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Four kinds, viz. : Alpha- het — Primer — Spelling Book — Reaproached for not lending more and more ;. whereupon they withdraw their friendship ; and those who ignorantly look on, or perhaps hear the story of A, whilst B, C, and D arc silent out of consideration for him, make remarks on inconstancy in friendship and the manner in which men arc forsaken in their adversity and distress. The desertion by friends, however well merited, leads the embarrassed man to consider himself as a castaway, and throw hims(^lf into still more reckless and shameless courses; and on the part of men in this condition there is sometimes seen a perfect in- fatuation of extravagance, which seems to proceed from the delusions of a disordered mind and a sort of fascination in ruin. Such men come to have a repugnance to spare expense, because it brings the feeling of their difficulties home to them ; and a relief in profuseness, because it seems for the mo- ment to rencnince the very notion of embarrassment. The end may be short of the gallows, (for in our days the gallows has fallen out of favor,) but it will scarcely be short of a punishment worse than death : for men will not tolerate in its necessary conse- OF MONEY. 25 quonces that to wliich they arc very hidulgent in its inchoation ; and the ' unfortunate debtor ' who was cockered with compassion whilst he was in that stage of his existence, is regarded with just indignation and abhorrence when he has passed into that of the desperate outcast : though it may be as much in the course of nature that the one stage should follow the other, as that a tadpole, if he lives, should grow to be a toad. Creditors have always been an obnoxious people, and in divers times and countries the laws which have awarded imprisonment for insolvent debt have shared in their unpopularity. But when we trace debt in its consequences and look to all the social evils which have their root in it, and when we con- sider that in moral as well as in physical therapeutics, the principle of withstanding commencements is a|l- important, we may well, I think, bring ourselves to believe that insolvent debt should be regarded as presumably criminal, and unless proved to be other- wise, should fall within the visitations of penal law. There remains only to be considered. Sixthly: — The subject of bequeathing : and some topics which might have fallen under this head have been anticipated in treating of motives for saving. To make a will in one way or another is of course the duty of every person whose heir-at-law is not the 26 OF MONET. proper inheritor oi' all lie possesses : and unless wliere there is sonic just cause for setting them aside, ex- pectations generated by the customs of the world are sufTicient to establish a moral right to inherit and to impose a correspomling obligation to bequeath. For custom may be presumed, in the absence of any reasons to the contrary, to have grown out of some natural fitness; and at all events it will have brought about an amount of adaptation which is often suffi- cient, as regards individual cases, to make a fitness where there was none. Unless in exceptional in- stances, therefore, in which special circumstances are of an overruling force, the disappointment of expec- tations growing out of custom is not to be inflicted without some very strong and solid reasons for believing that the custom needs to be reformed. If therc be such reasons, by all means let the custom be disregarded, all expeetati(>ns to the contrary not- withstanding — ' What custom wills, in all things should we do 'l, The dust on antique time would lie unswept, And mountainous error be loo highly heaped For truth to ovorpeer.' * But the presumption should be always held to be in favor of custom, and he who departs from it without * ' Coriolanus,' Act ii. Scene 3. OF MONEY. 27 the plea of special circumslancos, should 1)0 a])lo to find in himself a coini)elency to correct the errors of mankind. If it he not well for the; natural or customary- heirs that tluiy sl)f)uld he disappointed, neither is it good for those to whom an inheritance is diverted, that wealth should come upon them by surprise. Sudden and unexpected accessions of wealth seldom promote the happiness of those to whom they accrue ; and thf;y are for the most part morally injurious ; especially when they accrue by undue deprivation of another. But some part of the propcjrty of most people, and a large part, or even ihe whole of the property of some people, may not be the subject of just or natural expectations on the part of customary heirs ; and in respect of such property there is a great liberty of judgment on the part of the testator, though ii is to be a grave and responsible, not a capricious liberty. The testator has to consider to whom the property will bring a real increase of enjoyment without increase of temptation ; and in whose hands it is likely most to promote the happi- ness of others. In general the rule of judgment should be to avoid lifting people out of one station into another ; and to aim at making such moderate additions to moderate fortunes in careful hands as 28 OF MONEY. may not disturb the proportion of property to station, — or still better, may rectify any disproportion, and enable those who are living with a difficult frugality to live with a free frugality. This rule is not, I fear, verj^ generally regarded; for mere rectitude, and the observance of measures and proportions, does not much lay hold of the minds of men. On the contrary, there is a general dispo- sition to add to anything which affects the imagination by its magnitude ; and there is also in some people a sort of gloating over great wealth, which infects them with a propensity to feed a bloated fortune. Jacques took note of this when he saw the deer that was weeping in ' the needless stream : ' — • ' Thou mak'st a testament As worldings do, giving thy sum of more To that which had too much.' * Thus it is that in the most solemn acts which men have to perform in the management of their money — in those too from which selfish ends seem most removed — they will often appear to be as little sensible of moral motives and righteous responsibili- ties as in any other transactions ; and even a testator jamjam moriturus will dictate his will with a sort of posthumous cupidity, and seem to desire that his worldliness should live after him. * ' As You Like It,' Act ii. Scene 1 OP HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. I PROPOSE to treat of these jointly, because I regard them as inseparably connected in life. We shall find, I think, on looking below the surface, that Humility is the true mother and nurse of In- dependence ; and that Pride, which is so often sup- posed to stand to her in that relation, is, in reality, the step-mother, by whom is wrought — novercalihus odiis — the very destruction and ruin of Indepen- dence. For pride has a perpetual reference to the esti- mation in which we are holden by others ; fear of opinion is of the essence of it ; and with this fear upon us it is impossible that we should be indepen- dent. The proud man is of all men the most vul- nerable ; and as there is nothing that rankles and festers more than wounded pride, he has much cause for fear. Pride, therefore — w^hether active or pas- sive — whether it goes forth to claim the deference of mankind, or secludes itself from the danger of 30 OF HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. their disrespect — has always much at stake, and leads a life of caution and solicitude. Humility, on the contrary, has no personal objects, and leads its life in ' the service which is perfect freedom.' An uneasy, jealous, or rebellious feeling in regard to ranks and degrees, argues this want of indepen- dence through defect of humility. It is the feeling of a man who makes too much account of such things. A begrudging of rank and station, and refusal of such deference as the customs of the world have conceded to them, will generally be found to proceed from the man who secretly overvalues them, and who, if him- self in possession of them, would stretch his pre- tensions too far. For plebeian j)ride and aristocratic pride issue from one and the same source in human nature. An illiberal self-love is at the bottom of both. When low-born men of genius, like Burns the poet, maintain the. superiority of intrinsic worth to adventi- tious distinction, we can readily go along with them so far: but when they reject the claims of social rank and condition in a spirit of defiance and resentment, as if sullering a personal injury, we may very well question whether they have not missed of the inde- pendence at which they aimed : for had their inde- pendence been genuine, they would have felt that all they possessed which was valuable was inalienable; OF HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 31 and having nothing to lose by the social superiority of the bettor born, they would have made them wel- come to it, as being perhaps a not inequitable com- pensation for the comparatively small share bestowed on them of intellectual gifts and abilities. If equality be what these men of independence would contend for, it can only be had (if at all) by the balance of what is adventitious : for natural equal- ity there is none. If personal merit be what they regard, this, at least, will not found any claim for intellectual endowments to be preferred to accidents of station. There is no more of personal merit in a great intellect than in a great estate. It is the use which is made of the one and of the other, which should found the claim to respect ; and the man who has it at heart to make the best use he can of either, will not be much occupied with them as a means of commanding respect. Thus it is that respect is com- monly least due, as well as least willingly accorded, where it is arrogated most, and that independence is hardly possessed where it is much insisted on. * The proud man,' says St. Jerome, ' (who is the poor man,) braggcth outwardly, but beggcth inwardly.' The humble man, who thinks little of his independence, is the man who is strong in it ; and he who is not solicitous of respect will commonly meet with as much as he has occasion for. * Who calls ? ' says the old 32 OF HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. shepherd in * As You Like it ; ' ' Your betters/ is the insolent answer : and what is the shepherd's rejoinder ? ' Else are they very wretched.' By what retort, re- prisal, or repartee, could it have been made half so manifest that the insult had lighted upon armor of proof? Such is the invincible independence of hu- mility. The declaration of our Saviour that the meek shall inherit the earth, may be understood, I think, as veri- fied in the very nature and attributes of meekness. The dross of the earth the meek do 7iot. inherit ; the damnosa Jucreditas of the eartlvs pomps and vanities descends to others : but all the true enjoyments^ the wisdom, love, peace, and independence, which earth can bestow, are assured to the meek as inherent in their meekness. "Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.' It depends on our own hearts to cast off the bondage of pride with all its chains and sores, and by meekness to possess the earth. For this pos- session comes not by observation, and saying ' Lo ! here, or Lo ! there : • * But as the Kingdom of God is within us, so also is the inheritance of the Earth : ' How much that Genius boasts as her's And fancies her's alone, On you, Meek Spirits, Faith confers ! The proud have further gone, * Luke xvii. 21. OF HUMfLITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 33 Perhaps, through life's deep maze, but you Alone possess the labyrinth's clue, ' To you the costliest spoils of thought, Wistlom, unclaimed, yields up ; To you the far-sought pearl is brought, And melted in your cup ; To you her nard and myrrh she brings, Like orient gifts to infant kings. ' The single eye alone can see All truths around us thrown, In their eternal unity ; The humble ear alone Has room to hold, and time to prize, The sweetness of life's harmonics.' * If distinctions of rank, order, and degree were of no other use in tlic world, they might be desired for the exercise which tliey give to a generous humility, on the part of tliosc who have them and of those who have them not. The inequahty of relation should cultivate this virtue on both sides; those who have the superiority being disposed to prize it at no more than its worth ; thof^ who have it not, being glad to recognise superiority in others, even in this its least substantial form — * Aubrey De Vere ; Waldenses, and other Poems, p. 165. 3 34 OF HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. ' Cloth of gold, be not too nice, Though thou be matched with cloth of frieze ; Cloth of frieze, be not too bold, Though thou be matched with cloth of gold.' * Here arc two humilities enjoined ; that which in a superior forgets superiority — that which in an infe- rior remembers inferiority : and neither could have place without difference of rank and degree. When the social distinctions indicate power and a governing authority, the relations between the parties are still more pregnant with occasions for the exercise of humility. From humility there will result, not only on the one side a generous care and consideration in the use of power, but likewise, on the other, what may be called a generous submission. For though the world may be more aware of generosity shown in the exercise of power, there is a generosity also in the spirit of obedience, when it is cordial, willing, and free ; and this is the case only when the nature is humble. It is indeed chiefly in our intercourse with equals and superiors that our humility is put to the proof. When the * Servus Servorinn ' at Rome washes, ac- cording to annual usage, the feet of some poor pil- grims, the ceremony, if it be held to typify humility, • Old Saw. OF HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 35 should at the same time be understood to be typical of the easiest of all humilities. If the same personage were to hold the stirrup of an emperor, the proceeding would be typical of another degree of humility, — and one to which the Potentates of the Earth could not bear witness in his predecessors. Many people are gentle and forbearing with those placed under them, but proud and quarrelsome in their dealings with those above them. Where humility is wanting, there may be much submission without generosity, or, on the other hand, much resistance without an independent spirit. The disposition to submit to authority unduly, and where the interests of others or our own are un- justly injured, will never arise out of humility ; it will always arise out of those worldly anxieties from which the humble heart is exempt. The disposition to resist authority from personal feelings, where no duty dic- tates the resistance, will never proceed from a genuine spirit of independence ; for the heart is not indepen- dent which is engaged in a struggle for personal ob- jects. And whether submitting or resisting, humility and independenpe will still be found to go together ; but they will for the most part be found to be favored by submission; for the pride of the human heart, which is commonly called up by resistance even when not undue, is in like manner abated by submission, even when carried too far ; and wherever pride is 36 OF HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. abated, the heart is raised and |nirifiod and made free. Elevation, therefore, is chiefly to be found in submission — * Govern them and lift them up.' Iluniilitv, like most other virtues, has its credit a cood deal shaken by the number of counterfeits that are abroad. Amongst the false humilities by which the world is most flattered and beguiled, is that of the professor in this kind who shrinks from all censure and reprobation of wliat is evil, under cover of the text, ' Judge not lest ye be judged ; ' as if it were the intent of that text, not to warn us against rash, pre- sumptuous and uncharitable judgments, but absolutely to forbid our taking account of the distinction between right and wrong. ' It is not for us to judge our broth- er,' says the humilitarian of this way of thinking ; ' we know not how he may have been tempted ; per- haps he was born with stronger passions than other people ; it may have been that he was ill brought Uj) ; peradventure he was thrown amongst evil associates; we oursidves, had we been placed in the same cir- cumstances, might have been in like manner led astray.' Such are the false charities of a false and popular humility. If we are to excuse all the moral evil that we can account for, and abstain from judging all of which we can suppose that there is some adequate explanation, where are we to stop in our absolutions ? Whatever villany exists in the world is compounded OF HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 37 of what is inborn and what comes ])y circumstance : there is nothing so base or detestable but it is the consequence of some adequate cause ; and if we are to make allowances for all but causeless wickedness, there is an end of condemnation. The man of true liuinility, on the contrary, will not spare the vices and errors of his fellow-creatures, any more than he would his own ; he will exercise man- fully, and without fear or favor, those judicial functions which God has committed, in some greater or less degree, to every member of the human community; but he will come to the task, on serious occasions, not lightly or una wed, but praying to have ' a right judgment in all things;' and whilst exercising that judgment in no spirit of compromise or evasion, he will feel that to judge his brother is a duty and not a privilege ; and he will judge him in sorrow, humbled by the contemplation of that fallen nature of which he is himself part and parcel. There is a current and a natural opinion, that a man has no right to censure in others a fault with which he is himself chargeable. But even this limitation is founded, I think, upon the same erroneous notion, of moral censure being an honorable privilege instead of a responsible function, a franchise instead of a due. No faults are better known and understood by us than those whereof we have ourselves been guilty; none, 38 OF nUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. siiroly, sliouKl bo so porsoiially obnoxious to us as those by which wo liavo oui"solves been defiled and dc- gmded : and may wo not, there foix?, be expected to be quick in perceiving them, and to regard them with a pccuHar bitterness, ratlier than to overlook them in othei*s: I would answer, assuredly yes: but always witli this proviso — that to bitterness of censure should be added confession and humilijition and the bitterness of personal shame and contrition. AVithout tliis the censure is not warrantable, because it is not t'ounded upon a genuine moral sense ; it is not, indeed, sincere : for though the olfence may be worthy of all disgust and abhorrence, that ablion*ence and disgust cannot be really felt by those who have connnitted the like ollence themselves without sliame or repentance. Resides the false humility under cover of which we desert the duty of censuring our fellow-creatures, there are others by which we evade or pervert that oi^ cen- suring oui*selves. The most conunon ot^ the spurious humilities of this kind, is that by which a general lan- guage of self-disparagement is substituted for a dis- tinct discernment and specific acknowledgment of our nwl faults. The humble individual oi^ this class will declaix^ himself to be very incontestably a miserable sinner ;^ but at the same time there is no particular fault or error that can be imputed to him tVom which he will not tlnd himself to be happily exempt. Each OF HUMILITY ATK'\lo a stnto. that \\\c n^liiii«nis must iu\h1s lu> ;i Ianijl\ii>iv-stivk, — was this th(Mr liiunility : 1 wish tv> spoak of Mr. Wosh\v with ix^spoot. not to say ivvt^r- oi\0(^ : h\it in tl\is iiistanot^ I think that l\is apptwl was inailo to a loinpor oC \\{\\u\ in his t'ollowtMN wlnoh was not piux^ly C^'hristian. It is not tho mook who will thivw o\\\ this sort o( ohalhMigo at\il iltMiatu'o : juul it i^^ pritlo. at\d not hmnility. whioh wo sl\all fiml \o Ho nt tho hoitvMn ot* any suoh i^stontations solt' alv\so- inont — ' For Priao. ^V^iv'h is tho IVvU's toastinij-tork. k\o[\\ toast lliM\ bi\>\vt\ost th;\t his whiteness vauutoih most.' OF (:u()\(:i-: ix maiumaoe. ' What (]() you think of rnurriaj^o r ' fv'AyH the I>uch- OKH of Mulfy in WohHtcr'H play, fxnd Ant/>riio annvvcrH, ' I take it as ihohc that deny pargat/^ry ; It locally contains or heaven or hell j Th';re in no third place in it.' When I waH young and inexpcrionccrl in wives, I did not take the 8?irno view of marriage which Antonio took. I uH<;d to say that there were two kindw of rnar- ri?jgeK, witli eitfier of whicli a rnan might he cont/mt; the one ' the ineorponxte existence marriage,' the other * the pleawint addit^ument marriage.' For I thought that if a man could not command a marriage hy which all UiUirfiHiH would ^iC deepened, all ohy'XiU exalted, rewardw and forfeitures douhled and far more tlian douhled, and all the companitives of life turned into HuperlativcH, then there remained, neverthelesH, a very agreeahle kind of resource, — a marriage, that ih, in which one might live one's own Hul.rHtfintive life with the additional ernlx^lliwhment of s<^^me graceful, »implo. •11 oi" ciiou'i', IN ]maki{ia(;k. ji;ay, rnsy-h«Mrl(ul rr(^;ilur(\ wlu) woulil li(> li^lit upon the surfaco of one's heiii^, be at hand wlienever soli- tude and st>rious j)ursuits liad heeoine irksome, and nev(M' h(> iu the \vay \\\\v\\ sIk^ is not wanted. Visions thi^s(» are ; nier(>ly dn\'nns oi' our Ki)ieureau youth. Then* is no s\\v\\ wife, and marriage is what Antonio took it to he. And niarriai:;!^ l»eiu<:; thus tlie hiijjiiest stake on this side \\\c jj;rav(\ it stUMUs straui^e tliat men slundil be so hasty in the elioiee kA' a wife as tliey sometimes an" ; (or if we look about us at those marriages in which HUM) and women have ehoscn for themselves, we sliail liud that own when" then' has hvcn no abso- lute passion to i^xpcdite the busiuess, the ehoiee has not always Ihmmi preeedtnl by nuieh deliberation. Per- haps it is t)wiu«j!; \o that very fact of the decision being so critical, that it is often a little hurried; for when great inti^rests are (li'|)(Midiug, we deliberatt" with an anxiety to avoid iMior wbiidi presently becomes too paiid'ul to be eudurtnl. aud i)erhaps, also, too disturbing to be succt\ssful ; and it is at some crises of their fortunes that men in all tinu's have been ilisposed to oonunit them to Provitlence, under various forms of reliance, some religious, others superstitious. M^> aro most sensible of the fallibility o( human judgment in those matters in whii-h il is nu»st essential to judge well, ;uul to the irreligimis man, fate, destiny, chance, OF CirOICK IN MAHHlAdK. 45 Rortilogo, the stars — fuiytliirj^ seorns moro truHtwor- thy ; wliilnt ho who is not irreligious knows that what is itt<:r. Thf; rri.'iid who * was rn.'irriod oua morning as sho wont into tho gardfin i'or parsloy to BtufT a rahhit^' migFit liavo nothing to foar in rnarriago if sho was ono to whom all things work logolhor for good . Men who know not in what to [>ut trust will oftfjn fall into tho fatal <;rror of su|)[)fjsing that sorno of tho graver oonsequonces of marriage arc to ho escaped by concubinage, — a supposition from which, if there bo no holtf;r rnonilor at hand, ovon th<: wisrlorri of this world might withliold thorn. Unless thoy l)o utterly heartless and worthless, thoy will find that the looser tic is not the lighter. Mistresses, if they have any h(*ld on the aflootions, are gonor.'illy rnorfj exacting than wives; and with ro.-ison, i'or thf;ro will n.'iturally be tho most assertion of claims wh(;ro there is the least ground for confidcince. TIkj claims strengthen with time, whilst tho (jualitif;s for whi('h miHtresscs are cornriKjnly chosen, and on which thoy (lop(;jid for thfjir charm, arc proverbially perishable. I>(;auly and the vivacities of youth fall away as soon frorrt the con- cubine as if sho were a wife ; domestic cares and jealousies will ar-crue as ro-'uliiy in tho orw, case as in tho other; and unless gone rosily bo out. of the ques- 46 OF CHOICE IN BIARRIAGE. tion, and a man have so ' corrupted his compassions/ as to have deliberately determined to keep a woman's affections until they should involve the cares naturally belonging to the affections and then to cast them off, there is no one of the burtlicns, vexations, dues and responsibilities incident to marriage, which will not be felt with tenfold force in concubinage. Such are the miscalculations of selfishness. A man thinks that he has hung a trinket round his neck, and behold ! it is a millstone. Whilst one man will be hurried into a marriage from the very painfulness of perplexity, another will live and die a bachelor out of mere indecision. The latter case is the more rare, and requires a peculiar serenity of temper and strength of irresolution. But it can occur. And the cases occur very frequently in which a man misses, through indecision, the opportu- nity of making the marriage he would have liked best, and then, resolving to be indecisive no more, takes a wrong decision. So that, having regard to' the various sources from which error proceeds in such matters, it may perhaps be reasonably doubted whcth-. er a passion, with all its impetuosities and illusions, affords, comparatively speaking, an ill guidance ; and whether those who have surrendered to it might not have been as much misled, had they proposed to themselves the task of making a calm and judicious choice. OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 47 And indeed the seasonable time for the exercise of prudence, is not so much in choosing a wife or a husband, as in choosing with whom you will so asso- ciate as to risk the engendering of a passion. Even in this choice the prudence should not be cold-blooded ; for a cold-blooded choice of associates is likely to lead to a cold-blooded marriage. With the leanings and leaps of the heart in the new acquaintanceships of the young, there should be just so much prudence pre- siding, as will turn them away from what there is reasonable ground for believing to be false, selfish, weak or vicious. There should be thus much and no more. If the taste and fancy are resisted upon grounds less substantial than these, they are resisted by what is less worthy to prevail than they ; for the taste and fancy are by no means of small account — they are indeed of all but paramount importance — in human life and intercourse. The taste lies deep in our nature, and strikes the key-note with which outward circumstance is to harmonize. But if the taste be, in truth, a matter of such import and ascendancy in our life, it follows that we are deeply responsible for the formation of it. It is, like everything else in us, partly of Nature's fashion- ing, partly of our own ; and though it is to rest upon the foundation of our natural dispositions, it is to be built, not like a baby-house at our pleasure, but ac- 48 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. cording to the laws and model of the great Architect, like a temple. If there can be little that is genial or cordial in our life, married or unmarried, unless the taste be indulged, for that very reason it behoves us so to raise and purify the taste, as to be enabled to give way to it in safety and innocence — not certainly with a total abandonment or an absolute affiance — nothing short of perfection in taste could justify that — but with a trust proportioned to the degree of purity and elevation which has been attained. According to this measure our habitual propensities will be to- wards what is good ; whilst the habit of guarding and correcting the taste will prevail to some extent even over its more impassioned movements ; and if we are carried away by our fancy, we shall yet know whither we are going, and give some guidance as well as take some. Wealth and worldly considerations have a good deal to do with the choice made in most marriages ; and though the taste which is under these influences will not be supposed to be very high, yet if it cannot be elevated, better that a man should take the lower course to which it points, than aim at what is above him. If his mind be habitually involved in worldly interests and pursuits, he has no right to suppose that by stepping aside from them on a single occasion, even though it be the most important of all occasions, OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 49 ho can place himself in a different order of beings, or bring himself into harmony with what is high and free. What he has to do is to emancipate his mind if he can ; but if not, to marry according to the con- ditions of his slavery. For if he marries from a mere impulse of his higher mind, whilst he is still in habitual subjection to the lower, the impulse will pass away, whilst the habit stands fast, and the man will find that he has introduced a discord into his life, or rather that he has composed it in the wrong key. The man who marries for money has one advantage over those who marry for other considerations ; he can know what he gets ; if he can feed upon husks and draff, it is competent to him to see that his trough is filled. But if marrying for money is to be justified only in the case of those unhappy persons who arc fit for nothing better, it docs not follow that marrying without money is to be justified in others, — marrying, that is, without the possession or the fair prospect of a com- petency suited to their condition in life. What is to constitute such a competency, depends in a great measure on the prudence, independence, and strength in self-denial of the parties. Those who resolve to marry on very small means, against the wishes of their relatives and friends, should always consider that they are setting up a claim to an extraordinary share of these excellent virtues; and they should not 4 50 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. expect their claim to be readily acknowledged unless it be founded, not merely on good intentions, but on actual savings, on ascertained facts of frugality and habits of self-sacrifice. Without such habits, they may intend and profess what they please as to indepen- dence and self-reliance : the result will be, that they have indulged their unworldly inclinations at the ex- pense of others. Whether money have much to do with a marriage or little, proper marriage settlements are of great importance. And whether, or not they be insisted on by the woman's friends, no man should consider that his individual probity or good intentions are to stand instead of what is just and right upon general principles, or that it can be otherwise than a disgrace to him to marry without divesting himself of all power which is not right and just that he should possess. Many are the cases in which the settled money comes to be the only stay of the family, and this in itself is a strong reason for maintaining the principle of just marriage settlements ; but there are objects other than ^pecuniary and prudential, which are effected by it. The negotiations and transactions connected with marriage settlements are eminently useful, as search- ing character and testing affection, before an irrevo- cable step be taken. Rank and station have an influence which, though OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 51 not very high or worthy, is to be regarded, I think, as somewhat less bare and poor than motives which are merely mercenary. There is something in differences of rank and degree which affects the imagination, as everything does which is unfamiliar ; and an imagina- tive person is perhaps more apt to fall in love with what is either above him or below him in station, than with what is on a dead level with him. This, however natural, should be looked upon as a misdirection of the fancy ; for any extreme inequality of station will com- monly lead to sore trials in marriage. Beauty, in itself and of itself, has, I believe, less power in determining matrimonial choice, than at first sight it might seem natural that it should have. The charm of mere physical and corporeal beauty is per- haps too open and immediate to involve consequences ; its first eflfect is too strong in proportion to its further effects : for the imagination of man wishes to feel that it has something to come to ; and there is a charm more insidiously winning in that which turns to beauty as you advance, than in that which declares itself as •beauty from the first. Lord Bacon has said that ' There is no excellent beauty without some strangeness in the proportion ; ' from which I infer that the beauty which had indi- viduality was alone excellent in his eyes ; and I believe this to be so far prevalent amongst mankind, 52 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. that whilst the name of beauty is given to perfection of symmetry, the power of beauty is felt in a slight deviation from it — just sufficient to individualize without impairing. It is this peculiarity, this * some strangeness,' which lays hold of the imagination. But even when such a hold has been taken, the first feelings are those of admiration rather than love, and there must be something in the beauty indicating something besides the beauty, in order that the admi- ration may pass into love. If other forces are behind, admiration is an excellent herald and harbinger of love ; if not, admiration will not of itself constitute love ; indeed, where the passion of love has attained to its full force, admiration will sometimes be almost lost and absorbed : ' She loved too deeply to admire,' said one lady writing of another some thirty years ago. It is commonly said that beauty, howsoever enchant- ing before marriage, becomes a matter of indifference after. But if the beauty be of that quality which not only attracts admiration, but helps to deepen it into love, I am not one of those who think that what charmed the lover is forthwith to be lost upon the husband. It is doubtless a question of kind. There may be much beauty, eminent in its way, which is but ' the perfume and suppliance of a minute ; ' but there exists also a species and quality of beauty, the effect OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 53 whereof (as I conceive) it would not be possible for daily familiarity to deaden, and the power whereof may be expected to last as long as the beauty itself lasts, and perhaps much longer. Pictures and statues wrought by the more spiritual masters of art, do not satiate the sense ; and if in that beauty which is of art's creation, when the art is of the highest order, there is this cleaving and abiding power, we are not to doubt that Nature, which creates the art, is compe- tent to create, without the intervention of the art, a beauty expressed in flesh and blood, that may be con- stantly lived with and daily dwelt upon, yet be found to be not less inexhaustible in its charm. Other objects will intervene, no doubt, where beauty is present to our daily life ; a man cannot be consciously and continually occupied with such impressions; in- susceptible moods will intervene also, and the percep- tions will from time to time be overclouded ; this will be the case in regard to works of art, and even in regard to those natural and universal sources from which the sense of beauty in man is nourished as with its daily food ; nor can it be otherwise in regard to human beauty : but when this beauty is pure and spir- itual, I see no reason to suppose that it will be a less permanent source than those others; and I will not consent to believe that daily familiarity with it will make it of no effect, any more than that the flowers 54 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. will cease to please because they hang over our doors, or the stars because they shine nightly. The exception to be taken to beauty as a marriage portion, (if it be beauty of the highest order,) is not therefore that it can become otherwise than precious whilst it lasts, but rather that, as it is precious so is it perishable, and that, let it be valued as it may, it must be accounted at the best but a melancholy posses- sion : — ' For human beauty is a sight To sadden rather than delight ; Being the prelude of a lay Whose burthen is decay.' And if it be our fortune to encounter in flesh and blood a beauty which seems to revive for us the reali- ties from which Raffaello and Perugino painted, we are to consider whether to possess such beauty in marriage, and see it subjected to the changes and chances of this mortal life, would not bring upon us the same sort of feeling with which we should con- template a Madonna or a St. Cecilia hanging exposed to the weather, and losing some tenth part of its form and coloring with each successive winter. I have said that, considering the many misguidances to which a deliberative judgment is exposed in the matter of marriage, there may often be less risk of error in a choice which is impassioned. But I ought, OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 55 perhaps, to have explained, that by a passion I do not mean — what young ladies sometimes mistake for it — a mere imaginative sentiment, dream, or illusion. Such imaginative sentiments, dreams, or illusions, not only do not constitute a passion, but they commonly render the person who indulges them incapable of con- ceiving one ; they bring out a strong fancy perhaps, but a weak and wasted heart. This is well understood by worldly mothers, who will rather promote than dis- courage a rapid succession of such sentiments, resting upon the maxim tha^ there is safety in numbers.^ In destitution there is security from arrest, in nakedness there is security from a rending of garments, and in this beggary of the heart there is security from a passion. But if the heart have been trained in the way that it should go, the passion to which it will lie open will be something very different from a warm illusion or a sentimental dream, though very possibly including these, and having begun in them. For true love is not, I think, that isolated and indivisible unity which it might be supposed to be from the way in which it is sometimes spoken of. It is mixed and manifold according to the abundance of the being, and in a large nature becomes in its progress a highly com- posite passion ; commonly, no doubt, having its source in admiration and imaginative sentiment, but as it rolls 56 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. on, involving divers tributaries, swollen by accessory passions, feelings, and affections, — pity, gratitude, generosity, loyalty, fidelity, anxiety, fear, and de- votion, — and deepened by the embankments of duty and justice — foreign to the subject as these last may seem to some. In short, the whole nature and con- science being worked upon by this passion, re-act upon it and become interfused and blended with it; not by an absorption of all elements into one, but by a development of each into each : and when, therefore, I affirm that passion, err though it may, will be often less misleading than the dispassionate judgment, I do but aver that the entire nature — reason, conscience, and afTeciions, interpenetrating and triune, — that this totality of the nature, raised, vivified, and enlarged by love — is less likely to take an erroneous direction than a part of the nature standing aloof and dictating to the other parts. I say not, however, that the risk is small in either case or under any guidance. Far from it. And the preference to be given to passion as a guide, will depend upon the natural capabilities, and the maturity and cultivation of the moral, spiritual, and intellectual mind. If there be much of this for the passion to call out, it will be an exalted and enlightened passion, and may see its way. If there be little, it will be a blind passion. Whence it follows that passion is OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 57 not to be taken for a guide in extreme youth; in the rawness of the moral and spiritual elements, and the greenness of the judgment. And as it is in these days that a first passion will most frequently take place, it will generally be found, I believe, that a second may be better trusted. If, however, I maintain that passion in one season or another of our soul's progress, is to have a voice of much force and potency in the direction of the judgment, and will enlighten it on some points more than it may bedarken it on others, this is not because I imagine that it can realize its illusions or establish its empire in marriage. Passion is of course ^designed by Nature to be transitory,; — a paroxysm, — not a state. And then the question arises which has been so often agitated, whether the affection which succeeds marriage is in all cases much influenced — and if influenced, how influenced — by the nature of the feeling which preceded? — Whether a passion which has transmigrated into an affection carries with it into the affection any elements which could not exist in an affection otherwise originating? When it begins with passion, there must needs be a period of collapse and regurgitation, or at least of subsidence. Whether, therefore, is the affection the weaker for never having known the high tide, or the stronger for not having felt the rcfluence ? — This temporary flooding of the 68 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAOE. afibctions, (lo(\s it dcvaslaU^ us n^ganls ilurablc results, or (Iocs it cnric'li ? I tliink that \hc prcdpniinnnco, nmounling almost to universality, of the law of Nature which places us once iu our livi's at least iukIim" the doininiou of this passion, would allord of itstdf a strong presump- tion that souK^ heni^ficial r(\sult is to Ix^ hrought ahout by it. And if it ho adinitl(Ml (as without any ollencc to Cnlvin I ho[)(^ it well may) that the l)ctler part of most human heiugs is the larger part, it will follow that tliis temporary expansion and outburst of the wholo of the being, will bring a grcatxu' accession of good activities than of bad ; and as the first cry of the infant is ncu'cssary to bring the lungs into play, so the lirst love of tbo adult may, through a transitory disturbance, be designed to impart a luMiltby action to the moral and spiritual ualur(\ Tlu^ better the tree, the b(>tliM- of course will Ix^ tlu^ fruits; neither the rains of spring nor the glow of sununer will make grapes grow upon brand)l(>s; but wliatt^ver the fruits may be, the yield will ho larger after (n'(M*y seasonable operation of Natun^ has been undergone. \Vilh the few in \\lu>m envy, jealousy, suspicion, pride, and self-love are predominant, tluM-e may be an aggravation of these evil dispositions or of some of them ; but to them (and (lod be j)rais(Hl they arc the many) with whom hiunilitv, generosity, the love OF CHOICE IN MAURI ACE. irJ of Cod, and tlu; Ic^vo of Cod's crcalun.'S, lliotioli j,;irlly lal(!nl ixM'ljjips, is powrrfidly inli<"n^nl, tlio j):issi()n of love will bririff with it an c!nlarM is not tho saiuo >vith uiulorstaiuliiij;, taliMits, capacity, ability, sai:;arity, stM»so, or pnuliMU'o — not {\\c sanu' with anv ono ot' thoso ; niMthor w ill all thoso togotlior HKiko it up. It is that oxiM-rist^ oC tho roason into whioh tho hi>art ontoi-s — a struotiuv o( tho nndor- stanilini:; rising out of tho moral anil spiritual nature. It is t'or this i-auso that a hii::h otiUm' i^l' wisdoni — that is. a highly intoUootual wisiKnu — is still nunv ran^ than a high onlor oi' gonius. W'hon thoy roach tho vory higlu^st onhM* tlu^y aro ouo ; for oaoh inolutlos tlio iMhor, anil intollootual groatuoss is niatohoil with moral strength. r>ut thoy hanlly ovor roaoh so high, inasnmoh as groat intolloot, aooonling to tho ways of Proviilonoo. almost always brings along with it groat infirmitios — or. at loast, infinnitios which appear groat owing to tho soalo ol' o[HM"ation ; anil it is certainly exposed to unusual temptations; for as powiM- ami piv- cminence lie bet\>re it, so ambition attends it, which, whilst it determines the will and strengthens tho uc- tivities, inevitablv weakens the moral tabric. OF WIHJiOM. 75 WJHrJorn \h corrupted by arnbilion, f:vr;ri w}ir;ri Ojc fjualify of thf; amhition \h intollootual. For ambition, even of tbiH quality, in but a form of H^;lf-lovo, which, Becking gratification in llic corifK-iouHDCHH of intellec- tual power, is loo rnueb rjr;|ij/ht.ed with tlje exercise to liiive a Hinglr; and paramount regard to the end ; and it is not according to wisdom that the end — that jh, the moral and Hpiritual con.sequences — should HufTer dero- gation in fw.vor of tlie intellectual meann. God in love, and God is light; whence it rcHultn tliat love \h light; and it is only by following the effluence of that light, that intellectual power issues into wisdom. The intellectual power which loses that light and i«sue» into intellectual pride, is out of the way to wisdom, und will not attain even U) int^jllectual greatness. For though many arts, giftJ*, and att;AinmentH may co-cxi«t in much force with intellectual pride, an open great- ness cannot ; and of all tlje correspondences l>^;lsveen the moral and intellectual ruiture, there i« none more direct and immediate than that of humility with ca[;;x- ciousness. If pride of intellect be indulged, it will mark oiit to a man conscious of great talerjts the circle of his own intellectual experiences as the only one in wliich he can keenly recognise and appreciate the intellectual universe; and there is no order of iitU-A- lectual men which stands in a more strict limitation than that of the man who cannot conceive what he 76 OF WISDOM. does not oontain. Siu'li \\\cu \\\\\ ofttMitimos dazzle the worlii, and i^xoroiso in llioir day and »]jonoration nnu'h influonci^ on the many wlioso rangr is no wider tlian ll\oirs. and whoso fowo is loss; hut tho want of spiritual and inia«:;inativo wisdom will stop thtMU thm-o ; and [\\c undoi-standings iVoni wlnoh mankind will sock II ptM-n\an(Mit and authontio piidaiu'o, will ho thoso whioh havo hoon oxaltod hy lovo and onlargml hy huniility. It' wisdom ho doloatod hy andtitiiMi and stdf-lovo when thoso an^ oooupiod with tho urmv inward con- sciousnoss of intoUootual powor, still moro is it so wluMi thoy aiv oai:;or {o ohtain vooognition ami admim- tion of it fnnn without. AUmi who aro aooustomod to write or spoak for tMloot, may write or speak what is wise from time to time, heeause they may he eapahle of thinking and intelleetually adopting what is wiso : hut th(\v will not ho wisi^ men ; het-ause \\\c \o\c of Cod. the love oi' man, and the love oC truth not having the mastery with them, the growth and struetnre of their minds must needs he perverted if not stunted. Thenee it is that Si) many men aix^ ohserved to sjieak wisidy ami yet aet foolishly ; they aiv not defieient in their undei-standings, hut tho wisdom oi' the heart is wanting to their ends and ohjeots, and to those feelings which have the direction of their acts. And if they do speak wisely, it is not heeause they are wise; for OF WISDOM. 77 tl)f; permanent shape arifl organization of tlie mind proceeds from wliat we feel and (Jo, and not from what we Hpeak, write, or think. Thrire is a great vohirnr; of truth in thf; arlrnonitJon wliifdj teaehe-H uh that the spirit of oh';dienee is U) }>re[>are thr; way, actiofj to eome next, and that krjowledgr; is nf>t pre- cedent to these, hut eonserpjent : * Do tlie will of my J'alhf;r whieh is in heaven, arid iIjou slialt know of the doctrine.' Those wlio are nnjeh conversant with intellectual men will ohserve, I think, that tlie particular action of self-love hy whieh their minds are most fn^quently warped from wisdom, is that whieh hrjjon^^s to a j^ride and pleasure taken in the exercise of the argumenta- tive faculty; whence it arises that that faculty is en- ahled to assert a f>redominance over its hettf;rs. With fjueh men, the elemf;nts oi' a question whieh will make c/reet in argument, — those whieh are, so far as thf;y go, demonstrative, — will he rated ahovo their value; and those whieh are matter of prof)ortion and degree, not palj)able, ponderahle, or easily or shortly produ- cil)le in wonls, or whieh are matters of moral r.-stima- lion and o[)tional opinion, will go for less than they are worth, because they are luA available to ensure the victory or grace the triumph of a disputant. In some discussions, a wise man will be silenced by ftrgumerjtalion, o/dy because he knows that the rpjes- 78 OF WISDOM. lion should be determined by considerations which lio beyond the reach of argumentative exhibition. And indeed, in all but purely scientific questions, arguments are not to be submitted to by the judgment as first in command ; rather they arc to be used as auxiliaries and pioneers ; the judgment should profit by them to the extent of the services they can render, but after their work is done, it should come to its conclusions upon its own free survey. I have seldom known a man with great powers of argumentation abundantly indulged, who could attain to an habitually just judg- ment. In our courts of law, where advocacy and debate are most in use, ability, sagacity, and intellec- tual power flourish and abound, whilst wisdom is said to have been disbarred. In our houses of parliament tlie case is somewhat otherwise ; the silent members, and those who take but little jiart in debate, and indeed the country at large which may be said to listen, exer- cise some subduing influence over the spirit of argu- mentation, and the responsibility for results restrains it, so that here its predominance is much less than in the courts of law ; yet even in the houses of parliament wisdom has been supposed to have less to say to the proceedings than a certain species of courage. Ambition and self-love will commonly derange that proportion between the active and passive understand- ing which is essential to wisdom, and will lead a OF WISDOM. 79 man to value thoughts and opinions less according to their worth and truth, than according as they arc his own or anotlier's. The ohjcction made hy Brutus to Cicero in the play, — that he 'would never follow anything which other men began ' — points to one corruption operated by self-love upon a great under- standing. Some preference a man may reasonably accord to what is the growth of his own mind apart from its absolute value, on the ground of its specific usefulness to himself; for what is nature to the soil will thrive better and bear more fruit than what has been transplanted : but, on the other hand, if a man would enlarge the scope and diversify the kinds of his thoughts and contemplations, he should not tliirdc too much to apprehend nor talk too much to listen. He should cherish the thoughts of his own begetting v/ith a loving care and a temperate discipline — they are the family of his mind and its chief reliance — but he should give a hospitable reception to guests and to travellers with stories of far countries, and the family should not be suficred to crowd the doors. Even without the stimulant of self-love, some minds, owing to a natural redundance of activity and excess of velocity and fertility, cannot be sufficiently passive to be wise. A capability to take a thousand views of a subject is hard to be reconciled with directness and singleness of judgment; and he who can find a 80 OK wisnoiM. giviit dci\\ io s;iy for any vit^Nv, will not o^\c\\ j^o the Ktraiglit road to tlu* t)iU' viow \\\i\\ is right. If sul)tl(My ho luliloil to t^xulxM'aiu'o, \\ic iu(lij;nuM»t is still inoro ciidungoivil — 'Tell Wit hi)\v i)ft .she wrunj^U's In lickol iH)ints of niconoss, Toll Wisdoju she cntiinj^les llersolf in ovcr-wisonoss.' * r>ut wlun srlf-lovo is not at the n^ot, tluMV is htMtt^r \\opc for wisdom. Nature proaonts us with various walks ot" iiUolliH-tual lifo, and sui'h a siMootion may 1)0 madi^ as shall ronilor a disproportion of tho aotivo \o tho passivo inttdhvt loss danji;tM'ous. Spooulativo wisiion\ will sudor h^ss hy oxot^ss of thinUiui; than praotioal wisdom. Thoro aro tiolds to he fouij;ht, in whioh a wido ran^o is moro t^sstMitial than an unerring niui. In some n^gions wo are to eultivato the surfaee ; in otluM"s to sink the shaH. No one i'ltolloot ean he eipially availahU^ for opposite avooatious, and wlu»n> thert> is no intorforouoo of self-love, wisdom will be attained throu«j;h a wise ehoiee of work. C^ne eminent man oi' our times has saiil of auothiu', that 'seienee was his l"orte, and i>nu\iseienee his foible.' Init that instanee was not an extreme oui\ Crises have oe- eurred in which wisdoui has sutlered total overthrow : • Sir WalUT KaltMirh. the grc;aU;Hl inff;llf;r.t. Mrif;';n Hf;r;n to pnHH into a })ijrHijfr r>r tlif; n»cro vaniti*^ and frJvolilio« of irjtf;Ilr:r,t.iia| (liH)*lay. If, })ow<:Vf,r, a ffinn of m;niiJH hf; ror1.unaf/;Iy frrio from .'ifrifiitifui, t}if;r'; i-i ycA ' COrripanif;H ^f;niu.'i, arid is, [*';r}iap:-;, llio ^^n;al.f;f;t of all trials to th(; moral arnJ Hpirilual }i';arl. It waH a trial too Hfivoro cwcn for Sf>lomon, * wliosf! hf;!jrl, lhouf.;h large, \W.f/u\\i-i\ ljy fair IdolatrcsNCK, fcJl 'J'o ifjols foul.' * *V\\(', tr;m[»fation hy wlii^-Ji such a man is a^;Hailf;d, r:on- BiHtH in ima^inin^^ that Ik; has within hirns'dr and by virtue of liiw tf;m|jf:ramf;nt, sourcos of joy altorff;thf;r indf;pf;ridf;nt of r.f>ndijct and circurnstancfjH. It is truo that hf; has lhf;HO Ho\irr/-.H o\\ thi.s ijnf:oriditiorjal tonuro for a tirrK; ; and it is owinf.*; to this wi;ry truth that }ii,4 futurity iH in danj^'ir, — not in ro.spoct of windom only, but alHO in r<-M\)<:<'X of ha[>[>inf;ss. And if wo look to rccordod examples, wf; shall find that a ^^roat capacity of enjoyment docs ordinarily hrinr^ about the destruc- * Paradise Loft. 82 OF WISDOM tion of onjovineiit in its own ulterior consequences, having uprooted wisdom by the way. A man of genius, so gifted — or, let us rather sav, so tempted — lives, until the consummation ap- proaches, as if he possessed some elixir or phylactery, reckless o( consequences, because his happiness, be- ing so inward to his nature, seems to be inherent and indefeasible. Wisdom is not wanted. The intellect, perhaps, amidst the abundance o\' its joys, rejoices in wise contemplations ; but wisdom is not adopted and domesticated in the mind, owing to the fearlessness of the heart. For wisdom will have no hold on the heart in which jov is not tempered by fear. The fear of the Lord, we know, is the beginning of it; and some hal- lowing and chastening influences of fear will always go along with it. Fear, indeed, is the mother of fore- sight ; spiritual fear, of a foresight that reaches beyond the grave ; temporal fear, of a foresight that lalls short ; but without fear there is neither the one fore- sight nor the other; and as pain has been truly said to be the deepest thing in our nature, so is it fear that will bring the depths of our nature wiUiin our knowledge : — ' "What sees rejoicing genius in the Earth ? A thousand meadows with a thousand herds Freshly luxuriant in a May-day dawn ; A thousand ships that caracole and prance OF WISDOM. 83 With freights of gold upon a sunny sea ; A thousand gardens gladdened by all flowers, That on the air breathe out an odorous beauty.' Genius may see all this and rejoice ; but it will not exalt itself into wisdom, unless it see also the meadow in the livid hues of winter, the ship under bare poles, and the flower when the beauty of the fashion of it perishes. It is true, however, that the cases are rare and exceptional, in which this dangerous capacity of en- joyment is an unbroken habit, so as to bring a steady and continuous pressure upon tlie moral mind. A great capacity of suffering belongs to genius also ; and it has been observed that an alternation of joyfulness and dejection is quite as characteristic of the man of genius as intensity in either kind. Doubtless these alternations will greatly enlarge his knowledge, both of Man and of the universe. The many moods of his own mind will give him a penetrating and experienced insight into many minds ; and he will contemplate the universe and all that goes on in it from many points of view. Moreover, it is by reaction from the extreme of one state, that the mind receives the most powerful impulse towards another — in resilience that it has its plenary force. But though these alternations of excess do thus enlarge and enrich the understanding, and minister to wisdom so far forth, they must yet, by the S^l OF wisroM. sluvks Nvhii-h thoy oooaslon to l\\c inoral will, ilo injurv on tho wliolo to that oomposito oilifioo, buill up ot' the moral and national niiml. in whioh Wisdom lias her (Iwollini;. Tho injufv is not so iijivat as in iho other oaso : bottor aiv >vintor ami sunnnor tor tho mind than tho torrid /.one — foasts and lasts than a piM'potnal plontv — but cither way the temj)er;iment ol' genius is harvlly ever favorable to wisdom; that is, the highest order of gtMiius, or that which includes wisdom, is o( all things tho most rare. On tho other hand, wisdom without gt^nius (a far more piveious git't than genius without wisdom) is, by God's blessing upon the humble and loving lieart, though not as ot'ten met with as * the i^rdinary o( Nature's sale-work,' yet not alti^geihor raiv ; t'or the desiix? to be right will go a givat way towarils wis- dom, lutelleetual guiilanee is the less needed where theiv is little to lead astray — wheiv humility lets the lieart loose to the impulses of love. That we ean Ih^ wise by impulse will seem a paradox to some ; but it is a part of that true dtvtrine whieh tmees wisdom to the moral as well as the intelleetual mind, and more surely to tho former than to the latter — one of those truths whieh is ivoognised when we look into our nature through the elearness of a poetic spirit : — * Momonis there are in lite — alas how lew ! — Wheu casting cold prudential doubts aside, OF WISI>OM. 85 We take a f.;r;ncrous impulse for our ;^uidc, , And followifjj.5 promptly what the heart thinks bcht, Commit to i'roviflence the rest ; Sure that no after-reckoning will arise or hhame or sorrow, for the heart is wise. And happy ihey wlio thus in faith obey Their better nature : err sometimes they may, And some sad thouj^hts lie heavy in the breast, Such as by hope deceived are left behind ; IJut like a shadow these will pass away From the pure sunshine of the peaceful mind.' * Tho (\(j<'Anr\o at all times aware of it; but it is in the order of Nature that this consciousness should be quickened from time to time by the contemplation oi' evil con- sequences arising from specitic errors o( judgment, however innocent in themselves; which contemplation, accompanied with a natural ivgret, constitutes what may be called a repentance of the undei-standing — not easily to be escaped by a plain man. nor properly to be Repudiated by a philosopher. Yet when the consequences of an error o( judgment are irivmediablc, how often are those who would ani- madvert upon it, met with the admonition to ' let tho past be past :' as if the }vist had no relations with the future : and as if the experience of our errors of judgment, and the inquisition into their sources, did not, by its vei*y painfulness, ellect the deepest cultiva- tion o( the undei-standiug, — that cultivation whereby what is irremediable is itself converted into a rem- cdy. The main scope and design of this disquisition having been to inculcate that wisdom is still nioro essentially a moral and spiritual than it is lui intellcc- OF WISDOM. 89 tual attribute, that genius can mount to wisflorn only by Jaof^b's ladder, and that knowledge can only be converted into wisdom by an application of the heart, I cannot better close it than with that declaration of the jialure of wisdom which is delivered in the 28th chfipter of the book of Job : — * Whf;nce then cometh wisdom ? and where is the place of understanding ? * Seeing it is hid from the eyes of all living, and kept close from the fowls of the air. * Destruction and death say, we have heard the fame thereof with our ears. * (iod understandeth the way thereof, and he know- eth the place thereof. * For he looketh to the ends of the earth, and seeth under the whole Heaven; 'To make the weight for the winds; and he weigh- eth the wate-rs by measure. ' When he made a decree for the rain, and a way for the lightning of the thunder : * Then did he see it, and declare it ; he prepared it, yea, and searched it out. * And unto man he said, Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom ; and to depart from evil is un- derstanding.' CHILDREN From the complaints which everybody brings against everybody in the matter of the management of chil- dren, one might be led to suppose that such a thing as good management of them did not exist amongst man- kind. And no doubt this is so far true, that on a subject on which so many and such various kinds of errors may be committed, the best management can be but very imperfect, and those who are complained of should be willing to listen, in the assurance that real errors there are, and for the chance of those being the errors that are hit upon and pointed out. But remonstrance and admonition, whether listened to or not, seem in general to be of as little avail on these questions as theories and doctrines; and from the uselessness of all these, and from the fact that thoughtful and cultivated people are seen, not unfrc- quently, to get as wrong as others, it may be inferred that the most essential qualifications for training a child well, are not of a nature to be communicated by books CHILDREN. 91 or lectures on education. They arc, 1st, The desire to be right in the matter ; 2d, Sense ; 3d, Kindness ; and 4th, Firnnness. Where these are wanting, the wisest admonitions in the world will be of no other use than to relieve the mind of the person who throws them away. Theories, however, seem to have more poNYcr to pervert the natural understanding, in this case, than they have to enlighten it. The doctrine of an eminent writer (of a generation now nearly gone), that a child should be reasoned into obedience, had, in its day, more of a misleading efficacy than might have been thought possible ; and many a parent was induced to believe that a child should be taught to give its obedience, not because it was obedience, but because the thing ordered was reasonable ; the little casuists and controversialists being expected to see the reason of things as readily in real life, as in the dialogues between Tutor and Charles. The common sense of mankind has now made an end of this doctrine, and it is known now, as it was before the transit of that eminent person, that obedience — prompt, implicit, un- reasoning, and almost unconscious — is the first thing to be taught to a child, and that he can have no peace for his soul without it. The notion of setting up the reason to be the pivot of humanity from the cradle forwards, belongs to a 93 CHILDREN. generation of fallacies which have returned to the dust from which they camo ; but it included one error in theories of education wliich will be found to belong to many that are still iwtant : the error of assuming that the pariMit is to he perfect. Under the reason- ing regimen, what was to happen when the parent's reasous were had ? And in like manner, with respect to many less uimatural systems which are recom- mended as if they were of universal a])plicability, the question may bo asked, Will most parents be competent to give effect to them ? And, hearing in mind tiie not inconsiderable number of mankind who labor under imperfections of the understanding or other disqualifying defects, I believe we shall find that a few strong instincts and a few plain rules, are all that can be appealed to for general guidance in the management of children. That iirst and foremost rule of exacting obedience, is so far from being subject to the condition of showing reasons, that I believe a parent with a strong will, although it be a perverse one, will train a child better than a jiarent of a reasonable mind, tainted by infirmity of purpose. For as ' Obedience is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams,* so an authority which is absolute by virtue of its own inherent strength, is better than one which is shaken by a reference to ends and purposes, and by CHILDREN. 93 reasonable (lou])ls as to whether they arc the best and most useful. Nor will the parent's perversity, unless it be unkind or ill-tenripered, occasion the child half so much uneasiness in the one case, as the child will sulDsr from those perversities of its own which will spring up in the other? For habits of instant and mechanical obedience are those that give rest to the child, and spare its health and temper; whilst a recusant or dawdling obedience will keep it distracted in proi)ensity, bringing a perpetual pressure on its nerves, and consec[uently on its mental and bodily strength. To enforce this kind of obedience, our most clTica- cious instrum(!nt is a clear and determinate manner; because with children at least this is the most signifi- cant expression of an authoritative will. But it is an instrument which those only can employ who arc authoritative; by temperament; for an assumed man- ner, or one which is not true to the temperament, will be of no avail. Those parents who are not gifted with this temperament and this manner, myst needs, if they do their duty, have recourse to punishments; of which, in the case of most children, those arc best which are sharp and soon over. And let not the parents think that by a just and necessary amount of punishment they run any risk of impairing the child's affections. The risk is far greater of impairing 94 CHILDREN. them by indulgence. A spoilt child never loves its mother; never at least with the same measure of love as if it were unspoilt. And there is in human nature an essential though somewhat mysterious con- nection of love with fear, which, though chiefly recognised in the relations between man and God, is also discernible in the relations between man and man, and especially in those between parent and child. Love in either relation is deepened by some degree — not oppressive or too disturbing — some slight degree of fear; and the very truth of the text, that ' perfect love casteth out fear,' shows that fear must be there before the love is made perfect. Therefore the parent who shrinks from inflicting just and proper punishments upon a child, deprives that child not only of the rest to be found in duty and obedience, but also of the blessings of a deeper love. There is another way not much adverted to by blind parents, in which children arc injured by undue indulgence. It prevents them from benefiting by the general tendency of mankind to have kind and friendly feelings towards children. Such feelings are checked and abated when it is seen that children are unduly favored by their parents. And when the rights and comforts of others are sacrificed for their sake, instead of being objects for the protection and CHILDKEN. 95 good offices of all around them, they become odious in the same manner as princes' favorites do, and their parents' sins arc visited upon them. Then the repugnance wliich people feel towards the objects of an unjust partiality, provokes them to exaggerate the demerits of the children, — not probably to the face of the parents, but in a way to go round to them, — whereupon the parents come in with some show of reason as protectors of injured innocence, and fortify themselves in their own de- lusions by detecting injustice in the views of others. It is not the nature of mankind to be unjust to children, and where parents find this injustice to prevail, they should look for the source of it in their children or in themselves. Indeed, it is the nature of mankind to be only too kind to children, and to take too much notice of them ; and this is a reason for not throwing them too much in the way of strangers and casual visitors. When the visitors are intelligent, and the parents are not the sort of people to whom flattery is accept- able, the children may be no worse for meeting the visitors, though they should never be sent for to be shown. But when the parents are known to have open ears for the praises of their children, there are hardly any strangers so careful and conscientious as not to say what is expected of them, and very many 96 CHILDREN, will i-arry thoii* MaiulishnuMits to an exlivnio of gross- ncss ami falseness. A oonsiileratc visitor will observe the eouihiet of a judieious parcnt towards a eliild, and be guid(\l hy it : but \\\c instances arc far more frequent in wbieb the I'olly o( injudieious jiarents is unserupulonsly abetteil by the levity o( t>thers ; and the only consolation fi)r a rational bystander is that the childivn may havc^ more sense than their flatterers anil more diseernnuMit than their parents, and be unflattertHl and ill-pUviseil (as will sometinies haj>pen) by these coarse attempts at adulation. It is selfishness on the part of parcnts which «j:ives rise to undue indulixonce of children, — the selfishness of saerilu-iui; those (ov wIumu they care less to those t'er whom they care uhmv ; and the selfivshness of the paivnt for the child will invariably produce selfishness o( the child lor himselt'. A spoilt child is never generous. And selfishness is induced in a child not only by \oo much indulgence, but even by too much attention. It will be most for a child's happiness and well-being, both present and to come, thai he should teel himselt', in ivspect to comlorts and enji^yments, the most insignificant person in the house. In that case he w ill have his own resouives, which will be more available to him than any wliieh perpetual attention can minister; he will be subject to fewer discontents : and his atfections w ill be more CHILDREN. 97 cultivated by tiio occasional tokens of kindness which a contented child will naturally receive in sufficient abundance, than they would be by continual endeavors to make him happy. And if continual attention to making him happy will not produce happiness, neither will continual at- tention to making him good produce goodness. For if the child feels that there is some one incessantly occupied widi his happiness and goodness, he will come to be incessantly occupied with himself. Some- thing must be left in a spirit of faith and hope to Nature and God's providence. Parents arc the in- struments, but they are not to be all in all. Room must be left for some liberty of action, for many an untended impulse, for self-reliance, for temptations and trials, with their natural results of victory with self-respect, or defeat with remorse. Cy such treat- ment the child's moral nature, being amply exercised, will be seasonably strengthened ; and when he comes into the world as a man, he will come with a man's weapons of defence ; whereas if the child be con- standy watched and kept out of liarm's way, he will come into the world a moral weakling. I was once present when an old mother, who had brought up a large family of children with eminent success, was asked by a young one what she would recommend in the case of some children who were too anxiously 7 98 CHILDREN. educated, and licr reply was — 'I think, my dear, a little wholesome neglect.' For shiiilar reasons it may be well that children should not be hedged in with any great number of rules and regulations. Such as are necessary to be established, tliey should be required imj)licitly to ob- serve. But there should be none that are superfluous. It is only in rich families, where there is a plentiful attendance of governesses and nurses, that many rules can be enforced ; and I believe that the constant attentions of governesses and nurses is one of the jrreatest moral disadvantages to which the children of the rich are exposed. I have heard a multiplicity of petty regulations defended, on the ground that it was a constant exer- cise of the child's sense of right and wrong. But will a child be really the better for always thinking about whether he does right or wrong, that is, — always thinking about himself? Were it not well that, for hours together, no question of right or wrong should arise in his path .'' or at least none that de- mands from him more than a half-mechanical atten- tion ? For the conscience of a child may easily be worn out, both by too much pressure and by over- stimulation. T have known a child to have a con- science of such extraordinary and premature sensi- bility, that at seven years of age she would be made CHILDREN. 99 ill by remorse for a small fault. vShe was brought up by persons of excellent understanding, with infinite care and affection, and yet, by the time she was twenty years of age, she had next to no conscience and a hard heart. A person who had some experi- ence of precocious consciences once observed to me, in respect to those children who are said to be too good and too clever to live, that it was very desira- ble they should not. These views are not, of course, to be pushed too far. A child's conscience should always have that sufficiency of exercise which due discipline and the occasions of life will not fail to supply, without facti- tious duties or needless rules. And with respect to the treatment of the conscience on the point of sen- sibility, natural constitutions are so diverse that it is difficult to speak generally ; but though I would not have it much stimulated or unintermittingly worked upon — though I would avoid to intimidate or inten- erate the conscience — I do not agree with those who think that the appeals to it should be invariably made with a judicial calmness, and that all punish- ments should be inflicted dispassionately. Moral dis- approbation on the part of parents towards children (as indeed on the part of men towards men throughout all relations of life) should not operate mechanically, bringing with it, like a calculating machine, a pro- 100 CHILDREN. portionate evil to be suffered as a consequence of every evil act. It should operate according to its own human nature, as a matter of emotion, not only bringing an evil to be suffered, but a moral sentiment to be recognised and taken to heart — a passion which should strike upon the moral sense. According to the nature of the child and of the fault, the emotion should be sometimes more of sorrow than of anger, sometimes more of anger than of sor- row. But it were better for the child's conscience that there should be some errors of emotion, than that punishments should be cold and dry. A parent should ' be angry and sin not ; ' that is, the anger should be a just and moral anger, and grave and governed ; but at the same time it should be the real anger of flesh and blood, and not the mere vis motrix of an instrument of discipline. In this way the moral sentiments of the parent, if they be virtuous, gener- ous, and just, will be imparted to the child : for it is a truth never to be lost sight of in the treatment of our children, that their characters are formed, not by what we do, think, or teach, but by what we feel and by what we are. With respect to the intellectual cultivation of chil- dren, it is very important that the body, mind, and moral sense of the child should proceed in their growth proportionately and pari passu: — - CHILDREN. 101 ' For nature, crescent, does not grow alone In thews and bulk ; but as tins temple waxes. The inward service of the mind and soul Grows wide withal.' * As this temple waxes let it be ; not before this temple waxes. Whichsoever of tiiese constituents of the human being, the body, the intellect, and the moral sense, shall shoot forth prematurely and in advance of the others, will run a great risk of being nipped and blighted. The intellectual is, of the three — in these times at least — that which is most liable to premature development. The evil consequences of such development have been very generally per- ceived, and many maxims are afloat against over- education ; but the ambition of parents is commonly too strong for their wisdom and prudence, and the over-education proceeds, the maxims notwithstanding. And schools and colleges and all tutors and teachers being governed by the same spirit, it is difficult for a wise parent to give effect to wise views, even when he heartily desires it. One rule, however, it is in his own hands to carry out, and this is, if he talk much to his children, not to talk intellectually. The intel- lectual talk of adults is apt, not only to stimulate the child's intellect to efforts beyond its strength, but also to o\ierlay many intellectual tastes which * Hamlet. 102 CHILDREN. have their natural place in childhood, and which it is good for every mind to have passed through. It is best for a child that he should admire cordially what he does admire ; but if the intellectual tastes and criticisms of the adult mind are brought to bear upon him, he will try to admire what he cannot, and fail to admire what he might. On the other hand, I would* not be understood to recommend the sort of jocular nonsense which some intellectual parents will have recourse to in order to place their conversation on a level with a child's understanding; nor do I observe that children are fond of it, or at all flattered by it, but rather the contrary. For it is a mistake to suppose that any joke is good enough for a child. Intelligent children, if not absolutely fastidious as to jokes, (which cer- tainly all children are as to taste and manners,) will not, however, accept as complacently as might be wished, the mere good-natured disposition to make them merry; nor can they respond in the manner that is sometimes expected from them, to every well- meant effort of heavy gambolling and forced faceti- ousness. Whatever is most simple and natural is most pleasing to a child ; and if the parent be not naturally light and gay, he had better be grave with his children, only avoiding to be deep or subtle in discourse. CHILDREN. 103 But however parents may demean themselves, it is not desirable that they and their children should be always together. Children and young people — and I should say even adults — are not the better in their understandings for an exclusive association with their superiors in understanding. Such association should be occasional, not constant. The inferior mind so associated may possibly not be of a nature to be over- excited and over-wrought ; it may be safe from those evils through defect of spontaneous force and activity ; but in that case another evil arises ; it is led to adopt its opinions instead of thinking them, and finds a short cut to posts to which it would be better that it should fight its way. In the case of a young man who has been brought up in the constant society of a parent greatly superior to himself, it will generally be found that he has come by his opinions not (as is best in youth) partly through deference to authority, partly through conflict with evils, and partly by spontaneous impulse, but almost entirely by adoption, as if they were certified facts. And this leaves the mind unen- larged and the judgment unexercised. There is a class of opinions, however, — those con- nected with the moral and spiritual nature, — which are to be inculcated on a different principle from those which concern merely the cultivation of the intellect. For these are opinions which are not to be valued 104 CHILDREN. merely as opinions, but on account of the feelings and affections which are to be incorporated with them. Great as is the importance of true religious doctrine — which is, as it were, the body of religion — it is, nevertheless, an importance subsidiary and derivative ; it is derived from the efficacy of true religious doctrine to cherish and protect the growth of genuine religious feeling, which is the soul of religion. The opinions are the organic structure ; the feelings are the vital principle. It is for the sake of the feelings that the organization is so important; and I think, therefore, that religious truths, or what the parent believes to be religious truths, should be presented to children through the conveyance of the feelings for implicit adoption, and not as matters to be wrought out in the under- standing. For the primary object, which is to fix the feeling, will be in some measure frustrated — the feel- ing will be in some measure abated or supplanted — if more thought be called up than the feeling of its own mere motion will naturally generate. But if the religious beliefs of a child be not founded in his reason, what, it may bo asked, will become of them when the credulous simplicity of childhood shall be at an end, and the thinking faculty shall have set itself to work? I answer, that whether his beliefs have been founded in reason, or whether they have been founded in love, receiving from reason merely a CHILDREN. 105 collateral support, it is probable that if the child be of an active and inquisitive understanding, the beliefs will, at one period or another within childhood or succeeding it, sustain some shock and trial. But those who have taken much note of human nature will have observed, I think, that the reason is the weakest part of it, (God forbid that it should not!) and that the most reasonable opinions are seldom held with much tenacity, unless when they have been adopted in the same way as that in which prejudices are adopted; that is, when they have been borne in upon the under- standing by the feelings. Whilst I think, therefore, that love is that constituent of faith of which a child's nature is most capable, I also believe it to be that groundwork of faith on which all nature must rest, if it have any resting-place at all ; and love, therefore, inspiring the reason, but not reduced to the reason, must be so imparted to the child as to animate the growing and changing forms of doctrine through- out the several stages of childhood ; and when child- hood shall have been left behind, it is this, and nothing else, that can be relied upon to withstand the rashness of a youthful intellect, flushed by its first discoveries. The struggle will be great at this season, in proportion to the largeness of the nature and the force of the elements at work ; and if a strong under- standing should be too suddenly expanded, it is 106 CHILDREN. probable that there will be some disruption of the material fabric of doctrine in which the spiritual feeling has hitherto had its abode. But if the principle of love have been cherished and made strong from the first, the broken forms of doctrine will reunite, and love, with whatever strivings and wrestlings, will find an organic faith in which to set up its rest and secure itself from accidents of the intellect, as well as from whatsoever the world can do against it. And in most cases (though not in all unhappily) the faith will be the more strongly founded for the conflict in which it has been engaged. It was by Eros and Eris, by Love and Strife, that Order was brought out of Chaos. ' I can just remember,' says a theologian of the last century, ' when the women first taught me to say my prayers, I used to have the idea of a venerable old man, of a composed benign countenance, with his own hair, clad in a morning gown of a grave-colored flower- ed damask, sitting in an elbow-chair.' * And he pro- ceeds to say, that in looking back to these beginnings, he is in no way disturbed at the grossness of his infaiiit theology. The image thus shaped by the imagination of the child was in truth merely one example of the various forms and conceptions, fitted to divers states * Lights of Nature and Gospel Blended, ch. iii., s. 1. CHILDREN. 107 and seasons and orders and degrees of the religious mind, whether infant or adult, which represent the several approximations such minds, or minds at such seasons, can respectively make to the complete- ness of faith. These imperfect ideas should be held to be reconciled and comprehended in that complete- ness not rejected by it ; and the nearest approximation which the greatest of human minds can accomplish is surely to be regarded as much nearer to the imperfection of an infantine notion than to the fulness of truth. The gown of flowered damask and the elbow-chair may disappear ; the anthropomorphism of childhood may give place to the divine incarnation of the Second Person in after years ; and we may come to conceive of the Deijty as Milton did when his epithets were most abstract : ' So spake the Sovran Presence.' But after all, these are but different grades of imperfection in the forms of doctrinal faith; and if there be a devouter love on the part of the child for what is pictured in his imagination as a vener- able old man, than in the philosophic poet for the ' Sovran Presence,' the child's faith has more of the efficacy of religious truth in it than the poet's and philosopher's. What we have to take care of in the religious training of a child is, that the love 108 CHILDREN. shall bg indestructible and paramount ; so that in all the transmutations of doctrine which after years may bring, from the palpable picturings of Tucker's infant imagination to the 'Three Incomprehensibles ' of St. Athanasius, he may preserve the same relig- ious heart ; and whatever other knowledge or sup- posed knowledge shall supervene, may still ' know that there is nothing better than the fear of the Lord, and that there is nothing sweeter than to take heed unto the conuuandnu^nts of the Lord.'* * Ecclesiasticus, xxiii. 27. THE LIFE POETIC. Let it not be too contemplative for action, nor too active to afford room and space for contempla- tion. The tendency of our times is to bring every man of eminent abilities into great outward activity, and thereby perhaps in some cases to dam up and divert to the turning of this mill or that, the stream which should have flowed unbroken * in omne voluhilis cBvum,'' and made itself a mirror to nature. But it may happen to a man of genius, conscious of this tendency of the age, to throw himself too much' into the opposite extreme. His leanings should be towards retirement, no doubt; but he should indulge them, though largely, yet still with a measured free- dom, not a total abandonment. ' Fountain-heads and pathless groves, Places which pale passion loves ' — * should be, without question, his favorite haunts : but • * Fletcher. 110 THE LIFE POETIC. he is not to forget tliat i'ov the cultivation of the highest order of poetry, it is necessary that ho should be conversant witli life and nature at large, and ' Know all qualities with a learned spirit Of human dealings ' — * that his poetry should spring out of his life, and that his life should abound in duties as well as in con- templations. For that poetic vision which is the vision of the introverted eye alone, has but a narrow scope : and observation comes of action, and most of that action which is the most responsible. And if it be true that * a man's mind is sometimes wont to tell him more than seven watchmen that sit above in an high tower,'! it is also true that that man will hear most of all, who hearkens to his own mind and to the seven watch- men besides ; whilst what he hears will turn to know- ledge, and will be fixed, amplified, and defined, in proportion as there are deeds and consequences to follow, and sweet or bitter fruits. He is but a child in knowledge, however versed in meditation, who has not to act, to suffer, and to teach, as well as to inquire and to learn. If a meditative man be used to be taken about a city in a carriage or led about it by a friend, it will be long before he knows his way in it ; but * Shakespeare. f Ecclesiaslicus, xxxvii. 14. THE LIFE POETIC. Ill not SO if he have to go about in it by himself, still less if he have to lead another. If, then, a poet would entitle himself to take the highest rank in his art, — to be numbered, that is, amongst the ' poets sage^^ he should be, to a moderate extent, mixed up with the affairs of life. His mind should be not a vessel only, but a vat. His wisdom should be a tried and stirring wisdom. His specula- tions should emanate from facts and events, and his poetry should have its roots in the common earth. But it is difficult to say how this conversancy with men and affairs is to be attempted in these times, without losing hold of the contemplative life altogether, and becoming involved in the inordinate activities of the age. If a profession be adopted, there is hardly any which leaves a moderate degree of leisure except to men of inferior abilities. Men of eminent abilities embarked in a profession, are placed under obligations of exertion which they cannot escape. In trade, strenuous efforts are enforced upon a man by the pressure of competition ; and trading occupations are perhaps in other respects unsuited to a poet. Political life is not open to him unless circumstances be favor- able ; and to a man who is alert and excitable, (as a poet must be supposed it to be,) it will prove too violent a diversion from poetic pursuits ; and this, not from tlic nature of the business only, but because it 112 THE LIFE POETIC. commonly leads a man of quick sympathies (which again must be supposed in the poet's case) into a good deal of social dissipation. * If life,' says Cowley, ' If life should a well-ordered poem be, (In which he only hits the white AVho joins true profit with the best delight,) The more heroic strain let others take, Mine the Pindaric way I '11 make. The matter shall be grave, the numbers loose and free.' This liberty of life cannot, I think, in these days — and in the case of a man of eminent abilities — be secured, if a man be confined to any of the establish- ed ruts in which life is made to run. If, then, neither professional, commercial, nor po- litical life will sort well with the life poetic, there remains little besides casual employments and the duties which accrue in every station, to supply a poet with the quota of action required for his purposes. These, however, may suffice if they be sedulously pursued. The poor are always with us, and their affairs fall fitly into the hands of educated men who have no professional avocations. Let the poet be a man of fortune, and the duties of a landlord are incumbent upon him, whilst those of a magis- trate lie before him, with the whole field' of county THE LIFE POETIC. 113 business. If he be not a proprietor, yet one place he must occupy — that of a parishioner, with parochial functions ; and the vestry will present, to an observant eye, as instructive an exponent of human nature, with pretty nearly the same variety of features, as the Lords spiritual and temporal with Her Majesty's faithful Commons in Parliament assembled. Nor is the business of a parish to be regarded as unworthy the diligent attention of a man of genius. It is not impossible that, from time to time, it may require the same species of ability as the business of an empire, and exercise the same faculties in its adjust- ment ; for the amount of prudence and sagacity needful for the successful transaction of business depends comparatively little on the scale of operation. Sometimes, indeed, the larger the scale the easier the task. Furthermore, a man of judgment and ability will find, as he advances in life, that the duties of friendship and relationship will multiply upon him more than upon men of inferior capacity, if only he be found willing to discharge them. And if he shall attain to eminence as a poet, that, like every other species of eminence, will bring with it no inconsider- able demands upon his activity. To these may be added — if they should fall in his way — casual and temporary employments in the public service, taking 8 114 THE LIFE POETIC. care, however, not to let that service fix itself upon him and suck the blood out of his poetic veins. Milton had employments of this nature ; and before he should hold himself equipped for his great enterprise in poetry, he deemed it indispensable that to ' industrious and select reading' should be added ' steady observa- tion' and 'insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs.' * Spenser and Cowley had such employ- ments also; and many others might be named, were they worthy to be named after these. But if a poet shall fail to find any field for external activity, which would admit also of leisure and retire- ment, or if he shall have an invincible repugnance to an outward life, (which may not unnaturally be his predicament,) then it behoves him the more to place his life under a well-devised discipline, in order that it may be, if not externally active, yet orderly and sedulous. For by how much a man shall reserve himself to a contemplative life, by so much will he need a more constant and watchful self-regulation in the conduct of it; and by so much, also, will the task of self-regulation be difficult and severe. The regimen of external circumstan/se and of obligations contracted to others, is an aid which only a strong man can dispense with in the ordering of his days * Reason of Church Government, Book 2d. THE LIFE rOETIC. 115 and hours ; and moreover, if the course of the hours is to be governed wholly from within and pro re natd as it were, there will be some danger of self- government being accompanied by too much of self- occupation. Nor is it to be forgotten that the man who lies under no external obligation, (none that is apparent and palpable,) to occupy himself in one way or another, will become a prey to many demands for small services, attentions, and civilities, such as will neither exercise his faculties, add to his knowledge, nor leave him to his thoughts. The prosecution of a contemplative life is not an answer to any of these demands ; for though the man who is in the pursuit of an active calling, is not expected to give up his guineas for the sake of affording some trifling grati- fication to some friend or acquaintance or stranger, yet the man who has renounced the active calling and the guineas in order that he may possess his soul in peace, is constantly expected to give up his meditations, and no one counts it for a sacrifice. Meditation, it is thought, can always be done some other day. A man without something indispensable to do, will find his life to be involved in some of the difficulties by which a woman's life is often beset, one of which difficulties is the want of a claim para- mount upon her time. And these difficulties will not 116 THE LIFE POETIC. be the less if the poet have, as he ought to have, something of the woman in his nature ; as he ought to have, I aver ; because the poet should be hie et hcsc homo — the representative of human nature at large and not of one sex only. With the difficulties of a woman's life, the poet will not find that any of its corresponding facilities accrue ; he will find claims to be made upon him as upon a man, and no in- demnities granted to him as a poet. Thus it is that in the bustling crowds of this present world, a medi- tative man finds himself, however passively disposed, in a position of oppugnancy to those around him, and must struggle in order to stand still. But even if a poet devoted wholly to retirement, should be able to seclude himself from petty and unprofitable interruptions, he would still be the better for methodizing his life by some severity of self- restraint. Meditation is a wild business when there is nothing else to be done. An excitable mind will wander and waste itself if it be unenclosed ; and nothing needs to be intermitted more than the exer- cise of the imaginative faculties. I have heard a man of ardent religious feelings declare, that his devotions were more lively and spiritual after a day of business than in a day consecrated to devotional exercises; and in like manner it may happen with a poet, that there shall be more freshness and vigor THE LIFE POETIC. 117 in the contemplations which spring up after compres- sion, than in those which are the predetermined occu- pation of the day. Next to conversancy with life and affairs, a poet should cultivate a conversancy with external nature. The cultivation, indeed, will come of itself, if his life be led where nature is favorably presented to him; and not where it is soiled and obscured, as in the smoky parts of Yorkshire and Lancashire, or built out, as in great cities. If, however, circum- stances should oblige him to live in a city, occasional visits to the country may still do much for him — in some cases, perhaps, even as much as constant resi- dence. The loss of continual intercourse with Nature is, no doubt, a great loss to those who have an ever- flowing love and a never-failing admiration of her; which are, indeed, supreme amongst poetical gifts : but on the other hand, if there be some short-comings in this kind, the benefits of continual residence will bear a less proportion to those of occasional inter- course. What we see rarely is seen with an access of enjoyment which quickens observation and bright- ens recollection ; and if the susceptibilities need to be stimulated, the stimulation will redound more from what is fresh than from what is familiar. Mr. Tennyson has described — as he only could — a sort of semi-seclusion, which would seem to com- 118 THE LIFE POETIC. bine all that a poet could want to favor his intercourse with Nature and with his kind : * Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love : Kews from the humming city comes to it In sound of funeral or marriage bells ; And, sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear The windy clanging of the minster clock ; Although between it and the garden lies A league of grass, washed by a slow, broad stream, That, stirred with languid pulses of the oar, Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on. Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge. Crowned with the minster-towers.' * It must be acknowledged, however, that the greatest English Poets of past times did undoubtedly live much in London ; and of those, he who excelled most in the treatment of external nature, composed his best descriptions from the images retained in his imagination, when the knowledge of nature was at one entrance quite shut out. In our own times the greatest poets have lived in the country ; but indeed they had good reasons for doing so, independently of intercouse with nature. For ^ the social life of cities is much changed from what it was two hundred years ago. In London, in * The Gardener's Daughter. THE LIFE POETIC. 119 the present times, an eminent man is beset with a multiplicity of social enjoyments and excitements, the very waste-pipes of genial sensibility ; and the poet's imagination, instead of forming a fund to be continually deepened and widened by influx from secret sources, is diffused and spread abroad and speedily dried up. Such, at least, is the case with those eminent men who are lively in discourse or cordial and courteous in demeanor. Others, perhaps, invested with an adequate unpopularity, may be in little danger. * Me, though blind,' says a poet who seems not to have perceived the perils of social popularity till they had passed by him, — 'Me, though blind, God's mercy spared, from social snares with ease Saved by that gracious gift, inaptitude to please.' But social repulsiveness has its evils too, when fully brought out in a metropolitan life : the garb of hedge- hog skins, though a coat of proof, may be turned outside in, and not worn with the equanimity with which that sort of garment is said to have been worn by the Saint. Whether, therefore, the poet be so- cially unacceptable, or be courted, flattered, and caressed, but most in the latter case, London, in these times, is not the place in which his faculties will be most favorably developed. 120 THE LIFE POETIC. And a due appreciation of the tennptations to which a poet is exposed by popular admiration and the courtings and wooings of social life, may lead us to juster views than are, I think, generally entertained of the ways in which genius and art are to be cher- ished by nations and governments. There is much complaint made by the admirers of arts and litera- ture, that their professors are not sufficiently advanced and honored by the State and by mankind. In my estimation they are honored more than is good either for themselves or for their calling. Good for mankind it may be to admire whatever is admirable in genius or art; but as to the poet himself, a very moderate extent of favorable acceptance in his own times is all that can be beneficial to him either as a man or as an artist. He is by temperament but too excitable ; with him the vita timhralilis is essential to repose and self-possession ; and it is from repose and self-possession, — ' Deep self-possession, an intense repose — ' * that all genuine emanations of poetic genius proceed. To the poet, solitude itself is an excitement, into which none that is adventitious should intrude : the voices which come to him in solitude should not be mixed with acclamations from without ; and the voices • Coleridge. THE LIFE POETIC. 121 which proceed from him should not be confounded by the amiable intrusion of their own echoes, apt, when quickly reverberated, to be too intently listened for. It is true that he must have some more or less conscious anticipation of sympathy to come; he must feel that his voice will not be as the voice of one crying in the desert, but that his just thoughts, his glorious visions, his passions and * the high reason of his fancies,' will in their due time of maturity, and after so many revolutions of the seasons as are need- ful for the ripening of such results, reach the hearts of multitudes, and find an echo in the ages that are unborn. But these anticipations of what is distant are not of a nature to agitate or disturb the mind in its self-communion. They serve to animate his lighter efforts, and they support him in his severer labors and more strenuous studies ; but they do not dissipate or distract the mind. It is far otherwise in respect to contemporaneous and immediate admiration; and I doubt whether any high endeavor of poetic art ever has been or ever will be promoted by the stimulation of popular applause. Still less would poetic art be advanced by rewards in the shape of civil honors and distinctions ; and the proposals which have been made for so rewarding it betray, when they are examined, the inconsistency of the views on which they are founded. It v/ould prob- 122 THE LIFE POETIC. ably be admitted by their authors that poetic art should not be accounted in any respect inferior to military or political art. Yet has any one entertained the notion of assigning to the greatest poet of an age, civil honors and distinctions tantamount to those which are assigned to the greatest soldier or politician ? The creation of a Duke of Rydal, with an appanage of .£10,000 a year, is not the sort of measure which has been suggested, and probably there is no one who would not acknowledge it to be absurd. Yet it could be hardly more absurd than the assignment to our greatest poets, of titular distinctions, which, being the highest that are proposed as a reward of poetic genius, are yet amongst the lowest that would be considered worthy the acceptance of a meritorious general officer or a serviceable county member. The truth is, that civil honors and titular distinctions are altogether unfit for great poets ; who, being but two or three in a cen- tury, are to be distinguished by the rarity of their kind. With regard to pensions, were they intended merely as honorary rewards, they would be open to the same objections. If they were supposed to have reference to the dignity of the calling, such pensions as are given to Lord Chancellors and Ambassadors should pitch the scaljC, rather than such as are given to Clerks and Collectors of Customs. But they are assigned upon different principles, and their sufficiency is to be THE LIFE POETIC. 123 brought to another test. In treating of the life which a poet ought to lead, I have left out of the account one material question, — whether it be such a life as it is likely that he will be able to lead. And as there is no reason to suppose him one of the few who are born to a competency, the renunciation which I have recommended of all professional and commercial pur- suits, and also of all public employments except such as are casual and temporary, may well suggest the inquiry in what manner he is to be maintained. Not, certainly, on the profits of poetry ; for unless he apply himself merely to please and pamper and not to ele- vate or instruct, his poetry will do little indeed towards procuring him a subsistence : it will probably not even yield him such a return as would suffice to support a laboring man for one month out of the twelve. This has been the case with the greatest poets, if not during the whole, at least during the greater part of their lives ; and even when their poetry has attained to what may be called popularity, it is still a popularity which extends only to the cultivated, as distinguished from the merely educated classes, and does not bring with it any very profitable sale. If poetry, then, be unavailable, will the poet be enabled to subsist by the aid of prose ? This will probably be his best resource ; but even prose will fail to return a profit, unless it be written for- the market. 124 THE LIFE POETIC. Having been almost the only resource of one who was at once an eminent poet, and in general literature the most distinguished writer of his age, Mr. Southey, his example may be fairly adduced as showing what can be made of it under the most favorable circum- stances. By a small pension and the office of laureate, (yielding together about .£200 per annum,) he was enabled to insure his life, so as to make a moderate posthumous provision for his family ; and it remained for him to support himself and them, so long as he should live, by his writings. With unrivalled industiy, infinite stores of knowledge, ex- traordinary talents, a delightful style, and the devotion of about one half of his time to writing what should be marketable rather than what he would have desired to write, he defrayed the cost of that frugal and homely way of life which he deemed to be the hap- piest and the best. So far it may be said that all was well ; and certainly never was man more con- tented with a humble lot than he. But at sixty years of age he had never yet had one year's income in advance; and when between s\xty and seventy his powers of writing failed, had it not been for the timely grant of an additional pension,* his means of subsistence would have failed too. It was owing * Through the care of Sir R. Peel. THE LIFE POETIC. 125 to this grant alone, that the last years of a life of such literary industry as was the wonder of his time, were not harassed by pecuniary difficulties; and at his death the melancholy spectacle was presented, of enormous preparations thrown away, one great labor of his life half finished, and other lofty designs which had been cherished in his heart of hearts from youth to age, either merely inchoate or altogether unat- tempted. We mourn over the lost books of Tacitus and Pliny, and rake in the ruins of Herculaneum to recover them; but .£300 a-year — had it been given in time — might have realized for us works, over the loss of which our posterity may perhaps mourn as much or more ! * Things incomplete, and purposes betrayed, Make sadder transits o'er Truth's mystic glass, Than noblest objects utterly decayed.' * If one moiety of Mr. Southey's timet — applied to procure, by marketable literature, the means of * Wordsworth. t I will allow myself to note here, whether or not it be to the purpose, that the only son of the author of the Book of the Church — a most active and exemplary clergyman with a large family — is left (unavoidably perhaps, but the well-wishers of the Church must surely wish that it could 126 THE LIFE POETIC. subsistence — is found to leave such miserable results as these, it may easily be imagined what fortune would attend the cfTorts in marketable prose, (always assuming them, of course, to be good and worthy, and not the mere suppliance of the literary toyshop,) of a man of like poetical gifts, but not endowed with the same grace and facility in composition, the same unwearied industry and almost unexampled produc- tiveness. Pensions to poets, then, in such cases — and, in- deed, pensions to all writers, poetical or other, in the higher and graver and therefore less popular and lucrative walks of literature — may be deemed, I think, tliough not appropriate as honors or rewards, yet desirable as providing a subsistence which may not be attainable in other ways without great injury to the interests of literature. The provision should be suited to the retired and homely way of life, by which the true dignity of a poet will be best sus- tained, and in which his genius will have its least obstructed development; but it should be a provision calculated — if prudently managed — to make his life, in its pecuniary elements, easy and untroubled. I be avoided) to struggle with the world, on a hard-working poverty-stricken curacy. This he does, however, in a spirit of manly contentedness worthy of his father. THE LIFE POETIC. 127 say ' if prudently managed,' because as to the wants of a spendthrift poet, or of one who is incompetent to the management of his affairs, they are wants which it is hard to measure and impossible to supply. If the pensions now given to men of letters, to scien- tific men, and to artists, be of such amount as would enable them, living frugally, to give all or most of their time, with an easy mind, to those arts and pur- suits by which they may best consult the great and perdurable interests committed by Providence to their charge, then the amount is sufficient, though it be but little ; and the fact which is so often brought forward, that it is less than the ordinary emoluments of trades, professions, or the humbler walks of the public service, is not material to the case. If the pensions, on the other hand, be of less amount than will effect this purpose, then I think that the just ground on which the grant of such pensions is to be rested, — that is, the true interests of men of genius themselves, and, through them, the interests of litera- ture and art, — require that they should be advanced in amount so far as may be sufficient for this purpose, and no farther. It is not only to secure to him the undisturbed possession of his time, and the undiverted direction of his endeavors, that it is expedient to make some sufficient pecuniary provision for a poet : such a pro- 128 THE LIFE POETIC. vision is important also as a safeguard to his character and conduct ; for few indeed are the men whose character and conduct are unimpaired by pecuniary difficulties ; and though wise men will hardly be involved in such difficulties, let their need be what it may, and though none but a wise man can be a great poet, yet the wisdom of the wisest may be weak in action ; it may be infirm of purpose ; through emotions or abstractions it may be accessible to one inroad or another ; and though I am far from claim- ing any peculiar indulgence for the infirmities of men of genius — on the contrary, in my mind, nothing can be more erroneous than to extend indulgence to moral aberrations precisely in those cases in which, operating to the corruption of the greatest gifts, they are the most malign and pernicious, — yet, for this very reason, whilst refusing them any indult or abso- lution, I would claim for men of genius all needful protection — more perhaps than ought to be needful — in order that no danger that can be avoided may attend the great national and universal interests in- volved in their life and character. For never let this truth depart from the minds of poets, or of those who would cherish and protect them — that the poet and the man are one and indivisible; that as the life and character is, so is the poetry; that the poetry is the fruit of the whole moral, spiritual, intellectual, THE LIFE POETIC. 129 and practical being; and howsoever in the imperfec- tion of humanity, fulfilments may have fallen short of aspirations, and the lives of some illustrious poets may have seemed to be at odds with greatness and purity, yet in so far as the life has faltered in wisdom and virtue, failing thereby to be the nurse of high and .pare imaginations, the poet, we may be sure, has been shorn of his beams; and whatsoever splendor may remain to him, even though to our otherwise bedarkened eyes wandering in a terrestrial dimness, it may seem to be consummate and the very ' off- spring of Heaven first-born,' yet it is a reduced splendor and a merely abortive offspring as compared with what it might have been, and with what it is in the bounty of God to create, by the conjunction of the like gifts of high reason, ardent imagination, efflorescence of fancy and intrepidity of impulse, with a heart subdued to Him and a pure and un- spotted life. Out of the heart are the issues of life, and out of the life are the issues of poetry. And the greatest of those poets whose lives, though perhaps less blemished in reality than evil report would have them to be, are certainly not free from reproach, have seen and acknowledged all this, and have known what they have lost. If the little that has come down to us concerning Shakspeare includes somewhat against him, we know also from himself 9 130 THE LIFE POETIC. how it was by himself regarded ; and what is to the present purpose, we know that he imputed the evil courses into which he was betrayed to the way of life, forced upon him by the want of a compe- tency : — \ * Oh, for my sake do thou with Fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds. Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdued To that it works in, like the dyer's hand.' * And we know further, that when he had attained to a competency, (would that it had been earlier !) he followed that way of life no longer. We have now plotted out for the poet a life, con- templative but not inactive, orderly, dutiful, observant, conversant with human affairs and with nature; and though homely and retired, yet easy as regards pecu- niary circumstances. But some particulars remain to be added. As his life of contemplation is to be varied by practical activity upon occasion, so should his solitude be varied by occasional companionship. In youth his companions will probably be chosen very • 111th Sonnet. THE LIFE POETIC. 131 much for the sake of their intellectual powers and acquirements ; and whilst we are young we are most open to cultivation from such companionship. After- wards, truth and kindness come to be, if not all in all, yet at least of all qualities the most essential ; and to one who, learning from books what books can teach, would desire to make more direct inquisi- tion into the secrets of human nature, it is far less important that companionship should be intellectual, than that it should be confidential. The poet being himself frank and unreserved, (as I think poets for the most part will be found to be,) should beget frankness and unreserve on the part of his compan- ions, who should come/ to him for advice and sym- pathy in all the emergencies of life. 'I have got into this or that dilemma or difficulty, what am I to do ? ' 'I have fallen in love with this or that young lady, what will become of me .? ' 'I have been ill- used and betrayed, shall I forgive it, or shall I resent it.?' The poet's companions, making hasty resort to him under such circumstances, the inmost thoughts of their hearts disclosed by the passion of the time, whilst a friendly or perhaps even an impassioned interest is excited in the heart of the poet, the result will be a living knowledge, and a judgment, by as much as it is responsibly and affectionately exercised, by so much the more deeply cultivated. This is the 132 THE LIFE POETIC. companionship which, being indeed essential to any one who would bring out his better nature and fulfil his duties as a man, is eminently essential to a poet. There is another companionship to be considered, — that of books. The reading by which Milton proposed to prepare himself to write poetry was, as appears by a passage to which I have already referred, ' select reading.' In these times I think that a poet should feed chiefly (not of course exclusively) on the litera- ture of the seventeenth century. The diction and the movement of that literature, both in verse and in what Dryden calls 'that other harmony,' are, in my apprehension, far more fitted than the literature which has followed it, to be used for the training of the mind to poetry. There was no writing public nor reading populace in that age. The age was the worse for that, but the written style of the age was the better. The writers were few and intellectual; and they addressed themselves to learned, or, at least, to studious and diligent readers. The structure of their language is in itself an evidence that they count- ed upon another frame of mind and a different pace and speed in reading, from that which can alone be looked to by the writers of these days. Their books were not written to be snatched up, run through, talked over, and forgotten; and their diction, there- THE LIFE POETIC. 133 fore, was not such as lent wings to haste and impa- tience, making everything so clear that he who ran or flew might read. Rather it was so constructed as to detain the reader over what was pregnant and profound, and compel him to that brooding and pro- lific posture of the mind, by which, if he had wings, they might help him to some more genial and profit- able employment than that of running like an ostrich through a desert. And hence those characteristics of diction by which these writers are made more fit than those who have followed them, to train the ear and utterance of a poet. For if we look at the long-suspended sentences of those days, with all their convolutions and intertextures — the many parts wait- " ing for the ultimate wholeness — we shall perceive that without distinctive movement and rhythmical sig- nificance of a very high order, it would be impossible that they could be sustained in any sort of clearness. One of these writer's sentences is often in itself a work of art, having its strophes and antistrophes, its winding changes and recalls, by which the reader, though conscious of plural voices and running di- visions of thought, is not however permitted to disso- ciate them from their mutual concert and dependency, but required, on the contrary, to give them entrance into his mind, opening it wide enough for the purpose, as one compacted and harmonious fabric. Sentences 134 THE LIFE rOETIC. thus elaborately constructed, and complex though mu- sical, are not easy to a remiss reader, but they are clear and delightful to an intent reader. Sentences, on the other hand, such as are demanded in these times by the reading commonalty, and written by those who aspire to be their representatives in the republic of letters, lie under little obligation to address themselves to the ear of the mind. Sense is to be taken in by so little at a time, that it matters not greatly what sound goes with it ; or, at all events, one movement and one tune, which all the world understands, is as much as our sentence can make room for or our reader will take time for; and as matter and style will ever re-act upon each other, I fear there is a tendency in our popular writers to stop short of that sort of matter to which brief bright sentences are not appropriate and all-sufficient. How- ever this be, the finer melodies of language will always be found in those compositions which deal with many considerations at once — some principal, some subordinate, some exceptional, some gradational, some oppugnant ; and deal with them compositely, by blending whilst they distinguish. And so much am I persuaded of the connection between true intel- lectual harmony of language and this kind of com- position, that I would rather seek for it in an Act of Parliament — if any arduous matter of legislation be THE LIFE POETIC. 135 in band-— than in the productions of our popular writers, however lively and forcible. An Act of Par- liament, in such subject-matter, is studiously written and expects to be diligently read, and it generally comprises compositions of the multiplex character which has been described. It is a kind of writing, therefore, to which some species of rhythmical move- ment is indispensable, as any one will find who attempts to draft a difficult and comprehensive enact- ment, with the omission of all the words which speak to the ear only, and are superfluous to 'the sense. Let me not be misunderstood as presuming to find fault generally and indiscriminately with our modern manner of writing. It may be adapted to its age and its purposes ; which purposes, as bearing directly upon living multitudes, have a vastness and momentousness of their own. All that it concerns me to aver is, that the purpose which it will not answer is that of training the ear of a poet to rhythmical melodies. And how little it lends itself to any high order of poetical pur- poses, may be judged by the dreary results of every attempt which is made to apply it to purposes of a cognate character — to prayers, for example, and spiritual exercises. Compare our modern compositions of this kind with the language of the liturgy — a lan- guage which, though for the most part short and ejac- ulate ry and not demanding to be rhythmic in order to 136 THE LIFE POETIC. be understood, partakes, nevertheless, in the highest degree, of the musical expressiveness which pervaded tlie compositions of the time. Listen to it in all its varieties of strain and cadence, sudden or sustained, — now holding on in assured strength, now sinking in a soft contrition, and anon soaring in the joyfulness of faith, — confession, absolution, exultation, each to its appropriate music, and these again contrasted with the steady statements of the doxologies ; — let us listen, I say, to this language, which is one effusion of celestial harmonies, and compare with it the flat and uninspired tones and flagging movements of those compounds of petition and exhortation, (from their length and multi- fai'iousness peculiarly demanding rhythmic su])port,) which are to be found in modern collections of prayers for the use of families. I think the comparison will constrain us to acknowledge that short sentences in long succession, however clear in construction and correct in grammar, if they have no rhythmic im- pulse — though they may veiy well deliver themselves of what the writer thinks and means — will fail to bear in upon the mind any adequate impression of what he feels — his hopes and fears, his joy, his gratitude, his compunction, his anguish and tribula- tion ; or, indeed, any assurance that he had not merely framed a document of piety, in which he had carefully set down whatever was most proper to THE LIFE POETIC. 137 be said on the mornings and evenings of each day. These compositions have been, by an illustrious sol- dier, designated ' fancy prayers,' and this epithet may be suitable to them in so far as they make no account of authority and prescri})tion ; but neither to the fancy nor to the imagination do they appeal through any utterance which can charm the ear. I come back, then, to the position that a poet should make companions chiefly of those writers who have written in the confidence that their books would be learned and inwardly digested, and whose language was framed for patient and erudite ears, and an atti- tude of the mind like that in which St. Paul listened to Gamaliel, sitting at his feet. And I think that he should rather avoid any habitual resort to books, however delightful in their kind, such as are written in these times and for these times, to catch the fugacious or stimulate the sluggish reader ; books such as may be read in the captiousness of haste by a lawyer with an appointment to keep and a watch on the table, or in an inapprehensive weari- ness by a country gentleman after a day of field sports. Moreover, by this abstinence, and by a conversancy with elder models in the matter of diction, the poet will be enabled to employ as his own, by the habit which is a second nature, that slightly archaistic 138 THE LIFE POETIC. coloring of language, which, being removed from what is colloquial and familiar, at the same time that it has no incongruity or unnatural strangeness, is, I think, in these times at least, (as by Spenser and others it was deemed to be formerly also,) the best costume in which poetry can be 'clothed, combining what is common to other ages with what is charac- teristic of its own. At the same time the true poet will be choice and chary, as well as moderate, in the use of archaisms ; by no means detaining or reviving old forms of speech, which, being intrinsi- cally bad, are in a way to be worthily forgotten. The wells of English were not altogether undefiled in any age ; and they who aspire to be what poets ought to be, the conservators of language, will proceed, not by obstructing the expurgation of their mother tongue, — a process which, as well as its corruption, is con- tinually on foot, — but by remanding to their more derivative significations, words which are beginning to go astray, and by observing with a keener insight the latent metaphorical fitness or unfitness by which all language is pervaded. Nor is it to be supposed that the true poet will betray his trust in the conservation of his country's tongue, through any latitude popularly permitted to him for convenience of rhyme or rhythm. For what- ever may be meant by those who speak of poetical THE LIFE POETIC. 139 license, that phrase would mislead us much, were we to suppose that the language of poetry is not required to be precise for the most part, and beyond all other language apt and discriminative. And though this peculiar aptitude will escape many of the poet's readers, (if he have many,) and much of it will not be recognised at once even by the more skilful few, yet in this, as in other matters of art, it is what can be fully appreciated only by continual study, that will lay the strongest foundations of fame. The ' hsec placuit semel ' should be, to the poet, of infi- nitely less account than the ' hccc decies repetita placebit : ' nor is he worthy of the name of a poet who would not rather be read a hundred times by one reader than once by a hundred. ( When that great man of whom I have already made mention, speaks of his life as led in his library and with his books, those to which he adverts as his never-failing friends, are the books of other times; and a poet's feelings as to this companionship, could not be more expressively conveyed than in the verses in which he has given them utterance ; -— ' My days among the dead are past, Around me I behold Where'er these casual eyes are cast, The mighty minds of old : 140 THE LIFE POETIC. My never-failing friends are they, "With whom I converse day by day. ' With them I take delight in weal, And seek relief in woe ; And while I understand and feel How much to them I owe, My cheeks have often been bedewed With tears of thoughtful gratitude. ' My thoughts are with the dead ; with them I live in long past years ; Their virtues love, their faults condemn. Partake their hopes and fears : And from their lessons, seek and find Instruction with an humble mind. ' My hopes are with the dead. Anon My place with them will be ; And I with them shall travel on Through all eternity j Yet leaving here a name, I trust, That will not perish in the dust.' With regard to the habitual reading of books in foreign languages, whether living languages or other, I, being but veiy imperfectly acquainted with any but my own, am not competent to say what would be the effect of it upon a poet's diction and numbers ; but this subject is one which would deserve to be THE LIFE POETIC, 141 investigated by some duly qualified critic* Milton, I think, though he greatly enriched his store of poeti- cal images and materials by his conversancy with Latin, Greek, and Italian books, did yet suffer injury on the other hand in the perverting of his diction to the Latin ; his numbers, however, (for numbers are less than diction accessible to foreign influence,) remaining unwarped and eminently his countiy's and his own. Dante had no indigenous literature to assist him in the moulding of his verse, being himself the founder of the Italian as a literate language ; and he rebukes with some severity of disdain, those who were 'tarn obscense rationis,' as to magnify the lan- guage of their native country above eveiy other. * Since the first and second editions of this book were published, I have been informed by Mr. Crabbe Robinson, the friend of Schiller and of most of the other great men of letters of his times in England and Germany, — indeed I may add, the friend of all men, great and small, who stand in need of his friendship, — that being one day with Schiller in his library, and observing on the shelves a collection of German translations of Shakspeare, he inquired how it was that Schiller, who understood English, could require these translations. Schiller's answer was, that he was in the habit of reading as little as possible in foreign languages, because it was his business to write German, and he thought that by reading in other languages he should lose his nicer perceptions of what belonged to his own. 142 THE LIFE POETIC. ' For myself,' he s;iys, ' whose country is the world, being native to that as the fish to the sea, though I drank the waters of the Arno before I liad a tooth in my head, and have so loved Florence as, by reason of my love, to undergo an unjust banishment, yet have I holden my judgment subject to my reason rather than to my senses ; and as to Florence whence I am sprung, regard it though I may as the place in the world most pleasant to me, yet when I revolve the works of the poets and other writers by whom the world has been described in all its particulars from pole to pole, I am strong and absolute in the opinion, derived from other evidence than that of the senses, that there are regions and cities more delightful and noble than those of Tuscany, and languages better both for their use and their charm than the Latian.'* * ' Nam quicunque tam obscense rationis est ut locum suae nationis deliciosissimum credat esse sub sole, huic etiam praB cunctis proprium vulgare Ik-ebit, id est maternam locutionem, prseponere : . . . . Nos autem, cui mundus est patria velut piscibus aiquor, quamquam Sarnum biberimus ante dentes, et Florentiam adeo diligamus ut, quia dileximus, exiliura patiamur injusle, ratione magis quam sensu spatulas nostri judicii podiamus : et quamvis ad voluptatem nostram, sive nostras sensualitatis quietem, in terris amocnior locus quam Fiorentia non existat, revolventes et poetarum, et aliorum THE LIFE POETIC. 143 It would be matter of much interest to know from competent critics, how far the operation of these sentiments is to be traced in the fabric of Dante's verse, he having had, as it were, to build it up from the ground ; or how far the native genius of the language has ruled supreme. If Milton, however, have accepted foreign aid, and perhaps Dante also, yet Shakspeare is a signal example of the all-suffi- ciency of national resources ; having, with his ' small Latin and less Greek,' so large and various a vocabu- lary, it hardly seems possible that any extent of erudition could have bettered it, and a structure of language so flexible and multiform, that it Could not have been more so had there been a confluence of twenty tributary tongues at its formation. Having considered, if not sufficiently, yet at suffi- cient ' length, after what manner a poet is to live, it scriptorum volumina, quibus mundus universal! ter et mera- bratim describitur, ratiocinantesque in nobis situationes va- rias mundi locorum et eorum habitudinem ad ulrumque polum et circulum aequatoreum, multas esse perpendimus firmiterque censemus, et magis nobiles et magis deHciosas et regiones et urbes, quam Thusciam et Florentiam, unde sum oriundus et civis, et plerasque nationes et gentes delec- tabiliori atque utiUori sermone uti, quam Latinos.' — De Vulgari Eloquio, 1-6. I extract the passage, because in translating I have abridged it. 144 THE LIFE POETIC. may be well, before I conclude, to inquire at what period of his life he should deem himself to be pre- pared for the exercise of his vocation on a large scale. And from the nature of some of the preparations which have been treated of as indispensable, it will plainly appear that this period will not arrive in early youth. For if contemplation, action, conversancy with life and affairs, varied duties, much solitude in its turn, with observation of Nature, and reading select and severe if not extensive, be, as I have deemed them to be, essential requisites for the writing of poetry in its higher and graver kinds, some not inconsiderable tract of matured life must have been travelled through before these fruits can have been gathered. And with this hypothesis our literary history and biography will be found to accord. Milton, at twenty-three years of age, thought that he ripened slowly ; and when he supposed himself less happy in that respect than others, doubtless it was because his own deficiencies were better known to him than theirs : — ' * How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, Stolen, on his wing, my three-and-twentieth year, My hasting days fly on with full career. But ray late spring no bud or blossom sheweth. Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth That I towards manhood am arrived so near, And inward ripeness doth much less appear. Than some more timely happy spirits induelh.' THE LIFE POETIC. 145 Even in his twenty-ninth year he regarded his poetical efforts, (and comparing himself with himself, perhaps wc may say with reason,) as a pkicking of the ' berries harsh and crude.' But the history of poetry at large would show, I think, that Milton's poet- ical faculties were not of slower growth than those of other poets of the high and intellectual orders ; and that at all events the period of the culmination of such poets is in middle life. And with regard to exceptional cases — instances of high achievement at other periods, — whilst a few may be cited as belong- ing to the periods short of middle life, more illustrious examples still will be found belonging to periods be- yond it. Pope wrote verses with singular grace and dexterity in his early youth : but, on the other hand, Dryden when he produced the ' Alexander's Feast,' was in his sixty-seventh year ; and ' are not the glean- ings of the grapes of Ephraim better than the vintage of Abiezer ? ' Goethe may be quoted as an authority as well as an example. When the poet, in the pro- logue to the Faust, sighs after his lost youth, his friend reproves him, and whilst admitting that youth is pro- pitious to divers other ends and exercises, declares that, for the purposes of poetry, the elder is the better man : — ' The cunning hand of art to fling With spirit o'er the accustom'd string j 10 146 THE LIFE rOETIC. To seem to wander, yet to bend Each motion to the harmonious end : Sach is the task our ripened age imposes, Which makes our day more glorious ere it closes.** Nor is it only the poetry of the highest intellectual order which is better written after youth than in youth. Even for amorous poetry, there is a richer vein than that of youth's temperament, and a more attractive art than youth can attain to. Let the masters of erotic verse be mustered, and it will appear, I think, that few or none of them wrote consummately in early youth, whilst the best of .them gave utterance to their best strains long after they had sung their ' Vixi Puellis.^ The sense of proportion, which is required equally in the lighter as in the graver kinds of poetry, is natural- ly imperfect in youth, through undue ardor in particu- lars ; and no very young poet will be content to sacrifice special felicities to general effect. Nor can there well exist, at an early period of life, that rare and peculiar balance of all the faculties, which, even more perhaps than a peculiar force in any, constitutes a great poet : — the balance of reason with imagination, passion with self-possession, abundance with reserve, and inventive conception with executive ability. On the whole, therefore, it is not desirable that a poet should prosecute any great enterprise in early THE LIFE POETIC. 147 youth ; nor is it likely that his lighter efforts will be worth much. Nevertheless, it is the period for prac- tice and exercise ; and a poet must and will write much verse in youth, and he will be much the better for it ; nor will he write it with the purpose of throwing it away. If he be affected with the usual impatience of an ardent temperament in early life, it will perhaps be best for him to publish ; for till he have rid himself of this impatience, he will not go to work with an ambi- tion sufficiently long-sighted and a steady preference of ulterior to early results. And publication, if unsuc- cessful, (as the juvenile publications of great poets are almost sure to be,) is a sedative of much virtue and efficacy in such cases. ' Be not ambitious of an early fame,' says Mr. Landor, ' for such is apt to shrivel and drop under the tree.' Early success puts an end to severe study and strenuous endeavor; whereas early failure in those in whom there is genuine poetic genius, and what commonly accompanies it — * Faith in the whispers of the lonely Muse — ' * acts as a sort of narcotic stimulant, allaying impatience, but quickening the deeper mind. The outset of a poet's life, and the conduct of it ^ nel mezzo del cammin' — the seasons in which his * Wordsworth. 148 THE LIFE POETIC. poetiy is sown and reaped — are most important to the interests of the art and of mankind. The manner in which it shall be drawn to a close may be supposed to be important chiefly to the poet himself: yet it is not altogether so ; and a few words may not be wasted in speaking of that latter autumn of a poet's life which succeeds his harvest-home. With poets whose life reaches its three-score-years-and-ten, this will be a period of some years' duration. For the fact that by some great poets some short poetical efforts have been hazarded in old age with eminent success, should not certainly lead to the conclusion that an old man should occupy himself in adding to the bulk of his poetical works, (especially if already voluminous,) when he can no longer hope to enhance their rateable and specific value. It is important to every poet to keep his works within compass. Moreover, the intensities of life should be allowed to come to their natural close some steps short of the grave ; and passionate writing should not be extended over this period, even if the imagina- tion have not ceased to be impassioned. There are other ways, at once congenial with the poetic life and consentaneous with its decline, in which the activities that remain may be gently exercised, when the passion has been laid to rest. The long edu- cation of a poet's life (for as long as he lives he should learn) will have enabled him to detect, at the end of it, THE LIFE POETIC. 149 many faults in his writings which he knew not of be- fore ; and there will be many faults, also, of which he was cognisant, but which, in the eagerness of his pro- ductive years, he had not found leisure or inclination to amend. In his old age, as long as the judgment and the executive power over details shall be unim- paired, — as long as the ha7id shall not have lost its cunning, — the work of correction may be carried on to completeness, and the poet's house be put in order. Some caution will be requisite. Age is prone to fas- tidiousness ; and if the poet can no longer go along with the ardors of his younger years, he should take care lest he quench them with too cold a touch. Age, too, is vacillating : and if he have lost his clearness and decisiveness of choice, he should not deal with any delinquencies of his younger verse except those which are flagrant ; and in all his corrections, indeed, the presumption should be in favor of the first draft, which should have the benefit of the doubt if there be one ; otherwise the works may be the worse for the last hand. But, subject to these conditions, there seems to be no employment better suited to the old age of a poet, than that of purifying and making less perishable that which he trusts may be the earthly representative of his immortal part. For such purpose and in so far forth, he may permit himself, even at a period when ' the last infirmity ' 150 THE LIFE POETIC. should be on its last legs, to be occupied with himself and his fame. But when his own works are as he would wish to leave them, nothing of that which is pe- culiar to him as a poet and not common to him as a man, will so well become his latter days, as to look beyond himself and have regard to the future fortunes of his art involved in the rising generation of poets. It should be his desire and his joy to cherish the lights by which his own shall be succeeded, and, perhaps, outshone. The personal influence of an old poet upon a young one — youth and age being harmonized by the sympathies of the art — may do what no writ- ings can, to mould those spirits by which, hereafter, many are to be moulded ; and as the reflex of a glori- ous sunset will sometimes tinge the eastern sky, the declining poet may communicate to those who are to come after him, not guidance only, but the very colors of his genius, the temper of his moral mind, and the inspiration of his hopes and promises. That done, or ceasing to be practicable through efllux of light, it will only remain for the poet to wait in patience and peace. 'While night Invests the sea, and wished morn delays.' * * Paradise Lost. THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. There is a great and grievous complaint in some quc.rters, that the Rich are too rich, and that their ricl.es are continually increasing, whilst from other qua:-ters the complaint is, that those who thus com- plain have as great a desire for riches as if they saw no harm in them. A few years ago a writer of great sagacity and knowledge of the world, repre- sented England to be a country in which poverty is contemptible. Such an account of things tends to propagate the sentiment it proclaims ; because in all countries there are many who are prepared to go with the stream. But let us hope that it is not a true account. There are large numbers of English- men, though not, perhaps, of the particular section of society which fell more directly under the observa- tion of that writer, by whom poverty is not despised, unless resulting from indolence or misconduct, and by whom riches are not respected, unless well won or well spent. 152 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. Nevertheless it is true enough that riches are too much valued by some classes, whilst they are re- garded with jealousy by others ; and in the present state of society it were well if all classes could be led to consider justly, and if none would permit themselves to consider enviously or ungently, the manner in which riches are expended, and the gen- eral demeanor of the Rich and the Great. Although the Rich are a small minority of the people, there is no reason why their happiness and enjoyments should not be cared for; and there is in human nature so much of a disposition to sympathize with happiness and prosperity, that their enjoyment of their wealth will not be unpopular, if it be not seen to be selfish or absurd. But it is desirable both for the sake of the Rich and Great, and for the sake of the sentiments with which the other classes may regard them, that what is expended for enjoyment should really contribute to enjoyment, and also that it should not be more than duly proportioned to vhat is expended for the benefit of others. The expenditure of the Rich and Great in matters of mere appearance is often objected to, and it is true that by far the greatest portion of their expendi- ture is more for show than for any other species of luxury. But this is not to be indiscriminately de- THE "WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 153 noimced ; and those by whom it should be so dealt with, even though they were the poorest of the poor, would probably be found to be, in their practice, within the condemnation of their own principle. *What need of five-and-twenty, or of ten, or of five followers ? ' said Goneril. ' What need of one ? ' added Regan. But the King made answer — ' Oh reason not the need ; our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous : Allow not Nature more than Nature needs, Man's life is cheap as beast's ! ' The plea of ' supporting the station to, which Provi- dence has called us,' is not unmeaning, though it be often much abused ; and when it is not abused, the common sense of the people will generally recog- nise it sufficiently to make matters of show inoffen- sive. But in order to give validity to the plea, the shows should be such as have attached themselves to the station very gradually, so as to form part of the transmitted usages of society, and be harmonized in men's imaginations. New inventions in the way of show, or new extensions of old expenditures in this way, are obnoxious, and should tend to derogate from the respect in which a man is held by his equals, as well as to impair his popularity ; because they are evidence that he is not merely sliding into 154 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. the track which is prepared for him, but deliberately turning his thoughts to ostentation. A man's expen- diture for show, should therefore belong either to the station to which he is born, or to that into which he has gradually passed by the natural influence of in- creasing riches, superior abilities, or other circum- stances, which make the shows incidental to the life rather than expressly devised and prepared. Even if the show be no more than proportioned to the wealth, it will not avoid to be obnoxious, if the wealth have been suddenly acquired, and the transition from obscurity be abrupt. ' For I,' says Mr. Landor, 'have shunn'd on every side, The splash of newly mounted pride.' And who has not? And in whatever measure show is indulged, let it be apparent that other things are uppermost, and that a man's heart is in his benefi- cence and in his business. Amongst the superfluities which add nothing to the enjoyments of the Rich, and detract from their usefulness, may not superfluous houses be numbered ? A man who has many houses, will oftentimes have no home : for the many objects and associations which a man gathers about him, as a shell-fish forms its shell, in a conformity with his manner of being, cannot be so gathered in more places than one. And THE WAYS OF THE KICH AND GREAT. 155 the perplexity which will beset him from time to time, especially if there be different opinions in his fomily, in determining to which house to go, will more than counteract the pleasures of change ; and his life will need more of forecasting. And as to usefulness and popularity. Operations for the improvement of his neighborhood will be interrupted or impaired by changing from house to house, and his own interest in them will be broken and imperfect. If on the other hand he leave any of his houses long unoccupied, the neighborhood is deprived of the services which are due from a resi- dent man of property. And moreover there is a sense of waste in seeing a house constantly and deliberately left unoccupied. It is something good, which is neither to be used and enjoyed, nor sold nor lent, nor given — one of the most naked, forms of superfluity. If these views be just, it would follow that rich men should not wantonly embarrass themselves with many houses ; and that those to whom they have accrued as unavoidable adjuncts of large estates, should, if possible, let them even for a nominal rent, or establish in them some junior members of their family. There are objections also to an excessive extent of park, pleasure-ground, and demesne. For this 156 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. tends to isolate the owner, and to place his neighbors and his duty to his neighbors at a distance from him. The physical element of distance will often make an important difference in a man's relations with his fellow-creatures. An extensive park introduces more or less of this element in the case of all a man's neighbors except his lodge-keepers ; and a great extent of contiguous landed property added to this, introduces it in respect of all his neighbors except his tenants. This is no small evil. The tenantry and dependents of the Rich and Great are not the only persons with whom they should be in relations of good neighborhood. It is perhaps equally impor- tant that they should be in such relations with the clergy and the smaller gentry around them. The attraction of cohesion by which society is to be kept together, will not be brought about by an approxi- mation of its opposite poles, but by an attraction of the nearest to the nearest throughout the social body. The distancing of country neighbors by large parks and estates is the more to be deprecated now, because railroads have recently operated in the same direction, by filling great country-houses more than ever with metropolitan society. In this case again, what is to be done when parks of this excessive extent have descended to the owners, consecrated, perhaps, by hereditary and historical THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 157 associations:* — or when they could not be disparked or contracted in size without injury to the beauty of the country ? Little, perhaps, to abate the specific evil ; but much to compensate for it. Such parks, instead of being disparked, may be popularized. Access should never be refused to strangers ; certain spaces in them should be assigned for the sports of the neighboring peasantry ; and periodical games and festivities should be celebrated in them for the benefit of the neighbors of all classes. The Aristocrat should ever bear in mind, that his position has something in it of a public and national character, and that aristocratic possessions exist for popular purposes. That portion of the expenditure of the Rich which is devoted to luxuries of the table, may escape the observation of the Poor, and be, therefore, perhaps less unpopular than it ought to be. But of all excess in luxury, that of the table is the most offensive to the taste of those who would wish to see the higher classes distinguished by refinement at least, if not by simplicity of Hfe. To do the Rich justice, the extent to which this species of expenditure is carried in these times, is to be attributed less to sensuality than to ostentation; and it is to parade expenditure rather than to pamper the appetite, that those never-ending still-beginning dinners are served up, at which a 158 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. person of a taste unvitiated by custom could hardly look on without a sense of dreariness and disgust. That the offence to good taste is wanton and gratui- tous rather than gluttonous, may be inferred from the small quantity of the dainties displayed that is really eaten ; and one proof out of many that costliness is chiefly aimed at, is to be found in the practice of providing esculents which are out of season. By a true and unsophisticated taste, what is out of season would be rejected as out of keeping with Nature ; and even without reference to any such principle of taste, a strawberry in March is at all events no better than a strawberry in July, though it is about a hun- dred times dearer ; and by our greedy anticipations and our jumbling together of the products of the seasons, we deprive ourselves of that change and variety which Nature, in her own orderly successions, would provide. But if the motive for this sort of sumptuousness is display more than gluttony, it has, nevertheless, a most pernicious tendency to promote gluttony; and, indeed, the length of time that people are required to sit at these dinners would be intolerable if there were not much eating and drinking to fill it up. The sensuality is not so gross, certainly, as that of our drunken fore- fathers ; but having regard to the fact that dinners are late as well as long, and that in these times men's brains THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 159* are taxed as well as their stomachs, the pressure on health is perhaps almost as severe. It has been ob- served by an eminent physician, that more pressure of that kind results from a life of steady high living than from one of occasional debauch. To long and late dinners, longer and later social entertainments of divers kinds succeed, till the sun rises upon a worn- out world. Everything in the nature of an amusement is protracted and strained, and there cannot be a* greater mistake than this in the economy of enjoy- ment. The art of carrying off a pleasure is not to sit it out. Expense in furniture is perhaps as innocent as any expense can be which is not meritorious. Yet the internal garnishing and decorations of a house have nothing of the public and patriotic attributes which may be ascribed to the house itself, if it be designed as a work of architectural art, to adorn the land from age to age. The garnishings are for the more exclusive and selfish enjoyment of the owner and of those whom he may admit to his society, and they are fugitive and perishing. Therefore the very large proportionate expenditure of the Rich in these times on luxuries of furniture (designated, perhaps, by the sober and respectable name of ' comforts ') is, to say the least, not to be commended. Moreover, 160 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. many of these luxuries are in reality less conducive to comfort than what is cheap and common ; and there are many more which impair the comfort through the health. The air we breathe in our rooms would be lighter and fresher if there were no such things as carpets, window-curtains, bed-curtains, or valances ; and the more full and heavy the draperies of a room, the less light and nimble is the air. And this effect is aggravated if the room be spacious. It is an error to suppose that rooms which are very large and lofty are more airy than others. They may be more airy than very small rooms, but they are less so (and this is well known to the asthmatic) than rooms of mod- erate dimensions, every corner of which is near the external air. Again, the love of displaying cost and magnificence in furniture is seldom accompanied, even amongst the richest of the rich, by an indifference as to whether it is spoilt or blemished : and yet solicitude on this point militates much against comfort. The sun is often shut out to save the color of carpets and cur- tains, at times when Nature's sunshine might well be preferred to the best of upholstery. In short, there are a hundred ways in which luxury overreaches itself — a hundred in which penance enters into the worship of Mammon. Double windows make our rooms close. Artificial waters poison our parks. And one truth the Rich would do well to keep in mind, for THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 161 very comfort's sake — that comfort, like health, may- be impaired by being too anxiously cared for. Very different is the view to be taken of a Rich man's in-door expenditure, when he is sparing of mir- rors and jars and satin and velvet-pile, but lavish in objects which address themselves to the intellectual and imaginative tastes. In libraries, and works of art, pictures, sculpture, and engravings, a rich house can- not be too rich : and the house of an educated gentle- man should no more be without the works of Michael Angelo or Raphael, in one form or another, than with- out the works of Milton and Shakspeare. And with regard to the galleries of the Rich, if unoccupied as apartments, should they not be always open to stran- gers ? and if they be so occupied, should they not be open on certain days of every week ? In the Palazzo Borghese at Rome, the rooms are not only always open, but they are provided with fires in cold weather, with seats, catalogues, and tubes to look through, so that the stranger feels himself to be a guest, and the guest of a gentleman, and is sensible, not only of the mere liberality of the owner, but of his attentions, courtesy, and good-breeding. As to the free access to libraries, and the free loan of books, those who lend books no doubt run some risk of losing them. There is nothing which bor- 11 162 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. rowers take so little care to return. Yet the value of a book is only realized in proportion as it is read. A book which is never read is of absolutely no value. Therefore, though many books are said to be lost by lending them, more are lost indeed by leaving them on the shelf. And for the personal and particular loss to the owner, he loses more than he need, if he allows himself to be cheated of his liberality by the occa- sional thoughtlessness or thanklessness of those whom he gratifies. That old scholar and gentleman who, after his name written in Latin in the blank page of his books, wrote ' et amicorum ejus,' had a better possession than that of a library. But the Rich might guard their possessions in books by keeping a libra- rian, who would not cost so much (alas !) as an under butler or a groom of the chambers. Amongst the most important of the relations in which the Rich and Great stand to their fellow- creatures, are their relations with their servants and their relations with their tradesmen. Under the former head, there may be, perhaps, little to find fault with on the score of mere manner and outward demeanor. To use servants with harsh- ness, or to be wanting in that species of consideration for them which consists in a certain mildness and amenity of manner, would ruffle and deform that THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 163 smooth surface of things which it is agreeable to the taste of people in high life to see around them. Nor do they, perhaps, interfere with the comforts of their dependents by any undue or onerous exactions of service ; for their establishments, being for the most part calculated for show, are more numerous than is required for use, and are therefore necessarily under- worked, except, perhaps, in the case of some poor drudges at the bottom, who slink up and down the back stairs unseen, and whose comfort, therefore, may not always engage the attention of a family of this class ; and even these will not be oppressed with their labors, unless when some impoverished people of fashion may find it necessary to dock the tails of their establishments in order to keep the more prominent portions entire. Nevertheless the exceptions which may be taken against the life of the Rich and Great, as affecting the class of servants, are of a very grave description. Late hours and habits of dissipation in the heads of a family make it almost impossible, especially in London, to exercise that wholesome household disci- pline which is requisite to secure the well-being of a servant. The usages of high life require that the servants of these people should be numerous; their number unavoidably makes them idle ; idleness makes them debauched; debauchery renders them often ne- 164 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. cessitous ; the affluence or the prodigality, the indo- lence or indulgence or indifference of their masters, affords them every facility for being dishonest ; and beginning with the more venial kinds of peculation, their conscience has an opportunity of making an easy descent through the various gradations of lar- ceny, till the misdemeanant passes into the felon. In the meantime, the master, taking no blame to himself, nor considering that servants are, to no inconsiderable extent, what their masters make them, — that they are the creatures, at least, of those circumstances which their' masters throw around them, and might be moulded in the generality of cases, with a fair prospect of successful results, by the will and conduct of the master — passes over, with an indolent and epicurean censure, the lighter delinquencies which he may happen to detect, laughs perhaps at his own laxity, and, when at length alarmed, discharges the culprit without a character, and relieves himself, at the expense of he knows not whom, by making of a corrupted menial a desperate outcast. Hospitals, work-houses, and prisons, swarm with the broken- down servants of the Rich ; and it is but a small portion of them that live to be old. If it be said that a man cannot be expected ta change his mode of life for the sake of his servants, it must be answered, that a mode of life which THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 165 hazards the perdition of several of his fellow-crea- tures, ovglit to be changed, and cannot be persevered in without guilt. But if no such sacrifice were con- sented to, there remain means by which the evil might be mitigated. A reduction in the number of servants would be one great means of promoting their well-being, and would involve no real sacrifice of comfort or even of luxuiy. The way to be well served is to keep few servants ; and the keeping of superfluous servants is one of the many ways in which luxury is self- destroyed. Some little time ago, a lady who kept nine men-servants, after several vain attempts to get some coals for her fire, received from her butler the explanation that none of the footmen would bring them up, because ' the odd man ' had forgotten to fill the scuttles ; the odd man on such establishments, being the drudge who is hired to do the work of the house. Thus it is that the multiplying of means will often defeat the end ; work is seldom well done except by those who have much to do ; the idleness of one hour spreads itself rapidly over the whole twenty-four ; and servants whose numbers are calculated for show become unavailable for use. And again, even good servants conduce less to comfort on many occasions than is often supposed. Is it not frequently most for your comfort to serve 166 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. yourself? How much easier to get yourself some- thing, than to wait doing nothing till it is gotten for you. For impatience is prevented or abated by instru- mental activity. ' A watched pot is long in boiling,' says the proverb : but go into the garden, gather some dry sticks, put them under the pot and blow the bel- lows, and you will not have felt it long. And a rich man, though aware of this, may not be able to help himself; for his household being formed upon the system of everything being done for him, the system becomes too strong for him, and he will not be per- mitted to do^ though often compelled to wait. Every superfluous servant removed, not only re- moves from the master one superfluous responsibility, but also lightens the difficulties of exercising due discipline over those that remain. It diminishes the risk of disorders and disputes, not merely by sub- tracting one from the chances ; for the one super- fluous servant who is the cause of idle time in the establishment, will probably open as many sources of dissipation and discontent as there are members of the household ; and many servants, having little occupation, will invariably employ their leisure in quarrelling with each other : — ' Nothing to do was Master Squabble's mother, And much ado his child.' THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 167 But in recommending that the numbers of servants should bo so reduced as to give them full work, let this be understood to mean full work in working hours only, always taking care that there be fair time allowed for relaxation — time, in the case of those who will so use it, for reading and self-cultivation — and occasional time for the maintenance of those original domestic affections which, in the circumstan- ces in which servants are placed, are so apt to be supplanted. Another way in which the characters of seiTants in high life might be improved, would be by seeing their masters a little more scrupulous than some of the more fashionable amongst them are wont to be, in matters of truth and honesty. The adherence to honesty on the part of the masters might be exem- plary ; whereas their actual measure of honesty would perhaps be indicated with sufficient indulgence, if they were described (in the qualified language which Hamlet applies to himself) to be ' indifferent honest.' And there is a currency of untruth in daily use amongst fashionable people for purposes of conve- nience, which proceeds to a much bolder extent than the form of well-understood falsehood by which the middle classes also, not perhaps without some occa- sional violation of their more tender consciences, excuse themselves from receiving a guest. Fashion- 168 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. able people, moreover, are the most unscrupulous smugglers and buyers of smuggled goods, and have less difficulty than others and less shame, in making various illicit inroads upon the public property and revenue. It is not to be denied that these practices are, in point of fact, a species of lying and cheating ; and the latter of them bears a close analogy to the sort of depredation in which the dishonesty of a servant commonly commences. To a servant it must seem quite as venial an offence to trench upon the revenues of a duke, as to the duke it may seem to de- fraud the revenues of a kingdom. Such proceedings, if not absolutely to be branded as dishonest, are not at least altogether honorable ; they are such as may be more easily excused in a menial than in a gentleman. Nor can it ever be otherwise than of evil example to make truth and honesty matters of degree. But there is a worse evil in the manners of this country in regard to servants. It is rarely that they are considered in any other light than as mechanical instruments. It unfortunately belongs very little to our national character, to feel what the common brotherhood of humanity requires of us in a relation with our fellow-creatures, which, however unequal, is so close as that of master and servant. We are not accustomed to be sensible that it is any part of our duty to enter into their feelings, to understand I THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 169 their dispositions, to acquire their confidence, to culti- vate their sympathies and our own upon some common ground which kindness might always discover, and to communicate with them habitually and unreservedly upon the topics which touch upon that ground. This deficiency would, perhaps, be more observable in the middle classes than in the highest — who seem gen- erally to treat their inferior with less reserve — but that in the latter the scale of establishment often removes the greater part of a man's servants from personal communication with him. Whether most prevalent in the fashionable or in the unfashionable classes, it is an evil which in the growing disunion of the several grades of society, is now more than ever, and for more reasons than one, to be re- gretted. The operation of the habits of the Rich and Great upon the class of tradesmen, (and here, again, refer- ence should be made more especially to those amongst the Rich and Great who form what are called the fashionable circles,) — the operation of their habits of life upon tradesmen is, perhaps, a subject of greater moral and political importance than either, party is aware of. People of fashion are for the most part improvi- dent : but even when they are not so in the long run, 170 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. it seems to be their pride to be wantonly and per- versely disorderly in the conduct of their pecuniary transactions. The result of this to themselves is not here the point in question, — although there are few things which in their effects are more certain to pervade the entire moral structure of the mind, than habits of order and punctuality, especially in money matters ; nor is there anything to which character and honor are more likely to give way than to pecuniary difficulties. But what are the consequences to the tradesmen with whom they deal ? In proportion to the delays which the tradesman has had to contend with in procuring payment of the account, is the degree of laxity with which he may expect to be favored in the examination of the items ; especially if he have not omitted the usual means of corrupting the fidelity of servants. The accuracy of a bill of old date is not in general very ascertainable, and it would seem to be but an ungracious return for the accommodation which the creditor has afforded, if the debtor were to institute a very strict inquisition into the minutise of his claims. These considerations concur with the habitual carelessness and indolence ■ of people of fashion, as inducements to them to lead their tradesmen into temptation ; and the result is such a demoralization of the whole class, that it is rare indeed to meet with a tradesman accustomed to THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 171 be employed by people of fashion, whose accounts, if closely scrutinized, would not betray a want of integrity and fair dealing. The tradesman's want of probity again, will second the customer's want of care ; and he will often, from dishonest motives, per- tinaciously resist sending in a bill of short date ; well knowing in what cases he can rely upon an ultimate payment in full, of an account ' of which the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.' Again, people of fashion, though (with occasional coarse exceptions) very civil-spoken to their trades- men, are accustomed to show in their conduct an utter disregard of what amount of trouble, inconve- nience, and vexation of spirit they may occasion, either by irregularity in paying their bills, by requir- ing incessant attendance, or by a thousand fanciful humors, changes of purposes, and fastidious objections. Possibly, indeed, they are very little aware of the amount of it ; so inconsiderate are they of every- thing which is not made to dance before their eyes, or to appeal to their sensibilities through their senses. Their tradesmen, and the workmen whom their trades- men employ, are compelled, those by the competition they encounter in their business, these by the necessi- ties of their situation in life, to submit to all the hardships and disquietudes which it is possible for fashionable caprice to impose, without showing any 172 THE WAYS OF THE KICK AND GREAT. sign of disturbance or discontent; and because there is no outcry made, por any pantomime exhibited, the fashionable customer may possibly conceive that he dispenses nothing but satisfaction among all with whom he deals. He rests assured, moreover, that if he gives more trouble and inconvenience than others, he pays for it ; the charges of the tradesmen of fashionable people being excessively high. Here, however, there is a distinction to be taken. There is no doubt that all the fantastical plagues and pre- posterous caprices which the spirit of fashion can . engender, will be submitted to for money : but he who supposes that the outward submission will be accompanied by no inward feelings of resentment or contempt, either is wholly ignorant of human nature or grossly abuses his better judgment. Between customer and tradesman the balance is adjusted : between man and man there is an account which money will not settle. It is not indeed to be desired that any class of men should be possessed with such a spirit of venal servility, as to be really insensible to the folly and oppression which enters into the ex- actions of fashionable caprice ; or that, however com- pelled to be obsequious in manner, they should alto- gether lose their perception of what is due to common sense and common consideration for others — ' And by the body's action teach the mind A most inherent baseness.' THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 173 If such be the actual result in some instances, then is that consequence still more to be regretted than the other. Moreover, if the master-tradesmen are willing to sell themselves into this slavery, the consequences to the m.uch more numerous classes of those whom they employ, remains to be taken into the account. These, at least, are not paid for the hardships which ensue to them. Many is the milliner's apprentice whom every London season sends to her grave, because the dresses of fine ladies must be completed with a degree of celerity which nothing but night labor can accomplish. To the question, ' When must it be done ? ' ' Immediately,' is the readiest answer ; though it is an answer which would perhaps be less inconsiderately and indiscriminately given, if it were known how many young creatures have come to a premature death in consequence of it, and how many hearts have been hardened by the oppression which it necessitates. Nor does the evil stop there. The dressmaker's apprentices in a great city have another alternative ; and it is quite as much to escape from the intolerable labors which are imposed upon them in the London season, as from any sexual frailty, that such multitudes of them adopt a vocation which affords some immediate relief, while it ensures a doubly fatal termination of their career. The temp- 174 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. tatlons by which these gh'ls are beset might be deemed all-sufficient, without the compulsion by which they are thus, as it were, driven out into the streets. Upon them, 'the fatal gift of beauty' has been more lavishly bestowed than upon any other class — perhaps not excepting even the aristocracy. There are many of them, probably, the spurious offspring of aristocratical fathers, and inherit beauty for the same reason as the legitimate daughters of aristocrats, because the wealth of these persons enables them to select the most beautiful women either for wives or for concubines. Nor are they wanting in the grace and simplicity of manner which distinguish the aristocracy ; whilst constant manual occupation produces in them more vacuity of mind, than even that which dissipation causes in their sisters of the superior class. They are thus possessed of exterior attractions, which will at any moment place them in a condition of com- parative affluence, and keep them in it so long as those attractions last, — a period beyond which their portion of thought and foresight can scarcely be expected to extend : whilst, on the other hand, they have before them a most hitler and arduous servitude, constant confinement, probably a severe task- mistress, (whose mind is harassed and exacerbated by the exigent and thoughtless demands of her employers,) and a destruction of health and bloom which the THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 175 alternative course of life can scarcely make more certain or more speedy. Goethe was well aware how much light he threw upon the seduction of Margaret, when he made her let fall a hint of dis- content at domestic hardships : — ' Our humble household is but small, And 1, alas ! must look to all. We have no maid, and I may scarce avail To wake so early and to sleep so late ; And then my mother is in each detail So accurate.'* If people of fashion knew at what cost some of their imaginary wants are gratified, it is possible that they might be disposed to forego the gratification ; it is possible, also, that they might not. On the one hand they are not wanting in benevolence to the young and beautiful ; the juster charge against them being that their benevolence extends no farther. On the other hand, unless there be a visual perception of the youth and beauty which is to suffer, or in some way a distinct image of it presented, dissipation will not allow them a moment for the feelings which reflection might sug- gest : * Than vanity there's nothing harder hearted ; For thoughtless of all sufferings unseen, * ' Faust,' Lord F. L. Gower's translation. 176 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. Of all save those which touch upon the round Of the day's palpable doings, the vain man, And oftener still the volatile. woman vain, Is busiest at heart with restless cares, Poor pains and paltry joys, that make within Petty yet turbulent vicissitude.' If it be against people of fashion mainly that these charges lie, there is another and a heavier charge, which lies against the aristocratic classes generally ; and not against them only, but also against no incon- siderable portion of the classes next below them. Many, we fear most, of the mothers of these classes, are in the habit of refusing to suckle their children, even when perfectly able to do so, and of bribing the mothers of the Poor to abandon their duty to their own infants, in order to perform the function thus devolved. A denunciation of this practice was delivered some years ago by an eminent person in the House of Lords, which it were well if he would repeat every session till the country shall be cleansed from so foul an offence. It may be stated, on the highest medical authority, that out of every five infants of wet-nurses thus deserted, four perish. They are delivered over to women who take no interest in them, to be brought up by hand — a species of nurture peculiarly requiring a mother's care and the aids and appliances of wealth ; they die miserably of starvation or neglect, and their THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 177 death is to be laid at the door, not so much of their own mothers whose poverty consents, as of those who corrupt the maternal instincts of the Poor, and betray them into a cruelty which nothing but ignorance and poverty can palliate. The injunction ' Thou shalt not seethe the kid in its mother's milk,' pointed to a lesser sin than this. Erasmus held her to be scarcely half a mother who refused to suckle the child that was born to her. He accounted the offence against nature as little less than that of the desertion and exposure of an infant ; and he asks her, when the child began to speak, with what face could she hear him call her mother, who had neglected to perform for him that most maternal office. In our times the lady's child may not suffer, but the child of the nurse is much more certainly sacrificed ; and thus it is that one unnatural mother makes another that is more unnatural still.* But besides those who are able, but not willing, to * ' AHoqui cum infans jam fari meditabitur, ac blanda, balbutie te mammam vocabit, qua fronte hoc audies ab eo, cui mammara negiris, et ad conductitiam mammam releguris, perinde quasi caprae aut ovi subjecisses ? Ubi jam erit fandi potens, quid si te pro malre vocet semi-matrem ? Yirgam expedies, opinor. Atqui vix semi-mater est, quae recusal alere, quod peperit . . . Et in tales foeminas mihi competere Graicorum videtur etymologia, qui u»/r/;(? diet putant k ul^ 12 178 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. suckle their infants, there are many who profess to be willing, but not able. Do they diligently try ? or do they satisfy their consciences with the easy assurances of nurses, attendants, or friends, who are willing to say what they desire to hear ? If they he unable, does not their inability grow out of a luxurious and un- wholesome mode of life, which there is no necessity that they should adopt ? and why should the children of the Poor be defrauded of their mother's milk, to supply deficiencies wilfully created by the indolence and luxury of the Rich ? Occasional cases there are, no doubt, in which the inability to suckle is both real and inevitable ; and if these cases cannot be met by the employment of such wet-nurses as have already lost their children through natural causes, the wet-nurse should bring her own child with her ; and with the sufficient supervision which wealth and maternal vigi- lance might supply on the part of a rich mother, to guard against maternal partiality on the part of the wet-nurse, a fair and equal share of natural nurture should be secured to the one child and the other; what is wanting to each being made up by the best artificial substitute. rriQBiv, hoc est, k non servando. Nam prorsus conductitiam nutricem infantulo adhuc k matre tepenti adsciscere, genus est expositionis,' — Erasmi Colloq. Puerpera. THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 179 Amongst the incidental evils of the system of wet- nursing, one is that unmarried mothers are most fre- quently employed, and not unfrequently preferred, for this purpose ; and being pampered as well as highly paid, a countenance and encouragement is afforded to vice, and women of tainted character are mixed up with the rich man's household. On the other hand, if the wet-nurse be married, it is almost invariably (and for physical reasons) made a condition, that during the period for which she is hired she shall not see her hus- band ; and he and her elder children are exposed to the temptations and evils consequent on such a disrup- tion of domestic ties. The charge of deserting the mother's function in the suckling of infants lies, as has been said, against other classes, as well as against the Rich and Great ; but the practice is more universal amongst the Rich and Great ; it is politically more important that they should rescue themselves from the reproach of it ; their ex- ample is of more account; nor is there any person in the realm, however high in station, who, on the very ground of that rank and pre-eminence, should not be the foremost to withstand this crying corruption of the humanities of domestic life. When such accusations as these are brought against the wealthier classes, it ought by no means to be for- 180 THE "WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. gotten that such things are exceptional, not character- istic ; and that there is amongst those classes in these times an activity in charitable works, and a bounty and beneficence, such as probably has never been witnessed in the world before. All classes have been rapidly improving in the last five-and-twenty years. Increase of crime does not prove the contrary, even of the lowest class; it only proves an increased activity of the bad elements as well as of the good ; it may show that bad men are worse, — it does not show that fewer men are not bad, or that good men are not far more than proportionately better. But if other classes have improved, (the commercial least, perhaps, owing to over-stimulated love of gain,) there qan be little ques- tion that the higher classes have stepped the farthest in advance. Ask our bishops who are the best of the clergy, and will they not answer, the middle-aged and the young, rather than the old or the elderly ? Amongst the country gentlemen not advanced in years, how few are there now who think that they have nothing else to do in life but to make the most of their property and their game. The charity of the Rich is often, indeed, misdirected and mischievous; their liberality sometimes runs ahead of their personal activity as almoners ; their judgment still more often halts behind their personal activity. But as long as it is the spirit of love and duty which is active in them. THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 181 they must be doing good, if not to others, at least to thennselves : and in spite of all the errors of injudicious zeal, they will do well upon the whole, and they will be continually learning to do better. The system of visiting the poor at their houses has been much found fault with for its obtrusiveness. It is very certain that the somevvhat unsocial character and manners of the English, both rich and poor, does put difficulties in the way of it. It is not all sorts of ladies and gentlemen who can carry it out with suc- cess, and now that so much is done by organization and the division of labor, it would seem desirable that charitable persons should consider what are their per- sonal aptitudes, and employ themselves accordingly in this or other departments of charitable ministration. Even in that of visiting, there are many varieties. Where there is grievous sickness or other emergency, zeal and care will compensate for dryness of manner. In the more ordinary intercourse of good offices, it is very important to be pleasant to the Poor : for services alone will not cultivate their affections ; and those who would visit them for every-day purposes of charity, should be by their nature and temperament genial, cordial, and firm. But charity in detail to the lower orders will afford no sufficient vent for what should be considered the due and adequate bounty of the Rich and Great, — 182 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. not even though it b^ distributed through numerous and well -chosen almoners. The Poor of the lower orders are not the only Poor ; they are not always the Poor who are most to be pitied for their poverty ; and it devolves upon the Rich and Great to take charge of the many cases of penury in the classes more proximate to their own, which they have the means of duly sifting and appreciating. To them also belong works of munificence, — the providing and en- dowing of churches, schools, hospitals ; and to these let them add, libraries, picture-galleries, public gardens and play-grounds, for the Poor. In order that the Poor may feel that the Rich are in sympathy with them, the Rich must take a pleasure in their pleasures, as well as pity them in their distress. When the Rich give of their abundance to those who want bread, it may be supposed to be done for very shame, or under the constraint of common humanity. When they take order for the instruction and discipline of the Poor, they are conferring a species of benefit, for which, however essential, they must not expect a return in gratitude or affection. But if they bear in mind that amusement is in truth a necessary of life, that human nature cannot dispense with it, and that by the nature of men's amusements their moral characters are, in a great measure, determined, they will be led so to deal with the Poor as to make it manifest to them that they THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 183 like to see them happy, and they will be beloved ac- cordingly. But if the amusements of men have so much to do in forming them, it may be well to consider what are the amusements of the Rich and Great themselves. Into these it will be found that the ambitious activity of the times has made its way. It is no longer enough for the Rich and Great to be passively entertained ; to look on and admire does not content them ; and hence the theatre has fallen out of favor. They must be where they are themselves in part performers, or they must find their amusement in the prosecution of some object and end. Society, there- fore, becomes their theatre ; and to the not incon- siderable number of them who constitute what are called the 'fashionable circles,' a particular position and reputation in society becomes an object, in the pursuit ctf which they find their amusement. The effect of this upon the character is not favor- able. It used to be supposed that whatsoever of effort and uneasy pretension might prevail elsewhere, in the highest walk of society, amongst those whose born rank and worldly consideration was unquestion- able, where nothing further was to be attained and eveiything possessed was secure, the charm of confi- dence and quiescence would be found at last. But 184 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. when into this circle, as into others, the pursuit of a personal object is introduced, into this, as into others, cares and solicitudes will accompany it ; and the object of success in a social career has little in it that is elevating, or can help much to modify the selfishness of human nature. Into circles, therefore, where social reputation is aimed at, rather than merely the giving and receiving of pleasure, the feelings connected with the lower kinds of rivalry and com- petition must be expected to intrude, disturbing, in some more or less degree, the ease and grace of aristocratic life. And accordingly fashionable society, whatever may be its charms and brilliancy, when compared with other aristocratic society, is said to be characterized by some inferiority of tone, even in its higher walks ; and in its lower by a tone which, without any desire to use hard words, can hardly be called anything else than vulgar. It may, no doubt, be said for these circles, that talents are appreciated in them ; and if talents were the one thing needful in this world, on that they might take their stand. But it is not by the posses- sion and cultivation of talents, but by the best use and direction of them, that the aristocracy of this country is to be sustained in public estimation. Knowledge and ability which are merely made subservient to conversational effects, will do nothing for the aris- THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 185 tocracy. We may well allow that in the casual intercourse of life, or as common acquaintances, people of fashion, in spite of occasional inferiorities and vulgarities, are the most agreeable people that are to be met with. How should it be otherwise ? That persons who have spent their lives in cultivating the arts of society should have acquired no peculiar dexterity in the exercise of them, would be as strange as that one who had spent his life as a hackney coachman, should not know his way through the streets. Those who have been trained in the habits of society from their childhood, will generally be free from timidity, which is the most ordinary source of affectation. By those who are free from timidity, unaffected, and possessed of an average share of intelligence, address in conversation is easily to be attained with much less practice than the habits of fashionable life afford. It is an art which, like that of the singer, the dancer, and the actor, is almost sure to be acquired, up to a certain mark, by prac- tising with those who understand it. The elite of such society, therefore, will probably be found to be more adroit, vivacious, and versatile in their talk than others, more prompt and nimble in their wit, and more graceful and perfect in the performance of the many little feats of agility in conversation, which come easily to those who have been used to consider 186 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. language rather as a toy than as an instrument. At the same time, even if entertainment were the only- thing to be sought, a man of sense who should seek it in this style of conversation, would probably fall upon much that would be offensive to his taste, and not a little to which he would refuse the name of good breeding. He would find, perhaps, that sharp- ness and repartee were in general aimed at more than enough ; and that some persons possessed of a small sort of talent, and but meagrely provided with subject-matter of discourse, cultivate habitually a spirit of sarcasm and disparagement to which they do not very well understand how to give a proper direction. Quickness has justly been observed by Mr. Lander to be amongst the least of the mind's properties : ' I would persuade you,' says that very brilliant and remarkable writer, ' that banter, pun, and quibble, are the properties of light men and shallow capacities ; that genuine humor and true wit require a sound and capacious mind, which is always a grave one.'* Conversation is, in truth, an exercise very danger- ous to the understanding when practised in any large measure as an art or an amusement. To be ready * Landor's ' Imaginary Conversations,' 1st Series, Vol. 2, p. 404, 2d edition. THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 187 to speak before he has time to think, to say something apt and specious, — something which he may very well be supposed to think when he has nothing to say that he really does think, — to say what is con- sistent with what he has said before, to touch topics lightly and let them go, — these are the arts of a conversationist: of which perhaps the last is the worst, because it panders to all the others. Nothing is searched out by conversation of this kind, — noth- ing is heartily believed, whether by those who say it or by those who hear it. It may be easy, graceful, clever, and sparkling, and bits of knowledge may be plentifully tossed to and fro in it; but it will be vain and unprofitable: it may cultivate a certain micacious, sandy surface of the mind, but all that lies below will be unmoved and unsunned. To say that it is vain and unprofitable, is, indeed, to say too little ; for the habit of thinking with a view to conver- sational effects, will inevitably corrupt the understand- ing, which will never again be sound or sincere. The dealings of these people with literature and art, like their dealings with society, have some tinc- ture of personal ambition. Books are not read, pictures seen, or music listened to, merely for the delight to be found in them, or the private improve- ment of the mind. The Rich and Great make efTorts of their own in these lines, and become candidates 188 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. for public applause. This is by no means to be deprecated when the efforts made are such as to command respect as well as notice and attention. Let the works produced be admirable for their genius, or respectable for the labor and perseverance bestowed upon them, or the knowledge and capacity evinced by them, and nothing can be more commendable in the Rich and Great than to produce them, nothing more calculated to strengthen the hold of these classes upon the classes below. But the opposite consequence follows, when the Rich and Great are paraded and panegyrized by a particular department of the peri- odical press as the authors of light and frivolous tales ; or when they are found exhibiting their indifferent accomplishments in collections of ephemeral verses, or in engravings from their drawing, not unfrcquently sold at bazaars on those pretexts of charity which stand so much in need of a charitable construction. Imperfect efforts in literature and art make a refined and innocent amusement for the Rich and Great, and as far as they go are cultivating : but publication needs to be vindicated on other grounds. But let amusements be as innocent as they may, and let society be as free as it may from ambition and envy, still, if the life be a life of society and a life of amusement, instead of a life of serious avoca- tions diversified by amusement and society, it will THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 189 hardly cither attain to happiness or inspire respect. And the more it is attempted to make society a pure concentration of charms and dehghts, the more flat will be the failure. Let us resolve that our society shall consist of none but the gay, the brilliant, and the beautiful, — that is, that we will exclude from it all attentions towards the aged, all forbearance towards the dull, all kindness towards the ungraceful and un- attractive, — and we shall find that when our social duties and our social enjoyments have been thus sedulously set apart, we have let down a sieve into the well instead of a bucket. What is meant to be an unmixed pleasure will not long be available as a pleasure at all ' On n'aime guere d'etre empoisonne memo avec esprit de rose.' Nor is it in our nature to be durably very well satisfied with an end, which does not come to us in the disguise ehher of a means or of a duty. Duty being proscribed, the want of an aim will be felt in the midst of all the enjoyments that the choicest society can afford, and what was entered upon as an innocent amusement, will lose, in no long time, first its power to amuse, and next its innocence. The want of an object will be sup- plied, either by aiming at the advancement of this person or the depreciation of that — in which case the pursuit of social pleasure will degenerate into the indulgence of a vulgar pride and envy — or, (which 190 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. is worse and more likely',) by merging the social pursuit in the vortex of some individual passion. It is upon the blank weariness of an objectless life that these amorous seizures are most apt to supervene ; and the seat* which pleasure has usurped from duty will be easily abdicated in favor of passion and guilt. Such is the ancient and modern history of what is called a life of pleasure, with some variations of the particulars from century to century, but with little difference in the result. When Berkeley cast up, under distinct articles of credit and debt, the account of pleasure and pain of a fine lady and a fashionable gentleman of the last century, he mentions some items which may now be omitted, — (drinking and quarrel- ling are not now the vices of men of fashion, nor amongst the women is gaming so prevalent as it once was,) but he also supposed the omission of some which are now to be placed in the head and front of the bal- ance sheet : — ' We will set down,' he says, ' in the life of your fine lady, rich clothes, dice, cordials, scandal, late h .urs, against va- pors, distaste, remorse, losses at play, and the terrible distress of ill-spent age increasing every day. Suppose no cruel acci- dent of jealousy — no madness or infamy of love ; yet at the foot of the account you shall find that empty, giddy, gaudy, flut- tering thing, not half so happy as a butterfly or a grasshopper on a summer's day. And for a rake, or man of pleasure, the reckoning will be much the same, if you place listlessness, THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 191 \ Ignorance, rottenness, loathing, craving, quarrelling, and such qualities or accomplishments over-against his little circle of fleeting amusements,' * Assuredly, in this day and generation, the partic- ulars which Berkeley was willing to pretermit, are no longer to be regarded as doubtful elements in the cal- culation. Laxity in respect of the cardinal female virtue is unquestionably the cardinal sin of fashionable society : and what renders it most offensive is, that it is a discriminating laxity. It is impossible to deny that the frailties of persons who, by means of their wealth, can surround themselves with a surpassing degree of splendor, meet with an extraordinary quan- tum of indulgence. Absolutions and dispensations of a certain kind are bought and sold ; and of two women taken in adultery, the one of whom riots in a profusion of riches and is lavish of costly entertainments, whilst •the other enjoys no more than an ordinary share of affluence, fashionable infallibility will issue, to the one its indult, and to the other its anathema. Many who contemplate at a safe distance the ways of the great world, will feel the injustice and baseness of the dis- tinction, even more sensibly than the immorality, pernicious though it be, of the looser proceeding. An indiscriminate indulgence might pass for an amiable * Alciphron, Dial. 2. 192 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. weakness or an excess of charity. But if it be through a charitable spirit that the great and sump- tuous sinners are admitted into society, what shall we call that spirit by which the more obscure or indigent are expelled ? Society acts either in the one case with the cruelty of a tyrant, or in the other with the vile- ness of a parasite. It is true, that if the paramount interests of morality did not require that the rule of expulsion should be universal, there are some unfor- tunate and penitent creatures who might be very fit objects for a charitable exception : but these are precisely they who would have no desire to profit by it: on them society has no longer any boon to bestow; for they know that their place is in retirement, and that it is there they must seek their consolation and set up their rest. It is not by the humble, the pardonable, and the contrite, that admittance or restoration to society is sought, after one of these forfeitures ; it is only by the callous, the daring, and obtrusive — and it is they who succeed. Such are the unfavorable features of society amongst the Rich and Great; and were they to per- vade aristocratic life at large, instead of being, as they are, incidental merely to this set or that circle, it would not be easy for the aristocracy to hold their ground in the country. The sets and circles in question are, no doubt, from political and domestic connection, neces- THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 193 sarily mixed up with better aristocratic society; and as the show and pretension which belongs to them obtrudes them more upon the world, they bring upon that better aristocratic society a measure of disgrace which is far beyond its deserts. For let us clear away this clever, showy, frivolous outside of the aristocracy, and there will be found beneath it a substance as different from what might be expected as the old oak which is sometimes discovered beneath a coat of whitewash. And not only do the more favorable fea- tures prevail with the larger portion of the aristocracy, but they prevail most with the younger portion, and are therefore more full of hope and promise. The circle of the idle and the dissolute is a narrowing circle. The circle of the grave and religious, the active and instructed, is a widening circle. That one improvement which is the improvement of all others, — improvement in education, — is reaching the higher classes at last, though by slow degrees and with difficulty; for pedantic prejudice is of all prejudice the most obstinate. The improvement at present tends perhaps more to ambition and attainment than to the elevation of the mind ; but more than one example has shown that this is not an inevitable inferiority of schools and colleges; and a higher order of school- masters will, in time, effect by personal influence what mere tuition is utterly inadequate to accomplish. 13 194 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. The better training of our aristocratic youth at schools and colleges, is followed by better conditions of life in its outset and progress. It is expected of almost every young man that he should embark in some career, if not professional, then political; and a political career, even to those who do not hold office, is a much more serious thing than it used to be. The days of dilettante politicians are well nigh past. A member of parliament can no longer subsist upon a stock of great principles and an occasional fine speech. Public business consists now of dry detail in enormous masses; and he who is called upon to deal v/ith it, is constrained to take upon himself some moderate share, at least, of the infinite drudgery by which the masses are broken down. This is a wholesome element in the lives of our aristocratic youth; and if they shall aspire to a prominent position in political life, they must undergo an amount of labor in itself enough to entitle to respect the man who, not being in want of bread, shall submit to it from an impulse of no unworthy ambition. Besides the discipline of hard labor, there is another to which a man in a prominent public station must submit himself, — the discipline of obloquy and public reproach. There is no discipline by which strength is more tried, none by which it is more cultivated THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 195 and confirmed if the trial be borne with- temper, fortitude, and self-reHance, and with a disregard of all ends which are not public as well as personal. It is in the strength of silence that such trials are often best encountered : for silence has a marvellous force and efficacy in rebutting slanders ; being felt to be what it almost always is, the attribute of a clear conscience and of self-respect. Above all, let persons in a high • station beware of defending them- selves in the press, or responding to challenges there made. They will lose more in pleading to that juris- diction, than they could possibly gain by a favorable issue, even if a favorable issue were to be expected. But there is no such thing as a favorable issue in such an encounter. A controversy with the press in the press, is the controversy of a fly with a spider. The good repute of the Rich and Great, as of others, is endangered much more by not attending to just reproaches, than by disregarding those which are unjust. Not, therefore, by descending into the arena and hustling those by whom they are hustled — not by writing and reclaiming when babblers and scribblers assail them, let the aristocracy approve themselves — not by jealous assertions or angry ap- peals, but by silence and works. Let those of them who regard themselves as elected and ordained to 196 THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. act from a vantage-ground for the good of their country and their kind, demean themselves accord- ingly, using those transmitted weapons which are tempered by time, though the handling of them be by circumstance, — or, far better, those which make no account of time, but are sent with their perennial aptitudes direct from the armory above, — the breast- plate of righteousness, the sword of the Spirit, and the shield of faith. By charity, by munificence, by laborious usefulness, by a studious and not merely Epicurean cultivation of literature and the arts, by that dignity which sees not itself, by a maintenance of their Order as a national institution, for patriotic purposes, not fol' individual aggrandizement ; and, lastly, by standing apart, both in social life and in political, from that portion 'of their Order, however distinguished by rank or wealth, or useless and per- nicious talents, whose follies or vices or selfishness or pride tend to bring the whole into contempt ; — by holding on in this high and constant course, the aristocracy of this intellectual country, which was once, and after a sleepy century is now again, a pre-eminently intellectual aristocracy, will fulfil its appointed purposes, giving a support, not to be dis- pensed with, to that social fabric of which it may well be accounted the key-stone ; and sustaining, peradventure, for so long as the good of mankind THE WAYS OF THE RICH AND GREAT. 197 may require it to be sustained, that strength by which England is enabled at this instant time to look out from the shelter, which tlie winds and waves of a thousand years have scooped out for her, and see in safety the disastrous wrecks which are strewn about on every side, through the pride of aristocracies in times past and the present madness of the nations. THE END. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 014 549 094 7 1 11