity for flattering speeches. " Un- 
 knowing how to flatter the great," one of Caravagio's biographers 
 says of that ill-starred genius, " he was driven from city to city 
 in the utmost indigence, and might truly be said to paint for 
 his bread." When the ambassador from Lucca chid Benvenuto 
 Cellini for not acting the courtier better to his patron, the 
 Grand Duke of Tuscany, " I made answer," quoth Ben, " that 
 I ^nshed well to my lord, was his affectionate and faithful 
 servant, and could not stoop to the arts of flattery and adu- 
 lation." Not Madame d'Arblay's Mr. Crutchley could more 
 energetically repudiate such arts, all and sundry. " Me ! " 
 cried he : " no, indeed ! I never complimented anybody : that 
 is, I never said to anybody a thing I did not think, unless I was 
 openly laughing at them, and making sport for other people." 
 " Oh," cried Fanny Burney, (everybody cried in her days : at 
 any rate, crying was "pretty Fanny's way," all her Diary through,) 
 " if everybody went by this rule, what a world of conversation 
 would be curtailed ! " 
 
 When Henry Home, afterwards Lord Kames, was a young 
 man, wily old Lovat, as Dr. Chambers tells the story, observed 
 his talents, and conceiving, from his success at the bar, that he 
 might, in the course of time, become serviceable to himself, 
 resolved to make him his friend. He set about it by rushing 
 out to embrace Hom.e one day, in his fulsome style, and by 
 pretending extreme admiration of his personal graces, and con- 
 sequent ambition to become his intimate friend. " My lord," 
 cried Home, struggling to extricate himself from the hug, " this 
 is quite intolerable. I ken very weel I am the coarsest-looking 
 fellow in the Court o' Session ; so ye needna think to impose 
 upon me wi' your fair-fashioned speeches. Hae dune — hae 
 dune." " Henry," exclaimed Lovat, in an altered tone, " I was 
 
192 PROOF AG A INST FLA TTER V. 
 
 only trying you. I'm truly glad to find that you can withstand 
 flattery." " My dear lord," said Home, " I am glad to hear 
 you say so." Lovat's purpose was accomplished. He had 
 flattered his man upon his superiority to flattery ; and that, as 
 the sequel proved, was the way to win him. 
 
 " Most crafty when no craft appear'd, 
 When simple most, most to be fear'd . , , 
 Wantonly cheating o'er and o'er, 
 Those who had cheated been before. " 
 
 The elder and worldly-wiser of Mr. Trollope's Bertrams 
 cautions his son, who is chary of civil words to the churlish 
 uncle that professes to disrelish them, not to "believe every- 
 thing that everybody tells you in his own praise." When a 
 man says that he does not like flattery, and that he puts no 
 value on soft words, do not on that account be deterred. Sir 
 Lionel advises, from making any civil speeches you may have 
 ready : he will not be a bit stronger than another because he 
 boasts of his strength. 
 
 Does one of Sam Slick's protesting listeners think that if the 
 adroit Yankee wanted to "soft sawder" him, he'd take the 
 white-brush to him, and slobber it on, " as a nigger wench does 
 K> a board fence, or a kitchen wall to home," and put his eyes 
 out with the lime? " No, not I ; but I could tickle you enough, 
 and have done it afore now, just for practice, and you warn't 
 a bit the wiser. I'd take a camel's-hair brush to you, knowin' 
 how skittish and ticklesome you are, and doing it so it would 
 feel good. I'd make you feel kinder pleasant, I know. ... I 
 wouldn't go to shock you by a doin' of it coarse ; you're too 
 quick and too knowin' for that. You should smell the otter o' 
 roses, and sniff, snifl" it up your nostrils, and say to yourself, 
 ' How nice that is, ain't it? Come, I like that; how sweet it 
 stinks ! ' " The other assures Mr. Slick that he overrates his 
 own powers, and exaggerates his listener's vanity : " You are 
 flattering yourself now ; you can't flatter me, for I detest it." 
 " Creation, man," said Mr. Slick, " I have done it now afore' 
 your face, these last five minutes, and you didn't know it," and 
 the other, on consideration, has the candour to plead guilty, 
 
THE EARTH ABIDING. 193 
 
 and to say, " You took me in. You touched a weak point. 
 You insensibly flattered my vanity, by assenting to my self- 
 sufficiency in supposing I was exempt from that universal frailty 
 of human nature." And Mr. Slick duly chuckles over the 
 confession that he did " put the leake " into the Squire, that's 
 a fact. 
 
 Decius can undertake to " o'ersway " Caesar, by flattery the 
 the most subtle and suasive ; and this is how the expert goes 
 about it, — 
 
 " But when I tell him, he hates flatterers, 
 He says he does ; being then most flattered. " 
 
 XXIII. 
 
 THE EARTH ABIDING. 
 
 ECCLESIASTES i. 4. 
 
 HE that preached vanity of vanities, all is vanity, opened 
 that discourse with a contrast between fleeting man 
 and the abiding earth. The sons of men come and go ; they 
 appear for a little while, and then vanish away ; but the scene 
 of their brief show is a fixture, and the stage they strut upon 
 till the curtain falls is no mere vanishing quantity, no mere 
 dissolving view, like themselves. " One generation passeth 
 away, and another generation cometh : but the earth abideth 
 for ever." The contrast seems almost a cruel one between the 
 material dwelling-place and the spiritual dwellers therein ; it 
 abideth, but they abide not ; the round world hath its founda- 
 tions so sure that they cannot be moved, but the races that 
 people it are hurried off the scene, and for them there is no 
 stay. Even within their sorry space of existence they have 
 time, some of them, to grow feeble and old, to outlive their 
 o^^^l health and strength, to exchange comeliness for wrinkles, 
 and bloom for decay. But the earth abideth as it was — its 
 canopy of skies as blue as of yore, its rush of rivers as fresh 
 
 13 
 
194 EVANESCENCE OF MAN 
 
 and free, its encompassing seas as buoyant as ever with the 
 dvripLOfxov yeXafr/xa it is SO hard to translate. 
 
 Whatever poets may say to the contrary, urges one who might 
 claim to be a prose-poet. Nature is not s.ympathetic : rather is 
 she very insolent to us in her triumphant, durable beauty ; 
 and she loves to say to us, " Though you are weeping, my eyes 
 are dry ; though you are very sick and feeble, I am strong 
 and fair ; though you are most short-lived, here to-day and 
 gone to-morrow, I am eternal, I endure." Generations come 
 and go, live out their little life, and descend in common to 
 dusty death, come like shadows, so depart ; but the earth 
 abideth. A Cornhill essayist loves to think that the air we 
 breathe through our open window is the same that wandered 
 through Paradise before Eve was there to inhale it; that the 
 primroses which grow in our dear old woods are such as 
 decked the banks before sin and death came into the world ; 
 and that our children shall find them, neither better nor worse, 
 when our names are clean forgotten. Owen Meredith, in one 
 place apostrophizing Nature, exclaims, 
 
 ' ' On the winds, as of old, 
 Thy voice in its accent is joyous and bold ; 
 Thy forests are green as of yore ; and thine oceans 
 Yet move in the might of their ancient emotions." 
 
 As again in another place he calls the sun 
 
 "changeless, as when, 
 Ere he lit down to death generations of men, 
 O'er that crude and ungainly creation, which there 
 With wild shapes the cloud-world seems to mimic in air, 
 The eye of Heaven's all-judging witness, he shone, 
 And shall shine on the ages we reach not." 
 
 So Churchill, in very different metre and manner, sings of how 
 the same stars keep their watch, and the same sun runs in the 
 track where he from first hath run ; " the same moon rules 
 the night; tides ebb and flow; Man is a puppet, and this 
 world a show." The saying of some people that there is no 
 antiquity like that of nature, is disputed by Hartley Cole- 
 ridge : Nature, indeed, has her antiquities, he says ; but they 
 
AND STABILITY OF NATURE. 195 
 
 are not the sun, the moon, and the stars, nor the overflowing 
 ocean, nor the eternal hills : these are all exempt from time, 
 and are no older now than when angels sang hallelujahs at 
 their creation. It is of La Nahire that Charles Perrault 
 smoothly and soothly sings or says, ' 
 
 " Son etre est immuable, et cette force aisee 
 Dont elle produit tout, ne s'est point epuis6e : 
 Jamais I'astre du jour qu'aujourd'hui nous voyons, 
 N'eut le front couronne de plus brillants rayons ; 
 Jamais dans le printemps les roses empourprees 
 D'un plus vif incamat ne furent colorees ; 
 Non moin blanc qu 'autrefois brille dans nos jardins 
 L'eblouissant email des lis et des jasmins. " 
 
 The passions of men may, as Gerald Griffin says, convulse the 
 frame of society, and centuries of ignorance, of poverty, and of 
 civil strife may succeed to ages of science and thrift and peace; 
 but still the mighty mother holds her course unchanged : spring 
 succeeds winter, and summer spring, and all the harmonies of 
 her great system move on through countless aeons with the 
 same unvarying serenity of purpose. " God bless them ! " 
 cried Southey, of the lakes and mountains to which he got 
 back in 1803 : "I look with something Hke awe and envy at 
 their unchangeableness." They say the Highlands are changed, 
 exclaims Scott's Highland Widow, " but I see Ben Cruachan 
 rear his crest as high as ever into the evening sky." Come, 
 bids us one of Nature's poets, 
 
 ** Come, let us laugh at the old worldly modes, 
 
 And seek new life in Nature's deathless power. 
 
 We'll leave the dust upon the beaten roads, 
 
 And in the meadows look upon the flower 
 
 Fresh as it ever bloom'd in Eden's bower." 
 
 And then, star-gazing, — 
 
 ' * Ye fixed ones, what eye hath seen you stir 
 Since mark'd by Chaldee old, your ancient chronicler? 
 
 * * * * * 
 
 Still are ye deathless beacon-lights to Pain, 
 And watchful Sorrow. Thrones arise and sink, 
 Earth is transform'd beneath you ; ye remain, 
 Clasping distracted man with Order's sacred chain. " 
 
196 THE EARTH ABIDING. 
 
 Hood's ode to the Moon closes with an Amen, " So let it be : — 
 Before I lived to sigh, Thou wert in Avon, and a thousand 
 rills, Beautiful orb ! and so, whene'er I lie Trodden, thou wilt 
 be gazing from thy hills." Herr Teufelsdrockh, gazing up- 
 wards at the stars, muses on the thousands of human genera- 
 tions, all as noisy as our own, that have been swallowed up of 
 Time, and of whom there remains no wreck any more ; while 
 Arcturus and Orion and Sirius and the Pleiades are still 
 shining in their courses, clear and young, as when the shepherd 
 first noted them in the plain of Shinar. 
 
 " Fool'd was the human vanity that wrote 
 
 Strange names in astral fire on yonder pole. 
 Who and what are they — in what age remote — 
 
 That scrawl'd weak boasts on yon siderial scroll ? 
 Orion shines. Now seek for Nimrod. Where ? 
 
 Osiris is a fable, and no more : 
 
 But Sirius burns as brightly as of yore. 
 There is no shade on Berenice's hair. 
 
 * * * * *■ 
 
 Man knows no more than this : that you are still, 
 But he is moved : he goes, but you remain." 
 
 From Wordsworth's Churchyard among the Mountains we over- 
 hear at dusk the voice of a pensive gazer at the planet Jupiter, 
 that hung above the centre of the vale : it said, " That glorious 
 star, in its untroubled element will shine as now it shines, when 
 we are laid in earth, and safe from all our sorrows." In like 
 mood muses the Rydal bard himself at twilight, saying of his 
 surroundings. Thus did the waters gleam, the mountains lower, 
 to the rude Briton wandering in wolf-skin attire ; and by him 
 was seen the same vision of mighty barriers and enclosed gulf, 
 " the flood, the stars, — a spectacle as old as the beginning of 
 the heavens and earth !" A Somersetshire archaeologist pictures 
 for us a bit of local scenery from an unfathomable antiquity 
 downwards, and during the later Pliocene bone-cave period we 
 are instructed to feel ourselves at home, for the trees, and even 
 the mosses, and probably also the wild flowers, are the same : 
 even the main features of the landscape are identical : " The 
 Quantocks, and the Mendips, and the Blackdowns are still 
 
THE EARTH ABIDING. 197 
 
 overlooking the level plain at their feet." It is a common- 
 place with sojourners in Rome to glorify the view shut in by 
 the Alban mountains, looking just the same amid all the 
 decay and changes of "the eternal city," as when Romulus 
 gazed thitherward over his half-finished wall. So with the 
 unshaken snow on the brow of Delphi, 
 
 *' High and eternal, such as shone 
 Through thousand summers brightly gone, 
 Along the gulf, the mount, the clime ; 
 It will not melt, like man, to time." 
 
 States fall, arts fade, but Nature doth not die, as Childe Harold 
 has it. Leaning over a parapet and watching the flow of the 
 Rhine, Walter in the Golden Legend exclaims, 
 
 ** Yes, there it flows, for ever, broad and still, 
 As when the vanguard of the Roman legions 
 First saw it from the top of yonder hill." 
 
 Much it strikes the youthful Gneschen as he sits by the Kuhbach, 
 one silent noontide, and watches it flo^\^ng, gurgling, to think 
 how this same streamlet had flowed and gurgled, through all 
 changes of weather and of fortune, from beyond the earliest 
 date of history. " Yes, probably on the morning when Joshua 
 forded Jordan ; even as at the midday when Caesar, doubtless 
 with difficulty, swam the Nile, yet kept his ' Commentaries ' 
 dry, — this little Kuhbach, assiduous as Tiber, Eurotas, or Siloa, 
 was murmuring on across the wilderness, as yet unnamed, 
 unseen ; here, too, as in the Euphrates and the Ganges, is a 
 vein or veinlet of the grand World-circulation of Waters, which, 
 with its atmospheric arteries, has lasted and lasts simply with 
 the World. Thou fool ! Nature alone is antique, and the oldest 
 art a mushroom ; that idle crag thou sittest on is six thousand 
 years of age." In silence lies Wordsworth's old Matthew, 
 and eyes the stream beneath the tree, till he too finds voice 
 in song : 
 
 * ' No check, no stay, this streamlet fears : 
 
 How merrily it goes ! 
 Twill murmur on a thousand years. 
 
 And flow as now it flows." 
 
198 OLD OCEAN EVER YOUNG. 
 
 Low they dug Lord Marmion's grave, even where he lay when 
 he fell; but every mark of it, his minstrel tells us, is gone : 
 Time's wasting hand has done away the simple Cross of Sybil 
 Gray, and broke his font of stone ; 
 
 " But from out the little hill 
 Oozes the slender springlet still." 
 
 Barry Cornwell's Thought on a Rivulet begins, " Look at this 
 brook, so blithe, so free ! Thus hath it been, fair boy, for 
 ever — a shining, dancing, babbling river ; and thus 'twill ever 
 be. 
 
 'Twill run, from mountain to the main, 
 
 With just the same sweet babbling voice 
 
 That now sings out, ' Rejoice, rejoice ! ' 
 Perhaps 'twill be a chain, 
 
 That will a thousand years remain — 
 
 Aye, through all times and changes last, 
 
 And link the present with the past." 
 
 We talk of " old " ocean, hoary ocean ; " I cannot associate 
 age with it," protests one of America's foremost writers : '^ it is 
 too buoyant, animated, living : its crest of foam is not hoariness, 
 but the breaking forth of life." Ocean to him is perpetual 
 youth. The sea, as another transatlantic man of genius de- 
 scribes it, drowns out humanity and time ; it has no sympathy 
 with either ; " for it belongs to eternity, and of that it sings its 
 monotonous song for ever and ever." He calls it a " great liquid 
 metronome " that beats its solemn measure, steadily swinging 
 when the solo or duet of human life began, and to swing 
 just as steadily after the human chorus has died out and man 
 is a fossil on its shores. • Mr. Kingsley, in one of his studies 
 on the coast of North Devon, has a similar rhapsody, but does 
 not forget the Apocalypse in his finale : he pictures for us 
 green columns of wave which rush mast-high up the perpen- 
 dicular walls, and then fall back and outwards in a waterfall of 
 foam, lacing the black rocks with a thousand snowy streams : 
 there they fall, and leap, and fall again; and so they did 
 yesterday, and the day before ; " and so they did centuries 
 ago, when the Danes swept past them, battle-worn, . . . from 
 
THE SEA UNTOUCHED BY TIME. 199 
 
 the fight at Appledore. ... Ay, and even so they leapt and 
 fell, before a sail gleamed on the Severn sea, when the shark 
 and the ichthyosaur paddled beneath the shade of tropic 
 forests — now scanty turf and golden gorse. And so they will 
 leap and fall, on, on through the centuries and the ages. Oh, 
 dim abyss of Time, into which we peer shuddering, what will 
 be the end of thee, and of this ceaseless coil and moan of 
 waters? It is true, that when thou shalt be no more, then, 
 too, ' there shall be no more sea.' " Meanwhile, 
 
 " Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee — 
 Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they ? 
 Thy waters wasted them while they were free, 
 And many a tyrant since ; their shores obey 
 The stranger, slave, or savage ; their decay ^ 
 Has dried up realms to deserts : — not so thou, 
 Unchangeable save to thy wild waves' play — 
 Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow, 
 
 Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now." 
 
 The penultimate line was scarcely improved when expanded 
 by Mr. Robert jMontgomery into the couplet, 
 
 * '' And thou, vast Ocean, on whose awful face 
 
 Time's iron feet can print no ruin-trace." 
 
 In the journal that Francis Jeffrey kept during his voyage 
 to America in 181 3, we find reflections on man leaving no 
 traces of himself on the watery part of the globe : he has 
 stripped the land of its wood, and clothed it with corn and 
 cities; he has changed its colour, its inhabitants, and all its 
 qualities; and over it he seems, indeed, to have dominion; 
 but the sea is as wild and unsubdued as on the first day of its 
 creation. " It is just as desert and unaltered in all particulars 
 as before its bed was created; and would be, after his race 
 was extinct. Neither time nor art make any alteration here." 
 Continents are worn down and consolidated, and the forests 
 grow up or rot into bog, by the mere lapse of ages ; but the 
 great expanses of the ocean continue with the same surface 
 and the same aspect for ever, and are, in this respect, to 
 Jeffrey's thinking, "the most perfect specimen of antiquity, 
 
OLD OCEAN EVER YOUNG. 
 
 and carry back the imagination the farthest into the dark 
 abysses of time passed away." It is pleasant to see the old 
 Scottish judge in retreat at Skelmorlie, an old castle on the 
 Clyde, in after years, toying with " the shells and pebbles that 
 engaged the leisure of Scipio and Lselius, in a world in which 
 nothing was like our world but the said shells and pebbles, 
 and the minds of virtuous men resting from their labours." 
 So is it to see Dr. Channing, in decline and decay, writing 
 gratefully from his dear native Rhode Island, when seeking 
 rest there, and finding it : " Whilst the generation with which 
 I grew up has disappeared, nature is the same ; and even when 
 a boy, it seems to me that my chief interest clung to the fields, 
 the ocean, the beach." He is struck, during another visit, 
 amid other so many and great changes, with the continuance 
 of the order and beauty of the natural world, and sees in this 
 a manifestation of the immutableness of God, and a pledge 
 of the duration of " that principle which is nobler than nature, 
 the human soul." Madame de Stael delights to recall the 
 soul's "purest of emotions, religion," while gazing at that 
 superb spectacle, the sea, on which man never left his trace. 
 He may plough the earth, she says, and cut his way through 
 mountains, or construct rivers into canals, for the transport 
 of his merchandise ; but if his fleets for a moment furrow the 
 ocean, its waves as instantly efface this slight mark of servitude, 
 and it again appears as it was on the first day of its creation. 
 There is no writing a wrinkle on that brow, whether by man 
 the mariner or Time the destroyer. 
 
 " Old Ocean was 
 Infinity of ages ere we breathed 
 Existence — and he will be beautiful 
 When all the living world that sees him now 
 Shall roll unconscious dust around the sun. 
 Quelling from age to age the vital throb 
 In human hearts, Death shall not subjugate 
 The pulse that swells in his stupendous breast, 
 Or interdict his minstrelsy to sound 
 In thundering concert with the quiring winds." 
 
 But perpetual youth is not the exclusive prerogative of Old 
 
AGE OF THE EARTH. 201 
 
 Ocean, perversely so-called. A traveller to Petra, exploring 
 its ruins, turns from regarding the works of man there, all 
 time-worn and decayed — statue and inscription, form, name, 
 and story alike gone — to discourse upon the products of 
 nature as alone perennial; for while the monuments of man 
 are all spoiled, the deUcate branches of the caper-plant hang 
 down as fresh and beautiful from the chinks in the rock as 
 they did two thousand years ago ; and the foliage of the wild 
 fig and tamarisk are as rich, we are told, " and the flower of 
 the oleander as gaudy, as they were when the Princes of Edom 
 dwelt in the clefts of the rocks, and held in pride the height 
 of the hill." No wonder if poets love to identify the strain of 
 song-birds in the dim past and the very present : thus Keats 
 with the nightingale — 
 
 ' ' Thou wast nof born for death, immortal Bird ! 
 No hungry generations tread thee down ; 
 
 The voice I hear this passing night was heard 
 In ancient days by emperor and clown ; 
 
 Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path 
 
 Through the sad tears of Ruth, when sick for home, 
 
 She stood in tears amid the alien corn." 
 
 And so Hood of the skylark, when he gladdens to think that. 
 after ages of sorrow and wrong, the scorn of the proud, the 
 misrule of the strong, and all the woes that to man belong, 
 
 " The lark still carols the selfsame song 
 That he did to the uncursed Adam." 
 
 Of the Earth herself, however, some poets incline to speak 
 as if she were even past " a certain age " — which phrase may 
 be taken to imply a certainly advanced age, but uncertainly 
 how far advanced. Philosophers rather than poets should be 
 the authority in such a question ; and the doctors differ. 
 Father Prout, indeed, contends that there is often more strict 
 logic, and more downright common sense, in a poet's view of 
 Nature and her works, than in the gravest and most elaborate 
 disquisitions of soi-disant philosophy ; and he cites with appro- 
 bation Chateaubriand's protest against those who regard the 
 earth as an old toothless hag, bearing in every feature the 
 
202 IS THE EARTH OLD- AGED? 
 
 traces of caducity; a protest followed up by a surmise (prae- 
 scientific, or anti-scientific, or both) that the earth may have 
 been designedly created with " the marks of age on its hoary 
 surface." Did not the Creator, he asks, understand the effect 
 and beauty of what we are agreed to call the picturesque ? 
 "Sans cette vieillesse originaire il n'y aurait eu ni pompe ni 
 majeste dans I'univers." The present question concerns, how- 
 ever, not the positive geological age of our planet, or any 
 amount of millions and billions of years more or less, but the 
 " certain " or uncertain age she has reached in point of 
 maturity; whether life and hope are as yet young with her, 
 and the world all before her, and she still in her teens ; or 
 whether she is decaying and waxing old, and therefore more 
 or less ready, as senescent, to vanish away. Several years 
 ago, some person or other — " in fact, I believe it was myself," 
 Mr. de Quincey quaintly says — published a paper from the 
 German of Kant, on the age of our own little Earth — meaning, 
 not the positive amount of years through which she may have 
 existed, fifty milHons for instance, but the period of life, the 
 "stage," which she may be supposed to have reached. Is 
 she a child, in fact, or is she an adult ? Lady Mary Wortley 
 Montagu, in one of her letters, affirms the world to be past 
 its infancy, and no longer to be contented with spoon-meat. 
 " I imagine we are now arrived at that period which answers 
 to fifteen. I cannot think we are older, when I recollect the 
 many probable follies which are still (almost) universally per- 
 sisted in : I place that of war as senseless as the boxing of 
 schoolboys, and whenever we come to man's estate (perhaps 
 a thousand years hence) I do not doubt it will appear as 
 ridiculous as the pranks of unlucky lads." M. Guizot reckons 
 civilization to be as yet very young, and alleges of it and of 
 society, that whatever the length of the road they have come, 
 t*hey have incomparably farther to go. Old-fashioned Owen 
 Feltham opined, in his day, that the world had reached its 
 middle age when it was " somewhat more than four thousand 
 years old " — " though considering that there are promises that 
 the latter days shall be shortened, we cannot expect that it 
 
IS THE EARTH OLD- AGED? 203 
 
 should endure for a like extent of time from that period." 
 He knew not, he added, what certain grounds they had who 
 pretended to foretell the particular time of the world's confla- 
 gration ; but surely, in reason, and nature, the end could not 
 be very far distant. "We have seen its infancy, its youth, 
 its virility, all past; nay, we have seen it well advanced in 
 declining years, the most infallible forerunner of a dissolu- 
 tion." He seems to see it as in t"he figure poetized by Lovel 
 Beddoes, of 
 
 "some aged, patient globe, 
 Whose gaunt sides no summers robe, 
 That like a prisoner through his grate, 
 Shivering in despair doth wait 
 For sunbeams broken, old, and pale." 
 
 Montaigne, on the other hand, ridiculed those who vainly 
 conclude the decline and decrepitude of the world by the 
 arguments we extract from our own weakness and decay : 
 Jamqiie adeo est affecta cetas, effcefaque telliis. The opposite 
 argument of Lucretius has been rudely Englished, 
 
 " But sure the nature of the world is strong, 
 Perfect and young ; nor can I think it long 
 Since it beginning took, because we know 
 Arts still increase, and still politer grow." 
 
 Who shall say that this old earth is near its decadence? 
 exclaims Dr. Wynter. " Why, it has only just been endowed 
 with its nervous system ; its muscles, if Ave may so term the 
 steam-engine, have only been just set in motion ; and its 
 locomotive powers, the railway and steamship, have only just 
 found out the full use of their legs. In brain, nerve, and 
 limb, it is but just emerging from its helpless infancy." The 
 American Autocrat of the Breakfast-table tells us he should 
 have felt more nervous about the late comet, if he had 
 thought the world was ripe : " But it is very green yet, if I 
 am not mistaken ; and besides, there is a great deal of coal 
 to use up, which I cannot bring myself to think was made 
 for nothing." The comet allusion reminds us of De Quincey's 
 sportive speculation as to the comparative age of our planet : 
 
204 VEXED QUESTION OF 
 
 whereas some think her in that stage of her life which cor- 
 responds to the playful period of twelve or thirteen in a 
 spirited girl, his impression rather inclines him to represent 
 the Earth as a fine noble young woman, full of the pride 
 which is so becoming to her sex, and well able to take her 
 own part, " in case that, in any solitary point of the heavens, 
 she should come across one of those vulgar fussy Comets, 
 disposed to be rude." He professes to perfectly abominate 
 those who place our Earth in the catagory of decaying, nay, 
 of decayed women — who absolutely fancy themselves to see 
 hair like arctic snows, failure of vital heat, palsy that shakes 
 the head as in the porcelain toys on our mantlepieces, and 
 asthma that shakes the whole fabric. " They absolutely hear 
 the tellurian lungs wheezing, panting, crying ' Bellows to 
 mend !' periodically as the Earth approaches her aphelion." 
 Elsewhere, again, he contends that if the Earth were on her 
 last legs, we her children could not be very strong or healthy. 
 " If our mother could, with any show of reason, be considered 
 an old decayed lady, snoring stertorously in her arm-chair, 
 there would naturally be some arottia of phthisis, or apoplexy, 
 beginning to form about us, that are her children." But is 
 there? He trows not. Is it likely, is it plausible, he asks, 
 that we children of Earth should just begin to find out effec- 
 tive methods by steam of traversing land and sea, when the 
 human race had a summons to leave both ? 
 
 A writer in the Times^ within the last decade, made a bit of 
 a sensation at the time by announcing that age was beginning 
 to tell upon the earth ; that its crust had got very dry ; that 
 its mould was not what it used to be ; that its natural covering 
 had become very thin in some places, and had quite dis- 
 appeared in others; in short, that, partly from having lived 
 too fast, partly in the ordinary course of things, this poor old 
 world of ours was rapidly becoming bald. It was an agricultural 
 warning ; and people were staggered at first. We all knew, as 
 one of his critics conceded, that it would be nonsense to pre- 
 tend our world was in the first bloom of its youth : even by 
 its own confession, it was not by any means a chicken, if 
 
THE EARTH'S DECREPITUDE. 
 
 205 
 
 that phrase can be applied to a member of the solar system : 
 geology had hinted that it might be a good deal older than we 
 suspected — that there was something wrong about the dates 
 in the parish register ; and, in short, every one was walling to 
 admit that, as Falstaff puts it, "though not clean past its youth, 
 it had some smack of age in it, some relish of the saltness of 
 time." But we were not prepared for the statement that our 
 world was breaking down, or getting ready for its "lait de 
 poule et bonnet de nuit." We considered it, in the words of 
 a Saturday Reviewer, to be "a globe that was wearing well — 
 that might spin down the ringing grooves of change, take 
 a part in the music of the spheres, and indulge generally in 
 the amusements of planetary society for ages to come, with- 
 out any imputation of levity unbecoming its years." And by 
 general consent the idea of the earth's decrepitude seems to 
 have been put aside. "I believe the world grows near its 
 end," wrote Sir Thomas Browne, two centuries since; "yet 
 is neither old nor decayed, nor will ever perish upon the 
 ruins of its own principles" — that is, it will undergo mutation, 
 not annihilation. La Bruyere favoured the notion of the 
 world lasting " only," say, a hundred millions of years ; and 
 if so, it is yet in all its freshness, and is but just beginning. 
 If one may judge of the future by the past, he went on to 
 say, what novelties unknown are in store for us in the arts, 
 in the sciences, in nature, and in history; what discoveries 
 await us; what a variety of revolutions on the face of tlie 
 earth, in states and in empires ! What ignorance is ours, and 
 how shallow the experience that only dates back some six 
 thousand years ! Montesquieu, in his Lettres Persanes, touches 
 on current conjectures as to the decline of population, and 
 the comparative barrenness of this earth. "Seroit-elle deja 
 dans sa vieillesse? et tomberoit-elle de langueur?" We see 
 many regions exhausted of the power to yield sustenance to 
 man, he says ; and for all we can tell, the earth at large may 
 be suffering from causes gmerales, lentes et impej'ceptibles de 
 lassitude. Goldsmith's travelled Chinese, a sort of correlative 
 or counterpart in idea and in action to Montesquieu's travelled 
 
2o6 EARTH'S ALLEGED DECREPITUDE. 
 
 Persian, speculates with something of trepidation on the senes 
 cence of the solar system in full, and dreads as all too near 
 the time when the motions of the planets may become so 
 irregular as to need repairing ; and a pang seems to afflict him 
 in seeing that, as Byron puts it, the brow 
 
 '' Of Earth is wrinkled by the sins and tears 
 Of— but Chronology best knows the years." 
 
 Old Scottish divines, of the time and the type of Rutherford 
 and Binning, argued that the properly instructed, who saw 
 Nature as she really was, knew that as she, for about five 
 thousand years had been constantly on the move, her vigour 
 was wellnigh spent, and her pristine energy had departed. 
 " This is the world's old age ; it is declining ; albeit it seems 
 a fair and beautiful thing in the eyes of them who know no 
 better, and unto them who are of yesterday and know nothing, 
 it looks as if it had been created yesterday ; yet the truth is, 
 and a believer knows, it is near the grave." "The creation 
 now is an old rotten house that is all dropping through and 
 leaning to the one side." Despite such doctrine, the first gush 
 of spring is confessedly as balmy and as exhilarating to us as it 
 was to Lucretius ; and man walks from generation to generation 
 with the same skies and stars over him, and the same gales. of 
 Eden breathing spring after spring on his face. 
 
 "Nature surely never ranges, 
 
 Ne'er quits her gay and flowery crown ; 
 But, ever joyful, merely changes 
 
 The primrose for the thistle-down. 
 'Tis we alone who, waxing old, 
 Look on her with an aspect cold, 
 Dissolve her in our burning tears, 
 Or clothe her with the mists of years." 
 
 Shaftesbury maintains of " this Mother-Earth, that though ever 
 breeding, her vigour is as great, her beauty as fresh, and her 
 looks as charming, as if she newly came out of the forming 
 hands of her Creator." What though Samuel Rutherford 
 assert that the lilies and roses had "more sweetness of beauty 
 and smell, before the sin of man made them vanity-sick " ? If 
 
A FALLACIOUS FLORAL ANALOGY. 207 
 
 so, is not the change in man, not in them? Keble, in the 
 Christia?i Year, remembering the Divine monition to consider 
 the lilies, hails them as relics 
 
 " of Eden's bowers, 
 As pure, as fragrant, and as fair, 
 As when they crown'd the sunshine hours 
 
 Of happy wanderers there. 
 Fall'n all beside .... 
 But cheerful and unchanged the while 
 
 Their first and perfect form they show, 
 The same that won Eve's matron smile 
 In the world's opening glow." 
 
 As of men, so of flowers, one generation cometh and another 
 goeth, while the earth abideth for ever. It was once a favourite 
 fallacy to infer man's renewed existence from analogy with the 
 reflorescence, each returning spring, of the flowers of the field. 
 One might apply to the fallacious analogy the words of the 
 Man of Uz : " There is hope of a tree, if it be cut do^vn, that 
 it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof wall 
 not cease. . . . But man dieth, and wasteth away; yea, man 
 giveth up the ghost, and where is he?" There is hope, in 
 the case of the tree, of a fresh crop of leaves, while the trunk 
 remains alive ; but not of the same leaves. So there are ever 
 appearing new human lives here on earth, while the human 
 race itself, the original stock, continues in existence; but the 
 same men, once dead and gone, do not reappear. It is a 
 fresh set of men, as it is a fresh set of leaves. Not by such 
 floral analogies is the resurrection of the dead to be plausibly 
 maintained. A description of Esther Craven straying lonely 
 in November along the " steaming tree-caverned wood-paths — 
 the solemn charnels of the dead summer nations of leaves and 
 flowers," expands into a reflection on Miss Broughton's part 
 touching the fondness preachers show for drawing a parallel 
 between ourselves and those forest leaves ; telling us that, as 
 in the autumn they fall, rot, are dissolved, and mingle together, 
 stamped down and shapeless, in brown confusion, and yet in 
 the spring come forth again fresh as ever ; so shall we — who, 
 in our autumn, die, rot, and are not — come forth again in 
 
2o8 A FALLACIOUS FLORAL ANALOGY. 
 
 our distant spring, in lordly beauty and gladness. " So speak- 
 ing, whether thinkingly or unthinkingly, they equivocate — they 
 lie ! * It is not the same leaves that reappear ; others like 
 them burst from their sappy buds, and burgeon in the ' green- 
 haired woods ; ' but not they — not they ! They stir not, nor 
 is there any movement among the sodden earth-mass that 
 was them [sic]." If the parallel be complete, she goes on to 
 say, others like us, — others as good, as fair as we — but yet 
 not 7ve — " other than us, shall break forth in lusty youth, in 
 their strong May-time ; but 7^ie shall rot on ! " Homer's simili- 
 tude is as perennial as its subject — 
 
 " Like leaves of trees the race of man is found, 
 
 Now green in youth, now with 'ring on the ground ; 
 
 Another race the following spring supplies, 
 
 They fall successive, and successive rise. " 
 
 Another race, not the same. But certainly both preachers and 
 poets, preaching poets in particular and poetical preachers, 
 have been, if they are not still, given to assume identity, in 
 their analogical arguments. So Hurdis, when arguing from 
 the return of spring a future resurrection for man : Will the 
 great God, who thus by annual miracle restores the perished 
 year, and youth and beauty gives by resurrection strange, 
 where none was asked, leave only man to be the scorn of 
 time and sport of death ? So Beattie : 
 
 ' ' Shall I be left abandon'd in the dust, 
 "When Fate, relenting, lets the flower revive ? 
 
 * -K- * * 
 
 No ; Heaven's immortal spring shall yet arrive ; 
 
 And man's majestic beauty bloom again, 
 
 Bright thro' th' eternal year of Love's triumphant reign." 
 
 And in his Hermit the same bard gives expression to the sombre 
 utterance, involving the fallacy in question, — 
 " Nor yet for the ravage of winter I mourn ; 
 
 Kind nature the embryo blossom will save. 
 
 But when shall spring visit the mouldering urn? 
 
 Oh, when shall it dawn on the night of the grave ? " 
 
 * The lady's lie -giving reminds one of Byron's, 
 
 " I tell him, if a clergyman, he lies ! " 
 
DEAD FLOWERS SUPPOSED TO LIVE AGAIN. 209 
 
 With which plaint the note of a later minstrel, his theme the 
 
 Mystery of Evil, is in tune : 
 
 *' And then ' Resurgam ' on those tombs was writ, 
 Though, when man once was hidden in their glooms, 
 I saw him never with life's spark relit : 
 Yet from their silken graves the very worms did flit." 
 
 Wordsworth's sonnet in Lombardy closes mth a reverse of this 
 last figure — an old man bent by a load of mulberry leaves being 
 his theme, and Man and Worm compared and contrasted : ere- 
 long their fates do each to each conform : " both pass into new 
 being, — but the Worm, transfigured, sinks into a hopeless grave ; 
 his volant spirit \nll, he trusts, ascend to bHss unbounded, glory 
 without end." Hood falls in \\'ith the current notion of flower 
 privilege, in his Ode to Melancholy : 
 
 " Is't not enough to vex our souls, 
 
 And fill our eyes, that we have set 
 
 Our love upon a rose's leaf, 
 
 Our hearts upon a violet ? 
 
 Blue eyes, red cheeks, are frailer yet ; 
 
 And, sometimes, at their svrih decay 
 
 Beforehand we must fret : 
 
 The roses bud and bloom again ; 
 
 But love may haunt the grave of love, 
 
 And watch the mould in vain." 
 
 Chateaubriand finishes a chapter of his d' outre-tombe memoirs 
 with an apostrophe to a little wood-pink resting on his table 
 among his papers : " Thou wilt spring forth again, little wood- 
 pink — thou whose late blossom blooms among the heather " — 
 but we, nous autres, "we shall not live again upon this earth 
 as will the sweet and solitary- flower." Delta (Moir) sings over 
 his loved lost Casy Wappy that snows muffled earth when he 
 left it in life's spring^^loom, but now '" the green leaves of the 
 tree return — but with them bring not thee " : 
 
 ' ' 'Tis so ; but can it be — (while flowers 
 Revive again) — 
 
 Man's doom, in death that we and ours 
 For aye remain ? 
 
 Oh, can it be, that, o'er the grave. 
 
 The grass renew'd should yearly wave, 
 
 Yet God forget our child to save?" 
 
 14 
 
2IO DEAD FLOWERS ASSUMED TO LIVE AGAIN, 
 
 The same note of interrogation, of deprecation, almost of ex- 
 postulation, rings through the closing stanzas of W. Caldwell 
 Roscoe's lines written after his sister's death : 
 
 *' What ! shall the faithful God who leads 
 
 The long revolving year — , 
 Who in His bosom warms the seeds, 
 
 And breathes on Nature's bier, — 
 Let lapse in earth our mortal goal — 
 
 This life, our seed immortal ? 
 Or this diviner spring — our soul, 
 
 Let freeze in Death's cold portal ? " 
 
 Abu Abdallah offered to his American visitor the rose ol 
 Jericho as a proof positive of man's immortality : in due 
 season the rose withers and dies, but also in due time it — 
 but what " it " ? — revives : " The little shapeless mass became 
 a miracle indeed. . . . The roots had expanded, the leaves 
 had unfolded, life and breath had returned to the dead child 
 of the Sahara, and the very blossoms began to show, and to 
 rival the faint rosy tints of the evening sun. — I never," adds 
 Mr. De Vere, "forgot that lesson of immortality — I never 
 forgot that Rose of Jericho. On my return to Europe I 
 learned that botanists called it ' Anastatica,' the flower of 
 the resurrection."* But the analogy should be of individual 
 man with each several flower; the root corresponds to the 
 human stock or race. That abides, but the individual man 
 dies off like the several leaves or blossoms of each succeed- 
 ing year, and those several leaves or blossoms revive not with 
 reviving spring. 
 
 " Ah. friends ! methinks it were a pleasant sphere, 
 If, like the trees, we blossom'd every year," 
 
 sings Leigh Hunt. But what he sees, and presently goes on to 
 say or sing, is applicable to our purpose : 
 
 " Besides, this tale of youth that comes again, 
 Is no more true of apple-trees than men. 
 The Swedish sage, the Newton of the flow'rs, 
 Who first found out those worlds of paramours, 
 
 * Leaves from the Book of N'ature, by M. S. De Vere. 
 
RESURRECTION FALL A CIES. 2 1 1 
 
 Tells us, that every blossom that we see 
 Boasts in its walls a separate family ; 
 So that a tree is but a sort of stand, 
 That holds these filial fairies in its hand." 
 
 Young is within his right when he tells how day follows night, 
 and gray winter gives place to soft spring, and all, to reflourish, 
 fades : as in a wheel, all sinks, to reascend ; " emblem of man, 
 who passes, not expires."' But man is here the stock, the race, 
 not the individual. Young was verging on the misleading 
 analogy when he proceeded to ask, Can it be that matter is 
 immortal and that spirit dies, and 
 
 " Shall man alone, for whom all- else revives, 
 No resurrection know ? Shall man alone, 
 Imperial man ! be sown in barren ground. 
 Less privileged than grain, on which he feeds, . . . 
 Severely doom'd death's single unredeem'd ? " 
 
 Redeunt jam gramina campis, Arbor ibiisque comce : . . . Nos, 
 ubi decidimus . . . Fuh'is d umbra siimus. Spring after winter 
 is life coming back to a dead world : it is a resurrection. But 
 all this species of analogy and illustration, valuable as it is in 
 the way of suggestiveness, is, in Frederick Robertson's words, 
 " worth nothing in the way of proof" It may be worth every- 
 thing to the heart, in so far as it strengthens the dim guesses 
 and vague intimations which the heart has formed already \ but 
 it is, he insists, worth nothing to the intellect ; for the moment 
 w^e come to argue the matter, we find how little there is to rest 
 upon in these analogies. '^ They are no real resurrections after 
 all: they only look like resurrections." To take a simile as 
 much in favour as the flowers of the forest— the chrysalis only 
 seemed* dead, just as the tree in winter only seemed to have 
 
 * Lord Holland at a dinner-party at Bowood in 1819 objected to the 
 stanza in a new poem of James Montgomer}''s which was being then and 
 
 there discussed : 
 
 " The dead are like the stars by day, 
 Withdrawn from mortal eye, 
 But not extinct— they hold their way 
 In glory through the sky." 
 
 It begged the question, he objected in the first place ; and next, the stars 
 
 reappear continually, which the dead do not. 
 
THE MORE KNOWLEDGE, 
 
 lost its vitality. What is wanted to show is a butterfly which 
 has been dried and crushed, fluttering its brifliant wings next 
 year again — or a tree that has been plucked up by the roots 
 and seasoned by exposure, the vital force really killed out, 
 putting forth its leaves again. We should then, it is admitted, 
 have a real parallel to a resurrection. But not until then. 
 
 XXIV. 
 
 THE MORE KNOWLEDGE, THE MORE SORROW, 
 
 ECCLESIASTES i. l8. 
 
 WHAT came of the Preacher giving his heart to know 
 wisdom ? The invariable outcome, in his case : vexa- 
 tion of spirit. "For in much wisdom is much grief; and he 
 that increaseth knowledge, increaseth sorrow." 
 
 Man's unhappiness, the Weissnichtwo philosopher takes it, 
 comes of his greatness. His capacity of knowledge brings 
 pains and penalties with it. Of almost all books that enlarge 
 the experience and have something really of revelation in them, 
 it may be said, as of that little book in the Apocalypse, that 
 even though sweet as honey in the mouth, the after-taste, the 
 abiding one, is bitter. Some books indeed, and to some 
 students, lack the prelibation of sweetness ; for, in a sense, all 
 study is a weariness to the flesh, and the rhymed rhetoric of 
 Shakspeare's Biron will apply : 
 
 " Why, all delights are vain ; but that most vain, 
 Which, with pain purchased, doth inherit pain : 
 As, painfully to pore upon a book, 
 To seek the light of truth ; while truth the while 
 Doth falsely * blind the eyesight of his look : 
 Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile : 
 So ere you find where light in darkness lies, 
 Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes." 
 
 The aspirations of Manfred have been beyond the dwellers 
 * Dishonestly, treacherously. 
 
THE MORE SORROW. 
 
 of the earth, and they have only taught him that " knowledge 
 is not happiness, and science but an exchange of ignorance for 
 that which is another kind of ignorance." There was never a 
 finer lesson read to the pride of learning, says a great critic, 
 than the exclamation of Marlowe's Faustus, after his thirty years' 
 study : " Oh, would I had never seen Wittenberg, never read 
 book ! " On the score of happiness, what comparison, asks a 
 latter-day sage, can you make between the tranquil being of the 
 wild man of the woods, and the A\Tetched and turbulent exist- 
 ence of Milton, the victim of persecution, poverty, blindness, 
 and neglect? "The records of literature demonstrate that 
 Happiness and Intelligence are seldom sisters."' Ever\^ new 
 lesson, says an eastern proverb, is another gray hair. Sated 
 latter-day pseudo-Solomons have echoed the prayer, 
 
 ' ' Take from me this regal knowledge ; 
 Let me, contented and mute, with the beasts of the field, my brothers, 
 Tranquilly, happily lie, — and eat grass, Hke Nebuchadnezzar ! " 
 
 It is in opposition to the doctrine of Pope's line, of " Happi- 
 ness, our being's end and aim," that Mr. Carlyle asks. How 
 comes it that although the gross are happier than the refined, 
 the refined would not change places with them? Were that 
 doctrine right, for what should we struggle with our whole might, 
 for what pray to Heaven, if not that the " malady of thought " 
 might be utterly stifled \vithin us, and a power of digestion and 
 secretion, to which that of the tiger were trifling, be imparted 
 instead thereof? "O too dear knowledge! O pernicious 
 learning ! " is the regretful cry in one of Hood's serious poems. 
 And in the same key is the note of Selred when taxing Ethwald 
 with having spoilt a promising youth by his clerkly appliances : 
 
 " For since he learnt from thee that letter'd art 
 "Which only sacred priests were meant to know, 
 See how it is, I pray ! His father's house 
 Has unto him become a cheerless den, 
 His pleasant tales and sprightly playful talk, 
 Which still our social meals were wont to cheer, 
 Now visit us but like a hasty beam 
 Between the showery clouds."' 
 
 Even the growing sense of ignorance is a depressing power. 
 
214 THE MORE KNOWLEDGE, 
 
 It is the law of all human knowledge, that the more the rays of 
 the light within us multiply and spread, the increasing circle 
 of light implies an increasing circumference of darkness to hem 
 it round. " Increase the bounds of knowledge, and you in- 
 evitably increase the sense of ignorance ; at all the more points 
 in a belt of surrounding darkness do you encounter doubt and 
 difficulty." Goldsmith's Chinese philosopher opens an epistle 
 with a grave expression of incipient misgiving as to the suffi- 
 ciency of wisdom alone to make us happy : he begins to doubt 
 whether every step we make in refinement is not an inlet to 
 new disquietudes. '' When we rise in knowledge, as the pros- 
 pect A\idens, the objects of our regard become more obscure, 
 and the unlettered peasant, whose views are only directed to 
 the narrow sphere around him, beholds nature with a finer 
 relish, and tastes her blessings with a keener appetite, than the 
 philosopher whose mind attempts to grasp an universal system." 
 But that is open to exception again, as tending to an inference 
 as general as the one drawn by the toper in the Golde?i Legend 
 is particular, viz., that 
 
 ' ' the friars who sit at the lower board, 
 
 And cannot distinguish bad [wine] from good, 
 
 Are far better off than if they could, 
 
 Being rather the rude disciples of beer 
 
 Than of anything more refined and dear. " 
 
 Beranger, however, is free to adopt the travelled mandarin's 
 philosophy; for he may be said to echo it in the Hnes, 
 " Des sages m'ont ouvert les yeux ; 
 
 Mais j 'admirals bien plus I'aurore 
 
 Quand je connaissais moins les cieux." 
 
 y 'ai perdu ma douce ignorance, is the burden of his song. It 
 harmonizes with Barry Cornwall's strain, on the text that igno- 
 rance is bliss : " Rains fall, suns shine, winds flee, Brooks run, 
 yet few know how. Do not thou too deeply search," etc., for 
 " Men mar the beauty of their dreams by tracing their source 
 too well." One of his dramatic fragments is a more direct 
 annotation on the Preacher's utterance : 
 
 " What's knowledge? — Sorrow, — sorrow; little else. 
 All the black units which make up the amount 
 
THE MORE SORROW. 215 
 
 Of human life (sad sum of deeds and thoughts!) 
 Together join'd, form knowledge. The great marks 
 Which guide us onwards thro' tempestuous seas, 
 Are beacons, currents, rocks. The sunny places 
 Teach nothing, save that now and then we sink 
 By trusting what looks fair." 
 
 To know nothing is the happiest life, says Sophocles : kv rw 
 (fipovcLv yap fxiqhh/, ^Sl(tto<; /3los, — of which the Latin adage 
 is a close translation, JVi/n7 scire est vita Jucundtssima, and the 
 English saw an accepted paraphrase, " Fools and children lead 
 a merry life." Montesquieu's travelled Persian soon comes to 
 the conclusion, " Heureuse I'ignorance des enfants de Mahomet !" 
 Balzac somewhere exclaims, to this effect, Frightful condition 
 of our race ! there is not a single one of our happinesses which 
 is not due to some kind of ignorance. Giordano Bruno con- 
 tends that ignorance is the mother of happiness, and that he 
 who promotes sciences increases the sources of grief. The 
 Admirable Crichton wound up his dies mirabilis at Padua with 
 a declamation on the blessedness of ignorance. One point 
 there is, as to which the mse of all ages are pretty well agreed, 
 in praise of ignorance, however faithfully they may be repre- 
 sented on the main question by Wordsworth's philosophic 
 moralist, when he exclaims, lamentingly, 
 
 " But, after all, 
 Is aught so certain as that man is doomed 
 To breathe beneath a vault of ignorance — 
 The natural roof of that dark house in which 
 His soul is pent ? How little can be knowm — 
 This is the Wiseman's sigh." 
 
 Or again when, in his autobiographic poem, he counts highest 
 among the many joys of youth the acquisition of knowledge : 
 
 " But oh ! what happiness to live 
 When every hour brings palpable access 
 Of knowledge, when all knowledge is delight, 
 And sorrow is not there ! " 
 
 The point of agreement referred to is with regard to the prying 
 into forbidden mysteries, such as the Caliph Vathek is warned 
 off from : " Woe to the rash mortal who seeks to know that of 
 
2i6 THE MORE KNOWLEDGE, 
 
 which he should remain ignorant" — the sequel of the story 
 containing Vathek's avowal to Carathis, " How much I ought 
 to abhor the impious knowledge thou hast taught me!" — and 
 the moral of it teaching professedly the chastisement of blind 
 ambition, that would transgress those bounds which the Creator 
 hath prescribed to human knowledge, and by aiming at dis- 
 coveries reserved for pure intelligence, acquire that infatuated 
 pride which recognizes not the condition appointed to man, 
 *'to be ignorant and humble." As the great churchman says 
 in Sir Henry Taylor's " Anglo-Saxon " play, that 
 
 " not in mercy, 
 Save as a penance merciful in issue, 
 Doth God impart that moumfuUest of gifts 
 Which pushes farther into future time 
 The bounds of human foresight." 
 
 And such the drift of argument in Pope's Essay on Man — that 
 in pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies, quitting our sphere 
 to rush into the skies : 
 
 " Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate, 
 All but the page prescribed, their present state : 
 From brutes what men, from men what spirits know ; 
 Or who could suffer Being here below ? 
 The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day, 
 Had he thy reason, would he skip and play ? 
 Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food, 
 And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood. 
 Oh, blindness to the future ! kindly given. 
 That each may fill the circle mark'd by Heaven." 
 
 So again in the third epistle of the same didactic poem, we 
 have an iterated enforcement of the same doctrine, that "blest" 
 is the lot of the animal doomed to feast man, " which sees no 
 more the stroke, or feels the pain, than favoured Man by touch 
 ethereal slain;" and though Man does foresee his death, he 
 cannot foretell the time of it — and previsions of that time are 
 only what Milton calls visions ill foreseen. 
 
 " To each unthinking being, Heaven a friend 
 Gives not the useless knowledge of its end : 
 To Man imparts it ; but with such a view 
 As, while he dreads it, makes him hope it too : 
 
THE MORE SORROW. 217 
 
 The hour conceal'd, and so remote the fear, 
 Death still draws nearer, never seeming near." 
 
 One of the Ingoldsby Legends takes up the strain, and rhymes 
 it anew in longer but lighter-footed metre : 
 
 " The kid from the pen, and the lamb from the fold. 
 Unmoved may the blade of the butcher behold ; 
 They dream not — ah, happier they ! — that the knife, 
 Though uplifted, can menace their innocent life ; 
 It falls ; — the frail thread of their being is riven, 
 They dread not, suspect not, the blow till 'tis given." 
 
 Walter Savage Landor was for once writing in that metre, but 
 touching on altogether a different theme, when he closed an 
 epigram A\'ith the couplet, so far (and only so far) pertinent to 
 our purpose, — 
 
 " In another six years I shall know all about it ; 
 But some knowledge is vain, and we do best without it." 
 
 Sleep on, is the gazer's benison on Eden's " blest pair ; and O, 
 yet happiest, if ye seek no happier state, and know to know no 
 more." Once having tasted the defended fruit, let them boast, 
 if they will, or can, their knowledge of good lost and evil got ; 
 " happier, had it sufficed them to have known good by itself, 
 and evil not at all." It was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's 
 philosophy to be young as long as she could, since there is 
 nothing can repay one for that invaluable ignorance which is 
 the companion of youth. " To my extreme mortification I grow 
 wiser every day. I don't believe Solomon was more convinced 
 of the vanity of temporal affairs than I am." J^e devieiis vieux 
 eii appreiiant toiijours. There was bitterness to Rousseau in his 
 private interpretation and self-application of that old verse ; 
 for, said he, " c'est une bien triste science . . . I'ignorance 
 est encore pre'ferable. . . . Que ne suis je reste toujours dans 
 cette imbe'cille mais douce confiance " in friendship and the 
 like. " Oh, rather rest in ignorance, — 
 
 ' ' Nor ask thou if thy friends be what they seem ; 
 
 It is but misery too much to know 
 
 Amid this weary scene of life below — 
 It has its charms — that ignorance is one ; 
 Nor is it wise its veil aside to throw, 
 
21 8 THE MORE KNOWLEDGE, 
 
 Till in the presence of the Eternal Throne 
 
 It will be bliss to know even as we ai-e known." * 
 
 If ignorance can ever be bliss, then where and wheresoever 
 it is so blessed, Gray's conclusion is unimpeachable, that 'tis 
 folly to be wise. And blessed ignorance there is in this weary 
 world, of one sort and another, unless wearied experts bear false 
 witness. Leontes curses his forfeiture of complacent ignorance; 
 regrets the time when his knowledge was narrower : 
 
 " Alack for lesser knowledge ! How accursed 
 In being so blest ! " 
 
 So Othello's "I had been happy . . . had I nothing known !"t 
 Hamlet congratulates Horatio on 7iot knowing that "water-fly," 
 the frivolous Osric : " Thy state is the more gracious ; for 'tis 
 a vice to know him." No Hamlet on the one hand, and no 
 Osric on the other, is the " respectable " hero who utters the 
 respect-worthy prayer, " May the last, knowledge I acquire be 
 that knowledge of the world which induces mistrust and con- 
 tempt of one's fellow-creatures." Gibbon congratulated "the 
 arctic tribes " of Lapland, as " alone among the sons of men 
 ignarant of war and unconscious of human blood : a happy 
 ignorance, if reason and virtue were the guardians of their 
 peace." Goldsmith accounted his ideal English peasant's "best 
 riches, ignorance of wealth." Beattie's sage warns off a young 
 inquirer with an 
 
 " Alas ! what comfort could thy anguish soothe, 
 Shouldst thou the extent of human folly know ? 
 Be ignorance thy choice, where knowledge leads to woe." 
 
 After reading all that was to be found in the languages she 
 was mistress of, the Lady Mary we have already quoted utters 
 a lament over the decay of her eyesight by midnight studies, 
 
 * Poems by C. F. Cornwallis. 
 
 f Compare a passage in the CEdipus Tyranmis, where Jocasta tells the 
 too eagerly and fatally inquisitive king, ' ' Thine ignorance is thy bliss. " 
 " CEdip. A bliss that tortures ! 
 Jocasta. Miserable man ! 
 
 Oh couldst thou never learn the thing thou art !" 
 
THE MORE SORROW. 219 
 
 and " I envy," she adds, " the easy peace of mind of a ruddy 
 milkmaid, who, undisturbed by doubt, hears the sermon, with 
 humility, every Sunday, not having confounded the sentiments 
 of natural duty in her head by the vain inquiries of the schools, 
 who may be more learned, yet, after all, must remain as 
 ignorant." Madame de Motteville sounds a not unlike note 
 when she writes, recalling the transgression of the mother of 
 all flesh, " II nous coute si cher d'avoir .voulu apprendre la 
 science du bien et du mal, que nous devons demeurer d'accord 
 qu'il vaut mieux les ignorer que de les apprendre, particuUere- 
 ment a nous autres qu'on accuse d'etre cause de tout le mal.'' 
 To be restored to his happier state of ignorance is the pleading 
 of Sydney Dobell's impassioned and sadly-enlightened Roman, 
 "if the sad fruit of knowledge dwells for ever on the lip. 
 
 " Take back this terrible sight, 
 This sight that passeth the sweet boundary 
 Of man's allotted world. Let me look forth 
 And see green fields, hills, trees, and soulless waters. 
 Give back my ignorance. Why should my sense 
 Be cursed with this intolerable knowledge?" 
 
 Take them away. Monsieur Emanuel Paul's pupil exclaims, of 
 the books lent and expounded by that exacting master : "Take 
 them away, and teach me no more. I never asked to be made 
 learned, and you compel me to feel very profoundly that learning 
 is not happiness." The particular instance is of general sig- 
 nificance. Churchill begins his now unread, if not unreadable, 
 poem oi The Author m!C^ something like an execration of letters 
 and learning : 
 
 ' ' Much are the precious hours of youth misspent 
 
 In climbing Learning's rugged, steep ascent ; 
 
 When to the top the bold adventurer's got, 
 
 He reigns, vain monarch, o'er a barren spot ; 
 
 Whilst in the vale of Ignorance below, 
 
 Folly and Vice to rank luxuriance grow ; 
 
 Honours and wealth pour in on every side, 
 
 And proud Preferment rolls her golden tide." 
 
 Prior philosophizes in verse on happy obscurities in optics 
 and obliquities in vision, and so comes to the conclusion, 
 
220 THE MORE KNOWLEDGE, 
 
 • 
 *' If we see right, we see our woes ; 
 Then what avails it to have eyes ? 
 From ignorance our comfort flows. 
 The only wretched are the wise." 
 
 Unthinking creatures, muses Richardson's Clarissa, have 
 some comfort in the shortness of their views; in their un- 
 apprehensiveness, and that they penetrate not beyond the 
 present moment ; in short, that they are unthinking. 
 
 Speaking of the world as full of objects of sorrow, our 
 capacities to take which in are enlarged by knowledge, "none 
 but the wise man can know himself to be miserable," says 
 Robert South, who shows how not Solomon himself could 
 separate his wisdom from vexation of spirit, and who cites 
 Aristotle's assertion, that there was never a great scholar in 
 the world but had in his temper a dash and mixture of 
 melancholy. Nihil scire vita jucundissima est. It is the empty 
 vessel that makes the merry sound, argues the wittiest of our 
 old Caroline divines ; " which is evident from those whose 
 intellectuals are ruined with frenzy or madness ; who so merry, 
 so free from the lash of care ? their understanding is gone, 
 and so is their trouble. It is the philosopher that is pensive, 
 that looks doumwards in the posture of the mourner. It is 
 the open eye that weeps." Erasmus, in his Mtopias 'EyKw/xtov, 
 Stultitise Laudatio, Praise of Folly, affirms the different branches 
 of science and learning {disciplincE) to be in truth gifts of the 
 daemons, who should properly be called Sarjfxovcs, or " knowing 
 ones," — and to have been without influence in that golden age 
 when all talked one language, so there was no need of grammar; 
 no one disputed, so logic was not required; rhetoric and 
 jurisprudence would have been equally superfluous. But when 
 the golden age had passed away, " learning came with other 
 evils, one grammar alone being sufficient for the perpetual 
 torture of hfe." It is consistent with the praise of folly and 
 the consequent or concomitant deprecation or disparagement 
 of science, that the witty scholar should declare idiots and 
 maniacs to enjoy advantages unknown to the learned and the 
 great : the swineherd was better off than TroXvfxrJTts 'OSvcra-cvs, 
 
THE MORE SORROW. 221 
 
 by Homer designated ^vVrr/i/o?: let the sad, morose life ot 
 the wise man be compared with the career of a men*}' court- 
 fool, and ever}' advantage is claimed as indubitably apparent 
 on the side of the latter. Richard Baxter's Dying Thoughts 
 reverted to the text, " Much reading is a weariness of the 
 flesh," and he bore corroborative testimony to the truth that 
 whoso increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. '"'How many 
 hundred studious days and weeks, and how many hard and 
 tearing thoughts, hath my little, very little knowledge cost me ! 
 And how much infirmity and painfulness to my flesh, increase 
 of painful diseases, and loss of bodily ease and health !" In 
 more than one or two of his letters to Temple, Boswell hesitates 
 between the charms and the penalties of advancement in 
 learning. Now he en\T[es his friend's riper knowledge. But 
 then again, " when I consider what vexations you suffer, from 
 which I am free, I am inclined to quiet myself ' ^luch study 
 is a weariness to the flesh,' says the ^^'ise man ; now, if there 
 is on the whole more pain than pleasure in advancing far into 
 literature, would you advise me to do it?'' "Men of delicate 
 nerves may at times suffer from their knowledge, but they would 
 suffer from something else, and even their enjoyments from 
 knowledge counterbalance their sufferings." Considerable as 
 are the pleasures of studying logic and metaphysics, such 
 pleasures, in the opinion of modern thinkers, are alloyed by 
 the inseparable conviction that they are barren as far as all 
 result is concerned, and that such seductive inquiries, if pursued 
 in a spirit of remorseless logic, are discomfiture and uncertainty 
 after all. This also is vanity. As Shenstone echoes the sigh 
 of Ecclesiastes, — 
 
 " Ah ! what is science, what is art, 
 Or what the pleasure these impart ? 
 Ye trophies, which the leam'd pursue 
 Thro' endless, fruitless toils, adieu ! 
 "What can the tedious tomes bestow 
 To soothe the miseries they show ?" 
 
222 'ENVY DOTH MERIT 
 
 XXV. 
 
 ENVIED MERIT. 
 
 ECCLESIASTES iv. 4. 
 
 FOR every " right work," the Preacher, having considered 
 all travail, found that a man is " envied of his neigh- 
 bour." The envy is at once the penalty paid by, and the 
 homage paid to, merit. 
 
 " Envy doth merit as its shade pursue ; 
 And yet the shadow proves the substance true." 
 
 The heart of Artemidorus, in Shakspeare, laments that virtue 
 cannot live out of the teeth of emulation. To apply the words 
 of Othello, "Yes, 'tis the plague ol great ones; 'tis destiny 
 unshunnable, like death." Alcides, whose stalwart arm had 
 conquered all besides, found Envy too strong for him, and to 
 be overcome only by death : Comperii invidiam supremo fine 
 
 domari. 
 
 " All human Virtue, to its latest breath, 
 Finds Envy never conquered, but by Death. 
 The great Alcides, every labour past. 
 Had still this monster to subdue at last. 
 Sure fate of all, beneath w^hose rising ray 
 Each star of meaner merit fades away." 
 
 The " every labour past," is a phrase that recalls the " I con- 
 sidered all travail" of Ecclesiastes. 
 
 The French Academician who penned the admired Essai 
 stir les Eloges, tracing the omnipresence here below of Envy, 
 which strives to sully what is beautiful, and to lower what is 
 exalted, says that " at the very moment when Merit appeared 
 in the world, Envy too was born, and began her persecution." 
 A Chinese proverb runs : Towers are measured by their sha- 
 dows, and great men by their calumniators. It seems a hard 
 case, to Shenstone's thinking, that envy should be the conse- 
 quence of merit, at the same time that scorn so naturally 
 attends the want of it ; but he takes it to be perhaps in some 
 measure an unavoidable, if not useful, passion in all the most 
 
AS ITS SHADE PURSUE: 223 
 
 heroic natures, where, refined through certain strainers, it takes 
 the name of emulation. " It is a pain arising in our breasts, 
 on contemplation of the superior advantages of another ; and 
 its tendency is truly good, under some certain regulations." 
 But the instances of its perversion he allows to be obvious to 
 every one's observation; insomuch, indeed, that it might be 
 quite safe to fix our esteem on those whom we hear some 
 people depreciate. " Merit is to them as uniformly odious, 
 as the sun itself to the birds of darkness." And Shenstone 
 would as implicitly give his applause to one whom they pull 
 to pieces, as the inhabitants of Pegu worship those who have 
 been devoured by apes. 
 
 " Is there a bard -whom genius fires, 
 Whose every thought the god inspires ? 
 When Envy reads the nen^ous lines, 
 She frets, she rails, she raves, she pines ; 
 Her hissing snakes with venom swell ; 
 She calls her venal train from hell : 
 The servdle friends her nod obey. 
 And all Curll's authors are in pay. 
 Fame calls up Calumny and Spite : 
 Thus shadow owes its birth to light." 
 
 John Gay knew what he was here writing about. And it was a 
 familiar topic with his friend Swift, with whom such utterances 
 as these abound : 
 
 " At highest worth dull malice reaches, 
 As slugs pollute the fairest peaches ; 
 Envy defames, as harpies vile 
 Devour the fruit they first defile." 
 
 Balzac, of the seventeenth century, not the nineteenth, asserted 
 his delight at the number of libels pubHshed against him, — 
 " a heap of stones that envy has cast at me without doing me 
 any harm," he called them, alluding to those cairns or monu- 
 ments of the eastern nations, which were mountains of stones 
 raised upon the dead body by travellers, that used to cast every 
 one his stone upon it as he passed by. It is certain, says 
 Addison, that " no monument is so glorious as one which is 
 thus raised by the hands of envy." It appears, to Landor's 
 
224 ' ENVY DOTH MERIT 
 
 Eubulides, to be among the laws of Nature that the mighty 
 of intellect should be pursued and carped by the little, as the 
 solitary flight of great birds is followed by the twittering petu- 
 lance of many smaller. His Boccaccio maintains that seldom 
 are we envied, until we are so prosperous that envy is rather 
 a famiUar in our train than an enemy who waylays us. " If 
 we saw nothing of such followers and outriders, we might begin 
 to doubt our station." No crime, it has been said, is so heavily 
 visited as that of being successful : it is the sale of your picture, 
 or the success of your book, that first makes people find out 
 your faults to the full. Little Tidd, of novel note, made it the 
 business of his life to go about maligning every one who was 
 successful, and endeavouring, when he came across them per- 
 sonally, to put them out of conceit by hints and innuendos. 
 Names that lie upon the ground, as Anaxagoras tells Aspasia, 
 are not easily set on fire by Envy, but those quickly catch it 
 which are raised up by fame, or wave to the breeze of prosperity : 
 every one that passes is ready to give them a shake and a rip ; 
 tor there are few either so busy or so idle as not to lend a 
 hand at undoing. That Sophocles escaped the ordinary per- 
 secutions of envy, one of his critics ascribes to that laxity 
 of principle which "made him thought so agreeable a fellow. 
 People lose much of their anger and envy of genius, when it 
 throws them down a bundle or two of human foibles by which 
 they can climb up to its level." Plutarch's Lives iterate the 
 truism that envy delights in the disgrace of great men, and 
 loses a part of her rancour by their fall. He says it of 
 Themistocles ; and of Publicola he remarks, ''What is the 
 fate of all great men, to be persecuted by envy, was also his ; " 
 while of Plutarch himself biography records that, like other 
 men of renown, he found envy conquered but by death. Not 
 that death itself invariably conquers that conqueror. To apply 
 
 Beranger's lines, 
 
 " Le laurier devient cendre, 
 * Cendre qu'au vent I'Envie aime a jeter." 
 
 Vivien tells Merlin, the Fame that follows death is nothing 
 to us : 
 
AS ITS SHADE PURSUE.' 
 
 " And what is Fame in life but half-disfame, 
 And counterchanged with darkness ? You yourself 
 Know well that Envy calls you Devil's son, 
 And since you seem the Master of all Art, 
 They fain would make you Master of all Vice. " 
 
 The shadow proves the substance. " So in the light of great 
 eternity, Life eminent creates the shade of death ; The shadow 
 passeth when the tree shall fall." It is old Madame Pernelle's 
 firm creed that 
 
 *' La vertu dans le monde est toujours poursuivie ; 
 Les envieux mourront, mais non jamais I'envie." 
 
 A^on minus periculi ex viagnd famd, qiia??i ex 7nald, — the 
 aphorism is terse as becomes Tacitus. South had the start 
 of Pope in alleging that shadows do not more naturally attend 
 shining bodies, than envy pursues worth and merit, always 
 close at the heels of them, and like a sharp blighting east 
 ^^•ind, still blasting and killing the noblest and most promising 
 productions of virtue in their earliest bud, and, "as Jacob did 
 Esau, supplant them in their very birth." Envy is always 
 caused by something either good or great, for " no man is 
 envied for his failures, but his perfections." It is not safe 
 for any man to be " borne upon the wings of fame, and ride 
 in triumph upon the tongues of men ; for the tongues of some 
 do but provoke the teeth of more ; and men, we know, do 
 much more heartily detract than they use to commend." 
 Milton hails in H. Lawes one greeted "with praise enough 
 for Envy to look wan;" as again George Wither sees true 
 Poesy encompassed with 
 
 *' Mists of envy, fogs of spite, 
 'Twixt men's judgments and her light." 
 
 De Quincey speaks of that happy exemption from jealousy 
 whfch belongs almost inevitably to conscious power in its 
 highest mode ; it is where he describes Bentley reposing calmly 
 on his own supremacy, content that pretenders of every size 
 and sort should flutter through their little day. So Boileau 
 declares of " ces basses jalousies, des vulgaires esprits malignes 
 renesies," that 
 
 15 
 
226 'ENVY DOTH MERIT AS ITS SHADE PURSUE: 
 
 " Un sublime ecrivain n'en pent etre infecte ; 
 C'est un vice qui suit la mediocrite." 
 
 It is in tracking the rise and progress of one whom France at 
 least accounts a great man, altogether one of her greatest, that 
 Mr. Carlyle incidentally remarks : " Numerous enemies arise, 
 as is natural, of an envious venomous description; this is 
 another ever- widening shadow in the sunshine." Dii m'erite 
 edatant une sombi'e rivale, — sojnbre as becomes ombre. As with 
 Mr. Savage's too versatile hero : " Detraction was of course 
 very busy. Envy began to nibble at his reputation, when it 
 was yet green, by way of earnest of what she would do here- 
 after, when it should attain its full growth." Ben Jonson's 
 big-voiced burly Roman talks his burliest and biggest when he 
 designates the object of his admiration one for whose virtue 
 
 " Earth cannot make a shadow great enough, 
 Though envy should come too." 
 
 Racine is complimented by Boileau on the amount and the 
 degree of envy his genius has stirred into life and strife ; the 
 prerogative of genius, this, and to be cancelled only by death, 
 as so many others have said before and since. 
 
 " Et son trop de lumiere, importunant les yeux, 
 De ses propres amis lui fait des envieux. 
 La mort seule, ici-bas, en terminant sa vie, 
 Peut calmer sur son nom I'injustice et I'envie." 
 
 Handsomely enough the poet contrasts his own comparative 
 freedom from envious attacks with the unlimited liability of 
 Racine : " Moi-meme, dont la gloire ici moins repandue Des 
 pales envieux ne blesse point la vue," etc. Persons of eminent 
 virtue, when they are advanced, are less envied, says Bacon, 
 who might have remarked however, as Whately suggests, that 
 in one respect a rise by merit exposes a man to more «nvy 
 than that by personal favour, through family connection, private 
 friendship, etc., — the individual being more envied in the 
 former case, because his advancement is felt as an affront to 
 all who think themselves or their own friends more worthy. 
 In the latter case, the unpromoted are left free to think, " If 
 
OBVIOUS DUTY DONE WITH MIGHT. 227 
 
 it had gone by merit, I should have been the man." The 
 annotating archbishop goes on to add, that when any person 
 of really eminent virtue becomes the object of envy, the 
 clamour of abuse by which he is assailed is but the sign and 
 accompaniment of his success in doing service to the public ; 
 and that if he is a truly ^vise man, he will take no more notice 
 of it than the moon does of the howling of the dogs. Her 
 only answer to them is "to shine on." One of a thousand in 
 the rare privilege of immunity from envy, as well as in the 
 gifts and graces that mark him so pre-eminently a man of men, 
 is thlt Marquis Posa, of whom Schiller makes his sovran 
 admiringly exclaim, 
 
 " What sort of man is this, 
 
 Who can deserve so highly, yet awake 
 
 No pang of envy in the breasts of those 
 
 Who speak his praise ? The character he owns 
 
 Must be of noble stamp indeed, or else 
 
 A very blank. I'm curious to behold 
 
 This wondrous man." 
 
 XXVL 
 
 OBVIOUS DUTY DONE WITH MIGHT. 
 
 ECCLESIASTES ix. lO. 
 
 WHATSOEVER thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy 
 might." Behold, exclaims another lay Preacher, 
 the day is passing swiftly over, and the night cometh, 
 wherein no man can work. '"^The night once come, our 
 happiness,* our unhappiness, — it is all abolished; vanished, 
 clean gone ; a thing that has been : ' not of the slightest con- 
 sequence' whether we were happy as eupeptic Curtis, as the 
 fattest pig of Epicurus, or unhappy as Job with potsherds, as 
 
 * "The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking 
 much about was, happiness enough to get his work done." — Carlyle, Past 
 and Fresent, book iii., ch. iv. 
 
228 OBVIOUS DUTY 
 
 musical Byron with Giaours and sensibilities of the heart ; as 
 the unmusical Meat-jack * with hard labour and rust. But our 
 w(^rk, — behold, that is not abohshed, that has not vanished: 
 our work, behold, it remains, or the want of it remains ; — for 
 endless Times and Eternities, remains ; and that is now the 
 sole question with us for evermore. Brief brawling Day, with 
 its noisy phantasms, its poor paper-crowns tinsel-gilt, is gone ; 
 and divine everlasting Night, with her star-diadems, with, her 
 silences and her veracities, is come ! What hast thou done, 
 and how ? " At his Church-Porch holy George Herbert meets 
 us with the monition — 
 
 '* When thou dost purpose aught (within thy power), 
 Be sure to do it, though it be but small, "f 
 
 Act well your part; there all the honour lies. It has been 
 said of St. Paul's injunction to slaves to do service with good 
 will, " as to the Lord, and not unto men," that it shows how 
 entirely he felt the meanest occupation to be sanctified by and 
 
 * An old story, familiar to all Mr. Carlyle's familiars. 
 
 f Though it be but small. Contrasting the stage in England (where the 
 actor who represents Laertes or Horatio is considering himself all the while 
 as a degraded man, because he is not the Hamlet of the evening) with that 
 of France, where there is, or was, a race of actors who never aspire to 
 more than secondary parts, or, if they have any hope of so aspiring, en- 
 deavour to recommend themselves by the superior manner in which they 
 discharge the subordinate characters meanwhile entrusted to them ; the 
 Quarterly Reviewer of the " Life of Kemble " cites the mention by that dis- 
 tinguished actor of his once observing in Paris, while behind the scenes at 
 the Comedie Francaise along with Talma, one of the company conning his 
 part with great attention, rehearsing it with different tones and gestures, 
 and, in short, so sedulous in his rehearsal, that it seemed he had some most 
 important part to perform. Interested in this actor's assiduity, Kemble 
 SKsked what weighty character this hard student had to represent. Talma 
 informed him that the man had only five words to say, "Madame, the 
 coach is ready;" and that, notwithstanding the brevity and seeming un- 
 importance of his part, whatever it might be, the actor in question uni- 
 formly spent much time in studying and adjusting the action, tone, and 
 manner of delivering himself. In short, as Sir Walter Scott says, *'the 
 English actor thinks himself positively sunk and injured when obliged to 
 perform a part of little consequence ; the Frenchman, with happier vanity, 
 considers that he may exalt any part by his mode of playing it." 
 
DONE WITH MIGHT. 229 
 
 to a religious heart ; and that if he were exhorting us moderns, 
 he would enlarge the precept to embrace our several profes- 
 sions. We are referred to the exalting examples of those of 
 the great Italian painters who, from mere love of their art, 
 spent on a picture labour tenfold of what the set price required, 
 preferring to live in extreme self-denial, rather than not execute 
 it in_^their highest style. " This seems to typify the unworldly 
 spirit, in which, when we are more perfect, we shall follow our 
 ideas or our professions, of whatever kind." But to George 
 Herbert again : 
 
 " Art thou a Magistrate ? then be severe : 
 
 If studious ; copy fair Avhat time hath blurr'd ; 
 Redeem truth from his jaws : if Soldier, 
 Chase brave employments with a naked sword 
 Throughout the world. Fool not ; for all may have, 
 If they dare try, a glorious life, or grave." 
 
 The manly part, says Emerson, is to do \vith might and main 
 what you can do ; and he laments over a world full of fops 
 who never did anything, and who have persuaded beauties and 
 men of genius even to wear their fop livery, and to deliver the 
 fop opinion that it is not respectable to be seen earning a 
 living; that it is much more respectable to spend without 
 earning. For the brave workman, it is " no matter whether 
 he make shoes, or statues, or laws."* Moliere's woodcutter 
 
 * The disposition in some quarters to magnify one's office, to a positive, 
 or comparative, or even superlative degree of exaggeration, has evoked the 
 temperate remonstrance, or reminder, that although it may be in some 
 respects desirable to do all sorts of things on the highest principles, it is 
 not the less true that to sell figs in the name of the Prophet is a proceeding 
 which has an absurd and injurious as well as a dignified aspect. It is 
 quite true, the objector concedes, that a remarkable man, or a number of 
 remarkable men, may be called upon by circumstances to be cobblers or 
 jobbing tailors ; and equally true that, if they are, it is their duty, and ought 
 to be their pride and pleasure, to stick to their wax-ends and finedrawing 
 like men, and to produce neater patches than any former generation of the 
 same craft ; but it does not follow, he submits, that the patching of old 
 shoes and coats is in itself a very important or dignified pursuit ; the 
 importance of a vocation depending upon a set of considerations altogether 
 distinct from those which make it imperative upon every man, no matter 
 what his vocation may be,, to pursue it with as much vigour, and to attain 
 
230 CONSISTENT ENERG Y. 
 
 piques himself on his supremacy in that Hne of things : " II est 
 vrai, messieurs, que je suis le premier homme du monde pour 
 faire des fagots. . . . Je n'y epargne aucune chose, et les fais 
 d'une fa^on qu'il n'y a rien a dire." Shakspeare's Timon would 
 have even a villain thorough in his villany, workmanlike about 
 it while he is about it : 
 
 " Do villany, do, since you profess to do't, 
 Like workmen." 
 
 One may apply what Shakspeare's Launce says, in his soliloquy 
 to, or almost colloquy with, his dog : " I would have, as one 
 should say, one that takes upon him to be a dog indeed, to be, 
 as it were, a dog at all things." The late Mr. Assheton Smith's 
 biographer tells us of him that quicquid vult valde vult was his 
 motto in every business he undertook; and that whether it 
 was the chase,* or the improvement of ship-building, or the 
 development of his quarries, or . the bettering of the con- 
 dition of his Welsh labourers, whatsoever his hand found to 
 do, he did it with his might. 
 
 While it was Washington Irving's counsel to Prince Dolgo- 
 rouki to fix his attention on noble objects and noble purposes, 
 
 as much excellence in it as he can. " It matters infinitely to a crossing- 
 sweeper whether he is a good or a bad one, but it matters very little to the 
 public whether his crossing is swept well or ill ; and though, for his own 
 sake, he ought to pursue his calling in a healthy and vigorous spirit, he is 
 greatly mistaken if he supposes that he alters the state of society by doing 
 so." The reflection is suggested as specially applicable to those members 
 of a large number of professions who habitually look upon themselves as 
 underrated by the public. 
 
 * Upon this topic a Saturday Reviewer observes that, granting the chase 
 to be a good thing in itself, and that it is for the interest of England that 
 the dwellers in the country should learn the art of riding, and acquire confi- 
 dence and self-possession in the hunting-field, a man riiust have been doing 
 a great public service who, carrying the love of fox-hunting to its utmost, 
 showed how well it could be done, how much science it might exhibit, 
 how many moral qualities it could develop, and who gave the sport he 
 loved the countenance of an honoured name. "If the thing at which a 
 man works is good, it must be an advantage to the public that he should do 
 it extremely well, and set the pattern of a recognized excellence." (vi. 302.) 
 
COXCENTR'ATED EFFORT. 231 
 
 sacrificing all temporary and trivial things to their attainment, 
 he was strenuous in urging him to mark one line in which to 
 excel, and to bend all his thoughts and exertions to advance 
 towards perfection in that line. In this way he would find his 
 views gradually converging towards one point, instead of being 
 distracted by a thousand objects. Bessel the astronomer says 
 of himself, in the preface to his Ufitefsiichungen, that he kept 
 one idea continually present to his mind — that of always 
 working up to an immediate and definite object. The author 
 of the Conduct of Life makes a grand point of stopping off 
 decisively our miscellaneous activity, and concentrating our 
 force on one or two objects; as the gardener, by severe pruning, 
 forces the sap of the tree into one or two vigorous limbs, 
 instead of suffering it to spindle into a sheaf of twigs. " The 
 one prudence in life is concentration ; the one evil is dissi- 
 pation." You must elect your work, he insists, — taking what 
 your brain can, and dropping all the rest : only so can that 
 amount of vital force accumulate which can make the step 
 from knowing to doing. With money as with genius, according 
 to the Caxton Essays, the wise master of his art v.ill say, 
 " There is one thing I can do well ; that one thing I will do as 
 well as I can." Money, like genius, it is added, is effective in 
 proportion as it is brought to bear on one thing at a time : 
 money, like genius, may comprehend success in a hundred 
 things — but still, as a rule, one thing at a time : that thing 
 must be completed or relinquished before you turn to another. 
 The man who succeeds above his fellows is the one, says Lord 
 Lytton, who, early in life, clearly discerns his object, and 
 towards that object habitually directs his powers.* 
 
 The most popular writer of his day, in admitting how very 
 fortunate he had been in worldly matters — many men who 
 'had worked much harder, not having succeeded half so well-^ 
 affirmed that he could never have done what he did, without the 
 
 * "Thus, indeed, even genius itself is but fine observation strengthened 
 by fixity of purpose. " To observe vigilantly and resolve steadfastly, is, in 
 this sense, to grow unconsciously into genius. 
 
232 OBVIOUS DUTY 
 
 determination to concentrate himself on one object at a time, 
 no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels. 
 " Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my 
 heart to do well ; whatever I have devQted myself to, I have 
 devoted myself to completely ; in great aims and in small, I 
 have always been thoroughly in earnest. . . . Never to put one 
 hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self ; and 
 never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was ; I find, 
 now, to have been my golden rules." He who thus writes could 
 not have been without something of admiring sympathy with 
 one of the most consummate scoundrels of his own creation, 
 just in so far at least as that intensified rascal did everything 
 v/ith intensity and concentration — did each single thing, as if he 
 did nothing else — a pretty certain indication in a man of that 
 range of ability and purpose, that he is doing something which 
 sharpens and keeps alive his keenest powers. Mrs. Schimmel- 
 penninck, again, ascribes a main portion of her success in Htera- 
 ture and life to her observance of the principle her " intellectual 
 father" was so fond of inculcating on all his children — to be 
 deeply earnest in whatever they did, and, whether it were great 
 or httle, to give their whole mind and being to it. '' Whether in 
 play or study, there is no pursuit, even in childhood, so trivial, 
 but that numbers of useful things may be made to cluster around 
 it." Lavater, in the practice of his art, not a little pleased 
 Windham by declaring him to be a man who did not choose to 
 do anything which he was not conscious of doing well. 
 
 Confucius compares the path of duty to the going a long 
 journey, where you must begin at the nearest point ; and to the 
 cUmbing of an eminence, where you must begin with the lowest 
 step. Perge modo, et, qua te ducit via, di?ige gi-essum. It is the 
 part of practical wisdom, as expounded by Sir A. Helps, to be 
 for ever reminding us where we are, and what we can do, not 
 in fancy, but in real life. It does not, he says, permit us to wait 
 for dainty duties, pleasant to the imagination ; but insists upon 
 our doing those which are before us. He does not refer to, but 
 he may have had in mind, perhaps, the lines in Milton touching 
 the trick that fancy has of roving. 
 
DONE WITH MIGHT. 233 
 
 *' Till wam'd, or by experience taught, she learn 
 That, not to know at large of things remote 
 From use, obscure and subtle ; but to know 
 That which before us lies in daily life, 
 Is the prime wisdom. " 
 
 Even so Emile and his tutor, instead of vexing themselves to no 
 purpose, disquieting themselves in vain, with their inability to 
 imitate Telemachus and Mentor in playing benefactors to their 
 fellow-men, strive to do good in their humbler career, and ^^ith 
 this result — that even were they kings, more beneficent they 
 could not be. In one of his letters Emile adverts to the folly 
 of a fussy quest of outlying duties, as if duties did not lie close 
 at hand in every one's instance, as if they did not follow one 
 whithersoever one goes, and claim as their right the law of first 
 come, first served. As for doing fine things, says Mr. Kingsley, 
 in his Winter-garden musings, he has learnt to believe that he 
 is not set to do fine things, simply because he is not able to do 
 them ; and as for seeing fine things, he has learnt to see the 
 sight, as well as to try to do the duty, which lies nearest him. 
 " In any life, in any state, however simple or humble, there 
 will be always sufficient to occupy a Minute Philosopher ; and 
 if a man be busy, and busy about his duty, what more does 
 he require, for time or for eternity?" Religion consists, in 
 the language of the Port-Royal Memoirs, not in the doing of 
 extraordinary things, but in the doing of common things extra- 
 ordinarily well. Not every one doth it beseem, as Schiller's 
 Wallenstein has it, to question 
 
 " The far-off high Arcturus. Most securely 
 Wilt thou pursue the nearest duty." 
 
 We must not, says Milverton, so bring in the immensities about 
 us and within us as to crush our endeavours : " Here we are ; 
 let stars, or bygone times, or the wTecks of nations, say or show 
 what they will, there is something also to be done by us : we 
 have our little portions of the reef of coral yet to build up." 
 The wild dreamer in the last of Hawthorne's Twice-told Tales 
 wakes up to find a very homely solution of his visionary riddles ; 
 .and the moral is, that were all who cherish the like wild wishes 
 
234 OBVIOUS DUTY 
 
 to look around them, they would oftenest find their sphere of 
 duty, of prosperity, and happiness, within those precincts, and 
 in that station, where Providence itself has cast their lot. 
 " Happy they who read the riddle, without a weary world- 
 search, or a lifetime spent in vain ! " It is Romola's belief, 
 when hasting away from home, that once beyond the last fringe 
 of Florence, the skies will be broader above her, and life richer 
 in results worth the living for. But Fra Girolamo warns her, in 
 after-days, against thus blindly seeking the good of a freedom 
 which is lawlessness. She ought to feel that Florence is the 
 home of her soul as well as her birthplace, in seeing the work 
 that is given her to do there. " My daughter, every bond of 
 your life is a debt : the right lies in the payment of that debt ; 
 it can lie nowhere else. In vain will you wander over the earth ; 
 you will be wandering for ever away from the right." 
 
 It is in praise of Friedrich Wilhelm minding his own business, 
 in 1720, — "a most small sphere, but then a genuine one," — 
 that Mr. Carlyle, in his History of a greater Friedrich, exclaims, 
 "Wise is he who stays well at home, and does the duty he finds 
 lying there !" Some fourscore pages later the historian finds 
 occasion to reflect, that, " Truly, if each of the Royal Majesties 
 and Serene Highnesses would attend to his own affairs, — doing 
 his utmost to better his own land and people, in earthly and 
 in heavenly respects, a little, — he would find it infinitely profit- 
 abler for himself and others." A subsequent chapter in the 
 same history opens with a glance at the Crown Prince's enforced 
 daily observance of drill-duties. " ' This, then, is the sum of 
 one's existence, this ?' Patience, young * man of genius,' as the 
 Newspapers would now call you : it is indispensably beneficial 
 nevertheless ! To swallow one's disgusts, and do faithfully the 
 ugly commanded work, taking no counsel with flesh and blood : 
 know that 'genius,' everywhere in Nature, means this first of 
 all; that without this, it means nothing, generally even less."* 
 
 * History of Frederick the Great, vol. i., pp. 496, 568 ; vol. ii., p. 6. 
 
 The earlier works of Mr. Carlyle might be drawn upon largely for parallel 
 passages. Here, for instance, is the counsel of Herr Teufelsdrockh to him 
 who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light : "Do the Duty which 
 
DONE WITH MIGHT. 235 
 
 Hie Rhodiis ; hie salta. Do not, as Julius Hare paraphrases the 
 proverb, do not wait for a change of outward circumstances ; 
 but take your circumstances as they are, and make the best of 
 them. Luther, says he, moved the world, not by waiting for 
 a favourable opportunity, but by doing his daily work, by doing 
 God's will day by day, without looking beyond. Says Romney 
 Leigh to Aurora, in Mrs. Browning's poem — 
 
 " Oh cousin, let us be content, in work, 
 To do the thing we can, and not presume 
 To fret because it's little."* 
 
 Wordsworth records mth complacency how, at a turning-point 
 in his career, ambitious projects pleasing him less, he sought 
 for present good in life's familiar face, and built thereon his 
 
 lies nearest thee," which thou knowest to be a Duty. Thy second Duty 
 will already have become clearer. " The situation that has not its Duty, its 
 Ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes here, in this poor, miserable, 
 hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or 
 nowhere is thy Ideal : work it out therefrom ; and working, believe, live, 
 be free. " That is founded on the celebrated passage in Goethe's Wilhebri 
 Meister, — "Here or nowhere is America" — the America of Lothario's quest. 
 The thing thou seekest is already with thee, "here or nowhere," couldst 
 thou only see. "Produce! Produce!" is therefore the Herr Professor's 
 cry. " Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce 
 it in God's name ! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee : out with it then. 
 Up, up ! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. 
 Work while it is called To-day ; for the Night cometli, wherein no man 
 can work." 
 
 Again, in Fast and Present, the seeker after a "New Religion" is told 
 he needs none, nor is like to get any. He has already more " religion than 
 he makes use of. " This day, thou knowest ten commanded duties, seest 
 in thy mind ten things which should be done, for one that thou doest. Do 
 one of them ; this of itself will show thee ten others which can and shall be 
 done." (Chapter xv.) 
 
 * *' * Set me some great task, ye gods ! and I will show my spirit.' 'Not 
 so,' says the good Heaven ; 'plod and plough, vamp your old coats and 
 hats, weave a shoestring ; great affairs and the best wine by-and-by ! ' 
 Well, 'tis all phantasm ; and if we weave a yard of tape in all humility, 
 and as well as we can, long hereafter we shall see it was no cotton tape 
 at all, but some galaxy which we braided, and that the threads were Time 
 and Nature." — Conduct of Life, chapter ix. 
 
236 OBVIOUS DUTY 
 
 hopes of good to come. And elsewhere he writes as one, called 
 like the rest, each after his sort and according to his ability, 
 to exercise his skill, 
 
 ** Not in Utopia, — subterranean fields, — 
 
 Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where ! 
 But in the very world, which is the world 
 Of all of us, — the place where, in the end, 
 We find our happiness, or not at all ! " 
 
 Mrs. Gaskell in various of her works is strenuous in enforcing 
 the law of minding the nearest duty. In one, she describes 
 Margaret Hale as more successful than her father, the vicar, in 
 a poor widow's disordered household, newly fatherless : " The 
 children seeing their little duties lie in actions close around 
 them, began to try each one to do something that she suggested 
 towards redding up the slatternly room." In another, we over- 
 hear this bit of homely advice from a shrewd good doctor to 
 an over-worked and over-anxious factory girl : " I'll tell you 
 what ; never you neglect the work clearly laid out for you by 
 either God or man, to go making work for yourself, according 
 to your own fancies. God knows what you are most fit for. 
 Do that. And then wait; if you don't see your next duty 
 clearly. You will not long be idle in this world, if you are 
 ready for a summons." In a third, the speaker and actor is 
 an old maid-of-all-work, who makes a resolve — as honourable 
 to her, in her poor way, as was any of Owen Feltham's to him, 
 in his — that she will try and make a pudding well, not only for 
 her young master to like it, but because everything may be 
 done in a right way and a wrong ; the right way being to do it 
 as well as we can, as in God's sight. She is ready with a lecture 
 on bed-making to one who needs it. " You sighed so, you 
 could not half shake the pillows ; your heart was not in your 
 work j and yet it was the duty God had set you, I reckon ; 
 I know it's not the work parsons preach about ; though I don't 
 think they go so far off the mark when they read, ' whatsoever 
 thy hand findeth to do, that do with all thy might' Just try 
 for a day to think of all the odd jobs as to be done well and 
 truly as in God's sight, not just slurred over anyhow, and you'll 
 
DONE WITH MIGHT. ' 237 
 
 go through them twice as cheerfully, and have no thought to 
 spare for sighing or crying." Having said which, Sally bustles 
 off to set the kettle for tea, and feels half ashamed, in the quiet 
 of the kitchen, to think of the oration she has made upstairs. 
 
 In no one instance, asserts one of Hannah More's good 
 people, do we deceive ourselves more than in fancying we can 
 do great things well, which we are never likely to be called to 
 do at all ; while, if we are honest, we cannot avoid owning how 
 negligently we perform our own little appointed duties. 
 
 Charming old Grand'mere, in Miss Tytler's Huguenot story, 
 professes to believe, for her part, that the doing of a thing well 
 or ill, and not the special sanctity of the deed, is the proof of 
 the hero, the saint, and "above all, the Huguenot;" and that 
 the question is not so much whether he erects a temple, or 
 shapes a pair of pantaloons, as the world and the Church of 
 Rome will have it. " Let the potter turn but one cup in fair 
 proportion, or let the painter reproduce one true image, and 
 the world of homely men and women is so much the better 
 for him." A Christian should never, says John Newton, plead 
 spirituality for being a sloven : " if he be but a shoe-cleaner, 
 he should be the best in the parish." The question how far 
 what we have done, or are doing, or what comes before us to 
 do, is ''worth while," is justly said to sound so reasonable and 
 philosophical, that one is apt to think those ought to be 
 the wisest persons who ask it oftenest, and act solely by the 
 conclusions arrived at. But, urges an essay-\mter on this very 
 subject of Things that are worth while, the question in question 
 is, in fact, the one moral hindrance to all exertion, hampering 
 not only questionable activity, but all activity whatever. " To 
 think things worth while is not only a sign, but a great promoter 
 of cheerfulness, and, as opposed to giving in, is almost always 
 wise." A good solid bit of work lasts — is Adam Bede's* creed 
 
 * Adam Bede was the sort of man to appreciate the self-made Sir Roger, 
 in Doctor Tho7-ne ; and therefore to appreciate the author's suggested com- 
 ment on the monument set up in vie?noria?n of that hard-working baronet, 
 in Barchester Cathedral. Sir Roger was there portrayed as smoothing a 
 . ,block of granite with a mallet and chisel ; while his eagle eye, disdaining 
 
238 OBVIOUS DUTY 
 
 of labour: "if it's only laying a floor down, somebody's the 
 better for it being done well, besides the man as does it." 
 Adam's work is essentially part of his religion ; from very early 
 days he has seen clearly that good carpentry is God's will — is 
 that form of God's will which more immediately concerns him. 
 Profitably suggestive is the fact in the old poem of Piers 
 Ploivman, that when after some time Truth reveals herself to 
 Piers, it is to command him to stay at home, and tend his 
 plough. Of the young peasantry, she instructs him, industry 
 in their calling is the highest duty. Let them do it, in that 
 state of life to which, and not out of which, it has pleased God 
 to call them. The biographers tell us o{ Rahel von Ense, 
 with all her innate capacities, that she "was not appointed to 
 write or to act, but only to live." Call her not unhappy on 
 that account, urges one of them, call her not useless ; nay, he 
 would incline to call her happier and usefuller. " Blessed are 
 the humble, are they that are not known. It is written, 'Seekest 
 thou great things, seek them not : ' live where thou art, only 
 live wisely, live diligently," And of those who write, a very 
 different writer has said, that not every one need write for 
 distant places and ages ; that it is far better for ordinary men 
 to write for their nearest neighbours, and at most seek to act 
 upon posterity through their influence upon the lives and 
 manners of such people. Duty is well said to be coextensive 
 with life itself, and human society a sort of body corporate, 
 made up of different members, each having its own special 
 function. Whence it follows that " whoever contributes to the 
 full and proper discharge of these functions is contributing to 
 
 such humble work, was fixed upon some intricate mathematical instrumen 
 above him. "Could Sir Roger have seen it himself, he would probably 
 have declared that no workman was ever worth his salt who looked one 
 way while he rowed another." He might have taken up his parable with 
 the Bridge in the Biglow Papers— 
 
 *' I'm older'n you, an' I've seen things an' men, 
 . An' here's wut my experience hez ben : 
 
 Folks that worked thorough was the ones that thriv, 
 
 But bad work Toilers ye ez long's ye live ; 
 
 You can't get rid on't ; jest ez sure ez sin, 
 
 It's oilers askin' to be done agin." 
 
DONE WITH MIGHT. 239 
 
 the general good of the whole body ; so that a person occupied 
 in them is doing good in the strictest sense of the words," — 
 that is, he is forwarding and preserving the happiness of the 
 society of which he is a member. Human society is thus 
 compared to a vast and intricate machine, composed of innu- 
 merable wheels and pulleys. "Everyone has his special handle 
 to grind at — some with great and obvious effects, others with 
 little or no assignable result ; but if the object ultimately pro- 
 duced by the combined efforts of all is in itself a good one, it 
 cannot be denied that whatever is essential to its production is 
 good also." 
 
 Mendelssohn writes in one of his letters from Rome, " I love 
 any one who adopts and perseveres in some particular pursuit, 
 prosecuting it to the best of his ability, and endeavouring to 
 perfect it for the benefit of mankind." This he says by way of 
 apology for an otherwise tedious and unattractive personage, 
 with whom he was then consorting. No doubt he could have 
 found it in him to admire, after a sort, — in the old grammatical, 
 if not in the vulgar, sense of the word, — the earnestness of 
 Elia's Mrs. Battle at the card-table ; to admire her never con- 
 niving at miscellaneous conversation during a game ; admire 
 her emphasized observation that cards were cards, and her 
 impatience at having "her noble occupation, to which she 
 wound up her faculties," considered in the light of a mere 
 amusement. " It was her business, her duty, the thing she 
 came into the world to do, — and she did it. She unbent her 
 mind afterwards, over a book." She could have entered into 
 the gamester's stanzas in Mr. Browning's lyric — as well the 
 counter as coin, he submits, when your table's a hat, and your 
 prize a dram. 
 
 " Stake your counter as boldly every whit, 
 Venture as truly, use the same skill. 
 Do your best, whether winning or losing it, 
 
 If you choose to play — is my principle ! 
 
 Let a man contend to the uttermost 
 
 For his life's set prize, be it what it will." 
 
 Think earnestly upon any subject, investigate it sincerely, and you 
 
240 OBVIOUS DUTY DONE WITH MIGHT. 
 
 are sure to love it, Sir A. Helps assures us : " There have been 
 enthusiasts about heraldry. Many have devoted themselves to 
 chess." The occasion for this remark is, a querist's alleged 
 perplexity what to choose as his point of action, and still more 
 how to begin upon it. The answer is another query. Is no 
 work of benevolence brought near to you by the peculiar 
 circumstances of your life ? If there is, follow it at once. If 
 not, still you must not wait for something apposite to occur. 
 " Take up any subject relating to the welfare of mankind, the 
 first that comes to hand : read about it : think about it : trace 
 it in the world, and see if it will not come to your heart." 
 That many have devoted themselves to chess — to say nothing 
 of the unique Sarah Battle's lifelong devotion to whist — suggests 
 the question. Is the welfare of living, thinking, suffering, eternal 
 creatures, less interesting than the knight's move, and the pro- 
 gress of a pawn ? 
 
 But opportunities of doing good, the author of Organization 
 in Daily Life insists, " though abundant, and obvious enough, 
 are not exactly fitted to our hands : we must be alert in pre- 
 paring ourselves for them." Benevolence, on his showing, 
 requires method and activity in its exercise. Whatsoever the 
 hand findeth to do, is to be done with the right hand's might ; 
 but that right hand must owe its cunning to the brain, its 
 energy of impulse to the heart. 
 
 XXVII. 
 
 PENAL PANEGYRIC. 
 Proverbs xxvii. 14. 
 
 IT stands written in the Proverbs of Solomon, that whoso 
 " blesseth his friend with a loud voice, rising early in the 
 morning, it shall be counted a curse to him." Save me from 
 my friends, of that sort. The blessing roared forth in boisterous 
 tones at that unseasonable hour, and at that unreasonable pitch 
 of a stentorian voice, startling the object of it from his slumbers, 
 
PENAL PANEGYRIC. 
 
 241 
 
 and stirring the neighbourhood to protest, comes in no sense 
 as a blessing in disguise. It is a crying evil. There is such 
 a thing as — Pope has made classical the expression — to damn 
 ^^ith faint praise. But it is only too possible to produce the 
 like result with loud praise. So loud, that the echo rebounds 
 with a vengeance, almost cracks the ear-drum, and quite frets 
 and lacerates the aural nerve. Such loud blessing is in effect 
 a malison, not a benison ; no boon, but a bane. 
 
 Mendelssohn laments, in one of his letters from Smtzerland, 
 his inability to form any judgment of his new compositions — 
 to tell whether they are good or bad, — his alleged reason for 
 this incompetency being, that all the people to whom he had 
 played anything for the last twelve months, forthwith glibly 
 declared it to be wonderfully beautiful. " And that A^ill never 
 do," exclaims Felix, reviewmg his position. " I really wish that 
 some one would let me have a little rational blame once more, 
 or what would be still more agreeable, a little rational praise, 
 and then I should find it less indispensable to act the censor 
 towards myself, and to be so distrustful of my o^\^l powers." 
 Certainly moderate praise, writes Lord Bacon, used ^^ath oppor- 
 tunity, and not vulgar, is that which doeth the good. " Too 
 much magnifying of man or matter doth irritate contradiction, 
 and procure envy and scorn." Owen Feltham holds it a greater 
 injury to be over than under valued. " There is no detraction 
 worse than to over-praise a man ; for if his worth prove short 
 of what report doth speak of him, his own actions are ever 
 giving the lie to his honour." Churchill shrewdly says of the 
 poet in general, but v;ith a particular application to himself : 
 
 *' Greatly his foes he dreads, but more his friends ; 
 He hurts me most who lavishly commends." 
 
 The art of praising has been described by an accomplished 
 French critic as one of the rarest proofs of literary talent, — a 
 much surer and more delicate indication of it than is the gift 
 of supreme excellence in satire. 
 
 Of the two evils, an excess of ridicule and an excess of flattery, 
 there can be no doubt, rules a home authority, that ridicule is 
 
 16 
 
242 PEXAL PANEGYRIC. 
 
 by far the least damaging to a man of merit who is working his 
 way. 
 
 Praise undeserved is censure in disguise ; and even at a 
 public dinner one may now and then see, it is allowed, that the 
 object of a thoroughgoing piece of flatter}' is not smirking, but 
 is really annoyed at the folly and impudence of his eulogist. 
 "The more a man appreciates his own services to science or 
 adventure or letters or anything else, the less likely he is to 
 endure with patience the clumsy and misplaced praises of the 
 man who knows nothing of the subject except what he has learnt 
 by hastily looking out his victim's name in Men of the Twie" 
 but who ladles out masses of hot, greasy, steaming adulation, 
 — like the pancakes in the ballad that_ were " egged on " till 
 enough to poison poor Jack. 
 
 The worst detractor, wTites an essayist on " Laurels," is less 
 of an enemy than the unflinching paneg\'rist, though the sugari- 
 ness of panegyric on the palate makes men whom it would be 
 absurd to call weak cry out that there is nothing so delicious, 
 nothing so proper, — albeit an hour of candid reflection would 
 convince them irresistibly that there is nothing so ruinous, or so 
 destructive of anything like free growth. Swift likens praise to 
 ambergris ; a little whifl" of it, and by snatches, is very agreeable; 
 but "when a m.an holds a whole lump of it to his nose, it is a 
 stink, and strikes you down." La Bruyere is intolerant of the 
 aftected superlatives of eulogy with which some folks overrate 
 some books ; and after enumerating some of the exaggerated 
 phrases in vogue, " nuisibles a cela meme qui est louable, 
 et qu'on veut louer," he demands, why can't they simply say, 
 Voila un bo?i livre. 
 
 *' A vile encomium doubly ridicules : 
 • There's nothing blackens like the ink of fools. 
 If true, a woful likeness ; and if lies, 
 Praise undeserved is scandal in disguise." 
 
 If Horace speaks slightingly of Plautus, as of Ennius, it must 
 be said, with Dean Liddell, that he was provoked by the fashion 
 which in his day prevailed of overrating the old Pvom.an ^Titers. 
 It is a sort of dead-weight incumbrance, as the Greek proverb 
 
PENAL PANEGYRIC. 243 
 
 runs, to be praised overmuch : Bapo? n kul to 8'eo-Tiv alvila-Oat 
 \iav. Dr)'den says in one of his University of Oxford pro- 
 logues, that, 
 
 " When our fop gallants, or our city folly, 
 Clap over-loud, it makes us melancholy ; 
 We doubt that scene which does their wonder raise, 
 And, for their ignorance, contemn their praise." 
 
 The grandson of his Achithophel, another Shaftesbur\', after 
 inveighing against the satire of the day as scurrilous and witless, 
 adds : " Our encomium or paneg>Tic is as fulsome and dis- 
 pleasing, by its prostitute and abandoned manner of praise. 
 The worthy persons who are the subjects of it, may well be 
 esteemed sufferers by the manner." The ridiculous exaggera- 
 tion of the praise lavished on Racine, not only '•' revolted " the 
 admirers of Corneille, but did Racine harm with moderate men, 
 and made the judicious grieve. When Italian comedy was in- 
 troduced into France, under the auspices of Cardinal Mazarin, 
 the enthusiasm affected by such supple courtiers as Mortemart 
 and Grammont, and the hyperboles of laudation in which they 
 indulged, soon made the newly imported attraction a veritable 
 bore to people of temperate tastes, — such as Madame de 
 Motte\ille, sober of speech herself, and confessedly entiuyee by 
 SI fortes exagcrations. It was sage counsel that Fontenelle gave 
 to Lassonne — to do his best to keep his friends from praising 
 him in excess ; " for the public is apt to treat with utter severity 
 those of whom their partisans make too much." Sainte-Beuve 
 taxes M. Aime' Martin with drawing an ideally romantic portrait 
 of Bemardin de St. Pierre, and in fact writing one of those 
 "■ impossible biographies " which at once put a reader of good 
 sense on his guard. Macaulay obsei-ves of Johnson's extra- 
 vagant estimate of a well-known and " noble passage " in Con- 
 greve's Mourning Bride, which the Doctor, both in writing and 
 in conversation, extolled above any other in the English drama, 
 — that it "has suffered gready in the public estimation from the 
 extravagance of his praise." The same critic, in his strictures 
 on Mr. Gleig-'s " puerile adulation " of Warren Hastings, is 
 confident that the Governor-General would have preferred a 
 
244 PENAL PANEGYRIC. 
 
 likeness of himself, though an unfavourable likeness, to a daub 
 at once insipid and unnatural. "Paint me as I am," said 
 Oliver Cromwell, while sitting to young Lely. " If you leave 
 out the scars and wrinkles, I will not pay you a shilling." And 
 Macaulay contends that if men truly knew their own interest, 
 it is thus they would wish their minds to be portrayed. We 
 should choose, it has been said, in reference to friends, that 
 they should see one's failings, know their scope, and yet think 
 little of them when weighed in the balance with one's recom- 
 mending qualities. As the writer of an essay on Appreciation 
 puts it, an author or an artist who demands that every admirer 
 shall be an adulator, unconscious of this or that defect in the 
 clay of which his idol is composed, unconscious that the idol 
 is other indeed than supernaturally refined gold, may be very 
 sure that his vanity will rob him of the kind of friends who are 
 best worth having. 
 
 Lord Grenville declared it to have been his fate all through 
 life to be more injured by the press in his favour than by that 
 which had been pretty unsparingly employed against him. A 
 biographer of Lord St. Vincent says of Nelson, that to his truly 
 noble and generous nature nothing was ever more disgustful 
 than the attempts of that tribe, the worst kind of enemies {pessi- 
 mum iniviicornm gejius, laudatores) — the mean parasites who 
 would pay their court to himself by overrating his services at 
 St. Vincent in 1797, and ascribing to him, instead of to Jervis, 
 the glory of that memorable day. 
 
 De Quincey contends that in the case of the first appearance 
 of a man of really splendid attainments, it is a mistaken policy 
 which would deprecate the raising of great expectations. On 
 the contrary he maintains them to be of real service, pushed 
 even to the verge of extravagance, as tending to make people 
 imagine the splendour of the actual success even greater than 
 it was. "Many a man is read by the light of his previous 
 reputation. Such a result happened to Bentley." The same 
 author enforces the same doctrine in one of those characteristic 
 novelettes which he wrote for Blackwood. He there again 
 assails the commonplace maxim — that it is dangerous to raise 
 
PEAAL PANEGYRIC. 
 
 expectations too high ; a maxim true only conditionally, on 
 his contention ; which is, that in any case where the merit is 
 transcendent of its kind, it is always useful to rack the expec- 
 tation up to the highest point ; in anything which partakes of 
 the infinite, the most unlimited expectations will find ample 
 room for gratification ; while it is certain that ordinary observers, 
 possessing little sensibiHty, unless where they have been warned 
 to expect, will often fail to see what exists in the most con- 
 spicuous splendour. 
 
 But the commonplace maxim holds its own as a rule, which 
 exceptions but help to prove. Boileau prefaces his tenth Satire 
 by a deprecation of the mischief done him by friends who pre- 
 luded its appearance ^\ith a flourish of trumpets too blaring 
 by half. Says Leatherhead to Littlewit, in Ben Jonson's Bar- 
 tholomew Fair, " Sir, do not you breed too great an expectation 
 of your play among your friends ; that's the hurter of these 
 things." After telling us that F. Bayham's criticisms on Clive 
 Newcome's first portrait-paintings were tremendous, so that you 
 would have thought there had never been such drawings since 
 the days of Michael Angelo, Mr. Thackeray adds that, in fact, 
 F. B., as some other critics do, clapped his friends so bois- 
 terously on the back, and trumpeted their merits with such 
 prodigious energy, as to make his friends themselves sometimes 
 uneasy. If, observes Mr. Slick, you want a son not to fall in 
 love ^^dth any " splendiferous gal, praise her up to the skies, 
 call her angel, say she is a whole team and a horse to spare, 
 and all that : the moment the crittur sees her, he is a little 
 grain disappointed, and says, ' Well, she is handsome, that's a 
 fact ; but she is not so very very everlastin' pretty arter all.' 
 Then he criticizes her ; . . . and the more you oppose him, the 
 more he abuses her, till he swears she is misreported, and ain't 
 handsome at all" Mrs. Thrale was cut short in her high praise 
 of Mr. Dudley North, by Johnson's summary disparagement of 
 him. The Doctor told her he knew nobody who blasted by praise 
 as she did ; for wherever there is exaggerated praise, everybody 
 is set against a character, and is provoked to attack it. There 
 was Weller Pepys, for instance : she praised that man with such 
 
246 PENAL PANEGYRIC. 
 
 disproportion, that Johnson was avowedly incited to lessen him 
 more than he deserved. " His blood be upon your head," 
 said the Doctor to the dame. We are suggestively told at the 
 close of the first of the Tales of a Wayside Inn, that, 
 
 " Soon as the story reached its end, 
 One, over- eager to commend, 
 Crowned it with injudicious praise ; 
 And then the voice of blame found vent, 
 And fanned the embers of dissent 
 Into a somewhat lively blaze." 
 
 He that, as South puts it, should celebrate a captain that had 
 the good fortune to worst the enemy in a skirmish, to the 
 degree of a Caesar or an Alexander, would render the poor 
 man ridiculous instead of glorious ; and every one that mea- 
 sures his actions by the superlatives of the panegyrist, sets his 
 reputation upon stilts, which is not- the surest way of standing. 
 The flatterer "greatens and advances everything beyond the 
 bounds of its real worth ; describing all in hyperboles, high 
 strains, and words of wonderj till he has puffed up the little 
 thing that he commends, as we see men do a bladder, which 
 owes all its bulk only to air and wind, upon the letting out of 
 which, it returns and shrinks into a pitiful nothing." Wind- 
 bags are a standing text with Mr. Carlyle ; and what they mean 
 is, collapse. 
 
 Pope warned the inconsiderate of the possibility of some 
 kinds of work being not impaired by storms alone, but feeling 
 the approaches of too warm a sun : 
 
 " For Fame, impatient of extremes, decays 
 Not more by envy than excess of praise. " 
 
 Scott told Miss Seward, then engaged on a life of Dr. 
 Darwin, that to himself, biography, the most interesting per- 
 haps of every species of composition, lost all its interest when 
 the lights and shades of character were not accurately and 
 faithfully detailed ; and he took that opportunity of expressing 
 his want of patience with such " exaggerated daubing as Mr. 
 Hayley has bestowed upon poor Cowper. I can no more 
 sympathize with a mere eulogist, than I can with a ranting 
 
COUNTING HEADS AND WEIGHING BRAINS. 2^7 
 
 hero upon the stage ; and it unfortunately happens that some 
 of our disrespect is apt, rather unjustly, to be transferred to 
 thesubject of the panegyric in the one case, and to poor Cato 
 in the other." Cowper, k paiivre homme in this instance, 
 had long before, with emphasis and discretion, penned his pro- 
 test against profuse paneg>Tic, in lines designedly imitative of 
 Shakspeare : 
 
 " Trust me, the meed of praise, dealt thriftily 
 From the nice scale of judgment, honours more 
 Than does the lavish and o'erbearing tide 
 Of profuse courtesy. Not all the gems 
 Of India's richest soil at random spi'ead 
 O'er the gay vesture of some glittering dame, 
 Give such alluring vantage to the person, 
 As the scant lustre of a few, with choice 
 And comely guise of ornament disposed. " 
 
 XXVIII. 
 COUNTING HEADS AND WEIGHING BRAINS. 
 
 ECCLESIASTES ix. I5, 16. 
 
 THERE came a great king, once upon a time, against 
 a little city, and besieged it, and built great bulwarks 
 against it. " Now there was found in it a poor wise man, and 
 he by his wisdom delivered the city ; yet no man remembered 
 that same poor man." Is it not written in the words of the 
 Preacher, the son of David, king of Jerusalem? "Then said 
 I, Wisdom is better than strength ; nevertheless the poor man's 
 wisdom is despised." Little city or big, the story is of con- 
 stant application. Wisdom is better than strength ; but then 
 again majorities are strong ; and the unwise majority take small 
 account of the wise unit. He has more brains than they all ; 
 and if influence were recognized and merit appraised by the 
 weighing of brains, one man's against a multitude's, the one 
 man would weigh down the scale, and the multitude would 
 kick the beam. But counting heads is a more popular 
 
248 COUNTING HEADS 
 
 arithmetic, and an easier, than weighing brains ; and so numbers 
 are apt to have it all their own way. 
 
 As in casting account, says Sir Thomas Browne in his 
 Religio Medici, "three or four men together come short in 
 account of one man placed by himself below them, so neither 
 are a troop of these ignorant Doradoes [gilt-heads] of that 
 true esteem and value as many a forlorn person whose con- 
 dition doth place him below their feet." A troop of them? 
 nay, say with Young, albeit not in his sense, — 
 
 " Ten thousand add ; add twice ten thousand more ; 
 Then weigh the whole ; one soul outweighs them all." 
 
 Mr. Carlyle tells us, in his plainest spoken fashion, that a 
 million blockheads looking authoritatively into one man of 
 what is called genius, or noble sense, will make nothing but 
 nonsense out of him and his qualities, if they look to the end 
 of time. ''He understands them, sees what they are; but 
 that they should understand him, and see with rounded outline 
 what his Umits are,— this, which would mean that they are 
 bigger than he, is for ever denied them." Then again, the 
 mass of men consulted at hustings, upon any high matter 
 whatsoever, our Latter-day Pamphleteer pronounces as ugly an 
 exhibition of human stupidity as this world sees. What though 
 there be such things as multitudes all full of beer and non- 
 sense, who by hypothesis cannot be wrong? He sees no 
 safety in " a thousand or ten thousand brawling potwallopers, 
 or blockheads of any rank whatever," (such, for instance, as 
 the Doradoes, or gilt-heads, of old Sir Thomas Browne,) if the 
 Fact be against them. Prompt is he to answer the objection, 
 Are not two men stronger than one ; must not two votes carry 
 it over one? Prompt, with a plump No, nor two thousand, 
 nor two million. *' Many men vote ; but in the end, you will 
 infallibly find, none counts except the few who were /;/ the 
 fight. Unit of that class, against as many zeros as you like !" 
 Simple addition enough ! exclaims old Bartle Massey, in Adam 
 Bede, scornfully and shrewdly, in deprecation of a scheme 
 that affronts his philosophy of Hfe : " Add one fool to another 
 fool, and in six years' time six fools more — they're all of the 
 
AND WEIGHING BRAINS. 249 
 
 same denomination, big and little's nothing to do with the 
 sum." The sum total is of no more value, by such an esti- 
 mate, than that of the best integer in it : ciphers in such a 
 case go for nothing — go for nought, or for naught — spell it how 
 you will. 
 
 One of what Ben Jonson calls his '-'Discoveries" is, that 
 suffrages in Parliament are numbered, not weighed ; " nor can 
 it be otherwise," says he, " in those public councils, where 
 nothing is so unequal as the equality : for there, how odd 
 soever men's brains or wisdom are, their power is always even 
 and the same." Hobbes quotes, approvingly, and in a spirit 
 of complacent self-application, the case of a certain Roman 
 senator who, having propounded something in the assembly 
 of the people " which they, misliking, made a noise at, boldly 
 bade them hold their peace, and told them he knew better 
 what was good for the commonwealth than all they ; and his 
 words are transmitted to us as an argument of his virtue." 
 He would have subscribed his ex animo assent and consent 
 to the poet's reply to an objector's argiutientuf/i ad verecundiam, 
 "You must be wrong; the World is in the right." 
 
 " What is this World? — A term which men have got 
 To signify, not one in ten knows what ; 
 A term, which with no more precision passes 
 To point out herds of men than herds of asses ; 
 In common use, no more it rneans, we find, 
 Than many fools in same opinions join'd." 
 
 And therefore is our poet resolved, unawed by numbers, to 
 follow reason, once found, and recognized, however untrodden 
 the route; rather than cast in his lot with the unreasoning 
 many : 
 
 " Rather stand up, assured with conscious pride, 
 Alone, than err with millions on his side." 
 
 La tcte dhm chef en pese plusieurs 7nilliers, writes Agrippa 
 d'Aubigne. Montaigne calls it sad work to be at that pass, 
 that the best trial of truth must be the multitude of believers, 
 in a crowd where the number of fools so far exceeds that of 
 the \vise. " For my part, what I should not believe from one, 
 
2^0 
 
 COUNTING HEADS 
 
 I should not believe from a hundred and one." Le Comte de 
 Crillon said one day to M. d'Allonville, " If all the world and 
 I professed one opinion, and M. Necker propounded a con- 
 trary one, I should straightway be convinced that all the world 
 and I were mistaken." Le public ! le public ! exclaims Chamfort 
 — combien faut-il de sots pour faire un public ? Coleridge's 
 computation is applicable, that a million of insulated individuals 
 is only an abstraction of the mind, and but one told so many 
 times over without addition, as an idiot would tell the clock 
 at noon — one, one, one. La mediocrite de la foule does not 
 cease to be mediocrity because the numbers of the foule 
 are raised to however high a power. Grant the component 
 members of the crowd to be stolid, and stolidity is the out- 
 come of the imposing throng en masse. Put them together, 
 as Luther once said, " and they have not wit enough to 
 cure a spavined horse. What are they? What the wolf said 
 of the nightingale, — a voice, and nothing else." Washington 
 Irving somewhere has his fling at certain orators who are 
 described in conventional phrase as "speaking the sense of 
 the meeting" — said meeting generally consisting of men whose 
 quota of sense, taken individually, would make but a sorry 
 figure. And this is suggestive of the curious fact discussed 
 by Whately in his Elements of Rhetoric, that a sensible man 
 can express his sentiments in private to a sensible friend with 
 perfect facility, who yet is either completely struck dumb, or 
 greatly embarrassed, when he tries to address a large audience 
 in the same words. It cannot, urges the Archbishop, be from 
 any superior deference which the speaker thinks it right to feel 
 for the judgment of the hearers ; for it will often happen that 
 the single friend, to whom he is able to speak fluently, shall 
 be one whose good opinion he more values, and whose wisdom 
 he is more disposed to look up to, than that of all the others 
 together. " The speaker may even feel that he himself has a 
 decided and acknowledged superiority over every one of the 
 audience; and that he should not be the least abashed in 
 addressing any two or three of them separately ; yet, still, all 
 of them, collectively, will often inspire him with a kind of 
 
AND WEIGHING BRAINS. 251 
 
 dread." Mr. Browning's apologetic Bishop supposes himself 
 chargeable with undue resort to "grosser estimators" than he 
 needs — knomng, as so well he knows, that 
 
 " One wise man's verdict outweighs all the fools', — 
 I pine among my million imbeciles 
 (You think), aware some dozen men of sense 
 Eye me and know me." 
 
 There is more irony than humility in Hajji Baba's profession 
 of faith, after an interview with a great man of the Board of 
 John Company, — " I will not conceal from you my belief, and 
 perhaps in my ignorance I am wrong, that the head of one 
 wise man would be worth the collected knowledge of the 
 twenty-four chair-sitters, if they were all like the fat merchant 
 with whom I happened to converse." Shaftesbury marvels at 
 the moderns who have no better knowledge of truth than by 
 counting noses, — satisfied if they can poll an indifferent number 
 out of a mob. These would be the sort of '-people" to form 
 the finale to La Fontaine's fable : 
 
 *' Le peuple s'etonna comme il se pouvait faire 
 Qu'un homme seul eut plus de sens 
 Qu'une multitude de gens." 
 
 All mankind, by the verdict of Samuel Butler, in his miscel- 
 laneous thoughts, is a rabble, silly and unreasonable, with whom 
 
 " all the reasons that prevail 
 Are measured not by weight, but tale. " 
 
 Quantum, not quale, is their desiderated quotient. "Pour moi," 
 says Montaigne, "de ce que je n'en croirois pas un, je n'en 
 croirois pas cent uns ; " and it might be, if it has not been, 
 plausibly contended that since everybody is rather prone to 
 error, the more people hold to an opinion the Hkelier it is to 
 be ridiculous. Mr. Emerson would away ^vith the hurrah of 
 masses, and let us have the considerate vote of single con- 
 scientious men. He refers approvingly to ancient Eg}'pt, where 
 it was established law that the vote of a prophet be reckoned 
 equal to a hundred hands. He thinks it was much under- 
 estimated. " Clay and clay differ in disunity," as we discover 
 
252 COUNTING HEADS 
 
 by our preferences every day. Pairing off man against man 
 in political tactics he scouts as a vicious practice. Suppose 
 the three hundred heroes at Thermopylae had paired off with 
 three hundred Persians ; would it have heen all the same to 
 Greece and to history? "Napoleon was called by his men 
 Cent Milk. Add honesty to him, and they might have called 
 him Hundred Million." Mr. Emerson's countrymen are the 
 subject of Mr. J. S. Mill's remark, that all being nearly 
 equal in circumstances, and all nearly alike in intelligence and 
 knowledge, the only authority which commends an involuntary 
 deference on their part is that of n'dmbers : the more perfectly 
 each knows himself the equal of every single individual, the 
 more insignificant and helpless he feels against the aggregate 
 mass, and the more incredible it appears to him that the 
 opinion of all the world can possibly be erroneous. " Faith 
 m public opinion," says M. de Tocqueville, " becomes in such 
 countries a species of religion, and the majority its prophet." 
 Racy as usual is the penman of the Biglow Papers when 
 touching on the national worship of numbers : 
 
 * ' More men ? More Man ! It's there we fail ; 
 Weak plans grow weaker yit by lengthenin' ; 
 Wut use in addin' to the tail, 
 
 When it's the head's in need o' strengthenin' ?" 
 
 Four hundred in number were the complaisant prophets whom 
 Ahab gathered together, all as one man to humour him in 
 his designs. But well might Jehoshaphat ask, " Is there not a 
 prophet of the Lord besides, that we might inquire of himV^ 
 Edmund Burke charged the revolutionary doctrinaires of his 
 day with reducing men to loose counters, merely for the sake of 
 telling, and not to figures whose power is to arise from their 
 place in the table : the elements of these gentry's own meta- 
 physics should, he thinks, have taught them better lessons: "the 
 troll of their categorical table might have informed them that 
 there was something else in the intellectual world h^^x^^'s, substance 
 and quantity y The votes of a majority of the people cannot 
 alter the moral, any more than they can alter the physical, 
 essence of things. Ponderanda sunt testimonial non numei^anda. 
 
AND WEIGHING BRAINS. 253 
 
 People are not, in Landor's figure, like bars of iron, to be 
 mended and magnified by adding one to another. Chateau- 
 briand, speaking of men of genius, adds, "dont le moins savant 
 a plus de sagesse que tous les hommes ensemble." The height 
 of a crowd of a thousand people is confessedly no more than 
 the height of the tallest man in it. One of the greatest of 
 English poets says of, or to, the shade of one of the greatest 
 of Italian, — 
 
 ' ' Each year brings forth its millions ; but how long 
 The tide of generations shall roll on, 
 And not the whole combined and countless throng 
 Compose a mind like thine ! Though all in one 
 Condensed their scatter'd rays, they would not form a sun." 
 
 If Ne\\ton had not solved the problem of gra\atation, some 
 one else, it is pretty safely alleged, would have done it a little 
 later; but no combination of commonplace intellects would 
 avail to keep science up to its level — no such combination 
 would " discover the differential calculus, or solve the problem 
 of planetar)' motion, or be even capable of attacking the diffi- 
 culties involved in them, any more than a million scribblers 
 of poetry could produce a Shakspeare, or a dozen bad generals 
 . produce one Napoleon." In the ideal and pleasurable arts, 
 as Dr. John Brown has it, quality is nearly everj^thing. " One 
 Turner not only transcends ten thousands Claudes and Vander- 
 veldes; he is in another sphere. You could not thus sum 
 up his worth." "Tous les grands 7?iediocres" — the phrase is 
 due to Marivaux, himself one of them — " entasseraient grain 
 iur grain pendant des siecles pour s'elever et se guinder en se 
 concertant jusqu'a cette sphere superieure, ils n'en sauraient 
 venir a bout." A great number of finites does but make up a 
 great number of finites, and by no means avails to make up 
 the infinite ; just as, again, Petre parfatt ne pent etre la collection 
 de tons les etres itnparfaits. 
 
 A discourser on " Catholic infallibility " accepts as something 
 intelligible the notion of an infallible man ; but when told of 
 an infallible assembly of men, he tries in vain to conceive of 
 what separate atoms of inspiration the collective miracle is 
 
254 HEADS BY TALE, BRAINS BY WEIGHT. 
 
 made up. Every individual member in his separate capacity, 
 and before he entered the assembly, is perfectly fallible ; when 
 there, he utters the very opinions which he brought there, and 
 tenders the vote which he previously designed; yet "the aggre- 
 gate of these fallibilities is inspiration ! " As ten miUions of 
 circles can never make a square, so, argues Dr. Primrose, the 
 united voice of myriads cannot lend the smallest foundation to 
 falsehood. Reasoners on the doctrines of the New Academy 
 have unreasonably enough alleged that, although no single 
 sense does actually convey to us a correct impression of 
 anything, nevertheless we are enabled so to confirm or modify 
 the rqDort of one sense by the report of another sense, that the 
 result of the whole activity of the five senses is a true impres- 
 sion of the external Thing. This is a curious fallacy, observes 
 one of their critics : it pretends that " a number oi false impres- 
 sions are sufficient to constitute a true one ! " Southey, in the 
 well-known imaginary conversation v/ith Porson, cites as too 
 self-evident for argument the truism, that the opinion of a 
 thousand millions who are ignorant or ill-informed,* is not 
 equal to the opinion of only one who is wiser. Hamlet sets 
 off the judgment of the single judicious spectator against that 
 of the " unskilful " and overbearing throng ; " the censure of . 
 which one, must, in your allowance, o'erweigh a whole theatre 
 of others." Non numero hcec judicmitur sed pondere. 
 
 * An able dissertator on Taste shows that it is not from the greatest 
 number of voices, but from the opinion of the greatest number of well- 
 informed minds, that we can establish, if not an absolute standard, at 
 least a comparative scale, of taste. And while he freely admits that the 
 greater the number of persons of strong natural sensibility or love for any 
 art, and who have paid the closest attention to it, who ajree in their 
 admiration of any work of art, the higher do its pretensions rise to classical 
 taste and intrinsic beauty ; so, on the other hand, he urges that, as the 
 opinion of a thousand good judges may outweigh that of nearly all the 
 rest of the world, there may again be one individual among them whose 
 opinion may outweigh that of the other nine hundred and ninety-nine ; that 
 is, one of a still stronger and more refined perception of beauty than all 
 the rest, and to whose opinion that of the others and of the world at large 
 would approximate and be conformed, as their taste advanced in culture. 
 
o 
 
 THE SISTERS OF BETHANY. 255 
 
 XXIX. 
 
 MARTHA AND MARY. 
 St. Luke x. 38 seq. 
 
 LSHAUSEN observes that the account given in St. 
 Luke's gospel of the two sisters of Bethany marks 
 them, though in few touches, so strikingly and clearly, that 
 they are often chosen as the exemplars of the pecuharities of 
 two distinct religious tendencies : Martha being the recognized 
 type of a life busily devoted to externals ; and ^lar}^ of quiet 
 self-devotion to the Divine as the one thing needful. "Among 
 the apostles, Peter corresponded to Martha: John, on the 
 other hand, to IMar}-.'' * The same commentator, while affirm- 
 ing that to a certain extent both tendencies \nll be combined 
 in each believer, is careful not to overlook the existence of 
 different vocations, or the fact of many being better fitted for 
 busy outward labours than for an inner comtemplative life, 
 although the most active must cultivate a real spirit of devo- 
 tion, and the most contemplative must consecrate his energies 
 to a practical service of God. Although Mary, as Jeremy 
 Taylor says, was commended for choosing the better part, yet 
 Mar\- had done worse, if she had been at the feet of her Master 
 when she should have relieved a perishing brother. " Martha 
 was troubled with much serving; that was more than need, 
 
 * Dr. Newman somewhere calls attention to the fact that Simon 
 remained at his nets, while his brother Andrew followed John the Baptist ; 
 and that Andrew first recognized the Messiah among the inhabitants of 
 despised Nazareth, and brought his brother to Him ; yet to Andrew, Christ 
 spake no word of commendation which has been allowed to continue on 
 record, whereas to Simon, even at his first coming. He gave the honourable 
 name by which he is now designated, and afterwards put him forward as 
 the typical foundation of His Church. Nothing, indeed, can hence be 
 inferred, one way or other, concerning the relative excellence of the two 
 brothers. " Andrew is scarcely known, except by name, while Peter has 
 ever held the place of honour all over the Church ; yet Andrew brought 
 Peter to Christ." Swan cuique is at times an ideal law, rather than a 
 practical or plainly practicable one, in this busy world of ours. 
 
256 MARTHA AND MARY. 
 
 and therefore she was to blame; and sometimes hearing, in 
 some circumstances, may be more than needs; and some 
 women are troubled with overmuch hearing, and then they had 
 better have been serving the necessities of their house." 
 
 The address of Jesus to Martha is justly held to refer less to 
 household activity in itself (for that must be cared for) than to 
 the state of mind in which she went about it, and the com- 
 parison she instituted in this respect between herself and Mary. 
 Busying herself to provide the best entertainment she could 
 for the beloved Guest, she exaggerated the relative value of 
 her household diligence ; and from the gratification she felt in 
 hiaKovta — a term comprising "all domestic services in which 
 Martha lost herself in needless bustle " — from the enjoyment 
 she felt in her congenial occupations, arose the reproving 
 speech directed against her sister."^ Martha's implied rebuke 
 of Mary, whom indeed she desires our Lord implicitly to 
 rebuke, is itself rebuked in His reply. He rebukes first the 
 fxepLfxvav and Tvppd^cLv — the being careful and troubled, turbari, 
 about many things — that is, her " restless spirit of action, as 
 moved by the impulses of creature affection ; " and next, He 
 contrasts the trivial many things, TroWd, with the indispensable 
 one thing, h, — intimating at the same time that for the sake of 
 the former she was losing the latter ; though the many things 
 might be dispensed with, the one thing not. 
 
 There is something of gentle chiding too, or mild rebuke, in 
 our Lord's " Said I not to thee , . . ? " addressed to Martha, 
 at her brother's grave. He had just bidden them take away the 
 stone ; and the doing so would, as Dr. Hanna puts it, at once 
 expose the dead, and let loose the foul effluvium of the 
 advanced decomposition. " The careful Martha, whose active 
 spirit ever busied itself with the outward and tangible side of 
 
 * ' ' Perhaps conscience stirred her up and testified that Mary had more 
 of Jesus than she. But as her craving for the heavenly was not sufficiently 
 strong and pure, she suffered herself to be fettered by external activities, 
 which in reality were more agreeable to her, and out of this state of mind 
 may have arisen her speech. Jealous of Mary, she wished her to be as she 
 herself was." — Olshausen, 
 
MARTHA AND MARY. 257 
 
 things, at once perceives this, and hastens to interpose a 
 check." Let us, however, be prompt to remember, with 
 Bishop Hall, that "it was Martha who went to meet Jesus." 
 So was it — to recall the assumed affinity between Martha and 
 Peter on one side, Mary and John on the other, — so was it 
 Peter who " went into the sepulchre " of his risen Lord. John 
 had outrun Peter, when to the sepulchre they ran both together. 
 John came first to the sepulchre ; yet went he not in. 
 
 Modern criticism is caustic on Bishop Fisher's elaboration 
 of a parallel between the Lady Margaret and Martha of 
 Bethany, in four respects. First, nobility of person ; second, 
 discipline of her body ; third, in ordering her soul to God ; 
 fourth, in hospitality and charity. " Now," urges the author 
 of the Biographia Borealis, " unless there be, as in all proba- 
 bility there is, a traditional history of Martha, containing many 
 particulars not recorded by the evangelists,"'^ it would puzzle a 
 herald to prove her nobility^ except it consisted in her descent 
 from Abraham, which made her akin to the kings of Israel and 
 Judah." He adds that neither does it appear in Scripture that 
 she disciplined her body in the sense here meant ; while, as to 
 the third and fourth conformities, it is observable that '' in the 
 only passage of the gospel wherein much is said about Martha, 
 she is rather reproved for not turning her soul to God, and for 
 being too intent upon her hospitality. But it had long been a 
 commonplace to represent Martha and Mary as the types or 
 symbols of the active and the contemplative f duties, and every 
 good woman was compared to one or the other." 
 
 * On which point a foreign divine, already cited, observes, in reference 
 to Martha's being described as owner of a house in the Kileixr) of Bethany, 
 that whether she was a widow, or lived unmarried with her sister and 
 Lazarus, cannot be determined, the evangelists being " remarkably sparing 
 in their historic notices of the persons mentioned by them. They confine 
 themselves to what is simply necessary, and are intent rather on the deline- 
 ation of their spiritual life." 
 
 f Mr. E. S. Dallas, in his elaborate treatise on the science of criticism, 
 glances casually but effectively at this symbolism. He is showing that 
 ours is a chequered life, in which the moral forces cross and counteract 
 each other, and in which no one of them can be regarded as by itself per- 
 
 17 
 
258 MARTHA AND MARY. 
 
 Hartley Coleridge himself compares a good woman to them 
 both ; or, at least, exhorts, in a hortatory sonnet, a winsome 
 Martha of his acquaintance to emulate the excellence of each. 
 *' Thou bear'st a name by Jesus known and loved ; 
 And Jesus gently did the maid repiove 
 For too much haste to show her eager love. 
 But blest is she that may be so reproved. 
 Be Martha still in deed and good endeavour, 
 In faith like Mary, at His feet for ever. " 
 
 Of pure devotionality, more common in Roman Catholic 
 countries than in England, Arthur H. Clough had this to say, 
 in his review of Professor Newman's book on the Soul, — that 
 the religionist who practises it simply ignores the exterior world; 
 all that is done is merely mechanical, and absorption in the con- 
 templation of the Deity is the whole life : to sit at the feet of an 
 Unseen Visitant, to gaze on a celestial countenance, visible to 
 the entranced one alone, and to listen to words spiritually dis- 
 cerned, inaudible to the carnal, — this is the one thing needful 
 with which Martha must not interfere, however much Mary be 
 needed for the many things of service. " In this life, except 
 perhaps that the beatified Mary of necessity postulates the 
 existence of the unblest Martha, there is at least consistency 
 and unity. But, obliged as most people must be to mix with 
 things earthly, and be cumbered and careful and troubled, they 
 have to settle the question of reconciling the world and the 
 Spirit, they have to make themselves holy friendships out of 
 the unrighteous Mammon, to serve God in the world and in 
 their generation." It is of millennial days that Doctor Hopkins 
 
 feet. Justice without mercy, for instance, becomes hateful, and the gentle- 
 ness of doves may fail if divorced from the wisdom of serpents. There 
 may be too much of a good thing : the moral not less than the physical 
 earth needs change of weather, and could not thrive either in eternal sun- 
 shine or in eternal showers. So it is absurd, he argues, to speak of poetry 
 and the fine arts as if they had not their weak side. " Religion itself has 
 its weak side ; and Mary, who sits at the feet of Jesus, knows not how much 
 she owes to Martha, who takes the burden of the household cares. " The 
 life poetical and the life practical — this is his conclusion — may have each 
 its virtues ; but evidently they are virtues that, carried to certain, or un- 
 certain, lengths, encroach upon each other. 
 
MARTHA AND MARY. 259 
 
 is speaking when he significantly tells his hearers that " All the 
 careful Marthas in those days will have no excuse for not sitting 
 at the feet of Jesus ; there will be no cumbering A\qth much 
 serving ; the Church ^^^ll have only Marys in those days." 
 Meanwhile the Marthas have their day. Where there are 
 sisters in a family, a Mary sometimes seems almost to imply 
 a Martha. We read in the Autobiography of old Dr. Lyman 
 Beecher that the young lady he married, Roxana Foote, had 
 thought herself converted at five or six years of age, though far 
 from satisfying the exactions of an apostle of absolute election ; 
 but at least she was the Mary among the three granddaughters 
 of General Andrew Ward, who used to say that when the girls 
 first came down of a morning, Roxana would put some thought- 
 ful question, suggestive of study and meditation, while Harriet's 
 voice would be heard briskly calling out, " Here ! take the 
 broom ; sweep up, make a fire, make haste ! " Harriet's name- 
 sake, Dr. Beecher's more celebrated daughter, is fond, like 
 other American lady-novelists, of referring to the Bethany 
 sisters, as often as not in a vein of humour ; where, for instance, 
 Mrs. Twitchel characterizes her indispensable " help," Cerinthy 
 Ann, as " one of the most master hands to turn off work ; she 
 takes hold and goes along like a woman. . . . Deacon was 
 a^sayin', if ever she was called she'd be a Martha, and not a 
 Mary : but then she's dreadful opposed to the doctrines. . . . 
 She was a-tellin' me yesterday, when she was a-hangin' out 
 clothes, that she never should get reconciled to Decrees and 
 'Lection." So with Aunt Ildy in Mrs. Whitney's Hitherto, 
 whom it made restless only to see a person reading a book, or 
 sitting at a window to watch the sunset, so long as she could 
 possibly find anything for them to do. ''I never could help 
 thinking of her when I read in the Bible of Martha of Bethany." 
 There is a touch of the sisterly distinction in the Varnah and 
 Ainah of Sir Arthur Helps's Realmah : spiritual things were 
 not m the domain of the former ; to be thriving and comfort- 
 able was the real object of life as she \-iewed it ; but she was 
 conscious of her inferiority to Ainah as a soothing companion 
 and comforter, gentle, and considerate, and sympathetic. 
 
26o MARTHA AND MARY, 
 
 The elder of the maiden sisters in Mrs. Oliphant's White- 
 ladies tells the younger, '' I am Martha, and you are Mary." 
 " If I am earthly while you are heavenly, you must put up with 
 me ; for, after all, there are a great many earthly things to be 
 looked after." This elder sister would pause in the midst of a 
 hundred real and pressing occupations, a hundred weighty cares, 
 to condole with or support her sister in her more " spiritual " 
 yet somewhat trifling pursuits ; as for Susan's own serious cares, 
 she could not look for Augustine's sympathy or interest in regard 
 of them ; she knew, indeed, that she would rather be disapproved 
 of, perhaps censured, for being engrossed by the affairs of this 
 world. Miss Augustine " was the ideal nun of romance and 
 poetry, not the ruddy-faced, active personage who is generally 
 to be found under that guise in active life." If Augustine in 
 one room planned alms and charities for the expiation of the 
 guilt of the family, which had made itself rich by church lands, 
 with the deepest sense that her undertaking was of the most 
 pious character, — Susan, in another, set herself to ponder how 
 to retain possession of these lands, with an underlying sense of 
 practical piety too. 
 
 No scene could have been more peaceful than that of our 
 first introduction to Mrs. Poyser and Dinah Morris in Adam 
 Bede, if the former very notable housewife had not been making 
 such a frequent clinking with her iron, in " ironing a few things 
 that still remained from Monday's wash," and moving to and 
 fro whenever she wanted it to cool ; carrying the keen glance 
 of her blue-gray eye from the kitchen to the dairy, where Hetty 
 was making the butter, and from the dairy to the back-kitchen, 
 where Nancy was taking the pies out of the oven. And then 
 we are told that the family likeness between her and Dinah, 
 with the contrast between her keenness and Dinah's seraphic 
 gentleness of expression, "might have served a painter as an 
 excellent suggestion for a Martha and Mary." 
 
 There is a touch of Martha in Scott's Dame Glendinning, 
 when scrupulous not to let her grief for a heavy loss interfere 
 with her housewifely hospitality. A visitor must be considered, 
 first of all. Her barley-bread had been toasted, her choicest 
 
MARTHA AND MARY. 261 
 
 cask of home-brewed ale had been broached, her best butter 
 had been placed on the hall-table, along with her most savoury 
 ham and her ripest cheese, ere she abandoned herself to the 
 extremity of her sorrow ; and it was not till she had arranged 
 her little repast neatly on the board, that she sat down in the 
 chimney-corner, threw her checked apron over her head, and 
 gave way to the current of tears and sobs. " In this there was 
 no grimace or affectation. The good dame held the honours of 
 her house to be as essential a duty ... as any other pressing 
 call upon her conscience ; nor until these were suitably attended 
 to did she find herself at liberty to indulge her sorrow for her 
 departed friend." 
 
 In Longfellow's Divine Tragedy, this is Mary's address to 
 the Master, at whose feet she sits, while Martha bustles about, 
 muttering " She shows her love by words, and I by works " : — 
 
 " O Master ! when Thou comest, it is always 
 A sabbath in the house. I cannot work : 
 I must sit at Thy feet ; must see Thee, hear Thee ! 
 I have a feeble, wayward, doubting heart, 
 Incapable of endurance or great thoughts, 
 Striving for something that it cannot reach, 
 Baffled and disappointed, wounded, hungry ; 
 And only when I hear Thee am 1 happy, 
 And only when I see Thee am at peace. 
 
 Stronger than I, and wiser, and far better 
 
 In every manner, is my sister Martha. 
 
 Thou seest how well she orders everything 
 
 To make Thee welcome ; how she comes and goes, 
 
 Careful and cumber'd ever with much serving, 
 
 While I but welcome Thee with foolish words ! 
 
 Whene'er Thou speakest to me, I am happy ; 
 
 When Thou art silent, I am satisfied. 
 
 Thy presence is enough. I ask no more. 
 
 Only to be with Thee, only to see Thee, 
 
 Sufficeth me. My heart is then at rest." 
 
262 WORKING WHILE IT IS DAY. 
 
 XXX. 
 
 DA Y LIGHT AND DA Y'S WORK. 
 St. John ii, 9, 
 
 THE Master's avowed intention of going again into Judaea, 
 where so lately the Jews had sought to stone Him, 
 moved the disciples to remonstrate in the form of a question : 
 ''Goest Thou thither again?" thither, where enmity is so 
 active and unrelenting, and threatens a too speedily fatal issue. 
 That question He met, and dismissed, by another, that has the 
 terse import and tone of an adage : " Are there hot twelve 
 hours in the day ? " The day's work must be done by daylight, 
 while it is called to-day. Walking by day, a man stumbles not, 
 for light is above him and about him ; but if a man walk in the 
 night, he stumbleth, for want of light. The night cometh when 
 no man can work ; and therefore must He that is sent do the 
 work of Him that sent Him while it is day. 
 
 Yet a little while, He told the people later, should the light 
 be with them. Let them walk while they had the light, lest 
 darkness come upon them ; for he that walketh in darkness 
 knoweth not whither he goeth. " While ye have light, believe 
 in the light, that ye may be the children of light." So exhorted 
 them He in whom was life, and the life was the light of men. 
 And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness compre- 
 hendeth it not. That was the true Light, which lighteth every 
 man that cometh into the world. And He would have us walk 
 in the light, as He is in the light, and as He walked by day- 
 light; walked and worked while His day upon earth lasted, 
 leaving us an example that we should so walk, in His steps. 
 
 Upon the dial-plate of his watch Dr. Johnson had the Greek 
 inscription engraved, Ni;^ yap cpxerat* — night cometh; to 
 
 * It was also chosen by Sir Walter Scott as a text to be engraved on the 
 dial -stone which used to stand in front of his old cottage, but afterwards 
 in the centre of the garden at Abbotsford. 
 
 A warning stroke in the autumn of 1831 made Sir Walter resist every 
 
THE NIGHT COMETH. ' 263 
 
 remind him with the lapse of every hour that the dayUght of 
 this life was waning and waning, and the darkness of the grave 
 gathering and gaining upon him — the night wherein no man 
 can work. 
 
 Marcus Antoninus " meditates " how much it concerns us to 
 push forward, and make the most of our matters, because 
 death is continually advancing. " Do not," he elsewhere bids 
 himself, " manage as if you had ten thousand years to throw 
 away : look you,* Death stands at your elbow \ make the most of 
 your minute, and be good for something while yet you may!" 
 To suffer and to do, says De Quincey, was the portion in this 
 life of Joan of Arc ; and not for a moment was it hidden from 
 herself: life, she felt, was short, and the sleep which is in the 
 grave so long: let her use that life, so transitory, for the glory 
 of those heavenly dreams destined to comfort the sleep which 
 is so long. " Never once did this holy child relax from her 
 belief in the darkness that was travelling to meet her." The 
 voice that called her to death, she heard for ever. — What more 
 particularly impressed those who were most intimate with 
 Mendelssohn was, that in every pursuit he was so thoroughly in 
 earnest — that with him the business of the hour was no trifling 
 play, no filling up of idle spare time. To his friends' entreaties, 
 towards the last, that he would spare himself, his resolute reply 
 would be, " Let me work while it is yet day. Who can tell 
 how soon the bell may toll ? " Within a few days of his death, 
 he seems to have rather intensified than abated in energy, 
 because he felt, he said, "as if some one were lying on the 
 watch for me, and crying. Stop ! no farther ! \Halt ! tiicht 
 wetter fY' As with the toiling parish priest in Miss Broughton's 
 first story, whose poor fragile body might be sick, and wear\% 
 and full of aches and pains ; no matter ; it must perform all 
 
 importunity to keep him away from work, just when he was least fit for it. 
 The Lockhart brothers strove in vain to keep him with them awhile ; he 
 would listen to no persuasions : "I must home to work while it is called 
 day," he said ; "for the night cometh when no man can work. I put that 
 text, many a year ago, on my dial-stone ; but it often preached in vain." — 
 Lockhart's Life of Scott, ch. Ixxx. 
 
264 DA YLIGHT AND DA Y'S WORK. 
 
 the task the brave stout spirit laid upon it j the time for resting 
 was not come yet. " There's so much work for me to do, and 
 such a httle day to do it in. We cannot, any of us, tell how 
 soon the night may come, and I sometimes fancy my night is 
 getting very near ; " though he owns this may be only a super- 
 stitious fancy : still he would like to be getting on with his 
 work "against it does come." So with the Wanderer, by that 
 name known and read of many men, — whose prayer is, 
 
 " Lord, imbue me 
 With will to work in this diurnal sphere, 
 Knowing myself my life's day-labourer here, 
 Where evening brings the day's work's wages to me.*' 
 
 And whose confession is, in another place : 
 
 " Knowing that night of all is creeping on 
 
 Wherein no man can work, I sorrow most 
 For what is gain'd, and not for what is lost ; 
 Nor mourn alone what's undone, but what's done." 
 
 It was the practical philosophy of Horace to account each 
 new-born day his last, how far soever he may have been, in any 
 devout or Christian sense, from living each day as if his last. 
 Omnem crede diem tibi diliixisse siipremmti. Who knows whether 
 the gods above will add a morrow to the day that now is ? he 
 asks in one of the Odes : Quis scit an adjiciant hodierncc 
 crastina summce Tempora Di superi^ Seneca, philosopher of 
 another school, budge doctor of another fur, argues from the 
 uncertainty as to when and where death awaits us, the ex- 
 pediency of our awaiting it every where and when : Incertiim 
 est quo te loco mors expectet; itaque in omni loco illam expecta. 
 Emerson scouts as one of the illusions we should get rid of, 
 that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write 
 it on your heart, he bids us, that every day is the best day 
 in the year. " No man has learnt anything rightly, until he 
 knows that every 'day is Doomsday." A thousand pities it is 
 that Petronius Arbiter had not a better meaning to put upon 
 his boast, that always and everywhere he had so lived, that he 
 might consume the passing light as if it were not to return : 
 
LIVING EACH DAY AS ONE'S LAST. 265 
 
 Ego sic semper- et tibique vLxi, ut iiltima7n qua7nqtie hicem. 
 taviquam ?ion redituram, consumerem. So in the Alkestis of 
 Euripides : the passing day esteem thine own, and all beyond 
 as Fortune's : 
 
 B^'o^' Xo7t^oi' (Toj', to, S'dXXa tt}? Tux''??. 
 
 Dr. South would adopt, but refine into a voice becoming 
 a Christian, the note of the merry epicure. To o-rj/x-epov /xeXct 
 ^01, TO 8'avpLov TL<5 otSe; I will take care for to-day, who 
 knows to-morrow? He that would live for ever, let him 
 look upon himself as living but to-day : let this be secured, 
 and whatsoever comes afterwards, let him reckon it as an 
 overplus, and an unexpected gain. A severe illness taught 
 Rousseau to number his days in this manner — if not so as to 
 apply his heart unto wisdom, in the Scriptural sense, yet so as 
 to live more wisely than before : '' Tout en regardant chaque 
 jour comme le dernier de mes jours," he tells us, of this 
 period, he studied vath. as much ardour as if he had endless 
 life before him. On another page he writes that he could 
 veritably say he never began really to live until he had thus 
 come to look on himself as a dead man. At ninety, Bishop 
 Burgess, who had long lived in the constant anticipation of 
 death, used every night to compose himself to sleep as to his 
 ver}^ last. Speaking of danger as a most effective counter- 
 irritant in cases of mental suffering, Dr. Holmes describes a 
 perturbed spirit who, in circumstances of daily peril, learnt to 
 endure the trials of each day better by dwelling in imagination 
 on the possibility that it might be the last for him. There is 
 a flavour of Horace's of?ine??i crede in Dr. Channing's avowal 
 when life was all but over with him, that he welcomed and 
 was grateful for every simple pleasure of homely daily life, 
 "perhaps the more because I do not look forward to them. 
 I live as in the midst of death." Grata sicperveniet qucs noti 
 sperabitur hora. 
 
 Cowley was treading closely in the footsteps of Horace when 
 he ;^T0te, — 
 
!66 PERDIDI DIEM, 
 
 "Thus would I double my life's fading space, 
 For he that runs it well, twice runs his race. 
 
 And in this true delight, . . . 
 I would not fear nor wish my fate, 
 
 But boldly say each night, 
 To-morrow let my sun his beams display, 
 Or in clouds hide them; I have lived to-day." 
 
 Ille potejts sui Loetusque deget, cui licet in diem Dixisse, Vixi. 
 On all-important time, says Dr. Young, through every age, — 
 
 " Though much, and warm, the wise have urged ; the man 
 Is yet unborn, who duly weighs an hour. 
 ' I've lost a day ! ' the prince who nobly cried. 
 Had been an emperor without his crown." 
 
 The Aniici, diem perdidi, (Friends, I have lost a day,) of the 
 Emperor Titus, that " Delight of the human race," is said by 
 Dr. Merivale to have obtained higher appreciation than the 
 phrase seems, when taken with the context, to deserve. It 
 was on remembering one evening at supper that he had made 
 no present to any one since the morning, that Titus uttered this 
 celebrated exclamation of self-reproach. The context is forgotten, 
 and Perdidi dietn has for ages been accepted as a saying worthy 
 of all acceptation, and pregnant with moral force, — as indeed 
 not unworthy of the epithets applied to it by Victor, of divinum 
 et celeste. Here and there, however, an admirer recognizes, 
 whether in prose or verse, or, like John Oldham, in prosy verse, 
 the occasional cause of the immortalized utterance: "Brave 
 Titus!" runs the apostrophe, in a cacophony of consonants, — 
 
 " Thou heretofore deservedst such praise, 
 When acts of goodness did compute thy days. 
 Measured not by the sun's, but thine own kinder rays. 
 Thou thoughtest each hour out of life's journal lost, 
 Which could not some fresh favour boast, 
 And reckonedst bounties thy best clepsydras. " 
 
 So Boileau : Tel fut cet e?npereur 
 
 " Qui soupirait le soir, si sa main fortunee 
 N'avait par ses bienfaits signale la journee." 
 
 Titus himself loquitur, or ipse dixit, in Racine — 
 
NULLA DIES SINE LINE A. 267 
 
 " Depuis huit jours je regne . . . 
 D'un temps si precieux quel compte puis-je-rendre? 
 Ou sont ces heureux jours que je faisais attendre? 
 Quels pleurs ai-je seches ? dans quels yeux satisfaits 
 Ai-je deja goute le fruit de mes bienfaits? 
 * * * * 
 
 Sais-je combien le ciel m'a comte de joumees? 
 Et de ce peu de jours, si longtemps attendus, 
 Ah malheureux ! combien j'en ai deja perdus ! " 
 
 One of the three regrets specified by Cato was that he had let 
 a day pass without doing anything. xVpuleius tells us of the 
 Brachmani, a sect of Gymnosophists, that every disciple was- 
 required at the close of each day to give proof of some good 
 thing done by him in the course of it, or his doom was to go 
 supperless — in effect dinnerless, or more speakingly still, break- 
 fastless — and serve him right. Nulla dies sine lined is a healthy 
 law of life when healthily understood and carried out. A man 
 may WTite too much, as Heywood did in penning a sheet a 
 day. But one respects his diligence, as one does that of 
 Manuel Souza penning daily forty-eight pages of thirty lines 
 each; of Thion de la Chaume carefully noting down every 
 night whatever that was noteworthy he had seen by day; of 
 Navarrete letting no day go by without searching into some- 
 thing; of Sotheby in old age daily adding lines upon lines 
 "without fail" to his translations ; of Dr. Prout, exciting whole- 
 some emulation by the amount of extra-professional labour he 
 achieved by economy of spare minutes and seconds, day by 
 day continually. On the principle of keeping up his earlier 
 studies, amid the distractions of a busy professional career, 
 Sir Henry Holland records his having devoted a certain time 
 each day to some one or other of these subjects ; well knowing 
 that the continuity of pursuit here, once thoroughly broken, 
 can rarely be recovered. " At the time when my medical 
 practice most pressed on other occupations, I maintained these 
 studies by methods . . . simple indeed in kind ; . . . but a 
 steady perseverance has given to them the force of habit — 
 that strongest of all forces." He resolved "never to let the 
 day pass wholly without" some taste of Greek and Latin reading, 
 
268 . WASTING A DA V. 
 
 were it but for ten minutes. "Every day, even the busiest, 
 will yield its ten minutes over and over again, if they are well 
 looked after and taken up at the time." He speaks of having 
 much aided himself in using these " fractions " of time by the 
 practice, of more than forty years' standing, of transcribing into 
 a volume all the finest passages of Greek and Latin poetry and 
 prose which had come under his notice : " This practice I have 
 kept up to the present moment, having added even to-day some 
 lines from the Andromache of Euripides." So with the physical 
 sciences : as in the case of classical reading, a very short time 
 regularly applied suffices, in his experience, to fulfil the purpose ; 
 at any rate had enabled him to " keep pace with all the greater 
 discoveries of the day." Leigh Hunt was fond of urging, from 
 his own example, that by dint of doing a little, or even a very 
 little, every day, not a lover of letters but might in the course of 
 a few months be deep as a bee in some of the sweetest flowers 
 of other languages. 
 
 A poetaster was taunted the other day with attempting to 
 justify the enormity of foisting so much worthless and un- 
 meaning rubbish upon the public, by alleging Nulla dies sine 
 lined to be his motto, and that " one line — at least one " he 
 " must needs write, before the sun goes down with an angry 
 glare to tell the ocean of a wasted day." His critics could not 
 help thinking, for his own sake, that he had better have braved 
 the worst consequences of the anger of the sun than have 
 exposed " such stuff as this " to the daylight. Their advice 
 therefore was that he be bold enough to hold his hand, and 
 not mind what that tell-tale luminary may have to say. 
 
 One of the entries in John Foster's Journal runs thus : 
 "Saturday night. Must I exclaim, ' Diem perdidi'l Whether 
 I have lost this or not, I believe I have not saved so many as 
 the man who uttered that regretful sentiment. ... I hope 
 the last great day will have better days than this to disclose, 
 in the account of my life." And in his essay on the Improve- 
 ment of Time, he speaks of the regret which would be felt by a 
 man prosecuting some grand scheme of ambition, for the loss 
 of a day or an hour, if it were possible for him to have been 
 
KILLING TIME. 269 
 
 betrayed into such a remissness, as commanding with justice 
 our admiration and reproaching our indolence, however much 
 we may reprobate the grand schemer's designs. While he is 
 adjusting an immense complexity of concerns, even in the 
 time given by others to perhaps needless sleep, "how many 
 men of talents, with some pretensions to virtue, and with a 
 considerable scope for efficient activity before them, are ab- 
 sorbing their days in idle musings, or dissipating them in a 
 trifling kind of social intercourse ? " etc. A more recent essayist, 
 after describing how the day of an English girl in town is apt 
 to be made up, — of a little riding, namely, a little reading, a 
 little dabbling with the paint-brush, a little strumming on the 
 piano, a little visiting, a little shopping, a little dancing, and a 
 general trivial chat scattered over the whole, — declares that 
 Woman can always say with Titus, "I have wasted a day," 
 but the confession wears an air of triumph rather than regret. 
 " A world of trivial occupations, a whole system of social life, 
 has been laboriously invented, that the day might be wasted 
 gracefully and without boredom," If the idle, says Coleridge, 
 are described as killing time, the man of methodical industry 
 and honourable pursuits may be justly said to call it into life 
 and moral being, while he makes it the distinct object not only 
 of the consciousness but of the conscience : he organizes the 
 hours, and gives them a soul ; and that, the very essence of 
 which is to fleet away, and evermore to have been {fuisse), 
 he takes up into his own permanence, and communicates to it 
 the imperishableness of a spiritual nature. "Of the 'good 
 and faithful servant ' whose energies, thus directed, are thus 
 methodized, it is less truly affirmed that he lives in time than 
 that time lives in him." For his days, months, and years, it 
 is added, as the stops and punctual marks in the records of 
 duties performed, will survive the wreck of worlds, and remain 
 extant when time itself shall be no more. 
 
 There are some who account a day lost in which they have 
 not done something silly or mischievous. There are those we 
 read of in the Book of Proverbs who sleep not except they 
 
270 PERDIDI DIEM. 
 
 have done mischief; and whose sleep is taken away unless 
 they cause some to fall. 
 
 " Clara, with Titus, thinks she's lost a day, 
 Which some new source of scandal don't display." 
 
 CHton tells Dorante, in Corneille's one comedy that lives, Voire 
 Jmnieiir sans eniploi 7ie pent passer un jour. Montesquieu's 
 Persian Letter- writer cites an "honest citizen" of his acquaint- 
 ance, who cannot, in these troublesome times, betake himself 
 to rest unless he can say, " I have ruined a whole family 
 to-day; I'll ruin another to-morrow." Chamfort declares the 
 most utterly lost of all days to be that which had gone by 
 without a good laugh. This was in his prose 7naximes etpensees; 
 he could essay the heroic style in his poesies, as where he sings 
 the praises of those " mortels magnanimes " and " bienfaiteurs 
 fameux," who have taken for their model 
 
 * ' Ce Titus, qu'a genoux tout un peuple environne, 
 Pleurant au pied du trone 
 Le jour qu'il a perdu sans faire des heureux." 
 Dr. Armstrong is said to have designed by Thomson been 
 in his Castle of Ittdolence portrait of the splenetic solitary who 
 would brook no company, and quite detested talk, 
 " Ne ever uttered word, save when first shone 
 The glittering star of eve — ' Thank heaven ! the day is done !'" 
 
 Done, and no good done it by him. Gone, and left no pleasant 
 memory to him, whether of beneficence or even of benevolence. 
 Shelley contrasts with the sting which retributive memory im- 
 plants in the hard bosom of the selfish man, the 
 " ecstatic and exulting throb 
 Which virtue's votary feels when he sums up 
 The thoughts and actions of a well-spent day." 
 
 In one of Longfellow's narrative poems we have a sombre man 
 who counted each day as lost on which his feet no sacred 
 threshold crossed. In one of his lyrics we have a village black- 
 smith who goes through life toiUng, rejoicing : 
 ' ' Each morning sees some task begin, 
 Each evening sees it close ; 
 Something attempted, something done, 
 Has earn'd a night's repose." 
 
DA YLIGHT AND DA. Y'S WORK. 271 
 
 Fly idleness, is George Herbert's exhortation, 
 
 " which yet thou canst not fly 
 By dressing, mistressing, and compliment. 
 If these take up thy day, the sun will cry 
 Against thee ; for his light was only lent." 
 
 And one verse of that, par excellence, Country Parson's " Even- 
 song " runs thus : 
 
 " What have I brought Thee home 
 For this Thy love ? have I discharged the debt 
 Which this day's favour did beget ? " 
 
 Very solemn, to Archbishop Trench's thinking, as being far 
 deeper than at first sight it might seem, is the Arabian proverb, 
 " Every day in thy life is a leaf in thy history " — a leaf which 
 shall once be turned back to again, that it may be seen what 
 was written there ; and that whatever was \\Titten may be read 
 out in the hearing of all. To-day is the theme of a copy of 
 verses by Mr. Carlyle, such as make one wish that even that 
 master of quaint, rugged, picturesque, graphic, grotesque, and 
 sometimes most eloquent and sonorous prose, had WTitten more 
 such, and many more : 
 
 So here hath been dawning another blue Day : 
 
 Think wilt thou let it slip useless away. 
 
 Out of Eternity this new Day is bom ; 
 Into Eternity, at night, will return. 
 
 Behold it aforetime no eye ever did : 
 So soon it for ever from all eyes is hid. 
 
 Here hath been dawning another blue Day : 
 Think wilt thou let it slip useless away." 
 
 XXXI. 
 
 GALLIO. 
 Acts xviii. 12 — 17. 
 
 GALLIO was deputy of Achaia what time the Jews in 
 Corinth made insurrection with one accord against 
 Paul, and brought him to the jud^ient-seat, charging him with 
 
272 GALLIO. 
 
 persuading men to worship God contrary to their law. Without 
 waiting to hear the defendant, GaUio dismissed the charge. It 
 was altogether a matter outside of his function. He would 
 have nothing to do with it. Had the matter been one of 
 wrong, or wicked lewdness, he would of course have entertained 
 it. But as it simply turned on verbal distinctions and Judaic 
 doctrines, let them settle it among themselves; he would be 
 no judge of such matters. And so saying, the proconsul 
 summarily dismissed them (aTreXawctv need not indicate the 
 violence implied in " he drave them ") from the judgment-seat. 
 
 Whereupon the Gentiles, perhaps instigated to the attack by 
 a wish to please Gallio, as well as by their spite to the Jews, 
 laid hands on Sosthenes, the chief ruler of the synagogue, and 
 beat him before the judgment-seat. " And Gallio cared for 
 none of these things." His allowing his tribunal to be abused 
 to such an extent as this, even his apologists or admirers are 
 scarcely able to defend. Contempt of court so flagrant, his 
 own official self-respect might have forbidden or denounced. 
 But with regard to the earlier procedure, the refusal to take 
 cognisance of the case against Paul, the men of this generation 
 are disposed to eye it with something at least of complacent 
 interest and even approval, very different from the spirit in 
 which it was common to stigmatize Gallio as the odious type 
 of all that is coldly apathetic and systematically irreligious. 
 
 As the man who cared for none of these things, GalHo was 
 practically bracketed and branded together with Pilate, who 
 asked, What is truth? Bible-readers looked at him from a 
 somewhat narrow point of view — their own standpoint of 
 Christian creed and life — and condemned him accordingly as 
 a heartless and professed worldling, representative of that cynical 
 indifferentism which pooh-poohs not only all religions together, 
 but religion itself. In which light the deputy of Achaia is 
 marked out for emphatic and universal reprobation. From a 
 thousand pulpits have fervid declaimers rolled the thunder of 
 their rhetoric against him. From almost as many periodicals 
 have the pens of ready writers discharged their blackest ink 
 upon him. But the thoughts of man are widened with the 
 
GALLIO. 273 
 
 process of the suns. And Broad Church is one of the issues 
 of this widening process ; and with greater breadth of vision 
 comes the perception that something is, from his own stand- 
 point, to be said for GalUo after all. 
 
 An old Dissenting minister, simple, grave, sincere, whose 
 good name for simple piety is still cherished in Wellingborough, 
 made even his Independent congregation stare a little, when, at 
 the commencement of his pastorate there, he prayed that " our 
 rulers may be like GalUo, caring for none of these things." 
 The aspiration was that of a consistent adversary of the union 
 of Church and State ; but there was an " independent " origi- 
 nality about the manner of it that might naturally make lifelong 
 " independents " and confirmed congregationalists wonder what 
 might come next. But the day was not to be very far off when 
 a Frederick Robertson at Brighton would commend from the 
 pulpit as " exceedingly wise " the conduct of Gallio in caring 
 for none of these things. " He took no notice. He would 
 not see." The preacher admits that the affair of the beating 
 of Sosthenes was doubtless illegal and tumultuous, '* a kind of 
 contempt of court — a great offence in Roman law." But what 
 ensures his approval of Gallio is, that the proconsul preferred 
 permitting a wholesome outburst of healthy indignation, to 
 carrying out the law, — knowing, as the deputy did, that in that 
 popular riot human nature was throwing off an incubus ; it was 
 a kind of irregular justice, excusable because of its provocation. 
 " And so Gallio would not see. He covered the transaction in 
 a wise and wilful blindness." 
 
 Coleridge \vas regarding him from the conventional, if also 
 from a correct, point of view, when he observed incidentally, in 
 the Aids to Reflection, " Many there be of Gallio's temper, who 
 ' care for none of these things,' and who account all questions 
 in religion, as he did, but matter of words and names." Renan 
 remarks that the total absence of religious and philosophical 
 proselytism among the Romans of this epoch made them regard 
 devotion to truth as a chimaera : such discussions annoyed 
 them, and appeared to them devoid of meaning ; all their dis- 
 pleasure fell upon those who asked them to inflict punishment 
 
 iS 
 
274 GALLIO'S POLICY. 
 
 for what to them seemed vain subtleties. " Until the fall of 
 Jerusalem, the rule which the Romans adopted in administra- 
 tion, was to remain completely indifferent to these sectarian 
 quarrels." Tros Tyriusve they were for treating nullo discrimine. 
 We might apply the spirit, if not quite the letter, of a couplet 
 in one of Dryden's dramatic prologues : 
 
 "Jove was alike to Latian and to Phrygian ; 
 And you well know, a play's of no religion," — 
 
 (upon which last clause, may be. Dean Close would put an 
 assenting construction, all his own). Gibbon writes that the 
 innocence of the first Christians was protected by ignorance 
 and contempt, the tribunal of the Pagan magistrate often proving 
 their most assured refuge against the fury of the synagogue. 
 In the case of Paul of Samosata the same historian observes : 
 "As a Pagan and as a soldier, it could scarcely be expected 
 that Aurelian should enter into the discussion, whether the 
 sentiments of Paul or those of his adversaries were most agree- 
 able to the standard of the orthodox faith," though the emperor's 
 decision has the praise of being founded on the general prin- 
 ciples of equity and reason. Again, Gibbon describes Con- 
 stantine, in a.d. 324, as being " yet ignorant of the difficulty 
 of appeasing the quarrels of theologians," and accordingly 
 addressing to Alexander and to Arius a moderating epistle, in 
 which he attributed the origin of the whole controversy to a 
 trifling and subtle question concerning an incomprehensible 
 point of the law, and [lamented that the Christian people, who 
 had the same God, the same religion, and the same worship, 
 should be divided by such inconsiderable distinctions. Con- 
 stantine turned over a new leaf anon, and came to regard the 
 support of the orthodox faith as the most sacred and important 
 duty of the civil magistrate \ and we have to turn over many 
 leaves in the history of the empire's decline and fall, without 
 often coming upon an emperor of the type of Michael the 
 Stammerer (a.d. 821), who treated image-worship with such 
 contemptuous impartiality, declaring that he knew nothing of 
 these ecclesiastical quarrels, and that he would maintain the 
 
THE NICKNAME OF GALLIO. 275 
 
 laws and enforce an equal toleration. Caviare to the general 
 was doctrine, and practice, such as this. The general are apt 
 to regard such rulers much as Rufus Lyon's housekeeper re- 
 garded that fine gentleman, whose " air of worldly exaltation 
 unconnected with chapel," was painfully suggestive to Lyddy 
 of Herod, Pontius Pilate, or the " much-quoted Gallio." And 
 if from George Eliot we are off at a tangent to Sir Walter Scott, 
 it is for the sake of his reference to the Covenanters' distrust of 
 Henry Morton, whose prudence they termed a trusting in the 
 arm of flesh, and whose avowed tolerance for those of religious 
 sentiments and observances different from his own, " obtained 
 for him the nickname of Gallio," as caring for none of these 
 things. The age of the Covenanters might be one in which 
 there was a rising school of rational theology, and in which 
 latitudinarianism was of active force as well as passive weight ; 
 but the accepted and approved feeling towards Gallio was that 
 indicated by Robert South, when in one of his sermons he 
 took that " much-quoted " man for an exact type of " that 
 temper of mind, that indifference in things spiritual," which is 
 begotten in the minds of its worldly-wise followers by " policy, 
 the great idol of a carnal reason," insensibly working the soul 
 to "a despisal of religion." Few things can better mark the 
 distinction with a difference between the theological tone of 
 the seventeenth century and of the nineteenth, than the style 
 in which Gallio is discussed, in either age, by the leaders of 
 opinion. From the pages of one potent Review alone, in our 
 own day, might be culled, at frequent intervals, repeated notices 
 of GalHo, always more or less commendator}^ or sympathetic. 
 These recurrent references betoken the sort of charm that is 
 nowadays felt in the man, or in the subject. At one time he 
 is made the theme of an elaborate essay, with his name for the 
 title of it, — the writer deeming it strange that, in this time of 
 civil and religious liberty, " nobody should have a good word 
 for Gallio," whose hard lot has been to be set forth as a type 
 of carelessness and scepticism, to be scouted by name as a 
 byword of reproach — his sole crime appearing to consist in his 
 having refused to listen to the accusations against the Apostle 
 
276 GALLIO. 
 
 Paul, and having looked on with profound unconcern at a 
 bastinado inflicted upon the chief ruler of the synagogue. The 
 possibility is conceded that a modern magistrate would have 
 felt it his duty to interfere to prevent any and every breach of 
 the peace ; but a beating is not a serious matter among Oriental 
 communities, and when inflicted upon a Jew would be deemed 
 a bagatelle ; and at all events, as far as the Apostle was con- 
 cerned, Gallio " can claim the posthumous credit of having 
 released him from his captors without even waiting to call on 
 him for his defence." His decision was grounded on the prin- 
 ciple of the non-interference of the State in matters of purely 
 religious discipline and controversy, — " Libera chiesa in stato 
 libero," — and such being his decision, it became wholly un- 
 necessary for him to hear the prisoner at all. " We do not 
 even know that the Apostle wished to be heard, but in any case 
 Gallio did nothing beyond what the strictest and most orthodox 
 Bow Street magistrate of the nineteenth century would have 
 done." The sole point, it is urged, to be plausibly alleged 
 against his character seems to be his appearing not to have 
 been converted to Christianity before the Apostle opened his 
 mouth to convert him, while the opportunities of religious in- 
 vestigation which he enjoyed were not extensive ; whence -the 
 plea in his behalf, that, provided he discharged with propriety 
 the only secular duty he was called on to perform, he does not 
 merit the opprobrium of being a careless thinker, any more 
 than that of being an unjust judge. — At another time, another 
 apologist for Gallio in the same Review is less thoroughgoing, 
 and affirms his real fault to have been a gross breach of his 
 duty as a magistrate ; inasmuch as a shameful disturbance and 
 assault happened in court before his own eyes, and he did not 
 do his duty in putting it down. At another, it is submitted 
 that even supposing the point at issue between St. Paul and the 
 Jews to have been " a petty sectarian squabble," the particular 
 matter which Gallio cared not to take cognizance of was the 
 public beating of the Jewish Rabbi before the judgment-seat. 
 At another, the reviewer of some Chinese correspondence on 
 the rights and claims of missionaries, spoke of diplomatists as 
 
GALLIO. 277 
 
 seldom required to discuss the supposed conflict of spiritual 
 and temporal duties, and of our Foreign Secretary as habitually 
 emulating the statesmanUke neutrality of Gallio, whose " deter- 
 mination to confine himself to his proper functions has been 
 persistently misunderstood for eighteen centuries." Arguing 
 that the charge against the deputy, of indifference to religious 
 truth, must be considered as not proven, his ablest advocate 
 further contends that the charge is singularly inconsistent in 
 the mouths of those who prefer it against him ; it being illogical 
 in ecclesiastical commentators to upbraid the Executive of the 
 Roman Empire at one time for interfering, and at another for 
 not interfering, in the early controversy between Christianity 
 and its assailants. " One of two things is obvious — either that 
 the Imperial Government was lax or not lax upon subjects of 
 Pagan orthodoxy ; but it is idle to accuse its agents simul- 
 taneously of scepticism and of tyranny." In point of fact, the 
 line drawn by Gallio between what was and what was not a 
 matter for State inquir}% is shown to have been conformable to 
 the principles of Imperial Rome, which could not afford, with 
 her enormous frontier and her system of outlying province, to 
 be anything else but tolerant. And we are reminded that if 
 Gallio had chosen to investigate the Apostle's orthodoxy, he 
 would have had to investigate it not merely from a Jewish point 
 of view, but so as to decide whether his opinions were con- 
 sistent or not with allegiance to the Roman Emperor : Gallio's 
 "abstinence from unnecessary inquisitiveness was therefore 
 rather a political virtue than a theological vice." Dean Stanley, 
 indeed, goes so far as to take Gallio for his model statesman, 
 on the ground that, however often and vehemently reviled 
 as a careless libertine, he showed the true judicial attitude 
 towards petty sectarian squabbles of which he could take no 
 cognizance. 
 
1-]% NEVER TO MEET AGAIN. 
 
 XXXII. 
 
 A LAST PARTING. 
 Acts xx. 36 — 38. 
 ROM Miletus, bound for Jerusalem, St. Paul sent to 
 
 F 
 
 Ephesus, and called the elders of the church. He 
 was to take leave of them there and then, and it was to be 
 a last parting. He told them how well he knew that not one 
 of them all, among whom he had gone preaching the kingdom 
 of God, should see his face again. Bound for Jerusalem, he 
 knew not what should befall him there, beyond the bonds and 
 afflictions that assuredly awaited him. But this one thing he 
 did know, and he would have his friends from Ephesus know 
 it equally well, that they, all of them, should see his face no 
 more. And when he had spoken to them all his farewell 
 charge, given them his last counsel, warning, comfort, — he 
 kneeled down and prayed with them all. And they all wept 
 sore, and fell on Paul's neck, and kissed him, — sorrowing most 
 of all for the words which he spake, that they should see his 
 face no more. 
 
 And was not he too moved ? There is emotion instinct in 
 every sentence of his farewell words. The Apostle was also a 
 man, a man of like passions with themselves, with a heart none 
 the less warm that it was the great heart of so great a man. 
 The record of the parting is told with touches of nature that 
 make the whole world of readers kin. This Jew of Tarsus 
 was one of ourselves in the ties of human affection, in the 
 bonds of our common humanity. Except these bonds ? Nay, 
 there was no such exception here. He would be both almost, 
 and altogether, such as we are, not excepting these bonds. 
 
 Hath not a Jew eyes? — eyes to fill at the prompting of 
 emotion, to shed tears as copious as those of any Ephesian 
 elder that fell on his neck, and kissed him, before accom- 
 panying him to the ship. Hath not a Jew hands ? hands to 
 grasp, and press, and hold fast those of his fellows, Jewish or 
 Christian or both. Hath not a Jew organs, dimensions, senses, 
 
LAST PARTINGS. 
 
 279 
 
 affections, passions, in common with his kind? If you prick 
 him, does he not bleed ? Cut him to the heart with the pangs 
 of a last parting, and it is with a bleeding heart he will feel the 
 bitter-sweets of that final embrace, that sore weeping, those 
 farewell kisses. In all their affliction he is afflicted, and for 
 this the sorrowing most of all holds good on either side, that 
 they shall see one another's faces no more. 
 
 From Scripture to Shakspeare, the transit is often easy ; an 
 ease that may come of second nature. And seldom is Shak- 
 speare more severely yet serenely dignified in his pathos than 
 in the words of Brutus on the eve of PhiHppi : 
 
 " And whether we shall meet again, I know not ; 
 Therefore our everlasting farewell take : — 
 For ever, and for ever, farewell, Cassius ! 
 If we do meet again, why we shall smile ; 
 If not, why then this parting was well made. 
 Cassius. For ever, and for ever, farewell, Brutus ! 
 If we do meet again, we'll smile indeed ; 
 If not, 'tis true, this parting was well made." 
 
 After that noble valediction, it is a clear descent to the other- 
 wise not ignoble valediction of Addison's Cato : 
 
 " Once more farewell ! 
 If we e'er meet hereafter, we shall meet 
 In happier climes, and on a safer shore, 
 Where Caesar never shall approach us more. " 
 
 But neither in Shakspeare himself were it easy to find a vale- 
 dictory passage on the same high level as that of the two last 
 of the Romans. Else we might cite, as pitched in the same 
 key, or in the minor key to that major one, such passages 
 as Salisbury's, " If we no more meet, till we meet in heaven, 
 Then, joyfully," to " warriors all, adieu ! " — and the leave- 
 taking scene between Bagot, Green, and Bushby (in King 
 Richard IT.)'. "Farewell: if heart's presages be not vain, We 
 three here part, that ne'er shall meet again." "Farewell at once; 
 for once, for all, and ever." " Well, we may meet again." " I 
 fear me, never." Or again Hotspur's leave-taking of his friends 
 before the battle of Shrewsbury, when he bids sound all the 
 lofty instruments of war, " And by that music let us all em- 
 
28o LAST PARTINGS. 
 
 brace : For, heaven to earth, some of us never shall A second 
 time do such a courtesy." Even the fantastic Le Beau might 
 claim a hearing, in his last words to Orlando : 
 
 " Sir, fare you well ; 
 Hereafter, in a better world than this, 
 I shall desire more love and knowledge of you." 
 
 Le Beau may have been a frivolous courtier only, but his 
 words effect a lodgment in the soft corner of one's heart j and 
 one recalls them in reading so simply grave and feeling a 
 passage as that of Dr. Johnson's account of his last parting 
 with that dear old family friend, Catherine Chambers : " I then 
 kissed her. She told me that to part was the greatest pain 
 that she had ever felt, and that she hoped we should meet 
 again in a better place. I expressed, with swelled eyes, and 
 great emotion of tenderness, the same hopes. We kissed and 
 parted. I humbly hope to meet again, and to part no more." 
 
 Varied enough are the instances at which we might glance 
 of one kind or another of last partings, oral or written. At 
 William of Orange throwing his arms around Egmont, and 
 holding him for- a moment in a close embrace : tears fell 
 from the eyes of both, and they parted, never to meet again 
 on earth. At the last interview of Frederick the Great with 
 his mother, which closes at once a chapter and a book of 
 Mr. Carlyle's great history : " ' Adieu, Madam ; Adieu, O 
 Mother ! ' said the King, in royal terms, but with a heart 
 altogether human. ' May God above bless you, my Son ! ' 
 the old Lady would reply; — and the Two had seen one 
 another for the last time ; Mother and Son were to meet no 
 more in this world." At exiled Bolingbroke's written fare- 
 well to Swift : " Adieu, dear friend ; may the kindest influence 
 of heaven be shed upon you. Whether we may ever meet 
 again, that heaven only knows." "In heaven we may, on 
 earth ne'er shall we meet," is the utterance of Marlowe's 
 Edward II. to his adherents. And we recall the query of the 
 Lady of the Lake, 
 
 *' Why else that solemn warning given, 
 * If not on earth, we meet in heaven ' ? " 
 
LAST PARTINGS. 281 
 
 and the Rokeby '' Adieu for evermore, my love ! and adieu for 
 evermore ; " — and the strain of Ruggiero in Sir Henry Taylor's 
 Sicilian Summer: 
 
 " My eyes shall never more behold your face 
 Till, looking through the grave and gate of death, 
 I see it glorified, and like to His 
 Who raised it." 
 
 And we recall Jean Paul's Firmian holding fast the form of 
 his departing friend, \vith the entreaty, " We ^vill look at one 
 another only once more ; " and they bent back, with their faces 
 channelled by sorrow, and looked at one another for the last 
 time, as the night-wind, like the arm of a stream, mingled with 
 the deep river, and both, united, murmured in larger billows, 
 and as the mde mountains of creation trembled beneath the 
 dim radiance of tearful eyes. But this is becoming too Richter- 
 esque. So we glance aside at Thackeray's Virginians, one of 
 whom tells how the "truest of friends and fondest of brothers 
 accompanied me to my boat, which lay waiting at the river-side. 
 We exchanged an embrace at parting, and his hand held mine 
 yet for a moment ere I stepped into the barge which bore me 
 rapidly down the stream. ' Shall I see thee once more, dearest 
 and best companion of my youth ? ' I thought. . . . He stood 
 on the shore till his figure grew dim before me. There was 
 that in my eyes which prevented my seeing him longer." May 
 it not, must it not, have been so too with those elders from 
 Ephesus who sorrowed most of all for the words of a last 
 parting that Paul had spoken, and who accompanied him 
 unto the ship? 
 
 Glancing hither and thither, in directions historical and 
 unhistorical, illustrious and obscure, classical and romantic, 
 we see Atticus and Cicero taking leave of each other at 
 Tusculum, with " all possible marks of the most sincere and 
 tender affections," and with saddening previsions of a darken- 
 ing, sundering future. We see Lord Karnes in the act, as 
 his end drew near, of taking a public farewell of his brethren 
 of the bench, and we hear that able and philosophic but 
 
282 LAST PARTINGS. 
 
 eccentric judge use for the occasion the pet phrase which, as 
 one apologist candidly allows, " is only legitimately applicable 
 to the female of the canine species ; " for Dr. Robert Chambers 
 was informed by an ear-and-eye witness, who was certain that 
 he could not be mistaken, that after addressing his fellow lords 
 of session in a solemn and affecting speech, and shaking their 
 hands all round, in going out at the door of the court-room he 
 turned about, and casting on them a last look, cried, in his 
 usual familiar tone — "Fare ye a' weel, ye" plural feminine 
 of dogs. He died eight days later. — Then again we turn to 
 that parting of Napoleon with the aged King of Saxony in 
 1813, which Alison describes as "a noble and touching inter- 
 view worthy of dramatic representation in future times." Or 
 to that final embrace of Napoleon and Murat, in the same 
 year, when the Emperor was possessed by a melancholy pre- 
 sentiment, and a true one, that he should never see his too 
 brilliant kinsman again. Or to ' his embracing the Empress 
 and his son for the last time, in the opening month of the 
 following year, when he set out for the army, — with little 
 right, and perhaps as little inclination, to adopt the style of 
 Braganza, in making a like exit : 
 
 * ' Now to our stations. Yet, ere we depart, 
 This honest pledge, the soldier's short embrace : 
 The sweet remembrance, if we fall for freedom, 
 Will more than soften half the pains of dying ; 
 But if we meet, in stronger clasps renew'd, 
 Will double all the joys of victory." 
 
 Whither or whence away again to John Howard's farewell 
 interviews with his chosen friends — the last words spoken 
 by him on several of which occasions have been religiously 
 observed ; as, for instance, to one friend : " I am persuaded 
 that I shall not return and be permitted to lay my bones in 
 my native land ; " — to another, " You will probably never see 
 me again ; but, be that as it may, it is not matter of serious 
 concern to me whether I lay down my life in Turkey, in 
 Egypt, in Asia Minor, or elsewhere ; " — to another, " We shall 
 soon meet again in heaven," — and then, after a pause, " The 
 
LAST PARTINGS. 283 
 
 way to heaven is as near from Grand Cairo as from London." 
 Or we glance at the farewell mention in Chalmers' diary of 
 his final parting with Edward Irving : " We parted from each 
 other ^^ath great cordiality, after a prayer which he himself 
 offered with great pathos and piety" — on that October 
 morning in 1830 when, as Irving's biographer words it, the 
 two made everlasting farewells, so far as this world was con- 
 cerned, and parted in life, spirit, and career, each retaining a 
 longing love for the other. 
 
 ' * We in another world shall meet again ; 
 For our long friendship, this a brief fare well, " 
 
 is Lionel's leave-taking of dying Talbot in '^Q\i^^x'% Jungfrau 
 von Orleans. We might collate \vith it an utterance of the 
 Marquis in Don Carlos ; the injunction against over-grief is 
 Pauline in tone : 
 
 * ' Promise me, not by unavailing sorrow, 
 Unworthy of great souls, to aggravate 
 The pangs of parting. I am lost to thee, 
 Carlos, for many years — fools say, for ever." 
 
 In which remonstrant tone, so far as it pleads for self-restraint 
 and deprecates self-indulgence in sorrow, Schiller's model 
 statesman comes much nearer to the parting apostle, in pre- 
 cept and in protest, than does the gushing veteran in Rowe's 
 tragedy : 
 
 *' I'm summon 'd hence ; ere this, my friends expect me. 
 There is, I know not what of sad presage, 
 That tells me, I shall never see thee more ; 
 If it be so, this is our last farewell, 
 And these the parting pangs which nature feels 
 When anguish rends the heartstrings. ..." 
 
284 '^00 MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 XXXIII. 
 
 A PLEA FOR THE WEAKLY. 
 Romans xv. i ; i Thessalonians v. 14. 
 
 IT is, upon apostolic authority, the duty of the strong to 
 bear the infirmities of the weak. And in another epistle, 
 the brethren are exhorted to " comfort the feeble-minded " and 
 to " support the weak." Whatever the special drift of either 
 passage may have been, there is obviously in the general 
 spirit of both of them a plea for the weakly. And we may 
 be allowed to take the spirit of them as opposed to what 
 once threatened to become the predominant tone of, so- 
 called, Muscular Christianity, — in that phase of it, at least, 
 which developed muscle at the expense of Christianity, and 
 so may be said to have made more of the gift than of the 
 altar which sanctifieth the gift — to have made more of the 
 gold than of the temple which sanctifieth the gold. In pride 
 of muscle there were certain Christians who seemed to wax 
 so strong, that they could not bear, could not put up with^ 
 the infirmities of the weak. And instead of supporting the 
 weak, they seemed incHned to suppress them. Instead of 
 comforting the feeble, they seemed disposed to make away 
 with them altogether. 
 
 Heathen philosophy, even Plato's own, had taken up this 
 strain long before. It was systematically hard upon the 
 weakly. It anticipated modern theories and practice in such 
 matters as the struggle for existence, survival of the fittest, 
 and happy despatch. In the exercise of the art of medicine, 
 for instance, what was Plato's teaching? It might serve to 
 cure the occasional distempers of men whose constitutions 
 are good; but as to those who have bad constitutions, let 
 them die ; and the sooner the better : such men are unfit for 
 war, for magistracy, for the management of their domestic 
 affairs, for severe study and speculation ; and the best thing 
 that can happen to such wretches is to have done with life 
 at once. Contrasting Bacon's view of the matter with Plato's, 
 
A PLEA FOR THE WEAKLY. 285 
 
 Lord Macaulay observed, that the humane spirit of the English 
 school of wisdom altogether rejected the notion that a valetu- 
 dinarian who took great pleasure in being wheeled along his 
 terrace, who relished his boiled chicken and his weak wine 
 and water, and who enjoyed a hearty laugh over the Queen 
 of Navarre's tales, should be treated as a caput lupi7ium 
 because he could not read the Timseus without a headache. 
 And as Plato had cited the religious legends of Greece to 
 justify his contempt for the more recondite parts of the 
 art of healing, Bacon vindicated the dignity of that art by 
 appealing to the example of Christ, and reminded men that 
 the great Physician of the soul did not disdain to be also 
 the Physician of the body. Ha^vthorne somewhere asserts 
 that most men — nor would he always claim to be one of the 
 exceptions — have a natural indifference, if not an absolutely 
 hostile feeling, towards those whom disease, or weakness, or 
 calamity of any kind, causes to falter and faint, amid the 
 rude jostle of our selfish existence. The education of 
 Christianity, he owned, the sympathy of a like experience, 
 and the example of women, may soften, and possibly sub- 
 vert, this ugly characteristic of the less gentle sex; but it 
 is originally there, and has its analogy in the practice of 
 our brute brethren, who hunt the sick or disabled member 
 of the herd from among them, as an enemy. Mo7't aux 
 faihles ! "Si quelque volatile est endolori parmi ceux d'une 
 basse-cour, les autres le poursuivent a coup de bee, le plument 
 et I'assassinent." Faithful to which code of action, the world 
 at large, says Balzac, in his JEtudes Philosophiques, is lavish of 
 hard words and harsh conduct to the wretched who dare come 
 to spoil the gaiety of its fetes and to cast a gloom over its 
 pleasures : whoever is a sufferer in mind or body, or is 
 destitute of money and of power, is to it a pariah. " Ainsi le 
 monde honore-t-il le malheur : il le tue ou le chasse, I'avilit 
 ou le chatie." Is there not Spartan precedent for such sharp 
 practice? The weakly or deformed child of a Spartan was 
 thrown by order into the cavern called apothetcc, — in the 
 belief that its life could be of no advantage either to itself 
 
286 THE ROBUST AND THE AILING. 
 
 or to the State. The worst of charity is, complains Emerson, 
 that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth pre- 
 serving. 
 
 " History can tell of early ages dim, 
 
 When man's chief glory was in strength of limb ; 
 
 Then the best patriot gave the hardest knocks, 
 
 The height of virtue was to fell an ox : 
 
 111 fared the babe of questionable mould, 
 
 Whom its stern father happen'd to behold j 
 
 In vain the mother with her ample vest 
 
 Hid the poor nursling on her throbbing breast ; 
 
 No tears could save him from the kitten's fate, 
 
 To live an insult to the warlike state." 
 
 In the great school of the world it is as in those others of which 
 Cowper wrote in his Tirocinium : 
 
 "The rude will scuffle through with ease enough, 
 Great schools suit best the sturdy and the rough. " * 
 
 A disposition to despise weakness, observed the late Mr. 
 Fonblanque, seems to be a law of nature, which humanity 
 prevails against with effort, by urging the sympathies, and 
 stimulating them by the imagination. Poor Boswell again 
 and again \ makes piteous record of Johnson's unimaginative 
 contempt for the sufferings of frailer constitutions; and he 
 philosophizes on the fact that, in full health, men can scarcely 
 believe their ailing neighbours suffer much, "so faint is the 
 image of pain upon our imagination," and so difficult is it to make 
 allowance for sensations in others which we ourselves have not 
 at the time. Thus, in May 1763, when Boswell shivered in 
 the night air on the Thames as they returned together from 
 Greenwich, "Johnson, whose robust frame was not in the 
 least affected by the cold, scolded me, as if my shivering had 
 been a paltry effeminacy, saying, 'Why do you shiver ?'"t 
 
 * " Rassemblez-vous des enfants dans un college ? Cette image en 
 raccourci de la societe, mais image d'autant plus vraie qu'elle est plus 
 naive et plus franche, vous offre toujours de pauvres ilotes, creatures de 
 souffrance et de douleur, incessamment placees entre le mdpris et la 
 pitie : I'j^vangile leur promet le ciel." — Le Peau de Chagrin, § iii. 
 
 \ When Perthes was engaged at Bohme's book-warehouse in Leipzig, 
 the first winter left his feet frost-bitten. Bohme himself had never been ill 
 
A PLEA FOR THE WEAKLY. 287 
 
 "At your age, sir, I had no headache," snapped the Doctor 
 at Sir William Scott once, when the future Lord Stowell 
 ventured to complain of one. 
 
 With equal point and tenderness Madame de Sevigne writes, 
 '' II faut aimer ses amis avec leurs defauts ; e'en est un grand 
 que d'etre malade." When poor Fanny Burney fell ill at Court, 
 and got no sympathy on that score, but sour looks rather, and 
 chilly words, she wrote in her Diary : " Illness here, till of late, 
 has been so unknown, that it is commonly supposed it must 
 be wilful, and therefore meets little notice, till accompanied 
 by danger, or incapacity of duty. This is by no means from 
 hardness of heart — far otherwise ; . . . but it is prejudice and 
 want of personal experience." It is when the nerves are some- 
 what weakened that the senses of sympathy become more 
 keen; for, as a distinguished essayist on the subject of ill- 
 health remarks, that impetuous and reckless buoyancy of spirit 
 which mostly accompanies a hardy and iron frame, is not made 
 to enter into the infirmities of others. How can it sympathize 
 with what it has never known ? he asks. We seldom find men 
 of great animal health and power possessed of much delicacy of 
 mind ; their humanity and kindness proceed from an overflow 
 of spirits — their more genial virtues are often but skin-deep, 
 and the result of good-humour. Mrs. Gore's Hardynge was so 
 happy in himself, that he was not to be tamed into serenity : 
 the stirring, prosperous activity of the world he lived in seemed 
 to allow no leisure for people to fall sick, and die, and be 
 buried. Time enough when they grew old and gray and useless. 
 For shattered nerves, these boisterous demonstrations of his 
 were sadly too much. " Indisposition he could not compre- 
 
 in his life, and scorned the indulgence of a stove, for he could keep himself 
 comfortably warm by dint of stamping his feet and rubbing his hands. He 
 saw young Frederick's distress, but took no notice of it till the lad could no 
 longer stand upon his feet, and a surgeon had to be called in, who at once 
 declared that the lapse of another day would have meant amputation. Now 
 Bohme, for his part, had no notion of such weakling ways, and small 
 patience with them. But, 
 
 " When men in health against physicians rail, 
 They should consider that their nenres may fail." 
 
THE ROBUST AND THE AILING. 
 
 hend." Lord Beaconsfield tells us of Count Mirabel; "he had 
 never been ill in his life, even for five minutes." Squire 
 Western's notion of helping on a sick friend was by bouncing 
 into his room with a view-halloo, and boisterously greeting him 
 in stentorian tones,* whether he found him asleep or awake. 
 Like one of Richardson's characters, '"Tis a shocking creature, 
 and enjoys too strong health to know how to pity the sick." 
 There is a stalwart country rector of Anne Bronte's painting, 
 who, being a great despiser of tea and such slops, and a lover 
 of malt liquors, bacon and eggs, ham, hung beef, and other 
 strong meats, which agreed well enough with his digestive 
 organs, maintained them to be good and wholesome for every- 
 body without exception, and confidently recommended them 
 to the most delicate convalescents or dyspeptics, who, if they 
 failed to derive the promised benefit from his prescriptions, 
 were told it was because they had not persevered, and if they 
 complained of inconvenient results from the experiment, were 
 assured it was all fancy. Even thus did Cato the elder write 
 an essay on medical treatment for the use of his family : his 
 own iron constitution bade defiance alike to physician and 
 quack; but, as Plutarch drily remarks, both Cato's wife and 
 their only son died at an untimely age. Stoical and muscular 
 Christian as Samuel Johnson was, and, like Cato Censor, 
 impatient of weakly folk and their ways, he was not, like Cato, 
 proof against dumps. Macaulay writes of him, " Though his 
 own health was not good, he detested and despised valetudi- 
 narians." He lacked the imagination that can make allow- 
 ances. Miss Yonge's Theodora, in Heartsease, is an almost 
 "awful example" of such an embodiment in the feminine 
 
 * A critical dissertator on Voices refers to certain men who do a good 
 deal by a hearty, jovial, fox-hunting kind of voice, eloquent of a large volume 
 of vitality and physical health ; and declares this to be a good property 
 for a medical man, as it gives the sick a certain fillip, and reminds them 
 pleasantly of health and vigour — provided it is not overpowering. But it 
 is agreed that a voice of this kind has a tendency to become insolent in its 
 assertion of vigour, swaggering and boisterous ; and then it is too much 
 for invalided nerves, just as mountain winds or sea breezes would be too 
 much. 
 
A PLEA FOR THE WEAKLY. 289 
 
 gender : Violet's weakly health she " could neither understand 
 nor tolerate" — and she took all unclassified ailments as fine-lady 
 nonsense. For a weak man to sympathize with weakness, is 
 easy, said John Sterling, as for a strong man to sympathize 
 with strength ; but it is hard for the weak to sympathize \nth 
 the strong, and far harder for the strong to sympathize with 
 the weak. Mr. Stuart Mill reckoned it as one of the dis- 
 advantages of Jeremy Bentham, that from his childhood to his 
 old age he had never had a day's serious illness : his unbroken 
 health helped to incapacitate him for sympathy with his 
 fellows, and weakened his powers of insight into other minds. 
 The remark has been taken to suggest that a certain degree 
 of functional derangement is not so unmitigated an e\'il as we 
 are apt to consider it. Not that it would be easy to define 
 the limits within \thich so equivocal an advantage is really 
 desirable; but, say, "a slight touch of liver complaint, a liability 
 to disease of the lungs, or a constitutional tendency to disease 
 of the heart, may perhaps lend a certain charm to the character," 
 and, at any rate, tone do\\Ti the exuberant spirits which are apt 
 to disgust us in perfectly healthy men. We recall Churchill's 
 lines, and line of thought, — 
 
 " The surest road to health, say what they will, 
 Is never to suppose we shall be ill. . . . 
 If Rupert after ten is out of bed, 
 The fool next morning can't hold up his head ; 
 What reason this which me to bed must call. 
 Whose head, thank Heaven, never aches at all ? * 
 
 ***** 
 The gods, — a kindness I with thanks must pay, — 
 Have form'd rne of a coarser kind of clay." 
 
 * Richardson's Honourable Miss Byron has heard her grandpapa say, 
 that men of strong health, and of a jovial turn, ought, for mere compassion's 
 sake, never to keep company with men of feeble constitution, and make 
 them the companions of their excess. In his Confessions of a Drunkard, 
 Elia avowed a belief in the existence of constitutions, robust heads and 
 iron insides, whom scarcely any excesses can hurt, and on whom his warning 
 voice would be wasted : they would but laugh at a weak brother, who 
 trying his strength with them, and coming off foiled in the contest, would 
 fain persuade them that such agonistic exercises are dangerous. 
 
 19 
 
290 THE STRONG INTOLERANT OF THE WEAK. 
 
 Reflecting on the fact that by the constitution of society the 
 bold, the vigorous, and the buoyant rise and rule, and that 
 the weak, the shrinking, and the timid fall and serve, Mr. 
 Walter Bagehot deems it idle to expect that this will not 
 give great pain, and that the rough and strong will not often 
 consciously inflict grievous oppression — will not, still more 
 often, without knowing it, cause to more tremulous minds a 
 refined suffering which their coarser texture could never expe- 
 rience, which it does not sympathize with, nor comprehend. 
 We may say with the poet, though not as he meant it, 
 
 ** The law of the one is still to absorb : 
 To be absorb'd is the other's lot : — 
 The lesser orb by the larger orb, 
 
 The weak by the strong . . . why not ?" 
 
 When the young man called John disposed of a deformed 
 acquaintance by the curt verdict, " A fellah's no business to 
 be so crooked," — " Yes," said the Professor at the Breakfast- 
 table, thoughtfully, " the strong hate the weak. It's all right. 
 The arrangement has reference to the race, and not to the 
 individual. Infirmity must be kicked out, or the stock run 
 down. Wholesale moral arrangements are so different from 
 retail ! — I understand the instinct, my friend, — it is cosmic, — it 
 is planetary, — it is a conservative principle in creation." But the 
 Professor's irony was thrown away upon the young fellow, whose 
 face gradually lost its expression as he listened, until it became 
 as blank of vivid significance as the countenance of a ginger- 
 bread rabbit with two currants in the place of eyes. 
 " But what, said I, still laughing at the view, 
 Have these weak creatures in the world to do ? " * 
 
 A cruel query; for if, as Shakspeare's Isabella urges, it is 
 excellent to have a giant's strength, still it is tyrannous to use 
 it like a giant, and to take no account of dwarfs. A humaner 
 query is that of the laureate's plain John, who walks to meet 
 the mail : 
 
 * ' What know we of the secret of a man ? 
 His nerves are wrong. What ails us, who are sound, 
 
 * Crabbe, The Widow's Tale. 
 
EXASPERA TINGL V ROBUST. 291 
 
 That we should mimic this raw fool the world, 
 
 Which charts us all in its coarse blacks or whites, 
 
 As ruthless as a baby with a worm, 
 
 As cruel as a schoolboy ere he grows 
 
 To Pity — more from ignorance than will." 
 
 That is a pregnant line of Pope's, in which he speaks of men 
 "in all the madness of superfluous health." So Cowper is con- 
 stitutiQnally and legitimately impatient of men 
 
 ** With mouths made only to grin wide and eat, 
 And minds that deem derided pain a treat. 
 With limbs of British oak, and nerves of wire," etc. 
 
 Theodore Hook somewhere avows his inability to endure a 
 man who is always boisterously mirthful, with a self-satisfied 
 grin stereotyped on his face, and a trombone voice of self- 
 gratulation perpetually sounding in one's ear ; men whorn 
 nothing can move to tenderness or pity, and who live confident 
 in their prescriptive immunity from broken health and spirits. 
 As to Cowi:)er, he had another species of this genus to deal 
 with, in the stalwart person of John Newton, whose robust 
 frame could bear a severity of discipline that to Cowper, so 
 fragile, sensitive, and morbidly susceptible, was all but fatal. 
 Not of John Newton'^s physique (nor of his sound divinity) was 
 the poet thinking when he penned the stanza, 
 
 " O why were farmers made so coarse. 
 Or clergy made so fine ? 
 A kick that scarce would move a horse, 
 May kill a sound divine." 
 
 There was not much about Newton of that Doctor Amboyne 
 who, recognizing the abnormal sensibility of a patient, tells an 
 inquiring friend, ." Tough folk, like you and me, must begin 
 by putting ourselves in his place before we prescribe for him, 
 otherwise our harsh hands may crush a too tender flower." 
 And in this respect might be bracketed mth . Mr. Charles 
 Reade's sympathetic physician the Dr. Kittredge of Elsie 
 Venner, who knew so well what a nervous woman is, and how 
 to manage her : " He could tell at a glance when she is in 
 that condition of unstable equilibrium in which a rough word 
 
292 THE BIGOTRY OF ROBUSTNESS. 
 
 is like a blow to her, and the touch of unmagnetized fingers 
 reverses all her nervous currents." Byron's friend, Charles 
 Skinner Matthews, was fain to own in one of his letters, " I 
 found my shivering and invalid frame so perpetually annoyed 
 by the thoughtless and tumultuous health of every one about 
 me, that I heartily wished every soul in the house to be as ill 
 as myself." Matthews is known in literature as the author of 
 a very readable book, the Diary of an Invalid. And invalids 
 are the subject of an essay by one of our best essay-writers, 
 who dilates on the social wrongs to which they are exceptionally 
 exposed ; for, whereas there are certain conventional forms of 
 illness which are privileged, — a broken hmb, or any bodily 
 wound that is visible to the eye, or any such disorder as 
 rheumatism or gout that requires sharp treatment, — on the 
 other hand, the merely though thoroughly ailing man who has 
 nothing very definite to show, is denied any such privilege, 
 either in kind or even degree. "Any ailment which forces 
 you to keep your bed, is presumed to be genuine ; and very 
 tolerant persons believe in the existence of consumption. But 
 this is the limit beyond which toleration is not allowed to go. 
 In every kind of ill-health which is not expressed by some 
 term well known to the popular vocabulary, society — or at 
 least the robust portion of it — utterly refuses to believe. No 
 man in good health will listen to the suggestion that there can 
 be delicacy without illness, weakness and depression of nerves 
 without absolute disease, and a necessity for care even in the 
 absence of fatal symptoms." And the writer goes on to assert 
 that there is no bigotry in existence so complacent, so absolutely 
 self-satisfied, as the bigotry of robustness, — looking as it does 
 on the professing invalid either as a hypocrite of the basest 
 sort, or else as the victim of a strange delusion, which it is the 
 mission of the robust person to dispel, by gentle remonstrance, 
 if possible, or, if that be unavailing, by taunts, importunities, 
 and rough practical jokes. It is allowed to be not unnatural 
 that the robust should regard the invalid with contemptuous 
 unbelief: such a sceptical attitude of mind conveys with it 
 several very consolatory and complacent reflections to the robust 
 
A PLEA FOR THE IVEAKLY. 293 
 
 man himself; for whereas it would be little to gratify in the 
 belief that nature had given him a strong nervous system which 
 she had denied to his friend, it is very pleasant for him to 
 reflect that his superior condition is entirely owing to his own 
 greater energy and firmer wall, and that his friend would be 
 quite as strong "if he would only just try and exert himself 
 a little." 
 
 There is a separately published essay on taking things 
 coolly, which we perhaps owe to the same anonymous, writer, 
 and which demonstrates how ver}^ materially the ability so 
 to take things depends on the physical temperament. Of two 
 men, for instance, one shall be cool and steady — in short, he 
 shall have all his wits about him — the other in a hopeless state 
 of fluster ; yet for the one to rebuke the other would be as 
 shabby as for the pilgrim vv^ith boiled peas to scoff" at the 
 limping gate of his less fortunate companion. '•' The two are 
 unequally matched. It is often a mere affair of the pulse. 
 So many beats more or less make a man a fidgety ne'er-do-weel 
 or a tranquil hero." Of course it is conceded that the mental 
 power and the earnest will are not to be ignored, for they 
 come distinctly into play, and modify or override man's natural 
 tendencies and infirmities ; yet the man who has not naturally 
 a clear head, stolid nerves, and a pulse beating with the do^yo-ed 
 equanimity of a kitchen clock, is heavily weighted for the race 
 of life, and may claim generous consideration from the world 
 at large. "More especially may he claim it from those to 
 whom kind nature has imparted the useful faculty of takino- 
 things coolly^ in cloud or sunshine, in tempest or in calm." 
 Mr. Feeble-mind, in Bunyan, made as if he would lincrer 
 behind, when the other and healthier pilgrims were startin^^ 
 from the house of Gaius : they were all lusty and strono-, he 
 said, when invited to accompany them, and he was weak and 
 would be upset by that which others made nothing of. He 
 felt unequal to keep up with them, and. he dreaded their 
 inability to make allowances for him. For " he that is ready 
 to slip with his feet is as a lamp despised in the thought of 
 him that is at ease." Whereupon Mr. Greatheart, tender and 
 
294 THE UNTEMPTED THAT STAND, 
 
 true, sought to reassure him by the reply, that he, the guide 
 of the pilgrims' progress, had it in commission to comfort the, 
 feeble-minded, and to support the weak. 
 
 XXXIV. 
 
 THE UNTEMPTED THAT STAND, AND THE TEMPTED 
 THA T FALL. 
 
 Galatians vi. I. 
 
 ST. PAUL would have his brethren restore in the spirit of 
 meekness a man overtaken in a fault, each of them, the 
 while, considering himself, lest he also be tempted. 
 
 It is easy, said a heathen poet, to be virtuous when one is 
 not exposed to temptation : Esse bonuni facile est, ubi quod vetet 
 esse remotum est. But no soul is absolutely impeccable ; and, 
 in Frederick Robertson's words, it seems as if all we can dare, 
 to ask even of the holiest is how much temptation he can bear 
 without giving way. 
 
 *' 'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, 
 Another thing to fall ; " 
 
 but the distinction comes with sorry grace from one who fell 
 so low as Angelo. Who, asked Rogers, can say, " In such 
 circumstances I should have done otherwise"? Who, did he 
 but reflect by what slow gradations, often by how many strange 
 concurrences, we are led astray; with how much reluctance, 
 how much agony, how many efforts to escape, how many self- 
 accusations, how many sighs, how many tears, — who, did he 
 but reflect for a moment, would have the heart to cast a stone ? 
 Byron was the subject of his lines beginning, 
 
 " Thou art gone ; 
 And he who would assail, thee in thy grave, 
 Oh, let him pause ! For who among us all, 
 Tried as thou wert — even from thy earliest years, 
 "When wandering, yet unspoilt, a highland-hoy — 
 Tried as thou wert, and with thy soul of flame ; 
 
AND THE TEMPTED THAT FALL. 295 
 
 Pleasure, while yet the dow-n was on thy cheek, 
 Uplifting, pressing, and to lips like thine, 
 Her charmed cup — ah, who among us all 
 Could say he had not erred as much, and more ? " 
 
 To Byron himself once turned Sheridan at a dinner-party, 
 in tears, and said, " It is easy for my Lord G. or Earl G. or 
 Marquis B. or Lord H., with thousands upon thousands a year, 
 to boast of their patriotism and keep aloof from temptation ; 
 but they do not know from what tempation those have l^pt 
 aloof who had equal pride, at least equal talents, and not 
 unequal passions, and nevertheless knew not in the course 
 of. their lives what it was to have a shilling of their own." 
 And Byron, could he ever have forced himself to quote 
 Wordsworth, might for once have used lines of the derided 
 Lake poet's, and have reassured his fellow-guest, so far as he 
 was concerned, by the assurance, 
 
 " I am not of the world's presumptuous judges. 
 Who damn where they can neither see nor feel. 
 With a hard-hearted ignorance." 
 
 Said Johnson once, " You may not have committed such crimes 
 as some men have done ; but you do not know against what 
 degree of light they have sinned." But the Judge who, as 
 Thackeray puts it, sees not the outward acts merely, but their 
 causes, and views not the wrong alone, but the temptations, 
 struggles, ignorance of erring creatures, has, we know, a 
 different code to ours — to ours, who fall upon the fallen, who 
 fawn upon the prosperous so, who administer our praises and 
 punishments so prematurely, who now strike so hard, and, 
 anon, spare so shamelessly. 
 
 " Who made the heart, 'tis He alone decidedly can try us ; 
 
 He knows each chord — its various tone, each spring — its various 
 
 bias : 
 Then at the balance let's be mute, we never can adjust it ; 
 What's done we partly may compute, but know not what's 
 
 resisted." 
 
 Was Lord Nelson, it has been asked, a better or a worse man 
 than a clerk in a London bank who passed his life in a sort 
 
296 THE UNTEMPTED THAT STAND 
 
 of moral torpor, without sufficient energy or temptation to do 
 anything very right or very wrong ? Et combien semblent purs 
 qui ne furent qulieureux ! exclaims Victor Hugo. It is all 
 very easy for a man to talk of conquering his appetites, when 
 he has none to conquer, says Charles Kingsley's first hero. 
 We owe all to Heaven, even our virtues, muses the Vicar in 
 metaphysical William Smith's Grave^ihurst ; and he professes 
 to have always felt a certain timidity in dealing out the 
 requisite censures against men who ha\-e been led into error 
 by hot impetuous temper, who probably thirsted after pleasures 
 and excitements v/hich to him and others were no temptations 
 at all. The Countess Brunella of Dr. Moore's ■ Z^/z/r<? "was 
 chaste, without being virtuous; because in her it proceeded 
 from constitution, not principle. Guarded by the breastplate 
 of frigidity, which, like the aegis of Minerva, repels the shafts of 
 love, she walked through life erect, and steady to the dictates 
 of decorum and self-interest, without a slip or a false step.'' 
 In his Inquiry concerning Virtue, Shaftesbury accepts as the 
 greatest proof imaginable, that a strong principle of virtue lies 
 at the bottom, and has possessed itself of the natural temper, 
 when ill passions or affections are evidently and firmly seated 
 in one part of the temper, whilst in another part the affections 
 towards moral good are such as absolutely to master those 
 attempts of their antagonists : " Whereas, if there be no ill 
 passions stirring, a person may be indeed more cheaply, vir- 
 tuous, . . . without sharing so much of a virtuous principle as 
 another." To apply a couplet of Corneille's Pauline,— 
 
 " Ce n'est qu'en ces assauts qu'eclate la vertu, 
 Et Ton doute d'un coeur qui n'a point combattu." 
 
 Leonard Fairfield m,ay admire as a definition wiser and simpler 
 than any in the most elaborate sermon by Parson Dale, Helen's 
 question and answer, What is the difference between being 
 good and bad ? The good do not yield to temptation, and the 
 bad do. But it is too epigrammatic to be exhaustive. Dn 
 Boyd accounts it fearful to think what malleable material we 
 are in the hands of circumstances : " the graceful vase that 
 
AND THE TEMPTED THAT FALL. 297 
 
 stands in the drawing-room under a glass shade, and never 
 goes to the well, has no great right to despise the rough pitcher 
 that goes often and is broken at last." The image recalls one 
 that follows Frederick Robertson's apostrophe to the proud 
 Pharisee of a woman, who passes by an erring sister with a 
 haughty look of conscious superiority, ignorant, it may be, of 
 what temptation is, with strong feeling and mastering oppor- 
 tunity : " Shall the rich-cut crystal which stands on the table 
 of the wealthy man, protected from dust and injur}-, boast that 
 it has escaped the flaws, and the cracks, and the fractures 
 which the earthen jar has sustain^, exposed and subjected 
 to rough and general uses?" Gibbon is sneering, as usual, 
 when he remarks that the virtue of the primitive Christians, 
 like that of the first Romans, was very frequently guarded by 
 poverty and ignorance. 
 
 How is it, asks Crabbe, that men, when they in judgment 
 sit 
 
 " On the same fault, now censure, now acquit? 
 Is it not thus, that here we view the sin, 
 And there the powerful cause that drew us in ? 
 'Tis not that men are to the evil blind, 
 But that a different object fills the mind. 
 In judging others we can see too well 
 Their grievous fall, but not how grieved they fell ; 
 Judging ourselves, we to our minds recall. 
 Not how we fell, but how we grieved to fall. " 
 
 Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he- fall. 
 There is something applicable in Ovid's line, Etsi non cecidit, 
 potuit cectdisse viderL A commentator on the two Bacons, 
 referring to the spotless descent to posterity of Roger's name, 
 while that of Francis has come down to us darkened Anth more 
 spots than time can efface, deems it hard to say how much 
 difference of position had to do with this difference of moral 
 purity. If Lord Bacon had lived in his study, we might have 
 had nothing but praises for his name. In judging such an 
 Edgar Poe-like German romancer as Ernst Hoffmann, if we 
 are forced to condemn him, let it be without forgetting, pleads 
 
298 THE UNTEMPTED THAT STAND, 
 
 Mr. Carlyle, that for a mind like his, the path of propriety was 
 difficult to find, still more difficult to keep : moody, sensitive, 
 and fantastic, he wandered through the world like a foreign 
 presence, subject to influences of which "common natures 
 have happily no gUmpse." The American romancer, Charles 
 Brockden Brown, modestly referred his abstinence from coarser 
 indulgences to his constitutional infirmities, and consequent 
 disinclination to excess : the benevolence of Nature, he used 
 to say, set him free from many of the temptations which beset 
 others in their hot youth. Had he been furnished with the 
 nerves and muscles of hi^ comrades, his career, he beHeved, 
 might have been the reverse of temperate and intellectual. 
 " Who has assayed no danger, gains no praise," is a sententious 
 line of Prior's. How can the proud Pharisee, as Dr. South 
 words it, that shall reprove a publican in terms of insultation 
 and boasting, tell but what, in the same circumstances and 
 opportunities of sin, he should have done the same " for which, 
 with so much arrogance, he reproves or rather baits another? 
 Was it not the mercy of Providence that cast the scene of 
 his life out of the way of temptation ? that placed the flax and 
 the stubble out of the reach of the fire ? " Prescott pleads for 
 Pizarro that his lot was cast among the licentious inmates of 
 a camp, the school of rapine ; and argues that the amount 
 of crime does not necessarily show the criminality of the 
 agent; and though history is concerned with the former, to 
 be recorded as a warning to mankind, it is He alone who 
 knoweth the heart, the strength of temptation, and the means 
 of resisting it, that can determine the measure of the guilt. 
 
 ** The life of the man — can you tell where it lies? 
 In the effort to sink, or the power to rise ? 
 Can you guess what the thirst is the man quenches thus?" 
 
 As Gordon says to Butler of their great leader, in Schiller's 
 
 Wallensteinstod : 
 
 '* We in our lucky mediocrity 
 
 Have ne'er experienced, cannot calculate, 
 What dangerous wishes such a height may breed 
 In the heart of such a man." 
 
AND THE TEMPTED THAT FALL. 299 
 
 To Macaulay the " moderation of virtue " ascribed to Sir 
 William Temple seemed littleness and meanness when he 
 compared him with many of those frail men who, aiming 
 high, but often drawn from the right path by strong passions 
 and strong temptations, have left to posterity a doubtful and 
 chequered fame. Clive, for instance, who, " like most men 
 born with strong passions and tried by strong temptations," 
 committed great faults. Of Cowper, on the other hand, as 
 the contrasted schoolfellow of Warren Hastings, the historian 
 observes, that having never been compelled to make a choice 
 between innocence and greatness, between crime and ruin, 
 his habits were such that he was unable to conceive how from 
 the path of right even kind and noble natures may be hurried 
 by the rage of conflict and the lust of dominion. 
 
 That which we do being evil, writes Hooker, "is notmth- 
 standing by so much more pardonable, by how much the 
 exigence of so doing, or the difficulty of doing otherwise, is 
 greater," — unless indeed this necessity or difficulty have origi- 
 nally risen from ourselves. To estimate the force by which 
 temptation is overcome, said Sir James Stephen, you must 
 ascertain the force of the propensities to which it is addressed. 
 Robert South describes Him who came to save the lost, as 
 never weighing the sin without weighing also the force of the 
 inducement — how much of it is to be attributed to choice, 
 how much to the violence of the temptation, to the stratagem 
 of the occasion, and the yielding frailties of weak nature. 
 De Foe is extolled by W. C. Roscoe as a great teacher of 
 charity to those who are apt, as we all are, to think of the 
 criminal outcasts of society as of persons removed from the 
 ordinary conditions of humanity, and given up to a reprobate 
 condition totally different from our own : one day we may be 
 surprised to find that, while right and wrong continue to differ 
 infinitely, the various degrees of human sinfulness lie uithin 
 much narrower limits than we, who measure by the external 
 act, are at all accustomed to conceive. Mit deni inigliickliche7i 
 solte der gliicklich nicJit rechteu, says a German dramatist. A 
 deed done, a word spoken, is an act over which we can sit in 
 
300 DECOMPOSITION 
 
 judgment; but how that word came to be spoken, the temp- 
 tation which led to it, the human nature which yielded — there 
 is quite sure, as one of George Eliot's reviewers affirms, to 
 be something in the process with which we can sympathize ; 
 enough for pity and fellow-feeling to mingle with our virtuous 
 indignation, and divest it of some of its harshness. There is 
 a good clerg}'man in one of Mr. Froude's early fictions, to 
 whom e\il, in its abstract form, was so loathsome, and in its 
 concrete so little familiar, that if ever he was obliged to transfer 
 the judgment he had of the general to the particular, it was 
 transferred whole : he could make no allowance ; he k-new not 
 the infinite variety of natures m.en receive at the hands of 
 Providence ; nor had . ever studied the strange laws which 
 govern the moulding of them into characters ; nor had any 
 idea that the same temptation acts as variously on different 
 men, as the same temperature on metals and gases. 
 
 XXXV. 
 
 NATURE'S LAW OF LIFE OUT OF DEATH. 
 I Corinthians xv. 36. 
 
 IN illustrating and enforcing his doctrine of the resurrection 
 of the body, St. Paul meets one hypothetical objector with 
 the trenchant reply, designed to be question and answer in one- 
 — *' Thou fool ! that which thou sowest is not quickened, except 
 it die." 'Acfipov, ctv o cnriipeLf;, ov ^ojoTroietrat eav /xt; d.TroOdi'y}. 
 
 With the Apostle's application of his argument we do not 
 here propose to deal. The illustrative text is simply quoted as 
 a starting-point for a digression on what may be called Nature's 
 law of life out of death— the natural matter of fact, or the 
 matter of fact in nature, that death is made to furnish new life, 
 supplies the materials for it, and as it were actively as well as 
 passively makes way for it. If the indefinite term Nature, 
 thus conventionally used, be cavilled at, the cavil seems hardly 
 
AND RECONSTRUCTION. 301 
 
 serious enough in practical import, however seriously urged 
 and in whatever serious tones, to require explaining, or explain- 
 ing away. And if objectors of another class take exception 
 to the Apostle's argument, and urge that it is not the seed 
 itself that dies — that the vital power of the seed, its germinating- 
 force, must remain, if there is to be any quickening process at 
 all — we are not careful to answer them in this matter. We are 
 concerned only with the applicability of the text to Nature's 
 recognized method of evoUing new forms out of decayed old 
 ones, of bringing reconstruction out of decomposition, reorgani- 
 zation out of dissolution, life out of death. 
 
 We might thus apply to Nature the words of Bildad the 
 Shuhite, and say : Behold, this is the joy of her way, and out 
 of the earth shall others grow. 
 
 " See plastic Nature working to this end, . . . 
 See dying vegetables life sustain, 
 See life dissolving vegetate again : 
 All forms that perish other forms supply, 
 By turns v/e catch the vital breath, and die." 
 
 Thus in the several orders of terrestrial forms, as Shaftesbury 
 words it, ''a resignation is required," a sacrifice and mutual 
 yielding of natures one to another : the vegetables by their 
 death sustain the animals, and animal bodies dissolved enrich 
 the earth, and raise again the vegetable world. " NSS. lives, and 
 by succession still revives. The temporary beings quit their 
 borrowed forms, and yield their elementary' substance to new- 
 comers. . . . New forms arise : and when the old dissolve, the 
 matter whence they were composed is not left useless, but 
 wrought with equal management and art, even in corruption, 
 Nature's seeming waste and vile abhorrence. The abject state 
 appears merely as the way or passage to some better." As 
 Friar Lawrence muses, herb-gathering : 
 
 "The earth, that's Nature's mother, is her tomb ; 
 What is her burying grave, that is her womb. " 
 
 Among the Cruvims Farnfrom King James's Table, and respect- 
 fully picked up and preserved as too good to be lost, by his com- 
 plaisant courtier and alleged victim, Sir Thomas Overbur}-, 
 
302 DECOMPOSITION 
 
 this fragment occurs : " All corruption is nothing but disso- 
 lution, and the last dissolution of everything is into the earth, 
 which shows that from thence we began." His Majesty reasons 
 not like Lucifer in Byron's Cain, when he bids his air-borne 
 pupil, though out of sight of earth, deem not he can escape it : 
 he shall soon return to earth, and all its dust : " 'Tis part of thy 
 eternity, and mine . . . And mightier things have been extinct 
 To make way for much meaner than we can surmise." Dust 
 we are, and to dust we return. It is not wonderful, said Dr. 
 Rowland Williams, that those who accept no clue out of the 
 labyrinth save speculation, and who observe completeness in 
 the round of Nature, become tempted to class man with other 
 animals, in the vast circle of life and decay, in which all things 
 that breathe enjoy their hour, and relapse into that field of 
 death, from which new harvests spring. "Why should the 
 forces which moulded us, not mould out of ou rremains fresh 
 forms of life ? Air to air, dust to dust ; the grass greener with 
 our flesh." The Lucretius of the laureate bids 
 
 "Great Nature, take, and forcing far apart 
 Those blind beginnings that have made me man,. 
 Dash them anew together at her will 
 Through all her cycles — into man once more, 
 Or beast or bird or fish, or opulent flower." 
 
 Heraclitus, we are told, was the first to proclaim the absolute 
 vitality of Nature, the endless change of matter, the mutability 
 and perishability of all individual things, in contrast with the 
 eternal Being, the supreme Harmony which rules over all. 
 He said there was nothing but a perpetual flux of things, that 
 the whole world of phenomena was as a flowing river, ever- 
 changing yet apparently the same. "Another truth I now 
 unfold," said Empedocles : " no natural birth 
 
 " Is there of mortal things, nor death's destruction final ; 
 Nothing is there but a mingUng, and then a separation of the mingled, 
 Which are called a birth and death by ignorant mortals." 
 
 We may be reminded of ScheUing's expression of the accepted 
 idea of life, as depending on the incessant disturbance and re- 
 establishment of an equilibrium ; or again of De Blainville's 
 
IS RECOMPOSITION. 303 
 
 definition of it, as a continual movement of decomposition and 
 recomposition. Two streams circulate through the universe, 
 said Julius Hare, the stream of Life and the stream of Death : 
 each feeds, and feeds upon, the other ; for they are perpetually 
 crossing, like the serpents round Mercury's Caduceus, where- 
 with animas ille evocat Oreo Pallentes, alias sub Tartara tristia 
 iiiittit. Victor Hugo presents the grim aspect of the vext 
 question when he dilates on the fact, that all nature which is 
 under our observation is alternately devouring and devoured : 
 the prey prey on each other. Nor is he over-eager to accept 
 the solution of Bonnet, whose notions may be thus summarized: 
 Universal death necessitates universal sepulture : the devourers 
 are the sextons of the system of nature. All created things 
 enter into and form the elements of other. To decay is to 
 nourish. Such is the terrible law from which not even man 
 himself escapes. So fleeting, as Mr. Carlyle moralizes, is the 
 habitation of man — "his very house of houses, what we call 
 his body, were he the first of geniuses, will evaporate in the 
 strangest manner, and vanish even whither we have said." La 
 fange, ^vrites Lamartine, devient homine et fermente encore : 
 
 " Puis un souffle d'en haut se leve, et toute chose 
 Change, tombe, pent, fuit, meurt, se decompose," — 
 
 as in Emerson's preception of the generation of contraries, of 
 death out of life, and life out of death — " that law by which in 
 nature, decomposition is recomposition, and putrefaction and 
 cholera are only signals of a new creation." In a later work 
 the essayist says of Nature that she turns her capital day by 
 day ; deals never with dead, but ever with quick subjects : all 
 things are flowing, even those that seem immovable : ''~ the 
 
 * The labours of Rouelle, Desmarest, Dolomieu, and Montlosier, made 
 familiar to their countrymen, as Mr. Buckle remarks, the previously strange 
 conception, that the surface of our planet, even where it appears perfectly 
 stable, is constantly undergoing most extensive changes ; that this per- 
 petual flux takes place not only in those parts of nature which are obviously 
 feeble and evanescent, but also in those which seem to possess ever}' element 
 of strength and permanence, such as the mountains of granite which wall 
 the globe, and are the shell and encasement in which it is held. 
 
304 NATURES LA W OF 
 
 adamant is always passing into smoke : the plants burn, that is, 
 exhale and decompose their own bodies into the air and earth 
 again : the animal burns, or undergoes the like perpetual con- 
 sumption : the earth burns, — the mountains burn and decom- 
 pose, — more slowly, but incessantly. To apply the quaint 
 deliverance of a picturesquely disposed philosopher, the New 
 works itself out from under the Old ; and in some instances 
 the Old sits sedulously hatching a cockatrice that will one day 
 devour it. 
 
 Science has shown the great circles* in which Nature works; 
 the manner in which "marine plants balance the marine 
 animals, as the land plants supply the oxygen which the 
 animals consume, and the animals the carbon which the plants 
 absorb." Nature is thus said to work on a method of all for 
 each and each for all : the strain that is made on one point 
 bears on every arch and foundation of the structure ; there is a 
 perfect soHdarity. Shelley sings how the leprous corse touched 
 by a spirit tender, 
 
 ' ' Exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath ; 
 Like incarnations of the stars, when splendour 
 Is changed to fragrance, they illumine death . . . 
 Nought we know dies." 
 
 In a different mood were written the lines of Earth's scornful 
 
 song, 
 
 " As she sung, To my bosom I fold 
 
 All my sons when their knell is knoll'd, 
 
 And so with living motion all are fed, 
 
 And the quick spring like weeds out of the dead." 
 
 In Queen Mab he had, long before, calmly propounded v/hat is 
 but another reading of the argument transferred or transposed 
 from Chaucer by Dryden, only in the elder poet's there is a 
 Personal great First Cause : 
 
 * Lord Lytton somewhere observes how often it had seemed to him that 
 if there be, as ancient philosophers fabled, one certain figure pervading all 
 nature, human and universal, it is the circle. Round, in one vast monotony, 
 one eternal gyration, roll the orbs of space ; and thus moves the spirit of 
 creative life, kindling, advancing, maturing, decaying, perishing, reviving, 
 and rolling again, and so onward for ever through the same course. 
 
LIFE OUT OF DEATH. 305 
 
 " He perfect, stable ; but imperfect we, 
 Subject to change, and different in degree ; 
 Plants, beasts, and man ; and, as our organs are, 
 We more or less of His perfection share. 
 But, by a long descent, the ethereal fire 
 Corrupts ; and forms, the mortal part, expire. 
 As He withdraws His virtue, so they pass. 
 And the same matter makes another mass." 
 
 Thus do the generations of the earth, wrote Shelley, go to the 
 grave, and issue from the womb, surviving still the imperishable 
 change that renovates the world : " even as the leaves Which 
 the keen frost-wind of the waning year Has scattered on the 
 forest soil, and heaped For many seasons there, though long 
 they choke, Loading with loathsome rottenness the land. All 
 germs of promise. 
 
 *' Yet when the tall trees 
 
 From which they fell, shorn of their lovely shapes. 
 
 Lie level with the earth to moulder there. 
 
 They fertilize the land they long deformed, 
 
 Till from the breathing lawn a forest springs 
 
 Of youth, integrity, and loveliness. 
 
 Like that which gave it life, to spring and die." 
 
 So Professor Lowell makes a moral emblem of the oak that 
 profits by the foregone lives of immemorial vegetable races that 
 have worked-over the juices of earth and air into organic 
 life, out of whose dissolution a soil might gather fit to maintain 
 that nobler birth of nature. And so too Washington Irving 
 applied the thought to the mutability of literature ; urging from 
 analogy that as we daily behold the varied and beautiful tribes 
 of vegetable growth springing up, flourishing, adorning the fields 
 for a short time, and then fading into dust, to make way for 
 their successors, in like manner the works of genius and learn- 
 ing decline, and make way for subsequent productions, haply 
 dependent for much organic matter upon them, as they had 
 been on the earlier series. Generation after generation passes 
 away, but the vital principle is transmitted to posterity, and the 
 new find sustenance from the old, the living from the dead. 
 One of Arthur Hugh Clough's miscellaneous poems touches 
 
3o6 NA TURK'S LA W OF 
 
 on a subject which, however absolutely wide of the mark, in 
 itself, is suggestively capable of present application : 
 *' Where processes, with pain, and fear, 
 
 Disgust, and horror wrought, appear 
 
 The quick mutations of a dance, 
 
 Wherein retiring but to advance. 
 
 Life, in brief interpause of death. 
 
 One moment sitting taking breath, 
 
 Forth comes again as glad as e'er, 
 
 In some new figure full as fair, 
 
 Where what has scarcely ceased to be, 
 
 Instinct with newer birth we see." 
 
 A younger poet takes the more cynical side of the main ques- 
 tion, in blurting out such stanzas as these : 
 " We follow the way that nature leads, 
 
 What's the very first thing that we learn ? — To devour. 
 Each life the death of some other needs 
 To help it from hour to hour. 
 
 From the animalcule that swallows his friends. 
 
 Nothing loth, in the wave as it rolls, 
 To man, as we see him, this law ascends." . . . 
 
 That Demades the Athenian should have condemned an 
 '' undertaker," or vendor of funereal appliances, for making a 
 profit by the deaths (the more the merrier) of his fellow-citizens, 
 Montaigne accounted a folly, since no profit whatever can be 
 made but at the expense of another ; and the essayist professed 
 to hold, with natural philosophers, that the birth, nourishment, 
 and increase of any one thing, is the dissolution and corruption 
 of another. Continuo hoc mors est illius quod fuit ante. The 
 world subsists upon alteration, meditates Marcus Antoninus, 
 and what it loses one way, it gets another ; " for generation and 
 corruption are but related terms." "The destruction of one 
 thing is the making of another ; and that which subsists at pre- 
 sent, is as it were the seed of what is to spring from it." Pages 
 might be filled with excerpts to the same effect from widely- 
 sundered sections of the imperial stoic's Meditations. As 
 where, again, he speaks of things rotting in the earth, appa- 
 rently sheer refuse and rubbish, but by the economy of nature 
 reconstituted, transfigured, renovated, reformed. Elsewhere : 
 
LIFE OUT OF DEATH. 
 
 307 
 
 "All things are in a perpetual flux, and a sort of consumption." 
 And again : " The dissolution of forms is no loss in the mass 
 of matter." So again: "All things change of course, and 
 wither, and drop to pieces, that new ones may be made out of 
 them." The destroying agencies, argued J. S. Mill, are a neces- 
 sary part of the preserving agencies : the chemical compositions 
 by which life is carried on could not take place without a 
 parallel series of decompositions. " The great agent of decay 
 in both organic and inorganic substances is oxidation, and it is 
 only by oxidation that life is continued for even the length of 
 a minute." His reviewer in the Edinburgh has this to remark 
 of the great facts of mutual destruction, disease, decay, and 
 death, w^hich appear so revolting to the essayist on theism, 
 that they are obviously the inseparable conditions of a state of 
 being of brief duration, by means of which an inexhaustible 
 flow of successive generations passes onw^ards through a limited 
 sphere of space and time, and the world is perpetually renewed. 
 " Life supports life but by losing it, for while vegetables draw 
 their nutriment directly from the chemical ingredients of the 
 soil, animals only subsist upon organic productions." * A 
 stranger who seeks the tomb of Lord Bacon, in St. Michael's 
 Church, near Gorhambury, may still read upon his monument 
 the words placed there by the faithful Meautys, " Composita 
 solvuntur." That, says the Edinburgh reviewer, is perhaps the 
 secret of the world. For, as Tertullian has it, " Omnia per- 
 eundo servantur ; omnia interitu reformantur." The Christian 
 Father is so far at one with the most materiaUstic of philosophers, 
 opening and alleging that the formation of new combinations, 
 out of dissolving forms, is the immutable order of ever-active 
 nature. 
 
 " On sent a ce travail qui change, brise, enfante, 
 Qu'un eternel levain dans I'univers fermente. " 
 
 * " Water and salt are perhaps the only inorganic exceptions in the diet 
 of man, but these alone will not support life, though they are essential to 
 it. If the globe were inhabited by a fixed number of creatures, incapable 
 of destruction or of increase, the whole movement of animated nature 
 would cease : we should live in what Professor Tyndall calls the stagnation 
 of the marsh, instead of the leap of the torrent." (Vol. cxli., p. 25.) 
 
3o8 NA TURK'S LA W OF 
 
 Affirming that the carbonic acid which passes from our lips at 
 every breath, is a precious boon to thousands of things of which 
 we have daily need, an accomplished lecturer on science finds 
 a sort of hint at physical truth in the old fairy tale of the girl 
 from whose lips, as she spoke, fell pearls and diamonds ; for 
 the carbonic acid of our breath may help hereafter to make the 
 pure carbonate of lime of a pearl, or the still purer carbon of a 
 diamond ; — nay, it may go — in such a world of transformations 
 do we live — to make atoms of coal strata, which shall lie buried 
 for ages beneath deep seas, shall be upheaved in continents 
 which are yet unborn, and there be burnt for the use of a future 
 race of men, and resolved into their original elements. " Coal, 
 wise men tell us, is on the whole breath and sunlight ; the breath 
 of living creatures who have lived in the vast swamps and forests 
 of some primaeval world ; and the sunlight which transmuted 
 that breath into the leaves and stems of trees, magically locked 
 up for ages in that black stone, to become, when it is burnt at 
 last, hght and carbonic acid, as it was at first." When we walk 
 in a sunlit garden, Mr. Charles Kingsley reminds us, every 
 breath we breathe ''' is feeding the plants and flowers around ; — 
 the delicate surface of the green leaves absorbs the carbonic 
 acid, and parts it into its elements, retaining the carbon to 
 make woody fibre, and returning us the oxygen to mingle with 
 the fresh air, and be inhaled by our lungs once more. Thus 
 are we shown to feed the plants, just as the plants feed us ; and 
 the geranium standing in the sick child's window absorbs the 
 breath which he needs not, and gives to him the breath which 
 he needs. " It is true — too true, if you will — that all things 
 live on each other. But is it not, therefore, equally true that 
 all things live for each other? — that self-sacrifice, and not 
 selfishness, is at the bottom the law of Nature, as it is the 
 law of Grace?" Is it not true that everything has to help 
 something else to live, whether it knows it or not ? — that not 
 
 * What becomes of this breath which passes from your lips? Is it 
 merely harmful ? merely waste ? God forbid ! God has forbidden that 
 anything should be merely harmful or merely waste in this so wise and 
 well-made world," tic— The Two Breaths, by Rev. C. Kingsley. (1869.) 
 
LIFE OUT OF DEATH. 309 
 
 a plant or an animal can turn again to its dust without giving 
 food and existence to other plants, other animals ? * 
 
 ** Nought lives for self All, all from crown to base — 
 The clouds, whose glory is to die in showers, 
 The fleeting streams, who in their ocean graves 
 Flee the decay of stagnant self-content ; 
 The oak, ennobled by the shipwright's axe ; 
 The soil, which yields its marrow to the flower ; 
 The flower, which feeds a thousand velvet worms 
 Born only to be prey to eveiy bird ; 
 All spend themselves on others." 
 
 And the poet moralizes his song by teaching that Man, whose 
 every breath is debt on debt, must show himself the creatures' 
 lord by free-will gift of that self-sacrifice which they, perforce, 
 by Nature's laws endure — the law of self-sacrifice, whether un- 
 conscious or not in the animals, rising in man into consciousness 
 just as far as he is a man. 
 
 * ' Death is the one condition of our life ; 
 To murmur were unjust ; our buried sires 
 Yielded their seats to us, and we shall give 
 Our elbow-room of sunshine to our sons. 
 From first to last the traffic must go on ; 
 Still birth for death. Shall we remonstrate then ? 
 Millions have died that we might breathe this day : 
 The first of all might murmur, but not we." f 
 
 Sic rerum summa novatur, thus Nature renews herself — this 
 fragment from Lucian is coupled with Ovid's Milk animas 
 una necata dedit (one death is made the opening to a thousand 
 lives), by Montaigne, in an essay which deprecates an irrational 
 dread of death, considering of how great utility it is to Nature 
 in maintaining the succession and vicissitude of her works, and 
 
 * " Is it not true . . . that the very tiger, seemingly the most useless 
 tyrant of all tyrants, is still of use, when, after sending out of the world 
 suddenly, and all but painlessly, many an animal which would without him 
 have starved in misery through a diseased old age, he himself dies, and, in 
 dying, gives, by his own carcase, the means of life and of enjoyment to a 
 thousandfold more living creatures than ever his paws destroyed ? " — Kingsley 
 Oil Bio- Geology. 
 
 \ T. Lovell Beddoes: The Second Brother, Act iii., Sc. 2. 
 
3IO NA TURK'S LA IV OF 
 
 that, in this universal republic, it tends more to growth and 
 increase, than to loss or ruin. Omnia comnmtat natura, et 
 vert ere cogit. This planet of ours is for ever, as De Quincey 
 said, working by golden balances of change and compensation, 
 of ruin and restoration : she recasts her glorious habitations in 
 decomposing them ; she lies down for death, which perhaps a 
 thousand times she has suffered ; she rises for a new birth, 
 which perhaps for the thousandth time has glorified her disc. 
 " Hers is the wedding-garment, hers is the shroud, that eternally 
 is being woven in the loom of palingeiiesis. And God imposes 
 upon her the awful necessity of working for ever at her own 
 grave, yet of listening for ever to His far-off trumpet of resur- 
 rection." 
 
 The D'Holbach school, without God in the world, in similar 
 terms aver that by this palingenesis, this regeneration, the great 
 whole, the mighty macrocosm subsists ; and they compare it to 
 the Saturn of the ancients, perpetually occupied as it is with 
 devouring its own children. 
 
 Spenser rhymes and reasons to the like purpose, in the second 
 canto of his fifth book : 
 
 " Likewise the earth is not augmented more 
 By all that dying into it doe fade ; 
 For of the earth they formed were of yore : 
 However gay their blossome or their blade 
 Doe flourish now, they into dust shall vade. 
 What wrong then is it if that when they die 
 They turn to that whereof they first were made ? " 
 
 We may take Mr. Robert Browning's word for it, that 
 " Roses Mali bloom, nor want beholders, 
 
 Sprung from the dust where our own flesh moulders." 
 Foiwriture, c'est noiirriture. The same elementary substances 
 sustain in turn, or are animated by so many successive organisms, 
 " the young Phoenix rising from the ashes of its parent." In 
 Prior's diction, 
 
 " Here all is changed, though all is still the same, 
 Fluid the parts, yet durable the frame ; 
 Of those materials which have been confess 'd 
 The pristine springs, and parents of the rest, 
 Each becomes other." 
 
LIFE OUT OF DEATH. 311 
 
 In a lighter vein and looser strain the same poet sings how 
 " reptiles perish, plants decay ; flesh is but grass, grass turns to 
 hay, and hay to dung, and dung to clay." And yet again, in 
 statelier rhythm, Master Matthew inveighs against the folly 
 which, after so much teaching, still thinks it strange 
 
 " That all the parts of this great fabric change, 
 Quit their old station, and primeval frame, 
 And lose their shape, their essence, and their name. " 
 
 Our very mother-earth, as Mr. G. H. Lewes reminds us, is 
 formed of the debris of life : plants and animals which have 
 been, build up its solid fabric ; the very quarry into which we 
 dig, thousands of feet downwards, is mainly composed of the 
 skeletons of microscopic animals ; the Apennines and Cordilleras, 
 the "chalk cliffs so dear to homeward-nearing eyes," are the 
 pyramids of bygone generations of atomies. " So revolves 
 the luminous orb of Life. Generations follow generations ; 
 and the Present becomes the matrix of the Future, as the Past 
 was of the Present : the Life of one epoch forming the prelude 
 to a higher Life." What is this world? asks Blair; and answers 
 his own question : 
 
 " What but a spacious burial-field unwall'd . . . 
 The very turf on which we tread once lived \ 
 And we that live must lend our carcases 
 To cover our own offspring ; in their turns, 
 They too must cover theirs." 
 
 Life has been called the heir of Death, and yet his conqueror : 
 victim at once and victor : all things Hving succumb to Death's 
 assault ; Life smiles at his impotence, and makes the grave her 
 cradle. " Life never dies," as PhiUp von Artevelde takes it : 
 
 " Matter dies off it, and it lives elsewhere, 
 Or elsewhere circumstanced and shaped ; it goes ; 
 At every instant we may say 'tis gone. 
 But never it hath ceased : the type is changed, 
 Is ever in transition, for life's law 
 To its eternal essence doth prescribe 
 Eternal mutability." 
 
 Wordsworth's gray-haired Wanderer enforces one of his most 
 impressive discourses with a reference to " Nature's pleasant 
 
312 ST. PAULS GIFTS OR DEFECTS OF SPEECH. 
 
 robe of green, humanity's appointed shroud" — and with the 
 sort of collateral reflection which becomes the most reflective 
 of poets, — glancing from the individual to the social : 
 
 " The vast frame 
 Of social nature changes evermore 
 Her organs and her members, with decay 
 Restless, and restless generation, powers 
 And functions dying and produced at need, — 
 And by this law the mighty whole subsists." 
 
 XXXVI. 
 
 FORCIBLE PEN AND FALTERING TONGUE. 
 2 Corinthians x. io. 
 
 TO take the estimate of the men of Lystra, St. Paul was a 
 distinguished speaker. They called Barnabas, Jupiter, 
 and Paul, Mercurius, because he was the chief speaker. To 
 take the estimate of the Corinthians, the great Apostle of the 
 Gentiles was no speaker at all, or, at best, a bad one. They 
 called his speech contemptible. His bodily presence, they 
 said, was weak ; and here the men of Lystra so far agreed with 
 them that they gave to Barnabas the imphed superiority of 
 imposing figure and mien. Altogether, the Pauline physique 
 was very poorly thought of at Corinth. " His bodily presence 
 is weak, and his speech contemptible." "Rude in speech" he 
 admits himself to be, — let the oral defect have been what it 
 may, organic or otherwise. But, on the other hand, his letters, 
 they were free to own, were "weighty and powerful." If he 
 could not dazzle them by his speaking, he could " terrify them 
 by letters." They felt his power as a penman, however much 
 they might despise him as an orator. His epistles carried 
 weight, if his orations did not. 
 
 Whether they depreciated or not the spoken words of him 
 whom the world accounts a great preacher on Mars' hill, and 
 whose rhetoric almost persuaded King Agrippa to become a 
 
STATESMEN WHO WERE NO ORATORS. 313 
 
 Christian, he might have cited great names in holy writ of self- 
 asserted short-comers in the power of speech. "I am not 
 eloquent," protested Moses, the man of God, "but slow of 
 speech, and of a slow tongue." " Behold, I cannot speak," 
 pleaded Jeremiah, when ordained a prophet unto the nations, 
 ''for I am a child." 
 
 There can be no doubt, observes M. Jules Simon, that the 
 true worth of many choice spirits {esprits d'elite) will for ever 
 remain undiscovered, because the faculty of free and facile 
 expression has been denied them. " Notez," says Michelet, 
 "qu'un eifet trop frequent des grands travaux, des grands 
 efforts, c'est de faire perdre la parole. Qui agit ou cree, jase 
 peu." As a rule, according to Rousseau, people who know 
 little talk much, and they who know a good deal are compara- 
 tively slow of speech. A small stock of ideas is more easily 
 managed, and sooner displayed, as Smollett has it, than a great 
 quajitity crowded together. His Matthew Bramble enunciates 
 and enforces the not very novel proposition, that " a man may 
 be very instructive upon paper, and exceedingly dull in common 
 discourse." Many an example might be offered of some more 
 or less eminent statesman or influential legislator, who was yet 
 " no orator " — like the Lord Arlington of Clarendon's History, 
 who " had not the gift of speaking," and whose " talent was in 
 private." Biographers of the celebrated (second) Earl of Sun- 
 derland lay stress on the fact that all his success in political 
 life was achieved without the faculty of public speaking : he 
 scarcely ever opened his lips to express more than a simple 
 assent or dissent either in ParHament or at the meetings of the 
 Cabinet. " Honest Lord Althorp " he resembled not at all in 
 point of honesty and consistency, nor perhaps in anything 
 else except defective power of speaking; but then in Lord 
 Althorp's case, and because of his recognized honesty, a few 
 sentences from him are said to have been more than equivalent 
 to eloquent orations from less consistent statesmen. =•' Alison 
 
 * " Lord Castlereagh was a very tiresome, involved, and obscure speaker. 
 Lord Althorp was without any power of oratory ; yet I never heard two 
 men who had more influence in the House of Commons. Thus Lord 
 
314 ORATORS WHO HAVE 
 
 made much of Lord George Bentinck, as "an extraordinary 
 example of the success of energy and perseverance in over- 
 coming great natural disadvantages ; " for his voice was shrill 
 and feeble, and in speaking he " laboured under what was to 
 his auditors a painful hesitation in expression." Would he 
 ever come to an end, some were constrained to speculate, 
 unless by breaking down all at once, and so breaking off 
 altogether ? 
 
 Many a closely printed page might be filled with examples of 
 broken-down orators, whether in the habit or not of breaking 
 down. We should have Robortello, the pugnacious assailant 
 of Erasmus, Muretus, Henry Stephens, and others, who 
 broke down in his funeral oration in honour of Charles the 
 Fifth, not a little to the detriment of his own kudos. And 
 Algazzali, the Light of Islam and Pillar of the Mosque, once a 
 familiar name in Europe through the attacks of his adversary 
 Averroes ; his breaking down in a lecture he deemed a visita- 
 tion of God, to rebuke his vanity ; and so distressed was he as 
 to lose appetite and almost life, till he " sought refuge in con- 
 templation of the Deity." No such perturbation overcame the 
 Earl of HaUfax (George Montagu), when he broke down in a 
 debate on the Trials for Treason Bill, in 1691, but had the wit, 
 on recovering himself, to turn the misfortune into an argument 
 for what he was urging — that prisoners should be allowed 
 counsel. Equally happy, to say the least, was the turn Lord 
 Finch gave to his collapse, when standing up for Steele, who 
 had formerly refuted a libel on his sister. FinJiing himself 
 foiled in all his efforts to make a speech, he sat down in 
 despair, but the House cheered to the echo his exclamation 
 as he did so, " It is strange I cannot speak for this man, 
 
 Castlereagh and Lord Althorp had qualities that govern men, such as 
 sincerity and a conviction on the part of the hearers [can this too be called 
 a quality?] that the Minister is a man to be trusted, vi^hich has more to do 
 M^ith influence over the House of Commons than the most brilliant flights 
 of fancy and the keenest wits." — Earl Russell's liecollections and Sugges- 
 tions, 18 1 3 — 1873, p. 162. 
 
BROKEN DOWN. 315 
 
 though I could readily fight for him ! " The collapse was not 
 final \\dth him, any more than had been that of Sir Robert 
 Walpole when, some ten years previously, he^ too, as Earl 
 Stanhope words it, "was confused and embarrassed, and, ac- 
 cording to the Parliamentary phrase, 'broke down.'" On the 
 last day but one of the year 1796, no sooner had Pitt finished 
 his statement of the negotiation then pending at Paris, than 
 Erskine started to his feet, eager to assail it, but after a few 
 sentences, he faltered, broke down, and resumed his seat in 
 confusion. Moore tells us in his autobiography how signally 
 Robert Emmett, upon one occasion, broke down in a debate 
 at the Historical Society, ''to the no small mortification and 
 surprise of us who gloried in him as our leader." Moore 
 himself at a DubHn political meeting in 1830, as we read in 
 his Diar}', " once lost the thread of what I was about to say ; 
 all seemed to have vanished from my mind. It was a most 
 painful moment, and Sheil told me afterwards that I had 
 turned quite pale." But the little orator -managed to say some- 
 thing, he knew not what, and somehow the audience gave him 
 credit for having assumed this temporar}- fit of embarrassment. '■' 
 For the moment, his sensations must have been comparable to 
 those of Peter Bell the potter : 
 
 " He trembles — he is pale as death ; 
 His voice is weak with perturbation ; 
 He turns aside his head, he pauses ; 
 Poor Peter from a thousand causes 
 Is crippled sore in his narration." 
 
 Did not Burke himself fairly break down in his Glasgow 
 University address as Lord Rector, in 1783, and have to 
 stop short in the middle of it ? What, asked Francis Horner, 
 is that mysterious gift of self-possession, which is granted to 
 
 * Several years later he seems to have had a recurrence of the disorder 
 when speaking at a dinner at Devizes ; and Lord Lansdowne at once 
 consoled and surprised him by the assurance that he hardly ever, himself, 
 spoke in the Plouse without feeling the approaches of some such loss of 
 self-possession, and found that the only way to surmount it was to talk on, 
 at all hazards. 
 
3i6 FALTERING ORATORS. 
 
 some men and withheld from others, according to the con- 
 stitution of their nerves and blood-vessels? which deserting 
 us, when we are placed in a new situation, palsies the faculty 
 of memory in its recollection of what has been most recently 
 imprinted, and suspends the course of those habits which long 
 exercise had formed. Noteworthy is this entry from the 
 Journals of the House of Commons in 1601 : "Mr. Zachary 
 Lock began to speak, but for very fear shook, so that he could 
 not proceed, but stood still awhile, and at length sat down." 
 Like Boileau's falterer, — 
 
 " Le nouveau Ciceron, tremblant, decolore, 
 Cherche en vain son discours sur sa langue egar^ : 
 En vain, pour gagner temps, dans ses transes affreuses, 
 Traine d'un dernier mot les syllabes honteuses ; 
 II hesite, il begaie, et le triste orateur 
 Demeure enfin muet aux yeux du spectateur ;" — 
 
 spedatetir, not aiiditeur ; for as the orator is struck dumb, there 
 is nothing to hear; and those who came to listen can only 
 look, gaze, stare, make the most of their eyes, since their ears 
 are no longer in request. 
 
 In the Life of Saint Francis of Assisi may be read how, 
 when appointed to preach in the sacred consistory, he engraved 
 on his memory, with the utmost diligence, a sermon he had 
 composed with his utmost skill ; and how, at the sight of that 
 august audience, every trace of the sermon departed from his 
 mind, leaving him in utter confusion, and, as it seemed,* in 
 hopeless silence. Robert Hall more than once broke down 
 ignominiously as a youthful pulpiteer — suddenly pausing, 
 covering his face with his hands, and exclaiming, " Oh ! I 
 have lost all my ideas." So we are told of Henry Venn 
 Elliott, at a Bible-meeting at Chepstow, that after speaking 
 fluently for some twenty minutes, he suddenly " lost all his 
 ideas."! Like Curran, Henry Clay broke down when he first 
 
 * The hopelessness of the silence was in seeming only : for, after a pause, 
 and a mental prayer, and one vehement self-conflict, the preacher so spake 
 that Pope and Cardinals with one consent declared the utterance to be 
 divine. 
 
 f Upon his remark that he must have " had a face of brass to speak 
 
FORCIBLE PENMEN. 317 
 
 attempted to address an audience — though he gained con- 
 fidence as he went on, and made a good ending. M. Guizot, 
 in his Memoirs, describes Berlin de Veaux as singularly 
 sagacious, prompt, boldly, original and clever, who yet failed 
 signally in his one endeavour to take a place among the 
 orators of the Chamber of Deputies. "Before I mounted 
 the tribune," said he, when relating the story of this final 
 check, " I had a store of excellent things to say, and not the 
 slightest fear of those whom I was about to address. But I 
 no sooner found myself there, than my throat became closed 
 up, and my sight thick. I uttered very little of what I had 
 prepared, and returned to my seat, fully resolved never to 
 repeat the attempt." Lord Cockburn tells us, in a rather 
 homely phrase, how Jeffrey, at the Edinburgh dinner to John 
 Kemble, "stuck a speech." Jeffrey was chairman, and had to 
 make an address to the retired Roscius, before presenting him 
 \\dth a snuff-box. He began very promisingly, but got con- 
 fused, and amazed both himself and every one else, by actually 
 sitting down, and leaving the speech unfinished, and forgetting 
 all about the box. 
 
 A more fluent penman than Francis Jeffrey, it were hard to 
 name. It was a most rare exception, his failing with his 
 tongue ; but to the rule of absolute facility with his pen, no 
 exception could ever be alleged. Nor could he be claimed 
 to support the argument of those who insist on the incom- 
 patibility of ready social expression mth real culture of mind 
 and thought. Mr. Greville in his Diary speaks of John Stuart 
 Mill (in 1830) as "powerful with a pen in his hand," but "in 
 conversation he has not the art of managing his ideas, and is 
 consequently hesitating and slow, and has the appearance of 
 being always working in his mind propositions or a syllogism." 
 
 before Hannah More," the Saturday Reviewer of his Life was fain to 
 observe that "a generation to whom that awful woman is only kno\vn by 
 nurseiy tradition or the prints of the period will be inclined to sympathize 
 with the unfortunate young speaker." But possibly both nursery tradi- 
 tions and the prints of the period do less than justice to the formidable old 
 lady. 
 
3i8 FALTERING TONGUE AND 
 
 Swift maintained, paradoxical as it may sound, that natural 
 elocution usually springs from a barrenness of invention, and 
 of words ; by which men who have only one stock of notions 
 upon every subject, and one set of phrases to express them in, 
 are emboldened to air them on all occasions, and, as he expresses 
 it, to "swim upon the superficies;" whereas men of much 
 learning are confounded with abundance of matter, variety of 
 notions and words, which they cannot readily choose, but are 
 perplexed and embarrassed by too great a choice. As Chamfort 
 says, in one of his neatly pointed Maximes et Fensees, " Des 
 qualites trop superieures rendent souvent un homme moins 
 propre a la societe. On ne va pas au marche avec des lingots ; 
 ou y va avec de I'argent ou de la petite monnaie." But this 
 reads like a free translation or adaptation of Goldsmith's reply 
 to the lady who rallied him on his stint of talk in company : 
 " Madam, I have but ninepence in ready money, but I can 
 draw for a thousand pounds.'"^ But, as Chamfort says in 
 another place, "On n'est point homme d'esprit pour avoir 
 beaucoup d'idees, comme on n'est pas un bon general pour 
 avoir beaucoup de soldats." Shaftesbury sets it down as a 
 most certain observation in his science, that they who are great 
 talkers in company, men of " sprightly genius," homines d''esprit 
 of a sort, are shallow sciolists, and incapable of writing a book 
 that shall be worth the reading. Dugald Stewart alleged that 
 he seldom, if ever, found that a great philosopher excelled in 
 conversation — and that as for poets, or men of genius in the 
 realms of imagination, he had almost always been painfully 
 impressed by their comparative inferiority when not under the 
 inspiration of the Muse, who visited them, it would appear, 
 only during the hours of composition : at all other times they 
 were dullish, or idiotic, or at best commonplace. Yet were 
 Coleridge and Wordsworth (both " great " talkers, in more than 
 one sense), Byron and Scott, Rogers and Campbell,t his 
 
 * So again Descartes apologized for his silence in mixed company by the 
 plea that he had received his intellectual wealth from Nature in solid bars, 
 not in current coin. 
 
 f Campbell had the repute of being the reverse of brilliant as a talker 
 But the late Lord Lytton, in the Caxtoniana, has another tale to^ell. 
 
FORCIBLE PEN. 319 
 
 contemporaries. " A man of genius," said Professor Wilson, 
 " is always a man of genius, and, unless he has been too much 
 of a recluse, pleasant and instructive in all companies worthy 
 of him ; but he rarely desires to play first fiddle," — and indeed, 
 as the Ettrick Shepherd insists, there should never be a first 
 fiddle in a private concert. Another critical authority has said 
 of another man of genius, that although not wanting either wit 
 or polish, he tasked his powers too severely on great subjects 
 not to be sometimes dull upon small ones ; yet, when he was 
 "either excited or at home,* he was not without — what man of 
 genius is? — his peculiar powers of conversation." Thackeray 
 tells us of his Warrington, fresh from and full of the glories of 
 Nature he has been seeing while in Switzerland, that he mil 
 write ardently and frankly about that which he is shy of 
 saying; the thoughts and experience of his travel will come 
 
 * Some natures are only "at home" tete-a-tete. Two are company, by 
 this rule and practice ; raise the figure, and you reduce the result. They 
 can only get on with one other at a time, and that one must be a con- 
 genial spirit. It is a saying to be met with in several of Emerson's books, 
 that where we look for the highest benefits of conversation, "the Spartan 
 rule of one to one " is in force. It by no means follows, on his showing, 
 that we are not fit for society, because soirees are tedious, and because the 
 soiree finds us tedious. A backwoodsman, who had been sent to "the 
 university," told him that when he heard the best-loved young men at the 
 law-school talk together, he reckoned himself a boor; but whenever he 
 caught them apart, and had one to himself alone, then they were the boors, 
 and he the better man. " I find this law of one to one, peremptory for 
 conversation, which is the practice and consummation of friendship." 
 Margaret Fuller said to one of her biographers, referring to a common 
 acquaintance, — " You fancy you know him. It is too absurd; you have 
 never seen him. . . . You suppose him a mere man of talent. He is so 
 with you. But the moment I was alone with him he was another creature,*' 
 — as though, in fact, the animating lady's own creation. Washington 
 Irving was complained of as mighty dull at a dinner party, but delightful 
 "at home," or where he felt to be there. So of Etty we are told by 
 Mr. Gilchrist that in "general society" he could never, to the last, be got 
 to take a part : he " would often, at a dinner party, sit without saying a 
 word." It was only with an intimate friend that Wilkie could "get on" 
 or " come out." Sir James Stephen contrasts the reserve which hnng upon 
 Thomas Gisbome in crowded saloons, with his affluence and effluence of 
 cordial talk with some one congenial spirit. 
 
320 FORCIBLE PEN AND FALTERING TONGUE. 
 
 forth in his writings, as the learning, which he never displays 
 in talk, enriches his style with pregnant allusion and brilliant 
 illustration, colours his generous eloquence, and points his wit. 
 What more essential for conversational success, Mr. Lister 
 asks, than imagination and facility of expression ? yet the poet 
 has it not necessarily, nor the orator. " Anything, however 
 good, that anybody may have written or spoken, is no more a 
 security for his colloquial talents than for his personal good 
 looks." Isaac Disraeli devotes a section of his Cw'iosities 
 of Literature to men of genius deficient in conversation ; 
 and his examples are Corneille, Descartes, Nicole, Addison 
 (that "silent parson in a tie-wig," as he seemed to Man- 
 deville), Dryden (who avowed himself " slow and dull " in 
 conversation), besides Isocrates and Virgil among the ancients, 
 and La Fontaine among the moderns. La Bruyere described 
 La Fontaine as coarse, heavy, and stupid in society. And 
 Menage described La Bruyere as pas un grand pai'leur^ while 
 D'Olivet charged him with " craignant toute sorte d'ambition, 
 meme celle de montrer de I'esprit." Montesquieu was de- 
 ficient in conversation, nor was either Buffon or Rousseau 
 eloquent or pleasing in table-talk. Hume told Boswell that 
 the Abbe Raynal could not have written his books himself, for 
 " he is a dull man in conversation " — which Boswell discreetly 
 rejected as a certain rule for judging that a man cannot write 
 well. And Hume it was of whom Walpole said, that his 
 writings so excelled his conversation that the historian seemed 
 to understand nothing till he had written upon it. Gray, 
 according to Walpole, was the worst company in the world, 
 for he never talked easily. Yet Walpole himself talked ill, 
 remarks Mr. Forster; and so, he adds, did Gay; and so did 
 Pope, and Swift, and Addison, besides other Queen Anne 
 men already named. 
 
ASLEEP IN SERMON-TIME. 321 
 
 XXXVII. 
 
 THE FALL OF EUTYCHUS. 
 Acts xx. 9 — 12. 
 
 THE preacher who sends you to sleep may quote the pre- 
 cedent of St. Paul. But it does not at all follow that he is 
 a great apostle. Nor is it absolutely clear that St. Paul took to 
 himself none of the responsibility of the accident that befell the 
 young man Eutychus in consequence of a discourse prolonged 
 until midnight. In direct consequence : " as Paul was long 
 preaching, he [Eutychus] sunk down with sleep." There is, at 
 any rate, not a word of rebuke or expostulation on the Apostle's 
 part, towards the young man that, having fallen from the third 
 loft, was taken up dead, and whom he so gladly and gratefully 
 restored to his friends alive, with a cordial embrace, and without 
 so much as a parting monition. Go, and sleep no more — in 
 sermon-time. 
 
 Eutychus may be held forth as a frightful example, by way 
 of warning. xA.nd there is something to be said on that side 
 of the question. But there is something to be said for Eutychus 
 too. There are allowances to be made for him — at least 
 Scripture appears to have made them by its very abstention 
 from one syllable of censure. The author of the Acts of the 
 Apostles obviously takes the accident to have been fully 
 accounted for by the length of the preaching ; and he appears 
 to have studiously refrained from giving an ethical and im- 
 proving or cautionary tone to his narrative of the incident. 
 Or, if there be anything cautionary discoverable in it, the 
 caution may as legitimately be addressed to those illimitable 
 discoursers whose ignorance of when and where to stop sends 
 people to sleep, as to the involuntary drowsy-heads who are thus 
 overtaken mth a fault, if not, like Eutychus, with a fall. 
 
 Is this designed, then, by way of justification of sleeping in 
 sermon-time ? A thousand times, no ! But it is designed to 
 hint that St. Paul himself might sympathize, in certain cases, 
 rather with the droppers-off who can resist sleep no longer 
 
322 SOMNIFEROUS SERMONIZERS. 
 
 under a pulpit spell so somniferous, than with the scolding 
 preacher who resents the affront, and who descries and pro- 
 claims " a judgment " in the midnight catastrophe at Troas. 
 
 Of all misbehaviour, none is comparable to that of those who 
 go to church to sleep, says Dean Swift, in a sermon on the fall 
 of Eutychus. Opium, he adds, is not so stupefying to many 
 persons as an afternoon sermon : perpetual custom has so 
 brought it about, that the words of whatever preacher become 
 only a sort of uniform sound at a distance, than which nothing 
 is more effectual to lull the senses. " For that it is the very 
 sound of the sermon which bindeth up their faculties is 
 manifest from hence, because they all awake so very regularly 
 as soon as it ceaseth, and with much devotion receive the 
 blessing." In a contribution to The Tatler he makes an 
 imaginary parishioner complain of a perhaps not imaginary 
 vicar that " generally, when his curate preaches in the after- 
 noon, he sleeps sotting in the desk on a hassock." Cowper 
 has such a picture in The Tiz^^— only, in his instance, it is 
 the curate who dozes, and the rector who drones overhead 3 
 here too the clerk * is fast : 
 
 " Sweet sleep enjoys the curate in his desk, 
 The tedious rector drawling o'er his head ; 
 And sweet the clerk below. " 
 
 The Indian King in The Spectator (also by Swift), who 
 describes his experiences in this country, records a Sunday 
 visit to one of our churches, or *' holy houses," and his in- 
 ability to discover any circumstances of devotion in the 
 behaviour of the people. "There was indeed a man in 
 black, who was mounted above the rest, and seemed to 
 utter something with a great deal of vehemence ; but as for 
 
 * The beadle in the Scotch story is ready with a mollifying excuse. 
 How was it, the minister demanded, that that functionary managed to 
 keep briskly attentive whenever a stranger preached, and invariably dozed 
 under the discourses of his own pastor? "'Deed, sir, I can soon explain 
 that. When ye're in the poupit yoursel', I ken it's a' richt ; but when a 
 stranger preaches, I like to watch his doctrine a wee. " 
 
UNDER THE SOMNOLENT SPELL. 323 
 
 those underneath him, ... a considerable number were fast 
 asleep." So with Goldsmith's Chinese citizen of the world, 
 in his notes of travel : " The priest himself [no vehemence 
 of manner here], in a drowsy tone, read over the duties of 
 the day. Bless my eyes, cried I, as I happened to look 
 towards the door, what do I see? one of the worshippers 
 fallen asleep, and actually sunk down on his cushion : is he 
 now enjoying the benefit of a trance, or does he receive the 
 influence of some mysterious vision ? * Alas ! alas ! ' replied 
 my companion, ' no such thing ; he has only had the mis- 
 fortune of eating too hearty a dinner, and finds it impossible 
 to keep his eyes open.'" Addison gives a characteristic touch 
 of nature to his Sir Roger de Coverley at church, when he 
 describes him as landlord to the whole congregation, and as 
 such keeping them in vtvj good order, and suffering nobody 
 to sleep during service besides himself; for if by chance he 
 has been surprised into a short nap at sermon, upon recovering 
 out of it he stands up and looks about him, and if he sees 
 anybody else nodding, either wakes them himself, or sends 
 his servant to them. There is something in the self-assertion 
 of the waker to remind one of Squire Dale in the Last Chronicle 
 of Barset : " Uncle Christopher certainly does go to sleep when 
 Mr. Boyce preaches," Lily Dale admits ; " and he hasn't studied 
 any scientific little movements during his slumbers to make the 
 people believe that he's all alive. I gave him a hint one day, 
 and he got so angry with me ! " Nonagenarian Dr. Barnes 
 being rallied by a companion on his having nodded now and 
 then in his pew, insisted that he had been awake all the time. 
 " Well, then," said his friend, " can you tell me what the 
 sermon was about?" "Yes, I can," he answered, *'it v.-as 
 about half an hour too long." Lily Dale takes exception to 
 Mr. Boyce's sermons on that ground, and pleads for her uncle, 
 *' He doesn't like to go to sleep, and he has to suffer a 
 purgator}' in keeping himself awake." The Reverend Homer 
 Wilbur, of the Biglow Papers, is concerned at having to 
 number among his parishioners some whose gift of somno- 
 lence rivals that of the Cretan Rip van Winkle, Epimenides, 
 
324 ASLEEP IN CHURCH. 
 
 and who nevertheless complain not so much of the substance 
 as of the length of his (by them unheard) discourses. " Happy 
 Saint Anthony of Padua, whose finny acolytes, however they 
 might profit, could never murmur! Quare fermueruiit gentes '^ 
 Who is he that can twice a week be inspired, or has eloquence 
 {ut ita dica77i) always on tap ? " Of the Dominie of Mastland 
 we read with what infinite labour he composed discourses and 
 committed them to memory, and with what effort he delivered 
 them, and all with what failure of effect. The demonstrative 
 part sent almost every one to their sleeping corners, though 
 the schoolmaster supplied all the ruling elders with snuff. 
 The word " application " aroused the dozing congregation, who 
 stood up and listened with eyes and ears then. 
 
 It is a query propounded among Pope's collection of Thoughts 
 on Various Subjects, whether churches are not dormitories of 
 the living as well as of the dead. Jean Paul's description of 
 the Hehnlicher von Blaise, to be seen every Sunday evening 
 at his devotions fast asleep, includes this ironical apology, 
 that, like all other hearers, he was accustomed to close his 
 eyes during the scattering of the Divine seed, as people do 
 while their heads are powdered ; and that private chapels and 
 public churches are like the heathen temples of old, in which 
 oracular revelations were received in sleep. 
 
 Goldsmith's essay on the English clergy, and Popular 
 Preachers, of his time, describes their pulpit discourse as 
 generally dry, methodical, and unaffecting ; delivered with the 
 most insipid calmness : insomuch, that should the preacher 
 lift his head over the cushion, which alone he seemed to 
 address, he might discover his audience, instead of being 
 awakened to remorse, actually sleeping over his orderly and 
 laboured composition. As in Churchill's instance, 
 
 ' ' With sacred Dulness ever in his view. 
 Sleep at his bidding crept from pew to pew." 
 
 John Gait's Mr. Pittle is one of this complexion — a man whose 
 sermons in the warm summer afternoons, said the provost's 
 wife, were just a perfect hushabaa, that no mortal could 
 
SOPORIFIC PREACHERS, 325 
 
 hearken to without sleeping. The Ettrick Shepherd is criti- 
 cally observant of female physiognomy at such sleeping-times. 
 " As for the auld wives, they lay their big-bonneted heads on 
 their shouther, and fa' ower into a deep sleep at ance; yet 
 you'll never hear a single ane amang them committin' a snore. 
 .... But the curiousest thing to observe about the lasses, 
 when they are gettin' drowsy during sermon, is their een. 
 First a glazedness comes ower them, and the lids fa' down, 
 and are lifted up at the rate o' about ten in the minute. Then 
 the puir creatures gie their heads a shake, and, unwillin' to 
 be overcome, try to find out the verse the minister may be 
 quotin'; but a^ in vain, for the hummin' stillness o' the kirk 
 subdues them into sleep, and the sound o' the preacher is in 
 their lugs like that o' a waterfall." Hogarth, in virtue of his 
 Sleeping Congregation, in which picture a heavy parson is 
 promoting, with all the alacrity of dulness, the slumber of his 
 flock, has been called the most audible of painters, as Dante 
 is the most visible of poets. The soporific drawl of the 
 preacher, said to represent Desaguliers, and the whole gamut 
 of snores in the congregation, rise from the print like what 
 Hartley Coleridge calls a steam of rich distilled perfume. 
 The Sick Man's Salve, vaunted for efficacy in Ben Jonson, 
 was a prescription to go to church thrice a week to hea# a 
 preacher that would preach folk asleep. One would have 
 thought the receipt a very commonplace one, within every- 
 body's reach, and within the weekly usage of the majority of 
 payers of church and parish rates, 
 
 "For which they claim their Sunday's due, 
 Of slumbering in an upper pew," 
 
 as Prior has it. Jamie Fraser, the idiot of Lunan, was the 
 reverse of idiotic in his reply to the minister's rebuke of a 
 sleeping congregation, the example of Jamie sitting wide awake 
 in the front gallery being thus set before them : " You see even 
 Jamie Fraser, the idiot, does not fall asleep, as so many of you 
 are doing." To be thus designated was so little to Jamie's 
 mind that he at once gave a bit of it to the preacher: "An' 
 
326 ASLEEP IN SERMON-TIME. 
 
 I hadna been an idiot, I wad ha' been sleeping too." Mr. 
 Fitchett, in George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life, is noted for 
 his irrepressible tendency to drowsiness under spiritual instruc- 
 tion, and in the recurrent regularity with which he dozed off 
 until he nodded and awaked himself, he is said to have looked 
 not unlike a piece of mechanism, ingeniously contrived for 
 measuring the length of Amos Barton's discourse. 
 
 Mr. Thackeray's readers will hardly have forgotten his de- 
 scription of Mr. Trotter the curate, and his sermon before 
 Castle company at the little village church in the park : how 
 anxiously the preacher looks at the Great Pew, — faltering as 
 he gives out the text, and thinking, " Ah, perhaps his lordship 
 will give me a living!" How anxious Mrs. Trotter and the 
 girls look at the Great Pew too, and watch the effect of papa's 
 discourse — the well-known favourite ^discourse — upon the big- 
 wigs assembled. " Papa's first nervousness is over ; his noble 
 voice clears, warms to his sermon : he kindles : he takes his 
 pocket-handkerchief out : he is coming to that exquisite passage 
 which has made them all cry at the parsonage : he has begun 
 it ! Ah ! What is that humming noise, which fills the edifice, 
 and causes hob-nailed Meliboeus to grin at smock-frocked 
 Tityrus? It is the Right Honourable Lord Naseby, snoring 
 in the pew by the fire ! And poor Trotter's visionary mitre 
 disappears with the music." Meliboeus and Tityrus on the 
 broad grin remind us that Peter Plymley compliments his 
 reverend brother Abraham, who lives in the country, on 
 having a church than which no other can produce cleaner 
 faces and smockfrocks, or eyes more uniformly directed to the 
 preacher. Better still : " the eyes so directed towards you are 
 wide open." But what follows is an unkind cut: "For the 
 rustic has, in general, good principles, though he cannot 
 control his animal habits ; and however loud may be his 
 snore, his face is perpetually turned towards the fountain of 
 orthodoxy." As little could Sydney Smith control his dear 
 love of a fling at them of his cloth. One of his very earliest 
 contributions to the Ediftlmrgh Revieiv pictures himself in a 
 state of coma from which he was restored with difficulty, by 
 
THE FALL OF EUTYCHUS. 327 
 
 observing the rules of the Royal Humane Society, and all 
 owing to at sermon preached for that good cause. 
 
 Sir Walter Scott puts it on record in his Diary, as an elderly 
 man, that "one person talking for a long time," \vh,ether in 
 the pulpit or elsewhere, set him to sleep, — unless, indeed, 
 the interest was very great, and the eloquence of the highest 
 character. As a boy, we are told of him by Mr. Mitchell, that 
 " Master Walter had more of a soporific tendency than the rest 
 of my young charge," (it was somebody or something else that 
 was soporific ; but let that pass,) and that he needed some one 
 to rouse him, although he excited admiration by being able to 
 report more of the sermon than the others could; which the 
 narrator accounts for by supposing that, having heard the 
 text and divisions of the subject, Walter's own good sense, 
 memory, and genius supplied the thoughts which would occur 
 to the preacher. Charlotte Bronte describes the weary Sunday 
 evenings at Lowood, when a long sermon would be read with 
 irrepressible yawns, and a frequent interlude would be "the 
 enactment of the part of Eutychus by some half-dozen little 
 girls, who, overpowered with sleep, would fall do^\'n, if not out 
 of the third loft, yet off the fourth form, and be taken up half 
 dead." Nurse Wilson, in one of Mr. Charles Reade's books, 
 has this to say to her young mistress on the Troas mishap : 
 "Why, Miss, we do read of Eutychus, how he snoozed off 
 setting under Paul himself — up in the windy — and down 
 a-tumbled. But parson says it wasn't that he didn't love 
 religion, or why should Paul make it his business to bring him 
 to life again, 'stead of letting 'un lie for a warning to the 
 sleepy-headed ones? ' 'Twas a wearied body, not a heart cold 
 to God,' says our parson." — But after all, there is one point in 
 the context not to be overlooked by apologists for Eutychus, — 
 that St. Paul did not apparently regard the young man's fall as 
 a warning against long discourse ; for after the resuscitation he 
 talked again a long while, even till break of day. 
 
328 'BE YE ANGRY, AND SIN NOT: 
 
 XXXVIII. 
 
 THE ANGER THAT STOPS SHORT OF SIN. 
 Ephesians iv. 26. 
 
 NOT to be angry for any cause, would imply the being 
 something less, or at any rate something else, than man. 
 St. Paul's words, " Be ye angry," unless wrested into some 
 non-natural sense, offer a direct sanction for at least a certain 
 kind of anger, and in a certain degree. Taken in connection 
 with the context, their meaning is obvious : So be angry as to 
 " sin not. Let not the sun go down upon your wrath." Let 
 not anger carry you away. Be master of it, in mastering your- 
 self. And give it a limited time ; let it, at farthest, die out 
 with the dying day. The voice of the Preacher saith, " Be not 
 hasty in thy spirit to be angry ; for anger resteth in the bosom 
 of fools." And whoso is angry in haste and without due cause, 
 and suffers his anger to rest in his bosom, to abide there, and 
 rankle, and fester, — to him it is sin. 
 
 Analyses of the emotions tell us how necessary is anger in the 
 constitution of man ; it being the passion by which one creature 
 that would offer violence to another is deterred from the execu- 
 tion, while he observes how the attempt affects his fellow, and 
 knows by the signs which accompany this rising motion, that if 
 the injury be carried farther, it will not pass easily with im- 
 punity. But there is hardly any need, observes Shaftesbury, 
 to explain " how mischievous anger is if it be such a passion 
 as is rash, and violent in the instant of provocation ; or such as 
 imprints itself deeply, and causes a settled revenge, and an eager 
 vindictive pursuit." Thomson describes these phases of it : 
 
 "Senseless and deformed, 
 Convulsive anger storms at large ; or, pale 
 And silent, settles into fell revenge." 
 
 We are, as moral philosophy assures us, made capable of a 
 malevolence that may be said to be virtuous when it operates ; 
 for the moral affections which lead to the infliction of evil, are 
 
THE ANGER THAT STOPS SHORT OF SIN. 329 
 
 occasionally as necessary as the benevolent affections : if vice 
 exist, it must be loathed by us, or we may learn to imitate it. 
 But, that even this " virtuous malevolence " may not outlast 
 the necessity for it, it is made painful for us to be malevolent 
 even in this best sense. Furor brevis ira est; and there is not in 
 nature, says John Webster, 
 
 * • A thing that makes man so deformed, so beastly, 
 As doth intemperate anger." 
 
 Horace traces the origin of anger to Promethus' having placed 
 in our breast the " insane " rage of the lion. That anger is a 
 short madness is a saying for which the ancients are applauded 
 by Mr. Charles Reade, who observes, in reference to it, that 
 when we reflect in cold blood on the things we said in hot 
 — how impossible they seem ! how out of character with our 
 real selves I And this is one of the recognized symptoms of 
 mania. 
 
 Anger is certainly a kind of baseness, according to Lord 
 Bacon, " as it appears well in the weakness of those subjects in 
 whom it reigns, children, women, old folks, sick folks." But 
 there are two sides to every question ; and Fuller was, as usual 
 with him, wise as well as witty, when he spoke of anger as one 
 of the sinews of the soul : he that wants it hath a maimed 
 mind. 
 
 It has been said of Joseph de Maistre, that his anger — and 
 he felt he did well to be angry — " ressemblait tout a fait a celle 
 de I'ecriture : Mettez-vous en colere et ne pechez pas. C'e'tait un 
 tonnerre en vue du soleil de verite et dans des spheres sereines, 
 la colere de I'intelligence pure." Metaphysicians point out how 
 the rudest passions of our nature become, in the progressive 
 development of man, refined, and perhaps what seemed base in 
 itself becomes an essential element of a noble sentiment. Thus, 
 anger, which leads, in the first instance, to wild injustice, gives 
 to the advanced mind that moral indignation \\4thout which 
 there could be no strength of character. " I love not one that 
 will never be angry," said our King James the First, " for as one 
 who is with [? without] sorrow is without gladness, so he that 
 
330 RIGHTEO US INDIGNA TION. 
 
 is without anger is without love." Dante describes approvingly 
 one whose 
 
 " visage took the stamp 
 
 Of that right zeal, which with due temperature 
 
 Glows in the bosom ; " 
 
 even as Massinger's virgin-martyr protests there are things she 
 cannot bear " without a virtuous and religious anger ; " or again 
 as WordswDrth impersonates a spirit of righteous indignation : 
 
 ** Pale was her hue ; yet mortal cheek 
 Ne'er kindled with a livelier streak 
 
 When aught had suffered wrong, — 
 When aught that breathes had felt a wound ; 
 Such look the Oppressor might confound, 
 
 However proud and strong." 
 
 Defending himself from the charge of being actuated by passion, 
 in his proceedings against Warren Hastings, Burke owned to 
 feeling anger, but surely not a blamable anger ; for who, he 
 asked, ever heard of an inquiring anger, a digesting anger, a 
 collating anger, an examining anger, or a selecting anger? 
 The anger he had felt was, he affirmed, a uniform, steady, 
 public principle, without any intermixture of private animosity ; 
 and for five years it had continued unimpaired, neither greater 
 nor less. He would not have accepted as applicable to him 
 the poet's self-impeachment, Voe ! meiim Fervetis difficili bile 
 tu?net jecur : he would admit of no biliary derangement in 
 his case. Not one of the least Hkeable points about the late 
 Mr. Robertson, of Brighton, has been said to be his earnest 
 and genuine confession of wrathfulness and hatred, where he 
 thought them due. " He prided himself on this heroic, Achil- 
 lean capacity for a divine anger." His biographer says that the 
 indignation with which he heard of a base act was so intense 
 that it rendered him sleepless. " His wrath was terrible, and 
 it did not evaporate in words. It was Christlike indignation." 
 Falsehood, hypocrisy, the sin of the strong against the weak, 
 " stirred him to the very depths of his being." " My blood," 
 he writes himself, after a conversation on the wrongs of women, 
 " was running liquid fire." Of Frederick Perthes we read that 
 
ANGER A DESIDERATUM. 33 1 
 
 he was not easily, and never long, irritated by the opposition of 
 others, provided he thought it sincere ; but against insolence, 
 falsehood, indifference, and baseness, he blazed up instantly 
 and violently, even in cases where he was under no obligation 
 to speak. A leading English review speaks of the anger, even, 
 of Robert Burns as profitable for an example — there being 
 nothing sullen or lurid or spiteful about it, nothing either of 
 prudish, mawkish smouldering : with him anger was '• what it 
 should be in a big man — sheer lightning, swift, decisive, and 
 straight-hitting." In the case of offences which must be 
 corrected, and yet cannot well be corrected in cold blood, a 
 hot and hasty humour is held to be an actual advantage. Most 
 of us, indeed, as a discourser on the control of temper alleges, 
 can remember several times in our lives when we exhibited an 
 amount of wrath quite disproportionate to the cause of offence, 
 and have had just and prolonged reason to regret it; but to 
 some few among us there comes a distinct and more bitter 
 sense of suffering from the consciousness that there have been 
 moments when, if we felt, we at any rate did not show, the 
 anger which we ought to have shown ; and about this there is 
 something humiliating and shameful, inasmuch as it implies a 
 clear remissness, or even " a deficiency of courage, which is, 
 of all imputations, the hardest to bear." If it be true that no 
 much severer fate can overtake a man, among the smaller 
 tribulations of the world, than to have thrust upon him the 
 reputation of being what is called a philosopher, so is it that 
 one of the hardest of these penalties is the presuming him or 
 requiring him to be incapable of anger. The late Dr. James 
 Hamilton, in a memorial sketch of his mother, records her being 
 sometimes provoked at herself because she could not be angry. 
 The philosopher who, as such, is refused the right ever to be 
 angry, may well be angered by the refusal. Any exhibition of 
 the ordinary feelings of a human being is held to be so far a 
 lapse from his high estate. " Hot wrath against slovenliness 
 or indolence or incapacity or injustice is an emotion altogether 
 unworthy of so exalted a creature." In spite of the apostolic 
 injunction to be angry, as well as of the undoubted practice of 
 
332 'BE YE ANGRY, AND SIN NOT: LET NOT 
 
 the holiest persons both before and after apostolic times, anger 
 is constantly treated, one of our best essay-writers complains, 
 not as a righteous faculty which the just man ought on fit 
 occasion to use, but more frequently as a sin and a stumbling- 
 block, or at best as a weakness to be conquered and driven 
 out from a virtuous character. One of Mr. Reade's favourite 
 heroines is described as a little choleric, and indeed downright 
 prone to that more generous indignation which fires at the 
 wrongs of others. One of Mr. Wilkie Collins's is thus praised 
 in passing by the observant solicitor who has to put up with 
 her hot words : " I liked to feel her hearty indignation flash 
 out on me in that way. We see so much malice and so little 
 indignation in my profession." Ribira, in Jephson's tragedy of 
 Braganza, is conciliated by the " noble stamp " of fury in certain 
 excited spirits, whose 
 
 " honest rage glow'd on their kindling cheeks, 
 
 Broke through the cold restraints of coward caution, 
 
 And swell'd ev'n to an eloquence of anger." 
 
 One of Mrs. Brunton's autobiographic damsels is asked by 
 her conscience, " Dost thou well to be angry?" and she answers, 
 as every angry woman will answer, " Yes, I do well to be angry. 
 Vile were the spirit that would not stir against such inhuman 
 baseness." This was well spoken, the didactic demoiselle pro- 
 ceeds to remark, as perhaps it was well felt : ** Yet I would 
 advise all lofty spirits to be abstemious in their use of noble 
 indignation. It borders too nearly on their prevailing sin." 
 Let there be an attempt on the part of the mind, says Dr. 
 Chalmers in one of his Moral Philosophy lectures, to study the 
 phenomena of anger, and its attention is thereby transferred 
 from the cause of the affection to the affection itself; and so 
 soon as its thoughts are withdrawn from the cause, the affection, 
 as if deprived of its needful aliment, dies away from the field 
 of observation. Professor Ferrier, on the other hand, in his 
 Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness, contends that 
 the dying away of anger in such a case is in consequence of 
 the antagonist act of consciousness which comes against it, dis- 
 placing and sacrificing it. The two philosophers agree, however, 
 
THE SUN GO DOWN UPON YOUR WRATH: 333 
 
 in the main point, namely, as to the fact that anger does vanish 
 away in the presence of consciousness ; on which account this 
 act acquires (whatever theory may be held respecting it) a moral 
 character and significance, and the exercise of it becomes an 
 imperative duty ; for, as the subtler metaphysician of the two 
 demands, what passion presides over a wider field of human 
 evil, and of human wickedness, than the passion of human 
 wrath? and therefore what act can be of greater importance 
 than the act which overthrows, and puts an end to its domi- 
 neering tyranny ? 
 
 Taking men as they are, that man is perhaps to be envied 
 who can honestly describe himself, in Shakspeare's words, by 
 Brutus uttered, as one 
 
 " That carries anger as the flint bears fire ; 
 Who, much enforced, shows a hasty spark, 
 And straight is cold again." 
 
 Jean Paul's Leibgeber utters a hearty " God be praised ! " 
 when, as Night overtakes him, the fires of anger suddenly burn 
 down, and in a tone lower by two octaves he welcomes a sense 
 of returning peace and reconciliation. According to Plutarch, 
 it was a custom of the Pythagoreans, for those who had been 
 engaged in a quarrel, to kiss and make friends (ra? Se^ia? 
 ilx(3o.XXovT€? dAA>/Xot9, Koii aa-7racrdfX€voL) before the sun went down 
 {rrpiv rj Tov ^Xtov 8wai). When Archdeacon Grantley enjoins 
 his wife to write a message of bitterness to their offending son, 
 she undertakes to send it, " but not to-day." " Why not to-day?" 
 "Because the sun shall go down upon your wrath before I 
 become its messenger. If I am to write to him on your behalf, 
 I will take my instructions from you to-morrow morning. When 
 to-morrow morning comes, you will not be angry with me 
 because of the delay." We are told he knew she was right; 
 but his anger at the present moment was hot — so hot that he 
 wished to wreak it : he knew that it would cool before the 
 morrow, and no doubt knew also, theoretically, that it would 
 be most fitting that it should cool : but not the less was it a 
 matter of regret to him that so much good hot anger should be 
 
334 THE ANGER THAT STOPS SHORT OF SIN. 
 
 wasted. Then he is described as going out, about his parish, 
 intending to continue to think of his son's offence, so that he 
 might keep his anger hot, — red-hot ; remembering however that 
 the evening would come, and that he would say his prayers ; 
 and shaking his head in regret, — in a regret of which he was 
 only half-conscious, though it was very keen, and which he did 
 not attempt to analyse, — as he reflected that his rage would 
 hardly be able to survive that ordeal. 
 
 Fuller paraphrases the Pauline text as though the sinking 
 sun might carry news to the antipodes in another world of man's 
 revengeful nature; yet would he take the Apostle's meaning 
 rather than his words, with all possible speed to depose our 
 passion \ not understanding the text so literally as that we may 
 take leave to be angry till sunset ; for then, says Fuller, in the 
 very manner of Sir Thomas Browne, might our wrath lengthen 
 with the days ; and men in Greenland, where the day lasts 
 above a quarter of a year, have plentiful scope for revenge. 
 
 I 
 
 XXXIX. 
 
 SWIFT TO HEAR, SIOIV TO SPEAK. 
 St. James i. 19. 
 
 N exhorting every man to be " swift to hear, slow to speak," 
 St. James has by some been imagined to allude to the 
 silence which Pythagoras imposed upon his disciples. The 
 " allusion " is probably imaginary, and no more. But com- 
 mentators agree that the words rayy^ ks rb aKovaat, k.t.X., 
 are directed against the intemperate zeal and angry violence of 
 the Jews in maintaining their opinions, to which Horace refers 
 in Sat. I. 4. 412, Ac vehtti te yudai cogemus in hanc concedere 
 turham. It is, however, with the larger, indeed universal, ai> 
 plication of the precept that these pages are concerned; 
 applying them, in the terse form of a saw, to all and sundry 
 whom they may be said to counsel or characterize. We may 
 
SWIFT TO HEAR, SLOW TO SPEAK. 335 
 
 in this sense find a parallel in the Book of Proverbs, where it 
 is written that '' a fool uttereth all his mind, but a wise man 
 keepeth it in till afterwards." The fool is slow to hear, swift to 
 speak. The wise man is swift to hear, slow to speak. The 
 slowness of the one is the swiftness of the other; and the 
 wisdom of the one is the foolishness of the other. 
 
 Seest thou a man that is hasty in words ? there is more hope 
 of a fool than of him. Happy is the middle term between 
 such haste and the extremity of one that is dumb, who doth 
 not open his mouth ; especially if, as in the Psalmist's case, 
 he becomes even as a man that heareth not, as well. It was 
 because the deaf and dumb artist, Benjamin Ferrers, was pure 
 of life, in part perhaps from his infirmities — in so far at least as 
 the Power that made the Tongue, restrained his lips from lies 
 and guile, and He that made the Hearing, rescued him from 
 siren's song and the like temptations — that Vincent Bourne, in 
 Latin verse which Charles Lamb has Englished, was fain to 
 form and utter the else paradoxical wish, 
 
 "Might I but be 
 As speechless, deaf, and good as he ! " 
 
 Ver)^ like Shakspeare's Gloster is the aside-spoken line, "I hear, 
 yet say not much, but think the more." Very fike his Jaques 
 is that cynical forester's reference to the more sociable duke, 
 " I think of as many matters as he ; but I give heaven thanks, 
 and make no boast of them." And very like his Polonius is 
 the counsel that old state craftsman bestows upon his son : 
 
 " Give thy thoughts no tongue 
 
 Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice : 
 
 Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment" 
 
 To be a good listener, is, as some (consciously or uncon- 
 sciously) take it, to be the best of all good company. The 
 wonder we often express, says Dean Swift, at our neighbours 
 keeping dull company, would lessen if we reflected that most 
 people seek companions less to be talked to than to talk. 
 
 When Jean-Pierre Camus, Bishop of Belley, — the ecclesiastic 
 Boswell of St. Francis of Sales — expressed his wonder to his 
 
336 SWIFT TO HEAR. 
 
 patron-saint, if so (in life) the Bishop of Geneva may be called, 
 at women of the great world gathering about him, "for it 
 seems to me you never have much to say to them," — " Do you 
 call it nothing," was the reply, " to let them talk as much as 
 they will to me ? Most assuredly they care more for ears to 
 Usten than words to reply. They talk enough for both sides, 
 and probably they come to me because I am such a good 
 listener ; * nothing is so delightful to great talkers as a patient \ 
 \ hearer." A shrewd observer says that the most brilliant salons 
 have always been created by dexterous listeners : a pleasant 
 house is not a house where one is especially talked to, but 
 where one discovers that one talks more easily than elsewhere. 
 No flattery, it is rightly said, is so delicate as that which con- 
 sists in a Uvely perception of the force of every remark you 
 make ; nor again is anything more humiliating than the blank 
 indifference which some persons oppose to your most brilliant 
 flashes of genius. Francis Jeffrey, homesick in England, 
 solaced himself with the assurance that nowhere is a good 
 listener more popular than in London. In the same letter we 
 find him regretting the loss of Sir Walter ; and he was not only 
 the best of good listeners, but made a point of introducing those 
 good people into more than a few of his fictions. Story-telling 
 Claud Halero fastens with instinct on Mordaunt "as in a 
 favourable state to play the part of Hstener," and, with the 
 unfailing dexterity peculiar to prosers, contrives to dribble out 
 his tale to double its usual length, by exercising the privilege 
 of unlimited digressions, — so receptive an ear once secured. 
 Alan Fairford, pleading from his first brief, is happy enough to 
 see the presiding judge. Lord Bladderskate, relax the scorn of 
 his features into an expression of profound attention, — "the 
 highest compliment, and the greatest encouragement, which a 
 judge can render to the counsel addressing him." t Touch- 
 
 * A Good Listener is the subject of a previous chapter of instances, 
 from the same pen as the present, to be found in Cues from all Quarters, 
 pp. 236-251. 
 
 t A clerical fellow-countryman of Sir Walter's remembers feeling awe- 
 stricken by the intense attention with which **a very great Judge" was 
 
GOOD LISTENERS. y^j 
 
 wood's tattle, though Jekyl pays not the slightest attention to 
 it, is continued as cheerily as if he had been addressing the 
 most attentive listener in Scotland, whether the favourite 
 nephew of a cross, rich old bachelor, or the aide-de-camp of 
 some old rusty firelock of a general, who tells stories of his last 
 campaign ; but Touchwood ironically compliments the insouciajit 
 captain on his well-sustained silence, and declares himself 
 happy in having fallen in with a gentleman who hears him so 
 well : " That grave, steady attention of yours reminds me of 
 Elfi Bey — you might talk to him in English, or anything he 
 understood least of — you might have read Aristotle to Elfi, and 
 not a muscle would he stir — give him his pipe, and he would 
 sit on his cushion with a listening air as if he took in every 
 word of what you said." At this, Captain Jekyl throws away 
 the remnant of a cigar, ^vith a little movement of pettishness, 
 and begins to whistle an opera air. '' There again, now ! " 
 exclaims the exasperating and insuppressible but imperturbable 
 nabob, — "that is just like the Marquis of Roccombole, another 
 dear friend of mine, that whistles all the time you talk to him," 
 — and whose apology was that he learned it in the Reign of 
 Terror, when a man was glad to whistle to show his throat was 
 whole. What makes the Laird of Ellangowan, when estranged 
 from general society, increasingly partial to that of Dominie 
 Sampson, is, that although conversation is out of the question, 
 " the Dominie was a good listener," and succeeded \\ith some 
 tact in uttering certain indistinct murmurs of acquiescence at 
 the conclusion of Mr. Bertram's long and winding stories. All 
 that Professor M'Cloud, in a later fiction, wants, is a good 
 listening post, — so a rival alleges ; but that rival is anon found 
 
 wont, in ordinary conversation, to listen to all that was said to him. " It 
 was the habit of the judgment-seat, acquired through many years of listen- 
 ing, with every faculty awake, to the arguments addressed to him." But 
 when, records this reverend reminiscent, you began to make some statement 
 to him, it was positively alarming to see him look you full in the face, and 
 listen with inconceivable fixedness of attention to all you said, " You 
 could not help feeling that really the small remark you had to make was 
 not worth that great mind's grasping it so intently, as he might have 
 grasped an argument by Follett," or some other bar-leader of the day. 
 
 22 
 
338 GOOD LISTENERS. 
 
 paying his tribute to a new acquaintance : " We had a long 
 and interesting chat on the continuity-of-species question : I 
 found him really very intelligent^-a very good conversationist 
 indeed;" the truth of the matter being that the speaker had 
 prosed upon his favourite subject for an hour to his patient 
 victim, who had not comprehended a single word of the whole 
 harangue, but had kept saying, at judicious intervals, " Ah, in- 
 deed," "Very curious," — and by this simple means had acquired 
 a high character with the other as a conversationist. " Yes, 
 really a very good talker indeed ; pursues his subject ; does not 
 shatter the conversation in the kind of way that so many men 
 do." An essayist on social subjects thinks himself not mistaken 
 in saying that all great talkers are impatient of other talkers, 
 and resent the tax on their attention as a grievance and severe 
 infliction. The impatience of such a temperament is recog- 
 nized by signs only too unmistakable, where it is held in the 
 vice of necessity ; by sighs, jerks, fidgets, groans, biting of nails, 
 drummings, tappings, yawnings, in various stages of develop- 
 ment, as the natural tendency is partially restrained by good 
 manners or allowed full play ; by interruptions and exclama- 
 tions— '' Yes, yes ! " "Well!" "And so," "And then," "And 
 did he ? " and all the interjectional goads to greater dispatch, 
 as a discourser on impatience happily terms them. On the 
 other hand, to quote from an essay on Attention, " there are 
 eyes that invite confidence — 'bland,' serene, clear-shining, out- 
 looking eyes, at once patient and intelligent. This is the eye 
 of the good listener. He keeps your pace ; he goes with the 
 fluctuations of fact or feeling or argument without effort. You 
 may know you are not wearying him." The essayist's drift is, 
 that men constantly think they like and prize people for their 
 talking, when it is in fact for their listening ; and his conclusion 
 is, that every kindly intelligent man who possesses this accom- 
 plishment is certain to win to himself a great social reputation. 
 It is not, as a literary divine observes, the dull of hearing 
 whom it is the hardest to get to hear ; but rather the man who 
 is roaring out himself, and so cannot attend to anything else ; 
 and this is a mortifying indication of the little importance that 
 
GOOD LISTENERS. 
 
 33c^ 
 
 is attached to what you are saying, while there is something 
 provoking even in the outward signs that the mind of the 
 (by courtesy) listener is in a non-receptive state — the eye look- 
 ing beyond you, the grin that is not the effect of any smartness 
 on your part, and the occasional inarticulate sounds put in at 
 the close of your sentence, as if to delude you with a show 
 of attention. '•' The non-receptive mind is occasionally found 
 in clever men ; but the men who exhibit it are invariably con- 
 ceited. They can think of nothing but themselves." Alexander 
 von Humboldt has been charged with putting down all talk but 
 his own ; but those who knew him better declared this to be 
 the natural mistake of the empty-minded, who were not quali- 
 fied either to lisren or talk in his presence — there being, on 
 good authority, no better listener than Humboldt in the 
 presence of one who had anything worth hearing to say on any 
 subject whatever. The traditional picture of Chateaubriand in 
 Mdme. de Recamier's salon is quite different : when he deigned 
 to talk, everybody was bound to listen ; and nobody was 
 allowed to talk a moment longer than seemed agreeable to the 
 idol, who had " well-understood ways of intimating his weari- 
 ness or impatience," such as stroking an ugly cat placed pur- 
 posely on a chair by his side, or playing with a bell-rope 
 conveniently hung within reach, — which last was the signal for 
 Madame to rush to the rescue, ''coute que coiite." His deaf- 
 ness too, as Mr. Hayward says, was observed to come and go 
 upon occasions. 
 
 Judge Haliburton being assured by his Yankee hero, " I like 
 your conversation," as a motive plea for improving his acquaint- 
 ance, goes on to reflect, " How singular this is ! To the native 
 reserve of my country I add an uncommon taciturnity ; but 
 this peculiar adaptation to hstening has everywhere established 
 for me that rare, but most desirable reputation, of being a 
 good companion." It is therefore evident to him, that listeners 
 are everywhere more scarce than talkers, and are valued ac- 
 cordingly. Indeed, without them, what would become of the 
 talkers ? he pertinently asks. When Falstaff is accused by the 
 Chief Justice of being deaf, he answers, " Rather, an't please 
 
340 GOOD LISTENERS. 
 
 you, it is the disease of not listening, the malady of not mark- 
 ing, that I am troubled with." And the same disease or 
 malady continues to the present day, as "Original" Walker 
 complains, to be very troublesome ; and those who are afflicted 
 with it may, on his showing, be instantly known by the interro- 
 gative " umph ? " with which they notice whatever is said to 
 them. The habit he takes to arise not from any defect in the 
 faculties, but from carelessness in the use of them ; and it is 
 as great an impediment to conversation as deafness, and with- 
 out its excuse. "Pride cannot condescend to listen, except to 
 its superiors ; conceit does not think it worth while, and selfish- 
 ness is too much taken up with its own concerns." Attention 
 to whatever is said is confessedly sometimes the consequence 
 of obsequiousness, or of a fawning disposition ; but that is a 
 species easily distinguishable from the unaffected attention 
 which is the result of composure and kindness. " Attention 
 to what is said to us, or in our presence, is not only a very 
 agreeable quality, but it is indicative of a well-regulated mind, 
 of a mind at ease, above the cares and vanities of the world, 
 free from pride, conceit, and selfishness, and without fear or 
 [? self-] reproach " — of which last two hindrances, fear is de- 
 structive of presence of mind, and self-reproach turns inward 
 with fatal frequency. Chesterfield reckons it a great advantage 
 for any man to be able to talk or to hear, neither ignorantly 
 nor absurdly, upon any subjects ; " for I have known people 
 who have not said one word, hear ignorantly and absurdly : it 
 has appeared in their inattentive and unmeaning faces." He 
 assures his son, when pressing upon him the importance of not 
 only real but seeming attention, that "there is nothing so 
 brutally shocking, nor so little forgiven, as a seeming inattention 
 to the person who is speaking to you ; and I have known many 
 a man knocked down for (in my opinion) a much slighter pro- 
 vocation than that shocking inattention which I mean." Lord 
 Shaftesbury, in his celebrated critique on the Judgment of 
 Hercules, as a work of art, insists upon the absolute necessity 
 of silence being distinctly characterized in him, while Virtue is 
 pleading ; for the effect would be utterly lost if, in the instant 
 
GOOD LISTENERS. 341 
 
 that she employed the greatest force of action, she should 
 appear to be interrupted by the ill-timed speech, reply, or 
 utterance of her listener. " Such a design or representation 
 as this, would prove contrary to order, contrary to history, and 
 to the decorum or decency of manners." And he takes note, 
 in passing, of the general absurdity committed by many of the 
 "esteemed great masters in painting," who, in one and the 
 same company, jointly engaged in one simple or common 
 action, represent to us not only two or three, but several, and 
 sometimes all, speaking at once : which must naturally have 
 the same effect on the eye, as such a confused colloquy would 
 have upon the ear, were we in reality to hear it. 
 
 Salathiel found, even in the sandy ways of Palestine, that to 
 be a judicious listener is one of the first talents for popularity, 
 all over the world. There can be no doubt that real attention, 
 as a social essayist affirms, is a great talent and a great power : 
 indeed, an extreme impatience of attention incapacitates a 
 man for a place in the world. And he exposes that morbid, 
 demoralized state of mind in which men cannot listen — cannot 
 follow another man's train of thought, for they cannot give 
 their minds into another man's custody even for a moment — 
 the very thought of it is an irritation and a bondage. " No 
 man can be really influential who cannot listen as well as talk ; 
 and no one can know anything of the m.ind of others without 
 attending in the simple patient attitude of attention." There 
 is subtle significance in the saw ascribed to the Stoic philo- 
 sopher, Zenodotus : "A /cove rov ricra-apa wra ej^ovros — listen to 
 him who has four ears {" Had I three ears, I'd hear thee," 
 exclaims eager Macbeth) : listen to one who shows himself 
 ready to learn from others. Sir Jasper, in the story, is 
 described as having your true talker's instinctive faculty of 
 discovering a good listener : he finds one accordingly in 
 George Pauncefort; not your stupid listener, who gazes at 
 you with the fixed stare of rapt admiration, and flounders 
 dismally in the endeavour to reply to you, thereby too clearly 
 revealing that he has not understood a word you have been 
 saying; nor yet your self-absorbed listener, who abandons 
 
342 SWIFT TO HEAR. 
 
 himself to his own reflections while you talk to him, and 
 strikes in with a vacant grin and a " Really ! " whenever you 
 come to a full-stop. " Mr. Pauncefort was of the sterling 
 metal — the thoughtful Hstener who weighs every word you say 
 to him," and proves it by differing where need be, and by 
 tokens of intelligent discrimination to form a sort of running 
 commentary throughout. Eliesmere protests that whenever 
 a talk is good, he is the last man in the world to interrupt it : 
 he only interrupts folly, irrelevancy, inaccuracy, and incom- 
 plete logic. " I am the best hstener in the United Kingdom 
 when there is anything worth listening to." It soon came to 
 be admitted by all who knew Phineas Finn that he had a 
 peculiar power of making himself agreeable which no one 
 knew how to analyse or define. '' I think it is because he 
 listens so well," said one man. " He has studied when to 
 listen and when to talk," said another. Place aux dames. The 
 Lady Muriel of one popular story is admired as the possessor 
 of powers of conversation quite out of the common way— but 
 it never, says the author, occurred to her admirers to calculate 
 how much of her talking she did by means of intelligent 
 acquiescent little looks, graceful little bows, sprightly exclama- 
 tions, a judicious expression of intense interest in the subject 
 under discussion when it chanced to be personal to the other 
 party in the discourse, and sundry other skilful and effective 
 feminine devices. The Eleanor Vane of another wins the heart 
 of old De Crespigny by her manifestly real interest in his 
 reminiscent talk : he was accustomed to the polite attention 
 of his nieces, whose suppressed yawns sometimes broke in 
 unpleasantly at the very cHmax of a story, and whose wooden- 
 faced stolidity had at best something unpleasantly suggestive 
 of being listened to and stared at by two Dutch clocks ; but 
 he was 7iot accustomed to see "a beautiful and earnest face 
 turned towards him as he spoke, a pair of bright gray eyes 
 lighting up with new radiance at every crisis in the narrative, 
 and lovely lips half parted through intensity of interest." The 
 garrulous senior in this case was not quite of the class Mrs. 
 Gaskell somewhere describes as being not at all particular as 
 
SWIFT TO HEAR. 343 
 
 regards receptive intelligence, and who, so that they may them- 
 selves talk on undisturbedly, are not so unreasonable as to expect 
 attention to what they say. Her Cynthia, in a later (indeed 
 her latest) work, excels in putting on a look of intense interest 
 in what any one is saying to her, let the subject be what it 
 may, as if it were the thing she cared most about in the whole 
 world. The old squire, despite his distrust of her, can scarcely 
 find it in his heart to be hard on " a lass who was so civil to 
 me, and had such a pretty way with her of hanging on every 
 word that fell from my lips." Towards the end of the tale 
 Cynthia evinces her good taste as well as tact in listening with 
 the semblance of unwearied interest to Molly Gibson's dis- 
 tressful experiences at Hamley Hall, — knowing instinctively that 
 the repetition of all those painful recollections would ease the 
 oppressed memory : " so she never interrupted Molly, as Mrs. 
 Gibson had so frequently done, with — ' You told me all that 
 before, my dear,' " etc. The Miss Desmond of yet another 
 fiction that made its mark is characterized as always wise 
 enough to remember that the larger art of talking well compre- 
 hends the smaller art of listening gracefully ; she being empha- 
 tically ?tot one of " those obnoxious people " who talk for the 
 sake of talking, and who, after rattling on without a full-stop 
 for half an hour at a stretch, will stare vacantly at you while 
 you recite to them some noteworthy adventure, evidently 
 thinking of what they mean to say next, and waiting for the 
 chance of cutting in. Miss Tox in Dotnbey and Son, " from 
 a long habit of listening admiringly to everything that was said 
 in her presence, and looking at the speakers as if she were 
 mentally engaged in taking off impressions of their images 
 upon her soul, never to part with the same but with life," had 
 got her head settled quite on one side ; while her hands had 
 contracted a spasmodic habit of raising themselves of their 
 own accord as in involuntary admiration, and her eyes too 
 had become liable to a similar affection. Jane Eyre is often 
 elected the involuntary confidant of her acquaintances' secrets, 
 because people (Mr. Rochester included) instinctively discover 
 that it is not her forte to talk of herself, but to listen while 
 
344 SWIFT TO HEAR, SLOW TO SPEAK. 
 
 others talk of themselves ; they feel too that she listens with 
 a kind of innate sympathy, not the less soothing and winsome 
 because it is very unobtrusive in its manifestations. Mary 
 Scudder, again, is described as one of the most seductive little 
 confidants in the world ; so pure from all " selfism," so heartily 
 and innocently interested in what another was telling her, that 
 people in talking with her found the subject constantly in- 
 creasing in interest ; although if they had been actually called 
 upon afterwards to state the exact portion in words which she 
 added to the conversation, they would have been surprised to 
 find it so small. 
 
 It is one of the distinctive traits in the Caractere of Madame 
 de Longueville that she "ecoutoit beaucoup, n'interrompoit 
 jamais,''' et ne temoignoit point d'empressement de parler." So 
 it is^ Sainte-Beuve's estimate of Madame de Remusat, that she 
 " savait ecouter, savait comprendre et suivre " — being indeed 
 particularly sensible of the value of this kind of intelligence, 
 and rightly accounting it an excellent thing in woman. Ben- 
 jamin Constant was agreeably surprised to find what a good 
 listener Madame de Stael was, with all her affluence of talk : ; 
 elle suit parfaitement ecouter., he wrote to Madame de Charriere 
 in 1794; "elle sent I'esprit des autres avec autant de plaisir 
 que le sien." It was told to the disadvantage of Joseph de 
 Maistre, on the other hand, that when engaged in conversation 
 he had almost no ear for the respondent, il ?i'entendait guere les 
 reponses ; that he was, by turns, and very abruptly too, either 
 
 * Swift accords high praise to Stella (Mrs. Johnson) for the fact that "she 
 Bever interrupted any person who spoke." " She listened to all that was 
 said, and had never the least absence or distraction of thought." — On the 
 Death of Mrs. yohnson. 
 
 One of the Dean's most appreciative correspondents, Lady Betty 
 Brownlowe, begging leave to be present at his proposed meeting at 
 Cashel with the Archbishop, expresses her certainty "that you would 
 allow me to be a good listener," "for I assure you I have too great a 
 desire to be informed and improved to occasion any interruption in your 
 conversation, except when I find you purposely let yourself down to 
 such capacities as mine, with an intention, as I suppose, to give us the 
 pleasure of babbling." — Letters, May 19, 1735. 
 
SWIFT TO HEAR, SLOIV TO SPEAK. 345 
 
 extremely animated or excessively torpid ; all animation while 
 speaking, all drowsiness when he was being replied to; and 
 then, the moment the reply was ended, his eyes would open in 
 wide-awake vivacity, and animation was again the order of the 
 day. M. de Tocqueville is signalized among more recent 
 noteworthies as a capital listener. So, in his way, was Mr. 
 Crabb Robinson. He gives ingenuous proof of it in his Diar\' 
 when in Germany, in 1804, where he says of Knebel, at Jena, 
 that the attachment to him of the latter, " a wonder to me," 
 arose from his loving the society of those who would hear what 
 he had to say, " and my betters here are not of that description 
 — real scholars have not time, and have too much pretension. 
 I am a man of leisure." The amiable diarist is declared by 
 his biographer to have had few rivals in the art of conversation 
 — that is, of power of conversation without art; if any one 
 chose to be a listener only, " H. C. R. was his man : he had 
 always enough for two, and a bit over." And he appreciated 
 a listener. Dr. Sadler adds, and considered the faculty as 
 
 positive, not negative, virtue. " I consider ," he said, 
 
 "as one of the most sensible young men I ever knew." — 
 '•Why! he hardly says anything." — "Ah, but I do not judge 
 him by what he says, but by how he listens." How H. C. R. 
 listened was perhaps best shown by the tact with which he 
 followed his partner's lead. 
 
 Caustic, cynical Chamfort was one day asked by Queen 
 Marie- Antoinette how it came about that he had managed to 
 please every one at Versailles, she would not say because of 
 his wit, but in spite of it. The reason was very simple, he 
 replied, in his free way; "at Versailles I resign myself to 
 learn a number of things that I know, from people who are 
 ignorant of them." Hence he got on so well there. Else- 
 where, if the company pleased him not, he was at small pains 
 to conceal his intolerance. But, perhaps, rather than take the 
 trouble to assert his superiority, he would adopt the course of 
 hearing all and saying nothing — and that, done with method 
 and of malice aforethought, is bad listening with a vengeance. 
 
346 SWIFT TO HEAR, SLOW TO SPEAK. 
 
 Mr. Hunsden taxes the Professor, in Currer Bell's autobiogra- 
 phical fiction, with his cherished habit of sitting in a room full 
 of company, bent on hearing, not on speaking ; on observing, 
 not on entertaining ; looking frigidly shy at the commencement 
 of a party, confusingly vigilant about the middle, and insult- 
 ingly weary towards the end. " Is that the way, do you think, 
 ever to communicate pleasure or excite interest?" 
 
 As Viceroy in India, Lord Elgin made a point of having 
 two or three people to dine with him every day on which he 
 had not a great dinner — by which means, said he, " I get 
 acquainted with individuals, and if my bees have any honey in 
 them I extract it at the moment of the day when it is most 
 gushing." It was sometimes complained that on these occasions 
 he was so little communicative, drawing out the opinions of 
 others without expressing his own. But, submits the editor 
 of his correspondence, Mr. Theodore Walrond, it requires very 
 little reflection to see that this complaint is really a com- 
 mendation. — Captain Marryat was once invited at Brussels to 
 meet a company of literary •' wits," and everybody talked and 
 laughed away, the Captain alone excepted, who swallowed his 
 dinner gravely and almost in silence, much to the disappoint- 
 ment of the host, who, meeting him next morning, expressed 
 himself as ''afraid" his guest did not "enjoy himself" last 
 night. The guest protested he never enjoyed himself better. 
 " Then why didn't you talk ? " his friend remonstrated. "You 
 didn't make a single joke the whole evening." " Oh !" replied 
 Captain Marryat, with a prolonged utterance of the exclamatory 
 syllable, — "if that's what you wanted, you should have asked 
 me when you were alone. Why, did you imagine I was going 
 to let out any of my jokes for those fellows to put in their next 
 books? No; that is not my plan. When I find myself in 
 such company as that, I open my ears and hold my tongue, 
 glean all I can, and give them nothing in return." M. Necker 
 used to be censured for son silence habituel in literary circles : 
 " son esprit fin, ironique, de'daigneux, plein de nuances, se 
 plasait a observer un monde dont il jouissait et dont il allait 
 se servir sans jamais s'y meler entierement." An earlier his- 
 
SWIFT TO HEAR, SLOW TO SPEAK. 347 
 
 torical banker, Jacques Coeur, took for one of his devices, 
 ''' Bouche dose. Neiitre. Entendre dire. Faire, Taire,'' — a 
 ^^e and discreet maxim, which should be followed without 
 s})eaking of it, says Michelet, who takes it to show " the petty 
 wisdom of the trader of the middle age." The waiting-maid's 
 song in Iiikle and Yarico begins, 
 
 *' This maxim let every one hear, 
 
 Proclaimed from the north to the south : 
 Whatever comes in at your ear 
 
 Should never run out at your mouth. 
 We servants, like servants of state, 
 
 Should listen to all, and be dumb ; 
 Let others harangue and debate, 
 
 We look wise — shake our heads — and are mum." 
 
 Schiller's master of the cellar in The Piccolomini rebukes the 
 incipient tattle of the servants with the admonitory saw, A good 
 servant hears, and hears not ; he should be nothing but eyes 
 and feet, except when called to. 
 
 It is an alleged characteristic of the worldly-wise man that 
 he commits himself to no adventurously expressed opinions, 
 but simply accustoms himself to hold his tongue : his spirit 
 may burn within him, but he keeps silence ; and at the end 
 of a long life he is able to feel that he has never lost a chance 
 of good fortune by saying the WTong thing. But the reticent 
 have been called so many forms of living death ; for the faculty 
 of speech seems to have been given them in vain. " Any one 
 not a born fool can resolve to keep silence on certain points ; 
 but it takes a master-mind to be able to talk and yet not tell." 
 There is recognized art, consummate art, in appearing absolutely 
 frank, yet never telling anything which it is not wished should 
 be known. Caught by the easy manner of such an '• artist," by 
 his genial talk and ready sympathy, one may be insensibly led 
 to confide to him all of one's own and of other people's ; and 
 it is '' only long after, when you reflect quietly, that you come 
 to the knowledge of how reticent he has been in the midst 
 of this seeming frankness, and how little reciprocity there has 
 been in your confidences together." As with Rousseau and 
 
348 SWIFT TO HEAR, SLOW TO SPEAK. 
 
 Coindet — c" etait un singulier corps ce Coindef, who heard all from 
 Jean-Jacques, and would tell him nothing : " Au lieu de me 
 dire ce qu'il avait appris, ou dit, ou vu, qui m'interessait, il 
 m'ecoutait, m'interrogeait meme." It is full of character what 
 M. Fromentin tells us of villagers in the Sahara, that they ask 
 questions, but all curiosity about themselves they consider 
 impertinent, and improper, importunate. With people who, 
 par finesse, says La Bruyere, hear all, and say very little, you 
 will do well to say still less ; or if you talk freely, let your talk 
 be of trifles. 
 
 ** Conceal yoursel' as weel's ye can 
 
 Frae critical dissection ; 
 But keek thro' every other man, 
 
 Wi' sharpen d, sly inspection." 
 
 Pope is on his guard against ''■all sly slow things, with circum- 
 spective eyes : men in their loose unguarded hours they take, 
 not that themselves are wise, but others weak." Chesterfield 
 recommends a seeming ignorance, in order to become wise, in 
 the worldly-wisdom of " thorough and extensive private infor- 
 mation j " and his recommendation of it is, because it " will 
 make you pass for incurious, and consequently undesigning." 
 Hunc cavelo. And beware of accomplished practitioners of the 
 Leonine line of the middle ages, Audi, vide, tace, si vis vivere 
 i?i pace ; for such keen-eared, sharp-eyed taciturnity means 
 mischief, or at best bodes no good. Crabbe's borough-bailiff 
 counselling his son John, is so far a counterpart of Shakspeare's 
 Polonius counselling his son Laertes : 
 
 " Observe the prudent : they in silence sit . . . 
 They hazard nothing, nothing they assume, 
 But know^ the useful art of acting dumb. 
 Yet to their eyes each varying look appears, 
 And every M'ord finds entrance at their ears." 
 
 But this is how Cowper, with the generous warmth of a Christian 
 gentleman, deals with such practical philosophers : 
 
 " Some act upon the prudent plan, 
 * Say little, and hear all you can/" 
 Safe policy, but hateful — 
 
NO MORE SEA. 349 
 
 So barren sands imbibe the shower, 
 
 But render neither fruit nor flower, 
 
 Unpleasant and ungrateful. 
 
 The man I trust, if shy to me, 
 Shall find me as reserv^ed as he, 
 
 No subterfuge or pleading 
 Shall win my confidence again ; 
 I will by no means entertain 
 
 A spy on my proceeding." 
 
 XL. 
 
 NO MORE SEA. 
 
 Revelation xxi. i. 
 
 WHEN the first heaven and the first earth were passed 
 away from the vision of the seer of Patinos, and a 
 new heaven and a new earth filled his gaze, " there was no 
 more sea." Like so many other passages in his book of reve- 
 lation, this one is of disputed meaning. We islanders are apt 
 to grudge the literal acceptation of the words, and to fancy 
 that a cosmos without a sea would almost be chaos come 
 again. Expositors incline to the belief that what is implied 
 is the removal of a barrier to free intercourse, and that the 
 sea as such a barrier, oceanus dissociabilis,'^ can well be spared 
 from the new creation. But why should the waters of the 
 great deep be dried off on that account alone ? Water seems 
 to remain as a means of separation within the New Jerusalem 
 itself, — since we read of the tree of life " on either side of the 
 river," that pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, pro- 
 
 * A scholarly critic protests against what he calls the * ' miserable 
 fallacy of Horace about the oceanus dissociabilis,''^ and contends that so 
 far from an island-life implying the being cut off from the rest of the 
 world, throughout the history of Europe the sea has been the great con- 
 necter of nations. Till railways were invented, he argues, water carriage 
 was much the easiest way of travelling for all purposes ; and so far from 
 being cut off from other nations by our insular position, we islanders had 
 probably more intercourse with foreigners than had any other nation in 
 Europe. 
 
350 NO MORE SEA. 
 
 ceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. Seas 
 may be bridged as well as rivers ; it is a question of degree — 
 practically speaking, as well as conjecturally, or speculatively. 
 At any rate one is loth to accept an interpretation which would 
 involve the extinction of an object so instinct with associations 
 of grandeur, sublimity, and elevating awe, as the mighty ocean. 
 Be it fully conceded, nevertheless, that whole kindreds, 
 peoples, and tongues, especially in the East, have held the 
 sea in pronounced and persistent aversion, — hating it as 
 intensely as they feared it, and so hating because they so 
 feared it. Adam Smith opens a pregnant paragraph of his 
 Wealth of Nations with the remark, " The ancient Egyptians 
 had a superstitious aversion to the sea." To the Persians it is 
 as repellant as to the Arabs it is attractive. To the Romans, 
 says Gibbon, in his first chapter, the ocean remained an object 
 of terror rather than of curiosity ; they " tried to disguise, by 
 the pretence of religious awe, their ignorance and terror."* 
 Graphically Mr. Lothrop Motley describes the dismay of the 
 Spaniards before Leyden, in 1574, when the great dyke was 
 pierced : brave as they were on land, the Spaniards "were not 
 sailors," and it was natural that they should be amazed and 
 confounded at what they saw. "Nothing is more appaUing 
 to the imagination than the rising ocean tide, when man feels 
 himself within its power; and here were the waters, hourly 
 deepening and closing round them, devouring the earth be- 
 neath their feet," — not to speak of the flotilla that rode on 
 those waves, bent equally on their destruction. Two at least 
 of France's foremost prose poets — for so we may designate 
 both Michelet and Victor Hugo (not however forgetting the 
 right of the latter to be accounted one of her foremost poets 
 absolute and unconditioned) — have given forcible expression 
 to the sense of shuddering awe which the expanse of ocean 
 engenders in some imaginative minds. Victor Hugo dilates 
 upon the " mystery of the dread, laborious ocean," upon the 
 vacillation of the waves, the perseverance of the foam, the 
 
 * See Tacitus, Germania, c. 34. 
 
NO MORE SEA. 35: 
 
 wearing-down of rocks. Of these latter he is eloquent upon 
 the kind called, in the old sea-dialect, Isoles : rocks in mid- 
 ocean, where the sea is alone, and works her own ^vill, 
 undisturbed by token of terrestrial life. " Man is a terror 
 to the sea ; she is shy of his approach, and hides from him 
 her deeds. But she is bolder among the lone sea rocks. 
 The everlasting soliloquy of the waves is not troubled there." 
 She has her splendid and monstrous vegetation, composed of 
 floating plants which bite, and of monsters which take root ; 
 and she hides away all this magnificence in the twilight of 
 her deeps. It is here she developes at liberty her mysterious 
 side, inaccessible to man ; here keeps all strange secretions 
 of life, and here assembles her unknown wonders. " Moi 
 aussi,'' writes Michelet, in presence of a storm, "je regardais 
 insatiablement cette mer, je la regardais avec haine. N'etant 
 pas en danger reel, je n"en avais que davantage I'ennui et la 
 desolation. Elle etait laide ; d'affreuse mine. Rien ne rappelait 
 les vains tableaux des poetes. Seulement, par un contraste 
 etrange, moins je me sentais bien \ivant, plus, elle, elle avait 
 Tair de vivre. Toutes ces vagues electrisees par un si furieux 
 mouvement avaient pris une animation, et comme une ame 
 fantastique, dans la fureur generale chacune avait sa fureur. . . 
 Elles me faisaient I'effet d'un epouvantable mob, d'une horrible 
 populace, non d'hommes, mais de chiens aboyants, un million, 
 un milliard de dogues acharnes, ou plutot fous. Que dis-je ? 
 des chiens, des dogues? ce n'etait pas cela encore, c'etaient 
 des apparitions execrables et innommees, des betes sans yeux 
 ni oreilles, n'ayant que des gueules ecumantes. Monstres, que 
 voulez-vous done ! n'etes-vous pas souls des naufrages que 
 j'apprends de tous cot^s? Que demandez-vous ? 'Ta raort 
 et la mort universelle, la suppression d*e la terre et le retour 
 au chaos.'" If this be indeed the demand of the sea, — if the 
 voice of the waves is instant for the suppression of dry land 
 and for a return to chaos, — light is indeed thrown, be it lurid 
 or otherwise, on the saving import of that saving clause in the 
 Apocalypse, that there shall, in the new dispensation, be no 
 more sea. 
 
352 NO MORE SEA. 
 
 That line of Mr. Matthew Arnold's, '' The unplumb'd, salt, 
 estranging sea," has been pronounced by a discerning and 
 practised critic, inexhaustible in beauty and force, — shadowing 
 out, as it does, without any false emphasis or prolix dwelling 
 on the matter, the plunging deep-sea lead and the eerie cry 
 of "no soundings," — and recalling that saltness of the sea 
 which takes from water every refreshing association, every 
 quality that helps to slake thirst or supply sap, — and then 
 concentrating all these dividing attributes, which strike a sort 
 of lonely terror into the soul, into the one word "estranging." 
 
 Mrs. Browning calls the sea 
 
 "that blue end of the world, 
 That fair scroll-finis of a wicked book. " 
 
 To those who have been familiar with it all their lives, it 
 might almost seem. Archdeacon Hare said, as though their 
 minds would be " poor shrunken things," without its air to 
 brace and expand them ; " "^ if for instance they had never seen 
 the avrjpiOfxov yiXacr^a of the waves, nor knew how changeful 
 the sea is, and yet how constant and changeless amid all the 
 changes of the seasons, nor how powerful she is, whom Winter 
 with all his chains can no more bind than Xerxes could, how 
 powerful to destroy in her fury, how powerful to bless in her 
 calmness, — nor had ever learnt the lesson of obedience and 
 of order from her, the lesson of ceaseless activity, and of deep 
 unfathomable rest ; if they had no sublunary teacher but the 
 mute, motionless earth, and had been deprived of an ever- 
 faithful mirror of heaven. Julius Hare, too, equally with Mr. 
 Freeman, rejects the Horatian epithet dissociabilis, and main- 
 tains that however much the Sea may appear to be the great 
 separater of nations, the impassable barrier to all intercourse, 
 
 * Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes tells us of Myrtle and her long voyage as 
 a child, that, in the course of it, the strange mystery of the ocean was 
 wrought into her consciousness so deeply, that it seemed to belong to her 
 being : the waves rocked her, as if the sea had been her mother ; and, 
 looking over the vessel's side from the arms that held her with tender care, 
 she used to watch the play of the waters, until the rhythm of their move- 
 ment became a part of her, almost as much as her own pulse and breath. 
 
NO MORE SEA. 353 
 
 yet in fact it is the grand medium of communication, the chief 
 uniter of mankind, the only means by which the opposite ends 
 of the earth can hold converse as though they were neighbours. 
 *'Thus in divers ways the ttovtos a.Tpv^(.To% has become even 
 more productive than if fields of corn were waving all over it." 
 That it has been an essential condition in the civilizing of 
 nations, all history shows. Perhaps the Germans in our days 
 are the first people who have reached any high degree of 
 culture, — who have become eminent in poetry and in thought, 
 — without its immediate aid. Yet Germany has been called 
 "she of the Danube and the Northern Sea;" and might still 
 more justly be called "she of the Rhine."* 
 
 With the benison, "God be mth thee, gladsome Ocean," 
 Coleridge opens the first stanza of one of his lyrics. With 
 Wordsworth we watch " the gentleness of heaven brood o'er 
 the Sea ; 
 
 " Listen ! the mighty Being is awake, 
 And doth with his eternal motion make 
 A sound like thunder — everlastingly." 
 
 It is in the sonnet next succeeding this one, that the fine line 
 occurs which tells of the poet having " Of the old Sea some 
 reverential fear." And in a like spirit he speaks, in the Pre- 
 ludcy of " the grandeur which invests The mariner, who sails 
 the roaring sea Through storm and darkness." An American 
 \\Titer calls the sound of the soft, eternal pulsations of the 
 distant sea, the " mournfullest, most mysterious, of all the 
 harpings of Nature," — and goes on to speak \nth a kind of 
 shuddering awe of the " treacherous, soft, dreadful, inexpli- 
 cable sea." Dr. Howard Russell, if we may take Dr. Brady 
 for his spokesman, refers to an early voyage from which were 
 derived impressions of the force of the sea, of its cruelty, its 
 
 * The Greek was not shut in by his mountains. " The sea enlarged the 
 range and scope of his thoughts, which the mountains might have hemmed 
 in." To him, as to us English, it was an inexhaustible mine of intellectual 
 riches. " Nor is it without a prophetic symbolicalness that the sea fills so 
 important a part in both the Homeric poems. " — Guesses at Truth, 3rd edit., 
 p. 93 ; cf pp. 102 sq. 
 
354 ^^0 MORE SEA. 
 
 irresponsible power, its sullen anger and destroying rage, — 
 combining to excite in him a sense of antipathy to it, as to 
 a thing which had done him irreparable wrong. Another 
 expert traveller and voluminous author says emphatically of 
 the sea, " I hate it. I have a dread for it, as Mrs. Hemans 
 had." He avows that to him it is simply a Monster, cruel, 
 capricious, remorseless, rapacious, insatiable, deceitful ; sullenly 
 unwilling to disgorge its treasures ; mockingly refusing to give 
 up its dead, — though "it must, and shall, some day, the sea." 
 Rousseau, who, as Mr. John Morley observes, always loved 
 nature best in her moods of quiescence and serenity, and in 
 proportion as she lent herself to such moods in men, and who 
 therefore " liked rivulets better than rivers," — could not bear 
 the sight of the sea, whose infertile bosom and blind restless 
 tumblings filled him with melancholy.* Lord Cockburn tells 
 us of his friend Jeffrey, that, of all strong-minded men, there 
 never was one who from what he deemed a just estimate of its 
 dangers, but in truth from mere nervous horror, recoiled from 
 it with such sincerity of aversion. Jeffrey's diary of his voyage to 
 America (in 1813) abounds in disrespectful terms touching the 
 amazing narrowness and paltriness of the " boundless " ocean. 
 " There is nothing so ugly or mean as the sea in roughish 
 weather : the circuit very narrow, the elevations paltry, and 
 all the forms ungraceful and ignoble." A real gale of wind 
 comes, and he professes to have felt no alarm, but "never 
 saw an uglier scene ; and, what is worse, ugly, without being 
 sublime or terrible." He owns to feeling "a spite at the 
 sea, for I cannot bring myself to think or speak of it without 
 a certain contempt, as well as dislike." He would probably 
 have adopted ex animo, or con ainore, the opinion of that later 
 voyager across the same waters, Mr. Mark Tapley, who par- 
 
 * Vivid as are the pictures, in his Co77fessiotis, of the Venetian episode of 
 his chequered life, he makes no mention in them of his first sight of the 
 sea — nor, adds his English biographer, "does the sight or thought of the 
 sea appear to have left the least mark in any line of his writings. He 
 always disliked it, and thought of it with melancholy." — Morley's Rousseau, 
 
NO MORE SEA. 355 
 
 ticularly pronounced the sea "as nonsensical a thing as 
 anything going. It never knows what to do with itself. It 
 hasn't got no employment for its mind, and is always in a 
 state of vacancy. Like them Polar bears in the wild-beast 
 shows as is constantly a nodding their heads from side to side, 
 it never can be quiet. Which is entirely owing to its un- 
 common stupidity." One of the ablest of recent dissertators 
 on the subject avows himself prompt to agree with the philo- 
 sopher who wished that he could have been consulted at the 
 creation of the universe — for then we might probably have 
 had a world without an ocean. He holds it to be demonstra- 
 table that no object in nature is on the whole less beautiful than 
 the sea — that it is monotonous and singularly commonplace, 
 excepting always the cases in which it serves as an admirable 
 background to fine coast scenery. " But why there should be 
 so much sea out of sight of land is a problem which to our 
 present understandings must be abandoned as inscrutable." 
 So again an anonymous discourser upon long voyages takes 
 it to be undeniable that the sea loses nine-tenths of its poetry 
 and impressiveness while you are living on it : you think of the 
 noble things that poets have ^vritten about it, of its gigantic 
 irrepressible impulses, its tidal forces, its vast unchangeableness; 
 that time writes no wrinkle on its azure brow, is an exquisitely 
 graceful reflection as one sits on a grassy beach on a day- 
 in spring, but its significance and solace fade away into the 
 most dismal distance in a gale of mnd. Victor Hugo is said 
 to be the only great poet who has thoroughly understood the 
 " vile, insensate, and absolutely brutal ferocity " of the sea ; 
 a monster so thoroughly irrational, so incurably deaf and 
 bUnd, so unconditionally without purpose or aim. "The 
 sensations of most men in their first rough blow are probably 
 those of pure fear. But by the second and third blow fear 
 retreats an inch or two to make way for a fragment of con- 
 tempt. One begins to think a little meanly of the ocean, 
 which, in spite of all its fury and its hundreds of miles of 
 tumbHng waters, and with the winds for its auxiliaries, still is 
 thoroughly mastered by a clever toy of wood and iron. You 
 
356 NO MORE SEA. 
 
 feel that your raging foe has a good deal of the mere bully in 
 him, after all." On the other hand, it has been well said that 
 the child's first consciousness of the greatness and mystery of 
 the world around him is embodied in the sea — so charming 
 and yet so terrible, the most playful of playfellows, the most 
 awful of possible destroyers. By it the child is first and most 
 abidingly impressed with the sense of a mysterious life, the 
 sense of a mysterious danger, and, above all, the sense of a 
 mysterious power. Lamartine says that if prayer was not born 
 with man himself, it must have been on the sea that it was 
 invented, by men left alone with their thoughts and their 
 feebleness ; in presence of that abyss of the firmament, where 
 their view is lost in confusion, and of that abyss of the sea, 
 from which only a frail plank divides them ; in hearing the 
 roar of the ocean, when it growls, hisses, howls, and bellows, 
 like the voices of a thousand wild beasts. De Quincey speaks 
 of the sea as often peopled, amidst its ravings, with what seem 
 innumerable human voices — such voices, or as ominous, as 
 what were heard by Kubla Khan, "ancestral voices prophesy- 
 ing war ; " and he refers to the shapes of fear, or shapes of 
 beauty not less awful, that doubtless are seen at times upon the 
 waves by the diseased eye of the sailor, in other cases besides, 
 the somewhat rare one of calenture. For " all sailors, it is 
 notorious, are superstitious," — partly, it is inferred, from looking 
 out so much upon the wilderness of waters, empty of all human 
 life, — and mighty solitudes are generally fear-haunted and fear- 
 peopled. In his treatise on Modern Superstition the same 
 writer adverts to Wordsworth's notice of that ancient awe for 
 the sea and its tremendous secrets, which, he predicts, will 
 never become obsolete : no excess of nautical skill will ever 
 perfectly disenchant the great abyss from its terrors. In this 
 world, to his thinking, there are two mighty forms of perfect 
 solitude — the ocean and the desert : the wilderness of the 
 barren sands, and the wilderness of the barren waters. " Both 
 are the parents of inevitable superstitions — of terrors solemn, 
 ineradicable, eternal." 
 
 Of all the objects he had ever seen, there was none, said 
 
NO MORE SEA. 357 
 
 Addison, which affected his imagination so much as did 
 the sea. He could not gaze on the heavings of that pro- 
 digious bulk of waters, even in a calm, without what he calls 
 "a very pleasing astonishment; " but when it was worked up 
 in a tempest, so that the horizon on every side was nothing 
 but foaming billows and floating mountains, he found it im- 
 possible to describe the " agreeable horror " that rises from 
 such a prospect. A troubled ocean, he adds, to a man who 
 sails upon it, is " the biggest object that he can see in motion," 
 and consequently gives his imagination one of the highest 
 kinds of pleasure that can arise from a sense of the vast. 
 
 Mr. Black's winsome Princess of Thule tells the fair-haired 
 stranger from the South, when he rails against " that perpetual 
 and melancholy sea " amid which her lot is cast, — " Ah, but 
 you must not talk badly of the sea. It is our very good friend. 
 It gives us [Borva islanders] food, and keeps many people 
 alive. It carries the lads away to other places, and brings 
 them back with money in their pockets," — and sometimes, 
 interposes the objecting Southron, it smashes a few of them 
 on the rocks, or swallows up a dozen families, and the next 
 morning it is as smooth and fair as if nothing had happened. 
 ** But that is not the sea at all," said Sheila ; " that is the 
 storms that ^vill wTeck the boats, and how can the sea help 
 that? When the sea is let alone, the sea is very good to us." 
 And so animated and prettily accentuated was Sheila's defence 
 of her favourite, that the Southron confessed himself beaten, 
 and vowed that never again would he, in Miss Mackenzie's 
 presence, say anything against the sea. 
 
 In one of the least known of his miscellaneous poems, 
 Walter Savage Landor speaks reverently, lovingly, tenderly 
 even, of 
 
 "that unpausing sea 
 
 Which heaves with God's own image, ever pure, 
 
 And ministers in mightiness to Earth 
 
 Plenty and health and beauty and delight ; 
 
 Of all created things beneath the skies 
 
 The only one that mortal may not mar." 
 
 No one who could wx'iie. this, no one who can go along with the 
 
358 NO MORE PAIN. 
 
 writer of it, feel as he felt, and think as he thought, can accept 
 as probable or plausible, without something of a revolting intel- 
 lect and an aching heart, a literal, or literally commonplace, 
 interpretation of the text which announces, for the better life 
 and the new creation, no more sea. 
 
 XLl. 
 
 NO MORE PAIN. 
 Revelation xxi. 4. 
 
 ANEW heaven and a new earth, the seer of Patmos beheld 
 in his apocalyptic visions ; for the first heaven and the 
 first earth were passed away, and there was no more sea. But 
 other negative characteristics there were, also, in the new cre- 
 ation, due to Him who made all things new. Conspicuous by 
 its absence, in this cosmic regeneration, was a mystery deeper 
 than the sea, — the mystery of pain. In this new world, in the 
 holy city, new Jerusalem, God should be very present with His 
 people, and should wipe away all tears from their eyes ; and 
 there should be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, 
 neither should there be any more pain. 
 
 St. Paul had declared the whole creation, or every creature, 
 to be groaning and travailing in pain together until now. But 
 the Patmos vision was of a new creation, where there should be 
 no room for the cry, "Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound 
 incurable ? " — no cause for the lament, " Much pain is in all 
 loins, and the faces of them all gather blackness." The last 
 enemy that shall be destroyed is death ; and the charter of the 
 holy city. New Jerusalem, gives formal assurance to its denizens, 
 the citizens of no mean city, that there shall be no more death. 
 For the former things are passed away ; and with death are 
 passed away the concomitants and foreshadowers of death : 
 neither sorrow nor crying is to be heard in that better land, 
 neither shall there be any more pain. 
 
 Is all this but a wistful yearning? a sublime dream? a 
 
NO MORE PAIN. 359 
 
 pathetic aspiration ? Is the wish the father of the thought, 
 and hope the fabricator of but a baseless vision ? Even were 
 it so, the yearning is so natural, the aspiration is so tenderly 
 human and humane, the dream is so soothing as well as sub- 
 lime in its scope, that even the most negatively disposed of 
 Positivists might bear with a suffering believer's entreaty to be 
 spared his hope, and even the most astringent of Agnostics 
 comply with the appeal to let him dream his dream. 
 
 The New Testament makes no pretension, as Colani observes, 
 to suppress or ignore the existence and the power of pain. Too 
 well acquainted is it mth human nature to adopt and repeat 
 ce vwt insense of an arrogant philosophy. Pain, thou art nothing 
 but a name. The New Testament regards pain as something 
 much more than a mere name, or a simply nominal evil, — pain 
 is there accounted " la plus reelle des realites," and is treated 
 " au serieux." Grant, with Dr. Hugh Macmillan, the beneficent 
 purpose it answers in the economy of man, and that, but for its 
 warnings, these fearfully and wonderfully constructed bodies of 
 ours would often be seriously injured, without our knowledge, 
 unless indeed our attention were kept in a constant state of 
 distressing watchfulness, worse almost than any pain ; still, to 
 no martyr to physical suffering vAW any such explanation be 
 satisfactory ; he will only ask why, if the purpose of pain is a 
 purely benevolent one, should it be so excessive ? why should 
 it rend and rack the frame with agony ? why should it last so 
 long ? why should our sensibility be more developed for pain 
 than for pleasure, and a slight pain destroy much happiness ? 
 " Why should some begin to suffer tortures as soon as they 
 begin to live; and be destined in their mother's womb to lives 
 of lingering disease ? Why, as in the case of burning, should 
 it exhaust the system, and' thus produce the fatal result it was 
 intended to prevent ? " Not altogether bad, not in every- sense 
 bad, is the authority to which Milton assigns the dictum, 
 
 " But pain is perfect misery, the worst 
 Of evils, and, excessive, overturns 
 All patience." 
 
 No animal, as Hartley Coleridge has remarked, seems capable 
 
36o NO MORE PAIN. 
 
 of sufferings so exquisite as man, to say nothing of the aggrava- 
 tion each moment's pain receives from the prospect of a painful 
 succession. And pains of all sort are intolerable, when they 
 make us conscious of weakness. " To be weak is miserable." 
 Arthur Hallam called pain the deepest thing we have in our 
 nature, and to him union through pain seemed always more 
 real and holy than any other. But even such apologists for 
 pain as Hinton admit that no adequate explanation is to be 
 found of it in the beneficial effects which it produces in respect 
 to our physical existence : serving those uses, it yet exists 
 independently of them ; its source lies deeper, and its ends are 
 larger. 
 
 *' There is purpose in pain, 
 Otherwise it were devihsh. I trust in my soul 
 That the great master-hand which sweeps over the whole 
 Of this deep harp of life, if at moments it stretch 
 To shrill tension some one wailing nerve, means to fetch 
 Its response the truest, . . . 
 Its pathos the purest, from out the wrung heart, 
 "Whose faculties, flaccid it may be, if less 
 Sharply strung, sharply smitten, had fail'd to express 
 Just the one note the great final harmony needs. 
 And what best proves there's life in a heart ? — that it bleeds ! " 
 
 The philosophic author of Graveiihiirst — a book of thoughts 
 on good and evil — is keen to note how pain and suffering 
 prompt man's energies. The energy of fortitude he would not 
 forfeit for an immunity from pain. He shows how pain that 
 acts as a stimulant to action, blends with or is lost in the sense 
 of effort, or the vigorous muscular exertion it calls forth j very 
 acute pain paralyses or subdues, but the prick and the sting 
 that stimulate to energetic movement are forgotten in the 
 energy they produce. Of pain as the great conservator of life, 
 in giving note of danger, he says, " We should die very rapidly 
 if it were not for the pain of disease." Harriet Martineau, in 
 more than one of her life in a sick-room essays, expatiates on 
 the relief afforded by visitations of severe pain, in rallying the 
 vital forces, and vivifying and cheering "on the whole." But 
 also she describes with force, as we have seen in a previous 
 
NO MORE PAIN. 361 
 
 section (p. 60), the sinking of our spirits, fathoms deep, when 
 extreme pain seizes on us, and the self-put sickening question, 
 " How shall I bear this for five minutes ? What ^vill become 
 of me ? " — no word but " despair " expressing the feeling if the 
 imagination stretches on to an hour, or hours. She claims 
 accordingly a quite unbounded degree of admiration for those 
 who die, with any composure, of sheer pain — of the most 
 torturing diseases, — retaining their spiritual dignities to the 
 end. In a later chapter this expert in physical endurance 
 explicitly avowed her conviction, that there is no more pos- 
 sibility of becoming inured to acute agony of body than to 
 paroxysms of remorse — the severest of moral pains : a familiar 
 pain, frequently recurring, becomes, in point of fact, more and 
 more dreaded, instead of becoming lightly esteemed in propor- 
 tion to its familiarity. The pain itself becomes more odious, 
 more oppressive, more intolerable, in proportion to the accumu- 
 lation of experience of weary hours, and to the aggregate of 
 painful associations which every visitation revives. " When it 
 is, moreover, considered that the suffering part of the body is, 
 if not recovering, gro\\ing continually more diseased and sus- 
 ceptible of pain, it will appear how little truth there is in the 
 supposition of tortured persons becoming inured to torture." 
 Experiences differ, equally with organizations ; and we find Dr. 
 Channing convincing himself that by analysing a pain he could 
 discover an element of pleasure in it — and that by looking the 
 pain " fully in the face and comprehending it," he diminished 
 its intensity. Distinct perception, he argued, instead of aggra- 
 vating, decreases evil. Seeing that pain and death are every- 
 where, that all animated nature suffers and dies, that life begins 
 and ends in pain, he saw too that " pain has a great work to 
 do," and its universality reconciled him to it : he would not ask 
 to be exempted from the common lot. 
 
 There are uncommon degrees, however, of the common lot ; 
 and it is a commonplace in medical science that the degrees of 
 pain are not to be estimated by any obvious similarity of lesion, 
 or exciting cause ; and that, as Sir Henry Holland words it, the 
 " sentient state of the individual " is also concerned. — varying 
 
362 NO MORE PAIN. 
 
 in different persons, and at different times in the same person. 
 It is not to be doubted, says Dr. South, but a dull fellow can 
 endure the paroxysms of a fever, or the torments of the gout or 
 stone, much better than a man of sensitive temperament ; in the 
 one case pain beats upon a rock or an anvil, in the other it prints 
 itself upon wax. Medical authority has rebuked before now the 
 shallow heedlessness which flippantly derides the groaners who 
 cry out at a touch of pain : pain to some natures is all but 
 absolutely unbearable — in them the nervous organization is so 
 exquisitely delicate (though of course there are mere pretenders 
 as well, and plenty of them), that even " a touch of pain," which 
 most people would scarcely feel, is to them the acutest agony. 
 There are people, it has been said, who suffer as much in having 
 a tooth filed, as others in losing a limb. We find the late Dr. 
 George Wilson writing to Sir J, Y. Simpson a description of what 
 he suffered under an operation before the days of anaesthetics, 
 which account he begins by owning himself deficient in physical 
 courage, — meaning by physical courage that consciousness of a 
 power to endure bodily agony which accompanies a certain 
 temperament — the possessors of which courage know from the 
 first instinctively, and by-and-by learn from experience, that a 
 blow, a cut, a burn, an attack of toothache, or the like infliction 
 of injury, or onset of pain, can be endured by them, though 
 unwelcome, up to a degree of considerable severity, without 
 excessively incommoding them or exhausting their patience. 
 " I belong, on the other hand, to that large class, including 
 most women, to whom cutting, bruising, burning, or any similar 
 physical injury, even to a small extent, is a source of suffering 
 never willingly endured, and always anticipated with more or 
 less of apprehension. Pain in itself has nothing tonic or bracing 
 in its effects upon such. In its relation to the body, it is a sheer 
 and unmitigated evil." Lord Lytton made his Herculean Jasper 
 long to swell his groan into a roar, when the gnaw of the monster 
 anguish fastened on the nerves like a wolf's tooth ; and it is 
 suggested that the old fable of Hercules in the poisoned tunic 
 was surely invented by some skilled physiologist to denote the 
 truth that only in the strongest frames can pain be pushed into 
 
NO MORE PAIN. 363 
 
 its extremest torture. The finest constitutions may enable the 
 sufferer to bear pain which would soon wear away the delicate ; 
 but they are also those which, when once seriously impaired, 
 occasion the direst pain. In a later work the same author 
 maintains, in opposition to the popular belief, that pain is most 
 acutely felt by those in whom the animal organization being 
 perfect, and the sense of vitality exquisitely keen, "every injury 
 or lesion finds the whole system rise, as it were, to repel the 
 mischief and communicate the consciousness of it to all those 
 nerves which are the sentinels to the garrison of life. " Pain, 
 pain ! Has life any ill but pain ? " is the querulous query of 
 Margrave in A Strange Story, whose exquisite susceptibility to 
 it is made compatible ^^^th perfect health, and with that intense 
 vitality which connotes blissful consciousness of life. 
 
 It is well for us, Goethe somewhere remarks, that man 
 can only endure a certain degree of misery ; what is beyond 
 that, either annihilates him, or passes by him, and leaves 
 him apathetic. Isaac Barrow approves the common solace 
 of grief. Si gravis, brevis est ; si longus, leins ; if it be very 
 grievous and acute, it cannot continue long without inter- 
 mission or respite ; if it abide long, it is insupportable : 
 " intolerable pain is like lightning, it destroys us, or is itself 
 instantly destroyed." As Carlyle puts it, the maddest boil, 
 unless it kill you with its torments, does at length burst, 
 and become an abscess. A popular essayist argues that 
 the artificial infliction of excessive pain is impossible — that 
 Nature herself imposes the maximum — that after the first 
 sharp, cutting pang, all tends to faintness ; and that in the 
 most lingering operations acute pain ceases much sooner 
 than is commonly supposed. The Samson Agonistes of 
 Milton might give a text for such a treatise : 
 
 ** Much more affliction than already felt 
 They cannot well impose, nor I sustain." 
 
 To apply the phrase of a later poet, " Pain o'erreaches itself, so 
 is baulked." Omnis dolor, writes Cicero, aiii est veheme?is aut 
 levis ; si levis, facile fertur, si veheme7is, certe brans futurus est. 
 
364 NO MORE PAIN. 
 
 So that either levis or brevis it must be, on his showing — either 
 trifling in degree, or else brief in duration. " Rien n'est 
 longtemps extreme," the author of Le Mechant sings or says. 
 So William CuUen Bryant in his sonnet on mutation : 
 
 "They talk of short-lived pleasure — be it so — 
 
 Pain dies as quickly : stern, hard-featured pain 
 Expires, and lets her weary prisoner go. 
 The fiercest agonies have shortest reign." 
 
 So Byron, in The Tivo Foscari, speaks of the wretch who 
 happily escapes to death " By the compassionate trance, poor 
 nature's last Resource against the tyranny of pain." Or the 
 trance ffiay be a life-giving sleep — a sleep and a forgetting ; not 
 the sleep of death, and the forgetfulness of the grave, but the 
 sleep whose waking is to ntw life * this side the grave, and 
 
 * If room be found in these footnotes for a passing reference to the 
 pleasures of convalescence, it may perhaps be justified as foreshadowing 
 the better time coming when there shall be no more sickness, no more 
 pain. Jean Paul Richter regards the first day of convalescence of what 
 he calls the " over- wintered body" as the season of bloom of a beautiful 
 soul, which steps, as if transfigured, out of the cold rind of earth into a 
 warm Eden. "The whole heart is a moist, warm, gushing spring, full 
 of buds, beneath a young sun." Whose conscience ever slept during the 
 progress of a protracted convalescence? asks a discourser on that "sweet 
 and solemn time." A little while ago we had drifted so far away from 
 love, sunshine, work, and play, that it seemed as if the doors of the world 
 were almost closed upon us for ever ; but now they open again gradually 
 and graciously, and we catch from afar sounds and glimpses of the life and 
 light we love so well. "The coldest heart must acknowledge the goodness 
 of God with a thrill then. The most indifferent must lift up his eyes 
 reverently towards the commoti light of day, and whisper a thanksgiving." 
 So again the author of Cometh up as a Flower dilates on the sweet sleeps 
 that come to the young when their sickness is on the wane — the desire for 
 food that ensues — the pleasure they find in the dusty sunbeam streaming 
 through the window, in the mote playing up and down on ceiling and 
 wall. There is even a daring expression of wonder whether the bliss of 
 spirits at the Resurrection dawn, feeling the clothing of pure new bodies, 
 will surpass the delight that attends the renewal of the old body at the 
 uprising from a great sickness. To Esther Craven, fully dressed for the 
 first time since her long illness, and removed into an adjoining dressing- 
 room, there is "intense delight" in even that small change of scene — 
 delight even in the changed pattern on the walls, in the different shape 
 
NO MORE PAIN. 365 
 
 the oblivion a blessed immunity from the sense and from the 
 recollection of bygone pangs — the pangs of what Coleridge, 
 with such depth of meaning, calls agony that cannot be re- 
 membered. 
 
 Refine as we \\ill, optimize as we may, still is, and ever will 
 be, bewildering, to mortal insight, the mystery of pain. Pain 
 is not entirely synonymous with Evil, Mr. Carlyle once wrote, 
 but bodily pain seems less redeemed by good than almost any 
 other kind of it : from the loss of fortune, of fame, or even of 
 friends, philosophy pretends to draw a certain compensating 
 benefit ; but in general the permanent loss of health will bid 
 defiance to her alchemy. He regards it as a universal dimi- 
 nution — the diminution equally of our resources and of our 
 capacity to guide them; a penalty unmitigated, save by love 
 of friends, which then first becomes truly dear and precious 
 to us ; or by comforts brought from beyond this earthly 
 sphere, from that serene Fountain of peace and hope, to 
 which our weak philosophy cannot raise her wing. For all 
 men, in itself, disease, he goes on to say, is misery, but chiefly 
 for men of finer feelings and endowments, to whom, in return 
 for such superiorities, it seems to be sent most frequently and 
 in its most distressing forms. '' It is a cruel fate for the poet 
 
 of the chairs — even in the brass handles of the old oak chest of drawers. 
 " Every power seems new and fresh — every sensation exquisitely keen ; 
 in every exercise of sight and sound and touch there is conscious joy." 
 Gray's lines, so often quoted, and not long since by Mr. Gladstone with 
 an emphasis of admiration for Gray, must here be quoted once again, if 
 only for the justification the last of them suggests for appending such a 
 footnote to such a topic : 
 
 " See the wretch, that long has toss'd 
 On the thorny bed of pain. 
 
 At length repair his vigour lost. 
 And breathe and walk again ! 
 
 The meanest flow'ret of the vale, 
 
 The simplest note that swells the gale, 
 
 The common sun, the air, the skies, 
 
 To him are opening Paradise." 
 
 And what else deems mortal man of Paradise but of that promised land 
 where there shall be no more pain? 
 
366 NO MORE PAIN. 
 
 to have the sunny land of his imagination, often the sole 
 territory he is lord of, disfigured and darkened by the shades 
 of pain." His clay dwelling is changed into a gloomy prison; 
 every nerve is become an avenue of disgust or anguish ; and 
 the soul sits within, in her melancholy loneliness, a prey to the 
 spectres of despair, or stupefied with excess of suffering, doomed 
 as it were to a "life in death." Dr. Newman as explicitly 
 affirms bodily pain to be the most mysterious of all. Sorrow, 
 anxiety, and disappointment he sees to be more or less con- 
 nected with sin and sinners ; but bodily pain is involuntary for 
 the most part, stretching over the world by some external 
 irresistible law, reaching to children who have never actually 
 sinned, and to the brute animals, who are strangers to Adam's 
 nature ; while in its manifestations it is far more piteous and 
 distressing than any other suffering. He insists, too, as regards 
 the effect of pain upon the mind, that it has no sanctifying 
 influence in itself; that bad men are made worse by it; and 
 that even the most religious among us may be misled to think 
 it makes them better than it really does ; for the effect of it at 
 length, on any but very proud or ungovernable tempers, is to 
 cause a languor and composure of mind which looks like 
 resignation, while it necessarily throws our reason upon the 
 especial thought of God, our only stay in such times of trial. — 
 As to the brute animals, indeed, the mystery is deeper and 
 
 deeper still. 
 
 " Pain in man 
 Bears the high mission of the flail and fan ; 
 In brutes 'tis truly piteous." 
 
 These sheep, what have they done? If the wish could as 
 easily assure the event as it fathers the thought, there should 
 be assured to all these dumb sufferers a better land of green 
 pastures and still waters, no longer embittered with liabiHty to 
 suffering, but sweetened with the perennial promise of no more 
 pain. 
 
 No more Sea. The thought is depressing to many, if taken 
 in anything like a Hteral sense. How much to miss, to regret, 
 to lament, in a new world without the old, old sea ! 
 
NO MORE PAIN. 367 
 
 No more Night. That, again, may to many be a thought 
 the reverse of soothing, so endeared to their associations of 
 memory and of hope is the varied but ever solemn, and some- 
 times so sweetly solemn, aspect of Night. 
 
 No more sorrow, or cr^-ing. Even this, too, some may count 
 not absolutely and unconditionally a blessedness supreme, 
 while they bethink them of the sanctuary of sorrow, the sweet 
 uses of adversity, and the blessed relief of tears. 
 
 But, no more Pain ? Few indeed, and above or below the 
 level of our common humanity, must they be to whom this 
 prospect is not a promise to be caught at literally, and cherished 
 instinctively. They who cannot but sigh at the conjecture, as 
 matter of fact, of no more Sea; and who would fain put a 
 liberal private interpretation on the meaning of no more Night \ 
 and who could resign themselves almost complacently to the 
 explaining away a positive sense as regards no more sorrow or 
 crying, will pray God the words be strictly construed which 
 promise that there shall be no more pain. 
 
 THE END. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Achilles, 176, 330 
 
 Addison, 51, 168, 223, 279, 320, 
 
 323^ 356 
 Adullam, Cave of, 103 sq. 
 ^neas Sylvius, 172 
 u^^schylus, 18 
 Agricola, 100 
 Ahab, 24 sq. 
 Aide, H., 13 
 Albany, Duke of, 145 
 Aldred, Archbp., 168 
 Alexander VI., 150, 174 
 Algazzali, 314 
 Ali Pacha, 123 
 
 Alison, Sir A., 84, 140, 282, 313 
 Alliteration, 133 sq. 
 Alsatia, 105 
 Althorp, Ld., 313 
 Ampere, 49 
 Anastatica, 210 
 Andrewes, Bp., 80 
 Anger, 380 sq. _ 
 Annihilation, 49 sq. 
 Antoninus, Marcus, 263, 306 
 Appetite proof against trouble, 125 
 
 sq. 
 Apuleius, 267 
 
 Arblay, Mde. d', 62, 1S3. 191, 287 
 Arbuthnot, 69 
 Arcadius, 99 
 Arlington, Lord. 313 
 Armstrong, 270 
 Arnauld, 174 
 Arnold, Matthew, 15, 352 
 Arnold, Thos., 1 14 
 Asgill, 7 
 
 Asleep in church, 321 sq. 
 Atterbury, 177 
 
 I Attila, 121 
 
 Aubigne, Agr. d', 159, 249 
 Augustus Coesar, 167 
 Aurelian, 274 
 Austen, Jane, 36 
 Aytoun, W. E., 45 
 
 Babel, 22 
 
 Bacon, Ld.. 4, 226, 241,' 284, 228, 
 
 307, 329 
 Bagehot, ^\ alter, 290 
 Baillie, Joanna, 42, 52, 141, 142, 
 
 213 
 Bairakdar, 122 
 Balzac, H. de, 10, 59, 72, 84, 125, 
 
 184, 215, 285 
 Balzac, J. L. G., 223 
 Barante, 167^ 
 Barhani, R. , 217 
 Barrow, 363 
 Barthelemy, 33 
 Baxter, 221 
 Bayley. F. W., 137 
 Beaconsfteld, Ld., stj Disraeli, B. 
 Beattie, 66, 102, 208, 218 
 Beaumont and Fletcher. 148 
 Beckford, W., 215 
 Beddoes, T. L., 203, 309 
 Beecher. L., 259 
 Bellarmine, 14 
 Bentinck. Ld. G., 314 
 Beranger, 15, 68, 144, 214, 224 
 Berchoux, 12S 
 Berkeley, 4 
 
 Bernard, C. de, 64, 128 
 Bessel, 231 
 Beyle, H., 49 
 Black, W., 33, 3S7 
 
 24 
 
370 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Blair, Robert, 311 
 
 Carmel, Mt., 132 
 
 
 Blasche, 2 
 
 Cary, H., 189 
 
 
 Boileau, 13, 85, 188, 225, 226, 245, 
 
 Catharine IL, 73, 179 
 
 
 266, 316 
 
 Catiline, 104 
 
 
 Bolingbroke, 129, 158, 174, 280 
 
 Cato, 160, 267, 279, 288 
 
 
 Bonnet, C, 303 
 
 Cellini, B., 191 
 
 
 Boswell, 184, 221, 286 
 
 Chalmers, T., 283, 332 
 
 
 Bourne, Vincent, 335j 
 
 Chambers, R., 192, 282 
 
 
 Boyd, 296, 336, 338 
 
 Chamfort, 4, 250, 318, 345 
 
 
 Bronte, A. , 40, 288 
 
 Channing, 200, 265, 361 
 
 
 Bronte, C, 36, 69, 74, 219, 327, 
 
 Charles V., 145 
 
 
 343, 346 
 
 Charles VL, 143 
 
 
 Bronte, E., 78 
 
 Chateaubriand, 47, 154, 201, 
 
 209, 
 
 Brooks, C. S., 39, 96 
 
 253, 339 
 
 
 Brougham, Ld., 84, 163 
 
 Chatham, Ld., 116 
 
 
 Broughton, R., 36, 46, 52, 207, 
 
 Chaucer, 178 
 
 
 263, 364 
 
 Chesterfield, Ld., 103, 186,340, 
 
 348 
 
 Brown, C. B., 298 
 
 Chicken War, 144 
 
 
 Brown, John, 13, 255 
 
 Chiesley, 130 
 
 
 Brown, T.. 68, 96, 328 
 
 Chosroes, 121 
 
 
 Browne, Sir T., 5, 7, 29, 86, 205, 
 
 Churchill, 53, 168, 169, 194, 
 
 219, 
 
 248 
 
 241, 289, 324 
 
 
 Browning, E. B.,50, 62, 6}^^ 75, 89, 
 
 Cicero, 103, 104, 166, 176, 281, 
 
 363 
 
 235» 352 
 
 Cimon, 120 
 
 
 Browning, R.. 239, 251, 310 
 
 Clarendon, 178, 188 
 
 
 Bruce, J. C, 166 
 
 Clay, H., 316 
 
 
 Bruno, Giord., 215 
 
 Cleisthenes, 99 
 
 
 Brunton, M., 332 
 
 Olive, Ld., 299 
 
 
 Bruyere, La, 33, 100, 153, 161, 164, 
 
 Clough, A. H., 15, 87, 258, 305 
 
 186, 205, 242, 320, 348 
 
 Cockburn, H., 317, 354 
 
 
 Buckle, H. T., 303 
 
 Cceur, Jacques, 347 
 
 
 Buddhism, 50 
 
 Colepepper, 188 
 
 
 Bunyan, 293 
 
 Coleridge, Hartley, 13, 16, 49 
 
 ,53. 
 
 Burgess. Bp,, 2615 
 
 75. 151, 194, 257, 258, 325, 3 
 
 59 
 
 Burke, 30, 250, 315' 330 
 
 Coleridge, S. T., 23, 30, 41, 52 
 
 ^58, 
 
 Burns, R., 92, 173, 188, 295, 331 
 
 61, 64, 81, 85, 88, 134, 185, 
 
 269, 
 
 Bussy, De, 189 
 
 273, 353 
 
 
 Butler, S., 5, 163. 251 
 
 Collins, W. W., 121, 336 
 
 
 Byron, Ld., 5, 27, 47, 49, 58, 99, 
 
 Colman, G., 180, 347 
 
 
 122, 141, 155, 172, 183,197,199, 
 
 Colnet, 161 
 
 
 208, 213, 253, 302, 364 
 
 Columbus, 138, 164, 174 
 Compliments, 182 sq. 
 
 
 Cabra, 165 
 
 Conciliatory, 1 14 sq. 
 
 
 Caesar, Julius, 103 
 
 Confucius, 232 
 
 
 Callanus, 120 
 
 Confusion of tongues, 22 sq. 
 
 
 Campbell, J., ill 
 
 Constantine, 274 
 
 
 Campbell, T.. 59, 172, 318 
 
 Cooper, J. F., 125 
 
 
 Camus, J. P.. 335 
 
 Corneille, 75, 165, 270,283,296 
 
 320 
 
 Caravagio. 191 
 
 Cornelius Nepos, 160 
 
 
 Carlyle, T., ii, 23, 69, I2I, 129, 
 
 Cornish miners, 175 
 
 
 130, 146, 153, 162, 163; 182, 196, 
 
 Cornwallis, C. F., 10, 218 
 
 
 197, 211, 213, 226, 227, 234, 235, 
 
 Cornwallis, Ld., 139 
 
 
 248, 271, 280, 298, 303, 363, 365 
 
 Cossacks, 106 
 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Cotton, 1 6 
 
 Cousin, Victor, 191 
 
 Cowley, 265 
 
 Cowper. 16, 29. 135, 185, 24C, 247. 
 
 286, 291, 322, 346 
 Cox. Sir G. W., 18 
 Crabbe, 6, 19. 44, 63, 72.. 118, 173, 
 
 182, 184, 297, 348 
 Crichton, 215 
 Croly, G., 47, 50. 341 
 Custine, 162 
 
 Dallas, E. S., 257 
 
 Daniel, S., 166 
 
 Dante, 2, 24, 86, 109, 147. 189, 230 
 
 David, 95, 103 
 
 Davies, Sir John, 17 
 
 De Foe, 299 
 
 Death desired, 43 sq. 
 
 Decebalus. 120 
 
 Decomposition, 301 sq. 
 
 Delgrasse, 122 
 
 Desaguliers. 325 
 
 Descartes, 318 
 
 Dickens. 39, 64, 81, 97. 168, 176, 
 
 231, 343. 356 
 Disraeli. B., 13, 40, 64, 84, 157, 
 
 188. 288 
 Disraeli. I., 174, 320 
 Dobell, Sydney, 219 
 Domitian, 100, 145 
 Donne, 24 
 Dove's flight, 14 sq. 
 Drowsy preaching, 322 sq. 
 Dryden, 128, 160, 243, 274. 305, 320 
 Ducis, 42 
 Duty, Obvious, 227 sq. 
 
 Earth abiding. The, 193 sq. 
 
 Eden, i sq., 23 
 
 Eden, F.. 113 
 
 Edward II.. 143 
 
 Edwards. John. 14 
 
 Edwardes. A.. 126 
 
 Egede, Hans, 172 
 
 Egidius. 38 
 
 Eleazar, 120 
 
 Elgin. Ld., 346 
 
 Elijah, 132 
 
 Eliot. Geo., 31. 64. 70, 76. 234, 237. 
 
 248, 260, 275, 300, 326 
 Elizabeth. Queen, 114 
 Elliott, H. v., 316 
 
 Emerson, R. W.. 229. 231. 235, 251, 
 286, 303 ' 
 
 Emmett. R., 315 
 
 Empedocles, 302 
 I Envied merit. 222 sq. 
 I Erasmus. 220 
 
 Eternity, an oppressive idea. 5 1 
 
 Etty, 319 
 
 Euripides, 91 
 
 Eutychus, 321. 327 
 
 Evelyn, John, 25, 92, 173 
 
 Fairfax, 136 
 
 Farcy. G., 73 
 
 Farrar, 25 
 
 Faust, 4 
 
 Feltham, 202, 241 
 
 Fenelon. 34 
 
 Ferrars, B., 325 
 
 Ferrier, Prof., 332 
 
 Fielding, H., loi, 169 
 
 Finch, Ld., 314 
 
 Finlay, G., 109 
 
 Fisher, Bp., 257 
 
 Flattery, 178 sq. 
 
 Flowers, fallacious analogy of resur- 
 rection, 207 sq. 
 
 Fonblanque, A., 286 
 
 Fontaine, Ea, 95. 127. 144. 179,251, 
 320 
 
 Ford. J., 67 
 
 Forsyth, W.. 115 
 
 Foster, John. 45, 51. 112, 268 
 
 Foul Raid. The. 145 
 
 Fouquier-Tinville, 128 
 
 Fox, C. J., 102 
 
 Francis of Assisi, St., 316 
 
 Francis of Sales, St., 335 
 
 Francis Xavier, St.. 92 
 
 Fredegonde, 148 
 
 Frederick the Great. 49. 84, 130, 
 163. 187, 280 
 
 Froude, J. A.. 114, 126, 300 
 
 Fruit, The forbidden, 5 sq. 
 
 Fuller, Margaret, 319 
 
 Fuller, Thos., 324 
 
 Gallio, 271 sq. 
 Gait, J., 98, 324 
 Garrick, 180 
 Gaskell, 36, 236. 342 
 Gauden, Bp., 167 
 Gay, 180, 223 
 
372 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Genseric, 99 
 
 George I., 174 
 
 George III., 80 
 
 George IV., 102 
 
 Gibbon, 64, 99, 136, 145, 148, 218, 
 
 274, 297, 350 
 Gisborue, T., 319 
 Gladstone, W. E., 81, 85 
 Gleig, G. R., 243 
 Goethe, 52, 80, 109, 175, 363 
 Goldsmith, 71, 171, 180, 186, 187, 
 
 205, 214, 218, 254, 318,' 323, 
 
 324 
 
 Gore, Mrs. C, 98, 287 
 Grahame, J., 177 
 Gray, 365 
 Grenville, Ld., 244 
 Gresset, 73, 364 
 Grevile, C, 317 
 Griffin, G., 195 
 Gryphon, 2 
 Guises, The, 166 
 Guizot, F., 202, 317 
 Guizot, Mdme., 73 
 
 Haliburton, 192, 245, 339 
 
 Halifax, Ld., 314 
 
 Hall, Bp., 257 
 
 Hall, Robert, 316 
 
 Hallam, Arthur, 360 
 
 Hamilton, Jas., 177, 331 
 
 Hamlet and Claudius, 15 1 
 
 Hanna, W., 256 
 
 Hare, J. C, 235, 303, 352, 353 
 
 Harold, 166 
 
 Hastings, Warren, 173, 299, 330 
 
 Hawthorne, N., 42, 45, 48, 60, 93, 
 
 154, 233 
 Hayley, W., 246 
 Hayward, A., 187, 339 
 Hazlitt, 167 
 
 ' Hear all and say nothing, ' 345 ?q. 
 Helps, Sir A., ii, 34, 39, 232, 23J, 
 
 240, 259 
 Hemans, 154, 170 
 Herbert, G., 228, 229, 271 
 Hilton, J., 60 
 Hinton, J. H., 360 
 Hippias, 171 
 Hobbes, 74, 249 
 Hogarth, 325 
 Holland, Ld., 211 
 Holland, Sir H., 94, 267, 361 
 
 Holmes, O. W., 60, 75, 125, 203, 
 
 265, 290, 291, 352 
 Homer, 176, 208 
 Hood, 125, 196, 201, 209, 213 
 Hook, Theodore, 65, 291 
 Hooker, 299 
 Horace, 24, 47, 68, ?>t„ 190, 211, 
 
 242, 264, 329, 349 
 Horner, F., 315 
 Hudibras, 163 
 Hughes, T., 76 
 Hugo, Victor, 4, 15, 16, 28, 61, 88, 
 
 128, 135, 150, 161, 303, 350,355 
 Humboldt, A. von, 339 
 Hume, D., 80, 320 
 Hunt, Leigh, 41, 164, 187, 210, 268 
 Hurdis, 208 
 Hutton, R. H., 352 
 
 Indignation, Righteous, 329 sq. 
 
 Ingelow, J., 32, 46, 156 
 
 Innocent XL, 105 
 
 16, 18 
 
 Irving, W., 138, 166, 230, 305 
 
 Jacob, Zd, 90 
 
 James I., 301, 329 
 
 Jameson, A., 55, 61 
 
 Jean Paul, see Richter 
 
 Jeffrey, 199, 317, 336, 354 
 
 Jephson, R., 332 
 
 Jephthah, 103 
 
 Jerrold, D., 189 
 
 Jezebel, 119, 125 sq. 
 
 Joan of Arc, 263 
 
 Job, 29, 43, 57, 70, 71, 78 
 
 Johnson, S., 12, 35, 93, 181, 184, 
 
 243, 245, 262, 286, 288 
 Jonson, B., 104, 157, 226, 245, 249, 
 
 325 
 Joseph II., 179 
 
 Kalisch, 3 
 
 Kames, Ld., 191, 281 
 
 Keats, 201 
 
 Keble, 207 
 
 Kemble, J., 228 
 
 Killed in church, 147 sq. 
 
 Kingsley, C, 23, 62, 64, 167, 198, 
 
 233, 296, 308, 309 
 Kingsley, H., 37 
 Kirby, W., 92 
 Klaaszoon, 122 
 
IXDEX. 
 
 373 
 
 Knebel, 345 
 
 ' Knowledge is power,' 10 sq. 
 
 Knowledge, The more, the more 
 
 Sorrow, 212 sq. 
 Kotzebue, 69 
 Kuenen, 3 
 
 Laconic, 79 
 
 Lalande, 181 
 
 Lamartine, 18, 41, 70, 87, 89, 116, 
 
 175. 303. 356 
 Lamb, C, 5, 1% 52, 75, 115, 239, 
 
 2S9, 335 
 Lameunais, 68 
 Landor, W. S., 23, 74, no, 122, 
 
 217, 223, 224, 253, 357 
 Lansdowne, Ld., 315 
 Lavater, 232 
 Leslie, C., 172 
 Lewes, G. H., 5, 79, 311 
 Lewis L\., 38 
 Lewis XL, 105, 166 
 Lewis XIV., 129, 179 
 Leyden, J., 177 
 Liborio Romano, 116 
 Liddell, Dean, 242 
 Listeners, Good, 325 sq. 
 Lister, T., 11, 320 
 Lock, Z., 316 
 Locke, J., 79 
 Longfellow, H. W., 10, 52, 63, 89, 
 
 112, 214, 246, 261, 270 
 Longueville, ]Mdme. de, 344 
 Lovat, Ld., 191 
 Lowell, J. R., 83, 130, 238, 250, 
 
 305, 323 
 Lucretius, 203 
 Luther, 235, 250 
 Lycurgus, 79 
 Lyndesay, Sir D., 26 
 Lytton, Edw., Ld., 11, 28, 37, 44, 
 
 59, 93. 96, 123, 153, 154, 161, 
 
 172, 231, 296, 304, 318, 362 
 Lytton, Robt., Ld., 3, 8, 19, 20 sq., 
 
 48, 134, 155, 194, 264, 306, 360 
 
 Macaulay, Ld., 97, 130, 167, 173, 
 
 187, 243, 285, 299 
 Mackay, Gen., 167 
 Mackenzie, H., 36, 63, 72 
 Mackintosh, Sir J., 177 
 Macmillan, Hugh, 359 
 Madoc, 139 
 
 Magnin, 172 
 
 Mahony, F., 132 
 
 Maistre, J. de, 329, 344 
 
 Mammon- worship, 169 
 
 Marcy, R., in 
 
 Marivaux, 253 
 
 Marlborough, 168 
 
 Marlowe, 280 
 
 Marmont, 177 
 
 Marryat, 125, 346 
 
 Marston, J., 109 
 
 Martha and Mary, 255 sq. 
 
 Martin, Aime, 243 
 
 Martineau, H., 53, 60, 360 
 
 Martineau, Jas., 56 
 
 Matthews, C. S., 292 
 
 Mazarin, 166 
 
 Medici, Lor. dei, 149 
 
 Mendelssohn, F. B., 239, 241, 263 
 
 Merivale, C., 100, 120, 146 
 
 Merivale, Herm., 165 
 
 Mesnard, 18S 
 
 Michelet, 82, 105, 166, 313, 347, 
 
 351 
 Mill, J. S., II, 50, 162, 250, 2S9, 
 
 307, 317 
 Miller, Hugh, 115 
 Milman, 96, 149, 172 
 Milton, I, 2, 9, 17, 45, 51, 53, 89, 
 
 216, 217, 225, 233, 359, 363 
 Moir, D. M. , 209 
 Moir, G., 151 
 Moliere, 179, 186, 190, 191, 225, 
 
 229 
 :Monboddo, Ld., 102 
 Montagu, Lady M. W., 202, 217, 
 
 2X8 
 
 Montaigne, 203, 249, 251, 306, 309 
 Montesquieu, 205, 215, 320 
 Montezuma. 129 
 Montfort. Simon, 147 
 Montgomer}', Jas., 211 
 Montgomery, Robt., 199 
 Moore, E., 296 
 Moore, T., 99, 181 sq., 315 
 More, Hannah, 181, 237, 317 
 Morier, J.. 251 
 Morley, John, 354 
 Motley, J. L.,350 
 Muscular Christianity, 284 
 
 Naboth, 124 
 Napier, M., 167 
 
374 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Napoleorx I,, 117, 139, 157, 282 
 
 Porter, Jane, 76 
 
 
 
 Nature's law of life out of death, 
 
 Prescott, W. H. W., 129, 
 
 167 
 
 
 300 sq. 
 
 Prior, 219, 310, 311 
 
 
 
 Necker, 250, 346 
 
 Porter, B. J.. 198, 214 
 
 
 
 Nelson, Lcl, 98, 168, 244, 295 
 
 Prout, Dr., 267 
 
 
 
 New Orleans, 106 
 
 Provost, Sir G., 146 
 
 
 
 Newman, J. H., 10, 86, 255, 366 
 
 
 
 
 Newton, Sir Isaac, 253 
 
 Quillinan, E., 65 
 
 
 
 Newton, John, 237, 291 
 
 Quincey, Thomas de, 61, 
 
 66, 
 
 78, 
 
 Niebuhr, 83 
 
 167, 176, 202, 203, 225, 
 
 244, 
 
 263, 
 
 Nirvana, 50 
 
 3io> 356 
 
 
 
 Nodier, C, 54 
 
 Quintilian, 79 
 
 
 
 * Odisse quem Iseseris,' 96 sq. 
 
 Rabelais, 156 
 
 
 
 O'Keeffe, 74 
 
 Rachel, 90 
 
 
 
 Oldham, 180, 266 
 
 Racine, 76, 174, 226, 243, 
 
 267 
 
 
 Oliphant, Mrs.. 77, 125, 141, 260 
 
 Rahel von Ense, 238 
 
 
 
 Olshausen, 255, 256, 257 
 
 Raleigh, 167 
 
 
 
 Orators at fault, 313 sq. 
 
 Ranke, 150 
 
 
 
 Otho of Greece, King, 109 
 
 Raynal, 320 
 
 
 
 Overbury, Sir T., 301 
 
 Reade, Chas., 37, 85, 91, 
 
 III, 
 
 151^ 
 
 Ovid, 297, 309 
 
 176, 291, 327, 329, 332 
 Recamier, Mdme. de, 339 
 
 
 
 Pain, No more, 358 sq. 
 
 Rehoboam, 107, 109 
 
 
 
 Paley, 93 
 
 Remusat, Mdme. de, 344 
 
 
 
 Palingenius, 79 
 
 Renan, 273 
 
 
 
 Palmerston, Ld., 94 
 
 Resurrection, Fallacious 
 
 analogies 
 
 Panegyric, Penal, 240 sq. 
 
 of, 207, 211 
 
 
 
 Partings, Last, 278 sq. 
 
 Richardson, S., 77, loi. 
 
 [87, 
 
 220, 
 
 Patmore, C. 41, 116 
 
 288, 289 
 
 
 
 Pazzi, The, 149 
 
 Richter, Jean Paul F., 14, 53 
 
 •73, 
 
 Peach, 5 
 
 281, 324, 335, 364 
 
 
 
 Peacock, T. L., 156, 337 
 
 Rip van Winkle, 153 
 
 
 
 Peel, Sir R., 85 
 
 Robertson, F. W., 4, 29 
 
 67, 
 
 211, 
 
 Pepys, S., 108, 154, 186 
 
 273, 294, 297, 330 
 
 
 
 '• Perdidi diem,' 266 sq. 
 
 Robinson, H. €., 345 
 
 
 
 Perrault, C, 195 
 
 Robortello, 314 
 
 
 
 Perthes, F., 286, 330 
 
 Rogers, S., 294 
 
 
 
 Petronius, 264 
 
 Romulus, 103, 105 
 
 
 
 Phelps, E. S.. 116 
 
 Roscoe, W. C, 210, 299 
 
 
 
 Philip Augustus, 144 
 
 Rose of Jericho, 210 
 
 
 
 Philip II., of Spain, 80, 109, 1 19. 145 
 
 Rothschild, 168 
 
 
 
 Photius, 187 
 
 Rousseau, J. J., 34, 65, 69 
 
 94, 
 
 lOI, 
 
 Piers Plowman, 238 
 
 185,217,233,313,348, 
 
 354 
 
 
 Pierson, A. T. C, 25 
 
 Rowe, N., 77, 283 
 
 
 
 Pitt, W., 81, 85 
 
 Rufinus, 99 
 
 
 
 Pizarro, 129, 138, 167 
 
 Rutherford, S., 206 
 
 
 
 Plato, 284 
 
 
 
 
 Plutarch, 72, 120, 224, 288, 333 
 
 Saint- Hilaire, 50 
 
 
 
 Pomum, 5 
 
 Saint- Simon, 179 
 
 
 
 Pope, Alex., 24, 25, 161, 169, 190, 
 
 Saint Vincent, Ld., 244 
 
 
 
 213, 216, 241, 242, 246, 301, 324, 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, 4, 54, 71, i 
 
 1^, 
 
 243, 
 
 348 
 
 344 
 
 
 
INDEX. 
 
 375 
 
 Salathiel, 47 
 
 Sancroft, 172 
 
 Sardanapalus, 122, 123 
 
 'Saturday Review,' 230, 275, 317 
 
 Saul, King, 96 
 
 Savage, M. W., 180, 226 
 
 Sayce, A. H., 147 
 
 Schelling, 302 
 
 Schill, 140 
 
 Schiller, 28, 114, 119, 227,233,283, 
 
 347 
 
 Schimmelpenninck, 40, 65 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 31, 32. 63, 67,69, 
 72, 74, 84, 98, 105, 112, 113, 130, 
 132, 140, 148, 150, 174 sq., 181, 
 183, 195, 198, 228, 246, 260, 262, 
 275, 280, 327, 336, 337 
 
 Scudery, Mdlle. de, 190 
 
 Sea, No more, 349 sq. 
 
 Sejanus, 160, 167 
 
 Seneca, 240 
 
 Sennacherib, 143, 146 
 
 Sevigne, Mdme. de. 189, 287 
 
 Shaftesbury, Ld.,206, 243, 296, 301, 
 318, 328, 340 
 
 Shairp, J. C, 33 
 
 Shakspeare, 31, 6(i, 71, 79, 91, 106, 
 107, 108, 112, 118, 127, 128, 131, 
 150, 153, 160, 173, 184, 189 sq., 
 193, 212, 218, 222, 230, 254. 279. 
 280, 290, 294, 301, 333, 335, 339 
 
 Shell, R. L., 315 
 
 Shelley, 19, 42, 51, 61, 67, 72, no, 
 270, 304. 305 
 
 Shenstone, 221, 223 
 
 Sheridan, R. B.^ 295 
 
 Shirley, 88 
 
 Sicarii, The, 149 
 
 Silence, Sociable, 22 sq. 
 
 Silent grief, 66 sq. 
 
 Simon, Jules, 56, 313 
 
 Smith, Adam, 68, 71, 160, 350 
 
 Smith, Assheton, 230 
 
 Smith, Sydney, 153. 326 
 
 Smith, Wm. , 48, 296, 360 
 
 Smollett, 313 
 
 Sociable silence, 29 sq. 
 
 Sophocles, 90, 215, 218, 224 
 
 Sotheby, W., 267 
 
 South, 70, 82. 90, 220. 225, 246, 
 265, 275, 298, 299, 362 
 
 Southey. 9, 48. 71, ^39, 145- ^95 
 
 Spartacus, 103 
 
 Spenser, 9, 17, 27, 48, 69, 89, in, 
 119, 130, 189, 310 
 
 Spiegel, 2 
 
 Stael, Mdme. de, 83, 154, 184, 187, 
 
 200 
 Stanhope, Earl, 49, 97, 139, 315 
 Steele, 314 
 
 Stephen, Sir J., 38, 299, 319 
 Sterling, John, 56, 289 
 Steme, 182 
 Stewart, Dugald, 318 
 Stoiy, R. , 65 
 Stowe, H. B., 116, 259 
 Success, 159 sq. 
 Sunderland. Ld., 313 
 Swift, 41, 83, 102, 104, 158, 165, 
 
 184, 190, 223, 318, 322, 335, 344 
 Swift to hear, slow to speak, 334 
 
 ■sq. 
 Syrus, 128 
 
 Tacitus, 97, 99, 225 
 
 Talfourd, 44, 72, 172 
 
 Talma, 228 
 
 Tasso, 136 
 
 Taylor, Sir Henry, 77, 117, 216, 
 
 311 
 
 Taylor, Jeremy, 2, 8, 55 
 Tennyson. 20. 28. 46, 49. 57, 62. 68, 
 
 75.95, 105. 118, 133, 155. 170, 
 
 224. 302 
 Terence, 10. 67, 84. 91, no 
 Tertullian, 307 
 Tezpi. 16 
 
 Thackeray. A., 66, 127 
 Thackeray. W. M., 3, 95, 96, 155. 
 
 156, 168, 183, 245, 281, 295. 319. 
 
 326 
 Thibaut, 5 
 Thiers, 163 
 Thomson, 270. 328 
 Thrale. Mrs., 245 
 Tithonus, 45 
 Titus, 266 
 
 Tocqueville. A. de, 250, 345 
 Tongues. Gift of, 22 sq. 
 Tower of Babel, 22 sq. 
 Townshend. C. H., 195, 209 
 Tree of knowledge, i sq. 
 Trench. R. C, 271 
 Trollope. Ant. , 34, 69, 73. 74. 76. 
 
 100. 125. 156, 169, 192, 237. 323. 
 i 333 
 
yi^ 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Turner, J. M. W., 52 
 Tyndall, J.,307 
 Tytier, S., 237 
 
 Urban V., 172 
 
 Vaissette, 129 
 Verbiage, 78 sq. 
 Vertigan, 177 
 Virgil, 320 
 Voltaire, 4, 42, 187 
 
 Walker, Thos.. 340 ^^ 
 
 Waller, 174. 178 
 
 Walpole, Hon, 32, 74, 162, 320 
 
 Walpole, Sir R., 315 
 
 Warwick, Earl of, 105 
 
 Watts, G. F., 17, 
 
 Watts, Isaac. 113 
 
 Weakly, A Plea for the, 284 sq. 
 
 Webster, J., 329 
 
 West, B., 181 
 
 Whately, Archbp., 8, 22, 226, 250 
 
 Whitney, Mrs, , 35, 259 
 
 Wilkie, 319 
 
 Williams, Rowland, 33, 302 
 
 Wilson, George, 362 
 
 Wilson, John, 182, 319, 325 
 
 Windham, 232 
 
 Windischmann, 3 
 
 Wither, G.. 225 
 
 Wolcot, 181, 185 
 
 Wolf and the Lamb, The, 127 sq. 
 
 Wolsey, 164 
 
 Wordsworth, 15, 19, 27, 33, 50, 58, 
 72,73.95^ 142.. 173. 174,196, i97> 
 209, 215, 235, 295, 311, 315, 33o> 
 353 
 
 Wronged and Hated for it, 95 sq. 
 
 Xavier, St. Fras., 92 
 
 Yonge, CM., 288 
 Young. 43, 88, 210, 266 
 
 Zenodotus, 341 
 Zimri, 119 
 
 Hazell, Watson, and Viney, Printers, London and Aylesbury'. 
 
Date Due 
 
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